Hellfire (39 page)

Spud suppressed a wave of nausea. Maybe he was drunker than he thought. Maybe he should get the hell out of here. Put his head down somewhere. Sleep it off.

He turned to walk away.

Then he stopped.

A little voice in his head was telling him to follow his instinct.

He looked around. The street was deserted. And really, who would notice another break-in in a dump like this?

Spud walked past the wheelie bins, aware that he was still slightly staggering. He approached the ground-floor window to the right of the front doors. It was a sash, with glazing bars dividing each half into six rectangles. No curtains. The interior latch was clearly visible behind the middle lower rectangle of the top pane. No sign of any window locks.

Spud looked around again to check he wasn’t being observed. There was nobody watching. He laid his bike helmet on the ground, raised his right elbow and casually jabbed the windowpane. The glass shattered immediately, but only made the smallest tinkling sound. Spud put his hand through the hole, undid the latch and raised the lower sash. Seconds later he was inside. He closed the window behind him and looked around.

The room in which he found himself was very sparse. An old sofa. An occasional table. A set of dumbbells was propped up against one wall, and there was an unlit gas fire in the fireplace. Nothing else to see, but plenty to smell: the musty, unwashed stench of a single man’s house. Spud found himself flexing his fists. If al-Meghrani was home, Spud would want to put him down quickly and efficiently before he recognised the face of his intruder. He walked across the room to the closed door on the other side.

He listened carefully.

Silence.

He opened it.

A corridor. Narrow. Dark. The front door to the left. Spud could just make out pizza delivery slips on the floor. Still didn’t mean he was out. He could have just been walking over them.

He turned right, past a scummy bathroom, empty. He could see that there were two more rooms in the house: a kitchen at the end of the corridor, its door open, crockery overflowing in the sink. And what Spud had to assume was a bedroom, its door closed.

He silently approached the closed door and listened hard. Nothing.

He opened the door.

The smell was worse in here but it was obvious, at a glance, that the bedroom was unoccupied. The blankets on the double bed were stripped back and crumpled. There were clothes on the floor and a chest of drawers had all three drawers half-open. Spud checked behind the door as he entered, but he knew there was nobody there. This was the room of someone who had left in a hurry. He pulled out his phone and switched on the torch app. By its small, bright light, Spud made out more details: al-Meghrani’s cab-driver’s ID lying on top of a chest of drawers, an empty Burger King cola cup and fries wrapper. A bulky old CRT telly on a stand in the corner, and an electric fan next to it. Wire coat hangers on the floor. And at the foot of the bed, a pile of papers.

Spud sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the papers and started flicking through them.

There were gas bills and council tax demands, all of them overdue. A receipt for a pay-as-you-go phone. Nothing of any great interest, until he got further down the pile. Here there was a green paper wallet which bore the words: ‘Your Prints Are Enclosed’. It contained photographs.

Spud examined them. The first was a picture of al-Meghrani. He was standing against a plain wall, naked from the waist up. He was quite ripped, which explained the dumbbells. Spud’s eyes focused in on his hands. He wasn’t wearing his gloves, but was clutching his fists by his side. In the second photo, however, he was holding them up, almost as though he was showing them off. Spud frowned. The photo wasn’t great, but he could see that there was something wrong with those hands. It was like they were covered in some kind of rash. Or a scar.

He looked at the next photograph, and suddenly felt his heart rate increase.

This photograph was a close-up of al-Meghrani’s hands. Palms upwards, fingers spread. The skin was covered in a network of cobweb-like scarring. Beneath the skin there were little black dots, like grains of ground pepper.

‘Mother
fucker
,’ Spud whispered to himself.

He knew what he was looking at. Shrapnel scarring. He’d seen it before, on the hands of a mate of his who’d had a bad experience with a dodgy old Russian fragmentation grenade. These were the telltale markings of someone who’d been playing around with poorly made gunpowder explosives.

