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  Clearly alarmed by the closeness of the encounter – a police car would certainly have stopped – the man with the Smith and Wesson hit Masoud hard on the head with the heavy butt. The boy’s knees gave way, he was silent, and the black-clad kidnappers ran him to the rear of the vehicle.

  From his position by the radiator, Slater watched their legs moving between the back wheels as they got the rear doors open. His breathing was even, now, and his hands steady — fatigue had been replaced by a terrible clarity. Releasing the Mauser knife from its lanyard, he transfered it to his left hand. The blade was short, but it should serve its purpose.

  Quietly, he crept along the verge by the vehicle. Having achieved their objective, the terrorists were making no attempt at silence, and were conversing in breathless Arabic as they bundled Masoud into the luggage area. Slater guessed that they were arguing as to whether they should gag the boy, hit him again, tie him up, or all three. He had no idea which man had the gun and which man the knife. The basic rule was to assume that both men had firearms. He was two yards from the nearest man now.

  One yard.

  With the rear doors open all that Slater could see was a waist and a pair of legs. The black windcheater had ridden up, showing two inches of T-shirt above the unbelted jeans. Light flooded from the interior of the vehicle.

  With precision, Slater planted the four-inch Mauser blade to its hilt in the nearer man’s spleen. In the same movement, letting go the knife, he brought down the carved prow of the chair-leg on the sacro-iliac joint at the base of the second man’s spine.

  The nearer man froze, almost senseless with pain, and Slater jammed the half-door of the Cherokee against his back. Bellowing, the second man reared towards Slater, feinting with the knife. But his pelvis and sacrum had been smashed by that first, terrible blow. Will power propelled him a further step and then, twisting in agony, he fell to one knee.

  The first man, eyes dulled with shock, was straightening up in light from the back of the Cherokee now, and this time Slater saw the dull glint of gun-metal. Half-turning, he swung his improvised club in a scything back-hander, felt the splintering crunch as it connected with the side of his attacker’s skull. The firearm clattered to the road.

  Both men were down. The knifeman appeared to be praying, the gunman’s prostrate body was shaking as if in the throes of some desperate rape.

  Who hesitates, dies. Think detonator. Think grenade.

  Slater, his system screaming with adrenaline, didn’t hesitate. Snatching up the Smith and Wesson from the gutter, he put two .45 rounds into the base of each man’s skull.

  For thirty seconds, heart pounding, he stood there with the dead men at his feet. The police would be along soon, he was sure – assuming, that was, that Mrs Mackay had done her stuff. If necessary he could flag down a car, although not that many cars used this road at night. Apart from the school and a few farms, it didn’t really go anywhere.

  Masoud, he thought. I must see what those bastards have done to Masoud. He took a step towards the Cherokee – and to his horror saw it begin to move away in a cloud of exhaust, rear doors flapping.

  Sweet Jesus, thought Slater. There was a driver. But where . . . ?

  He must have seen him come over the wall, he realised. Flattened himself in the front of the car. And hearing the shots had decided – entirely sensibly – to get the hell out.

  With two flat tyres, however, the Cherokee wasn’t going anywhere. It managed twenty yards and then came to a halt.

  Running, Slater caught up with the vehicle. He waited a half-dozen yards behind it, the revolver pointing at the doors, which had swung shut on the recumbent form of Masoud.

  A half-minute passed, and then a male voice, Geordie-accented, came from the rear compartment.

  ‘I’m coming out.’

  The rear doors opened once more. Against the light Slater could not see the man’s features – only that he was wearing a fur cap with ear-flaps and holding a barely conscious Masoud by the collar. Condensing breath rose smokily from both figures. Was the driver armed? Slater had to assume he was, that a weapon was pressed to the small of Masoud’s back.

  Arms outstretched, he thumbed back the revolver’s hammer and trained the inch-long barrel on the driver’s head. He’d made this shot many times in training – the shot through the chin that passed through the hostage-taker’s lower skull and obliterated the cerebellum, ensuring that not even the slightest reflex movement threatened the hostage’s life. Out here in the dark, however, it was a desperately risky play: the heavy Smith and Wesson was the last weapon he would have chosen for precision shooting in low light conditions. An inch off target and he’d blow Masoud’s head apart.

