by Rob Sinclair
Aydin’s legs felt weak. He was surprised he didn’t collapse right there. If he’d been hit hard when he saw Nilay’s death on the news, then this was something else entirely.
He was completely numb.
But he didn’t want to be numb. Being numb wouldn’t help him. Begrudgingly his mind took him back to that place again. To the Teacher. Aydin could hear his words. Telling him to use his anger, to let it drive him. People might have thought that to be highly trained like he and his brothers were you needed a calm and level head to operate. That was true to some extent, but they’d also been taught to use hatred as a motivator. It was only through antipathy that they could carry out the acts they were asked to.
With focus, Aydin felt that anger growing inside as he watched the gurney being wheeled along the corridor. It didn’t take long before rage was surging through his veins.
He looked over and spotted a policeman standing by the open doors to the ambulance. A female colleague was muttering in his ear, but he was looking directly at Aydin. He wasn’t sure why the officer’s interest was focused on him. Perhaps it was just the animal in his eyes, or did he somehow recognise Aydin from the pictures in the house from when he was just a child?
The policeman said something to his colleague then edged forward. Whatever his motive, it was time for Aydin to go. He didn’t need a fight with the police tonight. He turned and, on shaky legs, walked away, not looking back at all. When he reached the end of the road he turned right and ran. Moving on a strange mixture of adrenaline and fury, he kept running until he was back in the shadowy depths of the city. Where he belonged.
Then he stopped.
That was enough running. That was no longer an option. Hidashar, the Teacher, all of the others, they were out there, and Aydin was damn certain they all wanted him dead. They would come for him. One after the other or all together, they would come again and again to kill him, as long as it took, and they would harm anyone who got in their way. Especially people who Aydin cared about. They didn’t just want him dead, they wanted to punish him.
If he ran he had no chance. What he needed was to fight back.
It was time to use his hatred. It was time to become the hunter.
EIGHTEEN
Rome, Italy
Ismail Obbadi placed the coffee cup down on its saucer then sat back in the booth as he looked out across the luxurious bar, crystal chandeliers dripping from the ceiling, gold trimmings here, there and everywhere. As much as there was that he despised about the city, it felt good to be back, after his short trip to Berlin. Good to be back playing this role.
The Uragan canisters were now safely stored in an industrial unit on the edge of the city. They’d be safe there until needed. Obbadi smiled to himself as he reminisced about watching Streicher take his last few pain-ridden breaths. He imagined with glee what it would be like to witness that on a grand scale.
The bar around him was just starting to get busy, the hubbub growing as the place filled out and as the rich but young revellers became more intoxicated. A group of young stallions who’d been in for more than two hours were becoming increasingly rowdy, and Obbadi noticed them wolf-whistle at several young ladies walking past. Their banter was growing more and more lurid, their behaviour leery.
Obbadi watched them closely, showing little reaction on the outside despite inwardly being disgusted by their behaviour. But then many of the young women the group were harassing were just as bad, blind drunk and with their breasts falling out of their tops and their arses hanging out of their skirts. If there was ever an indicator needed of just how far Western civilisation had fallen, Obbadi believed that young men and women like these were the epitome.
Staring blankly, Obbadi noticed one of the men was eyeing him up coldly. The group of twenty-somethings were all fashionistas, with tight-fitting clothes and slicked hair, tattoos and manicured stubble. Pristine prima donnas. Too much money, too little sense and zero responsibility. Obbadi, lost in his thoughts, continued to look on and drew the attention of others from the group. Soon they were gesturing over to him, their yobbish insults wide-ranging about his appearance, his formal clothes, his choice of drink, his skin colour and his Middle-Eastern origin – well they were wrong on that one, but how to explain to these cretins that he was in fact North African?
All of their ill-thought words only added further to the growing distaste in Obbadi’s mouth. Yet this was exactly why he’d come into the bar on a Friday night, when he knew it would be busy and filled with groups like these. It was a gentle reminder of exactly who Obbadi was, and who these people were.
He downed the rest of the coffee then stepped out of the booth. One or two of the men shuffled just a little, as though they sensed a scuffle was brewing. Obbadi straightened out his cream suit and walked towards them. The bull of the group, tall and athletic with piercing brown eyes and chiselled features, got up from his seat, ready for the challenge.
At least he thought he was. Obbadi wasn’t in the mood to show the little sod just how mistaken he was.
‘You’re celebrating?’ Obbadi said in Italian, running a hand over his closely shaven chin as he looked over at the men. He knew his accent only further gave away that he wasn’t a native to their country. He wondered how long it would be before he heard the usual buzzwords ‘go back home’, ‘terrorist’, ‘Taliban’, ‘ISIS’.
But instead the man simply gave an unfriendly sneer, perhaps surprised at Obbadi’s calm and collected question and also his confidence.
‘Someone’s birthday?’ Obbadi asked.
Now he heard more whispered insults, guffaws. Ah, and there it was. Terrorist scum. Shame he’d forgotten his Muslim insult bingo card today.
‘Hey, Berto!’ Obbadi shouted over to the wiry young man behind the bar. ‘My friends are having a party. Give them some free beer, will you.’
