by Andy McNab
She moved away to let him stand up.
He gently brushed his finger against her face. ‘Shit, you’re hot! I mean …’
He meant, she felt like she was burning up. And now he looked more closely, she looked tired under the make-up.
‘Yeah.’ She laughed a little. ‘I think I got a touch of sunstroke in Kent. So maybe it wouldn’t have been the best idea for either of us.’
They held hands as far as the front door, but that was all their physical contact, and she stayed leaning against the doorpost and watched him head along to the end. He gave her a last regretful wave as he disappeared into the stairwell.
But the moment he was out of sight he stepped up the pace to something that was as cheerful as his aching feet would allow. Considerably more cheerful than he would normally be if he had just missed out on spending the night with a fit girl. Even a one-nighter deserved honesty on both sides, and you couldn’t have that if one of you was an undercover operative.
But there could be other nights. He had liked her, her story seemed straight, and while they chatted he realized that he wanted her to be innocent. And then he had looked in her bag.
As far as he was concerned, Emma Booth was off the hook.
Chapter 20
Thursday 3 August, 23:30 BST
Dave scowled. ‘What is it with you guys and anti-malarials?’
It was reassuring to find a chink in Dave’s armour of knowledge. Their leader hadn’t made the connection from earlier, when Sean had reported their absence in Zara’s flat.
‘The malaria parasite can survive in your blood for up to four weeks,’ Wolston told him, ‘so you have to keep taking them for four weeks after you return. That way you kill off anything that’s still in your system.’
‘We got it well drummed into us by the MO,’ Sean added. ‘But Emma didn’t have anti-malarials anywhere in the flat this morning, she didn’t have them in her handbag now – so she doesn’t have them. Period.’
Dave still scowled. ‘So on that basis you conclude that Emma Booth is not Girl X?’
‘It’s the only thing I can think of that she’d do different if she’d just come back from Nigeria as opposed to Kent. You got any better ideas?’
‘But Zara didn’t have anti-malarials in her flat, either,’ Dave said, ‘and we know for a fact that she was in Nigeria. Explanation?’
Sean didn’t have one, and he bit his lip in frustration. ‘Maybe she does have them with her. Like Emma doesn’t.’
‘Of course …’ Mitra ventured. Sean and Wolston both swung their gazes round on him. ‘We’re soldiers and we’re used to following orders. Emma’s just a civvy. What do they know? Maybe it wasn’t explained properly to her.’ Then he grinned. ‘Anyway, she was gagging to shag Sean, so it’s not like she’s overflowing with good ideas.’
‘Ha fucking ha,’ Sean said with feeling. ‘Zara and Girl X worked in a hospital out in Lagos, so you’d think they really would know.’
‘All right!’ Dave made them feel like a pair of slapped-down kids as he pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I can see both sides. As for her just being too dim to take the right pills, the Sacred Cross Hospital in Lagos specializes in tropical diseases – so Sean’s right, we can assume that the girls would have been briefed and that they’d know about these things. OK. I’m reporting this line of reasoning back to the office to see what they say – and meanwhile we continue surveillance. What’s she doing now?’
‘She’s online.’ Wolston didn’t look up from the monitors. ‘Looks like … a ticket-buying site?’
‘What sort of tickets?’
Wolston shrugged. ‘What you got? Shows, events … I can’t read the text, I can just see the pictures when her body’s not in the way. I recognize the site logo.’
Sean, Mitra and Dave crowded round behind the seated Wolston to look at the laptop. Halfway to clicking on something on screen, Emma was suddenly gripped by a bout of coughing. She convulsed almost double and the small series of explosions came over the speakers.
Mitra nudged Sean. ‘If you were shagging to schedule, that would have gone right in your face.’
‘But not yours, ’cos you’d have got your zip back up and be out the door by now.’
‘Swiftly and with style, my friend.’
‘God, it’s like having teenagers around,’ Dave muttered.
Mitra and Sean glanced at each other. ‘We are teenagers,’ they said together.
