Free A Gentleman's Game by Greg Rucka Page A

the door, pushed it open, and rushed out into the cool Madinah night.
    Abdul Aziz stood at the back of the battered military surplus truck that had pulled up outside. Canvas covered the sides and back of the bed, but as Shuneal approached, Abdul Aziz reached up and drew it back, then pulled the latch and dropped the gate. Shuneal started forward, reached out to hold on to the side of the vehicle to help pull himself inside, but Abdul Aziz put a hand on his breast, a forceful pressure just short of a push.
    “Give me your name, boy.”
    “Shuneal. Shuneal bin Muhammad.”
    Abdul Aziz’s face broke into an amused smile and the shining scar on his jaw seemed to climb to reach his eye. “You are British?”
    “I am a Muslim.”
    “Do you still have your passport?”
    Shuneal couldn’t understand why it mattered. “Yes, with my belongings.”
    “In the house?”
    “Yes.” Shuneal dropped his hand from where he was still gripping the side of the truck, felt a swell of desperation so acute and so sudden, he was afraid it would bring him to tears. When he spoke, he tried to keep the whine from his voice. “Please, I understand. I understand what you told us, before we made the pilgrimage, I saw it, I saw the Jamrah, Abdul Aziz. I saw it.”
    “I know.” He said it with such flat conviction that Shuneal realized all at once that Abdul Aziz had been watching him throughout the Hajj. “Shuneal bin Muhammad?”
    “Yes, the name I took when I avowed my faith.”
    “No, no more.”
    Abdul Aziz reached out and took hold of Shuneal’s still newly shaven head in a surprisingly strong grip, and turned him to face Aamil and the others who had come outside.
    “See your brother,” Abdul Aziz said. “He has the heart of a
jihadi,
and I give him the name of one now, the name Sinan bin al-Baari. The spearhead of God.”
    He released his grip.
    “Get on the truck,” Abdul Aziz ordered.
    And Sinan bin al-Baari, who had been Shuneal bin Muhammad and who had been christened William Dennis Leacock, climbed aboard and began his long trip to his new home in the Wadi-as-Sirhan.

5
    London—Wood Green, North London
10 August 0414 GMT
    Chace came around the back way on foot, as instructed, mounting the six steps to the apartment building, hands thrust deep in her windbreaker, head down, pretending to the walk of shame, just in case anyone who shouldn’t see her coming did. She’d passed one of Box’s surveillance vans almost two hundred meters back, done up to look as if it was on its last legs, and she knew they’d seen her, and that was to the good, because it meant no one would be surprised by her arrival, and that therefore no one would shoot her by mistake.
    She was armed herself, an HK P2000 tucked at her waist, and that in and of itself was almost as odd as the errand she’d been sent on. It was a rule broken: Minders did not go armed in London.
    But the errand itself broke another rule: SIS and Box do not work together.
    It was a big, sad building, late fifties architecture that had forgone aesthetics in pursuit of efficiency, but even that had failed it, and in the cast of the electric lights over the door the masonry had the hue of a smoker’s teeth. She pushed through the entrance, out of the night, and into a hallway that was even more poorly illuminated than the world outside. She stopped to let her eyes adjust before continuing down the hall, stepping carefully around the trash in the corridor, food wrappers, empty bottles. A television was playing in one of the apartments she passed and she heard the unmistakably empty passion of a porno.
    She ignored the elevator and took the stairs, climbing three flights before stepping onto a landing and orienting herself. The light was marginally better, flickering from a spastic bulb in a fixture halfway along the wall. Chace slowed down, going as quietly as she could. She passed four-twelve, stopped in front of four-fourteen, and didn’t knock.
    The man who opened the door