Dark Horizon, page 20
She watched him bite down on a reply and swallow it. It’s not just getting shot down that worries him, she thought. He genuinely doesn’t know what will be waiting for him on the ground.
As if he sensed her thoughts, Hamid tapped the map screen. ‘Is it possible to divert this aircraft again, to another airstrip?’
‘I’m not doing that,’ she told him. ‘Not for you. And where would we even go? If we don’t show up on time where they told me . . .’ Kate shook her head, unwilling to finish the thought. ‘Like you say, if you’re not in charge, I’m not listening to you.’
Hamid’s lips thinned and he muttered a curse under his breath. ‘It is likely you will be executed after we arrive, you realise that? They will have no more use for you.’
‘I’m past caring about myself,’ said Kate, and saying those words aloud opened up a bleak, hollow space inside. But that knowledge let something free in her as well. If she was going to follow this all the way to the bitter end, then she had to find some edge, something she could use against Hamid, Finn and the others. Once before in her life, Kate Hood had given up on a future she wanted, and she vowed never to let that happen again.
‘I will not be able to help you once we land,’ he said.
‘Are you helping me now?’ Kate straightened. ‘I’m pretty sure I have been helping you from the start.’ She studied his frown in the reflection of the canopy. ‘You’re in trouble with your pals, and you know it. You’re telling me I’ll catch a bullet when we land. Well, maybe you will too.’ Hamid’s expression turned stony and she pressed her point. ‘Yeah, I’m right, aren’t I? How long were you out of circulation? I bet your pals think you talked. That’s why they’re meeting us in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?’
‘I did not talk.’ Hamid growled the denial back at her. ‘Despite everything your government and the Americans did to me, I said nothing. For all they knew, I was Yusuf al-Amal. And he knew nothing!’
‘I’m not the one you need to convince,’ Kate told him. ‘How are you going to prove you didn’t sing like a bloody canary?’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, everyone breaks eventually, don’t they? They taught me that in survival training. No one can hold out against interrogation forever.’
Hamid snorted. ‘Only the weak and the faithless believe that.’
‘Maybe,’ she offered. ‘But if the situation was reversed, and you were the one down there on that airstrip waiting for this plane, what would you do with the bloke stupid enough to get captured?’ Hamid’s silence was all the answer she needed. ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’
Kate sensed movement behind her and turned to see Finn standing in the doorway. He held his encrypted satellite phone in one hand, the ‘burner’ that he had been using to communicate with the rest of his co-conspirators. ‘I have received new orders from Nasir,’ he began, and glanced at the pilot. ‘Switch the radio back on.’ He read off a frequency from the phone’s screen. ‘There’ll be someone on that channel to guide you into the airstrip.’
Kate looked out over the dark landscape of hills and plains. She caught sight of a glimmer of white lights flickering to life in the distance, a line of them laid out along a wide valley floor to the east. Reluctantly, she turned the Hawker’s nose to track the approach to the airstrip and began the pre-landing checklist.
Finn followed Hamid back into the main cabin, throwing a last look back over his shoulder at the pilot. ‘What were you talking to her about?’
‘It is not your concern,’ said Hamid firmly, making it clear he would answer no more questions about the matter.
‘As you wish.’ Finn dropped into his seat and secured the safety belt over his lap.
Turning the sat phone over in his hand, he glanced at the American woman on the opposite side of the cabin. She sat heavily against the cabin wall, her head back against the panel. Her moon face was pallid and sweaty, her eyes closed. If it hadn’t been for the stuttering movements of Breeze’s chest with each intake of breath, Finn might have thought she was already dead. On some level he admired her tenacity, but he knew there had to be a limit to it. If she could be kept alive long enough for an al-Sakakin executioner to finish her off on camera, there might be a bonus in it for the turncoat and his colleagues, but her time was over.
Finn checked his watch, still set on Greenwich Mean Time, and dialled Matvey’s number. It was time to start tying up the remaining loose ends.
