by Andy McNab
‘Do you realize what time it is?’
Tom glanced at the clock on the oven.
‘And how did you even know where to find me?’
‘Something’s come up.’
It wasn’t an answer but it was a reply. Mandler went towards the counter. ‘Well, whatever it is, it’d better be damn good. This is highly irregular. And, technically, I’m not even in charge of you any more. In fact as of yesterday you’re off the books – you do know that? Woolf said he told you to disappear for a while till things blow over.’
‘I know, sir. And I have, sort of.’
Mandler shook his head. ‘But you always plough your own furrow don’t you, Buckingham?’ The beginnings of a smile twitched around the older man’s mouth. He sighed and steered towards the kettle. ‘Well, now you’re here, what’s it to be? Builders’ or Earl Grey?’
‘Builders’ will be fine, thank you.’
He filled the kettle and lifted a couple of mugs from the dishwasher, then turned back to Tom and frowned. ‘It’s not about money, is it? If you need a float to tide you over …’
Tom raised a hand to silence him. He launched into a detailed account that started with Rolt’s mysterious visitor and ended with his sighting of Ashton. Then he downed some of the tea, which was more than welcome after the dash back from the Lake District and he waited for Mandler to emerge from thought.
It was a full minute before he responded. ‘You do like to take things into your own hands, don’t you, Buckingham?’
Tom said nothing. The answer was obvious. ‘You don’t have a biscuit to go with the tea do you, by any chance? Sir.’
Mandler frowned, opened a cupboard and produced a packet of Fortnum & Mason ginger thins, which he pushed across the table.
‘Thanks.’
‘I sincerely hope that reporter you had in tow isn’t going to go into print.’
Tom shrugged. The events of that evening had been eclipsed by his excursion to the Lakes.
‘You’ve taken a lot of liberties.’
Tom wasn’t going to justify himself. He’d been in the game too long to expect any gratitude from Mandler, but he wouldn’t have minded a glimmer of appreciation for his efforts. ‘So, Ashton, what’s all that about?’
Mandler focused again, frowning. ‘You are absolutely sure about this, Buckingham? You’re not trying to settle some old score …’
Tom didn’t dignify that with a reply. Instead he just gave him a long cold look until he sighed and flapped the air with a gnarled hand. ‘All right. I’m not at my best at this hour.’
‘He’s a serving soldier. Is it possible he’s on some operation that you don’t know about?’
Mandler bridled. ‘I think it’s fair to say that, in my position in the food chain, it’s unlikely I would be unaware of an officer in Her Majesty’s special forces, and—’ He stopped himself.
Tom suspected he had just realized this wasn’t the time for pomposity.
‘Okay. Let’s look at what we know. Ashton had no idea you were there. He’d come to see Evans and his merry men.’
Tom nodded.
‘Or not so merry, as it turned out.’ Mandler sniffed at his own joke. ‘Did you really have to kill quite so many of them?’
Tom said nothing and contemplated his bandaged arm. His head was still throbbing from Evans’s clock attack.
‘So, the question is, was Ashton’s action anything to do with Evans’s attempt on your life?’
‘“This isn’t how we do this.” Those were his last words to Evans.’
‘So was he punishing him for making an attempt on your life—’ Mandler broke off and frowned. ‘Or was he punishing him for failing to kill you?’
‘If Ashton had any reason to kill me, he wouldn’t have sent someone like Evans. I’d topped his best mate. He’d found out somehow, and was mad about it.’
Mandler nodded. ‘Yes, I can see that. But what is Ashton’s part in all this? Does he even know Rolt?’
‘I think I’d know if he did.’
‘And you’re positive that the men he was with were Russian?’
‘Russian speakers. They could have been Georgians, Estonians, Kazakhs, Tartars, Chechens, Tajiks …’
‘Yes, all right, Buckingham.’
‘Ashton I know speaks Russian.’
‘Well, this is all very strange indeed. And are you thinking the meeting in Switzerland could have been with this Oleg fellow? Because that is pure conjecture.’
There was no way of knowing – short of asking Rolt.
