Dark Horizon, page 10
‘Make the wrong choice and you will die,’ he said carefully. ‘Then the boy. That is what she will see when she comes home. Is that what you want?’
Stiff and wooden, Alex shook his head, the fight in him suddenly stalled.
This wasn’t the first time someone had threatened him with a gun. A few months back, he’d been called in on a shout at a rough estate where a house had been turned into a makeshift cannabis farm. The resident had come after the firefighters with a sawn-off shotgun after Alex had told him they couldn’t save the place – and his crop of dope plants – from the electrical fire consuming it. But that bloke had been high as a kite, and in his dumb fury he hadn’t remembered to load any cartridges.
One look at the iron-hard eyes of the stranger with the pistol told Alex this man was in a totally different league. He had a predatory coldness about him, and there was zero doubt in Alex’s mind that he could kill without a second’s hesitation. That, however, was not the greatest of the fears that gripped him.
George.
Alex wanted to shout out his son’s name as loud as he could, tell him to run and run and not look back.
The man with the silenced gun cocked his head, and as if he plucked the terrified thought from Alex’s mind, he raised a gloved hand and waggled an admonishing finger at him.
‘Think, Mr Walker,’ he said, and the fact the gunman knew his name made the chill in Alex’s blood grow ever colder. ‘Think about your son.’
A wave of fatigue came over him, and his cheeks became hot as his colour rose. Alex felt ashamed and defeated. He tasted a trickle of blood on his lip, oozing from a fresh cut on his face. At length, he let his hands drop.
‘Good decision.’ The man stepped back, gesturing with the pistol. ‘Stand up slowly.’
As he did so, the man reached for the hallway light switch, flicked it off, then on, then off again. Out on the road, Alex saw an answering flash from the headlights of the parked car.
‘Dad?’ He turned toward the sound of George’s voice and the unfolding panic of the night’s terrible turn racked up another few notches.
Another stranger stood at the far end of the hallway, one gloved hand on George’s shoulder. Alex’s son still held the kettle he’d been filling to make some tea, and it shook in his grip. The man holding George shared the Slavic look of the man in the black jacket, and he had the bored, malicious eyes of a brute.
‘He . . . he came in over the back,’ said George, blinking as he tried to hold back tears. ‘Broke our fence.’
‘Far worse can happen,’ said the man with the gun.
Alex took a shaky breath and tried to exert some tiny measure of control over the situation. ‘What do you want? If you’re looking for money, you’ve come to the wrong place.’
‘We are not looking for money,’ said the thug. ‘We are looking for you.’
Then, when Alex thought it couldn’t get any worse, a third man strolled into sight, crossing the driveway. Three of them. Or are there more?
The gunman’s expression soured and he said something severe to the new arrival before he could enter the house. It sounded like Polish or Russian to Alex and, while he didn’t know what was said, the gist of it was clear enough. Go wait in the car.
The third man gave a disappointed sigh and sloped off back the way he had come.
Then the gunman closed the door and from a different pocket he produced the wireless doorbell unit. He let it drop to the floor before crushing it beneath the heel of his boot. The device gave off a strangled electronic bleat and then nothing.
The man’s attention returned to his captives. ‘The boy will make tea for us,’ he said, gesturing at the kettle in George’s hand. ‘And afterwards, we will have a conversation about what comes next.’
TEN
Breeze settled into the seat across the narrow table from the asset, helping herself to a bottled water as she studied the prisoner.
He rocked gently back and forth in his chair, and over the ambient background rumble of the Hawker’s engines, she could pick out the rhythm of what he was mumbling through his gag, beneath the cowl covering his head. Breeze couldn’t hear the individual words, but she knew a prayer when she heard it. He was reaching out to his god for deliverance, but the poor bastard had already been forsaken.
‘You spoke to Hood, then?’ Finn hovered nearby, nodding in the direction of the flight deck as Ray returned to his position. ‘What’s your read on her?’
Breeze shrugged. ‘Short fuse. Very few fucks to give. My kind of gal.’
