Ultimate Weapon

by Chris Ryan

Genres: Action & Adventure; War & Military; Suspense

Synopsis

Three people. Three stories. And a desperate race for survival in a country caught up in the hell of war. Nick Scott fought in the SAS -- the elite Special Forces unit of the British Army -- during the first Gulf War. Captured and tortured, he was left a broken man. His daughter Sarah is a beautiful young scientist at Cambridge University who appears to have cracked one of the great scientific secrets of our age: cold fusion. Now, she has vanished. Sarah's longtime on-and-off boyfriend, Jed Bradley, is one of the SAS's toughest young soldiers. Nick and Jed have never gotten along because Nick doesn't want his daughter dating a soldier. Deep down, Jed reckons he joined the SAS just to win Nick's approval. Reluctantly, the two men combine their efforts to rescue Sarah and soon they are caught up in a global power play, a deadly web of intrigue in which Nick and Jed encounter a traitorous scientist willing to sell out his country; a sinister Arab intent on destroying Western civilization; and a beautiful but manipulative intelligence agent whose motives are unclear. Nick and Jed must fight their way through a war-ravaged Iraq as the regime of Saddam Hussein collapses around them. It is a heart-stopping desperate race to find the woman they both love, and to unlock the secret of the Ultimate Weapon.

Release date: January 10, 2009

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 380

Sample

PROLOGUE

November 16, 1994

Nick Scott walked in silence. He could feel the cold air blowing down from the side of the mountain, brushing across his raw skin. A thin sweater was all that covered his chest, and a light dusting of snow was filling the morning air. It made no difference, thought Nick sullenly. A man who has lost his wife doesn’t feel the cold. He doesn’t feel heat, pain or pleasure, or any other sensation. Just a frozen emptiness inside.

Particularly when the man knows he has only himself to blame.

He glanced up toward the mountains. The heights of Les Houches, the smaller of the two mountains that dominate the Chamonix valley, were right ahead of him. A shaft of sunlight suddenly broke through the clouds, illuminating its lustrous white surface, while on the other side of the ravine the larger Mont Blanc was still shrouded in mist and cloud. It was a week now since Mary had died. Three days since they had buried her, here among the mountains she loved, and where they had hoped to make their new life together. A life that didn’t involve war, fighting, endurance, or survival. A life that had nothing to do with the Regiment. Just the two of them, their ski school, and their daughter. A small, happy family, just the way it always should have been.

And now it’s gone, buried along with Mary and every other dream I’ve ever had.

“You OK?” he said, looking toward Sarah.

“I’m scared,” she replied flatly.

She was walking at his side, the buttons of her ski jacket fastened tight against her thin neck. Just fifteen, thought Nick. Christ, she was young. Sometimes he had to pinch himself to remind himself that although she was starting to look like a woman, she was still just a kid. Ever since she was born, she’d constantly surprised him with how fast she’d developed. Sarah was always ahead of the other kids, able to talk at two, count at three, and read before she was four: it was as if she were rushing through life, getting her childhood out of the way, crashing forward toward a rendezvous with her destiny. When your dad’s as lousy as I am, maybe you have to grow up fast, he reflected bitterly. With no one to look after you, you learn to look after yourself.

“I’m scared of what’s going to become of us now that Mum’s not around anymore.”

She stopped in the snow and turned to face him. Her expression was worried, frightened. Sarah had long brown hair and blue eyes that shone out of her thin, freckled face like the headlights on a car. Her features were delicate, finely painted like her mother’s, but on her forehead and across her cheekbones there were traces of her father’s brute, oxlike strength. “You can say what you like, but I just know,” she continued. “We’re not going to be OK.”

“Of course we are,” snapped Nick. “I’ll look after you.”

“What happened to you in Iraq, Dad?”

The words struck Nick harder than any of the bullets he had ever taken. A bullet was just a lump of cold steel. It could tear through your flesh and fracture your bones, but so long as you were still alive it left your spirit intact. This was worse. This hurt in a way that no bullet ever could.

“I’m all right,” he said quickly.

She walked two paces ahead of him, twisting into one of the pathways that started to lead up the side of the mountain. They had lived here for just over a year now, but she had adjusted to the place much better than he had. Sarah spoke French like a local and had adapted to the school. As for me, thought Nick, I have hardly gotten to know a soul. I came here to escape. But you can’t escape from yourself.

