The Kill Zone

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Fine,’ Siobhan said. She refused to look directly at him. ‘I guess I’ll just sit here then, waiting for Lily to show up. Or not, as the case may be.’

  Jack walked up to her. He grabbed her gently by the arm and she wriggled to get away, but he wouldn’t let her. ‘We’re going to find her,’ he said. ‘We’ll speak to this dead girl’s friends; find out what they can tell us. When Khan gets back into the UK, I’ll question the fucker. But we’re not following him. It’s the most dangerous country in the world, Siobhan. I’m not going with you, and you won’t find anyone else to go either. At least, no one whose company is worth having. This is something I know about. Listen to me, and don’t do anything stupid.’

  She thinned her lips. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You promise? I don’t want Lily to have to attend her mother’s memorial service the moment she shows up.’

  That, at least, seemed to have an effect. Siobhan’s brow furrowed. ‘I promise,’ she said quietly.

  Jack nodded, then stepped back.

  ‘You’d better go,’ she told him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘Yeah, all right. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll make a plan.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Siobhan was looking out of the window again, her shoulders slumped. Yet again, Jack felt a brief desire to go and put his arms around her, but he knew that was a road neither of them wanted to take. And so he stepped towards the main door and let himself out.

  He glanced back once. Siobhan was still staring out of the window, her arms crossed and her legs slightly apart. It looked almost as if she was keeping watch over the whole city.

  2 JULY

  13

  Salim Jamali smiled at his mother across the breakfast table. He poured Coco Pops into his bowl, followed by a slosh of milk. Most of his friends would be eating more traditional Pakistani food – mangoes, perhaps, or lassi – but not Salim. His late father and his mother had lived in North London all their lives, as had their parents before them. And while they observed some of the traditions of their homeland – visits to the mosque were occasional but not unknown – the Jamali household was in many ways as English as Buckingham Palace. Salim’s mum wore jeans, and would much rather watch The X Factor than sit gossiping with some of the more traditional second-generation Pakistani women.

  Salim picked at his Coco Pops. ‘You need a good breakfast,’ his mum said. ‘You’ve got a busy day.’

  He nodded and forced a spoonful down his throat. His mum, he reflected, didn’t know how right she was.

  In a way, it was all her fault. Kids had teased him all his life on account of his harelip that was so bad people turned their heads in the streets to stare at it. For the most part he’d learned to deal with that, but when some of the boys at his school had started teasing him, saying that his mother was a Western slut, Salim had found it hard to take. He had tried to fight back, but they were too many and he was too small. Perhaps that was why he had tried to make up for things by attending the mosque more often. He would tell his mum that he was just going to the cinema, or to meet a friend, and she would believe him. In truth he was spending more and more time just off Finsbury Park, where he would hang out and chat with the young men who always seemed to be there. They didn’t care that his face was deformed, or that he was small, or unpopular. Somehow he’d known his mum would not approve of him associating with them; but it gave him better standing in the playground. It stopped the teasing and the bullying.

  And it was at the mosque that his real education had begun. There he had been persuaded – much to his mother’s disappointment – to leave school. There he had learned what the duty of true Muslims was. It was the mosque boys who had explained to him that there were places in the country of his forefathers where young men like him could go, to be tutored in the skills of the jihadi. Special training camps, where he would be taught the skills he needed to fight the infidel. Salim had never been able to fight with anyone. Not successfully. The thought of being able to do so appealed to him. The day he had turned sixteen, he had, without his mother’s knowledge, applied for a passport of his own. ‘Keep it and wait,’ the mosque boys had told him. ‘They will let you know when you can travel to the camp.’

  That had been seven months ago. A lifetime, in Salim’s mind. The more he saw his mother embracing the ways of the West, the more he grew to loathe her. He couldn’t wait to leave, but he was sensible enough not to let her suspect anything was afoot. Salim told her that he had found a job in a local garage, but she never seemed to notice the absence of oil marks on his hands and clothes. And of course she never asked him for money towards the bills. When someone trusts you, he realised, you have a unique power over them.

