WHATEVER HAZEL WAS expecting, it wasn’t that. “A hostage?” She heard her voice soar. “The pirates took someone of yours hostage, too?”
Ash was beyond pale. His skin was gray. But he was fighting to hold himself together, this close to answers he’d been seeking through four long, hard years. Hazel could hear the clamped-down tension in his voice, but the questions he was asking were the right questions. “Someone off one of your transports?”
Graves shook his head. “No. Someone I didn’t even know until … It’s hard to explain. Look, can I tell you what happened? How it happened? Then you’ll understand. I’m not trying to get out of anything. I don’t know—I honest to God don’t know—where I stand legally. Duress? Yes, certainly. They said they’d kill her if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.
“She’s just some woman. I didn’t even know her before this started. But they were clever, you see. They let her talk to me. They let us talk over a period of months, and you build up a kind of relationship. And it was as if this was the one person I could do something to save. All the others, including the men flying my shipments, were gone and couldn’t be helped. But this one woman was alive, and would stay alive if I cooperated, and would die if I didn’t. Somehow that mattered more than everything else.
“You’re going to tell me,” he said, anticipating Hazel’s interjection with perfect accuracy, “that I could have saved a lot more people by going to the police with the information I had. And maybe you’re right. I’m not sure—I only know what they allowed me to know, I couldn’t tell anyone where they are or how to find them—but maybe I could have prevented some of the later hijackings. And I know: people died every time. People working for me, some of them. And I can’t tell you how sorry I am—for them, for their families, for my colleagues in this industry who thought those deaths were their responsibility, when in fact they were mine.
“I could have stopped that. I could have blown the whistle, and trusted to the police to protect me and mine. I should have done that. But they’d have killed her. This one woman, who begged me to help her, who I’d managed to keep alive this far.”
He took a deep breath, the first he’d managed since deciding to talk. Then he went on in a slightly more measured fashion. “I tried to do it. I kept trying. I picked up the phone more times than I can tell you. Sometimes I even got as far as dialing. I almost told you, Gabriel, when you came to see me—last week, and then again today. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, and also the hardest. I knew—I’ve always known—it was the right thing to do. But you see, I knew her by now. She trusted me. I couldn’t betray her. It was easier to condemn a lot of people I’d never met than this one woman, sitting in a locked room somewhere in Somalia, guns pointed at her head, struggling to survive every day in the hope of a rescue that never came. I couldn’t bring myself to buy other people’s lives with hers.”
“What did you do instead?” Hazel asked softly, afraid that even at this late stage he could be jolted back into silence. “Give them advance warning of your shipments that were heading into their part of the world? Tell them when you heard about other people’s shipments?”
Graves hung his head. “Yes. That’s exactly what I did. Payloads, routes, destinations, refueling stops. The level of onboard security. It wasn’t worth their while to take on heavily guarded shipments—but nobody can afford that level of security all the time. When there’s been no trouble for a while, the security is scaled back. That’s what I told them—when it was safe to take on a particular plane and when it wasn’t.”
“But surely to God,” exclaimed Hazel, “nobody refuels in Somalia! Nobody’s that much of an optimist.”
Graves shook his head. “Of course not. But the world hasn’t just got smaller for you and me—it’s got smaller for the Somali pirates as well. In small, fast surface craft they’ll board oceangoing ships three hundred miles offshore. But they have aircraft as well—planes and helicopters. With those, all central Africa is within their reach.”
“Then why not overfly central Africa?”
“We try to. The problem is, a plane capable of carrying that much fuel is prohibitively expensive to operate. Our customers resist spending that kind of money. And then, what do you do if your end user is in the danger zone? You take all the precautions you can, you remind yourself that most flights get through without any trouble, and you go for it. Usually you’re lucky. Sometimes you’re not.”
“It isn’t luck,” growled Ash, “when someone is passing your flight plans to the enemy.”
“No,” whispered Graves. The weight of his culpability had bowed him. He looked up hesitantly. “What will you do?”
