Hunter Killer (20 page)

Abu Ra’id pressed the button again. As the blinds silently descended, he turned. There was a hard glint in his eyes. ‘If you do not wish to continue this important work, please just say the word. Your allegiance will not be in doubt, but there is room in our organisation for many different people’ – he looked over to the wall where the young man had been sacrificed – ‘who we may use for all sorts of different purposes.’

The girl’s eyes fell to the floor. She looked chastened. And scared. There was no doubt in Jamal’s mind that she understood just what Abu Ra’id was threatening her with. As did he.

Abu Ra’id stepped away from the window. ‘You will return to your homes,’ he said. ‘Your
home
, Jamal. You will not hide like a coward. And you will stay there. Wait for your instructions. And remember: God looks after the faithful, and so do I. But the unfaithful?’ He looked at each of them in turn. ‘The unfaithful are punished.’

He turned his back on them again. The audience, Jamal understood, was over.

He walked backwards to the door. Neither he, nor the girl, he sensed, could get out of there quickly enough.

The corridor that led to the exit was brightly lit. Jamal and the girl hurried down it, shoulder to shoulder. They passed a bathroom on the right-hand side. The door was slightly ajar, and as he hurried by it, Jamal saw inside. It was all marble and mirrors, with crisp white towels piled by the sink and a bath twice the size of any he had ever seen before. Two white towelling dressing gowns hung by a hook on the wall, but in the split second that he passed the door, he noticed something else: black robes of some description, hanging alongside them. A burka. He didn’t know why, but the sight made him feel very uneasy.

Outside the main entrance to the apartment sat the two men who had been in attendance both times Jamal had visited. Dark skin, broad shoulders, no hint of a smile. Jamal didn’t doubt that they were armed, and he felt their aggressive stares burn into his back as he and the woman waited for the elevator to arrive. It seemed to take an age, but even when the doors had closed around them and they had started the long, silent journey to the ground floor, he felt far from safe.

Claustrophobic. Hunted.

Stepping out on to the glamorous marble atrium of the ground floor, with its tinkling fountain and barely audible piped music, Jamal immediately felt the hot glare of the concierge, smartly uniformed behind his desk. He and the girl hurried past him without a word, then out into the early evening.

The plaza in front of the building was crowded. An outdoor fountain glowed thirty metres ahead of them, but none of the pedestrians paid it any attention. They seemed only intent on getting home. It struck Jamal as ironic: they no doubt thought that here, in the business centre of the capital, they were most at risk. And yet their enemy was hiding out right in their midst.

He pulled up his hood and turned to the girl. She still hadn’t told him her name. He thought about asking her again. She was very beautiful, and for a crazy moment he wondered what would happen if he tried to kiss her, even though he knew he was far too shy to do it.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked her, keeping his voice low.

The girl was less haughty now. A little unsure of herself. ‘Go home, I suppose. Like he told us.’ She frowned. ‘Do
you
think we’re going to be all right?’

‘Yeah,’ Jamal said. ‘Course.’ He peered upwards. The enormous glass tower loomed threateningly above them. Then he looked across the plaza to the other side of the fountain. There was a row of Boris bikes neatly lined up, and next to them his own bike, chained to a cycle rail. ‘Better make a move,’ he said.

He nodded, then hurried across the plaza and unchained his bike. He looked back at the tower block again. A window-cleaning cradle was descending to the ground floor. The guys inside were wolf-whistling the girl. Jamal felt a surge of anger. He wanted to go over and defend her honour. To tell the men that he was the Paddington bomber, and see how arrogant they felt then. But the girl was in charge of the situation. She gave the window cleaners an evil look before turning her back on them. Jamal calmed himself, then suddenly felt uneasy again. He realised that those window cleaners could easily have observed them when Abu Ra’id had opened the blinds in the penthouse, and he wondered again how the cleric could be so sure that he was safe.

As he pedalled back across London, Jamal’s mind was ablaze. Abu Ra’id seemed so
certain
that they were beyond the reach of the authorities. So
certain
that Sarim’s death had been an accident. But did Jamal believe him? Did he
dare
to believe him? Sarim had trusted Abu Ra’id implicitly, and look where that had got him. The cleric had insisted on Jamal returning home, but surely to do that would be madness.

Then again, did he really dare to disobey Abu Ra’id? He knew, better than most, just what he was capable of.

It took a long time to cross London. The traffic was bad, the police presence high. But as he cycled through Bayswater and past Shepherd’s Bush, he realised that he was not heading back to the B&B in Ruislip, but to his own flat in Perivale. And in a flash, he realised he had made his decision.

To run. To go into hiding from both the authorities and from Abu Ra’id. Tonight.

Ten

Clara went about her work in a kind of daze. The dead were everywhere. The hospital mortuary was overflowing. Injured men women and children were dying, one an hour, at the very least. It had become necessary to set up an overflow mortuary in a ward deep in the bowels of the hospital, where rented air-conditioning machines sucked the warmth from the air to stop the corpses decaying before they could be released back to the families. A poor substitute for the hospital cold room. Clara had already seen a fly crawling on the face of a dead woman.

When she was at school, she saw her history lessons not as an endless succession of facts, but a succession of pictures: injured men laid out in field hospitals in the wake of the Crimea, in the trenches of the Great War, on the outskirts of Saigon. Those grainy black and white images didn’t look so different from the sights that surrounded her now. London was at war. The enemy was unseen, the casualties were civilian. But it was a war nevertheless.