He glared at them, then looked back at the screen. ‘Is coughing a symptom of malaria?’
‘Uh – no,’ Wolston said. ‘Chills, fever, vomiting, diarrhoea – no coughing.’
‘And none of this proves anything. We’re going round in circles.’ Dave drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Maybe there is a weapons factory we haven’t found, and she keeps the pills there. Did that cross your mind? No. We need leads. Badly.’
‘If there was something for the detectors to pick up, we’d have got it,’ Sean said, with the sinking feeling that they were about to be sent out again. ‘We were fucking everywhere today—’
The sound of the doorbell made his head whip round, before he realized it had come over the speakers.
‘Which one was that?’ Dave demanded, but Emma had already answered the question for him on screen by pushing her chair back.
‘Switch to hallway camera! And get onto the telescope. Can we identify?’
Sean was nearest the left-hand laptop, which showed the view from the two telescopes set up on tripods by the sink, peeking out of the window and across West Square to Wolsey.
‘It’s a man. Uh – youngish.’
That was all he could tell. The image was slightly foreshortened because Sean was looking up from the fourth floor of Gladstone to the fifth of Wolsey. The guy was medium height, slender build, which didn’t narrow it down. His top half was silhouetted against the frosted glass of the front door. He was wearing a coat with the collar up, and a cap.
Sean saw Emma come up to the door, open it. She didn’t let the man in. They just stood there, talking. Their voices via the hidden microphone were the only sound in the OP. It was like listening to people in the next flat through a thin wall. They could pick up sounds and emotions, but the two of them kept their voices low, just below the threshold of the microphone, and no words came through clearly.
Then the man glanced briefly to one side, apparently thinking of an answer to something Emma had said. Sean immediately clocked his profile. The shiner hadn’t gone down much.
‘It’s Ste,’ he reported.
Ste sounded calm and level – more than when he’d confronted them that morning, now over twelve hours ago. Emma sounded less chatty than just now – maybe tired? More withdrawn?
‘Right.’ Dave clapped his hands as he came to a decision. ‘He lives one floor above her. Who in this day and age walks down a floor to have a private conversation when they can just text? Sean, Joe – get to the bottom of the stairs and hold position for further orders. Sean, you got a mike? No? Take one. He might just go back to his flat – or he might head off somewhere else, and I want him followed if he does. Ravi, you’re on the laptops, and I’m squirting that sound file up the line to see if they can make any sense of it. Let’s move.’
Sean and Wolston were already on the move, but it didn’t stop Wolston asking a question.
‘So, what exactly makes this a lead?’
Dave glared at the screen like he could scare the answers out of it. ‘This is an anomaly. It’s outlying data. It lies beyond the expected range of behaviour and so it gets investigated. And it’s all we have.’
Sean and Wolston didn’t run. Ste was right over on the other side of West Square, but if they moved too quickly along Gladstone’s balcony, then he still might snag them. Just for half a second, just long enough to bust them.
So they walked. Along the balcony towards the stairwell.
Mitra came online in their ears.
‘That’s Ste foxtrot, parallel to Joe and
Sean.’
So Ste was walking along the balcony on Wolsey towards his own stairs. Sean glanced sideways, straining his eyes over and turning his head as little as possible. People notice when they’re being looked at. Even from a distance.
Sean and Wolston had a slight head start. The moment they were in the stairwell, out of sight of Wolsey, they sped up and took the stairs down two at a time, gripping the rails as they hurled themselves round the corners.
If Ste just went back to his flat, then they had wasted time and got a bit of extra exercise. If Ste went into any other flat in Wolsey, they would find an excuse to get close up and see what was happening. And if he left the building, he would be followed.