  Two days previously he had been given the word. One of the mosque boys – his name was Aamir – had handed him a ticket for Heathrow Airport to Islamabad. Somebody would meet him there and take him on to the training camp.

  ‘What about my mother?’ he’d asked.

  Aamir had grinned. ‘Don’t worry about her. We’ll take care of it.’

  And now, as he finished his cereal, the passport and ticket felt strangely heavy in the inside of his jacket. He got up and kissed his mother on the cheek in the Western way that she expected.

  ‘You seem tense, Salim. What’s wrong?’

  He refused to look her in the eye. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’ And then, because it seemed like the obvious thing to say: ‘I might be late back.’

  She nodded, a look of quiet concern on her face, but didn’t ask any more questions.

  Salim left the house quickly, walked down the street and turned the corner, where a beaten-up old car was waiting for him. One of the mosque boys had offered to drive him to the airport and that was kind of him. It also meant Salim didn’t see what happened just minutes after he had left the house. He was unaware of the knock on his mother’s door, or of the two mosque boys – Aamir and one of his friends – who bundled into the house when she opened it, forced her into the front room and turned on the TV so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear her screams. He didn’t know that they had beaten her viciously, restraining their blows to below the neck so she wouldn’t exhibit any bruises on her face, even though her belly and breasts were so brutalised that she squealed like a pig being led to slaughter. Salim had no idea that Aamir had then forced his mother to strip, or that they had then dragged her upstairs to the bathroom. He was ignorant of the fact that they had filled the bath with hot water and thrust her head below the surface, keeping it there for a full minute before allowing her a five-second breath and repeating the operation.

  He was at the check-in desk when Aamir had said their first words to his mum. ‘Salim is away for a month,’ he hissed. ‘If you tell anyone, we will come back and do this all over again. And if you even think about telling the police he is gone, we will see to it that he returns as an orphan.’ They hadn’t bothered to ask if she understood what they had said because they knew she was in no state to reply.

  When Salim’s plane took off from Terminal 3, his mother was curled up, naked and shaking on the bathroom floor.

  The hotel Jack had chosen was central and expensive. In the basement there was a bar where he’d installed himself the moment he’d checked in and had started downing pints of black with the ferocity of a man having his last drink. If he’d expected the booze to soften the blow of the gruesome news about Lily, he was disappointed.

  He had carried on drinking, only stumbling up to his room long after he was the last person in the bar, and the barman had given up on the old meaningful looks. He had lain on his bed and, from his wallet, pulled out an old, dog-eared photograph. It showed him and Siobhan, with Lily between them. She was only three, and the photo had been taken on a summer’s day when they’d driven up to Ballycastle and made sandcastles on the beach. You could see the blue and white surf in the background, and Lily’s face was shining with childish pleasure. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  He woke up hungover and with the photo still lyi
ng on his chest. Having showered he left the hotel to find a café, where he wolfed down a big plate of ham, egg and chips and several cups of black coffee, before wandering around the town, marking time and getting his head in order. He was supposed to be in Hereford to meet the adjutant at 10.00 hrs the next day. He needed to get back, but he wanted to speak to Siobhan again first.

  He called her. No answer – just her curt voicemail message. Mid-afternoon, he returned to the hotel and stayed in his room for an hour or two.

  Just sitting.

  And thinking.

  He dialled Siobhan’s number again.

  Her phone started to ring this time.

  And ring.

  It was just before it clicked into voicemail that Jack realised what he was listening to. The ringtone. Not the standard two short rings, but different. A single tone, longer, and repeated.

  Jack stared at the wall for a moment, listening to Siobhan’s voice. An uneasy feeling rose in his stomach. He knew what that single tone meant, of course. That the phone was ringing abroad.

