The Will Slater Series Books 1-3 Page 11

  Unconscious.

  Unarmed.

  Useless.

  He rolled onto his side to see Abu and al-Mansur locked in a wild brawl across the lobby. Both scrambled around on the slippery floor like drunken thugs, swinging their sagging limbs, neither doing much damage at all to each other.

  This wasn’t their world.

  Slater got to his feet and strode across the lobby. Al-Mansur saw him coming and recoiled away, noticing the unconscious soldier lying motionless on the floor behind Slater.

  The man realised what he’d gotten himself into.

  Slater reached down and snatched al-Mansur to his feet as if he were scolding a child. He simply lifted the Brigadier-General off the ground, letting his legs dangle uselessly, kicking in protest.

  Slater slammed him into the far wall hard enough to knock the breath out of the scrawny man’s lungs.

  Al-Mansur dropped pathetically to the floor, whimpering, rendered useless by the barrage of force applied to his body.

  Alongside Slater, Abu picked himself up off the marble floor, wiping a drop of blood away from his lip.

  ‘Did you really have to do that?’ he muttered, angry at being treated like a discarded plaything.

  ‘Had to use my surroundings,’ Slater said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  Slater gestured to the Brigadier-General at his feet. ‘I’m going to ask him a few questions. You’re going to translate. Got it?’

  Abu didn’t respond. A look of sheer shock had settled over his features. His gaze flicked from the unconscious guard — only now starting to twitch as his motor functions kicked in and he began to return to the realm of consciousness — to al-Mansur, beaten into submission with overwhelming force.

  ‘I don’t think I fully grasped what it is you do until I saw it up close.’

  Slater nodded. ‘Uh-huh. Can we deal with that later, though? There’s about six men around the perimeter and one upstairs who’ll shoot us dead if they see this.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Slater handed the Jericho to Abu.

  ‘If he moves,’ he said, pointing to al-Mansur. ‘Pull the trigger. Don’t hesitate.’

  Abu said nothing. Slater doubted the man would do it — there was a world of difference between maintaining drills on khat plantations and shooting unarmed members of political office dead — but al-Mansur didn’t know that. The more terrified the Brigadier-General was, the less chance he would attempt anything brash.

  Slater hurried back across the lobby and forced the security guard back down to the floor. The man offered little resistance, dropping onto his stomach and lying still. He was still neurologically rattled by the quick trip into darkness. Slater knew the intricacies of shutting down the human body — it would be almost an hour before the man’s brain returned to normal.

  For reassurances sake, he ripped the man’s shirt off, tearing through the cheap buttons, and used it to fasten his hands securely behind his back. The man didn’t utter a word of protest.

  He lay with his forehead pressed to the cool floor and accepted his fate.

  When the shirt had been yanked around the man’s wrists, almost tight enough to cut off the circulation in his hands, Slater nodded satisfactorily and turned his attention back to al-Mansur.

  He could see it in the General’s beady eyes. Al-Mansur knew he was in deep shit. Slater had stormed the houses of innocent men before, and he knew the subtle cues that signified someone wasn’t involved in foul play.

  Innocent men showed more fear. Their eyes brimmed with terror, as they truly had no idea what was happening to them — or why.

  Al-Mansur knew. His expression was one of resigned acceptance, like he had just been caught red-handed. The man could barely hide his defeat. He seemed dejected, dismayed, as if the rug had been swept out from underneath his feet.

  Then the Brigadier-General composed himself, and his face turned to stone.

  Slater noted the shift in demeanour.

  Perhaps it would be hard to wrestle the truth out of the man after all.

  ‘Abu,’ he said. ‘You might not like what I have to do here.’

  Abu stared at Slater. ‘We don’t know if he’s involved. We don’t know what is going on. I don’t feel comfortable with hurting him just yet.’

  ‘He’s involved,’ Slater said. ‘I don’t know what capacity, but something’s going on. Something involving a chemical weapon. I can’t hesitate here. I’ve shown restraint with his men — even the pair I found on the mountain. I left them alive. I won’t show restraint with him.’

  ‘He might not talk,’ Abu said.

  ‘I’ll make him.’

  ‘Do I have to be here?’

  ‘I need you to translate,’ Slater said. ‘I’m sorry, my friend. There’s no other option.’

  Abu said nothing.

  ‘Think of what might happen if we don’t feel like doing the dirty work. Imagine an entire town in Yemen under attack, the infection spreading from host to host. Blood in the streets….’

  He shivered at the thought, remembering what had happened to the wolf.

  Rivers of blood, he thought.

  ‘Do you think he knows what we’re discussing?’ Abu said.

  Slater stared at the Brigadier-General, refusing to take his eyes off the man. Al-Mansur had adopted a look of oblivious confusion, but it was a poor performance on his part. Slater had seen the man’s morale break initially, before he masked it.

  That was all he needed to be sure of.

  ‘He knows what we’re here for.’

  ‘What reason would he have to do that to a city?’

  ‘I’m about to find out. Go find me a chair.’

