Osama

TWENTY-THREE

Mahmood Ashkani was staring at the sky, awaiting the moment when Flight BA729 from London to Dublin entered his line of sight.

His laptop was open on the car seat beside him, its sat-phone connection to the internet established. He had chosen his viewing point with precision. At 1013 hours the British Airways flight would be in this airspace. And at that moment he would see it fall from the heavens. Only when he had verified, with his own eyes, that the strike had been successful, would he upload the footage to YouTube. No doubt it would be taken down within minutes, but that would be ample time for bin Laden’s taunt to go viral across the world.

Eight minutes past ten. He thought of Delaney. His handler, the man he had been playing like a finely tuned instrument, would know by now that something was wrong. And when the planes started dropping from American airspace as well as British, he would finally understand the extent of Ashkani’s deception. He wished he could see Delaney’s pasty face when he realized what he’d done.

Eleven minutes past. He thought of Joe Mansfield. He thought of how desperate Delaney had been to eliminate him and how much effort he, Ashkani, had put into the job. Mansfield could have ruined everything.

Twelve minutes past.

The sky overhead was clear. He took a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from his jacket and put them on.

Thirteen minutes past. There was nothing in the sky except a flock of seagulls heading for the coast.

Ashkani breathed deeply, trying to keep a lid on his sudden unease. Perhaps there had been a delay.

Two minutes went by. Three. The sky remained empty of aircraft.

Ashkani glanced down at his laptop. It was all ready. He simply needed to press a button. But he could not do it. Not until he was sure…

He opened a new Firefox window and, typing meticulously with his two forefingers, navigated to Heathrow’s departures page. And as his eyes fell upon the list of flights, his slow, careful breathing suddenly became irregular. Each flight on the page was followed by a single word.

‘Cancelled’.

Ashkani stared at the page, and back at the sky. Then, in a sudden burst of anger, he ripped the phone from the laptop and hurled it to the floor by the empty seat. He stared at himself in the rear-view mirror for thirty seconds, his mind full of the explosions he could not see, trying to straighten his head and formulate a new strategy.

He was exposed. His cover was blown. By now Delaney would know that he had been double-crossing him, and Ashkani had nothing to show for it. But that didn’t change what he had to do right now: disappear. Quickly. Completely.

But first he had to cover his tracks. His mind wandered. He saw an isolated house and the dead body of an old woman at the bottom of the stairs. He saw a room filled with incriminating evidence.

He started the engine, performed a three-point turn, and began driving back the way he had come.

Both Eva’s body and mind were numb.

She had watched the clock tick relentlessly past ten.

Ten past.

Twenty past.

She couldn’t move. She could barely think. Her gunshot wound was terrible, but the state of her head, filled with images of burning aircraft and screaming children, was worse. She had no other thoughts.

Her body temperature dropped. Coloured blotches appeared in front of her eyes. She was vaguely aware of the clock. Ten twenty-eight.

Conor.

The thought was like a shot of adrenalin. She had forgotten him. Eva shook her head clear of the mist that was clouding her thoughts, and winced as a burning sensation shot through her trunk. Her breath had caused condensation on the inside of the windscreen and to lean forward and wipe it off with her sleeve was so painful that she gasped.

And she gasped a second time when she saw a grey Peugeot speed by in the opposite direction. The car passed in a flash. But she’d had enough time to see the face of the man at the wheel: the hooked nose, the dark skin and hair, even the slight hunch in his shoulders.

The same man she had seen just days before in Barfield, and whose photograph had since stared out of computer screens and been burned into her brain.

But he was dead. Joe had shot him. Hadn’t he?

Within seconds Eva was swinging the Range Rover round, ignoring the stress the movement placed on her side. Ahead there was a bend to the right, and the Peugeot was out of view. She stamped on the accelerator and the car screamed through the automatic gears as she gripped the steering wheel and peered through the windscreen still half obscured by moisture.

