Osama

by Chris Ryan

  From anyone else, the words would have been inadequate. From Eva, they were everything.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ she said. ‘I’ll wake you if anybody comes.’

  Joe nodded. His fatigue was overpowering everything else. He sensed Eva removing the overcoat and spreading it over him.

  His eyelids became heavy.

  In seconds he was asleep.

  It was midnight.

  A dark-haired man with stooped shoulders stood in a quiet suburban street. The rain was still falling, but that made no difference to him as he wore a heavy waxed raincoat. Its pockets were equally weighted on either side: in the left one, a small, leather-bound copy of the Koran. In the right, a Browning semi-automatic pistol and two cable ties.

  The house opposite which he stood had, as a focal point of the front garden, a magnificent magnolia tree in the early stages of budding. It also had, the man noticed, a flashing burglar alarm and one window open on the first floor. People only opened windows at night to give themselves ventilation as they slept. It meant someone was home.

  He crossed the road, opened the front gate, passed under the magnolia branches, and rang the front door bell. He heard no chime, but a red light by the button indicated that it was working. Twenty seconds later, through the glass of the front door, he saw a landing light come on and the silhouette of a figure descending the stairs rather slowly, apparently tying a dressing-gown cord as he went. The figure stopped on the other side of the front door. ‘Who’s that?’ The male voice sounded elderly and tired.

  ‘Police,’ the man replied. ‘I need to speak to you about Conor. I know it’s late but this is urgent. We think you might be in some danger.’

  A short pause. Then a click as the door opened to reveal a man in his late sixties, a pair of half-moon spectacles propped on his hook-like nose, the remnants of his hair in two dishevelled tufts on either side of his head, and wearing a navy blue kimono-style dressing gown. ‘You’d better come—’

  The man stopped short, perhaps realizing that his guest was not uniformed, nor did he have the demeanour of a policeman. Then his eyes darted down and he saw the Browning in the man’s left hand. On an instinct, he tried to slam the door shut, but the man already had one foot over the threshold – enough to keep it open.

  ‘Be so good, Mr O’Donnell,’ said the man, ‘as to keep utterly quiet as you step back from the door.’

  Mr O’Donnell did as he was told. Within seconds the man was inside and the door was shut.

  The first thing he noticed was the smell of flowers. The wide hallway was lined with bouquets of lilies and roses, all of them still in their plastic wrappers, with notes of condolence tucked into the foliage. As the old man staggered back, he knocked over one of the bouquets.

  ‘The boy?’

  Mr O’Donnell shook his head, as if to say that he wasn’t going to answer, but the newcomer noticed the way his eyes glanced momentarily up the carpeted staircase at the end of the hallway. He flicked the gun in that direction, and O’Donnell backed nervously up the stairs, unable to keep his eyes off the weapon. He stumbled into a sitting position a quarter of the way up the stairs, making a heavy thump that seemed to echo around the whole house.

  ‘Get up, turn around, keep walking,’ said the man. O’Donnell had no choice but to agree.

  There were three doors on the landing. Two were open. One led into a small bathroom, the other into a bedroom where the light was on and the head end of a double bed was visible. It meant that the third door was the one he wanted. ‘Open it,’ he told O’Donnell. ‘Wake him.’

  ‘Please,’ the old man croaked. ‘He hasn’t spoken since . . . You don’t know what he’s been through.’

  But that wasn’t true. The intruder knew just what he’d been through. He knew the boy would be traumatized. That would make him easier to handle. ‘Wake him,’ he repeated.

  The terrified old man staggered into the bedroom. ‘Conor,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Conor, you must wake up.’

  As the intruder followed him into the little bedroom, he switched on the light. The boy was drowsily sitting up in a single bed against the far wall, clutching a small grey soft toy in the shape of an elephant. Next to him stood a white bedside table on which were a glass of water, a framed photograph of a woman and a Horrid Henry book. At the other end of the bed was a matching chest of drawers. There was no indication that this was ordinarily a child’s bedroom – no toys or pictures, just a figurine of the Virgin Mary on a melamine shelf along the left-hand wall, and a wooden chair with some neatly folded clothes.

