by Chris Ryan
"I'm sure I don't need to say this, but it's essential that you don't repeat a word of what I'm about to tell you to anyone. Colleagues, senior officers, other security services people ..
Alex didn't bother to reply. Leaning against the back seat of the Mondeo with his eyes half closed, he felt a little of the tension leaving his shoulders.
"Good. Right, then. Had to say that. You know how it is."
Alex nodded.
"Right .. . Well, here goes. A fortnight ago there was a murder committed in Chertsey, just inside the M25 in Surrey. Know it?"
"Isn't there an MOD arms sales place there?"
"That's right. Which is why the victim one of our fairly senior people, a man named Barry Fenn happened to be staying in the area."
Alex nodded. He was suddenly and acutely aware of his appearance in his flowered shirt and flip-flops he looked and felt ridiculous. Typical of Box to get you at a disadvantage.
"Go on," he said levelly.
"You weren't here, obviously, but even if you had been you wouldn't have heard or seen anything about it. We found him, we cleaned him up, we disappeared the body. Officially Barry Fenn died of heart failure in an ambulance en route to St. Peter's Hospital, Chertsey. In fact, he was killed in the early hours of the morning in a third-floor bedroom at the White Rose Lodge by a person or persons unknown. The killer I'm assuming it's one person disabled the exterior floodlight warning system, scaled the back of the building, climbed in through a window, eliminated our man, returned the way he came and vanished."
"How did he kill him?" asked Alex.
"Horribly," said Widdowes, closing his eyes.
"Barry Fenn was a good friend of mine. Had been for twenty years odd."
Alex waited. Widdowes steepled his fingers again.
"The killer tied his wrists and drove a six-inch nail through the side of his head. When he'd done that he cut his tongue out.
Alex said nothing. Widdowes' words had fired off a number of warning flares in his mind, but he showed no outward sign of this. The SAS were deeply wary of the other security services, whose human resource management they considered fatally flawed. David Shayler had gone a long way towards making monkeys of Five by public ising their involvement in the Muammar Gaddafi assassination plot and Richard Tomlinson had performed much the same service for Six when he outlined plans to whack Slobodan Milosevic with the help of the RWW. In general it was not a good time to be sharing a sleeping bag with Military Intelligence.
"I'm sorry," Alex said neutrally.
"I'm sure he was a good man.
"He was," said Widdowes.
Alex glanced at his plastic flip-flops and sunburnt toes, and thought of Africa and Don Hammond and the screams of the wounded RUF men. Although the leech marks were still fresh on his arms and legs and groin, the bloody events of the night before already seemed a world away.
"Let's cut to the chase, Widdowes," he said.
"What do you want from me?"
The MI-5 man turned to him.
"We're going to the site of a second murder. Another of our desk officers, a man named Craig Gidley. Exactly the same modus operandi, except that this time the killer gouged his eyes out."
A moment's silence.
"Go on?" said Alex.
"And we've got reason to think the killer's one of our guys. Or to be precise, one of your guys. An SAStrained undercover agent."
Alex stared out of the window. They passed a flooded gravel pit, a coppice, fields.
"We need this man found, Captain Temple, and soon."
The dead man's house stood a short distance outside the Thames-side town of Goring. A high flint wall surrounded the property; inside, a converted Georgian farmhouse was fronted by a neat lawn, yews and a lime tree. On the gravel led drive in front of the main entrance several cars were drawn up.
Ritchie found a space for the Mondeo, opened Widdowes' door for him and returned to the driver's seat, patting his pockets for cigarettes. Widdowes led Alex round to the back of the house, where two men and two women were sitting at an ironwork garden table. They looked as if they had been there for some time.
Widdowes led Alex round the table, first to the older and obviously senior of the two women, whom he introduced as 'our deputy director', then to the two men, who were respectively a service pathologist and a forensics officer. The final introduction was to an anonymous-looking younger woman whose name was Dawn Harding.
With these formalities complete the pathologist and the forensics man excused themselves and returned to the house. In response to a gesture by the deputy director, Alex and Widdowes took their vacated chairs.
"Thank you for coming at such short notice, Captain Temple," said the deputy director. She was an austerely handsome woman in her fifties, grey-haired.
Alex nodded cautiously.
"I believe George has brought you up to date with events?"
"In general terms, yes.
"And with what we want you to do."
"He's given me a fair idea."
"And?"
"And my answer to him was the same as my answer is to you:
that I'm a soldier, not a policeman. I can track a man through the jungle or over mountains, but not through criminal record databases and security services computer files. You've brought in the wrong person.
The deputy director looked at her two colleagues and back at Alex.
"You won't need files or records," she said quietly.
"We know who murdered Fenn and Gidley."
Alex stared.
"You know who.
"Yes. At least we've got a pretty good idea. And finding him is something we've got well in hand ourselves. What we need from you is more in the nature of disposal. Before we go into that, though, I'd like you to look at the body and see what it suggests to you. George?"
Widdowes stood and led Alex into the house through the back door. Inside, a flag-stoned corridor gave on to an oak-floored front hall, and the hall on to a small, book-lined study. To Alex, as he flip-flopped through, the set-up looked like an expensive one. The furniture was old and dark, and the gilt-framed portraits which hung on the walls looked like originals.