  Abu bowed his head, clearly uncomfortable, and shuffled through to the next room — some kind of office on the ground floor. As he disappeared from sight, Slater covered the distance between himself and al-Mansur and squatted down next to the man.

  He seized the Brigadier-General by the throat.

  ‘I know you don’t speak English,’ he hissed in a low tone. ‘Look into my eyes.’ He jabbed two fingers at his own face. ‘I’ll get it out of you. Whatever it takes. Don’t delay it any longer than necessary.’

  He knew he was onto something. It didn’t take confirmation from al-Mansur to recognise that there was foul play afoot.

  But what came next chilled him to the bone.

  ‘Will…’ Abu called from the office.

  Slater stiffened at the man’s tone. He had never heard such fear in Abu’s voice, such uncertainty and confusion and worry all at once.

  He grimaced even before he hurried through into the room, dragging al-Mansur along with him.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  He noticed the expression on Abu’s face before his eyes turned to the setup in front of the man. Never had he seen such apprehension in a man’s eyes. Slater looked past Abu, who had frozen in place in the middle of the room, to peer at a strange computer setup splayed across a sweeping oak desk.

  The central CPU looked like something out of a bad Hollywood film, a towering brick of a device packed with an unimaginable amount of processing power. On either side of the CPU, eight screens were arranged in twin grids, each displaying a different grainy image.

  The feeds flicked across to new angles on self-timers, providing an unparalleled view of a metropolitan area.

  CCTV feeds.

  People bustled to and fro, choking the sidewalks with congestion, rugged up in winter clothing and thick scarves. Slater could almost make out the details in their expressions — the camera feeds switched between the overhead views of hundreds of pedestrians with each passing second.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he whispered.

  ‘This is something else,’ Abu muttered, visibly horrified. ‘He shouldn’t have access to this.’

  It didn’t take long for Slater to recognise the location. He had been there several times — sometimes for work, sometimes on vacation. He spotted several distinct landma
rks, each time wishing that his mind was deceiving itself.

  Clearly, there had been some kind of mistake.

  Then one of the video feeds cut to an unmistakeable view of the River Thames, like a scene straight off a postcard. He spotted Big Ben, and beyond it the London Eye, both landmarks staggering in scale.

  ‘This is government software,’ Abu said, leaning in to study one of the closest monitors. ‘I don’t know how he set this up, but he must have needed help.’

  ‘You think it has something to do with the bioweapon tests?’ Slater said, almost wishing he had been kept in the dark.

  But now he did know.

  And he needed to do something about it.

  ‘Why else would he need this?’ Abu said.

  ‘I thought his target was somewhere in Yemen…’

  ‘So did I. I just assumed. There was never any reason to believe otherwise.’

  Slater turned to face al-Mansur, who had slumped against a wall on the far side of the room with his hands resting squarely in his lap. Clear unease spread across the man’s face — almost anyone would react the same way if their private dealings were stumbled upon — but underneath the veneer was something else, a quiet smugness of sorts.

  Slater knew the look.

  It was confidence — the knowledge that no matter what anyone did to try and stop him, enough failsafes had already been put into place to ensure that the deed would go ahead regardless.

  Standing in the humid, high-ceilinged office of the Brigadier General’s mansion, surrounded on all sides by armed perimeter guards unaware of what was going on inside, battling to comprehend what al-Mansur had to do with the deserted tribal encampment and a blood-soaked, disease-ridden desert wolf, Slater took a deep breath and let the gravity of the situation settle over him.

  He sensed that — underneath all the mystery — there lay something he wasn’t fully prepared for.

  Something that could cause more devastation than he ever thought possible.

  Part II

  25

  London

  England

  Hussein had been told to collect the package at precisely two in the afternoon.

  Not a minute before.

  Not a minute after.

  He would never dare to displease those who gave the instructions.

  He had been promised a world of luxury and fulfilment if he followed them to a tee.

  The grimy one-bedroom flat in Kingston had been his home for close to three months now. Even though there were no records that his journey had originated in Yemen — his superiors had been painstaking in that regard, forcing him through an intricate web of complicated air and boat travel until finally he was granted permission to fly to Heathrow — he had spent much of the initial cooling-down period in constant fear.

  Not of arrest.

  Not even of death.

  But of letting his leaders down.

  Men who had selected him to carry out an act that had taken years of preparation. He was the individual who had been entrusted to pull the trigger, and the responsibility was certainly not lost on him.

  He would not let them down.

  He paced back and forth across the freezing apartment, restless as the first major hurdle approached. It hadn’t been within the budget of the operation to secure him a flat with heating.

  Or maybe it had, but his superiors had decided that Hussein would be better off integrating with the poorest residents of London.

  Nobody cared about the poor, after all.

  The three months had passed without incident. Now the day was upon him, and Hussein had never been more prepared for anything in his life. It had taken some time to acclimatise to London — upon arriving, almost everything had rattled him. He could now ignore his surroundings, though. He had come to expect anything.

  The first world was a strange place for a Yemeni native.

  An alarm he’d set on his smartphone three months ago kicked in, blaring across the room. Hussein crossed to the dresser and tapped the snooze button, staring at the screen for far too long.

