Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

The reply was equally curt. A male voice that belonged to someone she had never met and never would. ‘Traced.’

She put the phone back in her pocket and returned her attention to the old lady. She was still making fretful little noises. Still shaking. But she had the presence of mind to reach for the body of the phone — an attempt, the woman presumed, to call through to reception and alert them to the intruder in her room. It was a moment’s work to pull the phone from her weak hands and place it out of reach on the dressing table. The mewing grew a little more desperate.

She needed to be killed, of course. That much was obvious. She had seen the intruder’s face and knew what she was after. A gunshot was out of the question. Often the best you could do was mislead people about the cause of death. So it came quite naturally for her to look around the room in search of a more subtle instrument than the Beretta.

It didn’t take her long.

The old lady’s dressing table was neatly arranged. Two fading family photographs of a young girl and an older man, a hairbrush, a bottle of Nivea skin cream and a Tupperware box containing an array of medication. The woman looked through the box, discounting the vitamins and the cod liver oil and paying attention to the less benign drugs. The bottle she finally selected was made of brown glass and bore a printed pharmacist’s label. Warfarin. One capsule to be taken once a day, it instructed, and — in stark, bold letters — ‘in case of overdose seek immediate medical attention’. She shook the bottle. It was almost full.

‘I mustn’t take those,’ the old lady whispered. She sounded rather like a child repeating her parent’s instructions. ‘The nurse gives them to me. I mustn’t take them myself… it’s very important.. ’ She nodded rapidly to emphasise her point.

The woman ignored her and, laying her Beretta on the dressing table way out of reach, spilled some of the little pink capsules into the palm of her hand. The old lady started shaking her head as she drew near, and the mewing started again, more panicked than before.

The first capsule was the most difficult to insert into the old lady’s mouth. It meant pinching her papery, wrinkled cheeks with one hand — not too hard, so as to avoid bruising — and using the other to force it past her brittle teeth and on to the back of her tongue. Warm saliva collected around the woman’s two fingers as she forced the old lady’s head back, and inserted two more capsules in quick succession. There was a strangled, gargling sound from her throat, which grew more severe as the capsules were forced down. Now the old lady tried to beat her attacker with her fists, but she was much too weak to make any difference. Another three capsules were forced down her throat.

Then three more.

And another three.

The old lady was choking for breath now, holding her grey, veiny hands around her neck as the woman stood back and examined her handiwork. She didn’t fully know what the short-term effects of a Warfarin overdose were, but that didn’t matter. The capsules were only there in the unlikely event of an autopsy. She stepped over to the bed, picked up the pillow and returned to the wheelchair.

Even through the fog of her confusion, the old lady knew what was about to happen. She looked up with bloodshot eyes and shook her head as forcefully as she could. ‘Please,’ she managed to gasp through her breathlessness. ‘Please, no. My daughter…’

The woman put her lips just an inch from the old woman’s ear. ‘Your daughter will be joining you very soon,’ she whispered. ‘When I kill her, I will explain that her mother died squeaking like a cat.’

The old lady shook her head and a tear forced its way from her withered tear sacs into the corner of her eye. ‘Suze is a good girl,’ she whispered. ‘A good girl. You mustn’t hurt her…’

The woman sneered slightly at these words — the last, she knew, that the old lady would ever utter. She placed the pillow over her face — gently, because she knew that to press too hard could cause bruising around the nose and mouth — and then lightly pressed with her free hand against the back of her head, entwining her fingers in the thin, dry hair.

It was pathetically easy. The old lady’s struggles were feeble; the way she flailed her arms and kicked her thin legs quite ineffectual; her mewing stopped and she was silent. The woman’s eyes shone in the gloom as she went about her work. And because her victim was old and her lungs were tired, the process was quick. After forty-five seconds the flailing had eased off; after a minute and a half the body had slumped in the wheelchair. The woman removed the pillow and put two fingers to the jugular. Nothing. The old lady’s face was still and grey. She replaced the pillow on the bed, then wheeled the chair in front of the dressing table, where she left the Warfarin bottle open just within reach of the fresh corpse.

A new smell hit her senses. Urine. That was no surprise. Now she was dead, the old lady’s muscles were relaxing, and that included the bladder. Sometimes it happened sooner, sometimes later. In this case it had happened almost immediately, and now there was a dripping of liquid from the edge of the wheelchair on to the carpet. The woman was experienced enough to know that the bowels would probably follow, but by the time that occurred, she would be long gone.

It was calm in the room now. The rain continued to spatter against the window; the pink hyacinth remained the only splash of colour in this gloomy place. The woman allowed herself a bleak smile. The staff here would be used to occupants dying. When they found the old lady they would surely assume that she had come to the end of her natural life. If anyone did decide to investigate further, they would discover the overdose of Warfarin and assume that the confused old lady had had one bout of confusion too many.

She opened the door and walked out. The corridor was deserted, and she didn’t encounter a single person until she was down in reception, where nobody paid her any attention anyway. Outside the home, she pulled out her phone and called a number.

‘Mrs McArthur has quietly slipped from our embrace,’ she said.

Then she waited as the voice at the other end read out an address.

For a soldier in the field, the sound a chopper makes is like the sound of Christmas bells. Nine times out of ten it means casevac or exfiltration. One time out of ten it means something more sinister. This was one of those times.

Luke knew from the rough, mechanical sound of the rotary blades it was a Russian MI-8, even before he saw it. ‘Not one of ours,’ he told Finn as they stood quietly by the mouth of the cave, their assault rifles strapped to their bodies. They weren’t expecting an exfil, but if it had been a rescue helicopter it would be travelling low, fast and in a straight line towards them. This one sounded like it was circling above. Searching.

They stayed in the shadows as they looked out and up into the cloudy sky. Two minutes later the MI-8 appeared and circled above the desert just half a klick from their position, low enough for them to be able to see it.

‘Reckon they’re looking for us?’ Finn’s voice was dry.

‘If Fozzie and the others are compromised, maybe it’s just increased security?’ Luke frowned. ‘Put it this way: I don’t think it’s a jolly.’ He checked his watch. Midday. Ample time for word of the firefight back in the village to have reached military headquarters in Baghdad and for them to have dispatched a heli. Did the authorities know that Abu Famir had been hiding out there and was now on the move? Maybe, maybe not. But Luke had to plan for the worst. He had to assume that the Iraqis were coming for them.