Imposter 13 Read online

  Readers are gripped by the Sleeper 13 series

  ‘An original action-packed international thriller with tension and danger on every page. Rob Sinclair is a writer of immense power’

  – Michael Wood, author of For Reasons Unknown

  ‘Timely, gripping and utterly shocking … one of the most intense and engrossing thrillers of the last decade’

  ‘Perfect for thriller lovers and fans of I Am Pilgrim, Orphan X’

  ‘Another excellent read from Rob Sinclair. Couldn’t tear myself away from it from start to finish’

  ‘I could not put down this book’

  ‘A powerful and hard-hitting psychological thriller’

  ‘Took my breath away with its sheer energy and fast-paced narrative … I lived and breathed every moment’

  ‘A fast-paced, all-action thriller which keeps you on the edge of your seat’

  Contents

  Readers are gripped by the Sleeper 13 series

  Title Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  Credits

  By Rob Sinclair

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  Muscat, Oman

  The glittering marble columns of the cafe’s colonial terrace sparkled in the fierce sunshine. Rachel Cox, sitting in the shaded area at the back of the open-air space with her colleague Salman, took a sip from her coffee as she spied on the apartment building across the square.

  ‘What’s taking him so long?’ Salman, sitting next to her, said in his Eton-educated accent that to Cox, having known him for more than six months, remained an unexpected contrast to his obvious Middle Eastern origins: dark skin, thick black hair and dense stubble that reached uncommonly high on his face.

  She took the last sip of her coffee. Finally, across the way she spotted the man they were looking for. Lanky and dressed in drab clothing, he stepped out of the double doors of the stone building. Cox flicked her eyes down, sank a couple of inches in her chair, trying to be as inconspicuous as she could. The man was jittery as he looked around him, but he didn’t pay any attention to Cox or Salman, and after a couple of seconds he turned and walked away in the opposite direction.

  ‘Ready?’ Salman asked.

  Cox nodded. Salman had already paid the waiter minutes earlier, and he quickly finished his water before they both got up from their chairs. Cox noticed a couple of the local men staring at her and she once again averted her eyes, looked down. Yes she had her hijab on, to reduce offence as far as possible, but she couldn’t hide her light skin or her green eyes that clearly marked her out as a Westerner. The fact she was consorting with what looked like a local man only further added to the indignation she regularly garnered whenever out and about.

  Still, she wouldn’t let the glowers put her off the task at hand, and if anyone were to question her presence here she had all the papers required to explain who she was, including her ID showing her as a visiting professor of international studies at the Sultan Qaboos University. A fake ID, that is, but a necessary backstop for a white, single female in the conservative country.

  Particularly one who also just happened to work for the British government.

  They headed on across the square, Cox’s eyes busy as she surveyed the people around her. None appeared suspicious, and none were taking anything more than a fleeting interest in her and Salman. As they approached the doors to the apartment building, Salman slowed and veered off to the left to look into the window of a shop selling men’s formalwear. Cox carried on her path, and reached into her pocket to grab the key for the outer doors, which Salman had pilfered the previous day.

  She pushed the key into the lock and turned, then pulled open the door and stepped into the cool but dim interior with only a brief glimpse behind her before she shut the door. She paused. The small and sparse atrium was all quiet. She reached into her pocket again and took out the tiny earbud. She already had the equally tiny microphone attached to a fold in her hijab.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ she whispered when the earbud was in place.

  ‘Yes,’ came Salman’s reply.

  He would remain her eyes and ears on the outside. Just in case.

  Cox took a deep breath then moved for the wide stone staircase in front of her. The apartment building, in a far from seedy or downtrodden neighbourhood in the nation’s capital, had certainly seen better days, though its former glory and original class when it was built during the heavy British influence of the nineteenth century remained evident. The staircase was lined with a beautiful wrought iron banister, though the metal was rusted and its paint blistered in places, and the once perfect corners and edges of the stairs had been worn smooth from decades of footsteps and minimal maintenance.

  As she headed up, Cox saw no one, though sounds of life from the apartment doors beyond came and went. On the third floor she moved along the corridor, her eyes still busy, her body primed for the unexpected. There were no CCTV cameras in the building, but she kept her head down as much as she could anyway – habit as much as anything else.

  She stopped by the worn door to apartment 8 and knocked lightly. Was she expecting – hoping? – for her knock to be answered? They’d already seen Faiz Al-Busaidi leaving the building, but what of his wife, Thuriyah? Cox hadn’t seen or heard from Thuriyah, her key asset in Oman, for nearly two days, despite their hours of surveilling the apartment building.

  What had happened to her?

  Cox’s heart drummed with anticipation as she waited a few seconds with nothing but silence around her. She knocked again, only slightly louder this time.

  ‘Rachel? Are you inside yet?’ came Salman’s smooth voice in her ear. She jumped at the unexpected noise, her heart rate ramping up another few notches.

