Firefight

by Chris Ryan

  The men had said that it was because he had not cleaned his gun. Even as a boy, Ahmed doubted that - it was probably a faulty, cheaply made weapon - but he knew then that he would never take the risk. At that young age he had decided on two things: never brag about how good a shot you are, and always clean your gun.

  Back then, in Afghanistan, they had used something different - a thick oil that stuck to your fingers and stained your already dirty clothes. He had liked that smell too, just as he had enjoyed stripping down the weapons - mostly AK-47s in those days, taken from dead Soviet soldiers or supplied by the Americans.

  He stopped for a moment and sneered. He really had thought the Americans were their friends back then, when they gave them money and ammunition. But not now. No, now the Americans had shown their true colours; shown exactly what the life of a Muslim was worth to them. He snorted heavily to himself and continued to clean the gun barrel.

  No one would ever find him here, of that he was certain. The first thing he had done when he arrived in England was establish a number of safe houses - places he, and only he, knew about. He would never tell anyone where these safe houses were, no matter how close they were to him or how much he trusted them. That was the rule: these were places where he could disappear utterly, for weeks, even months at a time. They were chosen at random, so that nobody could second-guess where he would be staying; and they were always rented under false names - names that could never be tracked back to Faisal Ahmed.

  The gun barrel was clean. He held it up to the light and looked through it. The shiny curve of its interior pleased him. Ahmed placed it back down on the table, picked up another piece and continued to polish and clean another of the satisfying metallic components.

  When the cleaning process was finished, he clunked all the pieces together in order, grunting in satisfaction when the last one slotted in. He caressed the gun momentarily, as if caressing a woman, then scraped his chair back, picked up the MP5 and carried it to the side of the room. Along each wall were rows upon rows of metal shelving, firmly bolted together. The shelves were packed from floor to ceiling. Boxes of Semtex, G60 stun grenades, lined up neatly like toy soldiers. A couple of bulky Claymore mines with their long reels of detonating cord. There was an abundance of guns, too: a C8 carbine and grenade launcher, a Remington 870 with RIP tear-gas rounds and a selection of handguns. Faisal Ahmed knew that no amount of weaponry, ammunition or explosives were a substitute for his own clear thinking and tactical awareness; but the time would come when he would need firepower and it was good to know that everything was in place.

  He put the MP5 where it belonged on the shelf, then turned his attention elsewhere. There was a sleeping bag and a rolled-up foam mattress. He unfurled them on the floor. Then he checked that the door to the basement was locked, before taking a small handgun from the shelf. He slotted a loaded magazine into it, rested it by his makeshift bed and turned off the light. In the darkness he clambered into the sleeping bag, but it was a long time before he fell asleep.

  Sleep never comes easily, he found, when you know that someone wants to kill you.

  *

  The first time they made love it had been frenzied and quick. Kate had continued to dig her sharp fingernails into his back, noisily and vigorously responding to his enthusiasm. When it was over, they didn't speak a word: they simply lay there, her arm draped over his chest, her leg hooked over his. How long they lay like that, Will couldn't have said; but after a while he felt her hand moving gently over his torso and she was snuggling up meaningfully to him. It felt good. He rolled her over and pinned her down by her arms; Kate closed her eyes and groaned in anticipation as he kissed her.

  It lasted longer the second time, but was no less passionate. When they had finished, they both fell into a deep, satisfied sleep.

  It was still dark when Will awoke suddenly. He glanced over at the clock by the bedside. Half-past four. He laid back and stared into the blackness. His throat was dry and he would have liked to get up and find a glass of water; but he didn't want to wake the slumbering form next to him. So instead he remained still, with only the darkness and his thoughts for company.

  Was it wrong, what he had just done? It felt strange, being with a woman other than his wife. Had he been sober, had he been thinking straight, perhaps he wouldn't have done it the first time. But as he lay there, he found that he didn't feel bad. He didn't feel he had betrayed anyone.

  Betrayal. That one word brought to his mind the image of Faisal Ahmed. You can tell a lot from a photo, he thought to himself. An awful lot. Ahmed was a good-looking man. His eyes were calm. He seemed at peace with himself. At peace with what he had done.

  And then Will thought of the churchyard. The cold, lonely grave where, thanks to that man, his family lay dead.

  In the darkness, something became clear to him: wasting the rest of his life was no way to honour his family. Their death was only worth mourning if life was worth living. Strange how it had taken a night in bed with someone he barely knew for him to realise that.

