tell Mummy because she might be worried, and we don’t want to worry her, do we? and hated myself for doing it.
Three days later, the same man rang.
“I’m outside your house, Holbrook. You got my money?”
“I’m getting it. I told you.” I was at work, in the CID office, waiting for someone’s brief to tell them to go no comment.
“Getting it ain’t got it.”
He didn’t answer. Instead, I heard the unmistakable sound of a lighter. The hiss of gas, the click of the flint. I snatched the keys to a pool car and ran, calling Mina again and again as I drove to the house. She didn’t pick up.
When I got there, my heart pounding, the house was in darkness. I couldn’t smell smoke, couldn’t see the flicker of fire—had it been an empty threat?
The light went on in the bedroom window, and I called Mina’s mobile again. I had to know she and Sophia were okay. She canceled the call, and I stood on the farm track, wondering if I should go back to work.
But what if the threat hadn’t been empty?
She opened the door as I was walking up the path. No fire. Only Mina—suspicious, angry, unharmed—and a doormat soaked in petrol.
“Holbrook! If you’re in there, open the fucking door.” More hammering.
“Daddy,” Sophia whispers now. “Is it the bad man again?”
“I think so.”
“You were told midnight! Have you got it or not?”
Her face crumples, a tremor seizing her upper body. As long as I live, I will never forgive myself for putting her through this.
“I’ll take that as a no, then,” the man yells.
“We need to be quiet, sweetheart. He mustn’t know we’re in here.”
She nods, and I ache to put my arms around her. These bloody handcuffs. Again and again, I pull against the pipes, glad of the blood, of the pain, because it’s no less than I deserve.
The sound of an engine makes me stop. I look at Sophia. Was that it? Has he really given up so easily?
“I think he’s leav—” I start, but something catches in my nostrils, an acrid smell that fills me with fear and makes me pull at my handcuffs again.
Smoke. I can smell smoke.
The house is on fire.
FORTY-THREE
2 HOURS FROM SYDNEY | MINA
The vest isn’t real. It’s not a bomb. The words in my head are echoed by the voices around me, as though the more it’s repeated, the more we’ll all believe it. It’s not a bomb. She’s not wearing a bomb. The vest isn’t real.
Or is it?
How can we trust this woman, this pseudo doctor more likely to take a life than save it? How do we know this isn’t part of the plan, designed to push us toward our own demise?
Sweat’s running down the side of Ganges’s face, soaking into his collar. He’s breathing fast, rocking on the balls of his feet, but I’m not worried about him—he’ll fall the second he’s pushed. Behind him, in the entrance to the business-class cabin, Zambezi stands firm, and across the cabin, Niger waits, every muscle poised. He watches me, and I know he’ll move the second we do, but I can stop that. I’ve planned for that. These people stand between me and my daughter as surely as if I could see her behind them, and nothing is going to stop me reaching her. Eleven years ago, I made a terrible mistake, and I’ve lived with it ever since. I shouldn’t be here, but I am, and I have to make it count.
“What did she tell you?” I address my question to Ganges, the most likely to answer me.
“Just what we needed to know.” His answer is slippery, like Adam’s when he’d come home hours after his shift finished, telling me he went to see a mate, ran into traffic, had a problem with the car. I know what a lie looks like.
“Missouri told us the plane would be flown until the UK government gave into your demands or until we ran out of fuel. If that was the case, all of you would have known there was a chance you’d die, but that’s not what your faces said just now. You never thought you’d die, did you?”
Ganges doesn’t answer. His eyes dart from side to side, mouth working as though he’s chewing gum. I wonder how many fighter jets there are, whether they all fire at once—the way firing squads do—or whether one person has to live with the knowledge that they’ve brought down a plane. I wonder