by Andy McNab
Elena didn't reply, but Danny had worked out why the need for caution was essential. 'You mean Black Star might have set up some sort of bugging or surveillance device in the room?'
'It's highly probable.' Deveraux nodded. 'He's taken the trouble to reserve a room for her.'
Fergus was trying not to show his increasing feelings of concern. 'We have to realize what this guy is capable of at all times. Remember everything I've taught you.'
'That's all I have to say for now,' said Deveraux. 'Questions?'
Fergus shook his head. There were plenty of questions he could have asked. Questions about Danny and Elena's safety. Questions about what exactly would happen when and if they did track down Black Star. But those questions were best left unasked; he had a pretty good idea of what Deveraux was planning at the end of the operation.
Danny as usual, had no reservations about asking questions. 'So, we're there to locate Black Star, right?'
Deveraux nodded.
'Well, who does the destroying? You?'
'You concentrate on your part of the mission,' said Deveraux coldly.
Danny sat back in his chair. The answers had been more or less what he had expected, but it had been worth a shot.
'Elena?' said Deveraux.
Elena had gone back to window-gazing.
'Elena!' Deveraux repeated impatiently.
Slowly Elena looked back at her. 'What?' she said quietly.
'Have you any questions?'
'No, I haven't got any questions.'
'I'm surprised. You don't appear to have listened to a word I've said.'
'I was listening.'
Deveraux sighed with irritation as she gathered her papers together. 'Very well.' She turned to Fergus. 'We will liaise on my return from London. Now, I have something to do before I leave.'
The meeting broke up and Danny and Elena were left alone after Fergus told them he was going to listen to some music on his iPod.
'You all right?' said Danny, seeing Elena's troubled look.
She shrugged. 'I was thinking about my dad. Wondering when I'll see him again. If I'll see him again.'
Danny nodded. 'Are you scared?'
'Of course. Aren't you?'
Danny nodded. 'But my granddad says—'
'Yeah, I know, it's good to be scared. Well, he doesn't look scared. He's always wandering around with that iPod. I didn't even know he liked music.'
'He likes old music. Pink Floyd – something like that. Look, do you wanna watch a DVD? I hate this waiting around – makes me nervous.'
Elena shook her head and stood up. 'No. Sorry, Danny, there's something I want to do too.'
Deveraux was taking personal responsibility for ensuring that Black Star's instruction to destroy the hard drive of Elena's laptop was carried out. She didn't see how he could know whether it had been done or not, but it was best to go along with him at this stage, just in case. Every scrap of information stored in its memory had already been downloaded and forwarded to Security Service experts for further analysis.
She had the hard drive and had taken a hammer from the hotel tool shed. She walked into the garden, dropped the hard drive onto the concrete path and kneeled down with the hammer in her right hand. Three heavy blows were more than adequate to shatter the casing and reduce the copper-plated component board to a twisted, tangled mess.
As Deveraux thumped down on the hard drive for the final time, something made her look up and glance towards Elena's bedroom window.
The teenager was watching her, her face expressionless. Deveraux suddenly felt as though she had been caught in some act of mindless vandalism. Or something far worse – in the act of murder.
She felt exposed and slightly ludicrous, crouched down with the hammer gripped tightly in her hand.
And as Elena stared, Deveraux was unable to stop herself thinking about the night she had killed Joey. It was unfortunate, but Deveraux didn't deal in regrets. There had been no alternative.
The memory of those few moments came back to her: Joey on his knees, his nose pouring with blood while she crouched behind him, both hands around his neck, pulling back the thin edge of her Xda mobile phone into his crushed windpipe, gradually choking him to death.
As Deveraux shook her head to drive away the vision, she guessed that at that moment Elena was also thinking of Joey. It was almost as if the girl knew what had happened; had somehow worked it all out.
Deveraux looked down at the shattered hard drive and picked it up. She stood up and walked back towards the kitchen door, feeling Elena's eyes burning into her back.
18
Dudley emerged from his meeting with the Foreign Secretary to find Marcie Deveraux waiting for him.
He was his usual business-like self, but the pressure was on for everyone in the Intelligence Services. And the higher up in authority, the higher the levels of pressure. Dudley nodded a brusque acknowledgement to Deveraux, and without a word gestured for her to follow him into a room that had been hastily set aside for their conversation.
