by Chris Ryan
Neil Slater glanced at his watch. Another ten minutes, then he’d send the boys in for showers and high tea. They’d done well, and he had a fair idea of whom he was going to choose for Saturday’s match against Wellington.
Bracing himself against the wind, Slater watched as a slight sixteen-year-old American named Reinhardt intercepted an opponent’s pass, made as if to pass in his turn, dummied, wrong-footed his opposite number, and raced for the try-line. A metre or two behind Reinhardt, a Saudi boy named al-Jubrin kept effortless pace.
The opposing full-back moved to block Reinhardt. His pile-driving tackle drove the breath from the American’s body, but by then the ball was sailing towards al-Jubrin. That the athletic young Saudi would pluck the ball from the air without breaking step was a foregone conclusion, as was the subsequent try. Masoud al-Jubrin was born to play rugby.
al-Jubrin dropped the pass. There was no try – instead the ball spun away into touch.
‘Good, Paul!’ Slater called out to Reinhardt as the boy picked himself up. ‘Masoud, what happened? You don’t usually drop those — you’ll have to do a sight better than that if we’re going to beat Wellington on Saturday.’
The Saudi pupil was silent. The wind plucked at his neatly cut hair and snatched away the pale vapour of his breath.
‘What’s wrong, Masoud?’ asked Slater.
al-Jubrin shrugged. ‘Nothing, sir.’
Slater put his hand to the boy’s forehead, noted the feverish brightness of his eyes. ‘You’re burning up. How long have you been feeling like this?’
‘Sorry, sir. Since this morning, sir.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’
‘Sorry, sir. Thought it would . . . go.’
And worried you’d be dropped from the team if you mentioned it, thought Slater.
‘I want you in that three-quarter line on Saturday,’ he told the boy. ‘Now cut along and see Matron – my guess is she’ll put you in sick bay for the night. I’ll look in during the evening, make sure you’re OK.’
al-Jubrin looked at Slater, opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it. Nodding, he headed off towards the track suits piled on the touchline.
‘And while we’re at it, I’d like you to report to Matron too, Ripley. Have her take your temperature.’
Ripley, the son of a Midlands property developer, stared angrily at Slater. At six foot one, he was already two inches taller than the games master.
‘I’m fine, sir. Honestly.’
‘To Matron, Ripley. I’ll be checking with her.’
‘Sir, I can’t miss this evening’s prep. I’ve got a history project I’ve got to—’
‘You heard me, Ripley. I want you lean and mean for Saturday.’
The boy bit his lip, nodded, and loped off. Sometimes, thought Slater, these rich kids had it hardest. Would Ripley — basically a decent lad — be ruined by the privileges that he would undoubtedly inherit? And Reinhardt, he wondered, seeing the American limping towards him. How would he be ten years from now? Would that cheerful sportsmanship survive whatever corporate hell was waiting for him?
‘All right Paul?’
‘Cream-crackered, sir.’
Slater smiled. If nothing else, an English education had broadened the boy’s vocabulary. ‘Train hard, fight easy, Paul – who said that?’
Reinhardt frowned. ‘You’ve got me there, sir.’
‘General Suvorov,’ said Slater, and for a moment he saw the words painted on the adjutant’s door at the old regimental HQ, smelt the gun-oil in the armoury.
‘Who was General Suvorov, sir? I’m afraid my modern history’s a bit shaky.’
Slater looked at the boy, at his narrow shoulders and mud-caked knees. God, he thought, they were so young. ‘Look him up, Paul,’ he said gently.
Watching the rugby squad trudge back to the school, Slater wondered if he was ever going to find life at Bolingbroke’s School normal rather than freakish. On paper his was a good job. Games master to a school like Bolingbroke’s was not a position to be sneezed at – on a good day the 1st XV could give Sedburgh or Ampleforth a run for their money. And the boys were good kids, for the most part. Too bloody rich and too bloody foreign, one of his colleagues had confided to Slater during his first staff tea, but Slater liked them. In many ways, he found the foreign kids – the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Indians – easiest to get along with. Away from their overindulgent parents they had a hunger to prove themselves as individuals. They had no real understanding of the British class system, and they treated Slater exactly as they treated the other teachers: with an earnest, if at times joshing, respect.
