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  But why were they spaced out that way?

  The problem he faced was the lack of cover out here save for the dark. If one of them should turn back for any reason he’d be caught wrong-footed with nowhere to go.

  He compromised by keeping to the edge of the runway, where the grass and brush were heavy enough to give him an even chance of staying out of sight if he had to hit the ground fast.

  He counted his paces to give himself a feel for the distance he was covering, eyes fixed on the lights. They didn’t seem to be getting any closer, which was good, and as long as he could see three still moving, that was all he had to worry about.

  Then he realised they’d stopped moving. Had they sensed his presence?

  He froze and lowered himself to the ground, moving slowly. Quick movement, even at night, gets spotted easily, he knew that from his military training. He could hear the murmur of the men’s voices now, carrying on the night breeze with nothing out here to stop them. And they were closer, about a hundred yards he figured.

  The lights were still in a cluster, but now much closer. He edged forward, treading carefully to avoid dry strands of brushwood and hoping he didn’t step on a snake.

  Eighty yards. Their voices were more than just a murmur now, and he could pick out Paul’s quite easily over the other two. He sounded impatient and snappy, a man who liked giving orders and had no time for delay in others.

  Tommy-Lee sank to his knees and edged closer, pushing aside clumps of coarse grass with his hands.

  Fifty yards.

  He was close enough now to see that the three men were all wearing head-lights and standing around four of the crates from the hangar; two large, two small. Maybe that explained the way they’d been moving: they’d been carrying the crates in a line. By the lights he could see that Donny was on his knees and holding one of the white drones, which now had its skids and propellers fitted. He placed the drone to one side, then lifted one of the control units with its video screen out of the smaller box next to it. After a few moments he stood up and said something to the other two, and all three men moved back several feet and spread out.

  Donny hunched over the controls and there was a frantic buzzing noise and a flick of light, and the drone seemed to shake itself before lifting off the ground and into the sky, the white casing a ghostly blur reflecting the glow of the men’s head-lights. When the buzzing began to fade, Paul said something sharp. Donny replied and seconds later the buzzing grew again and the drone appeared in the lights, moving about fifteen feet off the ground. It flitted back and forth unevenly, then shot away again and over their heads.

  It was now heading directly towards the position where Tommy-Lee was hiding.

  He burrowed backwards, keeping low, then turned and scurried away on his elbows and knees as fast as he could, toes digging into the ground to give him purchase. Seconds later the drone passed right over his head and he hugged the earth and froze, then turned back towards the men. He watched it go but didn’t dare move; he was still in their direct line of sight and all it would take was for one of them to take their eyes off the drone and they might spot him. As soon as it flitted away to one side, drawing the head-lights with it, he started moving again to give himself some distance in case it came back.

  Suddenly the buzzing took on a higher, more frantic pitch. Tommy-Lee turned round to look. There was a flash as the drone was caught in one of the men’s head-lights for a split second, then it dipped suddenly and hit the ground with a dull crunch.

  He heard Bill laugh. But Paul said something ugly, cutting the big man off in midstream. Then Donny stood up where he’d been kneeling on the ground and walked away like he’d lost his pet dog.

  Paul hadn’t moved; he stood like a statue, watching Donny. Then he lifted his head and said something sharp to the big man, who turned and began walking in a wide circle, head swinging left and right like a guard dog, the light playing on the ground wherever he looked. When he turned his way, Tommy-Lee ground his face into the dirt and didn’t move a muscle. He was pretty sure the big lug wouldn’t see him this low down, but he held his breath all the same, breathing in the aroma of sun-baked soil, prairie dog shit, or whatever the hell else was laying around here.

  After a couple of seconds Bill’s head-light swung away and he resumed his patrol. Tommy-Lee relaxed. That Paul must have the instincts of a jackrabbit; yet he was sure he hadn’t made a wrong move and given away his presence. So what had spooked him like that?

  Then he recalled the camera he’d seen in the bottom of the smaller case, and the screen attached to the control unit. Damn, he’d been careless; the thought that they might have been able to see him watching them made his blood run cold.

  Even as he thought it, he saw something. It was a flicker of movement beyond where the men were standing. It was too quick to identify, but something low to the ground. He figured it might be a fox or a dog come to see what was going on, and Paul had seen the same movement.

  He breathed more easily and moments later saw Donny rejoin Paul. The bigger man was giving the geek a hard time, the words snapping out like a whip in the dark. Donny didn’t say a thing, just stood there and took it, head down like a beaten child. After a while Paul seemed to run out of steam and the geek went back to kneeling on the ground again, only this time working on the other two crates.

  Ten minutes later another shape took off, dipping sharply towards the ground before recovering and disappearing into the dark just like the last one. This one had a small red light on it, showing its position about fifteen feet above the ground and moving to one side some fifty yards away.

