‘Steady,’ Weiss said. ‘We wouldn’t want a silly accident.’
Silva choked as Weiss forced her onto tiptoes, his fingers tightening round her throat. The stone wall pressed into the back of her thighs. One push and she’d tumble over and fall.
‘It’s a long way down.’ Weiss made a play of glancing behind her. ‘What do you reckon? Fifteen metres? Twenty? And nobody would ever suspect a thing. You’d be just another sad statistic.’
She tried to speak as Weiss pushed her backwards. For a moment she was weightless, the horizon spinning as her vision blurred. In a desperate attempt to free herself she kicked out, but her foot met with nothing but air as Weiss released his grip and stepped sideways. She fell and grasped the wall, slumping down on the pavement as he walked away.
‘I hope you’ve got the message,’ Weiss said as he opened the car door and climbed in. He shut the door and the window slid down. ‘Because there’s more where that came from if you didn’t, understand?’
The car slipped off almost silently as Silva pushed herself up from the ground. She walked up to the Hoe and sat on the bench in the exact same spot as before. In the fading light she looked out across the water to where a warship lay in Plymouth Sound, anchored to a huge buoy. At this distance the figures milling on the bow were the size of ants. Men and women just like herself, Silva thought. Willing to put their lives on the line for their country, to risk everything while doing their duty. Not like the politicians and the shadowy figures in London. Not like the people in the black car. They were playing with people, squishing them underfoot as if they were ants. She remembered back to Afghanistan and all the soldiers who’d been lost out there. For what? Like each and every one of them she’d signed up willingly, obeyed orders, but when the shit hit the fan she’d been dropped quicker than a live grenade.
A long, low horn echoed across the water. The warship had cast off from the buoy and was easing round, heading for the open sea and whatever dangers lay at its destination. Silva took a few moments to get her breath back and then she stood. The threat from Weiss had backfired. Rather than dissuade her, it had instead confirmed her mother’s story as true and flipped her intentions one hundred and eighty degrees. Her mind was made up. Tomorrow she’d phone Fairchild and tell him she would travel to Italy. And on the fifteenth of August she was going to kill Karen Hope.
Chapter Seventeen
Taher was at the window again. Morning. A rush of humanity struggling through gridlock to slave at jobs nobody wanted doing, to earn money to spend on things nobody needed. Except there was nothing human about the rush. These people were animals, never meeting each other’s gaze, living in a bubble. When their government bombed civilians, they chose to read headlines about celebrities dancing or eating slugs. While their government paid for hundreds of thousands of refugees to be corralled in vast camps where they had to fetch water from a standpipe, they complained about the cost of a cup of substandard coffee.
If only they knew true hardship.
After his family had been wiped out in the missile strike, Taher’s uncle had rescued him and taken him in. Cared for him. And each year on the day of Taher’s birth they’d prayed together. Asked that Taher could have a long life so that he might fully avenge the deaths of his parents and his siblings.
Taher’s family was Bedouin, and while many of the tribe had moved to the cities, his father had preferred the simple life.
‘Hard, but honest,’ Taher remembered him saying. ‘We scrape in the earth and are rewarded with bounty.’
So it proved. The barren acres his family owned turned out to have rich deposits of monazite, a mineral containing rare-earth metals. The deposits had only come to light after the missile strike, when the cliff behind the house had collapsed and the ore had been exposed. At first the ore had been near worthless, but the rise and ubiquity of the smartphone sent the prices of the rare-earth metals soaring. His uncle might, Taher supposed, have claimed the land for his own. Nobody would have cared: after all Taher had been only twelve years old when his parents had died. But his uncle wasn’t like that. Greed didn’t motivate him. Even now, when Taher had a tidy sum in the bank, his uncle still lived out in the desert with his wife and a few goats. Life, he said, was about worshipping Allah, serving Allah, doing Allah’s will. The fire from the sky had taken Taher’s family, but the fire from the sky had also revealed the treasure that would help Taher avenge their deaths. Infinite wisdom. Infinite justice.
When Taher turned eighteen the money his uncle had put in trust had been released. By Saudi standards it wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to pay for Taher to go to university in London. When he finished his studies he was offered a post in the Saudi civil service, but he turned it down. He also turned down a lucrative position in Saudi Aramco, the country’s state-owned oil company. There were other things he wanted to do and they didn’t involve sitting behind a desk.
When he asked his uncle’s opinion, the old man said the pursuit of justice was not to be rushed. There was plenty of time.
Plenty of time.
Taher spent a year learning to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan and another in Iraq causing havoc alongside insurgents in Baghdad, but his talents were underused. He wasn’t a guerrilla soldier. It wasn’t that he lacked the bravery or skills, more he didn’t believe he was making much difference. As long as the war remained distant, the infidels could ignore it. Twenty-five dead on a Kabul
