by Andy McNab
I fired up the Q7 and drove, lights off, down to the villa. I tucked the passenger side against the wall and switched off the engine. I clambered out, day sack over one shoulder. As I readjusted to the silence, Lynn shuffled back into the driver's seat. 'Same as before – if I'm not back in an hour, it's the ERV.'
The crescent moon rose above the desert horizon. I jumped onto the bonnet and then onto the Q7's roof. I took a few more moments to study the villa then climbed onto the wall, checked below me and jumped.
Another few moments to assess the silence and I was on the move again.
I walked up the front steps and put my ear to the door. Nothing.
I edged around the back, giving each shutter a pull as I passed. No obvious way in there either, so I came back round to the front. I checked under the cactus pots to see if Layla had left a key for me, but she hadn't.
Only one thing for it: the roof.
The house had been built Mediterranean-style – normally there was no insulation; nothing between the roof and the room below.
I hopped onto a water-butt fed by a down pipe leading from the gutter and hauled myself up. If anybody was inside, this was the moment I'd find out. They certainly wouldn't think it was pigeons.
I started to peel off tiles and stacked them carefully alongside me. When I'd created a decent hole, I dug out the toolkit torch from the day sack and lay down on my stomach.
I was four metres or so above the marble floor of a large, open-plan lounge. I could see armchairs, a sofa, a fireplace, tables.
Grabbing a supporting beam, I lowered myself through the hole.
I checked each room. I found food in the fridge – long-life milk, salami, stuff that would keep – but the place didn't look like it had been lived in for a while. There was a light coating of sand on the floor and the bed and the furniture in the master bedroom had been covered with dust-sheets.
I found some keys hanging from a board next to the fridge. One of them unlocked the front door. The shutters opened easily from the inside. If I needed to leave in a hurry, I was spoilt for choice. I pocketed the keys and moved back into the lounge.
I didn't know what I was looking for so it was hard to know where to begin. I shone the torch around the room and its beam swept across a desk by the fireplace. I walked over and started removing the drawers. They were filled with the crap you usually find in desks: pens, paper, paperclips, rubber bands and correspondence – lots and lots of it. I flicked through the letters. Most were in Arabic, but some weren't.
I stuck the light in my mouth and pulled out anything written in a language I might understand. I found a compliments slip and an invoice in German from a clinic in Oberdorf, Switzerland, clearly addressed to a Fräulein Layla Hamdi, and a letter, in English, also to 'Ms Hamdi', from the Cancer Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Medical Science in Moscow.
Thank fuck for the international language. I checked the dates. The Swiss invoice, for treatment of some kind, had been sent in November. The letter from the Russian Academy of Medical Science was more recent and definitive – it was dated the first week of December and was confirmation of an appointment booked two weeks earlier.
The first sentence of the second paragraph jumped out at me.
Due to the urgent nature of the treatment, we suggest that you check yourself in as soon as possible . . .
I was just too fucking late.
106
I put back the letters and closed the drawers. As I stood up, my torch beam brushed past a row of photographs on the mantelpiece. One was of a tall man with unkempt hair, dressed in jeans and a camouflage T-shirt, his left arm draped round the shoulders of a beautiful olive-skinned woman, several years older than him. A few strands of hair had been blown across her face by the wind. They were standing in front of a house – this house. It hadn't changed at all.
As I stared at Lesser's lank hair and her piercing, sea-green eyes, the years peeled back. The dock, the Bahiti, finning across the harbour . . . Layla disappearing down the gangway with Mansour . . . Big Ben sliced almost in half by the det cord . . .
I panned left and there he was in more familiar gear: khaki combat jacket, black beret and shades – the uniform of the Provisionals. He was out on some bog, in the middle of nowhere; low, grey clouds scudding in from the Atlantic behind him. He beamed from ear to ear, clutching an Armalite, draped in the Tricolour and flashing a victory sign at the camera.
My gaze shifted to the next frame: this time no guns, no uniform; just jeans and a T-shirt. It must have been dress-down Friday. A summer's day, outside a cottage just like Dom's. From the look of him, the cut of his hair – short – and the zips and chains on his jeans, the shot must have been taken in the late seventies, when Lesser was in his early twenties.
Next to him was a girl with a pale complexion and the same unruly hair – a little older than him; a sister maybe.
She took centre stage in the last photo. The backdrop was the same – the cottage in Ireland – but this time a smiling, olive-skinned schoolgirl was hanging off her neck. She looked about five or six, no more, but I was shit at guessing kids' ages. She had an awkward, gap-toothed smile and I had the uneasy feeling that I'd seen her somewhere before. I turned back towards the door and stopped.
Lesser and Layla. Lesser and the girl, and a kid with olive-tanned skin and jet-black hair – all on Layla's mantelpiece.
