Sleeper 13: The most explosive must-read thriller of 2018

by Rob Sinclair

  Aydin heard gunshots in the distance, coming from further down the hill. He pulled himself to his feet, grabbed Cox’s gun from the floor and darted over to the front wall of the house next to them. He clambered to the top and looked out below at the maze of winding streets that led down from Albaicín to the cathedral, crammed with white-washed townhouses topped with red tiles. He saw bobbing heads: a couple of men in front; several with black helmets further behind them.

  That had to be Wahid – and Itnan? – being chased by the police. Aydin didn’t know how they’d got out of the compound in time, but they had. From his prominent position, he quickly took in the network of streets below, trying to work out not just the best route down, but also where Wahid would most likely come out so that he could try and intercept.

  Aydin had just about figured it out when he heard noise behind him. Shouting. Footsteps. Weapons cocking. He only managed to half-turn before the rattle of gunfire filled his ears. Someone was shooting at him. He hauled himself forward, landing with a crashing thud atop the terracotta tiles in the front yard of the house. The high wall he’d jumped from would at least protect him from whoever was shooting, and he had no wish to engage whoever it was in a tit-for-tat fight. He needed to go.

  He picked himself up, checked over Cox’s Glock, then headed for the front door of the house. It was unlocked, and he barged in, gun held out, and quickly made his way through the small space to the back. A middle-aged woman cowered in the kitchen behind a table, a bubbling pot on the stove behind her gave off a sweet scent of tomato sauce that filled the air. Aydin said nothing, and neither did the woman. He carried on out into the lush back garden, sprinting towards the white wall at the back that was lined with apricot trees. He swept up a white plastic garden chair as he moved and propped the chair against the wall, using it to clamber over the top.

  On the other side, he dropped down onto another cobbled street. Going through the house proved a welcome shortcut. He darted off to the right, initially moving up a slight incline, but he knew there was an alley on the left soon that would take him downhill, towards the fleeing Wahid. His body ached – from old wounds not yet healed, and newer ones from the blast – but he wasn’t going to stop now. Using all of his training and survival instincts to push through was vital.

  The whop-whop of rotors blistered the air. A police helicopter, circling a couple of hundred yards in the sky. No doubt they’d got Wahid in their sights. Aydin didn’t have long. The police surely couldn’t let Wahid get away now. But then Aydin knew to never underestimate his brother. They’d been planning the attacks for years. Plus, Aydin knew Phantom had fully kicked in and the authorities were operating at far from full capacity, the malware having chewed through their systems and their comms. It was going to seriously hamper both the police and MI6’s efforts to keep track of each of his former brothers now.

  Another explosion rose from further down the hill. Not a big one this time. Either a minor booby trap or just a simple hand grenade. Aydin saw the small wisp of smoke rising upward, helping him to keep his bearings. A left, then a quick right took him to the top of a steep street lined with shops selling North African curios; hookahs, incense, rugs, silks and cashmere. At the sight of him barrelling towards them, gun in hand, people shouted and scattered, but not all were quick enough and Aydin had to barge and shove several civilians out of the way. But it was slowing him down, and he took the first opportunity to move away onto a quieter alley, taking a right that snaked downward again, and hopefully would allow him to intercept Wahid.

  He continued running, lungs on fire, trying to eke out every last ounce of energy he had left, pushing his tired body to breaking point. A sharp bend in the alley made him hesitate. Rather than follow the bend, he headed straight for the white wall in front of him, and used his speed and momentum to run two, three steps up it before reaching and grabbing the top, pulling himself up and scrambling over.

  A thicket of bushes broke his fall, and he forced himself to ignore the stabbing and scraping of the jagged and prickly branches. He kept moving across the small space of overgrown wasteland – the garden of a derelict building as far as he could make out – as he headed to the wall at the other side. This one wasn’t as high and didn’t take as much effort to climb. As he got to the top he saw two figures off to his right, hurtling down the street.

  His heart almost exploded in his chest. It was Itnan and Wahid.

