Chris Ryan - Who Dares Wins

Sam walked back down the corridor, passing Clare’s bedroom on the right-hand side. Even in the gloom he could see the unmade bed that had been left in a hurry, the nightclothes strewn on the floor. Back in the kitchen, Clare was weeping again, her head buried in her hands. Sam walked round her, checked through the blinds of the back door, then spoke again.

‘Who else knows about this?’

It took a moment for Clare to stop sobbing. ‘No one.’

‘I mean it, Clare. Friends. Family. Boyfriend. Someone you called because you were scared.’

She shook her head. ‘On my mother’s life. I didn’t want anyone else to be in danger. Jesus, I wish I’d never started any of this. They weren’t messing with me, Sam. You know how you can tell, when someone’s stringing you along. That old man, he’ll have me killed if he thinks I’ve told anyone about this. I know he will. You’ve got to keep it a secret – you can’t let anyone know you’ve been here.’

Sam walked up to her. He perched himself on the table and put a hand on her slim shoulder. ‘Remember what I told you?’ he asked. ‘That if I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. Well the same goes for them. If they wanted you out of the way, they wouldn’t bother playing with you first.’ And then, quietly, ‘Look at your friend Bill.’

She looked up at him with wide, scared eyes. ‘Do you know who they were?’

Sam paused before answering. ‘I think they were MI5.’

A silence.

‘Think about it,’ Sam continued. ‘Your man was on the run. You alerted the security services to his whereabouts and a few hours later he was dead.’

‘But…’ Clare looked shocked. ‘I never told them. I never once said where he was.’

‘You didn’t need to.’ He walked to the table and pointed at the telephone number scrawled on the document. ‘Did you speak to him on that phone number?’

She nodded mutely.

‘Five would have had your phone records up in about ten seconds flat,’ Sam told him. ‘As soon as they narrowed down the possible numbers for your man, they’d have kept tabs on them. The minute he made a call, his phone became a tracking device. All he had to do was dial out for a pizza and the spooks would have had his location. Easiest thing in the world.’ He didn’t add that he’d done it himself before now.

Clare was shaking her head. ‘You mean… you mean it’s my fault.’

‘You didn’t kill the guy,’ Sam said.

‘But I…’ She became breathless. ‘I…’

‘You didn’t know.’

‘But… you’re really telling me that the British government murdered Bill?’

He stared at her. As he sat there on the edge of the table in this strange flat with a woman he’d never met before, the memory of the previous day’s briefing filled his mind. The rough, grainy photographs of the targets. The picture of his brother. And the Ops Sergeant’s stark warning. Your targets are British citizens. They’ll be speaking English. That shouldn’t distract you from the job in hand.

A silence. Sam stood up and looked again through the blinds.

‘Why are you here, Sam?’ Clare asked suddenly. ‘Who gave you this copy of my article?’

Sam sniffed. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘You said you were in the military. Care to elaborate?’

‘Not really.’

‘But you knew about the training camp. The one in Kazakhstan.’

Sam nodded.

‘And you seem to know more about how MI5 work than the average joe.’

‘You need to stop thinking so hard, Clare.’

Out of the blue, she slammed her hand down on the table. ‘I need to know what’s going on!’ she announced with sudden spirit. ‘Holy Mother, half an hour ago I thought you were going to kill me. I think I deserve an explanation, don’t you?’ She paused and caught her breath. ‘I’m not stupid, you know. You’re in the military and you deal with MI5. In my book that makes you special forces. Right? Right? ’

Sam stayed quiet.

‘Damn it!’ she exploded. There was a fire in her now that he hadn’t expected. All of a sudden she was no longer the frightened woman who had wept uncontrollably. She stood, then strode over to him, her arms raised and her fists clenched. ‘Tell me what’s going on!’ Sam blinked, then realised she was actually going to try to hit him in the chest in fury.

He grabbed her slender wrists. Her eyes flashing, Clare struggled, but without success. Sam kept hold of her and for the second time he smelt her perfume. He pulled her towards him and felt her breasts pressing lightly against his torso. She was warm. Almost comforting.

The struggle stopped and they stared at each other. Clare was blushing faintly. Maybe it was the anger; or maybe, Sam thought, it was something else. Her breathing trembled. Sam knew what it meant. He knew how easily some women would give themselves up to a man they thought could protect them.

He knew, even as he spoke, that he should keep his mouth shut. That sharing what he knew could lead to trouble for both of them. But his natural caution had been replaced by other emotions. ‘I’m SAS,’ he said. Calm. In control. ‘An operation has just been ordered. We’re to deploy to the training camp in Kazakhstan and neutralise all the British citizens there. Looks to me like you’ve opened up a can of worms. Five have got a covert network across the country. It’s started to spring a leak so they’re shutting it down. Permanently.’

Clare drew away slightly. ‘Neutralise?’ she asked. ‘You mean… kill?’

‘Yeah,’ Sam said. ‘Kill.’

‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. ‘How many of them are there?’

‘Twenty.’ He felt his face tensing up as the image of Jacob, bearded and rough, passed into his head. ‘Maybe more.’

Clare breathed deeply as she assimilated the information. Sam noticed that she didn’t pull her wrists away from his hands.

‘I still don’t know why you’re here,’ she whispered. ‘I still don’t know what this is all about.’

‘It’s about someone trying to warn me.’

‘What of?’

Sam knew he shouldn’t tell her. He knew he should keep it to himself. But he could feel her warm breath and could sense that she was looking at him through different eyes. And anyway, maybe she was right. Maybe he did owe her some sort of explanation.

‘One of the targets,’ he said quietly, ‘is my brother. And if anyone thinks I’m going to go out there to put a bullet in his head, they can think again.’

She had stopped asking him questions soon after that. She’d stopped crying too. But she hadn’t stopped looking at him, that look which was a mixture of apprehension and something else. It was edging towards morning when Clare slipped into her bedroom, leaving Sam sitting at the table, the lights dimmed almost to nothingness, the document and his gun laid out in front of him. She wanted to be alone, she said. She wanted to think. That was fine by Sam: he knew she wouldn’t want to be by herself for long.

It was a Regiment tradition to laugh at Five, to take the piss out of the suited goons who turned up at HQ with a slew of orders and an unwillingness to get their own hands dirty. Civil serpents, they were called. Fags. Tossers. And a lot more besides. But beneath all that, away from the bravado and everything that went with it, there was at least some sort of respect. The Security Service was secretive; it was difficult to understand; it had sent the Regiment on operations that most people would find morally dubious. But nobody doubted that they were on the same side.

At least that was what Sam had always thought. In the last few hours, though, he had become less sure. He didn’t know whose side he was on, nor even what the sides were. All he knew was that somewhere, in some godforsaken shit hole in central Asia, his brother was a target. He didn’t know why and he didn’t know how; all he knew was that Jacob had been shat on by the Government once before. He was damned if he was going to let it happen again.