Mandler got to his feet and stretched, but Tom hadn’t finished. ‘And whatever was said in the back of the Bentley, it was enough to turn Randall from loyal retainer into assassin?’
‘Well, since he’s dead, and so is Evans, we’ll never know that either.’
There was a dispiriting hint of resignation in Mandler’s tone. But, having come this far, Tom wasn’t going to back off now. ‘We need to find out what Ashton’s agenda is. Maybe it’ll take us closer to the identity of Rolt’s friend.’
Mandler peered at him. ‘I don’t think that’s at all wise.’
‘I think it’s time I met up with Ashton.’
Mandler gazed at him, mouth half open. ‘Are you mad? You saw what he did to Evans.’
‘Heard what he did, to be accurate. Sir.’
Mandler brushed a hand over his forehead.
‘Ashton dropped in on my parents, was asking after me. So it’s good timing, in a way. I’m just following up on his visit.’
‘You do love trouble, don’t you, Buckingham?’
42
08.00
Pimlico, London
Sarah Garvey was aware of a hammering coming from somewhere but she had decided to ignore it. She was back in her old office but it was full of people, drinks in hand. Rolt was there, in her seat, and on each side, like maids of honour, the loathsome cabinet secretary, Clements, and that prick of an intern, Henry. Nearby was the greaseball, Farmer. All the slime poured into one room, celebrating Rolt’s elevation.
Garvey was trying to listen to Buckingham’s instructions. The weapon felt cold and greasy, just like her father’s shotgun, and just as heavy. The handsome young former SAS trooper was showing her how to aim it. She could see his mouth moving but couldn’t quite hear above the hubbub.
‘What? What?’ she kept saying.
‘Twice in the temple, twice in the chest.’ Buckingham’s words got through at last.
And she remembered what her father had always said to her when he taught her to shoot: ‘Don’t think, girl. Just aim, squeeze – and kill.’
She took aim at Rolt, but Clements was right beside him. She could take them both – and the others! But there was the knocking again, hauling her back into consciousness.
She raised her head an inch and froze. Her eyes snapped open. ‘Damn and fuck.’ She felt as if an ill-fitting metal helmet had been jammed onto her head. Her eyes focused on the near-empty bottle on the coffee-table, the tumbler at forty-five degrees in her lap. She looked at her watch. Oh dear. She had fallen asleep on the sofa, not for the first time, not by a long way, but she had never slept away a whole night.
The metal helmet seemed to have spikes that drove into her head when she moved.
‘Ma’am? Visitor for you.’
She looked round. The place was empty. Then she remembered she still had security on the door. They had shouted through the letterbox. She levered herself up, the spikes forging deeper into her head. Gone were the days when she could drink any man under the table and rise for a breakfast meeting with her briefs mastered. She moved gingerly towards the kitchen to make some coffee, touching the furniture as she went to steady herself. ‘Just give me a minute!’
This wouldn’t do at all. Getting drunk as a skunk – in fact, she’d been pretty smashed the whole day before. Maybe once was allowed, just to get her through the post-election horror, the eviction from her office, the humiliating demotion, but this was not on. On the
other hand, how could she face the prospect of the back benches in anything other than a state of intoxication?
To drown her thoughts, she picked up the remote and pressed the TV into life. Aerial shots appeared of a housing estate engulfed in flames. Well, at least that wasn’t her problem now. Let’s see what a shambles Rolt makes of it, she thought. She completed her journey to the coffee-machine and fumbled for the packet and a spoon, tipping some of it over the counter. When she looked again at the screen there was Rolt, holding up a newspaper. Headline: The Butcher of Aleppo, and beneath it, a frame grab of a figure brandishing a long blade.
She flicked on the coffee and went into the bathroom to check herself over. What a sight. She straightened her hair and gave her teeth a cursory brush with plenty of toothpaste. Not that she was likely to be kissing anyone in the imaginable future. The number of people with whom she was on kissing terms had dwindled over recent years to … How many was it? Oh, yes: none. Especially now she was just a common-or-garden MP. From now on when she came into a room, no one would look up.