  And then a faint, rhythmic pulsing at the horizon was suddenly everywhere around them and the scene was flooded with light.

  ‘Drop your weapons,’ came a disembodied voice. ‘I repeat: drop your weapons.’

  Dead leaves and frost particles whirled in the police helicopter’s rotor-wash. Opposite Slater, Masoud slid to the ground and the Cherokee’s driver, a young Asian in a track suit who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, slowly raised his hands. There had been no gun.

  Releasing the hammer with his thumb, Slater flipped the Smith and Wesson to the frozen verge. Placed his hands on his head.

  Waited.

  TWO

  The custody suite at Henley-on-Thames police station, Neil Slater mused, was not designed with comfort in mind. The bedding was thin, a drunk in the next cell had alternately howled and sobbed all night, and there was an all-pervasive smell of vomit overlaid with disinfectant. Slater had been tempted to sit up replaying the events of the evening in his mind, but had opted instead to try to sleep and clear his head.

  The shakes had come soon after midnight, as Slater had known that they would, along with the fatigue and depression that invariably follows the adrenaline rush of violent action. He’d ridden them out as best he was able and had finally nodded off at about 2.30. His drift into unconsciousness had been eased by the certainty that his actions, given the circumstances, had been the correct ones.

  In a counter-terrorist engagement, it had been drummed into him, you didn’t leave wounded members of the opposition lying around where they could reach for a concealed grenade or detonator. If he’d had some armed assistance, perhaps the men’s lives might have been spared. As it was, he’d had no choice.

  For the terrorists themselves he felt not a gram of sympathy. They’d knifed Gary Ripley in the guts when he threatened to hold them up and they’d shot the unarmed security guards without a thought. Had they encountered Jean Burney and Christopher Boyd-Farquharson after kidnapping Masoud rather than before, the nurse and the boy would probably be dead too. No, by the time Slater had reached them, the two men had sacrificed any right to mercy or to any benefit of the doubt, and they’d known it.

  But there was still, Slater was well aware, a price to be paid. A couple of hours’ lost sleep was not going to be the end of it. There would be the flashbacks and the mood-swings that invariably follow a face-to-face killing. Alcohol took the edge off the process, but fucked you up in other ways. And there was no one, ever, that you could talk to about any of it.

  Once, as a newly badged trooper, he’d gone into a wine bar in Hereford in search of others from his intake. There had been a tight knot of NCOs standing around the bar, and a staff sergeant had called him over, stood him a bottle of Michelob, and introduced him to the others. Among them was a corporal with conspicuously long hair who had just returned from a tour of duty in Belfast. The group had been welcoming, asking how he was settling in, but then an inoffensive-looking civilian in a windcheater had brushed past the long-haired corporal, nudging the arm that held his bottled beer.

  The reaction was instantaneous. Grabbing the man by the lapels, the corporal had slammed him against the bar. ‘Who the fuck do you think you’re pushing around?’ he’d whispered, his face an inch from the terrified civilian’s. The others had pu
lled the corporal back, pinioning his arms, and Slater had seen that he was quivering with rage, his eyes narrowed and his teeth bared like a dog’s.

  The incident was swiftly over. While the senior NCO apologised profusely to the shaken civilian, the others calmed down the corporal. Two men were deputed to walk him back to Sterling Lines but the corporal shook them off, insisting that he was fine, that it had been a mistake, that there would be no more trouble.

  He carried on drinking – they all did – and the NCOs talked Slater through life in the Regiment – where to find the best bars, the cheapest cars, the prettiest girls. And then the corporal, who had been standing in silence, drinking bottle after bottle of Beck’s, looked Slater in the eye. ‘It’s shite,’ he said quietly. ‘The whole thing’s fucking shite. The Regiment’s shite, the job’s shite . . .’

  For a moment, the others fell silent.

