Defend or Die

by Tom Marcus

  DEFEND

  OR

  DIE

  TOM MARCUS

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  I SPY

  PROLOGUE

  This book is dedicated to my wife. My one true constant.

  Always inspiring me to go bigger!

  PROLOGUE

  The woman eased her foot off the accelerator just a little as she turned into the bend, and made a conscious effort to breathe. In the erratic sweep of her headlights, the landscape remained an amorphous blur of dips and ridges; the only thing she could see clearly were the white lines on the narrow ribbon of road unspooling ahead of her.

  Driving fast on open roads was the only way she knew to combat the tension that had gripped her. Not that tension was really the word.

  More like fear.

  She thought back to her little girl, Poppy, tucked up snugly in her cot back in the cottage, and the dread gripped her even tighter. What was she thinking, leaving her there, alone and unprotected?

  No, that was just paranoia. She needed to think clearly, remain rational. She gritted her teeth and focused on steering into the next curve. That was why she had grabbed her car keys and sped off into the night in the first place: to calm down. To sort her thoughts out so she could decide what was real and what was imagined.

  So she could decide what the hell she was going to do.

  For the next five minutes she just concentrated on keeping the car on the road, savouring the feeling of being right on the edge of control as she sped through the winding moorland road, the hum of acceleration and the whining of the gears like a soothing lullaby.

  When had she realized they were on to her?

  There hadn’t been a particular incident, a single trigger. More like a growing sense of things not being quite right: the instinctive reaction of a trained watcher when they themselves were being watched. And then once she really started paying attention, things that had remained unnoticed in her peripheral vision suddenly came into focus.

  The same dark-green saloon in her rear-view mirror twice within an hour.

  The man in the dark raincoat pushing a trolley round the supermarket without buying anything.

  The wrong number at seven in the morning.

  It all added up.

  The question was: what did it all add up to?

  Or, rather, who?

  Back in the day, she would have just called it in, carried on as normal and let the counter-surveillance lot deal with it. But that wasn’t an option any more. She wasn’t family. As far as they were concerned she’d burned her bridges. If she called, they’d probably just fob her off.

  No one here of that name, I’m afraid. Are you sure you have the right number?

  Someone would log it, of course: a curiosity to be looked into at a later date. When they had the time.

  She rounded another curve and there was the moon, three-quarters full and impossibly bright, revealed briefly between scudding clouds. It was like a giant searchlight, and she felt dangerously exposed in its silvery glare. Flicking her eyes back to the road, she caught a sudden movement and dabbed her brakes just in time as a hare or a weasel flashed into the gorse.

  She smiled to herself. Don’t go off the road, you silly bitch. You’re supposed to be calming yourself down, not driving into a ditch. But she didn’t slow. In fact, she gripped the wheel harder and put her foot firmly back on the accelerator. The adrenaline was doing her good, the need to focus on keeping control of the car freeing up the rest of her mind to sift through the data.

  So, who could it be on her tail? Nobody connected to the last op, surely. There was simply no way anyone could have connected the dots and drawn a line back to her. Further back? Even less likely.

  Unless . . .

  She looked in her rear-view and saw headlights, a mile or so behind her, playing now-you-see-me as they vanished into a dip before reappearing at the crest of the rise. Should she slow, in case it was a patrol car? Unlikely: surely they had better things to do than roam the moors at one in the morning. But she eased her foot off the gas, just in case. She had nothing to hide if she was pulled over, but she could do without the aggravation.

  As the headlights got nearer, she rehearsed what she would say. ‘Sorry, officer, was I going a little fast? I find going for a drive late at night clears the head, sometimes, don’t you? Have I been drinking? Absolutely not! But you can breathalyse me, if you like.’

  That was when she saw the other pair of headlights, coming in the opposite direction towards her. ‘It’s getting like bloody Piccadilly Circus around here,’ she muttered wryly to herself. So much for the solitude of the moors at night.

  The car behind must have been going a lot faster than she thought because it was suddenly right on her tail. She frowned and put her foot down to put a bit of distance between them again as the road straightened, but the other driver instantly matched her, his lights now filling her rear-view.

  What’s he fucking playing at? she thought.

  But she wasn’t worried. She couldn’t see what kind of car it was, but she knew she had enough under the bonnet, together with a local’s knowledge of every twist and turn in the road ahead, to outrun it if she had to.

  It was only when she saw the other pair of headlights coming straight for her down the middle of the road that she felt the first beginnings of panic. She nudged the wheel, hugging the edge of the road as close as she could and inviting him to move over, but instead he moved further over to her side, making a collision inevitable. She only had seconds, but she waited until the very last moment to wrench the steering wheel to the right, her heart in her mouth as she put her foot down even further to try and keep her wheels on the road, but instead of letting her past, the other driver swung back into his lane, meaning she had no choice but to continue the turn. She heard the tyres screaming as they left the tarmac, suspended in mid-air for a moment before settling with a crunch onto the turf, then the whole car started bouncing crazily over ruts and ditches as it careened down an incline, the headlights tracing a crazy stroboscopic lightshow against the blackness.

