Ultimate Weapon Read online

  He climbed down on to the platform at Paddington Station. As he stood next to the train, he checked his mobile again. Nothing. He pressed dial on the phone. ‘Hi, this is Sarah,’ repeated the familiar voice. ‘I can’t take the call right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’

  Where has she got to, he wondered.

  Nick looked at all the people bustling through the station. Places to go to, he reflected. Offices and homes waiting for them. The only appointment I’ve got is a plane back to Algeria in a month’s time. He shifted his rucksack on his back and started walking towards the Bakerloo Line. He could take that to Oxford Circus, switch on to the Central, then get a train to Cambridge from Liverpool Street. A poster for the Evening Standard caught his eyes. SADDAM’S MISSILES 45 MINUTES FROM LONDON, it said in thick black letters. Bollocks, thought Nick. I’ve been there. It takes those jokers forty-five minutes to tie their shoelaces in the morning.

  With his rucksack still over his shoulder, Nick pushed his way through the barrier, and down on to the platform. Sarah’s bound to turn up soon, he decided. When she does, I’ll be waiting for her. Go out and have some good food. And a drink.

  Lana was wearing just a simple white T-shirt and a pair of baggy jeans when she opened the door. Her blonde hair was tied up behind her head. Nick had met her several times before: she’d been sharing a flat with Sarah for the past three years while they both completed their doctorates. She treated him with the polite indifference that the young have for their friends’ parents. Nick had got used to it as soon as Sarah hit her teens. You were just part of the grey mass of boring old people in the background.

  ‘Is Sarah around?’

  Lana shook her head. At a moment like this, Nick was suddenly conscious of his appearance. He was still wearing his jeans and a black sweatshirt, and with his rucksack and tanned skin he looked like an itinerant building worker. Most of the other students at Cambridge had dads with skins that were pale white from sitting in an air-conditioned office all day, who arrived in brand new Land Rovers, and who had plenty of contacts to fix up their kids with work experience that would sparkle on the CVs. And me, thought Nick. If you want to know how to shoot a man between the eyes at a hundred yards so that he never gets up again, I might be able to help you. Apart from that, I’m useless.

  ‘Not for the last few days.’

  Nick stepped into the flat. It looked like student digs anywhere. A sofa, a TV, a hi-fi with an iPod plugged into it, and that musty smell you get when you stub cigarettes out in beer cans. There were two bedrooms, a sitting room, kitchen and bathroom. ‘How long exactly?’ said Nick, looking back at Lana.

  She shrugged. ‘Almost a week.’

  ‘A week,’ snapped Nick. ‘What the hell is she doing disappearing for a week?’

  ‘I’m her flatmate, not her mum,’ said Lana crossly.

  ‘Her mum’s …’

  Nick was about to say the word dead, but he stopped himself just in time. Lana knew, of course. She was Sarah’s best friend. But it never did any good to mention it. People just squirmed with embarrassment. ‘A bender?’

  Lana reached across the table, and poured herself a glass of apple juice from an open carton. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘How long since the last one?’

  Lana sat down. Nick could see the strain in her eyes. Like most students, she liked to act cool, and nonchalant and tough, but you could see the anxiety just below the surface of the skin. ‘Almost two months, I reckon.’

  ‘Has she been drinking much?’

  ‘Only at parties,’ said Lana. ‘A few cocktails, some gin. Nothing much.’

  ‘She seem OK in herself ?’

  Lana smiled. ‘The same old Sarah,’ she said softly. ‘Brilliant, but impetuous.’

  ‘Nothing different?’

  ‘She’s been working incredibly hard, that’s all,’ said Lana. ‘Spending whole nights down at the lab. I think she’s getting close to finishing her thesis. Last time I saw her, she wouldn’t tell me anything about it, but I could see she was excited.’

