Killing for the Company

by Chris Ryan

  And that was something she definitely could not risk. The very thought sent ice down her spine. She would hear a deep, masculine voice in her head. Hide, it said. Don’t stop hiding. In her mind she would see a blazing farmhouse and a dark-haired woman with cold eyes. And she would hug her child, conceived the very night everything changed in her life, and vow to keep him safe.

  The TV was on as usual today, but Suze was the only one watching it. The rolling news about yesterday’s train attacks might have been sickening, but the alkies in the Crown and Sceptre only appeared concerned with their own misery. They were oblivious to the scenes, even when Suze pointed the sticky remote control at the TV and turned up the volume. As one of the punters, a skinny middle-aged guy with thinning hair tied in a ponytail, came up and demanded his second pint of the day, she caught fragments of commentary.

  ‘International condemnation . . . no word from the Palestinian administration.’

  The guy coughed as he handed over the money for his drink.

  ‘Troop mobilisation across the Middle East . . . precautionary measure . . . tensions running high . . .’

  Suze put his change into his sweaty hand and went back to watching the screen, vaguely aware that, rather than returning to his table, he was loitering around the bar. For the third time that morning she watched the footage of a young reporter unable to cope with the horrific scenes the previous night.

  ‘As we stand here, relatives of the passengers on the 16.55 are beginning to gather in a neighbouring field, anxious for news of their . . .’

  ‘Them fuckin’ Muslims,’ the punter snarled. Suze ignored him.

  Suddenly the screen changed, taking Suze away from the repeated footage of the atrocity and back to the studio. An immaculately dressed female reporter with an earnest look on her face was speaking hesitantly, as if she’d just been fed information she wasn’t quite sure about.

  ‘News just in . . .’ she announced, before pausing. ‘In the last few minutes, police have released a photograph that they believe shows two of the UK bombers moments before they boarded the fateful 16.55 train from Bristol Parkway.’

  A grainy black and white image filled the TV screen.

  Suze stared up at it. And then, as if someone had suddenly flicked a switch, she gasped.

  The picture showed a crowd of people – maybe fifteen in all – with two men’s faces circled in red. They both wore rucksacks, and it was difficult to make out their features with any certainty.

  ‘Pakis,’ the guy with the ponytail muttered. ‘All look the fucking same to me.’ He scanned around vaguely, as if he was searching for someone to agree with him.

  But Suze had barely heard what he’d said. She was staring at the screen as a familiar sensation of dread crept over her body, draining away all her strength.

  ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart? Time of the month, is it?’ The punter chuckled at his own joke.

  Suze couldn’t answer. She just stared and stared.

  It wasn’t the men circled in red that had caught her attention. It was someone else, standing just behind them, with features almost as clear as if she had appeared in the Crown and Sceptre itself. A woman with dark hair, flat eyes. Older than when Suze had seen her last, but without question the same person.

  Her fingertips moved involuntarily to her neck as she remembered how the woman had tried to throttle her, and the force with which Chet had pulled her off. And her insides seemed to twist as she remembered watching her from the burning house in which the man who had saved her, and who had fathered the quiet, strange little boy she loved with all her heart, had perished.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she muttered.

  ‘What’s up, sweetheart?’ the punter asked. But he didn’t get a reply.

  Suze wasn’t supposed to leave the bar for long, but she had to. She turned and ran into the back room, where Harry was sitting on a battered sofa, surrounded by crates of brown ale and Schweppes tonic, carefully colouring in a Dora the Explorer picture book. Harry couldn’t read, but he would happily colour in childish pictures from morning till night. He stopped when he saw his mum, and looked up at her with big, wide eyes that were full of questions as she paced the room nervously, digging her fingernails into her palms and chewing her bottom lip.

  From in here, the sound of the TV was just a distant hum. Suze continued pacing in silence, as though movement would dispel the fear in her gut. It didn’t.

  ‘What is it, Mummy?’ Harry asked after thirty seconds. His voice was very soft, but it was unusual enough for him to say anything without being asked that Suze immediately stopped pacing and went to sit next to him. She held out his arms and he snuggled up to her. Harry was always ready for a hug. She felt some of her anxiety fall away.

