Chris Ryan - Who Dares Wins

A noise. His hand grabbed the gun at lightning speed.

It was only Clare. She stood in the doorway, her pretty features softened by the dim light. She was wearing a nightdress that fell to just above her knees. One of the straps had slipped slightly down her shoulder, but she made no attempt to adjust it. They stared at each other for what seemed like an age.

Sam stood up. Almost absent-mindedly he brought the gun with him. As he stepped towards Clare, he saw her lips part slightly. She was several inches shorter than him; as he grew closer she raised her head.

His gun hand was pressed into the small of her back now. The nightdress was satiny and so thin it might as well not have been there. Her body felt warm, but she was trembling.

‘Stay with me,’ she whispered.

Sam nodded, then pressed his lips against hers.

She kissed him nervously at first, as though she shouldn’t be doing it. But that timid kiss soon turned into something else. Something more passionate. Gently Sam slid the straps of her nightdress from her shoulders. The garment fell to a silent, gossamer heap on the floor, leaving Clare naked. She pulled her lips away and opened her eyes. There was still a look of anxiety on her face. No smiles. That was good. Sam didn’t feel like returning one.

She turned and walked to the bedroom. Sam followed, laying his gun on a small table by the doorway. Clare was standing by the bed. The bright moon shone through her bedroom window illuminating her body. His eyes followed the line of her hips, the curve of her breasts. He placed the gun on a chest of drawers and stepped towards her.

Clare’s breath was heavy. Shaking. She stretched out a nervous hand and slid it between the buttons of Sam’s shirt. He started to undo them and as he felt her hand wander over his torso, he felt at least some of the tension of the past twenty-four hours ease away. He pulled Clare towards him and kissed her again, before gently but firmly pushing her onto the bed. She gazed up at him as he removed his shirt.

‘Don’t go,’ she whispered.

Sam gave her a serious kind of look. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

He lay on the bed, softly ran his hands over her breasts and then kissed her again.

‘Not yet,’ he said.

The same moon that shone into the West London bedroom of Clare Corbett shone into an attic room on the other side of the city. It was a good deal less comfortable – a single bed, a rickety wooden table and a chair. It smelt a bit – not just of the fast-food packaging on the floor, but also of the neglect that is particular to a certain type of rented accommodation – and it only contained one person. Jamie Spillane lay on the bed and gazed through the skylight. He wished sleep would come, but he knew it wouldn’t.

Jamie felt stupid. He must have still been drunk the previous morning when he came clean to Kelly. Either that or just desperate to tell someone. But that had been the one thing they’d told him not to do. He remembered their words. ‘It’s not called the Secret Service for nothing. If you tell anyone, you won’t only blow your cover, you put them in danger as well. So remember that, and keep your fucking mouths shut.’

In the darkness his own stupidity hit him yet again.

At least she hadn’t believed him. That was something. Kelly wouldn’t go blurting it out to anyone. She’d just bitch about him to her friends, tell them what a useless bastard he was. He didn’t mind that.

Or did he? Truth was that the idea made him feel a bit uncomfortable. If he was honest with himself, he’d have to say that he liked Kelly. It wasn’t just the sex, although that was good; he liked the way that she just… looked after him a bit. He felt bad now about taking the money from her, bad that she knew about it and had something else to chalk up against him. The few weeks he’d spent with Kelly had been all right. He’d been kicked out by girlfriends before now, of course he had. But he felt particularly gloomy about this one.

Not least because he had nowhere to go. Home wasn’t an option, obviously. Jamie had decided he was never going back there. His mum and dad were the last people in the world he wanted to be with. He felt embarrassed that he had made that stuff up about them, but Jamie wasn’t so naïve about himself that he couldn’t admit that these were little fantasies about his parents that he’d had since he was a child. That his dad was, well, someone . Not just a pathetic, pissed-up waste of space. And his mum? He sneered in the darkness. Jamie didn’t even want to think about her.

Maybe he had tried to tell Kelly his secret because he knew he could never tell his parents. They always thought he was worthless. As a kid, when he’d gone off the rails, it hadn’t made them pay more attention to him. It had just reinforced their opinion. When he’d spent three months in a young offenders’ institute for joyriding and smashing up someone’s motor, they had seemed totally unsurprised. They didn’t visit him once. When he got out, the petty crime had continued. He got a buzz out of it. And somewhere deep down he wanted his parents to take notice. They never did.

Which was why he was here. A cheap, faceless bedsit. Rooms rented by the week. When he had been targeted by the Security Service and told he’d be put on a retainer of a few hundred pounds a month, paid directly and anonymously into a bank account, it had sounded like a deal too good to be true. But a few hundred pounds, he soon realised, doesn’t get you very far. He wouldn’t mind if they’d just give him something to do – anything to do – but since he’d got back from the training camp, there’d been nothing. Silence.

He’d been warned that this would be the case. ‘You won’t hear from us,’ he’d been told. ‘Not until the time comes for you to be activated. When that happens, we’ll find you. Just carry on as normal. Live your life. And remember: don’t tell anyone .’

This wasn’t living his life, though. Nothing like. He wanted some excitement. He was hungry for it. And he wanted something to do.

Jamie wouldn’t be able to tell his parents about it. He knew that. But he would know. He would know that he wasn’t the useless kid his mum and dad saw.

The moon continued to shine into the attic. Jamie continued to lie awake, waiting for morning, whatever it might bring.

A podgy man with square, thick-rimmed spectacles sat in the leather driving seat of his large, comfortable car. The coldest hour, he thought to himself, was always just before sunrise. He was glad of his coat and glad, too, that sunrise was just around the corner. He had spent too much time for his liking in this bland estate on the outskirts of the monstrosity that was Milton Keynes and he was looking forward to this particular engagement being over. That would happen – if everything went according to plan – very soon.

The Americans called what he was about to do the Boston Brakes Technique. Trust the Americans, he thought to himself, to claim the credit for everything. The technique in question, or course, had been used all over the world, not just in Boston. He himself had performed it five times and though he was not one for conspiracy theories, it did not take a genius to understand that the famous car crash under the Pont de l’Alma in Paris bore all the hallmarks of what he was about to do.

Car crashes, he found, were so satisfactory . They were commonplace, for a start. How many of them happened around the world every day? He did not know the exact statistic, but it was many, certainly. The cynic in him suspected that a small but significant number of these accidents were in fact carried out by the security services of various countries for precisely the reason he favoured them. Nobody would suspect foul play. And nobody would examine in any detail the crushed, crumpled shell of a wrecked motor vehicle; certainly they would not look close enough to find the small electronic device attached to the car’s steering column – if, indeed, the device itself had survived the crash.