Payback (10 page)

‘We might be able to do a deal,’ the investigator suggested, though he had no intention of keeping his word. That one million dollars had seemed so close he had almost been able to
smell it. All his career he’d been hoping for a score that big, one he could use to get himself and his wife out of Russia for good, with enough money to live comfortably for the rest of
their lives. When he’d opened the passbook he’d realized that he finally held the key to their new life in his hands. His disappointment had been even greater than Borisov’s
– but Litvinoff was angry as well.

‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ he urged, his voice soft and persuasive, ‘and we’ll try to work something out.’

Borisov was slumped in the chair, his head in his hands, trying desperately to think of some way – any way – that he could talk his way out of this mess. He had, he now realized,
only two options: he could tell the unvarnished truth, which at best would virtually guarantee he’d never leave prison for the rest of his life, or he could give Litvinoff a version of it
that incriminated him as little as possible. He knew there would be a full-scale inquiry at Zarechnyy, so whatever he said now had to cover the facts. It wasn’t a difficult choice.

‘As you know,’ he began, ‘I’m an administrator at PO Start. A few weeks ago I became suspicious about the conduct of two of our technicians.’

‘Their names, and how did they arouse your suspicions?’

‘Boris Devenko and Alexei Nabov. They were asking questions about the secure-storage facilities, obviously trying to find which building held certain pieces of equipment.’

‘What equipment?’ For a moment Borisov didn’t answer, and Litvinoff looked up from his notebook. ‘What equipment?’ he repeated.

‘I have a problem here,’ Borisov said, something of an understatement in the circumstances. ‘I can’t be specific without knowing your security clearance, and seeing your
identification.’

‘You’re in no position to start making demands, Bori-sov,’ Litvinoff snarled.

‘I don’t have a choice. This information is highly classified, and I could get into very serious trouble if I reveal it to anyone without the proper clearance.’

‘You’re
already
in very serious trouble,’ Litvinoff pointed out.

‘I know, but still I can say nothing.’

‘Very well.’ The investigator pulled out a small leather wallet and flipped it open on the table between them. Borisov recognized the distinctive shield immediately – FSB
officers were not infrequent visitors to Zarechnyy – and for the first time he learned that he was talking to Vaslav Litvinoff, a senior field investigator. He nodded, closed the wallet and
pushed it back across the table.

‘I’ll ask you again. What equipment were they looking for?’

‘Portable nuclear weapons,’ Borisov replied, and Litvinoff dropped his pen.

Al-Shahrood Stables, Ad Dahnā, Saudi Arabia

Saadi’s men had cleared the house. They’d found another seven servants – two Filipinos and the rest Pakistanis – plus four members of the wealthy
Arab family that owned the stables. None had resisted, because when each was kicked awake they found themselves facing at least one Kalashnikov assault rifle.

And any faint stirrings of resistance evaporated the moment they were all assembled in the hall, hands bound behind their backs and adhesive tape stuck over their mouths, and saw the body of the
young manservant dumped face-down on the floor, a small pool of urine discolouring the marble tiles by his groin.

Saadi stepped off the bottom tread of the staircase – he’d been making a final check upstairs – and walked across to join Massood in front of their terrified prisoners.

‘Get the digger,’ he ordered, ‘and take that with you.’ He pointed at the corpse.

Saadi nodded to Bashar, and the tall Arab led the way towards the rear door of the farmhouse, the other men herding the captives behind him. Outside, he could hear the diesel engine of the
Bobcat starting, the sound fading as Massood drove it past the house towards the open desert lying to the north of the stables.

The Bobcat was a single-seat digger, smaller than an average car, its steel bucket supported by two hydraulic arms on either side of the driver’s compartment. Though he had never handled
one before, Massood had no difficulty in controlling the small vehicle. He drove on past the stable block, found the track that had been marked on their maps, and turned the digger to follow it.
Some hundred yards further on, the grassed fields gave way to open desert, but he continued for yet another hundred yards before turning off the track, the Bobcat bouncing roughly as it hit the
uneven dunes.

