by Mark Dawson
“No. I was questioned here. A man called Abu. He said that the FBI raided the house.”
“They did. I was watching. We didn’t know that was going to happen. I still don’t know what it was about.”
Isabella continued. She told him how she had tried to escape, and how she had been overpowered and loaded onto the helicopter that had flown them to the airport. She told him about the flight aboard al-Khawari’s private jet, the mechanical problem that had forced them to turn around and land in Turkey and then the trip through the country toward Syria.
She told him about the ambush.
“I know,” Pope said. “I was there. I flew from Switzerland and got ahead of them. I was ready to stop the car and get you out, but the ambush happened before I could do anything about it. I followed instead. And then they brought the chopper in.”
“That was you?” she said, remembering the assault that had almost freed her.
“Yes,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything else. The chopper . . . I was outgunned.”
“How did you find me here, then?”
“We tracked the helicopter. I came over the border and followed it here. And then they were advertising the executions. They had pictures of Salim and Khalil. I didn’t know you’d be there, but it was as good a place as any to start. How did you get away from them?”
“I had some help,” she said. “One of the guards is English. He wants to get away. He let me out.” She would get to that, to how she had escaped and to Aqil and to what she needed to do now, but first she needed Pope to tell her what was going on. “Will you be honest with me?” she asked him.
“Of course.”
“Have you told me everything?”
“About?”
“You didn’t know about the FBI. Salim was going to Beirut, not Syria. They were going to kill him tonight. And they told me things when they were questioning me. Things you need to know. But you need to explain what’s happening first.”
“I’ll try.”
“At the house,” she started. “You said that it was to help break into Salim’s server.”
“Yes.”
“And the device worked?”
“Yes,” he said. “As far as I know, it worked perfectly.”
“Are you sure it was meant to hack into his system? Did you tell me the truth about what it would do?”
“That’s what I was told.”
“I don’t think that’s what it did at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“They questioned me twice. They asked me a lot of questions. They said the government released evidence that says al-Khawari and the people here were behind the bombings in London. That he put the money up, but it was their operation. But al-Khawari swears he had nothing to do with it. The man who questioned me said his organization didn’t either. And, the more I think about it, the more I think he’s telling the truth.”
“I’ve had the same thought,” Pope admitted. “ISIS ambushed him and brought him here. Why did they do that? They questioned him. They beat him. Maybe they got what they wanted, maybe they didn’t, but they were done with him. They were going to kill him tonight.”
It was a dense, confusing picture, and Isabella could draw only flashes of sense from it. “But how does that fit with what you told me?”
“It doesn’t fit. If he was working with them, he would have gone straight to Raqqa, not Beirut, and they would have treated him like a hero, not tried to put him on a cross.”
“Salim told them that there was no way that his servers could be hacked from outside. They know what I was there for. They know I was in Salim’s house so that we could break the security. But he says it wasn’t so that we could get the evidence that he was involved in the attacks. He says that it was so that the evidence could be planted. If that’s right . . .”
Pope finished it for her. “Then the whole al-Khawari angle is a set-up. It means everything I was told was a lie.”
Isabella listened as Pope told her about what had happened to him and Snow and Kelleher after the raid on al-Khawari’s compound. He explained that they had been ambushed by a well-drilled and professional team, and that Snow and Kelleher had been killed. Pope had only escaped by stealing a boat and taking it into the middle of Lake Geneva. He had crossed to the opposite bank, stolen a car and travelled to Geneva Airport, where he had met Vivian Bloom. It was Bloom who had arranged for him to be flown to Turkey so that he could go after Isabella and the al-Khawaris. But Bloom had been very clear: they were running to Syria.
But they weren’t.
“I think I’ve been very, very foolish.” She thought that he was about to elaborate, but he stopped himself. “Never mind,” he said instead. “We can talk about this later. The only way we’ll work it out is if I can get to al-Khawari. I have to get him out of the country. He’s the key to this.”
“I’ll help,” Isabella said.
Pope shook his head. “No.”
“You need help.”
“Absolutely not. You’ve already been put in unacceptable danger.”
“You don’t have a choice,” she said.
“Isabella—”
“You’ll have to tie me up and leave me here. I won’t stay and wait for you to come back.” He began to protest, but she shut him down with a brusque, “Don’t argue. I’m not a helpless girl. You know what I can do—you’ve seen. That’s why you asked me to get involved with Khalil. How do you think I got away from them? I broke out of that building, stole a car and headed for the border.”
“So what happened? Why are you still here?”
“The third man tonight? The third one they were going to kill?”
“He was young. Who is he?”
“His name is Aqil. He’s from England. He let me out. We got as far as a checkpoint on the way out of the city. I shot two of them. We would’ve made it through, but Aqil lost his nerve. I headed back into the city, but I had to leave him. They came after me. I killed another two, found a place to hide and then waited it out. I was going to make another run for it, but then I found out what they were going to do to Aqil. I’m not going to run and leave him to be killed, Mr Pope.”
