by Adam Hamdy
As Ziad pressed through the crowd towards Cutter’s table, he reminded himself of all he’d suffered, the pain and humiliation, the physical assaults in Al Aqarab, the heartbreak. The people responsible needed to suffer in reply, and if the price was a few incidental casualties like Cutter, so be it. Besides, this man was no angel. Tall and physically fit, Cutter would strike most casual observers as a prime specimen, but Ziad could see hints of the man’s debauched lifestyle, which was funded by the illicit work he did for Deni Salamov. Cutter had the puffiness of a heavy drinker, the red raw nostrils of a habitual cokehead, and the pinprick eyes of an opiate fiend.
‘Holy shit,’ Weasel cried when he caught sight of Ziad. ‘Ziad Malek!’
‘What the . . .’ Hot Rod said, staggering to his feet.
Weasel and Hot Rod embraced Ziad enthusiastically, but Cutter gave him a muted, cagey welcome.
‘Ziad,’ he remarked simply, without rising.
‘Take a seat,’ Hot Rod said. ‘What the hell happened to you, man?’
Ziad sat next to Weasel, aware that Cutter was eying him coldly.
‘I got pulled on a charge,’ he replied. ‘But I beat it.’
‘Sorry to hear that, man,’ Hot Rod slurred. ‘We should celebrate.’
Ziad felt a wave of nausea. He wasn’t in the mood to celebrate, but he played along. ‘That’s what I’m here for,’ he lied.
‘The blonde keeps looking at you,’ Weasel said.
‘Which one?’ Place is full of blondes,’ Cutter replied, casting his eyes around the heaving bar.
‘The tall one by the taps,’ Weasel said, nodding towards the crowded counter.
Hot Rod turned his unfocused eyes in the direction of the bar. ‘She’s looking at me, man.’
Weasel grabbed Hot Rod’s skull and pointed it in the right direction. ‘You’re so wasted you can’t even see straight. She’s over there.’
Ziad spied out the woman Weasel was talking about and it seemed the wiry little man was right; she was eying Cutter.
‘I’m going in,’ Cutter declared, getting to his feet. ‘I’ll buy a round to celebrate the old boss’s return.’ He emphasized the word ‘old’. ‘Who wants a drink?’
Weasel nodded and Hot Rod declared, a little too loudly, ‘You know it!’
Cutter pushed his way through the pressed bodies of port workers and slotted into a space beside the blonde. She was with four friends.
Ziad watched the arrogant player schmooze the swaying woman.
‘When did you get back?’ Weasel asked him.
‘Few days ago,’ Ziad replied absently. His eyes were fixed on Cutter, but he wasn’t sure he had the stone-cold guts to do what Elroy expected of him. The prison escape had been one thing, his actions born of necessity. This was something else. Cold. Calculated.
‘What are you going to do?’ Hot Rod asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ziad replied automatically. He couldn’t go through with it. He got to his feet. ‘You know what, I’ve got something I need to take care of. I’ll catch you guys later.’
Hot Rod and Weasel slurred entreaties to stay, but Ziad ignored them and started for the door.
He passed Cutter, on his way back to the table with the blonde and her four friends. ‘Hey, loser, where are you going?’ Cutter called to him, before turning to the blonde and saying, ‘This guy used to be someone.’
Ziad flushed with humiliation and felt a sudden resurgence of the anger that had become his familiar companion.
‘He used to be me,’ Cutter told the woman, before laughing at his own joke.
‘I was coming over to help with the drinks,’ Ziad replied, finding fresh resolve in Cutter’s cruelty.
‘I don’t carry my own drinks,’ Cutter said. ‘Tony will bring them over.’ He pushed on through the crowd, trailed by the women.
Ziad glanced past the massed bodies and saw Tony, the balding owner of the bar, at the counter, preparing a tray of drinks. Cutter was right; he had taken Ziad’s life, or at least a large part of it, and Ziad wanted it back. He watched the brash bully introduce the women to Hot Rod and Weasel, then turned and pushed through the crowd. As he neared the bar, Ziad reached into his pocket for a small tube shaped like a chapstick. Somewhere beneath the rowdy hubbub, a bed of music played, but Ziad couldn’t make out what the song was.
