by Andy McNab
The mute button had been deactivated.
"Release the weapon! Release the weapon now! Do it!"
I thought about it for the two seconds I would have before they pulled or shot me off her.
Her body relaxed and she opened her eyes and looked at me. It was almost an order.
"Do it... please."
Fuck it. I tilted the gun upward and it slid two inches until it jammed under her chin. Pointing it toward her skull, I let my head move aside. Her eyes followed mine as I pulled the trigger.
Blood and splintered bone splashed onto the side of my face.
I'd finished the job I'd been ordered to do; that was what I made myself think. A moment later I felt the pain shoot up my arm as someone kicked the pistol out of my hand.
I was manhandled onto my back. I looked up and there was ERT black everywhere, then Josh loomed over me, blocking out everything else, blood dripping onto me from the mess on his face. They tried to pull him off me as he started to give me a good kicking. It wasn't working.
I turned on my side and curled up to protect myself, and through the haze I could hear orders being shouted and the general confusion around me.
I was losing it. Josh was still screaming above me, and managed a few more kicks. It didn't matter, I could no longer feel them. What I really wanted to happen, did. I became unconscious.
JUNE 1998
I came out of the flat on Cambridge Street, checked I'd put the key on the ring of my Leatherman and closed the door behind me. It was a strange feeling, being a virtual prisoner here in Pimlico. I'd brought plenty of worried-looking people here in the past, but never imagined that some day I'd be one of the victims myself.
The debrief was taking forever. The Firm was trying to strike a deal with the Americans. Both sides wanted this to go away, and they weren't the only ones. It had been four weeks since I'd come out of hospital, and I'd been confined to the area ever since, under what amounted to house arrest.
I was getting paid, and at operational rate, but it still wasn't a good day out.
None of my injuries hurt much anymore, but I still needed bucket loads of antibiotics. The entry wound had sealed up quite well. All that was left was a dent in my stomach, colored the same vivid pink as the puncture wounds in my arm.
Walking down the last couple of stone steps to the pavement, I looked to my left at the crowd enjoying an end-of-the-week drink at the picnic tables outside the pub. Friday evening's rush hour had turned the whole street into a car park. The traffic fumes were cooking up nicely in the early evening sun. The heat was unusual for this time of year. It felt more like
Los Angeles than London.
I crossed between the stationary vehicles, heading for the all-in-one shop on the corner. The Asian father and son combo were used to me now;
dad started folding a copy of the Evening Standard as soon as he saw me come in. I felt like a local. Weaving back over the road, I headed for the
pub. There were just as many people inside, and above the din Robbie Williams was giving it full volume on the sound system. The smell of smoke, stale beer and body odor reminded me not to come here again. It did that every night.
I worked my way toward the rear, where I knew it wouldn't be so packed, and, besides, that was where the food was. I'd started to recognize some of the regulars sad fucks like me, with nowhere else to go, or office workers big-timing it, or old men smoking their roll-ups and spending an hour nursing a warm pint.
I asked for my usual bottle ofPils and, helping myself to a handful of peanuts from one of the bowls, headed for a booth. The one with the most room was occupied by an old man who looked as if he'd just come from a British Legion outing, all tie and association badges. He couldn't have been there long; his bottle of light ale hadn't yet been poured into his half of bitter.
"Anyone sitting here, mate?"
He looked up and shook his head. I eased myself into the seat slowly, taking care that my jeans didn't ride up and expose the tag around my right ankle. Taking a swig ofPils, I opened the newspaper.
It was all the usual doom and gloom. Ethiopian and Eritrean forces had stopped bombing the shit out of each other with their MIG 23s to give foreign nationals time to be airlifred from the war zone. That was the sort of work I liked, just plain and simple war. You knew where you stood with that shit.
I scanned the rest of the news sections, but there was still nothing about what had happened in Washington. Still no mention of the injuries to the ERT guy and Josh, and I knew now that there never would be. Lynn had given me the American party line during one of our little evening rides around town. The press release was short: a stressed-out member of the domestic staff had become temporarily deranged in the White House basement. It was a minor incident, dealt with in minutes. The three world leaders hadn't been made aware until well after the event. The most the story ever got was a column inch in the following day's Washington Post.
I was glad the ERT guy hadn't died. He'd just been wounded in the thigh something to tell the grandchildren about. Josh had got it big time in the face. Lynn said the round had split the flesh on the right side and made his mouth look as if it ended by his ear. I'd been told the surgery was a success, but I doubted he'd ever be modeling for Calvin Klein.
My one hope was that his Christian thing would work in my favor. Sitting in the flat a few days earlier, waiting for the debriefing team to arrive, I'd been listening to Thought for the Day on the radio.
"If you can't forgive the sin," the voice had said, "at least try to forgive the sinner."
Sounded good to me. I just hoped Josh could get Radio Four in his truck.
I hadn't spoken to him yet; I'd wait a while, give him time to calm down and me time to work out what the fuck I was going to say.
I hadn't seen Kelly since the Americans released me into the Firm's custody. We'd spoken on the phone, and she thought I was still away working.
