by Andy McNab
Just to the left of the cash-and-carry, a minor junction.
I hit the brakes and swung the van across the road, dousing the lights.
Rio shouted, making sure we all knew, ‘They’re turning! They saw us turn!’
Fuck it. Changing up a gear, I passed the cash-and-carry on the right, its security lighting giving me some help, and all of a sudden I saw what I didn’t want to see. I braked so hard Gabe shot forward.
‘Dead end!’
A barrier closed the road and behind it were piles of earth, mattresses and mountains of fly-tipped shit. I kept braking but the Peugeot’s pads had given up the ghost on gripping their discs.
‘Stand by for the fight!’
The wagon shuddered and broke into a skid.
I fought the controls and we came to a halt no more than a centimetre from the barrier. My right hand was already on the door and my left gripped my weapon.
‘Let’s fuck ’em up!’
I went to pull the handle but it was pushed from my grasp by an invisible force. There had been a massive shudder like we’d been torpedoed, then the deafening squeal of twisting steel. The van was hurled into the barrier by whatever had rammed us from behind and my head catapulted into the windscreen.
My world blurred. I saw flashes and starbursts.
I slumped into the footwell against Rio’s legs. The poor fucker was still hanging out of the window.
I heard the screech of brakes, and now my world slowed into a kaleidoscope of shouts, lights and voices coming at me from every direction.
My door was wrenched open and as unseen hands grabbed at my jeans and dragged me out onto a carpet of stones and twigs and empty Coke cans, our passports tumbled from the cab onto my face. The Mac bounced off my chest and onto the tarmac.
Bodies criss-crossed frenziedly in front of headlights, and boots splashed in water. I instinctively tried to flip over to lie face down. But from nowhere, a pair of hands gripped me and flung me onto my back once more. Someone aimed a kick into my side. As I looked up I could see a silhouette in the headlights, and the silhouette had dark brown bushy hair. Expecting more, I curled up, and another kick came. I tried to move my head out of the way but Mrs Bland got me in the side of the face with her boot, exactly where Phoenix had punched me.
Starbursts did their best to black me out as pain scorched through my body. I could feel myself losing it, and I really couldn’t let that happen. I worked hard to keep my eyes open. I was a bag of shit, but I knew I had to pull myself together if I had any chance of getting away with Yulia.
My jaw joint was grinding on itself – it felt dislocated. I probed with my tongue and discovered one of my teeth moving as a numb, swollen feeling developed on the right side of my face. I felt like I’d just had a session with a psychopathic dentist. I could hear other people dragging other bodies around, and then she was close to my ear. ‘Fuck you, Stone.’
It was her parting shot. As suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone.
Okay, not so bad: I was still breathing, I was winning, but my celebration was cut short. On the tarmac, near my head somewhere, the mobile vibrated.
Two seconds later, the bottom of a raincoat came into my view, a three-quarter-length number with a thin fleece lining under a nylon shell, just the sort a mattress salesman would buy from Marks & Sparks because it was practical for this time of year: light yet protective, as the sleeve tag would no doubt have said when he bought it.
I didn’t even bother looking up as more hands grabbed hold of me and dragged me back to one of the vehicles.
75
11.56 Thursday, 2 June
I was sitting at the same table, beneath the same picture. The People’s Princess was looking down at me, probably wondering why it was taking so long for me to be served. I knew I was.
Nothing much had changed in the last month. The clientele was still the same plug-in-and-glug crowd, though today their Metros and Standards almost vibrated with excitement and anger all rolled into one about Brexit. It didn’t matter to me: I’d be in Moscow or Zürich, sorting out that shit. The three lads had chipped in to fly and house me while I was away because that was what mates do.
The same jet-black curly haired woman was running around with a serving apron full of notebooks and a card reader and was definitely ignoring me. Maybe she hadn’t been too impressed by the tip last visit. Or maybe it was the state of my face after being rammed into a metal barrier, then Mr and Mrs Bland making merry.