‘Richie still drinking those rum and tonics?’ Ziad asked the barman.
‘Holy crap,’ Tony remarked when he registered who’d asked the question. ‘Ziad. Good to see you. Yeah, Cutter’s still on that weird concoction.’
‘Let me run these over,’ Ziad replied, signalling the tray of drinks.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ Tony said.
‘My pleasure,’ Ziad responded.
‘Thanks,’ Tony said, before turning his attention to another customer.
Ziad took the plastic tube from his pocket and unscrewed the lid. As he slipped the inner tube from its protective housing, the sound of the blood rushing through his veins drowned out all else. The end of the tube was tipped by foam that had been soaked in a clear liquid. Ziad swiped the foam tip around the edge of Cutter’s glass, screwed the protective housing back onto the tube, and returned it to his pocket. With his heart pounding in his ears, he picked up the heavy tray and carried it carefully through the crowd.
Weasel and a couple of the women who’d joined their group cheered when Ziad set the tray on the table.
‘You work here now?’ Cutter asked as Ziad pulled up a chair.
‘My name’s Rodney, but everyone calls me Hot Rod on account of my giant rod,’ Hot Rod was slurring to another of the women.
Ziad kept his eyes on Cutter, who took his glass from the tray and drank long and hard.
‘Men are so insecure,’ the woman countered. ‘I’ve never met a woman who went round calling herself Big Tits.’
‘She should. She’d be very popular,’ Rod slurred, provoking a round of giggles.
‘Please ignore my friend, ladies,’ Weasel said.
It started with a cough. Ziad registered a look of discomfort cross Cutter’s face. Whatever was in the tube Elroy had given him was as fast-acting as he’d promised – within moments Cutter was coughing and spluttering like the men in Al Aqarab. He was struggling to breathe, and the chuckles, giggles and bawdy talk were replaced by consternation as Cutter started to paw at his throat.
‘Stop screwing around, Richie,’ Weasel said. ‘It ain’t funny.’
But Cutter wasn’t pretending. His legs kicked out, knocking over the table and sending all the drinks flying.
One of the women screamed, and panic spread through the bar as Richie Cutter choked to death.
Ziad noticed Cutter’s eyes settle on him. Part of him wished he felt remorse, but he only experienced a slight rush of satisfaction at seeing the first casualty of his vengeance suffer. When Cutter’s eyes bulged from his head and turned red as the blood vessels burst, Ziad wondered whether he knew who’d done this to him. Ziad held the man’s horrified gaze as he made a futile effort to cling to the life that was leaving him. A moment later, Richie Cutter toppled sideways and fell to the floor, dead.
Chapter 8
Brigitte had taken Pearce overland for more than a week. They’d driven north into Thailand in an ancient red Volkswagen Polo, before heading east into Cambodia. The tiny car had no air conditioning and the autumn humidity made the journey almost unbearable. Brigitte had made it clear early on that she wouldn’t answer any questions and they weren’t the kind of people who did small talk, so most of the journey passed in silence, which suited Pearce. He didn’t trust the Frenchwoman. He tried to ignore the oppressive heat as he watched the lush jungle landscape roll by, and reflected on a life that had put him alongside the former French agent.
Abandoned by both parents as a young child, Pearce had drifted from one foster home to another, and, during a time he’d come to refer to as the wilding, he’d become increasingly hostile and angry. He’d seemingly been destined
for a life of juvenile delinquency and crime, until fate intervened and a despairing Merseyside social worker had sent him to St David’s, a specialist school in Wales. The caring, insightful headmaster, Malcolm Jones, had spotted Pearce’s potential and rescued him from his destructive path. Pearce had gone into the army, shown aptitude and had applied for and endured SAS selection. He’d served with a specialist unit, the Increment, which provided operational support to MI6. After years of trying, his liaison and mentor Kyle Wollerton finally managed to convince Pearce to leave the Regiment and work for Six at Vauxhall Cross, and for a few years he was an operations specialist in the field, until the fateful day he’d found himself in Islamabad and had got caught up in a terror attack. He’d been in the city for personal reasons and it was pure chance he’d been there when the horror unfolded. Isolated and up against the odds, he’d almost single-handedly thwarted a devastating plan to subvert Pakistan’s government.