It wasn't by any means Deveraux's first visit to the Foreign Office. The main building, with its marble columns, aged colonial oil paintings and heavy chandeliers, always looked to her more like an expensive Parisian hotel than a place of government.
Dudley led the way into one of the wood-panelled reception rooms. The heavy curtains were closed and they sat in armchairs on either side of an ornate low table, where coffee had been set out for their arrival.
The concerned look on Dudley's usually placid-looking face was a sign that his meeting with the Foreign Secretary had not gone completely smoothly.
'Your final arrangements have been made?' he asked brusquely.
'Yes, sir, everything is in place for tomorrow.'
'Good. I don't need to stress the importance of your mission, Marcie. And it is your mission.'
There was no need for Dudley to elaborate; Marcie Deveraux fully understood the implications of his words. It was her mission. A deniable mission. She had planned it, the strategy and the tactics.
As soon as it had been established that Black Star was in America, Deveraux was the one who had urged that the mission should remain deniable and that no MoU between the UK and the USA should be arranged. She argued that to share the information with American colleagues would delay the mission. The Americans would throw the full weight of their resources into the operation, quite possibly tipping off Black Star that they were on to him in the process.
Better to keep it small, said Deveraux, compact, the fewer involved the better. Get in, get the job done, and get out. That was the way she operated; it had worked for her in the past and it would work for her this time. Dudley had considered her plan and had then given the go-ahead.
If it was a success, the personal rewards for Deveraux would be enormous. Promotion certainly, and perhaps even Dudley's job. It was well known that he was to retire soon.
On the other hand, failure was too terrible to contemplate. The Americans would go ballistic if they discovered the Brits were conducting a covert operation in New York, involving a planted Angel, and PE with the potential to kill hundreds of US citizens.
Deveraux would be fully responsible and no one else. The Americans would be told that she was a rogue operator who had never been sanctioned to conduct an operation on US soil. She would be thrown out of the Security Service to ensure that good, if damaged, relations were maintained with the US.
Deveraux needed no reminding. She couldn't concern herself with the consequences of failure. She just had to concentrate on the job.
Her cover story was that she was working as a diplomatic attaché at the UN. It meant she would be travelling to and operating in the USA with the comforting security blanket of a diplomatic passport. At any time she could simply claim diplomatic immunity and fly out of the country. If the mission failed, she would be able to return to the UK, but she knew that returning home would not ultimately save her.
No one else involved in t
he operation had the same level of protection, and that was something Deveraux still needed to discuss with her boss. 'Watts spent years working as a K, sir, which means he's fully aware of what could happen to Danny and Elena. And to himself, of course.'
Dudley nodded. 'Yes. And I'm fully aware of your recommendations with regard to Watts and the teenagers if – he paused to correct himself – 'when the mission is successfully concluded.'
'Yes, sir,' said Deveraux. 'I've always believed that they can only be considered a threat to our security. As outsiders, they know far too much and we can never guarantee they will keep silent. As for Watts himself, there's too much history. And I've decided it's too risky to have him in New York. I've made arrangements to deal with that . . . In any event, after the successful conclusion of the mission my recommendation remains the same. They should all be eliminated. We need to clean house after this one, sir.'
Dudley sighed. 'I'm afraid I'm getting too old for this. I shall be glad to get to Dorset, and my bees.' He nodded again. 'It's unfortunate, Marcie, but yes, I agree. Elimination.'
19
Fergus was due to depart from Heathrow two hours before the others. He had kept his farewells to Danny and Elena brief when leaving Oxford, giving them a final reminder to 'take care'.
He had made other arrangements the previous evening while Deveraux was in London. He had phoned for the DHL parcel delivery company to come and collect a small envelope addressed to Frank Wilson – an alias he had used before, and the one Deveraux had agreed to for this mission – for collection at his hotel, the Roosevelt, which was just a few blocks away from the Pennsylvania.
Inside the envelope were three alias passports, complete with US visa waiver stubs, for himself, Danny and Elena; Fergus had made good use of his old contacts during the weeks in Oxford.
Terminal Four was as busy as ever. Fergus checked in and then joined one of the long lines of passengers waiting to pass through the security checks before going into the departure lounge.
Like most of the other passengers, he took off his jacket and made sure there was nothing metallic in his trouser pockets that would be likely to set off the metal detector as he walked through. He reached the front of the queue, put his jacket in one of the plastic trays and then slid that and the small rucksack he had with him onto the rubber conveyor belt and watched them disappear into the darkness.
