The Angel (26 page)

He risked a glance.

He was five hundred feet away from the shore. He could see six figures by the jetty. Four of them had handguns, and the other two had carbines. The C8 had an effective range of one hundred and fifty yards, but it could reach three hundred or four
hundred with
a degree of accuracy if the shooter was any good. Five hundred yards meant he should be safe here. The figures were too distant to make out any details. As he watched, he saw one of them
turn to the doo
r of the boathouse and raise his arm. Pope saw another
figure
silhouetted
in the light of the doorway, saw the flash of the gun and watched the figure fall back inside.

It was unfortunate, but there was nothing he could do about that. He turned to the east and assessed the way ahead. The lake was around two and a half kilometres wide at this narrowest point. He thought he would be able to make the crossing in fifteen
minutes
. He could see the lights of towns and villages all the way along the opposite shore. He would aim to make land again at Collonge-
Bellerive
.

He checked the time.

Ten.

He had a moment to breathe.

Snow and Kelleher were dead.

He couldn’t allow himself the luxury of anger. He tried to work out the angles, any reason at all that might explain how they had been compromised.

He squeezed his eyes shut. He needed to know that Isabella was safe. If something had happened to her, he knew he would never be able to forgive himself. The doubts about his decision to involve her reasserted themselves, crowding over him. It was foolhardy, arrogant and dangerous to put a fifteen-year-old girl into a position like that.

What had he been thinking?

He reached for his cell phone, but stopped. Could he call her? What if she was in trouble? He shook his head. He had no choice. He had to know she was okay. He took out the phone, saw that he had a bar of service, and selected her number.

He pressed dial, listened to the ringtone, and waited for the call to connect.

The man climbed back up the incline. One of his associates had backed their car out of the way while the others began the pursuit. An eighteen-wheeler rumbled along the road, its engine roaring as it sped by. The man looked down the slope as the other member of the three-man unit clambered back up the slope. This man gave a shake of his head. He allowed himself a tight little curse and then erased the emotion. What was done was done. Very well. They would adapt.

He was still a little wary as he took out his cell phone and dialled the number for his handler. The call connected, and with a clipped precision that had come to be his hallmark, he reported that two of the targets had been eliminated, but the third, one of the two males, had evaded them. He absorbed the abuse that he had known would be due to him – he thought it was fair, given that he had failed to accomplish all of his objectives – and then asked for his orders. Once they had been delivered, he ended the call and passed on the information to the others.

He took out his torch and surveyed the road and the verge. The shell casings were scattered around, little copper nuggets that glittered dully in the light. He was uncomfortable leaving them behind, but there was no point in trying to find them all. There were too many to be sure that none were left, and leaving one was as bad as leaving them all. His plan had been to eliminate the targets in a more controlled fashion. If they had stopped, as he had hoped that they would, they would have been able to take them out with a minimum of shots, and in those circumstances, they would have collected all of the evidence before leaving the scene.

He would not normally have been so profligate. He was a man who had always believed that if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing properly, and this felt unprofessional.

He got into the car, his men sliding in behind him, and put it into gear and set off for Geneva.

Chapter Fifty-Four

T
hey were in the air for twenty minutes before the pilot started to descend. Isabella used the time to come around from the blow that had knocked her out. She looked out through the window at the sparkling lights that flashed along both sides of a runway two or three kilometres to the north. They drew nearer, and she could see that it was a commercial airport. There were large jets pressed up against a terminal building, and as
she watch
ed, a 737 lumbered down the runway and blasted up into the night sky.

She tried to remember the maps that she had studied. Her focus had been on the immediate vicinity of Le Rosey and Geneva, but she remembered that there was another international airport to the east. She remembered the name: Sion.