I ran down the corridor to the bedroom and yanked the dust-sheet off the nearer of the two bedside tables and there they were – the intimate shots you didn't put on public display: Layla, pale and drawn, clutching a newborn, olive-skinned baby to her chest; Layla and the baby again, this time in laces and ribbons; and then the infant with Lesser's sister . . . no sign of Layla at all.
I pulled open the drawer and found letters, tucked away in envelopes with Irish postmarks, with Layla's name and address – a PO Box in Tripoli – scrawled in big, loopy handwriting. I opened one and was confronted by the same writing and a wobbly drawing of a horse. Dear Mummy . . .
I opened another. Different drawing, same writing, a bit more mature. More letters, more drawings, the same story . . .
Hamdi and Lesser – they'd had a kid; and, by the look of it, given her up for adoption.
I moved round the opposite side of the bed and whipped the dust-sheet off the other table. Lesser, in a large, black and white portrait, surrounded by an ornate silver frame, stared back at me – at the time he'd met Hamdi in the desert, I guessed, every inch the young shit-stirrer, doing his best Che Guevara imitation.
And then there was a picture of Lesser standing beside the little girl, holding her hand – in the garden of the cottage again. The girl was seven or eight; Lesser now in his early thirties. It could only have been months, maybe even weeks, before he was dropped.
Another shot. The girl, in school uniform, giving the camera a self-conscious smile, braces on her teeth, the first signs she was developing into a young woman. And another. The girl on a pier or a ferry, leaning against railings, the sea behind her: teenaged, intense, angst-ridden, no smile, but more than a hint of her mother's haunting beauty. And finally, a big portrait, black and white again, like Lesser's – their girl all grown up.
And I had seen her before. I knew her. I'd met her.
My eyes flicked across the pictures again.
Lesser. Hamdi. The baby. The crofter's cottage. The schoolgirl. The girl on the pier or the ferry, whatever it fucking was . . .
The ferry.
Little Miss Camcorder. Mairead O'Connell.
107
I sat on the bed and looked down at the picture in my hand.
Duff had gobbed off to the press about a Brit spy hidden away on his ship . . .
Lynn's nickname became common knowledge around the highest levels of Libyan spookdom . . .
We'd killed her precious dad . . .
Fuck . . . It wasn't the Firm cleaning house. It was this bitch.
I ran from the room, into the lounge and
out through the front door. Clutching Layla's keys, I sprinted to the gate and produced the only one that would fit a large padlock. I shoved it in, gave it a twist and the chains fell away.
Lynn was already sliding back into the passenger seat. I jumped in and fired up the ignition. The engine caught. I sat there for a moment too long, air con kicking in, working everything out in my head.
Could the device have been her handiwork . . .? Her mother would have shown her the tricks of the trade.
I registered something out of the corner of my eye – a glint, nothing more: metal catching moonlight.
Something on the move; something coming at me – fast. I hit the gas.
Too late.
As the wheels spun I heard the scream of another engine a second before it rammed the Audi side on. It cannoned into my door, catapulting me off my seat and into Lynn as Mansour's car was slammed into the wall. In the same instant the airbags exploded and the side window shattered into a thousand fragments.
Sand and dust and yelling filled the air. The airbags pinned my body back against the seat and my arms to my sides. I couldn't get to my weapon. Boots crunched on the bonnet. Somebody was trying to pull the driver's door open, but it was too buckled to move.
There were urgent, angry shouts and a crowbar crashed down against the windscreen – once, twice, again . . . The lamination crazed like a spider's web, but the glass didn't give. The boots stomped across the roof as I struggled for the weapon. My door was still being pulled at, the distorted metal screeching against the frame.
More shouts, but not in Arabic.
The sunroof imploded. Glass rained down onto me like confetti, then something hard and metallic struck my shoulder then my head and I saw white starbursts in a sea of black.
I forced myself to fight it, but when I was grabbed by my arms and pulled towards the roof, I was too weak to resist.
The shouts were muffled now, but the blows weren't. And then, in the far distance, as I felt myself being lifted, I heard a woman's voice.
108
I came to on a hard, cold floor. As I struggled to focus, blurred pinpricks of light danced across my retinas. Stars. I was looking up through the hole I'd made in Layla's roof.
There was something sticky in my mouth. The taste of metal clung to the back of my throat. Blood, or the crowbar? The tip of my tongue did a quick inventory. As far as I could tell, I still had all my teeth.
I couldn't move my feet. They were tied to my wrists and elbows behind my back.
My eyes still wouldn't focus, even though I commanded them to. As the haze cleared, I found myself facing the fireplace and the rogues' gallery.
Seeing the pictures brought it all back again: Layla . . . Lesser . . . the daughter . . .
I heard a noise to my right and managed to turn my neck against the pain. No more than a metre away, and similarly bound, lay another prisoner.
Lynn had bruises on his face and cuts to his head that had come from something a bit more vigorous than an open hand. He'd gone down fighting.
'It's Lesser's daughter.' I strained to get eye to eye. 'That fucking bitch is—'
'I know. She made me listen to her life story.'