  Nick was glancing around the sitting room. On the CD rack, he could see a few of Sarah’s favourites, and on the bookshelf there was a picture of her with Mary. He remembered the picture, although it was more than a decade since he had taken it. They were standing on one of the ledges that jutted out of the side of the trails leading up Mont Blanc. It must have been just after six in the evening, and they were all tired after a long Sunday afternoon walk. The sun was just starting to set, and the light was fading into the white snow to fill the valley below with a glowing orange light, like the embers burning away as a fire extinguishes itself. Mary was holding Sarah tight to her chest, and both of them were smiling. That was two days before she died, thought Nick. The last sunset she ever saw.

  ‘She’s been gone a week, you reckon?’ he said, looking back at Lana.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Lana quickly. ‘I was down at Mum and Dad’s for the weekend. When I came back on Tuesday, she wasn’t here.’

  ‘And you last saw her when?’

  ‘Friday.’

  It was Thursday today. That meant she could have been gone a week. Or maybe just three days. Sarah went on occasional drinking binges, and had done ever since she was fifteen. She just took off, stayed in some town somewhere by herself, drank in the local bars, or just in a hotel room. Nick didn’t know that much about it. She wouldn’t tell him, and quite possibly couldn’t quite remember herself. He’d been on a few week-long drinking sessions himself before he kicked the bottle, and he knew how hard it could be to remember. Usually she came back after three days, and by the time she sobered up she was fine again. It was almost as if it was something she just had to get out of her system.

  ‘A note?’

  Lana shook her head. ‘When she takes off, she never says anything.’

  He walked through to the bedroom. The duvet was drawn up, and a couple of cushions arranged perfectly next to the pillow. Sarah never bothered with decorating any of her rooms. Even as a child, she never had a special toy, or posters on the wall. She travelled light through life. Another reason, Nick reflected, why she might have made a good soldier.

  ‘Has she packed a bag?’

  ‘Not that I can see,’ said Lana. ‘But you know what she’s like. A pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and she’s happy.’

  Nick wrote his mobile number down on a piece of paper, and put it down in front of Lana. He could see the first drop of a tear starting to form in her eye, but decided to ignore it. He had never been any good at comforting women. My talent is for making them feel worse, not better.

  ‘If you hear from her, give me a call,’ he said, his tone harsh. ‘Right away.’

  * * *

  One of these decades, I’m going to buy myself a suit, thought Nick as he stood at the customer service desk of the bank. Start looking like a businessman. Maybe that way I’d start getting better service in these places.

  ‘The name and account number,’ said the girl at the desk, who according to her lapel badge was called Sandrine.

  ‘Nick Scott and Sarah Scott,’ said Nick. ‘It’s a joint account. The number is 62115073.’

  ‘I’ll check.’

  Nick had spent the night at a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of the city. He liked Cambridge, had done ever since Sarah got her place at King’s College six years ago. Maybe it was the pride, he sometimes reflected to himself. No one from his family had ever been to university, never mind Cambridge. Mary’s family had all the brains: her grandfather had been a professor of biology at Manchester University, and her father a doctor. As he walked around the city, he’d always taken pleasure from its ancient courtyards, and the views of the river as you stepped away from the colleges.

  Not this night, however. After leaving the flat he’d checked his kit into the B&B, then walked down to the local pub to get some food and a drink. He allowed himself one pint of lager and a double Irish whiskey to chase down the burger he o
rdered from the bar. The drink tasted good. Too good, he reminded himself as he finished the whiskey. Something is wrong, he kept telling himself. I know Sarah’s disappeared plenty of times, so maybe I shouldn’t worry, but this just feels bloody crooked.

  ‘Letter two and six from the password,’ said Sandrine, returning to the desk.

  ‘L and H,’ answered Nick.

  He’d set up the joint account when Sarah started university. Her fees were paid for, but Nick hadn’t wanted her to take out a student loan to live on: he’d signed up for the army at eighteen, and the only loan he’d ever taken in his life was to start the ski school. He hadn’t needed to borrow money so he didn’t see why she should either. From his wages on the rigs, he paid a thousand every month into the account he’d opened in both their names, but it was her money: Nick never touched it. This month, he’d decided to check the account, just to see if it gave any clues as to where she might have got to. Most bank statements these days gave you the location of any cash machine you used. If she’d taken out any money in the past couple of days, he’d find out where she had gone drinking. Maybe even find her, and get her sobered up.

