‘Restraining order. Bloody cops.’ He shrugged and drained his glass before refilling it again. ‘She’ll come around eventually. Till death do us part, right?’ He grimaced. ‘Sorry. Stupid thing to say.’
Shepherd waved away the man’s apology. ‘Where are you working, Jock?’
‘I’m looking after an office building near the station,’ said McIntyre. ‘Days mainly but I get overtime overnight a couple of days a week. It’s quiet at night so I can catch forty winks.’ He raised his glass to Shepherd. ‘At least no one’s shooting at me and I don’t have to keep looking out for IEDs.’
‘I thought there was plenty of work out in Iraq, private security and that,’ said Shepherd.
‘Not any more,’ said McIntyre. ‘At least not for the likes of you and me. They do it on the cheap now, the days of a thousand dollars a day are long gone. Used to be you got great food and business-class flights back and forth and plenty of leeway to do what needed to be done, but that’s all gone. There are guys out there now earning a hundred and fifty bucks a day, Spider. That’s close to minimum wage. And it’s as dangerous as it ever was. More so. What they’ve done is to privatise casualties. Whereas it used to be the army that took the hits, now it’s the contractors. And when you do get hurt, you’re sent back home and left to your own devices. You have to take out your own insurance and that costs an arm and a leg.’ He laughed harshly, the sound of a wounded animal. ‘No pun intended. I wouldn’t go back to Iraq if they got down on bended knee and begged me.’ He raised his glass but his hand was unsteady and whisky slopped on to the carpet. ‘So what brings you to Reading? I’m guessing it’s not a social visit.’ He sipped his whisky and scrutinised Shepherd over the rim of his glass.
Shepherd met McIntyre’s gaze and forced a smile. McIntyre was a mess, he looked as if he was close to a breakdown. There was a tenseness about his movements and a small twitch to the side of his right eye that made it look as if he was winking. His nails were bitten to the quick and his skin had a yellowish pallor, a sign that all the alcohol he was drinking was taking its toll on his liver. Shepherd had half a mind to walk out.
‘Come on, Spider. Spit it out. It’s got be something important to get you out here.’
Shepherd nodded as he held his glass with both hands. ‘Remember Ahmad Khan?’
‘The muj that shot you and the captain? Like it was yesterday. One of the biggest regrets of my life is that we didn’t slot that bastard in Pakistan.’
Shepherd reached inside his jacket and pulled out the newspaper cutting that Harper had given him. McIntyre put his glass on the table next to a Domino’s pizza box and walked unsteadily over to Shepherd. He took the cutting from him and peered at it, then walked back to the table and began rooting through the fast food boxes, muttering to himself. Eventually he found a pair of reading glasses and he perched them on the end of his nose and stared at the cutting again. ‘What the hell is he doing in the UK?’ he said.
‘You think it’s him?’
‘Of course I think it’s him. And so do you. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Shepherd.
‘Come on, how many Afghans with straggly beards and one milky eye do you see in London?’
‘I don’t know, to be honest,’ said Shepherd. ‘There are thousands of Afghans in London, and a lot of them have beards. I don’t know how common that eye thing is.’
‘We were in Afghanistan and he was the only one I saw with an eye like that.’
Shepherd nodded. That was true. It was a very distinctive blemish, one that Shepherd had never seen elsewhere.
McIntyre paced up and down the tidy room as he reread the newspaper cutting. ‘How the hell does this happen?’ he muttered. ‘How does a Taliban murderer end up living here?’
‘That’s a good question,’ said Shepherd. ‘But a better question is what are we going to do about it?’
McIntyre took off his glasses. ‘You know what we’re going to do about it. We’re going to slot him, like we should have done in Pakistan.’
‘One step at a time, Jock,’ said Shepherd. ‘First we’ve got to be sure it’s him.’
McIntyre gave the cutting back to Shepherd. ‘Then we slot him, right?’
Shepherd pocketed the cutting. ‘One bridge at a time,’ he said.
McIntyre put his spectacles back on the table and picked up his glass of whisky. He raised it in salute. ‘We’re going to give that bastard what he deserves.’
‘No offence, Jock, but you need to lay off the booze.’
‘Sure, sure.’
‘I’m serious. We’re going to need clear heads to pull this off.’
McIntyre nodded. ‘No worries. I can take it or leave it.’ He saw the look of disbelief on Shepherd’s face and he grinned. ‘Spider, I drink because I’m bored, end of.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ said Shepherd. ‘How about we start by pouring that in the sink?’
McIntyre held up the glass. ‘Now that’d be a waste of perfectly good whisky, wouldn’t it?’
‘Clear heads,’ repeated Shepherd. ‘Starting now.’
McIntyre sighed, then walked over to the sink and emptied the glass. Then he fetched the bottle and poured the contents away. ‘Happy now?’ he said, tossing the empty bottle.
‘Happier,’ said Shepherd.
McIntyre gestured at the glass in Shepherd’s hand. ‘The no-drinking rule applies to you as well, right?’
Shepherd laughed. ‘Fair comment,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay off the booze as long as you do.’ He looked at the whisky in his glass, then quickly drank it. He grinned at McIntyre. ‘Starting now.’
AFGHANISTAN, 2002
Ahmad Khan and Captain Todd flew to the Jalalabad base on a Blackhawk helicopter and then drove the final thirty miles to the SAS Forward Operating Base in a convoy of armoured Land Rovers as soon as it was light. It was ‘bandit country’ and all the occupants of the Land Rovers, including Khan, were armed. Khan had a scarf around his head and face, concealing his identity from any Taliban spies who might be watching from the shadows.
He looked around him with interest as they approached the Forward Operating Base. The road that led up to the gates was studded with huge concrete blocks, forcing any vehicle to slow down and weave from side to side as it approached, preventing suicide bombers from driving a truck packed with explosives straight into the gates.
The base was small, surrounded by razor-wire fences and berms bulldozed out of the stony soil, providing blast protection and cover for those inside. From what he could see, it looked much less well equipped than the American bases. Beyond the berms, Khan could just glimpse the tops of rows of shipping containers and tents and a heavily sandbagged, mud-brick building, the only permanent structure on the site. Around them were sandbagged emplacements from which protruded the barrels of General Purpose Machine Guns, and the much thicker firing tubes of mortars.
Bulldozers had flattened everything within half a mile of the perimeter in all directions, removing any cover for insurgents and giving the defenders of the base a clear field of fire. The cleared ground included the flattened rubble of a series of buildings, and as they passed them, Khan wondered whether they had merely been sheds or barns, or had once been people’s houses.
When they reached the gates, the British soldiers travelling with them were waved through after a brief check of their ID, but when Todd and Khan tried to follow them, the two armed guards blocked their way. Khan could see the looks of contempt aimed at his black dishdasha and AK-47, but he kept his expression neutral and looked away as Todd first talked and then argued with them, his voice rising as he became increasingly frustrated.
As the captain argued with the guards, two soldiers walked over. They were not dressed like the other British soldiers he had seen, but wore shorts and sun-faded T-shirts. They were no taller than he was and did not appear particularly powerfully built, but from their lean, muscled physiques and air of relaxed self-confidence, Khan suspected they were special forces.