Dead Centre

by Andy McNab

  I headed towards the sports deck. They sold everything from trainers to canoes, but I wasn’t after a pair of Versace trainers or a twenty-thousand-dollar home multi-gym. I needed a telescopic fishing rod – the one you see in gadget mags that folds down into something that fits in the palm of your hand.

  20

  HAD MOSSAD, THE Israeli secret service, not assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, one of the co-founders of the military wing of Hamas, in his Dubai hotel room in January 2010, I might have been trying to make entry in a totally different way.

  The electronic lock of Room 419 could be accessed and reprogrammed directly at the door, but getting hold of the right box of tricks would have taken a lot more time than I had to spare. But – thanks to my mate Julian’s involvement at MI5 in tracking down the source of the British passports Mossad’s hit squad had used as cover – I knew a shortcut.

  Burglars use fishing rods all the time to lift the keys you leave on the hall table. They then make entry with the house keys, or stay outside and steal whichever vehicle blinks in response to the key fob. Mossad had had an even better idea.

  Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was wanted for the kidnap and murder of two Israeli soldiers in 1989, and purchasing arms from Iran for use in Gaza. He wasn’t on Mossad’s happy holiday list. They followed him from Syria to the Al Bustan Rotunda hotel near Dubai airport.

  Al-Mabhouh was no fool. He’d requested a room with no balcony and sealed windows, so the only way in was through the door. He showered and changed, put documents into the room safe, and left the hotel between four thirty and five p.m. When he got back to his room at eight twenty-four that night to relax in front of a couple of episodes of Mr Bean, Mossad were inside, waiting for him. Half an hour later, he failed to answer a call from his wife. His body was found by a cleaner the next morning. And all it would have taken to stop his assassins in their tracks was a bath towel.

  A read-out indicated that an attempt was made to reprogramme al-Mabhouh’s electronic door lock, but that wasn’t how the boys from Tel Aviv had got in. They’d used a method Julian had demonstrated to me in my own living room. Fuck knows why he’d brought a telescopic fishing rod with him. Maybe he thought if he could show me what fun they were all having, I’d cross back over to the dark side.

  21

  I HEADED FOR the house phones in the lobby, keeping eyes on the entrance for Ant and Dec. I had lost them for sure, but once they’d lost me they’d have had to make a decision. Stake out the flat, if they knew it, or go back to my last known location. Or split up and check both. Fuck it, I just had to get on with what I was here for, and as quickly as I could before one of them turned up.

  I got six rings from 419 before an automated voice said what I guessed must be the Russian for ‘Please leave a message’. I hung up.

  I checked out the hotel restaurants, but it was far too early to sit and eat. I didn’t see any of the crew having a session in the gym or the pool. But a drink or two to celebrate the fact they were alive? That was a definite maybe.

  They weren’t in the lobby bar. I took the lift to the roof. The view of the Kremlin was straight out of a winter-wonderland brochure.

  I heard the crew before I saw them. They were well wrapped up under gas heaters, and by this stage their breath was probably 90 per cent proof. They were having a great time and I didn’t blame them.

  I turned back into the lift. As it descended I started to assemble the Mossad magic wand. The fishing rod telescoped down to about seven inches, but extended to five feet when fully open. It was made of bendable alloy. I’d binned the reel that had come with it, and the low breaking-strength line. I needed to land a shark, not a kipper.

  The eyelets the line fed through also folded down. I opened the one at the tip, tied the end of the shark line to it and kept the other eyes closed.

  I got out of the lift and checked the corridor for movement and sound. I wasn’t going to wait around. Defeating the door would take about ten seconds. The more I hovered about, the longer I was exposed. There was nothing in front of me, nothing behind. The shark-line reel on my left index finger spun as I started to extend the rod. I only needed about three feet. I put it over my knee and bent it into the shape of a bow saw.