“You’re not responsible for him,” Pope said. “He came here. You know what that makes him?”
“He didn’t think it through—”
Pope interrupted, “It makes him a terrorist—”
“He’s not a terrorist,” Isabella replied, cutting him off in turn. “He’s made a mistake and now he’s out of his depth. And he wants to get out.”
“I don’t care what he wants. I can get you out, Isabella. And I’ll get Salim out. But that’s that. The more of us there are, the less chance we have of making it. I don’t know anything about him, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that he’s your friend. This isn’t a humanitarian mission. He chose to come here. He’s as guilty as the others. If they kill him, it’s his fault. It’s nothing to do with us.”
“I’m not leaving him.” She stood. “It’s up to you. You do what you have to do. But don’t think you’re responsible for me. I’m here because I agreed to help you. I could have stayed in Marrakech, but I didn’t. I make my own decisions, and I’ll live with the consequences. If you don’t want to get him out, I’ll just do it without you.”
“No, Isabella.”
She waved away his objection. “Like you say, it’s just a block away. I’ll take one of your weapons, or you can stop me and I’ll go and find one. And it’s not far to the border. I’ll get him, get a car, and I won’t stop this time.”
Pope turned away from her. He reached up to scrub a hand against his scalp. When he turned back to her again, his expression was rueful. “Has anyone ever told you how alike you are to your bloody mother?” He shook his head. “All right. You win. We’ll get them both.”
“And Khalil and Jasmin?”
“You want them, too?”
“No,” she said. “Not really, but they don’t deserve to be left here.”
�
�If they’re there,” Pope conceded.
“What do you want me to do?”
“You can help, but you do exactly as I say. Can you do that?”
Pope crossed the room to his backpack. He opened it, reached inside and withdrew a 9mm pistol. He held it up: it was a Beretta M9 semi-automatic.
“Did your mother show you how to use this?”
She took it from him, expertly ejected the magazine, checked it and pushed it back into the port. “What do you think?” she said.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Pope drove the pickup back down the road from which they had arrived, slowing as they approached the building where the prisoners were being held. They drove by, both of them straining their eyes as the storm obscured everything with windblown sand. Isabella could make out the three vehicles that they had seen, parked up against the wall of the prison block. There was a single light burning above the entrance to the facility, with a guard standing beneath it, partially sheltered from the storm behind the flimsy wooden guardhouse. The building looked almost unrecognisable from when Isabella and Aqil had fled from it; she had been concentrating on the way ahead, she supposed, and the storm was making everything look strange and alien.
He drove on for another hundred metres and then parked.
“I’ll go back and scout it. Stay here.”
“I know it,” she said. “I’m coming.”
Isabella opened her door. The wind was too loud for him to make himself heard without shouting, so he just paused, shaking his head and pointing back inside the cab.
Isabella ignored him and started back to the prison block.
Pope caught her up and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Do what I say,” he said. His voice was muffled through his headscarf and almost inaudible through the wailing of the wind, but his irritation was obvious and unmistakeable.
She gave a nod to tell him that she had heard him and understood, and then, before he could say anything else, she set off for the block again. He gave up and followed.
There was no point in scouting the front of the facility. They had already seen it, and there was no realistic prospect of gaining access without being seen by the guard. The factory was surrounded by a concrete fence that was, in turn, topped by mesh and then coils of razor wire. It was too tall and too difficult to climb, but as they scouted along it, she saw something that gave her cause to stop.
Pope joined her. She pointed at a narrow gap at the foot of the concrete block. The ground fell away, leaving a hole that was fifty centimetres wide and perhaps forty centimetres deep.
“I can get through that,” she said.
Pope looked down at the gap and shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“Come on,” she said. “What are you going to do? We can’t go in the front without a firefight. We can’t climb the fence without cutting ourselves to shreds. I can get under there with the Beretta, get around to the front and take the guard out. Wait at the gate. I’ll let you in from the inside.”
“I don’t like it,” he said again.
“Got a better idea?”
“You’d be on your own.”
“Not really. You’d be here.”
“On the other side of the fence,” he said dubiously.
“Come on, Mr Pope. The storm’s not going to last forever. You said it yourself: we have to take advantage of it. If you have another plan, let’s have it.”
He paused. His scarf was pulled tight around his face, his eyes barely visible through a narrow slit left. “I don’t,” he said.
“So?”
He was uncomfortable about it; she could see. “All right,” he said.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Isabella lay on her back and slid beneath the concrete slab. She got her head and shoulders through without any problem and lay there for a moment, half on one side and half on the other, trying to listen for anything that might alert her to a risk that she might be observed. The wind was too loud; she couldn’t hear anything. She wriggled ahead, the base of the slab pressing against her chest and then her hips. She reached down with her arms, levering herself upwards and then, by pressing with her feet and scrabbling with her hands, she was able to clamber out from the shallow trench. She rolled over, onto her hands and knees, and then raised herself up onto her haunches. She took the Beretta from the waistband of her trousers and scurried ahead. There was a margin of three feet between the concrete wall and the building, and as she pressed herself up against the bricks, she listened again. She still heard nothing.
