And then she stands, pulling up her trousers. And she’s off, crashing through the bushes and up the slope.
“Bitch… whore.” Omar is struggling with his door handle. “You stay here!” he barks at Max, who has just noticed a lorry driver standing by the side of his truck, smoking a cigarette. Omar spots him too and stops, returning to the car.
“Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” he says, looking more angry than flustered. “Take the key. Drive.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Harry is in the departure lounge waiting to be called, his back to the other passengers who have already started a queue, and looking out of a window past the runways and across at the Alps. The mountains are bathed in the afternoon light. Next to him a young man is simultaneously reading a Kindle and listening to music through earphones, while on his other side a woman is speaking on her phone in French. There don’t seem to be any uniformed police around.
Rows one to fourteen are called, and that includes Harry, so he stands up and joins a shorter queue that is forming alongside the other one. There’s a short, fit-looking man in jeans and T-shirt talking animatedly with the girl at the departure desk and she seems to be checking down her list. Harry has a sinking sensation as the man nods and steps to one side, looking carefully at Harry’s queue. Nothing for it but to meet his fate.
As he approaches the desk the man seems to take no interest in him. The girl takes his passport and scans the boarding pass on his phone, and wishes Harry a ‘good flight’. Relieved but slightly perplexed, he makes his way towards the plane, looking back at the man who he thought had been a plain-clothes cop. The man isn’t returning his gaze.
Harry is relieved to find that he has his bank of three seats to himself and, only ten minutes later than scheduled, the plane starts taxiing down the runway. “The flight time this afternoon will be approximately one hour and thirty minutes,” announces the captain, “and the weather at Gatwick is overcast, with a temperature of twelve degrees.” Someone groans on a seat behind him.
They’re gaining speed now, and with a thrust the plane is airborne, with Lake Geneva below them, and banking away. Down there lie Simon and Kylie. Harry feels badly about Kylie. And somewhere down there are Max and Aafia… the lovely Aafia… and Omar with his scars. The nightmare is receding fast.
Harry buys a copy of The Times and an overpriced sandwich that is so chilled that it doesn’t taste of anything. He decides against having a small bottle of wine, not so much because it would go straight to his enervated, sleep-deprived head, but because he wants to postpone celebrating his deliverance until he is safely back in London.
As they pass over France, Harry tries to make out landmarks. Is that river the Gironde or the Loire? He likes looking at maps. And he likes France, where he had his first foreign holiday, when the school arranged a trip to Paris. Perhaps he’ll live there for a while – buy a nice, rundown old cottage in the middle of nowhere and with a nice climate, and grow his own food.
And then as the northern coast of France starts to pass by the window, the captain announces that they are beginning their descent into London Gatwick. Almost immediately they run into a bank of dirty grey cloud, and the plane starts shaking in the turbulence, the seatbelt signs pinging into life. Harry checks his Rolex, which is saying a quarter past five Swiss time.
Heading low over the patchwork fields of Sussex, Harry can see that the trees are starting to green up. But the fields look bleached and worn out after the long winter, more so under the leaden skies. Rain streaks the window.
The landing is smoothly executed, and the captain asks everyone to stay seated until they reach their gate. He has no luggage, and, Harry suddenly remembers, he has no home. He’ll find a hotel near to work in Mayfair and charge it to the company. And then he must try and locate Max.
The plane finally comes to a stop, a fuel truck making its way across the tarmac for the quick turnaround back to Geneva. And then Harry notices the three black Range Rovers parked in front of the departure gate, and the men, compact-looking blokes wearing trainers, their T-shirts tucked into their jeans, standing arms crossed next to their vehicles.
There’s a chorus of unbuckling seatbelts as the passengers start to stand up and rummage in the overhead lockers, but Harry remains seated and watches the men walk purposefully into the terminal building. Perhaps he’s imagining things, like with the man at Geneva airport.
Being fairly close to the front, Harry is soon making his way past the smiling cabin crew with their phony farewells, and onto the walkway connecting the plane and the terminal. There seems to be some sort of hold up at the top of the walkway. “They’re checking passports,” a man in front of Harry tells his travelling companion. “Why here?” People immediately start patting pockets and looking for theirs.
As he emerges out of the walkway Harry sees the burly looking men he had spotted from the plane, and all them are now looking straight at him. Behind them stand two uniformed policemen with machine guns.
They don’t wait, but push their way through the handful of people in front of Harry, and take him by the arms.
“Harry Kimber?” asks one of them.
“Yes?” says Harry, trying to make himself sound surprised. The other passengers are looking at him horrified.
“Can you come with us?”
* * *
On the other side of the embankment, Aafia finds herself in open country. She crosses a dirt path, and a narrow drainage ditch, and leaps into field that is already sprouting whatever crops have been planted here. There’s a line of trees about a hundred metres in front of her, at the far end of the field, but the going is muddy and she almost slips and falls.
