Marine I SBS Read online

  Contents

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  1

  ‘Let’s go for a drink,’ McClure said, surprising both himself and her.

  He was in one of his stranger moods, Annie thought. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to spend time in a pub with him, but there was nothing on telly and it would be nice to get out for once. ‘OK,’ she said.

  He swung himself off the bed, pulling the sheet with him. ‘I need a shower first.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ she said, not bothering to pull the sheet back across her breasts. It would have been quicker to have a shower together, but she knew instinctively that he wouldn’t like the idea.

  Ten minutes later they were both dressed and ready to go. ‘I left the money on the pillow,’ he told her as they started up the street towards the pub on the corner. It wasn’t one she would have chosen, but at least he wasn’t wearing his uniform. These days that was like a red rag to a bull to some people.

  As he got the drinks – a pint of bitter for him, a pint of Guinness for her – she sat and wondered what they would talk about after four years of nothing but fucking.

  For the first half-hour they talked about her – mostly, she suspected, because he didn’t want to talk about himself. ‘My dad was killed in Korea,’ she volunteered, ‘before I was born. Mum brought me up on her own. She’s still going – she lives in Southampton on her war pension, playing bingo and watching telly.’

  ‘What do you do when you’re not . . . ?’

  ‘Working? I go places. Twice a year. Nowhere really exotic – just package tours. They’re dead cheap if you take last-minute cancellations, and since I don’t have many advanced bookings myself . . .’ She grinned at him.

  ‘Where’d you go this year?’

  ‘Tunisia. And I got to ride a camel in the Sahara.’

  For a while they talked about places they’d been, and it seemed to her that he might even be opening up a little.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ she risked asking after he’d bought another round.

  ‘London,’ he said, without too much reluctance.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘I grew up in Kilburn.’

  ‘So why did you join the Marines – being a Londoner, I mean?’

  He almost smiled. ‘Swimming. I was a good swimmer.’ He was being modest – he’d been the West London junior freestyle champion. ‘And I wanted to be a soldier, so it had to be the Marines. They’re the only soldiers that swim.’ This time he did smile, and it transformed his face. Only the eyes resisted – the feeling from them was like a bruise.

  Annie felt a rare sense of confusion. She wanted to reach out and comfort him, and knew that he’d be outraged at the thought. ‘I have to go to the Ladies,’ she said.

  He sipped his pint, still thinking about the swimming. He knew now that it had saved him from either an early death or a life in prison. Before he’d discovered, almost by accident on one of his European football trips, that he could swim better than the average fish, he’d been well into a downward spiral. ‘Going bad’ as they said in American films.

  He’d been kicked out of three schools, had run with the Chelsea Shed lads and been arrested several times. He’d had no interest in football, but the violence had excited him, taken him out of himself. It was the only thing he’d ever been good at until he discovered how fast he could swim.

  That had been the year it had happened. He had always been angry, but up until then he had just let it out – there had been no control, no using it. That year he had turned it inwards, learnt to use the anger like fuel. It had given him back his control, allowed him to make it as a Marine, all the way up to a sergeant’s stripes in the SBS.

  Annie was walking back across the room, hips slightly swinging, red hair dancing on her shoulders. She’d once admitted to being over thirty, and McClure would have added another ten years, but she was still a sexy woman.

  A man at the bar said something to her and she stopped to say something back. One of her regulars, he supposed; it didn’t upset him.

  Then the man said something else, and she turned away from him, her face hardening.

  ‘What was that about?’ McClure asked when she got back to their table.

  She could see the glint in his eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said. A year or so ago the man had screwed her, short-changed her, and then hit her when she complained – all of which was par for the course. What had upset her just now was the realization that he didn’t even remember doing it.

  ‘What about your parents?’ she asked McClure.

  He took his eyes off the man at the bar and shook his head, as if he was trying to shake himself free from their memory. ‘My dad was Irish. He left when I was three. My mum liked to think she was a hippie.’ She did what you do, he thought, but she couldn’t get it together to charge for it. ‘She walked in front of a bus when I was thirteen,’ he said.

  By accident or on purpose? Annie wanted to ask, but she didn’t suppose it mattered very much to him.

  There was a silence. He was remembering visiting his mum’s grave in Kensal Green Cemetery the year before. He’d stood there in the sunshine, wondering why the fuck he’d come. He had no good memories of her, just the smell of dope and knowing from an early age that he had only himself to rely on. And yet, for the first time he could remember, the tears poured down his face.

  She’d had red hair too.

  ‘I’d better be getting back,’ Annie said. ‘I may work on my back, but I never seem to get enough sleep.’

  He gave her another half smile and drained his pint.

  She was still fastening her coat on the pavement outside when the man she’d spoken to at the bar emerged behind them. He was probably still in his thirties, slightly balding, wearing jeans and a tan leather jacket. He looked like he fancied himself, McClure thought.

  ‘Hey, hold on a minute,’ the man said.

  ‘What do you want?’ Annie asked coldly.

  He laughed. ‘What do you think I want – a palm reading? I want what you sell – a quick fuck.’

  ‘Not tonight,’ she said, and turned away.

