by Chris Ryan
She looked surprised to see him. ‘Oh . . . Excuse me . . . I thought . . .’
Chet stood up and gave her one of his rare smiles. ‘Sorry, love,’ he said, then noticed a flicker of annoyance on her face. He took a couple of steps towards her and read the name on her plastic name tag. Suze McArthur. ‘Sorry, Suze. No cleaning in here today.’ He caught the faintest whiff of a perfume he recognised from an ex-girlfriend, but that had been a long time ago.
Suze looked flustered. ‘I’ll go next door . . .’
‘’Fraid not. Out of bounds.’
‘But I have to clean . . .’
‘Looks like you might have the morning off.’ Chet hesitated. ‘Tell you what – I’ll be free in a couple of hours. I’ll buy you coffee . . .’
The girl backed away. She scurried back up the corridor, taking her vacuum cleaner with her and casting just a single glance over her shoulder as she went. She almost appeared frightened.
Jesus, Chet thought. I didn’t think I looked that bad.
He went back to sweeping the room. Twenty minutes later he was done. After cordoning off the room, just as he had the first, he stood watch in the corridor outside.
He’d only been standing there a few minutes when he heard a commotion by the lift, which he could just see from his position. A group of five people had arrived. Three of them were muscle – he could tell just by the way they held themselves. The fourth man was entirely bald, his face and scalp tanned and shiny, his suit a bright blue that suggested he was foreign – French or Italian, perhaps. As he drew nearer, Chet could see that he held across his chest a leather wallet file with the ornate G emblem of the Grosvenor Group. He was speaking loudly, with an American accent, to the fifth man.
And Chet recognised him.
‘What the hell . . . ?’ he muttered to himself.
The Prime Minister wore a well-cut suit and his trademark red tie was impeccably tied. Alistair Stratton almost had the bearing of a film star, out of place in this workaday office environment, and was listening attentively to the bald man as they walked, his brow creased in earnest concentration. Stratton glanced at Chet as he approached, and clocked his scarred face, before quickly recovering and turning his attention back to the bald man. There was something about being in his presence that impressed Chet, despite himself.
They stopped outside the first cordoned-off door. ‘Who’s in charge of security here?’ the bald man asked abruptly. He clearly hadn’t noticed Chet standing there. ‘I said, who’s in charge of . . . ?’
His eyes fell on Chet.
‘You?’
Chet nodded.
‘Which room?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Come on, we don’t have all day.’
‘Take your pick. They’re both clean.’
The American looked at the two doors, shrugged, chose the closest, then stretched out one arm to indicate that the Prime Minister should enter.
Stratton, however, waited for a moment. ‘Ex-military?’ he asked Chet.
Chet wasn’t surprised the PM could tell. He knew he had the bearing. He nodded.
The PM held out his hand for Chet to shake. His skin was cold and dry, his grip firm. ‘Thank you,’ he smiled. ‘I, er . . . I don’t believe people say that enough.’
The bald man looked a little surprised that Stratton had taken the time to stop, but he quickly followed his lead. He slapped Chet’s upper arm in a comradely way. And if he noticed that Chet was unimpressed, he didn’t show it.
‘Shall we, Prime Minister?’
Stratton nodded and followed the American inside, closing the grey door firmly behind him.
The muscle immediately took up position: one outside the room, one where the corridor entered the open-plan area and the third by the lift. None of them even acknowledged Chet’s presence. He shrugged. If they wanted to stonewall him, fine. He needed to stick around till the meeting closed, so he took himself off into the empty room to wait.
Chet sat on the edge of the large meeting table, facing towards the windows looking out over Whitehall. It felt good to take the weight off his leg. He pulled a fifty-pence coin from his pocket and started flicking and catching it as he tried to make sense of what he’d just seen. Chet made a habit of not asking too many questions about these meetings the Grosvenor Group wanted to keep so secret. It suited him just to do the job and get paid. He couldn’t help wondering, though, what Stratton was doing here and what conversation was being held in the adjacent room.
He walking over to the window, absent-mindedly tapping on the tinted glass as he looked down on to Whitehall. It was full of buses, taxis and pedestrians, silent from this height. Number 10 was just up the road. The Houses of Parliament too. Stratton had any number of places he could conduct meetings. Why here? Unless he didn’t want this meeting to be common knowledge . . .
He flicked the coin again and caught it.
He remembered a conversation he’d had years ago, sitting in a Serbian bar. Luke Mercer was speaking quietly so as not to be overheard. ‘Stratton is a politician. Therefore Stratton is a wanker. End of.’ Chet had seen Luke three weeks ago as he was preparing to go away on ops. He’d asked where, but Luke had given him an apologetic look. ‘Sorry, buddy. You know the deal.’
Yeah, Chet knew the deal. With the Americans and the Iraqis squaring up to each other, and the Brits showing every sign of wanting to come along for the ride, Chet could make an educated guess about what Luke was up to. But a guess was all it could be. He was out of the Regiment and out of the loop. Get used to it, buddy.
It was as these thoughts circulated in his head that something caught his eye. A flash of sunlight reflecting off something on the opposite roof.
