by Chris Ryan
He caught his breath. There were voices shouting out on the street as firemen alighted from the engine. He zoned them out. All his attention now was on the house as he worked out how he was going to break in.
It was a fairly old brick building. Victorian, maybe. A bit shabby. The garden was overgrown. Three windows on the top floor. Two on the ground, one either side of the door. As he watched, a light appeared in the top-left window. Through the curtains he saw a silhouette. It stood very still for perhaps ten seconds, watching through the window, then melted away. That told him where his target’s bedroom was. He knew he wanted to break in round the back, but not until the light was out again, and the fire engine had moved on.
He didn’t move for a full 30 minutes. Not one muscle. Out on the street was all the commotion that went with extinguishing the garden fire. A second siren arrived – police, he supposed – but Danny’s only focus was on staying motionless and hidden. Moisture seeped through his clothes from the wet grass, but he’d spent longer than this hiding out in far worse conditions. The noise on the other side of the fence died away. The figure disappeared from the bedroom window and the light switched off. Danny gave it another ten minutes. Then he advanced.
He kept to the perimeter of the garden, where the fence afforded a little bit more camouflage. The high grass made a slight swishing sound underfoot, but he kept it to a minimum by careful pacing. He boxed round the side of the house, then quickly crossed the grass until he was outside the back door. It was a dump here. Old cardboard boxes, made soggy by the rain, were piled high against the back wall of the house. A foul smell filled the air from bin bags full of rotting refuse. Danny had the impression that Abu Ra’id’s missus was a prisoner in her own house. He gave the back door a cursory examination. Two mortice locks and a single pane of glass. Hard to open, and it would make an unnacceptably loud noise if he shattered the window. He looked around for the entry point he thought he’d seen on Google Maps.
He found it in seconds.
Danny didn’t imagine that the old brick coal bunker had been used for decades. It was a couple of metres wide, a couple deep and maybe a metre high. Right now it was covered with slimy, wet old bin bags, which Danny carefully removed to one side. On the top of the bunker was a rusted metal plate with an iron handle. He yanked it.
Stuck.
Danny climbed on top of the bunker and yanked it again with a bit more force. This time it worked loose, but made a harsh grating sound as it came off in Danny’s hands that sounded all the louder because he needed to be quiet, and sounds could travel a long way through a quiet house – even up to the White Witch’s bedroom, if that’s where she currently was. He crouched down and remained motionless for two minutes. Then, when he was sure he hadn’t disturbed anyone, he took his red torch and shone it down into the bunker. It was about two metres deep. He lay the grate so that it was half covering the hole, then jumped down into the bunker.
Silence.
There was no coal here. Probably hadn’t been for years. Rodent droppings all over the floor. And an opening, only a metre high and half a metre wide, into the basement of the house.
He was in.
The basement was high enough to stand in, and completely empty. A flight of wooden steps on the far side. Danny crept up them. A door at the top. He extinguished his torch and tried it.
Unlocked.
He stepped out on to the ground floor of the house, and closed the cellar door quietly behind him.
It smelled damp. Musty. Dirty. He was in a hallway. To his right, the kitchen, which looked out over the back garden. To his left, a staircase heading up to the first floor, and a door to the front room. He paused, concentrating hard on the quietness of the sleeping house as he fixed his next move in his mind. He didn’t know for sure that the White Witch was alone in the house, and although it seemed likely, he knew his interrogation of her needed to be as quiet as possible. He didn’t want anybody walking in while he got to work on her. Best place was her bedroom: a hand over the mouth while she was asleep would stop her screaming when she realised there was an intruder in her house.
A minute passed. Everything was quiet. He got ready to creep up the stairs.
But then there was a sound.
Footsteps up above. Light spilled down the stairway.
