John Carr

5.

THREE HOURS LATER, five people stood on the Strand in London, in the shadow of the Royal Courts of Justice, and waited for the hubbub to die down.

On the left were James Monroe Caville QC and his junior, Charlotte Morgan, in black gowns, barristers’ wigs in hand, smiling.

Then Emily Souster, carrying a leather case across her middle.

Next to her was Zeff Mahsoud, in a dark, ill-fitting suit, a serious, even angry, expression on his face.

And next to Mahsoud was Paul Spicer – pink and plump, and wearing collar-length hair and a suit which fit him very nicely indeed. Three thousand pounds, bespoke, from Gieves & Hawkes, so it should.

Spicer held up a hand. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please,’ he said, raising his voice over the traffic noise. ‘I have a statement to read on behalf of my client, Mr Mahsoud.’

The hubbub slowly died down.

Spicer cleared his throat and looked down at the sheet of A4 paper in his hand.

‘Today is a great day for British justice and the British people, and a terrible day for the repressive agents of the British State,’ he read. ‘Two years ago, on my return to this country from a fact-finding and aid expedition to Libya, I was detained by the border authorities at Gatwick Airport. I was held on remand for six months, and astonishingly, although I was wholly innocent, I was eventually convicted of several terrorism offences and given a substantial prison sentence. I have since served a further six months of that sentence. Today the Court of Appeal found that my convictions were unsafe.’

Paul Spicer paused for a moment, and looked at the assembled journalists. Then he continued to read.

‘I am grateful to their Lordships for their decision, but the story does not end here. It is no exaggeration to say that this whole experience has been a waking nightmare for me and my family, and I have asked my legal team to explore ways in which I can take action against the authorities for their disgraceful actions.’

Spicer paused again, and shot another glance at the reporters.

‘My release today would not have been possible without the tireless work of that legal team, especially Paul Spicer and Emily Souster of Spicer, McGraw and Hill, and my barristers, James Monroe Caville QC and his junior, Charlotte Morgan. I intend to spend the next period of time with my family, especially my young daughter, before considering that legal action, and exploring once again ways in which I can help the people of Libya, whose plight remains my main focus.’

Spicer folded the A4 sheet and slipped it into an inside pocket.

Then he looked up once again. ‘The last year or so has been very trying and stressful for Mr Mahsoud, as I’m sure you can imagine,’ he said. ‘I would request very strongly that you allow him and his family time and space to decompress and recover from this ordeal. He will take no questions today. That is all. Thank you.’

With that, the five turned and walked back into the Royal Courts.

Once they had re-cleared security, they made their way to the consultation room which had been booked for the duration of the appeal hearing.

Three days, they had expected.

‘What the hell happened in there then, James?’ said Spicer, as he closed the door. He shook his head in something that looked like amused wonder. ‘I mean, we had a good shout, anyway, but once they withdrew the sources…’

‘Just give thanks, Paul,’ said the QC, unbuttoning his starched collar. ‘It’s a lot easier when the other side makes your argument for you.’ He chuckled. ‘I’ll have a chat with Bernard later, but I suppose they just saw the writing on the wall. Charlotte should take a lot of the credit for that.’

Charlotte Morgan blushed. ‘I don’t think I did very much,’ she said. ‘I’d say it was Emily, more than me.’

‘I always thought there was a chance they’d fold if we could put them on the spot over their covert sources,’ said Emily Souster, her eyes almost ablaze. ‘But even I didn’t expect it to be as easy as that.’

Coffee was poured, and drunk, and there was the usual small talk which follows the end of a major case.

After twenty minutes or so, James Monroe Caville looked at his watch, stood up, and reached for his collar and wig and black leather box briefcase.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘There’s no rest for the wicked. My clerk has managed to squeeze in a con in Chambers at two, so I must bid you adieu. Best of luck, Mr Mahsoud.’