  Perched on the wall, Aydin lifted the gun and fired. His brothers both sensed him, and were forced to duck and weave out of the way. It saved Wahid’s life. Itnan wasn’t so lucky: one bullet to the chest, the other straight through his scapula. He skidded to the ground, face first. Aydin dove from the wall, on top of Wahid as he tried to scramble past. They rolled to the ground in a heap. Whatever Wahid was holding in his hand – a gun, a phone? – clattered away, as did Aydin’s Glock. They grappled for a few seconds, both of them dazed. The longer they stayed there on the ground, though, the bigger the chance of the police arriving and taking them both out.

  Wahid must have realised that too, because he fought with ferocious speed and urgency, and it was too much for Aydin. He’d never been a physical match for his brother. It was one of the many reasons why Wahid was number one and Aydin was the lowly thirteen. Aydin’s many injuries only made the fight even more one-sided, and after several strikes too many to his gut and his kidneys, Wahid managed to scrabble out and away.

  He dashed forward, scooping up from the ground the device that he’d dropped moments before. A phone, Aydin thought. He made a grab for Aydin’s gun too, but didn’t attempt to turn and shoot, just made off down the street.

  Aydin somehow managed to find the strength to get to his feet. He hobbled forward, more or less dragging his right leg behind him, it seemingly having deserted him. Was it broken?

  Wahid too was moving sluggishly. In front of them the narrow street opened out and they soon found themselves in the middle of a long, straight main road, four lanes wide. But it was strangely deserted.

  Aydin soon saw why. Up to the left, past the soaring structure of the Renaissance cathedral, were a multitude of flashing blue lights. A police cordon. He heard the shouts as the officers spotted him and Wahid emerging.

  ‘It’s over, brother,’ Aydin said.

  Wahid stopped and turned to him, a strange grin on his face. He dropped the gun to the ground. There was a line of policemen rushing forward towards both of them. Wahid lifted his hands in the air, as if in surrender. But he was still clutching on to the phone . . .

  ‘No!’ Aydin shouted. He scrambled back, falling and landing on his backside. Wahid winked at him.

  ‘Allahu Akbar,’ he said, calm and composed.

  His thumb touched the screen.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Aydin couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. Dust and grit filled the air all around. It hadn’t been just one explosion. When Wahid pressed the detonator a series of blasts had fanned out all around, bangs and rattles and booms – not just bombs exploding, but also the rumble as the buildings on all sides faltered and then collapsed. Aydin’s guess was that the cathedral was the main target. That’s why the police cordon was positioned where it was. He could only hope the police had enough time to move civilians away from the area, but the cordon was surely too close. He’d be surprised if any of the waiting police had survived.

  Aydin coughed and spluttered, trying to find a fresh breath of air in the thick dust. But it wasn’t just the dust, there was a strange odour in the air too, almost like musty hay – Aydin’s lungs burned more and more with each breath.

  And he knew why. Phosgene.

  He had to get away, and his only hope was that he was far enough from the central blast to be inhaling non-lethal doses.

  There was another distant rumble, and moments later another rush of air and grit blasted into him. Not a bomb, just another building saying goodbye to the world, more collateral damage.

  ‘Wahid!’ Aydin shouted out as
loudly as he could manage with his lungs burning. His brother wouldn’t escape, not this time.

  Aydin somehow hauled himself up. Blood covered his ragged clothes, spilt from a large gash above his ear. Another on his shoulder. His arms were grazed, his legs were on fire – literally. He swiped at the flames that were leaping up his trousers and managed to smother them before they took hold.

  Rocks and stones and chunks of concrete scraped beneath his feet, the thick dust swirling in the air around him meant he could barely see a metre in front of him. Above the din of raging fires he could hear moans and groans, coughing. People screamed in pain. Voices too – perhaps paramedics or police tending to the scene of destruction.

  But he could see no one.

  Wahid had been all of five yards ahead of him before the bombs went off. Aydin had moved that far already, but there was no sign of Wahid now. But then Aydin didn’t even know which direction he was moving in.

  ‘Argghhh!’ Aydin shouted in frustration when he saw the head of the street he’d come down earlier. Disorientated, he’d gone in the wrong direction.