  Some. But not all.

  She started to shake.

  ‘Are you crying?’ the little boy asked. His voice was quite matter-of-fact. And when Suze didn’t reply: ‘You always tell me not to cry.’ It wasn’t an accusation. Harry spoke with such concern that she wanted to cry twice as hard. But she forced herself to get control and, drawing away from her son, she cupped his precious face in her hands.

  The look he returned was serious. Not the look of a ten-year-old, but the look of an adult. It made sense in a way. Little Harry had never spent any real time with children his own age, but it caught her off guard sometimes, how much he looked like his father. It was almost as if Chet was staring out at him from behind his son’s eyes. ‘Why are you crying, Mum?’

  What could she say? How could she explain such things to someone so young? How could she share her fear with someone so innocent? She closed her eyes.

  ‘Mummy’s just . . . just a bit sad,’ she whispered.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because . . . because sometimes . . . sometimes there are people who do bad things.’ She opened her eyes again to see Harry’s concerned little face still looking up at her.

  ‘But we don’t do bad things, do we?’ he asked.

  Suze blinked. Do we? she wondered. She thought of the occasional shoplifting he knew nothing about; the secrecy; the deception. She’d never told Harry about his father. She’d never told anyone what happened that night. She didn’t have anyone to tell, and even if she did, fear would have held her tongue.

  Stay anonymous. Stay dark.

  Whenever she thought of going to the police, Chet’s words had echoed in her head. She remembered leaving London with him, and the two police officers in the service station bearing down on them. If she made herself known to the police, she could throw her anonymity out of the window. If it had been just her, maybe she’d have done that before now. Maybe she’d have given up. But it wasn’t just about her any more. It was about her son, and nothing in the world was going to make her put his life at risk . . .

  ‘Well, if we don’t do bad things, then that’s all right, isn’t it?’ Harry interrupted her thoughts.

  She looked at him. He was so earnest. So right.

  Countless people were dead and Suze was in possession of important information. She had to tell someone.

  Not the police. But someone.

  She took Harry’s right hand in hers and squeezed it tenderly. He smiled at her – such a reassuring smile that she almost felt calm again. Like she could think her way through this.

  If she couldn’t tell the police, who could she tell? Her mind flitted back once more to the night of Chet’s death. If you ever need any help, track down Luke Mercer, 22 SAS, tell him what you know. But only if you have to, Suze.

  Luke Mercer. The name was etched in her memory. She had no idea who he was, or where he was. From time to time she’d thought about approaching the SAS directly, but she’d never gone through with it. After all, if the police were compromised, why couldn’t the army be? She had tried to locate him other ways – not because she wanted to get in touch, but because she knew the day might come when she did. It had all come to nothing. Luke Mercer, whoever he was, had no listing in the telephone directory, nor a
ny mention on the electoral register. He hadn’t been married; he hadn’t died. The internet had no mention of him whatsoever. It was like he didn’t exist.

  But he did exist. He had to. Chet wouldn’t have mentioned him otherwise. Suze only had one remaining idea of how to contact him, but after everything Chet had said, and after everything that had happened, the thought of doing it made her feel nauseous.

  It was too dangerous. It would put Harry at risk.

  Suze stood up and, with a sad smile at her son, returned to her position behind the bar. Nothing had changed. The locals were still there, in their usual places, sipping slowly at their pints and ignoring everything all around them. The TV was still on. The rolling news was still rolling.

  She stared once more at the images. The scenes of devastation. For the umpteenth time she saw the young journalist breaking down on camera, unable to keep his composure in the face of such horror. And then the picture again: the two Palestinian men circled in red, and Chet’s killer, easily distinguishable in the background.

  She suppressed a shudder, but remembered what Harry had just said. If we don’t do bad things, then that’s all right . . .

