Zero 22, p.10
Zero 22, page 10
part #8 of Danny Black Series
He knelt down again in the firing position, waited a minute, then continued his advance.
There was no further contact. As Danny reached the truck, he circled it, searching for enemy personnel. Nobody was left alive. He checked in the cab, under the body and finally placed himself in front of the back doors. He lowered his rifle, pulled his handgun and, with his free hand, opened the back of the truck.
It was stuffed full of weapons. Serious weapons. Assault rifles with underslung grenade launchers, sniper rifles, RPG launchers and wooden crates full of warheads, Claymore mines, plastic explosives, detonators, coils of wire, boxes of ammunition. They hadn’t stumbled on a drugs deal. They’d stumbled on a weapons deal. If the guys involved had had more tactical nous, they might have realised that they had enough gear here to take out an entire squadron, let alone a solitary SAS man and an unarmed former spook. He closed the truck up and checked the ignition. No keys. They had to be here somewhere. He approached the body of his final target. The man was lying at a gruesome angle by the front wheel and the three rounds from Danny’s burst had made a real mess of him. They had torn open his thoracic cavity. His chest still oozed blood and fragments of rib and lung poked through the tears in his clothes. Danny’s hands became bloodied and sticky as he patted his victim down, searching for the keys that he finally found in a back trouser pocket. He took them, then jogged back to Bethany and the wrecked quad bike.
She stood up as he approached. Danny raised his NV goggles so he could see her properly.
‘All clear?’ she asked, with the strained inflexion of a stressed person trying to sound calm.
Danny nodded. ‘Enough weapons in that truck to sink a battleship.’
‘Smugglers?’ she said.
‘Probably.’
Bethany looked over at the vehicle. ‘Probably Jordanian criminals selling weapons to West Bank Palestinians,’ she said. ‘We know it goes on.’ She frowned, clearly aware that she’d just inadvertently put herself back in the role of an active MI6 officer. ‘I mean—’
‘I know what you mean.’ He nodded at the quad bike. ‘We have to deal with this.’
‘What do you mean, deal with it?’
‘It’s a British quad bike, covered with our DNA, nowhere to hide it. If the Jordanian authorities come across it, they’ll start asking questions.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Burn it. Stand back.’
Danny unloaded all their gear from the quad bike, removed the GPS unit and set it all in a pile fifteen metres from the bike itself. Then he located the quad bike’s fuel line, detached it and allowed fuel to spill over the chassis and on to the ground. He located a stash of waterproof matches in his day pack, lit one and threw it on to the fuel. It ignited immediately. He hurried back to where Bethany was standing and waited for the explosion of the fuel tank. It happened within seconds and, before a minute was out, the entire bike was alight, flames licking high and a plume of black greasy smoke pumping into the desert night.
‘Fetch your gear,’ Danny said. ‘That fire’s going to be visible from a distance. We need to get out of here.’
They grabbed their stuff, slung their day packs over their shoulders and ran back up to the truck. Bethany stared at the corpses as they passed. There was a blankness to her expression that chilled Danny. She showed no sign of being disturbed by the sight. She’d seen worse. She’d done worse. That was why she was here in the first place.
‘Israeli plates,’ Bethany said, pointing at the truck.
They climbed up into the truck. It was old and dirty and stank of fuel. Danny placed the GPS unit on the dashboard and familiarised himself with the vehicle. The gear stick was stiff, hard to manoeuvre, but when Danny put the keys in the ignition the engine turned over easily. Bethany looked out of the window, staring at the bodies again. ‘You’ve killed a lot of men, Danny,’ she said.
‘That makes two of us.’
‘When do you stop counting?’ she asked.
‘The trick is not to start in the first place.’
She turned to face him. ‘I was going to stop,’ she said. ‘For my son’s sake. I promised myself. No more. But here I am.’
