‘Good Morning, Doctor. I apologise for my lateness. I’ve been watching you for the past forty minutes. You appear to be alone and you’ve just come off a flight so I know you’re not armed: you wouldn’t have risked it and there wasn’t time to sort out permission. I take it you’ve brought what I asked for?’
‘Where’s my daughter, Khan?’
‘All in good time,’ replied Khan with the smug smile of a man who knew he was in charge.
‘You’re getting nothing until I see my daughter,’ said Steven, his hands gripping the table edge as he struggled to keep them off Khan.’
The smile faded from Khan’s face. He placed his left hand on the table; it was clenched and holding something. Steven now understood why he hadn’t used this hand to free the laptop strap.
‘We don’t have any time to waste. I have a flight to catch. Your daughter is in a car in the car park. When you turn on my laptop and put in the memory card to demonstrate decryption of the disk that’s already in there, I will give you this.’
Khan raised his left hand but kept it clenched. ‘This is a transmitter. As long as I keep the contacts open by maintaining pressure on a spring, nothing will happen. Should I let go… for any reason…’ Khan watched to see that Steven had got the message, ‘the circuit will complete and the car your daughter is currently locked inside will explode. If the card is genuine, I will transfer the transmitter to you very carefully and you can keep the contacts open until your daughter is found and freed… or until,’ Khan glanced at the clock, ‘twenty three minutes have passed.’ After that, the car will explode anyway.
‘What car park is she in?’ demanded Steven. ‘This is an airport. There are lots of car parks, damn it.’
‘One of them.’
‘You bast…’
‘Time is passing. I suggest you turn on the computer.’
Steven opened the case and slid out a Sony Vaio laptop. He pressed the on button, finding it hard to take his eyes away from Khan’s clenched left fist as the machine powered up.
As the Windows jingle heralded the start of the session, Steven caught sight of Nick, the SAS man moving in the background. He sensed that he was looking for an angle that might give him the opportunity to shoot Khan without risk of hitting anyone else. This only added to Steven’s rising sense of panic as he neared the moment when he must insert the fake card. Nick couldn’t know about the triggering device in Khan’s hand. He wanted to make eye contact and shake his head but recognised that that could be equally fatal, causing Khan to release the trigger arm of the device and start shooting his way out in the aftermath of an explosion which would cause widespread panic. The fact that the café was busy was however, working in his favour. Nick couldn’t risk it. He brought out the card from his inside pocket. ‘How do we do this?’ he asked.
‘Start the disk then insert the card…’
Steven highlighted the disk drive and opened it to display gobbledegook on the screen.
‘Now the card.’
All the anxiety of the past hours, the fear for Jenny’s life, the regrets, the self-criticism, all disappeared in an instant to be replaced by cold, calm resolve. The ability to act under extreme pressure had kicked in, the quality that Macmillan had seen in him a long time ago, the very reason he worked for Sci-Med. It was now or never.
Steven pretended to have difficulty looking for the memory card slot in a machine strange to him. He examined both sides of the laptop with exaggerated head movement, the second of these involving moving his elbow to deliberately knock over the full mug of coffee that was sitting on the table untouched. It flooded the keyboard causing an immediate short circuit and blacking out of the screen.
In the tiny space of time that Steven anticipated he would have between shock registering on Khan’s face and his taking any action, Steven threw himself at Khan, having eyes for nothing but his left hand. He closed both his hands round it and held it shut. He was now hopelessly vulnerable, unable to stop Khan using his right hand to probe for his eyes. Steven was relying on Nick to put a stop to that.
Nick duly obliged. He arrived beside the two struggling men on the floor as if contriving to break up a fight but making sure he had his back to those in the café when he brought out his silenced pistol and ended Khan’s life with a solitary body shot which Steven noticed he even covered the sound of with a cough.
THIRTY ONE
Breathlessly, Steven explained to Nick why he couldn’t let go of Khan’s hand until he had control of the triggering device. He told him quickly about Jenny and the unknown car park and Nick used his radio to call in the others in his group. At that moment the airport police arrived on the scene — two burly officers carrying submachine guns.
‘Shut up and listen,’ snapped Steven they launched into their routine. ‘You’ll find my ID in my pocket when I stand up. I’m a Sci-Med investigator on a code red. Verify this with your superiors then get chummy here to somewhere a bit more private. He’s dead but let’s pretend he isn’t for the benefit of onlookers.’
He hoped that the people in the café wouldn’t be too sure what to make of the scene they’d just witnessed. With any luck they might conclude it was an unseemly squabble over coffee spilt over a laptop with a third man wading in to break up the resulting melee. The police were now on the scene; order would soon be restored. No need to panic, no need to get involved.
Steven succeeded in transferring the trigger device from the dead man’s hand to his own without releasing the spring. ‘I need some tape,’ he said to Nick as he got to his feet.
One of the police officers extracted Steven’s ID and held his lapel radio to the corner of his mouth to relay details while the other looked on suspiciously, his finger loosely curled round the trigger of his weapon. He turned to Nick who had just returned with a roll of tape from one of the flight desks. ‘And you are?’
‘I’m with him.’
Steven held down the lever of the device while Nick taped it tightly so that it couldn’t release.
‘Yes sir, understood sir,’ said the policeman into his radio before returning Steven’s ID and saying, ‘Apparently we’ve to do whatever you say, Doctor until the brass arrive.’
‘Close the airport to all traffic,’ Steven said. ‘All car parks have to be cleared of people and remain closed. There isn’t time to clear the terminal buildings so keep people inside. One of the cars in one of the car parks is going to explode in…’ Steven looked at the time. ‘Eleven minutes.’
‘Jesus,’ said the policeman.
‘There’s a little girl trapped inside the car. I need… volunteer officers to help look for her. If they should come across her, they should report back before they touch anything. She may be wired… She’s my daughter.’
‘Christ almighty…’
‘Get to it.’
Steven turned to Nick, ‘My impulse is to start running round the car parks at a hundred miles an hour like a headless chicken but we haven’t a hope in hell of covering them all… so it has to be best guess time.’
‘I don’t see him using any of the outlying ones,’ said Nick.
‘Agreed,’ said Steven. ‘And I’m going to guess he’s been using a hire car, probably from one of the big boys like Avis or Hertz so that’ll cut out a few makes and models. We can forget Range Rovers, sports cars and top-end marques. We’re looking for an anonymous run-of-the-mill model in… I think he’d go for the nearest car park to the terminaclass="underline" he had no reason not to. That means the multi-storey across the road. ‘Agreed?’