Heartbreaker

By Nick Louth

The outstanding thriller from the #1 bestselling author of BITE, Nick Louth

Veteran BBC journalist Chris Wyrecliffe finds himself in the Middle East as the Arab Spring explodes into life. Back on the front line at last, he’s stumbled across the biggest story of his life.

But two women have a hold on him. One, a wealthy Saudi beauty he has loved since the first moment he saw her. The other, a feisty young Palestinian refugee loves him with a frightening intensity.

Wyrecliffe is caught between them in a dangerous game whose implications are as extreme as they are hidden…

For in the dark Al Qaeda underworld hides a man with the veteran journalist in his sights. The net is closing fast. With the clock ticking, Wyrecliffe could be the instrument of a terrorist plot astonishing in its ingenuity and daring…

An extraordinary thriller that grips like steel, Heartbreaker will keep you guessing until the very last page. Perfect for fans of Tom Bale, David Jackson and K.L. Slater.

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‘I absolutely loved this book, it is well written and keeps you on your toes all the way to the last chapter.’

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‘Exciting, interesting and unpredictable. Highly recommended.’

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‘Had me hooked from the start! I would definitely recommend this book.’

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jul 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781911591764

Nick Louth

Nick Louth is a million-copy bestselling thriller author, and an award-winning journalist. After graduating from the London School of Economics, Nick was a foreign correspondent for Reuters, working in New York, Amsterdam, London and Hong Kong. He has written for the Financial Times, Investors Chronicle, Money Observer and MSN. His debut thriller, Bite, was a Kindle No. 1 bestseller and has been translated into six languages. The DCI Craig Gillard series and DI Jan Talantire series are published by Canelo, and in audio by WF Howes. He is married and lives in Lincolnshire.

Book preview

Copyright

Heartbreaker

Nick Louth

Canelo

For Louise and in memory of my father

Foreword

This was intended to be a work of fiction, but it is so tightly bound in the events of the day, developing as I wrote it, that there are inevitably both real, recognisable people and real events in the backdrop to the fictional journey described. As I write this the second round of Egypt’s presidential elections are in the balance, the Supreme Court has forcibly dissolved the newly-elected Parliament, and the army has surrounded the Parliament building just a few streets away from where I am sitting. Having been shot at, and dived for cover, while researching this book in Cairo, I feel that the thrill I hope to put across is a real one.

Almost everything that I describe in the broad scope of this book, the issues of terrorism, technology and identity either have already happened or will, and perhaps sooner rather than later. The main characters, tightly bound to each other, are my own invention, and any resemblance to particular individuals is unintended. But if they are alive, and if you care about whether they live or die, I will be satisfied.

Tahrir Square, Cairo

June 2012

Prologue

It is 2011 and the Arab world is in uproar. In an anonymous room, in a hotel in the Middle East, a hunted woman removes her veil. She shrugs off the dark, heavy, full length abaya. Her slim body trembles. She spreads a blanket over the bed, and then over that places a towel. She strips to her underwear. With her fingers, she feels the place. Just above the line of her pants. Feels the edges of the bump. She positions the mirror on a chair, to see exactly what she is doing. If only the tremors of fear that are pulsing in her abdomen would cease. She looks at her resources. A darning needle, which she has threaded with cotton, a miniature bottle of eau du toilette, some cotton wadding, a roll of sticking plaster, a tube of antiseptic cream and a leather belt.

A knife.

A Stanley knife, for cutting carpets or boxes. She presses the button and slides the triangular blade out, wipes it in perfume to sterilise it, then retracts it smoothly into the metal shaft.

Slide. Retract. Slide. Retract.

She doesn’t know how long she has sat there, trying to pluck up the courage to do what she has to do. If there was any other way, any alternative, she would take it. But there is not. It has to be done. Her pursuers are hot on her trail. They may be here in this hotel already. They might find her at any time.Then all would be lost.

An insufferable loneliness weighs her down. There is no one to help her. No one to take the responsibility. No one to do the job that has to be done. She just has to do it herself. She has prayed for strength and, inshallah, she will find it. She doesn’t know whether she can bear the pain, but she knows she must try. It isn’t just her own life at stake. The lives of others, perhaps many others, depend on her having the courage to cut her own flesh.

And to remove the evil within her.

She folds the belt and grips it between her teeth. Then she brings the blade to the edge of her quivering coffee-coloured flesh. And begins to cut.

Book One

Chapter One

BBC Radio 4 Studio, Broadcasting House, London

March 2009

‘My castaway today is a man who surely needs no introduction to Radio Four listeners. For ten years he has been a warm and comforting early morning presence on the Today programme, his earthy Yorkshire voice easing many of us into our daily routines with a balanced and good-natured probing of the great and good. Before that he was an outstanding BBC foreign correspondent, in Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and in the Bosnian War. I’m sure many of us will recall him giving us a chilling eyewitness account of the 1995 discovery of hundreds of bodies, civilians massacred in Bosnia. During the course of his reporting he has had a grenade thrown at him, lost the top of an ear, and survived having his tent run over by a Serbian tank. But these days he says his most difficult task is to get up at three in the morning without sounding grumpy on air,’ presenter Kirsty Young said. ‘He has, he says, never been good at getting out of bed.’