Danny quickly evaluated his options. Head back down into the cellar? No: harder then to tell when the coast was clear. Kitchen? If she came downstairs, it was most likely that’s where she’d be heading. He fixed his eyes on the other door. Decision made. He headed towards it. To his left he saw a shadow stretching down the stairs, cast by someone standing at the top. He had a horrible intuition that she’d heard him.
He silently opened the door and stepped into the room beyond.
A poky sitting room. His eyes picked out the shape of a sofa by the window. A fireplace with a large picture above the mantle. TV in one corner. A rug on the floor. The same stale smell that pervaded the whole house. He hurried over to the sofa and crouched down beside it. As long as it stayed dark, he’d be hidden. If she turned the light on, things would hot up.
Footsteps down the stairs.
The hallway light came on, spilling into the room through the few inches where the door was ajar.
From his hiding place he briefly saw a figure pass the crack in the door.
He felt his jugular pulsing. If there was going to be violence, he wanted it to be on his terms. At the moment, it wasn’t.
A clattering sound in the kitchen. She was looking for something.
Footsteps again. They stopped outside the front room. The door slowly opened.
She was standing there. A silhouette in the door frame. He could clearly see the shape of her head, the folds of her dressing gown.
If he moved, she would see him.
She made a sucking sound through her teeth. Danny’s eyes flickered round, looking for a weapon. They fell on the picture over the fireplace. The light spill from the door was shining on it now. It wasn’t a picture at all. It was an Arabic symbol.
A symbol he had seen before. Recently.
He tried to place it, but couldn’t.
Suddenly, the woman turned. It seemed she was satisfied that there was no intruder in the house. She switched the light off and clumped up the stairs.
Silence, and darkness, filled the house once more.
Danny waited a couple of minutes before moving again. He slipped out of the front room and silently climbed the stairs.
He knew which was her room, because he’d seen the light from outside. At the top of the stairs he walked along the landing until he was there. The door was slightly open. He peered in. He could see the bulk of her body beneath her blankets. Distance to the bed, five metres. If he crossed it quickly, he could have one hand over her mouth before she screamed.
He inhaled slowly.
Then he moved.
She was awake. He could tell that by the way she started before he was even halfway across the bedroom floor. But before she could make a noise, he was looming over her. Even in the darkness he could see the whites of her eyes as she stared up at him. He slammed one hand down on her mouth before she could make a noise, even though he sensed that she hadn’t been going to scream.
Only her head was visible above the blankets. Her body, however, was very still. Tense. She was no looker. Pasty skin. Spots. Greasy black hair matted to her forehead. A rank smell of stale sweat.
‘Listen very carefully,’ Danny breathed. ‘Your fella’s dead. I watched him having his throat cut. His little friends with the big bombs are dead too. I killed the fuckers myself. Nasty way to go, all of them. And I will kill you, in a way that will hurt more than you can imagine, if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to.’
She made no attempt to speak.
There was a lamp on the bedside table. No lampshade, just a bare bulb. He reached over with his spare hand and twisted the bulb from the lamp. He threw it to the floor, then switched the lamp on and h
eld the bulb socket an inch from her cheek. ‘Make a sound,’ he said, ‘and you’re toast.’
No response.
He gingerly lifted his hand from over her lips. No sound. She just stared straight up at him.
‘Abu Ra’id left you a message. You want to hear it?’
A pause.
In the split second that followed, Danny realised now what the clattering sound in the kitchen had been. She’d fetched herself a weapon. The White Witch thrust upwards with one hand and the point of a sharp kitchen blade pierced her duvet. Danny knocked it away easily enough with his free hand, but this woman wasn’t giving up without a struggle. She managed to sit up. The duvet fell away, revealing her flabby white breasts. She tried to stab at Danny again with her knife – a hopeless gesture that Danny easily deflected for a second time. But she leaned forward as she did it, and the flesh of her breasts pressed against the exposed bulb socket that Danny was holding in his right hand.