  ‘Shit,’ he hissed. He was out of the room in three strides flat. Jack ran down the corridor, and the lift to the foyer couldn’t move quickly enough for him. He burst out into the street, jumped into the nearest cab he could find and directed the driver to Siobhan’s flat, cursing every time they hit a red light or got snarled up in traffic.

  When they reached their destination, he shoved a handful of notes into the surprised cabby’s hand and jumped out of the car. The old woman was there, with her supermarket trolley and her radio. Jack approached her and dropped a twenty in her trolley, keeping his breathing shallow because of the smell.

  ‘Have you seen her?’ he demanded. But the old woman just gave him a wild look, then started pushing the trolley away, muttering to herself.

  Jack didn’t even bother with the front entrance. Instead, he ran round to the back of the apartment block where a metal fire staircase stretched up, leading to a precarious iron balcony on each floor. Jack sprinted up, counting the floors as he went. Ten storeys up he walked along the balcony. He needed to pass five windows before he got to Siobhan’s flat: he crouched down to avoid being seen by the occupants. But soon enough he came to a window that led on to Siobhan’s kitchen. There were no lights on inside. It had an unoccupied air.

  He looked over the balcony to check nobody was observing him. All clear. He removed his jacket, held it up in front of the kitchen window and punched it. The glass shattered and shards fell inwards into the sink. The window itself was locked, so Jack was forced to clear the remaining glass from around the frame and clamber in. He cut his hand, but barely noticed it.

  It was gloomy inside, but Jack kept the lights switched off as he went from room to room. Everything about the place suggested that Siobhan had left in a hurry. In her bedroom, the cupboard doors were still open and there were clothes strewn on the bed. The broken whiskey glass that she had slammed on to the floor the previous night was still splintered over the carpet. He went into the bathroom. There was a removable panel at one end of the bath that you wouldn’t see if you didn’t know it was there. Jack did know. He felt behind it and his fingers touched the cold steel of the firearm that he knew she hid there whenever she was in the flat. It was a bad sign that it was still there.

  Because the only time Siobhan didn’t take that weapon with her was when she was catching a plane.

  The sick feeling in his stomach grew worse.

  He moved back into the main room. Her laptop was at an angle on the coffee table. He opened it up and switched it on. In less than a minute, he was reading her browsing history.

  It didn’t surprise him to see that she had been visiting airline websites.

  He cursed under his breath, then opened up Siobhan’s email. His eyes were instantly drawn to the two most recent messages. One from British Airways, confirming her on to a flight from Belfast to Paris via London. The second from Ethiopian Airlines, booking Siobhan on to a plane from Paris to Djibouti.

  Jack consulted his mental map of Africa. Djibouti, the small country bordering the northern edge of Somalia. Jack had never been there, and he was positive Siobhan hadn’t either. But he was equally positive that from there she’d be able to cross the border.

  Fuck. Siobhan was good. One of the best even by the standards of the Det. No doubt about it. But this was too dangerous, even for her.

  He looked at his watch. Just past six. From the flight times on Siobhan’s computer, he could conclude that at that very moment she was somewhere in the air between Europe and East Africa.

  Jack stared at the screen, stunned by her recklessness. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said that he wouldn’t risk going to that part of the world without a crowd of heavily tooled-up Regiment guys. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he told Siobhan that one glance of her white skin and they’d kill her – but probably not before they raped her first.

  ‘Damn it!’ he exploded, crashing his hand down on the laptop so that it slammed shut. He stood up and started prowling around the room, feeling that he’d like to start breaking things. He was angry with Siobhan; but he was angry with himself too. He remembered leaving the flat the night before, seeing her staring out over the city. Jack knew Siobhan well enough to realise that she wouldn’t forget about her crazy idea just because he told her she should. That was like a red rag to a bull, and when Lily was involved . . .

