Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

Within a couple of minutes they had reached the Toyota and come to a halt. As the two SAS men climbed out of the 4 x 4, Finn yelled, ‘For fuck’s sake, look at him. He’s going to compromise us.’

Luke opened the boot of the Toyota, took out a med pack and handed it to Finn. ‘Let’s get them into our vehicle. You can treat him on the go.’

‘Treat him? You’re fucking losing it, Luke. Let’s just nail the bastard now and get out of here.’

Luke ignored him. ‘We’re going to get right away from the village, then get on the radio to base, tell them what’s happening. If the order comes through to extract him too, that’s what we’ll do. If not, we waste him. Now stop fucking arguing and let’s move.’

He walked round to the other side of the 4 x 4, opened the door and dragged the wounded man back towards the Toyota.

Two and a half thousand miles away, in a poky top-floor studio flat just off Edgware Road in London, Suze McArthur was half asleep on the sofa.

The sofa was covered with an embroidered ethnic throw that Suze had bought on a shopping trip with friends to Camden Market. The friends had long since deserted her for jobs and husbands and kids, no longer content with the world of student marches and protests. Suze would be thirty in just two months. The throw had adorned the sofas in the various bedsits she’d rented ever since college, her job as a midwife never allowing her to afford anything bigger.

In front of the sofa was a small wooden chest that doubled as a table, on which a patchouli joss stick had almost burned down to the end. Next to the joss stick was a Dictaphone loaded with a C90 cassette. There was only one picture on the wall — a slightly crumpled old X-Files poster showing Mulder and Scully, arms folded and back to back, looking down into the room. A TV was on in the corner and on top of the set there was a photograph: a picture of Suze with her arm around a much older lady sitting in a wheelchair, a pink hyacinth blooming in the background. The floor was covered with newspaper cuttings, and in one corner a lava lamp shone dimly.

Dramatic music from the TV, and Suze came to. Her last memory was of watching 100 Worst Serial Killers, some crap American rubbish. She looked at her watch. Half past eleven. The big-haired female presenter was standing outside a forbidding Victorian building. Slowly Suze tuned in to what she was saying.

‘ It is here, in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, England, that the man known as the Yorkshire Ripper lives, and it is here that he will most probably die. ’

A familiar orange-backed picture of a black-haired man appeared on the screen.

‘ In 1981 Stuart Sutcliffe was convicted of the murder of thirteen women. The Ripper claimed during his trial that a voice in his head had instructed him to kill prostitutes, and that this was the voice of God. The Yorkshire Ripper is not the only serial killer to have made such claims. A significant number have made similar assertions that God… ’

Suze fumbled for the remote control and turned the TV off. She shivered. Some things were better not watched alone and in the dark. That included tales of serial killers and religious nuts. She remembered something she’d read a long time ago: the world is divided into good people and bad people. Good people will do good things, bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things takes religion.

Good people. Bad people. Sometimes, she thought to herself, it was difficult to tell the difference.

She got down on her knees and starting collecting the clippings. A jumble of headlines that she’d read a hundred times before filled her mind. ‘profits soar… aerospace industry on upward trajectory.. management buyout boosts stocks’. When she had them in a pile, she placed them all back in the box file where they lived, and on the spine of which she had written two words in clear black marker pen: ‘grosvenor group’. She carried it to the other side of the room, where she slotted it into its place on a rickety Ikea bookshelf, next to an identical box file with a single word written on the side: ‘stratton’.

Her pretty face curled into an expression of dislike.

She went over to look out of the room’s one small window. From here she could see the street below — Wimbourne Terrace — and, above the opposite roofs, the A40 flyover, with plenty of cars travelling in either direction even at this time of night. She turned and looked back into the room, and her eyes fell on the Dictaphone.

Maybe she should take the tape to the press. Make it all public. But did she trust them? And would they believe her anyway, even with the evidence?

Suze shook her head. The truth was, she didn’t trust anybody. She had gone to such lengths to acquire the contents of that tape on the table — it made her feel sick, the memory of the danger in which she’d put herself — and now she wasn’t only afraid of its contents, she was afraid to do anything with it!

You’re fucking crazy. The words of the man with the limp who had caught her on the rooftop earlier that day rang in her head. She winced as she thought of the things she’d threatened him with. Shameful things.

Maybe he was right.

Maybe she was crazy.

Maybe these bastards had dragged her down with them.

Perhaps she should throw the tape away? Burn it. Forget she’d ever heard its contents and just get on with her life. Get herself a husband and some kids, like all her friends had. Like her mum had tried to persuade her to do for so many years, until her mind had started to wander.

But she knew she wasn’t going to do that. She knew what she’d heard. And even if she didn’t yet know the full story, she knew she had to do something to stop it.

Suze put the Dictaphone on the bookshelf alongside her research files, then found herself a blanket and snuggled up on the sofa again. She needed a clear head, and for a clear head she needed sleep.

Whether sleep would come, with all these thoughts spinning around in her mind, was a different matter entirely.

Chet drove.

His mind was racing. What the fuck had happened? Who was the intruder? Who had tried to kill him?

You’re going to tell me the name of the woman you spoke to outside the meeting room today. If you do that, you might live to see morning.

Suze McArthur. That pale-faced redhead with a stud in her nose and the smell of incense in her clothes had someone running scared. But who? And why?

He remembered what he’d overheard on the rooftop. Trust me, Prime Minister Stratton. This war is good to go… the Americans are all on board. The question is, how are you going to get it through…?

Was that enough to persuade someone to make an attempt on his life? No way. Chet knew the decision to take out an individual like that was never made lightly — especially if the hit had to be carried out on home turf. Too many things could go wrong. Killing someone was easy; covering it up was more difficult. The conspiracy theorists loved the idea that the intelligence agencies would think nothing of assassinating suspected terrorists or troublesome members of the royal family, but that was bullshit.

And in any case, the woman in his flat had not been British. As he drove, Chet desperately tried to place her accent. ‘ Harah! ’ she had said. Chet was a first-class Regiment linguist, and he thought the word seemed familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

It was just past midnight when he turned off Euston Road to drive down Gower Street and into the West End. He parked his car in the NCP on Wardour Street, hid his rucksack underneath the passenger seat and limped through the maze of red neon, pubs and sex shops. A woman, comfortably in her forties and with too much make-up on, called to him from a doorway. ‘Looking for a bit of business, love?’