“I’m fifteen,” she said, not turning to look at him. “I can handle the truth.”

The truth, thought Nick. Maybe she can handle it, and maybe I can’t. The bald outlines of the story were clear enough. He was a Regiment man, had been for a decade. He’d just missed the Falklands war but had been involved in every action the Special Air Service had fought in since then, and fought with distinction as well. He had the medals and the scars to prove he was as good as any man in the Regiment. Then, in the lead-up to the Gulf War, he’d been dropped into enemy country. First into Kurdistan, then traveling south with a small unit of five men until they hit Baghdad. Two of his mates had been killed on the way. Two of them had been captured. What happened to Ken, Nick had no idea. The last memory he had of him was the grimace of defiance on his face as the Iraqi soldiers smashed the butts of their rifles into his ribs as they led him away. Probably rotting in a shallow, unmarked grave by now. Nick had been taken into the prison cells below Saddam’s Republican Palace and tortured. What the hell they’d been trying to get out of him, he never knew. Perhaps it was just sadism. Their army was getting whipped, and they needed someone to take it out on. He just happened to be there. It was nothing personal. It just felt like that when they were attaching electrodes to your balls.

It was only after the war had ended, as part of the cease-fire agreement, that Nick had been released. He had had no idea the war had even ended, and when they came to haul him out of the dark, dank cell in which he had been living for the past few weeks, he’d assumed it was a firing squad he was about to meet, not a helicopter to ferry him home. It had taken two months in the hospital to patch up his wounds, but the mental damage had been far worse than the physical impact. After he returned to the Regiment, it was impossible to get back to soldiering again. The orders didn’t make any sense. The training had no purpose. The missions seemed stupid. After a year, he quit, disgusted with both himself and the army.

“Nothing happened in Iraq, silver girl,” he said, slipping into the nickname he’d had for Sarah since she was a toddler.

He put his arm across her shoulder, but she shook it away.

“Then why are we here?”

The move had been made just a few months after Nick had left the army. Nick and Mary had talked about opening a ski school for years. Both of them loved the mountains, and they had met on the French Alps twenty years earlier when he was doing his army ski training and Mary had been waitressing in one of the tourist bars. They’d taken Sarah from the moment she was born: she could ski practically before she could walk. They’d leased a small office, hired Heinz, a young German skier, to help out, and Nick had done most of the teaching while Mary took the bookings and looked after the accounts. But nothing had gone the way Nick had planned it. The first season was tough, and the clients were all idiots. Rich bankers from London who could barely stand up, let alone ski, and who thought it was Nick’s fault. They spoke to you like you were dirt. A couple of times he’d lost it, shouting at them. Couldn’t help myself, they were spastics, he said later. But word soon got around that he was difficult. Mary was furious with him, and the bookings were starting to dry up. They’d sunk all their savings into this school. They were arguing all the time.

We argued the night she died . . .

“To do something different with our lives,” said Nick.

“I don’t want to,” said Sarah, her voice suddenly icy with controlled anger. “I don’t want to be here.” Tears were starting to stream down her face. “I just want my mum back.”

“It’s going to be OK,” said Nick, reaching out for her. “

No, it’s not,” screamed Sarah. “Nothing’s going to be OK, not now, not ever.”

She was running away from him now, her legs skidding across the frozen surface of the track. Her hair had come loose and was now streaming in the wind behind her. Not ever, heard Nick, the words bouncing off the side of the mountain, and bouncing back toward him. Nothing’s going to be OK, not ever.

And the worst of it is, maybe she’s right.

Nick caught up with her, reaching out with his arms, hugging her tight to his body. Her breath was short, gasping. “I just want to hide from the world,” said Sarah, wiping the tears away from her eyes.

Nick glanced up toward the brooding slopes of Les Houches. There was a dip on the left-hand side of the mountain, where the rock seemed to fade into the cloud to create a shape like a crescent. “You see that mountain,” he said, cradling Sarah in his arms. “I hid in a mountain just like that when I was dropped into Kurdistan. Hiding isn’t as simple as you think it is when you’re fifteen. It’s hard, lonely work that cuts into a man’s soul. Hide for long enough and you forget who you even are.”

Sarah turned to look at him, her eyes fierce with anger. “Well, you should know, Dad. You’ve been hiding ever since you came back from that stupid war.”

