Chris Ryan - Who Dares Wins

He and Clare left the reception and climbed the stairs back to their room.

Neither of them noticed the man on the other side of the street, an umbrella protecting him from the rain, his eyes firmly fixed on the door of their hotel.

They say that the darkest hour comes just before dawn. For the young Kazakh man in a small village in the southern part of that huge country, it came a lot earlier than that. He lay in his bed, fast asleep, blithely unaware that his snoring could have woken the dead. Or even that he was only a squeeze of a trigger away from joining them. The trigger in question belonged to a fully loaded AK-47 and, at that precise moment, the cold steel of the weapon was about to be pressed into the fleshy part of his cheek.

His eyes shot open. He gasped. In the darkness, silhouetted against the silver moon that beamed through his open window, stood a man. He couldn’t fully see his face, but he could tell he was big; and he could tell that the man was holding the weapon in one hand. The other was up towards his face, one finger pressed to his lips.

‘Shhh…’ he said quietly.

The young Kazakh man started to tremble. He tugged his thin sheets a bit further up his body, but his assailant pulled them away again revealing him to be naked apart from a pair of rather unfashionable underpants. The stranger bent over, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him out of bed.

He did not dare shout out. The weapon was pressed into his back now; it hurt his knobbly spine. ‘ What do you want? ’ he whispered in Kazakh, but the man did not appear to understand him. They moved swiftly out of the bedroom, into the only other room of the small house. Through the window he saw – on the forecourt of his small petrol filling station – an old four-by-four truck. The lights were off, but it sounded like the engine was turning over. It was parked right by his single, solitary pump and just beyond the small booth where he took his customers’ money near the controls for the pump.

He turned to the gunman. In here he could see his face better. He had dark hair and a scraggly beard. His eyes were narrow and hard. The gunman pointed towards the booth. ‘We’re going there,’ he said. ‘You’re going to turn the pump on.’

The Kazakh didn’t understand his foreign-sounding words. ‘ I have no money ,’ he replied in his own language. ‘ No money here! ’

His assailant pointed to the booth again. Then, letting go of him for a moment, he mimed the turning of a key. The man nodded quickly, then ran back into his room. He pulled on his trousers and shirt while the gunman surveyed him from the doorway, then removed a bunch of keys from his trouser pocket and held them up. The gunman nodded in satisfaction. ‘Open up,’ he said, then stepped aside to let him pass.

He was marched, at gunpoint, outside. The gritty ground was painful against the soles of his feet, but he was hurried quickly to the booth anyway. His hands shook and it took a couple of goes to insert the key into the door; but once he managed it, the booth opened easily. Inside he headed straight for the till and flicked it open. ‘ Look, ’ he said, indicating the empty tray, ‘ nothing! ’

The gunman shook his head darkly, then pointed out towards the pump. Only then did he understand. The guy wanted fuel. For a brief instant he wondered why someone would go to such trouble – such danger – simply for diesel, but he didn’t let it worry him for long. Under the counter there was another keyhole. He inserted the relevant key and switched it on. On the forecourt, the faint humming of the pump started up.

The gunman, still pointing the weapon in his direction, urged him outside. They approached the vehicle and, without having to be asked, he started filling the tank. Meanwhile, the gunman opened up the back and dragged out four empty fuel canisters. When the vehicle was full, he moved on to these. The dial on the pump whizzed around and somewhere at the back of his mind the young Kazakh had a vision of simply stuffing hard currency into the canisters. But he said nothing. The presence of the wicked-looking weapon was enough to keep his mind on the job.

His whole body was trembling by the time the fourth canister was filled and returned to the back of the truck.

The gunman raised his weapon. He aimed it at the young man’s forehead.

A terrible cold numbness spread through his body. He closed his eyes. ‘ Please, ’ he whispered. ‘ I have done as you asked. ’

He waited for the sound of the shot.

A bang. It seemed to go straight through him. But it wasn’t the gun. He opened his eyes. The gunman was not there. The noise had been only the sound of an exhaust backfiring. He collapsed to his knees in relief, watching, shivering, as the vehicle disappeared into the darkness.

Sam and Clare sat in their room, surrounded by a bubble of tense silence. The night they had spent together was all but forgotten. They were not two lovers in a hotel room; just two people with a common interest, and common fears.

‘There could be more than one Alexander Dolohov, you know,’ Clare said.

‘Then I’ll visit them all.’

‘How will you find out which is the right one?’

Sam didn’t answer. There were some things she didn’t need to know.

Clare stared at him. ‘You’ve found out things that I don’t know, haven’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘Your friendly granddad from MI6 paid me a visit.’ He saw Clare shudder slightly. ‘They’ve got a theory.’

‘Care to share?’

Sam hesitated. His instinct was to keep everything to himself, but it seemed a bit ridiculous keeping Clare in the dark. ‘The red-light runners,’ he said. ‘The Firm claims they’re nothing to do with MI5. That they’re being trained up by some foreign agency and led to believe they’re working for Five.’

Clare’s eyes widened. ‘Who?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘Your man wouldn’t say. My guess is the Russians.’ His voice went quieter. ‘Remind me to ask Dolohov when I catch up with him.’

Clare looked at him intently. ‘But Sam, maybe you should just tell MI6 what you found on this laptop. I mean, it could be serious.’

Sam shook his head. ‘No way.’

‘Why not?’

He considered telling her – about the Spetsnaz soldiers surrounding the camp and his suspicions that someone in the Firm had tipped them off about the Regiment’s arrival – but he kept quiet. ‘It’s just not safe,’ he muttered inadequately. ‘Trust me.’

At that precise moment, there was a knock on the door. Sam and Clare exchanged a look just as a voice called from the other side. ‘Phone!’

They hurried downstairs.

Clare took the call almost in silence, the telephone nestled in the crook of her neck as she made notes in a speedy shorthand. She nodded occasionally – pointlessly – and when the conversation was over she uttered a brief word of thanks before replacing the handset. A short nod at Sam and they returned to the privacy of their room.

‘Well?’

‘Two Alexander Dolohovs,’ she said. ‘One in Manchester, one in London.’

‘Shit,’ Sam cursed.

‘Not really,’ Clare replied. Despite the stress, there was a twinkle in her eye. ‘The one in Manchester is three years old.’ She scribbled an address on a piece of paper from her notebook, tore it out and handed it to Sam. ‘I’d say that was your man.’

Sam read the address. A road in Maida Vale. Flat 3.

‘My friend couldn’t get much on him. He teaches Russian at a university college in Bloomsbury. I, er, I also asked her to look into a couple of other things.’

Sam raised an eyebrow. She indicated the laptop. ‘The red-light runners. I gave her the names of the two latest, er… the two who died most recently.’