Tom Cain - Assassin

And then, as the music died away and tens of thousands of people settled down to listen to what the President had to say, and he stood there calmly, smiling at the TV cameras, letting the mood subside a little before he began his oration, Carver heard a whirring, buzzing noise above his head and something very much like an oversized insect zipped past him, just a few feet overhead.

‘What the hell was that?’ he shouted.

‘What?’ asked Grantham.

‘That thing that flew by, like a cross between a mosquito and a miniature helicopter.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Grantham, nonchalantly. ‘Probably one of the spotter drones. The cops use them to observe the crowd. They’ve got video cameras. Clever little buggers. They use electric motors, very quiet, and they’re only a couple of feet across, so you can’t see them from the ground.’

Realization dawned on Carver, just as Lincoln Roberts began his speech.

‘More than two hundred years ago, my ancestors were taken captive on the shores of Lake Chad in central Africa, in a land then known as Bornu. They were marched overland many hundreds of miles to the barracoons of Lagos, then sold to the white slavers who would transport them across the oceans to the colonies of the Americas and the Caribbean. They made the terrible crossing of the Atlantic, the dreaded Middle Passage, and were sold again in the slave market in Charleston, South Carolina. The people who shipped my ancestors across the Atlantic, and brought the profits back to cities just like this one, were white. The people who owned, worked and whipped my ancestors in the plantations were also white…’

Carver could almost feel the shame rising from the audience, the consciousness of a sin that could never be expunged or atoned for. But he was only half listening to Roberts. Instead, his concentration was focused on the sky above the crowd as he swept his binoculars slowly back and forth, looking out for the drones.

‘But white people were not the only sinners in the slave trade, nor Africans the only victims,’ Roberts continued. ‘No white man had ever ventured close to Lake Chad at the time my folks were seized. They were first enslaved by their fellow-Africans, who probably traded them to Arab merchants along the way. And this trade flowed in more than one direction. Over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of white Europeans, many of them from England, were captured by raiders and taken to be sold in the slave markets of North Africa. This is how it has been since the very dawn of mankind. Slavery is the original form of human oppression. And it is still among us, on a greater scale than ever before, right here in the heart of our civilization, right now in the twenty-first century.

‘So it is time we made a stand…’

As the crowd started getting to their feet, clapping and cheering as they rose, Carver shouted at Grantham, ‘How many of these drones are there?’

‘Dunno. Two, I think.’

‘It is time we said, “Enough is enough!”’ Roberts declared.

The crowd noise rose another level as Carver yelled, ‘You sure?’

‘No,’ Grantham replied, having a hard time making himself heard. ‘Why does it matter?’

Roberts’s voice grew stronger still: ‘It is time we put an end to slavery. And that is what I, and you, are going to start doing today.’

Carver’s throat, still suffering the after-effects of Tyzack’s torture, felt as though he’d just swallowed a cocktail of acid and barbed wire and his voice was starting to go. ‘Don’t you get it?’ he rasped. ‘ “Look to the sky.” That’s what Thor meant. Tyzack is using a drone!’

Grantham cupped a hand to his ear and screwed up his face to indicate that he couldn’t hear over the din. Then the noise subsided as the President stood silently again so that he and everyone else could all catch their breaths.

‘It’s the drones,’ Carver repeated. ‘That’s how Tyzack is going to do it.’

‘You sure? They’re not armed or anything,’ said Grantham sceptically. ‘But call it in if you think you’re on to something.’

On stage Lincoln Roberts was moving to the next section of his speech. ‘Pretty soon I’m going to tell you all how I believe we can use the power of our armed forces and the strength and justice of our cause to beat the people-traffickers and slave-traders. But first, I want to show you what slavery looks like today; what form its victims take. I’d like to introduce a very special, very brave young woman whom I had the privilege of meeting earlier today. She comes originally from the land of Armenia. Some of you may have heard or read of her story… how she was betrayed by a member of her own family and handed over to men of unspeakable evil and brutality… how she was bought and sold just like my ancestors were… how she was forced into prostitution against her will; beaten, raped and abused. To understand this young lady’s courage, just know that as we were coming here I showed her the words that I have just spoken to you, words that describe her shame and degradation. Yet she still agreed to stand by me today because she felt that it was her duty so to do – her duty to the women who still suffer as she once did. It is my profound honour to introduce to you… Miss Lara Dashian!’

While Roberts was making his introduction, Samuel Carver was trying to get a message through to Assistant Commissioner Manners. The officer to whom he spoke did not have his name on the official list of the communications system’s approved users. He certainly wasn’t willing to disturb his commanding officer at such a vital point in the day’s proceedings. And anyway, he could not hear, let alone understand what Carver was saying over the cacophony of background noise. In the end, he cut Carver off without a word of warning, still less apology.

On HMS Daring one of the seamen operating the Sampson radar displays called over an officer. ‘There’s something odd going on here, sir. It’s the area directly above where the President is giving his speech. I’m seeing three spotter drones.’

‘Yes, what’s the problem?’

‘There are only supposed to be two.’

‘So which one isn’t meant to be there?’

‘I don’t know, sir. The drones don’t carry any kind of identification beacon, they’re too small. They’re only the size of model airplanes, sir.’

‘What’s the altitude?’

‘About one hundred and fifty feet, sir.’

The officer thought the problem through. Even if there was an extra drone, and there was something suspicious about it, they didn’t know which one it was. Even if they did know, they could hardly blast it out of the sky: that close to the ground, the exploding missile would cause a host of casualties in itself.

In the circumstances, he did the sensible thing. He covered his backside, called the ship’s bridge, informed them of the situation and passed the problem up the line.

Damon Tyzack felt just fine about what he was going to do. If there was one thing he really hated, it was pompous, sanctimonious moralizing. This President Roberts was the worst kind of preachy, self-righteous politician. It would really be doing the world a favour to get rid of him. And… ah, perfect! Here came little Miss Dashian, looking very nicely scrubbed-up and respectable. He thought of the whore he’d carried to his hotel bed in her high heels, micro-skirt and painted tart’s face.

You don’t fool me, my dear, Tyzack thought. You’d still be anybody’s for five hundred dirhams.

He looked down at the iPhone. Its screen displayed a map of the Broad Quay area. A moving, flashing dot showed the position of the drone that Geary and his men had launched from the playing fields. It was moving towards the stage, its precise location tracked by a pair of ever-changing co-ordinates at the bottom left of the screen. After yesterday’s practice runs, Tyzack knew precisely where the drone had to be, at what altitude, and at what speed it had to be travelling to ensure the delivery of its payload to the precise spot where the President and the whore were standing.