Ultimatum

Seventeen

11.50

Heathrow’s Terminal 5 offered the kind of welcome to the UK that gave tourist chiefs sleepless nights. The queue started almost as soon as you were in the building — thousands of people shuffling along in a thick unruly line, as if the arrival here of the planes that had been carrying them had been completely and utterly unexpected. Young Asian staff with funky haircuts and big badges on their shirts claiming they were ‘Here to Help’ barked orders like prison guards as they shepherded the passengers down the escalators, before wedging them like cattle on to the shuttle trains, which then deposited them a few minutes later at the back of an even bigger and more chaotic queue in the cavernous Arrivals Hall.

Luckily for Voorhess, he wasn’t in a hurry. The man next to him, a bald-headed Australian in a tailored suit, was. He kept repeating what a disgrace it was being treated like this, and that this was the last time he would travel through Heathrow. A couple of other passengers murmured in agreement, others talked in hushed tones about the bombs in London that morning, but Voorhess just looked ahead, an amiable expression on his face. He was being paid for his time here. There was no point getting distressed.

It took close to an hour from leaving the plane to finally reach Passport Control. It amused him to see that of the dozen or so officials manning the desks, all but one of them was Asian. It was, he thought, more like arriving in New Delhi than London.

The only white passport officer, a severe-looking lady with a turned-down mouth and beady eyes, inspected Voorhess’s Irish passport. The document was a fake, but a near perfect one — one of a batch from within the Irish Passport Office itself — and there was no way either she or the computer would spot it. Voorhess gazed at her with the same amiable, slightly vacant expression he often wore in public as she inspected both it and him. He was a big man, both in height and broadness, and he had an imposing presence that was only partly diluted by the thick head of curly black hair, the boyish swirl of freckles, and the twinkling green eyes — Irish eyes — that he got from his mother. The powerful build came from his father, an Afrikaner farmer who’d somehow managed to tempt his mother to live on his bleak homestead at the arse-end of the Eastern Cape.

The woman gave him back his passport with a reluctant thank you, her tone making it clear she wasn’t actually thanking him at all, and Voorhess headed straight for the Nothing to Declare channel at customs, joining the many others swarming through. There were only a handful of customs officers on duty, although he knew more of them would be watching through the tinted screens above the exit door.

The last line of defence against the bad guys. When you were through that door you were in the country and able to disappear at will, yet they seemed to be letting everyone in, including Voorhess himself, which would turn out to be a very serious mistake on their part. Today he was one of the bad guys, here to commit a crime that, for a short space of time at least, would capture the world’s attention and spread fear like a contagion.

The thought didn’t bother him. Voorhess was a professional. He did what he was paid to do, and those who hired his services knew that he could be relied on to carry out his orders, as long as the money was right and the risk manageable. He’d always been good at killing because he was able to disassociate himself from the fact that those he killed were human beings. He just killed them. It was as simple, and as complicated, as that.

He remembered the first time, all the way back in 1982, when he’d been a young conscript in the South African Defence Force, fighting the SWAPO Marxists in Angola. The captain of his platoon, a man named De Koch, had considered Voorhess soft. It was his boyish face, and those twinkling eyes. They always made people think he was soft.

They’d been on patrol one morning down a narrow back road through forest and had run straight into a patrol of SWAPO coming the other way. Both sides had been completely surprised at running into the other, and for a moment everyone just stopped and stared. Voorhess had felt no fear. Just a single burst of adrenalin. He hadn’t seen people. He’d seen targets. And crucially he was the first to react. He’d cut down three of them before De Koch and the others had even raised their weapons. Two rounds to the chest in each one, killing them stone dead. It was something he’d been doing periodically ever since — first for the military, and finally for himself.

The previous night he’d received an email from the client telling him that a rental car was parked ready for him on the third floor of the long-stay car park, and when he got there he was pleased to find it was a Mitsubishi Shogun, similar to the one he drove back home. The keys were on top of the front passenger side tyre, as instructed, and when he got inside there was a blank envelope on the passenger seat containing an address and two front door keys.

This was how Voorhess liked to do business. Anonymously. With the exception of some of his victims, no one ever saw his face, and that included the people who hired his services. That way it protected both them and him.

He switched on the engine and shoved the heating on to full blast to banish the damp English cold, before reversing out of the space. His stay here was going to be brief. He was already booked on a flight out of Heathrow to Bangkok first thing the following morning.

And, if all went according to plan, he’d be leaving mayhem in his wake.