In the background there was a familiar baritone laugh, liquid and infectious.

Young continued: ‘His abiding passion though is the charitable work for refugees in Lebanon, to which he has devoted himself for almost twenty years, and for which he was awarded the CBE last year. Looking back, he says, he was always struck by the hospitality and humanity of those caught up in wars, their generosity to strangers, and it is something that he says he has tried in his own small way to pass on.’

‘He is, of course, Chris Wyrecliffe.’

Wyrecliffe squirmed slightly as she went on to outline his junior schooling at Ripley in Yorkshire, where the geography master once called him ‘too clever by three-quarters’ and then his time at Bradford Grammar School, where he was caned on at least four occasions. His school report, mostly glowing, still made frequent use of the word ‘insolent.’

He laughed again.

‘So, when you were growing up as a little boy in the Yorkshire Dales, had you always wanted to be a reporter?’

‘No, not at all,’ he said, describing instead a boyhood passion for cricket, and with adolescence, rugby. ‘A place beside Geoffrey Boycott would have suited me fine.’

Desert Island Discs, the oldest and most reflective of celebrity shows, asks the interviewee to imagine they were marooned on a desert island with little more than a record player for company, and to pick the eight pieces of music that would help them survive. Wyrecliffe’s first choice was Bach’s B minor mass, which brought back memories of his time as a chorister. After broadcasting an excerpt, Young probed his days at Oxford’s Balliol College, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics. ‘You gained a 2:2, which some would say was a disappointment of early promise.’

‘I can’t argue with that…’

‘Oxford, you have said, was where you discovered girls,’ she said. ‘Indeed one of your contemporaries said your success with women was the cause of much envy.’

‘Well, I’m not sure about that. At that age, it’s the central pre-occupation of most males. I wasn’t much different.’

Kirsty Young referred to the substantial fan mail he now received as a radio personality. She alluded to an excerpt from one letter addressed to him at the BBC back in 2006 which the Daily Mail had got hold of and published. It was from a woman who despite being happily married to a barrister, wrote ‘I fancy you rotten’ and wouldn’t mind being serenaded along Venice’s Grand Canal just to listen to ‘your rich, chocolatey voice’. Another had written that while listening to him introduce a news item on the grouse-shooting season, she fantasised about being ‘borne away to the moors on a dark horse by a large hirsute Heathcliff figure with the voice of Mr Wyrecliffe’ and under whom ‘she was prepared to suffer any beastliness, any depravity.’

Relief arrived with a recording of Humphrey Lyttleton jazz, and then a series of still more personal questions. Had he been expected to lose his Yorkshire accent during his early BBC days? It wasn’t true, and he hadn’t. No, there’d been no voice coaching either, though an early nicotine craving, dispatched almost the day he gave up his addiction to war zones, had perhaps added a deeper timbre. What about that beard?

‘I started wearing a beard out of laziness when I was reporting in the field,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit more neatly trimmed now. I’m always surprised when listeners discover my picture on the Radio 4 website and see I have facial hair, and say they are surprised, even annoyed, because that isn’t how they imagine me.’

‘Annoyed?’

‘Oh yes,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve destroyed a piece of mental furniture. You imagine someone one way, listen to them every day for years, and they turn out to look different. It scrambles the picture you get in your head next time you listen.’

Desert Island Discs, traditionally famous for fawning to the famous, was now expected to get underneath a guest’s skin. The next question didn’t come as much of a surprise.

‘Now, I must ask you about the ‘A’ level scratchcard incident,’ Young said.

Wyrecliffe had a particularly unpleasant interview on Today a year ago with a bumptious education minister. The question was asked why it was that ‘A’ level results had got better every year without a break for fifteen years, if not through becoming easier. The minister had doggedly stuck to the party line: good students, better teaching, and restructured education. Marking, he said, had not been softened one jot. The interview made the papers because Wyrecliffe had been heard to say after the minister departed, and supposedly off-air: ‘When ‘A’ levels are given out on scratchcards, he’ll finally be able to get his own.’

‘That wasn’t very fair was it?’ Young asked.

‘No, absolutely not,’ Wyrecliffe laughed. ‘But the minister and I have since had a good chuckle about it.’ This wasn’t quite true. The ministry had made an official complaint to the BBC and Wyrecliffe had been pilloried by the Head of News. Not so much for what he said, as for not identifying the difference between a microphone that was on and one that wasn’t.

Young then switched to a different tack, but one which he had prepared for.

‘What was the most moving experience you ever had as a foreign correspondent?’

Wyrecliffe paused, aware that rushing straight in would make his answer seem as prepared as it was. He didn’t want to dispel the impression of spontaneity, the recollection and the weighing of experiences, the catching of sighs and hesitation which Desert Island Discs so values.