Once they reached ground level they slowed down again, strolling out into the square, two mates having a chat. Or maybe, given the five or six years between them, big brother and kid brother. Before leaving they had each grabbed a can from the fridge, and now they joined the groups of lads still lounging against the dry fountain in the centre of West Square, even though it was pushing midnight; they took careful sips while making it look like they were knocking it back. Wolston pulled the names of a couple of imaginary girls from thin air, and he and Sean had a conversation about which one had the best imaginary tits. Meanwhile they kept an eye on the exit from Wolsey’s stairwell.
And they kept on keeping an eye.
And kept on. No Ste.
‘So, what do you think?’ Wolston asked after a couple of minutes. To an onlooker it could have been a slightly out-of-sync comment in the tits debate.
‘Ste hasn’t exited the stairwell on any level,’ Mitra reported. ‘He’s still in there.’
‘So he’s gone into the sublevels,’ Dave said. ‘Unless he’s just sitting on the stairs and waiting, it’s the only thing he could do.’
Wolston and Sean glanced at each other, and Sean felt his heart begin to thump in its pre-action warm-up routine. They knew what was coming and, sure enough, it came.
‘Joe, Sean, get down there,’ Dave ordered. ‘I want Ste pinned down.’
Chapter 21
Thursday 3 August, 23:45 BST
Mitra had the code for the gate ready, so they could go straight on in.
The sounds of the square vanished in seconds, cut off by the concrete bulk of the tower. No sound of movement, no conversation, no music playing.
They moved cautiously, though there was no cover, nowhere to hide if anyone saw them. All the doors – storage units, and the back doors of the shops – were shut and locked for the night, though they studied them closely for a sign that anything had been opened lately.
No Ste.
The real bummer was that Sean had been here earlier that day – and the detector had drawn a blank. He took it out again, checked the screen. Still nothing read higher than trace levels. He held it up so that Wolston could have a shufti for himself. The corporal just nodded to acknowledge the point. Whatever Ste was down here for, it didn’t involve explosives.
They came to an opening that led down a flight of concrete stairs into the depths beneath the square. Here, there was noise. The ventilation and heating systems of all the buildings were down there and they made a steady drone.
Wolston pointed at Sean, then at the floor where he stood – a basic signal for Stay here. Sean nodded as Wolston crept down the stairs. If there was a chance of anyone being spotted, then better if it was just one of them.
Wolston reached the bottom and peeked round the corner, then beckoned. Sean padded silently down to join him.
The passage at the bottom ran parallel to the one they had just been in. There were more locked doors down one side; the other was a jumbled mess of nooks and crannies buried in miles of pipework.
The doors down here were just for privacy and basic security. They weren’t solid and fireproof like the shop doors – in fact, there were wire meshes in the wall above each one: ventilation for the room behind. All the meshes were black squares, except for one which had a light behind it. The fifth one along.
Target acquired. Sean fixed his eyes on it, then looked at Wolston for orders. Wolston waggled his beer can in Sean’s face, and crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. Sean got the message. If they were spotted, they were a pair of drunks who’d got lost. Fuck me, Sean mate, there’s people down here! Maybe this would be the moment to pretend to take a slash.
They moved silently along the passage, taking extra extra care where their feet went, to avoid kicking or scuffing anything. Even over the background drone, the sound of Sean’s rubber-soled shoes parting company with the concrete floor sounded like a route march over gravel.
They waited by the fifth door, ears straining, pressed to the crack on either side. Then their eyes met and they allowed themselves grim, triumphant smiles. Over the mechanical rumble they could hear voices in there.
Wolston raised his eyes to the mesh. He jerked his head up at it, and then crouched down, hands locked together, fingers twined into a stirrup resting on his knee.
Sean had often wondered what it would be like to put his head above the rim of a trench during a firefight. This had to be similar. He nodded, and took a breath, and put his foot into the stirrup so that Wolston could hoist him up into the air. He rested his hands against the wall as gently as he could, and put his face to the edge of the mesh.
The room was a bare concrete box, and the angle from up here was wrong for looking down. But he could see the top of a man’s head. It was Ste. He seemed to be bent at the waist, like he was maybe studying something on a table. Or someone lying down.