Danny shrugged. He didn’t want her to see that the catch in her voice had triggered something like sympathy in him. ‘Turns out it becomes a habit,’ he said. ‘As long as you limit it to the bad guys, you can rest easy at night.’
‘And this general you all want me to deal with. He’s one of the bad guys?’
‘One of the worst.’ For the second time in half an hour, he remembered the ambush in Syria and his dead mates.
‘Will they look after him?’
‘What do you mean?’ Danny was confused.
‘My boy. He’s the only reason I’m giving you the time of day, you know. Will they look after him? Is he okay?’
Danny couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eye. He knocked the vehicle into first gear. ‘He’ll be fine. You’ll see him again in a couple of days. He’ll have forgotten about all this before you know it. Kids are like that.’ It wasn’t true, of course. In a couple of days, Bethany would be dead. She was one of the bad guys. And her son? Danny told himself that wasn’t his problem. ‘We need to stay off the road. The smugglers will want their gear and if anybody stops us with half a ton of heavy weaponry, it’s going to take some explaining.’ He released the clutch and the vehicle rolled off the road and back on to the desert terrain. The quad bike was still burning and smouldering. He turned away from it, following the directions given him by the GPS.
‘He talks about you, you know?’
‘Who?’ Danny said, even though he knew exactly what she meant.
‘Danny. My son. You made an impression.’ They drove in silence for a few seconds. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not about to suggest a cosy reunion.’
‘Good.’ He checked the GPS again. ‘We should be at the RV point in about an hour.’
‘The Roman ruins?’
‘Right. Dawn is at ten minutes past five, but I want to make sure we’re early. I’d prefer to see our contact arrive than the other way round. So I need to concentrate.’
‘Concentrate away.’ Bethany looked out of her window and fell silent.
Danny killed the vehicle’s lights, flicked down his NV goggles, and drove.
NINE
London, 01.00 hrs, GMT
The MI6 building was different at night. Alternative faces and a quieter atmosphere. Alice attracted some curious glances at security, dressed in casual clothes and shiny white Filas. She looked even less like the typical MI6 employee than usual. She made her impatient way through security and hurried not to the fourth floor, but to the basement.
Alice did not often venture to the sunless depths of the building. There were areas here for which she didn’t have clearance. But this was also where the techies lived. Where the huge cluster of comms satellites atop the building sent their incoming messages from around the world. Where the secure servers were located. It was to this part of the basement that she headed. There were further security checks before she could gain access. A biometric iris scanner, a fingerprint check. All was good, and she entered the techies’ lair.
It was gloomy in here. The only light came from laptops and a few large screens on the far wall. There were perhaps fifteen people working down here, all men, all under twenty-five. They wore single-ear headsets and there was a constant clickety-clack of fingers on keyboards. Alice strode up to the nearest techie. He had a hipster beard and a black polo neck, and he pretended not to notice Alice approaching. Alice had no time for such games. She didn’t humour him with a polite clearing of the throat or a diffident ‘excuse me’. ‘I need access to files that have been uploaded from an agent in Moscow,’ she said.
The techie held up one finger and continued to type for twenty seconds before turning on his swivel seat and finally acknowledging her. Alice was used to the barely perceptible look of surprise when people saw her for the first time, and she recognised it now. The techie’s demeanour visibly softened. He gently stroked his beard. Alice recognised that gesture too. If they were in a bar, the techie would start hitting on her about now. Here at work, he wouldn’t dare. He wasn’t of the old school like Mark Cawley. ‘Say again?’ he said.
Alice repeated her request, even though she knew he’d heard every word of it.
‘What’s your asset’s identification code?’ the techie asked.
Alice recited it. The techie did his thing at the keyboard. ‘Here it is,’ he said. He frowned. ‘Are these from a games console?’
‘Xbox,’ Alice said. ‘I need to know if there’s any audio files we can extract.’