The fourth and final picture showed the same hands palms down. The scarring was not so bad on this side, but it was still there. There was no doubt in Spud’s mind: these were the hands of a man who had handled low-grade explosives, albeit inexpertly. No wonder he wanted to keep them covered.

Any beer-induced wooziness had disappeared. Spud’s thinking was clear-cut, and he no longer doubted himself. He tucked the pictures back into their wallet and continued to shuffle through the papers. More bills. A begging letter from a charity that donated goats to families in Darfur.

And at the very bottom, two email printouts.

They were flight confirmations. The first: London Gatwick to Athens, Greece. Flight time: 23.58 hrs the following day, departing South Terminal on easyJet. The second: Athens to Ankara, Turkey.

He checked the name on the ticketing details. ‘Mr K. al-Meghrani’.

Spud inhaled slowly. For a moment he was back in the MI6 building with Eleanor.
He’s never owned a passport, Spud. He’s never even left the UK.

‘Oh yeah?’ he breathed. Passports could be faked. MI6 intelligence could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Spud folded up the flight confirmations and put them, along with the photographs, into his jacket pocket. Then he stood up and left the room. He exited the flat by the front door. A couple of teenagers were loitering on the other side of the road. They gave him a suspicious look. Maybe they knew al-Meghrani and they thought it was strange seeing Spud leave his house at this time of night. Maybe they’d clocked the broken window and were considering ransacking the place. It didn’t matter to Spud either way. He knew from the state of the place that al-Meghrani wouldn’t be back any time soon.

He hurried to his bike, got behind the wheel and evaluated his options.

Option one: call Eleanor, tell her what he’d discovered. Forget it. She’d already ticked al-Meghrani off her list. She’d probably look at the photographs, sigh heavily and tell Spud his suspect had eczema.

Option two: call Hereford. No way. They’d told him to get back in his box once already. They wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

Option three: head for Gatwick, kill the following day there and intercept al-Meghrani when he arrived to catch his flight. Do what he should have done the moment he saw his Claymore bag: make the fucker talk.

Decision made. He turned the engine over, set his sat nav for Gatwick, and pulled out of his parking space. In his rear-view mirror he saw the two teenagers approaching al-Meghrani’s flat.

Help yourself, he thought. He won’t be needing the place, by the time I’ve finished with him.

Twenty-four

05.00 hrs AST.

Dawn was arriving as the unit hit the outskirts of Doha, but the lights of the high-rise buildings were still burning, illuminating the sky with a neon fluorescence. As their guy drove along a broad, beach-side highway, streaks of salmon pink crept across the sky from the horizon. The sea itself was dotted with yachts, many of the size that only the oil-rich could afford. Even at this early hour, commercial helicopters were coming in to land on the top of brightly lit skyscrapers – an airborne reminder that this was a place where the super-wealthy came to work and to play.

‘Your drop-off location is in the West Bay district,’ Morgan told them. ‘Poshest part of the whole fucking Gulf. Your guy must be quite the playboy.’

Danny nodded as their guy looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, love,’ he said to Caitlin, ‘but when girls looking like you rock up at the offices or apartments of men like him, they’re normally charging by the hour – and making a fair whack out of the deal too.’

‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ Caitlin said, her voice frosty.

‘I’m just saying people notice it, if you’re trying to stay under the radar.’

‘You train up Qatari SF?’ Danny asked the driver, trying to change the subject.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘They good?’

‘Not bad. No problem getting them the gear they need. You know . . . oil money.’

‘They end up working for the West Bay playboys?’

Their guy shrugged. ‘Some of them,’ he said. ‘But the truth is these Qatari guys can afford to recruit from the flashier end of the market. It’s kind of a status symbol to have a couple of Seals in your security detail.’

‘Even after Bin Laden?’

‘Sure. Money talks louder than religion in Doha. For most people, at least.’