Like Slater, the foreigners had started out as outsiders. Unlike Slater, however, they soon discovered that wealth and privilege confers its own insidership. For all the importance attached to rugby and cricket, games masters did not rank highly in Bolingbroke’s pecking order. Slater was considered a cut above Jimmy McCracken – the semi-alcoholic groundsman who tended the pitches and was known to staff and pupils alike as ‘Windy’ on account of his dodgy colon – but well below any of the other teachers, most of whom were Oxbridge graduates and former public schoolboys. When he had first arrived at the school Slater had wondered whether he should imitate them, with their leather-patched sports jackets, their polished brogues and their baggy corduroys. He’d dismissed the idea immediately — he’d never get it quite right. To carry off that that kind of upper-class shabbiness you had to be born to it.
And Slater, as was regularly made clear to him, hadn’t been born to it. He wore civilian clothes – as one of the warrant-officers had memorably pointed out on the first day of his undercover course — like a squaddie on the piss. He’d never quite sorted out the whole clothes thing. Or, for that matter, the accent thing. Or the posh restaurant and vintage wine thing that was supposed to work so well with women. Or any of that host of other ‘things’ that made for an easy progress through life.
But he did, Slater mused ruefully as the cold dusk gathered around him, have certain skills. At this moment there was a hot shower waiting for him and with luck a pot of tea and a plate of Jammy Dodgers in the staff room. If he ended up drinking the tea alone, well, bollocks to the lot of them. It was a billet, and all things considered, a comfortable one.
He pulled on his sweatshirt. With a fair wind behind them Masoud and Paul and the rest of the lads should punch holes through the Wellington defence on Saturday. Train hard, fight easy.
As he made his way towards the school buildings, Slater’s attention was caught by a vehicle on the public road beyond the boundary wall. It was a Cherokee four-wheel drive, proceeding at about twenty miles an hour. Even given the warning signs outside the school, this seemed unnaturally slow for the road, and Slater realised that he had noticed the vehicle driving in the same direction and at the same speed earlier in the day. The Cherokee was a maroon colour, he remembered, although now in the failing light it looked almost black.
For a moment he wondered if the driver was a parent. A lot of the parents had Cherokees – it was pretty much Bolingbroke’s signature vehicle – but not many went for the tinted window option. What was the point of spending all that money, after all, if no one could see who you were? And none of the parents considered themselves bound by the local speed restrictions, as this driver clearly did. Slater watched as the four-wheel drive crested a rise and passed out of sight. He had memorised the number.
Anxious to unload his misgivings and forget the incident with a clear conscience, Slater walked over to the main gate, where a white Mondeo, bearing the mailed-fist logo of a private security company, idled at the verge. The car was more of a public relations stunt than anything else, in Slater’s opinion. All it served to do was to underline the fact that the children of some very rich people were in residence – a fact which the blue and gold school notice-board (motto: Fortitude, Truth, Valour) made clear at a glance.
It was Bolingbroke’s proximity to Heathrow – less than fifty minut
es in a chauffeur-driven Lexus – which attracted the overseas customers. Summer visits were especially popular. Parents could fly in in the morning, take in a lunchtime meeting and a dash down Bond Street, and then spend a lazy couple of hours in a deckchair pretending to understand the rules of cricket. Rather fewer of these parents, Slater had observed, volunteered for duty on the rugby touchline. In the winter months, he supposed, parents were happy for the formation of their sons’ characters to proceed on trust.
But there were real security issues, as there were wherever the children of the super-rich gathered. And while the school did not wish to turn itself into a high-tech prison – much of its commercial appeal lay in its traditional appearence and atmosphere – it wished to make clear that it took these issues seriously. Hence the white Mondeo.
And hence, Slater assumed, the chugging exhaust. What made people leave their car-engines switched on for hours at a time? He knocked on the driver’s side window, which was blurred with condensation.
