Chris Ryan - Osama

He closed his eyes, raised his face to heaven, and pressed the button on his phone.

Mason Delaney prided himself on his ability to read a man’s face. But he didn’t need much skill to realize that something was going wrong. One look at General Sagan’s expression was enough for that. The man’s leathery skin had turned several shades paler; his brow was furrowed.

‘What is it, Herb?’ Delaney asked quietly. And then: ‘ What is it? ’

‘I’m getting word from Tampa,’ Sagan breathed.

Delaney closed his eyes. ‘What?’

‘They’ve located the bottles.’

Delaney could feel his fat neck pressing against his tight collar. ‘And?’

But Sagan was holding up one finger, listening intently to his headset. ‘Boston, Orlando, Cincinnati, Philly… same goddamn story.’

Suddenly Delaney was on his feet, clutching the edge of the table. His mouth hardly moved as he spoke. ‘What story, Herb?’

The general stared at him. ‘They’ve isolated all the passengers, they’ve located the bottles and they’ve done preliminary tests on the contents.’ He blinked. ‘Shampoo,’ he said. ‘They all contain shampoo.’

Delaney felt as if the blood was draining from his veins.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What the hell do you think I mean, Mason? Goddamn it, I thought you said your information was—’

But at that moment the door swung open. Scott Stroman appeared. He was out of breath and his eyes were slightly wild. He looked awkwardly over at Sagan, then at his boss. ‘Sir, we’ve just had word from the Federal Aviation Administration.’

‘What? What? ’

‘All US and UK flights grounded, sir. There’s been an explosion at Heathrow, but the British were pre-warned.’ He looked over at Sagan again, before taking another deep breath. ‘They were also pre-warned about five strikes on US soil, sir.’

Delaney fell back into his seat. A chill wind was blowing through the room. ‘They had the same information as us?’

But Stroman was shaking his head. ‘We’ve been misled, sir. The explosives…’

‘Where?’ Delaney whispered.

‘Semtex, sir. In the in-flight meals.’

Sagan was looking between them, his expression somewhere between confusion and suspicion. ‘What the hell’s going on, Mason?’ he demanded, a dangerous edge to his voice.

But Delaney didn’t answer. Not immediately. For a full ten seconds he sat stunned.

Then he stood up and walked over to Stroman. When he finally spoke, it was in a low hiss that only his white-faced assistant could hear.

‘Find him,’ he said.

‘Sir?’ Stroman asked.

‘ Find Ashkani! Now! ’

Mahmood Ashkani was staring at the sky, awaiting the moment when Flight BA729 from London to Dublin entered his line of sight.

His laptop was open on the car seat beside him, its sat-phone connection to the internet established. He had chosen his viewing point with precision. At 1013 hours the British Airways flight would be in this airspace. And at that moment he would see it fall from the heavens. Only when he had verified, with his own eyes, that the strike had been successful, would he upload the footage to YouTube. No doubt it would be taken down within minutes, but that would be ample time for bin Laden’s taunt to go viral across the world.

Eight minutes past ten. He thought of Delaney. His handler, the man he had been playing like a finely tuned instrument, would know by now that something was wrong. And when the planes started dropping from American airspace as well as British, he would finally understand the extent of Ashkani’s deception. He wished he could see Delaney’s pasty face when he realized what he’d done.

Eleven minutes past. He thought of Joe Mansfield. He thought of how desperate Delaney had been to eliminate him and how much effort he, Ashkani, had put into the job. Mansfield could have ruined everything.

Twelve minutes past.

The sky overhead was clear. He took a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from his jacket and put them on.

Thirteen minutes past. There was nothing in the sky except a flock of seagulls heading for the coast.

Ashkani breathed deeply, trying to keep a lid on his sudden unease. Perhaps there had been a delay.

Two minutes went by. Three. The sky remained empty of aircraft.

Ashkani glanced down at his laptop. It was all ready. He simply needed to press a button. But he could not do it. Not until he was sure…

He opened a new Firefox window and, typing meticulously with his two forefingers, navigated to Heathrow’s departures page. And as his eyes fell upon the list of flights, his slow, careful breathing suddenly became irregular. Each flight on the page was followed by a single word.

‘Cancelled’.

Ashkani stared at the page, and back at the sky. Then, in a sudden burst of anger, he ripped the phone from the laptop and hurled it to the floor by the empty seat. He stared at himself in the rear-view mirror for thirty seconds, his mind full of the explosions he could not see, trying to straighten his head and formulate a new strategy.

He was exposed. His cover was blown. By now Delaney would know that he had been double-crossing him, and Ashkani had nothing to show for it. But that didn’t change what he had to do right now: disappear. Quickly. Completely.

But first he had to cover his tracks. His mind wandered. He saw an isolated house and the dead body of an old woman at the bottom of the stairs. He saw a room filled with incriminating evidence.

He started the engine, performed a three-point turn, and began driving back the way he had come.

Both Eva’s body and mind were numb.

She had watched the clock tick relentlessly past ten.

Ten past.

Twenty past.

She couldn’t move. She could barely think. Her gunshot wound was terrible, but the state of her head, filled with images of burning aircraft and screaming children, was worse. She had no other thoughts.

Her body temperature dropped. Coloured blotches appeared in front of her eyes. She was vaguely aware of the clock. Ten twenty-eight.

Conor.

The thought was like a shot of adrenalin. She had forgotten him. Eva shook her head clear of the mist that was clouding her thoughts, and winced as a burning sensation shot through her trunk. Her breath had caused condensation on the inside of the windscreen and to lean forward and wipe it off with her sleeve was so painful that she gasped.

And she gasped a second time when she saw a grey Peugeot speed by in the opposite direction. The car passed in a flash. But she’d had enough time to see the face of the man at the wheel: the hooked nose, the dark skin and hair, even the slight hunch in his shoulders.

The same man she had seen just days before in Barfield, and whose photograph had since stared out of computer screens and been burned into her brain.

But he was dead. Joe had shot him. Hadn’t he?

Within seconds Eva was swinging the Range Rover round, ignoring the stress the movement placed on her side. Ahead there was a bend to the right, and the Peugeot was out of view. She stamped on the accelerator and the car screamed through the automatic gears as she gripped the steering wheel and peered through the windscreen still half obscured by moisture.

Three minutes later she was speeding past the car park where they had stopped the previous night and surging over the brow of the hill. The sea appeared, about two kilometres in the distance, and between the top of the hill and the coast, about 250 metres inland, was the solitary house. Eva didn’t slow down. As the vehicle jolted over the hill she felt another hot jab of pain in her side, but she also saw, maybe a mile along the road that snaked out ahead, the Peugeot. It had taken a left at a fork in the road. There was no doubt about it: it was heading for the house.