Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

He tried to pick out the targets, but they were just part of a crowd now. A crowd that was heading through the Dung Gate and into the Old Town.

Towards the wall.

He jumped to his feet. Maya Bloom was still lying motionless. He had to leave her there. But first he clicked the mag release catch between the magazine and the trigger guard and removed the mag from the sniper rifle. The remaining hardware — including her snubnose and his Sig — he stashed in the Bergen. The ceramic knife he kept in his hand. Without hesitating for another second, he ran across the roof, past the skylight and back down the ladder, gripping the knife between his teeth.

At the base of the building, he dumped the rucksack in one of the bins. He took a moment to collect his thoughts. To gather his breath. To steady his nerve.

And then he ran towards the Dung Gate.

Alistair Stratton’s study at Albany Manor was dark.

He had closed the curtains and locked the door. The only source of light was the television against the wall, set to BBC News 24. The sound was down low, but the image showed an aerial view of an American warship ploughing through the waves. The text banner along the bottom of the screen rolled continuously: ‘american troops continue to mobilise in the middle east… president states he will stand “shoulder to shoulder with our israeli allies in the fight against terror”… middle east peace envoy alistair stratton’s negotiations with hamas administration “inconclusive”… unconfirmed reports of anti-western riots in the gazan capital…’

Stratton sat perfectly still in an armchair. His clothes were still torn and dirty. His face was still bruised and his broken nose had started to bleed again. He ignored the moistness that dripped from his right nostril, over his lips and on to his chin. He hadn’t showered, changed or received medical attention since Gaza.

He didn’t care.

To his right was an occasional table with a powered-up laptop on it. He had directed the browser to a live webcam image of the Western Wall. It was grainy and juddering, refreshing only every few seconds, but it was sufficient for him to see the exposed section and the crowds around it. Sufficient for him to witness his work, even though he was many miles away.

The picture on the TV changed, to show footage of the current Prime Minister shaking hands with his Israeli counterpart in a conference room in Tel Aviv. The caption read: ‘iran states it will see western aggression towards any islamic country as “an act of war”

… un observers report “substantial activity” on the libya-egypt border…’

Stratton glanced at the time in the top-left corner of the screen. 08.37. Which meant 10.37 in Jerusalem.

Twenty-three minutes to go.

He remained seated. Still. His pale face was bathed in the light of the television and the laptop. His eyes were darting between the two and his lips were moving constantly. But they made no sound.

Miss Leibovitz felt like she needed eyes in the back of her head. The entrance to the Western Wall plaza was crowded and although there were three other teachers as well as her to look after the girls, it was difficult to keep tabs on them. They were swarming in a rather disorganised way around the security gates, chattering happily, clearly excited and totally oblivious to the stern-faced troops on the other side of the body scanners.

‘Girls… girls! ’ Even though her voice was raised, it had little effect on her charges. But then she saw something that made her raise her voice even louder. ‘Clara… excuse me, Clara! What do you think you’re doing?’

If there was one thing Miss Leibovitz couldn’t stand, it was inconsiderate behaviour from her girls. She was looking at such behaviour right now. Little Clara, normally such a well-behaved thing, was so excited that she had barged right in front of a pregnant lady who was just approaching the security gates.

‘Clara, please be more considerate to the people around you,’ the teacher snapped. The child hung her head, shamefaced. And the pregnant woman stopped for a moment. She was wearing a headscarf and a shawl round her shoulders and she looked rather taken aback.

Her eyes flickered towards the armed guards on the other side of the gate.

She looked at Miss Leibovitz, and at Clara.

And then she too cast her eyes to the floor and walked through the body scanner. It made no sound and the guards didn’t give her a second look.

‘Now then, girls,’ Miss Leibovitz called. ‘Form an orderly queue, please. I want you to be a good example of your school, and I really don’t want to have to speak sharply to anybody else, today of all days

…’

The plaza was filling up.

There was a buzz about the place, a sense of celebration. The Israeli flag flew from a pole at the back of the square. Little groups of friends and family had gathered here and already the crowd of worshippers by the wall itself was three people deep — the men segregated to the left, the women to the right. A military aircraft flew overhead; seconds later an enormous bang resounded across the skies as it broke the speed barrier. Most of those assembled looked up; but the sight and noise of the aircraft did nothing to spoil the atmosphere. It was Hanukkah, after all.

The defiant party spirit extended to every corner of the plaza and even a little way along the Western Wall tunnel. The further north you went along the tunnel, however, the less populated it became. About 200 metres down and on the left was a little anteroom. This was occupied by a small group of people, huddled by the doorway so that they could see if anybody approached.

They were eight in number. Three young men in traditional dress, one woman in a shawl and headscarf, her belly swollen. These four oozed anxiety. The men were sweating; the woman’s hands were trembling. One of the four remaining young men by their side had stubble, a black and white skullcap, baggy jeans, earphones round his neck and a mobile in his hand; and three others were similarly dressed, brandishing phones and appearing a lot cooler than their companions.

The stubble-faced man looked around. Then, from the large pockets of his hooded top, he brought out a clear freezer bag, sealed at the top and with a length of fishing line attached to it. The bag was filled with one-, two- and five-shekel coins. Some people used the word shrapnel to describe loose change like this.

They didn’t know how accurate they were.

There were eleven more such bags in his top. He divided the whole lot between the three men and one woman — four bags each. The men slipped the bags between the buttons of their shirts and into the pouches they were wearing beneath. For the woman it was different. Her undergarments were not so easy to access, so she merely placed the coins into her shoulder bag. It didn’t matter that they were not close to the explosives. She had more taped to her belly than the others. The coins would easily do their work on the crowd, while the plastic explosive took care of her, her unborn child and of course the wall.

When the improvised shrapnel had been dealt with, the four young men removed their synchronised watches and handed them over to the others.

‘The detonators?’ the woman asked in Arabic when the watches were all fastened.

The man with the stubble nodded and unplugged his phone. He handed it to the woman, then detached the lead from the earphones, unthreaded it from under his top and handed it over. The woman plugged the lead back into the phone and pulled the earbuds from the other end of the lead to reveal two wire probes. These she inserted into a section of the plastic explosive that was just peeping from below her right sleeve. As she did this, the remaining phones were handed over to the three men — each device with a lead ending in two probes that they pushed into their C4 body casings.