by Andy McNab
I closed down the phone and thrust the ledger into Charlotte’s arms. I took the large Jiffy-bag out from under my sweatshirt, which had been tucked into my jeans. The outside was wet with sweat, but the bubble-wrap was keeping the inside dry. ‘Put it in this, for protection. You must guard it. Remember: Flavia, nobody else. She’ll be waiting. Tell no one you’ve got it. They’ll be looking for it on me. There’s work to do with this. We’ve got to make it safe.’
As she gripped it, I pulled her into my arms and hugged her so tightly the ledger dug into our ribs. I whispered into her ear: ‘You really are the real deal. But you always were.’
I let go and she looked freaked out, but I didn’t want to explain what I had just seen written. She could do that for herself once she was on the heli and safe. ‘Go! Go! Go!’
She didn’t move. ‘James, what’s happening? What are you doing? Why are you staying?’
‘I’m not. I’m just checking. I don’t want to leave anything that will give us up to these people later. We want to get away with this, don’t we? Go! I’m right behind you.’
Charlotte pushed the ledger into the Jiffy-bag before she dropped to her knees and crawled through the hole. As soon as her feet had disappeared I turned and raced up the wooden staircase the other side of the steel door, and into the darkness and echoes of a cavernous hallway. It was empty. What little ambient light there was came from the stars penetrating so many full-glazed walls. Enough to make finding the main door easy.
I threw the locks and pulled, and the huge floor-to-ceiling double doors, so heavy they must have had steel inners, opened agonizingly slowly.
I stood outside, my mind racing, and as I looked up at the stars a buzzing sound filled the night and one of the drones zoomed behind and above me. The pitch of the rotor tone increased as it took the weight of the deniable, and soon the noise was gone. There was nothing but silence again and the stars. It was the first time I’d noticed them since I’d been here, and maybe I was noticing them now because I was trying to take them in. It might be the last time I got to see anything or anyone because it was my turn now to take a stand, and try somehow to give Charlotte, the ledger and the team some space.
I felt at ease with myself, almost calm, as I realized I really was willing to die for what was in that ledger.
I heard movement to the left of the house, and the noise was closing in on me.
62
Hurling myself into the bushes and away from the slabbed pathway, I crouched on the ground and fumbled for anything to attack with. My breath quickened but I tried to control it. The sound was magnified tenfold in my head. Surely they could hear me. My hand moved over the dry soil and I found a stone just big enough for me to feel I was armed. I grabbed it as the noises grew clearer: movement and laboured breathing. My hand closed round the stone.
The body shape came into view as it turned the corner of the house. A male coughed, and an arm went up to steady himself against the glazed wall of the house.
‘Tony?’
He looked as startled as I was.
I climbed out of the hedgerow and he stooped, hands on his hips as he fought to get his breath back. He looked at me long and hard. ‘What are you doing here, boy?’
‘What are you doing here? I thought you were taking care of Warren.’
He shook his head. ‘Gemma can do that. She’s going to put the fear of God into him. He’ll be okay. Me, run? That wouldn’t happen for too long, boy. I’d drop dead within a minute.’
He gave a slight chuckle, hoping to make light of it, but he was probably telling the truth. ‘So I thought to myself I’d try to do something.’
‘What?’
‘You know. What have I got to lose? I’m on my last legs here, boy. The cancer.’ He tapped his chest. ‘It’s got me.’
I felt like a sledgehammer had hit me, but all I could think to say was ‘Shit.’
‘Don’t let it worry you, boy. It doesn’t worry me. Now that Maureen’s gone, I’ve got nothing left. That’s why I thought I’d stay and see what’s coming up the road – you know, give you kids a bit of a head start.’
He comforted me with a tap on the arm. ‘Come on, cheer up, boy. Something gets us all in the end. At least I have a fancy one: respirable crystalline silica. All that breathing in concrete dust since my apprentice days. That’s what got me, not Maureen’s fags.’ He chuckled away as he drifted into his own world, thinking about his wife. ‘You know, she got thrown off a bus once because she was smoking and disagreed with the ban.’
