At Risk

63

The Green Man was large and plain and beery, with a long oak bar and an impressive array of pumps. There was no jukebox or fruit machine, but the clientele was young and boisterous and noise levels were high. A cloud of cigarette smoke hovered a little above head height. After a brief search, Jean and Denzil found a table against the wall, and Denzil went to buy the first round. At the bar, as he waited, Jean saw him surreptitiously counting his money.

He returned with a pint of Suffolk bitter for each of them. As a Muslim, Jean hadn’t drunk alcohol for some years, but Faraj had suggested that she have at least one drink to show willing. The beer had a sour, soapy texture but was not altogether unpleasant. It gave her something to do with her hands and, equally important, something to look at as they talked. Early in the evening she had made the mistake of looking Denzil in the eye-of meeting his open, inquisitive gaze-and it had been almost unbearable.

Talking to him was harder than she would have believed possible. He was awkward and shy, but he was also sensitive and self-deprecating and kind. He was almost painfully concerned that she should enjoy her evening with him, and she sensed him casting around for subjects of conversation which might engage her interest.

Don’t look at him, look through him, she told herself, but it didn’t do any good. She was sharing a small and intimate space with a young man whom she found herself liking very much. And planning to kill him.

When it was her turn to buy the drinks, she returned with a pint in each hand and gave them both to him. Her first pint was still only half drunk.

“To save time,” she explained. “It’s a bit jam-packed up there.”

“It gets a lot more crowded when the Americans are here,” he told her. “Not to mention making things a lot harder with the girls for us local boyos.”

“So why aren’t the Americans here tonight?”

“Grounded, probably. Apparently there’s been a terrorist scare. There’ve been a couple of murders up towards Brancaster and they think it might be something to do with Marwell.”

“What’s Marwell?”

“One of those RAF bases that the US Air Force use. You know, like Lakenheath… Mildenhall…”

“So what have they got to do with Brancaster? I thought that’s where people went sailing.”

“To be honest, I haven’t followed the whole thing very closely. My stepfather told me. He’s…”

She waited.

Denzil frowned awkwardly at his pint. “He’s, um… he’s a bit more clued up than me, localwise. They reckon the people who committed the murders on the coast might be about to launch some sort of attack on Marwell.”

“Why?”

“Honestly, I haven’t really followed the whole thing. I’ve been out for most of the last few days.”

“Is it near here?”

“Marwell? About thirteen miles.” He raised his glass as if to check the steadiness of his hand. “And given that there are three battalions of troops between us and it, I’d say we’re probably pretty…”

She turned to him. She could feel the faint, dizzying effects of the alcohol hitting her system. “Suppose we weren’t? Suppose it all ended tonight? Would you feel you’d lived… enough?”

“Wow! That’s a bit of a heavy…”

“Would you, though? Would you be ready to go?”

He narrowed his eyes and smiled. “Are you serious?”

She shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Well, OK. If I had to, like, die, this would probably be as good a moment as any. My mum got remarried a couple of years ago and is happy for the first time that I can remember, and I’ve now got a baby sister-seventeen years younger than me, can you imagine it, seventeen years younger than me-who hasn’t really had the chance to get to know me, and so wouldn’t be hurt by my death, but who my mum would still have. And I haven’t really begun doing anything with my life, careerwise, so in a sense there wouldn’t be anything wasted, so… Yeah, if I had to go, now would be as good a time as any.”

“What about your father? Your real father?”

“Well… He walked out on us years ago, when I was a boy, so he can’t ever have really cared for us…” He rubbed his eyes. “Lucy, I really like you, but why are we having this conversation?”

She shook her head, her eyes unfocused. Then, draining her pint glass, she nudged it towards him. “Could you…?”

“Yeah, sure.”

There was a distant roaring in her head, as if she had her ear to a giant sea shell. Yesterday morning she had killed a boy, much the same age as this one, with a silenced Russian pistol. She had smiled at him and squeezed the trigger, felt the gasp of the damped recoil, and seen the boy’s head empty itself into the corner of the car boot. Now she was reborn, a Child of Heaven, and at last she understood what the instructor at Takht-i-Suleiman had always found so funny-so funny that it regularly reduced him to shaking incoherence.

She had been reborn dead. The moment had, as promised, changed everything. It had thrown a switch inside her, jamming the circuitry and paralysing the networks. She had feared that she would feel too much; instead, infinitely worse, she felt nothing. Last night, for example. She and Faraj had been like reanimated corpses. Twitching in each other’s arms like electrified frogs in a school laboratory.

