Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

The politician turned. ‘What?’

‘You won’t find her, you know. I can absolutely promise you that you won’t find Maya Bloom. And if you do…’

He went silent.

‘What?’

Cohen remembered the brutalised body of the agent he’d sent to kill her. The guts spilled out all over the bed. The blood and the stink. The message she’d sent him, and which he had heeded. He wanted to say, ‘She’ll kill you,’ but he thought better of it.

‘ What? ’ Blumenthal demanded again.

Cohen shook his head and sighed deeply. ‘Nothing, Ehud,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’ And he watched with an expressionless face as the Rottweiler stormed out of the room, slamming the door noisily behind him.

Leaving Hereford had been far from straightforward. First there had been the meet and greet with the Royal Protection Squad at 07.00 hrs. Luke hardly heard anything the RPS boys said. He was just replaying last night’s conversation over and over again. Trying to make sense of it. Trying to work out what it meant.

I was with Chet Freeman the night he died… the night he was murdered.

Part of him thought the caller must have been a nutter, winding him up or playing some sick joke. But his phone was supplied by work. That meant it was encrypted. Impossible to trace and impossible to find the number if you didn’t know it already. Luke knew that he had to get out of camp and down to London.

They were scheduled to leave for Israel the following morning. Going AWOL wasn’t an option, so he approached O’Donoghue at midday and spun him a crock of shit about having a few personal loose ends to tie up before heading out on the op. The ops officer hadn’t been happy. ‘Fucking hell, Luke, we leave in twenty-four hours. It’s not the time for you to start sorting out your woman trouble.’ But he cut his man some slack and agreed to stand him down for a few hours. And so, by early afternoon, Luke had changed out of his camouflage gear and into a pair of jeans and an old hooded top that he normally wore for jogging in the winter. Today he selected it because the hood would disguise his face a little. Before long he was screaming down the M4 to London.

He hit the western outskirts at 14.45 hrs. As a London boy born and bred, it felt like coming home. But it was an uneasy homecoming. By 15.45 he was parking up just off Fleet Street. He was in good time for the RV and that suited him well. He didn’t know what this woman looked like; he didn’t know if this was some elaborate game; so he wanted to get eyes on the location early.

The light was just failing as he walked up Fleet Street with the illuminated dome of St Paul’s rising above him. Luke turned up the collar of his leather jacket against the cold, pulled up his hood and stood fifty metres from the steps, in the shadow of the maroon awning of an Indian restaurant. The smell of curry reminded him how hungry he was, but he put that to the back of his mind and surveyed the scene.

The entrance to the cathedral was lit up, and people were wandering in and out of the huge wooden doors, only just visible behind the temple-like column of the facade. Many of them were tourists — there was a large party of Japanese students with backpacks and cameras — but he saw too a good number of ordinary Londoners, suited and booted. Perhaps, he thought to himself, the events of a couple of days ago had made people more religious. Luke didn’t know. It was all bullshit to him. When you’re dead you’re dead. No pearly gates or swooning angels. Just a hole in the ground, if you’re lucky.

The minutes ticked away. Luke stayed in the shadows, watching the steps. Waiting. People came and went. Was the woman he was here to meet one of the crowd sitting on the steps? Impossible to tell.

He continued to watch. It grew cold. He ignored it.

‘You hungry, boss?’

He looked round sharply. An Indian man in a grey suit had appeared at the door of the curry restaurant. ‘I have very good food.’

Luke shook his head and went back to watching.

Time check: 16.57. Three minutes to RV.

Luke scanned the steps, directing his vision in concentric circles so he covered the whole area. Nobody stood out. He looked at his phone. No calls. He scanned the facade of the cathedral; he checked along its wings for anything suspicious; he searched for loiterers in the general vicinity.

Nothing. It looked like just another London evening.

16.59.

Something caught his eye.

Two people had emerged from the entrance of the cathedral. A woman and, holding on to her hand, a young child. Luke wouldn’t have given them a second glance, were the woman not looking around anxiously, as if she too was searching for someone. The child stood calmly by the woman’s side. He showed none of the woman’s anxiety, but then why should he? He was just a kid.

Luke stayed where he was. A nearby church bell rang the hour and the woman’s anxiety appeared to increase. He continued to check for anything suspicious: unmarked cars parked nearby; anyone else observing the steps.

Still nothing.

At 17.03 he stepped out from the shadows. He didn’t walk directly up to the steps, but followed a circular route and approached from the side. As he drew nearer to the entrance of the cathedral, the woman’s features became clearer. She was thin, with short red hair and bags under her eyes. There was nothing particularly remarkable about her face, but the same couldn’t be said of the child who held her hand. He was thin too, with serious eyes and dishevelled brown hair. But there was something familiar about him. So familiar, in fact, that just to look at him sent a prickle of recognition down Luke’s spine.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up. The woman was chewing on her lower lip. She glanced at her watch and muttered something to herself, then bent down and spoke to the child. And it was as she was speaking that she caught sight of Luke staring at her.

She stared back and slowly stood up to her full height again. Her expression was questioning. Luke hurried up the steps, but he didn’t head straight for her. Instead he bypassed the pair of them and passed through the main doors of the cathedral.

He’d never been inside before. Last time Luke had been in a church was to say goodbye to a member of A Squadron who’d had his bollocks blown off during a raid on a Taliban facility in the badlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They’d repatriated those bits of his body they could find, but the guys who’d shouldered his coffin said afterwards that it felt empty. Whatever. The family had something to plant, that was the main thing.

He quickly took in his surroundings: the narrow aisle with its chequerboard floor and row upon row of wooden pews, the massive dome, the highly decorated altar and imposing organ, the huge arches along either side of the aisle leading to the unseen wings of the cathedral — very pretty, Luke supposed, but he wasn’t here to marvel at the fucking architecture. At the far end of the cathedral, just in front of the altar, a large choir of maybe a hundred people was rehearsing — a fifty-fifty mixture of schoolboys in blue and grey uniform and men and women of retirement age. Their conductor, clearly unhappy with something, was shouting at them, and his voice echoed meaninglessly around the huge space. Weird, what some people got themselves worked up about. Aside from the choir, there were probably another hundred people in here that he could see, some of them sitting on the pews with their heads bowed, others wandering aimlessly, looking at the architecture, or just talking.

The conductor’s shouting stopped and, almost imperceptibly, the choir started singing. It was quiet, but the voices sounded like they came from every corner of the cathedral.