Hellfire (23 page)

The masked man grabbed Ali’s neck with his free hand, then allowed his knife to hover over the old man’s eyes. It was as if he was deciding which one to carve out first.

Ali tried to say, ‘No!’ But all that came was a formless, gurgling grunt. His attacker seemed to settle on the right eye, and Ali saw the bloody tip of the blade move in close. It brushed his eyelashes, and he clamped his eye shut. A fraction of a second later he felt the incision, carefully made, circling the eye socket. He tried to move his head but couldn’t, because the masked man had such a firm grip on his neck. He could do nothing but lie there, everything spinning, the pain beyond imagining, blood dripping down the side of his head.

The knife left his skin. For the briefest of agonised seconds he was relieved. He managed to open his good eye, but wished he hadn’t, because it meant he had advance warning of what happened next. He saw that the knifeman was handing his blade to one of his accomplices, before extending his two forefingers like a child making a pretend gun. The forefingers moved towards his bad eye. Ali clamped the good one shut and made another futile attempt at shouting out as he felt the fingers worm their way into his eye socket and try to get purchase behind the eyeball. He felt the eyeball squirming within the socket, and then a sudden flash of excruciating light flashed within his brain as his attacker yanked the eyeball from the head.

Amid the pain and the half-shout that emerged from his damaged mouth, Ali could just feel the way the wet optic nerve flopped onto his cheek as his attacker dropped the eyeball. He vomited with pain, but the vomit caught in his throat, merged with the blood from his still-weeping tongue, and started choking him for the second time.

His skin shrieked as he felt the tip of the knife scoring around his left eye. By this time, the room was spinning more violently. The dizziness wasn’t just in his head. It seemed to penetrate every part of him. It was a horrific whirlwind of nausea and pain, so intense that he couldn’t even feel sorrow for his murdered wife, or the injustice of knowing he would never see his son Ahmed again.

All he wanted was for it to be over.

Within thirty seconds, it was. As his attacker wormed his fingers behind his right eyeball, the pain magnified to a peak that no human could endure. And as he pulled it from the socket, there was a second blinding flash.

And then there was nothing. No pain. No choking.

No life.

The three masked men stood back and examined their handiwork.

It wouldn’t have been enough simply to kill them. A message had to be sent. Their intention had been to make the scene look horrific. There was no doubt they’d achieved that. The chef lay in a glossy pool of his own blood. The old woman, lying on her reclining chair, had a rictus grin on her face that exactly mirrored the curved wound on her throat. But the old man was the stuff of nightmares: two gaping wounds where his eyes had once been, and a bloody, mushy mess for a mouth. His fingers clutched the arms of his reclining chair, as if he’d thought that by holding on tight he might be able to save himself.

Their work was not yet done. Silently, each man dipped his fingers in the blood of one of the three corpses. Then they started writing the same Arabic word – Caliph – that one of them had already scrawled with the point of his knife. They covered the room with this blood graffiti: over the Picasso, across mirrors and marble floors. It took five minutes, by which time the room was bathed in blood.

One of them took the picture of Ahmed bin Ali al-Essa, the old couple’s son, which sat underneath the Picasso. He ripped the photo out of the frame, then laid it carefully over the bloody face of his father. While he was doing this, the knifeman approached the old lady. There was one more indignity he wished to impose upon her. He ripped open the legs of the loose trousers she was wearing, to reveal the urinary bag strapped to her leg. With one quick slash of the knife, he cut it open so that its foul contents spilled all over the reclining chair, some of it dripping down on to the floor. The sight and smell of it disgusted him, and he spat at the woman, as if it was her fault that he’d been exposed to the contents.

They took photographs. They knew how easy it would be for whoever discovered this scene to clean it up and pretend it hadn’t happened. But it was harder to erase a photograph. If the Caliph wanted the dead couple’s son to receive proof of what had happened, they would be in a position to obey him. And they were certain of one thing: obeying the Caliph was the only way to ensure a long life.

