Witness X

by Mark Dawson

  The cottage was typical, the kind of thing you’d expect to find as the second home of rich Londoners: craggy oak beams, exposed stone walls, spotless inglenook fireplace with a wicker basket for split firewood logs that would probably never be used, leaded windows with those cute window seats all piled with embroidered cushions. Quaint English country charm, one hundred percent artificial and at a whopping price tag that became a lot more manageable if you supplemented your income by selling missile technology to maniacs who might use it to loft nuclear warheads.

  Every room had the same phony designer styling. Dining room, study, bathroom, main bedroom… Duffy spent a lingering moment staring at the bed and tried not to let himself imagine Tamsin and Tony together. That was almost as difficult as getting the picture of her shockingly mutilated face out of his mind.

  The cottage had the same degree of fanatical orderliness that he’d noticed at Bell’s main home. Not a molecule of dirt, everything perfectly arranged, as if nobody had ever actually lived in the place. Duffy would leave it exactly as he found it, unmarked by his passing. He would move like a ghost.

  Which was why it struck him as odd, when he returned to the living room after having installed the first of his bugs in the study, to find the dusty footprints on the stone floor.

  Two lots of prints. They came from the direction of the rear hallway and the back door, which Duffy now saw was slightly ajar. Someone obviously hadn’t learned to wipe their feet. The tracks led in parallel into the living room. Two men, walking side by side. Both wearing trainers, maybe Nikes from the tread pattern. One slightly larger and heavier than the other, judging by the differences in the prints. Halfway across the living room, they split apart in a forty-five-degree fork, the smaller guy veering left towards the dining room, the larger guy making his way towards the stairs.

  The tracks had not been there three minutes ago. And they led only in, not out. You didn’t need a postdoctoral degree in polyurethane-bound aluminium-APCP composite propellants to work out that the cottage’s most recent visitors were still inside.

  Not just that, but that their intentions were less than friendly.

  Duffy’s instincts told him there was no point in hiding, because they already knew that he was here. It could be no mere chance that their arrival at the cottage coincided with his own. He sensed that they’d come for him, and that meant that they’d followed him all the way from London. And that, given his level of training and experience in surveillance and counter-surveillance, was a very hard thing to do indeed.

  Who were they? Duffy had a pretty good idea of the answer, though their presence begged many more questions that would have to be puzzled out later.

  If these men considered themselves to be the hunters and him the hunted, they were making the worst and last mistake of their lives. Duffy became very still. As his mind focused, his breathing slowed and a concealed knife slipped hilt-first from his right sleeve into his hand. Guns were noisy things, even with sound suppressors attached. The blade was the tool that required the warrior to get closest to the enemy, hence closest to death; in Duffy’s way of thinking, that made the knife the queen of all weapons, the hardest to master, and the most rewarding with which to vanquish your foe.

  Without needing to turn his head, Duffy saw the approaching figure reflected in Bell’s big-screen TV. The guy was large and broad shouldered, but not too muscle-bound to be quick. His trainers carried him silently across the floor in long strides. Something in his right hand caught a triangular gleam of light from a leaded window as he drew nearer.

  Duffy remained stock-still until the final moment, when the knife was coming for his back.

  Then he moved.

  If Duffy had been asked to write a book on knife fighting, it would have been just a few lines long because, in his world, there were so few rules. There were five: one, speed is everything; two, kill first, or die; three, never hesitate or show mercy; four, do the job in as few cuts as possible; five, expect to get cut yourself.

  It was to avoid rule number five that Duffy was so adept at rule number one. His speed was stunning, devastating. In a fraction of a blink he twisted his body away from the incoming stab, which, if it had connected, would have run him through. He rolled the knife hand aside in a move he’d been taught by an aikido master in the Group’s Wiltshire training facility, trapped the guy’s right arm, twisted it with his body movement, and felt the knife fall from the man’s fingers. At the same time, all within less than a second, Duffy’s own razor-sharp double-edged blade was slicing point-first through the air and thrusting into the side of the guy’s neck with a sound like chopping cabbage. The blade sank deep, right to its carbon-steel hilt.

  For an instant the guy stood there as though paralysed, swaying slightly on his feet. Then Duffy ripped the knife out of his neck. A jetting arc of blood sprayed one way; the guy went down like a falling tree the other way. He crashed into a low coffee table, splintered a Tiffany lamp, and started twitching and spurting blood everywhere.

  Mr Neatness wasn’t going to like it.

  A bullet passed three inches from Duffy’s head and thunked into a sideboard, toppling glassware. Duffy turned. The small guy was suddenly storming towards him, a big black automatic pistol canted over gangster-style in his right hand, firing as he came. Duffy watched him as though he were a slow-motion replay. His hand released his knife and went to the Glock. Smooth, clean draw. No safety, ready for action. Finger on the trigger, squeezing even as the muzzle cleared the leather of his belt. Two-hand clasp, straight on target.

  Duffy had his own personal variation on the traditional chest–head double tap. Conventional wisdom had it that you shoot centre of mass first, that was to say the upper torso, where most of the critical organs were, the theory being that any decent solid hit in that zone was going to knock most of the fight out of your opponent. Once your man was thus incapacitated, you finished him off with the shot to the smaller target of the brain. Which was all fine and dandy.