Acclaim turned to criticism when it became clear to Pearce’s superiors that he would not drop his investigation into what he believed was a wider conspiracy, and, after a final confrontation with his superior Dominic McClusky, the man he would later expose as a traitor, Pearce was let go. He’d been on the trail of the conspirators ever since, pausing only to avenge his old comrade Nathan Foster’s death and deal with a British far-right group called Black Thirteen. It was during that investigation that he’d met Brigitte Attali, when she had been working for the DGSE. Her encounter with Pearce had blown her cover – she’d subsequently been relieved of duty and had wound up working for Huxley Blaine Carter, the man they were on their way to meet, a Silicon Valley billionaire who fancied himself as some sort of private spymaster.
They’d ditched the Polo and crossed the porous land border into Cambodia, where Brigitte had bought an old Suzuki hatchback for cash. They’d driven to a remote airstrip in the heart of the country where they’d been met by a private jet that had brought them to Geneva.
A pair of Mercedes G-Wagens had been waiting for them, driven by a duo of lean, shaven-headed hard men in dark suits who looked so alike they could have been related. Each driver had a passenger riding shotgun. Similarly hard, gaunt men, their eyes had betrayed no emotion when Brigitte led Pearce out of the terminal.
They’d been shown to the lead vehicle, and as they’d been driven through Geneva’s busy streets, shielded by opaque privacy glass, Pearce had become aware of two motorcycle outriders who swept the roads around them for potential tails. Blaine Carter had upped his security since their previous encounter in San Francisco. Pearce looked at Brigitte and wondered how many of the improvements were down to her.
The traffic was so heavy it took over an hour to get out of Geneva and another forty-five minutes to reach the French border. Night had fallen by the time they started into the foothills of the Alps. They turned off the main highway and joined the Route d’Abondance, a winding two-lane road that snaked around steep, richly forested slopes, sheer cliffs and high waterfalls. The summer hiking season was over and the snow was at least a couple of months off, so they encountered very little traffic in either direction. Some fifteen miles after leaving the highway, the G-Wagen slowed for a sharp left bend, but rather than straighten up to follow the road, the driver held the turn and headed for what Pearce thought was a solid cliff. He almost yelled at the man, until he realized that what he’d mistaken for darker rock was actually shadow and that a narrow road lay between two tiers of the cliff. People probably drove past the cut in the rock every day without even realizing it was there.
The powerful Mercedes started a steep climb and sheer rock sped by inches from either side of the big car. After a couple of hundred metres, they’d risen above the cliffs and the road wound its way through forest, making a series of sharp turns to climb the steep sides of the mountain. The road became little more than a track in places and when they headed north, Pearce’s window was directly over the precipice that marked the edge of the road. There was no barrier and one wrong move would send them plummeting hundreds of feet. But the driver was confident and controlled and had the skill of someone who’d been born in the mountains. When the road looped back on itself and they headed south, Pearce peered into the dark shadows between the high pines and wondered what secrets they concealed.
After a quarter of an hour, a pair of slatted metal gates barred their way. Pearce saw movement, and a suited guard stepped out from a gatehouse partially shielded by the treeline. As the G-Wagen slowed to a stop, Pearce took in the twelve-foot-high chain-link fence disappearing into the darkness of the forest, and the dizzying precipice on the other side of the gate. The first guard stood in the middle of the road, while another remained in the gatehouse opposite the edge and held a pair of infrared field glasses to his eyes. The gates weren’t opened until the driver had lowered all the windows to allow the vehicle’s occupants to be identified. They were all subjected to a rapid Covid-19 test. When the G-Wagen finally rolled on, Pearce looked over his shoulder and saw the trailing vehicle park across the road in front of the closing gates. The two motorcycles pulled up beside the gatehouse. Huxley Blaine Carter really had upped his game since their last meeting.
