‘Trust me, John. I can take care of them.’
‘You’ll have Sally to answer to if you don’t,’ Westwood added, and Richter smiled briefly at him.
‘Just trust me,’ he said again. ‘It’s what I do.’
For another hour the two men lay silently, studying the house through their binoculars, but saw no sign of movement apart from the patrolling guard.
At three twenty Richter turned to Westwood again. ‘It’s time, John. I know you won’t need it, but good luck in there.’
‘Right,’ Westwood eased up into a sitting position and glanced at his left wrist. ‘I’ve got three twenty-one.’
‘Check,’ Richter said, looking at his own watch. ‘You should be outside the house by three forty-five, but that’s not critical. But four zero five is, OK?’
‘I’ve got it, Paul. Four zero five. Just be sure you’re ready by then.’
‘I will be. They’ll be expecting you to be armed, so are you carrying?’
‘No,’ Westwood replied.
Richter reached into his inside jacket pocket, pulled out the Browning Hi-Power and passed it over. ‘It’s got a full magazine, but you shouldn’t have to use it. The safety catch is on and there’s one in the chamber. Just remember it belongs to the Queen and I’ve had to sign for it, so I would appreciate getting it back sometime.’
Westwood nodded. ‘Right now, making sure your paperwork gets completed properly is the least of my worries, but I’ll do my best. You’ve got the SIG?’
‘You bet,’ Richter said.
Without another word, Westwood moved backwards into the relative darkness of the copse, and began making his way down towards the main thoroughfare and the side road where he’d parked his Chrysler.
For fifteen minutes Richter did nothing, lying motionless to watch both the house and the approach road. The outside guard didn’t seem to be following any set pattern in his patrolling of the grounds, but Richter guessed that would change after Westwood had arrived. Once the fly was in the web the spider could relax.
At three thirty-five Richter himself started down towards the safe house across the largely open countryside that lay in front of him. Even when the guard was out of sight he moved as quietly as possible, keeping low just in case one of the other men was watching through a window.
By three forty-five, now only twenty yards from the boundary of the property, Richter crouched down behind some bushes. He could see an easy way into the grounds almost right in front of him – a narrow gap in the hedge that he reckoned he could squeeze through – but he was going to wait for Westwood’s arrival before he moved again.
He heard the Chrysler Voyager before he saw it, heard the noise of its tyres on the road. He saw the light-coloured roof of the vehicle moving slowly, decelerating further to make the turn into the driveway. And then he saw Westwood himself in the driving seat as the car pulled up outside the house.
As Westwood had explained, the drive was equipped with sensors to detect any vehicle approaching the property, so Richter wasn’t surprised when the main door of the house opened at almost the same moment as the outside guard reached the Chrysler.
John Westwood braked to a halt and switched off the engine. He opened the door just as a man walked over and stopped beside it. His jacket was hanging open so Westwood could see the bulge of a shoulder holster and the butt of an automatic pistol.
Beyond him, the front door of the house swung open and another man peered out. It wasn’t Nicholson, and Westwood heaved a sigh of relief. That had been one of their worries, since Richter’s plan called for Westwood to get inside the house before any of them realized who he was.
‘Your name?’ the man standing beside the car demanded.
‘Mike Murphy,’ Westwood said. ‘I’m expected here.’
The guard gestured for Westwood to lift his arms above his head and then frisked him expertly. He found the Browning almost immediately – Westwood had simply tucked it into the rear waistband of his trousers – removed the magazine and worked the slide to eject the round already in the breach, then tossed the pistol and the magazine onto the driver’s seat of the Chrysler.
When he was checked again, Westwood realized that the man was looking for a wire. After a moment, the guard stepped back, satisfied. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
At the front door of the house, the other guard stood waiting and now stepped back to precede Westwood into the building.
As Westwood walked down the hallway, he prayed again that Richter was up to it.
