‘Are you going to kill me like you did Tommy-Lee?’ James Chadwick was seated in the rear of the blue van, his wrists cuffed to the bench seat. Malak was sitting across from him, occasionally checking one of his cell phones for text messages while Bilal was driving. Every now and then Malak smiled and nodded with satisfaction as he read the screen, then texted a rapid reply. When he was finished he stamped on the phone before tossing it out of the window and picking another from a box by his feet.
‘Not if I don’t have to.’ Malak lifted his eyes long enough to give James a cold look. It was like being studied by a predatory fish, he thought. So very different to the man who had first approached him after the conference outside Chicago. Back then he had come across as genial, even excited, the typical wannabe thrusting businessman with his ambitions out there for everybody to see and smelling success if only he could get the kick-start funding and advice he needed.
He had even referred to his plan by name: Freedom. As if it were already real and in place. And when James had asked, to be polite, where his company was located, he had used the same name. Freedom.
It had turned out to be entirely false, of course, the real intent soon visible when James had turned down his request for help and the over-the-top offer of money. Yet even then Malak had seemed somehow different; hopeful, maybe, while quick and lively in his look and manner – what some in business referred to as a comer. Later, when James had tried every search engine he could think of to track the man or his company, he had come up with nothing.
Now, though, something in Malak had changed; he had a permanent dullness to his eyes and his nerves seemed stretched to breaking point. It was a look James had seen in too many entrepreneurial types who had gambled everything on a single idea with no backup plan and too few resources to dig themselves out of a hole. Poised on a precipice of their own making, they had become almost dangerous in their desperation to succeed.
But Malak was dangerous for entirely different reasons, and James had to admit to being terrified at the coming few hours.
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough.’
It was the same answer each time. All he knew from the restricted view inside the van was that it was getting dark and they had been following a meandering route for the past couple of days, always on the move and using back roads. They had stopped only at remote motels, sometimes overnight and for a few hours during the day when Malak needed an internet connection. Another stop was coming up.
He adjusted his buttocks on the bench seat and leaned against one of the boxes containing a drone. That was another question to which he’d received a shrug and no comment: what hideous concoction lay inside the glass tube packed in foam that he’d seen Malak handling back at the airfield after the man named Donny had disappeared? He could only speculate, but the obvious conclusion was the stuff of nightmares.
But that wasn’t the only danger inside the van; not two feet from where he was sitting were several small packs of what he was certain was some form of explosive. If it was C4, as he suspected, there was enough there to completely vaporise this van and everything else around it for a considerable distance. He’d tried figuring out what possible use Malak might have for the stuff. Was he going to load some on the drones and use them as flying bombs? If so he would need some form of detonator – maybe one of the mobile phones in the box. It would work, but the combined weight would stretch the carrying capacity and speed of the drones and make them more difficult to control if there was any turbulence.
So what was the plan? The only thought that came to mind was a suicide run; if all else failed Malak might choose a spectacular ending. But was that really his style? The more the man talked, the more James was beginning to read him and understand the character behind the cold mask. And something about his personality, as guarded as he was, spoke of a man who would not choose suicide unless all else was lost – an option of last resort.
Logic also told him that Malak wouldn’t risk his own life unnecessarily when he clearly had a mission to accomplish. But what if fate intervened and they ran into a police or army patrol? It was clear that the one named Bilal was a violent thug with a love of guns, and thought himself invincible. But a volley of bullets would go through this van without stopping and one only had to strike the launcher or the C4 and…
He pushed the thoughts away, focussing instead on Ben and Valerie. Occasionally his thoughts dwelled on Elizabeth, but hardly to the same degree; that boat had sailed a long time ago, for which he blamed himself. He made a resolve, however, that if ever he got out of this jam in one piece, he would go see her and try to make some peace between them, if only for Ben’s sake.