Three minutes later she was speeding past the car park where they had stopped the previous night and surging over the brow of the hill. The sea appeared, about two kilometres in the distance, and between the top of the hill and the coast, about 250 metres inland, was the solitary house. Eva didn’t slow down. As the vehicle jolted over the hill she felt another hot jab of pain in her side, but she also saw, maybe a mile along the road that snaked out ahead, the Peugeot. It had taken a left at a fork in the road. There was no doubt about it: it was heading for the house.

Eva trod down hard, her face set in an expression of fierce concentration. A minute or two later the house was just thirty metres ahead. She barely slowed down as she entered the driveway, and came to a noisy, skidding halt a car’s length from the front door.

Silence.

The Peugeot was parked five metres to her right, at an angle that suggested its driver had also come to an abrupt stop. Sweating now, Eva fumbled for the handgun Joe had left her with, quietly opened the door and stepped outside.

There was no sign of Ashkani. She found herself gripping the weapon hard, resting it on her left forearm, which was raised in front of her. She felt faint, and worried that she would pass out any moment. She couldn’t prevent her footsteps crunching a little on the gravel as she covered the three metres to the door. It was ajar – just an inch – so she prodded it gently with her right foot, keeping her weapon raised.

The entrance hall was murky and quiet. No sign of anyone. It looked just as it had when she had left. She listened hard – no sound – and as she stepped inside she quickly checked left and right that there was nobody waiting to jump her.

Nothing.

Lightly pushing the door shut behind her, she crept across the hallway to the bottom of the stairs. Her weapon was pointing upwards now. The door of the bedroom where she had left Conor was wide open. Was that how she’d left it? She couldn’t remember.

The treads creaked as she ascended – each pace sent a tremor through her. By the time she reached the top of the stairs she was gulping for air.

She paused, gritting her teeth. Then she inhaled deeply several times and lunged into the room.

It was empty.

‘Oh my God,’ she breathed. ‘Conor…’

She limped across the room to the bed where he had been lying. The indentation of his little body was still there, and the coat that had covered him was lying over the open box in which she had found the airline meal tray. But there was no sign of Conor.

She turned.

Otherwise the room was just as she had left it: full of boxes, the books still lying on the floor. She blinked. There was something on the table that hadn’t been there before. She took a step towards it; her eyes lingered on a plain black laptop and, lying squared up on top of it, a small, leather-bound book. On the cover it said: ‘Holy Koran’.

A sound from the corner of the room sent a jolt through her veins. Instinctively she pointed her gun at the wardrobe. It was open just a fraction. Hadn’t it been open wide when she left?

She edged round the table, her weapon still primed, and, treading lightly, covered the three metres between herself and the cupboard. Taking a deep, slow breath, she eased the wardrobe door open with the gun barrel.

Pale, frightened eyes looked up at her.

Conor was crouched in one corner, his knees pulled up to his chest.

There was a mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. Eva caught a glimpse of her face. It was corpse-white. She tried to smile at the little boy; to pretend that she was not as scared as him. She held out her free hand and took one of his. It felt surprisingly warm.

‘Let’s go, sweetheart,’ she breathed. ‘Don’t be scared… let’s go.’

Conor climbed out of the wardrobe, his little hand clutching Eva’s. The timber frame groaned, but then all was silent as he stood next to her and looked up for reassurance. Eva gave him another weak smile, then led him to the bedroom door.

She stopped and listened.

Silence.

They couldn’t walk down the stairs two abreast, because the stairlift took up too much space. Eva went first, walking down into the dim hallway, her right hand in front of her clutching the gun, her left hand behind holding Conor’s. The stairs creaked, but once they reached the bottom, everything was deathly quiet once again.

Eva bent down so that her lips were inches from Conor’s ear. ‘My car’s out the front, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘It’s the black one. As soon as we’re outside, we’ll run straight for it. Do you understand?’

Conor was staring at the door.

‘Do you understand, Conor?’

He nodded.

Eva straightened up and they started to cross the hallway.

A noise behind them. Eva spun round and peered through the gloom.