  He turned and pulled his body along, back the other way. There was another rush of air, but this time rather than adding to the dust, it cleared it momentarily. Just a gust of wind? At that moment, he saw a clouded figure in front of him, scrabbling over debris. Aydin picked up the pace, stepping over stones and round boulders.

  ‘Wahid!’ he shouted again.

  The figure stopped, turned. It was him.

  Aydin picked a rock up from the floor, he took two more steps . . .

  But then Wahid was gone, vanishing into the dust as though he and it were one and the same. Aydin carried on forward, with more trepidation, the rock held up ready to smash it down.

  He sensed movement. He spun desperately to his left. He didn’t see Wahid until his brother’s hands were just inches away, and the big man barged into him, grabbing him around the waist and hauling him backward. Wahid carried him along, growling in anger with each step. Aydin lifted the rock and smacked it down onto the base of Wahid’s neck, but he didn’t even flinch.

  Wahid launched Aydin, whose back smashed off something hard. A car, an industrial bin – he didn’t know what, but he was soon on the ground even more dazed than before, the rock nowhere to be seen.

  Wahid dived on top and began to rain punches onto Aydin’s head. Among the blur of fists Aydin caught a flickering glimpse of his brother’s face. He saw the pure hatred in Wahid’s eyes; the anger. Out of control, he was pummelling Aydin, and the attack was simply too savage for him to offer a response.

  Aydin did his best to lift his arms to block, but had too little strength left, and Wahid easily punched through the pathetic defence. Aydin began to drift. Wahid wouldn’t stop, of that he was certain. Not until Aydin’s head was a mush of blood and brain and skull.

  Aydin’s hand searched at his side, looking for anything that he could use to try and fight Wahid off. His fingertips scraped desperately across the floor, skin peeling off. He found a loose rock and grabbed at it, but he barely had the strength to hold on.

  He screamed in desperation, one last final attempt to save his life. The rock was lifted up shakily, and he pulled back his arm, and drove the stone into Wahid’s face. His nose crunched as blood spurted. Aydin hit him again in the face, then twice more on the side of the head. All of a sudden it was the animal in Aydin that was in control, and now Wahid’s fire was going out.

  After another vicious blow with the bloody rock, Aydin heaved Wahid off him, swivelled, and was the one on top.

  He held the rock in both hands, above his head. One more killer blow was all that was needed. Wahid’s face was a mess. His nose had all but disappeared, his left eye socket crushed, blood dribbled out from his spluttering lips.

  ‘Why?’ Aydin asked, his voice trembling. ‘My sister. My mother. You didn’t have to kill them.’

  ‘Your sister was too close,’ Wahid managed to say. ‘You should have done it. But I wasn’t sure you could. It was a test.’

  A test? They killed his sister as a test of his allegiance? And what about his mother?

  ‘Your father . . .’ Wahid said, and Aydin was sure his brother was trying to smile. ‘Your father will be so disappointed.’

  The was no emotion in the taunt. No anger or anything else. Just a blunt, measured statement.

  Aydin froze. Your father. Not my father, or our father. Wahid wasn’t talking about the Teacher. He was talking about Aydin’s real dad. Ergun Torkal. The man who’d taken him away from his mother and sister. Who’d forced this life on him. Aydin hadn’t seen his father since he was nine years old. All he knew was that his father had been dead for years . . .

  So why would Wahid say that?

  Aydin screamed with pure rage and his arms tensed, ready to crash the rock down.

  ‘Aydin, no!’

  A woman. It was Cox. He heard her cock the gun.

  ‘Please,’ she begged, before coughing and spluttering.

  Once again, she hadn’t kept to her word. She’d said if he got to Wahid first, there was nothing that could be done. That Wahid was his to kill. Yet there she was, pointing a gun at his back just as he was about to put Wahid out of his misery.

  ‘This isn’t the way, Aydin,’ she pleaded. ‘We need him. We need to understand.’

  ‘He’ll never talk,’ Aydin said weakly. ‘And he doesn’t deserve to live.’