The British agent didn’t appear pleased with her off-hand evaluation. ‘I don’t like being forced into using someone we haven’t had time to vet properly. Price was reliable, a known quantity. This woman . . .’ He trailed off.
‘I’m not giddy about it either,’ she admitted. ‘But we’re gonna play the hand we’re dealt.’ Breeze shifted and briefly focused on him. ‘Shouldn’t your people in London be looking into whatever the hell happened to Price? I mean, your pilot disappears on the very night he’s needed – that smells like shit to me.’
‘I’ve informed Vauxhall Cross,’ he said, referring to the MI6 headquarters in London. Finn fingered his beard. ‘It may be a coincidence.’
‘No such thing, so find out for certain,’ she retorted. Then Breeze turned back to the asset. ‘Do we need to keep him like this? Take off the cover.’
‘That is not protocol.’
‘Same excuse again? Ask me if I care. Go on, do it.’
‘Fine.’ Finn leaned over and the prisoner flinched as he removed the hood, then the headphones, gag and finally the blacked-out glasses.
She wondered what had been going through Yusuf’s mind. With his senses of sight and sound stolen from him, her captive would have nothing but the motion, the vibrations through the floor and the changes in pressure to tell him what was going on.
The man jerked in his chair, trying to look in every direction at once. When he saw the cabin window next to him, he leaned closer to it, blinking as he peered out into the night.
‘Nervous flyer?’ Breeze offered him a bottle of water. ‘Thirsty?’
He looked back at her, his dark eyes partly illuminated by the steady pulse of the running light on the jet’s wing. He studied the plastic bottle like it was a venomous snake and made no move to take it.
‘I’m not gonna poison you with a goddamn bottle of mineral water, Yusuf.’ She put it down on the table in front of him, within his grasp. ‘Drink up. It may be a long time before you get another opportunity.’
Warily, he reached out with his bound hands and worked off the cap, before finally taking a deep draught. As he drank, Breeze shot Finn a look that clearly meant get lost, and he took the hint, retreating to the other end of the cabin.
The prisoner guzzled down half the bottle before coming to a panting halt. At length, he looked up at her. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Already told you,’ she replied. ‘A deep, dark, dusty hole.’
‘A p-prison?’ He stiffened at the thought.
‘No.’ She spoke slowly, plucking at his fears like a harpist working the strings of her instrument. ‘Something much worse. You know the kind of place. I’ll bet your friends in al-Sakakin have told you horror stories about them. Let me assure you, it’s a nightmare.’
He stared at the table. ‘Why are you doing this to me? What have I done to wrong you?’
‘I don’t want you to think I’m a bad person, Yusuf,’ she went on, paying no attention to his entreaties. ‘I have a code of ethics. I believe in second chances. I’m gonna offer you one right now.’ Breeze tapped on the oval window. ‘All I have to do is give an order.’ She made a looping motion with her finger. ‘I just need to say the word, and this plane will turn around and go right back to where we started. We can leave that dark hole far behind.’
‘If . . . if I give you what you want from me. Yes?’ He gripped the water bottle so tightly that the thin plastic crackled.
‘See, I knew you were a smart man.’ Breeze nodded to herself. ‘That’s what your surveillance file suggests. A smart man, caught up in dangerous company.’ She paused, stacking up conversational gambits in her mind like they were cue cards at a debate. ‘Your file doesn’t say you’re a killer, Yusuf. But your friends certainly are. They’ve hurt a lot of people. Maybe you’ve known that all along, maybe you’ve tried to pretend it isn’t as terrible as that. I don’t care what lies you tell yourself so you can sleep at night.’
The captive looked down at the table, unable to hold her gaze any longer. When he didn’t respond, she pressed on.
‘You can stop more needless deaths from happening. If you talk to me, if you tell me the truth, I will keep you safe. We can do the right thing, you and I.’ Breeze pointed upward. ‘If Allah is watching, my friend, what do you want him to see?’