  It took a few seconds for the boy to realize what was happening, by which time the intruder had raised a gloved finger to his lips. ‘Shhh . . .’ he hissed gently, before turning back to the old man. ‘On your knees,’ he whispered.

  The old man sank to the ground.

  ‘My name is Mr Ashe,’ said the man to the boy. ‘You must do exactly what I say. Do you understand?’

  Conor nodded mutely.

  ‘Go to your drawer. Remove two pairs of socks and give them to me.’

  Like his grandfather, the boy could not take his eyes from the gun. He crawled the length of his bed and fumbled in the top drawer before removing the socks as he had been told. One pair was plain black, the second had a Spider-Man logo. He handed them to Mr Ashe, then quickly retreated to the pillow end of his bed.

  Mr Ashe stepped up to O’Donnell. ‘Open your mouth,’ he instructed, and when the old man had done so, he stuffed the Spider-Man socks inside, pressing down so that they reached the back of his throat, before filling the remaining cavity with the second pair. The old man gagged, and his eyes bulged, but he remained immobile in the kneeling position Mr Ashe had forced him to adopt.

  Mr Ashe removed one of the cable ties from his coat and tied the old man’s hands behind his back, speaking as he worked in a quiet, unflustered voice.

  ‘I want you to watch your grandfather very carefully,’ he said. ‘I want you to understand, and to remember, how much this will hurt him.’

  The old man made a panicked sound and tried to stand up, but Mr Ashe was too fast for him. He wrapped the second cable tie around his victim’s neck and yanked it tight.

  The noise was disgusting: a feeble croak accompanied by the unmistakable sound of the old man pissing himself in fear. His neck bulged outwards and became red, blue and blotchy. He fell to his side, flailing like a landed fish, growing weaker and weaker as the seconds passed.

  He had, Mr Ashe, estimated, no longer than thirty seconds of consciousness left. It was important to make the most of them.

  He stepped round the old man and approached the bed. The boy cringed away from him, backing into the corner, pulling his duvet with him. His lower lip was trembling, and tears had appeared in his eyes.

  Mr Ashe held the gun up to the boy’s head. He made a sudden small movement with the weapon. The child started and closed his eyes, before opening them again five seconds later, apparently surprised that he was still alive.

  ‘You understand, Conor,’ whispered Mr Ashe, ‘what will happen if you do not do exactly as I tell you?’

  The boy’s terrified nod was barely visible. But it was enough. Mr Ashe tucked his weapon back into his coat. ‘If you make a sound,’ he said, ‘I will kill you. If you try to run, I will kill you. If you fail to do what I say, I will kill you. Are you sure you understand, Conor?’

  The little boy nodded.

  ‘Good,’ said Mr Ashe. ‘Then get dressed. Now.’

  FIFTEEN

  0600 hours.

  Eva walked through the main entrance into Scotland Yard.

  As a plainclothes officer it was normal for her to be wearing civvies, but ordinarily that meant something smart. This morning, having thrown on jeans and a sweater when she fled her house, and then spent the remainder of the night shivering in the shelter of the bandstand watching Joe muttering feverishly as he slept, she looked a mess. Her clothes were still damp, and she was in no doubt that she smelled none too
fresh. She kept a change of clothes in her office, but until she got there, she’d stick out horribly.

  These offices never slept. There was always a selection of mostly male officers, thickset and burly, wearing cheap suits, and with physiques that suggested they’d spent a lot more time behind desks writing reports and drinking sweetened coffee than was good for them. But this was the Yard’s quietest hour. The main shifts wouldn’t change over till 8 a.m. – that was when Eva was officially due in – but the bulk of the night’s work was done and the corridors were largely empty. The security guard at the desk gave her a friendly nod, with perhaps a hint of surprise that she’d arrived at this unusual hour looking so bedraggled, but she was a familiar enough face to walk straight past him and along the corridor that led to the lifts.

