At Risk (28 page)

“No, which is presumably why she chose the place. But the guy has good recall of her appearance. Early twenties, wide-set eyes, mid-brown hair held in some sort of elastic band. Quite attractive, he says, and with what he describes as a ‘mid-posh accent.’ ”

“Has the garage still got the fifty-pound notes?”

“No. Banked them a couple of days ago. But Whitten’s got an Identifit artist on the case. He and the garage guy are putting a portrait together right now.”

“When can we see it?”

“We’ll have it on our screens within the hour.”

“She’s right under our noses, Steve. I can practically smell her.”

“Yeah, me too, petrol and all. That A to Z suggests that whatever the hell she’s up to—it’s right here. Has London come up with anything?”

“They’re down to a dozen or so possibles. No sighting of the Astra, I assume?”

“No, and I wouldn’t hold your breath on that either. We’ve circulated the details and hopefully the reg number’s taped to every squad car dashboard in the country, but . . . well, you need a hell of a lot of luck with cars. We usually only find them once they’re dumped.”

“Can we recirculate to the Norfolk force? So that every single policeman or -woman in the county is looking for that black Astra as a matter of absolute priority?”

“Sure.”

“And have spotters in unmarked cars lying up on the approach roads to the American air bases.”

“Mr. Mackay’s already suggested that, and Whitten’s on to it.”

Liz looked around her. “Where is Mackay?”

“He told Whitten he was driving down to Lakenheath, to liaise with the station commander there.”

“OK,” said Liz. Good of him to keep me in the picture, she thought.

“I’ve heard they do a very nice hamburger down at those bases,” said Goss.

Liz glanced at her watch. “Would you settle for a ploughman’s at the Trafalgar?”

“Reckon so,” he nodded.

T
hey saw two police cars on the way back from Norwich. They were waiting in line at the intersection of the A1067 and the ring road when an unmarked red Rover with a tall antenna swept past southbound at close to the speed limit. The intent features of the driver and front-seat passenger and the closely controlled driving style had the unmistakable smack of officialdom about them, and she felt a sick thump of fear.

“Go!” said Faraj, who she guessed had not recognised the Rover for what it was. “What is it?”

The road ahead of her was clear, but traffic was now approaching from the right. She had to wait. In her mirror she could see the impatient face of the driver behind her, and when the road was finally clear she let out the clutch with a jerk.

“From now on,” said Faraj tersely, “you drive smoothly, OK? When the time comes we will be carrying highly unstable material. Understand?”

“Understand,” she said, breathing deeply in an attempt to control the residue of her fear.

“The next time you can stop, we change places, OK?”

She nodded. She supposed that it was important that he was familiar with the car. If she was taken out . . .

If she was taken out . . .

She faced the truth, and to her surprise the weight of the fear lifted a little. She could be killed, she told herself. It was that simple. If it came to a firefight she would be facing the best. A Counter-Terrorist Squad tactical firearms unit or an SAS Sabre team. That said, she had learned in the hardest of hard schools that she was good herself. That weapons obeyed her, and moved fluently in her hands. That close-quarter battle was her talent, her late-discovered skill.

If she was taken out . . .

She drove in silence for fifteen minutes and pulled up at a bus-stop in the village of Bawdeswell. As they changed places, and she buckled her seat belt, she saw the distant blue light of a patrol car at the roundabout a quarter of a mile ahead of them. Briefly engaging its siren, the police vehicle took a westbound exit lane and disappeared.

“I think it’s time to get rid of this hire car,” she said. “It was in the car park when you killed the thief. Someone could have made a connection.”

He thought for a moment and nodded. She knew he had seen and heard the police car. “We’ll need another.”

“That was allowed for,” she said. “I hire it in my own name.”

“So what do we do with this one?”

“Disappear it.”

“Where?”

“I know a place.”

He nodded and pulled away from the bus stop, controlling the Astra with smooth, disdainful competence. There were no more police vehicles.

At the bungalow, when they had eaten, and she had spent several minutes searching the coastline to east and west of them with the binoculars, he laid the morning’s purchases on the kitchen table. In silence, they rolled up their sleeves. She knew the routine well—the urban warfare cadre had been made to memorise it at Takht-i-Suleiman. It was curious, though, seeing it done here.

Taking a pyrex bowl, Faraj brought water to the boil. Adding two packets of clear gelatin, he carefully mixed it in with a stainless-steel dessert spoon. Pulling on the oven gloves that Diane Munday had provided, and which were striped blue and white like a chef’s apron, he then removed the mixture from the heat. Handing the woman the gloves, he allowed the mixture to cool for a couple of minutes, added a half-cup of cooking oil, and stirred. As they watched, a thin surface crust of solids began to form. Ready with the spoon, she skimmed these off and placed them in a small Tupperware box, which she then put in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. Both of them worked in silence. The atmosphere was almost domestic.

Pouring away the residue, and washing the pyrex bowl, Faraj then began to empty out the Silly Putty containers. When he had a large ball of the material, he dropped it into the bowl, pulled on the yellow Marigold gloves that were hanging over the sink, and began to work in the other ingredients. After a few minutes, leaving the greasy rubber gloves hanging over the side of the bowl, he went to the rucksack in his room.