A muscle in his jaw twitched, and Breeze thought he might shout something angry back at her, but then Yusuf sagged and wiped a hand over his mouth and unkempt beard. ‘I swear to you that I would tell you anything and everything you want to know, if I knew these men you speak of. I told the British, again and again, I know nothing of these people. I am a businessman! I am not a criminal! You are holding an innocent man against his will and you are breaking the law!’ By the end of his retort, the prisoner was sobbing.
Irritation flared in her, and Breeze reached out, snatching away the half-empty water bottle, tossing it across the cabin and far from his reach. ‘Innocent, huh?’ She growled the words. ‘We’ll see about that.’
They were passing over the coast when a ringtone played a repeating snatch of synth-heavy music, the intro to a Europop tune from the mid-eighties that had been a favourite of Kate’s mother.
The notes chimed around the flight deck as she fished her phone from a pocket, earning Kate another censorious look from Ray.
He flicked the mike pick-up away from his mouth and shook his head. ‘You still have it switched on? I told you before, you can’t use that device, let alone keep it activated.’
‘And I told you before, sod off.’ Kate’s eyes narrowed as she saw the name on the caller ID: ALEX WALKER.
He knew better than to call her at the office, so to speak. Alex understood that he should only ring her if there was something that absolutely couldn’t wait, and so the needle on Kate’s anxiety gauge immediately spiked.
‘You need to turn that off,’ Ray insisted.
‘You need to mind your own business,’ she shot back.
Despite what airlines liked to imply, using a cellular telephone on board an aircraft would not immediately cause it to plummet out of the sky. One lone cell phone signal was unlikely to mess with a jet’s avionics; it was only when a few hundred passengers were using them at once that it could become a problem. But Kate knew that Ray worried more about matters of security than electronic interference.
‘I signed the Official Secrets Act when I was in the Forces,’ she added, in an off-hand attempt to mollify him. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to blab about your precious cargo over an unsecured line.’ He was still complaining when she slipped back one cup of her headset and pressed the phone to her ear, leaning into it to take the call. ‘Alex?’
‘Kate.’ That single word was enough to make her stomach drop. Alex’s roughened voice was heavy with desperation, and she knew immediately that something was wrong. ‘I’m . . . I’m so sorry . . .’
Before she could ask him what he meant, there was a clicking, scuffling sound as the phone on the other end changed hands, and the next voice she heard belonged to a stranger.
‘I am speaking to Katherine Hood?’ The man’s accent was distinctive but careful, each word clear as a bell. ‘The pilot of aircraft Golf Lima Tango Tango Papa?’
‘Yes. Who is—?’
‘You will restrict your replies to one-word answers,’ he broke in. ‘We have Alex and his son as our captives. They will be harmed if you do not do exactly as I tell you. Do you understand this, Ms Hood?’
Kate felt ill, her gut twisting into knots. She stared at the canopy glass, seeing a distorted reflection of her own face. The woman looking back at her had gone ashen.
‘Do you understand?’ The voice repeated the question firmly.
‘Yes.’ Kate could see Ray from the corner of her eye, flicking glances at her in between scanning readouts on the Hawker’s control panel.
‘If you attempt to raise the alarm or inform anyone else aboard the aircraft of this conversation, we will know,’ he continued. ‘If you refuse to comply, there will be consequences for disobedience. The boy and his father will suffer.’
‘No . . .’ The denial died in her throat, turning to dry ash.
‘By now, you will be aware of the nature of the operation you are involved in. You are going to change the destination of that flight. Comply, and Alex and George will be permitted to live. Refuse, and it will not go well for them.’
Kate said nothing. The confining walls of the flight deck drifted away from her, becoming untethered, and the constant rumble of the engines rose to a howl. She stared at her own reflection, feeling a stifling surge of hot fear – and impotent anger – open up inside her.
‘In a few moments, you will receive a message providing map coordinates. You are to take control of the aircraft and divert it to a landing strip at that location.’
‘How?’ Her mind raced with the myriad terrible possibilities.
