Muhammad Aslam had been profuse in his apologies but Othman had put him at ease. It wasn’t Aslam’s fault that the assassin had failed. And Othman had more than enough money to try again. And again. He would keep sending assassins until they were both dead. He would not rest until he had avenged his sons. It was the Bedouin way.
He sighed and opened his eyes. It was half an hour’s drive to the palace. The prince had arranged a dinner with his three brothers, all of whom Othman knew and had done business with in the past. He wasn’t looking forward to it. The prince had already agreed to sell the hotel for double what he had paid for it three years earlier, so his business was concluded, but the Kuwaiti had insisted that Othman accept his hospitality. The brothers, like the prince, enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh, and Othman had no doubt that the palace would again be filled with prostitutes. He shuddered.
Off in the distance he saw something streak through the sky. His eyesight was perfect but whatever it was moved so quickly that it was hard to focus on it. It was metallic, glinting in the sun, and left behind it a trail of white vapour. As Othman watched, it curved through the air as if guided by an unseen hand.
The bodyguard in the front passenger seat of the Mercedes had seen it, too. ‘Incoming!’ he screamed and punched the driver’s shoulder. The driver swung the wheel hard to the right and Othman banged into the man sitting next to him, who put his hand on the back of the seat in front to steady himself. The tyres screeched across the Tarmac and Othman tasted bile at the back of his throat. The driver swung the wheel in the opposite direction and Othman was flung across the car so roughly that his head struck the window hard enough to daze him. Then the missile hit and the car exploded in a ball of flame.
‘Perfect,’ said Simon Nichols, twisting around in his seat. ‘They don’t come much better than that.’
Richard Yokely raised his Coke can in salute. ‘You’re the man, Simon.’ Nichols turned back to study the screens in front of him. One showed an aerial view of the carnage on the road below, transmitted from the unmanned Predator drone some two hundred feet above the ground. The lead Mercedes had pulled round and three Gurkhas in dark suits were racing towards the car that had been hit by the four-hundred-pound Hellfire missile. ‘Bring her back, Phillip,’ said Yokely.
‘Your wish is my command,’ said Phillip Howell, who was piloting the Predator. He toyed with a joystick and the aerial view on the LCD screen panned to the left. The Predator’s cameras were so powerful that they could have picked out the numberplates of the cars on the ground from as high as thirty thousand feet. A variable-aperture television camera gave them the live feed and an infra-red camera provided real-time images at night or in low-light conditions.
Yokely, Howell and Nichols were seven thousand miles away from Kuwait at Nellis air-force base in Las Vegas. The Predator had taken off from Balad air base, forty miles northwest of Baghdad, under the control of the US military, but once it had reached four thousand feet, control had been handed to Yokely and his team in Las Vegas. No flight plan had been filed and the US military kept no record of where the Predator went or what it was doing. The Predator’s hundred gallons of fuel allowed it to stay in the air for a full twenty hours if it was cruising or to fly 450 miles at its top speed of eighty miles an hour and was more than enough for it to fly into Kuwait, carry out its mission, and fly back to land at Balad air base. Howell had piloted the drone at just under twenty thousand feet across the Iraqi desert until it had reached Kuwaiti airspace, then taken it down to just a hundred feet above the sand, flying higher only when it got to within five miles of the target. Nichols had fired the Hellfire missile, one of two carried by the twenty-seven-foot long Predator. There had been no need to fire the second.
As the Predator continued to bank to the left, still flying low, Nichols centred the nose-cone camera on the burning Mercedes. The car was lying on its side and clouds of black smoke were being blown across the road by the desert wind. The Landcruiser had run off the road to avoid the explosion. The Gurkha bodyguards were standing in the sand, their hands on their heads as they stared helplessly at the wreckage.
Yokely’s face tightened as he watched the car burn. He had known the bodyguard sitting in the front passenger seat of Othman’s car. He had been a former Navy Seal who had served with Delta Force and worked with Yokely on an anti-drugs operation in Colombia during the mid-nineties. Unlike Yokely, Rick Dawson had quit working for the Government and moved into the more lucrative private sector. It was simply bad luck that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it had been his choice. No one had forced him to work for Othman. There was no way that Yokely could have warned him of what was to happen. The bodyguard would have had to come up with some excuse to get himself off the convoy, which might have tipped off the target.
‘Who was he?’ asked Howell, interrupting Yokely’s train of thought.
‘Just an angry old man,’ said Yokely. ‘He won’t be missed.’
The phone rang, dragging Shepherd out of a dreamless sleep. He groped for the receiver, fumbled, and pressed it to his ear. ‘Yes?’
‘Mr Daniel Shepherd?’ It was a woman, upper class. Her voice alone could have frozen water.
‘Who is this?’ growled Shepherd. The only person who ever called him Daniel was his mother-in-law, but this definitely wasn’t Moira.
‘Hold the line, please, Mr Shepherd. I have the Prime Minister for you.’
‘What?’ said Shepherd. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Music started to play. Classical, something with lots of violins. ‘Hello?’ said Shepherd.
He wondered if this was a practical joke, but then a man was on the line and he knew immediately that it wasn’t a prank. He recognised the Prime Minister’s measured tones and the soft Scottish burr he’d heard so many times on news broadcasts.
‘Sorry to call you so late, Mr Shepherd, but I’ve been trying to get our Education Bill through and I’m having to grease an awful lot of wheels.’
Shepherd tried to focus on the digital clock on his bedside table. It was just after one o’clock. ‘That’s all right, sir. Not a problem.’
‘I’ve been asked to give you a call to reassure you that we are aware of the approach that has recently been made to you by your American counterparts.’
‘Right, sir. Thank you.’
‘The fight against terrorism is one we absolutely have to win. There’s no question about that. And sometimes measures have to be taken that fall outside the remit of our law-enforcement agencies.’ The Prime Minister spoke slowly, almost as if he was reading from a script.
‘I understand, sir.’
‘We’re very grateful for the work you’ve done for us in the past, your exemplary army career and the excellent job you’ve done as a police officer and with SOCA. There’s no pressure on you to accept the offer that has been made. All I’m doing is calling to let you know that if you do accept, you do so with our blessing and that you will be accorded whatever protection we’re able to offer. Subject to total deniability, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Shepherd.
‘So, that’s it, then. Good night, and God bless.’
‘Good night, sir.’
The line went dead and Shepherd hung up. Richard Yokely had been right. He did have friends in high places.
