by Tom Cain
‘Absolutely. My lips are sealed. But how about after all this is over, can I write about it then?’
Clemens looked at him as if he’d just broken wind. ‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘No promises at all, but maybe. And only after you have received explicit clearance from the Chief of Staff’s office. Now get aboard the damn plane before I change my mind.’
Tolland ran up the steps, followed more sedately by Clemens. As she reached the cabin he was already strapping himself into a set facing backwards, directly opposite Lara, who was smiling at him in a way that made her whole face light up. Suddenly she seemed a totally different creature to the shy, suspicious, obviously traumatized girl who had shuffled across the front hall at the House of Freedom.
Oh my Lord, thought Chantelle Clemens. I do believe that crazy child is sweet on the boy. She sighed, shook her head in wonderment at the resilience and optimism of youth, and made her way to her seat. Then she summoned the steward and said, ‘You can tell the captain we’re ready to go.’
Lara was flown into Fairford airbase well before dawn and shown to a guest suite. Someone told her they’d give her a few hours to rest, but Lara was so filled with a mixture of nervousness, excitement and sheer confusion at the dizzying pace of events that she lay wide awake until someone knocked on the door to take her to breakfast.
She’d been smuggled out of the House of Freedom with a blanket over her head and the only photographs of her that had reached the media were some blurry old family snaps, touted by the same aunt who had sold her into slavery. Yet somehow all the people in their military uniforms, going about their work or lining up for food, seemed to know who she was, and they greeted her as someone special, even precious.
Lara had been used by plenty of Americans in Dubai, and she couldn’t understand how those crude, drunken oafs could have been produced by the same nation as the impeccably neat and sober Air Force personnel who were now smiling at her, shaking her hand and calling her ‘ma’am’. They told her what a privilege it was to be taking care of her. They insisted that she should let them show her round the base. They even helped her choose what to eat when she was overcome by the sheer profusion of choices on display.
She found herself looking round every so often, just to make sure that Jake was still close by. He would give her hand a little squeeze and that would be enough to make her feel safe until the next time she was overwhelmed by it all. In the meantime, she was happy to let Chantelle Clemens tell her what to do now, what would happen tomorrow and what her role in proceedings would be.
‘You’ll meet the President when he arrives here and you’ll travel with him to Bristol,’ Lara was told. Clemens must have seen the look of alarm on her face because she added, ‘Don’t you worry yourself about Mr Roberts. He’s a good, kind man, and he’s got kids about your age. He’ll make you feel right at ease.’
Lara nodded, saying nothing as Clemens continued, ‘When we get to Bristol, I’ll be there to look after you and show you where to go, OK? Good. Now, you’ll be introduced onstage during the President’s speech. We wrote some words for you to say, if you think you can manage that. But if you can’t that’s fine. Take a look, why don’t you? I’ve got them here.’
Clemens handed Lara a sheet of paper. ‘What do you think?’
Lara read aloud, speaking quietly: ‘My name is Lara Dashian. I was taken from my country, Armenia, against my will. I was bought and sold. I was made to do terrible things. If I did not do what my owners wanted, I was beaten.’
She stopped for a moment, unable to go any further.
‘Take your time,’ Clemens said.
Lara nodded, took a deep breath to compose herself and continued. ‘But I was lucky, I was rescued. Many other girls, just like me, are not so lucky. They are still slaves. Please, I beg you, do everything in your power to help rescue them.’
She fell silent, the arm holding the sheet of paper loose at her side, her head down, biting her lip.
‘Please excuse me,’ Lara said. She walked a few paces away and then slumped down against a wall. She ended up on the floor, with her head in her hands.
Clemens gave the girl time, then went over to her, crouched down on her haunches and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
Lara nodded.
The two of them stayed silent and motionless for a few seconds, then Lara looked at Chantelle Clemens and said, ‘I will say those words. For the other girls, the ones who are not so lucky, I must say those words.’
84
Damon Tyzack heard the explosive crack echo around the rolling Cotswold landscape and watched as a puff of orange smoke billowed up into the air. He cursed under his breath. The dummy explosion had detonated on a patch of grass at least ten yards from its target, a crude structure built from scaffolding, planks and hay bales. It stood at one end of a field far from any public roads at the heart of an estate in Gloucestershire owned – via a complex series of intermediaries – by the Russian mafia leader Naum Titov. The loan of his field was Titov’s contribution to the death of Lincoln Roberts. To Damon Tyzack, however, the simultaneous removal of Lara Dashian was at least as important an objective.
He spoke into a walkie-talkie. ‘Let’s do that again. This time I want more height at the point of release, and a longer delay on the fuses. See if that achieves the desired result.’
Tyzack had been hard at work for several hours, calibrating his equipment and checking that the combination of stolen goods, back-street engineering and software mailed in from the far side of the Atlantic could do the job for which it was intended. Not yet, was the answer. But it would, even if he had to stand in that damn field all night. The only weapon he would be taking into the killzone tomorrow would be the iPhone on which Bobby Kula’s custom application was installed. He watched the screen one more time, hit a button, waited a few seconds… Crack! This time the smoke rose from a point just beneath the foot of the stage. They were getting closer.