The moment the outside guard turned to escort Westwood to the front door, Richter moved. He slipped through the hedge and ducked down immediately. As soon as the patrolling guard was out of sight, he stood up again and sprinted across to the house, flattening himself against the wall and concealed between two large bushes. Whichever direction the guard now approached from, he would hear the man’s footsteps on the gravel path before the guard could see him. That was all the edge Richter needed.
He eased the SIG P226 from the waistband of his trousers. The extra length of the attached silencer made the weapon much more cumbersome than a normal pistol, but Richter was more than willing to trade that inconvenience for the ability to fire nearly silently.
But the guard moved much more quietly than expected, and he was within ten feet of Richter’s hiding place before he heard him. Richter eased back against the wall and ducked down slightly, waiting for the man to pass. But as the guard drew level, his peripheral vision must have detected the intruder for he swung around, simultaneously grabbing for his shoulder holster.
Richter dropped the silenced SIG and launched himself off the wall like a torpedo out of a tube. He didn’t want to kill the guard: he had no quarrel with him or the other two men inside the house. They were just doing a job, maybe hired for the day or perhaps junior CIA agents. But Richter needed to subdue him quickly, because the clock was already running.
Westwood followed the guard across the entrance hallway and into a spacious inner hall. Before the man proceeded any further he stopped and motioned for Westwood to lift his arms above his head.
‘The guy outside just checked me,’ Westwood said, raising his hands.
‘And now I’m checking you.’
Apparently satisfied, he gestured for Westwood to follow him again, heading towards a door set in wooden panelling, which Westwood knew led down to the underground briefing-room. So far, things were going more or less as Richter had predicted.
Outside the soundproof entrance of the cellar room below, he pressed the bell twice. Then he opened the door, pushed Westwood inside, and pulled it closed behind him.
The lighting in the briefing-room was bright and harsh after the comparative gloom of the house above, and Westwood had absolutely no difficulty in recognizing the other figure in the room, seated at a small table. But Nicholson stared back for a few seconds without apparent recognition before his face darkened.
‘Westwood, you meddling bastard,’ he spat. ‘Where’s Murphy?’
‘Murphy didn’t make it.’
Nicholson nodded as if it was the answer he had been half-expecting. ‘I suppose you think you’ve been clever, trying to trace me through the database.’
‘Seems I succeeded.’
‘Whatever,’ Nicholson waved a hand dismissively. ‘I was going to arrange for you to have an accident anyway,’ he added, picking up a pistol from the table and levelling it at Westwood’s stomach, ‘but now I won’t bother. You can just disappear.’
‘Dead bodies have a habit of turning up inconveniently.’ Westwood forced a certain bravado into his voice.
‘Not in this case. There’s a disused well just about five miles from here. It’s not marked on any maps, and it’s full of the bones of people who’ve been foolish enough to cross me. I’ll cut your tongue out just to keep you quiet, then I’ll drop you down it, and you’d better pray the fall kills you. Otherwise it’ll take you days to die.’
Even used to the hardened
attitudes of his Company colleagues, Westwood was shocked by the ruthless venom evident in Nicholson’s tone, and again prayed silently that Richter knew what he was doing.
As Richter crashed headlong into the guard, he groped for the man’s hands as they tumbled backwards onto the neatly trimmed lawn fringing the gravel path. The guard had managed to pull out his pistol – a nine-millimetre Austrian Glock – and was trying to bring it to bear when Richter grabbed his right wrist and twisted it up and back.
‘Pull the trigger now, and it’ll be the last thing you do,’ Richter panted in the man’s ear, pushing his hand further back until the pistol barrel was directly under the guard’s chin.
As the man suddenly relaxed. Richter seized the barrel of the Glock with his left hand and twisted it away. But at that moment the guard brought his left knee up hard towards Richter’s groin. Feeling the sudden movement, Richter twisted sideways, taking the impact on his outer thigh, as he tossed the Glock behind him.
The guard pulled himself away and scrambled to his feet. Richter recognized immediately from his stance that he’d been trained in one of the martial arts.