He stopped the machine and checked the terrain in front of him by the light of the Bobcat’s headlamps, now supplemented by the rising sun. The sand was fairly level and relatively firm, so
the digger’s fat tyres hardly sank in at all. It was good enough, Massood thought. He raised the bucket, the Filipino’s body tumbling out. Then he turned the machine, dropped the bucket
and dug the lower edge into the sand, powering the Bobcat forward to move as much as possible. He lifted the hydraulic arms, drove the digger a few feet to one side and emptied the contents of the
bucket. Then he backed up and repeated the operation, the hole already beginning to take shape.

Saadi stood by the edge of the track and watched. Behind him, Bashar and the other men had formed a loose ring around their fifteen prisoners – they had found four staff asleep in the
stable block – and were watching the thirteen bound men and two women carefully.

After twenty minutes Massood had excavated a pit about fifteen feet long, ten feet wide and eight feet deep. He decided it was adequate, then manoeuvred the digger around the hole until the
vehicle was positioned on the uphill side, behind the heap of sand he’d dug out.

Saadi walked forward and looked down. The width and length were fine. He would have preferred it a little deeper, but time was passing and they still had a lot to do. He turned and issued a
crisp order to the men guarding the prisoners. Intimidated by the threat of the Kalashnikovs, the captives walked over to the hole in single file and lined up along the longest edge of the pit.

It was only then – in that long moment of silence before the shooting started – that the appalling reality of their situation finally dawned on them. Their captors moved to stand in
two groups, one at either end of the hole, their assault rifles trained on the prisoners.

The quickest way to finish the job would have been to use the Kalashnikovs, but over the years Saadi had developed a taste for a more personal kind of execution.

He stepped behind the first of the bound men and without haste drew a Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol from a holster under his
gellabbiya
. He extracted a suppressor from his
pocket and attached it to the end of the barrel. Then he racked back the slide and released it to chamber a round, the sound of the mechanism loud and unmistakable in the silence.

‘Kneel down,’ Saadi ordered, not the faintest trace of emotion in his voice. As the Pakistani servant obeyed him, he aimed the pistol at the back of the man’s head and without
hesitation pulled the trigger. The weapon coughed once. The nine-millimetre copper-jacketed bullet smashed into the man’s skull, bored straight through his brain, and emerged in a fountain of
blood through his left eye. His instantly lifeless body flopped forward, tumbling into the pit.

Saadi glanced down at the corpse, then stepped across to the next man. ‘Kneel down,’ he instructed, but the man shook his head in a pathetic display of defiance. Saadi shrugged
indifferently, took a half-step back, raised the pistol and shot his victim where he stood.

As the second body fell forward, a man at the other end of the line broke ranks and began running away, heading straight out into the desert. He made less than twenty feet before two of the
Kalashnikovs fired, four bullets ripping through his torso and sending him screaming to the ground, his body arching and twisting in agony.

Saadi made no move to administer a
coup de grâce,
and neither did anyone else. Instead, he raised his voice slightly. ‘If you try to run, you’ll die slowly and very
painfully. If you stand still, it will be quick and it won’t hurt. But you
are
all going to die.’

The stable’s owner was the tenth man Saadi reached, and he turned to face his executioner as the body of the man beside him fell into the open grave. He had managed to work loose part of
the tape covering his mouth, and as Saadi raised the pistol he looked straight into his eyes and uttered a single word: ‘Why?’

‘You don’t need to know,’ Saadi replied, and squeezed the trigger.

The man who’d run was still alive by the time Saadi reached the end of the line. He walked over and watched his agonized writhing for a few moments, then aimed the Browning and shot him
through the head. At a nodded instruction, two of his men picked up the body and tossed it on top of the others. Another couple of his men swung the corpse of the Filipino manservant into the hole
as well. Saadi approached the edge of the grave and looked down in satisfaction, even as Massood started the Bobcat to begin filling the hole.

Fifteen minutes after the last execution, Massood swung the digger onto the track and headed back towards the farmhouse. Before he left the site, Saadi carefully checked that no traces were
visible. The terrain looked virtually the same as when they’d arrived and the bodies, he hoped, were buried deep enough not to attract scavengers.