I laughed to myself. But not too much: I was trying to stop the newly formed flesh on my lips splitting like Rio’s had on Bodmin Moor.
The black-haired one should have seen the state of me three weeks ago. I wouldn’t even have made it into the café because a concerned third party would have called the police. At least now the wounds were starting to scab up and I didn’t look like I’d done a runner from an operating table.
I’d received the call from Mrs Bland last night to say the Owl wanted to meet me at midday, and that I had to be on time. He had only thirty minutes to spare – what for and what it meant wasn’t explained. At least there was some movement. The only time I’d seen him since we were lifted was just over two weeks ago. He had put all four of us into an MPV and personally driven us to Brandon railway station before letting us loose on society once more.
It had been painful. Once they’d dragged us all out of the van in Leicester we were poured into the footwells of the team’s vehicles and driven to Lakenheath, a USAF base in Suffolk, about a hundred miles east.
I was shoved into the back of the same one as Rio, who was in so much trouble with his back he had to grit his teeth and breathe through the pain every time the 4x4 lurched in a pothole or swung round a corner for the two hours it took. I muttered to him not to worry, but the moment we sailed unchallenged past the front gate of the USAF base, with its floodlights and uniforms and red and white flashing lights along the barrier, I knew we were fucked.
I was fully expecting us to be flown straight out of the UK to a black site somewhere either very hot or very cold, and then get gripped, but that didn’t happen.
We were individually isolated on the airbase’s medical wing, and it was there that we were treated for our damage, yet simultaneously exposed to what the military like to call TQ, tactical questioning. It was a euphemism, a bit like bombing a wedding party and calling it collateral damage.
Mr and Mrs Bland wanted to know the whole story, every single thing that had happened from the moment I’d left this café last time until she’d started kicking me. And not only what had happened, but also why. They were easy enough questions to answer, because there wasn’t anything to hide. I wanted them to know every single detail so they could clean up behind us as fast as they could. Loose ends were going to affect our safety and the safety of the third party. They needed to lift the Vectors out of their hide. It might be a bunch of kids out playing who landed up zapping each other.
76
I had no worries about the other three giving away the location of their individual memory sticks. No one knew where each other’s was, and no one knew anyone else’s pass statement to Claudia. If just one of us held out, that would be enough to ensure the Owl couldn’t clean up the mess.
But it was academic. I knew the team wouldn’t let each other down. Not now, not ever. They were mates: that was what they did. If that hadn’t been so, none of us would have been breathing. Just to make sure it continued, I called Claudia from the first phone I could find, which took for ever, and told her to reinstate the pass statements for the other three. I just hoped Rio and Gabe could remember them.
Of course, no one told me explicitly whether it was just the memory sticks keeping us alive, or that we had delivered Yulia, or that we had compromised an ISIS fundraising group. Maybe a combination of all three. It really didn’t matter. We were still breathing, so we were still winning. For now, at least – but we were still loose ends.
I wasn’t too sure what to think abou
t this meeting so I told Rio, who was still putting me up in Tulse Hill. We then called Jack and Gabe, who were staying at Jack’s, knowing full well that the Owl would be listening in. Jack and Rio had been proved right – the barn had been rigged up. The Owl explained during the road trip to Brandon how he had placed a technical attack on the barn first, then Rio’s house was next. It just so happened we’d compromised that one, or they would have gone on to bug Gabe’s hotel. That made sense. The hotel would have been the last attack because it was the easiest – but at the same time the easiest to be compromised.
His plan for using us to lift Yulia, the Owl explained, was simple. He knew FSB were recceing for a technical attack on Nigella. He also knew that Phoenix and his South Africa-based team were supporting Yulia on the recce. His only problem was that he couldn’t do anything about it. The job was too sensitive even for him to pour oil over it as he would normally have done. He wasn’t sure how to stop it without the real world’s intelligence agencies finding out or, even worse, their politicians.
