The Rhythm Section--A Stephanie Patrick Thriller

by Mark Burnell

  Petra lowered the Beretta to her side. ‘Whatever happens to us, the Sons of Sabah have failed. I’ve identified the twelve flights from the disk that I took from your jacket. They’ve been grounded. And when they check in for those flights, the rest of the Sons of Sabah are going to be caught.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ he said, but she could tell that his heart wasn’t in the denial.

  She smiled sadly. ‘You haven’t even checked your jacket pocket. You already know that I know about the flights, don’t you? And you know that I’ve been on to the flight deck. So what other conclusion can there be? I’ve got my message out.’

  ‘And what of the people on this aircraft? Do you care what happens to them?’

  Petra said, ‘It’s over.’

  He cocked his head to one side. ‘The message will be the same. It will be enough for the world to know that it could have happened. The margin of the escape will still be narrow enough to chill hearts. In the end, that’s what really matters.’ They gazed at each other without hostility and then Reza Mohammed added: ‘So this is, in fact, better. This is perfect.’

  * * *

  The lights go out. Outside the 747, somebody has shut down the Auxiliary Power Unit. It’s started. With the blinds pulled down and the flight deck door now closed, we are in total darkness. We cannot see each other. My training and my natural instinct for self-preservation kick in at the same time. I raise the Beretta and point it into nowhere. I release the safety-catch and start to squeeze the trigger. But I do not fire. I can’t.

  Reza Mohammed—or Mustafa Sela, perhaps—doesn’t fire either. I imagine him in front of me as a mirror-image of myself; I cannot shoot him because I cannot shoot myself. That is what I would be doing if I fired now. I ease the safety-catch back on and lower the gun again. What will be will be and I am resigned to it.

  Neither of us says a word. We hear the screams below us. We hear the triple crump of explosives. We hear the pop of gunfire. We hear shouts, we hear an accent that is familiar to me; it belongs to the anonymous soldier. We hear the heavy tread of boots on the stairs leading up from the main part of the aircraft to the upper deck. Red lasers cut through the darkness. A pinpoint of brilliant scarlet dances across my face and then settles on the centre of my chest.

  The aircraft has not exploded. Mustafa Sela has not pressed the buttons on the Sony Walkman. He has not fired his Smith & Wesson 645. We are the same, this man and I. Neither of us were volunteers. Both of us were driven to this point on the earth at this point in time.

  There is a cough of gunfire from the rear of the upper deck. In the inky blackness, I see nothing except a brief muzzle flash. Then there is a thump in front of me as a dead weight hits the floor. It could have been me. But it isn’t.

  I am still standing so I must be alive.

  0617 GMT

  Alexander lit a Rothmans and stared at the cassette on his desk.

  Of the eight terrorists who had seized British Airways flight BA283, seven were dead. The other had been discovered locked in a toilet. Under any other set of circumstances, that might have seemed comic. Two passengers had been killed during the SAS storming of the aircraft and another fourteen had been injured, of whom three were in a serious condition. As regrettable as the losses were, Alexander considered the casualty figure extraordinarily low. Within the confined environment of a commercial aircraft, a far higher toll could reasonably have been expected.

  How had it come to this? It was now clear to Alexander that Petra had developed an agenda of her own and had run it independently of him. The anonymous caller who had phoned Magenta House using her security clearance had not yet been traced and Alexander very much doubted that he ever would be. Petra would have made sure of that. At least it had alerted Alexander to her presence on board, thus giving him time to contact Boyd who had connections with the SAS hierarchy at Hereford; he had arranged for Alexander to masquerade as a ‘technical liaison’ for the operation.

  Petra. Where was she?

  In the immediate chaos that followed the end of the hijack, she had slipped through the net and vanished. Alexander recognized that for someone with her training, it would have been absurdly easy. None of her identities had been used in the three days since Malta and no money had been withdrawn from any of the bank accounts in those names. Alexander was forced to conclude that she had developed at least one identity of her own, independently of Magenta House.