She took a few deep breaths. The powerful mint flavour of the toothpaste coursing through her pipes helped her to focus. She moved towards the door, keeping half an eye on the TV.
‘Who is it?’
She peered through the spy-hole. The protection cops outside were holding back a girl with long black hair half covered by a loose headscarf. She opened the door.
‘Sorry to bother you, ma’am. This – person insists she knows you.’
She looked about fifteen, with big, dark anxious eyes, in clothes – the headscarf, smart black coat and boots – that seemed meant for an older woman. She had definitely never seen her before. She was about to tell them to send her away when it occurred to her.
‘Adila?’
43
Adila sipped her green tea while Garvey sat very still, listening. It was the tears that made her look even younger than her eighteen years.
‘I’m so sorry for just turning up on your doorstep like this, I really am, but I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t dare phone or text. A neighbour helped me leave the house by going through her garden, and I just covered up with this.’
She touched the headscarf she had stuffed into her overflowing bag. Despite her tear-stained face, in her white shirt and straight black skirt, Adila had a business-like primness about her that appealed to Garvey. Also, she had insisted on taking off her boots at the door because of the snow. And now she sat opposite her on the sofa, bolt upright, her hands wrapped around the mug on her lap. She seemed so horribly vulnerable.
‘All I know is he was detained at Heathrow, taken off the plane from Turkey and just marched away. I don’t have any idea where he is. They won’t tell us anything.’
Garvey glanced at the paper Adila had brought with her, the same one she had seen being held up by Rolt, with the headline Butcher of Aleppo. She pointed at the screen shot from the video. ‘And this is definitely your brother?’
Adila’s eyes welled up again. She nodded. ‘But I can’t believe he would do such a thing.’
‘He was out there how long?’
‘Four months, nearly five.’ She balled the handkerchief in her fist and dabbed her eyes. ‘Look, I know he did a bad thing, going there at all, but you have to understand there are so many who saw the Syrians being brutalized by Assad and the West doing nothing. But he was so shocked by the militants. Are they all going to be punished, treated as traitors?’
Maybe not on her watch, but things were different now.
‘The group your brother was with, it’s affiliated to ISIS. And beheadings aren’t exactly about helping the oppressed.’
‘He texted me: “They teach that jihad is not about mercy but extreme retaliatory violence to deter enemies. I cannot do this.”’ She took an iPad out of her bag and powered it up. ‘Let me show you something. It’s been taken down now but I managed to save it. Look.’
She ran the video down to a close-up of Jamal raising the machete and inched it forward over the cut to a wide shot of the girls. ‘Look at the shadows: they’re long in the shot of the women, but they’re short in the image of my brother. The sun is much higher in the sky. It’s a different time of day – or even a different time of year.’
‘Show me again.’
Garvey scrutinized the shots as Adila moved between them. She didn’t regard herself as technically savvy but she did understand shadows. The girl had done her homework. She was impressed. ‘Okay. The first thing to do is get an expert opinion.’ Before, she could have handed it to one of her staff, who would have had it rushed through. Not so easy now she was banished to the wilderness. She scrolled through her contacts until she found Woolf. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask.’
She could hear the wariness in his tone. ‘You know I’m Under New Management.’
‘Yes, funnily enough. And you’ve got your arse to cover.’ She mouthed, ‘Sorry,’ at Adila for her language. ‘Just listen.’ She started to tell him about the video but he cut her off.
‘The little shit.’
A minute later her phone buzzed. A different number but it was Woolf calling her back. ‘Sorry, had to go to somewhere a bit more private. Look, between you and me, the so-called Butcher of Aleppo video, we’ve already had it analysed. There’s no question it’s been doctored.’
Garvey nodded at Adila, whose eyes widened anxiously. ‘Good. So we’ve got MI5’s word for it?’
Adila leaned forward, almost rising out of her seat.
Woolf sighed. ‘Ah, not as such. Rolt’s just ordered us to bury the report – and he’s got Number Ten to go along with it. He’s adamant that this doesn’t come out.’