  He laughed again. ‘I thought whores were like taxis – not allowed to refuse a fare.’

  ‘Get lost, mate,’ McClure told him, resisting Annie’s tug on his arm.

  ‘Gary, come on,’ she urged.

  ‘Yeah, Gary, come on,’ the man mimicked. ‘She’s old enough to be your fucking mother!’

  The next thing McClure remembered Annie was pulling at his arm and shouting in his ear. The man was lying on the pavement in front of him, blood streaming from his nose and forehead, breath rasping from his throat. A small crowd of people had poured out of the pub and were now staring at him from a safe distance, a mixture of awe and hatred on their faces.

  ‘Someone get an ambulance,’ Annie snapped at them, pulling McClure away.

  Seconds later she heard the first sirens. ‘You’d better disappear,’ she told him. ‘I’ll tell them I’ve never seen you before tonight. They won’t waste much time looking.’

  He looked at her, and she thought she could see gratitude and resentment warring in his eyes. ‘Thanks,’ he said curtly, and started running.

  2

  Uday al-Dulaini checked his appearance in the glass window of the door which led down to the basement, rearranged his tie a few millimetres to the left and descended the steps. Kusai Hussein was waiting for him, standing with hi
s hips up against the rim of the large bath which had earned the whole building its nickname of the ‘Sheep Dip’. On Uday’s last visit to the basement some months before, the pitted vat had still been full of industrial acid and a dead Kurdish rebel had been hanging from the scaffolding above, his legs and lower torso half dissolved from their immersion in the bath.

  This time Kusai was alone, and the various pieces of apparatus, which at first sight reminded visitors of a Western work-out gym, were not in use. Uday wondered once again why his superior had chosen this place for the meeting, and hoped once again that complete privacy was the only reason. He didn’t like the idea that Kusai might be threatening him. The Mukhabarat boss was not invulnerable, but he was Saddam’s brother, and Uday wanted to keep on his good side until such time as he could afford not to.

  Kusai certainly wasted no time on civilities. ‘So where is the little shit?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘He’s in Istanbul,’ Uday said. ‘He’s been there for two days. Staying in a small hotel.’

  Kusai raised an eyebrow, and ran the fingers of his right hand along the rim of the bath. ‘So how did he get away?’

  Uday sighed. ‘He just took a bus to Makhmur, walked across into the northern zone and got the Turks to let him across the border.’

  ‘Why wasn’t he under guard?’

  ‘He was, but the two men concerned . . . I dealt with them personally.’

  Kusai smiled to himself. ‘So what does he know and who has he told?’

  ‘He hasn’t told anybody anything specific. At the moment he’s still haggling with several English and German papers, trying to push up the bidding for his story. All he’s told anyone so far is that he has sensational new facts about our nuclear programme.’

  ‘Does he?’

  Uday knew Kusai wanted a definite answer, but he shrugged anyway. ‘It’s hard to say. He was told he would be moving in order to work on the new programme, but not the location. He knows what the programme is, of course. And as to where, it’s possible he picked up one of the rumours that have been flying around, and he may even have believed one of them . . .’

  ‘The location is the only thing that matters,’ Kusai said.

  ‘Of course,’ Uday said, allowing himself a trace of irritation. ‘I don’t think he knows, but if he does, he hasn’t told anyone else. My . . . our people have the phones covered and he hasn’t posted anything.’

  My people, Kusai thought, noticing the slip with amusement. Uday had always been an arrogant little puppy, and here he was, all five foot six of him, with his over-long hair and his immaculate suit, practically usurping Kusai’s own position as head of the Mukhabarat. But Kusai had to admit that the little puppy was very efficient. ‘I assume you’ll also be dealing with this in person,’ Kusai said.

  ‘Of course.’ Uday looked at his Rolex. ‘I have a plane in just over an hour.’

  Kusai massaged his moustache. ‘You must walk a fine line on this one. I want him thoroughly discredited as far as the rest of the world is concerned, but our scientists have to find out what the penalty for treason is. You understand?’

  Uday resented the tone, but knew it would not be prudent to let the feeling show. ‘I already have a team working through the man’s records, and by the time they’ve finished editing his life story no one will believe he was interested in anything other than money and vices.’ He allowed himself a thin smile. ‘By the way, the woman he took wasn’t his wife but his mistress. And the wife’s angry and frightened. She’ll say whatever we need her to.’

  Kusai straightened his back, causing the bath to rumble on its foundations. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Call me from Istanbul.’

  They went up the steps together and parted in the lobby, Kusai heading up to his office on the second floor, Uday walking straight out to the waiting limousine. His driver scuttled forward to open the rear door.

  ‘The airport,’ Uday told him, and pushed a button on the CD player, flooding the air-conditioned car with En Vogue. He wasn’t that crazy about the music, but the videos of the group which he had seen on MTV had fuelled his fantasies for several weeks.

  At the Tigris the Mercedes took the bridge lane reserved for government vehicles, surging past the gridlocked traffic in the other lanes. Further downstream the reconstruction of the bridges destroyed by American bombs seemed to be making no appreciable headway.