  The conversation was done. No more delays. Aydin’s arms twitched, then he swung the rock down towards Wahid’s face.

  But he didn’t see where the rock ended up. Before contact was made, Aydin heard the blast of the gun.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  London, England

  Cox looked over the benches, beyond the altar to the large wooden cross hanging there. She had headphones in her ears as she listened to the live BBC broadcast of the funeral that was taking place outside the chapel. The newsreader talked through the devastation. Over a hundred people killed across Europe, many of them police officers who were trying to thwart the attacks. Many hundreds more injured. There’d been a great financial toll too – billions of pounds, dollars, euros had been lost on stock markets across the world as the malware the Thirteen had let loose worked through corporate systems, derailing businesses everywhere. It was still unclear just how much money the terrorist sponsors had made short-selling those companies’ stocks. Then there was the money needed to account for the physical destruction, mostly notably of World Heritage buildings destroyed in Southern Spain.

  And what of the Thirteen? Seven attackers were dead. Five were in custody, including Wahid.

  One insurgent, Aydin Torkal, was still on the loose.

  Cox squeezed her eyes tightly shut and winced in pain as she took a large inhale of breath. The after-effects of the residual phosgene she’d inhaled back in Spain.

  The newsreader began to talk about the heroes of the day. Not just the police who had lost their lives, but the ones who had helped to save so many more. The security services were given praise too, as was the one outstanding operative of MI6 who’d become labelled in the tabloid media as ‘Plain Jane’. There had already been calls from the public and in the media for the unnamed operative to be awarded the George Cross.

  Cox cringed. She hated that she was being made out to be some sort of hero. The situation was as much down to the political machine as it was because of her actions, she knew. In desperate times, people needed a hero.

  A hand on her shoulder made her jerk.

  It was just Flannigan. Cox pulled the buds from her ears and the stoic voice of the BBC broadcaster faded away.

  ‘You sure you’re not going to join me?’ Flannigan was dressed in a smart black suit and Cox had to admit, with his sombre face showing none of his more usual anger, he looked almost welcoming.

  ‘I just can’t,’ Cox said, looking down.

  ‘You’ve got to stop beating yourself up.’

  ‘Not until we find the rest of them.’


  ‘The rest of them? There’s only one of them left. And we will find him.’

  Cox cringed. Aydin had been named and shamed in the press. There was simply no way round that. He was one of them, and he was still on the loose. Yet Cox firmly believed Aydin’s actions had helped save hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

  ‘I didn’t mean Aydin,’ Cox said. ‘I mean the ones who recruited and trained him, and all the others. The people responsible for the Thirteen.’

  ‘We will find them. And you’re going to help.’

  ‘I thought you said I needed to take time off.’

  ‘You do. But after that you’ll come back stronger. I know you will. You’re Plain Jane,’ he said with a small grin. ‘You’re indestructible, apparently.’

  Cox smiled. ‘So I keep hearing. Pretty much a real-life James Bond.’

  ‘Jane Bond, don’t you mean? I hear Hollywood are already interested.’

  Cox scoffed. ‘We haven’t even buried our dead and producers are already seeing the dollar signs.’

  Flannigan was serious again now. ‘It’s not your fault they died. Not any of them.’

  ‘More than a hundred people lost their lives. We could have stopped it all. We were so close.’

  ‘You need to think about the lives we – you – saved. More than three thousand, by most accounts. And we all know how horrific it would have been. Bombs, fire, chemicals. Those attacks were designed not just to kill but to cause agony and misery.’

  Cox didn’t respond, just felt herself flinch at the thought of how much worse events could have been.

  Flannigan held out his hand. Cox hesitated for a moment, but then reached out and took it. She stood up and her eyes caught his.

  ‘Shall we go?’

  Cox nodded. They walked slowly, side by side over to the doors. Flannigan stepped in front and pushed them open and they both stepped out into the driving rain. Flannigan quickly opened up his giant golfing umbrella and huddled next to Cox. She stopped and looked over to the mass of people in the near distance, many dressed in police uniforms.