Hunter Killer

by Chris Ryan

  ‘On who,’ Ripley demanded.

  ‘Four people. Their names are Victoria Atkinson, Harrison Maddox, Piers Chamberlain and Hugo Buckingham.’ He reached inside his pocket and handed out the printouts of the Hammerstone quartet that he’d made in the library in Birmingham.

  ‘One of this lot’s my target. I just don’t know which one yet. I need your help to smoke them out. Each of these people works out of a different building. Atkinson’s MI5, so that’s Thames House. Maddox should be at the American embassy. Chamberlain has an office at the MoD building in Whitehall. And Buckingham’s MI6.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Ripley asked.

  ‘A little bird told me.’ The little bird was Buckingham, of course, after their first Hammerstone meeting, but the guys didn’t need to know all about that.

  ‘Come morning, each of us is going to keep eyes on one of those buildings. We’ll ID each one target as they enter their place of work. Once they’re inside, I’m going to do something that’s going to make one of them want to get to an RV. Each person needs following when they leave. Barker, you’ll follow Atkinson from Thames House. Ripley, take Maddox from the Embassy. Hancock, you’ll follow Chamberlain from the MOD building.’

  ‘And you?’ Hancock asked, his face intent and one eyebrow slightly raised.

  ‘I’ll take Buckingham,’ Danny said quietly.

  ‘No prizes for guessing who your money’s on,’ Ripley breathed.

  Danny ignored that. ‘Did you bring the bikes?’

  Ripley frowned. His collection of motorbikes was his pride and joy. ‘They’re in the back of the Transit. I’m parked up a couple of blocks away.’ He looked shiftily around him. ‘Look, mate, they’re nice bits of kit. Do you really have to use them?’

  ‘It’s that or Boris bikes,’ Danny said.

  Ripley looked at him like he’d just taken a shit on the pavement. ‘I don’t want a single fucking dent in any of them,’ he said.

  Danny was already looking at the bag Barker was holding.

  ‘Did you get the phones?’ he asked.

  Barker nodded. ‘Five of them. Samsungs. Pay as you go. Couple of gigs of data each. That’s six hundred quid you owe me, mucker. Hope you’re good for it.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you need five,’ Ripley said. ‘There’s only four of us.’

  ‘Give me two,’ Danny said. For their own safety, the less they knew, the better.

  Barker handed round the phones. They spent five minutes plugging in each other’s numbers.

  ‘All the bikes have a phone holder,’ Ripley said as he tapped at the screen of his phone. ‘Fucking use them, eh guys? I don’t want you crashing my bikes because you’ve got your fucking phones in one hand.’

  No answer from the others.

  ‘And there’s a chain and padlock for each one,’ Ripley added, his voice increasingly anxious. ‘Fucking big ones. Do me a favour and lock the bikes up if you leave them. I don’t want some shit-kicker turning up and . . .’

  ‘We communicate by text,’ Danny interrupted him. ‘Every message goes to all of us. That way we can stay in the loop. Did you manage to bring any weapons?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ripley said, the old sarcasm back in his voice. ‘Just walked into the fucking armoury and checked them out.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Danny said. ‘Let’s get the bikes, then find somewhere to sit it out till dawn. You need to study these images, commit them to memory so you can recognise the targets the moment you see them. We’ll set up surveillance as soon as the sun comes up.’

  Clara didn’t know where she was.

  The Poles had shoved her into the back of a four-by-four. How long ago had that been? Twenty-four hours? More? The guy who had grabbed her hair had taken the wheel. The other man, the one with the tattoos, had sat next to her, his flick knife just inches from the side of her midriff. Clara had been too frightened to take any notice of their route. She had considered trying to jump out of the car, but as soon as the driver saw her glancing towards the doors, he’d switched on the central locking.

  ‘I’m not his girlfriend, you know,’ she’d whispered after they’d been driving for ten minutes. ‘He doesn’t care about me.’