Garvey felt her hangover come back with a vengeance as the anger rose inside her. ‘I want that report.’
‘It’s more than my job’s worth, ma’am.’
Garvey glanced at Adila again. She was all on her own, trying to do the right thing against forces whose power she couldn’t begin to imagine. She hissed into the phone, ‘If your job is about burying the truth, it’s not worth a shit, is it?’
This time she didn’t apologize for the language.
44
08.30
Bampton Lodge
Tom slept fitfully in Mandler’s spare room. The old man had shooed him off to bed and told him not to move for at least twelve hours. During what was left of the night his dreams were crowded with the events of the last two days, a jumbled montage of incidents, each leaving behind it a trail of unanswered questions.
It might have been the sound of Mandler moving about, preparing breakfast to the sound of the Today programme that woke him, but it wasn’t. When Tom’s eyes snapped open it was because he had been recalling Mandler’s reluctance for him to contact Ashton.
Why was that so unwise? What possible danger could there be, unless … He was on his feet now, heading downstairs in his shorts and T-shirt. Mandler was already out of the house and trudging through a fresh fall of snow towards his Jaguar. Tom shot through the front door, feet bare, onto the snow-covered gravel.
‘You know exactly who Rolt’s friend is, don’t you?’
Mandler turned round and looked at him dismissively, taking in his lack of proper clothing. ‘Go back to bed, Buckingham. You’re delirious.’
Tom followed him to the car, the ice stinging his feet. ‘You’ve not been straight with me.’
He caught his arm. Mandler shook himself free with surprising force, climbed into the car and slammed the door. ‘Get some more sleep.’
Mandler fired up the Jaguar and slammed it into drive. As it shot forward, Tom stepped back and watched. The slope up to the single-track road was steep. As the vehicle hit the incline, the rear wheels started to spin and the Jaguar fishtailed inelegantly as it fought a losing battle for grip. Tom folded his arms and watched with grim satisfaction as Britain’s most senior spook tried and failed to make his getaway.
45
Tom adjusted the Range Rover’s rear-view
mirror so he could keep an eye on Mandler’s expression. Ideally he would have preferred to eyeball him for this, but that would have meant another sit-down in his kitchen and time was ticking on.
‘From the beginning, please. If you don’t mind, sir.’
Mandler sighed heavily, like a deflating balloon. ‘All right, Buckingham. But it goes no further, and if any of it comes back on me, I’ll deny we ever had this conversation, understand?’
‘Whatever you say.’ Tom eased the vehicle slowly but steadily up the drive onto Mandler’s lane, then stepped on it. The tyres bit satisfyingly through the snow and the vehicle powered ahead.
‘Umarov – Oleg Emil Umarov, Dr Oleg Umarov. He’s your man.’
‘Okay. Go on, sir, if you wouldn’t mind.’
Mandler let out another sigh. ‘We have to go back to the last century, the nineties and the volatile post-Soviet days. Young Oleg had been on our books as something of a sleeper, one of those people we established contact with during the height of the Cold War on the off-chance that he might prove useful later. His Crimean Tartar heritage marked him out as a likely anti-Soviet. His father, Emil, was reputedly an awkward bugger – fought with the Nazis during the war after they overran Ukraine, then joined up with Himmler’s Tartar Legion. After the Soviets took back Crimea the whole Umarov family was packed off to a Siberian gulag, which was where little Oleg was born, and where Umarov senior died of a mixture of exposure and an excess of forced labour. Are you following this, Buckingham?’
‘I’m all ears, sir.’
‘Young Oleg turned out to be a lot smarter than Dad and played the system for all it was worth – talked his way out of the gulag by demonstrating amazing prowess at numbers and, armed with a doctorate in mathematics, which he completed at night school, secured himself a foothold in the Soviet machine. The disadvantages of his ethnicity were more than outweighed by his intellect, and he reached an influential position in the Soviet oil and gas ministry in Ukraine, where his brains earned him the charming nickname “Doktor Kalculyator”.