Harry heard the faint metallic snick of a safety being thumbed off, saw the Heckler & Koch come up in both her hands.
Aimed straight at Flaharty’s head.
11:23 P.M.
Colville’s estate
The Midlands
“You know,” Tarik Abdul Muhammad said, glancing over at Arthur Colville—still blinking like an owl caught in the daytime from the blindfold the bodyguard had removed only moments before, “you really can dispense with the theatrics. I know who you are. Which means I also know where you live.”
He could feel the ex-soldier tense behind him, the English bulldog sensing a threat to his master. But the publisher simply smiled, turning away from the fireplace to face him. “Fair enough. We should treat as equals, in truth.” He extended the sheet of paper in his hand. “Your men did good work.”
It was a mock-up of the Daily Standard’s front page, a lurid photo of the synagogue in flames filling the page above the fold. The article below lamenting the murder of Rabbi Chaim Ariel, his gunshot-riddled body found amidst the charred ruins by firefighters.
One less Jew. It was hard to find something to lament in that, the Pakistani thought, passing the paper back to Colville without comment.
“The PM’s position is becoming tenuous,” the publisher continued without waiting for an answer. “Two days of rioting, and there seems to be no end in sight. However, we need to up the ante. More precisely, you need to.”
Tarik shook his head, at once affronted and amused by the Englishman’s arrogance. “Do I now?”
“If we are to succeed…yes. I need you to launch a suicide bombing against a target here in the UK. A single bomber. Nothing elaborate, nothing high-profile—frightening in its very simplicity.”
The boy. Tarik listened expressionlessly, the face of the young man from the night before clear in his mind’s eye.
Rahman’s words from earlier. “He is a pious young man. Completely unskilled, but true of heart.”
And so young. The perfect candidate. And yet…
“Why?” he asked, his eyes never leaving Colville’s face.
The publisher looked nonplussed. “We need the pressure to build of course, to foment a public outcry for the government to crack down harshly. That’s exactly the wrong move, and Whitehall, for all their cowardice, knows it—which is why we can leave them with no choice. I think the reasons are fairly obvious, and—”
“You’ve explained how your plan is to your advantage,” Tarik said coldly, cutting him short. “I have yet to see how following it is to mine. What are you prepared to give me?”
Colville nodded, glancing behind Tarik to his bodyguard. “I think, Conor, that it is time we discussed the endgame.”
11:25 P.M.
The wood
Outside St. Albans
There were moments in one’s life when you realized, in a flash of blinding clarity, just how badly you had miscalculated.
Even if you didn’t yet fully grasp why.
“Put the gun down, Mehr,” Harry warned, thrown off balance by the suddenness of her action. The burning hatred emanating from her dark eyes as she gazed at Flaharty. “I know this man’s history of action against the Crown, but that’s in the past. He’s a CIA asset—he’s working with me.”
“No.” She shook her head, a single tear leaving her eye and streaking down her cheek, glistening fiercely in the glare of the headlights. “I can’t.”
He moved as if to step between her and Flaharty, but something in her eyes warned him back. A glance over to Flaharty showed him that the Irishman hadn’t moved since Mehreen had spoken his name, just standing there frozen in place—his assault rifle still held at the ready.
Harry shook his head. “Could someone be so kind as to tell me what is going on here?”
“Harry,” Flaharty began, moving slightly forward into the light, “I’m afraid that—”
“Not another step,” Mehreen warned him, spitting the words out from between clenched teeth. Harry heard another click as she thumbed back the HK’s hammer to full-cock. “You…killed my husband.”
Nick. Harry’s heart seemed to turn to stone within him at Mehreen’s words, his eyes flickering back and forth between Mehreen and Flaharty—her face full of anguish, his full of…guilt.
“Is this true?” he demanded, finding his voice in that moment. Glaring at the Irishman as if he could have killed him himself. He and Nick had been more than comrades, closer than brothers.