The electronic hydrometer which he took out was still in its factory packaging. The printed instructions, which he briefly glanced at, were in Russian. A second bag held a selection of cellular batteries wrapped in a twist of greaseproof paper. Locking a single battery into the hydrometer, he tested the density of the grey-pink mixture in the bowl, and then, unsatisfied, returned to blending it. First by hand, and then with the spoon.

It was tiresome and messy work, but finally the mixture assumed the requisite melted-fudge consistency and the hydrometer showed the correct reading. Both of them knew that the next stage, in which the two highly unstable mixtures had to be folded together, was the most dangerous. Expressionless, Faraj laid the hydrometer on the table.

“I’ll finish it,” she said quietly, laying a hand on his wrist.

He stared down at her hand.

“Take the weapons, the documents and the money,” she continued, “and drive a few hundred yards up the road. If . . . if it goes wrong, get out fast. Fight on without me.”

He looked up from her hand to her eyes.

“You must live,” she said. She tightened her hold on his wrist, which somehow required more courage than anything that had yet been required of her.

“You know . . .”

“I know,” she said. “Go. As soon as I’ve finished you’ll see me walk down to the sea.”

Briskly, he moved away. It took him no more than a minute to assemble all that he needed. At the front door, he hesitated and turned back to her. “Asimat?”

She met his flat, expressionless gaze.

“They chose well at Takht-i-Suleiman.”

“Go,” she said.

She waited until she could no longer hear the popping of the gravel beneath the Astra’s tyres, and moved to the fridge. Lifting the chilled Tupperware box carefully from the freezer, she added the fragile crusts to the mixture in the bowl. Gently but surely, murmuring a prayer to steady her hands, she worked the two compounds together until they had assumed the consistency of clotted cream.

C4, she murmured to herself. The north, south, east and west winds of jihad. Composition Four explosive.

Taking one of Diane Munday’s cheap supermarket knives from the cutlery drawer, continuing her prayer, she cut the creamy paste into three equal-sized lumps. With the help of a teaspoon, she smoothed each lump into a sphere the size of a tennis ball. Spherical charges, they had told her, guaranteed the highest detonation velocity.

As she melted a couple of candles in the scratched Teflon saucepan, she allowed herself to draw breath. The worst was over, but one more test remained. “Too hot the wax,” she remembered the instructor telling them at Takht-i-Suleiman, his eyes merry, “and
poo-o-o-o-f!
” He had shaken his head at the sheer hilarity of the idea.

Too cool the wax, though, and it wouldn’t coat the explosive properly. Wouldn’t seal it effectively from moisture, or sudden extremes of temperature or barometric pressure. Taking the saucepan off the flame, and waiting until a pale film had formed over the wax, she laid the three balls of compound in the pan with the teaspoon, and gently rolled them around. When they were evenly coated with the wax she nudged them with the teaspoon so that they fused together in a three-tiered line. Gradually the wax hardened, became opaque. The charges now looked like giant white chocolates, perhaps Belgian, like the ones that her mother . . .

Don’t go there, she told herself. That life is dead.

But it wasn’t quite dead, and the prayer that she was murmuring had somehow mutated into the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which, before the split-up, her parents had liked to play in the car. And there they were, their hazy figures drifting casually through the bungalow kitchen, laughing together and calling her by her old name, the name that they had given her. Furious, she stepped back from the table, closed her eyes hard for a second or two and slapped her pocket so that her hand stung as it met the loaded Malyah.

“Asimat. My name is Asimat.
My name is Asimat.
”

The intense pleasure that had accompanied Faraj’s approval had evaporated. Instead, the self-doubt which periodically banked up like a stormcloud at the edge of her consciousness was threatening to inundate her. She felt a pain behind her breastbone, and the hard, bitter pounding of her heart.

Taking herself grimly in hand, she turned her attention back to the explosive. Taking three pipe cleaners, she pushed them through the cooling wax of the central sphere and out the other side—she was praying out loud now—and twisted the ends together for connection to the detonator hook-ups. Standing back, she cast a cold eye on the result. It looked as she wanted it to look, and the seamed, mirthful face of the Takht-i-Suleiman instructor seemed to nod in approval. The triple-cascade C4 detonation had always been favoured by the Children of Heaven. It was, you might say, their signature, and she, the fighter Asimat, was signing off.

Feeling more balanced now, and with the stormclouds in check, she carried the little pipe-cleaner-limbed fetish over to the fridge. It was very light, most of the weight was in the wax, and she laid it reverently on the top shelf. That done, she walked out of the back door and down the shingle to the sea’s edge, where she stood expressionless and unmoving with her arms by her sides and the wind lashing her hair about her face.

T
ell me,” said Liz, pulling her coat around her as the wind shuddered the phone box door. It was the seventh reverse-charge call she’d made to Judith Spratt.

“As things stand, we’ve drawn a blank.”

“The Bath woman?”

“Sally Madden? She spent the evening and night of the murder in the town of Frome with a friend whose dog was sick.”

“Does that check out?”

“The friend corroborates and the Frome vet remembers the two of them bringing the dog to his surgery at five-ish. And according to your phone call earlier, the person we’re after was buying petrol at a Norfolk garage by six.”

“Damn.
Damn.
And none of the others . . . the ones who live alone, for example, what about them? And the Christmas shoppers?”