Malak sniggered and held out his cell phone so that James could read the screen. It was a breaking news report of a rocket attack on the county jail in Alva, Oklahoma, followed by the pursuit and shooting dead of the attackers by local law enforcement officers. The death toll in the attack on the jail stood at five, with two injured jail workers in a critical condition. One of those killed inside the jail, the report continued, had been a newly-arrested man named Donny Bashir, who was said to have had proven terrorist connections and was being interviewed by the FBI at the time of the assault. Police and FBI sources were speculating that the attack had been to gain Bashir’s release.
‘They’re running around in circles. Like headless chickens,’ Malak said softly, taking the phone back and snapping it off. More and more, Chadwick noticed as time went on, Malak the apparent American was given to using a more staccato form of speaking which made him seem both more foreign than he had first sounded, and increasingly more intense, as if he were now the person he had always aspired to be. It made him seem both tragically comic and frighteningly dangerous.
‘They were your men,’ said James. ‘Don’t you feel for them?’ He no longer felt wary of asking such questions; whatever Malak had prepared for him in the coming hours was hardly going to be made worse by anything he said at this stage.
‘They weren’t mine. They were tools, like Bashir.’ He gave a self-satisfied smile, and the intensity of his gaze so close was deeply unsettling. ‘And there are others. They, too, will perform a task or die in the attempt. It is how things are done.’
‘That’s cold.’ James nodded at the phone in Malak’s hand. ‘At this rate you’re going to start running out of tools.’
‘Never.’ Malak leaned forward until James could smell his breath, and spoke so softly that it had to be so that Bilal up front wouldn’t hear, ‘There are always those willing to die for a good cause. Always. Have you not already realised that from everything you’ve seen over the past twenty-five years?’ He grinned and sat back as if enjoying himself. ‘Of course you haven’t. You think it’s a filthy Arab habit, so nothing to concern yourselves with. So what if a few dozen ragheads blow themselves to pieces? Let them do it… as long as they keep it to the Middle East where you westerners don’t have to watch it! Well, your time has come and you had better get used to a new era in conflict!’
James said nothing. An inner light was glowing in Malak’s eyes, and he realised there was more than a glimmer of the idealist in there. Yet somehow, as loaded with passion as it should have sounded, the words had come across as somehow a little too rehearsed, as if he were talking to like-minded individuals like the muscle-man up front, voicing words that were part of a common mantra they expected to hear.
‘Another thing,’ Malak continued, this time in a calmer tone. ‘You Americans think you created the joint idea of enterprise and war, of big business making profits from conflict by manufacturing arms and munitions. But what of waging war itself – as a business? Huh? You ignore history at your peril. There have been armies since the dawn of time making profit from fighting, but in modern-era America, that has been seen as too disgusting to consider – until recently.’
‘You mean mercenaries?’ James decided to interrupt the flow, if only to show he wasn’t intimidated by this man’s passion. ‘That’s hardly an American invention.’
‘True enough. But it’s the United States that has taken the idea of paid armies to a whole new level, with its PMCs – its private military contractors; thousands of private soldiers and so-called black ops ‘specialists’ fighting on behalf of the state and doing its dirty work under cover, unaccountable and untouchable. Well, you’re not the only ones who can play by those rules. You had better be ready for the reality of what you’ve unleashed because now there’s a new game in town.’
‘You’re a mercenary? Is that what you’re saying? Am I supposed to be impressed?’
Malak smiled. ‘I don’t care whether you’re impressed or not. But you had better be concerned.’ He held up a finger. ‘As a business consultant I’m sure you’ll appreciate that it’s a very simple principle. Take one organised and patient man with an idea and lots of financial backers. Team him with others who care nothing for money or reward, but who share a deep, abiding hatred of a common superpower and a lasting faith in the hereafter. Now what do you have?’
James was horrified. There was no answer he could think of.
‘I’ll tell you what you have, Mr Chadwick: you have what you fancy business consultants might call a first-class business model: the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. And the best thing of all? It’s constantly renewable, generation by generation, feeding on itself and gaining ground. In the end it will be everywhere and unstoppable.’ He grinned and waggled his fingers in a ghastly parody of a comedian. ‘Now that, my friend, is an idea you can take all the way to the bank!’