  There was a knock on the door. It was Rosie.

  ‘Is he ready?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. He’s downstairs. But there’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve just had confirmation that she was in Zurich the day before yesterday. At Banque Henri Lauder. She left their office at three-thirty in the afternoon.’

  The numbered account at that bank had been established to handle Serra’s payments to Petra. It had not been one of her personalized accounts.

  ‘So, she went from Malta to Zurich,’ Alexander said. ‘And we know she was in Paris last night. But where does that leave us this morning?’

  ‘Sir, the money’s gone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The money for the Leon Giler termination. It’s gone. She closed the account and walked away with the cash in a leather shoulder bag.’

  The colour drained from Alexander’s cheeks. ‘A million dollars?’

  ‘A bit more, actually. She’d also already received the first tranche of the half-million she’d negotiated for the hijack. Minus deductions, it comes to roughly one million and eighty thousand.’

  * * *

  Alexander poured himself a mug of coffee from the pot. It was a small room with no windows. There was a circular table at the centre with six leather-clad swivel chairs around it. Tiny tungsten bulbs embedded in the ceiling dropped a dozen cones of light into the room. The walls were grey. So was the carpet.

  ‘I apologize for asking you to come here at this hour.’

  Frank White said, ‘I’m not interested in your apologies.’

  ‘Then let me get straight to the point. This woman—Marina Gaudenzi—you had an affair with her, yes?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That must have been convenient for you. With her living in the same building, I mean.’

  ‘What exactly is your point?’

  ‘My point is this: you were supposed to keep an eye on her. Not sleep with her.’

  Frank sat back in his chair, folded his arms and didn’t reply.

  ‘What happened?’ Alexander demanded.

  ‘Look, if you’d wanted someone to spy on her, you should have sent her somewhere else. Not to my building. You never even said what I was supposed to be looking out for.’

  ‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘Not to me. Our arrangement was never like that. Remember? I used to do the occasional favour for you when I was abroad and when our spheres of interest coincided. I’d trade a piece of information, make a low-level contact, keep my eyes open in some of the more politically sensitive areas in which we were testing. But that was as far as it went. You know that as well as I do. So don’t try to rewrite the rules now. It’s too late for that.’

  Alexander sat down opposite Frank. ‘So what do you think you were supposed to do?’

  ‘Keep my eyes open, see who she saw, that sort of thing. Look at her envelopes in the hall…’

  ‘And who did she see?’

  ‘Apart from me, no one, as far as I know. I never saw her with anyone else. As for checking her post, I never bothered. And to be honest, by the time I’d spoken to her once or twice, I’d lost interest in whatever it was that you wanted.’

  Alexander’s posture stiffened. ‘Ah. A romantic. How nice.’

  ‘Well, you don’t strike me as the sort of man who’d understand something like that.’

  ‘Where do you suppose she is now?’

  ‘I have no idea. She never said that she was going anywhere. The last thing she said
to me was “see you tonight”.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll see her again?’

  Frank shook his head. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Why not? I thought the two of you were–’

  ‘She won’t risk making contact with me because of you.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Actually, I do. I know who she really is. Her name is Stephanie Patrick. She told me everything. Except about you which, I imagine, was an attempt to protect me. She had no idea that I already knew who you were. And what you were.’

  Alexander considered this for a while. ‘Then you’ve lost her, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And so have you. The difference is, I can feel good about it because, at last, she’s free.’

  * * *

  A black cab dropped Frank at Curzon Street and he went into the Europa supermarket to pick up some milk and bread. He remembered meeting Marina—no, Stephanie—in one of the shop’s aisles. She had been hostile towards him and the thought of it now made him smile. In fact, it was a sweet miracle that he had fallen for her at all. He paid for his groceries and stepped out of the supermarket. The rain had become torrential. Beside him, a man stood in the doorway, trying to avoid the worst of the downpour. He was expertly rolling himself a thin cigarette, despite having plasters around three fingertips on his right hand and two on the left. He lit it and then said, ‘I’ve got a message for you.’