He stepped through the metal detector and was relieved not to hear the alert ping, which would have meant an irritating body search. Fergus went to the conveyor belt, put on his jacket and picked up the rucksack. He reached passport control, which had been hastily put in place after the London Underground bombing of 7/7, and showed his passport and boarding card to the waiting security officer.
As he turned to walk towards the departure lounge, he saw two smartly suited men approaching him. He knew instantly who they were: Special Branch. There was no point in panicking; it would have been pointless.
Fergus realized at that moment that he had been set up.
The closest man smiled politely. 'Hello, sir. Can we see your passport and boarding card, please?'
Fergus's passport was in the name of Frank Wilson. The name made no difference: the Special Branch men knew exactly who they were dealing with.
Fergus handed over the passport and boarding card, going along with what he knew was an inevitable process.
The man looked at the passport as he and his colleague escorted Fergus away from the crowds by the security gates. It was a standard practice: move the suspect away from any public areas.
'Just routine, sir,' said the second man as they led Fergus along a corridor and into an office.
It was a small room, the only furniture a desk and a couple of upright chairs. There was hardly enough space for the two Special Branch men, Fergus and the two burly uniformed Metropolitan Police officers, both complete with body armour and MP5 sub-machine guns. One of these was pointing directly at Fergus's head.
Fergus knew the drill. Without even bothering to attempt to protest, he slowly placed his rucksack on the floor, turned round, extended both his arms behind him and waited for the handcuffs to snap into place.
20
Danny was close to the back of the plane, and as the huge Boeing 747 lumbered down the runway, lifted its nose and began its steady climb into the sky, he thought of the last time he had been inside an aircraft.
The two flights could hardly have been more different. This time he was sitting at one end of the central section and was one of several hundred passengers. And even in economy class there was relative comfort and adequate legroom.
On the previous occasion he had been squeezed into the back of a single-engine Cessna alongside his grandfather as they returned to England after six months on the run in Spain.
The tiny plane had collected them, in the dead of night, from an improvised LS deep in the Andalusian countryside, and the highly skilled pilot had used NVGs to negotiate his way through the darkness and onto the ground. They took off knowing only that they were flying into the unknown, as the final struggle to clear Fergus of the accusations laid against him began.
Danny almost smiled as the 747's four huge engines roared and the Jumbo climbed up through the clouds. There was one similarity between the two flights: he was once again flying into the unknown.
But Danny's smile hid the sense of unease he was feeling. Not about the mission – he was feeling good about that, glad that he was part of a crucially important operation of worldwide significance.
He knew that many of his fellow passengers would be thinking about the teenage suicide bombers. Some would be anxious – Danny had noticed the elderly woman next to him give him a long, questioning look as they fastened their seat belts. He had been expecting that sort of reaction; people were bound to be unnerved by the sight of a teenager travelling alone. But Deveraux and his grandfather had briefed him well, and Danny had eased the woman's fears with a smile and a few well-chosen words about the long flight ahead.
He had also dealt skilfully with the extra-long questioning and the bag and body search he had been subjected to when going through security to the departure lounge at Heathrow.
Danny glanced across to his right and saw the newspaper headline:
HUNT FOR BOMB MASTER
Little did the passenger reading the newspaper know that someone at the forefront of that hunt was sitting just a few seats away.
And despite his grandfather's fears over Deveraux, Danny felt excited about whatever lay ahead. But there was a nagging worry: Elena.
After their short conversation at the end of Deveraux's briefing the previous afternoon, Danny had seen no more of Elena until this morning. She had stayed in her room all evening, not even bothering to come down for dinner.
She had reappeared at breakfast but had been quiet and withdrawn, even when Fergus had said his farewells.
And then, just as they were about to say their own awkward goodbyes, Elena had done something that seemed to surprise them both. She had kissed Danny; fleetingly brushing her lips against his before whispering, 'Goodbye, Danny.'
Before a stunned Danny could even reply, she was gone, apparently not wanting to prolong the parting any more than was absolutely necessary. Danny didn't like the word 'goodbye' when it came from Elena. He was used to 'see ya' or 'later', or even 'bye', but 'goodbye' was weird. Too . . . final.
They travelled separately to Heathrow – Deveraux had insisted on that, just in case Black Star, or an associate, was watching out for Elena on this side of the Atlantic. It was unlikely, but Deveraux was taking no chances.