  She braced herself, the sickening feeling of the car being tossed around by forces out of her control making her gasp. She saw the boulder a split second before she hit it, a solid shape suddenly looming at her out of the darkness, then felt rather than heard the crash, an irresistible force lifting her out of her seat and smashing her head and shoulders against the roof of the car as it continued spinning though the air.

&n
bsp; Time stopped.

  She felt herself revolving in slow motion, and then nothing.

  The car she’d been trying to avoid had come to a stop a hundred yards or so beyond the point where she’d left the road. Slowly it reversed back until it was alongside the second car. Two men got out. They were dressed in dark clothing and both wore black driving gloves. One was short and thick-set, with close-cropped grey hair and a fleshy face. The other was taller, his jacket hanging off his bony frame. With a mop of dark hair and sculpted cheekbones, he would have been handsome if it wasn’t for the long scar that bisected his cheek and tugged at the corner of his mouth, giving him a permanent sneer.

  ‘Nice job,’ said the short man.

  The tall man shrugged. ‘She had some balls, I’ll give her that. I thought she was going to run me off the fucking road.’

  The short man chuckled, pulling a small torch out of his pocket. ‘Better go and make sure, though.’

  Together they followed the helter-skelter route she’d taken down the slope. The car was lying on its roof, one headlight still casting a mournful beam into the night. As they approached, they could hear the ticking of the engine as it cooled in the night air. The passenger door was open and hanging off its hinges. The short man leaned in carefully and played the torch around the interior.

  ‘She dead?’ the tall man asked.

  ‘Looks like it,’ the short man said after a few moments. The tall man took a step closer and peered in. She was hanging upside down like a puppet whose strings had been cut, her face dripping blood onto the roof.

  ‘“Looks like” ain’t good enough, though, is it?’ the tall man said.

  ‘Christ almighty, give me a fucking chance, will you?’ the short man replied.

  The tall man stood back to give him room so he could shine the torch into what was left of the woman’s face. Bloody bubbles formed between her lips, and a sound emerged halfway between a moan and a whisper. The short man strained to hear.

  Papa? Puppy?

  Not quite dead, then. It would probably only be a matter of minutes, but in his experience it was best to be certain. Belt and braces, that was his motto.

  Slowly, he reached forward until he was able to cup her jaw in one hand. He put one knee down to brace himself, then reached his other hand behind her head as far as he could and took a firm grasp of her hair.

  ‘Right then,’ he said.

  With a quick movement he rotated her skull, as if he were trying to open a giant jar of pickles. Both men heard the crack.

  ‘There you go.’

  He eased himself backwards out of the car, trying not to brush his clothing against the seat.

  ‘OK, all done.’

  They walked back to the cars, careful not to step in the muddy ruts the wheels had carved out of the turf. The short man quickly shone his torch over the road. One set of skid marks.

  Good.

  He turned to say one last word to the tall man, but he was already in his car. As he got into his own car and started the engine, the tall man was pulling away. The short man did a three-point turn and drove off in the opposite direction.

  Only after he had been driving for a mile or two and could no longer see the tall man’s tail lights in his rear-view did he allow himself a smile of satisfaction at a job well done.

  1

  The pub was out of the way, but not too out of the way. A habit from being surveillance operatives, I suppose. Stay out of the limelight, but don’t go so far off the beaten track that you stand out. It was on a quiet street, but still close enough to the centre of town for a few tourists to have wandered in by accident. Otherwise it was locals, and being a Friday night at nine thirty, most of them seemed to be here.

  The place wasn’t much to look at: a couple of TVs above the bar if you didn’t feel like talking and your phone didn’t have any charge, and some sort of noisy slot machine in the corner by the door to the toilets that could just about be heard flashing and beeping over the noise of conversation, as if vainly trying to get the patrons’ attention. A handful of framed photographs were stuck wonkily on the walls, some of them signed, suggesting local minor celebs – TV soap actors, maybe. I didn’t recognize any of them except, bizarrely, one: a photo of Michael Jordan, hanging improbably in the air over the basket. I was willing to bet he’d never stopped in for a pint here. All in all, it suggested an old man’s pub that someone had half-heartedly tried to liven up a bit before giving up.

  It suited my mood. Good choice, Alex, I thought.

  We hadn’t seen or spoken to each other for two months. In fact, the whole team had deliberately gone to ground since the op. Not that we suspected anyone was aware of our involvement. You’d never seen a D-Notice clamped so tight. But in these digital days you could never be a hundred per cent sure. There’s always some smart alec with a phone, always the chance that you got snapped somewhere you shouldn’t be, or talking to someone you shouldn’t be, and once those images were on the net, then anyone who was actually looking would eventually find them.