  Frank wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. ‘What?’

  ‘She called me last night. From Paris. She’s moving on this morning but she asked me to find you.’ A flash of lightning illuminated Curzon Street and was accompanied by a thunder-clap; the rumble ran through both of them. There were too many questions Frank wanted to ask. Instead, he just stared at the man, who seemed to understand, and who smiled at him and said, ‘So, do you want to hear the message or not?’

  * * *

  Back in his office, Alexander was standing by the window when the lightning shot everything into photo-negative. Rain streaked the glass. He returned to his desk and picked up the cassette, which was a recording of the message left on the Adelphi Travel answer-service just after ten the previous night. The call had been traced to a Parisian pay-phone. He pushed the cassette into the machine and pressed ‘play’.

  * * *

  Khalil is dead. Whatever you might hear to the contrary, Khalil is dead. I killed him. And no matter what you think, the contract between us is now terminated. Don’t bother trying to find me. You won’t succeed—you’ve trained me too well for that. The world’s a big place so there’s no need for us to run into each other. But you should be clear about one thing: I will be watching you and what is left of my family. If any harm comes to any of them, I will step out of the darkness once more and then I will vanish for ever. Do you understand? I hope so, for your sake. If you ever see me again, I’ll be the last thing you ever see.

  Afterword to the 2018 Edition

  The Rhythm Section was first published in 1999 and the question I am most frequently asked about it is a variation of this: how did you know about 9/11 two years before it happened? The answer, of course, is that I didn’t. The reason I get asked this, however, is because of the similarities between the events of 11 September 2001 and the terrorist plot within the novel. Those similarities are not a coincidence. The terrorist plot in The Rhythm Section is actually closer in structure to the failed 1995 Bojinka plot than to anything that occurred on 9/11 but there is a strong connection between the two because 9/11 was born out of Bojinka.

  On 26 February 1993, a Pakistani man known as Ramzi Yousef (probably born Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim, according to the 9/11 Commission, although this is disputed), parked a hired Ryder van in the car park beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. The bomb in the back of the van was intended to collapse the North Tower into the South Tower. The device detonated, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand others, but failed to topple the North Tower. In the aftermath, Yousef evaded capture and fled the United States.

  The following year, on December 11, travelling on an Italian passport, Yousef boarded Philippine Airlines PAL 434, bound for Tokyo from Manila, stopping at Cebu. During the first leg of the flight, he assembled and concealed a timer-controlled bomb with components he brought on board in Manila. He then disembarked at Cebu. The device detonated over Japan, as the aircraft cruised at 33,000 feet, blowing a hole in the floor but, crucially, failing to pierce the fuselage. Astonishingly, there was only one fatality, a Japanese businessman named Haruki Ikegami, whose body absorbed much of the force of the blast. The captain diverted to the airport at Okinawa and executed an emergency landing without further loss of life.

  This attack was a successful test run for a far larger operation that would employ substantially more powerful bombs. Satisfied with his progress to that point, Yousef returned to Manila and began preparations for what became known as the Bojinka plot. His chief co-conspirator in this endeavour was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the architects of 9/11, while finance was provided by Osama bin Laden.

  The Bojinka plot had three distinct phases: firstly, to assassinate Pope John Paul II; secondly, to place bombs on eleven airliners flying between South-East Asia and the United States (each flight included a stop): thirdly, to fly an aircraft into the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. The third phase was a reduction of a more ambitious attack that had originally included others targets, among which were The White House, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York.

  The Bojinka plot was scheduled for January 1995, with the first phase, the assassination of Pope John Paul II, earmarked for January 15, three days after the Pontiff’s arrival in the Philippines. However, on the evening of January 6, a fire broke out in Room 603 of the Doña Josef apartment building in Manila. Yousef had rented Room 603 and was using it as an operational base. When the Manila police raided the apartment, the plot was exposed in its entirety; the bomb-making ingredients, the plans for the assassination of the Pope, the false passports to be used on the targeted flights and a laptop detailing almost every aspect of the plan.

