Chris Ryan - Who Dares Wins

‘ Huck! ’ Rebecca admonished him. ‘Stop asking your father silly questions and eat your breakfast. You’re going to be late for school.’

‘ You’re not even dressed,’ Jess observed sulkily.

Rebecca opened her mouth to deliver another reprimand, but Mac gave her a subtle shake of the head. ‘I’ll take them,’ he said.

‘Yeah!’ Huck cried. He jumped down from the table and rushed to find his school things.

It was just gone eight-thirty when the kids were ready. Mac pulled on his jacket, kissed Rebecca on the cheek and led them outside. It was a ten-minute walk and he hoped the fresh air would clear his head.

He didn’t even make it out of the front garden before he stopped.

The figure standing on the other side of the street, leaning against a lamppost, looked like a ghost. Mac’s sharp eyes saw that his face was cut up; his eyes were haunted.

‘ Sam ,’ he said under his breath.

Sam said nothing. He didn’t even move. He just continued to stare.

‘Come on, Dad!’ Huck shouted. He was out of the gate now, his schoolbag slung over his shoulder. Jess was kicking her heels.

Mac looked over at Sam. ‘Wait there.’ He mouthed the words silently and pointed a finger to emphasise what he was saying. ‘ Wait there! ’

Sam nodded.

The walk to school was a brisk one. Huck talked nine to the dozen, but barely received a response from his dad – just a ruffling of the hair at the school gates, and a kiss on the cheek for a slightly embarrassed Jess. They sloped off into the playground and Mac ran back home. As he turned on to his street, however, and looked over at the lamppost, he saw that Sam was no longer there.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said under his breath.

‘Language, language.’ A voice from behind.

Mac spun round. Sam, right behind him.

‘Jesus, Sam. What happened to your face?’ Close up he could see just how bad it was. The skin was sliced and splintered, all the way from the top of his forehead to the bottom of his neck. A couple of the larger cuts had been closed up with steri-tape, but the treatment had a distinctly homemade feel about it. Sam touched his fingers to his face; as he did so, Mac noticed that his wrists were also deeply cut.

‘Head-butted a windscreen,’ Sam said. ‘Long story.’

‘You’d better come back to mine,’ Mac replied. ‘Becky’s good at this stuff. She can patch you up a bit better.’

Sam shook his head. ‘Let’s walk.’

They headed to a nearby park. Mums with kids played at the swings, but the two men took a seat on a park bench at a good distance from them. Sam looked like something from a horror movie, after all. They sat in silence for a moment. Mac deduced that Sam would speak when he was ready.

‘Jacob was there,’ he said finally. ‘In Kazakhstan. I warned him off.’

Mac took a deep breath and nodded. It wasn’t a total surprise, but it took a certain effort to dampen down his anger with his old friend. ‘That what you told the Firm?’ he asked.

Sam shook his head.

‘They believe you?’

‘No. Listen, Mac. All sort of shit’s gone down since then. I need to know I can trust you to keep it to yourself.’

‘Fucking hell, mate. Everyone’s asking questions.’

‘Can I trust you?’

Mac closed his eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘Course you can.’

Sam gazed into the middle distance and then he started to speak – quickly, as if the words were painful for him. Mac listened in rapt attention as his story unfolded: Porteus’s letter, the red-light runners, seeing J. Then Sam described his interview with the Firm – how Bland had called his bluff about going out to rescue Jacob and how Sam had denied everything. He told Mac about the laptop, Dolohov, escaping from the SBS. And, finally, the meet.

‘When is it?’

‘Tomorrow night. Piccadilly Circus. The Firm will be there, Mac. Dolohov knew the time and place. And they’re hardly going to give J. the benefit of the doubt.’

Mac took a deep breath. ‘Mate,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but J.’s got a lot of questions to answer.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Are you sure he’s not in cahoots with the Russkis? He was treated like shit you know…’

Instantly Sam lost his temper. ‘You think I don’t fucking know that?’ He slammed his wounded hand against the arm of the park bench.

‘I’m just saying,’ Mac flared. And then, more quietly, ‘I’m just saying , all right?’

Sam was breathing heavily to regain his composure. He stood up and started walking. Mac walked with him. ‘These red-light runners,’ he said, his voice clipped. ‘You know what? They don’t sound so different from me when I was a kid. If it wasn’t for Jacob, I’d still be like that. It was him that put me on the right track, you know? Not my parents – they’d washed their fucking hands of me. Not my friends – they were a bunch of shitkickers. It was Jacob.’ He stopped and looked intensely at Mac. ‘I don’t know what Jacob’s up to,’ he said. ‘I just don’t fucking know. Half of me thinks he’s working for the FSB, some kind of gun for hire. Half of me thinks there’s got to be more to it than that. I’m not going to know until I ask him, Mac. Face to face. If the Firm get their hands on him, that’ll never happen. You know what those bastards are like, Mac – they’ll make what I did with Dolohov look like a tickle under the armpits.’

Mac stared at his old friend. He could feel his anger and his confusion, like heat from an oven. And somehow – he wasn’t quite sure how – he knew what was coming.

‘I need help, Mac. At the RV. The place is going to be crawling with spooks and ham-fisted coppers. I need another set of eyes. I need a weapon. I can’t ask anyone else, Mac. I can’t trust anyone else.’

Mac looked down to the ground. He felt torn – torn between his loyalty to Sam and… And what? Had Jacob turned? Was he a traitor? It seemed impossible; and yet…

He sighed, then looked back up at his friend. ‘You remember Baghdad?’ he asked quietly.

‘’Course.’

‘Before it happened, during that raid. We could have been goners if Jacob hadn’t turned up.’

Sam nodded.

‘Do you remember what he said, when you two crazy fuckers were persuading me we could take the house by ourselves?’

Sam narrowed his eyes.

‘“You’re a long time looking at the lid.” I’ve never forgotten that. Thought about it a lot.’

‘It was something he used to say.’

Mac took another deep breath and looked over Sam’s shoulder, into the distance. He could just make out the back of his house from here. He allowed himself a moment of silence.

‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Count me in. What do you want me to do?’

In a small bedsit in North London, a young man sat alone. Two more anonymous packages had arrived. Jamie Spillane once again took the precaution of locking his door before opening them. He needn’t really have bothered, for the contents of the first package would have been quite uninteresting to the casual observer. Just a briefcase. Not even a new one. This was brown and scuffed. The casual observer, however, would not have understood its relevance. They would not have realised that this briefcase was an exact copy of the one Jamie Spillane had taken such pains to photograph. He had e-mailed the images from an Internet café to a perfectly unremarkable and innocent-looking e-mail address; and now it had arrived, each mark and scratch perfectly replicated. He set it to one side on the bed and turned his attention to the second package.

It was well sealed. He struggled to get it open. Once he did, he removed the contents gingerly. A mobile phone, brand new, with a sticker on its back detailing its number. Jamie placed the phone gently on the briefcase, then removed another object. A wire, with a jack plug at one end and two metal prongs at the other. The sort of thing that, if you found it lying at the bottom of a drawer, you’d probably throw away. A set of lock picks and a tension wrench.