And Jessica. She had put aside the question of the baby. Lifting her forearm, she bit it until the teeth met, and when she released herself there were two purplish crescents in the skin, oozing blood. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt, it just didn’t matter. For a moment, a split second, she felt the dark presence of her pursuer.

“… Another pint for Mademoiselle Lucy. You’re not married by any chance, are you?”

“Not by any chance, no.” She drank.

“So tell me, unmarried Lucy, just where exactly are you staying round here, and just why are you inviting yourself to pubs with strangers?”

Familiarity, she saw, had emboldened and calmed him. Her head sank slowly forward until her forehead touched her glass. “That’s a good question,” she said. “But a very hard one to answer.”

He leaned forward. “Try.”

She was silent. Took a deep swallow of the beer. And another.

“Or not, of course,” he murmured, straightening up and looking away.

The alcohol raced round her system. In the old days, with Megan, it had never taken much. A couple of glasses and she was flying. “If I told you that the conversation we’ve just had was the most important of your life…”

“I’d…” He shrugged. “I’d guess that’s possible.”

In his eyes she could see the dawning of the knowledge that the evening was not going to end magically. That she was just one more flaky, difficult woman who was not for him.

She took his hand. It was large, warm, and damp from his beer glass. Holding it by the fingers, she examined his palm, and as she did so, something-in fact, everything-became blindingly obvious. She laughed out loud. “See,” she said. “Long life!”

“We’re a long-living family,” he said warily.

She smiled at him, and releasing his hand, drained her glass. “Lend me your car keys,” she said. “I need to get something.”

Outside, at the car, she put on the backpack and zipped up her coat over it. When she returned, wearing her waterproof, Denzil looked at her resignedly. “You’re going to disappear, aren’t you? And I’m never going to know anything about you.”

“Let’s see,” she said. And touching her hand to his cheek for a moment, she walked out.

Outside, the rain blew gently across her face. She couldn’t feel her feet on the ground; instead, she seemed to be floating, buoyed by a lightness of spirit that she had never known. It wasn’t a question of rationalisation-she simply wasn’t going to do it. She had been cut loose from the need to obey anyone, or any creed, ever again. They couldn’t kill her; neither Faraj and his people, nor her pursuer and her people. She was already dead.

How long she walked, she didn’t know. Not more than fifteen minutes, probably. The beer had filled her bladder, and as she crouched at the side of the road with her combat trousers round her ankles-memories of Takht-i-Suleiman-she saw Denzil sweep past in the Honda Accord. She walked on. It was as if she stood still and the road unrolled beneath her feet. She was smiling, and the tears were coursing down her cheeks with the rain.

The noise of the helicopters was small at first, and then it became a snarling, slashing fury all around her. Before her was the cricket ground, spotlit from the sky-a scene of unearthly theatricality and beauty. At its centre, hissing faintly and rocking on its struts, a British Army Puma from which the black-clad chorus ran to take their positions. Heckler and Koch MP5s, she noted approvingly. The SAS. And on the road beyond them the sapphire winking of police vehicles against the Georgian frontage, more running figures, and the bouncing echo of a loud-hailer.

Jean D’Aubigny kept walking. She would have liked to stop weeping but the beauty of it all, and the attention to detail, was just too much. Faintly, at the edge of her consciousness, she heard the multiple snicker of rifle bolts drawn back and locked. Police snipers, she thought, but quickly forgot them, for there at the scene’s centre, downlit by a police helicopter, was a slight, determined-looking figure whom she knew immediately. The woman’s dark hair was slicked back from her face and her leather jacket was zipped to the chin.

Jean smiled. Everything was somehow so familiar. It was as if the scene had played itself out an infinity of times before. “I knew you’d be here,” she called out, but the wind and the updraught from the helicopters plucked her words away.

In the pavilion, Faraj watched as the security forces flooded the area, and knew himself a dead man. He saw the soldiers leap from the Puma, the cricket field flooded with light, and the police marksmen pour down the ropes from the hovering Gazelles on to the surrounding roofs. Thanks to the binoculars, however, he knew one further thing for certain: that the boy had driven the Honda into the garage several minutes before. The bomb had to be in the car, and he kept the binoculars trained on the front door of the target house. Where the girl was he had no idea, presumably in the house with the boy, but he had to act before the police evacuated the place and the entire operation was in vain. From his jacket pocket he took the remote detonator, kissed it, bade farewell to the fighter Asimat, and spoke the name of his father and of Farzana, whom he had loved.

