by Chris Ryan
For now, he decided to sleep again. To refresh himself for the next stage of his journey.
09.00hrs GMT
‘What are we doing here?’ Clara asked.
They had taken the first train to Hereford. Now they stood outside Danny’s flat. Clara looked up and down the street, all around. She had been doing that all night, as they nursed paper coffee cups at Euston. The police presence at the station was high. Clara found that a comfort. At no point had she seen the hooded figure and she was beginning to wonder, as she always seemed to when morning came, if seeing him again had just been some kind of coincidence.
‘I’m going to break in,’ Kyle said. His hands were shaking. Delirium tremens, she diagnosed at a glance. Kyle was craving a fix of something.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a key.’ She hurried up to the front door and let them in, ignoring the voice in her head that asked her why on earth she was still carrying Danny’s house key after he’d finished with her.
It was dark in the flat. All the curtains were closed, and there was an unpleasant mustiness. Once inside, Kyle shot down the corridor towards Danny’s bedroom. ‘What are you doing?’ she called. He didn’t answer. When she followed him into the room, she found that he had opened the wardrobe and was on his knees, pulling up the floorboards inside. ‘Kyle, what the hell are you . . .’
She fell silent. Kyle had three wads of bank notes in his fist and a look of unrestrained greed on his face. He started stuffing the money into his pockets. When he was sure he had it all, he followed Clara back along the corridor to the front door, which was still ajar. She opened it wider.
And gasped.
He was there. On the other side of the street. Despite the hood, she could make out a little more of his face this time. Dark eyes. A hooked nose. And was that a stud in his lower lip?
She slammed the door shut. ‘I’m being followed,’ she whispered.
Kyle frowned. ‘What do you mean? You’re as bad as him.’ His hands involuntarily went to the pockets where his money was.
‘There’s a gate in the back garden. It leads to an alleyway. Run!’
She pushed past him and hurried back to the bedroom where French doors led to the garden. They were locked. No sign of the key. She grabbed a pillow from the bed, held it by one hand against the glass pane in the door, then kicked it as hard as she could. The glass splintered. Two more kicks and it was in shards around her feet. ‘Come on!’ she hissed at Kyle, who was hanging back, staring stupidly at her.
They picked their way through the jagged remains of the window pane. Clara winced as a shard scraped against her scalp, but she kept on moving, dragging Kyle along behind her. Danny’s garden was untended and overgrown. The back gate was open. They hurried through it, out into the alleyway behind the row of houses.
Left or right? She knew that both directions ended out in the street. Left emerged further away from Danny’s front door. If her stalker suspected that she was escaping round the back, he’d expect her to take that route. So she turned right.
Kyle was wheezing and out of breath after just a few metres. Clara pulled him along. He was red-faced and coughing as they emerged on to the street. She looked carefully around.
No sign of the stalker. She turned to Kyle.
‘Where can we go?’ she demanded. ‘Not your place. Somewhere nobody can find us till Danny gets back. Do you know somewhere?’
A shifty look crossed his face. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know somewhere. You won’t like it.’
‘I don’t have to like it,’ Clara snapped. ‘Is it far?’
‘No,’ Kyle said. ‘Not far. Follow me.’
She followed.
14.15hrs Central European Time
Frankfurt International Airport. Eritrean Airlines Flight 592 from Massawa touched down on to a rain-slicked runway. A bendy bus transferred the passengers from the aircraft to the terminal building. Danny felt a twist in his stomach as he stepped off the bus. Armed police, everywhere. But he told himself that was to be expected. All of Europe would be on high alert after what had happened in London.
He kept his head down as he stepped into the terminal building. He knew there would be CCTV everywhere. Impossible to spot them all. Better to spend his time making sure he went unobserved.
There was a long queue at passport control. Most of the other passengers from Massawa went into a separate line for non-EU citizens, but Danny joined at least 50 others waiting to present their passports. There were five people between them in the queue. Danny instinctively looked around, checking where the exits were in this huge immigration hall. He saw plenty, but he knew, of course, that they were of no use to him if everything turned to shit. The exits were guarded, and he was unarmed.
It took a full 20 minutes before Danny was called up to have his passport checked. He walked up to a grim-looking German woman and handed over his passport. Was it his imagination, or did the woman glance disapprovingly at his dirty hand, little knowing that this wasn’t ordinary grime, but a mixture of gun residue and dried blood.
She scanned the passport. Danny couldn’t see the screen of her terminal, but found himself scrutinising the contours of her face. He noticed a sudden tightness around her eyes. He tensed up.
She looked at the photograph, then directly at Danny. She frowned. The images were different, since Danny had shaved his head.
Back at the photograph.
Back at Danny.
‘Willkommen in Deutschland,’ she said, handing the passport back.
‘Danke schoen,’ Danny mumbled.
He forced himself to keep a steady pace as he walked away from the immigration desk. Ten metres to his right, an armed police officer. But the cop paid him no attention. Relief crashed over Danny like warm water. He was through.
Next stop, southern Ireland.
1500hrs GMT
‘What is this place?’