  ‘You want to know a secret?’ the corporal continued in the same flat, undemonstrative tone. ‘They don’t die. You shoot them, you stab them, you do what you like, but they don’t fucking die.’

  ‘All right, that’s it!’ snapped the staff sergeant. ‘Tony, Stevo, get him back to the Lines.’

  The trio swiftly disappeared and the staff sergeant shook his head. ‘He’s had a bit of a rough tour. He’s still in the old Darkland.’

  ‘Darkland?’ Slater enquired.

  The sergeant glanced at him for a long moment, expressionless, and then returned to the inspection of his drink. It became clear that no answer was forthcoming.

  But Slater had remembered the expression.

  Darkland.

  He’d never seen the corporal again.

  Breakfast was an Egg McMuffin from the high street and a mug of the desk sergeant’s tea.

  ‘Just had that headmaster of yours on the phone,’ he told Slater with cheerful satisfaction.

  ‘Pembridge,’ said Slater.

  ‘That’s the one. Sounded like a very unhappy man!’

  ‘Have you met him?’

  ‘Once or twice, yes. A couple of years ago he tried to make the case that we should have a permanent detachment guarding the school. When the super suggested to him that he put his hand in his pocket for the privilege he . . . got rather irate. Started spouting on about foreign policy by other means, invisible exports, defence sales to the Middle East – all bloody sorts.’

  ‘And ended up going private,’ said Slater.

  The sergeant rolled his eyes but kept his opinion of the security arrangements to himself. At the desk the phone started ringing. ‘No rest for the wicked,’ he grumbled, retrieving Slater’s empty mug.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that!’ murmured Slater, stretching out on his mattress.

  He was not feeling as bullish as he sounded. Two dead men, considered in the cold light of day, meant some very serious aggravation. No one would have blamed him if he had merely dialled 999 from the Matron’s phone and left it at that – technically speaking, in fact, that was precisely what he should have done. But whether Masoud would have survived if he’d done so was another matter. By the time marksmen and a hostage rescue unit had been activated, the snatch team would have been long gone. And even if they’d located them, the Arabs hadn’t looked like men who’d come out with their hands up – no matter how politely they’d been asked.

  How would the school view the incident? Badly, that was for sure. When Slater had joined Bolingbroke’s staff six months earlier he’d told Pembridge that he’d spent the majority of his service career with the SAS, and indeed had played rugby for the Regiment, but had requested that these details were kept quiet. Pembridge had agreed, and the story was put about that Slater had been a physical training instructor with the Royal Engineers – his parent regiment.

  If an inquest on the dead men revealed Slater’s true identity to the press, there were going to be some very angry faces on Bolingbroke’s Board of Governors. Any coverage would be damaging enough; an SAS connection would punt the story straight to the front page and keep it there.

  The Regiment themselves, he guessed, would probably be understanding. Not happy – the SAS hated seeing their name in print in any connection – but understanding. They would know that whatever Slater was, they had made him.

  It was for this reason that he had rung Lark as soon as he’d arrived at the station in the early hours of the morning.

  Lark was a clean-up man, a conjuror in pinstripes who made things disappear. If some chopping had to be done – as it had had to be done in Gibraltar and on several less-publicised occasions — then Lark was the man who smoothed out the rough edges afterwards. He was a Treasury Solicitor, one of a highly secretive elite working out of the Metropole building on Northumberland Avenue, where a small band of high-flyers concerned themselves with the legal interests of the Ministry of Defence. In the last two decades he had represented the difference between jail and freedom to at least a dozen SAS soldiers and other security services operatives. If Lee Clegg and his mates from 3 Para had had access to Lark after gunning down a joyrider at a Belfast check-point, Slater mused, they wouldn’t have ended up being banged up.

  Lark presented himself in the Henley-on-Thames custody suite at precisely 9am, carrying a Thermos of fresh coffee and a folded copy of the Daily Telegraph – details which Slater appreciated. As usual Lark was impeccably dressed. His tie was that of one of the older civil service rowing clubs.