Fucking about on the ice, where there was no one to witness what was happening, was one thing, but in the UK? When he discovered I wanted to meet up with him and make a deal, his problems were solved. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, because he didn’t elaborate. All he did say was that it wasn’t about wanting to fuck us up. He kept telling us: ‘We have to have some trust now, don’t we?’
I was still trying hard not to laugh to myself at those words when the black-haired one finally came over to take my order. Clearly it was the face that had held her back.
‘Car crash. Tea, please, and lots of milk.’
I could read her mind. She was wondering how I was going to drink it without dribbling out of the side of my swollen lips. I already had a system.
‘And a straw, please.’
She reached into the Aladdin’s cave in her apron pocket and pulled out a bunch of napkins. I nodded my thanks. We both knew I’d be needing them.
I had seen Yulia just once as she got dragged off into Lakenheath’s medical centre, but since then none of us had seen her. I asked Mr and Mrs Bland but didn’t get a reply. All Mrs Bland did was smile, and tell me that really didn’t concern me now. Then she did her favourite trick of positioning her fingers and thumb at either side of my jaw, and shaking my head, like I was a naughty schoolboy, only she squeezed just a bit too much and shook just a bit too hard. And then she rounded it off by telling me that she and her oppo had asked to be the ones to TQ me.
On the way to Brandon, Rio asked the Owl what had happened to her, and just got an ‘All’s kinda good’ reply, with an emoji smiley face. Then, as if we had just been released from prison, he dumped us all at the railway station with fifty pounds each and told us to get on with it.
Then he explained that fifty pounds was all we were going to get. No hundred and sixty grand: it had been hard enough for him persuading the guys at the top, the big kahunas, just to keep us alive.
At least we were out; we were a bit fucked up, but we were moving away from the problem, even if the train was seventeen minutes late. The delay gave the other three time to argue – he really did look like an owl.
The rest was for another day – and clearly that day was now.
77
The tea turned up and so did my little red and white plastic straw. I poured in all the milk and took a suck, but it was still too hot. The gap where a lower right molar used to be was still sensitive.
The Owl had told us on the way to the station that the Beamer parked at the golf course had led them to us in Bristol. He’d had a heli up, loaded with a team to clean up the mess at Phoenix’s pick-up point, and as soon as that was being taken care of it had begun a sweep for us. They had found the Beamer without too much trouble. Then it was just a matter of clicking into the city’s CCTV and its facial-recognition software. I imagined it wouldn’t have taken long to confirm the Beamer belonged to the SNS. All it would have taken was a glance through the driver’s window at the suicide spinner.
The lift wasn’t going to happen in the city centre, so the plan had been to follow, then take the lot of us as soon as it was safe to do so. We were much better than his team, it turned out, but technology was on his side.
An older woman came into the café with what I supposed were her two small grandchildren to pay homage to the People’s Princess. Her grey hair was shorter than Gloria Hadley’s had been, but she was probably the same age. I thought about her, and what Phoenix had said about her family’s pain at never knowing what had happened to her. He was right. Despite thirteen million CCTV cameras tracking us, PINs, credit-rating, databases, social media, email, even GPS, up to twenty thousand people would vanish in the UK this year. Along with the box-van couple, Gloria was collateral damage. All three had just been folded into a statistic and forgotten.
Not even the Owl had been able to clear up the mess in Leicester. There wasn’t time. The houses in the estate were straight on to the police once the fight had started in the alley.
There had been some deaths, three, in fact, then Special Branch had taken over and there had been further arrests; some of the survivors had cooperated. Being able to read about the spectacular success of the security service in smashing a terrorist fundraising operation made a welcome change from Brexit boom or bust and the rest of the bullshit that was going on in preparation for the referendum.
Good for them – tea and medals all round. But what about us? What did the Owl want? He had summoned me here today for less than thirty minutes of what?
I was about to find out.
He walked in wearing a zip-up grey cardigan over a blue checked shirt, button-down collar done up all the way to the top. He gave a big smile and a wave as he came over to take the same seat as last time, and placed his laptop bag strap over its back.
