Who Dares Wins

by Chris Ryan

  He kept a careful track of time, knowing how easy it was to lose a sense of such things at sea. 02.00 passed.

  03.00.

  04.00.

  And then the sky started glowing with a faint pink light. Morning. And with it, in the distance, the sight that Jacob had been waiting for.

  Land.

  The wind was behind him now, urging him onwards. The tiredness that he felt from being awake for nearly twenty-four hours fell away as Jacob looked carefully towards the shore, his eyes searching for unpopulated areas and deserted stretches of beach. Only when he was a couple of hundred metres out did he see a likely target. He adjusted his course and started tacking towards it.

  His body was aching with cold and tiredness. Exhaustion. It took all his effort, as he approached this rocky inlet, to lean forward and pull the centreboard, first halfway and then, when he was only a few metres out, fully up. The boat wobbled precariously; Jacob braced himself just as she slammed on to the pebble-strewn shore. The wind was still screaming in the full sails; he crawled to the centre of the boat and tugged the halyard down, bringing the sail with it.

  All of a sudden the noise stopped. He was surrounded by an almost silence. Just the lapping of the waves and the calling of a seagull. Without giving himself a moment to rest, however, he grabbed the weapons bag and his rucksack, then climbed out of the boat.

  And for the first time in six long years, Jacob Redman stepped out on to English soil.

  TWENTY-TWO

  May 23. 07.45 hrs. Mac was at home. At home, and glad that his wife Rebecca had let him back after his recent misdemeanours. Not before time. The atmosphere back at base was horrible. Porteus’s departure had caused a weird air of mistrust among the men. Moreover, word of how Sam had been asked to stay behind with the men from the Firm had got around. It didn’t take the guys a great deal of head scratching to work out that the two events were related and, as everyone knew, Mac was Sam’s closest mate in the Regiment. They went way back. He could barely show his face without someone trying to pump him for information. Truth was, Sam had gone off the radar. Mac had tried to call him any number of times; he’d even gone round to his flat. He felt half-worried, half-angry. There was no doubt about it: Sam Redman had some explaining to do.

  Back home, nobody knew anything of this, and so it was that he found himself at the breakfast table of the unim-posing two-up two-down in Hereford, listening to the chink of his kids’ spoons against their cereal bowls, while nursing a cup of coffee and a hangover. Rebecca, sitting in her dressing gown with her long hair mussed, cast him an occasional kittenish look. Amazing what a night of drunken passion could do. He smiled at her.

  ‘Are you back for ever now, Dad?’ asked Jess, his nine-year-old daughter.

  Mac smiled at her. Not for the first time he felt a pang of guilt about his less than perfect parenting skills. ‘’Course I am, love,’ he said.

  ‘Except for when you go away to kill baddies,’ Huck butted in, his mouth still half full of Weetabix. Huck was seven, and although he knew nothing of the SAS, the fact that his dad was a soldier with lots of guns had caught his imagination. ‘How many baddies did you kill last time, Dad? Loads, I bet.’

  ‘Huck!’ Rebecca admonished him. ‘Stop asking your father silly questions and eat your breakfast. You’re going to be late for school.’

  ‘You’re not even dressed,’ Jess observed sulkily.

  Rebecca opened her mouth to deliver another reprimand, but Mac gave her a subtle shake of the head. ‘I’ll take them,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah!’ Huck cried. He jumped down from the table and rushed to find his school things.

  It was just gone eight-thirty when the kids were ready. Mac pulled on his jacket, kissed Rebecca on the cheek and led them outside. It was a ten-minute walk and he hoped the fresh air would clear his head.

  He didn’t even make it out of the front garden before he stopped.

  The figure standing on the other side of the street, leaning against a lamppost, looked like a ghost. Mac’s sharp eyes saw that his face was cut up; his eyes were haunted.

  ‘Sam,’ he said under his breath.

  Sam said nothing. He didn’t even move. He just continued to stare.

  ‘Come on, Dad!’ Huck shouted. He was out of the gate now, his schoolbag slung over his shoulder. Jess was kicking her heels.