  Uday thought about snorting a line of coke, but decided against it. At the other end of the bridge a crowd of people was trying to cross the road, and the driver slowed slightly, allowing a flashing glimpse of the faces. Some were staring angrily at the car, some almost flinched, but most managed to hold their expressions in neutral. Uday was enjoying the variety when a particularly beautiful girl – a Kurd, probably – caught his eye. He glanced at the Rolex and sighed. There was no time to stop and invite her into the back seat – not today.

  A little over four hours later, Barzan al-Hassan watched as the Turkish Hava Yollari airbus from Baghdad came in to land at Ataturk International, and lit a cigarette as it began taxiing towards the terminal. He felt nervous, though there was no real reason why he should. He had followed his instructions to the letter, and nothing had gone wrong. The traitor scientist was living on borrowed time.

  But Colonel al-Dulaini always made Barzan nervous. Uday, the colonel insisted on being called, as if they were young men out on the town together, rather than boss and subordinate in an organization not noted for its tolerance of anything other than unthinking obedience.

  He had been in awe of Uday at the beginning, in awe of his good looks, his self-assurance, his lack of scruples, his certainty. And he supposed he still was, but after two years of working with the man, there was also something else, some other feeling for which Barzan had yet to find a name . . .

  There was no point in thinking about it. He ground the cigarette under his heel, thinking that it would probably be his last for several hours, and popped a mint into his mouth before making his way downstairs to the arrivals gate.

  The young colonel emerged with his usual alacrity – despite their country’s current pariah status he never seemed to have any problems at airports. Officials melted away before Uday, happy to give him whatever he asked for. Women fell at his feet, or would have done if Uday had ever bothered to ask. Where women were concerned he simply took.

  Barzan walked forward, trying to rid himself of negative emotions. ‘A good flight?’ he asked, taking his superior’s suitcase.

  Uday grunted. He was glad to be off the wretched plane. Flying bored him, and lately . . . It didn’t frighten him of course, but there was a feeling of being caged, of powerlessness, which he found thoroughly distasteful.

  The two men walked out to the car, a Mercedes identical in all but colour to the one Uday had left behind in Baghdad. In the spacious rear they sat facing each other, and Barzan found himself wishing that the drinks cabinet by his side was primed with more than fruit juice and mineral water. But alcohol, like tobacco, was forbidden in Uday’s presence, allegedly on religious grounds.

  ‘Any new developments?’ Uday asked, as the car gathered speed on the highway into the city. To their right the Sea of Marmara stretched away like a lake of oil, with only a few pinpricks of light visible on the distant Asian shore.

  ‘One,’ Barzan told him. ‘About three hours ago he phoned the Sunday Times in London, and agreed to send them the first two pages of a document he says he has. The document itself is fifty pages long. The newspaper will examine the two pages and then agree a price for the whole document.’

  ‘Has he sent them?’

  ‘No. If he had tried then I would have prevented it. He told the English paper he would send them tomorrow morning by express post.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Uday said. ‘Now tell me about the hotel they are staying in.’

  ‘It is in Binbibdirek, in a quiet street only a few hundred metres from the Blue Mosque. It is small – three storeys, four rooms on each, and Abas Naji has taken one of
the front rooms on the top floor, the one on the left as you look from the street.’

  ‘We’ll go straight there,’ Uday said, and Barzan instructed the driver accordingly.

  The lights on the Asian shore drew steadily closer as the Sea of Marmara narrowed towards the Bosphorus, and within half an hour the car was pulling up a street away from the defecting scientist’s hotel. ‘I rented a room across the street,’ Barzan explained. ‘It was expensive, but I didn’t want to risk scaring him off.’

  ‘You acted correctly,’ Uday said, as Barzan had known he would. His boss had never shown any inclination to worry about expenditure. If the Mukhabarat had accountants, they were doubtless of the creative variety.

  The back way to the rented room led through a dark and muddy alley, which did nothing for the shine on Uday’s Gucci loafers, and up a flight of outside steps. A Turkish woman was sitting smoking at the top of the latter; she looked at them with interest but said nothing. The rest of the Mukhabarat team were in the room, one with his binoculars trained on the street and opposite hotel, the other lounging in a chair.

  Uday examined the view through the window. The Feneri Hotel looked like a haunt of travelling salesmen or an urban port of call for visitors up from the country. It would not be on any tourist list.

  The curtains of the relevant room were pulled shut, but moving shapes could be seen through the thin material.

  ‘What’s the woman like?’ Uday murmured.

  ‘She must be over forty,’ Barzan said disparagingly, ‘but she’s good-looking just the same.’

  ‘Have you fixed me up for tonight?’ Uday asked.

  ‘The embassy arranged it. She’ll come to your room at ten.’

  Uday spent another thirty seconds watching the opposite room, then abruptly turned away. ‘Let’s go.’

  Fifteen minutes later he was checking into the Sophia Hotel, where Barzan had booked him a luxurious three-room suite overlooking the Golden Horn. After dismissing his subordinate – who retired to the bar for a much-needed cigarette and whisky sour – Uday stripped off his clothes and stood under the shower for several minutes, thinking about the task which Kusai had set him. Nothing had occurred to him when there was a knock on the suite’s outer door.