  I knelt on the plush carpet outside 419 and eased the tip, with the shark line attached, through the gap under the door. Hotel fire regulations are more or less uniform internationally. There has to be enough space – a maximum of ten millimetres at the threshold – to allow the door to swing without it touching the carpet.

  I squeezed the rod through, pushing down the carpet on both sides. Once it was about three feet in, I twisted the handle and worked it up against the bottom of the door. The rod would now be going up vertically the other side. I nudged it to the right, towards the handle. The alloy clunked as it made contact with the metal.

  I took a second to visualize what was happening inside the room. The shark line would be hanging between the handle and the door. The rod itself would be on the far side of the handle. I pulled down gently and heard another clunk of rod against handle a few inches from my head. The handle was trapped between the apex of the rod and the line.

  I held the rod handle firmly in my left hand, rested my head against the door and pulled hard on the line. It pushed down on the handle and the door sprang open.

  I slipped quickly inside, closed the door and activated the deadlock. I collapsed the deformed rod as best I could and shoved it inside my jeans.

  All the Hamas lad had needed to do before he went out was roll up a towel and place it between the handle and the door. Mossad would have been fucked. Rudy and his boys also had a lot to learn.

  The room still stank of cigarette smoke, and the mini-bar had been raided. Empty miniatures and beer bottles and chocolate wrappers were scattered on the table by the window. At least the bed had been made. Beyond it, the Kremlin son et lumière was in full swing.

  I lifted out the holdall and unzipped it to discover not very much at all. There was a passport for the boy; a new one, of course. A carton of 200 Camel. Some socks, still in their cardboard packaging, and a few pairs of Speedo-type briefs. And a memory stick.

  I headed for the B&O and hit the space-age remote. It took me a minute to work out how to persuade it to do what I wanted. I finally inserted the USB end plug into a port in the side of the TV. There was only one icon on the stick. I clicked on it and got a picture but no sound.

  I was glad there wasn’t.

  Tracy’s face filled the TV screen.

  Her skin was red and flushed; her face screwed up.

  A pair of male hands came into shot from behind her and around her naked shoulders, pulling her away from the lens. I was dreading what I was about to see.

  As the hands turned her and pushed her towards the bed, I could see that BB was still inside her from behind.

  I watched for about five minutes, then sat there in shock. I thought about the pain in Tracy’s eyes. I thought about BB being an arsehole. And I thought about my promise to Mong.

  I threw the stick back into the bag, zipped it up and replaced it under the bed. I wasn’t about to take it with me. Frank was obviously a generous employer, but I already knew you didn’t want to fuck him over.

  I closed the door carefully behind me and headed for the lift.

  22

  BACK AT THE apartment, I had a shower and changed. I stank like I used to when I had to hang around pubs as a kid, waiting for my mum and stepdad to stop drinking and take me home. The smoke from Player’s No. 6 or whatever knocked-off cigarettes they’d bought from the market that week used to soak into my clothes, hair and skin even when I sat under the table. In the morning, the stench made me feel like throwing up.

  I felt like throwing up now.

  I grabbed my passport and threw a few things into a day sack. It felt good to be back in that routine, getting on with a job – even though it wasn’t a job until I knew they were alive.

  I looked up Frank Timis online. Nothing.
I even tried Wikipedia and Wikileaks. I couldn’t find a thing.

  I sat on the sofa and looked out over the river and the downtown lights. Steam billowed out of every building. I speed-dialled Anna. I usually called her every other day after the three p.m. broadcast. She always wanted to know what footage they’d used, and if there was anything she’d done wrong.

  There seldom was. She was an old hand at reporting foreign conflicts. A lot of journos turned up in war zones without a clue. A picture of one unwittingly wearing Gaddafi green, for instance, could be valuable propaganda. It could also get you killed.

