Witness X

by Mark Dawson

  Duffy stared at the second screen, and all the air seemed to have been sucked out of the conference room as the dark almond eyes of the woman in the photo gazed back at him. She was smiling and looked happy and bright and all that she once had been. Until now. With a lurch in the pit of his stomach, he realised that it was the same woman on both screens.

  He found his self-control deserting him, and he had to restrain the urge to scream at Control, at Stone, at Bloom, at the lot of them.

  Instead of that, he said, in a voice that was tight and thrumming with menace, “Is this some kind of joke?”

  But it wasn’t.

  The woman in the picture was Tamsin.

  His Tamsin.

  FOUR YEARS EARLIER

  9

  Duffy had owned the Audi TT Sport convertible for just under a week, purchased the same day he’d returned from his latest pleasure tour of Afghanistan with the Royal Marines. He was still exploring the car’s performance limits as he buzzed through the Kent countryside like a fighter pilot, top down, totally in control, senses focused on every nuance of the road ahead. The engine note soared as he downshifted at ninety for the upcoming bend. The instrument needles dipped and then started quickly climbing again as he accelerated hard out of the turn.

  The brown and white blur of a moving object bursting from the roadside bushes cutting across his path made him slam on the brakes. He brought the Audi to a rapid, controlled halt as a young boxer dog pranced about in the middle of the road, still trailing a leather lead from his collar. Most drivers would have run straight into the mutt, but Duffy’s reflexes were honed to a razor edge.

  Even as the Audi came to a halt, Duffy could see a white van coming fast the other way, giving no indication of slowing down. He leaped from the car and went sprinting towards the dog, who seemed as oblivious of the oncoming vehicle as its driver apparently was of the animal’s presence in the road. By the time the van’s brakes began to screech, it was almost too late. Duffy made it to the dog with half a second to spare, snatched him up in his arms and yanked him out of the van’s path as its wheels locked solid and it began to veer wildly across the road, smashing into Duffy’s parked Audi.

  Duffy might have had something to say about that, but he didn’t get the chance. To the sound of howling rubber, another car came speeding around the bend behind him, braked and skidded to avoid the wreck of the white van and the Audi, and with nowhere else to go, careened straight towards him.

  Duffy barely had time to register the imminent impact. With all his strength he threw the dog bodily towards the verge. In the next instant a shocking impact spun him off his feet and swept him up over the bonnet of the oncoming car. He hit the windscreen with his left shoulder and was thrown over the roof. For a weird moment he was weightless, floating in mid-air as though in a dream; then the road came up to meet him and everything went black.

  Duffy awoke to a confused jumble of flashing blue lights and bustle and voices all around him. He realised he was lying on a gurney, with an ambulance crew milling and fussing over him. It was a second or two before the sensation of pain cut in, jolting through his body like a couple of million volts. Not as bad as getting your entrails hacked out by machete-wielding Taliban fighters, as had happened to a mate of his. But still pretty uncomfortable. The dislocated shoulder was one thing; the broken left femur was going to be a bitch to heal.

  Duffy had to laugh. Months spent in a bloody war zone, dodging bullets, mortar fire and suicide bombers without a scratch, and now this. What a great way to spend your leave, hobbling about in a cast. At least he could be fixed up. His precious Audi, half flattened under the remains of the van, might not recover so easily. The Transporter’s driver and passengers, fairly well banged up themselves, were currently being patched by the second ambulance crew. Four lads, dressed in workmen’s overalls. The Ford Mondeo that had hit Duffy was a little farther up the road. Its very unhappy owner was talking to the police.

  Through the confusion of faces, he saw that of a distraught young woman looking at him. Her almond eyes were dark and full of tears, her blond hair tied up in a slack ponytail with little wisps breaking loose here and there. He would remember thinking that her light summer dress was the exact same shade of red as her lips. In one hand she was clutching a dog lead, and on the other end was the young boxer responsible for causing the pile-up and putting him in the back of this ambulance.