‘Thank you,’ said Zeff Mahsoud with a nod and a distant smile.

‘I’ll see you to the door,’ said Spicer. ‘While we have you, there’s another little matter that we need to run by you. Emily, do you mind…?’

He indicated that Souster should accompany them.

‘I’ll be back in a few minutes,’ she said, before following the two men.

Once they had left, Zeff Mahsoud turned to Charlotte Morgan.

‘I’d like to thank you for your assistance also, Miss Morgan,’ he said, in an accent that hovered somewhere between Bradford and the tribal badlands of southern Waziristan. ‘I was worried that we might not succeed.’

‘You can never be certain,’ she said. ‘But once they withdrew the evidence from those sources it was really only going to go one way.’

‘It has been a very difficult time for me.’

‘I’m sure it has. But it’s over now.’

‘Yes,’ said Mahsoud. ‘Well, as I say, I am grateful.’

He paused for a moment.

Then he said, ‘I suppose you’re very busy also?’

‘Rushed off my feet,’ she said, with a laugh. ‘But it’s better than the alternative.’

‘I expect you are looking forward to your holiday,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Spain, I think you said?’

‘Oh, goodness, yes,’ she said. ‘I’m shattered. Yes, my boyfriend and I are going with some friends at the beginning of August. Emily, too.’ She nodded at the door through which Souster had left. ‘Can’t wait.’

‘I had the greatest holiday ever in Barcelona,’ said Zeff Mahsoud, sitting forward in his seat. He paused. Then he added, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘And, of course, Spain was a muslim territory from 717.’

‘Bit before my time,’ said Charlotte Morgan, with a laugh.

‘Wonderful galleries and architecture,’ said Mahsoud.

‘In Barcelona?’ said Charlotte. She began gathering up her papers, and stood up. She smiled. ‘So I believe. But too much culture never did a girl any good. It’s Marbella for me, I’m afraid. I’m all about the sun, sea and sand.’

6.

LATE THAT EVENING, after he had travelled north from Euston, and been reunited with his wife and their daughter, Zeff Mahsoud slipped out of the family home.

He had an important call to make, to a keeper of secrets.

It was the first of many.

PART TWO

7.

THREE MONTHS LATER

JOHN CARR LAY on a white towel in the hot sand, propped up on his elbows, staring out at the tranquil Mediterranean Sea.

Gentle waves – no more than ripples – broke, soft and frothy, on the beach.

Close to the shore, the Med was striped in dazzling turquoise shades, decorated with playful flashes from the noonday sun; further out, the waters turned a dark and mysterious blue, flat calm but hiding myriad untold secrets in their timeless depths.

It was very beautiful, Carr had to admit.

But despite that he was as restless as ever.

There were things John Carr liked about beaches, and things he didn’t.

The things he liked were good-looking young women in bikinis – who often liked him right back.

The things he didn’t like were sand, heat, flies, screaming kids, lying around doing nothing, and being caught looking at good-looking young women in bikinis by his teenaged daughter.

There was plenty of eye candy in the vicinity, but Alice was immediately to his left.

Stretched out on her towel, wearing mirror shades.

He thought she was asleep, but he couldn’t be sure, because he couldn’t see her eyeballs, because of the mirror shades.

So he kept his own eyes front.

John Carr had retired from 22 SAS as a Squadron Sergeant Major, having fought his way across every theatre of operations from the first Gulf War onwards in a long and distinguished career.

He’d twice been decorated for gallantry – not for nothing had he been known as ‘Mad John’ – and he had taken no shit from anyone in a very long time indeed.

But Alice, seventeen years old, and sixty-two kilos wringing wet, could bring him to heel with one withering look and a few choice words.

He wasn’t sure what they were filling her head with at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, for his thirty-five grand a year, but a lot of it seemed to revolve around the patriarchy, feminism, and the objectification of women.