ONE

February 10, 2003

Jed Bradley could feel the muscles in his neck tightening. His throat was dry, and the knuckles on his broad, strong fists were tapping against the surface of the wooden table. I don’t mind being dropped from a helicopter, he told himself. I don’t mind sleeping rough, tabbing fifty miles with a pack on my back or escaping through hostile territory. I don’t even mind being shot at.

But I don’t like being sneered at by morons. That’s not what I joined the Regiment for.

“I said it’s fucking bollocks,” snapped Jim Muir. “We need proof. Proper proof. Not this fucking, poxy, vomit-inducing bollocks.”

Jed shot him a glance. Muir was a short man, with thinning brown hair, a pallid complexion, and a thick, glowing nose so red it could have won a prize in a tomato competition. A former tabloid reporter, he’d joined the prime minister’s press office two years earlier and had already earned himself a reputation as a bruiser. Should have stuck to the Page Three girls, mate, thought Jed.

“Maybe you’d like to go into Iraq next time,” said Jed.

His tone was polite, restrained. But the anger was still evident in the expression on his face.

“None of your bloody lip, soldier boy,” spat Muir. “I thought the SAS was supposed to be tough.” A mean cackle started to rise up from his chest. “Not just a bunch of bloody, bed-wetting pansy boys.”

Jed leaned forward on the table and was about to speak, when the woman sitting next to him put her fingers on his arm. “Let’s all calm down,” Laura Strangar said, “and try to examine what we have.”

They were sitting in the Vauxhall headquarters of the Firm, just next to the Thames. For the last three years, all the important meetings had taken place in one of the secure rooms. There were no windows a terrorist could launch a missile through. You needed the highest possible security clearance to be allowed through the door, and even then you were searched and put through a metal detector. It was the safest place in London.

There were seven people sitting around the table. Muir was directly opposite Jed. At his side was Mike Weston, the government’s chief weapons scientist, plus his younger deputy, Miles Frith. On the other side sat David Wragg, the deputy director of the Firm, and the man feeding intelligence on Iraq into the system. There was an American intelligence officer who never gave his name and never spoke; he just sat there, making notes on his BlackBerry. And next to him, Laura Strangar, the intelligence officer assigned to directing Jed’s work. Plus me, thought Jed. The only one of these intelligence experts who might actually have set foot in the country they’re supposed to be experts on.

Strangar intrigued Jed. He had first met her two weeks ago at his briefing for the mission. She was no more than thirty-five, he guessed, but like many young London career women, it was hard to tell her exact age. They spent so much time in the gym, and were so careful about their diets, the years never seemed to register on them in the usual way. Her muscles were toned like a man’s, and yet her skin was soft and white. Her elegant features were highlighted by a dusting of face powder, and the natural redness of her lips was enhanced by a thin film of lipstick.

Jed’s mission had been the most perilous he had undertaken in the four years since he had passed selection into the Regiment from the Paras. He’d been made to grow a beard and fitted out with some old Arab clothes—one of the reasons he’d been chosen was because he had brown eyes that would help him to blend in with the locals. A chopper had dropped him into Iraq, into a patch of scrubland six miles to the west of Baghdad: the British and the Americans had total control of the skies, even though there was no war yet, but there were still only a few places a special forces soldier could land safely.

Next, he’d made his way by foot around the perimeter of the city, until he hit one of the roads running into its northwest corner. The suspected weapons laboratory was two miles from the dropping-off point, located at the center of an industrial suburb. It was a drab, prefabricated block that could have passed for an out-of-town retail shed back in Britain. The one advantage of Baghdad, Jed had reflected on the journey, was that the whole population was so terrified that nobody ever came out at night. It also reminded Jed of some of the foster care homes he’d spent the better part of his childhood in while his dad made regular trips to the local police station. Once you got out, you didn’t ever want to go back in again.

The mission had sounded straightforward enough. Go in close to the lab, and lie up somewhere you can’t be seen. Then, using a high-powered digital camera, take as many pictures as you can of the facility. “Just make sure they’re nice and clear,” Laura had told him as he’d left for Kuwait.

Easy for you to say, Jed could recall thinking as he lay behind a low wall, looking across at the facility through his night-vision goggles. A lot harder to do when you’re here. Maybe they’d like me to get a couple of palm trees and a nice sunset into the snaps as well. Make it look like the Baghdad tourist brochure.

