Adam had no answer. He continued circling, waiting for the next strike…
Khattak made his attack — but not the one Adam expected.
He didn’t stab with the knife. Instead he roared and rushed at the American, the blade leading his charge like a rhino’s horn.
Adam delivered a fierce hit to his head with the umbrella, but not hard enough to fell him. He twisted to dodge the knife.
He was only partly successful. It ripped through his coat, slashing across his chest. Khattak ploughed into him, knocking him backwards. They crashed against the pigeon loft. Cages broke open, terrified birds blinding Adam in a swirl of flapping wings. His foot caught something and he fell. He sensed as much as saw Khattak through the maelstrom and kicked as hard as he could. The Pakistani stumbled away from him.
Adam used his arm to shield his eyes from the whirling pigeons. The empty SIG was a few feet away.
He still had a spare magazine.
He scrabbled for the gun. He grabbed it, about to drop the umbrella and take out the new mag…
Khattak had retrieved his own pistol.
The wood and wire of the pigeon loft would not stop a bullet, and the cover of the stairwell was too far to reach in time. But the roof’s edge was just a few strides away.
The agent ran for it. Khattak turned, gun raised—
Adam plunged off the roof as the terrorist fired, the bullet whipping above his head.
Khattak stared in amazement before a brief, disbelieving ‘Hah!’ escaped his mouth. Toradze, or whatever his real name was, had just committed suicide. Even if the four-storey fall hadn’t killed him, the landing would have broken his legs, leaving him a helpless and immobile target below.
He swaggered to the edge and looked down.
The other man was on the ground. But he was neither dead nor crippled. He was standing, the open umbrella a discarded black flower at his feet as he slapped a new magazine into his SIG-Sauer and took aim—
The bullet went through Khattak’s right eye, punching out of the top of his skull in a spray of blood and fragmented bone.
He collapsed, toppling forwards and falling. His body hit the ground with a horrific crunch, limbs splayed at unnatural angles. Blood oozed out from his head.
A good shot. A good kill.
Adam returned his gun to his coat, then dragged the broken corpse against a wall beside a pile of trash, using a flattened cardboard box to conceal it as much as possible. ‘Holly Jo?’
Her reply was hesitant. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes.’ He glanced down at his chest. There was blood on his shirt, but not enough to concern him. ‘Tag this location. There’s another body for Imran’s people to clean up. It’s next to a pile of garbage under some cardboard. Tell Tony that you can start packing up your gear. I’ll make my own way to the airport. Out.’
Before Holly Jo could say anything else, he tapped a spot behind his right ear. There was a small bulge beneath the skin — a control for the implanted radio. The touch switched it off. He fastened his coat to conceal the blood and picked up the umbrella. The shaft was made from kevlar and steel, the spokes ultra-strong carbon fibre able to support his weight on parachute-grade nylon. The device, which could slow a person enough to survive a thirty-foot fall unharmed, had inevitably acquired the nickname ‘Mary Poppins’.
Adam’s landing from a greater height had not been painless, but training had taught him how to roll to absorb most of the impact. He raised the umbrella over his head, then set off down the back street, limping slightly. Behind him, the rain slowly washed the splattered blood into the gutter.
‘Hey, hello? Can you hear me?’
Malik Syed slowly opened his eyes to see people looking down at him with concern. The closest, a man, patted his cheek a few times. ‘Can you hear me? Are you okay?’
‘He’s waking up,’ said a woman behind him, relieved.
Hands helped him to his feet. Syed looked around in bewilderment, his neck aching. Where was he? An alleyway — he had been lying amongst plastic sacks of garbage at its end. ‘What… what happened?’
‘I think you were mugged,’ the man said. ‘I saw someone run out of here and came to see what was going on.’
Syed hurriedly checked his pockets. His phone had gone, as had his wallet. The latter was only a minor inconvenience, as the identity card in it was a fake and he could easily get hold of a replacement as well as more money, but the phone was more of a worry. While he didn’t keep the numbers of any of his al-Qaeda contacts in its memory, it still held a record of its most recent calls, which the authorities might be able to use against the group. ‘Did you see who did it?’
‘I didn’t get a good look, but he was just a kid. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. He had a spanner or something in his hand — he must have hit you with it and pulled you down here.’
That was, oddly, a relief; it was unlikely that the police or counterterrorism agents would use street urchins to do their dirty work. He checked the rest of his belongings. His mugger had left his watch, a cheap Casio. Several minutes had passed since he last remembered checking the time…
What was the last thing he remembered? Thanking his benefactors, he stepped out on to the street. He wasn’t far from the market. He had gone through it to shake off anyone who might have been following him, but then… nothing. He frowned.
‘Are you okay?’ the man asked again. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘I’ll be all right.’ He squinted down the road, mentally trying to retrace his steps, but the memory would not come.
‘He might have hit you on the head,’ said the man. ‘Maybe you should see a doctor.’
‘I’m fine,’ Syed said irritably. He turned in the other direction and strode away. He was already dismissing the incident as bad luck, falling victim to an opportunistic thief, rather than anything sinister. If Pakistani or American intelligence agents had been behind the attack, he would be on his way to a torture cell by now.
The other onlookers dispersed, leaving the man alone. He watched until Syed was out of sight. The earpiece that had been in his pocket while he ‘helped’ the terrorist was returned to his ear. ‘Tony, it looks like Syed bought it,’ reported Lak. ‘He doesn’t remember what happened. Now,’ a sigh, ‘where are these bodies we need to clean up?’
Chapter 7
The Schizoid Man
Pakistan had been left far behind as the private jet crossed over the Kazakhstani border into Russian airspace, heading north on a trans-polar route back to the United States.
Adam had been undergoing a debriefing — at times, almost an interrogation. Malik Syed was only a relatively small cog in the terrorist organisation, and as such his knowledge of its overall activities was limited, but even so there was urgency to the questioning. Part of this was due to the desire of the American agents to obtain the most vital information as quickly as possible. Lives, after all, could be at stake.
The other part was a matter of neurochemistry. The process that had transferred Syed’s memories into Adam’s mind was only temporary.
Tony was conducting the debriefing in a small cabin at the rear of the jet, Holly Jo recording everything. The field commander had a long list of questions: names of contacts, meeting places, phone numbers, email addresses, past operations, future targets. Adam’s answers often led to tangential but equally valuable queries, stretching out the process. They were almost four hours in, and barely halfway down the list.
And getting an answer was not always straightforward.