The driver lowered the glass, releasing a warm odour of fart and processed food, and regarded him suspiciously. Beyond the driver a second man was leafing through a pornographic magazine.
‘Hi! My name’s Slater. I’m the games master.’
The driver, a heavy-set man in a Barbour jacket, said nothing. A half-eaten meat pie sat in its foil dish in his lap. Pastry crumbs speckled his thighs.
‘Did either of you notice a maroon Cherokee passing here a minute ago?’ Slater continued.
‘Why would you be concerning yourself with a maroon Cherokee, sir?’
‘It’s been past at least a couple of times today. Going very slowly. Looked to me as if it was scoping the place out.’
The second man turned his magazine through ninety degrees. ‘Fuck me!’ he said, grimacing with disbelief. ‘Look at the state of that!’
The driver glanced at the magazine and turned back to Slater. ‘A slow-moving maroon Cherokee that you think you’ve seen before.’
‘And these have got to be silicone,’ murmured the second man. ‘They’re all over the fucking shop.’
‘I took the number,’ said Slater, ignoring him. ‘You might want to get it checked out. Here, I’ll put it on your pad.’
Smirking, the driver handed Slater his pad. It was blank. Slater wrote down the number.
‘Don’t worry, sir,’ said the driver, returning the pad to his pocket without looking at it. ‘We’re professionals. But thanks for the tip.’
‘As the actress said to the bishop,’ added the second man.
As Slater made his way up the drive, he heard both men laugh.
The Cherokee was parked in a lay-by 500 yards down the road.
In the driver’s seat, smoking nervously, was a twenty-year-old man of Pakistani descent in an Umbro tracksuit. He was good with cars, and over the painful course of his teenage years – five convictions for taking and driving away, thirty offences taken into consideration – had refined his skills to the point where he was now considered one of the top wheel-men in the Gateshead area.
In the back seat sat two slightly older men, both bearded, both dressed in black windcheaters, jeans and hiking boots. They were Shi’ite Muslims from al-Ahsa, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province. The men were cousins; their mutual grandfather had emigrated from the Iranian Gulf port of Basra in 1925 and, unlike their Saudi neighbours, the two had been brought up strictly in the tenets of their faith.
They were followers of a radical Shi’ite holy man named Shayk Nabil Rahmat. Rahmat was the founder of a revolutionary faction called al-Hizb al-Makhfi – the Hidden Party. Acting with the utmost secrecy, and guarding its identity closely, the Hidden Party had carried out bombings in Riyadh, Jeddah, and even the Prophet’s own city of Medina.
The Hidden Party, however, had been dealt a severe blow. Seven of its members had been convicted of terrorism by a religious court in Ahsa province, and condemned to death by beheading. Only the decision of a senior judge sitting on the Court of Cassation, the final court of appeal, stood between the seven party members and the execution of sentence.
And unless extraordinary pressure was brought to bear, that decision was a foregone conclusion. The judge in question was known as one of the most conservative members of the Saudi judiciary, and vehemently opposed to everything that Rahmat and his followers stood for. His name was Shaykh Marwan al-Jubrin. He was Masoud al-Jubrin’s father.
The two men in the Cherokee had come to England in order to set in motion the applying of extreme pressure on the old judge. They had secured false Turkish passports from the intelligence services of the Islamic Republic of Iran, flown from Tehran to Rome, and then travelled across Europe by train to Denmark. In Copenhagen they had embarked on an overnight ferry to Newcastle, where they had shown their Turkish passports and been met by a local sweet-manufacturer. This man, a devout Shi’ite who had once burnt an effigy of Salman Rushdie for the benefit of an ITV news crew, had placed his spare bedroom at their disposal. At dawn, having picked up the driver, the sweet-manufacturer had driven the cousins to a lock-up garage where the stolen and replated Cherokee was waiting. Concealed beneath the driver’s seat were the two weapons they had requested: a loaded Smith and Wesson Model 25 revolver and a sheathed Gerber Patriot knife with a six-inch oxidised blade.
The trio had begun the drive south immediately and by 2pm, after an unpleasant meal consumed at a service station outside Henley-on-Thames, had begun to recce the roads around Bolingbroke’s School.