Obbadi turned back to the whippersnapper and gave him a warm smile that nearly knocked him off his feet.
How easily these imbeciles are manipulated.
‘Thank you for coming to my bar,’ Obbadi said. ‘I hope you enjoy the rest of your night, and that you’ll come again soon.’
He reached out and the man flinched as Obbadi gently patted him on the shoulder. He turned and walked towards the bar. Berto leaned over.
‘You really want to give them free drinks? I heard what they said to you.’
‘Why not? They may not get many more opportunities to enjoy themselves in this city.’
Berto, bemused, said nothing. Obbadi winked, then looked back to the group one more time. He gave them a friendly wave. They just sat there looking ridiculous and clueless. Obbadi walked out the back door.
He headed past the office and through the exit into the sprawling building’s marble-covered atrium. He took the elevator up to the fifteenth-floor penthouse apartment. When he opened the front door he noticed the lights were already on and he could hear music coming from the lounge. He took off his brown Gucci shoes and headed across the thick carpet and into the expansive space where he spotted Katja lying naked on the L-shaped sofa. Beyond her the wide floor-to-ceiling windows gave breathtaking views across the city, the Roman Forum and Coliseum in the near distance lit up beautifully as always. Another city filled with such rich history of warfare and clashing civilisations.
‘I thought you were going out?’ he said.
‘I was waiting for you,’ Katja purred, rubbing a hand over her bare skin, up towards her breasts.
‘Cover yourself up.’
He grabbed the robe from the floor and flung it over her.
‘Idiota,’ Katja responded, sitting up with a sullen look on her face. ‘I wanted to surprise you.’
‘I’m not in the mood.’ He fished in his pocket and took out the roll of notes. He began to unravel a few to give to her but in the end stopped and just flung the whole bundle. It banged off her leg and rolled to a stop on the floor. ‘Why don’t you go and have a good time. Maybe we’ll go out tomorrow.’
/> ‘Testa di cazzo!’ Katja shouted as she shot up from the sofa, leaving the money on the floor. She stormed up to Obbadi and banged into his shoulder as she passed. ‘I don’t need your money. You want a whore then go and get one.’
Even though he knew he’d provoked her, anger brewed somewhere deep in his stomach at her insulting him like that. He easily held it in, just like he had with the men downstairs. There were far bigger nuisances in Obbadi’s life than angry young spoilt Italians.
While Katja grumpily banged and crashed about in the bedroom, Obbadi headed over to the open-plan kitchen and poured some chilled bottled water into a crystal tumbler. After two large swigs he took his phone out of his pocket and saw there was a message. He hadn’t felt his phone vibrate when the text arrived. Ten minutes,was all it said. He’d received it eight minutes ago.
Obbadi growled under his breath and headed over to the door to the office. He unlocked it with the key strapped around his neck and headed inside, closing the door behind him. The large room was pleasantly cool with the air-conditioning on a constant twenty degrees and Obbadi sat down at the leather swivel chair behind the thick oak desk and fired up the laptop. He checked his watch. Just in time. He sat and waited. After two minutes there was nothing and he sent a text message reply.
Ready?
Moments later he heard banging doors and stomping feet outside. Katja making a stormy exit. She’d get over it. And if she didn’t, who gave a flying fuck really? Obbadi got up and walked back to the door, opening it just a few inches to peep out. He looked over to where the bundle of euro notes had moments earlier lain untouched. He was amused to see the money now gone. Like all the others in this place, Katja was so predictable.
Obbadi closed the door again. While he waited he opened up the app that connected to the building’s CCTV system. He was soon looking through the various feeds for the bar and found himself with a bird’s-eye view of the raucous group of young men. Obbadi clenched his fists as he stared at them. It was tempting, and would be so easy, to make them all pay for their slights. Using the CCTV images of their faces he had the connections to quickly identify each and every one of them.
For a few seconds he imagined what he could do next – how he could target not just those men but their friends and families too. There was no denying that he would take great joy in showing them just how mistaken they’d been to throw their bile at him.
Just thinking about it caused adrenaline to surge through his body, but he would take it no further than violent fantasy tonight. There were many good reasons why Obbadi now found himself a very rich man, able to live a life of luxury that the majority of the billions of people on earth could only dream of. Being able to keep a level head when others would certainly have snapped was one of those reasons.
The incoming call finally came just moments later. Obbadi pressed the button on the keyboard to accept.
‘Talk to me,’ came the gruff voice through the speakers, no pleasantries offered or given.
‘It’s in hand,’ Obbadi said, not wanting to show any weakness by having to justify what had already gone wrong. No point in dwelling on the past, as he’d always been told. Show your strength by how you deal with the present.
‘Do you have him?’
‘Not yet,’ Obbadi said. ‘But we will get him.’
Though the truth was that Obbadi didn’t currently have a solid plan of how to make that happen.
‘Your confidence is impressive, but please don’t fail again. We can’t let this stop our plans.’
‘It won’t. Paris is still operational.’
‘And London?’
‘This was only a small distraction. Nothing has changed.’
