Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,44

go in my vehicle and Jackson’s,’ he said.

Satisfied it was safe, he pushed open the door and moved swiftly to the cars. In the lot, the three ARU vehicles had been torn apart by the Kalashnikov gunfire so the men ignored them and headed for the civilian cars parked beside them. Cobb and Jackson pulled their keys and clicked open each car, the two vehicles giving two chirps as they were unlocked. Jackson climbed into the driver's seat of his BMW, Archer and Fox with him, whilst Porter and Chalky went with Cobb. Both engines fired up, and Cobb took the lead, reversing and heading out of the lot swiftly. One of the two Met officers stationed at the perimeter lifted the yellow police tape, and the two cars moved underneath, past the gathering group of journalists, news-teams and members of the public, and headed off down the street, moving fast.

In the lead car, heading down the road, Cobb thought for a moment then pulled his mobile phone from his inside suit pocket and pushed Redial. The call connected to Nikki back upstairs in the ops room inside ARU's headquarters.

'Sir?' she answered.

'Nikki, call my wife,' he said. 'Tell her to come straight in and bring the boys. Until this is over, I want them all under armed protection.'

'Yes, sir,' she said.

He ended the call, put his foot down and the car sped off down the street.

‘Simon Fletcher,’ Chalky said. ‘Was he a member of the rescue team, sir?’

Cobb shook his head, his face hard.

‘No. He was one of the hostages.’

Back at the command post, the big man sitting alone in the darkness saw the CNN screen flicker to reports of a double-homicide discovered in a family home in McLean, Virginia.

So they’d found the fat man and his wife. Finally. For a government town, they’d taken their time. He’d been expecting that discovery two weeks ago. When he and his team had arrived in McLean after leaving Belgrade, they had settled in a hotel and started to look around for what they were after. They had eventually found it sitting in a local bar, three days later. The man's name was Peter Shaw, an overweight and disgruntled analyst who worked for the CIA. Spider had stopped into a local bar for a beer, and had heard the overweight man complaining to a co-worker about how his talents were being misused, the two men sitting on stools down the bar nursing two cold beers.

Once Bug and Flea had joined Spider and the fat man’s friend had said his goodbyes and headed out, Spider had moved over and introduced himself, making up a bullshit story about his background and struck up a conversation. Over the next few hours, the three soldiers had proceeded to get Shaw increasingly drunk, encouraging him to talk and vent his anger about his perceived misuse by the Agency. Shaw had gone on and on about how his skills were being wasted by his superiors, how he was the best analyst you could find in the entire damn town and how he was sick of being overlooked for promotion again and again by people who couldn’t do their job without him. The three men kept nodding in agreement, feigning interest and feeding him more booze, fuelling his dissatisfaction and in the process finding out what his security clearances were.

Once Spider told his commanding officer about Shaw the next morning, they agreed he was exactly what they were looking for. The next step was when to give the fat man the assignment. The team knew that they couldn’t approach Shaw in his vehicle or anywhere near his office at the Agency headquarters. So they had accosted him twenty four hours later, just before he went to work early in the morning. He had opened the door, surprised to see his new friends from the bar standing on his porch. The men had stripped his wife naked in the living room and held a butcher's knife from the kitchen to her throat. She was as overweight as her husband, her pale fatty flesh marbled and stretched. Her nudity was an unpleasant sight.

The long blade to the fat woman’s jugular, the leader had said very clearly and simply what they wanted. If Shaw complied, he promised that they both would live and they would leave them be. But if he failed or tried to tell anyone what was happening, the leader of the group would let his men start on his wife.