She felt the adrenaline in her blood. Her fingers twitched, her right hand clasping and unclasping around the pistol, and she felt the jolt of energy in the muscles of her legs and shoulders. With her back squared against the wall, she shuffled toward the front of the building. The sand had gathered against the wall in little drifts, and her boots sank into it. The wind howled, seemingly louder and louder, and she had to squint when she turned her head into it.
She reached the corner of the building. The front of the prison block led away to her left, and she saw the wooden guard post. She waited there, crouched low, with the sharp corner of the building pressed into her back, and observed. The lightbulb in the hut swung to and fro in the wind, the cone of light lashing left and right. Isabella had seen the guard as they had driven by the front of the building, but now she was unsure whether he was still there. She gripped the butt of the pistol and was about to creep ahead when she saw a shadow detach from the deeper darkness inside the gatehouse; it was the guard, and he was coming toward her.
She slid back around the side of the building and positioned herself low to the ground so that she was resting on her toes, the brick against her back and with her weight pressing down on her quadriceps until they burned. She raised her left arm, her forearm pressed against the brick, and then aimed the gun at the edge of the wall. The guard appeared from around the side of the building, just ambling, perhaps something as mundane as stretching his legs. He stopped a metre from where Isabella was waiting and she took aim. He rearranged his headscarf, and as her finger began to tighten around the trigger, he turned and walked back toward the guard post.
Isabella came out from behind the wall and watched. The man kept going, walking to the other side of the building.
Isabella changed her mind. She hurried after him, the gun raised and ready to shoot, but rather than fire, she turned into the entrance to the building and tried the handle. It was unlocked; she opened the door and went inside.
She remembered the interior: the narrow corridor with two doors to the left and right and a set of double doors straight ahead. The double doors opened out into the factory’s main space, where the cells had been constructed.
She paused there for a moment and listened. Nothing, save the howling of the wind. Should she stop, go back and shoot the guard and let Pope inside? She decided against it. She would get Aqil first.
She stepped forward, stopping at the door to her right. She pushed it open with her left hand, the gun held out ready in her right. There was a small room with a screen down the centre that extended halfway across it. There was a latrine in the floor to the left of the screen and a sink to the right. The room was empty.
She let the door close, crossed the corridor and checked the other door. The room looked as if it was used as an office. There was a table and a chair, and three A4 ring binders stacked on the table next to a pile of papers. A black and white ISIS flag had been hung from the wall and, below that, there was a single hook. A bunch of keys had been left on the hook. Isabella collected them.
She went back to the corridor and, slowly and carefully, approached the double doors.
She pushed them apart and, the gun held out ahead of her, slipped between them and into the murkiness beyond. She remembered it: the cells that had been built against one wall of the old warehouse, the single light fixed to the middle of the wall, the gash in the ceiling through which particles of sand gently fell to the floor. Deep
shadows filled the corners of the room, so dark as to be impenetrable, and as she paused to acclimatise herself, she thought she saw a blur of movement against the opposite wall. She aimed, the trigger against the pad of her index finger. She saw the smudge of movement again, but as she was about to fire, it moved through the light and she saw it for what it was: a mongrel, so thin that the corrugation of its ribcage was visible across the room, sheltering from the storm inside the building. It saw her, cocked its head and then shuffled away again into the gloom.
Isabella hurried to the cells. The first three, including her own, were empty, the doors left open. She looked inside and saw a mess of blankets, mattresses and discarded clothes on the floor of each of the narrow spaces.
The door of the fourth cell was locked. She slid back the peephole and looked inside.
She saw Salim al-Khawari.
He looked up at her.
“Be quiet,” she said in a tight little whisper.
His face flashed through fear and confusion. “Who are you?”
She doubted that he would have been able to see her face in the gloom.
“I’m going to get you out,” she said. “You need to wait there and be quiet. Understand? No noise.”
He nodded.
“How many guards are here?”
“I do not know. I think—” he said. He paused, mid-sentence. “Daisy?”
“Answer the question,” she said.
He stumbled. “I—I—there were two in the car with us. We were moved this morning before they—” He paused again, and she knew that he was talking about what had nearly happened to him and his son this evening. “They said the place was being closed down, but they brought us back here after the explosion. After the drone.”
“There was no one else here?”
“It’s just us. My son and me and the other one they were going to kill.”
“Be quiet. I’ll be back.”
She continued along the line of cells. The next one was empty, the door open, but the following one was locked. She looked inside. Khalil was there, curled up on a mattress, his knees drawn up tight against his chest. He looked as if he was asleep, and she didn’t disturb him.