Disposal. Typical Box bullshit. They meant execution.
The owner of the house was lying face down on the study carpet. Although not tall he was a bulky man, and his dinner jacket and trousers looked a size too tight. His hands, blackened and swollen, had been tied behind his back with yellowish cord and it was clear from the severely chafed wrists that he had struggled violently against his bonds. Beneath his face a congealed pool of blood had blackened the worn Persian rug. The coppery smell of the blood hung in the air.
From the doorway Widdowes signalled for Alex to approach the body.
"We've taken the photos and run all the technical stuff. You can move him around if you want."
There was nothing that Alex wanted to do less, but he put his hands to the body and pushed, and the corpse rolled heavily over on to its back. In this position the full horror of the assault was revealed.
The face was an unrecognisable mask of caked blood.
Where the eyes had been were now clotted black holes. At the victim's right temple the head of a six inch flat-head nail showed a couple of millimetres proud of the skin surface. On close inspection the nail head proved to be flecked with rust. For the best part of a minute Alex stared at the body. It seemed to be expected of him.
"OK?" asked Widdowes.
Alex shrugged.
"Just fill me in again on what happened. The Gidleys were having a party, yeah?"
"A dinner party," said Widdowes.
"A dinner party for four Service colleagues and their partners. They would have arrived at about the same time that you left Freetown to keep your appointment with the RUF."
"And you weren't there?" asked Alex.
"No," said Widdowes, a small note of annoyance creeping into his voice.
"I wasn't, as it happens."
"An
d the deputy director?"
"The DD was there, yes. In all including Craig and Letitia Gidley ten people sat down to eat. By half past midnight the guests had all left, and Craig Gidley locked the front gate and let the dogs out."
"They were Dobermanns, right? Attack dogs?"
"That's right. They'd been shut up in their kennels while the guests were around. Normally they had the run of the grounds - a couple of acres in all. Better than any alarm, as you can imagine."
"Not on this occasion," said Alex soberly.
"Well, no, as it happened. Not on this occasion." Widdowes rubbed his eyes. It occurred to Alex that the MI-5 man had probably had as shitty a day as he had.
"Shortly afterwards Letitia Gidley saw her husband lock the front door.
She went up to bed they had separate bedrooms -and he went into the study announcing that he was going to have a finger of Scotch and spend half an hour on the computer. That was the last time she saw him alive. She found him here at 9.30 this morning and called the DD."
"Where's what's her name Letitia Gidley now?"
"At a colleague's in London. In a fairly bad way, as you can imagine. Let's go outside."
Gratefully, Alex followed him into the hall and thence to the porch. The front door was of heavy steel-backed oak.
"This how he got access?" asked Alex.
"Yes. Picked the lock. Very expertly. Come through." Widdowes led him the fifty yards or so past the parked cars to the front gate, where he pointed to a telegraph pole.
"See that little box on the line running to the house?" Alex recognised it at a glance.
"It's a sonic deactivator. Sends a false "secure" signal to the alarm monitoring station.
"That's right. Have you ever used one?"
Alex chose to ignore the question.
"And it was just the house that was alarmed?"
Widdowes looked at him thoughtfully for a moment before nodding.
"Just the house. These two little charmers kept an eye on the garden.
He led Alex along the lawn. In the herbaceous border, doubled up among the lupins and delphinia, were the stiffened bodies of two Dobermann pinschers.
Alex whistled appreciatively.
"He's good, this guy. And the wife heard nothing?"
"Nothing."
Alex nodded. At the front door the two men he had met earlier were loading a body bag into the boot of one of the cars. Ritchie, cigarette in mouth, was giving them a hand.
"How would you have taken out Gidley?" asked Widdowes.
"I'd have done pretty much as this guy did," Alex answered.
"Wait until everyone's inside and the party's under way, then climb the telegraph pole and disable the alarm. He wouldn't have gone inside the grounds at that stage because of the dogs."
"How would he have known about the dogs?" asked Widdowes.
"He would have seen them," said Alex.
"He'd have had this place under surveillance for days, maybe even weeks. He'd have known the dogs' names, when they were fed, everything."
"So then?"
"Then he would have pulled back from the target and positioned himself somewhere he could count the cars out at the end of the evening. Field, maybe, or a tree. He probably had binoculars. Soon as he was sure the Gidleys were alone, he'd have returned and gone over the wall."
"What about the dogs?"
"See the way they're lying?" asked Alex, pointing to the twisted bodies.
"I'd put money on his having used poison, meat laced with strychnine. You whistle the dogs over, throw down the meat and then assume a submissive posture face down on the ground. Instead of going straight for your throat the dogs just piss on you. Once they've symbolically dominated you, you see, you're no longer a threat and they can get on with the meat."
"Big mistake," murmured Widdowes drily.
"Very big," agreed Alex.
"They're dead in seconds. Then our man takes a quick trot to the front door, boosts the lock and..." He shrugged.
"That's the how of it, anyway. As regards the why, you tell me."