I laughed with him. ‘Maureen used to get through those B&H like a good ’un, didn’t she?’
We took a breath, both staring out into the darkness at the end of the slabbed walkway that led to the drive.
I nudged Tony with an elbow but kept my eyes forward. I was finding it hard to look at him, and I realized how much I loved him. ‘I liked that magnet trick.’
He gave another laugh and cough combo, then cleared his throat. ‘The safe was controlled by a solenoid. They’ve been about since the 1820s. That’s how fancy that lump of steel was. Magnets, never leave home without one. That’s what I say.’
We both fell silent once more. We didn’t say it, but we both knew we were waiting for four sets of headlights to cut through the dark.
‘Son, I know what you’re doing here, and you don’t need to. It would be a waste but I’m glad you’re here because I need a favour.’
‘Anything.’
‘Just promise me you’ll get me back, scatter my ashes in Dean’s Park. Maureen’s there – she’s behind the memorial in the wall. That’d do me. You’ll have to do it without the buggers seeing you, mind.’
I knew the park well. It was part of York Minster’s grounds.
‘She wanted me to throw her about the grounds as a final two fingers up to the cathedral because they wouldn’t let us get married there.’
He played with his nose, pushing the tip up more than most humans would be capable of. ‘Not posh enough, don’t you know?’
I nodded and put an arm around him. ‘Of course. But I need a favour from you.’
He didn’t say anything: he waited.
‘Me and Charlotte have always wanted to know how you got that nose. I mean, if you were born like that, you would have been in a circus.’
He had a little laugh, which morphed into a hacking cough. ‘It was your mother. She hit me smack in the face with a frying pan.’ He couldn’t control his laughter as he put his hands on his hips, leaning forward, coughing up the contents of the tunnel and having a spit out. I rubbed his back, as if I was winding one of my boys when they were babies.
He finished and stood himself upright. ‘I knew your mum and dad from schooldays, when we were like eight or nine years old. By the time we were getting to be teenagers, well, you’re thinking about people differently – and I fancied your mother. Fancied her rotten, I did. We all had a bit of a party at her house one day because her mum and dad were out – and I tried to grab hold of her and give her a kiss.’ He squashed his nose again with his forefinger. ‘But she put paid to that nonsense!’
He laughed and spluttered again, then gripped my arm. Vehicle lights were cutting into the darkness ahead of us.
‘You’d better get going, boy.’
I hesitated. This wasn’t how I’d thought it was going to play out.
‘Go! Get on!’
I grabbed him, hugged him to me, and felt his hands come up onto my back and embrace me. ‘Say goodbye to Charlotte for me, will you?’ And then I swore I saw him wink. ‘And your mum.’
We parted. I turned and walked back towards the house.
Tony was confused. ‘What are you doing? Just cut across the grass. Get picked up by one of those drone things. Go! Go!’
I got to the door. ‘Not yet. There’s something I have to do.’
63
Heaving the huge wooden doors shut behind me and throwing every lock I could find, I sprinted back into Sanctuary and the light sp
illing round the staircase to the basement. I took the stairs two at a time until I came into full brightness.
The first thing I did was unscrew the black camera from its mount. I wanted the living memory it contained. I shoved it down the front of my sweatshirt and tucked that into the top of my jeans, all the time moving towards the hole in the tiles. I scrambled and crawled my way back through the hole, then the one in the bung, and ran as fast as I could along the tunnel. My boots stamped into the steel grating, the metallic clang each time bouncing off the walls. My chest heaved.
At the far end I ran up to the stairs, two at a time again, almost jumped through the steel double doors and ran out into the bright lights of the hangar. I could see the black triangle of the still-open shutter area, and as I got closer the perspective changed. Beyond the light spilling out of the hangar, I could once more see the glimmer of stars.