  ‘Mr Slater,’ he began, extended a well-manicured hand, ‘I hadn’t expected to see you again . . . quite so soon.’

  ‘We do have to stop meeting like this,’ Slater agreed wryly, running his hand over his chin. The lawyer’s immaculate grooming made him feel like a roughneck. His mouth tasted sour and he needed a shave.

  Lark smiled – or at least the corner of his mouth momentarily flickered – as he loosened the lid of the flask. ‘Usual drill, Mr Slater,’ he said. ‘Tell me everything. And I mean everything.’

  Savouring the coffee, Slater started at the beginning; Lark made notes.

  When Slater had finished, the Treasury Solicitor steepled his fingers. ‘I’ll tell you the bits I don’t like,’ he said thoughtfully, wrinkling his nose as if tasting a mediocre sherry. ‘For a start I don’t like the chair-leg – it argues premeditation of assault, I think . . . I think that what you actually took from that room was a torch – a big fifteen-inch Maglite, perhaps. A torch would have been an entirely prudent thing to take outside with you. If you were later taken by surprise and forced to defend yourself with it, well, that’s something else — do you take my point?’

  Slater indicated that he did.

  ‘I think it’s possible that a friend might drop in with just such a torch later today and that you might have a look at it – handling and fingerprinting it fairly extensively in the process.’

  Slater nodded. Relief flooded through him. They were going to give him the full five-star service – exactly as if he’d still been ‘in’.

  ‘It won’t be found at first, of course. We’ll give it a night or two. And I rather think that someone’s going to have to have a quiet word with Matron about that chair. Any feelings about what line we should take with her?’

  ‘The truth?’ hazarded Slater.

  Lark looked appalled. ‘I’m not sure that we—’

  ‘Listen, she’s seen one of her patients abducted and one of them stabbed, she’s had a fourteen-year-old boy and a nurse beaten senseless just because they happened to be on her wing. She doesn’t need to be threatened or bribed, she just needs to be put in the picture. She’ll say what needs to be said.’

  Lark pursed his lips doubtfully and then nodded. ‘The second thing I’m not very keen on,’ he continued, ‘is the impression – a false impression, I’m sure – that your reason for pursuing these men down the school drive was to provoke a confrontation. I put it to you that your original intention in leaving the school grounds was to ascertain the registration number of the kidnappers’ vehicle from a distance in order to convey t
his information to the police. Would this interpretation of your actions be an accurate one?’

  Slater assured him that it would.

  ‘And that having come upon their vehicle apparently untended, you attempted to disable it by slashing the front tyres. Unfortunately, while doing so, you were discovered – knife in hand – by the kidnappers . . .’

  Slater nodded.

  ‘A fight ensued . . .’

  Slater nodded.

  ‘You see, the impression I really want most strongly to dispel is that you effectively mounted an ambush on these men.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Slater.

  For two unbroken hours they went through every move, every gesture, trimming the action so that no legal blame could adhere to Slater. A phone call by Lark from the front desk established that Ripley was in intensive care in Reading, but expected to make a full recovery.

  Lark excused himself at 11.30, leaving Slater with the Daily Telegraph. Slater read the newspaper from cover to cover, unsuccessfully attempted the crossword, and eventually tried to sleep. And then, at 2.00, the door of the cell was unlocked, and his effects were handed back to him. ‘Whole thing’s been taken out of our hands,’ the desk-sergeant told him resignedly. ‘Security implications, apparently, whatever that means. I’m to tell you’ – he glanced at a Post-It note attached to the counter – ‘that you’ll be contacted in due course by Mr Lark, vis-à-vis a witness statement and possible Court of Inquiry.’

  Slater nodded gratefully. This was exactly what had happened on previous occasions. Lark had spent a few days hammering out a suitable statement, he’d been called in to sign it, given a copy to memorise – to ‘internalise’ as Lark put it – and the whole dossier had then been consigned to some dusty drawer at the MOD. Classified for reasons of national security. As a system it wasn’t watertight – there were increasing demands in the left-wing press for the ‘accountability’ of the security services – but it had seen Slater right so far.