  But Duffy felt that many in his profession failed to understand that a handgun, even a magnum handgun, was a light weapon. Only a twelve-gauge combat shotgun loaded with buckshot or a high-velocity large-calibre rifle could be counted on to really, truly smack a man down with authority every time. And you couldn’t always go around carrying a bulky long-gun. In the lore of pistolcraft, too many stories existed of psychotic or drug-crazed assailants keeping on coming even with a .45-calibre slug lodged in their chest.

  This was why Duffy always went for the head.

  You could always tell when Duffy had been shooting at the Group’s underground twenty-five-metre pistol range. The giveaways were the piles of human silhouette targets with neat holes punched into them where the foreheads had once been.

  Duffy fired twice, on target, and the expanding Hydra-Shok hollow-points took care of the rest. The smaller man hit the floor with the pulped remnants of his brain blown out the ragged fist-sized hole in the back of his skull.

  Duffy put away his pistol and went to retrieve his knife, which he carefully wiped before sheathing it. Duffy was nothing if not methodical: you always clean your blade because haemoglobin is corrosive due to all the iron in it. Like any self-respecting tradesman, Duffy took extra special care of his tools.

  He moved over to inspect his victims. Even with the holes in his head, the little guy’s Asian features were obvious. Duffy would put money on the man not being Chinese, either. He stepped over to the other. Same story: definitely a native of a certain rogue state within the Korean Peninsula. Needless to say, neither was carrying ID. Nor was either of them Kang Kum-Sok or Choi Sang-Hak, the two names he’d been fed by Control. Evidently there was more to the merry little gang of North Korean hitters than the Group knew about.

  But Duffy did find one item of interest folded into the pocket of the guy who’d tried to stab him. It was a colour printout of a photograph. One taken by a hidden camera. A hidden camera that had been positioned inside the lounge of Tony Bell’s
London house. The person in the image was none other than Duffy himself, snapped shortly after Bell had led him inside the room.

  Duffy said to himself, “Well, well.”

  15

  Duffy parked the Omega in a lay-by outside the village. He took out the photograph of himself and gazed thoughtfully at it. He needed to think things through.

  His photo in their possession left no doubt that the two North Korean assassins had been specifically deployed to kill him. Should have sent at least four guys and definitely not second-rate lackeys like these, Duffy thought, feeling almost offended that they’d considered him so easily disposed of. It bordered on disrespect.

  But here was the perplexing part: if the North Koreans had been monitoring the conversation in Tony Bell’s lounge via live video feed, they’d have seen Duffy set up the diversion with the drinks so that he could step quickly into Bell’s study and fit the logger at the back of the computer. That would have taught them at once that an intelligence or law enforcement agency was closing in on Bell’s deal to sell technical rocket data.

  They also knew Duffy’s name, as Bell had mentioned it during that conversation. Had Bell done so for the benefit of the cameras? Duffy thought not. He was certain that Bell had no idea his home was bugged. He had been way out of his depth from the start.

  But, clearly, wheels had started turning from the instant Duffy had arrived at Bell’s house. Was DPRK intelligence good enough to connect the name Bryan Duffy to Group Fifteen? Were the North Koreans even aware of the agency’s existence? These issues weren’t, in themselves, Duffy’s concern. Group Fifteen was like any other covert intel outfit, subject to a barrage of hacking infiltrations by enemy agencies around the clock. It was up to Control and the techs at GCHQ to keep his house clean and his integrity secure. If the damage was done, then there was no point crying over it now. All that mattered was this: it didn’t matter whoever the North Koreans knew or thought Bryan Duffy was, they needed him to be dead.

  More perplexingly, it was clear to Duffy that the men had been tailing him from the moment he’d left Bell’s home. Duffy was good, but no one could spot a really professional tail. They must have been using multiple vehicles. Which meant that more hitters could turn up at any moment. He looked up and gazed out of the window at the quiet lane that stretched back to the cottage. There was nothing to see.

  Most alarming of all, the rash of sudden developments that had taken place within the last few hours were highly likely to have forced the enemy’s hand. If Bell was still in the process of delivering the information he’d been paid for, the heightened urgency of the situation might induce his handlers to put more pressure on him to cough up the rest of the goods sooner rather than later. Then, once that part of the deal was concluded, to slit his throat and put a bullet in his brain, plus whatever other damage they had in mind to inflict. Group Fifteen’s intervention might very well have unwittingly set off a chain of events that would cause significant damage.

  Another reason why Duffy needed to get back to London as fast as possible, before things got really out of hand.

  Duffy put the car into gear and pulled out. He was damned if he was going to let the likes of Kang Kum-Sok and his henchmen slip through his fingers, but the clock was ticking. If his targets vanished back behind the iron curtain of their North Korean domain, the only way to get to them would be to hunt them within their own borders. A lunatic suicide mission that Group Fifteen would never sanction. John Milton had done it once, but the climate was different now. Nobody wanted to spark off a war.

