The Ultimate Truth (21 page)

I glared at him. ‘I’m trying to tell you—’

‘I know what you’re trying to do,’ he said calmly. ‘But you need to stop it right now.’

‘
Stop it?
’

He nodded. ‘No more, OK? This has gone far enough.’

‘What do you
mean
?’ I said, frowning at him in disbelief. ‘We
know
where Bashir is now. We know that Omega have got him. All we have to do now
is—’

‘We don’t
have
to do anything, Travis. We’re not
going
to do anything.’

‘But if we don’t—’

‘That’s
enough
!’

Grandad had never raised his voice to me before, and the sudden shock of it stunned me into silence. I stared at him, awed by the burning intensity of his eyes.

‘Now you
listen
to me,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Just
listen
, OK?’ He paused, taking a few moments to compose himself. ‘This isn’t some
sort of game, Travis,’ he said. ‘You have to understand that. This is the real world. And the real world can be a dirty and dangerous place. You might think you can deal with it, but I
can assure you that you can’t. You were lucky today.
Very
lucky. You had a gun pointed at you. You outfought a man twice your size. You got into a car with three trained killers and
they let you out when you asked them to.’ Grandad looked into my eyes. ‘Do you realise what
could
have happened? What probably
should
have happened? I mean, just
think
about it, Travis. Think about what
could
have happened to you today. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

I nodded.

‘Life’s tough enough as it is without taking unnecessary risks,’ he continued, leaning back in his chair. ‘The only people who go looking for danger are fantasists or
fools.’

‘What about you?’ I said quietly.

‘Me?’

‘You were in the army. That’s a dangerous thing to do, isn’t it?’

‘That’s different.’

‘Why?’

‘It was my job. I was specially trained, I knew what I was doing.’

‘Then you became a private investigator.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Another dangerous thing to do.’

He just looked at me.

I said, ‘No one
forced
you to be a soldier, did they? I mean, you chose a career that you knew was going to be dangerous—’

‘It was my job,’ he repeated calmly. ‘Just as it was your mum and dad’s job to find Bashir Kamal. But it
isn’t
yours. That’s all I’m trying to
say, Trav. Whatever’s going on with Bashir, whatever happens or doesn’t happen to him . . . it’s nothing to do with you. And even if you think it is, I’m
not
going to
let you risk your life – or anyone else’s – over something that doesn’t concern us.’

‘But we can’t just leave Bashir at the warehouse.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we don’t know what’s going to happen to him—’

‘We don’t
know
what’s going to happen to anyone.’

I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I just scowled at him.

‘I’m sorry, Travis,’ he said, ‘but all I care about is looking after you and Nan and Granny Nora. And right now the only way I can do that is by keeping the CIA and MI5
out of our lives. If that means leaving Bashir at the warehouse . . . well, I’m sorry, but that’s how it has to be.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘Look, even if he
is
at the warehouse – and it’s quite possible he’s not – there’s nothing we can do for him anyway. You said yourself that there are at least seven Omega men
there . . .’ He shrugged. ‘What chance would we have against seven trained men? Besides, if they
are
just protecting him from the CIA . . . well, good for them.’

‘Yeah, but what if they’re not?’ I said. ‘What if they’re working for a terrorist group? I mean, just because Omega
claim
they’re working for the good
of the country, that doesn’t mean they are, does it? You said yourself that no one knows anything about them. They could be a bunch of mercenaries for all we know, working for anyone who pays
them. What if the terrorists found out that Bashir was an MI5 informant and hired Omega to kidnap him? They could be keeping Bashir at the warehouse until they hand him over.’ I looked at
Grandad. ‘And they have to hand him over tonight or tomorrow morning because the warehouse is going to be demolished on Monday. That’s why Winston asked me not to do anything for
twenty-four hours.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Grandad said, without much conviction. ‘They might just be moving him somewhere else. Somewhere safer. And anyway—’

‘Why don’t we call the police?’ I said. ‘If we’re not going to do anything to help Bashir, we should at least let the police know what’s going on.’

