Osama (33 page)

He was in an alleyway behind a terrace of Victorian houses. He didn’t know how he’d got there. It was quiet. A bold urban fox stared at him from ten metres away, but apart from that he was alone, standing by three green wheelie bins overflowing with stinking rubbish bags. He crouched down between two of them, making sure he was fully out of sight in case anyone should appear at either end of the alley. With trembling, fumbling hands he removed the stolen phone from his lumberjack shirt, replaced the battery and switched it on.

Ten seconds passed. The screen lit up with an animated Nokia logo. The service bars were half full, the data coverage good. He quickly opened the browser and directed it to the Hotmail homepage. After pulling out the scrap of paper with the email addresses he’d created, his calloused fingers tapped in the details on the touchscreen. In an instant he was staring at two emails in his inbox: one welcoming him to Hotmail, the other from the second address he had created. From Eva.

He tapped it and read the message that appeared: ‘The visitor’s name is Hussein Al-Samara. Address: Flat B, 23 Wimborne Road, Dagenham. There’s a cafe directly opposite. I’m there now. E’.

Joe could feel the return of the anger that had just made him lose control. He didn’t know who this Hussein Al-Samara was, but he knew he wanted to fuck the guy up. And if he knew anything –
anything –
?about Conor . . .

Joe acted with sudden clarity. He had stolen this phone for a reason. If someone was searching for him – someone with resources – there was a chance they were monitoring access to his regular email account. If he accessed it from this phone, they could start tracing it. But it would be a moment’s work to leave the handset under the seat of a bus and set his pursuers on a wild goose chase . . .

He didn’t hesitate. Logging out of his new account, he typed in the username and password of his old one. Ten seconds passed while the connection was made. His inbox appeared.

There was a long list of unread emails. The usual shit: loan offers, porn sites and Viagra. Joe paid no attention to any of them. At the top of the list was an email from an address he did not recognize, but with a subject heading that he certainly did: ‘Conor’.

He felt, as he lightly tapped the screen, that the world had slowed down. It seemed to take an age for the email to display. When it did, and he tapped on the link that formed its only contents, the delay was excruciating.

Ten seconds passed. Twenty. A YouTube video appeared on the phone’s screen. No title. Number of views: 0.

Joe tapped the screen to play it. He saw dark, juddery camerawork. A time code read ‘06:03’. There were clunking noises, and then perhaps, very faintly, a whimpering sound.

A child’s voice. Full of fear.

The camera swung round. There was a window. Beyond it, he thought he could make out the sea. The sky was growing light, but there was no sign of the rising sun. It continued to move. He saw a bed. On the wall behind it there was a picture of a sailing ship in stormy seas.

And, sitting on the bed, was his son.

Conor’s face was beaten and bruised. There was a cut on his lower lip, and a daub of blood just below it. His eyes were raw and swollen. His hands were tied behind his back.

He tried to speak, but couldn’t. All that came from his mouth was a weak, shuddering sound. But then he looked up, clearly paying attention to whoever was holding the video camera. Whatever sign that person made, it seemed to fill Conor with more horror.

Finally he spoke. Each word was an effort. He stuttered and stumbled, and it sounded more like weeping than speaking. The message, though, was sufficiently clear.

‘Daddy . . . I don’t know where I am . . . Mr . . . Mr Ashe . . . He killed granddad . . . He says he’s going to kill me . . .’

The very second he had forced these feeble words from his terrified throat, the screen went black. The video was over.

With dread creeping through every cell of his body, Joe stared at the empty screen. And when he tried to replay the scene, he was unable. Instead of his beaten, terrorized son, he saw a brief message: a message that chilled him almost as much as what he had just seen.

‘Video unavailable,’ it said. ‘The owner has removed this content.’

The full cup of coffee on the table in front of Eva was cold, the toast uneaten, the
Daily Mirror
unread. She had no stomach for either food or news.

She had chosen a seat by the front window. It looked directly onto the pavement and the busy street just off Dagenham Heathway. And on the other side of the road, the black door of number 23. Her eyes were stuck on it. If a lorry or a bus passed – which they did frequently – she had to suppress brief surges of panic. If the mysterious Hussein Al-Samara – or Mr Ashe, or whatever he wanted to call himself – came in or out of the premises, she needed to know about it. Joe would ask her what she had seen when –
if
– he arrived, and she wanted his approval. Given the events of the last twelve hours, there wasn’t much else that seemed important.

She checked her watch: 09.48. Had Joe read her email? How long should she wait for him to arrive? All day? The café was full and the middle-aged Greek woman who had supplied her coffee and toast was eyeing her from behind the counter, obviously peeved that she was taking up a table that other customers might want.

Her eyes panned up to the first-floor window. Flat B. Was that Al-Samara’s place? The wooden frame looked rotten, the pane was covered with a net curtain. A faint glow suggested that a light was on inside.

‘You finished?’

Eva looked up. The woman from behind the counter was looking down at the uneaten food like it was a personal slight.

‘Yeah . . .’ she muttered. ‘Thanks . . .’ Her eyes wandered back to number 23. ‘Um . . . maybe I’ll have another . . .’

She’d seen movement in the first-floor window. The net curtain fluttered slightly. She thought maybe she’d seen a shadow passing it.

‘. . . coffee,’ she breathed. The woman cleared her table.

Eva’s phone rang. She answered it immediately. ‘Joe?’ she said, before remembering that he didn’t even have her number.

‘DI Buckley?’ A voice she half recognized.

‘Who’s this?’ There was a tremor in her voice.

‘Jason Riley, Scotland Yard.’

She didn’t answer.

‘You came to see me this morning? In the basement? It’s about the fingerprint ID I gave you . . .’

‘What about it?’ she breathed.