The helicopter slowed over a private apron and started to descend. The guards stowed their weapons in two identical black tote bags and unfastened their seat belts. The wheels bounced a little as the helicopter landed, but the guards wasted no time. The man nearest to the fuselage opened the door and jumped down. He unclasped Jasmin’s belt and dragged her out, looping a beefy arm beneath her shoulders to hold her upright. Salim and then Khalil al-Khawari came next, then the second guard. He reached back up and took Isabella’s hand, tugging her to the exit. She stumbled down into the vortex of downdraft, her hair whipping around her head.

The first guard led the way across the apron. Isabella could see an aircraft fifty feet away from them, its nose pointed towards the taxiway and the runway beyond. It was a smaller jet, sleek and aggressive looking. A private jet, she guessed. A Gulfstream or a Learjet or something similar, she didn’t know which.

She tried to stop.

‘Move,’ the man said, taking her arm and dragging her forward.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere a long way away from here.’

She tried to shake off his hand, but he was too strong. A retractable flight of steps had been unfolded at the front of the jet, and he led her to it. They climbed aboard. The cabin was plush, with eight leather seats, racks of china and crystal and LCD screens fitted fore and aft.

The man slung her into one of the seats. ‘Sit down and shut up.’

Khalil took the seat next to her. He fastened his belt, reached across her and raised the blind over the window.

She still had her clutch bag. Her cell phone started to ring.

Khalil heard it. He yanked the bag out of her hand, took the phone and looked at the screen.

‘Who’s Rupert?’

‘My uncle,’ she said.

One of the guards indicated that Khalil should throw the phone across to him. He did. The man removed the back of the phone and pried out the battery. He opened the door and tossed the pieces outside.

‘Where are we going?’

He ignored her.

The second guard boarded and pulled the steps up behind him. The door was shut and locked, and moments later the e
ngines whine
d.

‘Khalil,’ she insisted, ‘talk to me.’

‘It’s too late now.’

‘I don’t understand. What’s happening? Where are we going?’

He turned his attention to her. His eyes shone with anger. ‘Home,’ he said.

Epilogue
Chapter Fifty-Five

A
qil and Yasin Malik waited in line at immigration. The queue was long and served by a bored woman in a single kiosk. She ushered travellers forward, took their papers, compared them to their photographs and, always satisfied, sent them inside with a desultory wave of her hand.

Yasin fidgeted next to him. ‘Come on,’ he said.

The flight had been straightforward. Aqil had been unable to read the magazine he had found in the departures lounge.
He could
n’t concentrate on it, and the words wouldn’t go in. Instead, he gazed out of the window at the clouds below them as they flew over
Germany
, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. They passed over the Black Sea and then over Turkey itself. Antalya was on the
southern
coast. After six hours, the jet started its descent. He watched as the landscape resolved into finer detail. He saw the
terminal
building, the buildings of the town spread across the
coastline
and,
beyond, the
deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea. There were palm trees, the lush greens tempered by bright yellow sand dunes, white-capped waves rolling in to shore. It looked beautiful.

‘It’s taking forever,’ Yasin said. ‘We need to get going.’

He was nervous. He had been that way ever since they had set off. Aqil had believed that it was the prospect of being
stopped be
fore they could leave the country, but the more he observed his brother, the more he realised that it was something more
fundamental
than that. For all his brash certainty that this was the
correct
path for them to take, he still doubted his decision. He
was wor
ried about their family and what they would think.
There was
fear, too: a fear of the unknown, of the things that they might be asked to do when they reached the caliphate. They had seen the YouTube videos and read the literature about what they could expect. It was easy enough for him to pronounce Allah’s will from the security of their home. It was more difficult to find certainty when the prospect became less of an abstract idea and more of a likely reality.

They had a long day of travel ahead of them tomorrow. They would check into the five-star resort that they had booked with the travel agency in Manchester. It was important that they did that in order to minimise suspicion. It was more difficult to make passage through Turkey than it had been, and there was a suggestion that travellers who arrived on a package holiday and then did not arrive at their accommodation would be reported to the authorities. They would avoid that. ISIS had produced a glossy document that explained how best to make their way into Syria, and they were going to follow it to the letter.