Clara didn’t know which part of Hereford they were in. All she knew was that it wasn’t a good part. To get here, they’d passed through an area of bleak parkland. Clara had noticed, just metres from the swings and slides, a metal bin for depositing used needles, on which someone had sprayed a single graffiti tag. Raddled-looking mums sitting nearby, wiping their running noses on the sleeves of threadbare clothes as they watched their pale children on the roundabout, none of them wearing enough clothes to protect them from the biting cold.
Now Kyle was leading them along a terrace of run-down houses. Condemned, most of them, with graffitied steel casements over the windows and building-control signs warning passers-by not to enter on grounds of safety. A few cars lined the streets, but almost without exception they had missing tyres or broken windows. A supermarket trolley lay on its side in the middle of the pavement. Even though it was broad daylight, an urban fox sat in the road, watching them intently. Somewhere in the distance, just on the edge of her hearing, she sensed the throb of a drumbeat. But there was no music in this street. It was silent.
The house outside which they stopped looked worse than the others. The ground-floor windows were covered in bolted steel mesh. On the first floor, the panes were smashed and the frames rotten, leaving the interior of the house open to the elements. There were slates missing from the roof. The chimney stack was crumbling.
The door, however, was slightly open.
Kyle walked up to the door. He pushed it open with his foot and stepped inside. Clara looked over her shoulder. There was no sign of anyone in the street. She followed Kyle inside.
The first thing that hit her was the smell. She could discern cannabis and booze, but that wasn’t the half of it. There was a lingering stench of vomit. Also, sewage. And lacing it all together, the sweet, sickly smell of infection. The doctor in her knew before she had even taken a second step over the threshold that this was a house of the unwell.
It was dark in here, and very cold. She knew that there could be no electricity, but looking up she saw that neither was there a light fitting in
this narrow hallway. Just a bare wire hanging from the ceiling. Instinct told her that if there had ever been a bulb and fitting there, they had been stolen and sold long ago. Same went for the light switch and even, she noticed, for the radiator that had once stood against the wall between the sawn-off ends of two copper pipes. The house had been stripped of anything of value, then graffitied so heavily that she could see nothing of the walls.
‘I don’t like it here,’ she breathed.
Kyle shrugged, then threw her own words back at her: ‘You don’t have to like it.’
Clara clenched her jaw as she followed Kyle further into the house, up a flight of stairs with a thin, sticky carpet. At the top of the stairs he turned right. They entered a large bedroom – in fact, it looked like two rooms knocked together. It was even colder in here. The windows were broken, as she’d seen from the pavement, and the carpet in front of them was wet where the rain had seeped in. Which was presumably why the sleeping bodies had congregated at the far end of the room. She counted them: six people, bundled up under thin blankets.
Clara heard herself say: ‘What is this place?’ But even as she said it, her eyes fell on the paraphernalia that surrounded the sleeping bodies. Teaspoons. Candle stubs. Small Calor Gas stoves. Dirty swabs of cotton wool. And needles, maybe ten of them, lying on the ground, with no sign of sealed foil wrappers to show they were sterile. Three upturned milk crates were dotted around the room in place of chairs. The walls were graffitied just as heavily as downstairs, and there was a stench of urine that suggested someone had relieved themselves in here recently. There was a poster on the wall showing a picturesque French village, but that too was graffitied.
‘We can’t stay here,’ she breathed.
‘Why the hell not?’ Kyle said. ‘Nobody’s going to come looking for you in this place.’
‘What about the police?’ she said. She didn’t know why, but the thought of the authorities finding them put a chill through her.
Kyle snorted. ‘Don’t be stupid. Police don’t want anything to do with this lot.’ And Clara supposed that was right. Especially now, when all their resources were focused on the terror alert. She’d heard people say on TV that there’d been a crime spike since the bombings, as the understaffed police force tried to prioritise their workload. But these people, she surmised, had been here since long before the bombings. They probably didn’t even know the atrocities had happened.
‘How do you know about this place, Kyle?’
But that wasn’t a question Kyle wanted to answer. He indicated a patch of floor, empty except for a couple of old cigarette packets and a crushed tin of Tennants Super.
‘Make yourself at home,’ he said.
16.00hrs CET
Aer Lingus from Frankfurt to Dublin.
He felt a strange sensation when, from his window seat, he saw the coast of southern Ireland slip into view. Home turf, or as near as. Why, then, did it seem threatening? On ops, you knew your friends from your enemies. Now that he was heading home, he felt like the two had merged into one.
Except for Clara. He knew, implicitly, that he could trust her. He loathed himself for putting her in the care of his brother. He just hoped – prayed – that for once Kyle had managed to man up.
17.00hrs GMT. Touchdown. Another excruciating pass through passport control. But no hold-ups. Danny stepped out into the damp Irish air, exhausted, his face grim. He felt no sense of triumph at having got this far unobserved. No satisfaction that all he needed to do now was board a ferry from Dublin to Holyhead, a route Danny knew would not even require him to show his passport. Just anger. Raw, burning anger as his thoughts turned to Spud back in Eritrea. Had he made it? Danny had no way of knowing.
Someone, he told himself, was going to pay.