It wasn’t just the endless procession of injury and death that seemed to suck everything out of Clara. After Paddington, she had been able to talk about what she had seen with Danny. He wasn’t the type to try to comfort her, but he
did
listen. And she knew that beneath it all, he cared. She missed him more than she knew how to express. It was a constant dull ache somewhere deep inside her. She had told herself that morning that she would deal with it by throwing herself into her work, and the influx of casualties from the shock bombing in the Trocadero meant she didn’t have much choice. But in a corner of her mind, she felt his absence more than she would ever have admitted to anyone.

She worked long past her shift time. They all did. It was gone nine o’clock when she scrubbed down, disinfected her hands for one last time, put on her ordinary clothes and clocked out. She walked alone through the foyer of the hospital and flashed her ID at one of the crowd of policeman guarding the front entrance. Police guarding a
hospital
? Had it really come to this? She shuffled out in the cold night air with her head down. She was exhausted, but dreaded going home. Now was not a time to be alone.

She could walk to Maida Vale from here, and a good thing too – there was no public transport running, and every cab in the city seemed to be taken. She set off. She could get home in half an hour if she kept her pace up. There was a short cut round the back of the hospital that very few people knew about. It was a narrow, dark alleyway, uninviting at the best of times and especially this evening. Clara stumbled along it, her head down, barely aware of her surroundings, her mind lost in unpleasant thoughts.

She didn’t realise that she was being followed until she felt someone grab her by the arm.

On another occasion, she might have screamed. But not tonight. Whoever had grabbed her had done so from behind, and in an instant 24 hours of frustration seemed to come steaming out of her. She spun round. ‘What the
hell
. . .’

It was so dark. She couldn’t see clearly at first. She blinked and tried to clear her head.

Then she stopped.

Danny?

She started at him. He was in a terrible state. His right eye was purple, bulging and bruised. There was a cut on his upper lip, sealed together with a length of steristrip. She caught a whiff of stale booze from his body.

And only then did she realise that it wasn’t Danny at all.

‘Kyle?’ she whispered. ‘Oh my God, what’s
happened
to you?’

’S nothing,’ Kyle said. His speech was slurred.

‘Then let go of me.’

Kyle let his hand fall.

‘Who
did
this?’ Clara asked. And then, almost immediately, she answered her own question. ‘The Poles? The ones you were talking about?’

Kyle nodded, and averted his gaze. He looked humiliated. He was also shivering.

The doctor in her decided that what Kyle needed most was a hot drink. ‘Come with me,’ she said, and she started striding along the alleyway. A moment later they were in the main street. Kyle trotted to keep up with her, and as they passed a pub he looked longingly towards it. But Clara knew that more booze would be a disaster, and five minutes later they were sitting opposite each other in Starbucks. There was a copy of the
Evening Standard
on the table. The front page showed the devastated frontage of the Trocadero, and the baristas, when they weren’t looking at Kyle’s beaten face, were talking feverishly about the latest explosion. Kyle had his shivering hands wrapped round a hot drink. The smell of booze was more obvious in here. It turned her stomach.

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘Told you already. ’S nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing. How much do you owe them, Kyle?’

Danny’s brother shrugged. ‘Five Gs. It’s not a problem. I’ll get my hands on the money somehow.’ He took a sip of coffee and winced as the hot liquid scalded his damaged lips.

Clara stared at him. ‘Where are
you
going to get five thousand pounds from?’

Another shrug. ‘There’s always Danny. Been trying to call him. Fucker’s not answering.’

‘How long have you been waiting for me outside the hospital?’ She vaguely remembered telling him where she worked when he’d turned up in Hereford and Danny had left them alone for a few minutes. But the thought of him stalking her like this creeped her out.

‘Couple of hours. Thought Danny might pick you up. He’s not around Hereford, least not as far as I can tell.’ He took another painful sip of coffee. ‘So where
is
the cunt?’

‘
Don’t . . .’
Clara felt her pulse rising at his language, but she managed to hold her tongue. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she said.

Kyle clearly couldn’t hide it – the flicker of panic that shadowed his face, the frown that creased his forehead. He was even less successful at keeping the emotion from his voice. ‘Don’t matter,’ he said. ‘I know people. I’ll get it sorted.’

Clara couldn’t help a pang of sympathy. Kyle was like a bolshie kid, unable to confess that he was in trouble. If she’d had five grand in her pocket, she reckoned she’d probably have given it to him. But she didn’t have that sort of money, either in her pocket or in her bank account.

‘These Poles,’ she said. ‘You
can
go to the police about them, you know.’

Kyle gave a harsh, mirthless bark of laughter. ‘Right,’ he said.

Silence. There was something unspoken between them. Clara tackled it first. ‘If you give them
something
, will they lay off you for a while?’

He looked at her sharply. ‘Maybe,’ he said. There was a sudden eagerness in his eyes, and a wiliness too. ‘Depends what I give them.’

‘Well, it won’t be much,’ Clara said. ‘I don’t
have
much.’

It was as if Kyle couldn’t stop himself from being offensive. ‘Yeah, right. You sound like a right daddy’s girl.’ He looked like he was going to say something else, but perhaps he noticed the steel in Clara’s eyes.

‘Come with me,’ she said.

The nearest cashpoint was three doors down. There was no queue. Clara had the impression that nobody wanted to stay in the same place for long, and the passers-by did just that: pass by. She had two credit cards. The maximum withdrawal on each was £250. She maxed each of them out. Kyle couldn’t keep his eyes off the money, and Clara was honest enough with herself to admit that this was probably a very bad idea. But Kyle was Danny’s brother, and he was in trouble. And she never had been able to refuse help to a person in trouble.

She handed over the money. Kyle snatched it from her and stuffed the wad into his pocket. His eyes darted around again. He didn’t have the grace to utter a word of thanks. He just turned on his heel and walked back down the street. After ten metres or so, he looked over his shoulder to see if Clara was still watching him. When he saw that she was, he continued on his way.