‘And again,’ he said into his handset.
As he waited for the next run, Tyzack thought about the events of the previous night. He had to admit, he’d got a hell of a shock when he’d looked through the Transit’s windscreen and seen Samuel bloody Carver getting out of a Jag thirty yards up the road. The man was supposed to be dead. What in God’s name was he doing alive and well outside Bill Selsey’s house?
Tyzack had ducked his head just in time, thanking his lucky stars that his face was partially hidden by his cap. Carver’s arrival had significantly altered the odds and made the attack on Selsey unacceptably risky. If that was all he had to do, Tyzack might have gone ahead, just to take on Carver and put him down for good. But with so much else at stake, that was one pleasure he would have to deny himself, for now at least. He’d shouted at his driver to keep going, then told Geary to abort the mission.
And it had not been an entirely wasted effort. Tyzack now knew a lot more than he had before. MI6 had obviously not only broken Selsey, they had also used him as bait. Selsey did not know who had hired him, but Carver would have worked it out in an instant. Tyzack went over what he had told Carver about the Roberts hit. No name had been mentioned, but he’d certainly given enough clues. He’d wanted Carver to work it out and be tortured by the thought that there was nothing he could do to stop it.
That had been a mistake, Tyzack had to admit. But again, he had learned something, too. They were expecting him. That was useful to know. Especially since there was absolutely nothing that anyone could do to stop him.
About thirty miles to the south-west, a slender blue-grey and black XSR48 speedboat was cruising at a fraction of its potential 100-mph top speed upstream along the river Avon. Its destination was a berth on a pontoon at a boatyard located off The Grove in Bristol. The man at the controls had no idea why he was making the delivery. That was none of his business. His orders were to get the boat to where it was meant to be, make sure it was refuelled and ready to go, then take a cab to Bristol Temple Meads station
and get on the first train to London. He carried those orders out to the letter.
In Bradford, Foster Lafferty, sitting in a Bangladeshi curry house on his interracial diplomacy mission, was equally clueless as to what any of it was about. Not long ago Tyzack had wanted him to teach the Pakistani gangs a lesson. Now he was supposed to offer the same men a hundred grand just to do Tyzack a favour. Lafferty had never known the boss let anyone off the hook like that before. But he’d been around a long time, and both his instincts and his experience taught him that the best thing to do was say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and leave the thinking to the high-ups. When the deal was finally concluded, he heaved a sigh of relief and ordered a couple of onion bhajis, a chicken tikka bhuna (extra hot) and a pint of Kingfisher. That, at least, he understood.
85
Carver spent the day just trying to fill the hours. It was a feeling he knew well from his military days, the point when all the plans and preparations have been made and there’s nothing to do but wait until it’s finally time to go into action. That’s when boredom becomes a soldier’s biggest enemy.
Grantham had booked him into a nondescript three-star hotel just off Kensington High Street. Carver slept late, piled into a full English breakfast, choosing fried bread rather than toast, then worked off the cholesterol with a run that took him on a massive figure-of-eight through the parks of central London, via Hyde Park Corner and Buckingham Palace. In the afternoon a doctor came round to his room to take a look at the dressings on his back and make sure that the wounds were clean.
The doctor told Carver to take it easy. ‘Don’t worry, I will,’ he replied. And for the next few hours, at least, he kept his word. He watched some cricket on TV and then went to a movie, sitting in the dark, munching popcorn and watching actors fake the things he did for real. Afterwards, he had a couple of pints, ate Chinese for dinner and went to bed early. Grantham was picking him up at five the next morning to drive him down to Bristol, so by ten in the evening he was getting into bed. Carver wasn’t prone to anxiety before a big day. He went out like a light.
Air Force One was wheels-up from Andrews shortly before midnight, local time. The President conferred briefly with his staff before retiring to his personal quarters, intending to spend most of the six-hour flight asleep. Elsewhere in the aircraft, Tord Bahr did not allow himself that luxury. It was already dawn in England and his people were all getting into place. Earlier in the day, he’d spoken to the Brits’ anti-terrorist chief, Manners. It seemed they were taking Carver’s warning about this Damon Tyzack guy seriously. Manners assured Bahr that they had the situation covered. He also told Bahr the same thing he’d told Carver. It made no difference what Tyzack was or was not planning to do. They’d already prepared for every conceivable attack scenario.
Bahr had double-checked. He’d been on to Homeland Security, the Feds, the CIA and NSA. None of them had any intelligence whatever about any hit being planned by people-traffickers; nothing about Tyzack, either. The only indication anywhere that Tyzack might be planning something was an unsubstantiated, unreliable claim made by a man who had just suffered extreme physical and psychological abuse. But as much as he hated to admit it, to himself or Carver, Bahr didn’t think Carver was the kind of guy who invented allegations for no good reason. There might be something to what he said, despite the lack of any supporting evidence. Either way, it was an uncertainty, and it niggled away at Bahr’s mind. He got an hour’s sleep, was woken just before landing and felt like shit as he got off the plane and set foot on British soil.