But first he had to bottle the anger. To use it. He forced himself to concentrate on his own situation. On Clara. And on Hammerstone. His job was only just beginning, and there was only so long that he could remain off the grid.
By 20.00hrs, he was on the Holyhead ferry. He stood on deck, sheltered from the rain by the overhang of a deck above him. Danny had often discussed with his Regiment mates how this was an easy route for terrorists or criminals to slip into the UK unnoticed. He’d never thought that one day it would be him doing it. In the distance, the west coast of Wales slipped into view as Danny carefully thought through his next move. He needed three more guys, he decided, if he was going to smoke out his enemy. People he could trust to keep their mouths shut – to help him out and not let anyone know that he’d made contact.
Ripley was the first name on Danny’s list. He was a good man. Trustworthy. More to the point, Danny knew his home number. He was also a petrolhead. Danny and the improvised team he was going to put together would need transport. Ripley could bring some of his motorbikes.
Barker was second on the list, assuming he was out of hospital after his flesh wound from the dealers in Horseferry Mews. And there was that mate of Barker’s who’d had the brother killed in the Paddington bomb. What was his name? Hancock? Danny reckoned he could get him on side if he thought it was to do with the terror attacks.
He decided he’d make contact from a public pay phone as soon as he got in to Holyhead. Arrange to meet with the guys in London the following night. That would give him time to make a few more arrangements.
Not to mention one other crucial thing. He had to pay a visit to the White Witch.
Part Four
RV
Twenty-two
Midnight
Clara felt sick.
Sick with fear. Sick with disgust. And just plain, ordinary sick.
She was huddled in the corner of this revolting room, hugging her knees, with nothing to protect her from the cold that came in through the window but the clothes she wore.
Kyle had disappeared 20 minutes after they arrived here. She’d tried to persuade him not to leave her, but he’d simply spat a few obscenities and left anyway. The six junkies were all unconscious and she’d been terrified to find out what their reaction to her would be when they woke up. In fact, they’d barely looked at her. She’d soon realised why: it seemed they all still had gear on them, and they were far more interested in getting that into their veins than in the petrified newcomer shivering in the corner of the room. They all awoke at different times, and immediately went about the business of cooking little sachets of brown powder in teaspoons over candle flames, and sending themselves back to oblivion. The doctor in Clara wanted to stop them. But good sense prevailed. She knew that to stand between one of these addicts and their next hit would be asking for trouble.
Kyle had returned a couple of hours later. He stank of booze and he had a bottle in his pocket. He had thrown Clara a packet of crisps, but otherwise barely acknowledged her. Starving, she had wolfed down the food while Kyle sat on the other side of the room, sipping frequently from his bottle of Teacher’s.
‘We can’t stay here,’ she’d whispered.
‘Fine,’ came the reply. ‘Fuck off.’
She’d remained just where she was, of course. She was scared to stay, but she was even more scared to leave.
Just as the light was failing, one of the junkies woke up. He had pale, sallow cheeks and terrible acne, especially round his lips. His hands shook. He stared, bleary-eyed, across the room. First at Clara. He eyed her up and down. Not a lascivious stare – Clara had an intuition that the drugs had long since pushed any thought of sex from his mind – but a calculating one. Did she have any drugs? Any money? What could he get from her?
The junkie turned his attention to Kyle. A flash of recognition registered in his eyes. ‘Back again?’ he asked in a thin, reedy voice.
Kyle ignored him. The junkie snorted dismissively. Everyone fell silent, while the junkie looked between the two of them.
‘Got anything for me?’ the junkie had asked Kyle.
‘You’ve got a fucking nerve.’
Whatever that meant.
Ten minutes passed. T
hen, suddenly, the junkie stood up. He was unsteady on his feet, and his hands were shaking worse than ever. He left the room. Clara heard his uneven footsteps going down the stairs. The door slamming. Silence again.
‘How does he know you?’ Clara had asked. But she’d received no answer. Just a shifty look, and another pull from the bottle of Scotch.
Now it was midnight. Dark in the room. Colder than ever. She was shivering. Kyle had fallen asleep, the bottle empty in his fist. Clara’s thoughts were darker than the room. How had she ended up here? What was she doing? Panic gripped her. She wished, more than anything, that Danny was here. To take her away from the horror of it. But he wasn’t. The only person she had was Kyle, and he was the last person in the world she could trust.
She heard voices outside the house. For some reason they made her jump and she realised she hadn’t heard anybody in the street since she arrived here. This was a place people avoided. A now-familiar cold shadow of dread passed over her. She found herself, almost involuntarily, standing up and creeping towards the broken window. She peered through it.
There were three figures on the pavement outside the house. She couldn’t see their faces, but one of them had the same lanky gait as the junkie who had left that evening. She strained to listen. She could hear two different voices. At first she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then she realised why: they weren’t speaking English. She tried to work out what language it was. It sounded harsh and angular. Russian, perhaps? Or Eastern European?
She swallowed hard. She was no linguist, but she suddenly knew, beyond doubt, that they were speaking Polish.
She hurried over to Kyle and shook him. ‘Wake up. Wake up!’
Kyle groaned and lashed out.
‘Wake up! The Poles are here!’