‘I think it was after an earthquake in Turkey in 1991. We had managed to get to a mountain village that had been cut off for at least a week, and found a family camped by the side of their flattened home, from which they had managed to rescue just a battered settee. It was freezing, with sleet coming in horizontally. A small fire was burning in front of the settee, amid a circle of stones, on which a small blackened can acted as a saucepan. A stout and dignified woman in cardigan, headscarf, wellingtons and improvised skirt would every so often poke the contents of this can with a stick, while a clump of tiny shivering children on the settee stared goggle-eyed at it. We got some tremendous close-up pictures, of the concentrated longing written into the children’s faces, and the snowflakes on their hair and eyelashes. They clearly hadn’t eaten for days, but this food, whatever it was, was taking a long time to cook. When it was finally ready, we stopped filming, to give them some space. It was no more than a cupful of rice, clearly gathered from a floor, because it was tainted with soot and grit. The woman then shooed the children from the sofa, indicated that cameraman Rick Baxter and I should sit, and with quiet pride offered to share their tiny meal with us. We, of course, graciously declined.’

After a long pause, a final question, with an unexpected twist.

‘We’ve heard all about your charitable work, and I understand this was inspired by a tragic incident in your early days of reporting. What happened, and what effect has it had on your life. Has it changed you as a person?’

‘That’s a big question,’ Wyrecliffe chuckled. ‘It had all begun in an obscure town, deep in one of the world’s most intractable troublespots, twenty years ago.’

And as he started to talk, he knew there was much he could never tell. This was a story that had shaped his life. And it was a very long way from being over.

Chapter Two

Christian Militia Zone – South Lebanon

November 1989

Fouad Adwan coaxed the aged Peugeot over the last broken section of baking roadway leading up to the hilltop town of Soultaniye. The chassis grumbled as it negotiated the shrapnel-fractured concrete, and skirted the whitewashed stones laid out to mark the edge of a deep crater.

Wyrecliffe, thirty-five, and a BBC world affairs correspondent, sat next to Adwan, the twenty-three-year old driver, freelance sound-recordist and general fixer. Behind him was cameraman Rick Baxter, five years Wyrecliffe’s junior. Beside Baxter were three boxes of camera kit, the U-matic tape cassettes, Wyrecliffe’s Tandy laptop, spare cables and within the spare lens box, carefully wrapped in a copy of the Beirut Times, a precious bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label.

Wyrecliffe had spent most of the hot and uncomfortable journey with his six-foot three inch frame crammed in the front seat where the extra space and working window mechanism was offset by an apparently dead radio and a rebellious seat spring which jabbed him fiercely in the left buttock on each and every bump. The insertion of a dog-eared BBC Style Guide, 116 pages of Reithian bureaucracy, between him and the seat had only slightly numbed the pain. There was much more discomfort to come. A decade of indiscriminate mortar fire and sporadic heavy shelling ensured that there were an awful lot of bumps on this journey. A winding eighty-nine miles from Beirut led to the Israeli security zone, a rugged range of hills controlled by the South Lebanon Army, a paramilitary group that had grown up to protect the Maronite Christians during the civil war, but had become a close ally of Israel.

This was the last and most dangerous stage of a journey to interview the most powerful man in Southern Lebanon. Antoine Lahad, a retired lieutenant-general from the Lebanese Army, had run the SLA since 1984. He was either an icon of national salvation or a despicable turncoat, depending on which parts of Lebanon’s tangled ethnic thicket you came from. The Palestinians hated him, and they detested the SLA. It was a feeling that was reciprocated in full.

While the SLA was implicated in many bloody acts, it was most notorious for one single horror, undertaken in three days in 1982. More than 3,000 Palestinian civilians, mainly women and children, had been slaughtered like cattle in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila while Israeli soldiers looked on.

Today, seven years later, the SLA was ready to let the BBC interview its leader. Interviewing Lahad was a quest that for Wyrecliffe had begun months, even years ago. He had always known it might not work out. Things often didn’t in Lebanon, but in recent months the chances had improved. The bloodiest phase of the civil war seemed to be over, and the toll of death across the country was now down to the mid teens. Not per month, not per week. Per day. This was calm for Lebanon, unthinkable carnage for any other country. Still, that relative calm, and the upsurge in news elsewhere around the globe this year had given Wyrecliffe the break in his daily work schedule to try. London, by which he meant the BBC editing desk, was less likely to pester him when they had their hands full with the IRA bomb blast in Deal which had killed eleven soldiers, the Thames pleasure boat cut in two by a dredger with the loss of eighty-nine lives, the Tiananmen Square massacre whose death toll had run into hundreds, and above all the gradual collapse of the Iron Curtain. Lebanon would need an extraordinary news day to compete with that.

Lahad had agreed to be interviewed, on camera, by the BBC for half an hour. It was a coup. No-one else from the international press had ever interviewed him, and the ‘non-interviews’ in sympathetic newspapers and on Maronite radio were just polemic rants. A true interview, with critical questioning, was what Wyrecliffe wanted. Getting it was another matter. Wyrecliffe’s initial list of questions, demanded by Lahad’s officials in advance, were systematically whittled down. Most emphatically, Lahad wouldn’t talk about the 1982 massacre, or his relationship with Elie Hobeika, the Christian Phalangist leader who had ordered it. Well, there are always ways.

