Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

He checked behind him. Bethany and O’Brien were following. Danny himself was drawing attention from passers-by. In this district his suit marked him out. He took care not to catch anybody’s eye. A misinterpreted glance could easily lead to trouble. He couldn’t quite be the grey man, dressed like this. But he could at least be monochrome.

Danny had been walking for a couple of minutes when he spotted an opportunity. Up ahead, a young man was leaving a bar. There were two things that made Danny notice him. The first was the set of car keys in his hands. The second thing was his gait. He was having a little difficulty walking in a straight line. He’d been drinking. Danny felt a moment of gratitude that alcohol was not frowned upon in Jordan to the same extent as in some other Muslim countries. He locked on to him like a guided missile. He was the perfect target: a driver, easy to overcome and unlikely to go to the police, at least until he’d sobered up. By which time Danny and the others would be in a stealth chopper out of here.

He had to slow his pace to keep an unremarkable distance from his target, who was still weaving erratically as he walked. When the guy turned into a side street, Danny loitered for a few seconds at the corner. He watched his target stop to take a piss against a closed-up shop before continuing along the street and stopping by a parked vehicle. Danny couldn’t see what type of car it was at first, because his view was blocked by another vehicle parked in front of it. He upped his pace, striding over the stream of urine that trickled down into the gutter. He checked once to see that Bethany and the General had appeared at the street corner and were waiting there for a moment, just as he had. The guy was fumbling with his keys and seemed completely unaware of Danny as he approached. Danny could smell the booze on him from a good three metres away. He instinctively sized the guy up. He was five inches shorter than Danny, for a start. He was wearing Western clothes. The loose material of his badly fitting leather jacket told Danny that he had a light frame, was unlikely to be strong. Danny bore the guy no ill will. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t want to hurt him, but he did need to put him out of action for a while.

He checked his surroundings. Other than Bethany and the General, Danny and his target were the only people in the street. He approached him from behind and, before the target even knew what was happening, wrapped his right arm around his neck and covered his mouth with his left.

The secret was to asphyxiate him sufficiently that he passed out, but not so much that he would suffer any long-term consequences. It meant waiting for the precise moment that his body went limp, then releasing. He struggled, of course. A flailing of the arms. A writhing of the body. But he was entirely helpless against Danny’s strength and skill and he soon passed out and dropped the car keys on to the ground. Danny allowed the body to relax into his grip. He held the guy under both arms and dragged him away from the car to a nearby doorway. Danny sat the guy down so that he slumped into it. Just a drunk, sleeping it off. At least, that’s what any passer-by would see.

He picked up the car keys and turned to signal to Bethany and the General that they should approach, but they were already halfway up the street. They’d dropped the pretence of being a couple and were no longer holding hands, but striding purposefully in Danny’s direction. Danny opened up the vehicle – it was a yellow Nissan, maybe ten years old – and took the wheel. The interior stank of stale tobacco. The windscreen was grimy with dust. That suited them well. He turned the engine over and checked the fuel gauge. It was three quarters full. Enough, he hoped, if they had a straight run.

Bethany took the passenger seat. The General sat in the back. It was a smaller car than the Passat and the General looked correspondingly larger in the rear-view mirror. Danny retrieved the GPS unit from his shoulder bag, switched it on and set it to direct them to the drop zone. He handed it to Bethany behind him. ‘Guide me,’ he said. He placed his Sig in the door and then pulled out into the road. He glanced at the drunk guy still out in the doorway but put him from his mind. It would be a while before he raised the alarm, and longer before anybody acted on it.

‘Left at the end of the road,’ Bethany said. He accelerated. It felt good to be in an anonymous car. Untracked. Unmarked. He knew not to let his guard down, but the worst of the job was probably behind him.

They drove in silence, punctuated only by Bethany’s directions as she read them off the GPS. It took them through back streets of Amman that Danny would never have navigated without help. He was glad of Bethany’s calm co-piloting. It meant he could concentrate on his driving and his situational awareness. Not that it proved necessary. There were no trails. No SUV with hidden gunmen pulling up alongside and taking shots. It was an ordinary, uneventful journey up and down the hilly urban terrain of Amman. And so Danny allowed a corner of his mind to wander, to consider everything the General had said. If he was right, and was telling the truth, it meant Danny now found himself at the centre of a global conspiracy that led all the way to the Oval Office and the Kremlin. A foolish American president plotting an atrocity on his own people in order to justify a power grab, and all this orchestrated and masterminded by the Russians. Danny was no politician. He was just a soldier who did as he was ordered, most of the time. But this sickened him. It also made him wary. Knowledge like this was dangerous. Powerful men would kill to keep it secret. He glanced at the General, who was looking thoughtfully out of the window at the passing street scenes. The conspirators wanted him dead because of who he was and not because of what he knew. Just imagine the energy they would put into assassinating him if they realised he was on to them.

The same went for Danny, of course. To the Oval Office and the Kremlin, an SAS grunt was a thousand times more expendable than a five-star general. They’d kill him without thinking. And as for Bethany. He glanced at her beautiful face as he drove. She was incredibly calm, given everything that had happened. But for her to have this knowledge would make MI6 even more determined that she should be silenced permanently, for fear that she would use it as leverage. Had Bethany worked that out? She knew how the security services thought and operated. If she shared any of Danny’s intuition, however, she was hiding it well. Not for the first time, he felt a certain grudging respect for her. He would still do what he was told, when the time was right. But his enthusiasm for that particular part of the job was waning fast.

It took an hour for the urban sprawl of the city to subside. They found themselves on a straight motorway, clusters of buildings here and there on either side, moderately busy traffic in either direction. Danny settled into the slow lane: sedate, unremarkable driving. ‘We follow this for about forty miles,’ Bethany said. ‘Then we have to go off-road. You think the car’s up to it?’

‘It’s going to have to be,’ Danny said. ‘We’ll make it.’

As he spoke, he was checking the vehicle behind him in the rear-view mirror. He couldn’t discern its make or colour because its headlamps were bright, but he could see that it was starting to overtake.

Rapidly.

It drew up alongside the Nissan. Its passenger window was open. The man in the passenger seat looked too big for the car. He had a buzz-cut mohawk. Turgenenv. His scarred scalp was sweating and he was looking directly at Danny with that gloating grin.

And then, quite suddenly, Turgenev’s vehicle veered into Danny’s.