Saadi walked forward and looked down. The width and length were fine. He would have preferred it a little deeper, but time was passing and they still had a lot to do. He turned and issued a crisp order to the men guarding the prisoners. Intimidated by the threat of the Kalashnikovs, the captives walked over to the hole in single file and lined up along the longest edge of the pit.
It was only then — in that long moment of silence before the shooting started — that the appalling reality of their situation finally dawned on them. Their captors moved to stand in two groups, one at either end of the hole, their assault rifles trained on the prisoners.
The quickest way to finish the job would have been to use the Kalashnikovs, but over the years Saadi had developed a taste for a more personal kind of execution.
He stepped behind the first of the bound men and without haste drew a Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol from a holster under his gellabbiya. He extracted a suppressor from his pocket and attached it to the end of the barrel. Then he racked back the slide and released it to chamber a round, the sound of the mechanism loud and unmistakable in the silence.
‘Kneel down,’ Saadi ordered, not the faintest trace of emotion in his voice. As the Pakistani servant obeyed him, he aimed the pistol at the back of the man’s head and without hesitation pulled the trigger. The weapon coughed once. The nine-millimetre copper-jacketed bullet smashed into the man’s skull, bored straight through his brain, and emerged in a fountain of blood through his left eye. His instantly lifeless body flopped forward, tumbling into the pit.
Saadi glanced down at the corpse, then stepped across to the next man. ‘Kneel down,’ he instructed, but the man shook his head in a pathetic display of defiance. Saadi shrugged indifferently, took a half-step back, raised the pistol and shot his victim where he stood.
As the second body fell forward, a man at the other end of the line broke ranks and began running away, heading straight out into the desert. He made less than twenty feet before two of the Kalashnikovs fired, four bullets ripping through his torso and sending him screaming to the ground, his body arching and twisting in agony.
Saadi made no move to administer a coup de grâce, and neither did anyone else. Instead, he raised his voice slightly. ‘If you try to run, you’ll die slowly and very painfully. If you stand still, it will be quick and it won’t hurt. But you are all going to die.’
The stable’s owner was the tenth man Saadi reached, and he turned to face his executioner as the body of the man beside him fell into the open grave. He had managed to work loose part of the tape covering his mouth, and as Saadi raised the pistol he looked straight into his eyes and uttered a single word: ‘Why?’
‘You don’t need to know,’ Saadi replied, and squeezed the trigger.
The man who’d run was still alive by the time Saadi reached the end of the line. He walked over and watched his agonized writhing for a few moments, then aimed the Browning and shot him through the head. At a nodded instruction, two of his men picked up the body and tossed it on top of the others. Another couple of his men swung the corpse of the Filipino manservant into the hole as well. Saadi approached the edge of the grave and looked down in satisfaction, even as Massood started the Bobcat to begin filling the hole.
Fifteen minutes after the last execution, Massood swung the digger onto the track and headed back towards the farmhouse. Before he left the site, Saadi carefully checked that no traces were visible. The terrain looked virtually the same as when they’d arrived and the bodies, he hoped, were buried deep enough not to attract scavengers.
In the stables, a dozen or so jittery horses looked out of their stalls as the men walked through the central yard. Saadi stopped and looked round. ‘Find it,’ he called, and moments later Bashar gestured to him.
From a stall in one corner, the head of a large chestnut horse was peering out inquisitively, showing no fear of the new arrivals. Bashar pointed to the wall beside the split stable door, where an ornamental plaque had been screwed. It bore a single word: ‘Shaf’.
Chapter Six
Their hotel was located on the outskirts of Old Cairo. It offered them a view of the Sphinx and the pyramids of the Giza Plateau lying on the other side of the Nile — at least from one of the corridor windows on the top floor, if you leant out far enough — though that was pretty much its only redeeming feature. But the two Americans weren’t bothered. They were used to accommodation of almost every type and standard, and they were only staying in Cairo until Dawson and Wilson arrived with the weapon. Then they’d head for the United Arab Emirates, but this time travelling in style.
O’Hagan picked a cyber café right in the centre of Cairo, and sat down at the keyboard while Petrucci ordered coffee. The system unit was on the table beside the monitor, and had a couple of USB sockets below the DVD drive. That was exactly what O’Hagan had been hoping for.
He logged on to the Internet and accessed mail2web. com, typed his email address and password, and pressed ‘Enter’. The connection was broadband, and the first messages appeared in seconds. There were only half a dozen in all, four of which he deleted immediately. He then opened the first of the remaining two, and noted its contents with satisfaction.
He looked up to ensure that Petrucci was still distracting the waiter’s attention, then reached into the breast pocket of his shirt. He pulled out a memory stick and swiftly slotted it into one of the USB sockets.
He first copied the open email message onto the memory stick, then clicked ‘Reply’ and rapidly typed an answer. Again checking he was unobserved, he attached three image files from the USB stick to the email and clicked ‘Send’. The images were small and the message only took a few moments to be transmitted. Then he opened the second message, and also copied that onto the memory stick.
O’Hagan extracted the USB device and nodded to his companion. Petrucci finally chose a couple of cakes, and let the waiter carry them over to the workstation. By that time, the flash drive was back in O’Hagan’s pocket, and he was busily reading the headlines on CNN.
‘Fuck a duck,’ Julian Caxton muttered, as Evans finished explaining why Tariq Mazen had requested their meeting.
The expletive was hardly characteristic, for Caxton was a devout Christian who rarely raised his eyebrows, let alone his voice. To Evans and his fellow SIS officers in Bahrain he appeared an anachronism, a throwback to the older, more genteel days of the service. An old-fashioned gentleman in a world that had largely forgotten what the very word was supposed to mean.
‘How certain is Mazen about this?’ Carole-Anne Jackson asked, frowning.
‘He’s not,’ Evans said. ‘That’s the trouble. His only witness is a Filipino hospital cleaner, and Mazen doesn’t even know his real name.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Caxton said firmly. ‘I know bin Laden has sympathizers in Bahrain and, let’s face it, he’s got support all over the Middle East, but I simply don’t think he’d have the unmitigated gall’ — that was more like Caxton; Evans would have said ‘sheer balls’, or worse — ‘to come here for medical treatment.’
‘I agree it’s not likely, but perhaps he had no alternative,’ Evans replied. ‘If it is bin Laden, his kidney complaint might now be so serious that, without dialysis or a transplant, he’ll die within just days or weeks. If that’s the case, he might be prepared to take the risk because he literally has nothing left to lose.’