Ken McClure: The Secret

Mark swallowed, his head swimming with all that had happened. Cut to the chase ? he thought. Cut to the fucking chase ? That was the sort of thing English actors said in some crummy olden-days drama on TV, not some fucking psycho in a cave in the middle of fucking nowhere. When would this nightmare end? His head lolled in silent appeal. ‘I don’t have it.’

‘Shit,’ said Faisal although not angrily, more as if it had been the response he’d been expecting and he was mildly irritated. He punched numbers into his satellite phone and then held it by his side until it beeped twice. He examined it and nodded in satisfaction before turning it round and holding it up in front of Mark’s face. Laura and Jade filled the small screen. Their mouths were taped but their eyes spoke of the terror they felt. A knife blade hovered at Laura’s throat. Jade wore a badge that said I am 4 .

‘Now, do we understand each other?’

The dam broke inside Mark and he unleashed every expletive he could think of at Faisal, who remained impassive throughout the outburst. When he finally ran out of energy and imagination, his curses degenerating into disjointed sobs and appeals, Faisal said simply, ‘Give me the key.’

Mark, unable to take his eyes off Laura and Jade, nodded silently and was released from his bindings. He picked up his empty briefcase from the floor and said, ‘I need a knife.’

Faisal nodded and one of the armed men handed Mark his knife, handle first, to the accompaniment of clicking gun mechanisms. Mark picked away at the stitching of an interior side panel of his briefcase and extracted a computer memory card. He handed it to Faisal who passed it to one of the men sitting at the monitors. After a few moments, the man appeared satisfied and indicated as much to Faisal, who smiled. The intelligence agent took back the memory card and put it along with the disk he’d held up earlier in an envelope which Mark noted was marked Vaccination schedules . He handed the envelope to one of his men and told him where to take it, adding, ‘When you get to the village, leave it at the clinic. Dr Khan will pick it up from there.’ Then he turned to Mark who was now suffering the agony of having betrayed his country on top of everything else.

Mark said, ‘You’ve got what you wanted. Let my wife and daughter go.’

Faisal didn’t bother with a reply. He nodded to the armed men flanking Mark and they gripped his arms to drag him outside, ignoring his questions and pleas before ending his suffering with a burst of gunfire that echoed off the surrounding rocks in a fading, repetitive requiem.

Back in Deansville, Laura’s and Jade’s lives also came to an end. Not being in the wilds of the Khyber, gunfire would have aroused suspicion in the small Maryland town, so a knife was used. What had started off as such a good day for the McAllister family had ended very badly indeed.

When Faisal received confirmation that the marines left to guard the vehicles down in the pass had been dealt with and that the vehicles themselves had been destroyed, he felt a warm glow of satisfaction. All he needed now was a message confirming that the information he’d obtained from the American had arrived safely at the pre-arranged collection point in the village for his mission to have been a complete success. He got it before sunrise.

When Faisal emerged from the cave complex to watch the sun come up, his conclusion that life was good was to be short-lived. He had underestimated the CIA man Brady who, unsure of whom or whom not to trust in Pakistani intelligence, had attached a tiny GPS transmitter to Faisal’s clothing, thus ensuring that the CIA would know exactly where he was within a one-metre range of any spot on the planet. If for any reason Brady did not report back within an agreed period of time, a train of events would swing into operation. Brady was dead, but from beyond the grave he was responsible for a little black speck’s appearing in the morning sky as Faisal drew deeply on his first cigarette of the day. The speck was an unmanned drone that had locked on to Faisal’s GPS signal.

The calm gaze with which Faisal watched the speck get bigger had barely time to change in response to the awful dawn of realisation before the drone unleashed its fiery equivalent of hell on earth and Faisal, together with his friends and accomplices, were all but vaporised in the firestorm that swept through the caves. The CIA wasn’t to know that the information they wanted most to destroy wasn’t actually there.

Dr Steven Dunbar parked the Porsche Boxster and got out to clamber over steep dunes to reach the beach, with the soft, dry sand and tufted grass begrudging him every step of the way. He needed to escape the travails of everyday life, to get his head straight, to think things through, and, as always, it was a beach he came to when milestones loomed large in his life. The location of the beach didn’t really matter as long as it was deserted and afforded him views to the horizon with a big expanse of sky above, the bigger the better.

Today’s beach was on the north shore of the Solway Firth in south-west Scotland — the part tourists rushed past on their way north to Loch Lomond in their haste to embrace the Walter Scott-manufactured myths of the Scottish highlands. Many of those who knew and loved the wild, romantic shores of the Solway were in no hurry to let the cat out of the bag and were aided in their desire for continuing anonymity by uneven sand banks, fast-flowing tides and quicksand lying in wait for the unwary.

Steven’s milestones were the usual mix of sad and happy common to most folk — a time when a life-changing decision had to be made, the death of a parent, an impending marriage, the birth of a child and, in his case, the tragic loss of a wife through the ravages of a brain tumour. Today he’d learned of the death of a friend and needed to be alone. He’d been on leave up in Scotland visiting his daughter Jenny when the news had reached him. Sir John Macmillan, his boss and head of the Sci-Med Inspectorate in London, had phoned to tell him that Dr Simone Ricard of the French-based but international charity Médecins Sans Frontières had been found dead. Macmillan had remembered that she’d been a friend of Steven’s and thought it significant enough to interrupt his long weekend with the news. Currently he had no further information but would keep him informed if and when details came in.

Steven reached the water’s edge and drew a line in the sand with his toe for no particular reason. It was clear enough today to see where the sky fell into the sea and this pleased him. It conferred a sense of order on the scene, unlike days when the heavens disappeared into the water in a miasma of grey nothingness. He thought about Simone and wondered, as he had so often in the past, how they had become friends in the first place. True, they were both doctors, but they could hardly have been more different in outlook.

Simone was French, the only child of professional parents — both university lecturers — who’d been born and brought up in Marseilles but had moved to Paris to complete her education and attend medical school. She had wanted to become a doctor from an early age and had never wavered in her determination. For her, medicine was a true vocation while for him it had been the course he’d followed at university, the one he had pursued largely in order to please parents and teachers who’d sought the kudos of having a doctor in the family or on the school records.

He had gone all the way through medical school before maturing enough and achieving the self-confidence necessary to admit to himself and everyone else that he had no great wish to board the medical career train: his heart simply wasn’t in it. When the arguments were over and the dust had settled he had gone on to complete his studies and qualify as a doctor, even working his obligatory registration year in hospitals before veering off to join the army and pursue a career more suited to his love of the outdoors and a yen for adventure.