The Russian picked up on the first ring, and when he spoke he sounded breathless and distracted. ‘This is not a good time.’
‘You mistake me for someone who gives a shit,’ Finn retorted. ‘Have you regained control back there?’ On a previous call, Matvey had made oblique references to some problems with the hostages, but Finn had been too busy dealing with the situation aboard the plane. Now, as the operation moved into its final phase, he needed to be sure that there would be no last-minute surprises.
‘We are . . . working on it.’ In the background, Finn could hear road noise. The Russian was in a vehicle, on the move.
‘We’re almost done with this,’ he told the other man. ‘I don’t want any more complications. What is going on?’
‘I told you, we are handling it,’ insisted Matvey. ‘That is what we are paid for.’
Finn hesitated, then decided not to press the point. He had enough to be dealing with himself. As soon as the jet touched down at the rendezvous point and the asset was handed over, al-Sakakin’s payment to Finn’s ghost account in the Cayman Islands would be deposited. With that money secured, he would be free to buy himself a brand-new identity and disappear to somewhere warm and remote, far beyond the reach of MI6. The fates of Matvey and his men were a long way down his list of priorities. They would get their payment and he would never see or hear from them again.
‘Begin the clean-up,’ he told the other man. ‘You know the exfiltration plan. Your pick-up will be waiting for you at the arranged location. Make sure there are no witnesses, no traces left behind. Stick to that, and in a few hours you’ll be out of the country.’ With those words, any promises that had been made to Kate Hood crumbled, but then the plan had always been to kill the hostages when their usefulness was at an end.
‘I will need an insurance policy,’ said Matvey. ‘Some leverage of my own.’
Finn sighed. ‘Fine. Kill the father. Keep the boy. You can dump him later, after you’re clear, yes?’
‘That is acceptable.’
‘Just get it done,’ said the Englishman from the other end of the line. ‘And by tomorrow morning, your money will paid in full.’
The other man cut the call and Matvey pocketed the burner phone, his expression turning grim.
‘You didn’t tell him,’ said Stepan, sitting across in the BMW’s driving seat. ‘You let him think we still have the hostages.’
‘If I had told him they fled, what would happen?’ Matvey grimaced. ‘We want to end this night’s work with our pay in our hands. That will not happen if he believes we have failed.’
‘What he does not know will not concern him,’ offered Luka, from the back seat. ‘We will get them back.’
‘He is a snake of a man,’ said Matvey. ‘The Englishman will surrender us in a heartbeat if it will be to his benefit.’ He took a breath and ran a hand through his hair. ‘We need to find the boy and his father. They were on foot! They could not have gone far!’ He glared out of the car’s window, scanning the dark roadside as they circled the area. Matvey’s frustration and anger were simmering close to the surface, and he pulled the silenced pistol from inside his jacket, checking over the loaded weapon. He vowed that when they found Walker and his son, he would punish them both for their defiance.
‘They did not cross the road behind the woods,’ said Stepan. ‘Which means this is the only other route they could have taken.’ He nodded at the road ahead.
Matvey nodded, his mind racing as he thought through his options. If they could not find the escaped hostages soon, they would have to abandon them entirely. But leaving the boy and his father alive dramatically increased the risk. Matvey, Luka and Stepan had shown their faces. A live witness would be able to identify them.
‘There!’ Luka pointed, interrupting Matvey’s thoughts as he caught sight of something. ‘I see them! Moving away from us, they don’t know we are here.’
‘Slow down,’ ordered Matvey, and Stepan obeyed, the car’s progress dropping to a crawl. He followed Luka’s line of sight and saw what the other man had spotted.
Sure enough, he saw the shadows of two figures framed against a wall of bushes, both of them moving quickly along the roadside path, one a stocky adult, the other a skinny youth. They were heading toward a turning off from the main road, a lay-by where cars could pull in, where a mobile food van sat to ply its trade. The van was shuttered up and dark, and parked a few metres beyond it was another vehicle, long and boxy with a high-visibility strip along the side and a light bar on the roof. Even from a distance, the uniformed figures seated inside were visible.