  The decision was a sudden one. She grabbed her coat from where she’d stashed it under the bar and went to the back room to get Harry. The little boy looked surprised as she took him by the hand and dragged him towards the front door of the pub – just in time for them to bump into the landlord waddling back in. ‘Aye up, Linda Lovelace, where the hell do you think . . . ?’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Suze spat at him, and hurried with her boy out into the street.

  Half an hour later she was in a local supermarket, spending money she couldn’t afford on a pay-as-you-go mobile, choosing the cheapest one that had a camera. Suze hadn’t touched a phone all the time she’d been in hiding, and she felt uncomfortable with it as she walked out of the supermarket and continued up the bustling high street. Five minutes later she and Harry arrived at Argos, where a bank of twenty-five display TVs were showing the same channel; and after another five minutes, the picture of the bombers, with her attacker clearly in the background, was repeated on each screen.

  Suze held up her camera phone to one of the TVs. It made a click and, as she examined the tiny screen, she was surprised by how well the image was reproduced. The woman’s face was perfectly clear. She switched off the phone and put it back in her pocket.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Suze spun round to see a suspicious female shop assistant standing there. She shook her head, grabbed Harry’s hand and hurried out. She checked her watch. Nearly half past twelve. She would wait until tonight, when Harry was asleep. Then she would play the only card she had. She just wished it wasn’t so fucking dangerous.

  Mother and son started wandering back to the squat in silence. And as they went, Suze thought about Luke Mercer. Would he really be able to help her? she wondered. What kind of man was he?

  And where in the world might he be now?

  EIGHTEEN

  Luke Mercer was in the back of a Pinzgauer 6 x 6. The canopy was closed against the rain, and his face was bathed in the monochrome light from a VDU about the size of a laptop screen.

  The olive-drab vehicle had seen better days, but the modifications it had undergone were state-of-the-art. Mounted on the cab was a high-velocity missile launcher. Known as THOR, it was a four-missile variant of the Starstreak HVM, a high-velocity surface-to-air munition that had not yet seen combat. Top-speed Mach 3.5 – three and a half times the speed of sound – laser-guided and each missile containing three armour-piercing darts. These darts were each packed with a pound of explosive. The weapon’s sights – regular, thermal-imaging and night-sight – could pick up and track targets at a range of more than seven klicks, even fast-moving UAVs behind cloud cover. All in all, a pretty formidable bit of kit. Not the sort of thing you wanted to entrust to some wet-behind-the-ears crap-hat not long out of nappies.

  Some of the younger guys in camp had a habit of taking the piss out of Luke these days. To them, he was the old boy, with a flash of grey round his temples and a body scarred by a long career in the Regiment. Top brass had given him the opportunity to slow down a bit on any number of occasions. Take a training role. Move over to L Detachment as a PSI. Luke had resisted, preferring to mix it with the kids. To keep active. Plenty of the younger troopers thought he was nuts. Why wouldn’t you take the same pay for less aggro? Why wouldn’t you grab the chance not to have some extremist fuck using your arse for target practice?

  Luke had his own reasons. Reasons he kept to himself, and which he probably couldn’t have wholly explained even if he’d wanted to. A sense he owed something. Whenever that thought crossed his mind, he would see Chet’s face. Scarred. Stony. The knowledge that his best friend was dead, killed in a tragic accident from which he couldn’t escape on account of an injury that should have been Luke’s. How often had he relived that night in Serbia so long ago? How often had he seen the fragmentation grenade rolling towards him, only to be kicked out of the way by Chet in one moment of selfless bravery?

  And what right did Luke have to give up fighting, when the man who had saved his life would never fight again?

  To keep fighting meant ensuring his Blade skills were sharper than sharp, his body in peak condition. So when the others were in the Hereford boozers drinking for England, Luke was gymning it or pounding the streets. And when his younger colleagues gave him the sarky comments, they did so knowingly. There wasn’t a man in Hereford who didn’t think Luke Mercer was the equal of anyone in the Regiment.

  With the aid of a joystick, Luke was practising manoeuvring the sight mounted above the truck. Its accuracy and range were remarkable. On the screen in front of him, he could make out individual trees miles away in the distance. The THOR was intended to take out low-flying aircraft, but it also had ground-to-ground capability, and it was this that they were testing today.

