Authors: Chris Ryan
He stopped stock-still and listened. But there was nothing to listen to, other than silence.
Stepping over the body, he started to climb the stairs. His eyes were firmly fixed on the door at the top and to the left. It was slightly ajar.
The cat miaowed again. Joe froze. Had something disturbed it?
No sound.
He continued to climb.
At the top of the stairs he stopped. His finger was resting lightly on the trigger of his handgun. His breathing was shallow and silent. Slowly, he extended his right foot and gently kicked the door open.
By the misty moonlight shining through the windows, Joe immediately recognized the place. The video he had seen was burned on his memory. There, against the far wall, was the bed on which Conor had been sitting. On the wall behind it, a picture, its details obscured by the darkness, but Joe knew that if he looked more closely it would show a ship in a storm. His eyes panned round the room. There was a table in the middle, piled high with books. Boxes were piled up in corners and against the walls. The room was chaotic.
And it was clear nobody was at home.
Joe stepped over to the bed. Something had caught his eye. He bent down and picked it up off the blanket: a small, grey elephant, patched up and the worse for wear.
He flung the toy down on the ground, hissing with frustration.
There was nobody here.
Less than six hours till the RV that was only a couple of klicks away. Was it really likely that they’d already set out?
Joe raced through the rest of the house – two more bedrooms upstairs, a large sitting room and a fourth bedroom on the ground floor. He knew it was pointless. He knew the house was deserted apart from him, an old lady’s body and a restless cat. Back in the room where Conor had been held he was almost careless enough to switch on the light. He stopped himself at the last second: if he could observe the place from afar, anybody could. And if Conor’s abductor had even an inkling that events were not unfolding as he had planned, that could only be bad for the boy. He stalked round the room, seeking anything that might help him. It was only thanks to the moonlight streaking in through the window that he saw it.
The passport was in plain view, sitting atop one of the piles of books on the round table. On the front it had the words ‘United States of America’. Joe examined the identification page. There was no mistaking the features of the man in the photograph. Joe had seen that face once before. Until now he had been unable to recall its features, but as it stared out of the passport at him, he was transported back to the visiting room at Barfield.
This was him. Mr Ashe.
But the name on the passport was Mahmood Ashkani.
Only two thoughts spun around Joe’s head. Two simple statements of fact.
First: the Middle Eastern man who had abducted his son held an American passport.
And second, if he wanted to see Conor again, the only option open to him was to turn up at the RV tomorrow at 0600 hours. At which point, Mr Ashe, or Mahmood Ashkani, or whoever the fuck he
really
was, would undoubtedly try to kill him.
Eva was shivering with cold.
For ten minutes after Joe had left, she’d kept one hand on the key in the ignition. Now she was hugging herself to keep warm. More than once she found herself glancing at the door, checking that the central locking was on. She didn’t know quite what she was scared of. But she was scared.
One seventeen. She was dazzled by the sight of a single headlight turning at high speed into the car park. She fumbled for the keys, one arm covering her eyes to block out the brightness, but then the light disappeared and she could just make out Joe, jumping off the bike and letting it fall to one side. A fist on the driver’s window, and he was shouting: ‘Open up!’
Eva had released the lock before she registered that Joe had returned alone. She twisted round as she heard Joe opening the rear door. His face was illuminated by the small internal light, and the look on it chilled her. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Conor? Joe, what
happened
?’
When he didn’t answer she opened the driver’s door and ran round to the back of the vehicle. Joe had pulled out the body armour and was examining the Kevlar helmet. She grabbed his right arm but he shrugged her off.
‘I was too late,’ he spat. ‘They’ve already left.’
‘Are you sure it was the right place?’
He nodded. ‘Conor was there.’
‘So what are we going to do?’
‘The only thing I can do,’ Joe said. ‘Turn up.’ He started to pull on the body armour.
Eva peered nervously at him. ‘Joe, you
can’t
,’ she said. ‘He’ll try to—’
‘
What do you want me to do, Eva?
’ he shouted. ‘
He’s got my son!
’
‘But—’
Joe put one hand to his forehead and paused for a moment, clearly trying to calm himself down after his outburst. Eva noticed that his hand was shaking, and she had to fight a sudden urge to put her arms round him.
‘If I lose Conor,’ Joe said, in a low voice that was on the verge of cracking, ‘I lose everything. I’ll have nothing left in the world.’
He wasn’t even looking at Eva when he said it, so he could have had no idea of the effect the blunt truth of his words had on her.
‘Wait,’ she said.
He turned towards her.
She pointed at the body armour. ‘How safe is it?’
‘Depends on the round, distance, trajectory,’ he said. ‘He’ll try to take me out from the clifftop, I reckon. It’ll protect my vital organs, keep me alive to go after them. Probably.’
Eva nodded. She remembered how, when they were younger, Joe would do anything to keep her from harm. She remembered the look on his face when he told her that Conor had been abducted.
‘Give it to me,’ she said.
Nineteen
0330 hours.
Mahmood Ashkani, aka Mr Ashe, aka any number of other names at different times and different places around the world, would be glad to get rid of the boy. Ashkani knew that he had a gift for terror. It was not surprising the boy should be scared. He had gone to very great lengths to ensure it. But to be encumbered by someone so silently helpless was wearisome. And his frail, child’s mind was so damaged by what he had been exposed to that really he would be better off dead.
The grey light of dawn was still two hours away. The only light came from a street lamp ten metres to his right and it was further dimmed by the thick layer of condensation that covered the window of his grey Peugeot, parked in the car park at Thornbridge station. The first train would not leave here for another hour, so he knew the place would be deserted for as long as he needed it. The boy was in the back seat. Ashkani hadn’t bothered to bind his hands. The child didn’t seem to know where he was, or who he was. He just stared into space, never speaking, never moving.
