Passenger 13

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ben awoke with a gasp. His arm shot out to grab the fallen shotgun that his senses told him was just a couple of feet away across the deck.

But something was wrong. It wasn’t the solid timbers of the Santa Clara under him, but the soft, dry fabric of a car seat. Shaking his head to clear his blurry vision, he looked up and dimly recognised the figure of Jack Brewster turning round to speak to him from the front passenger seat.

Only then did Ben register the presence of the other two men in the vehicle: the guy wedged up against him in the back, and the driver speeding the car along a dark road.

‘Sorry about the tranquilliser,’ Brewster said. ‘Couldn’t have you taking down any more of my men. The effects will wear off by the time we get you to the plane.’

‘Where are you taking …’ Ben managed to mumble before the drowsiness sucked him back under again. The next time he regained consciousness, he was being hauled out of the back of the car. Two men steadied him by the arms as they walked him across tarmac to a building. He felt himself being shoved through a door and made to sit at a bare table. The two men left the room and locked the door behind them.

It was inside that tiny, stark room that Ben’s senses slowly returned over the next thirty minutes or so. By the time he heard the door being unlocked and the two men came back to collect him, he was fully alert and on his feet.

‘I don’t suppose it would do me any good to ask where we’re going?’ he said as they led him down a corridor.

No reply. One of the men pushed open a door and Ben found himself looking out across a stretch of taxiway at a sleek white Gulfstream jet.

‘I forgot my passport,’ Ben said, stepping out into the night air.

‘Move,’ said the other man.

The jet’s passenger cabin was quite empty, and looked more like a long, narrow luxury conference room than the interior of an aircraft. The moment Ben was on board, his escorts disappeared. A smiling hostess offered him soft drinks, which he turned down, and motioned him towards one of the very few seats, which he grudgingly sat in. He’d given up asking where they were going.

Minutes later, the jet began its taxi towards the main runway. Ben felt the rush as the aircraft soared upwards, and watched the lights of Grand Cayman grow tiny in the porthole by his seat.

Once the plane had levelled off to cruising altitude, a curtain swished aside and Ben’s old friend Jack Brewster appeared. ‘You might like to follow me,’ he said with a lopsided smirk. ‘Someone wants to talk to you.’

Ben wondered whether he could grab Brewster by his belt and collar and pitch him head-first through a window without being sucked out himself as the jet depressurised.

Maybe later on. Right now, he was more interested in knowing what this was all about.

On the other side of the curtain sat a man at a table. He was older than Brewster, early fifties, with a hawk-like face and swept-back dark hair, receding and greying at the temples. On the table at his elbow was a closed file. Calm and smiling, he stood up as Brewster showed Ben inside the screened-off compartment.

‘Leave us, Jack,’ the man said to Brewster, who disappeared back through the curtain. ‘You’re a very capable man, Major Hope,’ he said when they were alone. ‘It’s reassuring to know that you’re on our side. Egerton Sinclair, MI6.’ He offered his hand. Ben just looked at it.

Sinclair withdrew the hand, sighed and sat down at the table. ‘I don’t like to talk business on an empty stomach. One of the disadvantages of my profession is that I very often have to eat at the most unsociable hours, and therefore alone. Would you care to dine with me?’

Ben took the seat opposite him. ‘I’m not hungry. Being hijacked in the middle of the night does funny things to my appetite.’

‘If you’re sure. You won’t object if I carry on?’

‘You won’t object if I smoke,’ Ben said, taking out his cigarettes. ‘And get me a whisky. Single malt.’

The hostess reappeared with a trolley, and placed a selection of covered dishes on the table. ‘Excellent,’ Sinclair said, helping himself to chicken casserole and some sautéed potatoes. ‘Some scotch for our guest,’ he instructed the hostess, who departed without a word and returned a few moments later with a matching Waterford decanter and glass.

Sinclair smacked his lips after a gulp of wine. ‘Excellent,’ he repeated. ‘Now, before we go any further, Major Hope, I must apologise for the very regrettable incident outside your hotel on Grand Cayman. An unfortunate slip that would have been entirely avoided if my subordinates had been properly informed as to who you were. In the event, rather more unfortunate for the men who were hired to go after you.’ Sinclair grinned. ‘I’m also sorry we had to be somewhat forceful with you this evening.’

