The Secret

THIRTY

Steven bought a ticket on the Edinburgh flight, politely declining the offer of a seat on an earlier flight as there was still time as the smiling girl behind the desk pointed out. He bought black coffee and found a quiet spot in the airport lounge where he settled by a window to look out at the grey morning light before calling Tally.

Steven? I expected you to call last night. I was worried.’

‘I’m sorry… rather a lot’s been happening.’

‘Something’s the matter,’ said Tally, alarmed at the nuance she was picking up in Steven’s voice.

‘I don’t know how Khan found out about Jenny and where she lived but he did. He’s kidnapped her and wants to trade her for the memory card Simone enclosed with her letter. Right now I’m at Birmingham Airport waiting to go up to Edinburgh… to await his instructions.’

‘Oh my God, Steven… Oh, Steven this is awful… poor little love… Oh God, is there anything I can do? Anything at all?’

‘No, it’s all up to me right now,’ said Steven. ‘I… just thought you should know what’s going on…’

There was a pause before Tally said quietly, ‘Of course I should know what’s going on; we love each other, don’t we? Jenny’s part of us, as in the two of us, isn’t she?’

‘Sorry, I put it badly. I’m not thinking straight. Of course, she is. It’s just that… I suppose I’ve suddenly become very aware of just how much my job affects the people around me, the people I love. You were much more aware of it than me. You spelt it out for me more than once and I kept pushing it to the back of my mind.’

‘Stop it, Steven,’ said Tally but not unkindly. ‘What I said in the past was based on my own selfishness. I thought I had a right to demand a safe and secure life and you should comply with that and fall into line but I was wrong and I remember all the unhappiness you went through for me before I insisted you return. You’re a special person doing a special job, a job that needs doing and it’s the rest of us who should fall into line. Every wife of every soldier serving in Afghanistan has to do this. I’ve come to realise there’s a great army of unsung heroines out there who go through hell every day but accept it without complaint. I’m now one of them. I love you; I’ll always be there for you and so will all the people you love so stop talking nonsense and go get Jenny back.’

Steven managed a smile for the first time in a while. ‘Will do.’

The flight north only served to increase Steven’s anxiety. He’d never been fond of the enforced proximity to strangers that air travel imposed but today it was the sheer normality of his fellow passengers’ behaviour that seemed to get to him; the very things that would normally confer anonymity on people were today doing the opposite. Filling in crossword puzzles, tapping laptop keys, reading newspapers, even the sipping of coffee seemed to imply a complete disregard for the personal agony he was going through.

The seatbelt sign went on as the aircraft crossed over the Lammermuir Hills on its long descent and banked steeply to the left to follow the Firth of Forth to make its final approach into Edinburgh airport. It was a journey Steven had often made in the past and he’d always enjoyed the moment when the two mighty bridges spanning the Forth came into view but today he had too many other things on his mind to offer more than a grunt when the man in the seat beside him pointed out that all the scaffolding and sheeting had been removed from the mighty Victorian rail bridge for the first time in years. ‘They’ve finished painting it,’ he said. ‘New kind of paint, should last twenty-five years.’

Steven could only think that Jenny would be thirty-five years old when they would paint the bridge again. She’d probably be married, probably have children — his grandchildren. He was wondering if she’d invite him for Christmas dinner when that image was interrupted by another, that of a group of mourners standing around a small white coffin. The hollow feeling in his stomach grew by the minute. The bump of the landing wheels didn’t help.

His fellow passengers stood in readiness for the aircraft doors to open, an impatient file all looking remarkably the same in his eyes, about to spend their day maintaining their role in the great scheme of things, negotiating contracts, securing orders, jockeying for position on the career ladder, but at the end of the day, it was odds on they’d all be going home to their families…

Steven turned his phone on as he made his way to the arrivals hall, walking past the row of name cards being held up along the route. He’d never had to pay these any attention before but today he did, simply because his actions were now to be determined entirely by somebody else. There was a ‘Clarkson’, written in green marker pen on cardboard, ‘Fenton — North Sea Gas’, presented as a smudged computer print-out, even a rather grand card bearing the name, Sir Peter Cross, being held up by a man in chauffeur’s uniform but no Dunbar.

With no real sense of purpose or direction to guide him, Steven imagined he was getting an inkling of what it must be like to be excluded from society; an unpleasant feeling but another human cameo to add to his collection. He restored purpose by gravitating towards the nearest café and buying coffee, the assistant’s inquisition about size and type irritating him more than usual. He sat down, placed his mobile on the table and waited for it to ring. It didn’t.

