Authors: Chris Ryan
The embassy’s reception area looked deserted. There was a time when it would have been thronging with foreign nationals seeking visas or other consular assistance, but anyone in their right mind had now taken their government’s advice and left Syria. It was a large room, some fifteen metres by twelve, and had seating areas along the two long sides and dog-eared posters of Prague and other Czech beauty spots on the walls. At one end of the room was a long reception desk, and it was only as he was stepping into the building that he noticed two armed guards lounging casually behind it. When they saw an armed man entering the building, they sprang up, raised their rifles and started barking at Danny in Czech. Within seconds he was face down on the floor and his hands were being plasticuffed behind his back. He didn’t resist – not even when they pulled him back up to his feet and confiscated his M4 and his Sig, along with the wad of dollars Taff had given him. They then escorted him at gunpoint to a windowless, unfurnished basement room and locked him inside.
Danny knew the Czech ambassador would see him soon. A heavily armed Brit rocking up on his doorstep would have all the hallmarks of a potential diplomatic incident. This wasn’t something he’d want to delegate.
He was right. After ten minutes the guards led him from the basement room and up an echoing flight of stairs behind the reception area to a room at the back of the first floor that looked on to an unlovely lightwell. Here a gaunt man with a bushy grey moustache sat behind a wooden desk, a nervous, pensive look on his face. Danny’s weapons were on top of a low cupboard behind the ambassador. His money lay on the desk. The two armed guards stood menacingly by the door.
‘You speak English?’ Danny asked the ambassador.
The ambassador nodded. He made no attempt to stop him as Danny, still handcuffed, picked up his money and flicked through it.
‘It’s two thousand light,’ he said.
The ambassador raised his hands in a gesture of apology, but Danny saw the greed and corruption in his eyes.
‘I need a private room and a secure, encrypted connection to MI6 in London. Can you fix that?’
‘Perhaps,’ the ambassador said.
‘Tell them you have a communication from call sign Kilo Alpha Six Four. And get your men to remove the grey Peugeot out front. The Syrian authorities will be looking for it.’
The ambassador thought about that for all of five seconds, then issued an instruction to the guards. One of them disappeared. The other uncuffed Danny before following his colleague.
‘May I ask,’ said the ambassador in excellent English, ‘the nature of your business in Damascus?’
‘No,’ Danny replied.
‘Do not misunderstand me, but the sooner you leave, the happier I will be.’
‘Trust me, pal. I feel the same.’
The ambassador stood up. ‘Please wait here. I apologise for the surroundings. My real office is in the front of the building. Less safe, they tell me. I will see to your communications.’ He left the room, returning a couple of minutes later. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
He led Danny to a room directly opposite his temporary office. A young man sat at a laptop, which was connected by a short lead to a mobile sat phone. The noises coming from the computer sounded like an old-fashioned fax machine: the technician was clearly having trouble connecting. Ignoring him and the ambassador, Danny edged towards a barred window that looked down on to the street below, keeping out of sight by staying to one side of it. There were no pedestrians and very little traffic. A blue Citroën drove by. Four minutes and thirty seconds later it passed by again, going in the same direction. Coincidence? Unlikely.
The laptop fell silent. The young man said something to the ambassador after an image popped up on the screen: an empty room. A face appeared. Danny walked over and recognised it immediately. Carrington, Buckingham’s boss. The spook who had sent them on this job.
He looked at the ambassador and the technician. ‘I’ll need the room,’ he said.
The ambassador nodded rather reluctantly. The two men left.
The connection was poor. Carrington’s face pixelated every few seconds and his voice had an almost robotic quality through the laptop’s tinny speakers. As he spoke, the first part of his sentence broke up. ‘. . . to see you, Black. We were beginning to worry, and we certainly weren’t expecting you to turn up in Damascus.’
‘We’ve got problems.’
‘So I understand. Let’s hear it.’
Danny was used to debriefs. What was relevant, what was not. He recounted the bare bones of the past few days to Carrington in not much more than a minute.
A pause. Even though the connection was poor, Carrington’s displeasure was unmistakable. ‘This is regrettable,’ he said.
‘Might have turned out better if you’d been up front with me from the start.’
Carrington smiled indulgently, as though Danny was a petulant child. ‘We couldn’t tell you the real reason for the operation, Black,’ he said. ‘If you’d been captured and interrogated, the jolly old
entente cordiale
with the French would have been well and truly shafted. I’m sure you understand.’
‘Not really,’ Danny said. ‘I’d have lasted a lot longer than Buckingham under interrogation.’
‘Of course. Think of it as damage limitation. Buckingham is an insincere little toad, as you’ve no doubt observed.’
At least that was something they could agree upon. ‘I can’t take on the Damascus
Mukhabarat
,’ Danny said. ‘You have to get on to the Syrians. Put some pressure on to get Buckingham and Clara released.’
‘We’ll do what we can, of course,’ Carrington said evasively. He smiled again. ‘This business with Taff Davies is unfortunate.’
‘You knew he was part of the private military team?’ Danny said.
‘Naturally.’
‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’
Carrington removed his glasses, inspected them at a distance of a few inches, then wiped them on his tie before putting them back on and continuing. ‘I was hoping not to have this conversation with you, Black. Now it seems it’s unavoidable. You’re quite alone?’
Danny nodded.
‘When Sorgen and Asu’s father was killed in Paris three weeks ago, the family of the suicide bomber, an Algerian national, were also found dead. The working theory was that the bomber dealt with them before the hit, but there was a curious anomaly. French investigators found DNA traces that matched a former French Foreign Legion member called Liam Skinner. Does the name mean anything to you?’