  The woman said, “I don’t know what to say…”

  “Then don’t say anything,” Duffy replied, already half in love and content just to gaze at her. Raw opium couldn’t have taken away his pain faster.

  She pointed towards the van passengers. “Those men told me what happened, how you ran out and saved Brigham. You could have been killed.”

  “Rubbish,” he replied. “I don’t kill that easy.”

  She smiled uncertainly, not quite knowing whether to believe him.

  “I’m Duffy,” he said.

  “Tamsin.” She motioned somewhere across the fields. “I live just over there… We were out walking. He slipped his leash. I… I’m so sorry. How can I thank you for what you did?”

  Duffy replied without hesitation, “Come and visit me in hospital.”

  And she did. Not once, not even twice, but every day of the entire week it took until the torturers in white coats finally deemed he’d suffered enough. Then it was dinner the next night, and a whole string of dates to follow, blossoming so fast into a full-blown romance that it made Duffy’s head spin and turned his blood to wine. Her name was Tamsin Gordon, and Duffy thought he’d met the love of his life.

  For a while, at any rate. All was bliss until his extended leave came to an end and he was called back to Afghanistan.

  Some women could adapt to the life. Not Tamsin. Duffy found it difficult to make her share his total conviction that nothing bad would happen to him over there. As the dreaded day of his departure approached, she tried everything to persuade him to stay with her. First the tears, then the anger, then the begging, and finally the ultimatums. “It’s the army or me. I can’t stand the thought of waiting every day for the news that… that…” She couldn’t even say it.

  “I can’t say it any more—I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s war, Bryan. People die.”

  “War is what I do,” he said. “It’s my job. I’m good at it. Trust me.”

  Duffy was genuinely taken aback by the force of her emotion, even if he couldn’t express that to her. But then, love was a new thing for him. For the first and only time in his life, someone actually cared. Looking back, he would think maybe he hadn’t fully appreciated that fact until it was too late.

  The second-to-last time he’d seen her was the morning he left to return to the killing fields of Afghanistan. When the troop transport flew him home three months later, she was engaged to someone else. If a broken leg and dislocated shoulder had hurt, Duffy now discovered that a broken heart was a far more bitter ache. She’d written him a long letter in which she said she’d always love him, and even invited him to her wedding.

  Needless to say, he had no plans to attend.

  Duffy did, however, go AWOL from duty in order to witness the event from the safety of the woods, a quarter of a mile from the country church where Ms Tamsin Gordon and Mr Tony Bell were married two months later. Duffy watched grimly through binoculars as the beautiful bride emerged from the church and descended the steps to the waiting limo, arm in arm with the new man in her life. That was the last time he’d laid eyes on her, certain he would never do so again.

  Until now.

  Duffy would gladly have given up the army, given up everything, to turn the clock back four years and not be where he was sitting now.

  VAUXHALL CROSS

  10

  “Now you know why we selected you, Twelve,” Control said. “You have a personal interest in this assignment that makes you just the man for the job.”

  Duffy felt nauseous. He had to fight the urge to tell them
what he thought of their assignment and leave. He focused on his breathing until he was able to ignore the wild impulses that threatened to engulf him. He could feel the eyes on him from all around the table.

  At last, he felt calm enough to speak. “How did you know about me and Tamsin?”

  Control offered a thin smile, which was about as much warmth as Duffy would have expected from the man. “You know better than to ask that. You keep watch over all our potential recruits. From the moment we had our eyes on you, we knew everything. We were inside your life. Tamsin’s, too. There are no secrets in our community.”

  Duffy pointed towards the screen, the one he could no longer bear to look at directly. “Who did it? I know you know, or we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Be patient,” said Bloom, relighting his guttering pipe. “You’ll be briefed in just a moment.”

  “Before we get to that,” Eliza Cheetham said, watching Duffy the way a mongoose watches a cobra before tearing into its flesh, “we have another picture to show you.”