  Mac looked over at Sam. ‘Wait there.’ He mouthed the words silently and pointed a finger to emphasise what he was saying. ‘Wait there!’

  Sam nodded.

  The walk to school was a brisk one. Huck talked nine to the dozen, but barely received a response from his dad – just a ruffling of the hair at the school gates, and a kiss on the cheek for a slightly embarrassed Jess. They sloped off into the playground and Mac ran back home. As he turned on to his street, however, and looked over at the lamppost, he saw that Sam was no longer there.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said under his breath.

  ‘Language, language.’ A voice from behind.

  Mac spun round. Sam, right behind him.

  ‘Jesus, Sam. What happened to your face?’ Close up he could see just how bad it was. The skin was sliced and splintered, all the way from the top of his forehead to the bottom of his neck. A couple of the larger cuts had been closed up with steri-tape, but the treatment had a distinctly homemade feel about it. Sam touched his fingers to his face; as he did so, Mac noticed that his wrists were also deeply cut.

  ‘Head-butted a windscreen,’ Sam said. ‘Long story.’

  ‘You’d better come back to mine,’ Mac replied. ‘Becky’s good at this stuff. She can patch you up a bit better.’

  Sam shook his head. ‘Let’s walk.’

  They headed to a nearby park. Mums with kids played at the swings, but the two men took a seat on a park bench at a good distance from them. Sam looked like something from a horror movie, after all. They sat in silence for a moment. Mac deduced that Sam would speak when he was ready.

  ‘Jacob was there,’ he said finally. ‘In Kazakhstan. I warned him off.’

  Mac took a deep breath and nodded. It wasn’t a total surprise, but it took a certain effort to dampen down his anger with his old friend. ‘That what you told the Firm?’ he asked.

  Sam shook his head.

  ‘They believe you?’

  ‘No. Listen, Mac. All sort of shit’s gone down since then. I need to know I can trust you to keep it to yourself.’

  ‘Fucking hell, mate. Everyone’s asking questions.’

  ‘Can I trust you?’

  Mac closed his eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘Course you can.’

  Sam gazed into the middle distance and then he started to speak – quickly, as if the words were painful for him. Mac listened in rapt attention as his story unfolded: Porteus’s letter, the red-light runners, seeing J. Then Sam described his interview with the Firm – how Bland had called his bluff about going out to rescue Jacob and how Sam had denied everything. He told Mac about the laptop, Dolohov, escaping from the SBS. And, finally, the meet.

  ‘When is it?’

  ‘Tomorrow night. Piccadilly Circus. The Firm will be there, Mac. Dolohov knew the time and place. And they’re hardly going to give J. the benefit of the doubt.’

  Mac took a deep breath. ‘Mate,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but J.’s got a lot of questions to answer.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Are you sure he’s not in cahoots with the Russkis? He was treated like shit you know…’

  Instantly Sam lost his temper. ‘You think I don’t fucking know that?’ He slammed his wounded hand against the arm of the park bench.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ Mac flared. And then, more quietly, ‘I’m just saying, all right?’

  Sam was breathing heavily to regain his composure. He stood up and started walking. Mac walked with him. ‘These red-light runners,’ he said, his voice clipped. ‘You know what? They don’t sound so different from me when I was a kid. If it wasn’t for Jacob, I’d still be like t
hat. It was him that put me on the right track, you know? Not my parents – they’d washed their fucking hands of me. Not my friends – they were a bunch of shitkickers. It was Jacob.’ He stopped and looked intensely at Mac. ‘I don’t know what Jacob’s up to,’ he said. ‘I just don’t fucking know. Half of me thinks he’s working for the FSB, some kind of gun for hire. Half of me thinks there’s got to be more to it than that. I’m not going to know until I ask him, Mac. Face to face. If the Firm get their hands on him, that’ll never happen. You know what those bastards are like, Mac – they’ll make what I did with Dolohov look like a tickle under the armpits.’

  Mac stared at his old friend. He could feel his anger and his confusion, like heat from an oven. And somehow – he wasn’t quite sure how – he knew what was coming.