  Duffy gritted his teeth. He didn’t feel bound by the same strictures. If a clandestine foray into the lion’s den was what it took to avenge Tamsin, then so be it. Duffy was prepared for anything. But if he could take care of matters here in England, so much the better.

  He headed out of the village, back the way he’d come only at twice the speed. As he drove, he took out his phone and punched the speed-dial for Control’s secure personal line.

  He heard Control’s voice over the hands-free. “Report.”

  Duffy was frustrated that Control had not been able to make his legal problems go away, but he still respected the man. He had two important redeeming features: the first was that he was a preternaturally focused listener who could suck in and coolly process incoming streams of data that would boggle a fighter pilot; the second was that he was the most incisive person Duffy had ever known, capable of making critical life-or-death decisions in a split second and with the implacable certainty of a computer.

  The instant Duffy had briefed him on the unfolding situation, Control made three decisions: one, to post two men at the hospital to protect Tamsin Bell from further harm, in case Kang’s intentions went that way; two, to dispatch a rapid-response clean-up team to the Cotswolds to remove the bodies and mop up the mess Duffy had left behind, before the police got a chance to stick their noses in and mess everything up; and three, well, needless to say, Control’s third decision was much less welcome than the first two.

  “I’d rather work alone,” Duffy said in protest.

  “Not this time. Too important. Number Ten will be waiting for you when you get there, and you will work with him. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

  He ended the call and spurred the Omega on even faster, muttering curses. Ten was the Group Fifteen agent two rungs above him on the ladder. Duffy had worked with him before, a year earlier. He was dependable. A good man to go into battle with. But Duffy disliked being told what to do just as much as he hated anyone slowing him down, and this was a job he wanted to do himself.

  HIGHGATE

  16

  A wild drive and a hundred busted speed limits later, Duffy screeched the Omega to a halt down the street from the Bell residence in Highgate. Number Ten emerged from a grey BMW parked a little way farther down. He was a tall man, with dark receding hair and a cigarette, wearing a long black overcoat that concealed the Springfield Armoury forty-calibre auto he carried in a shoulder rig. They met on the pavement, where the screen of trees in the Bells’s garden hid them from sight of the house. Their conversation was terse and concise, as always.

  Ten said, “Took your time.”

  Duffy ignored that. “Is he in?” he asked, glancing in the direction of the house.

  “His Jaguar’s there. No movement in or out since I got here.”

  “Wait.”

  Ten hung around by the gate and sucked down the last few drags of the cigarette while Duffy walked up the Bells’s driveway, past the parked Jag with the carpeting of leaves still intact on its bonnet and roof. Bell was probably laid out drunk on the floor of his fine home while his beloved wife lay alone in the hospital.

  Duffy jammed a knuckle on the front doorbell. When there was no answer after several rings, he signalled for Ten to join him. Ten ditched the cigarette and trotted up the driveway.

  “Back door,” Duffy said, motioning.

  Skirting around the side of the big house to the rear entrance, they found they hadn’t been the first ones that day to have had the idea of breaking in. A window had been neatly punched through and the back door opened from the inside. Either the intruder had managed to disable the alarm system before it had sounded, or it had been turned off beforehand.

  “Fuck,” Ten said. “We’re too late. They got him.”

  Duffy said nothing. He was first inside the house, with Ten following. It felt empty, yet there was something in the air. Duffy wasn’t one for superstition, but he believed that if you listened hard enough to the atmosphere of a building, its walls and fabric could communicate back, as though it wanted to tell you the things to which it had been a silent witness. Sometimes it meant finding a dead body inside, or the scene of a grisly massacre. Sometimes worse things.

  Duffy and Ten drew their pistols. They searched from room to room until they had covered the entire house. There was no dead body. No blood, no signs of violence.

  And no
Bell.

  The car might still be in the driveway, but its owner was gone.

  17

  “Shit,” Number Ten said. “They could be halfway to bloody Pyongyang by now.”

  The two Group Fifteen men were back down in the lounge after their search of the house. It was the last place Duffy had seen Tony Bell. And, judging by the near-empty glass and gin bottle sitting on the coffee table, unevaporated droplets of moisture still clinging to the inside of both, it was where Bell had been when his unexpected guests had suddenly turned up not all that long ago.

  Duffy had already located one hidden camera, based on the angle of the photo he’d found on the dead hitter. The miniaturised video bug wasn’t exactly state of the art, but close enough. Using handheld scanners from a kit bag Ten had retrieved from the car, they’d located three more cameras hidden about the house and ripped them out.

  Duffy wished he could see what the cameras had witnessed, especially the one in the lounge. He visualised the scene: Tony Bell sitting there polishing off the last of the Old Tom as the sudden crack of the forced entry made him sit up and boggle at the door, frozen, helpless, paralysed with fear.

  Next, his surprise Sunday visitors striding into the room. Pistols pointing. Jabbering at him to come with them: hurry, hurry.

  How could someone like Bell refuse? There would have been no protest, no struggle. Next thing, out the back way, into the street, nice and discreet, pistols out of sight, no need to alarm the neighbours, a waiting vehicle, engine still running, shoved into the back, the doors slammed shut and the car speeding away. Most likely never to return to his lovely home, whether Bell knew it or not.