  She motioned to Control, who pressed the desk console once more. The images of Tamsin mercifully disappeared from the wall screens. They were replaced by a pair of shots of someone very different. Contrasting angles and locations, but in each image the man was similarly dressed all in black, same as the thick mop of hair that hung over his brow. He was small and lean in the way that Bruce Lee had been small and lean, all work-hardened muscle and sinew, not a gram of spare padding anywhere on him. Like a tempered steel spring in human form, the kind of tough little guy who looks like he’s erupting into combat even when he’s standing still.

  “I don’t know him,” Duffy said. “Should I?”

  “His name is Kang Kum-Sok,” Control said. “No reason you’d know him, no. He’s a hitter for the North Koreans. Not been on the scene long, but making a name for himself in certain quarters. Formerly served with their Special Operations Force before he was recruited to their equivalent of Group Fifteen. Believed to have been personally involved with the assassination of Jang Song Thaek.”

  That rang a bell in Duffy’s mind. “Uncle of the Great Leader? Fed alive to a pack of starving dogs?”

  “Don’t believe the papers,” Cheetham said with a nasty smile. “What happened was worse.”

  Duffy didn’t answer, still staring at the picture of the hit man. The likeness was already branded on Duffy’s memory like a scar.

  At another touch of the console, a third image appeared. It was a grainy colour CCTV image of the inside of a plain white panel van, seen through its open rear door. The van was parked on what appeared to be a typical London street. Duffy was less interested in its location than in the two men pictured inside the van. Both were clad in black motorcycle leathers, which they were apparently in the process of removing in a hurry. The whippy little guy on the right had been snapped just as he pulled off his full-face helmet and had inadvertently turned his face to a three-quarter profile for the camera. The image definition was poor, but Duffy had no doubt this was the same Kang Kum-Sok pictured in the first two photos.

  “Taken a mile from the scene of the attack three days ago,” Control said. “Our witness reports indicate that Tamsin Bell was assaulted by two men on a motorcycle, both wearing black helmets and leathers. The pillion passenger approached her on foot, making sure he got close enough to carry out his task effectively. It’s clear that he called her by name at least twice, which tells us this was a targeted hit. Once the deed was done, he remounted the back seat of the bike, whereupon he and the driver made their escape to rendezvous with the waiting van, a white Volkswagen Transporter, also stolen, currently untraceable.”

  “Which means you have no idea where these two are now,” Duffy said.

  “No, but we’re not entirely clueless,” Control replied, picking up on his accusatory tone. “We do have a pretty good idea that the rider of the motorcycle was this fellow on the left: Choi Sang-Hak. Another charmer, also in the employ of the North Korean government, in much the same line of work as his friend but tending to play second fiddle. It would be characteristic of Kang to want to carry out the acid attack personally.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. What reason do the North Koreans have to target someone like Tamsin? I doubt whether she could even point out their bloody little dictatorship on the map.”

  “We’ll come to that,” Bloom said. “As much as I’m sure we all sympathise with what happened to her, this meeting was called for rather more pressing reasons of national security. Our purpose, gentlemen”––with a nod to Cheetham, graciously returned––“is to talk about the North Korean nuclear weapons program.”

  11

  “The DPRK have been keeping a lid on their arms program for years,” Bloom said, “but that hasn’t stopped our agencies from knowing a good deal about what they’re up to.”

  Cheetham took over. “The Pakistan government has admitted that the DPRK had access to their nuclear arms technology in the late nineties. Obviously, we’ve been keeping a very watchful eye on the Koreans ever since.”

  Duffy had the distinct impression this was all for his benefit, though he didn’t know why. He listened grimly.

  Bloom continued. “To describe the North Korean regime as highly unpredictable would be a gross understatement. In 2003, they withdrew from the International Nuclear Proliferation Treaty––which they had already done in a half-arsed way in 1993––but then suspended their withdrawal before the ink was dry on the paper. Two years later they admitted having developed nuclear weapons but vowed to end their program; then the following year, their state media was proclaiming that they’d carried out their first proper nuclear test.”