It mystified Carr, who’d grown up in the 1980s on the streets of the rough Edinburgh suburb of Niddrie: he respected birds, right enough, but since when had it become a sin to fucking look at them?

Still, better safe than sorry.

He rubbed the livid, inverted-crescent scar on his chin, and stared dead ahead.

They were twenty metres from the sea.

It really was beautiful.

Shame about those screaming kids.

One of them was really wailing now – he’d dropped his ice cream in the water, snot was bubbling from his nose, and his fat, orange, German dad was trying to calm him down.

Shame about the kids, and a shame about the sand in Carr’s shorts, too.

And in the crack of his arse, and between his toes, and gritty in his mouth.

He sighed, and looked to his right.

His son George – seven years older than Alice – was eyeing up a couple of pretty Spanish girls, his own girlfriend face-down on her towel and oblivious.

Beyond George, a couple of older blokes casually ogled Alice as they trudged by.

Carr stared at them, hard, and once they caught his eye, and clocked his menacing physique, they looked quickly away and moved on.

He glanced down between his legs and flicked at a piece of dried seaweed with a grey driftwood twig.

Funny how life turns out.

You grow up in a council tenement block, surrounded by concrete, broken glass and graffiti, you don’t expect to find yourself rubbing shoulders with Europe’s filthy rich on a beach at Puerto Banús.

Back home in the UK, Carr’s day job was as head of London security for the Russian oligarch Konstantin Avilov. Earlier in the year Carr had taken out a Ukrainian hitman who had tried to kill his boss on the streets of London, as part of the ongoing, low-level power struggle which increasingly stretched out from Moscow in every direction around the globe.

As a thank you, his boss had given him a big payrise, and a Porsche Cayenne – bit tacky, for Carr’s taste, so he’d quickly swapped it for a classy 5.0L V8 Supercharged Range Rover, in Spectral British Racing Green.

Avilov had insisted, too, that he take a couple of weeks at his Marbella villa, a ten-bedroomed, chrome-and-white monument to vulgarity, in a gated community five minutes away at Vega del Colorado.

Take the family, Johnny. It’s a thank you for everything what you done for me.

Including saving my life, he hadn’t said.

But both men knew.

A woman in her early thirties came into his eyeline, canvas bag in hand and diaphanous sarong hugging her hips, and gave him a long look through her Dior shades as she passed by.

Carr grinned at her, and then she was gone.

He looked at his watch.

One o’clock.

God, he was bored.

Sitting here, slowly chargrilling himself to death, in the heat of a Spanish midday in early August.

Christ, the heat.

Unlike many Scots, he was dark-haired and he tanned easily. Added to which, he’d spent enough time in hot, sandy places – carrying a rifle, 100lbs of kit and ammo in his webbing and bergen, and wearing a lot more than a pair of shorts – to have got used to it.

But somehow Afghan heat, Iraqi heat, African heat, didn’t feel so bad.

He grinned to himself: maybe it was the rounds cracking off past your swede. That had a funny way of putting things like the ambient temperature into context.

The two pretty Spanish girls got up and wiggled and jiggled off down to the water, giggling as they went.

Carr risked a quick glance.

Caught George’s eye.

‘You sad bastard,’ said his son, with a grin and a shake of his head. ‘You sad, sad bastard.’

8.

SIXTY KILOMETRES NORTH-EAST, the MS Windsor Castle sat at anchor on Pier 1 of Málaga’s Eastern dock.

On the bridge, the captain – an Italian, Carlo Abandonato – sipped his coffee and studied the latest weather reports.

In a few hours, they would be underway again, heading up and through the Strait of Gibraltar, three days out from Southampton on the final leg of the cruise.

The Strait could be a tricky little stretch, even for a ship such as the Windsor Castle, which – while not in the front rank of such vessels – was relatively modern and well-equipped.

The convergence of the roiling Atlantic with the almost tideless Mediterranean, in that narrow channel where Africa stared down Europe, created strange and unpredictable currents, and local weather conditions could make that much worse.