"Let's go back to the DD," said Widdowes.
They returned to the back of the house, where the deputy director was making notes in a small ring-binder. The two men sat down. It was several seconds before she looked up.
"So, Captain Temple, give us your assessment of the perpetrator of this murder."
Alex hesitated.
"Why me?" he asked her.
"Why pull me out of the Sierra Leone jungle when you could have had Hereford chopper a bloke down this morning? Why waste the best part of a day?"
The deputy director gave the faintest of smiles.
"Because I wanted you, Captain Temple, not just some "bloke". I've been led to understand that you're the best."
Alex looked away.
"Who told you that?" he asked sardonically.
"Commissioned from the ranks at thirty-four after a decade's exemplary service. RW~[ team leader while still a captain .
The facts speak for themselves."
Alex shrugged. He guessed that, one way or another, he'd managed to keep his nose clean over the years. And managed it without brown-nosing the brass, which he privately considered to be his real achievement.
"Let me get this right," he said.
"You're in the process of trying to locate the man who murdered Feun and Gidley. Assuming that you do locate him, you want me to move in and eliminate him.
"That's about the shape and size of it."
Alex nodded.
"If I'm going to do that, I'm going to need to know everything you've got on him."
"That's not a problem.
"And I'm going to need to ask you some pretty sensitive questions."
"And I'll do my best to answer them, Captain Temple.
There'll be no secrets between us. We want this man taken off the streets, and fast. For reasons I'm sure I don't have to go into, I want the whole thing tied up before the police get wind of it.
Or, God help us, the press. That means days, Captain Temple.
Not weeks. All of this is urgent."
Nodding his assent, Alex looked out across the evening stillness of the garden. Midges whirled in the scented air. Was it his imagination or had she emphasised the word 'captain', as if to suggest that promotion would accompany success. Or that demotion would follow refusal, perhaps .. . Not that he had a hope in hell of getting out of this.
"OK." He nodded.
The deputy director swept her papers together.
"Good," she said briskly.
"I'll see you in my office at 9 p.m.
tomorrow. By then we'll have photographs and the bulk of the forensic information, and I can give you some of the background to all of this. Meanwhile you'll be liaising with Dawn, who'll take you back to London. Anything you need, just ask her." With that she got up, briefly extended her hand to Alex he pressed it, perhaps more gingerly than was strictly polite and swept into the house.
"I'll wrap up here, Dawn," said George Widdowes.
"Why don't you and the captain make a move? Unless of course' he turned to Alex 'there's anything else you need to see?"
"I don't think so," said Alex and turned his attention for the first time to the woman who had been sitting in silence at the far end of the table.
SEVEN.
Alex's first impression was of toughness: tough grey eyes, tough posture and tough attitude. She had nondescript blonde hair, hadn't bothered with make-up and was wearing a black short-sleeved sweater, black trousers and flat-heeled elastic-sided boots.
The impression didn't last. The clothes, if plain, were clearly expensive and accentuated rather than concealed the smooth curves beneath. If she was wearing no make-up it was because she knew she looked fine without it. And she certainly wasn't tough in the way that the 14th Int women he'd known in Belfast had been tough. Women like Carol Denny or Denise Foley who would match the Regiment guys drink for drink after a good terrorist kill and would have
been perfectly happy lying up in a freezing hide with a Heckler and Koch snipers' rifle and doing the job themselves. Denise, he remembered, used to bake a cross-shaped cake every time the Det or the Regiment took a player out.
Nor was Dawn Harding much like the Box girls he'd met over the water. For the most part they had been bright, ordinary-looking types, much more deskbound and secretarial than their Det colleagues. Most of them, according to Don Hammond who'd always had a bit of a way with words were 'gagging for a bit of Regimental pipe'.
But not this one. This one was decidedly unimpressed and it wasn't just because he happened to be dressed like a West African pimp. It was because she wanted to impress on him from the start that there was a distinct difference in status between some Johnny-come-lately ex-squaddie and a fast-track MI-5 desk officer to be. When she turned to him it was with the polite but very slightly patronising look that all executive-stream Box personnel seemed to acquire sooner or later.
"So," she said.
"Back to London. Have you got anywhere to stay?"
It was a good question. Since clearing Customs at Heathrow, Alex had not had a moment to himself and he certainly wasn't about to ring Sophie with all these wan ky spooks hanging around. He didn't even want to call her from his mobile until he was well clear of them mobile phones were a pushover in surveillance terms and although it was unlikely that a scanner was being operated from the cars at the front of the house, he didn't want to take the chance.
There was one call he could and would make, though. Tersely excusing himself and deliberately marching a good twenty yards away from Harding, he put a call through to Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Leonard, the CO of 22 SAS. This, Alex knew, was in direct contravention of Widdowes' request, but bollocks to that.
Howard was still at his desk at the Regimental base at Credenhill, near Hereford.
"Well done last night," he said quietly.
"Overall, a bloody good show. You're in Berkshire I gather, with friends."
On insecure lines the Regiment used the minimum of military jargon. There would be no 'sirs' or 'bosses' or departments named.