They turned their backs on their victims and left the room. They were pleased with what they had done. And they knew the Caliph would be pleased too.

Fifteen

London, 08.00 GMT.

The MI6 building never sleeps. Sometimes the same is true of the people who occupy it, although Spud hadn’t expected to have to pull an all-nighter on his first day shadowing a spook. Eleanor was incredibly persistent. Spud was almost impressed. As he leaned against the wall of her office and sucked down his fifth cup of coffee since midnight, she explained to him what she had learned about the cab driver in Birmingham whose name had jumped out of the files at them.

‘Kalifa al-Meghrani,’ she said, ‘is a British citizen who has lived in the UK all his life – and so have his parents.’ She held up what looked like a photocopy of a birth certificate. ‘His grandparents arrived here from the area of the Persian Gulf coast that is now the United Arab Emirates. My neck of the woods, actually. Or at least my parents’. He went to school at the local comprehensive in Dudley and he had no previous criminal record up until his recent run-in with the police.’ She gave Spud a little matter-of-fact smile.

‘So what are you trying to say?’ Spud asked. He took another gulp of coffee.

‘You know what I think, Spud? I think you
want
this guy to be a terrorist. I think you judged him the moment you heard his name.’

‘No,’ Spud said. ‘He used the word “caliph”. Those ISIS nutters are always talking about the caliphate . . .’

‘
Despite
the lack of anything resembling a terrorist attack pre-incident indicator,’ Eleanor interrupted, ‘you’ve got it in your head that because he’s a Muslim, he has some sort of case to answer.’

‘Wrong,’ Spud said. ‘I’ve got it in my head that because he yelled abuse at a police officer—’

‘It’s the very fact that he yelled at a police officer that makes him
incredibly
unlikely to be a suspect of any kind.’

‘Why? That doesn’t make any sense at all.’

Eleanor removed her glasses and inhaled deeply, as though calming herself before explaining something to a child for the umpteenth time. ‘Listen carefully,’ she said, putting her glasses back on. ‘You were in 22 SAS, right?’

‘I still am,’ Spud said.

‘Fine. You
are
in 22 SAS. So if I’m a terrorist, and I’m trying to judge who is a greater threat to my activities, do I put you at the top of the list, or some fresh-faced teenager in the cadet force?’

‘That’s a stupid question.’

‘Not at all. Obviously you’re the greater threat. You’ve undergone millions of pounds’ worth of training. You’re highly competent with weapons. You’re extremely fit. You can observe me without me knowing I’m being observed. When the time comes you can kill me swiftly and silently, then melt into the background without anybody knowing you’ve been there. You don’t feel the need to boast about it. In fact, you go out of your way to keep your activities covert and quiet. Am I right?’

Spud shrugged.

‘Your kid in the cadet force? Chances are he mouths out about what he does every Friday night down the pub in front of his mates.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘That terrorists are no different. The higher their skill level, the more adept they are at melting into the background, at being invisible. The dangerous ones are sane, rational and highly organised. They take very good care to stay on the right side of the law up until the point that they carry out their atrocities. They just want to get their job done quietly and efficiently, and they know they can’t do that by mouthing off at police stations late at night. It just doesn’t fit the profile.’ She held up the birth certificate again. ‘Mr al-Meghrani doesn’t fit the profile.’

Spud stared at her. Maybe she was right. Maybe Spud was so keen to get out into the field that he was overlooking the obvious.

‘I still think we should have a word with him,’ he murmured.

‘
We’re
going to do nothing of the sort, Spud.
You’re
shadowing
me
, remember. You’re here to observe, and nothing more. If we go to Birmingham to speak to this guy, I’ll do the talking and you’ll do the listening. Is that clear?’