The cold Mistral, blowing down from the Rhone Alps, could quickly turn a warm summer’s day such as this a bitter, wintry grey, and when the Levanter blew across from the Balearics it often brought with it a sudden summer fog.

Worst of all was the Sirocco, which whipped up heavy seas and hurled sand from the distant Sahara at you in a blinding fury.

But today the water was duckpond flat, the wind no more than a warm breath, and the radar was set fair for the next few days.

Good news for Captain Abandonato, good news for the crew, and good news for the five hundred passengers who were currently drinking, eating, and sunbathing on the six decks behind and beneath him, or enjoying lunch ashore in one of Málaga’s many excellent restaurants.

He was looking forward to getting to Southampton; from there he would head up to Heathrow to fly home on leave to Civitavecchia.

His wife was expecting their second child – a son, the doctors had said – and was due to give birth the day after he arrived home.

Abandonato had booked a whole month off to spend time with Maria and their children.

He was looking forward to it so much it hurt.

It was always a wrench to leave, but at least it paid the bills: Maria was under an excellent but cripplingly expensive obstetrician, they were looking to move to a bigger house inland, near the lake at Bracciano, and their daughter was down for one of Roma’s best private nursery schools.

Such things did not come cheap.

He finished his coffee and looked at his watch.

Shortly after 13:00hrs.

He turned to his Norwegian staff captain, the second-in-command and the man who really drove the boat.

‘I’m going to freshen up and then have a walk round and see how the passengers are, Nils,’ he said. ‘Let’s have dinner together later?’

‘Sure,’ said Nils.

Abandonato pulled on his cap, straightened the epaulettes on his crisp, white shirt, and left the bridge.

9.

A GUY WITH dark eyes came out of nowhere and walked in front of John Carr.

There he stopped, temporarily blocking Carr’s view of the sea.

Flip-flops in hand, white three-quarter length linen trousers, billowing ivory shirt.

Flashy gold watch, which stood out on his tanned wrist.

Another Eurotrash millionaire, thought Carr.

The place was crawling with them.

Carr thought at first that the guy was staring at him, and Carr didn’t like being stared at, but then he realised that the man’s eyes had swept on, and that he was looking past him at another bunch of people.

Five seconds he stared, and then he carried on walking.

At which point Carr looked closer, his eye drawn by the guy’s odd, limping gait, and the deep scar on his right calf, where something had taken a big bite out of the muscle.

It looked to Carr like shrapnel damage, something he’d seen plenty of.

As the guy moved away, almost unconsciously, from force of habit, Carr stored his image in the vast filing cabinet in his head.

Longish black hair, wavy and greasy, held back by a pair of Oakleys pushed up on his forehead.

Dark eyes.

Kind of a cruel mouth.

Lopsided walk.

And that big, pink hole in his right leg.

Once inside Carr’s head it would never leave. He had an uncanny knack for remembering stuff like this – the skill had been honed during his near-two decades in the Special Air Service, and it had often proved invaluable on ops.

He looked over his right shoulder at the group the guy had been eyeballing.

Four young couples were in the process of laying out their towels, paperbacks, and iPads.

Their pale skin, Boden and Crew kit and beach cricket gear, would have marked them out as members of the British middle class, even if their accents had not confirmed it.

‘For goodness’ sake, Jemima,’ one of the young men was saying, ‘I thought you were bringing the Kindle.’

‘Oh piss off, Thomas,’ said Jemima. ‘You’re really getting on my nerves today.’

‘Yeah, Tom,’ said one of the others, good-naturedly. ‘Take a day off, why don’t you? What are you reading, anyway? Fifty Shades of Grey?’ There was a ripple of mocking laughter and jeers. ‘Right, who’s coming in?’

The second speaker pulled off his T-shirt and headed for the water, followed by three of the girls.