86
Carver was supplied with a flak jacket, just in case Damon Tyzack really was in Bristol and felt tempted to take a shot at him. They gave him a pair of binoculars so that he could search for Tyzack in the crowd. He had an earpiece and mike so that he could report any sighting, or receive information from Peter Manners, who was co-ordinating the British end of the operation. What he did not possess was a weapon of any kind. So far as the authorities were concerned, Carver was a civilian like any other. And British civilians are not allowed to bear arms in any city at any time, especially not when there’s a US President in the vicinity.
Jack Grantham had been assigned the job of minding Carver. ‘You got him involved in this, you can bloody well babysit him,’ Manners had said.
The two men managed to get through the entire journey down the M4 from London to Bristol without a single argument thanks to an old soldier’s trick: the ability to go to sleep whenever the opportunity arises, no matter what the surroundings. Grantham drove. Carver dozed. One hundred and twenty miles sped by in ninety minutes of silence. Carver woke as the car slowed down, driving into Bristol. The first words he heard were Grantham muttering, ‘What the hell is that?’
A line of coaches was crawling down the inside lane. As Grantham overtook them the two men saw that signs had been placed in each of the rear windows with slogans like ‘British Muslims Against Slavery’, ‘Bradford Unites Against Oppression’ and ‘American Satan, You Are Slave-Master Now’. Carver counted ten vehicles, all of them packed. And every one of the passengers appeared to be a young Asian male. At the front of the line was a police car, its lights flashing, acting as an escort.
‘Holy shit,’ said Carver, still looking out of the window. ‘What are the plod going to do about that?’
‘What can they do?’ said Grantham. ‘They can hardly keep them out. Everyone gets to see the President, except the Muslims? That would go down like a cup of cold sick.’
‘But they’ll have to strip-search the lot of them!’
‘And then they’ll start claiming discrimination-’
‘Which it is.’
‘Up to a point. You noticed any Hindu terrorists on our soil lately?’
‘But those people will say they aren’t terrorists, they’re upright British citizens. What a mess.’
‘I know,’ said Grantham, his face wreathed in a broad smile. ‘And our good friend Assistant Commissioner Manners has been lumbered with it.’ He sighed contentedly. ‘I knew this was going to be an entertaining day.’
The Bradford convoy was directed to a special area of the coach park where a line of policemen diverted from other duties was waiting for them. Each vehicle was carrying at least fifty passengers. When the luggage holds were opened it was revealed that every one of those passengers had a rucksack and many were also supplied with large placards and banners, some carrying slogans like those on the coaches, others bearing the flags of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. A police inspector was foolish enough to order the men to leave their belongings on the coaches and proceed to Broad Quay empty-handed. At once, he was surrounded by half a dozen irate community leaders.
‘Look!’ shouted one, pulling out a woven mat from his bag. ‘Prayer mat! You telling me I cannot pray? This is religious hatred! This is harassment!’
‘What about all them lot?’ said another, his accent pure Yorkshire, pointing at a line of young white people, many of them carrying bags no different from those being taken from the coaches and waving banners emblazoned with peace signs and pictures of Lincoln Roberts. ‘Tha’s not stopping them. That’s racism, that is.’
A group of more than fifty furious young men gathered around their leaders, shouting and waving fists at the now-terrified inspector, whose own men moved in to rescue him from the mob. As a stalemate was reached at the coach park – a seething mob of Asian Yorkshiremen on one side, a nervous line of police on the other – word of the confrontation reached Peter Manners in his command centre, and Tord Bahr, newly arrived at Fairford.
‘Get them out of there, right out of the city!’ Bahr shouted. ‘These are the people who let off bombs in London. They’re Islamic terrorists. I don’t want them anywhere near this thing.’
‘I’m afraid it’s not that easy,’ said Manners, trying to keep his cool. ‘In the first place, the government does not acknowledge the concept of Islamic terrorism, the official term is “anti-Islamic activity”-’
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�You have got to be kidding me!’
‘And in the second, any attempt to remove around five hundred fit young men would require all the manpower I have available, quite apart from the potential for widespread public disorder if the riot spreads. Just let us handle it. We’ll let them in, but not before we’ve made certain that they can’t do any harm.’
Half an hour was spent organizing the Bradford contingent into a line, complete with all their baggage. They were marched down to the security checks under massive police escort. More chaos ensued as all were subjected to bag and body searches whose severity slowed down the entire crowd as they waited to get into the speech site, causing shortened tempers and raised voices and adding to the confusion.
The tallest building on Broad Quay, a new office development, was also the closest to the stage. The building had been closed to the public, its occupants given the day off whether they liked it or not. Up on the roof three men, all wearing variations on the theme of black urban-combat uniforms, were peering back up the quay through binoculars, trying to get a look at the chaos.
Two of the men came from a Secret Service counter-sniper team. They bore small Stars and Stripes patches sewn on their packs and uniforms. Their handguns were carried in holsters strapped to their right thighs, directly below which their gold badges were displayed. One of the pair was standing by a custom-made sniper’s rifle of a type known as a JAR, or ‘Just Another Rifle’, because its manufacturer and specifications are confidential.
