Chris Ryan - Osama

The image she was looking for was two places from the bottom. She double-clicked on it, and a larger window appeared with the grainy but familiar face of a man of Middle Eastern appearance staring out at her. Dark skin. Hooked nose. And underneath the picture, a scan of his hand print, the time he checked in and the time he checked out.

His name: Sarmed Ashe.

Her heart was thumping. She closed the window on the screen and removed the data stick, then went to the door. She was about to step into the corridor when she saw the portly frame of DCI Jacobson walk past.

She cursed under her breath and moved to the side of the door, pressing her back against the wall. How long had it taken her to get here from the incident room? Fifteen seconds? She hadn’t exactly been paying attention. She counted to twenty before taking another deep breath, opening the door and leaving the room.

There was no one in sight.

She walked briskly, but not so fast as to attract attention. As she passed the incident room her eyes darted through the interior window. Jacobson was talking to the woman with the short grey hair. Impossible to tell what she was saying. But easy to guess. Ten metres to the lift. She picked up her pace, feeling like she had half the Met following her. On reaching the lift she pressed the down button and waited.

Movement further down the corridor. The door to the incident room opened. Three seconds later the lift hissed open. Eva glanced to her right. Jacobson had emerged into the corridor and was staring in her direction. Was she paranoid, or did he look suspicious? She saw him mouthing the word ‘Eva?’ just as she stepped into the lift and slammed the button for the basement.

Safely inside, she found herself almost hyperventilating and felt trickles of sweat all over her body. This wasn’t just a sacking offence, it was a prosecution offence. And all to help a man accused of murder?

The basement was the lair of the forensic teams. Like nearly everywhere else in the building, it was pretty much empty at this hour. She passed a pale-faced young man in his early twenties who barely seemed to notice her, but apart from that she met no one until she stepped into the badly lit room of the fingerprint department.

Two young men were on duty. Neither looked like he saw much daylight and only one looked up when Eva entered. Eva forced her face into an expression of confidence and marched up to him. ‘DI Buckley,’ she said. ‘Can you run me a search?’

‘ID?’ the young man asked.

Eva casually handed over her ID, which the young man barely glanced at – and so he didn’t see that her hand was trembling.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

Eva handed him the data stick. ‘Biometric details of prison visitors. There’s a Sarmed Ashe on there. I want to cross-check him with the system.’ The young man shrugged, as if to indicate that this was trivial for someone of his technical ability, and plugged the device into his terminal. Eva helped him navigate to the correct file. As the young man’s fingers flew over the keyboard, she felt her heart hammering in her chest and her eyes kept flickering to the door. She expected Jacobson to step inside any second.

‘Gotcha,’ the young man said finally.

‘What do you have?’

‘Well…’ said the fingerprint technician, relaxing a little, clearly enjoying his moment in the sun. ‘You’re lucky we’ve got him, to be honest. It’s only because he had a break-in back in 2008. SOCOs dusted him off just to eliminate his prints from the crime scene. Clean as a whistle otherwise. But what did he say his name was?’

‘Sarmed Ashe,’ Eva breathed.

‘Tch tch tch…’ tutted the technician, nodding. ‘Giving false ID to a prison officer. Naughty boy. ’Fraid that’s not his real name.’

‘What is?’

‘He’s actually called Hussein Al-Samara. Let’s have a look. Iraqi born. Granted political asylum 9 November 2001 – that’s, like, nearly two months to the day after 9/11, right?’

‘Right,’ Eva breathed.

‘Naturalized 15 December 2006… I suppose you want his address?’

Eva tried to keep her voice steady. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Print it out for me, would you?’

Ten minutes later, and clutching a single piece of paper, she was once more nodding at the security guy at ground-floor reception, before striding out of the Yard and wondering to herself whether she would ever set foot in that place again.

0700 hours.

Joe was wearing black jeans, a tight grey polo neck, a black woollen hat and a thick, checked lumberjack shirt. It had taken him two hours to find a charity shop where someone had left a black plastic bag of donated clothes in the doorway. These were the best-fitting, and warmest, items he could find. But anything was better than the dirty prison uniform that he had rolled into a bundle and chucked into a big metal catering dustbin at the back of an Indian restaurant on Tooting High Street. With one of the £50 notes he’d taken from Eva’s place, he’d bought himself hot, sweet tea and two platefuls of shepherd’s pie from an all-night café. It tasted disgusting – even the food in Barfield had been better than this – but he needed fuel and he wolfed it down. Just to get hot food inside him felt fantastic.

On the other side of the road was another all-night establishment. Posters in the window advertised the ability to wire money to any country in minutes, cheap phone calls to Nigeria and Delhi and internet access at £1 for twenty minutes. Three men – Turkish? he wondered – loitered by a counter, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from tiny cups. A fourth man, slightly older, stood behind it. They’d gone silent as Joe entered, and given him an unfriendly stare. He had just pointed at one of the computer screens, received a nod from the man behind the counter, and taken a seat. It took him five minutes to set up the Hotmail accounts using a false name and address. As soon as he was done, he’d walked up to the counter and handed over a fifty-pound note. The proprietor had taken it into a back room to get change while the three men moved over to a nearby table to continue their conversation in their own language, leaving their cigarette packets, keys and smartphones in plain view.

Joe’s plan was executed almost as quickly as it was formulated. He had surreptitiously removed the smartphone from the middle pile as he leaned over it, depositing it in the left-hand pocket of his lumberjack shirt. Seconds later the man had reappeared with his change. Joe had grunted a word of thanks, left the shop and hurried down the road before his act was discovered. Once he had turned off the main road, he’d switched off the phone and removed the battery. A mobile, he knew, was as good as a tracking device. But if anyone was going to track him, it needed to be on his terms…

The first Tube to Waterloo had left Tooting Broadway at 5.53 a.m. He bought himself a tin of Tennent’s Super from a local Spar, poured half of it away and sat at the end of the Northern Line carriage, head bowed, eyes half closed but still alert, the beer can that instantly marked him out as a wino to be avoided held lightly between his knees. As he’d hoped, the few bleary-eyed commuters on the carriage kept their distance and avoided eye contact. There are ways of being invisible, Joe understood. This was one.

Joe’s carriage on the train from Waterloo to Epsom was almost empty. Few people travelled out of London at this hour. He stared through the window, watching the suburban gardens whizz past… allotments… high streets… , churches. So much normality. It felt alien to him. A copy of the Metro freesheet was on the floor by his feet. He picked it up and opened a page at random. He stared blankly at the drawing that took up half a page for a good five seconds before he realized what he was looking at: an artist’s impression of the compound in Abbottabad, with images of crashed helicopters and arrows representing troop movements. In a sudden fit of anger he screwed the paper up and threw it back onto the floor. He figured that the world would suddenly be full of experts on what had happened that night.