It was always the same with the techies. They pretended to be so laid back, but as soon as you gave them a problem to solve, their inner geek presented itself. Alice watched his expression change from the self-confidence of a man who knew this wouldn’t be a problem, to the anxiety of man who had encountered an unexpected difficulty, to the satisfaction of a man who’d cracked it. ‘Just the audio files?’ he asked after a couple of minutes’ work.
‘For now.’
The techie took a new memory stick from his desk drawer, inserted it into his computer and transferred the file. Then he handed the memory stick to Alice and stroked his beard again. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.
Alice shook her head, rewarded him with a smile for his usefulness, then left the basement and headed back up to her tiny office.
There were no trains passing outside her window at this hour, but there were several workmen on the tracks with hi-vis jackets and head torches. Alice paid them little attention as she inserted the memory card into her computer and opened up the audio files. There were about thirty, but the metadata told her that only five had been recorded since Poliakov’s disappearance, so she decided to focus on those. She moved the file icons to a separate part of her desktop, plugged in some headphones, took out a pencil and notepad and clicked on the first of the five.
The recording was obviously of a Call of Duty-type game and the first sound she heard was the loud drilling of a computer-generated automatic weapon, and the over-the-top screams of computer-generated death. She reduced the volume and listened to a good two minutes of gameplay before she heard any human dialogue. There were two boys, their unbroken voices teetering on the edge of adolescence. Their conversation was in Russian, of course, but that was no problem for Alice. At first, she heard little more than monosyllabic grunts or the occasional whoop of delight when an on-screen enemy was killed. But gradually the conversation became more varied, if no more interesting: comments about homework left undone, or female classmates unkissed. There was one dominant voice on the first recording, and that was clearly the informant’s son, the owner of the Xbox. She knew this, because the second voice constantly referred to him as Sergei. After seven or eight minutes, Sergei referred to his friend as Alexander. This was not Poliakov’s son, whose name was Ivan.
Alice killed the recording and opened the next file. To her surprise, Sergei was talking to a girl called Masha.
Recording three was more interesting.
The metadata on the file told Alice that it had been recorded three days ago, and she knew within seconds that Sergei’s gaming partner was named Ivan, because he shouted his name as a massive explosion from the game resonated in her ears.
— Ivan, you bastard!
Alice scribbled her translation of the Russian on her notepad. Her brow was furrowed with concentration, and she squinted slightly as she listened hard.
For several minutes there was nothing but gameplay. Then both boys shouted as there was another explosion. The gameplay fell silent.
— When are you coming back to school?
— I don’t know.
— Are you on holiday?
— Not exactly. Do you want another game?
— OK.
The violent noise of the gameplay started up again. The kids’ conversation reverted to grunts and the occasional expletive. When it was over, they said a curt goodbye. End of recording.
None of the remaining recordings featured the voice of Ivan Poliakov. Alice was disappointed. It was gone three in the morning now, and what she had thought would be a very substantial lead had turned out to be less fruitful than she’d hoped. She removed her headphones, rubbed her tired eyes and looked back at the notepad. The fragment of conversation between the two boys yielded nothing, other than proof that Ivan had been alive three days ago and was staying somewhere with an internet connection and an Xbox. She considered her next move. Maybe they could access the Microsoft servers, find out the IP address of Ivan’s console. Worth a try, but her gut told her it wouldn’t lead anywhere. These kids, especially the Russian ones, were smart enough to keep their devices behind a VPN. Maybe GCHQ could do something with the hard drive, but she wasn’t hopeful.
She put the headphones back on and started up the recording of the two boys again, scrubbing forwards to the fragment of conversation. She replayed it several times, not quite certain what she was listening out for. Whatever it was, she didn’t hear it. After listening to the fragment for the fourth time, she let the recording continue playing as she stared at the workmen on the railway track below. The Call of Duty explosions continued. In the distance, very faint yet just discernible despite the headphones, she heard the distinctive sound of Big Ben striking the hour.