Then there was the location. Wyrecliffe had been ready to go as far south as Marjayoune, just south of the Litani River, a Maronite redoubt where Lahad lived. The SLA had other ideas. A secret location, finally dictated over a crackly phone line at 5am that morning. Wyrecliffe would wait at Soultaniye, a town two hours deeper into South Lebanon. He would then be escorted to Lahad’s operational headquarters nearby.

A longer journey compounded the potential snags. Roadblocks. Israeli or militia action. A car breakdown. Or simply a warlord who had changed his mind.

Soultaniye, a jumbled collection of cement homes, wooden sheds and olive groves looked deserted except for the stray goats which wandered around a burned out wreck of a car, and foraged amidst piles of rubbish. Adwan parked the car in the narrow main square as agreed, underneath a broken metal lamppost from which cables still looped towards a nearby house. He then tried one again to get a signal from the car radio, but he went right through the dial with nothing but the odd crackle.

‘Is broke,’ he said, finally.

‘Like everything on this blasted car,’ Wyrecliffe said, taking the opportunity to get out, stretch his bulky frame, and massage his sore buttock.

Had he remembered to bring his short-wave radio, he should not only be able to get BBC World Service, Voice of America and Radio Lebanon, but also Israeli Army Radio and the ad-hoc station run by the SLA. As it was, they had not heard a news bulletin since 6am. It made him all the more nervous about the huge risk they were running.

Wyrecliffe’s senior colleague, Jim Moore, was away in Edinburgh for a long-booked family wedding. This meant leaving the office in Beirut in the youthful and inexperienced hands of Taseena al-Khalifa. Of mixed Lebanese/French and royal Saudi parentage, Taseena had buckets of confidence, connections and charm, but she was still only twenty-two and utterly new to the BBC’s rigid style. She had spent most of her brief time since graduation from the Sorbonne covering Lebanese politics for a Gulf-based Arab language news magazine. She used her beauty to charm elderly but powerful politicians, who routinely underestimated her nose for news. Wyrecliffe had recruited her as a stringer, a journalistic freelancer three months ago at a pifflingly small rate. Her job was to add some back-up to the reporting: good contacts, excellent Arabic, a few stints monitoring the local language news broadcasts for anything missed by Caversham, the BBC’s Reading-based monitoring facility. Neither Moore nor Wyrecliffe envisaged her doing much up-front reporting. She was there to help them prepare for the unexpected. She was there in what journalists universally call CYA mode: Cover Your Arse.

Wyrecliffe had been warned that Taseena was ‘a looker’ by Associated Press bureau chief Mike Toller, who’d recommended her. But he hadn’t been quite prepared for the extraordinary glamour and poise she possessed. When he sat down to interview her, he was so distracted he dropped her application form, mislaid her Lebanese security credentials and forgot the questions he had intended to ask her. That was when he first experienced her laugh, something so warm and infectious that Toller had described it as being ‘bathed in sunshine’.

Whatever her talents, she’d need to fit BBC needs, and Wyrecliffe had done his best to prepare her. He bluntly told her to forget trying to convey Lebanese politics to a UK audience. The Great British Public struggles to follow anything from the Middle East except death and disaster, preferably along the known fault lines of Arab versus Jew and Sunni versus Shia. ‘Lead from the facts,’ he said. ‘You’ll lose their attention, and that of the editors, with much more.’

The facts need careful wrapping. Wyrecliffe had passed her a copy of the style guide, and recounted the essentials of reporting Lebanon for the BBC. First, good reporters avoid emotionally loaded descriptions. Say guerrillas or preferably militants not terrorists. Say explosion, or blast, if you hear one. Don’t use the term bomb until you know for sure it is one. In a typical minute of air time there is barely enough for the ‘what, when and how’ essentials of a bombing or attack. The ‘who’ needs careful handling, and you’ll rarely have time for much on ‘why’ even though that may interest you most. All news stories have to compete for air time with whatever is happening elsewhere. It’s not a story for London unless we have at least ten dead bodies here, if they are locals. Road accidents, gas blasts and other civil carnage isn’t news until we’re in the realms of twenty to thirty dead. Dead or kidnapped foreigners are more interesting, of course. The minimum for London interest is three Europeans, two Aussies or Kiwis, or a single Brit or American. Brutal, yes, but absolutely standard.

Wyrecliffe had left her his ‘boilerplate’ file, in which three typical Lebanese news events were effectively pre-written in BBC style. They were called Bombing, Clashes and Other, respectively. All she had to fill in was the body count (always headline and first paragraph) the source for this number (preferably a hospital), and to remember to pick initially the lowest figure if death tolls varied. ‘If you get conflicting numbers,’ Wyrecliffe had said, ‘be conservative. Say you have twenty-six, fifteen and twelve from different sources. Then say ‘At least twelve people have died in…’ that’s the best way to handle it. Nothing is worse than grabbing a headline with reports of eighty-five deaths and having to row back to seventeen later on.’

All that he had passed on in the interview, while trying not to stare too deeply into those big kohl-lined eyes. He had done all he could, but now everything was in Taseena’s hands. She was the CYA resource.