  Now that the moment was upon him, the pressure had him rattled.

  All he had to do was go downstairs and sign for the package.

  He slipped out of the flat, quashing his nerves — at least outwardly. Inside his guts churned and his heart pounded, but he didn’t let it show. There was no-one around, but he knew the importance of caution.

  The little girl he always seemed to pass was nowhere to be seen.

  At two in the afternoon, the residents of the Kingston apartment complex were either at work or so high on drugs that they had no intention of leaving their flats. Hussein imagined even the time of day at which he was supposed to collect the package had been assessed and determined based on minimising the amount of witnesses.

  Nothing had been left to chance.

  He knew that more than anyone.

  His time in London had been lonely — nothing he wasn’t used to, though. Given where he had come from, he considered his living conditions luxurious.

  Not that it mattered, in any case.

  He wouldn’t be here much longer.

  He made it to the end of the corridor and entered a dilapidated stairwell descending into gloom. During the three months he’d spent cooped up in his tiny flat, no-one had bothered to fix the flickering stairwell lights. After weeks of disrepair, most of them had eventually petered out entirely.

  Once again, it didn’t bother him.

  He reached the lobby — the most dangerous part of this entire ordeal. The receptionist was a kind-looking Western woman who had only ever been accommodating to Hussein. He held no ill will towards her. But if she ended up accidentally witnessing any part of the exchange, he would have no choice but to remove her from the equation entirely.

  He exited cautiously into the open space and froze when he saw the scene before him.

  The little girl from a neighbouring flat had her head pressed into the receptionist’s bosom. She was sobbing incessantly. It made Hussein falter — he hadn’t borne witness to emotion like that in this foreign land. Everyone here seemed detached, disinterested in sharing their emotions with the world. They were like robots to Hussein.

  Not this time.

  The receptionist looked up and noticed him standing there in the shadow of the stairwell. She gave a sad smile and shrugged, as if to attempt to wordlessly explain the interaction.

  Hussein smiled back, nodded his understanding, and carried on across the lobby.

  He had a deadline to meet.

  The strange situation heightened when the little girl lifted her head off the receptionist’s chest and turned to face the new arrival. Hussein met her innocent eyes, brimming with tears, and noticed the swollen red welt under her left eyelid.

  He hid a grimace.

  He smiled warmly to her, trying to reassure her that everything would be okay.

  Then he carried on.

  The afternoon air had a biting chill to it. Hussein stepped out onto the bustling sidewalk at one minute to two, shooting daggers up and down the street in search of the vehicle that was expected to meet him out the front of the building.

  Briefly, he wondered if circumstances had changed.

  An indistinct grey van with a logo Hussein couldn’t read screeched to a halt directly in front of him. The driver shot out of the cabin with a practiced urgency — fast enough to hurry the encounter along but slow enough not to attract attention. He threw open the rear doors and lifted a heavy cardboard box off the van’s floor, one of only a few packages in the vehicle. Hussein imagined the others were simple decoys.

  The box carried the same logo as the van, and the man wore a uniform sporting the insignia too.

  Hussein knew it was imitating a popular postal company in the area.

  He had no idea which one, or what it was called.

  That didn’t concern him.

  The driver played his part well. He dumped the box down on the sidewalk like it had no impo
rtance whatsoever, letting out an almighty huff of exertion. Playing up his discontent, just in case any cameras were watching intently.

  Hussein didn’t imagine they would be.

  In fact, he saw no flaws in the plan at all.

  The sequence of events had been painstakingly prepared and practiced.

  The driver turned to Hussein and babbled something in English.

  A question.

  Hussein nodded, playing his own part, going through the motions.

  The driver handed across a clipboard and a pen, gesturing to the lower half of a piece of paper that had been attached. Hussein had been told what to do. He scrawled a signature and returned the clipboard.

  The driver got back into the cabin and peeled away from the sidewalk just as fast as he had arrived.

  Hussein had been fed scraps of information about the effort it had taken for this box to reach his Kingston flat. There were rumours in the pipeline, rumours that what he had been deemed responsible for would change the shape of the world itself.

  Truth was, he knew little detail about what exactly would transpire after he was done.

  All he knew was that a button needed to be pressed.

  At the right place.

  At the right time.

  Nothing else mattered.

  He hauled the box into both arms and put into action a specific chain of commands that had been drilled into him for weeks on end. He had practiced the actions many times. The confident smile, the spring in his step, the straight shoulders.

  He wasn’t hiding anything.

  At least, that’s what anyone watching would think.

  He doubted there was anyone watching, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  He sauntered jovially back into the lobby, outwardly displaying his happiness. Not in a rush to hide anything, not pent up with nerves. Just a happy Kingston resident receiving a package they’d been waiting on for some time.

  Nothing to see here.

  The receptionist and the little girl were sitting side-by-side when he strode back into view. From the brief glance he threw in their direction, he noticed the receptionist attempting to distract the young girl from her troubles, pretending that she was a co-worker and handing her one document after another in a playful manner. The girl giggled, barely paying attention to her surroundings.