Osama

behind her freeze her muscles into inaction.

At the top of the stairs she glanced back. He was just five steps behind her, and he was smiling. Eva hurled herself into the bedroom and slammed the door shut. Her shaking fingers felt for the key in the lock; just as she attempted to turn it, she saw the doorknob twist. She threw herself against the thick wooden door and wrenched the key to lock it.

Conor was back on the bed, huddled up against the window. Eva limped to the nearest cardboard box and dragged it with difficulty against the door, not sure that it would make any difference.

A sudden thump felt like it went right through her. The door rattled. She froze.

Another thump. The door rattled again.

And a third.

As she ran to get another cardboard box she flinched at the sound of a fourth strike against the door. She dragged the box up against the first, then stood back.

The thumping had stopped. She felt a moment of relief that quickly morphed into more panic. She could hear footsteps descending the stairs. Staring at the door, ice in her veins, she tried to work out what exactly Ashkani was doing.

He was prepared. A safe house wasn’t safe unless, when you left it, you could easily remove all traces of your existence.

Having descended the stairs two steps at a time, he hurried through the kitchen at the rear of the house and out the back door. Mrs Jones’s garden, which faced the sea, was neglected. On occasion he had tended it as part of his strategy to keep the foolish old woman compliant, but over the months that he had used this house as a base, he’d also been careful to take advantage of the prefab concrete garage at the side. How well he knew from Mrs Jones that ‘her’ Gethin had erected this ugly thing with his bare hands, and one look inside was enough to confirm that the old woman had barely ventured into it in the years since her husband’s death. It was thick with dust and spiders’ webs; most of the floorspace was taken up by an ancient green Morris Minor with flat tyres, and along the far wall were four large, red metal cans. He seized one and shook it. It gave off the thick, greasy stench of petrol.

The cans were all full, and with some difficulty he carried two at once. He went back into the house with them, leaving one in the hallway and taking the second through to the front room where Mrs Jones’s body lay mouldering. He undid the cap and sprinkled the petrol first over her body, then over the sofa and surrounding carpet, before heading to the tall windows and dousing the base of the curtains and the carpet beneath them. Back in the hallway, he looked up: the door upstairs was still shut. Having seen the terror on that woman’s face, he knew it would remain shut. Smiling to himself, he carried the second can halfway up the stairs, opened it and allowed the petrol to gush over the threadbare carpet and trickle down into the hallway.

Having brought in the third and fourth cans, he placed them in the middle of the hallway, uncapped them both and knocked them over in the direction of the stairs. Petrol coughed out, and the floor in the hallway became a puddle. Ashkani returned to the fuel-sodden front room, taking care not to tread in the soaked areas. Mrs Jones’s electric heater sat in the fireplace. He unplugged it and carried it back into the hallway.

He looked up again. Still no sound from the bedroom. The woman and child clearly had no idea what was about to happen.

By the front door there was an old, yellowed double wall socket. Ashkani plugged in the electric heater and ensured that both bars were on. They soon turned orange. He stepped swiftly outside. It would not take more than thirty seconds, he figured, for the petrol fumes to ignite. Hurrying to the Peugeot, he climbed in and started the engine.

Ashkani was five metres from the road when the explosion happened. It was loud and brutal enough to give the car a jolt as it moved away; he looked in the mirror just in time to see a flash of orange and black from the doorway he had purposefully left open to ensure a flow of oxygen.

By the time he was ten seconds away from the house, he could see smoke billowing from the windows; from the brow of the hill two kilometres away, he could still make out flickers of orange as flames licked up the building’s exterior.

And as the house disappeared from view, he found himself thinking deeply – so deeply that he failed to notice, high above him, a black Agusta, flying in the opposite direction, towards the coast.

He was thinking not of the woman and child who were even now suffocating and burning to death; nor even of how his plan had been frustrated; but of the Lion. The Director. The Sheikh al-Mujahid. He was thinking about a thin old man who had once been great, no doubt, but whose time was over and whose head had been filled with incorrect intelligence the better to confound the Americans.

The Americans.

He thought of Delaney, and wondered just what his people would be doing with bin Laden right now.

‘There!’ Joe bellowed. ‘There!’

‘Roger that.’ The pilot’s voice was unflappable. But the sight of smoke billowing from the isolated house was like a knife in Joe’s guts. ‘Get down there!’

The armed unit that had apprehended him at Bristol Airport could not have looked less sure of themselves. Twenty minutes ago this man had been public enemy number one. A communication from GCHQ and another from MI5 and their instructions had been turned on their head: take him where he tells you. He’d roared a grid reference number at the pilot, who had immediately diverted the Agusta and headed north-west.

The chopper started to lose height and, now that they were no more than twenty metres above ground, the extent of the inferno became clearer. The house and gardens were covered in a shimmering heat haze and shrouded in black smoke. Joe scanned the surrounding area, desperately looking for the figures of a woman and a young boy, but he saw nothing. And the sight of the black Range Rover, parked in front of the house, was enough to make dread seep into his marrow.

Thirty metres east of the house, they touched down. The chopper had barely hit the grass before Joe jumped out and, hunched against the downdraft, raced towards it. The front of the house was engulfed in flames – the front door had fallen forward and flames were licking around the frame. It looked like the entrance to hell. The crackling of the fire was deafening and the heat was immense – by the time he was ten metres away he had to place one hand in front of his face to protect it. He could hear voices behind him – ‘Get back from the house… it’s not safe!’ – but he ignored them and skirted round to the left side, looking up to find the window of the bedroom where he’d left Conor and Eva. It was open, but the interior was obscured by a film of smoke.

The heat was not quite so intense here as it was at the front of the house. He managed to get within five metres of the wall, then screamed at the top of his voice: ‘The window! Get to the window! ’

He saw nothing but smoke wafting from the opening.

‘Conor! Eva! It’s me!’

Panic surged through him. He couldn’t bear it… he couldn’t bear to lose them…

‘The window!’ he shouted. ‘Get to the—’

He stopped.

The outline of a child’s face appeared in the smoke.

‘Conor, I’m here!’ Joe roared. ‘Jump – I’ll catch you. Don’t be scared, champ, I’m here!’

There was a devastating crash from somewhere inside the house. The sound impacted through Joe like a bullet. He looked over his shoulder. Three members of the armed unit had joined him, but they were standing a good ten metres further back. Joe looked up to the window again. ‘Conor!’ he screamed. ‘Conor! ’

But the boy wasn’t there. The face had disappeared.

Smoke billowed into the bedroom through the gap between the door and its frame. It hurt Conor’s eyes and made it difficult to breathe. The nice lady had moved the boxes away and stuffed clothes from the wardrobe along the bottom, where the gap was largest, but it was seeping through the material and filling the room. She was on her knees by the bed, bent double and coughing her guts out. Together they had tried to fold the mattress in half