  Eva knew, of course, that there was CCTV all over the Yard, but she’d never registered just how many cameras there were. She counted three on the short walk to the lifts, and as she ascended to the third floor she pictured herself as a monochrome fish-eye image on a screen somewhere in the bowels of this place. Never before had she felt so watched . . . It occurred to her that she had been infected with paranoia, and she put from her mind the obvious truth: that the source of the infection was on the run from the police, wanted for the murder of his girlfriend and, by his own admission, messed up in his head.

  The lift doors hissed open. Eva turned left. Her office was twenty metres along this corridor on the right. Once she was in there, she figured, she would not be disturbed for an hour at least.

  ‘Eva?’

  The voice, male, had come from behind. Eva stopped and turned slowly. On the other side of the lifts from which she had just emerged was her colleague Frank. She felt sick. They shared an office, but their rotas were normally in sync. She hadn’t expected him to be here.

  Frank caught up with her. Unlike most of the men who worked out of the Yard, he was lithe and fit. He looked tired, but had a big smile on his face.

  ‘Twenty-four hours, then I’m EasyJetting it out of here.’ He started to whistle ‘Viva España’.

  ‘What?’ Eva asked, confused.

  ‘Annual leave,’ he said. ‘Flying at midday.’ He gave her a broad grin. ‘Heard about Daniels?’

  She shook her head as they continued to walk down the corridor. Daniels, the sleazy colleague whose PNC login Eva had stolen. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Some lag broke out of Barfield. Turns out Daniels made an unauthorized PNC search on this bloke a few days ago. Commissioner’s spitting feathers. Looks like a suspension and he’s got one of Jacobson’s murder investigation teams knocking on his door. Still, couldn’t happen to a nicer fella, eh?’

  He stopped and looked at Eva as though for the first time, noticing her crumpled casual clothes and that she looked rough. ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Why the MIT?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said the murder investigation team were banging on Daniels’s door. Why? I thought it was just an escaped convict.’

  Frank shrugged. ‘Looks like he killed another inmate before he got out. Sounds like a right fucking psycho. Him and Daniels deserve each other. Tell you what – I’ll get us some coffee. Black?’

  Eva gave him a weak smile. ‘Great.’

  Frank wandered off and she hurried into her room. She felt sick. Joe had said nothing about another inmate. Nothing about . . .

  She drew a deep breath and remembered what he’d supposedly done to Caitlin. The scalpel he’d held in front of her face. The threats he’d made. Had he been lying to her after all? She closed her eyes and saw him, and the look of confused anger on his face when he’d told her all that stuff last night. Bin Laden . . . assassination attempts . . . Did she really believe him, or was she just trying to?

  ‘No,’ she muttered to herself.

  She reminded herself of the figure approaching her house just moments before they’d escaped it. It was a chilling memory, and it told her that something weird was going on, even if she didn’t know what.

  Eva turned and headed back to the door just as Frank entered carrying two polystyrene cups. They collided, and coffee sloshed over Frank’s suit. ‘Oh my God . . . sorry . . . sorry . . .’ But she didn’t stop to help him. She just wished he would go, so that she could change her own clothes. But it was clear he wasn’t going to and she gave up on that idea. A few seconds later she was back out in the corridor and running back towards the lift.

  The offices of Scotland Yard’s Homicide Command Unit were on the first floor. Ordinarily they had just a skeleton staff during the night, but it was immediately clear to Eva, as she walked along the corridors, that at least one MIT was active. She counted about fifteen people in the first incident room she passed, all of them looking busy.

  Eva stepped inside the room. It was ten metres square and its tinted-glass windows looked down on the Yard’s main entrance. There was the constant noise of muted telephone rings, the tapping of keyboards, the chuntering of a photocopy machine. The room smelled of warm printers and coffee. Eva was a familiar enough face here, but nobody even acknowledged her arrival.

  A woman approached from the far side of the room. She was wearing a two-piece suit and her grey hair was very short. For a moment, as the woman looked her shabby clothes up and down, Eva thought she was going to challenge her, but she swerved to Eva’s left and pinned a photograph to a corkboard on the wall adjacent to the door. Eva looked at it and felt her skin prickle. It was an old photo, but it was clearly Joe.

