Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

Headlamps appeared at 05.00 exactly. Two sets. The temperature had suddenly dropped and the sky had started to lighten, though there was no sign of the sun yet. Danny was breathing clouds of condensation. He raised his weapon and followed the lead vehicle with the barrel as the two cars drew closer and stopped. Distance: fifty metres. Both drivers’ doors opened. Two figures appeared, silhouetted by the headlamps. One of them stood in front of the car, blocking the left light. The other stepped towards the copse. ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘ Salam? ’

Danny and Bethany stood. Danny flicked a switch and the red dot of a laser sight appeared on the man’s chest. The man noticed immediately and quickly put his hands in the air.

‘Keep them there!’ Danny called. ‘And your friend, too.’

The man shouted something in Arabic. The guy by the car quickly raised his hands. The two men stood statue-still. Danny kept the laser sight on his guy’s chest.

He let thirty seconds pass. He could see that they were dressed in regular Arabic garb: plain white dishdasha and sandals. They had full beards but looked young, maybe early twenties.

‘Follow me,’ Danny told Bethany. ‘And do exactly as I say. If they sense any tension between us, it gives them the upper hand.’

‘So you really don’t trust them?’

‘I was only expecting one guy. And anyway, they’re fixers. They work for whoever pays them. If someone’s paying them more than us, guess where their loyalties lie.’

They emerged from the treeline, Danny with his weapon still raised, Bethany walking to one side and a little behind. As they approached the two men, Danny saw that they were younger than he’d first imagined, barely into their twenties. One of them had a chunky gold bracelet, the other an expensive watch. There was something about their wary yet arrogant demeanour that he didn’t like. He and Bethany stopped five metres from where they stood. Without lowering his weapon or looking away from his guy, Danny spoke. ‘Search them,’ he said.

Bethany stepped forwards and started to pat down the first guy. His outrage was clear on his face even before he complained. ‘What is this? Why is a woman touching me like this?’

‘Trust me,’ said Danny, ‘she doesn’t like you in that way.’

Bethany turned, holding up a pistol she had found on his person.

‘Anything else?’ Danny said.

‘Nothing.’

‘You sure?’

Bethany gave him a ‘do you want to do this?’ look, but kept quiet. ‘Do his friend,’ Danny said.

The second guy had no weapon. Danny lowered his. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Which is ours?’

The fixer pointed to the lead vehicle. ‘The keys are in the car, sir,’ he said. He licked his lips and looked around. ‘We were told there would be a quad bike?’

‘Change of plan,’ Danny said. He stepped up to the fixer. ‘There’s a truck behind those trees. When we leave here, you’re going to be tempted to open it up and see what’s inside. It’s booby trapped. You know what that means?’ The fixer nodded. ‘Good. Don’t touch that truck. If you do—’ He made an explosion gesture with two hands. ‘And if it’s not here when we come back in a day or two, you don’t get your money. Is there anything about that that you don’t understand?’

The fixer shook his head. ‘May I please have my gun back, sir?’ he said.

Danny gave him a withering look. He turned to Bethany. ‘Get in the car,’ he said. They jogged over to the vehicle together. It was a beaten-up Passat, covered in red dust and with several dents in the panel work. That suited Danny just fine – it was the kind of car nobody would look at twice. He stowed his rifle in the boot and took the wheel. With Bethany beside him in the passenger seat, he turned a full 180 and drove round the other vehicle away from the ruins. When he’d gone twenty metres, he held the fixer’s pistol out of the window, brandished it for a moment to be sure it could be seen, then dropped it in the sand.

‘You think they’re going to stay away from the truck?’ Bethany said.

‘Probably,’ Danny said. ‘But other people might come nosing around. We need to be sure we have another way of getting back to the pick-up point, if we need it.’ He kept his eyes on the road as he spoke, carefully avoiding Bethany’s gaze. An image flashed in his mind: he was standing over Bethany somewhere in the Jordanian desert. Bethany was on her knees, a gun to her head. He wondered if she suspected what was waiting for her.

Danny had no need for the GPS unit for this part of the journey. The road headed east, towards the rising sun. He knew that Amman lay in this direction and within fifteen minutes they found themselves on a well-maintained main supply route, busy with early morning traffic. Large road signs in Arabic hung overhead and the desert surroundings gradually became more urban. Warehouses on the outskirts of town. Mosques and grim-looking tenement blocks. In many ways, it could have been any city in the world. He switched back on the GPS unit and set it to direct them to the pre-loaded destination. A couple of klicks further down the road, the GPS directed them off to the left. They followed a winding, maze-like route through a busy, run-down suburb. It was only just gone 06.00 hrs and already the temperature was rising uncomfortably. The vehicle’s paltry air-con did not so much keep them cool as recirculate the choking traffic fumes from outside. The roads were filled with the beeping of car horns. Danny, already sweating, drove soberly. He ignored the occasional raised fist from impatient Jordanians. His objective was to get to their safe house without incident, not to demonstrate to the drivers of Amman what a big guy he was.

The GPS led them to a squat four-storey concrete block that wouldn’t have been out of place in the scummiest parts of Croydon. Its exterior walls were festooned with old air-conditioning units and lines of washing. There was an open basement car park. Danny reversed the vehicle into a space directly opposite the exit, ready to get out of there quickly if necessary. A few guys in traditional Arabic clothes were getting into their own cars, presumably on the way to work. Danny let them leave before he and Bethany exited the vehicle. The fewer people that saw them, the better.

Danny knew from his target pack that the safe house was apartment number 312 on the third floor. There was a lift from the basement, but he had no desire to put himself in an enclosed space with no exit. They took the stairs. A couple of curious kids playing cards on the ground watched them walk from the stairwell along the third-floor corridor, but by the time Danny and Bethany were outside their apartment, the kids had gone. Danny tried the door. It was unlocked. They stepped inside.

Danny was not expecting luxury. They didn’t get it. The four rooms of the apartment were equally grim. The bare concrete floors were peppered with rodent droppings. The kitchen and bathroom had different but similarly foul stenches. The bedroom contained a double bed with a stained old mattress and no bedclothes. There was no furniture in the main room where a dirty window looked out from the tower block towards the hilly urban sprawl of Amman, undulating under the blue morning sky. The city was a ramshackle, chaotic place. The sort of place you could easily lose yourself. Danny’s sort of place.

There was a key in the front door. Danny locked it from the inside and put the key in his pocket. ‘You want me all to yourself, is that it?’ Bethany said. Danny ignored the comment and pushed past her into the bedroom. There were two suitcases in here. He hauled them on to the bed and opened them up. Inside were sets of smart clothes for each of them: a navy suit, white shirt and shiny brown shoes for Danny, a black knee-length skirt, jacket and cream blouse for Bethany, and a bag of make-up. There was a brown envelope containing British passports with Danny and Bethany’s photographs but the names of Andy Waldren and Sophia Milton. Two press passes held the same photos and names, Danny’s accredited to the Sunday Times , Bethany’s to the Telegraph . A second brown envelope contained a sheaf of Jordanian dinars. There were two shoulder bags: a small leather handbag with detailing on the clasp, and a larger black man-bag. Each contained a blank A5 journalist’s notepad and a few rollerball pens, along with a local mobile phone, the number stuck on the back. Danny had his own encrypted mobile, so he’d have no use for it, but he memorised the number on the back of Bethany’s and took a moment to write his number on a piece of paper and hand it to her. She read it once, committed it to memory and screwed up the paper.