  The only thing I’d commented on so far this trip was the state of her hair. Apart from that, she looked perfect. I couldn’t wait to see her again. It was turning ugly out there. She’d been in Tunisia and Egypt earlier in the year, then moved to Libya. With the whole Middle East jumping up and down, she’d probably want to cover the fuck-up that was unfolding in Bahrain. Protesters had been shot and Saudi troops had moved into the country to back the government. Big drama ahead for all. Especially me, as she’d want to be in the thick of it.

  The phone buzzed and crackled in my ear as it tried to get cell contact. Eventually it opened up. She sounded concerned. ‘Nicholas – is everything all right?’

  There were screams and chants in the background as the rebels gave Gaddafi’s name a hard time.

  ‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that?’

  She laughed. ‘I got held up, that’s all.’

  She must have found a quieter spot because the noise went down a couple of decibels.

  ‘Anna, I need a favour. Can you find out about a guy called Francis Timis? I think he’s Ukrainian. He says he changed his name to Francis so it sounds more Western. He’s loaded, but I can’t find anything about him on the Net. There’s a Romanian mining guy, but that’s definitely not him.’

  ‘Maybe he’s rich enough to buy anonymity. Spell it for me?’

  I heard gunfire and some scuffling as she took cover.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Mid-forties, maybe. No older than fifty. Anything you can get.’

  There was more rustling. She had to shout to make herself heard. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I’ll tell you another time. You sound a bit busy. Have you got your date yet?’

  She was due to be replaced by a colleague. At first she’d been looking forward to some leave. But this past week she’d started to sound less keen. It didn’t make me worried, exactly, but I was concerned.

  ‘I’m going to have to go.’

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, usual time.’

  ‘Nicholas?’

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘Look after yourself.’

  I started to laugh as the phone went dead.

  My next call was to a London number. This time the line was a lot clearer.

  23

  I LEFT THE flat and crossed the street to the Metro. One change would get me to Paveletskaya, and from there the Aeroexpress to Domodedovo took just under an hour. That was the quick bit. Security at the airport had been a nightmare since the suicide bombing in January. The queues could snake around for miles inside the building. Passengers were missing their flights. It was going to mean I couldn’t just try and grab a seat on the next Heathrow plane. I’d have to factor in at least a couple of hours of downtime before I could get airside.

  As I neared the entrance, something registered in my peripheral vision. I didn’t turn my head. I carried on until I was nearly inside, then stopped, checked my watch and looked around like I was weighing up my options.

  About fifty metres down the road was a vehicle. I couldn’t see the driver, but it was either Ant and Dec’s Audi from outside the hotel or one that looked exactly like it, right down to the half-moons carved out of the grime on the windscreen and the two shapes filling the front seats inside.

  PART FOUR

  1

  Eastcheap, London

  Friday, 18 March

  07.20 hrs

  COFFEE SHOPS ARE like London buses. You don’t see one for ages, then three come along at once. I sat with my frothy cappuccino and stack of Danishes as more and more people lined up like lemmings for their pre-work caffeine fix. Nearly all of them had headphones or mobiles stuck to their ears.

  This branch of Starbucks was on the north side of London Bridge, by Monument tube. Jules had decided he didn’t want me to come to the office. His syndicate dealt with kidnap and ransom. K&R was a private, secretive world. His bosses wouldn’t want him bringing somebody in to tread across their turf – especially when Jules knew that that somebody wouldn’t be wearing a suit.

  I sipped at the froth. I’d gone to my flat in Docklands straight from Heathrow and got my head down for a couple of hours. I’d had a lukewarm shower when I got up because I’d forgotten to spark up the immersion heater when I came in. I gave it a twenty-minute burst and jumped in.

  The place was covered with dust. Dust sheets were for the movies, or so I thought. I hadn’t sold the 911 or the flat, or even rented it out when I went to Moscow. I didn’t need to. Prices had taken a hit in the recession, but they’d pick up again. As Mark Twain kept yelling from the Moscow billboards: ‘Buy land: I hear they aren’t making it any more!’