  ‘There’s no one here.’

  ‘Are you inside?’

  ‘I will be in a moment.’

  She took the small toolset from her pocket – a torsion wrench and a series of small picks. She worked away on the lock, her nerves continuing to grow. She heard a creak somewhere towards the stairs and whipped her head round.

  No one there.

  She cursed under her breath, worked on the pins inside the lock again, her fingers becoming clammy and fumbling. She might have worked
for MI6 for the best part of a decade, but she’d never learned to enjoy these James Bond moments one bit.

  Finally the last of the pins was pushed out of the way. The lock released and Cox let out a long but quiet exhale. She pushed the door open, stepped inside and closed the door behind her as silently as she could. She stood and listened. The apartment, a simple one-bedroom affair with an open plan living space and single bedroom with an en suite, was all quiet. No lights were on and despite the sunshine outside, with the sheer curtains in the living area drawn, the apartment was strangely dull and lifeless.

  ‘Thuriyah?’ Cox said as a shiver ran through her, her voice only slightly more than a whisper.

  Nothing in return.

  At least no one had leapt out to attack her. But where the hell was Thuriyah?

  ‘Come on, Cox,’ Salman’s voice echoed in her ear. ‘You need to hurry up.’

  He sounded more strained now, but if there’d been a problem he would have raised the alarm. He was just getting nervous, even though he had the easy job.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Cox said. ‘But I need to find it.’

  ‘If Faiz knows about––’

  ‘If he knows, then Thuriyah is already dead. But we still need to retrieve the information.’

  ‘You don’t even know what you’re looking for.’

  Cox ignored that comment. She moved through into the living area. Basic didn’t come close to describing the place. The few items of furniture were old and worn, the TV was a tiny set-top box like the black-and-white one her parents still had in the spare room when she was growing up. There was a similarly old-fashioned wireless radio, and the small kitchen area was falling apart. Cox quickly looked around, inside drawers and cupboards, under furniture, behind furniture, under the items of clothing that lay strewn, and the strangely stock-piled tins and packets of food that were here and there.

  Nothing.

  She moved into the bedroom. No bed. Just a mattress on the floor, a single pine wardrobe and not quite matching set of drawers. Cox rifled through. Nothing of interest. She looked to the door to the bathroom. Bloody images flashed in her mind of horror movies she’d seen – the dead body in the bathtub, red streaks everywhere. She gulped as she stepped forward.

  ‘Cox?’

  She didn’t answer. She slowly pushed the door open …

  The bathroom was empty. A murky-looking shower curtain was pulled back to reveal a grimy bath. No body, no blood.

  ‘Where are you?’ Cox said under her breath.

  ‘I’m still here.’

  She didn’t bother to clarify that she’d been talking to Thuriyah.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ Cox said. ‘The only thing remotely of interest is a crappy laptop.’

  ‘You can’t take it,’ Salman said, quite snottily Cox thought. ‘That’s not what you’re there for.’

  She knew that. She clenched her teeth rather than biting back. They couldn’t do anything that would risk tipping off Faiz. Stealing his laptop, whatever goldmine of information could be on there, would certainly do that.

  ‘I think you need to leave.’

  Cox, despondently, was quickly coming to that conclusion too.

  She turned, then paused.

  ‘This isn’t right,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her clothes are still here. In the wardrobe there’s a whole row of abayas. Shoes too. Underwear in the drawers.’

  ‘Come on, Cox. What are you doing? Get out of there.’

  ‘But it’s all clean. All the worn clothes on the floor, in the basket in the bedroom, are his. Same with the used things in the kitchen. Only one of everything. She hasn’t been here. Not in the last few days at least.’

  Salman said nothing now. Cox had worried for Thuriyah’s safety for weeks. That was the same any time she found an asset like her, who was prepared to speak out against those closest to her. Cox’s angst had naturally ramped up over the last couple of days after she’d been unable to get hold of her Thuriyah, but she’d tried her best to convince herself there was a reasonable explanation for the lack of contact.

  But now?

  Beyond her concern for Thuriyah’s safety, was a potentially even bigger concern. What of the intelligence that Thuriyah had promised to garner for Cox. Where was that now?

  ‘OK, I’m coming out,’ Cox said.

  Moments later she was descending the stairs, more quickly than she’d gone up, as yet more unwelcome and gory thoughts as to Thuriyah’s fate filled her mind.

  She pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs and stepped back out into the heat, immediately spotting Salman a few yards away, back pressed up against the wall of the next building along as he casually played with his phone. He stuffed it in his pocket when he saw her and as she reached him they gave each other a casual and concocted greeting to satisfy any watchful eyes, before setting off on foot for the far end of the square.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Salman asked her after a few moments of awkward silence.