  For the first few days after it all went down, the team hung around the hospital where I was recovering – a particularly brutal carjacking was the official line – just making sure there was always someone keeping an eye on who came and went. After all, it wasn’t as if they could put an armed policeman outside my door. But after I was discharged, they melted away. As if Blindeye had never existed.

  As if we hadn’t just rescued the Foreign Secretary from being beheaded on live TV.

  My injuries had pretty much healed by now. The muscle damage from the round I took in the chest seemed like a small price to pay. A nasty slash to my left forearm had been deep but managed to miss any vital tendons. A gashed cheek from somewhere. The details of the fight with the two jihadis on the houseboat were fuzzy now. And while my knee still gave me a bit of pain from time to time, the rest of the bumps and bruises had faded away.

  To look at me, you wouldn’t think I’d gone toe to toe with two knife-wielding fanatics in the service of Queen and country.

  Not that the Queen had known anything about it. Likewise the PM, and everyone else in the top echelons of the government and intelligence services. That was the whole point of Blindeye: because no one knew we existed, we didn’t have to play by the rules. If there was a threat, if a bad guy needed to be taken out, we just did it, no questions asked. And the operation against the two brothers had shown it worked. MI5 – my old employers – had dropped the ball. We’d been keeping tabs on the brothers, knowing they were planning something big, but at the crucial moment word came down that we had to let them go. Rules are rules. And so we did.

  It made me mad. It made me wonder what the fuck I was doing, putting my life on the line to try and stop terrorists from killing innocent civilians on our own streets, when the powers that be made sure you had one hand tied behind your back. When the Director General told me he felt the same way, and that he was trying to put together a clandestine team who weren’t afraid of crossing the line if it meant taking bad actors off the board, who would do whatever needed to be done to keep our streets safe, due process be damned, it was just what I wanted to hear.

  Alex felt the same way, too. We’d both had experience of the plug being pulled on surveillance ops, leaving dangerous terrorists in the wind. It was only a matter of time before a bloodbath was the result. There were only so many times you could drop the ball without scoring an own goal.

  I hadn’t known the others – except for Alan Woodburn, of course, our tech guy – before we became a team, and I have to admit I was suspicious at first. First rule of intelligence: don’t trust anybody in a suit who hasn’t done the business at the sharp end. Second rule: don’t trust anybody else, either – not unless they’ve had your back and you’ve had theirs.

  Well, there wasn’t time for that. With Blindeye it was straight in the deep end. But by the end of it we were a team. I liked them. Trusted them. And, I had to admit, two months on, I missed them.

&nb
sp; Well, it wasn’t as if there was anyone else in my life, was there? Soon after the DG had made his pitch, I’d lost my wife Sarah and my little boy Joseph to a knife-wielding madman. He ripped my heart out at the same time.

  I picked up my bottle of lager and took a swig, trying to put those dark thoughts out of my mind. Right on cue, Alex appeared, making her way through the crowd to the little corner table where I was sitting. As usual, she had changed since I’d last seen her. The shoulder-length mousy hair was gone, replaced by a Day-Glo blonde buzz cut, set off with a handful of ear piercings. She was wearing jeans, workman’s boots and a white tank top. All a bit dykey. I liked it.

  There was a brief awkward moment. Did I get up and give her a big hug or stay seated and keep it low-key? I wasn’t sure what parts we were playing, and believe me, when you’re a surveillance operative, you’re always playing a part, even when you’re not on an op. You don’t have a job – or even a life – you can be upfront about, so wherever you go, you have to ask yourself, ‘Who am I today?’ Not a great recipe for mental health, perhaps, but it could sometimes keep you alive.

  While I was still dithering, Alex practically hauled me out of my chair and put her arms around me, enfolding me in a fierce bear hug. Without thinking I hugged her back, and we stayed like that for a long time, the memories of everything we’d been through together flooding through me.

  Eventually we pulled apart and sat down. No need to say anything now. That part was over. She picked up the second bottle of lager and took a long swig, then looked at me.

  ‘So how have you been? You’re looking good.’

  ‘Not bad, not bad. Ready to get back in the game, that’s for sure.’

  ‘What’ve you been doing?’ She said it casually, but I could sense an undertone. She was worried I’d gone back on the booze, or worse, I’d let my demons back in. I could see it had been hard for her, being under strict orders not to reach out, not to make contact, until now, until we knew the coast was clear and there would be no comeback.

  I smiled, trying to look like a man without any demons, or, rather, a man who knew his demons well enough to be able to knock them back down when they threatened to get the upper hand. ‘You know, just getting fit again. Getting my strength back. Lots of running, hitting the bag in the gym. It’s amazing what a few days lying on your back in a hospital bed doing fuck all will do to you. I must have lost a stone.’