  Besides, I didn’t know what I was doing with Anna, and neither, I guessed, did Anna know what she was doing with me. We were sort of experimenting with the idea of living together.

  The newspapers were still dominated this morning by the Japanese tsunami and Gaddafi’s war.

  Japan had raised its nuclear-contamination alert level as core damage to Reactors 2 and 3 was worse than expected after the ’quake. Panic had spread overseas. Shops in parts of the US had been stripped of iodine pills.

  Libya’s government was declaring an immediate ceasefire after a UN Security Council resolution backed ‘all necessary measures’ short of occupation to protect civilians in the country. But no one seriously thought Gaddafi would stop bombing his own people just because he said he would.

  Elsewhere in the Middle East, yet another country was going tits up. At least thirty-three anti-government protesters had been shot dead in Yemen and another 145 wounded when government forces opened fire on a group of them. The Arab freedom wave kept on rolling, but at a cost.

  It was hard to cut away from it and keep my head full of Somalis and piracy. Until I’d joined the Regiment and had to deal with that shit head-on, I’d thought pirates belonged to a far-off world where the Jolly Roger flew on a Caribbean masthead while all the lads swigged rum and gave it the old yo-ho-ho on the quarterdeck. But these fuckers didn’t sport eye patches and head-scarves. There wasn’t a Captain Sparrow in sight. They ran round in flip-flops, shorts and tank-tops. They carried grappling hooks, RPGs and AK47s. And now they killed people.

  2

  SOMALIA IS A failed state. Its landmass, which makes up the Horn of Africa, is stuck between Ethiopia and Kenya to the west, and the Indian Ocean to the east. Its northern coastline is on the Gulf of Aden, the other side of which lies Yemen, whose government had just taken to killing protesters. Talk about keeping bad company.

  The piracy committed offshore is a direct result of the anarchy that rages on land. The same thing happens in other weakly governed states, like Indonesia and Nigeria, but it’s particularly bad in Somalia. The country has been caught up in civil war since the 1990s. Come to think of it, it can’t really be called a country any more.

  In the early 1980s, Somali pirates were mostly unemployed youths who hung round the docks looking for work. The warlords, the clan leaders, bunged them in a couple of boats and sent them out to mug whatever they found coming from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden. As one of the choke-points for world shipping, it offered easy pickings.

  Piracy grew into an industry. As Rudy had discovered, gangs now roved across thousands of square miles, as far east as the Seychelles, south to Tanzania, and north to the Arabian Sea and Oman. The turf was divided up. The waters of the Gulf of
Aden might as well be the streets of Mogadishu.

  A typical cell of a dozen or so men goes out into the open sea in two or three skiffs, small, cockroach-infested wood or fibreglass fishing boats, for three or four weeks at a time, taking only a couple of outboards. All other available space is filled with grappling irons, ladders, knives, assault rifles, RPGs and khat leaves, the local narcotic.

  There’s nothing to cook with. They catch fish, which they eat raw. The plan is always to find and take over a larger vessel, then live on it and use it as a mother-ship. Which was what must have happened with the skiffs that captured the Maria Feodorovna. They’d have binned the fishing boat and would now be using the yacht as a control base, having taken the hostages back to shore because they were European and would be worth a few bob.

  Why hadn’t they taken the crew as well? They were white, but maybe they were seen as fellow workers of the sea. Somali pirates had some rules. They didn’t attack all shipping. They left the Indian vessels that brought expensive goodies and food from the east, mainly because the clan warlords liked to buy the stuff with the proceeds of their crimes. If the supply dried up, the warlords wouldn’t be best pleased.

  But the fact was, these pirates attacked anything of value that floated: oil tankers, freighters, cruise ships, private yachts, they’d have a go at anything. I found it quite funny that a dozen Somali fishermen could fuck global shipping magnates about, holding them, their crews and world trade hostage. I’d have laughed into my brew if it hadn’t been for Tracy and the boy.