Any comfort that brought was soon ripped away as I ran out onto the hard-standing and heard shouts, screams, gunshots, and the rev of vehicle engines round the front of Sanctuary.
I jinked right, towards the high ground, so far away, totally in the darkness, but it was where the Js were. I ran – that was all I could do until the drones found me and picked me up. I never looked back to find out what or where, who was caught, who was shot.
My throat was parched, my face wet with sweat. I fell and recovered, stumbling, crawling before I could get up and run again as fast as I could. It didn’t matter what my body was doing as long as it was moving away from Sanctuary. But that wasn’t happening as fast as I wanted. Headlights swept across the ground from behind me, casting weak shadows from trees and bushes. An engine revved, and more lights swept past, right to left, propelling my shadow in front of me. It was stronger than before. They were getting closer, until the lights went static, their bright beams illuminating me.
I heard shots, then shouts: ‘Stop! Stand still! Stop!’
The vehicle surged towards me once again, lights still blazing. They had me. My shadow was straight in front of me, and its edges got sharper as the lights got closer.
More shouts to stop, but I kept running. What else could I do? The vehicle stopped. I glanced back and the headlights blinded me, but on the edge of the arc of light I saw the driver’s door opening. All I could see was the frame of a body. Just like Casper and Jon’s had been, the rifle was up. I ran at an angle to make a hard target and there was gunfire. Simultaneously a sharp, intense pain stabbed at my right leg, a deep burning, paralysing me with pain as well as disbelief, as I tumbled forward.
My face banged into the grass. My arms splayed out, the camera digging into my stomach. Instinct made me keep struggling, trying to crawl away from the danger. It wasn’t happening: where did I think I was going to crawl to? I rolled over onto my back, and as I writhed I put my hand down to the hole in the back of my jeans and the source of the pain.
The silhouette had made its way much closer to me, rifle up. I lay motionless. I couldn’t do anything more. I accepted my fate. I guessed that my timings and opportunity, my luck, had run out, and it was this guy’s time.
A strange calmness came over me. I didn’t have the ledger to lose, and that was what it was all about. Eyes open, I fought the pain: I wanted to see him, wanted to know what the man who was about to kill me looked like and what he was feeling. Was he sad? Angry? Or did he not give a shit?
Frustratingly, I couldn’t see his face. The shadows with the light behind wouldn’t let me.
For some strange reason I tried to get my breath back, as if that mattered or would help. My hand pressed tight over the hole in the back of my leg. Maybe his orders were to keep me alive to question me. I’d rather he spent more time dealing with me than any of the team, especially Charlotte – and the ledger.
Again, at the thought of her I felt calm. She would do the right thing with it. As soon as she’d read it, she would know what to do.
He took another step towards me and the silhouette got bigger. The rifle was still up, aiming at me, and at first the buzzing behind him didn’t register.
The sound pushed in from the right and got louder and louder as the drone descended from above. The eagle swooped out of the darkness, its legs down, claws fully extended in the attack as it smashed into the silhouette and took him to the ground. He still had his rifle as the drone hovered over him, but as he loosed off a couple of shots into the air the claws dug into his rifle arm. His screams of pain were louder even than the rotor noise as flesh was torn and bone was crushed. The claws lifted his arm upwards and his body followed. His legs kicked out at nothing but air as the eagle ascended and he tried to break free. The rifle fell to the grass now far below him, and just as quickly as it had appeared, the drone was swallowed again by the darkness. Soon even the distant screams had faded.
I turned and did my best to crawl towards the high ground, dragging my injured leg behind me. It felt like I was trying to pull it away from my body as the wound stretched.
The screams in the sky returned and got louder. Moments later there was a deafening crump. The ground shook. I turned back to see the man once more on the ground, but now a mangled doll.
The buzzing, too, got louder again. As I lay on my back the Js brought their beast down towards me, its claws extended. The arms gave a small electrical whine as they came down each side of me, two metres off the ground, the camera spinning through 360 as they checked the area before committing. Then the lens came down and focused just on me. It was as if the Js’ faces were focusing on me, taking me to safety.
