Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

Cunningham held up three fingers.

Two fingers.

One.

He yanked the door open. Moore hurled the flashbang inside.

It didn’t matter how often you trained with a flashbang. You never totally got used to the shock and awe. Good thing, too. They were designed to disorientate. As the grenade exploded inside the apartment, the shock waves physically jolted Cunningham, rocking him on his feet. His eyesight was protected by the door from the worst of the flash, but there was still a hint of retinal burn. ‘ Go! ’ he said. Weapons raised, Hobbs and Moore rushed into the apartment. Cunningham followed.

A wide, ornate corridor, fifteen metres long. Wood panelling. Small statues of armless figures on plinths. Big oil paintings of boring-looking men in suits. A chandelier. At the end of the corridor was the dining room, doors wide open, apparently empty of people. A large dining table. Silver candlesticks. Three doors on either side, five of them shut, the final one on the left-hand side slightly ajar, light spilling out. Noise from everywhere. Outside the apartment he could hear the manager screaming hoarsely, an absolutely agonising sound, and he knew Hunter must be pulling a tourniquet as tight as possible above his bullet wound. From a room to the right, more screaming. But different screams. Screams of fear. Cunningham could discern three voices: two kids, one adult female. Up ahead, from the dining room but out of sight, male voices. Russian. Shouting at each other. Also scared, but with an edge. Like they were about to take action.

Parsons entered, his handgun raised. Cunningham nodded in the direction of the door behind which the kids and woman were screaming. Ordinarily they would search the apartment room by room, but the direction of the voices gave them an indication of where everybody was. Parsons approached the door to the right as Cunningham, Hobbs and Moore advanced further along the corridor towards the dining room. Moore had taken a second flashbang from his ops vest. He rolled it along the corridor into the dining room. It came to a halt just in front of the dining table, then detonated. Cunningham closed his eyes to protect them from the flash. As the explosion ripped through the apartment, physically jolting him for a second time, the team advanced. The shouting and screaming was louder from all directions now. The manager. The woman and kids. The guys up ahead. Chaos. Cunningham cut through it, focused, mind on what was important. So, when a figure appeared ten metres ahead in the wide-open doors of the dining room, arm extended, holding a gun, eyes half closed because of the flash, Cunningham didn’t hesitate. He released a single round, to wound, not kill. It slammed into the figure’s shoulder, throwing him backwards so that he hit the table at an awkward angle and went down with a heavy thump. The team continued to advance, Cunningham at the point of their triangular formation, Hobbs and Moore behind him. Cunningham kept half his attention on the man he’d just shot. He was an older guy, maybe sixty. Tufts of hair on either side of his otherwise bald head. A hawkish nose. It was Rostropovic, Cunningham surmised. He’d dropped his weapon and was too busy clutching his wound to be reaching for it. Thank fuck he wasn’t screaming. It was like a lunatic asylum in here and there was still no sign of Poliakov. Couldn’t Parsons shut those kids up?

They entered the dining room. Broad, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the Thames. Expensive furniture. An artificial fireplace. More statues – whoever decked this place out had a liking for naked marble women. There was a big oil-painted portrait of Rostropovic over the fire. A second guy was cringing behind a metre-high plinth moulded like a Greek column. He had his back to them and looked like he was dialling on a mobile phone. Cunningham approached him quickly, leaving Hobbs and Moore to deal with Rostropovic. He freed one hand from his weapon, moved round so he was facing the suspect, then bent down and grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt. He hauled him to his feet, spun him and slammed him against the wall, knocking a painting askew as he did it. The phone went flying. He examined the man’s face. Short black hair. A mole on his left cheek that sprouted three tiny hairs. A thin nose. Stubble. It matched the picture of Dmitri Poliakov that the ops officer had provided that morning.

‘Positive ID!’ he shouted. ‘We’ve got him.’

FOURTEEN

19.00 hrs, Amman.

The General was kind of charming. Bethany had to give him that. He didn’t indulge in the usual tired chat-up lines or talk ad nauseum about himself. He seemed – or pretended – to be interested in her. He listened to her responses and laughed at her jokes. That didn’t mean Bethany didn’t cringe at his outrageous flattery, but she understood how a powerful guy like him would have success with women; his technique made them feel even more important than he was. ‘I bet you get all the scoops,’ he said, when she told him she was a journalist. ‘I bet the guys give you all their secrets.’

‘Men have secrets?’

‘Not from you, I’m willing to bet.’

‘Do you have secrets?’

‘Why don’t I buy you another glass of champagne and you can try to find out.’

Bethany rewarded the General with a smile – the kind of smile that she knew made guys weak – and accepted his offer of a drink.

Fair play to the guy , Danny thought. He was putting the work in. He watched their reflections in the mirror behind the bar, saw the effect of Bethany’s smile. The General’s eyes gleamed as brightly as his expensive brogues. And well they might. The smile was artful. It filled her expression with promise. She reached out and brushed the General’s elbow with her right hand as she said something that made him laugh. A tiny gesture, but Danny knew it would be electrifying for O’Brien. He felt a pang of jealousy. Under other circumstances, he wouldn’t mind being in the General’s position right now. A minute later the General returned Bethany’s gesture. A little more clumsily, perhaps, but Bethany didn’t shrink away when he touched her knee. She smiled at him again.

Something grabbed Danny’s attention. He had been aware of the chit-chat around him. It had almost exclusively been in Arabic, although he had tuned in to the occasional sentence in American-accented English. Now he heard a different language. Russian, he was certain, even though he didn’t speak it. He glanced over his shoulder. Two men were sitting at a nearby table. One had sandy hair and wore a grey polo neck underneath a tan leather jacket. The other had black hair and a Tom Selleck moustache, and had on an open neck shirt. They had shot glasses of colourless liquid on the table in front of them and were talking quietly. Nothing overtly suspicious, but Danny made a mental note of their presence.

He turned back to the bar. Bethany had one hand on the General’s knee. In Danny’s eyes, he was as good as dead.

17.03 hrs, GMT.

Rostropovic was being a pain in the arse despite his gun wound. Hobbs was patching him up and he was screaming at him in Russian, with the tone of voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed. Fair play to Hobbs, he was keeping calm, but Cunningham could tell he wanted to shut him up. The rest of the guys had checked there was nobody else in the apartment and now he could hear the police officers, summoned from the basement, talking to the woman and kids in firm, measured voices. Keeping them separate from where the Regiment team was doing its job.

Cunningham turned his attention to Poliakov. On jungle training, he had once caught a fer-de-lance snake. It was nearly two metres long, its body thick and brown. Cunningham had pinned it to the forest floor by the neck with a forked stick, and that snake had hissed and writhed violently in the few seconds it took for him to remove his knife and hack its head off. Poliakov reminded him of that snake. He was face down on the floor, cheek to the carpet, hands behind his back, wrists plasticuffed. Cunningham had one heavy boot between his shoulder blades to keep him on the floor, but Poliakov still kicked and wriggled and hissed and spat in Russian. He seemed to think Cunningham himself was Russian. Flecks of saliva showered from his lips. Cunningham didn’t know what he was saying. Nor did he care. In one hand he had Poliakov’s phone and a money clip containing Russian and British currency. His own phone was in his other hand, up to his ear and on the line to Hereford. ‘We got him,’ he said.