She blinked and looked at her watch. It was 03.27. And she had never – never – heard Big Ben from her office.
She hadn’t heard it in real time. She’d heard it on the recording.
She scrubbed back. The chimes had happened just after a particularly long burst of computer-generated fire, and a howl of frustration from one of the boys. It was faint and distant, and the second half of the peals was drowned out by more game noise. But it was unmistakeable, and it meant Alice had a lead: three days ago, Ivan Poliakov had been in London. Had his father Dimitri been with him? Alice didn’t know, but she was determined to find out.
And to do that, she needed some more help from the techies.
Hamoud’s wife Rabia routinely returned home at 8 p.m. The final two hours of waiting for her were always the slowest. The kids were watching Nickelodeon. Hamoud would ordinarily pretend – to himself and to the children – that he was busy. Folding and refolding clothes left on the floor. Preparing food for a frugal meal that he knew Rabia would finish cooking when she got back, shooing him from the kitchen. Sometimes he would panic that she wasn’t coming back. That she had met someone else. That she had grown tired of his constant anxiety. He knew it was paranoia. And he knew paranoia was a symptom of everything he had experienced at Guantanamo. But sometimes those paranoid thoughts multiplied in his mind and he wasn’t able to control them. It was a disease.
Tonight, however, he sat at the table while Spongebob Squarepants played in the background. He constantly swiped his phone to refresh the page that indicated Rabia’s location with a little blue dot. She had left her final cleaning job three blocks away and was making her way home. Hamoud was impatient for her to walk through the door.
Impatient and nervous. He hadn’t told the kids about Walt Disney World. He hadn’t the heart to raise their hopes when he wasn’t certain that Rabia would agree to the trip. There were, now he thought about it, many reasons not to. They would lose several days’ income, for a start. There was no sick pay for domestic cleaners. His wife never missed a day’s work, no matter how unwell she was. And it would mean removing the children from school. She was very strict about that. She wanted her children to have the benefit of a proper education, and not end up like their parents. And perhaps the biggest obstacle was her pride. She didn’t want to rely on anybody’s charity. They were not victims. She often used those precise words, glossing over the inescapable truth that Hamoud was – or, at least once, had been – exactly that.
He put his phone down when he knew she was close and busied himself in the kitchen. A couple of minutes later, the door clicked open and Melissa ran to meet her mother. It was as if a champagne cork had been pulled from a bottle. She started babbling about her lessons, her friends and what had happened in the school yard. Malick quietly joined her and even offered a few quiet observations about his day. Rabia enveloped them in her arms, laughing at their jokes and commiserating with their tiny problems at just the right moments. Only when they had finished talking to her and drifted back to the TV did she approach Hamoud, smile warmly, place one hand on his cheek and say: ‘And how are you, my love?’
Ordinarily, it was the most difficult question of the day. Because how could he tell her the truth? How could he tell her that all day he had been counting the seconds of his solitude, wrestling with the memories and dark thoughts that swirled in his mind? How could he tell her that today had been worse than yesterday, which had been worse than the day before? He had heard it said that a problem shared was a problem halved. But not for him. To share his problems would be to infect others with his negative thoughts. He could not do that to Rabia when she was so kind and worked so hard. So he would always reply with the same words. ‘Today was better.’ And she would smile, and nod, and go to the kitchen.
This evening, however, he said: ‘Today was interesting.’
Rabia raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’ she asked.
He tried to scratch his palms, but she gently stopped him. ‘How so?’ she repeated.
He told her about the letter. About the call. How they’d won a prize and, if they wanted to, they could take the children to Walt Disney World. He didn’t tell her about the peculiar way the letter had been delivered. He knew she would find that suspicious. When he had finished explaining it all, he took Rabia’s hand. ‘I know it means taking some time away from your work,’ he said, ‘and removing the children from school for a few days. But we could hold back some of the spending money to cover what you don’t earn. And when will we ever have this chance again?’