He took a series of pictures of the perimeter of the facility, but that told you nothing. A gray concrete wall, that’s all. Above it there were several towers, something like a chemical plant, but even though Jed had studied engineering at Cambridge before joining the Paras, he couldn’t recognize them. Not at this distance, anyway. He took some more pictures, then tried to get closer. The gates were to his left. He inched forward, taking up a position in the doorway of a boarded-up shop about thirty yards from the entrance. It was two in the morning, and the city was asleep. He could see a thin whisp of smoke escaping from one of the high chimneys, but that aside, the plant looked dead. The gates were secured with thick steel locks, and there were no guards on duty: Jed could only assume there were plenty inside, and he wasn’t about to risk finding out. Not on a solo mission.

By the time dawn rolled around, his legs were stiff and freezing: in February, the nighttime temperatures in Baghdad dropped to zero. As the first light of morning started to break over the distant horizon, a truck pulled up at the entrance. It was a battered old Toyota, its back covered with thick, black plastic sheeting. The gates swung open. Inside, Jed could see six guards hurrying forward, ushering the truck into the compound, then swinging the doors firmly shut after the truck drove inside. He managed to take a series of snaps with the digital camera, a dozen in total. By then the street had fallen quiet again, and a boy was looking at him. He was twenty yards away. Jed was dressed in a grubby white tunic and blue trousers. His skin was tanned, and with black hair there was nothing to distinguish him from an Iraqi. Still, the boy was staring right at him. He was no more than six, with huge brown eyes and a hungry look to him. There was no sign of his mother.

Jed scowled, then looked away. He could see the boy from the corner of his eye. Then the boy started walking toward him. He was saying something in Arabic, but Jed couldn’t understand it: back in Hereford they’d been running elementary Arabic classes—with an Iraqi instructor giving them the right dialect—for the last six months, but most of the lads hadn’t signed up for them. The only Arabic I need to understand is the rattle of an AK-47, as one of his mates had put it. It’s not as if we’re planning on talking to the buggers. Jed paused, wishing he understood the language. Then he waved at the boy with his arms. Go, he mouthed silently. Bloody well piss off.

The boy pointed at Jed’s camera. He was just a dozen yards from him now. Jed was thinking fast. Any closer, the kid was going to realize he was a foreigner. Any kind of commotion right now and half the Republican Guard was going to be steaming toward him. His orders were ringing in his ears. “Any trouble, get the hell out of there. The last thing we need is for an SAS guy to get picked up in Baghdad while we’re still trying to get the bloody surrender monkeys at the UN to sign up to the war.”

In the end, there had been no choice but to evacuate. He had fifty snaps of the plant already on the compact digital camera, and that meant the mission was complete. Retracing his steps through the dark, quiet city, within an hour he’d been back at the drop-off point, collected by a chopper, and back in Kuwait. In fewer than twelve hours, he was on home soil again. The pictures didn’t show much, but they were all he could get in the circumstances. If they didn’t like them, they’d just have to go and get their own.

“Can you tell us exactly what you saw, Jed?” said David Wragg. He coughed nervously. “As you know, we have to examine every piece of evidence coming out of Iraq with minute care. It would be bloody embarrassing if we ended up invading the place, and then found out they didn’t have anything more dangerous than a couple of peashooters in their arsenal.”

He was a thin man, with graying hair and green eyes that bore down into you as he spoke, like a drill cutting into rock. He was smartly but casually dressed: he wore chinos and an open-necked shirt, but still wore cuff links and black lace-up brogues. The Firm was edging its way into the dress-down era, noted Jed, but none of the senior guys looked really comfortable with it. Give them a chance, and they’d be back in their three-pieces and bowler hats.

“It’s all in the pictures,” said Jed.

“Yes,” said Wragg carefully. “The trouble is, the pictures don’t tell us that much.”

Muir leaned forward on the table. “We’re looking for what our friends in the porno business call a cum shot, laddie,” he said. “A nice big picture of Saddam cuddling up to a missile with the word Anthrax written on the side.”

Jed noticed Wragg leaning into Muir’s ear and whispering something. Cool it, maybe. If so, it was good advice. Any more lip from the Scotsman and he was going to get that bright red nose smacked.

“Well, this is all we have. Like it or lump it.”

Laura smiled at him icily. “We all have to understand that there is a lot of pressure to come up with some convincing intelligence about Iraq’s WMD and come up with it quickly. All our sources tell us that this is a very important facility. Whatever is going on in that lab, it matters a lot to the Iraqis. That’s why we sent you there.”