She said that Josh had called. He'd told her nothing about what had happened, just that Sarah and I had visited.
I still had no regrets about killing Sarah. The only thing that pissed me off was that every time in my life I'd let someone get close to me, they fucked me over. Everybody, that is, apart from Kelly. It seemed to be my job to do that to her.
I'd blown it again by making promises I couldn't keep. She still wanted to go to the Bloody Tower, and she wanted to go with me. Three times now I'd arranged it, only to cancel at the last minute because the debrief dragged on. At least she was going to her grandparents this weekend. Carmen and Jimmy would spoil her rotten.
I took another long swig of Pils fuck the antibiotics, I usually forgot to take them anyway and checked Baby-G. They started serving in twenty minutes.
The debrief was going OK, I thought, but you never knew with these people. I wasn't getting as hard a time of it as I might, mainly because Lynn and Elizabeth were potentially in just as much shit as I was and were taking measures to cover their asses. Even so, every event of those five days was being dissected in great detail. Not documented, of course. How could it be; it hadn't happened.
Not that any of it meant much. I was lying to the team, using a script supplied by the good colonel. I'd RV with him each evening, and the Serb would give us a few laps of London. As Lynn had said, "You need guiding, Nick, on some of the more, shall we say, delicate areas of the operation."
And, of course, to avoid the slight problem of the T104, since not even the investigation crew would be aware that such things existed. The only ones in the know were lowlife like me, Elizabeth and Lynn. To the investigators, I didn't even have a name; I was just referred to as the "paid asset." That suited me just fine.
Lynn had already told me that I'd been sent on the job because, if anyone could find her, I could. But I knew there was more to it than that. It had become blindingly obvious that those two fuckers had known all along what she was up to, and thought I'd be so pissed off with her I'd feed her through the grinder without a second thought
.
They'd even known where she was hiding, but wanted me to go through the process of finding her. They reckoned that if I thought I'd tracked her down through my own efforts, and if what I saw on the ground confirmed their story, that would put me even more in the mood.
There were still loose ends, of course. I still couldn't work out if Metal Mickey was part of Lynn's game or not. After all, Lynn did say he was loyal. But to whom? Fuck it, who cared? It just annoyed me that these people could never just tell it straight. Why bother to tell me all that bullshit?
I would still have done the job if I'd known the truth. The fucking games they played pissed me off, and worse, they put me in danger.
Naturally, nothing in the big picture had been changed by Sarah's death. Bin Laden was still out there doing his stuff. Yousef had closed down, but he'd probably resurface in a year or two. And I still wasn't going to be getting permanent cadre: they said I'd be a disruptive influence on the team. I'd tried to get a bung instead, claiming that what happened in the White House might have been my fuckup, but I did stop the president from being shot. Well... you have to elaborate a bit. It didn't work.
Even the deafest old duffer in the pub must have heard their laughter. All I got was the promise that if a single word came from my lips that was off message I was history.
My major concern now was, what did I get up to after this? I needed to get some real money together so I didn't have to carry on getting fucked over by these people. Maybe I'd take a look at the American rewards program.
Bounty hunting terrorists, white supremacists and South American drug dealers wouldn't be so bad. Maybe I could try and recover those Stingers from the muj. Who knows?
The bottle was empty. People were three deep at the bar and it took ages to get myself another. As I rejoined my mate in the booth, I was again careful not to expose the light-gray band of plastic around my ankle, housing its two inch by two inch box of electronics. I checked my watch again; just over ten minutes till the peanuts disappeared and the menus were put on the bar. Not that I needed one. I knew it all by heart.
I thought about Sarah again. I'd learned more about her in my stints with Lynn than I had in all the time I'd known her. I'd always felt that she was holding something back from me, and in my stupid way I'd decided it was because she was scared of intimacy.
Sitting back on the cigarette-burned red velour, I started to pick at the label on the Pils bottle. The old man bent his neck as he tried to read the headlines on my paper. I passed it across the table.
The night before last had been another hot and humid one. Lynn had picked me up as usual for our daily debrief on the debrief, but this time in his new Voyager. It looked like the Firm's budget had got a bit of a boost this new fiscal year. The air conditioner was going full blast. The Serb, as ever, kept his eyes fixed on the road.
"How was all this allowed to happen?" I said.
"How come you didn't suspect her earlier?"
Lynn kept his gaze on the real world beyond the darkened window.
"Elizabeth voiced concerns." He shrugged.
"We took a few people aside for a word, but there was nothing we could put our finger on. The false flag operation in Syria seemed like a good moment to put her to the test."
Lynn obviously held a lot more pieces of the puzzle in his hand than he was letting me see, but he did tell me this much. The Syrian operation had been taken on by the Brits only as a means of checking whether Sarah was Bin Laden's best mate. It was Elizabeth's idea. Sarah changed the data, killed the Source and covered her tracks. She was good at doing that. I thought back to her giving the American a round in the head after taking his clothes in the forest. But she wasn't good enough in Syria. Without knowing it, Sarah confirmed that she didn't exactly go to sleep every night humming "Rule Britannia." It was then just a question of letting her lead the way to Bin Laden. The only problem for Elizabeth was that she had omitted to fill in the Americans when Sarah was posted to Washington.
