The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  Also by James Brabazon

  MY FRIEND THE MERCENARY

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 2018 by James Brabazon

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Brabazon, James, 1972– author.

  Title: The break line/James Brabazon.

  Description: New York: Berkley, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018007037| ISBN 9780440001478 (hardcover) |

  ISBN 9780440001492 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Intelligence officers—Great Britain—Fiction. | Assassins—Great Britain—Fiction. | Special operations (Military science)—Great Britain—Fiction. | GSAFD: Spy stories. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6102.R315 B74 2018 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007037

  Penguin/Michael Joseph hardcover edition / July 2018

  Berkley hardcover edition / January 2019

  Jacket art by Tim Robinson / Arcangel Images

  Jacket design by Adam Auerbach

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Joy

  Contents

  Also by James Brabazon

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Last Light

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue: First Light

  About the Author

  All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

  —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  PROLOGUE

  Last Light

  SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 1994

  IT BEGAN A LONG TIME AGO. I WAS NINETEEN THEN AND A SOLDIER. Not a killer.

  Early that evening, I was called to Colonel Ellard’s office. He sent an orderly, who asked me to bring my rifle and follow him immediately. I asked if I was in trouble, and the orderly shrugged and smiled.

  “There’s a man with him. Smart suit. They’re in a hurry.”

  We took off down the corridor at the double. The orderly smiled again and hung back, not wanting to be sent on another errand. I entered the room alone. Colonel Ellard was inside with the man who had been watching me all day. He sat at the back of the office behind the door. I couldn’t see him clearly.

  That morning, when the sergeant major told us to break for a smoke, I’d noticed him standing inside the wire next to the main gate. It was not long after sunrise, and the air was still cold. He had his hands in the trouser pockets of a dark gray suit and stared at me as I lit and then smoked half a Marlboro. The jacket had a red silk lining that flashed in the breeze and thin lapels that framed a white shirt open at the neck. I ground the cigarette out on a galvanized bin and stared back at him, and he turned and walked briskly toward the officers’ mess. He wasn’t wearing a coat and he was unshaven, which made me wonder where he’d come from.

  Later that day I saw him again, speaking to Colonel Ellard. They were pointing at me as I laid out my kit—rifle, slip, scope, suppressor and box of twenty rounds—and then he walked toward me while I lay prone on the firing line. Without introducing himself, he knelt down and asked me if I could see the retaining bolt that held the hundred-meter target in place. Through the scope I could, I told him. The man asked me to shoot it. I did. Then I looked up at him. He studied my face intently, as if looking for something he’d lost, and then walked away.

  I stood in the office, at ease. According to the custom at Raven Hill, no salutes were exchanged, but you could never quite relax with the colonel. He was so soft-spoken that it was hard to hear him on the range, and so patient with us that he made you feel, instantly, as if his entire focus was on you, and you alone. He was the last Irish officer in the British Army to come up through the ranks. “Not from private, but from the pits,” he told new recruits: before he enlisted, he’d cut coal on his back in the Arigna mines in County Roscommon. Now Ellard walked tall. He expected, and received, absolute obedience. What we feared was not his wrath but his disappointment. And, because they worked, we were unquestioningly dedicated to his methods. We were, all of us, terrified of him, too—because we liked him but did not understand him. I’d learned quickly in the army that there was no progress of any kind without the fuel of fear.

  Sitting behind the walnut desk in his office, Colonel Ellard motioned for me to give him my rifle, so I detached the magazine and pulled back the bolt twice to show that the breech was clear and handed it over. It was his policy that our weapons always be amber: charged magazine on, nothing in the chamber. He placed it carefully on the desk.

  “Thank you. You’ll find a black Mercedes out the front. Jump in and wait. You’re not driving.”

  I made to leave. He raised his right hand to stop me and nodded toward the man.

  “Max, this is Commander Knight. You are to follow orders from him as if they were given by me. He is your commanding officer until further notice.”

  Knight sat behind me and said nothing. I saw his face clearly as I walked out. He’d shaved. He smiled and gave me a curt nod of recognition.

  I sat in the front passenger seat. Ten minutes later, Knight stepped outside and put in the boot of the car a rifle sheathed in a slip. He joined me and took the wheel. We drove for an hour and didn’t
speak. I didn’t have anything to say. It was early spring. Dun-colored hills soaked up the last of the evening light. The clocks had gone forward that morning, and the late dusk was unsettling. We were circling a large village due west of Belfast on a metaled road coated with mud well trodden by tractor tires and peppered with cow pats. We looped behind the tallest hill and found the moon rising above Lough Neagh.