The electric shock was sudden and immediate. The White Witch’s body jolted violently, and so did Danny’s because his right arm was suddenly in contact with the woman’s chest. He let go of the lamp just as her limbs flailed momentarily out of control. Her legs jarred upwards, and her right arm, which still held the knife, slammed back inwards towards Danny.
Danny’s faculties were blurred by the shock. He instinctively knocked the knife hand away yet again, but it was an awkward movement, pushing the knife back towards the White Witch’s chest. She saw it approaching and tried to twist out of the way, but in doing so her skin came in contact with the bulb socket for a second.
Danny barely saw what happened. All he knew was that there was another violent jolt, and a second later, there was blood all over her stomach. The White Witch looked down in horror to see the blade sticking into her belly.
A moment of silence. The lamp fell away from the bed and clattered on the floor. Then a mouthful of blood erupted from the White Witch’s lips and spattered over her pasty, pale breasts.
‘Shit,’ Danny breathed. ‘Shit!’
Danny grabbed the knife and pulled it from her body. Blood pissed out over the sheets. He quickly laid her out onto her side, but the whites of her eyes were rolling upwards now. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps. Danny was reminded of Spud. But Spud was tough. The White Witch wasn’t. She was on the way out.
‘He left something for you,’ Danny whispered quickly. ‘He said you’d find it in the name of God. What did he mean?’
No reply.
‘What did he mean?’
She was unconscious. Perfectly still. Bleeding out.
Danny stared at her. Then he looked at his own hands. Blood. Everywhere. He realised his DNA – DNA that was undoubtedly filed away on a system somewhere – was smeared all over this gruesome scene.
He staggered back from the bed, blood dripping from his hands. The White Witch wasn’t dead yet, but she would be soon. An involuntary, mirthless laugh escaped Danny at the grotesque way she’d met her end. Then the horrible reality fell in on him. His enemies – whoever they were – would realise that he was alive just as soon as forensics got to grips with this scene. After everything he’d gone through in the past few days, he was fucked.
He staggered back to the stairs and hurried down a lot less stealthily than he’d climbed them. Still swearing under his breath, he walked past the open door into the front room.
Suddenly he stopped.
He turned again, and looked through the open door.
A memory flashed in his mind. He was at Hammerstone, watching the grisly video of the young man Abu Ra’id had almost persuaded to slice his own throat. In the background was a canvas with an Arabic symbol on it. He heard Spud’s sarcastic voice. Looks like a bird’s arse.
His eyes traced the shape of the symbol above the fireplace. A ‘w’ shape, followed by an ‘i’, with strange markings above.
It’s the Arabic for Allah, Buckingham had said. A very sacred symbol to the Muslim community.
Danny blinked.
What had Abu Ra’id said? Only my contact and I have the address and the password, but you will find them in the name of God. You know where to look.
Allah. The name of God.
He stepped into the room again, his eyes flickering towards the curtains. The surveillance guys didn’t know he was here. They didn’t know their subject was dead. He reckoned he could allow himself a couple of minutes to act on his hunch.
It was a square frame, about 60 by 60cm. He lifted it off the wall and carried it down into the basement – the only place in the house he felt secure using his torch. He laid it on the ground, face down, and scanned the backing board. No marks of any kind.
The board was stuck into the frame by strips of brown tape. Danny scraped them off with bloody fingernails, leaving traces of the woman’s gore over the board. When it was loose, he pulled it out and turned it over.
There was a white sticky label on the inside of the board. In neat, handwritten letters, it bore the words ‘username’ and ‘password’. And next to each of these, a 16-digit alphanumberic string.
Carefully, Danny peeled it off, taking very good care that it should remain intact. He secreted the sticker in his trouser pocket.
A strange calmness had come over him. He’d got what he came for. Now he needed to get the hell out.
He knew that as soon as he tried to scale the garden wall, he risked being seen by the surveillance guys. If they saw him, they’d make chase. He exited back through the coal bunker, his shoulder muscles burning as he hauled himself through the opening and into the garden. He hurried straight up to the front gate. It was deadbolted on the inside. Danny thought for a moment. Then he pulled his threadbare balaclava out of his pocket and pulled it over his head. He unlocked the bolts and pushed the door open. Then he stood to one side, out of sight.