But now there was no radio for him to check up on her. Without being able to pick up news bulletins he was running blind and that always made him nervous and irritable. There had been talk months ago of London making available to Middle East region one of their three precious new satellite uplinks. These suitcase-sized monsters took fifteen minutes to set up and came with a satellite dish the size of a wok, but enabled correspondents to stay in touch and file copy wherever they were. Wyrecliffe had put in a plea to be allocated one, as had pretty much every correspondent outside Europe. Lebanon’s phone system was dire in the best of times, even before the Israeli invasion, but that could equally be said of Lagos, Nairobi and even Mexico City. The first uplinker dispatched last month to cover East Berlin street protests had been stupidly labelled for what it was, and seized by East German airport officials before it had ever been used. BBC’s bean counters had then issued an edict stipulating they were only to be used ‘where there is a reasonable chance they will not be lost or damaged.’ Nowhere near a news story, then.

So as things stood, Taseena wouldn’t be able to contact him, and he could only ring her by prevailing on a local villager en-route. On top of that, the SLA hadn’t so far deigned to send anyone to meet them.

‘Why isn’t there anyone here to meet us?’ Wyrecliffe asked, draining one of their four remaining litre bottles of mineral water. It was warm after six hours in the car, but still refreshing.

‘We’re late,’ said Baxter. ‘It’s half two. They said 2pm. Maybe they’ve given up.’

‘Come on, Rick, this is Lebanon for Christ’s sake,’ Wyrecliffe said. ‘Lebanese punctuality means arriving on the same day as agreed, screw the time.’

Adwan honked the horn a few times. An old woman clad in black skirt, shapeless woollens and a headscarf emerged from a doorway. She and Adwan engaged in a shouted conversation in a mixture of Arabic and French.

He turned to Wyrecliffe. ‘She say Lahad people at next village.’

The woman gesticulated to Wyrecliffe, pointing south and then dismissed them with a flicked wrist go-away gesture and a final volley of speech.

‘Who are the sons of dogs?’ Wyrecliffe asked, his limited Arabic not able to pick up more than the insult.

The driver chuckled. ‘Hezbollah. She say Hezbollah fired a rocket which hit village early today. Kill her chickens. Only two left.’

Wyrecliffe leant against the car, lit a cigarette and flexed his aching back.

Somewhere in the distance there was the crack of small arms fire. Five or six shots. Then nothing.

‘That’s why there was no reception committee,’ Wyrecliffe said. ‘Let’s take a closer look.’ They climbed back in the car, and Fouad Adwan gunned the engine, taking the vehicle right at the square between stone cottages and up a twisting dirt lane towards the Maronite church which occupied the highest point in the town. From its hibiscus-overgrown graveyard they could clearly see the valley between them and the next hilltop village of Tebnine. The glint of a stream winding through orchards and vegetable plots gave way on the higher slopes to ancient olive groves, edged with dry stone walls and goat folds. Wyrecliffe scanned the scene with binoculars, looking for signs of tents, pick-up trucks or anything which might indicate the presence of an SLA base. The scoop now hung in the balance. If Hezbollah had got this far south, which wasn’t usual, they would fire rockets into Israel another eight miles further on. Those rockets probably wouldn’t do any damage, but the retaliation – and there always was retaliation – would come in the form of artillery fire. The guerrillas would be gone, but all too often Christian homes nearby would be damaged. Lahad would have other matters on his hands than a BBC interview.

Wyrecliffe had a dilemma. He could wait for the SLA reception committee to come to him. Which might never happen. Or he could take the risk of going out to find them. Further in the distance there was a more sustained bout of gunfire which lasted about thirty seconds. Looking back on this moment, years later, he thought this was the time he should have turned back. But he was a BBC correspondent in a war zone. You don’t turn back when you hear shooting. You go to it. That’s where the news is.

‘What do you think, Fouad?’ Wyrecliffe asked. ‘Would the road be mined?’

The Palestinian shrugged. ‘God willing, not. Too far south. But who knows, the SLA are crazy bastards.’

‘I vote we wait here. It’s where we are supposed to be met,’ Baxter said. ‘Give ’em an hour.’

Wyrecliffe looked at his watch. ‘No, I think they’ve forgotten us. An hour waiting is another hour out of touch. Let’s go.’

Baxter groaned as Adwan started the engine. They drove back through the town, taking a sharp right down the rutted hill into the valley, passing a wheel-less and rusted Soviet truck, Syrian army markings still visible, and a reminder of how fought over this terrain was. The vehicle might have met its end in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1967 or 1973, or more likely in the Syrian interventions in Lebanon of 1976. Or perhaps later still. Take your pick. The labyrinth of Lebanese suffering defeated all but the locals, who knew every twist and turn of the country’s agony.

From Tebnine a dust cloud betrayed the passage of another vehicle, travelling towards them at speed, horn blaring. It gradually distilled into a battered pick-up with at least two armed figures in the back. Wyrecliffe’s stomach tightened. He reached over to the back seat and fished out a large piece of dirty white card with the word PRESS written on it in marker pen letters a foot high. He pressed it against the windscreen, and prayed, as he always did in such circumstances, for literacy amongst the militias.