  “Yes, sir,” Duffy said. “I remember that.”

  “We estimated the output of the test blast at under a kiloton. Relatively small potatoes, but worrying nonetheless. Then Pyongyang renewed its promise to terminate their nuclear weapons program. But by 2009 they were at it again, claiming to have now become a fully nuclear power.”

  “Which is really the last thing anyone wants,” Stone offered.

  “Last year,” Bloom continued, “their government agreed again to suspend development of its nuclear programme, this time in return for humanitarian aid. The place is falling to pieces and the people are starving. They’ve spent so much on militarisation that they can’t hold the country together. Certain elements of the government here––myself excluded, I might add––were reasonably optimistic that we might now be able to remove the DPRK from the nuclear map. Of course, if they’d listened to me, they’d have known their optimism was badly misplaced.”

  Cheetham picked up the thread. “In February, the US Geological Survey detected a magnitude 5.1 seismic disturbance that was believed to have resulted from an underground nuclear test. The North Koreans have kept mum on that one, but South Korean intelligence estimates the yield at around forty kilotons. If that be the case, now we’re talking serious stuff––approximately twice the power of Nagasaki.”

  “In other words,” Bloom summarised, “whatever the shifty buggers may tell us, we know full well they’re working hell for leather to increase their nuclear capacity as much as they can. It’s certain knowledge that they have the warheads. But like a hand grenade, a nuclear warhead is only as useful as your ability to throw it any distance. The question is, can they deliver them?”

  Now it was Stone’s turn to take over, which he did gravely and solemnly. “The North Koreans used to have artillery rockets based on World War II designs that they used to tote around on the backs of trucks in their military parades. They got Scuds from Egypt in the seventies; then they started to build their own missile range. Hwasongs. As of last year, they were boasting that their latest rockets are capable of a ten-thousand-kilometre range. But there’s no evidence that any such missiles have actually been developed, let alone tested. Until now, we’ve had no reason to take such claims too seriously.”

  “Until now?” Duffy echoed.

  Cheetham leaned on
her elbows and fixed Duffy with a penetrating gaze. “What do you know about missile propulsion systems?”

  “Not exactly my area of expertise, ma’am.”

  “I’ll give you the simple version. Until now the North Korean missile systems have always used liquid-fuel engines. That’s been to our advantage in various ways. First, the fuelled rockets and fuel supplies are hazardous to move around, so the weapons tend to be stored in one location, where we can watch them. Second, DPRK bases lack the facilities for long-term fuel storage, so their practice has been to fuel the rockets up with fresh supplies shortly prior to use. That makes their intentions much easier to monitor. Thirdly, their outdated engines take forever to fuel, giving us a decent warning margin in case they might be about to pop one off at one of their neighbours, like South Korea or Japan.”

  “But?”

  “But new reports suggest that they’re set to move to a more cutting-edge technology. GCHQ have hacked North Korean documents that appear to be initial plans for a totally new solid-fuel engine, using ammonium perchlorate. You know, solid fuel, like those firelighters you light your barbeque with.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The new fuel allows for major improvements to the missile system—reduces the need for such a large rocket. The smaller, lighter rocket is more stable in flight, is more accurate than the older designs, and is more fuel efficient, meaning it can go farther. Worse still, its reduced size and weight also allow it to be road mobile in launch-ready condition, making it harder to detect, track and pre-emptively destroy in the event of a threatened attack against us or our allies.”

  “Easy to store, easy to transport,” Bloom said, puffing smoke, “and ready for deployment at the drop of a hat. In short, in one fell swoop it kills any tactical edge we previously enjoyed. The new rocket could be a game changer, allowing the North Koreans to finally develop what they’ve been set on all along: a true intercontinental ballistic missile with nuclear capability. The question is, after years of arsing around with outdated and antiquated technology, how the buggery did they suddenly come so far, so fast?”