  Tommy-Lee figured it was some kind of locator light so they could follow its progress in the dark. Maybe the last one hadn’t been working properly. The light didn’t stay on for long. After several manoeuvres that took it closer and closer to the ground, it suddenly flew high in the air like it had been fitted with a booster rocket, the buzzing frantic and high-pitched. He heard Paul shout a warning and saw Bill running off to one side to get out of the way. But it was too late. The red light dipped and went down to the ground way faster than it had gone up.

  There was another crash followed by a howl of frustration from Paul. This time Bill was silent. Paul strode across to Donny and swung his arm in a round-house punch. There was the sound of a fist on flesh and Donny gave a shrill cry and fell to the ground, his head-light flying off to one side.

  Tommy-Lee had seen enough. The morons had as much chance of keeping those things in the air as they did of flying to the moon. Whatever they thought they were going to do, they weren’t going to accomplish anything except make holes in the ground and smash up their toys.

  All he wanted was his money and he could be out of here.

  As for Chadwick, he’d have to take his chances.

  He was turning to go when he heard a phone ringing, followed by Paul’s voice. He sounded angry.

  “I told you who they work for. All you have to do is track the movements of any personnel from London. Use the brotherhood to enter the company’s systems. There are only two of them and one is a woman; it should be simple enough. Do not let them get in my way. I don’t care how you do it, but find them, follow them, and stop them! End it now!”

  twenty-eight

  Donny Bashir was feeling sick to his stomach. Which he thought was pretty odd, considering he hadn’t eaten properly for days now. As his mother would have surely told him, he was hardly big enough to sustain a diet in the first place; drinking only water and nibbling at biscuits was no way to stay healthy.

  The fact was, the very idea of eating had begun to desert him in earnest the moment he’d heard Asim—or Paul, as he liked to be known outside their group—finally outline the precise details of his plan to strike a blow at the Americans and send a clear message around the world to demonstrate that nothing and nobody was beyond the reach of the truly committed.


  Jihad, he had announced with ringing drama, was inevitable and just, and freedom was fast becoming a reality for all who were oppressed.

  Freedom and the oppressed. Words he’d heard uttered often and with great passion back at the mosque in Queens, and during other meetings with like-minded individuals. And Asim seemed to use them as a daily mantra for driving himself and others on in what he saw as their holy duty. But was it really a possibility? And what would real freedom be like, anyway? In the last few weeks he had felt less freedom in the company of Asim and Bilal than he’d ever experienced growing up, as a student at NYU, or in his job with Apple. With these two men he’d been watched every second, his day laid out before him with no time off, little or no opportunity to relax, and absolutely no contact with outsiders under pain of retribution.

  Was this what freedom would always be like?

  He lifted his head from the pillow of the cheap motel bed and looked across at where Bilal lay sleeping on the other side of the room. The man mountain was snoring as usual, his feet poking off the end of his bed and his muscular shoulders at rest like slabs of meat. He slept like a baby every night and Donny wondered if anything made much impact on him, even the idea of killing many people if the plan they were engaged in came to fruition.

  He checked the window. It was still light outside. His watch said four p.m. An occasional vehicle rumbled by, but this back-road motel was in its dying days and didn’t seem the kind of place to receive much commercial or leisure traffic. In fact, it pretty much reflected the pattern of low-level, roach-ridden dives they’d been confined to for the past few weeks since getting together under Asim’s directions; deliberately choosing cheap motels on county roads and moving every two or three nights so as not to attract attention.

  Travelling under the guise of a university film crew working on a documentary about rural society in the states of Oklahoma and Kansas, they had elicited few questions, as Asim had predicted. After all, who would care about students and their strange comings and goings and late sleep-ins? In addition, they had the right props in the form of cameras and recording equipment in case anybody did ask. Asim had even thought of that, making Donny shoot some footage of barns, roads, and countryside, and record some commentary in case they were stopped and questioned.

  It was forward planning, as Asim had explained, and it seemed to work. While Donny and Bilal were hardly of obvious white American stock, Asim looked and sounded like a university professor and was able to talk his way out of trouble with a few jokes and a genial manner.

  Donny tried covering his ears to blot out Bilal’s snores, but without success. The truth was he was too wired to sleep and felt like screaming with frustration … and not just a little naked fear. He’d given up everything in the name of jihad to join Asim and Bilal. Swayed by the words of visiting preachers at his mosque in New York and a growing yet inexplicable feeling of discontent, he had allowed himself to be talked into the promise of achieving something glorious that would make his name live forevermore.

  True, he had achieved much already, from his studies in IT and engineering at NYU Polytechnic, followed by his internship at Apple. But success had somehow failed to ignite the fire he’d been expecting and which everybody had told him would surely come his way if he applied himself to his studies.

  It had been hearing Asim explain how a man could use his successes to build into greater success and glory that had finally captured Donny’s attention. He had no idea how Asim had chosen him, only that within minutes of being introduced, he had found somebody who seemed to know and understand him like no other person had ever done.