  Sandrine looked down. Her expression changed subtly. Nick could hear a slight intake of breath, then a measure of curiosity as she looked back up at him. ‘You have a hundred thousand pounds, she said. ‘Plus seven hundred and thirty-two.’

  Nick leant across at the neatly printed-out piece of paper on her desk. ‘There’s some mistake,’ he said.

  ‘Would you like me to check?’

  He looked straight at her, and he could tell from her eyes that she was already suspicious. Men who look like me don’t usually have a hundred grand of loose change in their account, he thought. And if they do, they certainly know where the hell it’s come from.

  ‘Just give me a copy,’ snapped Nick.

  He took the sheet of paper and walked swiftly away from the bank. As he hit the street, he turned left. He had no idea where he was going, or why. He just needed to feel the ground beneath his feet, and let the cold morning air fill his lungs. Anything to try and calm himself down.

  A small thunderstorm of connections and conjectures had already exploded within his mind.

  Sarah has disappeared.

  There’s a hundred grand in the account.

  Something has happened to her.

  THREE

  Jed looked around the apartment. There was a view out across the Thames, and in the distance he could just make out the top of Big Ben. The block was one of the modern apartment buildings that had sprung up on the south side of the river in the past few years: huge, luxury towers where the flats started at half a million, and the penthouses set you back three or four times that amount. The walls were painted off-white, and the furniture was minimal and modern, but there were two nineteenth-century oil paintings dominating the main walls. Both military pictures, Jed noticed. Scenes from the Battle of Waterloo, unless his history was rustier than he thought.

  ‘Nice place,’ he said.

  ‘Convenient for work anyway,’ answered Laura from the kitchen.

  Jed poured himself a glass of Chablis from the bottle open on the dining table. A Diana Krall CD was playing on the hi-fi – the kind of sultry modern jazz that girls liked to go with their pasta, salad and white wine. It tasted cold and dry: Jed would have preferred a beer, but at least there was a kick to the alcohol. There were moments, sitting in a place like this, when he wondered whether he’d made the right choices in life. Four years ago, he’d graduated from Cambridge with a 2:1 in engineering. With that qualification, he could have walked into a job in one of the City banks, and might well be pulling down a hundred thousand a year by now. A lot of his mates were. Instead, he’d signed up for the army. They had been recruiting hard around the universities in the past few years. The days of the tough, brave squaddie were over, the Rupert signing him up had argued. There was so much kit to operate these days, the army needed men with a first-class technical education. Jed enjoyed the work, no question about that. Like all soldiers, he got a kick from testing himself against the most extreme conditions imaginable. You climbed a wall of fear every day. There was nothing to beat the feeling as you made it to the other side.

  Still, when he saw a flat like this, he wondered. The pay was crap, and the risks terrible. He knew why he’d really joined the army. It was just that he didn’t like to admit it to himself.

  ‘You’ve already got a drink, I see,’ said Laura, stepping out of the kitchen. ‘The food will be ready in five minutes.’

  Jed was surprised by how good she looked. It was a different Laura from the one he’d met at the offices of the Firm. Her blonde hair had been let down, and curled around the delicately sculpted features of her skin. A dusting of make-up had freshened up her face, and her lips were glossed until they shone. When she’d called to ask him over to dinner, he’d guessed it was some kind of come-on, but he couldn’t be certain. Now I’m pretty sure.

  ‘What have you been doing with yourself ?’ she asked, pouring herself a glass of the Australian white and raising it to her lips.

  Jed laughed. ‘A squaddie with a few days’ leave in the big city,’ he said. ‘What do we usually do with ourselves?’

  Laura smiled. ‘Get rat-arsed, and go on the pull.’

