Chris Ryan - Osama

She had chosen a seat by the front window. It looked directly onto the pavement and the busy street just off Dagenham Heathway. And on the other side of the road, the black door of number 23. Her eyes were stuck on it. If a lorry or a bus passed – which they did frequently – she had to suppress brief surges of panic. If the mysterious Hussein Al-Samara – or Mr Ashe, or whatever he wanted to call himself – came in or out of the premises, she needed to know about it. Joe would ask her what she had seen when – if – he arrived, and she wanted his approval. Given the events of the last twelve hours, there wasn’t much else that seemed important.

She checked her watch: 09.48. Had Joe read her email? How long should she wait for him to arrive? All day? The café was full and the middle-aged Greek woman who had supplied her coffee and toast was eyeing her from behind the counter, obviously peeved that she was taking up a table that other customers might want.

Her eyes panned up to the first-floor window. Flat B. Was that Al-Samara’s place? The wooden frame looked rotten, the pane was covered with a net curtain. A faint glow suggested that a light was on inside.

‘You finished?’

Eva looked up. The woman from behind the counter was looking down at the uneaten food like it was a personal slight.

‘Yeah…’ she muttered. ‘Thanks…’ Her eyes wandered back to number 23. ‘Um… maybe I’ll have another…’

She’d seen movement in the first-floor window. The net curtain fluttered slightly. She thought maybe she’d seen a shadow passing it.

‘… coffee,’ she breathed. The woman cleared her table.

Eva’s phone rang. She answered it immediately. ‘Joe?’ she said, before remembering that he didn’t even have her number.

‘DI Buckley?’ A voice she half recognized.

‘Who’s this?’ There was a tremor in her voice.

‘Jason Riley, Scotland Yard.’

She didn’t answer.

‘You came to see me this morning? In the basement? It’s about the fingerprint ID I gave you…’

‘What about it?’ she breathed.

‘Well, I was just logging the query and something came up. There were two other male visitors on the day in question and their fingerprint records are all the same.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Identical prints, all of them. Same bloke, this Hussein Al-Samara. Don’t know how they did it, but it looks to me like someone’s been tampering with the records. I’ll need to refer this upwards, but I thought I’d just give you the nod—’

‘ Shit! ’

Eva let the phone drop from her ear. The fingerprint technician’s words were bad enough, but her view of the first-floor window of number 23 was even worse. The shadow had suddenly reappeared, but this time it had slammed against both the net curtain and the window pane, and a crack had suddenly appeared in the glass. ‘Joe,’ she whispered. ‘Oh my God, Joe – what are you doing? ’

She stood up immediately, pushing past the waitress.

‘You haven’t paid!’ the woman shouted. Eva threw a note on the table without even checking what it was, before running out onto the street and straight across the busy road. Within seconds she was at the black door, pressing desperately, repeatedly on the buzzer for Flat B. It made no sound, but she pressed and pressed, thumping on the wooden door with her other hand.

Two minutes passed. Three. There was no response from Flat B. With a howl of frustration, Eva stepped back onto the pavement and cursed, before stepping up to the door once more and pressing the button for Flat A. It was answered within seconds.

‘Police,’ she bellowed into the intercom. ‘Open up.’

There was a clicking sound. Eva pushed the door open and hurtled inside.

She found herself in a square lobby with grey ceramic floor tiles and on one side a row of pigeonholes for mail. There was a door to her left, which opened to reveal a frightened-looking old lady in a dressing gown and hairnet.

‘Flat B?’ Eva demanded.

‘Upstairs…’ The old lady nodded at a staircase with a wrought-iron banister. Eva ran towards it, but then stopped and looked back. ‘Is there a rear entrance to these flats?’

The old lady nodded, but then frowned. ‘Do you have any identification?’

Eva didn’t answer. She ran to the old lady’s door and pushed past her into the ground-floor flat. Ignoring the feeble shouts of protest, she ran along the dark hallway and into the tiny kitchen at the end, where a door looked out onto an alleyway from which an external iron staircase zigzagged up. She yanked the door open – a wailing sound reached her ears from above – and flew up the staircase to the first floor.

It was no surprise to see that the back door of Flat B was swinging open.

The bigger surprise was the baby, no more than three months old, lying in a Moses basket on the kitchen table, screaming its lungs out.

Eva ran past it, heading for the room at the front. She could hear more shouting from in there. Then she saw why.

There were three people in the room. One of them was a woman, short, dumpy, Middle Eastern-looking, wearing a tightly wrapped green headscarf. She was kneeling in the far-left corner of the room, just beyond a tatty sofa, her hands clutched in front of her, her face stained with tears, her eyes full of terror.

The second person was Joe. Eva could never have imagined that a familiar face could look so unfamiliar. His eyes were insane, his lips curled with anger. In his hand was the same scalpel with which he had threatened Eva.

The third person was another man, tall and thin, with dark hair. Like the woman, he was on his knees, and he was sucking in deep breaths, two a second. Eva could not see his face because it was covered by his hands. What she could see, though, was the blood, seeping from behind his fingers.

‘ Joe! ’

‘Back off, Eva,’ Joe growled, without even turning to look at her. He stepped forward, eating up the two metres that separated him and the man on his knees, then grabbed a clump of his dark hair with one hand and with the other placed the scalpel against his neck. ‘ You think I won’t kill you? ’ he hissed. ‘ I’ll fucking enjoy it. The only way you’ve got any chance at all is to tell me! ’ He yanked the man by his hair to his feet, and now he was shouting. ‘ Tell me! Where’s my son? ’

‘I… do… not… know! ’ the man groaned. As he spoke, his hands fell away from his face.

Eva gasped.

It was not the blood that shocked her, flowing from his nose like a torrent, nor the ugly welts that Joe had inflicted on both sides of the man’s face with his fists. Nor was it his helpless expression of panic. It was something else.

‘Joe,’ she whispered.

‘ Back off, I said! ’ He yanked the man’s head to one side and pressed the edge of blade against the soft flesh of his trembling neck.

‘Joe, no…’

‘You’ve got three seconds. One. Two…’

‘Let him go! That’s not the man I saw! We’ve got the wrong person! That’s not him! ’

And as she screamed at Joe, she ran forward and pulled him away, placing herself between her violent friend and the terrified, bleeding, messed-up man he was on the point of butchering.

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, USA. 0700 hours EST.

‘Chocolate bourbon?’

Mason Delaney indicated a plate of biscuits on the coffee table. The man sitting at the other end of the comfortable sofa gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

‘You don’t mind if I do?’

‘Please…’

Delaney helped himself to a biscuit, placed it on the bone-china saucer that held his cup of tea, lifted the cup and took the tiniest of sips. Then he held the chocolate bourbon up in the air and examined it as if it were a precious stone. ‘I became very fond of these when I was stationed in the UK,’ he said. ‘The British have given the world many things, but for me their greatest achievement will always be tea and biscuits.’ To emphasize his point, he dunked the chocolate bourbon in his tea, before biting off a third of it and chewing it slowly and with emphasis. He did not take his eyes off his guest.