Chris Ryan - Who Dares Wins

He grabbed his wallet and stuffed it into the pocket of his baggy jeans, then left the room, taking care to lock the door behind him. There were other people staying here, as well as a nosy landlady, and he could tell that they would rifle through his room without a second thought if they reckoned they could get away with it. He knew, because he would do the same. Fortunately, though, he didn’t bump into any of them as he descended the three storeys of uncarpeted stairway, opened the main door to the faceless mid-terrace which housed the room he was renting and stepped out into the street. The sun was bright today. It made him wince, like an insect on an upturned brick. Instinctively, he pulled his hood over his head. It didn’t keep the sun out of his eyes, but it did make him feel more comfortable as he tramped down the pavement.

It took a while to find a supermarket. There were plenty of shops in this run-down area of North London, but they mostly sold cheap booze and cut-price phone cards. By the time he saw the familiar blue logo, he’d been walking for a good twenty minutes and was, he realised, a bit lost. He shrugged. He’d soon find his way back again. It wasn’t like there was anything else in the diary, after all.

The shop was almost empty; the few customers were elderly, pushing or carrying almost empty baskets of ready meals and cheap teabags. Jamie wandered the aisles aimlessly. He put chocolate milk and sandwiches in his basket before approaching the checkouts. There were only two of them open and so, despite the relatively few customers, each till had a queue. He joined the shortest and waited.

There was only one customer ahead of him when his mobile phone rang. Jamie pulled it out and looked at the screen. No number was displayed; to his surprise he noticed a little lurch in his stomach as he wondered if it might, just possibly, be Kelly. He placed his basket at the end of the counter and started to offload his purchases onto the moving belt with one hand. With the other, he answered the phone.

‘Yeah?’ he said. Cool. He didn’t want to give anything away.

A crackly kind of pause.

‘Hello?’ Jamie bellowed in the way only people talking into mobiles can. Briefly he considered hanging up, but at that moment a voice spoke.

‘Jamie Spillane?’ it asked.

Jamie couldn’t place the voice. ‘Who’s this?’ he demanded.

Another pause. ‘You know who it is.’

Jamie blinked. The checkout girl had scanned his items and was looking up at him with a bored, impatient expression. ‘Four pounds eighty-six,’ she said, a bit too loudly, as though she were saying it for a second time. Jamie hardly heard her. He left his lunch languishing by the plastic bags and hurried away from the checkout and out the shop.

‘I thought you’d forgotten I existed,’ he said under his breath. Silence. He was on the street now. The traffic was noisy. ‘ Hello? ’

‘You knew it could be some time.’ The more the voice spoke, the more Jamie recognised it. ‘The company is activating you.’

The company. Jamie knew what that meant. He knew that nobody would ever use the phrase ‘MI5’.

‘I’m listening,’ he replied. He had a finger shoved into his other ear to keep out the noise and it crossed his mind that this wasn’t quite how he had imagined things would happen. ‘Are you there?’ he asked when there was no reply.

‘I’m here.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

Again a pause.

‘Have you told anyone, Jamie?’

He was glad nobody was there to see his face. ‘Of course not,’ he replied. No hint of a lie in his voice. A bus had come to a halt just in front of him. Passengers spilled out and one of them caught his eye. Jamie started walking, speaking as he went. ‘Don’t worry about it, mate. It’s all cool.’

He carried on walking. His mouth felt dry. Jamie was frightened of the man at the other end of the phone. But he had to keep silent. He didn’t want to get Kelly involved in this stuff.

Silence. He continued to walk briskly. Randomly. He was getting a bit out of breath now – through exercise or excitement, he wasn’t quite sure which – so he came to a halt on the corner of a residential street. It was quieter here.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What do I need to do? What’s the job?’

He held his breath as he waited for the answer.

‘The job,’ the voice replied, ‘is difficult. But it’s important, Jamie. Lives depend on it. We’re asking you because you showed more aptitude than the others. Can we count on you?’

Jamie’s face twitched. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, you can.’

‘Good. You need to listen carefully, Jamie. If you don’t understand something, ask me to repeat it. Do you understand?’

Jamie looked around. The residential street was practically deserted; certainly nobody was paying him any attention. That was good. He pulled himself up to his full height. All of a sudden, he felt tall again. Excited. Useful. The row with Kelly, the shitty bedsit – all that disappeared from his mind.

‘Yeah,’ he announced into the receiver. ‘I understand. Go ahead. I’m listening…’

Sam’s dream had stayed with him, a shadow that haunted him for the rest of the day, just as it had haunted his night. Other things haunted him too. Clare’s story; the anonymous package. Who had given it to him? No matter how hard he thought about it, he just couldn’t make things add up. Driving back from London he could barely keep his car straight, let alone his thoughts. But as he approached the outskirts of Hereford, he realised he had come to a decision. And if he was going to pull it off, he had to pretend that everything was normal.

He headed straight for Credenhill. There were things that needed to be done before the op. The last thing Sam wanted to do at the moment was see any of the guys, but he had to make sure he was prepared. Pretend nothing’s wrong , he told himself. Pretend it’s just an ordinary op . If he didn’t put in an appearance, people might start to ask questions.

It was midday by the time he approached the weapons store and it was with relief, as he stepped inside, that he saw it was just him and the armourer. He was a tall man with short, spiky hair. Sam didn’t know his name. He hoped there’d be no wisecracks from him, no inappropriate questions about what use the weapons he dished out were going to be put to.

‘Didn’t think I’d be seeing your lot so soon,’ he observed drily.

A little voice in Sam’s head told him to act naturally. If you can’t keep it up in the armoury , he told himself, you’ll have no chance in the field . ‘Gluttons for fucking punishment,’ he replied before flashing a forced, rueful smile.

‘Diemaco?’

Sam nodded. ‘And the Sig.’

Each man’s weapon was particular to him. The rifle and handgun that Sam would be taking to Kazakhstan were the same ones that had kept him alive in Helmand Province; the same ones that had claimed more Taliban scalps in the previous few weeks than Sam could frankly remember. The armourer kept the weapons separate, safe and ordered in this locked, secure building. But it was up to Sam to test fire his guns on the range in preparation for the op, to make sure that they were still zeroed in to his eye. It took the armourer less than a minute silently to locate his Diemaco C8 and place it carefully on the counter along with a small box of 45 mm rounds. The Sig followed, a P226 with a 9 mm chamber and an extended twenty-round magazine. A box of rounds for the handgun and Sam was good to go. The armourer listed what Sam was checking out, then handed over the slip of paper for him to sign. He scrawled his illegible signature at the bottom of the paper, nodded curtly at the armourer and gathered up his weapons.