  The Pole had given a mirthless little snort. ‘You better hope he does,’ he said. He pulled a phone from his pocket, punched in a passcode and started swiping until a photograph filled the screen. He held it in front of Clara’s face. At first she couldn’t tell what she was looking at. Then she did, and her stomach turned. It was a close-up of a gun wound. A shoulder, she thought, shattered, blotched and bloody. The Pole swiped again to reveal an image that showed the victim’s entire body. A woman. Blonde hair, like Clara’s. Sprawled on the floor, semi-naked, her lifeless limbs spread out.

  ‘Want to know what we did to her before we killed her?’ the Pole had asked.

  Clara closed her eyes. ‘No,’ she’d whispered.

  They had driven for 20 minutes. Clara told herself she wasn’t going to scream. It would do no good, and she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. But she’d been screaming inside, especially when the car stopped and the Pole dragged her out of the vehicle.

  They were in a different part of town, that was for sure. She’d looked up and seen another house. Detached. Brick. Two storeys. A number three on the door. Not quite as rundown as the place she’d just left, but not far off. Boarded windows. And was that razor wire on the sills?

  She’d felt herself being pushed inside, along a dark hallway with peeling wallpaper. A door to the left. Stone steps leading down. The tattooed Pole had pushed her into the basement. There was a light down here, but nothing else. The Pole had thrown her to the floor, then kicked her hard in the ribs. She’d curled up into a little ball, whimpering as the pain coursed through her.

  Through her tears she’d seen the second man arrive in the basement. He was carrying something. Clara had only realised it was a roll of packing tape when he started wrapping it around her head, several revolutions covering her mouth and sticking her hair. She’d tried to struggle, but the men were too strong for her. They’d forced her arms behind her body and wrapped the tape around her wrists.

  As they left her in the basement, they’d switched the light off. Clara was glad of that. As she had been flailing on the floor, she thought she had noticed russet stains on the concrete. And as she lay there now, she couldn’t but remember the picture her abductor had shown her, and wonder if this was where the woman in the image had met her death.

  06.00hrs

  The skies above London turned slowly from starless black to drab grey. Lights had been burning in the MI6 building all night, of course. Danny stood alone in the shade of a clump of trees, 30 metres from the impressive entrance, on the opposite side of the stretch of Albert Embankment that ran in front of the building. He watched more lights switch on behind the bomb-resistant windows. Behind him, a train trundled noisily past on its way into Waterloo.

  The other three had confirmed that they were in place outside Thames House, the MoD building and the American Embassy. Danny himself was perched astride one of Ripley’s bikes – a grey Yamaha TDM900. ‘Top speed, 139 mph,’ Ripley told him proudly as he handed over the keys. ‘Crash the fucker, I’ll rip your kidneys out and sell them to settle the bill.’

  ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘And lock it up when you’re not using it!’ Ripley had called after him. There was a vast, thick chain with a sturdy padlock stowed in the storage box behind the saddle. Danny had no intention of using it. If he needed to move quickly, he couldn’t be fucking around with security padlocks.

  From this side of the building, he couldn’t see the satellite dishes perched on top of the MI6 building, or even spot any CCTV. But he knew they were there. He wondered, too, if there might be plainclothes surveillance operating in the area. The helmet Ripley had given him hid his face, of course, but he remained alert for signs that he was being watched. So far as he could tell, there was no one.

 
; At 7 a.m., as the trains into and from Waterloo became more regular and the traffic on the Albert Embankment started to stack up, employees of the security services started arriving en masse: men in suits, women in smart two-piece office wear, all of them trotting through the cold, dark morning to be swallowed up by the building. Danny looked up, wondering which of those windows, if any, was Buckingham’s. But then he snapped himself back to ground level. He couldn’t let his attention wander. He needed to keep sharp. And to make sure he saw his target as and when he entered the building.

  He stood there for an hour. Watching. Picking out faces from the crowd.

  No sign of him.

  Just after 8 a.m. the phone he’d clipped to the holder on his bike lit up. A text message, from Hancock to him, Barker and Ripley. It said simply: ‘PC’.

  Which meant that Piers Chamberlain had turned up for work.

  One down. Three to go.

  The second text message came through about two minutes later. From Barker this time. ‘VA’.

  Victoria Atkinson had arrived. Danny’s lingering worry that his rough printouts had been insufficient for the others to ID their targets started to ease. He shouldn’t have worried. His SAS mates had been trained to observe, and to do it better than anyone else.

