His thoughts turned to Ashkani himself. He remembered the man’s American passport. What did that mean? Whatever it meant, Joe needed to search this room. Find out everything he could about Mahmood Ashkani, if that really was his name. Find out who he was working for. And try to locate anything that might prove Joe’s own innocence.
Underneath the wardrobe he found four shoe boxes. They contained nothing but shoes. On top of the wardrobe was an old leather suitcase. Empty. He swiped the pile of books off the table – all in Arabic, they were meaningless to him, but he held each one upside down anyway, in case anything had been secreted between the pages. Nothing. And so he turned his attention to the cardboard boxes.
The room was littered with them – Joe counted fifteen in all. Three stood against the wall opposite the bed and window. He ripped them open. In the first he found nothing of interest – just old clothes, musty-smelling and crumpled. The second was more revealing. It contained a handgun – on examination he recognized it as a Glock 22 – along with a box of .40 S&W rounds. There was also money – not sterling, but a thick wad of Eritrean nakfa, bound together with a rubber band. Why did Ashkani have this currency? What were his links with Eritrea, that lawless land in East Africa that Joe knew was a sanctuary for AQ?
The third box contained the treasure.
The box itself was the smallest in the room – a 50cm cube. Its flaps were well sealed with packing tape, which meant that Joe had to rip through the cardboard to get inside. The first thing he pulled out was a newspaper: The Times. It took only a glance at the front page for Joe to see that it was the one that had his name, photo and crime plastered over the interior. He had no desire, or need, to read it again. In any case, he had already pulled out two DVDs in clear plastic cases. Each disc had been written on in black marker pen: the lettering was Arabic and Joe couldn’t understand it. And at the bottom of the box was a single sheet of A4 paper, on which was written, in a neat hand, a column of ten alphanumeric strings, followed by a three-letter code, followed by four digits. Joe only had to cast his eyes down the column once before realizing what they were.
Flight numbers. Airport codes. Take-off times.
‘Joe?’
Eva’s voice was weaker than ever.
‘Joe, I think we need to get to a hospital… Conor too…’
Joe nodded. She was right. He looked across the room at her, then back to the contents of the box. ‘Give me two minutes,’ he said.
Clutching the two DVDs, he hurried downstairs again, barely glancing at the old lady as he ran into her front room. The red standby light of her television was on. He opened the white-painted cabinet beneath it to find an ancient VHS machine and a DVD player, both covered in dust and clearly seldom used. He switched on the DVD player and inserted the first of the two discs. Moments later he was staring at a black and white image on the screen with a sick, knotted feeling in his stomach.
He recognized Lancing Way at once, and the black Discovery that had pulled up in front of his own house. And, of course, he recognized himself stepping out of the car on the day he had returned from Bagram, his scruffy black beard still intact, his North Face bag slung over his shoulder. He stared in shock at the screen, trying to work out where the image had been shot from. From the angle he deduced that a camera must have been hidden on the first floor of the house directly opposite his, where old Mr Thompson lived by himself. He watched himself knock on his own front door before disappearing inside.
The screen went black.
His hands were trembling as he ejected the disc, proof positive that he’d been under surveillance and that Ashkani had at least had access to it, even if he hadn’t organized it. What would the second DVD show? He barely dared look. JJ’s house? Caitlin? Was his murdered, brutalized partner about to appear before his eyes?
He started the disc and, with his heart thumping, stepped back to watch it.
He did not see himself. He did not see Caitlin.
He saw a dead man talking.
Thin, Middle Eastern, with a grey-streaked beard and wearing a simple, plain dishdash and a white headdress.
The nose was pronounced. The lips were slightly apart. The forefinger of his right hand was held aloft, but he was looking down, as if reading from some text that was out of shot.
The last time Joe had seen this man, he’d been shrouded in a body bag, carried by two SEALs through a compound in Pakistan towards a waiting Black Hawk. Now he lived again on this television screen.
The footage was grainy and shaky – clearly taken on a handheld camera, or even a mobile phone – but Osama bin Laden’s voice was clear enough. He spoke in Arabic, calm and measured, but whoever had made this video had intended it for English-speakers, because at the bottom of the screen were some amateurish subtitles in gaudy white letters. Rage rising in his gut, Joe read the words as the voice of bin Laden filled that quiet, dark room:
‘People of America and Britain, I address my words to you all. I begin by telling you that, although your governments spend more money on wars against the people of Allah, who built the heavens and the earth in justice, than…’
The screen crackled and blurred for a moment, then grew sharp again.
‘…once more we have shown that it is not within your power to stop the brave ones whose purpose is holy Jihad. It was on September 11 that nineteen young men were able to bring fire and death to America. And on May 11 we will have done it once more…’
The sick feeling in Joe’s stomach intensified. Suddenly only half his mind was on the screen. The other half was calculating today’s date.
‘…the infidels will be brought from the skies in balls of flame… None of you are safe…’
He’d got it wrong. Surely he’d got it wrong…
‘…know that His law is retaliation in kind. The killers will be killed… whoever obeys Him will enter the Garden, whoever disobeys Him will be refused… by the will of the Prophet my people can strike you down with ease…’
The screen went blank. Joe continued to stare at it for a handful of seconds.
He hadn’t got it wrong. The eleventh of May was today.
Joe was on his feet and hurtling up the stairs three at a time. As he burst into the bedroom he startled Eva. Conor was still motionless on the bed. Joe strode over to the cardboard box that had contained the DVDs and grabbed the A4 sheet again. He scanned down it: the first five flight numbers were adjacent to airport codes that he recognized: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Edinburgh, Belfast. The following five were American: Portland, San Diego, Minnesota, Detroit, Chicago.
He checked the flight times. All the UK flights were scheduled to leave at or around 1000 hours, the US flights any time between five and seven hours earlier local time, because of the time differences.
Ten planes. All in the air at the same time.
A video of bin Laden, clearly recorded before the raid in Pakistan, gloating about a fucking spectacular to take place today.
‘What time is it?’ Joe breathed still staring at the piece of paper in his shaking fist.
Eva didn’t answer.
‘What’s the fucking time?’ he yelled. He spun round, to see Eva’s pale face looking warily at him. Conor had started to cry. Joe rushed over to the other side of the room, grabbed Eva’s wrist and looked at her watch: 0744 hours. Two hours and sixteen minutes. Could he get to one of the airports on the list in that time? Not a fucking chance.