Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

She stood up as he approached. Danny raised his NV goggles so he could see her properly.

‘All clear?’ she asked, with the strained inflexion of a stressed person trying to sound calm.

Danny nodded. ‘Enough weapons in that truck to sink a battleship.’

‘Smugglers?’ she said.

‘Probably.’

Bethany looked over at the vehicle. ‘Probably Jordanian criminals selling weapons to West Bank Palestinians,’ she said. ‘We know it goes on.’ She frowned, clearly aware that she’d just inadvertently put herself back in the role of an active MI6 officer. ‘I mean—’

‘I know what you mean.’ He nodded at the quad bike. ‘We have to deal with this.’

‘What do you mean, deal with it?’

‘It’s a British quad bike, covered with our DNA, nowhere to hide it. If the Jordanian authorities come across it, they’ll start asking questions.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Burn it. Stand back.’

Danny unloaded all their gear from the quad bike, removed the GPS unit and set it all in a pile fifteen metres from the bike itself. Then he located the quad bike’s fuel line, detached it and allowed fuel to spill over the chassis and on to the ground. He located a stash of waterproof matches in his day pack, lit one and threw it on to the fuel. It ignited immediately. He hurried back to where Bethany was standing and waited for the explosion of the fuel tank. It happened within seconds and, before a minute was out, the entire bike was alight, flames licking high and a plume of black greasy smoke pumping into the desert night.

‘Fetch your gear,’ Danny said. ‘That fire’s going to be visible from a distance. We need to get out of here.’

They grabbed their stuff, slung their day packs over their shoulders and ran back up to the truck. Bethany stared at the corpses as they passed. There was a blankness to her expression that chilled Danny. She showed no sign of being disturbed by the sight. She’d seen worse. She’d done worse. That was why she was here in the first place.

‘Israeli plates,’ Bethany said, pointing at the truck.

They climbed up into the truck. It was old and dirty and stank of fuel. Danny placed the GPS unit on the dashboard and familiarised himself with the vehicle. The gear stick was stiff, hard to manoeuvre, but when Danny put the keys in the ignition the engine turned over easily. Bethany looked out of the window, staring at the bodies again. ‘You’ve killed a lot of men, Danny,’ she said.

‘That makes two of us.’

‘When do you stop counting?’ she asked.

‘The trick is not to start in the first place.’

She turned to face him. ‘I was going to stop,’ she said. ‘For my son’s sake. I promised myself. No more. But here I am.’

Danny shrugged. He didn’t want her to see that the catch in her voice had triggered something like sympathy in him. ‘Turns out it becomes a habit,’ he said. ‘As long as you limit it to the bad guys, you can rest easy at night.’

‘And this general you all want me to deal with. He’s one of the bad guys?’

‘One of the worst.’ For the second time in half an hour, he remembered the ambush in Syria and his dead mates.

‘Will they look after him?’

‘What do you mean?’ Danny was confused.

‘My boy. He’s the only reason I’m giving you the time of day, you know. Will they look after him? Is he okay?’

Danny couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eye. He knocked the vehicle into first gear. ‘He’ll be fine. You’ll see him again in a couple of days. He’ll have forgotten about all this before you know it. Kids are like that.’ It wasn’t true, of course. In a couple of days, Bethany would be dead. She was one of the bad guys. And her son? Danny told himself that wasn’t his problem. ‘We need to stay off the road. The smugglers will want their gear and if anybody stops us with half a ton of heavy weaponry, it’s going to take some explaining.’ He released the clutch and the vehicle rolled off the road and back on to the desert terrain. The quad bike was still burning and smouldering. He turned away from it, following the directions given him by the GPS.

‘He talks about you, you know?’

‘Who?’ Danny said, even though he knew exactly what she meant.

‘Danny. My son. You made an impression.’ They drove in silence for a few seconds. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not about to suggest a cosy reunion.’

‘Good.’ He checked the GPS again. ‘We should be at the RV point in about an hour.’

‘The Roman ruins?’

‘Right. Dawn is at ten minutes past five, but I want to make sure we’re early. I’d prefer to see our contact arrive than the other way round. So I need to concentrate.’

‘Concentrate away.’ Bethany looked out of her window and fell silent.

Danny killed the vehicle’s lights, flicked down his NV goggles, and drove.

NINE

London, 01.00 hrs, GMT

The MI6 building was different at night. Alternative faces and a quieter atmosphere. Alice attracted some curious glances at security, dressed in casual clothes and shiny white Filas. She looked even less like the typical MI6 employee than usual. She made her impatient way through security and hurried not to the fourth floor, but to the basement.

Alice did not often venture to the sunless depths of the building. There were areas here for which she didn’t have clearance. But this was also where the techies lived. Where the huge cluster of comms satellites atop the building sent their incoming messages from around the world. Where the secure servers were located. It was to this part of the basement that she headed. There were further security checks before she could gain access. A biometric iris scanner, a fingerprint check. All was good, and she entered the techies’ lair.

It was gloomy in here. The only light came from laptops and a few large screens on the far wall. There were perhaps fifteen people working down here, all men, all under twenty-five. They wore single-ear headsets and there was a constant clickety-clack of fingers on keyboards. Alice strode up to the nearest techie. He had a hipster beard and a black polo neck, and he pretended not to notice Alice approaching. Alice had no time for such games. She didn’t humour him with a polite clearing of the throat or a diffident ‘excuse me’. ‘I need access to files that have been uploaded from an agent in Moscow,’ she said.

The techie held up one finger and continued to type for twenty seconds before turning on his swivel seat and finally acknowledging her. Alice was used to the barely perceptible look of surprise when people saw her for the first time, and she recognised it now. The techie’s demeanour visibly softened. He gently stroked his beard. Alice recognised that gesture too. If they were in a bar, the techie would start hitting on her about now. Here at work, he wouldn’t dare. He wasn’t of the old school like Mark Cawley. ‘Say again?’ he said.

Alice repeated her request, even though she knew he’d heard every word of it.

‘What’s your asset’s identification code?’ the techie asked.

Alice recited it. The techie did his thing at the keyboard. ‘Here it is,’ he said. He frowned. ‘Are these from a games console?’

‘Xbox,’ Alice said. ‘I need to know if there’s any audio files we can extract.’

It was always the same with the techies. They pretended to be so laid back, but as soon as you gave them a problem to solve, their inner geek presented itself. Alice watched his expression change from the self-confidence of a man who knew this wouldn’t be a problem, to the anxiety of man who had encountered an unexpected difficulty, to the satisfaction of a man who’d cracked it. ‘Just the audio files?’ he asked after a couple of minutes’ work.