Hellfire (34 page)

‘
Show them the footage, Bixby
,’ the Chief said.

The image on the screen changed. Suddenly they weren’t looking at two spooks in a London office. At first, it wasn’t quite clear
what
they were looking at. The screen was dark, but with occasional flashes of torchlight. After a few seconds, they saw a figure in a white hazmat suit and rebreather mask. He was walking towards the camera, down what looked like the aisle of an aircraft. The camera panned left. The torch beam illuminated a face: a passenger in an aisle seat. In the brief few seconds that the face was lit up, Danny saw that it was a woman with white skin. Her nose had been bleeding. Her lips were cracked. There were two painful-looking welts on either side of her face, one of them glistening with some kind of discharge. But the worst thing was the expression in her eyes: a chilling mixture of horror and fear.

‘Jesus,’ Danny breathed. An image of Ripley’s blistered, bleeding body flashed in front of his eyes.

The camera panned back to the aisle. By the light of the torch Danny saw rows of passengers extending towards the back of the plane.

Then the screen went black again. The Chief and Bixby reappeared.

‘Is there any hope for them?’ Danny asked.

The Chief and Bixby exchanged a look. ‘
None
,’
the Chief said.

‘So what happens now?’

‘
We’re currently evaluating our options. But if word gets out about this, there’ll be mass panic. The economic implications will be—
’

‘Can’t you just make it known you’ve compromised the strike?’

Bixby and Seldon glanced at each other again. ‘
We would if we could
,’ said the Chief. ‘
But we haven’t
.’

Danny blinked. ‘What do you mean?’

‘
This isn’t over yet
,’ Bixby said. ‘
Not by a long stretch. It’s looking very likely that flight BA33489 was just a secondary strike, designed to keep our eyes off the main event. What I’m about to tell you doesn’t go beyond ourselves. We’ve credible intelligence of a similar strike at the London Marathon. That’s in approximately forty-eight hours.
’

Danny stared at the screen. Then he looked over his shoulder. Tony and Caitlin were standing there, just a metre behind him and in earshot of the briefing. Tony’s jugular was pulsing, but his face remained impassive. Danny couldn’t help thinking that if
his
missus was about to take part in an event identified as a major terror target, he’d be a bit less calm.

Danny turned back to the screen. ‘It could be a different threat. I bet there’s loads of cells targeting the marathon.’

Bixby shook his head. He stretched out one hand to his own keyboard and the image on the screen changed. It was blurry, but Danny recognised the picture immediately. It was one of the shots he’d taken on the
Golden Coral
of the storage container where the aerosols had been filled. ‘
You see the top edge of the storage container?
’ Bixby said. ‘
There’s a number there?
’

Danny strained his eyes to read it.
2121311
.

‘
The number’s identical to a serial number on the intel that warned us of an attack on April 26, in two days’ time. We take that to mean there’s going to be a serious attempt at a bio-attack.
’

‘Call it off,’ Danny said.

‘
What do you mean?
’

‘The marathon. Call it off. I’ve seen what this bioweapon does to people. If you let it loose in London, you’ll—’

‘
Impossible
,’ the Chief said. ‘
Number Ten will never allow it. There’s an election in a month and it’ll just make the government look weak.
’

‘
And besides
,’ Bixby added, ‘
all our modelling suggests that if we call the thing off, it’ll just alert the terrorists that we’re on to them and encourage them to bring the strike forward.
’

‘They know you’re on to them already,’ Danny urged. ‘You downed that flight from Lagos.’

‘Don’t be a bloody idiot, Black,’ Buckingham said. ‘That doesn’t mean they know we’ve predicted the main event.’

Much as it pained Danny to admit it, Buckingham was right. But they were fresh out of leads, weren’t they?

Bixby immediately answered that unspoken question. ‘
In the last few minutes, we’ve traced a call made from the
Golden Coral
to a cell phone most likely positioned off the coast of Qatar. Our working theory is that this was the militants making contact with someone on a higher rung.
’

‘The Caliph,’ Buckingham muttered.

Danny gave him a sharp look. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that the MI6 man knew the name.

The Chief cut in. ‘
Our only hope of stopping this event is by getting our hands on this Caliph before it starts.
’

‘But sir,’ Buckingham said, ‘we’ve already been down this line. Nobody will talk about him, they’re too scared.’

‘
Tell him, Bixby,
’ the Chief said.

‘
Buckingham, we’ve just received a communication from your man Ahmed in Doha. He has a number to call in the event he needs SIS assistance. He goes by the handle of codename Murdock. He’s been told to keep his communications obscure, but this is the first time he’s ever made a distress call and he’s obviously very frightened. We’re relaying GCHQ’s recording of the conversation now.
’

There was a pause. A crackly hiss came over the laptop’s speakers.

Go ahead, caller.

This is Murdock.

Please hold.

A twenty-second pause, then a new voice came on the line.

Go ahead, Murdock.

He’s killed my parents. He’s going to kill me. You have to help me.

The caller’s voice was trembling. He sounded terrified.

Please try to keep calm, caller. Who are you referring to?

Him . . .
him . . . The Cal . . .

The caller checked himself before speaking the word.

I’ll . . . I’ll do whatever you need. To help you catch him, I mean. Otherwise he’ll . . .

Caller, please be discreet.

I have an idea how we can find him . . . I . . . Send Mr Buckingham. Send him quickly . . . I have an idea . . .

The line went dead.

‘Why me?’ Buckingham breathed.