Movement.
Chet squinted, trying to make out what was up there. Partly hidden behind a railing was a figure. He grabbed his bag, pulled out a pair of binoculars and quickly focused them. The blurred figure grew sharp.
A woman. Long red hair. Cute nose. Stud on the left. Some kind of machine in front of her.
‘Cleaning lady, yeah right,’ Chet muttered.
And as he said it, he was already hurrying towards the door.
FIVE
Chet moved as quickly as his leg would allow him – out of the door and past Stratton’s security people.
‘Hey – where you going?’ the guy outside the meeting room shouted.
Chet ignored him and walked on.
His mind turned over. What had he just seen? The woman on the roof opposite was in no position to make an assassination attempt: the angle was ridiculous. And whatever the apparatus was that she had set up in front of her, it hadn’t looked to him like a sniper rifle. She was up to something else.
The lift took an age to get to the ground floor, and the moment the doors opened he half ran, half limped out of the building. The PM’s black limo was parked outside, with two more security men standing next to it. As Chet ran past, one of them put a sleeve to his mouth and started talking; Chet ignored them and hurried across the road towards the building opposite. He didn’t enter. The reception area was crowded, with thirty or forty office workers milling around and a security check-in. There was no way he’d talk his way through that. The same went for the girl. There had to be another access.
He looked back across the road. Stratton’s security hadn’t left their positions, but they were watching him and updating someone on the radio. Fine. He could explain his actions later. Right now he needed to get up to the roof. He hurried round to the side of the building, where a thin passageway separated it from the next one. It led to a much smaller side street running parallel to Whitehall, and as he turned left he found the rear of the building had a fire-escape door with an external metal staircase leading up to the roof.
He was fit enough to climb the five storeys to the top of the building in less than a minute, but his leg hurt like hell all the way. As he stepped out on to the roof, he felt the wind blowing strongly. It brought with it the honking and roaring of the traffic below. The
top of the London Eye rose in the distance.
He saw her immediately. Suze, or whatever her name really was, had her back to him and was slightly bent over, with her hands over her ears.
The howling of the wind was so strong that Chet didn’t bother with stealth. He strode straight towards the young woman. When he was about a metre behind her, he saw that she was crouched over what appeared at first glance to be some kind of photographic equipment on a tripod. Chet quickly twigged what it actually was, though: a long-range laser listening device. All you had to do was point the viewfinder in the direction of a window. The device would pick up the vibrations on that window caused by people speaking inside, then convert them back into sound. Linked to it was a little black cassette machine that was recording whatever the listening device picked up.
Chet had used something similar once himself, during a short tour in Northern Ireland just before he was dispatched to the Balkans. On that occasion he’d been treated to the sound of a PIRA bomb-maker in flagrante with some slapper he’d picked up in a pub a few hours previously. He was still getting stuck in when they burst into the flat.
Back then, the laser listening device had been supplied by 14 Intelligence Company, surveillance experts with all the latest equipment at their disposal. Where the hell this girl had acquired such a piece of kit was anyone’s guess. Maybe he’d just ask her.
Chet tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped and spun round. She was wearing headphones connected to the apparatus, and her eyes were slightly wild.
‘OK, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
Her eyes darted from Chet, to the apparatus, to the office on the other side of the road – through the window of which Stratton and the American couldn’t be seen because of the tinted glass. She seemed unable to speak. ‘Oh, God . . .’ she breathed.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Chet said calmly, holding his hands palm outwards to try to calm her down. He found his eye drawn to the curve of her neck. The smooth, unblemished skin.
‘No . . .’ Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. ‘Please. Please!’
‘Just come with me and we’ll sort this out.’ She seemed terrified, so he tried to sound as reasonable as possible.
‘Please . . .’ Her tear-filled voice was hoarse now. ‘They’ll kill me if they find out. I swear, they’ll kill me . . .’
She was desperate. That much was obvious. Desperate or nuts. Why was it always the cute ones that ended up being loonies? Chet could tell by the way she glanced over his shoulder that she was preparing to bolt; when she did, he was ready for her. He grabbed her by the top of one arm before she could even get past him. She started to writhe violently, but her slim build was no match for his strength. He kept a firm grip on her until her struggling had subsided into short, panicked breaths.
‘Listen to me carefully,’ he told her. ‘Nobody’s trying to kill anybody. You just need to come with me . . .’ But the girl was shaking her head again. She glanced down at the meeting room, then looked as if she’d made a sudden, reckless decision.
She removed the earpiece she was wearing and handed it to Chet. ‘Listen,’ she urged him. ‘Listen to what they’re saying . . .’
Chet shook his head. He wasn’t interested. If he brought her in, the Grosvenor Group would think the sun shone out of his arse. The gig would be his for life. He made to grab her again.
The girl shrank back. ‘If you don’t listen,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to carry me kicking and screaming out of this building, I swear. They’ll think you’re . . . raping me or something . . .’
Chet stared at her. She was totally wired, and looked as if she might just do what she threatened.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. He grabbed the earpiece and put it in his ear, half wondering if he’d be humouring her like this if she wasn’t a looker.