“What do you think we’re going to do?” demanded Hazel. “The first thing we’re going to do is tell everyone involved in this industry to put on hold any plans they’ve mentioned in your hearing. Then we’re going to have you talk to experts in this field with a view to getting as much information as possible about where these pirates are located and how they can be stopped.”
“And the woman?”
Hazel hardened her heart. “It’ll be someone else’s decision, but I don’t think we can afford to prioritize her safety. Not with aircrew going missing every few months. In order to protect her, you’ve sacrificed innocent people. That can’t go on. I’m sorry for her, desperately sorry. But it’s too high a price to pay for one woman’s life.”
“Who is she?”
Hazel didn’t have to look at him; she could tell from the timbre of Ash’s voice what he was thinking. “Gabriel—don’t.”
“I know,” he said quickly. There was an urgent rasp in the words. “I know all about odds. I know what the odds are against its being Cathy. But the thing about odds is, even at a thousand to one, there is that one. Even at fourteen million to one, somebody wins the lottery.” A fragile smile flickered across his face. “It could be me.”
Hazel shrugged. He needed to know. Even though knowing would tear him up all over again. She said to Graves, “You heard the man. Who is she, this woman whose life is worth dozens of other people’s?”
Grave shook his head apologetically. “I don’t know. They’ve never told me her name. They must have told her not to tell me. They call her…” He glanced furtively between them and swallowed. “They call her the cash cow.”
Cold fury bubbled up behind Hazel’s breastbone. She mightn’t be Gabriel Ash’s wife, this nameless woman sitting in a locked room in Mogadishu, but she was someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s daughter. And the men who had snatched her from that life—hauled her off a yacht, or a tourist beach, or a safari coach, waved their guns in her face, put her in immediate and ongoing fear of death—had the temerity to insult her as well. The cash cow. She kept them safe, and she kept the trade on which their piracy depended flowing, and they called her that.
Hazel had never wanted to kill anyone before, not even the man she had killed. She’d done what was necessary to keep other, better people alive, but she hadn’t wanted to end his life the way she wanted to end theirs. The pirates. The term didn’t make her smile anymore. There was nothing funny about them. They were thieves and terrorists and killers, and they kept this woman as a kind of human shield. They might have had her for years and they probably intended to keep her for years more, until despair killed her. And if they’d been where she could reach them, she’d have killed every one of them with any weapon that came to hand, or failing that, with her hands alone. The only word for that was hatred.
“Are you going to arrest me?” asked Graves timidly.
“Not my decision,” said Hazel roughly, and accurately. “You’ll certainly be interviewed under caution. Then it’ll be up to the Crown Prosecution Service.”
“They’ll kill her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“They said they’d kill her if I stopped helping them. They said they’d kill her if I stopped talking to them. They said if I went to the police, they’d kill her.”
Hazel was too tired to lie. “Then they probably will.”
Graves stared at her. “You’re all right with that?”
“Of course I’m not all right with that!” Hazel retorted fiercely. “But there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. They’re operating in a lawless state thousands of miles away, and even if we knew where they were holding her, there’d be nothing we could do to help her. The people we can help, the lives we can save, are the people flying those two or three planes a year that go missing. And the people your weapons are killing who’ll go home to their wives when the shipments can be sure of reaching their authorized end users again.”
The sound of a computer filtered in from an adjoining room. Graves’s eyes flared wide. “I think that’s them.”
Fear knotted a cold hand about Hazel’s entrails. She wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t capable of dealing with this. But there was no one to hand it over to, and no time to find someone. She swallowed hard. “What makes you think so?”
“Because that’s why I come here! I can’t talk to them in my office, can I, and I can’t talk to them at home. There’s a computer here that I use. It’s set up to receive satellite video calls.”
“Who lives here?”
Graves shook that off. “A friend. She’s gone abroad for a while. I keep an eye on the place for her.” His chin came up in a kind of terrified defiance. “Should I take that or not?”
