Fire Hawk Read Free

before.
    â€˜For you, Mister Packer.’
    It had been terrifying to hear his real name used, terrifying to hear it spoken by this stranger. The Iraqi had ignored his denials, leaning forward until his mouth was just inches from his ear. Then he’d begun to whisper, a warning that had taken Sam’s breath away: ‘
Anthrax warheads – they have been taken outside Iraq and will soon be used
.’
    Anthrax. Biological warfare. BW – the UN’s living nightmare, the primary target now of its five-year-long inspection regime inside Iraq.
Will soon be used
. . . Where? And when? Before he could ask the man was gone.
    His mind had cartwheeled. Was the warning true, or a trick? The man had known his name. Not Terry Malone, the name on his passport and the hotel register, but Packer. Sam Packer. And if they knew his real name, they knew he was a spy, and
they
must be Iraqi counter-intelligence. He’d felt caught in a spotlight. He’d scanned the lobby for watching eyes. The hotel was riddled with hidden cameras and microphones.
Someone
would have recorded the contact made with him. Slowly he’d stood up, slipping the envelope into the pocket of his jacket and making for the lifts.
    Up in his bedroom, unmasked and a very long wayfrom home, he’d felt the first shiver of panic. He’d locked himself in the bathroom and hidden behind the shower curtain to avoid covert lenses. Inside the envelope he’d found a single sheet of lined note-paper. On it, two sentences of four words each.
    Beware of Salah Khalil. He is Saddam’s man.
    The name had meant nothing to him. Two messages passed to him; one written, one verbal, one about a man, one about a plague. No obvious connection between the two.
    He’d memorised the words on the note, then burned it, flushing the ash down the drain. Common sense had told him this was a trap – the Mukhabarat feeding him phoney intelligence in the hope of catching him passing it to London. Yet his guts had told him something else, that the messenger had been risking his neck to speak to him. That the man was in fear of his life. With no time in which to think, he’d concluded the warnings could be genuine, and since the danger from anthrax weapons was so great, the tip-off, however vague, had to be passed on fast. Direct communication with London was impossible. No phone was safe. But he’d remembered the German businessman who’d given him the newspaper, remembered he was heading home via Amman that evening.
    He’d set to work fast, squatting on the loo seat and searching the newspaper for the crossword. Filling in blanks in its matrix, he’d scrawled K-H-A-L-I-L S-U-S-P-E-C-T and B-W A-T-T-A-C-K A-L-E-R-T – there’d been no time for code. Then he’d buried a phone number on the small ads page. Not the direct line for his controller at SIS – too risky if the German were to be stopped by the Mukhabarat – but a personal number, someone whose reaction to the message would be as instinctive as his.
    Chrissie Kessler, his lover until three months ago.
    Downstairs, the German had had the taxi door open when Sam found him.
    â€˜Your paper. You wanted it back,’ he’d declared, willing the man to understand. In a whisper he’d added, ‘Look inside. Later, not now. Ring the number on page six. It’s London. Ask for Chrissie. Read her the crossword. Please.’
    Not wavering for a moment, the German had climbed into the taxi and driven off.
    Three minutes later, back in the hotel lobby, Packer had been arrested. The Mukhabarat had seen everything. A trap after all. Two men had hustled him to a car, one of them with shiny black hair and a Saddam moustache. And now, God knew how many days later, here he was, strapped to a stretcher in the back of some truck that smelled of piss, heading for whatever fate they’d decided on. He was helpless. On his own. They could do what they liked with him