Grandad sighed again. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’

‘Get what?’

‘The only safe thing for us to do is nothing. If we go anywhere, talk to anyone, make any phone calls . . . if we do anything at all that connects us to this case, we’re going to
have a whole load of people crawling all over us – the CIA, MI5, counter-terrorist units, Special Branch, Omega. If Omega
are
working for a terrorist group, and we start poking our
noses into
their
business . . .’ Grandad looked at me. ‘Do you really want to take that risk?’

I reluctantly shook my head. I didn’t like admitting he was right, but there was no getting away from the fact that he was. Everything he was saying made perfect sense. And I knew I just
had to accept that. As I gazed down at the floor, feeling kind of deflated, I felt Nan’s hand on my knee.

‘I know it hurts, love,’ she said tenderly. ‘But we can’t always follow our hearts, no matter how good our intentions are. Sometimes, whether we like it or not, we just
have to do whatever’s necessary to keep ourselves going.’

I wasn’t exactly sure what Nan meant, but as I trudged up the stairs to my room – feeling physically and mentally exhausted – my only intention was to lie
down and close my eyes and empty my head of everything.

I was through with thinking.

I’d had enough of it.

I just wanted to sleep.

After about ten minutes of doing what I
thought
I wanted to do – lying on the bed with my eyes closed, trying not to think about anything – I finally gave up
and admitted to myself that it wasn’t what I wanted to do after all. And even if it was, it wasn’t going to happen.

You can’t stop yourself thinking about something that means everything to you, can you? And if you can’t stop thinking about it, you can’t just close your eyes and go to sleep,
no matter how exhausted you are. You have to keep going. Whether you like it or not, you just have to do whatever’s necessary . . .

Was that what Nan had meant?

Probably not.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what anything meant any more.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon. I’d had about an hour’s sleep the night before, and I’d been whizzing around doing all kinds of crazy stuff since six o’clock
this morning. My legs were tired, my arms were sunburnt, my head was throbbing like a pneumatic drill.

How was I supposed to know what to do about anything?

How was I supposed to
know
?

Why couldn’t I just accept that Grandad was right? Why couldn’t I just forget about Bashir Kamal? Of course I’d
like
to help him, but if helping him meant putting Nan
and Grandad in serious danger, why should I take that risk? I didn’t know Bashir, did I? I’d never even met him. So why did it seem to matter so much what happened to him? Why
did
it seem to mean everything to me?

It was only after I’d thought about that for a while that the ultimate truth finally dawned on me: Bashir Kamal
didn’t
mean everything to me. Of course he didn’t. He
only
seemed
to. It was Mum and Dad who meant everything to me. They
were
everything. Everything I’d been doing, everything I’d been trying to do, was all for them. For
their lives and for their deaths. That was it.

There wasn’t anything else.

My mum and dad were everything.

I sat up, rubbed the back of my head, and looked around for my laptop. It was on the bedside table. I reached over and picked it up, turned it on, and logged on to the Internet. I knew what it
was that I’d missed now. That nagging feeling I’d had that I’d missed something Winston had said, something really important . . .

I knew what it was.

At least, I thought I did.

It was something that wasn’t there.

I opened Google and went looking for it.

The trouble with looking for something that isn’t there is knowing how to tell if you’ve found it or not. You can keep looking for it in different places, keep
finding it’s not there, but how do you know it’s not somewhere else? How many different places do you have to check before you can be 100 per cent sure it’s not anywhere?

The answer, I suppose, is that you can never be 100 per cent sure.

You can’t keep looking for ever.

But you
can
keep looking until you’re 99 per cent sure.

It took me just over an hour.

And then, at last, I knew what I had to do. I had to go back to the warehouse. I wished there was another way, but there wasn’t. I had to go back to the warehouse, and I had to do it
tonight.

I spent the rest of the afternoon working out a plan of action. There was a lot to think about and a lot to be done, and I didn’t have very much time. It was almost three
thirty now. The sun would start going down in around five hours’ time, and by nine thirty it would be dark. I had six hours to get everything ready.