At first all he could hear was an indistinct and horrible cacophony – interference from the wind and the traffic down below – all of which was clearly affecting the vibrations of the window glass. He winced as he got an earful of static, which slowly morphed into something that sounded like several men talking underwater.
‘I can’t hear a thing,’ Chet said.
‘Keep listening.’
More static. More noise.
Then there was a word. Just a single word out of the meaningless burble.
‘Baghdad.’
Chet strained to hear more, but the distortion had returned. It dissipated a few seconds later, however, and he was able to make out a second word.
‘Military.’
Hold the fucking front page, Chet thought. So Stratton was discussing military action in Iraq. The guy probably didn’t talk about much else these days. The girl was looking at him with wide, expectant eyes. Chet made to pull the earpiece away, but she grabbed his hand. ‘Listen! You have to listen!’
Chet winced again as a burst of static exploded in his ear. But this time it was immediately followed by a few seconds of clarity.
He heard the bald American, the guy from the Grosvenor Group. He sounded lazy and confident. ‘Trust me, Prime Minister Stratton. This war is good to go . . .’
A couple of seconds of distortion, then the voice became clear again.
‘. . . the Americans are all on board . . . The question is, how are you going to get it through . . . ?’
The voices disintegrated once more into noise.
Chet removed the earpiece. ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘Now pack your bags. You’re coming with me.’
The fear returned to the girl’s face. ‘No . . . You haven’t heard what I’ve heard . . . You can’t have . . .’
‘That’s enough.’ He grabbed her by the arm again.
‘I’ll tell them we’re working together,’ she gabbled. ‘When we spoke outside the meeting rooms, they’ll have that on CCTV.’ She looked at the listening device. ‘I’ll say you helped me get this . . .’
Chet felt himself getting angry. She had a fucking screw loose. But his employers were paranoid – that was what kept him in a job. It wouldn’t take much for them to start having second thoughts about him.
Fuck it.
It only took one swipe of his arm for Chet to knock the girl’s listening equipment on to the hard concrete of the roof. It smashed as it fell, and she looked terrified. She got down on all fours and scrambled to eject a cassette from the recorder. ‘You’re fucking crazy,’ Chet hissed, and he pulled her away from the edge of the roof back towards the fire-escape stairs. She wriggled and writhed, her face a picture of dread, but there was no way she was going to get free from Chet’s grip. He pushed her on to the staircase first, then bore down on her so the only thing she could do was descend. As she went, she started begging again. ‘Please . . . you don’t understand . . . you’ve got to let me go . . .’ And when it was clear this wouldn’t work, she started up with the threats again. Chet just kept forcing her down.
He knew, when they hit ground level, that she’d try to run, and he was ready for that. He grabbed her arm once more and for a moment they stared at each other, he with dislike, she with fear.
Fuck it, thought Chet. Let her go. If she started putting ideas about him into people’s heads, he could kiss the Grosvenor Group job goodbye. He pointed to his left, the direction from which he’d come. ‘Stratton’s people are going to be looking for me,’ he said. ‘Go that way.’
He released his grip and the girl jumped backwards like a frightened animal. ‘Thank you,’ she said softly. Chet didn’t reply. He watched her hurry away, then turned right and headed back round the corner of the building into Whitehall.
Straight away he clocked Stratton’s muscle – two of them standing on the pavement, thick necked and slightly out of breath. They were looking around over the heads of the passers-by, searching for something. When they saw Chet, they bore down on him like a couple of fire and forget missiles.
‘All right, fellas?’ he murmured once they were standing on either side of him. Sweat trick
led down the nape of his neck. ‘Fag break, is it?’
‘You,’ said one of the men, and he poked his finger in Chet’s direction. ‘With us.’
Chet looked from one to the other. He considered trying to sweet-talk them, but if ever a couple of goons looked impervious to charm, they were it. He forced himself to smile at them, but they didn’t once lose that dead-eyed look as they led Chet across the busy road and into the building he had been contracted to sweep.
The ride in the lift up to the sixth floor was a silent and uncomfortable one. Chet’s mind turned cartwheels. Had Stratton’s guys followed him when he left the building? Did they know what had happened on the roof? How the hell should he play this?
They exited the lift and strode towards the meeting rooms, all eyes from the offices on them. From the corner of his vision, Chet could see the kid who had first greeted him, now watching intently. The third bodyguard was still standing outside the room Stratton and the bald man were using. As they approached, he knocked gently on the door.
Almost immediately the bald American stepped outside. ‘What the hell,’ he whispered when he saw Chet, ‘is going on?’
Chet started to formulate a response, but he didn’t get a chance to speak.
‘We saw you up there,’ the bald man said. ‘Who was it? What were you doing?’
‘I thought there was a security breach,’ he replied firmly. ‘I went to investigate.’
‘And?’
He almost told them – about Suze McArthur and the listening device. But something stopped him. He didn’t know what. The tension the man was displaying, perhaps. The palpable anxiety oozing from him.
‘It was nothing. A student peace protester putting up a banner. I sent her packing.’
Silence.
Suddenly the door opened and Stratton appeared. He said nothing, but his face was pale.