‘You are resourceful,’ said the man on the phone. ‘You will find a way. You have thirty minutes. We are watching. If we see no evidence of a change in heading within that time, it will be considered non-compliance. Is this understood?’
‘Yes.’ Kate forced out the word. She was rigid with tension, unable to move.
‘Once you have command of the aircraft, drop below the radar threshold.’ The voice paused. ‘You may think of testing my resolve. Be assured, I am a man who keeps his word. You do not wish to suffer the same fate as your colleague, Mr Price, and his loved ones.’
The line went silent, and Kate’s body suddenly let out the breath she had been holding in. At her side, the co-pilot gave her another questioning glance.
She turned away from him, rubbing her fingers at the corner of her eyes, holding the phone out of Ray’s line of sight. Kate’s heart hammered in her chest, cords of terror and near-panic tightening around it. Had the co-pilot heard any of that? Did he suspect something was wrong?
If he did, what would come next? She couldn’t afford to let anything happen to put Alex and George’s lives at risk. Kate gulped in a breath of air, tasting bile in her throat. The man on the phone had mentioned John Price, and the other pilot’s unexplained disappearance suddenly took on a horrible, sinister cast.
She thought about the trembling man under the cowl that Breeze’s team had marched aboard the Hawker. This was about him, whoever he was. Someone wanted that man badly enough to make these dire threats; perhaps even to commit murder.
‘Are you finished?’ Ray asked the question with a prim sigh. ‘If Finn sees you with that phone, he’ll go mad. At least put it away!’ He looked back over his shoulder through the half-closed door to the cabin beyond, afraid the bearded man might come in at any second.
Kate’s phone let off a pulse of vibration as a message arrived, and she turned it so only she would be able to see the screen.
The message was a photo of Alex and George, the father holding his son close to him in a protective embrace. Kate swallowed a gasp at the sight of Alex’s hangdog face lined with streaks of blood, and a hollow distance in his eyes.
The 13-year-old boy was small and fragile. In his hands, he held a sheet of paper with a set of navigational coordinates that Kate’s trained pilot instincts automatically retained. The numbers burned themselves into her mind and she hesitated with her thumb over the ‘erase’ key.
The photo made the nightmare real. The callous voice on the call had been ghostly and disconnected, but seeing Alex and George’s obvious distress brought the bleak threat into sharp, undeniable focus.
They were what mattered to Kate most. More than her job, her uncertain future or her tainted past. If she lost them, the world would crumble around her and she knew she would never survive going over that edge for a second time in her life.
The roaring of the engines grew, building in her head like harsh overpressure. But it wasn’t the jets – it was the thunder of the blood in her veins, the hammering of her racing heartbeat. Kate took a shaky breath, the memory of acrid seared plastic and burning fuel in her nostrils.
The box of old, pain-marbled recollections she kept buried deep inside her opened a crack, in danger of letting out the phantoms Kate hid from the world. She held on tightly to the Hawker’s yoke, making it the anchor to keep her in the here and now, mentally slamming closed the lid on yesterday’s trauma before it could return to engulf her.
After a moment, Kate carefully slipped the phone into a pocket and took a long, metered breath to steady herself.
‘All done, then?’ prompted Ray, unwilling to let the matter drop. ‘No more interruptions?’
‘All done,’ she echoed tonelessly. Kate’s gaze slipped to the clock on the control panel, noting the time.
Thirty minutes and counting.
The Scene of Crime officers had come in like the blazes, racing out to the Price household with all due haste, and when Grace had wondered out loud how they had arrived so quickly, Harris noted that the daughter and son-in-law of a certain chief superintendent had a house just a quarter mile away down the leafy lanes.
The locals had woken up to something unpleasant happening in their sleepy Little England hamlet, shaken by the strobing of passing blue lights and the growing number of coppers milling around. Blue and white tape shot through with POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS warnings now hung across the entrance to the Prices’ driveway in bleak garlands, and behind it the SOCOs were pulling on disposable paper overalls, shoe covers and gloves. Grace watched them work, each one rendered into a genderless, near-identical figure, like something out of a child’s toy box.