  What was she thinking? At that moment? Strangely, the colonial era square she was walking across reminded her of one just like it she’d seen on her first ever visit to nearby Saudi Arabia. There, in glorious sunshine, she’d relaxedly looked about the blindingly bright square, taking in the charm of the well-kept illustrious buildings lining the open space. Only to be told, quite casually, by her male chaperone, that the large stone slabs she was walking across were specifically laid with a slight inward slope to allow blood from public beheadings to drain away.

  ‘Cox? Talk to me.’

  ‘I think––’

  The vibrating phone in her pocket halted her explanation. She fished for the phone and shielded the screen from the sun with her other hand.

  She stopped in her tracks. Salman did so too, immediately looking nervous at the halt in their forward progress.

  ‘Come on, we need to go,’ he said. Cox didn’t move. ‘What is it?’

  ‘She’s alive,’ Cox said.

  She showed him the message on the screen.

  Salman shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This isn’t … You can’t trust that.’

  ‘She’s alive, Salman. That’s our code. Only she knows it.’

  He scoffed at that. She knew what he was thinking.

  ‘If she was under duress she would have included our red word,’ Cox said. ‘You know how it works.’

  He held up his hand. ‘I’m not your boss. I’m just saying. That doesn’t look good to me.’

  ‘Regardless, she’s alive,’ Cox said. ‘And if she wants to meet, I can’t say no to that.’

  Salman sighed deeply.

  ‘Then we’d better go get the car.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Two hours later Salman was driving the Toyota Land Cruiser along a dusty, winding track, Muscat miles behind them and long out of view, nothing but rolling hills of sand and rocky outcrops in sight in every direction.

  ‘Ever wish you’d signed up for accountancy training instead?’ Salman asked as he jerked the steering wheel when the back wheels of the Land Cruiser lost traction on the sand.

  ‘Never,’ Cox said with absolute seriousness and conviction. She looked over at him and saw the wry smile on his face. She’d missed the fact his question had been an attempt at humour, but her answer remained. Despite the danger, this was where she belonged. What she did was for the greater good. Someone had to.

  To her relief, her boss back in England, Henry Flannigan, had agreed with her desire to take Thuriyah’s message on trust. Or at least he’d gone along with it. Cox was in Oman for a reason, and just because there was a hint of trouble now, that didn’t mean the reason wasn’t still present and valid or any less important. In fact, Flannigan had taken barely any time to confirm he wanted Cox to follow the lead, which now, sitting in the Land Cruiser on the way to the remote rendezvous point, did make her question whether it was really a good thing that her boss was so brazen with her safety.

  Too lat
e to turn back.

  ‘I don’t know Thuriyah like you do,’ Salman said, ‘but asking to meet out here––’

  ‘It stacks up,’ Cox said. ‘Her family don’t come from the city. Her father was a cattle farmer. Their village is just a few miles from where we’re meeting.’

  ‘You’ve been before?’

  ‘To the meeting point?’

  ‘No, I meant the village. I know you’ve been to the meeting point before, you said already.’

  ‘I’ve been to the village too. What’s left of it at least. It’s just a cluster of ramshackle huts now. The farming in the region has all been conglomerated so most people from back then moved away.’

  ‘Dragged into capitalism.’

  She looked over at Salman again, the same wry smile on his face. She often struggled to figure out what he was thinking, where his head was at. That wasn’t a bad thing, she mused. His mystery, when he wasn’t being a whiny sod, was actually quite intriguing.

  ‘When her dad died – of natural causes I might add – her mum moved across the other side of Muscat. But Thuriyah still has family in the village. An ageing aunt, a cousin and his family.’

  ‘So you think she’s been staying with them?’

  ‘We’ll soon find out.’ And Cox certainly hoped the explanation for Thuriyah’s recent evasiveness was as simple as that.

  The drive to the remote destination took only another twenty minutes and they soon came over the crest of a hill to see the narrow valley beyond, the remnants of what looked like old farm buildings down below, a few hundred yards away. It wasn’t the first time Cox had met Thuriyah here, though she’d never felt this edgy about it before.

  She checked her watch. Forty minutes early. Plenty of time to check the area out. From their approach, there was certainly no signs of anyone else there.

  Salman pulled the car to a stop fifty yards from the crumbling remains of the farm and stopped the engine before they both got out. The sun in the desert, with no shade from buildings like in the city, was even fiercer than Cox remembered, and within seconds the skin on her face was stinging from its ferocity.

  ‘You check around the perimeter,’ Cox said. ‘I’ll look at the buildings.’

  Salman nodded. They once again had their wireless comms to communicate with each other, and they’d patch in to Flannigan too before Thuriyah arrived. Not that he’d be able to help if anything went wrong. There was no on-hand SAS team here to kill the bad guys and whisk them away, but at least with Flannigan online, if something did happen, he would hear it and be able to take subsequent action. Little comfort to Cox really if she was already dead, but better than MI6 being none the wiser.