‘Well, I was just logging the query and something came up. There were two other male visitors on the day in question and their fingerprint records are all the same.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Identical prints, all of them. Same bloke, this Hussein Al-Samara. Don’t know how they did it, but it looks to me like someone’s been tampering with the records. I’ll need to refer this upwards, but I thought I’d just give you the nod—’

‘
Shit!
’

Eva let the phone drop from her ear. The fingerprint technician’s words were bad enough, but her view of the first-floor window of number 23 was even worse. The shadow had suddenly reappeared, but this time it had slammed against both the net curtain and the window pane, and a crack had suddenly appeared in the glass. ‘Joe,’ she whispered. ‘Oh my God,
Joe – what are you doing?
’

She stood up immediately, pushing past the waitress.

‘You haven’t paid!’ the woman shouted. Eva threw a note on the table without even checking what it was, before running out onto the street and straight across the busy road. Within seconds she was at the black door, pressing desperately, repeatedly on the buzzer for Flat B. It made no sound, but she pressed and pressed, thumping on the wooden door with her other hand.

Two minutes passed. Three. There was no response from Flat B. With a howl of frustration, Eva stepped back onto the pavement and cursed, before stepping up to the door once more and pressing the button for Flat A. It was answered within seconds.

‘Police,’ she bellowed into the intercom. ‘Open up.’

There was a clicking sound. Eva pushed the door open and hurtled inside.

She found herself in a square lobby with grey ceramic floor tiles and on one side a row of pigeonholes for mail. There was a door to her left, which opened to reveal a frightened-looking old lady in a dressing gown and hairnet.

‘Flat B?’ Eva demanded.

‘Upstairs . . .’ The old lady nodded at a staircase with a wrought-iron banister. Eva ran towards it, but then stopped and looked back. ‘Is there a rear entrance to these flats?’

The old lady nodded, but then frowned. ‘Do you have any identification?’

Eva didn’t answer. She ran to the old lady’s door and pushed past her into the ground-floor flat. Ignoring the feeble shouts of protest, she ran along the dark hallway and into the tiny kitchen at the end, where a door looked out onto an alleyway from which an external iron staircase zigzagged up. She yanked the door open – a wailing sound reached her ears from above – and flew up the staircase to the first floor.

It was no surprise to see that the back door of Flat B was swinging open.

The bigger surprise was the baby, no more than three months old, lying in a Moses basket on the kitchen table, screaming its lungs out.

Eva ran past it, heading for the room at the front. She could hear more shouting from in there. Then she saw why.

There were three people in the room. One of them was a woman, short, dumpy, Middle Eastern-looking, wearing a tightly wrapped green headscarf. She was kneeling in the far-left corner of the room, just beyond a tatty sofa, her hands clutched in front of her, her face stained with tears, her eyes full of terror.

The second person was Joe. Eva could never have imagined that a familiar face could look so unfamiliar. His eyes were insane, his lips curled with anger. In his hand was the same scalpel with which he had threatened Eva.

The third person was another man, tall and thin, with dark hair. Like the woman, he was on his knees, and he was sucking in deep breaths, two a second. Eva could not see his face because it was covered by his hands. What she
could
see, though, was the blood, seeping from behind his fingers.

‘
Joe!
’

‘Back off, Eva,’ Joe growled, without even turning to look at her. He stepped forward, eating up the two metres that separated him and the man on his knees, then grabbed a clump of his dark hair with one hand and with the other placed the scalpel against his neck. ‘
You think I won’t kill you?
’ he hissed. ‘
I’ll fucking enjoy it. The only way you’ve got any chance at all is to tell me!
’ He yanked the man by his hair to his feet, and now he was shouting.
‘
Tell me! Where’s my son?
’

‘I . . . do . . . not . . .
know!
’ the man groaned. As he spoke, his hands fell away from his face.

Eva gasped.

It was not the blood that shocked her, flowing from his nose like a torrent, nor the ugly welts that Joe had inflicted on both sides of the man’s face with his fists. Nor was it his helpless expression of panic. It was something else.

‘Joe,’ she whispered.

‘
Back off, I said!
’ He yanked the man’s head to one side and pressed the edge of blade against the soft flesh of his trembling neck.

‘Joe, no . . .’

‘You’ve got three seconds. One. Two . . .’

‘Let him go! That’s not the man I saw! We’ve got the wrong person!
That’s not him!
’

And as she screamed at Joe, she ran forward and pulled him away, placing herself between her violent friend and the terrified, bleeding, messed-up man he was on the point of butchering.

Sixteen

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, USA. 0700 hours EST.

‘Chocolate bourbon?’

Mason Delaney indicated a plate of biscuits on the coffee table. The man sitting at the other end of the comfortable sofa gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

‘You don’t mind if I do?’

‘Please . . .’

Delaney helped himself to a biscuit, placed it on the bone-china saucer that held his cup of tea, lifted the cup and took the tiniest of sips. Then he held the chocolate bourbon up in the air and examined it as if it were a precious stone. ‘I became very fond of these when I was stationed in the UK,’ he said. ‘The British have given the world many things, but for me their greatest achievement will always be tea and biscuits.’ To emphasize his point, he dunked the chocolate bourbon in his tea, before biting off a third of it and chewing it slowly and with emphasis. He did not take his eyes off his guest.

‘I’m sure Her Majesty would be delighted to know that you approve.’

Delaney’s guest had one of those British accents that ordinarily made him shiver with joy. So clipped, so restrained, so white. Now Delaney ignored the hint of diplomatically repressed sarcasm and leaned forward, his eyes sparkling behind his horn-rimmed glasses, his lips trembling with amusement. ‘There are people in this very building who will try to tell you that the doughnut is a superior—’