“What’ll happen if you don’t?”
“I don’t know,” Graves said. “I always have. They let me know when I need to be here, and I wait for their call.”
Every instinct Hazel possessed was telling her that he shouldn’t take the call. That they had to buy time, and use it to pass the matter over to the proper authorities. She wasn’t even sure who the proper authorities were, but the Cambridge police would either know or find out. It would probably involve the Home Office and the Foreign Office as well. Decisions at the highest level. And none of them, none, to be taken by a twenty-six-year-old probationary constable on sick leave because right now her judgment was considered suspect.
What would they do, the pirates, if their call went unanswered? Call again, obviously, try to reestablish contact. Their business depended on it. But what would they do about the woman? Would they keep her alive because the source of their information had built up a useful rapport with her? Would they hurt her to make Graves feel guilty? Or would they kill her to show him they meant what they said? There would be other women they could use to keep him in line—if he was willing to compromise himself for one stranger, he’d probably do it for another.
All this passed through—no, raced through—her mind in much less time than it takes to read it. The computer in the next room demanded attention again, but only once. She had to make a decision, and good or bad, she had to make it now. She wished she knew more about this kind of operation. She wished, desperately, she had someone to advise her.
With the force of a thunderbolt came the realization that she did have someone to advise her. Someone with experience of exactly this kind of operation. Someone whose government had thought highly enough of his abilities to vest him with the job of closing it down.
Someone the pirates feared so much they’d destroyed his life in order to keep him off their backs.
Hazel half turned to Ash, hesitantly. The time-dilation effect of the emergency made her voice sound slow and echoey. “Gabriel…”
“Answer it,” said Ash without hesitation.
“Are you sure? If we don’t, they’ll have to call back. By then we could have an expert here to take it.…”
“I’m the expert on this,” Ash said tersely. He said to Graves, “Answer it. Don’t tell them we’re here.”
Graves nodded but still checked with Hazel for confirmation. “Officer?”
Inwardly, Hazel squirmed in an agony of indecision. She trusted Ash’s intellect. She didn’t entirely trust his emotions, and somewhere in his mind he still thought that the woman whose life they were gambling with could be his wife. Maybe he was right anyway. Maybe he was terribly wrong. Hazel had no way of judging. Nothing in her training had prepared her for this. Perhaps nothing could have done.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, and whether or not the men heard it, she detected the tremor in her own voice. “God help me, I don’t know.”
“I do.” It was almost as if everything that had happened in the last four years had been leading Gabriel Ash to this moment. As if the horrors he’d suffered, and had to confront, and had finally to move past had been steeling him. For four years he’d spent a significant part of every day considering how he would face the men who had taken his wife, if ever fate presented him with the opportunity. There was probably no way that contact could have been made that he had not contemplated. All the murderous hours he’d spent sweating his way through one scenario after another turned out after all to have had some kind of a point. He was prepared. The grief, the agony, the madness had all contributed to the staggering fact that, here and now, he knew what to do.
“Answer it. Do what you normally do, say what you normally say. Don’t let them know we’re here. But keep them talking—or her, if it’s the woman. Out of sight of the webcam, jot down everything you see. Everything in the room, everything anyone’s wearing, every symbol that comes up on the screen. Never mind whether it makes sense to you. Put a pad beside the monitor, don’t move your hand too much, but jot down everything you see. We can use it later to work out where they’re calling from.”
There was no time left, least of all for an argument when she had no confidence that he was wrong. Hazel nodded. “Do it.”
Stephen Graves did as he was told: followed the protocol exactly as he had all the previous times he’d done this. He keyed in his user name and password. They needed to know it was him they were talking to.
As always, there was a delay. An image tried to form, broke up, tried again, so bleached by distance and the marginal quality of the equipment that it was almost monochrome. Seconds passed. There was nothing unusual in that, only today the seconds stretched till their sinews groaned.