‘Police,’ said Stepan.
‘Chort!’ Matvey ground out the swearword.
Luka sighed. ‘That complicates things.’
‘No,’ said Matvey, with finality, ‘it does not.’ He weighed the pistol in his hand and made the cold calculation as to how he would proceed. Gesturing to Stepan, he reached for the door handle. ‘Keep the engine running. This will not take long.’
When they arrived at the address given as Kate Hood’s residence, Isla Grace had known right away that tonight was going from bad to worse.
The house didn’t look right; a few lights on inside but no answer at the front door and no pick-up when Harris tried again on the home phone. The two police officers shared a wary look and a silent communication: this was the same circumstances as the Price house earlier that night, and both of them dreaded the prospect of discovering the same horrors inside.
But what they found was more questions. A missing doorbell unit. A cheap fence panel around the back that had been kicked in to gain access to the garden. What could only be a bullet hole in the glass of a double-glazed door. And a mess of footprints in the damp earth, including one that looked a lot like the military boot Grace had spotted at the crash site a few hours ago.
‘Someone’s done a runner,’ said Harris, waving a hand to take in the common land and the nearby woods. ‘Could be anywhere.’
They moved back to the car and circled the area, eyes open for anything that set off their suspicions, and finally Harris made the decision to park up and put in a call back to base. There was too much going on for a pair of regular coppers to deal with on their own. It was the middle of the night, they were long into overtime and they needed the dog section or the helicopter unit out here. Grace couldn’t fault his logic.
They didn’t talk about it but they were both disturbed by the encounter with the armed men at Ridley Hill, and the ramifications of what had come next. Detective Inspector Khan hadn’t hesitated for one second to give those people what they wanted, and Grace felt horribly out of her depth. It was one thing to roll around the Kent countryside enforcing the law of the land. It was quite another to find oneself in the middle of something out of a spy movie. Khan had warned them in no uncertain terms to do their jobs and keep their mouths shut, but all either of them wanted to do was clock off and leave this behind.
Grace was ready to hang up her stab vest and let the night’s events fade away like a bad memory, but Harris had barely picked up the radio mike before someone came running up to the car, banging on the windows – a bloke in a rain-soaked jacket with a thin kid hanging on his arm – and both of them looking as fearful as anything.
Grace immediately got out of the Volvo, one hand held up, the other one close to the handle of her ASP baton in case the situation turned ugly. ‘What’s all this?’
‘Please,’ implored the man, ‘you have to help us! These blokes forced their way into our house, they were threating my lad and me . . .’
‘One of them had a g-gun,’ stuttered the boy, his eyes darting around.
‘All right, take it easy,’ said Grace. The call-in forgotten for the moment, Harris had climbed out too, and he cast around, keeping a watch on their surroundings. She exchanged a wary look with him, then focused her attention on the man. ‘What’s your name, sir?’
‘Alex. Alex Walker. This is George, he’s my son.’
‘Walker?’ Harris stopped short. ‘You live in a semi down on Luna Road?’
‘That . . . that’s right.’
‘We’ve been looking for you,’ said Grace. ‘Your partner is a woman named Katherine Hood, yes?’
Walker hesitated, a flash of recognition in his eyes. ‘You were the one who called the house. You left a message . . .’
‘But you didn’t pick up,’ said Harris, ‘so we came to have look around.’ He trailed off.
‘They broke the phones,’ said the boy, with a morose sniff.
But the other police officer’s attention was elsewhere, as something further down the roadway caught his attention. ‘Who’s this now?’
Grace heard a strange noise, a metallic rattle crossed with a strangled cough, and Harris jerked backwards like he had been kicked. His gloved hands came up to clutch at a ragged, bleeding gash in the side of his throat, and Walker’s son cried out in shock as Grace’s partner collapsed in the lay-by, blood fountaining from a fatal wound.
