both women were taped, Kadyrov leaned forwards and spoke to Charlotte.
‘Welcome to our lands, my dear,’ he said. ‘We do things differently here, as you will learn. We are going to travel now on a journey, about three hours, to Saïdia. It’s a beautiful place, but ruined by your people. At Saïdia we will catch a boat and go back to the sea.’ He chuckled. ‘Your intelligence people, we think they will be expecting us to stay on land,’ he said. ‘But they are not so clever.’
He turned and gestured towards the Land Cruisers.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘you must be placed in the back of one of these vehicles. We have made a special place, under the seats. Because we do not wish you to perish from heat exhaustion, we have fed the cold air through it. But it will be uncomfortable. You must be careful to make no noise. If we are stopped by any authorities, you say nothing. It will not help you, anyway – even if they hear you, some of the police are on our side, some are very stupid, and the others we can either bribe or intimidate. But still, remember this: you say nothing. If you disobey, you will die.’
He looked at the men standing nearby and nodded.
They lifted Charlotte Morgan’s stiffened, mummified form and carried her to the rear of the nearest 4x4.
It had, indeed, been modified, so that a narrow channel led from under the rear compartment’s floor to the passenger seat.
They pushed her into it, head-first, bodily.
Snapped it shut.
She heard them replace the carpeted floor.
Load some bags on top.
Then nothing for quite some time.
Outside, in the warm moonlight, Kadyrov turned to Argun Shishani and sighed, contentedly. ‘I can’t believe how well things are going, brother,’ he said. ‘Ride with me.’
They climbed into the rear of the first 4x4, and a few moments later the two vehicles set off in a slow convoy.
Beneath and behind them, in the lurching claustrophobia of the Land Cruiser’s secret compartment, Charlotte Morgan was fighting an inhuman terror which was total and absolute and almost all-consuming.
It was like being in a coffin: her body touched the sides of the compartment, and her head was pressed against the end. Her nose was inches from its roof.
After a minute or two the heat was already almost unbearable, despite the air-conditioning.
She wanted to call out, and scream, and beg, and plead, but she knew that it would not help.
She told herself to stay calm.
Breathe.
Started whispering a mantra: ‘You’re going to be alright, Charlotte, you’re going to be alright.’
Somehow, she had to get through this – one second, one minute, one hour, one day at a time.
What was to come she did not know. All she did know was that she was alive, and her friends were dead.
She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and concentrated on how she might kill these evil bastards.
And, strangely, she felt her pulse slow a fraction, and her strength return.
Revenge is a powerful incentive.
A LITTLE WHILE earlier, the police had finished with John Carr.
The main development was that they had been able to locate a shot of the man with the dark eyes, taken from a CCTV camera at the marina, for Carr to identify.
It wasn’t very clear – the best angle was a three-quarter face, shot from above – but it was a start, and it was now being flashed to every friendly security service and police force in the world, to see what came back.
Inspector-Jefe Javier de Padilla had arranged for Carr and his son to be dropped back at the villa.
As soon as she saw her father, Alice flew at him, throwing her arms around his neck and burying her face in his shoulder, sobbing.
It took a while to calm her down, but eventually she settled.
‘What happened?’ said Carr, to Chloe.
‘When you and George went, we went for a swim,’ she said. ‘We’d only got in up to our waists when they started shooting. It was… There were bullets everywhere. A little boy was killed just in front of us. We just swam further out and came back in up in the town.’
‘It was horrible, Dad,’ said Alice, wiping away tears. ‘He was a toddler. There was so much blood. He screamed and then he went quiet. I wanted to help him, but I was too scared.’
‘You couldn’t have done anything, sweetheart,’ said Carr, stroking her forehead.
As he spoke, he felt a cold rage building in his soul.
Carr had no qualms about killing those who truly deserved it. Throughout his long career in the Regiment, he had come up against plenty of men who had deserved it, and he had killed them without emotion, and had walked away without a backward glance.
The battlefield had allowed him that space; the civilian world, a world he was still getting used to, was different. It was a world of prevarication and second-guessing, and judgment by men who had never picked up a weapon and stood firm in their lives, and could not and did not know what it meant to look death in the eye and prevail by sheer force of will.
He lived now by the rules of the civilian world, so he forced his rage back down into the dark depths, and hid it from his little girl.
They talked for a while longer, but eventually the two young women started to flag as the adrenalin died away.
He put his daughter to bed, reassured her that he wasn’t going anywhere, and then padded out onto the veranda, into the muggy Mediterranean air, and dialled a number.
Fifteen hundred miles north, at her home in County Down, his ex-wife picked up the phone.
‘How are they?’ said Stella, the anxiety palpable in her voice.
‘Physically fine,’ said Carr. ‘Alice saw things she shouldn’t have seen, but she’s unhurt. George did well.’
‘How do you mean?’
Carr quickly recounted the events.
‘Oh my God, John,’ said Stella. ‘Oh my God.’
‘He grew up today, Stell,’ said Carr. ‘Never took a backward step.’
They chatted a little more – Carr reassuring his ex-wife that he would be cutting short his holiday and flying Alice home the following day – and then ended the call.
A few moments later, George appeared, still in his Union Jack shorts, carrying a couple of cold San Miguels.
Three large candles were burning on a big wooden table, and the two of them sat there in silence for a while, drinking their beer in the cooling humidity, listening to the crickets and mosquitoes, and watching kamikaze moths fly into the flames.
A big white gecko scuttled up a wall.
Overhead, the stars drifted slowly by, oblivious to the momentous events of the day.
In the town below, the lights of emergency vehicles lit up various streets.
Carr sent George in for more beers, and when he came back he saluted him with a bottle.
‘You did well today, son,’ he said.
George felt a warm pride suffusing his body: his old man wasn’t big on unearned praise, and he knew what he was talking about.
‘What now?’ he said.
Carr took a deep swig and felt the cold lager fizzing