Never leaving a man behind.
The downdraught from the six rotors blasted the sweat off my face as the drone hovered, waiting for me to move into the claws’ embrace. I sat with my arms up, and they interlocked under my armpits and around my back, then took the strain. I held on and the drone gently gained height. Soon my arse was off the ground. It carried on lifting and my feet left the ground. The pain in my thigh intensified as gravity took hold of my leg and tried to stretch the wound even more. But so what?
The more height the drone gained, the better my bird’s eye view of what was going on at Sanctuary. Lights were on in every room in the house, bathing the building, like a son et lumière show. Vehicle lights jerked back and forth; torches scoured the area.
I tried to lift my leg, as if that was going to help it in any way. It didn’t. It got worse, and I was dizzy. Pain, blood loss or the exertion of holding onto the drone’s arms? I wasn’t too sure. All that mattered was that the direction of travel was towards the Js.
I felt that I wasn’t alone out there. I looked around, checked left and right, and in the gloom to my right there was the second drone, just a couple of metres away, flying at the same speed and level. It, too, had somebody underneath it. But this body wasn’t holding on; it was a solid old unit and it bent at the waist, with its arms, head and legs trailing in the slipstream as we moved forward.
Was Tony’s death a waste? It didn’t matter whether he’d done well down there slowing Castro’s men or not. It was the fact that he’d been willing to. That was what mattered.
I closed my eyes, a stupid attempt simply to lessen the pain, and it didn’t work. All it did was accelerate things to the point at which eventually I passed out.
Part Eight
* * *
64
Akaroa
Saturday, 27 July 2019
12.23 p.m.
The GoPro’s eye still stared at me from the coffee-table, but a warning light was flashing red. My new police-inspector friend leant forward to change the big chunky battery. The remains of the cafetière were stone cold and neither of them had asked for more along the way, even though I’d offered. An intermission or two to make sure I’d covered the story would have been handy.
While Lawrence did the change-over I turned to Janet. ‘That’s it. That’s what happened.’
They had been shifting on the settee for the past three hours or so, but now Janet had resumed the position she’d st
arted in, her arm thrown over the rear of the seat, her legs crossed. At last it was her turn to talk.
‘And the team? What happened to them?’
‘They all made it back to Saraswati, including Tony and the Js. In fact, it was one part of the plan that actually worked.’ I gave a bit of a smile but nothing was coming back. I pushed on. ‘Tony got his wish. We were all there to scatter his ashes in Dean’s Park to join Maureen. Gemma? Who knows? She could be anywhere. She’s probably bought herself her very own rugby club and is busy oiling up the team for a match right about now.’
There was finally a hint of a smile, but it came from Lawrence, not Janet. I’d have to try a lot harder to get a result out of her.
I patted my blue cargo shorts. ‘And me, of course, I got this big boy.’ And quite a worrying-looking scar it was, too. They’d sorted out the wound for me on board the yacht. The rich don’t just have their own dietary chefs and hairdressers, they have their own doctors. I pointed to the dark pink keloid scarring on my right thigh. ‘That’s where the round went in, just there – and out through the other side, no bone hit, just missing the femoral artery. A little more physio, and I’ll be back to normal.
‘As for Warren, he’s still in York with his family. And us two? Well, we’re down here, aren’t we? So we’re all okay.’
Lawrence signalled that the GoPro was in recording mode again, and settled back to join Janet. She wasn’t accepting my bland statement. ‘Okay? Really?’
I shrugged. ‘Of course. Warren and Gemma have their money, and Charlotte and I have the crusade.’
Janet looked about the room. ‘You’ve got a bit more than that going on.’ She took in the luxury, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to comprehend the extent of the resource behind it. I used to register it, but never really understood the magnitude of extreme wealth – and I didn’t just mean the money Parmesh had had access to. But, then, did she even want to? I doubted it. A look of something close to disgust burnt out of her eyes. And I could understand that.