Basharat shook his head.
‘Okay,’ said the Major. He gestured at Shortt. ‘He speaks Arabic. Not fluently, but well enough to follow what you’re saying.’
Basharat looked at Shortt, who spoke a few clipped words in Arabic, then grinned. ‘I told him what I’ll do to his mother if he screws us around.’
‘If he even suspects you’re tipping your brother off, you’ll get a bullet in your head,’ said the Major. ‘Do you understand?’
Basharat nodded sullenly. The Major handed him the phone. Armstrong aimed the gun squarely at the Arab’s face, his finger on the trigger.
Basharat scrolled through the phone’s address book, then hit the green button. He put the phone to his ear, then spoke rapidly in Arabic. It was clear from his tone that he was apologising for waking his brother. Then he was talking in a more measured tone, trying to avoid looking at the gun.
Shortt was listening intently. The Major hadn’t been bluffing: Shortt did speak some Arabic but Shepherd was aware that his knowledge of the language was basic, to say the least.
Basharat’s voice was trembling and he kept taking deep breaths, trying to steady himself. He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose as he spoke. Eventually he ended the call.
‘Well done,’ said the Major, taking the phone from him. ‘What did he say?’
‘The video came attached to an email,’ said Basharat. ‘A Yahoo account. It was about four minutes long. My brother says there was nothing special on the bits they didn’t broadcast.’
‘Who sent it?’
‘The group holding him. The Holy Martyrs of Islam.’
The Major held out the phone. ‘Call him back. Get him to forward the email to you.’
‘He’s mad enough at me as it is,’ said Basharat.
‘Well, you’ll have to decide which is the least dangerous option,’ said the Major. ‘Your brother being angry with you, or me and these guys. I doubt your brother’ll put a bullet in your head.’
Armstrong tapped the gun barrel against Basharat’s head to emphasise the point.
‘He’s at home. The email will be on his office computer.’
‘Tell him it’s important, that you need it now – tell him what the hell you like but we want that email and we want it now. Do you have a personal email account? Yahoo or Hotmail?’
Basharat nodded. ‘I’ve got a g-mail account.’
‘Tell him you’re working at home so he should send it to your personal account.’
Basharat took the phone and called his brother again. Shepherd could hear the tension in his voice, and sweat was pouring down his face. He spoke earnestly, his brow furrowed, then fell silent for a while. When he spoke again, he was clearly imploring his brother to do as he asked. Eventually he sighed with relief and switched off the phone. ‘He’ll do it,’ he said. ‘It’ll take him about half an hour.’
‘Good,’ said the Major. He opened Basharat’s mobile phone, stripped out the battery and tossed the phone back to the Arab.
‘What happens to me now?’ asked Basharat, looking fearfully at the gun in Armstrong’s hand.
‘We pick up your email and then you’re free to go,’ said the Major. He gestured at Shortt, who pulled the hood back over the Arab’s head.
‘We need a computer,’ said the Major.
‘Let’s run by my house,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’ve got broadband.’
Shortt rolled Basharat over and bound his wrists with insulation tape. Then he and Armstrong helped the man to his feet.
‘Why are you doing this?’ asked Basharat, his voice muffled by the hood.
‘You don’t want to know,’ said Shortt. He put his face close to the Arab’s ear. ‘If we told you, we’d have to kill you,’ he whispered.
As Shortt and Armstrong bundled Basharat outside, the Major put his arm around Shepherd’s shoulders. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘I’m not happy about it,’ said Shepherd, ‘but it had to be done.’
‘We didn’t hurt him, not really.’
‘We scared him shitless and maybe cracked a couple of ribs.’ They walked together towards the door. ‘How far would we have gone, boss,’ asked Shepherd, ‘if push had come to shove?’
‘Hypothetical question. No point going there.’
‘The guy’s done nothing wrong,’ Shepherd said. ‘He’s just a journalist doing his job.’
‘And Geordie was doing his,’ said the Major. ‘We did what we had to do, Spider. Now, let’s get that email and Basharat can go home.’
Geordie Mitchell paced up and down, swinging his arms. He always thought better when he was on the move, preferably on a run. The bigger the problem, the longer the run. Most of his former colleagues in the SAS were the same. Running was always the first step on the road to fitness. It built stamina and anyone preparing for the SAS selection course spent six months or more running three or four times a week. At first it was a chore, then it became a habit and eventually it was as natural as breathing.
As he paced around the room, he gazed at the floor. It was bare concrete. It didn’t matter how thick it was because he had nothing to dig with. They’d taken his belt and emptied his pockets, and there was nothing in the basement he could use.
Mitchell dropped to the floor and started to do press-ups, keeping his breathing steady and even. He did a slow twenty, then a brisk ten, then another slow twenty, enjoying the burn in his arms. When he’d finished the second set of twenty, he rolled over, linked his fingers behind his head and did fifty sit-ups, lay on the floor for a minute to recover, then did a second set. It was the middle of the night but the light was still on. It hadn’t been switched off all the time he’d been in the basement. He’d told Kamil that it was hard to sleep with the light on and Kamil had apologised but said that they had to be able to see him at all times. Every half-hour or so Mitchell would hear a soft footfall outside the door, then a brief silence as one of his captors looked through the peephole. The footfall was a good sign. It meant that there was no covert CCTV coverage of the basement.
Mitchell sat up, breathing heavily. He frowned as he stared at the wall in front of him. There was a small three-pin power socket about six inches above the ground. Mitchell got to his feet and walked over to it. He sat down and stared at it. Two small screws fixed the socket into the wall. The fact that the lights were on meant that there was power to the basement, which meant that the socket was probably live. A live power line could be used as a weapon. And there’d be wires running to the socket behind the wall. Wires could also be used as a weapon. He prodded the screws with his finger. They were in tight. He needed something to loosen them. A coin, or a flat piece of metal. He stood up and walked slowly round the room, even though he knew he was wasting his time: he had already searched every square inch.
The Transit van pulled up outside Shepherd’s house. ‘You’ve sold it already, have you?’ asked the Major, gesturing at the estate agent’s sign in the front garden.
‘Under offer,’ said Shepherd. ‘Should be exchanging contracts later this week.’ He opened the van’s side door and stood on the pavement looking at the house. The lights were off. It was just before eleven o’clock so Katra had almost certainly gone to bed.
The Major climbed out and walked with him to the house. Shepherd let them in and they went through to the sitting room. ‘Drink?’ he asked, as he sat down at his computer. There was a stack of paper in the printer’s tray: Liam had been downloading information on the space-shuttle programme.
‘I’m okay,’ said the Major. He pulled up a chair and sat down. He had written down Basharat’s email address and password on a piece of paper and he handed it to Shepherd, who launched his Internet browser, tapped in the address of the g-mail home page, then logged on to Basharat’s account.
There were half a dozen unread emails, all but one in English, the most recent from Basharat’s brother in Qatar. The four-minute video was tagged on to the email as an attachment and Shepherd clicked on it.
‘When are you moving to Hereford?’ asked the Major, as they waited for the file to download.