Payback (5 page)

He stopped the car outside a tiny stone building, its façade pierced by just two small and glass-less windows and a single door. Beside it was a ramshackle wooden framework roofed with
sheets of corrugated iron acting as a rudimentary sunshade, and under that was a ten-year-old American Chevrolet. The car wasn’t covered in dust, which O’Hagan assumed meant it had
arrived there only recently.

The mid-afternoon heat was brutal after the air-conditioned cool of the taxi, a blanket of air so hot it almost hurt to breathe. Ahmed walked across to the door, rapped twice and stepped
back.

The man inside had obviously heard them arrive, for the door opened almost immediately, and a shrivelled, burnt-brown face peered out at them. Ahmed dispensed with the customary Arab greetings
and stepped inside.

If it had seemed hot outside, the interior of the house was almost literally baking, despite the gentle breeze blowing through the four small windows, the two at the front mirrored by a pair in
the rear wall. The occupant gestured to cushions piled on the floor – they were the only things resembling furniture in the room – then walked across to a small refrigerator standing in
one corner.

Petrucci puzzled at that for an instant, noticing that there were no electric lights or sockets visible, then he identified the faint hum of a generator running somewhere nearby. The man
returned with four ice-cold Cokes – they’d been hoping for beer, but that would have been too much to expect. The Americans opened their cans and drank.

The room was small and white-painted, and somehow conveyed an indefinable impression of transience, as if the current occupant had arrived there for the first time that morning – which,
O’Hagan reflected, he quite possibly had – scattering the cushions on the floor and starting up the generator to power the fridge. He’d probably brought a couple of six-packs of
Coke with him as well.

Ahmed sat down gracefully on a cushion, took a long swallow of his soft drink, then put down the can and looked across at the Americans. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is Omar, and
he’s obtained the equipment you need.’

‘The Chevrolet outside?’ O’Hagan asked.

‘Yes. Everything’s already inside it.’

The two Americans remained seated. They knew Arabs, and they knew it would be some time before they would get to drive the car away. First, they would have to talk about the Chevrolet itself,
and what was locked inside it, and then the route they were going to take back to Manama, and how difficult it had been to obtain all the equipment, and where they were going to park the car, and
how they would set the timer, and anything else that either Ahmed or Omar decided was relevant. Only then would they be able to hand over the money – the bulky bundle of American dollars
locked in Petrucci’s briefcase – and finally get the hell out of there.

It was going to be a long, hot afternoon.

Between Kondal and Zarechnyy, Russia

It was one of those stupid, mundane annoyances that drivers face daily in every country in the world. The truck driver should have had somebody standing in the road behind
his vehicle, stopping the oncoming traffic as he backed out. But he hadn’t bothered because the road had seemed fairly quiet. All he’d done was wait until everything looked clear, then
switch on his hazard warning lights, and begun to ease out slowly.

Three southbound cars approaching the entrance to the industrial area braked in time, but the driver of the fourth vehicle apparently didn’t notice the looming obstruction until too late.
He swerved out of his lane, moving around the rapidly slowing third car directly in front of him.

As he drove back towards Zarechnyy, Yuri Borisov was unaware of anything untoward until the overtaking vehicle suddenly lurched across the road in front of him. In an instant it filled his
windscreen, and less than a second later slammed almost head-on into his car.

It wasn’t the first time the Russian administrator had been involved in an accident. His elderly saloon car bore permanent and rusting testimony to a number of minor collisions, and the
dents and scars resulting from bouts of acoustic parking.

But this collision was far from minor. The oncoming vehicle was braking hard, but Borisov – who for perhaps the first time in his driving career was entirely blameless – was
travelling at around thirty miles per hour, giving a combined impact speed of almost fifty.

The sound of the crash was sudden and shocking, the bang echoing loudly off the walls of adjacent buildings. Both cars lifted and spun in opposite directions, their momentum dissipating rapidly
as wings and bonnets crumpled under the impact. Tyres screamed as the cars lurched sideways, black rubber streaking the worn tarmac surface of the road, while a glittering cascade of safety glass
tumbled from shattered door windows.