“I got the best pictures I could, short of risking capture,” said Jed coldly. “If you wanted me to go in, those should have been my orders.”

“We appreciate that,” said Wragg quickly. “And we appreciate your bravery. We just want to get a fuller description, that’s all.”

From the corner of his eye, Jed noticed that Muir was doodling a picture of a naked woman, with outsized breasts and a tiny miniskirt. Christ, he thought, when did they put this psycho in charge of the country?

“What did the building look like?” pressed Wragg.

“Nothing special,” answered Jed. “A carpet factory. Could be making rugs from the looks of the place.”

“And special defenses?”

“Just a high perimeter fence, and thick steel gates.”

“No guards?”

Jed shook his head. “Only on the inside.”

“Searchlights?” asked Laura.

“Two on either side of the compound,” said Jed. “But fixed. They weren’t scanning the area. They might have been built to, but they weren’t that night.”

“Electronic surveillance?”

“Not that I could see.”

“What did it smell like?” said Weston.

Jed paused. That was a good question. It smelled like fear, if he was being honest. His own terror sweating off him as he stood next to the plant, wondering if he was about to spend the next few months being tortured to death by the Iraqis. “Just dust, really,” he replied. “Concrete, tarmac. Tossed-out rubbish and dog piss. The same sort of smell you might get in any industrial park in this country on a hot day.”

“No fruity smells?” said Weston.

“Like what?”

“Burned almonds, dried oranges, anything like that,” said Weston. “Just any kind of memorable smell.”

Jed shook his head. Weston was a short, plump man, with a graying beard that looked like it could use a trim. He’d be more at home at a real-ale convention than the offices of the Firm. Still, he knew more about chemical and biological weapons than any man in the country. If it could come out of a test tube and kill you, then Weston was the man to spot it.

“Nothing like that.”

“How about lights?” said Miles Frith. “What kind of light was it giving off ?”

“It was dark.”

“I know,” said Frith. “But any kind of glow.”

Jed shook his head.

“Pipes?”

“What do you mean?”

“Any kind of thick pipe running into the place?”

Frith was younger than the other men, no more than thirty, Jed thought. He wore half-moon glasses that made him look older, and a short-sleeved blue shirt. His voice was thin and whiny, like a cat being prodded with a hot stick, but his manner was firm and decisive. Weston took him along to every meeting he attended, but no one else could understand why he was there.

Jed closed his eyes. In his mind, he recalled images of the pictures he’d taken. He’d looked at the building for hours, committing it to his memory, the way a photograph is committed to a roll of film. He could see the drab concrete wall that surrounded the place and the cylinders poking above them. And then to the right he could see a pipe.

“On the right of the plant,” he replied.

“How thick?”

“Maybe a foot in diameter.”

“Oil?”

Jed shook his head. Oil pipes usually came in a standard size, and they were smaller than that. And industrial plants didn’t need raw crude. “Water,” he said. “I think it was a water pipe.”

“Just into the plant.”

Jed nodded. “There were no pipes running off it, so yes. The plant must have had its own water supply.”

Weston looked suddenly interested. “What about the road leading into the place? Was it reinforced in any way?”

Jed nodded again. “There was thick tarmac on the road leading up into it. A lot thicker than any of the surrounding roads.”

Weston looked up at the picture Jed had taken of the building. He was scrutinizing it, the way an angler would scrutinize the fish on the end of his line, looking at it from every angle to judge whether he’d landed a prize catch. From the look on his face, Jed judged this one wasn’t about to be tossed back into the water.

“So what have we got here, laddies?” snapped Muir. “I can’t piss around all day talking to you fucking pansy boys. Is it WMD or not? Have we got the evidence?”

Weston stood up. After a brief moment of hesitation, Frith stood up as well. “What we are looking at here, I believe, is not WMD. At least not in the conventional sense.” He turned and walked out of the room. Frith followed, shutting the door softly behind him.

“I think that brings the meeting to a close,” said Wragg quickly. “Thank you, gentlemen.”

Muir snorted, collecting his pad from the desk. “Next time, try to get us the cum shot, boy,” he said, looking menacingly across at Jed. “Missiles, that’s what we want. Vats of fucking rat poison, marked ‘For Delivery to London.’ Not this overgrown Meccano bollocks.”