  She scanned the room. Frank had mentioned DCI Jacobson, head of one of the MITs. She knew him well – chubby, with brown hair, and always a bit crumpled. Jacobson was one of the few people in this place who didn’t have time for the constant inter-departmental sniping. A good man. She couldn’t make him out in the room. She swallowed hard, then followed the grey-haired woman back to her desk on the far side of the office.

  ‘Yes?’ The woman sounded impatient and didn’t look up from her screen to talk to Eva. It was clear she felt her personal space was being invaded.

  ‘Jacobson sent me,’ Eva said, as briskly as she could. ‘I need to cross-check visitors to Barfield over the last week.’

  ‘First I’ve heard of it.’

  Eva gave a half-smile and decided it was better not to volunteer anything. The woman sighed, but rummaged through a pile of papers on her desk until she found a plastic sleeve with a single data stick in it. Without looking at her, she handed it to Eva.

  ‘Good. Thanks. I’ll, er . . .’ Eva jerked a thumb over her shoulder, stepping backwards, and smiled. It wasn’t returned.

  She walked as casually as possible back to the door, holding her breath, positive that she was going to be called back at any moment. But she wasn’t. Out in the corridor again, she did her best not to run, looking for an empty room with a spare terminal. She found one three doors along, and within seconds she was sitting in front of the screen, plugging in the data stick.

  The information was divided into folders, one for each day over the past two weeks. She opened a file marked ‘08_05_11’, to be presented with a list of twenty thumbnail images. Her own photograph was third in the list. For a moment she considered deleting it, but she knew that would be stupid, and she hurried on.

  The image she was looking for was two places from the bottom. She double-clicked on it, and a larger window appeared with the grainy but familiar face of a man of Middle Eastern appearance staring out at her. Dark skin. Hooked nose. And underneath the picture, a scan of his hand print, the time he checked in and the time he checked out.

  His name: Sarmed Ashe.

  Her heart was thumping. She closed the window on the screen and removed the data stick, then went to the door. She was about to step into the corridor when she saw the portly frame of DCI Jacobson walk past.

  She cursed under her breath and moved to the side of the door, pressing her back against the wall. How long had it taken her to get here from the incident room? Fifteen se
conds? She hadn’t exactly been paying attention. She counted to twenty before taking another deep breath, opening the door and leaving the room.

  There was no one in sight.

  She walked briskly, but not so fast as to attract attention. As she passed the incident room her eyes darted through the interior window. Jacobson was talking to the woman with the short grey hair. Impossible to tell what she was saying. But easy to guess. Ten metres to the lift. She picked up her pace, feeling like she had half the Met following her. On reaching the lift she pressed the down button and waited.

  Movement further down the corridor. The door to the incident room opened. Three seconds later the lift hissed open. Eva glanced to her right. Jacobson had emerged into the corridor and was staring in her direction. Was she paranoid, or did he look suspicious? She saw him mouthing the word ‘Eva?’ just as she stepped into the lift and slammed the button for the basement.

  Safely inside, she found herself almost hyperventilating and felt trickles of sweat all over her body. This wasn’t just a sacking offence, it was a prosecution offence. And all to help a man accused of murder?

  The basement was the lair of the forensic teams. Like nearly everywhere else in the building, it was pretty much empty at this hour. She passed a pale-faced young man in his early twenties who barely seemed to notice her, but apart from that she met no one until she stepped into the badly lit room of the fingerprint department.

  Two young men were on duty. Neither looked like he saw much daylight and only one looked up when Eva entered. Eva forced her face into an expression of confidence and marched up to him. ‘DI Buckley,’ she said. ‘Can you run me a search?’

  ‘ID?’ the young man asked.

  Eva casually handed over her ID, which the young man barely glanced at – and so he didn’t see that her hand was trembling.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  Eva handed him the data stick. ‘Biometric details of prison visitors. There’s a Sarmed Ashe on there. I want to cross-check him with the system.’ The young man shrugged, as if to indicate that this was trivial for someone of his technical ability, and plugged the device into his terminal. Eva helped him navigate to the correct file. As the young man’s fingers flew over the keyboard, she felt her heart hammering in her chest and her eyes kept flickering to the door. She expected Jacobson to step inside any second.