“Your husband,” Flaharty began, staring earnestly at Mehreen, “was not the target. You were. And yes, I built the bomb.”
“You sodding—” she spat, her finger tightening around the trigger, her hands trembling with anger.
“Wait,” Harry said, cutting her off. The mission—his mission—had to come first. Anything that brought him one step closer to bringing down Tarik. That was priority. “Mehreen…you can take your revenge, but if we’re going to intercept the Special Branch transport before they can be ambushed—if we’re going to rescue your asset—we need to move, right now. You know I loved Nick like a brother, but you know as well as I what he would do in this situation. He’d see this mission through to the end.”
Was that even the truth? Harry asked himself, watching her face in the night. Reading the indecision written there. The rage. The pain.
Would Nick have been able to lower the weapon had the situation been reversed? Had it been Mehreen’s body lying beneath the stone there in Hendon? Had her killer stood before him?
No. No more than he would have spared—far less allied himself with—Tarik Abdul Muhammad. And yet he heard himself speaking once more, “You know what Nick would have done, Mehr.”
11:35 P.M.
Colville’s estate
The Midlands
The Shaikh was impressed, Colville could tell that much—though the man was trying hard to hide it. This is why he had made such an effort to locate him, risked so much to extract him out from under Security Service surveillance. He was a man of vision, a man whose sense of destiny was only equaled by Colville’s own. That was what made him a man they could use—what made him dangerous to them.
Colville shook his head. May God defend the right.
“The River Dee serves as a natural barrier on the north,” Conor Hale continued, gesturing with his pencil across the map. “On the west, there’s nothing but barren Highlands…empty country. No place to run to, to seek refuge. No help coming from that direction. Control the bridges to the east, and you effectively control access—in and out.”
“And how do you propose that I do that?” the Shaikh asked, his eyes searching Hale’s face keenly.
“Riflemen, roadside IEDs—I don’t suppose I bloody well need to tell you how to set up this type of thing. You sods did more than enough of that in Iraq. Provided you have men with the experience.”
He could see the anger in his subordinate’s eyes, the hatred festering there just beneath the surface. But Tarik seemed to ignore it, focusing instead on the map spread out before them on Colville’s desk. “I have the men. Men who fought in the jihad against the Americans in Iraq, against the apostate in Syria.”
“Brave men all, I’m sure,” Conor observed, the sarcasm fairly dripping from his words.
Colville shot him a warning look, but the Shaikh was already replying, not a trace of irony in his voice. “Brave enough…as God wills. When will all of this take place?”
“The Queen will arrive at Balmoral on the morning of the 4th.”
11:31 P.M.
The woods
Outside St. Albans
She had spent so many nights lying awake, alone in her bed…envisioning this moment. Flaharty’s face framed by the sights of a pistol in her hands.
For Nick.
She had known they would come for her one day, had always feared what might happen to those around her. But Nick, had always seemed invincible.
Even now, she could feel his strongly callused hand gently caressing
the nape of her neck, pulling her in close for a kiss as he prepared to go out the door—his tongue slipping teasingly within her mouth, a bit of the devil dancing in his bright eyes.
Less than two minutes later, she had heard the car’s motor falter as it came to life—and then the flat’s windows had exploded inward, shards of glass turned into flying daggers from the force of the blast.
A life—a love—extinguished, in the space of a heartbeat. Less.
She heard Nichols’ words, saw the pallor of the Irishman’s face in the darkness.
Nick. Ismail. Aydin. Loves warring within her, the dead vs. the living. Nick…could not be saved.
For the other two, there was yet hope.
Mehreen nodded finally, lowering the pistol—her heart still beating fast against her chest, her hands trembling with emotion.
She met Harry’s eyes and looked away, scarce able to trust herself to speak. “Then let’s be going.”
Chapter 18
12:06 A.M., March 31st
Somewhere along the M1 Motorway
He was being moved. That’s all he knew, arms shackled before him, a hood drawn tightly over his head.