  Strange, too, how something else was perfectly clear to him now. The two men at Thames House, unwittingly, had offered him a lifeline. A way out of his bland existence. They might want Faisal Ahmed dead for the best of reasons, but in this moment of honesty Will knew one thing: he wanted him dead so that he could avenge his family. Avenge them, and move on.

  As quietly as he could, he slipped out of bed. Kate stirred, but did not wake, as he groped his way out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, where he turned the dimmer light on low. His clothes were still on the floor; they felt dirty and greasy as he dragged them on. He was just pulling the belt buckle tight when the door opened. Kate stood in the doorway, naked and dishevelled. She eyed him seriously.

  'Are you going?' she asked.

  'I have to,' Will replied. 'I'm sorry.'

  Kate inclined her head. 'I won't see you again, will I?'

  Will hesitated. 'Probably not,' he answered, honestly. 'It's best this way, I promise.'

  'Another woman?'

  Will smiled affectionately. 'No, Kate,' he said,'not another woman. Just something I have to do.' He stepped forward and kissed her on the cheek. 'You take care, Kate,' he said kindly. 'And be careful who you take home from the pub next time. They're not all like me, you know.'

  'I wouldn't know,' Kate told him. 'That's the first time I've done it. The last, probably.'

  And with a half-smile, she watched as without any further word of farewell, Will descended the steps and let himself out of the flat.

  It was freezing outside and Will had a raging hunger. It took him twenty minutes to find a café that was open. An inviting yellow light spilled out on to the street from the misted-up shop windows and inside it was already nearly full of workers guzzling down hot drinks and plates of fried food. Will ordered the works and sat on his own, gulping down mouthfuls of sweet tea and ignoring the tabloids strewn over his table. When the food came, he devoured it, then ordered more tea and prepared to sit it out until nine o'clock.

  At quarter-past, he was striding up to the front entrance of Thames House. A security guard instantly stopped him and Will realised he must look a state in his dirty clothes; but that didn't prevent him saying what he had to say.

  'I'm here to see Pankhurst,' he announced flatly. 'My name's Will Jackson. I imagine he's expecting me.'

  Within minutes he was being ushered up to the same office as yesterday.

  Pankhurst was by himself now, sitting behind his big wooden desk. His suit was immaculate and not a hair was out of place. He did not look at all surprised as Will was shown in and once they were alone he indicated that Will should take a seat.

  'I'll stand,' he told the Director General.

  'As you wish. I take it you've given some thought to our discussion of yesterday.'

  Will looked at him with intense dislike. He had only known this man for twenty-four hours, but already he loathed him. Loathed his self-satisfied demeanour. Loathed the way he
had manipulated him. Loathed the fact that they had the same aim now. Different motives, but the same aim. Like it or not, Will Jackson and Lowther Pankhurst were on the same side.

  'What is it you want me to do?' he asked.

  FIVE

  Pankhurst pressed his fingertips together. 'It's complicated, Will,' he said. 'Why don't you sit down, let me order you some coffee.'

  Reluctantly, Will took a seat. 'Forget about the coffee,' he said. 'Just talk.'

  Pankhurst nodded his head. 'We need to find Ahmed, and we need to find him quickly. But we're stabbing in the dark. Truth is, we haven't got a clue where he is. Don Priestley's a yank through and through, always exaggerating the Americans' capacity to do things; but he wasn't exaggerating about Ahmed. They did a very good job with him. If he doesn't want to be found . . .'

  'You must have people looking.'

  'Of course we have, Will. We've got a lot of people looking. But it won't do any good. We don't even know if he's in the country.'

  'Then how the hell - ?'

  Pankhurst raised his hand in the air to silence Will's outburst. The director stood up, moved round to the other side of the desk and perched on the edge, just in front of Will. 'You don't like me, Will,' he said suddenly. 'That's OK, you're in the majority. My job means that I have to do some pretty unlikeable things. But we have to work together on this and that means you need to start putting some trust in the fact that I know what I'm talking about. Are we agreed?'

  Will held his gaze and for a moment the two men simply stared at each other.

  'We're agreed,' he conceded finally.

  'Good.' Pankhurst returned to his seat and continued as if that little confrontation had never happened. 'As I say, we have a lot of people looking for him, but I don't hold out much hope that he'll be found. But we have another lead and that's what I want you to follow up.'

  'What's the lead?'

  'His sister. Latifa Ahmed.'

  Will blinked. 'You think she'll know where he is?'