Once the decision had been made, Hazel had quickly taken up a position to the right of the monitor, out of view of the webcam, not even her shadow showing—she’d checked. From here, bent awkwardly because there hadn’t been time to pull up a chair, she had a tangential view of the screen and also of the pad where Graves’s right hand was already sketching letters and numbers and symbols. This was her field, at least it had been once, but she didn’t even try to analyze them now. There would be time for that later. Right now the priority was to keep Graves on track—support, encourage, help him out if he stepped into the quagmire. With only a tiny sideways glance he could see her face, lip-read her silent instructions, and no one in Mogadishu would have any reason to guess.
Ash was on the other side, also invisible to the computer’s camera, paying for his privacy with an on-screen image even poorer than the one Graves was seeing. Of course it was coming a long way—no one had Somalia at the top of their agenda when they were designing their satellites’ orbits; in addition, there were undoubtedly measures being taken at the other end to keep the signal untraceable.
In spite of all that, a picture was forming. A face—a woman’s face. Still too grainy to read much of an expression into it, and nothing whatever in the background—plain, colorless walls. Words came over the speaker, and a moment later her lips began to move. “Stephen? Stephen, are you there?”
“I’m here,” Graves said quickly. “Are you all right?”
A pause long enough to become uncomfortable, but it was only because of the distance the signal had to come. As soon as she’d received his transmission, she’d answered it. “I don’t know. Things are happening. I don’t know what it means. I think they’re going to move me again. Stephen—try to help them. Whatever they want, try to do it. They say you’re my only chance.”
She was an Englishwoman. It took Hazel a couple of sentences to be sure, because of the sound quality, but she had no doubt now. Well, if she was English, even if she’d been living abroad, it should be possible to find out who she was. There would be a record somewhere of her disappearance. Just how much help that would be, Hazel wasn’t entirely certain, but it seemed to her to matter. The woman must have family and friends somewhere, people who’d want to know that at least for now she was alive.
She concentrated on the imperfect picture of the woman’s face. It’s harder than anyone ever imagines to positively identify a picture of someone you don’t know. Hazel made a note of all the things that might help. Age, she thought, somewhere between forty and forty-five—though the life she’d been forced into would put years on anyone, so she could be younger. Thin, but that was only to be expected. Fairish hair, light skin; eyes looked washed-out, so probably blue or gray. Wearing a T-shirt you could buy in any bazaar anywhere in the world. It wasn’t much to go on.
She was concentrating so hard on doing her job that, incredibly, for a moment she had forgotten who else was here doing it with her. Remembering with a start, wondering how he was dealing with this, she looked guiltily across at him.
Ash was transfixed by the image on the screen. She might have been Medusa, with the power to turn men to stone, rather than an exhausted, terrified woman begging a man she had never met for help he couldn’t now give her. Ash’s lips moved, but it was like the transmission from Mogadishu—the sound was out of sync and came moments later. “Cathy?”
Hazel didn’t believe for one moment that it was Ash’s wife they were looking at. The man was trying to see what he wanted to see above everything in the world, and it had been four years, and the picture was poor enough for him to project even his most desperate hopes onto it. Another moment and he’d see he was wrong, and then the disappointment would take him like an avalanche, crushing him.
But something was going to happen before that, and arguably it was even worse. He was shifting his position to get a better view of the screen. Another second, less, and he’d be where she could see him. And if the woman could see him …
Hazel mouthed urgently at him, flagging her arms to get his attention, waving him back out of the line of sight. Ash saw nothing but the computer screen, and the grainy, jerky picture of a woman that he was trying with all his might to force into the image of his lost wife. He leaned closer. “Cathy?” he whispered again.
And then it was too late. She’d seen him. Her pale eyes flicked sideways from Stephen Graves, and her mouth fell open with shock. Her pale, dry lips tried three or four times to form a word before anything came, and this time it wasn’t just the lip-sync problem. She looked as if she’d been sideswiped with a length of two-by-four.
And then she said, “Gabriel?”