In the stables, a dozen or so jittery horses looked out of their stalls as the men walked through the central yard. Saadi stopped and looked round. ‘Find it,’ he called, and moments
later Bashar gestured to him.

From a stall in one corner, the head of a large chestnut horse was peering out inquisitively, showing no fear of the new arrivals. Bashar pointed to the wall beside the split stable door, where
an ornamental plaque had been screwed. It bore a single word: ‘Shaf’.

Tuesday
Cairo, Egypt

Their hotel was located on the outskirts of Old Cairo. It offered them a view of the Sphinx and the pyramids of the Giza Plateau lying on the other side of the Nile – at
least from one of the corridor windows on the top floor, if you leant out far enough – though that was pretty much its only redeeming feature. But the two Americans weren’t bothered.
They were used to accommodation of almost every type and standard, and they were only staying in Cairo until Dawson and Wilson arrived with the weapon. Then they’d head for the United Arab
Emirates, but this time travelling in style.

O’Hagan picked a cyber café right in the centre of Cairo, and sat down at the keyboard while Petrucci ordered coffee. The system unit was on the table beside the monitor, and had a
couple of USB sockets below the DVD drive. That was exactly what O’Hagan had been hoping for.

He logged on to the Internet and accessed mail2web. com, typed his email address and password, and pressed ‘Enter’. The connection was broadband, and the first messages appeared in
seconds. There were only half a dozen in all, four of which he deleted immediately. He then opened the first of the remaining two, and noted its contents with satisfaction.

He looked up to ensure that Petrucci was still distracting the waiter’s attention, then reached into the breast pocket of his shirt. He pulled out a memory stick and swiftly slotted it
into one of the USB sockets.

He first copied the open email message onto the memory stick, then clicked ‘Reply’ and rapidly typed an answer. Again checking he was unobserved, he attached three image files from
the USB stick to the email and clicked ‘Send’. The images were small and the message only took a few moments to be transmitted. Then he opened the second message, and also copied that
onto the memory stick.

O’Hagan extracted the USB device and nodded to his companion. Petrucci finally chose a couple of cakes, and let the waiter carry them over to the workstation. By that time, the flash drive
was back in O’Hagan’s pocket, and he was busily reading the headlines on CNN.

British Embassy, Government Avenue, Manama, Bahrain

‘Fuck a duck,’ Julian Caxton muttered, as Evans finished explaining why Tariq Mazen had requested their meeting.

The expletive was hardly characteristic, for Caxton was a devout Christian who rarely raised his eyebrows, let alone his voice. To Evans and his fellow SIS officers in Bahrain he appeared an
anachronism, a throwback to the older, more genteel days of the service. An old-fashioned gentleman in a world that had largely forgotten what the very word was supposed to mean.

‘How certain is Mazen about this?’ Carole-Anne Jackson asked, frowning.

‘He’s not,’ Evans said. ‘That’s the trouble. His only witness is a Filipino hospital cleaner, and Mazen doesn’t even know his real name.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Caxton said firmly. ‘I know bin Laden has sympathizers in Bahrain and, let’s face it, he’s got support all over the Middle East, but I
simply don’t think he’d have the unmitigated gall’ – that was more like Caxton; Evans would have said ‘sheer balls’, or worse – ‘to come here for
medical treatment.’

‘I agree it’s not likely, but perhaps he had no alternative,’ Evans replied. ‘If it
is
bin Laden, his kidney complaint might now be so serious that, without
dialysis or a transplant, he’ll die within just days or weeks. If that’s the case, he might be prepared to take the risk because he literally has nothing left to lose.’

‘And kidney dialysis isn’t something he could arrange in the Hindu Kush or the mountains of Pakistan,’ Jackson added. ‘He’d need a very well-equipped
clinic.’

‘It’s still difficult to believe.’ Caxton shook his head. ‘Despite being
persona non grata
in Saudi, I would have expected him to go there, rather than
Bahrain.’

‘That,’ Evans said, ‘may be exactly why he chose to come here, because he may have predicted that nobody would ever expect him to turn up in a place like this. Let’s face
it, bin Laden has enough money to convince almost any doctor that it’s worth bending the rules to give him the treatment he needs, and then persuade him to keep his mouth shut
afterwards.’