Zero 22, p.11
Zero 22, page 11
part #8 of Danny Black Series
‘Are you sure it’s genuine?’ she said.
‘I spoke to the lady. She was very kind. The tickets will arrive in the morning.’
She nodded her head slowly. For a moment, Hamoud thought the crease on her forehead meant she was going to say no. But then she smiled. ‘We deserve some good luck,’ she said. ‘Heaven knows we haven’t had much of it.’ Her eyes shone. ‘We’ll go! I’ll call my clients, and I’m sure the school will understand.’
For the first time in years, Hamoud felt light. He had something to look forward to, not just the relentless march of the days. ‘You tell them,’ Rabia said, nodding towards the children who were still transfixed by Spongebob.
Hamoud nodded gratefully. He released his hands from hers and went over to the kids. ‘Children,’ he said. ‘Turn off the TV. I have something to tell you.’
And once he’d told them, he was certain that he would never, until the day he died, forget the look on their faces.
There were more CCTV cameras in London than anywhere else in Europe. Or so they said. Alice didn’t know if it was true, but she knew this: if the security services had a picture of your face, and they wanted to track your movements in London, they had a good chance of finding you quickly. It was becoming a common strategy. The lawyers were increasingly queasy about phone taps, and the resources to track targets in person were desperately limited. But there was a vast network of surveillance cameras, and the advances in facial recognition technology meant the computers could do most of the heavy lifting.
Of course, it also meant that the techies in the facial recognition department were permanently overworked. And they liked you to know it. Alice prepared herself to break through a brick wall as she returned to the basement with a photograph of Dimitri Poliakov. She swiped herself through to the correct department and found herself in another room dominated by computer screens, laptops and the low hum of fans and electronics.
A woman approached. She was about Alice’s age with pale, freckly skin, red hair and black-rimmed glasses. ‘You need something?’ she asked.
Alice nodded and handed over the photograph. ‘I think this guy is in London. I’ve no other leads. Can you help me out?’
The woman glanced at the photo. ‘We’re running quite a few checks at the moment,’ she started to say. ‘I’m not sure how quickly we can get to it.’
Alice had a choice. She could invoke her superiors, explain that her instructions came from the top and hint that if she didn’t get what she wanted, it might be all the worse for this woman and her department. Or she could take the more effective path. In situations like this she had learned a little girl power went a long way. She glanced over her shoulder, as though worried someone might be listening or approaching. ‘Do me a favour,’ she said, as appealingly as she could. ‘I’ve got this bloody man in the department, always putting me down. If I could ID this suspect before he hauls his arse out of bed in the morning, it would just put me a step ahead of him.’ She flashed her a smile.
The woman’s demeanour softened. She gave the photograph a more detailed look. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what we can do.’
TEN
Hereford’s target pack had included satellite imagery of the old Roman ruins. There was enough weaponry in the back of this smuggler’s truck to mount a small siege. Hooking up with a local fixer ought to be routine. But he was on edge.
The flashbacks he’d experienced earlier in the night had stayed with him. As he drove the truck towards the RV with the benefit of his night-vision goggles, he couldn’t help noticing the similarities with the Zero 22 op. This, too, was a covert night-time approach on a supposedly friendly target. As a Regiment man, Danny had learned to treat all operational situations with a degree of uncertainty. He had reason to be more uncertain than usual, with an unpredictable Bethany White sitting next to him, driving a vehicle that the fixer wasn’t expecting.
An hour had passed since the contact with the smugglers. They had driven in silence. This truck was less suited to the terrain they were crossing than the quad bike; Danny drove slowly and with extra care. He winced each time a wheel hit an unexpected dip and the weaponry in the back of the truck shook noisily. But they crossed twenty-five miles of desert with no further incident and now were close to their destination. Danny stopped the truck, took his rifle and night sight and stepped outside to scan the area.