He leaned over, so that Jed could smell the stale aftershave on his skin. “And you should shave that stupid beard off, sonny,” he sneered. “You look like a bloody tramp.”

Jed was about to speak, but once again he could feel Laura’s hand on his wrist, restraining him. There was something about the touch of her skin on his that he liked: smooth, reassuring, and firm. The words stalled in his throat. Just as well, he reflected, as he stood up and started to walk across the room. Even a couple of years in a social services foster care home, then a couple more as a squaddie, didn’t prepare you for a swearing contest with that tosser.

“What the hell was that all about?” said Jed, turning around to look at Laura as they left the room.

They were standing in the corridor on the second floor of the Firm’s headquarters. A couple of men scurried past, holding bottles of mineral water and thick-looking bundles of paper. Jed could feel the tension in the air: it was the same mixture of anticipation, anxiety, and excitement you got at the Regiment the night before a big scrap was about to blow up.

Laura looked at him, a dazzling smile suddenly flashing across her full red lips. Her left hand reached up to play with her pearl earring.

“That was something that could make my career,” she replied.

TWO

Nick Scott glanced left and right as he walked through the green channel on his way out of Heathrow Terminal 3. A couple of customs officers looked at him, and Nick could tell they were considering the hassle of stopping and searching him. A tall, tanned man, with weather-beaten skin and a black rucksack slung over his shoulder, recently arrived from North Africa, I probably fit all the profiles for a search, he thought. But it’s almost lunchtime. They can’t be bothered.

His flight from Algeria had touched down an hour earlier, but it had taken almost forty minutes for the baggage to turn up on the carousel. It was already ten past one. Nick walked across the crowded terminal, sat down at the coffee bar, and ordered himself a tall latte and a ham-and-cheese sandwich. He stared into the busy mass of people, already wondering how he was going to fill the rest of the month until his next shift on the rigs started up again. I get back to Britain every other month, with my salary—about eight grand—sitting in my bank account, and I still don’t know what the hell to do with myself.

He fished his Nokia from his pocket and glanced at the screen. No messages. No texts. Nothing.

He took a bite of the sandwich, relieved to have some decent food again. For the last five years, he’d been working as a security consultant on the oil rigs off the Algerian coast. Four weeks on, then four weeks off, with your flights and all your meals paid for. It was OK work for a man who had just turned fifty, and he knew he was lucky to have it: there were plenty of former Regiment blokes having to run much greater risks for a lot less money. He liked the sea, and the shifting crew of Egyptians, Moroccans, Somalis, and Algerians who manned the rigs made OK company so long as you didn’t mind the constant smoking, the smell of couscous, or their insatiable demand for porno DVDs featuring German blondes. Being at sea meant you couldn’t spend any cash, and it kept you away from the bottle: most of the rig workers were Muslims and didn’t drink. But it was hot, dull work, and by the last week of every tour, he was just counting the days until he could get back to Britain again.

Until he could see Sarah.

Every man needs something to live for, he’d reflected as the plane had touched down on the runway. Something to pull him through the days. A wife. A job. A dream. For me it’s my daughter. The only thing I ever got right.

He glanced at the Nokia again. He’d sent her a text yesterday afternoon, but they often took a long time to get through—the Algerian landlines hardly worked at all, and the mobiles weren’t much better. Still, the routine was well established. Every time he got back from the rigs, usually with a few grand in his pocket, he’d get the train straight up to Cambridge to see her. They’d go out and have dinner, and share a bottle of wine or two. These days, Nick only allowed himself a drink every couple of months. Any more than that, he knew he’d be in trouble again. And then who would look after Sarah?

The screen was blank.

Funny, thought Nick.

Like most twenty-somethings, Sarah was a text addict. Send her a message, and you’d usually get a reply within minutes. He jabbed at the tiny keyboard and double-checked the inbox. Nothing. Next he looked up “Missed Calls.” Nothing. Christ, I’m a miserable bastard. A month out of the country, and in all that time I haven’t had a single call.

There were only three numbers stored on the phone. His own, the company that supplied the muscle to the rigs, and Sarah’s. He went to Sarah’s number, then pressed the green dial button. It was picked up immediately. “Hi, this is Sarah,” said the familiar voice. “I can’t take your call right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

“It’s Dad,” he said gruffly. “I’m at Heathrow. Give me a ring when you get the message.”

Nick folded the phone back into his pocket. He took another bite of the sandwich, but his appetite seemed