'Tell me.'
He shifted a fraction to try and take some of the strain off his plasticuffs. 'Her name is Mairead. Likes to be called Mary. Don't try calling her any other names.' He grimaced. 'She doesn't take kindly to it.
'She was born in Libya, lived the early part of her life here – while Lesser commuted back and forth to the Irish Republic. But Layla became a prime target for the Israelis, and we had Lesser in our sights. So they moved her away.'
He nodded at the pictures on the mantelpiece. 'The child-minder is Lesser's cousin. She never registered on our radar. Lesser, I suppose, visited the kid when he could, but when we took him out, any links we might have picked up between them vanished altogether. It was as if she'd never existed.'
'And now?'
'She's president of the Richard Isham fan club. Thinks the sun shines out of his arse – to the extent that she happily organizes drug runs to finance the cause. She's a zealot, Nick, devoted to the cause – but that's nothing compared to what drove her to this.'
'Don't tell me. She wants to avenge her father's death.'
Great. And Lynn and I didn't just have a ringside seat at Mairead's circus – we were the stars of the show.
'Who's she teamed with this end?'
'Russians. Mansour was involved, too, though whether officially or as a freelance, I have no idea. After he got out of prison, it wasn't antiquities that took his fancy; it was drugs. I should have realized.'
'Realized what?'
'These guys are representatives of the new world order – drugs, politics and organized crime. They want to create Afghanistan on our doorstep – substitute Kabul for Belfast and you start to get the picture. The Mafia get a ready-made market for their heroin and cocaine. Guys like Isham get the financial backing to buy votes and swell their numbered Swiss bank accounts. Everyone's happy. Including the new boys at the Kremlin, who always like a bit of European instability. I don't imagine Putin's government will be actively taking measures to close down this operation.
'But that's the big picture. As for the here and now, her personal vendetta . . .' The look on Lynn's face told me the worst. Beneath the bruises, he looked like he knew we'd reached journey's end.
'She has waited a long time for this, Nick. She'd always known her father's death was no accident. Duff confirmed it after he saw the Basra incident on TV. From that moment, you were compromised. She just needed someone to lead them to me.'
I heard a noise somewhere behind me then a woman's voice and I knew that she was there, in the shadows, and had been all along.
109
Her footsteps drew closer and the hairs bristled on the back of my neck. She stepped out in front of us.
Mairead O'Connell . . . still holding that fucking camcorder. We were on Candid Camera . . .
'That, gentlemen, will play particularly well on the six o'clock news, don't you think?' She smiled behind the lens and I caught a glimpse of her perfect white teeth.
'How did you so elegantly phrase it, Colonel? "Lesser, I suppose, visited when he could, but when we took him out, any links we might have picked up between them vanished altogether." When we took him out . . . That's the part I like. When this airs, that statement will be beamed into every home in the UK; and then it'll be picked up by YouTube and go all over the world. The British government's shoot-to-kill policy confirmed in a breath – as Richard has been saying all these years.'
She lowered the camera. 'But that's just icing on the cake. This evening's proceedings are all about justice.'
Mairead took a couple of steps forward. She pressed a button on the camcorder and rotated the little screen, holding it close to my face so I wouldn't miss a thing.
'I expect you're dying to see how I got to you?'
I found myself looking at close-ups of Liam Duff, bloodied, beaten, drilled full of holes. Through broken teeth, he mumbled that he had seen a face on TV. He recognized it as one he had seen on the Bahiti all those years ago. And that, he said, was when he realized that he had a story to sell.
It would only have taken her a couple of phone calls to discover the channel that first showed the footage – and that the face had been working for them in Basra.
The screen cut to a shot of Dom's TV station in Dublin. The picture was a little shaky to begin with; then it steadied. The microphone picked up the noise of the wind and the traffic. She'd been in a parked car – I could just make out a wing mirror on the edge of the frame. A group of people emerged from the building. One of them was Dom. It wasn't a presentation day; he was in jeans.
She would have put the building under surveillance and waited for Dom to appear. She had the perfect cover; if anyone challenged her, she'd have produced her ID and uttered the magic words Richard Isham. There wasn't a member of the security forces in Northern I
reland at the moment who would have touched her.
The picture jumped. I was now staring at the glazed front door of Dom's apartment block in Wapping. It had been shot on full zoom. Passers-by strolled between the camera and the building. A second or two later, the door opened and I stepped onto the pavement with Ruby's Christmas present and put it into the boot of the Merc.
And then . . .
There we were on the ferry. Ruby was talking into the camera, telling this woman what she was looking forward to about Ireland: green fields, horses, leprechauns, spending Christmas with Tallulah and Nick . . . it was all there.
She'd lowered the camera. What a darling little girl, she was saying. They were having such fun; didn't mean to frighten her, blah-de-blah-de-blah. But there, there . . . and I could imagine her reaching out to touch the little girl's head . . .
