Stella Rimington - At Risk

Outside, at the car, she put on the backpack and zipped up her coat over it. When she returned, wearing her waterproof, Denzil looked at her resignedly. “You’re going to disappear, aren’t you? And I’m never going to know anything about you.”

“Let’s see,” she said. And touching her hand to his cheek for a moment, she walked out.

Outside, the rain blew gently across her face. She couldn’t feel her feet on the ground; instead, she seemed to be floating, buoyed by a lightness of spirit that she had never known. It wasn’t a question of rationalisation-she simply wasn’t going to do it. She had been cut loose from the need to obey anyone, or any creed, ever again. They couldn’t kill her; neither Faraj and his people, nor her pursuer and her people. She was already dead.

How long she walked, she didn’t know. Not more than fifteen minutes, probably. The beer had filled her bladder, and as she crouched at the side of the road with her combat trousers round her ankles-memories of Takht-i-Suleiman-she saw Denzil sweep past in the Honda Accord. She walked on. It was as if she stood still and the road unrolled beneath her feet. She was smiling, and the tears were coursing down her cheeks with the rain.

The noise of the helicopters was small at first, and then it became a snarling, slashing fury all around her. Before her was the cricket ground, spotlit from the sky-a scene of unearthly theatricality and beauty. At its centre, hissing faintly and rocking on its struts, a British Army Puma from which the black-clad chorus ran to take their positions. Heckler and Koch MP5s, she noted approvingly. The SAS. And on the road beyond them the sapphire winking of police vehicles against the Georgian frontage, more running figures, and the bouncing echo of a loud-hailer.

Jean D’Aubigny kept walking. She would have liked to stop weeping but the beauty of it all, and the attention to detail, was just too much. Faintly, at the edge of her consciousness, she heard the multiple snicker of rifle bolts drawn back and locked. Police snipers, she thought, but quickly forgot them, for there at the scene’s centre, downlit by a police helicopter, was a slight, determined-looking figure whom she knew immediately. The woman’s dark hair was slicked back from her face and her leather jacket was zipped to the chin.

Jean smiled. Everything was somehow so familiar. It was as if the scene had played itself out an infinity of times before. “I knew you’d be here,” she called out, but the wind and the updraught from the helicopters plucked her words away.

In the pavilion, Faraj watched as the security forces flooded the area, and knew himself a dead man. He saw the soldiers leap from the Puma, the cricket field flooded with light, and the police marksmen pour down the ropes from the hovering Gazelles on to the surrounding roofs. Thanks to the binoculars, however, he knew one further thing for certain: that the boy had driven the Honda into the garage several minutes before. The bomb had to be in the car, and he kept the binoculars trained on the front door of the target house. Where the girl was he had no idea, presumably in the house with the boy, but he had to act before the police evacuated the place and the entire operation was in vain. From his jacket pocket he took the remote detonator, kissed it, bade farewell to the fighter Asimat, and spoke the name of his father and of Farzana, whom he had loved.

As the woman walked uncertainly on to the illuminated cricket ground, Liz realised that she was looking at Jean D’Aubigny. The hair was wet and cropped short, and the face was much thinner and sharper than that of the puppy-fatted teenager in the posters, but it was recognisably her. She was wearing a waterproof jacket, unzipped. Beneath it a high-necked sweater was intersected by the grey, bandolier-style strap of a bag.

As their eyes met the woman smiled, as if in a kind of recognition, and the lips moved in the rain-blurred face. She looked younger than her twenty-four years, Liz thought. Almost childlike.

The connection between them held for an instant, and then the night shivered and tore apart. A tidal wave of darkness roared towards Liz-pure force, pure hate-lifting and pitching her through the air like an unstrung toy. The ground slammed up to meet her, and for a moment, as the reverberating undertow of the explosion rolled over her, dragging the breath from her lungs, she knew and understood nothing.

There was a silence-a long silence, it seemed-during which soil and clothing and body-tissue fragments rained down, and then, by inclining her head, which hurt atrociously, she saw people moving soundlessly around her, ghostlike beneath the wavering spotlights. To one side a policeman was kneeling on all fours with his uniform hanging from his body and bloody mucus issuing from his nose and mouth. To the other, the overcoated figure of Don Whitten was lying face-down, shuddering, and beyond him an Army officer was sitting blank-eyed on the ground, bleeding from both ears. In her own ears she could hear a high, thread-like scream. Not human, but some kind of an echo.

A police officer ran up to her and shouted, but she could hear nothing, and waved him away. More running feet, and then the helicopters and the lights swung away from them to rake the cricket pavilion and the woods at the far side of the cricket ground. They must have found Mansoor. “Alive!” she tried to shout, clambering to her knees with the rain in her face. “Get him alive!” But she couldn’t hear her own voice.

She was running now, slipping on the wet grass, pushing away Wendy Clissold and another, vaguer figure. Running at an oblique angle to one of the SAS Sabre teams, who were working their way fast and purposefully around the perimeter towards the pavilion. Every step that she took was like a hammer-blow behind her eyes, and she could feel the warm, steely taste of blood in her mouth. She could still hear almost nothing beyond the thready scream in her ears and the slashing pulse of the helicopters, and so was unaware of Bruno Mackay until, launching himself at her from behind and wrapping his arms around the wet calves of her jeans, he brought her awkwardly to the ground and held her there.

She groaned, dazed. “Bruno, we… can’t you see, we…”

“Don’t move, Liz,” he ordered her, pinning her down hard by the wrists. “Please. You’re not thinking straight.”

His voice was just a whisper. She bared blood-darkened teeth, and writhed.

“I said don’t move ! You’ll get us shot.”

She lay there, immobilised. Watched as the police helicopter’s spotlight bleached the pavilion. Day for night. She wasn’t even sure what she’d been trying to do.

“I’m fine,” she murmured.

“You’re not fine,” he hissed. “You’ve got severe blast concussion. And we’ve got to get away from here. If there’s a firefight we’re likely to get our-”

“We need Mansoor alive.”

“I know. But move back now, please. Let the SAS do their job.”

The four soldiers moved towards the pavilion with their MP5 carbines raised to their shoulders, but as they did so, its front door slowly opened, and a wiry, aquiline figure stepped on to the spotlit players’ terrace and narrowed his eyes against the glare. He was wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt. His hands were raised. He was not holding a weapon.

Liz stared at Faraj Mansoor, fascinated. Watched as the first spatters of rain darkened his T-shirt. Mackay, however, barely glanced at him, and in a sudden, terrible rush of comprehension Liz knew exactly what was going to happen, and why.

There was a moment’s frozen stand-off, and then one of the SAS men yelled, “Grenade!”

Leaning forward into their weapons, and from a range of no more than half a dozen yards, the four men each fired a controlled burst of shots into Faraj Mansoor’s chest. Speechless, Liz watched as his body kicked and bucked and twisted to the ground.