He stopped alongside her and turned to watch the area by the Mall. Rik moved away without acknowledging her, heading towards the path to watch their flanks.
‘What happened to you?’ Harry asked quietly.
‘I needed space,’ she replied. ‘It all got too much, especially seeing Marshall and talking about what happened.’
‘No problem. You OK now?’
‘I don’t know.’ She turned away, chin dropping. ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’
Harry saw Rafa’i emerge from under the trees. He stood looking shakily around him, his nervousness obvious and out of place, like a crack head in a tea room. Rik was thirty feet away, being tapped for money by an old woman in a scruffy coat, but still alert. He looked up and nodded, signalling that he’d seen the Iraqi, too. His gaze dwelt for a long while on Joanne, and he shook his head.
Harry ignored him. He was waiting to see what Rafa’i would do. If they approached him, he might run for good. Better to let him come to them once he felt safe. He rechecked the area. If Dog was going to make his move, he would do it any time now. Then he’d make his getaway. This was the window of maximum danger.
‘It seems,’ Harry said casually, ‘that there are some question marks against your Mr Rafa’i.’
‘You’ve just discovered that?’ Her reply was acid, resentful, the words as sharp as carpet tacks.
He glanced at her, surprised by the venom in her voice. She was shaking her head as if Rafa’i being questionable was a given. It was in odd contrast to the way she had talked about him before, when she had expressed almost a closeness in their working relationship.
‘Come again?’
‘I used to think he was the whole shilling,’ she explained flatly. ‘But there were things he said. . people he met that made me wonder. He said a couple of times that he wanted Iraq free of the outside world. I took that to be the Coalition, especially the Americans.’
‘Well, nobody could argue with that. We’re hardly welcome guests, are we?’
‘He meant everyone: advisors, aid workers, army, engineers, contractors, the lot. All out. Even people like me. Especially people like me.’
‘Well, there’s no pleasing some people.’
The attempt at humour didn’t carry. Joanne said angrily, ‘It was like he wanted to build a wall around the country and turn it in on itself. And after everything we’d done to help. Oh, I know the arguments. . that we shouldn’t have been there, anyway. But still.’ She stopped, breathing heavily.
Harry said, ‘Why are you so angry?’
It was as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘Then he spun the whole thing and said he was just describing an old Iraqi dream. But it wasn’t his dream, he said. It was the people’s dream. And the people had a right to have what was theirs. He only wanted a peaceful country again.’
Harry wondered where this was going. Where the change in tune was coming from. She seemed to be rambling, as if seeing Rafa’i once more had revived an old discussion, ripped open old sores. But which ones?
‘Everybody wants peace out there,’ he said coolly, trying to figure her out. ‘But if Dog gets his way, Rafa’i won’t live to see it.’
She made a noise but said nothing.
‘Still, at least,’ Harry continued, ‘we know what he looks like. . unlike his two mates.’
Her eyes flickered. ‘What?’
‘He’s got help. Two men. Word is, they’re on their way here. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they look like.’ He was about to add that she, on the other hand, might do, having been on the same training course, but decided against it. It wasn’t the time or the place.
‘You don’t know much of anything, do you?’
‘Sorry?’ It was a coldly dismissive comment, uttered in a dull, flat tone. But she shook her head and chose not to elaborate, so he let it go.
All the same, he felt a stir of unease.
FIFTY-FOUR
‘What’s his problem?’ Joanne was staring hard at Rik, her expression hostile. She had been watching him intently for a few minutes now, as if suddenly troubled by his lack of warmth towards her.
‘Rik? He trusts people. . takes them at face value. It’s something I’m trying to cure him of.’ When Harry looked across at him, Rik turned away. Rafa’i was beyond him, waiting in the background.
‘He’s too close to Rafa’i,’ she said. ‘He should move away.’
‘He’s fine where he is.’ Harry couldn’t see the problem, and put her attitude down to last-minute nerves. For some reason, she and Rik were rubbing each other up the wrong way.
But she wouldn’t let it go. ‘Rafa’i won’t come if he sees him standing there. He needs to move to one side.’
Harry sighed and signalled to Rik to move aside a few feet, which he did with reluctance, the old woman tagging along. ‘That do you?’
‘Yes. You have to wait here.’ She walked away without waiting for a reply, clutching her rucksack to her chest.
Harry wanted to go after her and demand to know what was on her mind, but he didn’t. Rafa’i still hadn’t moved from his position by the trees. In fact, he’d retreated a few feet and was now in dappled shadow, casting around him like a startled deer ready to bolt. Something about the situation must have spooked him.
Rik prised himself away from the old woman and joined Harry, watching as Joanne moved into an empty space where Rafa’i would be able to see her.
‘What did she have to say?’ he muttered darkly.
‘Not much.’ Harry’s phone rang. ‘Keep an eye on her.’ He took it out and thumbed the button.
‘Harry?’ It was Ballatyne. ‘Is Archer with you?’
‘She’s close by. Why?’
‘Where are you?’
He hadn’t told Ballatyne where they would be this morning. The intelligence man’s instinct would have been to swamp the area with men in boots and jumpsuits. Rafa’i would have spotted them immediately and disappeared.
‘We’re waiting for Rafa’i,’ he replied enigmatically. ‘Problems?’ He checked there was nobody nearby and switched his phone to loudspeaker so Rik could hear.
‘You could say that.’ Ballatyne’s voice sounded tinny in the morning air. ‘We’ve had a call from the Met. We asked them to alert us if anything out of the ordinary happened. A former Special Forces man, Gary Pellew, has been found shot dead in a hostel near Victoria.’
Dog.
‘They say he’s been dead several hours — sometime between eleven last night and five this morning. Difficult to tell without forensic results, but we won’t get those for a while. It was a single shot to the chest, that’s all we know. His room was clean apart from a change of clothes, a knife and a semi-automatic with a full load and a spare mag.’
Fighting kit. Harry glanced across at Rafa’i, still hovering beneath the trees, then at Joanne, who was checking the immediate area, her head swivelling constantly like a lioness on the prowl. Most of the time, he noted, she was watching him and Rik.
The threat had been three-fold. With Dog down, that left two to be accounted for. So who the hell had shot him?
‘Do they know what calibre weapon?’ Harry asked.
‘No. Small, I’m told. Why?’
‘Jennings was shot with a small calibre.’
Rik muttered and flicked open his jacket. Harry could just see the butt of his semi-automatic.
‘Noted,’ said Ballatyne. Then in a bleaker tone, ‘We’ve also had more info from the Ops room in Baghdad. The comms corporal who was on the log the day Humphries was killed has come back.’
‘Go on.’
‘When we asked for the original check, we were only concerned with outgoing calls, to check on any arrangement Humphries had made. They were all normal business, all checked and cleared. But the corporal confirmed that the call Humphries received that day was on a secured line. That means it was an agency or military source. Humphries left the office immediately. Forty minutes later, he was dead.’