Chris Ryan - Who Dares Wins

‘ You should have fucking stayed away. ’

Mac Howden didn’t hear the shot that killed him. The bullet entered his head before he even had a chance. Nor, as he fell to the ground with one side of his head shot away, and miniature fountains of blood spraying upwards, did he see the look on the face of his killer.

A grim look. A horrified look. A wild-eyed look. A look of utter, brutal self-loathing. The look of a man covered in bits of another man’s brain tissue and blood.

The look of a man who could not believe what he had just done.

Sam ran along Regent Street, his gun in his fist. He collided with two men – big, burly and drunk. They wore jeans and football shirts, sporting joke orange beards. They yelled obscenities at him in broad Scottish accents and pushed him in the chest. Sam didn’t even bother to warn them. He whacked the gun against the side of one man’s face, which softened into an angry red welt. The other man he kneed in the groin before continuing to run.

His mind burned with impossible thoughts. He tried to keep his focus, to look for somewhere to access the rooftops. But he had run a hundred metres. Two hundred. He turned left, but found himself lost in a complex of side streets between Regent Street and Piccadilly. His blood raced with urgency. Like in a childhood dream he felt he couldn’t run fast enough.

He was on Piccadilly now, running east. Finally, to his left, he saw a small mews road. He ducked into it. To his right an alleyway, and a set of metal fire-exit stairs running up. Sweat poured from him, but he didn’t slow down. Three steps at a time. Four. He hurtled up, stopping to catch his breath only when he was on the roof.

He looked around, his gun at the ready. With a sense of nauseous anticipation he almost expected Jacob to be there. Half-formulated phrases buzzed around his brain. He felt a curious mixture of excitement and blind anger.

But Jacob wasn’t there. He was nowhere to be seen. As he stared out over the rooftops, however, Sam became aware of something else. Firmly gripping his gun, he stepped forward until he was standing right by the body.

Sam didn’t need to check it was dead. The face was unrecognisable, just a shredded, bloodied pulp. He knew it was Mac, though. He recognised the clothes and even if he hadn’t… He just knew.

Time stood still.

Sam bent down. He stared at the damaged corpse of his friend. His blood turned to ice in his veins. He couldn’t move.

They’ll tell you things, Sam. Things about me. Don’t forget that you’re my brother. Don’t believe them. What had sounded before like a warning now sounded nothing but a deceit.

‘Jesus, Mac,’ he whispered. And then, with a sudden outburst of violence. ‘ Jesus! ’

He stood up and looked around for something to kick, something to punch. There was nothing and so Sam found his arms flailing uselessly in the air, like some animal twitching violently in its death throes. He heard a voice. It was a hollow, hoarse scream.

‘ NO! ’

Only when the scream had echoed away into nothing did Sam realise it had come from his own throat.

He looked around helplessly, as if by searching on this lonely rooftop he could do something about the terrible events that were unfolding. But there was nothing to do and his eyes fell on the body of his friend, unnervingly still in the way only corpses can be. As he looked he heard Mac’s voice in his head, repeating Jacob’s words:

You’re a long time looking at the lid, Sam.

Blood was still seeping from his friend’s wounds. It oozed up against the sole of his foot.

You’re a long time looking at the lid.

Sam stepped back. And as he did so, he realised the whole world had changed. That he had changed. Jacob had always made him feel like a kid. The younger brother, always looking up. Respectful. In awe.

Not any more. Things were different, he saw that now. He stretched himself to his full height and jutted his jaw at Mac. ‘He’s not going to get away with it, Mac,’ he said, his voice still raw from the scream. ‘I fucking promise you, he’s not going to get away with it.’

Sam drank in the sight of Mac’s body – the last time, he knew, he would ever see him – then turned his back. It was wrong to be leaving his corpse here, but he had no other choice.

Not if he was going to do what he needed to do.

Not if he was going to avenge his friend’s death.

Not if he was going to find his brother and put a stop to this, once and for all.

Toby Brookes’s voice was strained and emotional. Gabriel Bland had to press his confounded mobile phone hard into his ear in order to hear him above the sound of shouting and sirens. With each piece of news he found his fury doubling. Dolohov dead. Another civilian casualty and all this in front of a city full of witnesses. Worst of all, no sign of Redman – of either Redman. No leads, no nothing.

When Brookes had finished telling him everything, he was silent for a moment. ‘I, ah… I suppose I don’t need to tell you,’ he said eventually, ‘that you are in a very, very grave situation, Toby.’

‘I’ve just seen two people shot.’

‘I don’t believe I need that statistic repeating.’

A pause. And then Brookes again, angrier than Bland had ever heard him: ‘Fuck this! Just… just fuck this !’ A click, and the line went dead.

Bland stood in his office with the phone to his ear for a good while after Brookes’s voice disappeared. Brookes had cracked. That much was clear. Bland couldn’t let that distract him. There were more important things at stake than a young man who couldn’t take the pace. He had the unnerving sensation of everything unravelling around him. His breath came in deep, nervous lungfuls. Then, suddenly, with an uncharacteristic burst of violence, he hurled his phone against the window of his office, which looked out over London. The toughened glass of the window was entirely unharmed; the phone, however, shattered. He stormed to his desk and buzzed through to his assistant. ‘I need to speak to the chief,’ he said. ‘Now.’

And what a conversation it was going to be. This was turning into the biggest balls-up the service had seen for years. They could issue all the DA notices they wanted, but with so many witnesses to the shootings it was probably all over the Internet already. And things were going to get worse. A major hit, Dolohov had said. Political. Jacob Redman was their only link. Without him they were blind men in a dark room. If things were bad now, they were going to get a whole lot worse.

Gabriel Bland headed towards the door, steeling himself for the encounter to come. It promised to be ugly. He knew that if anyone was going to take the rap, it would have to be him.

Five minutes later, the Chief of MI6 was staring up at him with a look of blank astonishment.

Bland had never appreciated the experience of taking orders from someone his junior. He had seen the service’s chiefs come and go. He had disapproved of none of them quite so much as this one, with his ridiculous ideas of making the service more ‘open’ – interviews with the media and advertising for posts on the Internet. This obsession with image, however, was just a distraction from the nitty gritty of their day-to-day work.

But right now, Bland had to put all that from his mind as he stood in front of his boss, who could quite clearly see an early retirement looming. ‘Who’s your agent on the ground?’ he demanded.

‘Toby Brookes, sir.’

‘Fire him. Fuck-ups don’t come bigger than this, you know. I’ve already got the PM asking me why he can’t take a leak without one of our guys looking over his shoulder. Now you’re telling me our only lead is missing and our collateral’s dead on the ground at Piccadilly Circus.’