  The Bojinka plot was over and the conspirators scattered. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, however, remained convinced of the viability of the plan. Six years later, he revisited and refined it. 9/11 was a streamlined, simplified version of the Bojinka plot where bombs were ditched in favour of making the aircraft themselves the weapons. Like so many others, I watched the attacks on the Twin Towers as they occurred, understanding instantly that I was seeing history in the making. I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable about the link between the plot of The Rhythm Section and the Bojinka plot, even though I could not have known at the time that what I was watching was a refined version of it.

  Ramzi Yousef was eventually captured in Pakistan in February 1995 and is currently serving a life sentence of 240 years with no parole at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003 and is being held at Guantanamo Bay pending trial.

  All of this information is now universally available and has been for years. Much of it, though not all of it, was already in the public domain back in 1997 and 1998 when I was preparing and writing The Rhythm Section.

  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I found my opinion being sought. I remember sitting on a panel of a late-night radio talk show, surrounded by experts from the intelligence community and feeling somewhat of a fraud. There was an assumption among people I met that I had some special insight to offer, that I must have had sources or contacts within the intelligence community who had provided me with raw material for the novel. This was not the case. I never met anybody from the intelligence community until after 9/11. In some instances, my insistence upon this only appeared to strengthen their suspicion; well of course you would deny it, wouldn’t you?

  Interestingly, those from the intelligence community whom I have subsequently met are often more interested in the fact that I reference Osama b
in Laden in The Rhythm Section. I have always found this surprising for two reasons: firstly, bin Laden is only referenced once in the novel, and rather briefly at that; secondly, although he had yet to become a household name, bin Laden was already an established and recognised terrorist entity by 1997.

  The Rhythm Section was researched and written in my own pre-internet era. As a technological late adopter, I didn’t use the internet at all during the preparation of the novel. Planning was done the old-fashioned way, collating material from books and articles. It’s a method that has served me well and which I still prefer. Although I use the internet now, I still require alternative verification for research. To mis-paraphrase a quote: ‘Google will provide you with a thousand answers. A library will provide you with the correct answer.’

  I always travel to the locations in which my novels are set. Again, the internet is a useful starting point and can certainly reduce the amount of time spent scouting locations. But it cannot be a perfect substitute. Authors who are over-reliant upon on the internet run the risk of getting found out and that is a serious flaw for a thriller, where the suspension of disbelief is critical. The better the research, the more likely you will be able to take the reader with you. To remind me of this, I keep a terrible novel on a shelf in my office as a permanent warning of all the pitfalls that a thriller writer needs to strive to avoid: lack of character development, an over-reliance on plot, an overly contrived plot, any form of cliché, bad dialogue, to name but a few. This novel was a huge international bestseller and comfortably one of the worst books I have ever read. Its presence in my office, and the fact that is so awful yet sold so well, serves two purposes-firstly, as a constant reminder to be vigilant, and, secondly, to remind myself that the true taste of the public is ultimately unknowable and that the Gods that govern writing are capricious.

  The Rhythm Section is written almost exclusively from the perspective of its central character, Stephanie Patrick. This was a proactive choice that was made much easier by the decision not to dwell too much on the characters of the terrorists. In almost everything I have ever read, heard or seen, it is striking how screamingly tedious most terrorists appear to be. They are voids, character replaced by incoherent rage or dogma, often spoon-fed rather than self-generated. Nothing in them is original. I see a similarity between the type of individual who becomes a suicide-bomber and the lengthening list of men who rampage through American schools armed with assault rifles. What unites them is their extraordinary solipsism. They dehumanise their victims because they lack empathy, a key marker for psychopathy. With a suicide-bomber or a school-shooter, it’s never really about the cause or the grievance. It’s about them. Hey, look at me. Please, just for a second …