Chris Ryan - Who Dares Wins

‘Shut up.’ Sam looked around for any sign of another car coming to a halt, but there was nothing. He glanced over his shoulder and pointed at Beridze’s assistant. ‘Does he speak English?’

‘Badly,’ Beridze replied.

‘I want you both to get out. When I say “walk”, you walk. When I say “stop”, you stop. Tell him.’

Beridze translated. His assistant gave a nervous nod and the three men got out of the car.

Sam felt naked without a weapon. His skin prickled as he looked around, scanning the area for signs of anything suspicious. Beridze’s assistant held his briefcase close to his chest as he looked anxiously around; both men were peculiarly out of place in these bleak, suburban surroundings. As though they were a long way from home.

‘Walk,’ Sam told them. He pointed back towards the main road. ‘That way.’

The two Georgians shuffled off. Sam took the rear, constantly checking around him. At the main road he made them wait, like an anxious parent, until there really were no cars – a road ‘accident’, he knew, was the easiest way to carry out a hit. When the road was clear he hustled them across.

‘How far?’ the ambassador asked, already out of breath.

‘Keep walking,’ Sam told him.

They arrived at the safe house in a couple of minutes. To look at it, you wouldn’t think it was anything special, just another in a long line of run-down, three-storey terraced houses. The windows were obscured with net curtains and there were no lights on inside. Further down the street there was an unmarked white van. Sam nodded. ‘We’re here,’ he said.

The three men stood in the street. ‘Well?’ Beridze asked, his voice sharp with impatience. ‘What now?’

‘We wait to be let in.’

‘But nobody knows we are here.’

‘Oh, they know,’ Sam replied. And at just that moment the front door clicked open. Sam pushed past the two Georgians, opened the door a little further and peered inside. Darkness. ‘It’s me,’ he called quietly. ‘Sam.’

A pause. And then from the silence emerged a figure. Tall, wide-shouldered, a weapon in his hand and a comms earpiece over one ear. Sam recognised the hook nose and the heavy eyebrows, of course. Steve Davenport. ‘Morning all. Got some packages to deliver, then?’ His voice was flat; immediately Sam picked up on a sense of unease, as if his SAS mate was less than pleased to see him.

‘Special fucking delivery,’ Sam replied. He turned round to the Georgians. ‘All right, you two. Get inside.’

The door was closed and they headed upstairs in near darkness. On the first-floor landing Sam saw a strip of light underneath one of the doors. Davenport opened it and they filed inside.

It was a sparse, unwelcoming room, but then Sam hadn’t been expecting the Ritz. A good safe house needed to be basic and free of furniture – the more stuff there was in it, the harder it would be to tell if the place had been tampered with. There was one window in this room, but it was blocked off by a large sheet of black tarpaulin in order to stop any light escaping from a single bulb that hung from the ceiling. A steel flight case of weapons was propped up against one wall, and sitting cross-legged in a corner, packet of cigarettes in front of him and one in his mouth, was Luke Tyler, Craven’s Cockney friend and the one who had taken his death the worst. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘Welcome to the party,’ he drawled. ‘These the strippers?’

Beridze looked incensed; Sam just ignored it. ‘Where are the others?’

‘Cullen’s upstairs watching the garden. Means he has to stand on the shitter, but he’s got a mouth like a toilet, so he’s probably at home. Webb’s up there watching the front and Andrews is on the ground floor doing the same.’ Tyler took another drag on his cigarette, without taking his eye off Sam. ‘Think he saw the milkman earlier on. Nearly shat himself.’

Beridze looked from one man to the other. Even though English wasn’t his first language he was clearly picking up on the tension in the room. Sam looked down at Tyler. ‘Get to your fucking feet, Luke,’ he said. And when the younger man had done so: ‘You got a problem, spit it out.’

Tyler dropped his cigarette onto the bare floorboards and stubbed it out with his boot. ‘Lot of rumours going around, Sam. Plenty of us want to know what your chat with the spooks after the Kazakhstan job was about.’ He set his jaw and stared at Sam.

The accusation hung in the air.

Tyler deserved to know the truth. They all did. But that meant telling them about Jacob and Sam couldn’t bring himself to do that. He walked over to the weapons stash and, almost absent-mindedly, picked up a Sig. ‘Get the others,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Cullen, Andrews, Webb. Get them.’

‘They’re on stag.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Get them now.’

Tyler shrugged, then disappeared. Two minutes later the others filed silently in, all of them wearing NV goggles up on their foreheads and with comms earpieces on one side of their heads. Only when they were all assembled did Sam speak. ‘Sounds to me like Hereford’s turned into a WI meeting.’ He looked at each of them in turn. Tyler, lairy and aggressive. Webb, a vicious fire in his eyes. Cullen, his lips pursed in an expression of mistrust. Andrews, his black skin glowing despite the early morning chill, his face calm but watchful. And Davenport, older than the others, but no less wary.

‘Craven’s dead,’ Sam continued. ‘You think I know something about it that you don’t. Well you’re wrong. You really think the Firm are going to confide in me?’ He let that thought sink in before he dropped the bombshell. ‘Mac’s dead too.’

The men looked at each other. Someone hissed the word ‘shit’, but Sam didn’t see who it was.

‘Shot,’ he continued. ‘Point blank. Night before last. Mac was my best friend. So while you’re all throwing your toys out of your pram, you might want to give that some thought.’

The men looked a bit less sure of themselves. ‘What’s the craic?’ Cullen asked. ‘What the hell happened to him?’

‘The Firm haven’t told me much. Just that he fell foul of the Russians. Like Craven.’ He pointed at Beridze. ‘And just like our man here will, if the FSB get their way.’ The unit looked towards the Georgian. At the mention of so many deaths, the ambassador had grown a little paler. Sam wondered how much he should tell them – about the missile base and the Iranians. Nothing, he decided. All that meant very little to these guys. Craven and Mac were dead and they wanted to pay someone back for it. Sometimes it paid to keep things simple. And sometimes it paid not to tell the whole truth.

‘They’re sending someone,’ he continued. ‘Tonight, we think.’ He looked them each in the eye. ‘Someone good. I asked for you lot because I knew you’d want this chance.’

A thick silence in the room. The two Georgians shuffled nervously.

‘Who knows we’re here?’ Davenport asked.

‘The Firm,’ Sam replied. ‘No one else.’

Davenport glanced over at the Georgians. ‘Our friends didn’t tell anyone?’

Sam shook his head.

‘Then the chances are we’ve sidestepped the hit, that no one’ll come.’

Sam was about to answer, but Tyler got there first. ‘Unless the same person who tipped off Spetsnaz decides to shoot his mouth off about where we are. That what you’re thinking, Sam?’

Sam didn’t know what he was thinking. Bland’s words kept coming back to him. There’s no mole, Sam. You’re seeing shadows. Jesus, he thought to himself. I probably am. It would make sense for Spetsnaz to have been guarding the FSB’s little secret in Kazakhstan. With a flash of insight he suspected he’d been wrong. But mole or no mole, one thing was sure: if this hit had Jacob’s fingerprints on it, things would be complicated. Very fucking complicated. It was a dark thought, but Sam couldn’t shake it.