Four hundred metres away, the other vehicle started flashing its headlamps. Adwan pulled off the road and slewed to a halt, flashing lights in response.

‘Our reception committee, finally,’ Wyrecliffe said, tossing the PRESS card into the back seat.

The pick-up screeched to a halt beside them. There were at least six armed men in it. An angry-looking driver leaned out and yelled something at them.

‘BBC,’ boomed Wyrecliffe, pointing to the cardboard sign as he and Baxter got out of the car. ‘Interview. Lahad.’ He pointed further up the road.

‘Moawad, Moawad!’ moaned one moustachioed man standing in the body of the pick-up. He was beating his chest with a fist, his face full of tears. Taped in the vehicle’s front window was a picture, hastily edged in black, of Rene Moawad, the Christian President of Lebanon, and underneath the single Arabic word qatala.

Murdered.

‘Jesus, Moawad’s been assassinated?’ whispered Baxter.

Wyrecliffe groaned as his worst nightmare appeared before him. Fouad shouted for a confirmation from the SLA driver and got one. Yes, Moawad was killed today, by a car bomb. The most important man in the country, blown to pieces.

‘He’s only been president a couple of weeks,’ Baxter said, as if Lebanon’s crazy fratricidal politics paid any respect to such things.

‘Fuck the bloody radio. Fuck FUCK! We’ll have to get back now,’ Wyrecliffe muttered, pounding the car roof.

Everything, including Wyrecliffe’s BBC career, now depended on how Taseena handled the story in their absence. For all the preparations in the boilerplate file, and all the advice to her, Wyrecliffe had known he had left himself vulnerable. He had known it. Murphy’s law of broadcasting: the big story breaks always when only a junior is on duty. Now this had happened. There was nothing in the boilerplate about presidential assassinations. She would have access to the Reuters terminal, and probably copy from the Associated Press in the adjacent office too, if she used her initiative. Maybe someone from the AP would offer a helping hand, maybe not, as they would be run off their feet too. She might be able to hold the fort for a few hours on spot copy, but London would very soon be wanting to speak to him for interpretation, background and analysis. He had broken the cardinal rule. He was off-base, six hours’ drive away at least from Beirut, and out of contact.

Wyrecliffe began to ask the SLA men about the president, and where the nearest telephone might be, but the pick-up was already pulling away. Over the tailgate the weeping man shouted into the skies and then tossed them something. It was done with such gentleness, such underhand bowling precision that Wyrecliffe for a split second took it to be a gift. Perhaps fruit, bread or some fond SLA memento from the wasted life of Rene Moawad.

Well, perhaps it was the latter.

‘Grenade!’ yelled Adwan, throwing himself down. Wyrecliffe saw, as in slow motion, the grenade fall ten feet behind the Peugeot. It bounced a foot off the ground, turning gently, a little puff of dust following it into the air as it described a balletic arc, showing the full three hundred and sixty degrees of its elegant killing simplicity. The ringed safety pin was missing, the detonator lever released and standing out, the typical three second fuse almost gone. All this Wyrecliffe absorbed in a silent millisecond as he hurled himself as far forward along the side of the car as he could. Baxter had dived into the car’s back seat. There seemed no sound of explosion. Just an enfolding hiss of static, like a TV without a signal. In his head he was shouting, screaming even, but he could hear nothing but this fizzing, roaring ocean.

Chapter Three

BBC Radio 4 studio, TV Centre, Wood, Lane London

April 2009

James Naughtie, in thick cardigan and headphones, looked at the clock.

‘The time now is 7.15. Now, it’s often said that Britain is a greying nation. Yet the care homes industry according to a recent report is failing to provide the level of care that we should expect. There was, as you remember, that shocking report on the Beeches, the care home in Nottingham, now closed down. However, according to a report just released by the new Care Quality Commission, more than a third of care homes are not up to the job. To discuss this we have on the line Sandra Ellgood of the Commission, and in our radio car, Paul Neesdale, who represents the care industry association.

Over the headphones, Wyrecliffe heard it too, gallery producer Sandra Kulczek said: ‘We’ve lost the radio car, Jim. Chris we’ve got David Willey from Rome, but let’s hold him and move Simon up. His interviewee is primed.

‘We seem to have lost the radio car,’ Naughtie intoned. Never mind, we’ll come back to this story in a few minutes. We’ll also be interviewing health minister Andy Burnham at ten past eight.

‘Cue Chris. Time check.’

‘It’s 7.19,’ Wyrecliffe said. ‘British Airways has just reported its latest quarterly results, and once again losses have risen. Here’s Simon Jack with the details,’ Wyrecliffe said, nodding to the younger besuited man sitting at a console nearby. BA chief executive Willy Walsh was primed to go at the BBC’s tiny studio at the London Stock Exchange. The interview would probably be a minute, perhaps even less, which was pretty much all the time that such a confined space was bearable, at least to captains of industry.