Both drivers were bounced violently from side to side as their cars gyrated and lurched. Borisov was arguably the lucky one because he was wearing his seat belt. The other driver wasn’t,
and at the first impact was thrown forward, crashing through the windscreen to end up lying unconscious, bleeding profusely from deep cuts in his head and neck, across what was left of his
car’s bonnet.

Borisov habitually drove with both hands holding the steering-wheel – which was good – but with his thumbs hooked around the wheel’s rim – which was bad. When the two
cars hit, the steering wheel spun hard to the left, instantly dislocating both his thumbs. The seat belt stopped his body hitting the wheel, but he smashed into the driver’s door with such
force that his left arm broke just above the elbow, and his head crashed through the side window, giving him a mild concussion. When the noise and the motion finally stopped he was both alive and
conscious, but at that moment it’s doubtful if he would have agreed that he’d been ‘lucky’.

A police car, which had been less than two miles away when the accident happened, arrived on the scene within minutes, a fire appliance and ambulance arriving shortly afterwards. The unconscious
driver was lifted as gently as possible from the remains of his car and driven straight to hospital. Borisov’s vehicle needed more work because the doors had jammed, and there was less
urgency because the Russian was visibly conscious and responsive.

In fact, as the police report stated later, he was
highly
responsive, trying as best he could with his mangled and useless hands to extract something from his jacket pocket. When the
police officers realized that what he was trying to pull out was a pistol, their attitude changed immediately, and Borisov became less of a victim than a suspect. They promptly disarmed him and
searched him thoroughly.

The Swiss bank passbook immediately attracted and held their attention. Once Borisov’s arm was set and his injured hands treated at the hospital, he was given a pain-killing injection and
taken straight to the police station in Kondal for questioning about the weapon and the huge quantity of American dollars lodged in a Swiss bank account in his name.

Bahrain

Omar finally stood up, nodded to the two Americans and walked to the door. He stepped out into the sunlight, leading the way around the house towards the parked Chevrolet.
Taking a key from the pocket of his
gellabbiya
, he opened the boot and stepped back a couple of paces.

In an open cardboard box were four packets wrapped in clear plastic, along with a small toolkit. There were also several smaller items: a battery, a cable, six detonators, a soldering iron, a
roll of black insulating tape and a battery-powered seven-day timer.

‘And the other stuff?’ O’Hagan asked.

‘In the bag on the back seat,’ Ahmed said, lowering the boot lid slightly and pointing through the car’s rear window.

‘Good. What is it – Semtex?’

‘Yes. It’s the easiest to get hold of, and it’s very reliable.’

He was right on both counts. Semtex was invented in the village of Semtin – which inspired its name – in East Bohemia by a chemist named Stanislav Brebera in 1966. It was stable,
odourless and had an indefinite shelf life. Unfortunately, terrorists immediately realized that Semtex was an ideal weapon for their purposes, as it passed with consummate ease through airport
metal detectors, and could not be identified by sniffer dogs. Brebera recognized the danger, and later incorporated metallic compounds and chemicals within the explosive, but these measures were
too little and too late.

Pan American flight 103 was brought down over Lockerbie in Scotland by twelve ounces of Semtex hidden inside a Toshiba cassette recorder, killing 270 people, and it was also the weapon used in
the 1998 attack on the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

The manufacturing company, Explosia, has exported over 900 tons of Semtex to Libya, and about the same quantity to a handful of other hostile or unstable nations, including Iran, Iraq, North
Korea and Syria. Altogether, it has been estimated that the world stockpile of Semtex is in excess of 40,000 tons.

‘What’s the total weight of the charge?’ O’Hagan asked.

‘Four kilos,’ Ahmed said.

The American reached down to pick up one of the detonators, a slim aluminium tube about two inches long with a pair of silver-coloured wires emerging from one end. The wires, he noted with
satisfaction, were twisted together. If they’re left separate there’s a possibility that they can act as antennae and, if a mobile phone or other radio device is used in the vicinity,
they can spontaneously detonate.

Ahmed noticed O’Hagan’s almost imperceptible nod of approval. ‘We know our business here,’ he added.

