Filled with anguish, Steven pulled out his phone, finding that all his fingers were becoming thumbs in his hurry. ‘Jesus!’ he exploded when he saw that there was no signal. ‘Give me a break, will you!’
He ran back to the front of the house, this time along the right side of the cottage, again checking to see if any of the windows were open. None was. Without any further delay, he picked up a heavy edging stone from the garden and used it to smash the window of the room which had been Leila’s bedroom. He’d chosen that one because the car lights were shining on it.
Still calling out Leila’s name, he stumbled across the floor to switch on the lights and tripped over the old electric fire sitting in the middle of the floor. His head hit the bedroom door causing him to curse before he pulled himself to his feet and clicked the switch. Nothing happened.
‘What the f…’ He felt his way through to the living room and to the light switch there. Still no light. ‘How the f… could there be light in the cellar if the power was off?’ he thought as he bumped and cursed his way out into the hall and along to the cellar door. He had never been down in the cottage cellar. Apart from not having any reason for doing so, Leila had told him she didn’t use it and always kept the door locked. She had given him a one word reason: ‘Rats’.
He pulled at the cellar door and found it unlocked. The door creaked back and cold air filled his nostrils together with the competing smells of dampness and old wood. He felt for the light switch before realising that the light should be on; this was the reason he was here; he’d seen it from outside. Surely the power couldn’t have failed at the very moment he entered the cottage. Not even his luck could be that bad… the only other explanation was… that someone had turned the power off! At that moment, a blow to the back of Steven’s head ended all further speculation.
Steven came round to find himself suspended by his wrists with his toes barely touching the floor. Blood from a head wound had trickled down into his eyes and crusted over them making it difficult for him to see properly but he knew he was in the cellar because of the black and white tiles on the floor. He had a blinding headache and his arms felt as if they were being torn from their sockets by the cable that secured his wrists to a beam in the ceiling. He looked for the prostrate woman he’d seen from outside but she was no longer there. Instead, he saw a bundle in the shape of a body, wrapped in black plastic, huddled at the foot of the stairs.
‘Oh, please God, no,’ murmured Steven, closing his eyes and railing against the agonies of body and mind that were pushing him to the very brink of endurance.
‘You’re awake, Dunbar.’
The man who had come from behind him was in his mid thirties and Middle Eastern in appearance. He sounded well educated and spoke without an accent but when Steven looked into his eyes he saw a cocktail of loathing and contempt there. It was being suppressed in the cause of establishing credentials of intelligence and sophistication but it was definitely there. It was a look he’d come across before and he’d always found it chilling to be regarded as something less than nothing, be it by religious zealots in their contempt for the non-believer or even in the eyes of the poor in India who could look through you as if you didn’t exist. It was what the worm must see in the eye of the bird about to eat it. If it came to a choice between confronting a cold-blooded psychopath or a religious fanatic who believed that some unseen god was with him in his struggle against the infidel, it would be a close run thing.
‘How do you know me?’ Steven croaked.
With no change of expression, the man held up Steven’s Sci-Med ID, which he’d taken from his pocket. ‘A pity. Ten more minutes and I would have been gone,’ he said. ‘Still, as you are here, I thought I might as well make the most of it. Tell me all about Earlybird and what their current thinking is.’ He moved across to the body lying on the floor and started to manoeuvre it into position to be dragged upstairs.
Steven felt sick in his stomach. ‘Who?’ he asked, fearing the answer.
The man looked amused at the question. ‘Dr Leila Martin,’ he said.
‘You bastard! Why?’
The man stopped what he was doing and came towards Steven slowly. He didn’t stop until he was only inches from his face. ‘Call it collateral damage,’ he said icily. ‘That’s what your friends, the Americans, called it when they incinerated my mother, my father and my sister.’
‘There’s a difference between war and cold-blooded murder,’ gasped Steven.
‘The difference is hypocrisy,’ said the man. ‘And in the end that is why you will lose. All the pretence about ‘liberation’ of oppressed peoples when all you ever wanted was our oil will be difficult to keep up and it will weigh you down just like the constant calls for internal investigations every time your own newspapers prints pictures that the hypocrites don’t like. Pretty soon the moronic lard-arses of middle America will get it through their thick skulls that their kids’ ass-kicking adventure in a place they’d never even heard of is going to come to grief. Junior’s rights-of-passage romp is going to end with him coming home in a body bag with a note from Donald Rumsfeld attached.
‘While the peace-loving forces of Islam ride on to victory in the cause of truth and justice helped by ignorant kids with explosives strapped to them because they’ve been promised a free fuck in heaven. Do me a favour.’
The man brought the back of his hand across Steven’s face in a vicious swipe that left his right ear ringing and blood pouring from his nose. ‘I was beginning to think you had a point until you did that,’ Steven gasped, amazed at his own attempt to take the moral high ground.
‘Let’s get one thing clear,’ said the man as he returned to the stairs to start dragging Leila’s body up them. ‘I will most certainly not be doing you any favours.’
‘Go screw yourself.’
The man paused on the stairs but only to give Steven a pitying look. ‘Professor Devon was very ‘brave’ too,’ he said. ‘But in the end, he told me what I wanted to know… as will you. You might care to consider that while I put Dr Martin in the car.’
Waves of pain and anguish washed over Steven as he faced up to the fact that he was now in the hands of the ubiquitous ‘Ali’, leader of the al-Qaeda team who had tortured and murdered Timothy Devon, Robert Smith and now Leila, not to mention two of his own. He also remembered that what this man had done to Timothy Devon had turned the stomach of a hardened pathologist.
Steven tried to find rational thought through the mess of competing emotions inside his head. His chances of getting out of this were close to zero. He supposed there was a possibility that Frank Giles might turn up eventually if it was noticed that he had been missing for some time but that would probably mean many hours and by that time he would be dead. He had no doubt of that: in fact, he had already accepted this and was concentrating on what he might have to endure before he was allowed to die.
As if having the last straw torn from his grasp, Steven suddenly realised that Frank Giles didn’t even know where the cottage was! He had never had cause to tell him where Leila Martin lived and he in turn had never had reason to ask… But Ali had known and he had come calling. Why?
Poor Leila and what she must have suffered at the hands of this lunatic and after all the doubts he’d been harbouring about her. He felt guilty and ashamed. Ali must have wanted to know how far she’d progressed with the vaccine against Cambodia 5. That in itself suggested that the vaccine was still relevant to the al-Qaeda mission despite his own doubts about city centre attacks.
Leila would, of course, have told him the truth — that it was already in production, but he had probably tortured her to make sure that she wasn’t lying. But what did Ali want from him? He obviously knew about Earlybird and that was disturbing in itself — another reminder that global terrorism was not entirely an external enemy. It was already embedded in the society it sought to destroy. Ali couldn’t have anticipated his coming here tonight so it would be a case of him gleaning any extra information he could before killing him. Maybe he needed it confirmed that the trail he’d gone to so much trouble to lay had been followed by the government who had — as they were meant to do — concluded there were to be city centre attacks across the UK using Cambodia 5. The best he personally could hope to do was withstand pain long enough to make divulging this appear like a genuine admission. The only secret he must keep was the fact that he believed this to be another red herring, a view he had shared with others. But as to what the real al-Qaeda mission might be… he really had no idea. Nothing Ali could do to him could make him tell what he didn’t know. A comfort? Steven thought not.