As the business segment kicked in, Wyrecliffe took a sip of coffee, and looked closely at page six of the Financial Times which was propped up on his keyboard next to a half-finished fruit salad. He checked it against his scripted piece on the banking crisis in Ireland, and spoke to the gallery.

‘Can someone look at this script quickly before we get the Irish finance minister on the line? The figures look wrong. Isn’t this billions not millions?’

Wyrecliffe got an acknowledgment from the gallery. They were anxious not to screw this one up, seeing as the last time the minister had been asked for interview he’d been unable to get in before Thought for the Day and ended up being boshed, pushed off the schedule. There hadn’t been time to squeeze him in before the weather which had to be started by 7.58am, or they’d risk crashing the eight o’clock pips, the sacred signal that marks the formal news bulletin.

Just as he was turning the page on the FT, Wyrecliffe did a double take. Like the uncanny ability to hear your own name whispered in a crowded room, he had pickedup, somewhere on the page, the name Taseena. It took a few moments to find it. Yes, being quoted under her married name Christodopoulos, in a report from Dubai about a new satellite channel for which she was the first female head of news. So, she was still breaking glass ceilings. Was she happy or not? Did she ever think of him? He always thought of her, always. Every day, as he was waking up, even though he hadn’t seen her for nearly twenty years. The discovery unsettled him for a moment, so that when the Irish finance minister finally did come on the line, Wyrecliffe had mislaid the questions he wanted to ask him. It was the effect Taseena had always seemed to have on him.

Chapter Four

Lebanon

November 1989

Wyrecliffe had lucid memories of that fateful day. He could still feel the searing heat of the blazing car, with Baxter still inside, struggling to get out. He tore open the door, leaving a layer of skin on the searing metal handle, and pulling the moaning cameraman out to lie shivering on the ground. He somehow retrieved the insulating space blanket from under the driver’s seat, knowing Baxter would need it. Then he ripped a sleeve from his own shirt to make a tourniquet for a jagged shrapnel wound high on Adwan’s inner thigh, and struggling with only partial success to stop the bright blood squirting out. He bellowed for help, turning in every direction and roaring in French, English and broken Arabic that there were two injured in need of help. The yells clattered around the dusty hills. Was there no one nearby? Or were they too scared to come?

He scrutinised his injured crew, wondering how to get them both to safety, after the sickening realisation that no water or first aid supplies had survived the conflagration. Baxter, shaking and incoherent, had weeping mottled burns to face and hands, but attempted to stand. An agonised yell revealed the cameraman had a shattered ankle too. He tumbled to the dusty ground. Adwan, pressing the tourniquet to his leg, called for Wyrecliffe to listen to him. The young Palestinian, father of two young children, was conscious enough for a selfless gesture.

‘Take Rick for help. I’ll be alright.’

‘That’s a terrible leg wound,’ Wyrecliffe said gently, seeing the impromptu tourniquet already dyed scarlet. ‘I’m worried about it.’

Baxter was unable to walk, but with burns that were perhaps too painful to risk him being carried. But would he die of shock left alone? The weight of decisions was crushing. Adwan ran the risk of bleeding to death if left alone. Or worse if Phalangists found him. A Palestinian refugee, with a Lebanese ID card listing him as Muslim, was as good as dead down here. The BBC accreditation he also carried would make little difference. If he hid his ID they might assume he was Hezbollah, a recipe for torture first, then death. That Fouad Adwan was willing to drive a BBC crew deep into enemy territory had marked out an extraordinary but nonchalant courage. So Wyrecliffe made the decision that of the two, Baxter, a British national and clearly so, was safer to be left behind. The SLA would not harm him, at least not deliberately, not as an act of policy.

Wyrecliffe knelt by the side of the barely conscious Baxter. ‘Rick, listen to me. I’m going to take Fouad for help. I’ll get back as soon as I can. Stay in the shade, okay?’

Baxter nodded, and looked up. Wyrecliffe wondered if it was the last time he would see his cameraman alive. He turned to Fouad Adwan, and squatted down, easing his arms under his back and thighs to help him stand. As he did so, Wyrecliffe bent down, reached between the Palestinian’s thighs, and hauled him across his shoulders in a fireman’s lift. That wasn’t just the easiest way to take the weight, but allowed him to compress the soundman’s wound with his forearm. Getting him up there wasn’t difficult. Wyrecliffe was a big man, and Adwan wasn’t. But he was still a good ten stone, 140 pounds. During rugby training at Balliol, Wyrecliffe had once run four hundred metres in just over two minutes carrying a hundredweight sack of potatoes on his shoulders. But carrying someone for an hour or more, uphill back to Soultaniye was going to be more of a challenge, especially without water, and in thirty degree heat.

‘Tell me about your kids, Fouad,’ Wyrecliffe said, trying to stop his charge slipping into unconsciousness. ‘How many have you got?’

‘Two. There is Hakim, who is…’ he whispered

‘How old is he, Fouad? How old is Hakim?’

‘He is ten years, a lovely boy.’

Wyrecliffe coaxed out the details of Fouad Adwan’s life. The two kids he doted on, his young wife Noura, his own four brothers and three sisters, his father Abu Saleem.