The word ‘ruins’ was definitely apt. There was barely anything to see here. Through his sight, he picked out some stones protruding from the ground in regular patterns about 300 metres away, and an old stone wall. This was no tourist site. There was a narrow road, little more than a track, leading from the far side. To Danny’s two o’clock there was a copse of cypress trees, atypical for the terrain. Danny figured there must be some kind of underground water source. If they poked around the ruins, they’d probably find an old well somewhere. He guessed that the copse was where the fixer planned to hide their quad bike. It was just about the only place Danny had seen for the last hour that offered enough cover to hide a vehicle. Hopefully they’d be able to hide the truck there.
Time check: 04.20 hrs. Dawn, the time of the RV, was at 05.10. This was open ground; there was very little cover. Danny drove the truck round the ruins and parked on the far side of the copse from the road, hidden from anybody approaching. He removed and stowed the GPS unit. Took the keys and buried them at the foot of a tree with a distinctive knot on the trunk. ‘Come with me,’ he told Bethany.
They entered the copse together and headed through the trees to the other side. They could see the road from here. Danny knelt behind the tree line. Bethany took her position next to him. They waited.
The desert was silent. Just the whisper of leaves in a faint, cold wind. Danny kept his eyes on the road. He could feel Bethany looking at him and sensed that she wanted to say something. Danny didn’t yield. His instruction to deal with her when the op was over was weighing heavily. He would do it, but he was only human: the more time he spent with someone, the greater the connection he felt.
Headlamps appeared at 05.00 exactly. Two sets. The temperature had suddenly dropped and the sky had started to lighten, though there was no sign of the sun yet. Danny was breathing clouds of condensation. He raised his weapon and followed the lead vehicle with the barrel as the two cars drew closer and stopped. Distance: fifty metres. Both drivers’ doors opened. Two figures appeared, silhouetted by the headlamps. One of them stood in front of the car, blocking the left light. The other stepped towards the copse. ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Salam?’
Danny and Bethany stood. Danny flicked a switch and the red dot of a laser sight appeared on the man’s chest. The man noticed immediately and quickly put his hands in the air.
‘Keep them there!’ Danny called. ‘And your friend, too.’
The man shouted something in Arabic. The guy by the car quickly raised his hands. The two men stood statue-still. Danny kept the laser sight on his guy’s chest.
He let thirty seconds pass. He could see that they were dressed in regular Arabic garb: plain white dishdasha and sandals. They had full beards but looked young, maybe early twenties.
‘Follow me,’ Danny told Bethany. ‘And do exactly as I say. If they sense any tension between us, it gives them the upper hand.’
‘So you really don’t trust them?’
‘I was only expecting one guy. And anyway, they’re fixers. They work for whoever pays them. If someone’s paying them more than us, guess where their loyalties lie.’
They emerged from the treeline, Danny with his weapon still raised, Bethany walking to one side and a little behind. As they approached the two men, Danny saw that they were younger than he’d first imagined, barely into their twenties. One of them had a chunky gold bracelet, the other an expensive watch. There was something about their wary yet arrogant demeanour that he didn’t like. He and Bethany stopped five metres from where they stood. Without lowering his weapon or looking away from his guy, Danny spoke. ‘Search them,’ he said.
Bethany stepped forwards and started to pat down the first guy. His outrage was clear on his face even before he complained. ‘What is this? Why is a woman touching me like this?’
‘Trust me,’ said Danny, ‘she doesn’t like you in that way.’
Bethany turned, holding up a pistol she had found on his person.
‘Anything else?’ Danny said.
‘Nothing.’
‘You sure?’
Bethany gave him a ‘do you want to do this?’ look, but kept quiet. ‘Do his friend,’ Danny said.
The second guy had no weapon. Danny lowered his. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Which is ours?’
The fixer pointed to the lead vehicle. ‘The keys are in the car, sir,’ he said. He licked his lips and looked around. ‘We were told there would be a quad bike?’