Spud felt himself flushing. ‘Whatever,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t be so childish,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’m very obviously a Muslim. If I ask the right questions he will open up to me. Anyway, I’ve been trained to interview suspects effectively. You never know, you might actually learn something.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said, I doubt it. Look, love, I’ve been on the front line and stared these fuckers down. I know what I’m looking for. I’ve
been
to terrorist training camps that you’ve only read about in intelligence reports.’

‘Well, you won’t have seen Kalifa al-Meghrani at any of them.’

‘How do you know that?’ Spud said. ‘How can you
possibly
know that?’

She gave him a cool look. ‘Because he was born in this country and he’s never owned a passport. He’s never even left the UK.’

Spud had no answer for that.

‘It may be that Kalifa al-Meghrani is a nasty piece of work. It may be that he’s been operating a minicab without a licence. But I’m afraid that neither of these make him a terrorist, or a terrorist sympathiser. And even if he name-checked the Caliph, I’m quite sure that he did so on the basis of hearsay and rumour – unless you think that one of the Firm’s most wanted Middle Eastern terrorists is hiding out in Dudley.’

‘It’s not impossible,’ Spud said. He sounded surly even to himself.

‘No. Not impossible. Just very unlikely.’

‘So we
should
go and talk to him.’

‘I thought I’d made myself clear, Spud.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘
I
talk, you listen. Of course I’m going to talk to him, because I want it to be belt and braces. But if you learn one thing by shadowing me, Spud, I hope it’s this: stereotypes don’t help terrorist-detection. They get in the way. Is that understood?’

Spud nodded curtly.

‘I’ll tell you what, though,’ Eleanor added. She stood up and, on her way to the door, slapped Spud on the buttocks. It felt like an outrageous act from a woman in a hijab. ‘I know you’re not just a pretty face, and I’m sure you’re jolly good behind the wheel, so I
will
let you drive. Shall we go?’

She opened the door. At that very moment, an older man in a crumpled suit strode past the room.

‘Good morning, Sir Colin,’ Eleanor said brightly.

‘Not now,’ the man said, and he disappeared from Spud’s view.

‘Who’s that?’ Spud asked.

‘That,’ said Eleanor, ‘is the Chief of SIS.’

Spud raised an eyebrow. ‘He didn’t look that pleased to see you.’

His barbed comment clearly hit its mark. Eleanor puckered her lips. ‘Sir Colin is a very busy man,’ she said. ‘Come on, I want to cross this cab driver off my list for sure, and I want to do it today. We need to get moving.’

‘Good morning, Sir Colin.’

Sir Colin Seldon glanced to his left to see a young intelligence officer, whose name he simply couldn’t remember, standing in a doorway and smiling hopefully at him. Like every other intelligence officer, she obviously wanted some face time with the Chief. Behind her, a squat, broad-shouldered man whose face was set in a scowl.

‘Not now,’ he said. There simply wasn’t the time. The Nigerian situation was developing fast. He needed to get a handle on it.

Two minutes later he was in the soundproofed confines of a secure meeting room. Along one wall was a series of five computer screens. Three were blank, but the remaining two each showed a pixellated face in real time. Seldon recognised Hugo Buckingham as one of the faces, whom he knew to be on a secure line from the British Embassy in Riyadh. The second face belonged to Tessa Gorman, who was still in her dressing gown at home.

There were two others present in the room: Seldon’s trusted analyst Bixby – his beard woollier than ever and his head leaning, as it always did, against the headrest of his wheelchair – and Brigadier Jeremy Lamb, Director Special Forces, who didn’t look any too pleased to be summoned at eight in the morning. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on, Colin?’ he said before the Chief could even sit down.

‘Go ahead, Bixby,’ Seldon told his analyst. ‘Words of one syllable please.’

‘To bring everyone up to speed,’ Bixby said, ‘we’ve had several communications from the Bravo Nine Delta unit. The High Commissioner to Nigeria is dead – beheaded by Boko Haram militants, despite the presence of a team from 22 Regiment—’