Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

Jake, a weedy fellow with etiolated complexion and bad teeth, played with his hands, twining the long and surprisingly powerful-looking fingers about one another as though embarrassed by praise from a maestro.

“Glad to have you with us,” said de Villiers. Then, changing the topic, “The video is fine. After some hours in the dubbing studio, we have it so the sheikh will suspect nothing. The film shows me accusing Marman of the killing at Zakhir and he denies it hotly. It looks real good. All we need now is to nail this guy in such a way that there is a 100 percent absence of suspicious circumstances.”

“Two hundred percent,” Meier retorted. “Let me take you step by step.”

“You normally do,” Davies said, slumping back in his chair with an exaggerated sigh.

Outside in Trebovir Road the street resounded to gunfire and Meier looked up, startled. Davies chuckled at his discomfiture. “Ever heard of Guy Fawkes? You should have… he was your alter ego but for the one-year fuse delay.”

“Mercedes,” Meier recited, “has a training workshop in Unterturkheim which, since 1916, has turned out apprentices that later advanced the world of engineering in many amazing ways. Jake here received three years’ training there and later achieved the diploma of master mechanic from the West German Chamber of Handicraft. He has studied my Boston system and is impressed. We will be working together until completion.”

Meier moved to the central table, on which he had laid out a road map of southern England. “First,” he said. “We have Davies’s report on the target. The man is macho cojones, a real swordsman or, as Davies puts it, very free with his whatsit. In practice this means he enjoys female company and is seldom alone. We are all agreed that the best scenario, to catch him alone, is out on the road.”

Jake put in his oar, his voice as cadaverous as his face. “We are lucky this man has a Citroen 2CV. Very feeble machine. Cracks easy like an eggshell. The driver has no untershied, no protection.”

Meier nodded at his acolyte. “This is correct, quite so, but to continue, having established that the action will be on the road, we ask ourselves: why no bomb? Why no sabotage? Why not make the brakes fail and hope for a fatal result?” He paused. “Because with all such events the police conduct an immediate forensic study and even I could not get away with a No Foul Play verdict.”

Davies coughed. “Get on with it.”

“Again, if we should have a Tadnams heavy in a reinforced car ram into the 2CV or drive Marman off the road, it will be obvious foul play. So what can we do? Of course, we need a random third party to collide head-on with his car at more than thirty miles an hour. This will certainly be fatal to Marman and the police will never even contemplate premeditation.” Meier beamed. “The Boston brakes will achieve all this for us.”

Davies cut in. “In principle maybe, but I don’t see your third-party random drivers rushing in to volunteer their services as guided missiles.”

Meier ignored him. “The theory is very simple. We find someone who we know will drive on the same road at the same time as Marman but in the opposite direction. I follow behind this chosen and doctored car with Jake driving me. You follow behind the 2CV and we keep in radio contact so that I know exactly when and where the cars will approach each other. Depending on the aggregate speeds, but at a likely distance of five hundred yards prior to the projected passing point, I take radio control of the random car and steer it to a head-on collision with Marman.”

“What if they happen to meet in a traffic jam, or at a roundabout, or on opposite sides of a steel crash barrier?” It was Davies again.

“Of course, that is possible. But with a country road like the A303, the odds against not meeting on the open road and at high speeds are greater than nine-to-one.”

“But still possible?” Davies persisted.

“Yes, and that is why our device will be detachable. We know from the diary that we have two other chances. Jake and I would simply transfer the device to another proxy car in readiness for another known Marman journey.”

“Okay, okay.” De Villiers was unconvinced. “But how the hell do you select a suitable proxy?”

“This we have already done.” Meier’s voice was sugary and conspiratorial. “Come, look at the map here.” He indicated the region between London and the south coast. Two red chinagraph marks indicated Marman’s Clapham house and the Wiltshire village of Steeple Langford.

“The target will lunch at the village here, departing at 3:15 p.m. in order to return to Clapham in time to make job-hunting phone calls. Then he goes round to his girlfriend, Julia, in Brook Green. We give him an average speed on a clear dual highway of fifty-five miles per hour and a simple mathematical process tells us he will at 3:45 p.m.-even allowing fifteen minutes and ten miles per hour overall differences to the planned parameters-be somewhere between Winterbourne Stoke and Popham on the A303, a stretch of over thirty miles of fast road. All we need now is to find a driver who is scheduled to be heading west in the opposite direction, along that same twenty-mile stretch at 3:45 p.m.”

“That,” said Davies, “is where you come unstuck.”

“Not at all,” Meier responded. “Look at the map here and you can clearly see that the A303 is a main arterial road between London and such towns as Exeter and Plymouth. What sort of person needs to drive that route frequently? A representative of a company with offices in both places. Naturally the city of Plymouth brought to my mind the hovercraft we used to such good effect last summer. That was a Slingsby SAH2200 model originating from a manufacturing group named ML Holdings with a subsidiary based in Plymouth. Tadnams quickly rustled up, from an acquisitions research company, the necessary background data on ML, Shorts of Belfast, and five other firms with London and Plymouth units.”

De Villiers was nodding quietly, with growing enthusiasm.

“What clinched the selection process was that ML Holdings are due to hold a Main Board meeting in Plymouth on the morning of November twelfth. Any London-based directors will need to be in Plymouth the preceding night, which, if they are to dine on expenses at a good Plymouth hotel, will mean their passing down the A303 mid-afternoon on the eleventh, D-Day.”

He paused to let the point sink in, then continued. “We forgot about the sales force at this point and concentrated on the senior staff and nonexecutive directors who would have to attend their board meeting. We are now in the process, with full support from Tadnams, of narrowing down a list of fourteen likely characters.”

“Narrowing down?” nudged de Villiers.

“Checking out which executives will be heading west at any point on our key stretch of the A303 at 3:45 p.m. in six days’ time. Meanwhile, Jake will have the equipment ready tomorrow evening and we will commence rehearsals with four stock cars at the Tadnams airstrip in Kent on the seventh. I will not have lost my touch with the control system but, as always, practice makes perfect.”

Davies studied the road map and avoided the smug, sideways glance of his technical colleague.

During the evening of Friday, November 7, Meier stopped the car at a garage in Stockbridge and asked the elderly attendant for the best route to Exeter.

“Well, my friend, I can tell you which way not to go, and that’s by the A30. It may look more direct, but what with its traffic problems and all, you’d be a fool to take it. Go along the A303 as far as you can, close to Honiton, then join the A30. That’s what the folks ’round here all do.”