‘Change of plan,’ Danny said. He stepped up to the fixer. ‘There’s a truck behind those trees. When we leave here, you’re going to be tempted to open it up and see what’s inside. It’s booby trapped. You know what that means?’ The fixer nodded. ‘Good. Don’t touch that truck. If you do—’ He made an explosion gesture with two hands. ‘And if it’s not here when we come back in a day or two, you don’t get your money. Is there anything about that that you don’t understand?’
The fixer shook his head. ‘May I please have my gun back, sir?’ he said.
Danny gave him a withering look. He turned to Bethany. ‘Get in the car,’ he said. They jogged over to the vehicle together. It was a beaten-up Passat, covered in red dust and with several dents in the panel work. That suited Danny just fine – it was the kind of car nobody would look at twice. He stowed his rifle in the boot and took the wheel. With Bethany beside him in the passenger seat, he turned a full 180 and drove round the other vehicle away from the ruins. When he’d gone twenty metres, he held the fixer’s pistol out of the window, brandished it for a moment to be sure it could be seen, then dropped it in the sand.
‘You think they’re going to stay away from the truck?’ Bethany said.
‘Probably,’ Danny said. ‘But other people might come nosing around. We need to be sure we have another way of getting back to the pick-up point, if we need it.’ He kept his eyes on the road as he spoke, carefully avoiding Bethany’s gaze. An image flashed in his mind: he was standing over Bethany somewhere in the Jordanian desert. Bethany was on her knees, a gun to her head. He wondered if she suspected what was waiting for her.
Danny had no need for the GPS unit for this part of the journey. The road headed east, towards the rising sun. He knew that Amman lay in this direction and within fifteen minutes they found themselves on a well-maintained main supply route, busy with early morning traffic. Large road signs in Arabic hung overhead and the desert surroundings gradually became more urban. Warehouses on the outskirts of town. Mosques and grim-looking tenement blocks. In many ways, it could have been any city in the world. He switched back on the GPS unit and set it to direct them to the pre-loaded destination. A couple of klicks further down the road, the GPS directed them off to the left. They followed a winding, maze-like route through a busy, run-down suburb. It was only just gone 06.00 hrs and already the temperature was rising uncomfortably. The vehicle’s paltry air-con did not so much keep them cool as recirculate the choking traffic fumes from outside. The roads were filled with the beeping of car horns. Danny, already sweating, drove soberly. He ignored the occasional raised fist from impatient Jordanians. His objective was to get to their safe house without incident, not to demonstrate to the drivers of Amman what a big guy he was.
The GPS led them to a squat four-storey concrete block that wouldn’t have been out of place in the scummiest parts of Croydon. Its exterior walls were festooned with old air-conditioning units and lines of washing. There was an open basement car park. Danny reversed the vehicle into a space directly opposite the exit, ready to get out of there quickly if necessary. A few guys in traditional Arabic clothes were getting into their own cars, presumably on the way to work. Danny let them leave before he and Bethany exited the vehicle. The fewer people that saw them, the better.
Danny knew from his target pack that the safe house was apartment number 312 on the third floor. There was a lift from the basement, but he had no desire to put himself in an enclosed space with no exit. They took the stairs. A couple of curious kids playing cards on the ground watched them walk from the stairwell along the third-floor corridor, but by the time Danny and Bethany were outside their apartment, the kids had gone. Danny tried the door. It was unlocked. They stepped inside.
Danny was not expecting luxury. They didn’t get it. The four rooms of the apartment were equally grim. The bare concrete floors were peppered with rodent droppings. The kitchen and bathroom had different but similarly foul stenches. The bedroom contained a double bed with a stained old mattress and no bedclothes. There was no furniture in the main room where a dirty window looked out from the tower block towards the hilly urban sprawl of Amman, undulating under the blue morning sky. The city was a ramshackle, chaotic place. The sort of place you could easily lose yourself. Danny’s sort of place.