‘I know you do, Ahmed, but it never hurts to check, particularly where this kind of stuff is concerned.’

‘You’re satisfied?’

O’Hagan replaced the detonator in the box. ‘Thank you, yes.’

Petrucci spun the wheels of the combination locks on the briefcase, aligned the numbers and snapped the catches open. He lifted the lid, pulled out a bundle of banknotes and handed them over to
Ahmed.

‘As we agreed,’ O’Hagan said. ‘Please check the amount’s correct.’

The Arab passed the money to Omar, who immediately began counting it. ‘
I
trust you, my friend, and I’m sure it’s right. Omar, on the other hand, does
not
trust
you, and he’ll no doubt let us know if there’s any discrepancy.’

As Petrucci slammed the boot lid shut, Omar nodded towards Ahmed and tucked the bundle of notes into his pocket. The Arab handed the car keys to O’Hagan.

‘Remember our arrangement. Leave the car on Al-Mutanabi Avenue, between Al-Khalifa and Tujjaar, at the location we requested.’ Ahmed extended his hand, and O’Hagan shook it.
‘It was good to do business with you again.’

British Embassy, Government Avenue, Manama, Bahrain

William Ewart Evans – whose initials, emblazoned in gold leaf on his cases, had been the cause of prolonged merriment on his arrival as a spotty schoolboy at Harrow
– was thirty-nine years old, tall, thin, fair-haired and a third secretary in the consular section at the British Embassy. His appointment was recorded in the Diplomatic List, and anybody
enquiring by telephone for that particular third secretary would eventually find themselves talking to Evans. Despite this, he actually worked elsewhere in the large building on Government Avenue,
and any callers genuinely seeking the help of the consular section would be politely passed on to someone else.

In reality, Evans was a career officer in the Secret Intelligence Service, responsible for local liaison and cooperation and, when he wasn’t out operating on the streets of Bahrain, he
could be found in the ‘Holy of Holies’, the name given to that section of the Embassy reserved for use by SIS officers.

The telephone call he received just after four-thirty that afternoon was both short and unremarkable.

‘Bill?’ The voice had a pronounced accent, and Evans recognized it immediately. He checked the caller-identification display on his desk phone and wasn’t surprised that it
reported a ‘private number’. The clarity of the line suggested it was either a mobile or a car phone.

‘Yes, Tariq?’

‘I’ve found that album you were looking for. Could we meet this evening for a drink so that I can give it to you?’ The man’s English was precise but somewhat stilted.

Evans glanced down at the filing trays on his desk, all of which, with the notable exception of the ‘out’ tray, seemed to be depressingly full, but knew he had no choice, because the
caller, Tariq Mazen, clearly had very urgent information for him.

The telephone code the two men used was simple, innocuous and very easy to remember, and relied on a handful of key words inserted into the kind of conversation any two male friends might have.
‘Album’ meant immediate, right now. The other options were ‘book’, which meant an urgent meeting within twenty-four hours; ‘CD’ within forty-eight hours, and
‘DVD’ within seventy-two hours. Simple enough: ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ in descending order of priority.

The second sentence contained the word ‘drink’, which meant that Mazen was already in his car waiting for him. For less urgent meetings he would have said ‘meal’, and
also suggested a date, time and place and, as the two men were openly friendly with each other, they would meet in a restaurant as agreed. There Mazen would hand over an entirely normal book, CD or
DVD, and Evans would pay him for it.

The information Mazen needed to convey would be passed to Evans during the meal itself, if circumstances allowed, or afterwards as they walked back to their vehicles. Nothing in writing had been
their rule from the first. If Mazen had to supply photographs or documents, he would simply seal them in an unmarked envelope and leave it at one of a dozen dead-letter drops scattered around
Manama, and tell Evans using a simple number code which one he was going to use, and when the drop could be serviced.

‘I’m sorry, Tariq,’ Evans replied. ‘I can’t tonight. I’m up to my ears in work here, and I’ve just had another ten files dumped on my desk. If I can
manage tomorrow, I’ll give you a call.’ That ‘ten’ meant he would be outside the Embassy building within ten minutes.