  It was starting to get dark outside. The River Lagan snaked beneath him and the city lights were twinkling as Jack stood where Siobhan had stood, a solitary figure in the blackness, his broad shoulders hunched and his eyes hooded. Half of him wondered whether Siobhan had left those emails, so easily accessible, knowing Jack would read them. The laptop was, after all, uncharacteristically insecure. Or maybe she really had just left in a tearing hurry, because she knew that if Jack found out what she was doing, he’d try to stop her.

  It didn’t matter either way. Jack looked at his watch. He had to make a decision. Get back to Hereford and leave Siobhan to her fate, in the hope that her not inconsiderable training would be enough to keep her safe in Mogadishu. Or go after her. Stop her from running into trouble. And if she did run into trouble, get her out . . .

  A little voice in his head spoke to him. She’d landed herself in this mess; she could get herself out. If he wasn’t with the adjutant tomorrow morning, that was the end of his career. No question. And he wasn’t supposed to give a shit about her any more. Remember?

  Jack felt his lip curling in the darkness. It wasn’t as easy as that, and really he knew that the decision he had to make was no decision at all. Siobhan, whether she meant to or not, had outmanoeuvred him. Just like she always did.

  It had grown cold. The broken window was letting the elements in. Jack stayed where he was. His mind was churning. Working things out. Planning.

  He could get to Djibouti the same way Siobhan had. That was the easy bit. Finding her would be more difficult; and finding her before she got transport into Somalia even more so. He knew nobody in-country and locating a fixer who could sort him out with the equipment he needed would take time. No. Following Siobhan to Djibouti would be pointless. Finding her in Mogadishu was riskier – but perhaps achievable. There were a limited number of places where Westerners could stay. Where anyone could stay. Yes, if he could make it into the Somali capital, he had a better chance of locating Siobhan and then getting her the hell out of there.

  Jack sat himself down at the laptop again and brought up a map of East Africa. He picked up the shape of Somalia’s angular coastline, then examined the borders. Djibouti to the north, Ethiopia to the west. Somalia’s long western border was a violent badland populated by dissolute Ethiopian troops and African mercenaries who’d slaughter anyone if the price was right, or who got in the way of their primary objective of looting or raping. The Ethiopian border was Somalia’s longest, and it was porous. With a decent fixer, an SAS unit and the appropriate weaponry, it could be crossed. But to try it a
lone would be stupidity.

  Which left the southern border with Kenya – a country he knew well from a stint he’d spent there training Kenyan troops. He could be on a flight to Nairobi within hours, and the internal flight system was reasonable. All he needed then was a fixer. Someone discreet. Someone with the local knowledge that would enable him to get tooled up and in-country.

  A face rose in his mind. It was deeply lined and grizzled, the skin tanned like leather, the hair gun-metal grey and cropped – at least it had been last time Jack had seen it. Jack hadn’t seen this man for years, but rumours of his whereabouts occasionally reached him. It wouldn’t take long to find out if they were true. He scrolled through the contacts on his phone until he found the number he was looking for: Lew Miller, an ex-Delta Force operator who was now enjoying his retirement taking rich tourists game fishing off the west coast of Florida and fleecing them for the privilege. Lew never changed. Jack just hoped he was by his phone and not screwing whichever of his female clients were tanned and buxom enough to pass his undemanding criteria.

  The phone rang several times before a voice answered. ‘Jack fucking Harker,’ it drawled. ‘To what do I owe the goddamned pleasure?’

  Jack didn’t have time for small talk. ‘I need a favour, Lew. Under the radar. Urgent.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Markus Heller. He still got that set-up in Kenya?’

  ‘Last I heard,’ Lew said warily.

  ‘Can you get me a number?’

  A pause. ‘Under the radar, huh?’

  ‘Can you get it?’

  ‘Call me in an hour.’ A click, and Lew hung up.

  Jack looked about. In the near darkness he would have to feel around for what he wanted, and his fingertips touched it soon enough. A crumpled piece of paper, the one Siobhan had thrown at him last night. When he unfurled it, he saw that it contained the scrawled address of a lock-up in West Belfast.