Nothing.

She could feel Conor squeezing her hand a little harder as they covered the remaining three or four metres to the door.

‘Ready?’ she mouthed silently.

Conor nodded.

She opened the door.

And screamed.

He was there. Standing in the doorway, his shoulders bent, his head slightly bowed, strands of black hair straggling over his menacing eyes. Ashkani moved with sickening speed, grabbing her wrist and slamming it against the frame with such force that the gun flew from her grasp as she pushed Conor back towards the stairs.

He let go of her wrist and quickly bent down to pick up the weapon. Eva seized her chance to run. Conor was already racing back up the stairs. Eva limped after him, arriving at the bottom step just as Conor reached the top and disappeared into the bedroom again.

She didn’t have to look over her shoulder to see Ashkani coming after her. She could sense his approach and expected any moment to either hear gunfire or feel the chill of a hand on her shoulder. Pounding up the stairs, she ignored the stabs of agony that streaked through her side, and tried not to let the sound of his footsteps 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 and squeeze it through the window to give them something to jump onto, but she was in pain and it was too heavy for them. He had tried to get her to the window, where she could breathe more easily, but she couldn’t move and he couldn’t lift her.

Conor coughed. It hurt, and it felt like he was choking and unable to breathe as his throat and mouth filled with warm phlegm. But he struggled into the centre of the room, where the smoke was thickest. Because the laptop was there, and the black book he had seen the man use. They were important. His dad would need them.

After everything that had happened, he wanted his dad to be pleased with him.

Carrying the two items, he clambered over the bed towards the window. He was still coughing and retching, but he could hardly hear the sound he was making because the fire in the rest of the house was so fierce.

Conor could hear his dad shouting. There was no way he could shout back – his throat and eyes were too full of smoke – so he didn’t even try. He just balanced the contents of his arms on the window ledge, then pushed them over, as if he was posting a letter.

‘Conor – jump!’

Conor knew his dad would catch him if he did. But he didn’t want to leave the nice lady here. He didn’t know who she was, but she had come back to help him and he wanted to help her too. That was what his mum would have expected, and his dad. He retreated back into the room, feeling his way to the end of the bed and down onto the floor where she had collapsed and was now choking. He pulled at her arm and tried to say, ‘Come on,’ but he just started coughing even more. Maybe if he pulled his T-shirt over his nose, he thought, that would help. As he did so, he gulped down a mouthful of air that was slightly less thick with smoke. The coughing eased for a moment.

‘Dad’s here!’ His mouth formed the words, but no sound came from his dry throat. ‘He says we should jump!’

The lady didn’t move. Not at first. But Conor continued to tug her arm, and after ten seconds she rose from her crouching position. She turned, and peered through the smoke at him. Her face was black, with wet streaks around her eyes, beneath her nose and around her mouth.

‘Dad’s here!’ He tried to say it again. He was kneeling now. The lady’s eyes lingered on his lips and he thought that perhaps what he’d said had made her feel a bit better.

That look didn’t last long.

The sudden creaking sound was louder even than the roar of the flames. Conor had seen a programme on TV once all about earthquakes and how they could make whole houses move and tumble into rubble. It was like that now. The floor suddenly seemed to slant. At the far side of the room a gap appeared between the wall and the floor. Beyond it he could see flames.

The lady grabbed hold of him. Together they tried to push themselves to their feet. But there was another great creaking, cracking sound as the floor gave way. The two of them collapsed with it, holding each other tight as they fell into a cloud of smoke, dust and flames.

Joe’s throat was raw from shouting. He had heard the noise, and now he saw an ominous crack along the exterior wall, at the height of the first floor and extending along its entire width. It could only have been caused by a collapse of the ceiling joists.

The laptop was on the ground in front of him, broken and smashed. Next to it, a leather-bound book, face down and open, its pages crumpled. Joe grabbed them and ran round to the front of the house, where he dropped them again. He could hear the scream of fire engines not far off, but he knew he couldn’t wait for them, and he ignored the shouts from the ARU.