‘You have a piece of chicken between your teeth,’ Ben said.

Sinclair’s grin dropped and he wiped at his teeth with his napkin.

‘Let’s talk about Larry Moss,’ Ben said. ‘I imagine you know who he is. Or was.’

‘Indeed I do, Major. Indeed I do.’

‘Then perhaps you’d care to enlighten me,’ Ben said. ‘That is the reason I’m here, isn’t it?’

Sinclair chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful of chicken, washed it down with another gulp of wine, then looked earnestly at Ben. ‘The information I’m about to reveal to you is strictly classified.’

‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ Ben said.

Sinclair opened the file next to him, slipped out a photograph and laid it down in front of Ben. It showed a nondescript-looking man in his early fifties or so. Chubby-faced, with thinning fair hair and the sallow complexion of someone who’d spent a few too many years living out of a suitcase, raided a few too many hotel mini-bars.

‘Larry Moss was one of our agents,’ Sinclair said. ‘One of the top operatives within a special counter-terror unit whose official name needn’t concern us at the minute. His work took him all over the world, under a variety of guises.’

‘A spook,’ Ben said.

‘To put it bluntly,’ Sinclair said. ‘And Moss was one of our most valuable agents, until while posing as a photographer in Pakistan, ostensibly there to infiltrate a suspected terrorist network, the damn fool fell head over heels in love with a certain young lady by the name of Salima. He thought she was a nurse. Needless to say, she wasn’t.’ Sinclair reached inside his file again and flipped another glossy 6X4 print under Ben’s nose. The Asian woman in the photo was thirty or thirty-two, black-haired and strikingly beautiful.

‘Nice, isn’t she?’ Sinclair said. ‘And extremely dangerous. Salima Chopra, born 1972 in Kashmir. Part of a fundamental Jihadist group called Al-Badr. Needless to say, whatever attentions she paid our man Moss were rather less genuine than he foolishly believed. She and her associates were onto him from the start.’ Sinclair shook his head sadly. ‘It’s the age-old story. God knows what he thought she saw in him, but there you are. Male vanity, perhaps. But I won’t bore you with the details. The facts are clear: after scoring a triumph with 9/11, the enemy were determined to press forward to expand their operations all over the world, hitting us randomly wherever we’d least expect it. For that they needed specialised expertise, and Larry Moss certainly had that. In his military days he’d spent eight years with 321 EOD.’

Ben nodded. 321 Explosive Ordnance Disposal had long been the most prestigious bomb disposal squadron of the British Army, and its most highly-decorated unit.

‘To be able to turn a man like Moss, with his vast knowledge of explosives and demolition, would represent a major coup for a terror group like Al-Badr,’ Sinclair said. He sighed. ‘And I’m afraid that’s precisely what happened. How and when the switch took place, we don’t quite know. But it did. Moss vanished from our radar, to reappear some months later, apparently a fully-fledged convert to the enemy cause. We believe it was thanks to information he divulged to Al-Badr that another of our key agents was taken in Islamabad, and found a week later in a basement, battered to death and half-eaten by rats. Did you want some ice with that scotch?’

‘Keep talking,’ Ben said.

‘Moss was a significant danger to us. This was a man who could take a whiz round your local hardware superstore and fill up a shopping trolley in five minutes with enough assorted goodies to knock you up an improvised car bomb capable of taking down an embassy building.’

Ben could believe it. SAS trained its men to do much the same thing.

‘Three weeks ago,’ Sinclair went on, ‘an Intelligence tip-off led to the acquisition of one of Salima Chopra’s associates in Lahore. During interrogation he revealed the location of their safehouse, which was subsequently assaulted by a US Special Forces team. We captured the lot — Salima included. But no Moss. He’d vanished again. All we were able to extract from the lovely lady and her colleagues was that there was a new terror strike in the offing. Moss’s own idea, apparently. An attack that would make the Selfridges bombing in June, the handiwork of one of Al-Badr’s sister groups, look like a mere opening gambit.’

Sinclair paused for effect. His jaw tightened grimly. ‘This would have been it, the attack everyone has been anticipating for almost two years. The next 9/11. We had every reason to believe that Larry Moss intended to detonate an explosive device in an airliner over London.’