Osama

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—’

‘Mason, I wonder if we might move the subject on?’

Delaney smiled, dunked the remainder of his biscuit, and waited for his guest to continue.

‘First, on behalf of the service I’d like to congratulate you on Operation Geronimo.’

‘Come, Peter. MI6 played its part. Your people were very helpful.’

Peter Schlessinger, like Delaney himself, had no official title within the British Secret Service – at least none that Delaney was aware of. The Brit continued in a businesslike fashion: ‘We have, of course, seen increased terrorist activity in the past few days. That’s only to be expected. Our services are liaising, naturally, but I’m not sure how much of the day-to-day stuff reaches you.’ Schlessinger bent down, picked up a leather briefcase, opened it and removed a sheaf of papers. ‘Most of it’s low-level, of course, but not all. Three men arrested at our East Midlands Airport, one of whom was trying to smuggle ammonium nitrate in a colostomy bag onto a flight to Newark.’

‘Delightful,’ Delaney murmured.

‘We have three individual cells planning to plant explosive devices in the foundations of the Olympic Village in east London at some point during the next two months…’

‘A year ahead of schedule,’ Delaney observed. ‘I didn’t know they had it in them to be so well prepared.’

‘Nobody wants another 9/11, Mason,’ Schlessinger said, perhaps a little piously. ‘We’ve had our people watching the site ever since the games were announced. A single watch battery could power a hidden detonator for several years. But that’s by the by – all three cells are compromised. Frankly they won’t be laying so much as a turd without us knowing about it.’ Delaney’s eyes widened in surprise at the director’s language. ‘There won’t be another Munich – our combined intelligence is too good. We can guarantee the safety of any American athletes in 2012.’

Delaney returned his cup to the table, then sat back on the sofa and pressed his fingertips together. ‘Do I sense the word “but” peeking over the hill, Peter?’

For a moment, Schlessinger didn’t reply. He returned the papers to his briefcase and clicked it shut before replying to his American counterpart.

‘Fifty per cent of our intelligence comes from sources outside the UK or the US, Mason. You don’t need me to tell you that.’

Delaney inclined his head in acknowledgement.