At least he had finally bought himself a shirt that fitted his new ‘Life is good’ size.
78
The Owl was all apologies. ‘I’m so sorry I’m late, Nick. London, you know how it is. People. Traffic. It’s crazy out there, isn’t it?’
He smiled the fast-food welcome he’d maintained since he’d come through the door. He placed his well-manicured hands in front of him on the table and finally switched his expression to one of concern. ‘It’s good to see you, Nick. How are you?’
His head moved from left to right, surveying the damage. He really did look so much more like an owl now.
‘I’m getting there. What’s the agenda?’
His head tilted to the left. ‘A couple of things. But first – I bet you really want to know why I asked you to take the job.’
I nodded as I sucked at my straw. I’d been waiting awhile and the tea was much cooler now.
He looked thrilled. ‘I knew you would. I thought it was a kinda neat idea. Because, well, first, no one knows you guys. And the job had to be kept well under the radar.’
His hands came up in surrender in front of him. ‘I admit it, and I’m sorry, but you guys wouldn’t have been my first choice. But, like I told you, I couldn’t risk a leak. It was far too important.’
His hands went back onto the table and he leant in to lessen the gap between us. ‘You know what?’ His voice dropped like this was some kind of conspiracy. I supposed it was, really. ‘Between me and you, I thought you guys would fail. Become history. That would have been good for me, you know with the big kahunas wanting you all out of the way – and at the same time you’d have stopped what was going down there with Yulia and those guys just by turning up. Bit of a win-win. But guess what? I was wrong. I was wrong about you, and I was wrong about the guys. I’ve just got to say, well done, and thank you for the extra help you gave in the fight against you-know-who. You did good, Nick. You guys should feel very proud of yourselves.’
He gave me a short, reassuring nod to let me feel good about myself for a job well done. That was great, but I wasn’t here for a pep talk.
‘Look, mate, we’re still breathing, that’s good enough f
or us. So you hoped we’d be history, I get that. The job was all about the memory sticks, wanting us out of the way? Sorry to disappoint.’
The Owl sat back in his seat, nodding away and agreeing as he straightened his legs and fished his left hand into his trouser pocket.
‘Hey, Nick, no need for sorry. I bet you would have done the same, no?’ He treated me to one of those we’re-all-in-this-together type smiles. ‘I know you would have.’
He became very happy with himself as he pulled out his hand. ‘There it is.’ He placed the coin-sized lump of alloy on the table and gave it a gentle tap with his forefinger. ‘Now that, Nick, was a very neat idea. But you know what? That’s what got you caught. My guys just kinda reverse-engineered. People are so clever, these days, don’t you think? I only wish I’d found it earlier, but it didn’t rain until that last evening. I grabbed my coat and out dropped this little fella.’
The black-haired one came over for the Owl’s order and I went back to sucking up my tea.
‘It’s okay, I’ll wait. Thank you.’
She turned and left. I gave her a few more steps away from us before getting back to business.
‘The big kahunas – the ones you protect us from.’
He nodded.
‘They don’t exist, do they? You are the big everything. All the shit that happens comes from you, right?’
He smiled, thinking a little before letting out a big sigh that I didn’t believe was submission. He leant forward again. ‘No, Nick, they really do exist.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘But in here.’
He let his hand fall away.
‘Maybe it’s because I like somebody else to blame stuff on. It kinda works for me. You see, I’m one of the good guys, Nick – but sometimes I’ve got to do bad. So the big kahunas, my guys up there? They have a function. They’re there to blame. You know, the guys making me do the bad thing.’
He gave a big grin. ‘I know, I have shoulders like a Coke bottle, don’t I just?’
I smiled back as much as my lips could manage, then took the last suck of tea. It wasn’t that I was joining in the joke: it was that I’d liked what he’d said. He was the one voice, so he was the power, and it was always good to be close to that, especially when he was trying to fuck you over.
