Chris Ryan - Osama

‘Ah, take the lad home,’ muttered Charlie’s dad. ‘We won’t get any peace until you do.’

Charlie’s mum gave her husband a dark look, but then started stroking his hair again. ‘Would you like that, love? Would you like me to take you home?’

Conor nodded.

The shower curtain was not easily punctured.

At first the point of the knife just made an indentation both in the curtain and in the soft flesh of Caitlin’s belly. It needed a sharp yank forward to pierce the plastic, but once it came into contact with Caitlin’s skin, it slid in with gruesome ease.

‘ No! ’ Joe roared. But the roar was only in his head.

Caitlin gasped. Immediately blood gushed from the wound. Most of it remained trapped between her skin and the clear plastic curtain, but some of it seeped through the hole and onto the handle of the knife, Joe’s hand and the paper suit of the man controlling him.

Joe’s mind started to spin. He heard Caitlin’s sharp, pained intakes of breath. He felt his hand being pushed downwards, slicing through her belly in the direction of her womb. A distended bubble of intestine slid softly, monstrously, from the gash as his hand was pulled back and reinserted, not into her belly this time, but into the area around her left breast. This was clearly more painful. She shouted out, but her cry faded after only a second as the strength sapped from her.

There was so much blood, most of it still caught between the shower curtain and her skin. Joe tried once more to fight against his paralysis, to take control of his body. It was useless. His assailants were moving him further up the bath now, forcing his knife hand towards the vicinity of Caitlin’s throat.

Their eyes locked. Joe had seen enough people die to realize that life was ebbing from her.

She spoke. A single word. ‘Conor…’

And there would have been no time for Joe to reply, even if he’d been able to. All his effort was focused on trying to stop the intruder from moving the knife forward. For an instant, when the tip of the blade was just three inches from Caitlin’s throat, he thought that maybe… maybe … a little strength was returning to his useless muscles.

But it was much too little, and much too late.

The incision of Caitlin’s throat was physically the easiest. There was no shower curtain to get through – just the unblemished skin of her smooth neck. And below the skin, the tight lengths of sinew that required a little more pressure from the intruder, but not much.

Caitlin’s eyes rolled. A disgusting mixture of blood and saliva foamed from her mouth and over the vomit that was now oozing down the side of the bath. Her whole neck was scarlet. As the knife was pulled out, she tried to breathe in. But her windpipe was punctured, and all Joe saw was a little of the blood around the wound being sucked back in, before oozing out again.

‘Enough,’ said one of the men behind him.

Joe felt himself being dropped, the knife still in his hand. His head hit the side of the bath before he crumpled to the floor. All he could see now was the pedestal of the basin, the toilet next to it and three pairs of SOCO-suit-clad feet walking out of the bathroom and into the hallway.

He could hear a sinister gurgling sound from the bath.

It lasted no more than ten seconds. And then there was silence.

A small spider crawled out from behind the basin’s pedestal. It scurried in the direction of the bath and out of Joe’s field of view.

His left leg twitched. Movement. He tried to manoeuvre it consciously. Still nothing.

Something was happening on the landing. He didn’t know, and couldn’t see, what. And he almost didn’t care. The horror of the past few minutes was burning his mind. He kept seeing the knife entering Caitlin’s body, kept seeing the blood piss from her wounds. Kept hearing her last, strangled, desperate word.

‘Conor…’

He felt his body jerk. The leaden numbness of his muscles was dissolving. Was the injection wearing off?? He tried to move again. His knife hand shifted an inch. But no more.

And then they were picking him up again. They dragged him backwards out of the bathroom so that he could see Caitlin’s body again as he exited. Her face was a fixed mask of terror, the skin a shocking, pallid white – a sharp, monstrous contrast with the devastating wound in her neck and the scarlet smears trapped within her shower-curtain shroud. He tried to say her name – like that was going to do any good now – but he was still no more the master of his voice than of his body.

Within seconds she was out of sight and Joe was lying on his back at the far end of the hallway, by the banister overlooking the staircase but up against the opposite wall. His body was twitching again, as though an electric shock was passing through it every ten seconds. He could move his left foot, but that was all.

He managed to roll his eyes to the right. One of the intruders had his back to him and was doing something to the banister. After fifteen seconds he stepped away. Joe saw that he had tied a length of rope to the rail. It was about two metres long and the other end, which the intruder held in his gloved hands, was tied in a loop.

A noose.

Another of the men came into view. He grabbed the banister and shook it. It rattled a little.

‘Will it take his bastard weight?’ his muffled voice asked.

‘Let’s find out,’ came the reply. The two men turned to face him.

Joe’s body jerked. He managed to move his right arm at the elbow. It lifted forty-five degrees, then flopped down to the floor again.

The drug was wearing off… His strength was definitely returning. But not fast enough. The intruder with the noose was bending down. Joe’s body twitched. He could hear the man’s heavy breath from behind his mask, and just make out his eyes behind the misted plastic.

The rope was barely twelve inches from his head…

A noise.

It came from outside: the sound of a vehicle pulling up. The ghost of a headlight beam shone through the bathroom window and along the hallway. The engine cut out. The two intruders that he could see straightened up. The one holding the noose dropped it.

‘Leave him. Take the rope.’ The instruction was curt, and responded to only by a nod. The intruders left quickly but silently. By the time – ten seconds later – Joe heard three sharp raps on the front door, they had already reached the spiral staircase, having shut behind them the door that led to it.

He tried to shout: to scream to whoever was at the front door to get to the back of the house. Nothing but a feeble croak emerged. Another three raps. He concentrated all his energy on trying to move, but all he could do was roll uselessly onto his front.

He heard the front door open.

‘Hello?’ called an uncertain voice. ‘Hello? I did knock!’

Joe would never have thought his stomach could get even more knotted. He recognized Elaine’s voice well enough, and he knew what it meant.

He knew Conor was downstairs.

He tried to call out again, to scream at them not to come up. Still the words wouldn’t come. With a massive effort he pulled his knees up under his body. Elaine was still shouting. ‘Hello? Hello? It’s only me… Elaine…’ He could hear her moving into the kitchen; he could also hear footsteps up the stairs. Small, tentative footsteps.

A child’s footsteps.

Joe was kneeling now. He stared at his blood-covered hands, and at the knife he was still holding. With a terrible, painful struggle he managed to look over his shoulder at the open door of the bathroom. Then he turned back, and saw an unmistakable sight through the railings of the banister: Conor’s scruffy, russet hair, his earnest young face, his shoulders, his blue dressing gown.