Aafia is fit, however, and although she gave up jogging with Tariq after they split up, she still goes for a long run twice a week. There was a sort of canal near the compound in Rome which was suitable, if you didn’t mind the whistles and remarks from the Italian men. Actually they came as almost a light relief from what she had left behind in the compound.
The first fighter to turn up from Libya was genuinely horrified to find himself in a position of equality with a woman. He couldn’t understand what Aafia was doing there, and wouldn’t eat with her, or even stay in the same room, despite Tariq explaining that she was financing the whole operation.
The second guy to turn up at the compound was only posing as a fighter. He was one of the two undercover agents from the Saudi secret services, Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah. He was a good actor, and pretended to despise Aafia too, and told her to wear a veil when she was in the compound and to cover hands arms and legs. But mostly he played at being aloof and generally grumpy. Aafia quite liked him, but it still added to the tense atmosphere.
And then Omar arrived and things became ten times worse. He was actively belligerent and questioned her every move. He didn’t seem to understand why she and Tariq had to keep up this pretence at being loved up and running a legitimate business. Any Muslim is a suspect in the West, was his attitude, but Aafia questioned to herself whether he had ever been to Europe before, and even remotely understood it.
He was so indoctrinated – all this stuff about purifying the world by killing millions of people, and how slavery, crucifixion and beheadings were a legitimate form of conquest, as laid down by the Prophet himself. He quoted endlessly from the Quran. Aafia didn’t argue. She just pretended to agree with each of his insane, and insanely boring, utterances.
He didn’t seem to be pursuing her now. She was half way to the trees and she hadn’t heard any shots. She had calculated that Max was more valuable to him, and that he couldn’t leave him to chase her. She wasn’t sure how much Max understood, but it seemed likely that his family in England were about to receive a visit soon. Maybe today. Some sort of coercion was about to be enacted. There was something Omar wanted Max to do. Where did that fit in with the boy? She must keep running.
Aafia reaches the tree line, and slumps down behind the trunk of one of the poplars, pantin
g hard. No bullets are whistling into the undergrowth and surely she must be out of range here. She swivels round to look at the ground she’s just crossed and Omar doesn’t appear to be chasing her. This doesn’t surprise her.
Omar still has her passport, but in her money belt is a wad of 100-euro notes, and an ultra slim Vivo X5 Max mobile. The number is in her contacts, under the word ‘gym’.
“Pronto,” says a gruff man’s voice, within two rings.
“Is this the gymnasium?” she asks; the agreed code.
“Si, signorina. How can I help?”
“I would like to renew my membership.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Tariq had been left alone for a couple hours, Maurilio promising to return after a while. Perhaps he should rest.
But the memory of the sarin had prompted associated memories. Omar was the leader of the three fighters who had arrived, one by one, from Libya. Tariq knew that Omar had taken to tailing them when he and Aafia went on their daily visits to the cafe, behaving like the love birds that they no longer were, and one day he decided to tail Omar in return.
He had followed him to Rome Termini, and then to a cheap nearby hotel. What’s the name of the hotel?
“There’s a hotel… near the central station,” he says as soon as Maurilio steps back into the room.
“A hotel? Go on.”
“I followed him one day, to this hotel.”
“Followed who?” asks Maurilio, putting down the paper bag that contains his lunch – a salami roll.
“Omar… his name’s Omar. He’s an Iraqi and he’s a veteran Isis fighter.”
“Can you remember the name of the hotel?”
Tariq shakes his head in frustration. “No… no… I can’t. I can sort of visualise it.”
“You keep doing that,” says Maurilio. “I’m going to have a word with your doctor… see if you’re fit enough to go on a car ride.”
* * *
They arrive at Fiumicino airport twenty-five minutes ahead of the satnav’s original estimate. Despite his tiredness, Aafia’s dash for freedom had given Max a new burst of adrenalin, and the last six hours of the drive had sped by in silence. He couldn’t quite believe that the dots hadn’t been joined up yet, and the Italian authorities hadn’t been alerted to the existence of the Audi. And surely Aafia would have phoned the police by now.
He had tried to engage Omar in conversation but each question was met by the same response of “Quiet now,” like he was trying to calm a nervous beast, which just made Max feel even more uneasy.
A few kilometres from Fiumicino, the satnav guides them into a trading estate, with huge furniture stores, shuttered today, and several half-built warehouses. After a few more lefts and rights, they turn into a row of brick buildings, some of them in the process of demolition, and the satnav announces without any suggestion of satisfaction at a job well done, that they had arrived at their destination.
“That one there,” says Omar, pointing his pistol at a low brick edifice with a huge blue roller-shutter door.
“Park round the side,” he says.
“Turn off the engine and give me the key,” he tells Max, who complies, his uneasiness beginning to build in the pit of his stomach. He doesn’t know what else he can do; just carry on and see what fresh hell this leads to.
Omar unlocks a side door painted the same blue as the loading bay shutters, and gestures for Max to go inside. It’s a plain office, with a table, a swivel chair, and a notice board, pinned to which are what look like health-and-safety notices, and a small frosted window probably too narrow to climb through. He unlocks another door and beckons Max over. This windowless, bare-bricked space is obviously some sort of store room.