Ismail Besimi leaned back against the partition of the van, feeling the road rush past beneath him—hearing the low murmur of the guard’s voices from the front.
“Our Lord,” he whispered, his parched lips breathing the words of the du’a, “place me not among those guilty of evil-doing.”
There had to have been some mistake. Something which would be sorted out, as God willed. In God’s time. That was something he had been telling himself for…days, was it?
Or weeks? The nights and days running together in a disorienting fog.
Don’t lose faith…
12:11 A.M.
They had taken both cars, Harry thought, eyes fixed on the red taillights of Mehreen’s Toyota ahead of him. Hand clenched in a death grip on the steering wheel, foot down on the accelerator as he did his best to stay with her in the midst of the late night traffic out of London.
And they had a location, or thought they did. This wasn’t a sanctioned op—he no longer had Carter’s team backing his play, providing him with intel in real-time.
What he did have was the long years at war—hard-earned experience in reading terrain.
Setting up ambushes of his own.
He’d looked over the route using terrain data from a commercial geosat—the type of information that had been the stuff of military secrets twenty years before, but now could be accessed by a teenager in his parents’ basement with a five-second Google search.
Three locations showed promise—three locations that he would have chosen if this was his op, rather than one he was attempting to thwart.
They were marked north to south on the Audi’s GPS—waypoints shining in the darkness along the M-1.
The first two were manageable in the time they had left. The third, well there was no chance they were going to reach it ahead of the transport.
He glanced over at Flaharty, sitting there in the passenger seat—staring out the window at the passing cars. They hadn’t spoken a word since returning to the vehicle.
“I served with Nick Crawford,” Harry said finally, breaking the silence. “From Iraq, to Lebanon, to Afghanistan…what seems like a score of godforsaken places in between. I would have given my life for him. Nearly did, more than once. What she said back there—is it true?”
“It is,” the Irishman replied, not looking at him, “every word of it.”
Good men die. Harry’s knuckles whitened around the steering wheel as he moved in on the sedan, closing the gap before a truck could change lanes and cut them off—the bellow of an airhorn filling the night around them. “You were a CIA asset then, your days with the Provos were over. Why?”
Flaharty sighed, an impatient sound. “You honestly think Davey was the first to suspect that I’d had a change of loyalties, boyo? He wasn’t. This game we’re all in together—you, I, the widow Crawford—you can stop playing, if you want. Give up. But you never get to leave. I had to prove myself, prove to them that nothing had changed. That everything was as it had always been.”
“So you built the bomb.”
“Aye,” Flaharty responded, shaking his head. “I built the bomb. Tell me, Harry—tell me honestly…did you ever hesitate to kill an enemy?”
No, came the response to his lips, the instincts that had kept him alive all those years in the field rising to the fore. Never. And yet something stopped him. “This was different.”
“How?” the Irishman demanded, a short, barking laugh escaping his lips. “She was with Five in Northern Ireland, her kind have been hunting me and my brothers for decades. Her husband—your sodding ‘mate’? He was a Para.”
His voice grew low and cold. “Many’s the time I put on the gloves and went round after round with Jackie Duddy when we were both lads. He was like a brother to me…up till that fine Sunday morning when the Paras shot him down in the car park. Shot a seventeen-year-old boy in the back as he was a-runnin’ away. I can still see Father Daley out in front of us as we tried to carry him to safety—his handkerchief stained red with blood—waving it before him as a flag of truce. But the Paras were having no truce, and Jackie wasn’t the only friend I lost that day.”
“Nick wasn’t there on Bloody Sunday,” Harry said quietly, his eyes focused on the road ahead.
“No, he likely wasn’t,” Flaharty conceded, “and that’s not the way war is, you know that. You may never get the man who shot your brother in the sights of your rifle, so you shoot the sod next to him and tell yourself it’s justice. That’s war. And you’re not going to ask me to regret what I’ve done.”