‘I think you’re forgetting something.’ Westwood took his eyes from the barrel of the pistol and looked up at Nicholson’s face. ‘If you kill me, you’ll never recover the CAIP file and those flasks. I’ve already made certain they’ll get into the hands of someone who can ensure the maximum exposure.’
For a moment, Nicholson just stared at him, then he threw back his head and laughed.
‘I expected better from you, Westwood. Do you have any idea how corny that routine sounds? It’s just bullshit and you know it.’
‘You want to take a chance that I’m bluffing? Walter Hicks knows where I am. He knows that I’m meeting you here.’
Nicholson stood up and moved closer. ‘The most Hicks can possibly know is that you’re supposed to be meeting a man named McCready. There’s absolutely nothing to tie me to McCready, so I’m quite happy to take the risk. Even if you have lodged the evidence with someone else, I can soon persuade you to cancel your arrangements.’
‘Dream on,’ Westwood murmured.
‘It’s no dream. You’re vulnerable, Westwood, and you know it. I reckon if I strapped your wife and kids into a row of chairs in front of you and started cutting slices off them you’d change your mind real quick.’
Nicholson smiled and, for the first time in his life, Westwood literally felt his blood run cold – a cliché come hideously to life – as he realized Nicholson would do exactly what he threatened. The man’s life and his career were on the line, and he would do whatever it took to contain the situation.
The guard stepped forward, left arm extended in front of him, the hand open and ready to grab, his right hand flattened into a killing blade, just waiting for the opportunity to strike.
Karate. Richter recognized the stance, but still he didn’t move. The man took another step forward, then lunged for Richter’s jacket with his left hand, his right swinging downwards and sideways. If the blow had connected it could have broken Richter’s neck, but the moment the guard moved, so did his opponent.
Richter stepped forward, blocked the strike with his left hand and turned to his left, stepping under the guard’s right arm and seizing his wrist with both hands. Then he straightened up, pulling the guard’s arm down and towards him, while simultaneously bending forwards.
The momentum of his strike had slightly unbalanced the guard and Richter’s move did the rest. The man stumbled forward, then somersaulted over Richter’s bent back, but the Englishman didn’t let go. He held on to the man’s arm, hauling it backwards as the guard’s body hit the ground hard, instantly dislocating his shoulder.
He screamed briefly but Richter hadn’t finished. He released the guard’s arm, leaned forward and hit him hard in the stomach, driving the breath from his body. Richter reached into his own pocket, pulled out a roll of brown adhesive tape and a couple of plastic cable ties. He rolled the guard onto his front, pulled his arms roughly behind him and lashed his wrists together with the ties, then pulled a length of tape off the roll and gagged him. Richter half-carried, half-dragged him across to the wall of the house and dumped him beside it. Then he stood up, surveyed his work and nodded in approval.
Richter crossed to the gravel path, picked up the Glock and stuck it into his rear waistband. Then he retrieved the SIG and began walking cautiously around the house towards the main door, keeping close to the wall and, hopefully, out of view of the security cameras. Halfway there he glanced at his watch. Three fifty-three. Just about right.
John Westwood just stared at Nicholson silently, then looked down to sneak a surreptitious glance at his watch. Eleven minutes to go.
‘Late for something?’ Nicholson demanded, his pistol still holding Westwood captive.
‘No,’ Westwood replied. ‘I was just wondering when you’d get around to telling me how clever you’ve been, and what you’re planning to do next with whatever’s contained in those sealed vacuum flasks. What have you done – sold them to al-Qaeda or some other bunch of deranged lunatics?’
For the second time since Westwood had been pushed inside the secure briefing-room, Nicholson just stared at him. ‘You have,’ he said eventually, anger flaring in his eyes, ‘absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You think I would sell out the Company? Fuck you, Westwood, I’m a patriot, and I’m doing everything I can to protect the Agency, and our country. Once I get my hands on that stuff it’s going straight into an incinerator.’