  ‘I need help, Mac. At the RV. The place is going to be crawling with spooks and ham-fisted coppers. I need another set of eyes. I need a weapon. I can’t ask anyone else, Mac. I can’t trust anyone else.’

  Mac looked down to the ground. He felt torn – torn between his loyalty to Sam and… And what? Had Jacob turned? Was he a traitor? It seemed impossible; and yet…

  He sighed, then looked back up at his friend. ‘You remember Baghdad?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘’Course.’

  ‘Before it happened, during that raid. We could have been goners if Jacob hadn’t turned up.’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘Do you remember what he said, when you two crazy fuckers were persuading me we could take the house by ourselves?’

  Sam narrowed his eyes.

  ‘“You’re a long time looking at the lid.” I’ve never forgotten that. Thought about it a lot.’

  ‘It was something he used to say.’

  Mac took another deep breath and looked over Sam’s shoulder, into the distance. He could just make out the back of his house from here. He allowed himself a moment of silence.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Count me in. What do you want me to do?’

  *

  In a small bedsit in North London, a young man sat alone. Two more anonymous packages had arrived. Jamie Spillane once again took the precaution of locking his door before opening them. He needn’t really have bothered, for the contents of the first package would have been quite uninteresting to the casual observer. Just a briefcase. Not even a new one. This was brown and scuffed. The casual observer, however, would not have understood its relevance. They would not have realised that this briefcase was an exact copy of the one Jamie Spillane had taken such pains to photograph. He had e-mailed the images from an Internet café to a perfectly unremarkable and innocent-looking e-mail address; and now it had arrived, each mark and scratch perfectly replicated. He set it to one side on the bed and turned his attention to the second package.

  It was well sealed. He struggled to get it open. Once he did, he removed the contents gingerly. A mobile phone, brand new, with a sticker on its back detailing its number. Jamie placed the phone gently on the briefcase, then removed another object. A wire, with a jack plug at one end and two metal prongs at the other. The sort of thing that, if you found it lying at the bottom of a drawer, you’d probably throw away. A set of lock picks and a tension wrench.

  The package was still not empty. There was one item left. He closed up the box and slid it under his bed. Then, after a few moments reflection, he pulled it out again. There would be something slightly uncomfortable, he decided, about sleeping above a stash of high explosive. He stashed it in the corner of his room, draped a jumper over it, then stowed the mobile phone and lock picks in the briefcase and placed it back in its box.

  Jamie Spillane often wondered where these items came from. Don’t worry about that, he’d been told. It’s better you don’t know. Still, he did wonder. It was lonely work, doing this by himself. But if the job went well and MI5 saw that he was a good asset for them, maybe they’d find more for him to do. He smiled at the thought.

  Three days now. May 26. It had to be that day. Jamie didn’t know why, but his instructions had been quite specific. Before then he still had things to do. Preparations to make. They weren’t straightforward, but he was trained for this. Everything had gone well so far and he saw no reason to think that it wouldn’t continue to do so.

  Jamie found his mouth going dry with excitement at the very thought.

  *

  Evening fell. Jacob Redman looked out on to the streets of North London.

  He had bought himself jeans and a couple of shirts from a charity shop in a bland town somewhere on the south coast. From a greetings card shop he had bought a roll of bright red ribbon, the kind used for wrapping gifts – though Jacob had something very different in mind. By now he had stashed the weapons in his rucksack, which he didn’t let go of as he travelled by train into Victoria. He checked into a Travelodge near the station, where he stowed the rucksack under his bed and allowed himself a couple of hours’ sleep. His body ached from the strains of the night crossing; but when he awoke and showered he felt invigorated. Leaving the weapons where they were, he headed out of the hotel and into the Underground. Victoria line to Green Park; Piccadilly Line to Manor House. Then a 20 minute walk. Now, as the light was failing, he found himself at the seedier end of Stamford Hill. He was stalking something and he knew this would be a fertile hunting ground.