He estimated it would take 60 seconds for one of the surveillance guys to come and see what was happening. In the event they were slower off the mark. It was a full minute and a half before a figure appeared. He didn’t quite enter the garden, but loitered in the frame of the gate for a fraction of a second. But that was all Danny needed. He grabbed the man and slammed his head against one of the fence’s uprights. He knew instinctively how hard to do it – enough to knock him out, not so hard as to do him any permanent damage. He was just doing his job, after all. The guy slumped to the ground. Danny reckoned he’d be unconscious for about a minute. That gave him enough time.
If the second was following any kind of SOP, he’d still be in the vehicle. Danny ran out of the gate and across the door to the car. Sure enough, the second guy was sitting behind the wheel, his window open. At the sight of the balaclava’d man approaching him, he started to panic, quickly grabbing the wheel and fumbling for the keys. But Danny got there first. He leant over. ‘Your mate needs an ambulance,’ he lied. ‘Urgently. You can either follow me, or help him. Up to you.’
With that, he walked round to the pavement and hurried back up to the top of the road. He ripped the balaclava off as he turned right, out of sight. He knew the surveillance guy wouldn’t be in pursuit. He had time to disappear into the shadows.
But that was the only comfort he had. Now the clock was ticking. It was only a matter of time before his presence in that house was confirmed. When that happened, every last policeman and security agent in the country would be looking for him. Because one of the Hammerstone quartet – and he had a very good idea which one – would know he was on to them. And if they wanted to pin a murder on him, it would be child’s play.
Which meant that now, he really did have no choice other than to use the information contained on a dog-eared sticky label to smoke out his enemy.
Before his enemy got to him first.
Twenty-four
03.00hrs
London could take your breath away at night, Danny had always thought. The bridges and the buildings all lit up. You could feel safe here, surrounded by all that strength.
But not tonight. Not Danny. Tonight London felt like the enemy, just like Ha’dah had.
The stretch of the Albert Embankment between Vauxhall Bridge and Lambeth Bridge was quiet. Danny walked past the MI6 building, brightly lit up even though the hour was early. But he was equally aware of MI5 on the other side of the river in Thames House. He looked ahead. Thirty metres away he saw three broad-shouldered men, one of whom had his arm in a sling. They were looking out over the river. Danny watched them for a moment. He saw Ripley, in his trademark biker’s jacket. Barker in the sling, a reminder of their encounter with dealers what seemed like an age ago. And next to Barker, Hancock, who had a shock of bright orange hair that almost seemed to glow in the riverside lamps.
They’d made their RV in time.
An old tramp staggered past them. Ripley was looking impatiently at his watch. Danny let the tramp pass before he approached them.
Barker and Ripley eyed him warily. There were no fond greetings. Far from it. ‘There’s a piss-up tomorrow,’ Ripley said. ‘The lads wanted to give you and Spud a good send-off. You coming?’
Danny ignored the sarcasm. ‘Busy,’ he said. ‘So will you be.’
‘Where’s Spud?’
Danny suppressed the cold twist of anxiety. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘He might be dead.’
‘So do you feel like telling us what the hell . . .’
‘The reason you thought I was dead is because someone wants me that way. Spud too, and they might have succeeded on that count.’ Danny gave Hancock a piercing look. ‘Whoever it is, I think they were involved with the bombings.’
A steely look crossed Hancock’s face. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘They’ve tried to kill me once and they’ll try to kill me again. I need your help. Can I trust you?’
The three men looked at each other. ‘What do you want us to do?’ said Barker.
That was enough for Danny. He pointed towards the MI6 building, then across the river at Thames House, impressively lit up in the darkness. ‘Surveillance,’ he said.