Westwood affected incomprehension, although he had guessed that Nicholson’s intentions had been something like that. ‘I don’t understand. Why go to all this trouble to recover the flasks if all you’re going to do is destroy them?’
‘You don’t understand, Westwood, because you’re stupid and ill-informed.’
‘I’m only ill-informed because you destroyed all the files,’ Westwood snapped.
Nicholson nodded impatiently. ‘Yes, but if you’d done your job you’d have seen that those files were destroyed with the highest possible authority.’
Westwood nodded. ‘And why would the President of the United States himself have gotten involved in sealing a bunch of CIA files?’
‘That remark just shows the pitiful depth of your ignorance.’
Nine minutes to go.
The main door of the house was unlocked. Richter pressed his ear against the wood, listening for any sound of movement inside. He wasn’t entirely sure that he would be able to hear anything through its thickness, but he had only lived as long as he had by taking care to check everything twice.
He double-checked the SIG again – full magazine, a round in the chamber and the decocking lever up – then reached out his left hand to turn the handle and open the door. As he had hoped, certainly half-expected, the hallway was empty. Their fly was already caught in the web: now closeted with Nicholson, Westwood had been the only visitor they were expecting, so the guards had clearly relaxed. The building alarms were switched off because of their frequent comings and goings: the most they would be likely to have left switched on was the driveway sensor, and Richter hadn’t approached down the drive.
He headed down to the inner hall, stopped close beside the wall and listened. A faint murmur of voices was audible from a short corridor leading to his right, so he followed the sound, treading slowly and carefully. At the end was a half-open door, and Richter could see from the corner of a wall cupboard inside that it was the kitchen.
He brought the SIG up into combat stance position, kicked the door fully open and stepped inside the room. Like a snapshot, the action there had been suddenly frozen. Two men sat facing each other across a wooden table, coffee pot on the stove behind them. One man’s hand had arrested its movement halfway to his mouth, a piece of buttered toast clutched in his fingers: the other guard had his right forefinger thrust through the handle of a coffee mug. Both their mouths hung open in shock, their eyes now fixed on the SIG P226 w
ith its long silencer.
‘Afternoon tea, is it?’ Richter observed contemptuously. ‘Now’ – the silenced muzzle of the SIG moved gently from one man to the other – ‘in this kind of situation there’s always a hard way to do things, and an easy way. The hard way is you both stop filling your faces and reach for your weapons, then I shoot you. That’s easy for me but hard for you, and it also makes a lot of extra work for the caretaker here who’ll have to clean your blood and intestines and stuff off the wall behind you.
‘That’s not a good option for you, OK, so let’s work on the second alternative. I’ll talk you through it, but to make things easier, let’s have some names. You first.’ He gestured to the man sitting on the right.
‘Blake,’ the guard replied shortly.
‘OK, Mr Blake, just keep that piece of toast in your hand in case you get hungry later. Now, with your left hand take your pistol out of its holster, finger and thumb only on the butt.’
The guard nodded agreement, his eyes still fixed on the SIG. Moving carefully, he pulled back the left side of his jacket and reached awkwardly for his pistol. He tugged it out of the holster and put it on the table in front of him.
‘Very good,’ Richter said. ‘Now finish your toast, then lace your fingers together and put your hands on your head.’
He watched carefully as the guard complied. ‘And you are?’ he asked, moving the SIG slightly to point directly at the other man.
‘Henderson.’
‘Same routine, Mr Henderson. Move slowly and carefully.’ He didn’t need to add any kind of a threat: the SIG did that for him.
‘Now,’ Richter said, ‘perhaps one of you is carrying a back-up piece – a small revolver in an ankle holster or something. If you are, now’s the time to tell me, because if I find out later, it’s back to the hard option. I’ll only ask you once: is either of you carrying a second weapon?’
He was rewarded with two shaking heads. ‘OK, now, on your feet, both of you. There are two things I want you to do, both of them easy. First, where are the television monitors and control panel for the security system located?’
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