‘Come on! Why can’t they open the other kiosks? This is
ridiculous
.’

It took another thirty minutes for them to pass through immigration. They had no luggage save their carry-on bags, and so they passed quickly through the arrivals hall.

The heat washed over them as soon as they stepped out of the air-conditioned arrivals hall.

Aqil stopped and tried to take it all in. It was a crazy, bustling place. Taxis bullied their way to the kerb as potential fares were shepherded by angry touts. Buses departed for the city. Families struggled with trolleys laden down with luggage. The air was full
of the
sound of arguments, crying children, the blare of car horns and the roar of jet engines. The sun pressed down on him, woozily hot, baking the asphalt. He was thirsty and hungry.

Yasin looked over the bedlam with bewilderment. ‘We need
a tax
i.’

Aqil’s attention was drawn to a blacked-out Mercedes Viano people carrier. It came out of a sealed-off area at the side of the main terminal building and nosed into the queue of traffic, the driver leaning on his horn as a taxi tried to cut in front of him. The taxi driver was persistent, and as the horn sounded again, the Viano nudged up against the car’s rear wing. Both vehicles stopped. The taxi driver – a broad-shouldered, deeply tanned man with
shoulder
-length hair and a prodigious moustache – flung his door open, walked around so that he blocked the Mercedes’ onward progress and then started to curse out the driver at the top of his lungs.

Aqil watched as two things happened at once. First, the driver of the Viano opened his door and went around to confront the driver of the taxi. He was big and mean looking, but the taxi driver did not back away. Rather than doing that, he spat at the man’s feet. It might have been a mistake. The other man drilled him with a sudden punch, knocking his head back and dropping him to the surface of the road.

Second, and simultaneously, the rear door on Aqil’s side of the Mercedes opened. He heard a shout from the cabin and then a flash of movement as a young, blonde girl stepped down onto the sill. He saw her, and behind her, a man and woman of dark complexion, a teenage boy – maybe the same age as the girl – and another, larger man wearing a dark suit. The girl was stopped as the woman wrapped her arms around her waist and started to haul her back. Aqil watched as the girl butted the back of her head into the woman’s face, hard enough to loosen her grip. She was just about to break free completely when the man in the dark suit reached out a hand and grabbed the girl by the top of her arm. Aqil saw the effort on her face as she tried to break his grip, but he was too strong. He yanked her back so that she bumped up against the seat and yanked again so that she fell onto it. The teenage boy reached for the handle and pulled the door until it slid closed again.

It had happened in a matter of seconds, and it was so incongruous that, once the door had closed, Aqil almost doubted that he had seen anything at all.

The driver, who had made his way back to the car, now revved the engine. A space had opened up into the outside lane that
promised
a faster route to the road away from the airport, and he released the brakes and surged into it.

‘You see that?’ Aqil asked his brother.

‘See what?’

‘The girl—’

‘Taxi!’ Yasin shouted, interrupting him. ‘Come on, it’s
stopping
. Hurry, Aqil.’

They wheeled their carry-on suitcases across the sidewalk. The taxi driver opened the trunk and put them inside.

‘Royal City Hotel, please,’ Yasin said.

The driver pulled into the queue, and they crawled out to the main road. Aqil distracted himself by going over their plan again. They would start early tomorrow morning. They would leave the hotel, take a taxi to the railway station and then a train to
Iskenderun
in eastern Turkey. The journey traced the coastline and passed towns with names that Aqil did not recognise: Alanya, Anamur, Icel, Ceyhan. From Iskenderun, they would take a taxi to Reyhanli. That would be where they crossed the border.

The short trip over the wire was known as the Gateway to Jihad. With a shiver of trepidation, Aqil couldn’t help but feel he was
teetering
on the edge of something momentous, something that would almost certainly change him forever. He felt his stomach dip, but then he realised the unexpected feeling he was experiencing wasn’t excitement. It was fear.