‘OK, you know the drill,’ Ste said. ‘Flex your fingers …’
A woman’s voice spoke – slowly, sounding weak and drained, like Sean’s mum when she had one of her heads. Similar accent to Ste.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know, not too fast, get a rhythm going. This is so boring. Think you could get me some more DVDs?’
‘Yeah, well, sorry you’re bored, sis,’ Ste said irritably.
Sis! Sean felt his guts tingle with satisfaction. He lowered his hand to the level of Wolston’s face and gave an emphatic thumbs up. They had found Zara, and now they knew that Ste was involved in whatever it was too. What that actually was – still no idea. Yet. So Sean kept listening.
‘You know, we could both have been doing this up in the flat,’ Ste went on, ‘if you’d come clean about your conviction. And Fayez wouldn’t have had to come up with the airport thing at the last minute …’
Sean remembered making the exact same observation to Dave: that the whole airport drama had only gone and drawn attention to what was meant to be a secret. Dave had said that new security measures had been put in place since the girls left the country that would have stopped them getting back in.
Another man spoke, right below Sean, out of sight, and Sean froze. He must have been leaning against the door just below the grille. He would have heard if Sean and Wolston had made more than the absolute minimum sound.
‘Have more faith, Ste. Arranging the airport diversion was, yes, a challenge – but we all came through it.’
He had an accent which Sean couldn’t quite place. Middle Eastern? Asian? The top of his head came into view. He was bulkier than Ste, and balding.
‘Is that not proof of the rightness of our cause?’ he added.
‘And I wanted to be part of the mission.’ Zara sounded sulky, like she had been threatened with a treat being taken away.
‘Yeah, and I almost got killed!’ Ste snapped. ‘That wasn’t in the plan.’
‘All of us are on jihad!’ said the other man. ‘Any one of us who dies is assured of Paradise. And for a man with no guerrilla training, Ste, you did very well. We told you to follow the leads of Omar and Mike, and it worked.’
Sean made a note of the names in his head. Mike – that would be May, the gunman identified as Michael Joseph who he had shot. Omar was a new one. He must have been Clarkson. And he had confirmation that Ste had been one of the gunmen
– so he had been Hammond – and that the whole operation had been a lash-up job. The names were adding up – Zara plus Girl X plus Ste plus Omar plus Mike plus Fayez – and, on the journey up from Tidworth, Dave had said that the bigger conspiracies got, the easier they were to locate.
After a day of utter bollocks, Sean still felt like he had stumbled on a treasure trove. Until he thought of Emma.
Arse.
Not so long ago he had convinced himself that she was in the clear; he’d been thinking of ways to get together with her when this was over … Well, there was still nothing to prove or disprove that Emma was Girl X, but he had to admit it seemed a hell of a coincidence that Ste had talked to her, then come straight down here. But, Sean told himself, that still didn’t prove anything. Maybe it was just Guess who I just saw?
‘So how come Mike ends up dead, Fayez?’ Ste demanded.
‘Mike is waiting now for us to join him in Paradise,’ Fayez said, with total, calm conviction.
Sean had heard bad and good motivational speakers in his time. Social workers trying to persuade him to go straight. Officers laying out a plan of battle. The bad ones sounded like actors delivering corny lines with a hidden smirk because they didn’t quite believe it themselves.
But the good ones could deliver exactly the same lines with one hundred per cent conviction, so that you were swept up in it without realizing. Some clever shift in their voice, something in the rhythm of the words? This guy had it down pat. Even Sean could almost believe him.
Fayez went on. ‘And the infidel who martyred him …’
‘Is here in Littern Mills right now.’
There was a freezing pause on either side of the grille.
‘Explain?’ Fayez’s voice was almost a purr.
‘That’s what I was going to tell you. I just learned that a man called Sean Harker is here on the estate …’
Sean flinched at the sound of his own name. Shit. So, yes, Emma had told Ste. Sean willed Ste to give more details. Had his name just come up in conversation? Or had it been a deliberate warning?