  He sat in the warmth of a café on the corner of a huge crossroads. The roads were busy – commuters coming home from work – but he knew they would soon calm down. That was when he would take to the streets. He sipped on his coffee slowly, closing his eyes as the caffeine surged through his veins, and carefully going through in his mind everything that was supposed to happen in the next twenty-four hours. It had to go smoothly. It had to. He had seen the suspicion in Surov’s eyes. He knew that if anything went wrong, he’d be dodging the FSB’s hitmen for the rest of his life.

  He continued to wait.

  Jacob was kicked out of the café just before 9 p.m. He didn’t make a fuss. Instead he took to the streets again. He walked down a main road that headed west from the crossroads, then left into a network of residential streets. A number of them were dead ends, with signs declaring them to be NO ENTRY between the hours of ten and six. To enable the residents to get a decent night’s sleep without the noise of cars? Jacob knew better. The NO ENTRY signs were intended to dissuade kerb crawlers. Hookers were rife in this part of town. Get rid of the punters and you get rid of the problem – that was the theory. It didn’t work. As the clock ticked towards 10 p.m., the women started to appear, as though drawn to the moon and the stars.

  Their attention was attracted by Jacob – a lone man, clearly giving them the eye. ‘Looking for a bit of business?’ one of them asked – a hefty girl, perhaps in her late twenties, the veins on her legs visible beneath her short skirt. Jacob bowed his head and walked on. She wouldn’t do. Not nearly. It didn’t seem to bother her – she took a bored drag on her cigarette and waited for another fish to bite.

  Jacob wouldn’t be rushed. Each hooker he passed, standing sentry on their own street corners, he eyed up. He looked lascivious, no doubt, but he didn’t care. They were too old, too small, too fat, too thin. But after about half an hour of searching, he saw one girl who looked like she might fit the bill. She was tall – about as tall as Jacob – and had short dark hair. She was comfortably in her forties and nobody could say she was pretty. As Jacob eyed her up and down, she addressed him. ‘Looking for a trick, darling?’

  Jacob looked around, checking that he wasn’t being watched. He moved closer to the girl. She stank of cigarettes, but her eyes seemed sharp enough; sharp enough to make him believe she wasn’t a junkie.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jacob replied. ‘Kind of.’ He flashed her a smile. ‘Something a bit different.’

  That didn’t seem to surprise her. ‘Different is more expensive, love. Money up front, too.’

  Jacob pulled out his wallet. As the hooker looked greedily on, he pulled out four fifty-pound notes and put them firmly
into her outstretched hands. ‘Must be proper different,’ she muttered as she tucked the money away into her clothes. ‘Where we going?’

  Jacob shook his head. ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘Be here tomorrow, you’ll get the same again, plus a decent tip if you do well.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘What exactly you got in mind, love? Us girls have got to be careful, you know.’

  Jacob smiled again. Friendly. Reassuring. ‘Just an appointment with a friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Nothing kinky. Likes a bit of dressing up. Bit of role play. You don’t mind that, do you?’

  The hooker shrugged. ‘Four hundred smackers,’ she said, ‘I’ll dress up like Orville the bleedin’ duck. What time you want me?’

  ‘Eight o’clock,’ Jacob replied. ‘Don’t be late. If you’re late, I’ll have to get one of your friends to join us.’

  And with that he turned away, leaving the girl to reflect on her good luck, and hoping she’d stay sober enough to keep their rendezvous the following evening. In the meantime he had another job to do. He felt in his jacket for the roll of red ribbon, then started heading back towards the Underground where he jumped on a train for Piccadilly.

  There were preparations to be made, and he had to make them well in advance.

  *

  May 24.

  Sam hadn’t been able to stay in Hereford for any longer than was necessary. It wasn’t safe there. Too many eyes. The Firm would have his house under surveillance, that much was sure; and Credenhill was out of bounds. Much better to get out of the city and back up to London. Even there he would attract the attention of passers-by with his cut-up face. He had suppressed the desire to go and see Clare – no doubt they’d be scoping her place out too – so he’d bought himself a hooded top to conceal his features as best he could, then laid low in the small room of the Heathrow Holiday Inn, where he hoped he’d be able to merge into the background.