At fifteen minutes past ten Steven bought more coffee but didn’t drink it. He needed neither the caffeine nor the attention of the woman whose task it was to clear away empty cups and sponge the table top with a cloth that smelt bad. At half past the hour his mind was going into overdrive, imagining all the awful things that could have happened when he saw Ranjit Khan walk towards him. He was dressed in a smart suit that had not come off the peg and carried a laptop slung over his right shoulder. He was clean-shaven and his black hair was cut and styled to perfection. He looked every inch the successful lawyer or business executive. He smiled as he sat down beside Steven, shrugging his laptop strap off his shoulder to place the computer on the floor between himself and Steven. It was a gesture Steven found slightly strange.

‘Good Morning, Doctor. I apologise for my lateness. I’ve been watching you for the past forty minutes. You appear to be alone and you’ve just come off a flight so I know you’re not armed: you wouldn’t have risked it and there wasn’t time to sort out permission. I take it you’ve brought what I asked for?’

‘Where’s my daughter, Khan?’

‘All in good time,’ replied Khan with the smug smile of a man who knew he was in charge.

‘You’re getting nothing until I see my daughter,’ said Steven, his hands gripping the table edge as he struggled to keep them off Khan.’

The smile faded from Khan’s face. He placed his left hand on the table; it was clenched and holding something. Steven now understood why he hadn’t used this hand to free the laptop strap.

‘We don’t have any time to waste. I have a flight to catch. Your daughter is in a car in the car park. When you turn on my laptop and put in the memory card to demonstrate decryption of the disk that’s already in there, I will give you this.’

Khan raised his left hand but kept it clenched. ‘This is a transmitter. As long as I keep the contacts open by maintaining pressure on a spring, nothing will happen. Should I let go… for any reason…’ Khan watched to see that Steven had got the message, ‘the circuit will complete and the car your daughter is currently locked inside will explode. If the card is genuine, I will transfer the transmitter to you very carefully and you can keep the contacts open until your daughter is found and freed… or until,’ Khan glanced at the clock, ‘twenty three minutes have passed.’ After that, the car will explode anyway.

‘What car park is she in?’ demanded Steven. ‘This is an airport. There are lots of car parks, damn it.’

‘One of them.’

‘You bast…’

‘Time is passing. I suggest you turn on the computer.’

Steven opened the case and slid out a Sony Vaio laptop. He pressed the on button, finding it hard to take his eyes away from Khan’s clenched left fist as the machine powered up.

As the Windows jingle heralded the start of the session, Steven caught sight of Nick, the SAS man moving in the background. He sensed that he was looking for an angle that might give him the opportunity to shoot Khan without risk of hitting anyone else. This only added to Steven’s rising sense of panic as he neared the moment when he must insert the fake card. Nick couldn’t know about the triggering device in Khan’s hand. He wanted to make eye contact and shake his head but recognised that that could be equally fatal, causing Khan to release the trigger arm of the device and start shooting his way out in the aftermath of an explosion which would cause widespread panic. The fact that the café was busy was however, working in his favour. Nick couldn’t risk it. He brought out the card from his inside pocket. ‘How do we do this?’ he asked.

‘Start the disk then insert the card…’

Steven highlighted the disk drive and opened it to display gobbledegook on the screen.

‘Now the card.’

All the anxiety of the past hours, the fear for Jenny’s life, the regrets, the self-criticism, all disappeared in an instant to be replaced by cold, calm resolve. The ability to act under extreme pressure had kicked in, the quality that Macmillan had seen in him a long time ago, the very reason he worked for Sci-Med. It was now or never.

Steven pretended to have difficulty looking for the memory card slot in a machine strange to him. He examined both sides of the laptop with exaggerated head movement, the second of these involving moving his elbow to deliberately knock over the full mug of coffee that was sitting on the table untouched. It flooded the keyboard causing an immediate short circuit and blacking out of the screen.

In the tiny space of time that Steven anticipated he would have between shock registering on Khan’s face and his taking any action, Steven threw himself at Khan, having eyes for nothing but his left hand. He closed both his hands round it and held it shut. He was now hopelessly vulnerable, unable to stop Khan using his right hand to probe for his eyes. Steven was relying on Nick to put a stop to that.

Nick duly obliged. He arrived beside the two struggling men on the floor as if contriving to break up a fight but making sure he had his back to those in the café when he brought out his silenced pistol and ended Khan’s life with a solitary body shot which Steven noticed he even covered the sound of with a cough.