  ‘Extra points,’ a voice behind him said, ‘if you can take out one of those fucking ramblers.’

  Luke looked over his shoulder and grinned at Nigel Foster. Fozzie was a good lad. Luke had even forgiven him for getting his team compromised all those years ago in Iraq, when he and Finn had been forced to make a break for the Jordanian border. At least they’d all got out in one piece, which was more than he could say for the Mossad agent they’d picked up on the way. SIS had been quick to bury that one. Thanks, lads, for your help, now be terribly good boys, would you, and don’t mention Amit’s little personal firework display to another soul. Six months after he and Finn had made it over the border back into Jordan, Luke had made a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to locate Amit’s sister like he said he would. He’d drawn a blank, though, and there was no way he was going to use his contacts to dig a little deeper. That would have had the Firm sniffing round him like dogs round a bitch’s arse.

  Luke had sometimes wondered what had happened to Abu Famir, the pain in the neck of an Iraqi do-gooder the coalition had been so eager to get their hands on, and for whose safety Amit had sacrificed himself. He had never seen or heard of the guy again, and sometimes he wondered what the point of the whole fucking escapade had been. Still, it wasn’t the first time the Regiment had been sent out to risk their lives on the whim of some bright spark in Whitehall. Wouldn’t be the last either.

  Luke moved the joystick and the sights panned left. The image on the screen – gridded, and with a set of cross hairs at the centre – was amazingly clear given its distance: 7.3 klicks, at a bearing of 183 degrees. The Pinzgauer stood on a piece of high ground, so the line of sight over the Beacons was uninterrupted.

  ‘You finished admiring the scenery yet, mucker?’ Fozzie asked.

  Luke didn’t reply. He panned slowly east, and just a few seconds later something caught his eye. He adjusted the instruments on the weapon’s control panel and the scene came more clearly into view. It was an old house. At least, it had been once. Now it was just a burned-out shell. A memory. And to Luke
’s eyes, a tomb.

  He stared at it for a few seconds, before sensing his mate looking over his shoulder. ‘We should lock on to the target, mucker,’ Fozzie said quietly.

  Luke nodded. ‘Roger that.’ His voice was emotionless. He panned further east and adjusted the range of the weapon. Within thirty seconds he was locked on to a very different scene. Luke knew the ranges on the Beacons well. Everyone in the Regiment did. They’d all spent more time than they cared to remember in these places on exercises – general weapons training, point of contact, even calling in air assets to drop ordnance. The ranges could be anything from a couple of hundred metres in length to the entire side of a hill. The one they were focusing on today had been decked out with a set of rails and a pulley system which could be used to drag vehicles along to simulate a moving target. The guys had set up an old Land Rover, and Luke had got it in the cross hairs.

  As soon as the range came into view, the radio burst into life. ‘OK, fellas. We’re ready for you. Send.’

  It was Fozzie who replied. ‘We have eyes on. Repeat, we have eyes on.’

  A pause. On the screen they saw the Land Rover start moving.

  ‘Fire at will,’ came the voice on the radio.

  Luke didn’t need to follow the target manually. The weapon system, once it was locked on, followed the Land Rover automatically. In a battle situation, the target – whether an aircraft, a vehicle or even a human – would be moving faster, but that didn’t matter. The THOR system could track just about anything. And once it was tracked . . .

  Luke pressed a single button to fire. There was a whooshing sound from above the Pinzgauer and then, almost immediately, a loud crack from in front of them. The rocket’s main propulsion didn’t kick in until it was 400 metres from the firing point, in order to protect the user; then, at Mach 3.5, it would take only seconds to reach the target. The weapon sights kept track of its trajectory, and Luke just had time to see the three lethal darts shoot from the main body of the missile, staying in a circular formation to increase the likelihood of one of them hitting the target, before the Land Rover exploded. The sudden combustion was visible on the screen. There was a two-second delay, then a harsh, metallic sound reached their ears as the sound waves from the explosion crashed past them, echoing across the hills.