First of all, I checked out the warehouse again on my laptop. Using a combination of Google Earth and Street View, I studied the whole area as thoroughly as possible – the surrounding
fields, the pathway, the car park, the geography of the streets around Sowton Lane. The views weren’t completely up to date, of course, but they showed me what I needed to know.

The next thing I had to work out was how to contact Mason Yusuf without anyone finding out. I didn’t know for sure if our landline was being tapped (by the CIA, MI5, and/or Omega), but I
got the feeling from Grandad that it probably was. Why else would he have used the telephone box when he’d called his contact the other day? As he’d also been reluctant to use my
mobile, I had to assume that he didn’t think that was safe either.

I went over to the window and looked down the street. The white van was still there, still in the same place. I wondered briefly if the CIA agents inside were the same ones I’d encountered
at my house. Special Agents Zanetti and Gough, the giant-sized man I’d kicked where it hurts . . .

Probably not, I thought, turning away from the window and going back over to my bed. Not that it mattered. Whoever was in there, they’d see me if I tried to use the telephone box. They
might even be monitoring it anyway.

Which left me a choice of either texting Mason or emailing him.

I knew that emails and texts can be traced quite easily once they’ve been sent, but I was less sure about whether they can be monitored
while
they’re being sent. I guessed it
wasn’t impossible though. There are all kinds of ways of hacking into email accounts and mobile phones – viruses, malware, Trojan horses – and I knew it wasn’t beyond the
CIA or MI5 to have somehow gained access to my phone. If they could do it, so could Omega.

But what other choice did I have? I definitely couldn’t phone Mason, and I didn’t haven’t time to go round and see him. So if I wanted to get in touch with him, I had to either
text him or email him.

I thought about it for a while, trying to weigh up the pros and cons of both options, but there were so many unknown factors to consider that it was really hard to make a rational decision. So
in the end I just went with my gut-feeling instead.

Text.

I took out my phone, found Mason’s number, and got started.

It was a long and laborious process. First of all I had to explain the whole situation to Mason, tell him what I was planning to do, and ask him if he was willing to help me.
Then after he’d texted back –
no prob. wot u wnt me 2 do?
– I had to spell out exactly what I wanted him to do. Then I had to wait while he made some phone calls, and after
that we had to figure out
how
to do what we were planning to do . . .

I’d never texted so much in my life.

Finally, at 5.49 p.m., Mason’s last message came through:

I replied:

Then all I had to do was wait.

I’m not bad at waiting. I once sat in a parked car with Dad for three hours, just waiting for a man (who was falsely claiming compensation for a serious leg injury) to
come out of his house and go jogging. On another occasion I spent nearly four hours on a park bench with Mum, just waiting to get a photograph of a recently sacked gardener who (the town council
suspected) had been stealing koi carp from their ornamental pond.

So it’s not as if I don’t have any experience of ‘just waiting’.

But that night it was almost too much to bear. As the early evening crawled into the summer dusk, and I waited for the sun to go down, the time seemed to pass so incredibly slowly that every
minute felt like an hour. I looked at my watch so often that the exact timing of everything that happened is still seared into my memory.

6.32 p.m. I suddenly remembered that I’d arranged to meet Courtney in the office that morning, and that unless she’d called here and spoken to Nan or Grandad, she
wouldn’t know why I hadn’t shown up.

I wondered if I should text her to apologise and explain.

And then I started wondering if I should let her know what I was planning to do with Mason, maybe even ask her to come along with us. I was pretty sure she’d like to be involved –
or, at least, part of her would – and there was no question she’d be an enormous help. I just wasn’t sure whether I could trust her or not. It wasn’t that I doubted her
loyalty. I knew she’d do almost anything for me. But I also knew that she felt responsible for me. So although the crazy-and-adventurous Courtney would love the idea of what I was about to
do, the grown-up-and-responsible Courtney would quickly realise there was no way she could let me do it. If I told her what I was planning, she’d try to persuade me to change my mind, and
then – having failed – she’d reluctantly call Grandad and tell him everything.