Lynn had turned and looked at me as if to underline his next disclosure.
"Things got slightly out of hand when Sarah took an active part in the ASU," he said.
"Once that had happened, how could we tell our friends across the sea? That was where you came in."
I let that one sink in in amongst all the other crap I was trying to make sense of.
The investigating team had been clutching at straws to explain Sarah's behavior, and I wasn't doing much better. I asked him, "Do you know what turned her?" He seemed to know everything else.
"We'll never completely know, will we? People are still trying to fathom out T. E. Lawrence ... and who really knows what made Philby and the rest do what they did?" There was a pause.
"A team went to Sarah's mother, to pass on the tragic news. She was saddened, of course, but very proud of her daughter's most untimely death in the service of her country."
"I thought her parents were dead."
"No, just her father. He died when she was seventeen. A team have been weaseling with the mother for a few weeks now. You know, trying for any links or information that may be useful."
Sarah's father, George, they had learned, was a big-time oil executive who was a stern disciplinarian and a major-league hypocrite. He'd spent his whole working life in the Middle East without ever getting to like the Arabs unless, that is, they were either royal or wealthy preferably both and took to all things Western in much the same way that flies take to shit. The right sort of Arab certainly didn't include his lower-class domestic staff and their nine-year-old son.
The friendship between Sarah and Abed had been perfectly innocent, the mother had said. The fact was, her daughter was just desperately lonely. But as far as George was concerned, inside every Arab was a rapist just waiting to get out.
The two kids were inseparable. Sarah was an only child, pushed from pillar to post all her life, with a remote, domineering father, a placid, ineffectual mother, and no opportunity to make lasting relationships. You wouldn't need to be an agony aunt to understand her joy in finding a friend at last.
George, however, was not amused. One day, Abed's mum and dad didn't turn up for work. Nor did the boy come around in the afternoon, as he usually did. The whole family seemed to have vanished. Then, just a few days later, Sarah's father pulled the plug on her education in Saudi and packed her off to a U.K. boarding school.
It was only after her father had died that Sarah learned what had really happened. She was helping her mother go through her father's things when she came across a gold Rolex Navigator.
Sarah said, "I never knew Daddy had one of these."
Her mother looked at the watch and burst into tears.
The Rolex had been given to him by a grateful business acquaintance.
It was George's prize possession. He had accused Abed of stealing it, and thrown the whole family out onto the streets. With a reputation as thieves hanging over them, their chances of ever working again would have been ziff. They would have seen out their days as "dust people," the lowest of the low, outcasts from Saudi society and living on the edge of starvation.
Sarah waited until her mother had finished, then left the house without another word. She never saw her again.
"Of course, I don't go along with all this nonsense about blaming everything in your life on the traumas of childhood," Lynn said.
"My parents dragged me around Southeast Asia until I was seven, then I went to Eton. Never did me any harm."
The menus were being plonked unceremoniously on the bar counter by the girl who'd served me before. The thought of dishing out another hundred stuff and chips obviously didn't fill her with too much excitement.
I decided on the pie and another beer. The same as last night and the night before. A quick look at Baby-G told me it was seven forty-eight, just over half an hour until my RV Traffic was still clogging the street by the time I left, but at least it was moving. I turned left, checked my watch yet again and headed toward Victoria Stat
ion. Thirteen minutes till the pickup. I turned two corners and stopped, waiting to see if anyone was following. They weren't.
Crossing the road, I cut through a housing estate that was packed with K reg Vauxhall Astras and Sierras, sat on a wall by the rubbish chute and waited. Half a dozen kids were skateboarding up and down the only bit of clear tarmac they could find--the exit in front of me that led onto the main drag toward the station. I listened to their banter, thinking about when I was where they were.
I thought of Kelly--the girl who'd had her whole family killed, and now had a stand-in father who constantly let her down. And worse than that, much worse, I was probably the closest thing she had to a best friend.
Sarah's words came back to me.
"You have a child now. I hope you live long enough to see her."
I cut away from all that and got back to real life by reminding myself of the two big lessons I'd learned in Washington. The first was never again to be so soft with someone who showed emotion toward me. I had to stop kidding myself that I knew, or even understood, that sort of stuff. The second was easier: always carry a pistol. I never wanted to play Robin Hood again.
It was last light as I sat, watched and listened. Sarah's words still bugged me.
"You have a child now ..."
The Voyager would be arriving any minute. I looked at Baby-G and thought about George's Rolex. And then I knew what I had to do. I wasn't exactly a top-of-the-range example for Kelly, but the very least I could do was be dependable. Maybe, just maybe, the one thing that Sarah had given me by sparing my life was the chance to do the right thing.
Moving swiftly away from the RV point, I jumped a fence that secured a communal garden.
Crouching in the shadows, I pulled the Leatherman from my pocket, opened the knife blade, and cut away at the plastic encircling my ankle.
The pliers made short work of the half-inch steel band that ran beneath.
