James Craig - Then We Die

Ryan smiled to himself: he was in the clear. This was just as well, given that the work assigned to his team here in London was far from finished.

The man sitting in the back of his cab was Noor Gyula Teleki, a known associate of Omid Jarragh Ajab. Both men were important members of Hamas’s military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and part of a four-strong cell that Mossad had been tracking through Europe for the last six months. Reliable intelligence from an informer inside the Palestinian Authority in Gaza had told them that the Hamas crew were presently in London to buy a cache of Chinese QBZ-95 rifles from an Armenian arms dealer. The guns were thought to be intended for Hamas’s Executive Support Forces in their ongoing squabble with the Preventive Security Force of the rival faction, Fatah. Palestinians shooting each other seemed like a good idea to Goya; he often wondered why his bosses didn’t just let them get on with it. But he knew that was considered an exotic notion. Anything that put arms into the hands of the Palestinians was to be stopped — by any means possible.

The other reason why Noor Gyula Teleki had to be killed was Itay Kayal. Kayal had been an eighteen-year-old conscript in the Israeli army who, ten years earlier, was standing, dressed in his uniform, at a bus stop near the southern Israeli town of Ashkelon when a battered white Mercedes drove past. Inside the car were Omid Jarragh Ajab, Noor Gyula Teleki and a third man, Karrar Shawqi Aboud. Turning the car around, they drove up to the bus stop, shot the boy in the legs, then bundled him into the boot and drove off.

Three weeks later, the Ha-Televizia Ha-israelit television channel had received a video of Itay Kayal’s execution. On his knees, bound and gagged, he had been decapitated with a sword. Itay’s body was only recovered seven years after the kidnapping, buried under a road near the border with Gaza.

Before leaving for London, Goya and his team had met with Itay’s sister, Tal. She told them how her parents had died broken-hearted soon after their son’s death. She told them how she herself had hosted a party to celebrate the death of Karrar Shawqi Aboud, after he had been killed three years later, shot by troops from the Israeli Defence Force, the Border Guard and the security service Shin Bet. And she told them how she prayed every night that Mossad would now step forward to complete the job and fully avenge her brother’s death by killing the other men responsible.

‘The memories continue to haunt us,’ Tal Kayal had said, holding Goya’s gaze with eyes devoid of any light. ‘We will always remember Itay, so I very much hope that you can find these terrorists and kill them.’

‘We will,’ affirmed Goya, bowing his head.

‘Kill them like dogs,’ she pleaded, her eyes welling up, ‘just like they killed my brother.’

By the end of that meeting, everyone present had been in tears. Goya was relieved when they were finally able to leave the room after faithfully promising Tal that they would bring about the answer to her prayers.

London was an extremely suitable place for the Mossad operation to take place. The risks were negligible here: even if they fucked up — which they already had — the British would do nothing. The Israeli Ambassador might get a talking-to, some minor ‘diplomat’ might get expelled, but that would be it. No one in Israel would admit to anything, and that would be all. It was because the British were such pussies that they’d been kicked out of the Middle East in the first place. Nowadays. . well, if they allowed arms dealers and terrorists to operate out of their capital, they deserved everything they got.

Goya stole a quick glance in the rear-view mirror. He was amazed that Teleki hadn’t run straight for the airport once his brother-in-arms had been eliminated. Hamas must need those weapons badly — or maybe he just had balls of steel. He was a big man, much stronger than Ryan, and doubtless felt that he could look after himself.

Whatever, he had taken a big risk there, and now he was going to pay the price.

Teleki was still talking away on his mobile phone. Ryan’s Arabic wasn’t up to much but he realized this was not a business conversation. Teleki was laughing and joking, talking about a couple of ‘English whores’ he had ordered for later in the evening. Ain ’ t life funny , Ryan grinned to himself. You ’ re lining yourself up a threesome and I ’ m sitting here safe in the knowledge that you ’ ll never get to shoot your load again . There was the sound of a horn behind him; the car in front had advanced about three feet. Releasing the handbrake, he let the cab roll slowly forward.

The car in front was some kind of Toyota mini-SUV. A young girl, maybe nine or ten, bored with being stuck in the traffic, was staring out of the back window. Catching Ryan’s eye, she pulled a face. Keeping eye-contact, he casually flipped the kid the finger. Laughing, she copied the gesture with both hands, before slipping back into her seat. Watch out for ricochets, little bitch , Ryan hissed silently.

He watched the clock on the dashboard tick round another thirty seconds. His mouth was dry and his heart-rate elevated. Licking his lips, he again flicked his eyes to the rear-view mirror. Teleki was still gabbling away about the hookers, oblivious to the fact that they had been heading away from his intended destination for the last ten minutes. Not that they had managed to get very far. When they’d decided to steal a taxi, Goya reflected with a sigh, they should have factored in more time to get to their intended location, a lock-up garage in the expensive neighbourhood behind Lord’s Cricket Ground. The clock on the dashboard told him that it was now almost three hours since they’d picked up this cab from outside a cafe in Victoria while the cabbie — a guy called Allan Johnstone according to the licence Ryan had removed from the glass partition between the front and back seats — was munching on a bacon roll and watching a Chelsea game on television.

Ryan knew that the cab must have been reported stolen by now. However, they had been careful to target an independent cabbie; Johnstone was not part of a collective like Radio Taxis or Dial-a-Cab, so there would be no one tracking the vehicle’s whereabouts in an office somewhere. Moreover, with hundreds if not thousands of black cabs on the roads of Central London at any one time, the chance of their being stopped by the police was statistically zero. Still, to be on the safe side, they’d changed the licence-plates and stuck on some decals advertising holidays in Malaysia. If he saw it driving past right now, Allan Johnstone himself wouldn’t recognize it.

Acquiring the cab was the easy bit. The biggest challenge in the whole operation was making sure that Teleki got into the right taxi as he left his hotel. As he came through the lobby of his Park Lane hotel, one of the Mossad team masquerading as a member of the hotel staff ushered him away from the official taxi rank and into the back of Ryan Goya’s vehicle. The click of the door locks confirmed that they had their man safe and secure. Pulling quickly away, Ryan nodded when Teleki gave him an address in Notting Hill. Cutting across a couple of lines of traffic, he skipped through a red light heading north. In less than a minute, he was past Marble Arch and heading up the Edgware Road. Passing a massive police station on his right, he smiled, before turning east onto Frampton Street. Almost immediately, however, he hit the traffic caused by the roadworks on Lisson Grove itself. Since then, they’d taken almost fifteen minutes to crawl barely 500 yards.

In the back of the cab, Teleki ended his call and sat forward. Peering through the windscreen at the stationary traffic outside, he cursed loudly in Arabic. ‘Faster!’