‘You know it does,’ Danny said. ‘If you want to speak to him, tough – he’s fertilising the desert.’
‘I think, on balance, that I’m pleased to hear it. His file doesn’t make edifying reading. I’ll spare you the details of how the Algerian’s children died.’
Danny shrugged. There was nothing Carrington could say about Skinner that would surprise him.
‘When we learned that one of Taff Davies’ team may have been involved, certain alarm bells started ringing. It’s not that we knew for sure that he was batting for the other side. We didn’t even particularly suspect it, as these private military chaps go from one contract to another all the time. But we did feel the need for an insurance policy. And that insurance policy, of course, is you.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Really, Black. You’re meant to be the Regiment’s finest. Are you telling me you didn’t wonder why we plucked you straight from the battlefield to lead this patrol?’
Danny had no answer to that.
‘Davies is a damn good soldier,’ Carrington continued. ‘Too good to be allowed to roam free if he’s taken it upon himself to make a monkey of the British government. And it looks like he’s done exactly that, so now it’s time for us to cash in on our insurance. You know Davies better than anyone. You know his methods and his tradecraft. You’re to locate him immediately, and eliminate him and the remainder of his team. When that’s done, we’ll get you out of there.’
Danny clenched his jaw and looked straight into the webcam.
‘No,’ he said.
‘It’s a direct order, Black.’
An image flashed in Danny’s mind: Taff, standing outside Sorgen’s tent. He could have stopped Danny, but he’d let him go.
‘I won’t do it.’
There was a silence, but despite the pixelation Danny could read a calculating look on the spook’s face. Finally, after about ten seconds, Carrington spoke again.
‘Remarkable thing, DNA,’ he said. ‘Imagine. Seven billion people on the earth, and we could identify Skinner’s beyond any doubt whatsoever. It’s certainly changed the way we do things. Not that you’d remember. You were still a child when profiling became routine. Shame really. It could have helped a lot when the RUC were investigating who shot your old man. And your mother, of course, God rest her soul.’ Another pause. ‘I take it Buckingham slipped that little nugget of information into the conversation at some point?’
Danny just stared.
‘What did Taff Davies tell you when you asked him, Black? That an unknown IRA gunman entered the hospital where you were born and escaped after killing your mother and wounding your father? That the only evidence they ever found was the scrubs the gunman was wearing bundled up under a bush in the hospital’s grounds?’ Carrington nodded. ‘That’s all true,’ he said. ‘But there’s something he
didn’t
tell you, because he didn’t know himself. A year or so after the shooting, Special Branch found themselves in a position to analyse those scrubs. They still contained DNA from your parents’ blood, of course, but also an overwhelming amount from the man who’d worn them.’
A pause.
‘We know who killed your parents, Danny. We’ve known since you were a child. I wouldn’t be surprised if, somewhere deep down, you know too.’
Danny found himself holding his breath. Surely he wasn’t about to be told what he
thought
he was about to be told.
Numbness. And then a strange kind of anticipated grief, reduced to a single point in his chest.
‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it, Black. Davies was the gunman. He killed your mother. He
tried
to kill your father. If you had a mind to, you could blame your brother’s – how can we put it? –
difficulties
on him too. There’s no doubt they stem from the trauma of what he witnessed that day.’ Another smile. ‘Listen to me. Quite the psychiatrist, eh?’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Danny.
‘Ah, but I think you do, Danny. I really think you do. MI6 has sat on the knowledge all these years because it suited our purposes having Davies as a gun for hire, doing our dirty work through the agency of private military contracts. But I rather think he’s past his sell-by date, don’t you?’
Danny was shaking his head. It didn’t make sense. Taff
loved
his mother. It was obvious. He’d always been there for his dad. And for him too. Jesus, Kyle had been right. He
had
been more like a father than a friend. ‘Why would he do it?’ he whispered, more to himself than to Carrington.
‘Jolly good question,’ Carrington said. ‘Perhaps when you catch up with him, you can ask. We have a good idea where you can find him. It seems Buckingham’s infinity device didn’t end up quite where we expected it to.’
‘I put it in Hector’s weapon.’
‘Ah,’ Carrington replied, as if a mystery had been solved. ‘We did wonder. Jolly useful, I must say. Kept us abreast of the situation. Would you care to hear the result of your efforts?’
Without waiting for a reply, Carrington looked like he was pressing a button on the table. A sound came over the line. It was muffled – that was to be expected from a listening device hidden in the magazine of an assault rifle – but it was clearly the noise of a vehicle in motion.
Then voices. Indistinct – Danny had to strain to pick up every word.
‘Nothing happens until we see the money.’ Taff’s voice.
‘Hugo Buckingham is dead?’ Sorgen.
‘As a dodo. No bullets. If anyone finds his body, they’ll just put it down to an explosion. One of the many.’
A click. A gap. The recording played on.
‘
Damn it!
You don’t understand what the hell’s going on. You’re still just a
fucking kid
.’
‘Not any more, Taff.’ Danny heard his own voice. ‘But then I guess we all have to grow up some day, don’t we?’
A gap.
Gunfire.
A gap.
A vehicle’s engine.
A gap.
Taff’s voice. He sounded angry. ‘Fuck you, Saunders. When you’re out on the ground, then you can start criticising my decisions.’
A pause.
‘I’m not a fucking delivery boy. Get someone else to do it.’ Danny realised that he was listening to a phone conversation. ‘Hold back my money, Saunders, and you might get an unexpected visitor in the middle of the night. Got it?’
Silence.
‘You’re a piece of shit, you know that? . . . Yes, I’ve got the fucking address, 157 Al Kamada Street, Damascus, midnight. You’d better hope your new Syrian mates haven’t flattened the place . . .’