Her ASP baton was in her hand as she saw a man coming up the road, a long weapon in his hand, the muzzle of it tracking her way.
Then the noise sounded again, and a burning impact struck her in the chest, the sudden force of it slamming Grace against the side of the police car.
TWENTY
Fear turned to relief, then to confusion, and finally shock.
When Alex spotted the patrol car idling in the lay-by, his first thought was that they would finally be safe. He and George could be free of this nightmare, if he could get the police to believe them.
But like everything else that had happened tonight, it wasn’t that straightforward. Something about the female police officer’s voice rang a distant bell in his mind, and it wasn’t until her partner told him they’d been trying to find them that he remembered the phone call back at the house.
This is Constable Isla Grace with the Kent County Police Service. I was hoping to speak with a Mr Alex Walker.
He was still processing details when a low, wasp-buzz noise cut through the damp air and Grace’s partner spun away, his throat torn ragged, blood spattering over the window of the car. George let out a cry of pure animal terror and shrank back from the grisly sight. Alex pulled him away, instinctively trying to put himself between his young son and any source of danger.
Grace’s arm jerked and her collapsible baton shot out to its full length, but before she could do more, the buzzing noise sounded again and the woman grunted in pain, stumbling back against the side of the vehicle.
They’ve found us.
The bleak realisation unfolded in Alex’s mind as he caught sight of the man with the greying hair who had come to his door, the one called Matvey. He advanced, each step slow and considered, leading with the elongated shape of the silenced silver pistol.
Alex backed away, pushing George down and out of sight along the flank of the police car.
‘This is your fault, Alex,’ called Matvey, sniffing at the air. ‘If you had stayed in the house. If you had obeyed me, it would not have been necessary to do this. Now there will be consequences.’
‘Dad.’ George clutched at him, wide-eyed. ‘Did he kill that policeman?’
Alex had seen the other copper go down, collapsing into a trembling heap. He had seen the awful wound that opened the man’s neck. In the moment of quiet that followed, both of them heard the choking noises coming from the other side of the lay-by. He had seen enough injuries in his time to know that Grace’s partner wouldn’t survive his.
‘Buh. Bastard.’ The female police officer lay slumped nearby, wheezing with each agonising exhale she made. Grace tried to right herself but her pain had to be excruciating. Matvey’s second shot had hit her in the chest, the round slowing as it passed through the layers of her stab vest. But the vest wasn’t armour plate – it was good against knives but not bulletproof. Alex saw a dark, wet patch growing on Grace’s undershirt, her pupils darkening as shock set in.
‘Dad, we have to run!’ George pulled on Alex’s arm. ‘The fire, Dad! The fire’s coming!’
It was as if the last desperate hours fleeing through the rain and the mud hadn’t even happened. They were back at the start of everything, desperately trying to figure out what to do next. It was happening again – the same horrible choice replaying. Alex wanted to tell his son to flee, but the moment George moved, Matvey would see him. And he would use that gun on Alex’s boy.
‘Quiet,’ he hissed, pressing a finger to his lips. George blinked, but he did as he was told and held his tongue.
Against the ticking of the rain, the only other sound was Harris, the poor sod breathing wetly as blood filled his mouth. Matvey’s footsteps grew louder as the man with the gun walked up to the opposite side of the police car, until he stood a few metres from the wounded policeman.
Alex risked a look, raising his head to see through the window of the driver-side door still hanging open. Dull moonlight glittered off the length of Matvey’s pistol as he raised it and fired again. Two more shots clattered through the night as the gunman finished Harris off with clinical precision.
‘I do not wish to leave behind a mess,’ said the Russian. ‘But I have little option. Come now.’ He turned, walking slowly toward the rear of the long Volvo. ‘Do not hide like cowards. Face me. Show some courage.’
Grace grunted as she dragged herself off her knees and looked toward Alex. ‘Get out of here.’ With a monumental effort, she used one hand on the patrol car’s flank to pull her body back to a kneeling position, still gripping the baton in the other.