‘
Because he recognises you. And in his situation, he’s not going to trust anyone he doesn’t recognise.
’

‘I don’t understand his sudden change of heart,’ Buckingham said.

‘
Nor do we, and it makes us nervous. Maybe he really is just very frightened.
’

‘Have you been able to confirm that his parents have been killed?’ Danny interrupted.

‘
Not directly, but we’ve put out some feelers and the Qatari authorities have clamped shut. That’s normally a good indication that something untoward has happened. They’re keeping it quiet for some reason.
’

Danny could sense Buckingham tensing up. ‘Sir, surely you don’t actually intend to send me?’

‘
That’s exactly what I intend to do, Buckingham.
’

‘But sir, what if the Caliph has
got
to him? What if it’s all a trap?’

‘
That’s why Black and his team are going to escort you back to Doha. Immediately.
’

‘But sir . . .’

The Chief cut in. ‘
Make it count, or a lot of people are going to suffer.
’

Danny’s mind was moving quickly as he tried to assimilate this information. Ahmed. Buckingham. The Caliph. Qatar. The spooks on the screen looked desperate. Yesterday they were trying to shaft Danny and his team. Today they were begging for his help again.

He leaned into the screen. ‘One more thing,’ he said.

‘
Go ahead
,’ said the Chief.

‘You’ve been setting us up for a fall ever since we landed in Nigeria. If you think we’re going to take a hit for your fuck-ups, or for his –’ he indicated Buckingham ‘– think again.’

There was a moment’s pause as a flicker of uncertainty crossed the Chief’s face. ‘
Your codename is Operation Hellfire. Do your job, Black, and make sure it’s a success
,’ he said. Then the screen went blank.

Buckingham turned to Danny. He looked pale. Frightened. But he hadn’t lost his arrogance. ‘You’ve got ideas above your station, Black.’ He looked over at Tony and Caitlin. ‘You should think about how behaviour like that reflects on the rest of your unit. That was the Chief of SIS you just spoke to.’

‘That was a man in a suit. He’ll be replaced by another man in another suit before long.’ Buckingham could play divide and rule all day long. It didn’t matter to Danny.

They exchanged a long glare. ‘You heard the man,’ Buckingham said finally. ‘Do your job. Get ready to leave.’

Danny was already standing up. ‘Make contact with Hereford,’ he said. ‘We need a movement order.’

He walked across the ops room. Dr Phillips, the Porton Down guy, was standing in one corner, his face etched with tiredness and worry. Danny approached him. ‘If there’s a bio-strike in London, how long before the infection spreads to the rest of the country?’ He was thinking of Clara, giving birth in a provincial hospital, which would very likely become a centre of infection if this thing spread out of London. But what could he do? Tell her to leave the country? She’d never do it. Not when she was about to give birth.

‘Impossible to tell,’ Phillips said. ‘A few days. A week at most. But it’s the inhabitants of London that will be in immediate danger.’

Danny narrowed his eyes, nodded, then walked straight to Tony, grabbed his arm and led him out of the ops room.

‘What the fuck . . .’

‘Just walk with me,’ Danny told him.

A minute later they were on deck again, the immense noise of the sea and the grind of the ship’s engines almost drowning out their conversation. ‘Your missus is running the marathon in two days, right?’

Tony nodded.

‘They’ll know that. They’ll be monitoring any communication you make with her. You can’t warn her directly. But she’s going to be right in the middle of this thing if it all turns to shit.’

Tony gave him an impassive stare.

‘I’ll get in touch with Spud!’ Danny shouted.

‘Why would you want to talk to that limping fucker?’

Danny let it pass. ‘He can get a message to Frances. Tell her not to go. The Firm are clutching at straws. If we don’t get direct proof there’s going to be an attack, they won’t stop the race going ahead.’

As Danny spoke, he was aware of movement along the deck. Caitlin had appeared, about fifteen metres from their position. She watched them, her hair blowing in the wind, one eyebrow raised at their sudden secrecy.

‘Nah,’ Tony said, suddenly dead-eyed. ‘You’re okay. Leave it.’

Danny blinked at him in shock and disbelief. ‘
What?
’ he breathed.

‘You heard me, Black. I said leave it.’ He glanced towards Caitlin, then walked purposefully off in her direction. The two of them headed back to the flight deck where, in the grey light of morning, Danny could see the stealth Black Hawk being wheeled back on to the LZ, a hubbub of Australian naval crew all around it, preparing the aircraft for take-off . . .

Twenty-one

Sir Colin Seldon stared at the blank screen. Danny Black had just called him out, and he felt a strange mixture of irritation and embarrassment.

They had made the call out of the way of the main ops room, in Seldon’s top-floor office overlooking the Thames. Dawn was creeping over the city, which was still illuminated by street lamps and office lights. A few boats shone as they meandered lazily up the Thames. Seldon pictured the streets filled with hundreds of thousands of people – both runners and spectators. What would it take? A handful of nutters among the runners to spray aerosols as they went? They could do it discreetly, without anyone even knowing it was happening . . .

He turned to Bixby, whose head was – as always – leaning listlessly against the cushioned pad, but who was eyeing his boss with an intensity that sometimes unnerved him.

‘We’re chasing shadows, sir,’ Bixby said. ‘The Qatari lead’s too little too late. Danny Black’s right. We should call off the marathon.’

‘We don’t
know
there’s going to be an attack, Bixby. And if we call off the marathon, you and I are out of a job.’

‘We
don’t
call off the marathon, we find ourselves in the middle of the worst terrorist strike in history.’