There was a key in the front door. Danny locked it from the inside and put the key in his pocket. ‘You want me all to yourself, is that it?’ Bethany said. Danny ignored the comment and pushed past her into the bedroom. There were two suitcases in here. He hauled them on to the bed and opened them up. Inside were sets of smart clothes for each of them: a navy suit, white shirt and shiny brown shoes for Danny, a black knee-length skirt, jacket and cream blouse for Bethany, and a bag of make-up. There was a brown envelope containing British passports with Danny and Bethany’s photographs but the names of Andy Waldren and Sophia Milton. Two press passes held the same photos and names, Danny’s accredited to the Sunday Times, Bethany’s to the Telegraph. A second brown envelope contained a sheaf of Jordanian dinars. There were two shoulder bags: a small leather handbag with detailing on the clasp, and a larger black man-bag. Each contained a blank A5 journalist’s notepad and a few rollerball pens, along with a local mobile phone, the number stuck on the back. Danny had his own encrypted mobile, so he’d have no use for it, but he memorised the number on the back of Bethany’s and took a moment to write his number on a piece of paper and hand it to her. She read it once, committed it to memory and screwed up the paper.
He wondered who had delivered all this to the safe house. An MI6 agent attached to the British Embassy, he presumed. He didn’t much like the idea of the locals spotting an obviously Western person carrying these suitcases up to the flat. He hoped they’d been discreet, and he double-checked that the door was locked before returning to the bedroom where Bethany was waiting for him. ‘Not going to lie,’ she said. ‘I’m quite looking forward to seeing you in a suit.’
Yet again, Danny found himself resisting her flirtation. A tendril of hair had fallen over her face in an appealing way. He wanted to brush it back over her ear. He forced himself to think about something else. ‘We need to talk,’ he said.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘We’re going to the General’s hotel this evening. I need to know how you’re going to do it.’ She cocked her head. ‘How are you going to do it?’ he repeated. ‘We won’t be able to take weapons into the hotel. It’s not as simple as a bullet in the head. You need a plan.’
Bethany didn’t reply immediately. She walked over to the window, where she looked out over Amman while tracing a shape on the glass with her forefinger. ‘I’ll improvise,’ she said.
‘Not good enough,’ Danny told her. And when she didn’t reply again, he strode over to where she was standing, grabbed her by the shoulder and roughly turned her round to face him. He was surprised to see that tears were welling in her eyes.
‘You think I’m a monster,’ she said. ‘You think I spend my time working out inventive ways to kill people.’
‘You’ve got form.’
‘And so do you. But there’s more to you than that. And there’s more to me, too. The men I killed, I killed for a reason.’
‘We’re killing this man for a reason too. So how are you going to do it? He’s highly trained.’
Bethany gave him a rueful smile and shook her head. She dabbed at her eyes with the same forefinger she’d been tracing on the window and walked over to the bed. ‘Once a man has his clothes off,’ she said, ‘you can do anything. You think you’re so damn powerful in the bedroom. You’re not. You’re putty in the hands of a woman who knows what she’s doing.’
‘We’re talking about a five-star American general here. Don’t underestimate him.’
‘I’m not underestimating anybody. But trust me, once a guy thinks it’s on, he’s a child again, I don’t care who he is. If I can get him to take me to his room, it’s a done deal. I don’t need much. A pen. A razor blade. Whatever comes to hand.’
‘His room might be guarded. You’ll need to keep him quiet while you do it.’
‘Trust me. He won’t make a peep.’ She pointed at the bed. ‘I’m going to get some sleep. If I’m going to be all the General’s dreams come true, I don’t want bags under my eyes. You can stay or go. It’s up to you.’
Danny left her in the bedroom, taking his press accreditation and passport. He returned to the front door. Sat opposite it with his back against the wall and his handgun on the floor beside him. He opened up the passport and committed the counterfeit Andy Waldren’s place and date of birth to memory. He calculated that Waldren would be thirty-four. He put the documentation to one side. He barely wanted to admit it to himself, but Bethany’s tears had affected him. He found himself wanting to comfort her. Maybe more. He did his best to put that thought from his mind as he closed his eyes and prepared to wait out the day.