The cousins waited in the car, smoking, until it was fully dark. Then they embraced, whispered a prayer, took a weapon each, and climbed out into the icy cold of the lay-by. Their point of entry to the school, selected two hours earlier, was close to the rugby pitch where the 1st XV practice game had taken place earlier.
Within minutes both men were crouched outside the seven-foot perimeter wall. A leg up, a grunt of effort, a helping hand and they were both over, falling with a soft crunch into the frosted bracken. Purposefully they made their way towards the school buildings, by now a blaze of light. Their afternoon’s reconnaissance had told them they had little to fear from the security guards and they moved fluently from shadow to shadow, eventually vanishing from sight among the ground-scraping branches of an elderly yew tree. A gravelled path led past this tree – a path joining the main school building to the modern refectory block. The two men settled down to wait.
For twenty-five minutes the darkness reshaped itself round them. Boys passed by, but always in twos or threes. Finally a solitary figure appeared, a slender fair-haired youth of about fourteen carrying a Game Boy. Apparently heedless of the cold, the teenager paused beneath one of the lighted refectory windows, his fingers stabbing at the little console. The two men’s eyes met. Soundlessly they climbed to their feet.
It was skilfully accomplished. Within seconds the boy had been bundled into the blackness beneath the yew. One man held him, clamping a strong hand across his mouth, the other urgently motioned silence. Eyes wide with terror, the boy nodded. To reinforce the need for silence one of the bearded figures produced the Smith and Wesson. In response the boy wet himself and began to shake.
‘Listen, my friend,’ whispered the second man. ‘We are not going to hurt you – we just wish to talk. Now, what is your name?’
‘C-Christopher,’ the boy managed.
‘OK, Christopher, when I give the word we are going to walk down the hill towards the games fields. Like I said, we will not hurt you but you must keep silent. Do you understand?’
The boy nodded, still shaking.
‘Good boy. Let’s go.’
The two men led the boy back in the direction they had come. Soon they were below the perimeter fence again. Getting him over was not easy. An icy frost now coated the stone, and terror seemed to have robbed the boy of all co-ordination. Eventually, however, they managed to bundle him up and over.
‘Are you hurt, Christopher?’ hissed one of the men as they landed to either side of him.
<
br /> The boy shook his head.
‘Just walk then,’ said the man. ‘Like normal, OK?’
In the Cherokee they turned on the ignition and the heater. The man with the Smith and Wesson pocketed his weapon and took out a small mobile phone.
‘OK, Christopher. I want you to ask to speak to Masoud al-Jubrin. I’m going to dial the number of his mobile, and I want you to arrange to meet him in the same place that we . . . that we met you.’
‘But I don’t know Masoud. At least, I know who he is but—’
‘It doesn’t matter. Just say you have something of great importance for him. Something you have to give him in person.’
‘Are you going to hurt him?’
‘No. We just have to speak to him. To give him a message. That is all.’
The boy frowned doubtfully at the windscreen. At his side, the black-clothed figure punched out a memorised number and handed him the little Motorola.
A murmured conversation ensued. A more confident tone was returning to the boy’s voice, especially now that the revolver was out of sight.
‘Masoud’s in the sick bay,’ he said eventually, lowering the phone. ‘He’s got a flu bug or something.’
The men looked at each other.
‘I’d like you to take us there, Christopher,’ said one.
The Delves house prefects were watching a documentary about the artist Tracey Emin in their common room. In theory they were supposed to be in their dormitories by ten; their minds and bodies, the headmaster insisted, needed proper recovery time if they were to handle the combined demands of competitive sport and the A-level syllabus. In practice, however, they could request late TV time if the programme in question was deemed to be of sufficient cultural value. As deputy housemaster of Delves, it was Slater’s duty to police this system. He had never heard of Tracey Emin but had given the programme the nod anyway.
When he stuck his head into the common room there was a pair of soiled knickers on the TV screen.
‘What’s this?’ he asked one of the boys, a rangy computer-fanatic named Tyrell.