He was five metres from the main door and the heat was almost unbearable. But he didn’t stop. With his head bowed and his right forearm covering his eyes, he strode forward, vaguely aware that someone had tried to pull him back – he’d shrugged them off without even looking back.

Joe burst through the burning doorframe and into the oven of a house.

He crouched low, almost crawling, because he knew that the floor of a burning building could be at least 100 degrees less hot than the ceiling, and the toxic CO2 levels much lower. The closer he kept to the floor, the longer he had. Even so, the heat was overpowering. It hurt just to breathe – like pumping fire into his nostrils – and it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. The staircase had completely collapsed and there was a great hole in the ceiling that seemed to be dripping flames. The wall two metres to his left was a crumbled mound of smouldering rubble; he could see through it to what remained of the bedroom on the first floor – the burning wardrobe, boxes ablaze. But a section of the floor had collapsed into the room below, and it was here that he saw the sight that ripped his heart out.

He could see a mattress, seven metres away to his left, upended against the exterior wall and burning; smouldering cardboard boxes that had also fallen through the floor were bursting into flame. And he could see, through the poisonous smoke, a small boy lying on the ground. To Conor’s right, through a screen of flames, a second figure was pushing itself up to its knees.

Joe didn’t have time to think, only to force himself further into the oven, through the smoke towards his son. He wanted to crawl more quickly, but the hot air pushed him back. His clothes, his hair, everything scalded, as though he too would ignite any moment. He shouted his boy’s name, but the shout was only in his head because his lips were clamped shut.

It took ten seconds to reach him; ten seconds that felt like an hour. Conor’s eyes were open and he was coughing. He was alive, so Joe turned to Eva.

They had not fallen in the same place. She was five metres away, but it might as well have been five miles. Two burning rafters had fallen in front of her and the wall of flame that burst from them had closed her into a corner. She was kneeling, and Joe could see her face through the flames and the heat haze. Half her hair had already been singed away, revealing her scalp; what remained had curled with the heat. The skin on her face and neck was blistering. She clearly wanted to break through the flames, but the heat was holding her back.

Half of Joe wanted to run – not for himself, but to get Conor out of there. The other half told him he couldn’t. Eva needed him. If he could just break through that barrier of flame, grab her and pull her back. He had to try – she would die if he didn’t.

Joe was steeling himself to burst through the wall of flame when he saw her lips move. No sound came from them, and he wouldn’t have heard anything over the roar of the blaze even if it had. But he could understand the exaggerated form of her mouth, carefully shaping two single words, her lips continuing to blister gruesomely even as she did so.

‘Ashkani,’ she mouthed. ‘Alive.’

A great groan from the old house told him another section of ceiling was falling. Burning timber thundered down on Eva. Joe roared her name, but even as he did so he had to fall back to protect himself and Conor from the collapsing building. He caught a glimpse of a solid wooden joist cracking against Eva’s head and her body bursting into flames as she dropped. He shouted again, and tried to step forward, but it was useless. He knew he couldn’t save her. He could only save his son.

Joe was still shouting as he ran from the inferno – ten metres, fifteen metres – before falling to the ground, exhausted, with Conor. He was aware of fire engines and neon; of men barking instructions and a bustle of activity; of Conor, groaning weakly on the ground next to him.

Ricky. Caitlin. And now Eva.

Joe barely realized he was curled on the ground. He didn’t notice four members of the ARU, their expressions full of shock at the insane howling of this grizzled, battered figure. They approached him with care, preparing to secure him if necessary. He did not notice how Conor, alive against the odds, pushed himself feebly to his feet and, unnoticed by the men going about their emergency work, staggered to where a damaged laptop and a leather-bound book were lying on the grass. He did not notice how the roof of the house suddenly caved in, thrusting smoke and rubble ten metres up into the air and all around.

The only fire he was aware of now was the fire in his soul. A furnace of hatred, fuelled by images of the dead, and by two words.

‘Ashkani. Alive.’