How far was it to Soultaniye? Four miles, maybe five? Uphill it felt like twenty. After the first half hour, having changed positions half a dozen times, Wyrecliffe realised he was drenched with Adwan’s blood. The soundman had long since failed to respond to his conversation, and looking back all he could see was a long gory trail of crimson drips pocking the dust down into the valley. The journey never seemed to end. Wyrecliffe realised that this would have been part of the same journey north that Fouad’s grandfather had taken, back in 1948 when the family was forced out of their home in Jaffa, now Haifa. More than fifty years later Fouad himself was taking a part of that journey, and in even more danger.

A child was tending goats on the edge of the town. Wyrecliffe bellowed in French for directions to a doctor. The child pointed, and ran alongside as Wyrecliffe lumbered on to the indicated house. The woman he saw there identified herself as the town’s midwife and, from the moaning coming from a nearby room, she was busy. He laid Adwan gently down onto a rug to ask her to look. He was unconscious and the blood flow appeared to have stopped. The midwife listened to his chest, checked his pulse, and shrugged an apology.

‘Desolee. Fini,’ she said with the brevity of one just as familiar with the end of life as the start of it. The same medical scramble, ending in one case with the cries of a child, and in the other, silence. Wyrecliffe spent the next ten minutes trying to resuscitate Adwan. She went back into the bedroom after first telling him to move the bloody corpse off the mother-to-be’s best rug.

From then on things got hazy. Wyrecliffe had no recollection of the phone call to Taseena he made from Soultaniye, nor of the call to the duty editor in London, nor of hiring an informal but outrageously expensive taxi there to get Baxter and himself back to Beirut. He had no recollection of that long and grim journey, of stumbling into the cramped BBC office at 11pm that night, having taken Baxter to hospital. But he did recall the shock on Taseena’s face at seeing him, her blood-spattered boss, lurching into the newsroom and demanding to see the day’s copy. Only after she had given him the sheaf of papers, and he had watched the VCR tape of the piece used by the Six O’Clock News, did he agree to go to the bathroom and let her carefully remove the shirt, thick with dried blood that had matted into his chest and back hairs.

‘I think you need a new shirt,’ she had said, as she gently soaked it with wet paper towels, then millimetre by millimetre peeled it off, a process that had taken half an hour. Once he was stripped to the waist, she washed off the dried blood on his hair, neck and back. Her warm and slender hands, slick with soap on his chest and back, were a sensual frisson and a comfort, the first for many hours, and he tremblingly surrendered to it. She held his hands and said kind words. In the mirror he was shocked to see his own eyes: haunted, aged, alien. And the top half-inch of his right ear, gone, with barely a speck of blood. It hadn’t hurt at all until he saw it. And then it hurt like hell.

How he had got through the next two days of back-to-back TV and radio bulletins he had no idea. The car bomb that killed the Lebanese president and twenty-five bystanders had weighed a quarter of a tonne, big even by Lebanese standards, and had blown the armoured Mercedes carrying the president dozens of feet into the air. Radio 4 presenter Brian Redhead had asked Wyrecliffe who could be behind it, and the answer was simple: almost anyone. The truth was that Moawad was a genuine moderate, probably the only man capable of uniting a fractured nation. Dozens of different factions, seeking profit from Lebanese agony, had a motive for killing him.

Three days after hurriedly depositing Baxter in hospital, Wyrecliffe finally found time to visit him. He’d made sure the cameraman was in a private hospital in the east of the city, where those with money had the best treatment. His burns, to face hands and neck, were no more than second degree. The ankle, smashed by a large piece of shrapnel which tore right through the car, was now pinned.

For Wyrecliffe another blow arrived a week after the assassination, after the editorial and staff department phone debrief, where all the platitudes and sympathy and false admiration had been trotted out for his attempts to save Fouad Adwan. It was then that BBC regional manager Alastair Marsh, who had flown in specially from Jerusalem, took Wyrecliffe aside into a stairwell and gave him an almighty echoing bollocking for being stupid enough to take a Palestinian soundman into SLA-held territory. Marsh, a sharp and clever Scot who had been a legendary foreign correspondent in his day, wasn’t interested in Wyrecliffe’s explanation that only Fouad Adwan was available that day. That Adwan had volunteered counted for nothing either. Marsh didn’t care that he was the best soundman in Beirut. Nor, as he put it, did he ‘care a toss’ that Adwan could pass himself off as a Christian, with enough of an accent and slang to fool the keenest Phalangist. Most unjustly of all, Marsh didn’t even consider the fact that Fouad Adwan’s death was as random as most deaths in Lebanon. Wyrecliffe knew that Adwan wasn’t killed that day because he was a Muslim. He wasn’t killed because he was a Palestinian. He died because a jagged lump of metal from a grenade thrown by a grieving gunman happened to tear an artery in his leg. His leg, not the leg of anyone else who was in the vicinity. Marsh may, deep down, have agreed. But his conclusion was that Wyrecliffe was culpable because in his frenzy to get a scoop he’d put an enthusiastic young freelancer in danger.

‘Your ambition got the better of you,’ Marsh said, his pale eyebrows arched beneath