  ‘Well, I tried to persuade a couple of the lads we should take in a poetry reading, then catch a string quartet at the Wigmore Hall. But I got outvoted. So, yeah, we got tanked up, and went looking for slappers instead.’

  Jed grinned, but actually it wasn’t quite true. After the meeting at the Firm, he’d been told to stay in London for a few days in case they needed to speak to him again. He was allocated a room at the Chelsea barracks, but there was nothing for him to do, so he’d filled up the day watching reruns of the football on Sky, and trying to get hold of Sarah. She wasn’t answering her mobile, and there was no reply from the flat either. Last time they’d met, she’d insisted they were on one of their breaks, but she did that all the time, and he’d learnt not to take much notice. Now she’d vanished from the face of the earth, the way she did sometimes. A girlfriend was around to take your calls, when you had some unexpected time off. Was that too much for a guy to ask for, he’d asked himself bitterly as he ate some miserable mess grub and watched Andy Gray on Sky Sports overhype yet another match between two teams who weren’t going to win anything in a million years.

  ‘I’m sure the slappers couldn’t believe their luck when you boys came in,’ said Laura. ‘You’re in better shape than most of the brickies and insurance salesmen they usually get off with.’

  Jed smiled, following Laura into the kitchen as she took the pasta out of the pan, mixed in the seafood sauce, and tossed the dressing on to the salad. It was an age since he’d had a woman cook for him: Sarah wasn’t much of a hand in the kitchen, and although there had been other girlfriends during the many breaks in their relationship, none of them had known any more about cooking than he did. Maybe I don’t attract that kind of girl, he thought. The homemakers see me, and they run a mile. And, frankly, I’m not sure I blame them.

  Laura was wearing a crisp white blouse, through which he could clearly see the outline of a black bra that held her small yet rounded breasts in place. Her tan leather skirt revealed a pair of legs that were perfectly toned, and the smell of the food mixed with her musty perfume to create a scent that was delicate, feminine yet strong all at the same time.

  ‘What’s a smart guy like you doing in the Regiment?’

  ‘Who says I’m smart?’

  Laura took a sip of her wine. ‘I took a good look at your CV before choosing you for this mission,’ she said. ‘A degree from Cambridge. Not many Regiment guys have one of those.’

  ‘More than there used to be.’

  Laura nodded. ‘The world is changing. The battles we’re fighting now are more about brains than brawn. The old Regiment guys don’t really understand that.’

  Jed laughed. ‘I remember one of the old
guys explaining their SOP to me.’

  ‘And …’

  ‘Standard operating procedure for this Regiment, boy: Bang, bang, then run like fuck.’

  ‘Maximum speed and maximum aggression, that was always the old motto,’ said Laura. ‘Now maximum intelligence has been added to the list. The only trouble is, some of the older hands haven’t quite caught up with what century we’re living in.’

  ‘And that’s why you wanted me to go into Iraq?’

  Laura nodded. ‘We need people who can recognise what they’re looking at.’

  Jed served himself another helping of the seafood pasta: the dish was a mixture of fresh prawns, squid and clams, drenched in oil, garlic and basil, and made a change from the sausages, chips and beans that made up a typical menu in the mess. He could eat his way through her whole larder right now. ‘I didn’t recognise it, though.’

  ‘You did enough.’

  Jed shook his head. ‘I could feel it during that meeting. Everyone was pissed off with me for not getting closer to that lab.’

  ‘We’re under a lot of pressure,’ said Laura. ‘I’ve been at the Firm for thirteen years now, ever since I got out of university. I’ve never known anything like it. The place is buzzing, but it’s also getting a bit weird. We have to come up with the goods on Iraq, no matter what. And it doesn’t matter how we get them.’

  ‘Or else that dickhead Muir bites your arse.’

  Laura laughed. ‘You saw the bugger in a good mood. You should catch him on an off day.’

  ‘So what did I see in there?’ said Jed, looking straight into Laura’s eyes.