  The traffic eased off. Fewer London buses, more black cabs. Danny worried that he might have missed seeing Buckingham enter the building during the rush hour. But he was fairly confident he hadn’t. He didn’t much like surveillance, but he was good at it.

  The third text came through at 10.38 a.m., from Ripley. ‘HM’. The CIA liaison officer had turned up at the American embassy.

  Which left only Buckingham.

  He didn’t show all morning. By the time midday came around, Danny was cursing inwardly. His strategy relied on them being able to follow each member of the Hammerstone quartet. Trust Buckingham to screw it up. If Atkinson, Chamberlain or Maddox left their locations before Buckingham arrived, they’d have to be followed from their place of work. The guys were up to it, but it wouldn’t be ideal. Not ideal at all.

  The afternoon wore on. It turned into evening. There was no word from the others, but that was to be expected: it just meant they had nothing to report. And no news was good news. It meant their other three targets were still in place. But it was 18.00hrs now, and Buckingham hadn’t showed. With a sick feeling, Danny started to realise that his plan might be screwed . . .

  Only it wasn’t. Because at one minute to seven, just as the workers he’d seen arriving that morning were exiting the building to go home, Buckingham arrived. No chauffeur. Just him and a small leather briefcase. He trotted up the stairs and into the building.

  Danny quickly sent his text to the others. ‘HB’.

  The targets were all in place.

  He didn’t hesitate for a second. Kicking the bike into action, he sped up towards Vauxhall Bridge. The road carried him straight past Victoria, across Hyde Park Corner and along the east side of Hyde Park. The Park Lane hotel, where he’d staked out Al-Sikriti, sped past on his right. But Danny’s focus was on what was up ahead. He eased up on to Edgware Road, resisting the temptation to speed. Getting pulled over would be a disaster.

  19.23hrs. Danny pulled up outside the dilapidated United Reform Church where, ten days previously, he had ended things with Clara. It had immediately popped into his head as a good place: deserted, but reasonably central. It was a large, red-brick building with old slate tiles on the roof. The mortar between the bricks was crumbling away, and clumps of litter – old crisp packets and Coke tins – had collected against its outside walls. The windows were boarded up and the whole place had an air of neglect.

  He left Ripley’s Yamaha unchained by the side of the road, then ran up towards the old building.

  The door into the building was padlocked, but the lock was rusty and loose. The whole fitting came away after a few good tugs. Danny opened the door and stepped inside.

  A single room, about 30 metres by 20. Dark. It smelled of damp. Bird shit covered the floor. A broken window at the far end, about three metres high on the wall. From somewhere, the drip-dripping of a leak. As Danny stepped inside, a flapping sound echoed off the vaulted ceiling and the silhouette of a pigeon tumbled across his vision before landing on the floor ten metres to his left. Otherwise, the place was completely empty.

  Danny pulled out the fifth mobile phone Barker had acquired for him. He checked that the 3G signal was good. Then he opened the browser and navigated to the Gmail homepage. From his pocket he took the sticker he’d confiscated from Abu Ra’id’s house. He tapped in the username and password for the first time. There was no way he could have risked a trial run before now, for fear that any activity on the account would be flagged. And there was no guarantee, he realised, that these account details would be correct or valid.

  He hit ‘enter’.

  A pause.

  Relief crashed over him as an empty inbox appeared on his screen.

  Quickly, he hit ‘compose’. Then he started typing.

  It takes more than a drone strike to kill me.

  He saved the message as a draft.

  He brought up a new browser page. It took only a few seconds to find a webpage that had archived the text of a standard Nigerian scam e-mail, offering a hundred grand in return for five hundred quid being deposited in a bank account. The sort of thing any right-thinking person would delete without a second glance.

  Unless they saw that it came from an e-mail address they recognised, of course.

  He copied the text, then pasted it on to a fresh e-mail from the Abu Ra’id account.

  He had committed to memory the address from which Hammerstone had sent their instructions. Now he keyed it into the top of the e-mail.

