Shepherd scrolled through his call list and phoned Bingham, who answered almost immediately. ‘Dan, everything okay?’ he asked.
‘No, everything is not okay,’ said Shepherd, acidly. ‘Everything is as far from okay as it could get without falling off the edge of the world. Button is still incommunicado.’
‘What do you need?’ asked Bingham.
Shepherd took a deep breath. There was no point in antagonising her number two. ‘We’re pulling out of Ashford station,’ he said. ‘I’ve just recognised another face on the platform from Button’s hit list.’
‘He got on the train?’
‘Yes. And he was carrying a suitcase similar to the one Hagerman had.’
‘I don’t think there’s any need to panic,’ said Bingham. ‘All the luggage-’
‘I’m not panicking,’ interrupted Shepherd. ‘I’m calling in with a sitrep. And the reason I’m doing that is because in ten minutes we’re going to be in the tunnel and I’ll be out of contact so I want to know now what I’m supposed to be doing.’
‘My apologies, Dan. I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I meant to say that we don’t have to worry overmuch, do we? All luggage is scanned before it’s allowed on to the Eurostar, and all the passengers go through metal detectors. There’s no way guns or bombs or even knives can get on the train, is there?’
‘True.’
‘So the most likely scenario is that they’re just travelling together. Which guy is it?’
‘The second one you sent me. I don’t know his name.’
‘Okay. I’ll inform the French. We’ll have them both tailed when they reach Paris. In the meantime carry out a quick recce. Find out if they’re sitting next to each other.’
‘Negative on that. There’s already a woman sitting next to Hagerman.’
‘Okay. But sweep through anyway. See if there’s anyone else you recognise. Whatever happens, call me back before you enter the tunnel. I’ll try to track down Button.’
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘The American embassy.’
‘A bloody cocktail party?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Bingham.
Button’s hands were shaking and she could barely breathe. Her discomfort was intensified by the smug smile on Yokely’s face. ‘You killed him,’ she said.
Yokely shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t. The man who pulled the trigger did.’
‘You ordered it.’
‘Someone had to.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me what you were going to do?’
‘Because I needed your reaction,’ said Yokely.
Button sat down and put her head into her hands. ‘What do you mean?’
Yokely sat opposite her. In the interrogation room, Broken Nose and Scarred Lip had the Saudi on the floor again. Broken nose was squatting on his back, pushing his face to the floor, while Scarred Lip bound his neck to his calves. They were putting him back in the stress position.
‘You were horrified, right? Disgusted?’
Button’s face was screwed up in disbelief. ‘Of course I was horrified!’ she shouted. ‘You had an innocent man killed.’
Yokely put up a hand. ‘Steady, Charlie. We’ve an assignment here, and that assignment is to make the bastard in there tell us everything he knows. Let’s not forget who the enemy is here.’
‘That boy wasn’t the enemy,’ said Button.
‘It was his call, not mine. All he had to do was to talk and that boy would have been released, unharmed. We gave him the choice.’
‘Richard, we can’t go about executing people!’
Yokely smiled amiably. ‘Actually, we do it quite a lot in America.’
‘The boy you had shot wasn’t guilty of anything. You had him killed…’ She was lost for words.
‘Listen to me, Charlie, and listen to me carefully. We are running out of time.’ He took a deep breath. ‘You didn’t see it, did you?’
‘See what?’
Yokely shook his head in mock-reproach. ‘You were too busy looking at the screen, weren’t you?’
Button wanted to swear at the American and tell him not to be so bloody condescending, but she bit her lip.
‘He was looking at the clock,’ said Yokely. ‘His own cousin was about to be killed, but he kept looking at the clock.’
‘There’s a deadline.’
‘Yes. Minutes or hours. Because if it was days he wouldn’t care what time it was.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ whispered Button. He was right. She’d broken one of the prime rules of an interrogation: always watch the subject’s reactions. Often it wasn’t what they said that gave them away but their body language.
‘I don’t think Jesus is going to help us,’ said Yokely. ‘This is something that’s been left up to us.’
‘Frankly, I’m not sure I can take much more,’ she said.
‘Which is why you have to be in there.’
‘I want a cigarette.’
‘This is a non-smoking building,’ said Yokely. ‘Sorry.’
‘Damn you, I want a cigarette and I want one now!’ she shouted.