Very tidy, thought Carr. Especially the tall brunette, and the blonde girl in the shocking pink bikini.

He could see why the guy with the gammy leg had been gawping at them.

But it wasn’t worth the aggro, not with Alice by his side and George running his gob, so he turned his head and looked conspicuously in the opposite direction.

Way off at the top of the beach, unnoticed by Carr or anyone else, a young man in cut-off denim shorts and a Manchester United replica shirt hung around under a palm tree, and made a phone call.

As he did so, he watched the new arrivals keenly – though he took care not to show it.

The call was answered a hundred metres away, by the man with the dark eyes and the cruel mouth.

He was by now standing on the deck of a powerful white yacht, moored up in the marina at the extreme western edge of the Puerto Banús beach, at the end of Calle Ribera.

The open sea a matter of metres away.

‘Yes,’ said Dark Eyes. ‘Keep watching them, and await further instructions.’

He killed the call, stood up, pulled his Oakleys down from his forehead, and stuck a Marlboro Light in his mouth.

The dark-eyed man did indeed look like a member of the wealthy, leisured Eurotrash, who idled their summers away sailing around the Med, their winters in Klosters and Courchevel 1850, and the rest of the year drinking pink champagne at 38,000 feet.

But the flashy gold Rolex was fake, and the linen trousers stolen, and John Carr was quite correct about the damage to his leg – it had been caused by a piece of red-hot Hazara shrapnel at Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, in 1997.

He was actually a Chechen, called Argun Shishani, and he was not the owner of the boat, the Mistral 55 class Lucky Lady.

He was merely borrowing it from someone – someone who, admittedly, would never need it again.

He had chosen this particular boat because its twin 7,400hp Codag engines made it capable of more than fifty knots – 52kts, to be precise, or 96kph, or a shade under 60mph.

And because it had a mooring ticket at Puerto Banús.

Argun Shishani threw his half-smoked cigarette into the water.

Watched in amusement for a moment or two as a dozen silver sardines flashed in and fought over it.

Then looked up at the endless blue sky, smiled, and went below to make the final preparations.

10.

CARLO ABANDONATO HAD taken time to walk around the sun deck, and all looked in order.

About half of the Windsor Castle’s passengers had gone ashore, and those who had remained were sipping cocktails, splashing in the pool, or slowly giving themselves skin cancer in the roasting sun.

It was a mid-range boat, so they were mostly families and a few pensioners – the bulk of them British with a few Americans, Canadians and Europeans thrown in.

A young woman waylaid him as he walked by, and Abandonato stopped to crouch down by her sun lounger.

She was a Londoner, he thought, and not unattractive, and she was flirting furiously; her husband was taken up with their toddler, and either didn’t notice or was used to it.

‘So how do I go about getting an invitation for dinner at the Captain’s table?’ the young woman was saying, looking at him over her sunglasses.

‘It’s a big mystery,’ said Abandonato, smiling. He was a handsome man, and he knew it, but he seemed to exert a particularly hypnotic effect on English women which he had never really understood. ‘The maître d’ has his ways, but I’m afraid I leave it to him.’

‘Well, tell him Becky in 414 on deck four would like to come,’ she said, with a conspiratorial grin. ‘Just me, my husband will be busy with our daughter.’

‘Oi, oi,’ said the husband, distractedly.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Abandonato, standing up. ‘Everything else is okay for you?’

‘Wonderful,’ said Becky, looking him up and down. ‘The view especially.’

Carlo Abandonato chuckled and walked on, heading to the elevator.

He’d travel a deck down, to two of the ship’s three restaurants, to make sure the lunch service was going well.

After that, he’d book himself off for an hour, go back to his cabin, and call his wife via the sat-link.

Then back to the bridge, go through the departure checks ready for 17:00hrs, when they were due to weigh anchor and be on their way.

He smiled to himself as the elevator doors closed and he started sinking.

There were worse jobs in the world.