‘Remember who he is. Remember what he is. He’s your brother. Don’t underestimate him. Finish this quickly.’
‘I will. But you’re wrong, he’s not my brother. Not any more.’
‘Just tell me when it’s done. And Germany?’
‘All in order,’ Obbadi said. ‘The goods are secured, and it works perfectly.’
He smiled again at that same thought.
‘And what about the cossack?’
‘Just as planned.’
He’d had word from Sab’ah several hours ago that he’d completed his task. News of the nerve-agent assassination of Roman Asrutdinov – a well-known hacker – had already made it onto the international news networks, though the idiotic reporters had no clue why, instead spouting all sorts of baseless theories about North Korea and Russia and spies. They simply had no idea of the malware code that Asrutdinov had helped create before his untimely – or was it timely? – death, or what it would soon be used for.
‘Good. Then you know what to do next.’
The call clicked off and Obbadi, slightly reeling from the bluntness of the conversation, even though it was nothing more than he’d expected, was left staring at the laptop screen, at the obnoxious face of the man who’d minutes earlier been so ready to challenge him.
Obbadi’s eyes narrowed. Yes, he could easily let this go. But that didn’t mean he wanted to, or that he had to. He wouldn’t take action tonight, but he also wouldn’t forget.
‘See you again soon, my friend.’
NINETEEN
Aleppo, Syria
Cox had her hand on the gun, inside her handbag, as she walked up the stairs to the safe house. Since ditching the moped she’d taken only thirty minutes more to reach the building. She just wanted to be inside. Lock the door and wait for the extraction team to arrive. She didn’t know who it would be, or how many there would be, but she had to trust in the SIS process and that they would keep her safe from there.
She reached the apartment door and took the key from her bag. All was quiet up on the seventh-floor landing. Before she put the key to the lock she had a sudden thought. She took out her phone. Outside the door she just had enough Wi-Fi signal to connect to the Internet. She went into the app for the safe house’s alarm system, then scrolled through into the data log.
The last entry was several hours ago, when she’d left the building to go and meet Subhi. Neither the magnetic contact on the front door or any of the other sensors had been triggered since then.
Cox put the phone away, unlocked then opened the door. The blips sounded as the front door contact triggered and Cox shut the door and input the six-digit code into the box on the wall to disable the alarm. She looked around the space in front of her. Everything seemed just as she’d left it.
She headed over to the laptop and flipped the lid, then navigated into the secure messaging account to check for emails. Nothing in there. She called Flannigan but got no response. Feeling her head throbbing from the crashing thoughts of what was happening, she slumped down on the sofa.
Where she went from there, she really didn’t know. Her two main assets in Aleppo – or were they close enough to be considered friends? – were dead. Cox was sure she too was now a target of their killers. The only explanation she could think of was that her digging for the identities and whereabouts of the Thirteen had led to both Subhi and Nilay being murdered.
Cox growled in frustration. No. She wasn’t responsible for their deaths. And now really wasn’t the time to dwell. She had two hours to get as far ahead of the game as she could before the extraction team arrived. She first sent a message to Flannigan, saying she was ready for the white-line call. While she waited for a response she dove into the thumb drive she’d taken from Nilay’s apartment.
Nilay had only recently confided in Cox about the existence of the data she’d collated. Cox had no doubt that the young woman had been killed because of the questions she was asking in Aleppo regarding the Thirteen. She had to hope there were answers to those questions on the drive.
As she scanned through she saw the documents on the thumb drive were a random mess of word files, spreadsheets and text notes. A few images – pictures of people, scans of documents. There was no filing structure or co-ordination and it was impossible to know the source of
the data, who had authored it, or even in many cases the context.
One thing was quickly clear, though: Nilay had reams of data about the Thirteen that Cox had never seen. Not full details on each and every person, but way more core data than Cox herself had pulled together.
In their conversations Nilay had claimed her brother – when he was only nine – was abducted from their London home by their father. Neither had been seen since, though Nilay believed her brother, Aydin Torkal, had become one of the Thirteen. The trouble was, there was absolutely no credible intelligence that Cox had seen on what had become of the boy. Just stories.
Until now. Because looking through the files, there was a candid photograph of a young man. The name of the file was Talatashar, and she was convinced the young man she saw was the boy who’d been known as Aydin Torkal. She’d long known about the numbering system, how the boys’ true identities had been forgotten and they’d been referred to not by name but by number, but this was the first solid evidence she had that linked those numbers to actual people.
The picture of Talatashar was black and white, and not the best quality, but his features were clear. He looked so . . . ordinary. Cox’s theory was that the Thirteen were a group of master jihadis, trained from their early years in all manner of combat and arms and engineering skills, science and theology too. Everything needed to wage a war on the West in a new and deadly way.
Could this mild-looking man really be part of that?
Cox looked away, thinking. Then the laptop chirped. Her immediate thought was that it was Flannigan getting back to her, but she saw it was an incoming Skype call. From her mum.
Cox groaned. Yet despite the precarious situation, she soon found herself reaching out and clicking the cursor over the green button to accept the call.
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Rachel! So you are still alive, then?’