  He stared at the screen for a moment, knowing that to hit ‘send’ would set in motion events whose outcome he couldn’t predict. A dodgy e-mail would arrive on the screens of the Hammerstone quartet. Only one of them, he assumed, would recognise the address it came from, and would surely take it as a sign to check the draft e-mail he’d left, purporting to be from Abu Ra’id. With the resources at their fingertips, it would be trivial for them to track the location of the phone that had sent the e-mail.

  And then what? Danny didn’t know. A hunted animal could be unpredictable. Certainly Danny couldn’t stay here. If he’d miscalculated, an armed unit could arrive at any moment and he couldn’t risk being in the vicinity. But if he was right, his target wouldn’t want to involve anyone else.

  He hit ‘send’. Then he laid the phone on the ground of the deserted church hall.

  He left the building, and jumped back on to Ripley’s bike. He performed a roaring u-turn as he headed back towards the Euston Road.

  Suddenly he stopped. He checked his watch. 19.31hrs. Instead of turning left on to the Euston Road he roared over it, towards the canal. Thirty seconds later, he had come to a halt again. The Yamaha’s engine purred deeply as he looked to his left.

  He could see Clara’s ground-floor flat on the other side of the canal. There were no lights on. He took that as a good sign. A sign that Kyle had done as he had asked and got Clara the hell out of there, to somewhere safe.

  But a cold, uneasy feeling in his gut doubled in intensity. Could he trust Kyle? Like hell he could. He wished he could call Clara, just once. Hear her telling him that she was okay. But he couldn’t. Not yet. The risk was too great.

  For fuck’s sake, Danny. You have to get back. He turned again, and floored it back towards the MI6 building south of the river.

  Danny was halfway across Vauxhall Bridge when the phone clipped to his bike lit up. It was a message from Ripley.

  It said: Target leaving.

  That meant Harrison Maddox had been the first to move.

  Twenty-five

  19.42hrs

  Danny’s mouth was dry as he took up position opposite the MI6 building again. He texted Ripley: Don’t lose him.

  Thoughts flickered through his mind. H
ad the CIA man been the one to take his bait? Had the Yanks been working with Abu Ra’id, persuading him to foment whatever bloodshed he could in London, to keep the wavering Brits on side in the war on terror?

  He had to rely on Ripley tailing the Yank to the very best of his abilities, and reporting back on his movements asap.

  Danny turned his attention back to the MI6 building. As a full moon rose behind the blocky architecture, two middle-aged men climbed into separate limos at 19.45hrs and 19.51hrs precisely. Lined faces, expensive suits. Like Buckingham in 20 years’ time. But not Buckingham.

  At 19.55, a second text came through. It was Barker. VA leaving.

  Keep on her, Danny texted back.

  The old suspicions started multiplying in his mind. The Muslim husband. The lost six months in Saudi. Could Victoria Atkinson really be a sleeper at the very heart of security services?

  It would seem not. Three minutes later another text came through from Barker. Heading south over Lambeth Bridge. The opposite direction from central London.

  Two minutes after that, his phone vibrated. Ripley. WW debussing at Canadian Embassy. Looks like a cocktail party.

  Keep eyes on, he texted back. But mentally he struck Maddox off his list before returning his attention to the MI6 building.

  Ten minutes passed. The rush-hour traffic on the Albert Embankment started to thin out a little. At 20.20hrs, a message came through from Barker. VA entered house near Old Kent Road. Family home? Young girl met her at the door. Daughter?

  Victoria Atkinson was home for the evening. Tucking the kids up in bed. It kind of figured.

  Piers Chamberlain was the third to leave. Danny received a text from Hancock at 20.28hrs to say as much.

  Don’t lose him, he texted back as Chamberlain’s face swam in front of his eyes. The royal links. The unfavoured boyfriend who’d died in the first bombing. The right-wing sympathies and the strange conversation they’d had with him in the cafe.

  Three targets were on the move. Only Buckingham was left. Danny’s pulse was racing. He felt as if the traffic was driving past in slow motion. Headlamps seemed to blur in his vision. He found that he was not even remotely surprised when a text message came through from Hancock which read: PC in Mayfair. MILF in a dressing gown opened the door to him. Dirty bastard.