As the city around them grew more built-up, Danny felt increasingly uncomfortable. They could easily be walking into a trap. What if the Caliph – whoever he was – had already got to Al-Essa? What if he was forcing this rich Qatari oil merchant to reel Buckingham and his SF team in? Danny looked in the rear-view mirror at Tony and Caitlin. Their severe faces suggested they were having similar thoughts.

Their driver indicated left and headed down a slip road. Thirty seconds later they were driving through the centre of the metropolis, skyscrapers left and right, the streets perfectly clean and well-ordered. The way the neon reflected off the buildings, the pavements were shining. They drove for about a mile, until Morgan indicated again and pulled up outside an impressive building whose ground floor had a huge glass frontage and a marble-clad foyer.

‘This is where we part company,’ their guy said. He glanced towards the building. ‘There’s a service entrance round the other side of the building. Word to the wise – if there’s no covering security round this place, I’m a fucking Chinaman. Take my advice and keep your eyes peeled.’

Danny turned to Tony. ‘Take the service entrance,’ he said. ‘Caitlin, front entrance. Any suspicious activity, let me know. I’ll go up with Buckingham. Work out whether this guy is on the level.’

‘Now look here,’ Buckingham cut in. ‘Ahmed is
my
contact. I’ll do the—’

‘You say a word before I give you the go-ahead, I’ll rip your fucking throat out.’

Buckingham fell silent. Danny noticed the sweat on his forehead. He was obviously as tense as the rest of them.

The unit alighted on the pavement in front of the foyer. There were no farewells. Once the doors of the vehicle were shut, it pulled out and became just another set of red lights on the increasingly busy main road. Danny looked around. There were only a handful of passers-by in the area, and no immediate sign of any surveillance on the building, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. There was a second skyscraper opposite, covered with mirrored glass which could conceal any number of observation posts. And there was enough traffic passing for at least one of the vehicles to be doing surveillance rounds of the building.

Danny slung his sports bag over his shoulder. ‘Take your positions,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

The foyer of the building was air-conditioned to perfection. There were seven or eight indoor palm trees, and a brightly lit interior fountain. In the centre was a concierge desk of burnished wood and shining brass. A man in full traditional robes sat behind it. There was nobody else apart from him. Danny strode up to the concierge, with Buckingham trotting behind him.

The concierge made no attempt to hide his disapproval of two men with tracksuits and sports bags approaching his desk. ‘May I help you, sirs?’ he asked, obviously assuming that they would speak English.

‘Ahmed bin Ali al-Essa,’ Danny said. ‘He’s expecting us.’

The concierge inclined his head, as if to say: I don’t
think
so. But he made a call, spoke a few words in Arabic and then, with a small bow, led them to an elevator at the back of the foyer. Danny’s earpiece crackled as he walked towards it. Tony’s voice. ‘
In position.
’

Danny checked the foyer again before stepping into the elevator. Nobody appeared to be watching them. Once inside the lift, he and Buckingham stood silently. Danny unzipped his tracksuit top and felt for the handgun strapped to his body.

The lift stopped. The doors pinged, then slid apart.

The elevator opened up on to another marble-clad reception room. To one side there was an enormous tank full of tropical fish. To the other, a door. It was open, but there was no sign of anyone.

‘Stay behind me,’ Danny said. He pulled his handgun and the two men stepped out of the lift into the lobby.

Buckingham’s feet clattered across the marble floor. Danny’s were much quieter. They approached the open door. Danny was tense. He was pretty sure nobody inside the building had been watching them, but he didn’t know what to expect inside the penthouse apartment itself. He raised his weapon and crossed the threshold.

He wasn’t prepared for what he saw.

It was a lavish apartment. A window on the far side looked out over the sea. There was expensive-looking art on the walls, and stylish items of furniture dotted around. Two more doors led off the room, at Danny’s ten and two o’clock. A large coffee table in the centre with a mirrored surface and a pile of magazines on one side. And behind it, sitting on a sofa, there was a man.