Ashkani’s left hand lightly touched the laptop that lay on the passenger seat. His fingertips brushed against the satellite phone resting on top of it, and against a 4GB data stick.
At 5.10 a.m. the headlights of a second car filled the rear-view mirror. It parked to the left of Ashkani. The driver exited and Ashkani gathered up the computer, phone and data stick so that the man could sit beside him. The newcomer looked not unlike Ashkani. He was a similar age and build, with black hair and dark skin. But he had a harsher, crueller face. The lack of lines around the side of his mouth did not make him look younger. It just made him look as though he seldom smiled.
‘Do you really think he’s coming?’ The newcomer spoke in Arabic.
Ashkani sniffed, then replied in the same language: ‘I killed his wife. I kidnapped his son.’ Turning to look at the other man, he asked: ‘Do you really think he’s
not
?’
‘I would have expected him to call the police.’
‘I have eyes and ears among the police. He has spoken to nobody.’
This reassurance seemed to be good enough for the other man.
‘You understand what you need to do?’ asked Ashkani.
‘It won’t be a problem.’
Ashkani failed to stop a wave of annoyance entering his voice. ‘If I knew it wasn’t going to be a problem,’ he said, ‘I would not have insisted upon my best marksman. This man is good at staying alive. Do not underestimate him.’
‘The reason I am your best marksman is because I underestimate nobody.’ A pause. ‘
You
will be . . . ’
‘I will be where I need to be.’
‘It is happening then? Today?’
Ashkani nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘The British soldier and his son must not survive this morning. You would not wish to deny the Lion his final roar?’ As he said this, he fiddled absent-mindedly with the data stick.
The other man looked over his shoulder. His expression, when he looked at the boy, was one of contempt. ‘Does he never speak?’
‘Sometimes. When forced. He won’t give you any trouble. He doesn’t know what’s going on.’
‘Good. I will take him now.’
Ashkani nodded. ‘Don’t let him out of your sight.’
‘I can’t have him with me when I—’
‘
Don’t
let him out of your sight.’
‘Whatever you say.’
Ashkani did not expect the boy to make any fuss when he was removed from the back seat and transferred to the other car, and he wasn’t disappointed. The child said nothing. He still didn’t even seem aware that anything was happening. Not that it mattered to Ashkani any more. He wound down the passenger window and looked out at the other man when he’d bundled the boy into the back of his car. ‘I want to know when it is done,’ he said.
The other man nodded, before climbing into the car, closing the door and driving off. Ashkani waited for five minutes, then he too drove from the station car park. Commuters would start arriving soon and besides, he had somewhere else to be.
Ashkani’s marksman drove slowly, westwards towards the coast. He wanted to be there early and if he could set up his position when the light was still dim, so much the better. As he drove, he cursed the mist that seemed to cling to this country. He had not wanted to say so in front of Ashkani, but it made things a great deal more difficult. Still, he had done difficult jobs before, and he had never failed yet.
He looked in the mirror at the kid. There was something unnatural about him, the way his pale face simply gazed into the middle distance, the way his silence seemed to fill the whole car. He considered disobeying Ashkani, gagging the kid and leaving him in the boot. He thought better of it. Ashkani was not a good man to disobey. But the sooner this morning was over, the better.
The marksman had already decided that he would not park the car at the clifftop car park, but would drive it out of sight down an old dirt road about a kilometre from the coast. He and the boy would then walk to the firing point under cover of darkness. He had already chosen, too, the precise location from which he would take the shot. The beach itself was 500 metres wide and the part of the cliff that overlooked it was covered in vigorous bracken, almost a metre high and stretching back about 100 metres from the edge of the cliff. There were many channels in the bracken – made mostly by walkers and children playing hide and seek, he supposed – and that was to his advantage. It meant nobody could tell what path he had taken through it to the cliff’s edge. And because the bracken extended all the way to the edge, he could overlook the beach and remain completely hidden, except for the barrel of his rifle peeking out, which nobody would be able to see in poor light and at a distance. Ordinarily he would have found some way to set up a ribbon on the beach to tell him which way the wind was blowing. On this occasion it was not necessary: the safety flag, there to indicate how safe or dangerous the sea was on a given day, would do the job for him.
Getting the boy out of the car was simple. Forcing him a kilometre cross-country was less so. He tripped and stumbled, falling helplessly to his knees on three occasions, and once flat on his face. Each time, the man pulled him up by his hair, thinking that the pain would make him stand more quickly. But the boy didn’t even seem to feel it. He said nothing. He didn’t complain, howl, or gasp. He just pushed himself slowly up and continued at his own pace.
It was four thirty by the time they reached the cliff’s edge. He pushed the boy to lie down and kicked his knee when he didn’t respond. But once he was down, prostrate on the cold ground, he didn’t move. He just shivered. The man eyed him suspiciously for a moment. It was all very well for Ashkani to believe that the kid was beyond causing problems, but he preferred to be sure. From his rucksack he pulled a length of rope. He tied the boy’s limp hands behind his back and bound his ankles together using the other end of the same piece. The boy didn’t struggle or complain.
The marksman turned his attention to the other contents of his rucksack. First, a satellite phone, which he laid on the ground next to him. Then his sniper rifle – a Galil .308 with a full magazine of tuned, match-grade rounds – which was separated into five sections. He could have slotted them together blindfolded – indeed, he had practised doing so many times in the past – so the darkness was not an obstacle for him. In less than a minute the rifle was assembled, its magazine of five 7.62mm rounds firmly clicked into place. He unfolded a small bipod, placed it on the edge of the bracken, and rested the barrel of the rifle on it. Lying on his front behind the weapon, he closed his left eye and looked through the sight.