As the woman walked uncertainly on to the illuminated cricket ground, Liz realised that she was looking at Jean D’Aubigny. The hair was wet and cropped short, and the face was much thinner and sharper than that of the puppy-fatted teenager in the posters, but it was recognisably her. She was wearing a waterproof jacket, unzipped. Beneath it a high-necked sweater was intersected by the grey, bandolier-style strap of a bag.

As their eyes met the woman smiled, as if in a kind of recognition, and the lips moved in the rain-blurred face. She looked younger than her twenty-four years, Liz thought. Almost childlike.

The connection between them held for an instant, and then the night shivered and tore apart. A tidal wave of darkness roared towards Liz-pure force, pure hate-lifting and pitching her through the air like an unstrung toy. The ground slammed up to meet her, and for a moment, as the reverberating undertow of the explosion rolled over her, dragging the breath from her lungs, she knew and understood nothing.

There was a silence-a long silence, it seemed-during which soil and clothing and body-tissue fragments rained down, and then, by inclining her head, which hurt atrociously, she saw people moving soundlessly around her, ghostlike beneath the wavering spotlights. To one side a policeman was kneeling on all fours with his uniform hanging from his body and bloody mucus issuing from his nose and mouth. To the other, the overcoated figure of Don Whitten was lying face-down, shuddering, and beyond him an Army officer was sitting blank-eyed on the ground, bleeding from both ears. In her own ears she could hear a high, thread-like scream. Not human, but some kind of an echo.

A police officer ran up to her and shouted, but she could hear nothing, and waved him away. More running feet, and then the helicopters and the lights swung away from them to rake the cricket pavilion and the woods at the far side of the cricket ground. They must have found Mansoor. “Alive!” she tried to shout, clambering to her knees with the rain in her face. “Get him alive!” But she couldn’t hear her own voice.

She was running now, slipping on the wet grass, pushing away Wendy Clissold and another, vaguer figure. Running at an oblique angle to one of the SAS Sabre teams, who were working their way fast and purposefully around the perimeter towards the pavilion. Every step that she took was like a hammer-blow behind her eyes, and she could feel the warm, steely taste of blood in her mouth. She could still hear almost nothing beyond the thready scream in her ears and the slashing pulse of the helicopters, and so was unaware of Bruno Mackay until, launching himself at her from behind and wrapping his arms around the wet calves of her jeans, he brought her awkwardly to the ground and held her there.

She groaned, dazed. “Bruno, we… can’t you see, we…”

“Don’t move, Liz,” he ordered her, pinning her down hard by the wrists. “Please. You’re not thinking straight.”

His voice was just a whisper. She bared blood-darkened teeth, and writhed.

“I said don’t move! You’ll get us shot.”

She lay there, immobilised. Watched as the police helicopter’s spotlight bleached the pavilion. Day for night. She wasn’t even sure what she’d been trying to do.

“I’m fine,” she murmured.

“You’re not fine,” he hissed. “You’ve got severe blast concussion. And we’ve got to get away from here. If there’s a firefight we’re likely to get our-”

“We need Mansoor alive.”

“I know. But move back now, please. Let the SAS do their job.”

The four soldiers moved towards the pavilion with their MP5 carbines raised to their shoulders, but as they did so, its front door slowly opened, and a wiry, aquiline figure stepped on to the spotlit players’ terrace and narrowed his eyes against the glare. He was wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt. His hands were raised. He was not holding a weapon.

Liz stared at Faraj Mansoor, fascinated. Watched as the first spatters of rain darkened his T-shirt. Mackay, however, barely glanced at him, and in a sudden, terrible rush of comprehension Liz knew exactly what was going to happen, and why.

There was a moment’s frozen stand-off, and then one of the SAS men yelled, “Grenade!”

Leaning forward into their weapons, and from a range of no more than half a dozen yards, the four men each fired a controlled burst of shots into Faraj Mansoor’s chest. Speechless, Liz watched as his body kicked and bucked and twisted to the ground.

There was a brief silence, and then one of the soldiers stepped forward, and with an air of brisk formality fired two further shots into the back of the fallen man’s neck.

Rain streamed from Liz’s face as she stared at the spotlit tableau. She felt Mackay take her arms from behind, pinioning her, and wrenched herself free. She could feel the blood on her face congealing now, and the rain streaming through her hair and down her back. She was almost weeping with fury. “Do you realise-do you fucking realise-what you’ve done?”

Mackay’s voice was patient.

“Liz,” he said. “Get real.”