Andy McNab - Brute force

I didn't know what I was looking for so it was hard to know where to begin. I shone the torch around the room and its beam swept across a desk by the fireplace. I walked over and started removing the drawers. They were filled with the crap you usually find in desks: pens, paper, paperclips, rubber bands and correspondence – lots and lots of it. I flicked through the letters. Most were in Arabic, but some weren't.

I stuck the light in my mouth and pulled out anything written in a language I might understand. I found a compliments slip and an invoice in German from a clinic in Oberdorf, Switzerland, clearly addressed to a Fraulein Layla Hamdi, and a letter, in English, also to 'Ms Hamdi', from the Cancer Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Medical Science in Moscow.

Thank fuck for the international language. I checked the dates. The Swiss invoice, for treatment of some kind, had been sent in November. The letter from the Russian Academy of Medical Science was more recent and definitive – it was dated the first week of December and was confirmation of an appointment booked two weeks earlier.

The first sentence of the second paragraph jumped out at me.

Due to the urgent nature of the treatment, we suggest that you check yourself in as soon as possible…

I was just too fucking late.

I put back the letters and closed the drawers. As I stood up, my torch beam brushed past a row of photographs on the mantelpiece. One was of a tall man with unkempt hair, dressed in jeans and a camouflage T-shirt, his left arm draped round the shoulders of a beautiful olive-skinned woman, several years older than him. A few strands of hair had been blown across her face by the wind. They were standing in front of a house – this house. It hadn't changed at all.

As I stared at Lesser's lank hair and her piercing, sea-green eyes, the years peeled back. The dock, the Bahiti, finning across the harbour… Layla disappearing down the gangway with Mansour… Big Ben sliced almost in half by the det cord…

I panned left and there he was in more familiar gear: khaki combat jacket, black beret and shades – the uniform of the Provisionals. He was out on some bog, in the middle of nowhere; low, grey clouds scudding in from the Atlantic behind him. He beamed from ear to ear, clutching an Armalite, draped in the Tricolour and flashing a victory sign at the camera.

My gaze shifted to the next frame: this time no guns, no uniform; just jeans and a T-shirt. It must have been dress-down Friday. A summer's day, outside a cottage just like Dom's. From the look of him, the cut of his hair – short – and the zips and chains on his jeans, the shot must have been taken in the late seventies, when Lesser was in his early twenties.

Next to him was a girl with a pale complexion and the same unruly hair – a little older than him; a sister maybe.

She took centre stage in the last photo. The backdrop was the same – the cottage in Ireland – but this time a smiling, olive-skinned schoolgirl was hanging off her neck. She looked about five or six, no more, but I was shit at guessing kids' ages. She had an awkward, gap-toothed smile and I had the uneasy feeling that I'd seen her somewhere before. I turned back towards the door and stopped.

Lesser and Layla. Lesser and the girl, and a kid with olive-tanned skin and jet-black hair – all on Layla's mantelpiece.

I ran down the corridor to the bedroom and yanked the dust-sheet off the nearer of the two bedside tables and there they were – the intimate shots you didn't put on public display: Layla, pale and drawn, clutching a newborn, olive-skinned baby to her chest; Layla and the baby again, this time in laces and ribbons; and then the infant with Lesser's sister… no sign of Layla at all.

I pulled open the drawer and found letters, tucked away in envelopes with Irish postmarks, with Layla's name and address – a PO Box in Tripoli – scrawled in big, loopy handwriting. I opened one and was confronted by the same writing and a wobbly drawing of a horse. Dear Mummy…

I opened another. Different drawing, same writing, a bit more mature. More letters, more drawings, the same story…

Hamdi and Lesser – they'd had a kid; and, by the look of it, given her up for adoption.

I moved round the opposite side of the bed and whipped the dust-sheet off the other table. Lesser, in a large, black and white portrait, surrounded by an ornate silver frame, stared back at me – at the time he'd met Hamdi in the desert, I guessed, every inch the young shit-stirrer, doing his best Che Guevara imitation.

And then there was a picture of Lesser standing beside the little girl, holding her hand – in the garden of the cottage again. The girl was seven or eight; Lesser now in his early thirties. It could only have been months, maybe even weeks, before he was dropped.

Another shot. The girl, in school uniform, giving the camera a self-conscious smile, braces on her teeth, the first signs she was developing into a young woman. And another. The girl on a pier or a ferry, leaning against railings, the sea behind her: teenaged, intense, angst-ridden, no smile, but more than a hint of her mother's haunting beauty. And finally, a big portrait, black and white again, like Lesser's – their girl all grown up.

And I had seen her before. I knew her. I'd met her.

My eyes flicked across the pictures again.

Lesser. Hamdi. The baby. The crofter's cottage. The schoolgirl. The girl on the pier or the ferry, whatever it fucking was…

The ferry.

Little Miss Camcorder. Mairead O'Connell.

I sat on the bed and looked down at the picture in my hand.

Duff had gobbed off to the press about a Brit spy hidden away on his ship…

Lynn's nickname became common knowledge around the highest levels of Libyan spookdom…

We'd killed her precious dad…

Fuck… It wasn't the Firm cleaning house. It was this bitch.

I ran from the room, into the lounge and out through the front door. Clutching Layla's keys, I sprinted to the gate and produced the only one that would fit a large padlock. I shoved it in, gave it a twist and the chains fell away.

Lynn was already sliding back into the passenger seat. I jumped in and fired up the ignition. The engine caught. I sat there for a moment too long, air con kicking in, working everything out in my head.

Could the device have been her handiwork…? Her mother would have shown her the tricks of the trade.

I registered something out of the corner of my eye – a glint, nothing more: metal catching moonlight.

Something on the move; something coming at me – fast. I hit the gas.

Too late.

As the wheels spun I heard the scream of another engine a second before it rammed the Audi side on. It cannoned into my door, catapulting me off my seat and into Lynn as Mansour's car was slammed into the wall. In the same instant the airbags exploded and the side window shattered into a thousand fragments.

Sand and dust and yelling filled the air. The airbags pinned my body back against the seat and my arms to my sides. I couldn't get to my weapon. Boots crunched on the bonnet. Somebody was trying to pull the driver's door open, but it was too buckled to move.

There were urgent, angry shouts and a crowbar crashed down against the windscreen – once, twice, again… The lamination crazed like a spider's web, but the glass didn't give. The boots stomped across the roof as I struggled for the weapon. My door was still being pulled at, the distorted metal screeching against the frame.

More shouts, but not in Arabic.

The sunroof imploded. Glass rained down onto me like confetti, then something hard and metallic struck my shoulder then my head and I saw white starbursts in a sea of black.