Omar wheels in a swivel chair and tells Max to sit down. Is this going to be another attempt at a filmed execution? More recruitment propaganda for would-be jihadists?
Omar returns with a pair of handcuffs. He tells Max to put his arms behind his back and the cuffs are snapped tightly on to wrists. He winces at the pain and tries to move his hands. They had been cuffed to the back of the chair.
He then returns with a length of nylon rope, which he uses to tie Max’s ankles together, looping them round the back of the chair and tightening them so that Max now feels completely trussed.
Lastly the blindfold, a strip of cotton material that might have been an old shirt, is wrapped around Max’s eyes, and knotted at the back with a couple of sharp tugs.
“And you can yell as much as you like… there’s absolutely no one around to hear you,” says Omar, followed a second later by the sound of the door closing and the lock turning, and then the faint sound of the desk drawer being opened, and then closed. Slightly louder is the noise of the side door to the outside world closing and being locked.
* * *
Omar retrieves a new passport and driving licence, these ones British and in the name of Tahmid Ahmed from Leicester, and locks the outer door. He knows that his is the only occupied building in this part of the trading estate, the others in the course of demolition. He had to be out by the end of April the agent had told him when he rented it. The end of April is fine, he assured the man. Would he like to be paid in advance in cash?
He drives the eight or so kilometres to the airport and enters the long-stay car park. From the boot he retrieves the long bag containing an assault rifle and two handguns – each individually wrapped in woollen blankets – and ammunition. This bag he carries to the shuttle stop to the airport. The afternoon is warm with only the faintest of breezes. Omar hopes that the fine weather will continue until at least tomorrow.
The bus eventually arrives, and he joins a smattering of other passengers, and the stop-start journey continues to the terminal building. A pretty girl is looking at him, and she looks away as he returns her stare. It was the scar again. Perhaps he needs some sort of plastic surgery.
At the terminal he makes for the car hire desk, and books a Fiat Panda in the name of Tahmid Ahmed, to be returned the same time tomorrow afternoon. The paperwork completed, he walks to where the car is located in the short-stay multi-storey car park and drives off in the direction of Rome.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
“You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
Harry has been driven at high speed to a police station, having been informed that he is being detained under the Terrorism Act. Searched, photographed, fingerprinted and swabbed, he is now sitting in a room on his own in front of a table where a recording device has been placed, just like he’s seen in countless films and TV dramas. Only it’s him, Harry Kimber, sitting here this time.
A man and a woman enter the room – both middle-aged and stressed looking, their clothes crumpled as if they’d slept in them.
“You’ll be pleased to hear that you’ve made news headlines all around the world,” the man says in an unpleasant voice, having introduced himself as belonging to the South East Counter Terrorism Unit. “Massacre at the Swiss ski chalet. Would you care to tell us all about it? We’ve got all the time in the world.”
“I will… willingly. But shouldn’t I have a lawyer present?” says Harry.
“You can make that request,” the man says. “Would you like to make that request?”
“I would,” says Harry.
“It may take up to forty-eight hours, but that’s up to you.”
“Forty-eight hours?”
“In terrorism cases, yes.”
A muddled rush of all those famous miscarriage of justice cases pass through Harry’s mind – the Guildford Four… the Birmingham Six. For some reason he has always mistrusted the police. Oh, fuck it…
“I have nothing to hide,” he says. “Where shall I start?”
“How about with these?” says the woman with a smirk, carefully placing two plastic bags on the table in front of them. Harry can see at once
that they contain the key to the safety deposit box and the accompanying paperwork.
* * *
The doctors are initially reluctant to let Tariq leave the hospital. Phone calls are made, meetings are called, and it’s eventually after five when a medical team accompanied by Maurilio and Nadia Pizzuto arrive by Tariq’s bedside.
“Do you want to see if you can walk?” asks one of the doctors, having detached him from the various drips and monitors.
Tariq sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. A rush of nausea hits him but then subsides. Gingerly he puts his feet on to the vinyl-matted floor, and equally carefully he puts his weight on them.
“So far, so good,” he says to Maurilio, who smiles.
They have parked a wheelchair for him by the door, and as Tariq pads towards it he begins to feel light-headed. One of the doctors sees him hesitate and puts a supportive arm around the small of his back.
“I’m okay now,” says Tariq, and walks more steadily towards the chair. Nevertheless he is glad to sit down again.
“Okay,” says Maurilio. “The doctor here is going to come with us as we take an ambulance down to the central station. We’ll drive around and see if you recognise which hotel that you saw Omar go into. Do you think you are up to that?”
“Yes,” answers Tariq unequivocally.
“Good,” says Maurilio. “Let’s go.”
As he is wheeled down the corridor and into a lift, Tariq breathes heavily to ward off spasms of nausea. These are weakening though, and he starts to get used to this upright position.
“What actually happened to me?” he asks the doctor who is accompanying them. He looks at Nadia Pizzuto and she nods.
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