Chapter 9
After forty-eight hours the magnificent home had started to feel like a prison to Leila Nuhman. It was a mind-boggling achievement of architecture, a fifty-metre-long, four-storey crescent-shaped structure of concrete, brushed metal and glass carved into the side of a mountain at an altitude of 6,000 feet. The house was wedged into a sheer cliff and the bend of the crescent was supported by struts that were pinned to the bottom of the face, so any rooms on the curve, including the one Leila had been given, hung in very thin air. A curved window took up an entire wall of Leila’s bedroom and below it was a two-foot-wide strip of toughened glass flooring that enabled her to peer hundreds of feet down into the valley below. Leila had gathered some of the pillows from her king-size bed and spent hours lying on the floor, gazing down at the miniature tops of giant trees far beneath wisps of cloud. Every so often her stomach would flip and her toes tingle at the thought of the fall and she’d press the glass floor to reassure herself it was still there.
Leila’s patience was being tested by her American host. Huxley Blaine Carter had welcomed her when she’d arrived and told her he was working hard to make good on the rumour that had enticed her to his home in the French mountains, but she hadn’t seen him since. He’d told her to make herself at home and use the gym, spa and glass-bottomed pool located on the lowest level of the house. She’d limped through the house, supporting herself on her black Derby walking stick, and visited the sauna and swimming pool. She’d even made use of the gym, admiring the mountain view as she moved around the large room, using the state-of-the-art weights machines to work on her arms. She’d brought her wheelchair with her, but so far she hadn’t needed it and was pleased to be moving about the huge house in little pain.
Pearce had told her about his encounter with Huxley Blaine Carter after the Black Thirteen investigation and Leila had satisfied her curiosity with some basic research on the man. He’d made his fortune in online payments and had subsequently backed a number of extremely successful tech start-ups as an early investor. He was worth billions, and could do just about anything, so Leila was puzzled why, unlike his peers who focused on space exploration, medical research and philanthropy, Blaine Carter had tried to get into the espionage business. Apart from a long-retired former NSA director who sat on the board of a couple of his companies, there was nothing in the tech mogul’s history that suggested a connection to any intelligence agency.
Leila had spent two days killing time, trying to avoid dwelling on the rumour Blaine Carter had shared with her. He claimed he might be able to get information on Leila’s sister Hannan, the only member of her family who wasn’t known to have died in Syria’s brutal civil war. Everyone else Leila cared about had been killed when ISIS had taken Raqqa or had been murdered trying to escape. Only Hannan was unaccounted for –
missing presumed dead. But this man, this rich American, claimed he might be able to get news of Hannan’s whereabouts. Leila had spent years thinking she was alone, that everyone who connected her to her ancestors was long dead. She’d spent countless hours and long, restless nights trying to suppress the horrors of occupation and the memories of her time spent as a forced bride to two murderous men, vainly hoping she could find some peace. Blaine Carter had given her something she hadn’t felt for a very long time: hope.
Leila was lying on the glass walkway, absently watching the valley below, when she heard a knock at the door.
‘Come in,’ she said, hauling herself upright.
The door opened, and a man in a dark suit leaned into the room. He had the close-cropped hair and ramrod bearing of someone who was ex-military. ‘Huxley would like to see you,’ he said.
Leila grabbed her Derby stick and propelled herself to her feet. She was in a pair of thick socks, jeans and a baggy T-shirt, but if the man had news of her sister, she wasn’t about to waste a second trying to make herself look more presentable. And shoes? She really couldn’t face the rigmarole. ‘Let’s go,’ she told her visitor.
Leila’s guide took her through the only door she hadn’t been able to open. She’d had the run of the lower two levels and had spent some time exploring the opulent guest bedrooms and living spaces, but this one door, secured by a biometric palm scanner, had remained resolutely locked. As she suspected, it led to the upper levels of the property. Leila followed the suited man into a wide glass-walled atrium that overlooked the valley. He led her up a wide staircase into a huge living room that occupied the centre of the structure’s curve, the floor-to-ceiling windows offering a magnificent view of the mountains. But her eyes weren’t on the jagged peaks. They were drawn across the eighty-foot room to a figure seated on a large corner sofa unit. It was a man she recognized; Scott Pearce’s recruiter and mentor, Kyle Wollerton. His craggy face betrayed surprise when he saw Leila and he hurried towards her.
