The rain did not let up for the whole journey. When the Daimler pulled over forty-five minutes later, its windscreen wipers were barely up to the job. Delaney removed the handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his misted-up window. They had parked in a small road that ran alongside a children’s playground. On the other side of the playground he could just make out a bandstand and, beyond that, parkland that disappeared into the rainy haze. He squinted. The whole area was deserted, with the exception of the swings in the playground. Despite the rain, there was a boy on one of them, swinging back and forth, wrapped in a navy blue raincoat.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Where was Ashkani? Hiding, until Delaney showed himself??
‘Umbrella, Mr Delaney, sir?’
Delaney nodded, unable to take his eyes off this child playing alone in the pouring rain. Moments later his driver had opened the passenger door and was standing holding a large black umbrella. Delaney climbed out. ‘Stay in the car,’ he instructed. The driver nodded and hurried back behind the wheel while Delaney crossed the twenty metres between the Daimler and the bandstand, one hand in his pocket, clutching the gun. The lower halves of his trousers were sodden by the time he reached it, and he was already shivering with the cold. Water was leaking from the bandstand’s neglected roof in several places. Delaney closed the umbrella and stood at one edge, away from the leaks, his eyes still fixed on the child in the rain.
Back and forth it swung.
Back and forth.
Where was Ashkani?
Something made him turn. He looked back towards the Daimler and once more squinted through the rain. The front door was open. The driver was no longer behind the wheel. He was sprawled on the sidewalk, face down, motionless, the rain beating onto his back.
Delaney found himself holding his breath. He turned back to the child. He looked one way, then the other. The chauffeur flashed in front of his eyes, then the child. Then the chauffeur, then the child turned to look at him and…
He had appeared as if from nowhere, ten metres away, perhaps from some ornamental shrubs between the Daimler and the bandstand. He was a giant of a man, with broad shoulders, a hooded top and a bowed head, charging forward. Even through the rain-haze, Delaney could make out the mad fury in his eyes. Stumbling backwards in the face of that oncoming rage, it was everything Delaney could do to stop himself falling as he tried to pull the gun from his pocket.
Too late.
The sudden violence with which the man launched himself at Delaney shook him to his core. He felt like he had been hit by an unstoppable force. It threw him back three metres, to form a heap on the ground, where dirty rainwater sluiced over his glasses and down his front. Although blinded by the water, he had managed to keep hold of his umbrella, and he held this up now, point outwards, in a feeble attempt to defend himself as he meanwhile tried again to remove his weapon. The umbrella, though, was swiftly ripped from his hands; seconds later he felt it brutally whack the right side of his face. His glasses clattered away from him and he groped in the direction they’d fallen, pulling out his gun as he did so; but just then he felt that being kicked away. It rattled across the decking as his attacker lifted him by the scruff of his neck and back to his feet, then pushed him hard against the back wall of the bandstand.
A face dominated his vision, five inches away from Delaney’s own. He recognized the features and they were not Ashkani’s. He had seen them, barely two weeks ago, enlarged on a screen in the basement of CIA headquarters. What he didn’t recognize was the mania in this man’s expression. Delaney had never seen such hatred.
‘You,’ he whispered.
‘Yeah,’ said Sergeant Joe Mansfield. ‘Me.’
‘But you’re… you’re supposed to be in a secure hospital.’
‘I guess it wasn’t that secure,’ Mansfield growled.
‘I have backup personnel,’ Delaney wheezed. ‘They’ll be here any—’
His feeble ploy degenerated into a howl of pain as Mansfield headbutted his nose. Delaney heard the bone crack and collapse half a second before he felt it. When Mansfield stood back again, he had Delaney’s blood dripping down between his eyes, but that was nothing to the torrent that flowed from the CIA man’s nostrils, over his bow tie and down the front of his shirt.
‘What’s your name?’
‘S… S… Stroman…’ Delaney lied, but then he shrieked again as Mansfield smashed his forehead once more against the already shattered nose, intensifying the pain. Out of the corner of his compromised vision, he was bizarrely aware of the kid still swinging in the playground, but before he knew it, he was squealing his own name: ‘Delaney… Mason Delaney… Please don’t hit me again…’
Another brutal shove and Delaney was back on the floor, his fierce-eyed, menacing attacker looking over him.
‘Talk,’ Mansfield said.
‘I… I don’t know what you want me to—’
The blow Mansfield gave Delaney’s ribs cracked a few. The American wheezed and spluttered as the air, and not a little blood-flecked saliva, escaped his mouth.
The monster was kneeling now. ‘Why,’ he hissed, ‘has your man been trying to kill me?’
‘My man?’
Suddenly Mansfield was holding something in front of Delaney’s face. A smoke-damaged, leather-bound book. A Koran. Ashkani’s Koran. His cipher. ‘You sent the message to meet here?’ the CIA man croaked. ‘How?’
‘My son.’
Delaney glanced myopically over his shoulder towards the swings where he could still see a blurred movement. ‘Your man used the codes in front of my son. Bad mistake.’
Mansfield had something else in his hands now. A gun. He pressed the barrel into the soft flesh of Delaney’s cheek. ‘They want me for two murders, Delaney. You really think a third will make any difference?’
‘The raid,’ Delaney squealed. ‘Abbottabad. You saw—’
‘What did I see? Two body bags – you killed bin Laden and who else?’
‘Killed bin Laden?’ Delaney hissed. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. Why would I want to kill him?’ He coughed again, and more bloody spittle dribbled from the side of his mouth. ‘Why would I want a bullet in the brain of the person with more information on Al-Qaeda than anyone else?’
The barrel of the gun dug deeper into his face. His eyes widened with the sudden fear that this lunatic was going to shoot him; instead, he heard him talk, under his breath, sounding as though something had just clicked. ‘A decoy corpse,’ Mansfield breathed. ‘A lookalike. Gun wounds already inflicted. The SEALs brought it in with them, took bin Laden alive, and photographed the decoy…’
‘Very smart,’ Delaney wheezed. ‘Smarter than our President, at least.’
‘You removed the corpse in one bag and bin Laden, still alive, in another…’
Delaney, despite everything, gave a sickly little laugh.
‘How many people know?’
The American tried to answer, but succumbed to another fit of coughing. His attacker kneed him in his already broken ribs. ‘The SEALs,’ Delaney spat. ‘And a handful of people close to me.’
‘And Ashkani?’
‘Of course Ashkani! It was Ashkani who told us where bin Laden was in the first place.’
A pause. The monster looked like he was absorbing this information.
‘Where is he now?’
‘I don’t know.’
His attacker didn’t hesitate. In a single, swift move, he grabbed the little finger of Delaney’s right hand and yanked it back so that it cracked noisily. Delaney screamed again, and the noise echoed off the roof of the bandstand.
‘You’ve got nine fingers left before I start on the bigger bones,’ Mansfield said once the shriek had withered to a whimper. ‘Where’s Ashkani?’