  'It's possible,' Pankhurst replied. 'At least, she's our best shot. It seems that Ahmed was always very close to her. Don Priestley told you yesterday that she was the only person in Afghanistan who knew the truth when Ahmed staged his own death. What he didn't tell you was that they kept in occasional but regular contact while he was in the US.'

  'How?'

  'Letters, mostly,' Pankhurst said. 'Ahmed would pretend to be a distant cousin living in Kabul. The letter would be sent to a US contact in the capital, then passed via a long sequence of agents - long enough that it would be nighon impossible to trace the source of the letter - before being delivered to her. It would never be more than a few lines and it could take months to arrive. Even so, from what I could glean from Priestley, the CIA were less than wild about letting him do even that.'

  'Why did they?'

  'Because it was his condition. He refused to help them at all unless he could have some way of letting Latifa know that he was OK. The CIA had to give in. Then, when he was reinserted into Afghanistan in 1990, he found his own ways to keep in touch with her.'

  Pankhurst paused for a moment. 'Tell me, Will,' he continued, 'how much do you know about the Taliban and the way they treated the women of Afghanistan?'

  Will shrugged. 'Bits and pieces,' he said.

  'Right. Well let me give you some idea of the conditions under which Latifa Ahmed was forced to live when the Taliban came to power in 1996. She was forced to wear the burka, of course; she was banned from proper medical care if she was ill; she was looked upon as a third-class citizen. But in actual fact, Latifa had it a lot better than most women in Afghanistan at the time. Ahmed saw to that. He had infiltrated the highest echelons of al-Qaeda by then and had influence among the Taliban authorities. Of course, no one knew she was his sister, but he let it be known around the neighbourhood where Latifa lived that if she was interfered with in any way, it would not be tolerated.'

  'Sounds dangerous,' Will commented. 'Surely he was worried people would ask questions.'

  'It was a risk he ran,' Pankhurst agreed. 'But he meant what he said. In 1998 a member of the Taliban police stopped Latifa in the street. It's unclear what he thought her misdemeanour was, but the punishment he gave her was brutal. Nothing out of the ordinary, you understand, but still brutal. In a busy street she was beaten with a metal stick; her arm was broken and she was left weeping in the gutter. Nobody offered to help, of course, because to do that would have been to risk imprisonment or worse.

  'The following day, the policeman was found. His throat had been sliced when he was sitting at his table eating a solitary dinner. Nobody saw the killer go in or out of the house, but rumours travelled fast. Nobody lay a finger on Latifa until Ahmed was outed in Afghanistan in the year 2000.

  'When word of his true identity reached al-Qaeda's ears, the rumours that he had been protecting Latifa Ahmed simply confirmed their intelligence. Latifa's luck changed then. She was imprisoned by the Taliban, where we can only assume she experienced the brutality for which that regime is so notorious.'

  There was a silence as the two of them considered the kind of horror Latifa would have gone through.

  'How do you know all of this?' Will asked after a while.

  'When Ahmed arrived in England, we debriefed him thoroughly. At first, all he wanted to do was return to Afghanistan to rescue his sister, but we nipped that in the bud.'

  'How?'

  Pankhurst's face twitched. 'We told him she was dead.'

  'Nice.'

  'We do what's necessary, Will. Faisal Ahmed was no good to us dead in a ditch in Afghanistan. We calculated that learning of his sister's death would harden his resolve against the Taliban, make him more likely to help us. The British and American governments had always advocated regime change in the region; if he worked with us, he could be doing his bit to avenge his sister.

  'He didn't have to grieve long. British and American troops marched into Afghanistan shortly after 9/11. Latifa Ahmed was discovered in a prison on the outskirts of Kabul and we were able to break the news to a grateful Ahmed that his sister was not dead after all. She wasn't in a good way, though. She weighed a little under six stone and her body was covered in sores. She hadn't eaten for weeks, nor had she been allowed out of the tiny cell in which she had been imprisoned, even to use the lavatory. She was practically swimming in her own excrement.

  'From that point on, our intelligence on Latifa gets a bit thin. Faisal Ahmed was already proving his worth to us, so to keep him sweet, we offered to look after Latifa. She was cared for by the security forces out there for a short while - a couple of weeks at the best, until she regained some of her strength - then she disappeared. Our best guess is that after the traumas she underwent at the hand of the Taliban, she hid herself away in a quiet village somewhere - although, as you know, quiet villages are few and far between in Afghanistan. We're fairly sure, from all we know about their relationship, that Ahmed will have kept in touch with his sister somehow. We're equally convinced - and a number of psychiatric reports back this up - that he will have continued to remain in contact with her even after he went dark in 2003.