Silence. Harry glanced up at the GPS, eyeing the first waypoint. Five kilometers.
“So, boyo,” Flaharty began after a long moment, “after all this is over an’ done with…are you going to let her kill me?”
Harry looked over at him, their eyes meeting in the darkness of the car. “I haven’t decided yet.”
12:31 A.M.
The Special Branch transport
Eight years, Dennis Tomlinson thought—staring through the bullet-resistant windshield of the transport van at the night, the far off red taillights of the cars ahead of them. Traffic had been light tonight, but that was bound to change the closer they got to London.
Eight years. That was how long he had been with the West Yorkshire Police, ever since he had come home from Iraq. Come back from the war.
He’d started off on the street—working the beat as he watched the face of Leeds change from the city he had known growing up as a lad. Long nights away from his family, his wife and two young sons. Dealing with everything from domestic violence to the ever-pervasive drugs.
Tomlinson leaned back in his seat as his partner drove, feeling the butt of his holstered Glock dig into his ribs. He’d been an Authorised Firearms Officer for three years, and he was still spending long nights away from his family.
His partner was similarly armed, and there was a SIG 553 assault rifle in the secure weapons locker behind the seat—that last only to be deployed upon the receipt of authorization from their controller in Leeds. The same protocols that applied to armed response vehicle personnel.
In three years, he’d only had to seek that authorization twice—and prayed that he’d never need it in a hurry.
“What is this?” Tomlinson looked up at his partner’s words, closing the mobile on his wife’s text. And then he saw the road before them.
“Oh, bugger me…it’s an artic.”
An articulated lorry—what Americans would have called a semi—had jackknifed into the median, its trailer turned on its side, well-nigh blocking all four lanes of traffic. Flares sparked brightly in the night, the figures of men casting strange shadows as they moved about the scene of the accident.
One of them, a big man wearing a reflective vest, seemed to spot the transport and waved, running over to Tomlinson’s window as he
rolled it down. “Bloody mess,” he said by way of explanation, “sodding fool of a driver was on his mobile.”
Tomlinson snorted. Who wasn’t, these days? “We’re trying to get this cleaned up and out of the way,” the man continued conversationally, “at least get one lane of traffic flowing again.”
But…that seemed to be the exact opposite of what they appeared to actually be doing, the police officer thought, his eyes narrowing even as he realized there were far too many men there for an accident which had just taken place.
Tomlinson jerked around in his seat, finding himself staring into the barrel of a pistol clutched in the big man’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” the man said simply, a curious look of regret in his eyes.
And then the night erupted in fire…
12:43 A.M.
The M1 Motorway
South of Luton
They had passed the first two waypoints with no sign of the prisoner transport. Nothing.
And now their time was running out. Harry tapped the gas, sliding around a panel truck as he glanced back up at the GPS. Another five minutes to the final waypoint. The sickening feeling that he had been wrong gnawing within him.
And if he had, well Mehreen’s asset was gone, forever.
It was then that he saw it, a looming shape across the southbound lanes—a low curse breaking from Flaharty’s lips as they both recognized the overturned semi for what it was in the same instant.
A roadblock.
Harry saw the brake lights of Mehreen’s Toyota flicker and he hit his own brakes, sliding into the far left lane—up against the median—shoving the door open almost before the car had stopped moving.
A twinge of pain shot through his ankle as he put weight on it, drawing his weapon as he moved toward the wrecked tractor-trailer. A doctor would have prescribed rest, but he’d had no time for anything of the sort.
He could hear Flaharty behind him, saw Mehreen out of the corner of his eye, silhouetted in the headlights of a passing truck, her pistol also drawn as they closed in.
There. His hands tightened around the Sig-Sauer as he spotted the darkened prisoner transport on the far side of the semi, just stopped dead in the middle of the road—the passenger window rolled down.
Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3) Page 35