  He rolled over and felt a sharp jab of pain slice through his jaw where a tooth had become dislodged. It was a reminder that Asim’s understanding was a double-edged sword, and of his ability to turn from light to dark in a flash. The beating last night had brought with it the painful realisation that his belief in Asim had slowly been slipping away over the past few days, especially after the two drones had remained in the air for no longer than a few minutes before crashing to the ground. Bilal hadn’t helped; the big man, whom he knew was secretly taking steroids to maintain his grotesque appearance, which was surely contrary to Islam, was as openly contemptuous of Donny’s skinny frame and bushy hair as he was of his education, and took every opportunity he could find of calling him “geek” and putting him down, even occasionally swatting him across the head like a misbehaving child.

  Donny closed his eyes tight, seeing once again the awful mental reel of the second drone crashing to the earth, its tiny red light a taunting beacon of its imminent destruction and his failure to control it, followed shortly afterwards by a furious punch to the face from Asim and a snigger from Bilal as he fell down.

  He couldn’t understand it; he had aced the many games in circulation at school and college, no matter how complex and demanding, and understood the inner working of the drones in a way neither of the other two ever would, including making modifications to the parachute system capsule requested by Asim. Yet mastery of their flight somehow continued to elude him in spite of his efforts to relax and “feel” at one with the machines in the way he knew he should.

  He knew why it was, though; it was Asim’s presence that was affecting him. The man’s brooding aura and the way he carried his gun, and his sudden bursts of fury when something didn’t go well or there was a delay he could not control, radiated out like waves of energy, making Donny feel sick and terrified.

  Especially after events at the airfield, and the construction crew. God, he’d been so stupid, so blind.

  Bilal’s snores were getting louder. For a crazy moment Donny speculated on the best way of silencing the noise forever, along with the pumped-up moron’s open contempt for him. Maybe if he could summon enough strength to bring the wooden chair down across his throat or substitute his steroids tablets with something more lethal—

  He rolled off the bed and stood up. It was no good; the moron would swat him across the room with no more effort than he would toss a pillow. Besides, thoughts like these were getting him nowhere and he was certain Asim had a way of sensing what was running through his mind. He needed to get out, if only for a short while. If he didn’t, he’d go mad.

  He picked up his shoes and stepped over to the door, easing it open and taking the key with him. As usual Asim had gone out to yet another meeting, telling them that they should wait inside for him to come and pick them up. Wherever the meetings were, they seemed to be almost daily and never at the same place in which they were staying. In fact, thinking about it, he’d never once been aware of Asim staying in the same motel, claiming he had people to see and plans to refine. Donny wondered who these mystery people were. He’d found the courage to ask that very question a couple of days ago, but had been told sharply to mind his business since the less he knew the less he could betray if anything happened and he got taken by the police or the FBI.

  If he’d needed a reminder of his place in the pecking order, that had been it.

  He pulled the door closed and slipped his shoes on, then walked across the parking lot to the road. The motel sat on the outskirts of a small town, with a deserted and abandoned gas station a hundred yards away that seemed to be sinking into the scrubby lot surrounding it as if going back to nature. He turned right and headed along the grass verge towards a cluster of buildings a quarter of a mile away. He hadn’t been paying much attention when they’d driven through the town to the motel, but a sour comment by Bilal about a garish bar fronting the street had embedded itself in his mind.

  A beer. That’s what he needed. A Bud if they had it, maybe a Coors. He’d have to eat something to take the taste away, otherwise Bilal would smell it on his breath and tell Asim.

  He walked quickly, hoping for two simple things above all else: one, that Asim would not come driving along the road right now, and two, that Bilal would continue snoring like the pig he was.

 
; The bar was called Jokers, and seemed busy. Several cars stood outside, and three trucks. He took a deep breath and stepped inside.

  Nobody even looked at him.

  He let the door swing shut. Fifteen people inside—thirteen men and two women—plus the bartender. He always did that on entering a building; he had no idea why, it was a habit he’d picked up as a kid. See the room and know instantly how many were there.

  “C’n I do for you?” The bartender smiled and stood aside to let him see what was on offer.

  Donny asked for a bottle of Bud and the bartender had it out of the chiller cabinet and on the counter inside three seconds. Donny paid up and drank it down almost in one, then asked for another.

  Man, that was so good. He hadn’t had a beer in a long time and felt himself starting to unwind immediately, a pleasant warmth spreading through his belly and right up his neck to his head. He’d show Asim and Bilal—and the “expert” Asim had kept talking about, the man who would teach him to fly the drones. Damn, he didn’t need teaching. He was a graduate of NYU and wasn’t about to be shown up by any so-called expert. And Bilal could go swallow a bucket of steroids. Brains beat muscles any day.

  He glugged down the next beer almost as quick, this time watched by the bartender.

  “A rough day, huh?” the man said automatically and wiped a few stray spots of beer off the bartop. If he was curious about where Donny was from, he clearly wasn’t about to come right out and ask.

  “You could say that,” Donny replied and signalled for another bottle.

  This one came with a friendly warning. “You want to slow down there, son. You look like you haven’t eaten in a while, and that stuff can go to your head.”