  At a checkpoint below a cut in the road manned by crap hats, we were joined by two soldiers in civvies—most probably from the SAS or the Det. No one saluted. They climbed in the back and seemed comfortable with Knight. They must have met before. Fifteen minutes later, we stopped again. I got out first and saw that one of our passengers had a SIG semiautomatic pistol stuck in the waistband of his jeans. Knight asked me to take the rifle from the boot of the Mercedes and walk with him off the road, directly up the hill. His accent was from Dublin, sharpened in an English public school, and reminded me of my father’s Irish lilt. They would have been the same age, too, had my father lived. The man’s brogues found no purchase on the smooth grass, and more than once he stumbled, so that he had to steady his ascent with outstretched palms. It had been a hot day in the end, and I’d been burned by the sun; now there was a chill, and the air was sharp and brittle again.

  As we climbed higher, I began first to smell and then to hear the village. It was a Sunday. Traditional Irish music tumbled out the swinging pub door and down the hillside. A tang of roasting meat lifted on the breeze off the lake, mixing with the reek of peat smoke and wet grass.

  Finally, the climb leveled off onto a broad grassy saddle. We ran slowly and at a crouch to the lee of the hill facing the south side of the village, the straps of the rifle slip bunched in my right hand. I could see the evening dew had soaked into Knight’s suit from where he had stumbled. Dark patches spread out from his knees and ringed his cuffs.

  Below us, the kitchen clatter that heralded the end of dinner filtered through the half-open window of a stone house. I took a map and a pair of binoculars from one of the plainclothes operators who’d followed us up, and I checked the range.

  Three hundred meters away, in the failing light, I could see a family of seven lit by a single tungsten bulb, framed by net curtains darkened by smoke from the open hearth. Four children babbled and whooped, whirling round the table, licking grease off their fingers and taking empty plates to a middle-aged woman in the kitchen. She stood, as if transfixed, behind a deep butler’s sink beneath a second window. At the head of the table a man sat with another child on his lap, a young girl with long hair the color of threshed corn. His daughter. Knight crouched next to me and handed me a charged magazine.

  “The man at the head of the table has blood on his hands. Your orders are to kill him.”

  “Yes, sir. Understood.”

  I eased the rifle from the padded slip. It was my rifle. Despite the bumps and knocks of the journey, it would have kept its zero. I clipped on the magazine, adjusted the scope’s elevation drum and brought the glass in front of my eye. Inside the house I could see the stains on the man’s shirt, the shaving cut on his neck from when he’d prepared for Mass that morning. I saw his daughter’s lips moving. Their eyes were the mirror image of each other’s. I saw his chest rise, watched the rhythm of his breath. The target turned his face to the gathering gloom and stared out the window, listening to the girl. I fed a round into the chamber. The wind dropped. There were no adjustments to make: safety off, weapon live.

  “Sir?”

  “Weapons free.”

  The horizontal line of the crosshairs ran beneath the target’s eyes. The vertical bar divided the tip of his nose. He inclined his head, resting his chin on the girl’s scalp. Time stopped. Taking the first gentle pressure on the trigger, the pad of my index finger crept to a stop, and then drew a hairbreadth farther back.

  Nothing.

  The clocks restarted. Only the faint, dry echo of metal on metal remained above the sound of blood pumping in my ears, oxygen rushing in my throat. I cleared the breech and chambered another round. A flash of brass glinted in my right eye as the dead cartridge spun out in front of Knight’s face next to me. I settled the crosshairs. We were alone again, the target, his daughter and I. She touched his cheek. He looked out the window straight at me, seeming to hold my monocular gaze. First pressure: already I was part of him, following the pin into the cartridge; already I was tethered to the bullet.

  Again, nothing.

  I gulped a lungful of air and felt the grass-wet palm of Commander Knight on the back of my right hand as I tensed and moved to rework the bolt. And then those three words that still wake me.

  “You did well.”

  The firing pin had been removed from my rifle. It was the final test in Knight’s search for what he later described as a “legally sane psychopath.”

  “Your father,” he said as we returned to the car, “would be proud of you.”

  1

  TWENTY-THREE YEARS LATER

  I picked her up at the 360˚ roof bar. She was already half-cut. Her ex-boyfriend was the political officer at the US embassy in Caracas—a crew-cut spy with a face like a potato and a weakness for local women. He’d dumped her the week before, or so I’d been told. I guessed she was either drowning her sorrows or still celebrating. Outside, the city was disintegrating. Everyone was drinking hard.

  I bought her a rum and lime, cracked a joke in deliberately shaky Spanish and sat down beside her.

  “How do you know I’m not expecting someone?” she asked.

  “Because you’ve been waiting for me all these years, corazón.”

  She laughed, and her elbow slipped on the mahogany table. A slop of the sticky dark rum ran over her knuckles. She licked it off.

  “Just think how much more fun us two blonds could have.” I raised my glass to her. “Double trouble.”

  “Double trouble,” she repeated in Spanish with a wide, sad smile. “I’m Ana María.”

  She held up her glass, too, and looked at me, waiting.

  There we were: a businessman chatting up a local girl at a discreet corner table on the upper terrace, taking in each other and the view. Except she wasn’t a local girl. And I was supposed to kill her.

  “My name is Max,” I said. “Max McLean.”

  We touched glasses and each took a long swallow of rum. It seemed like an unnecessary cruelty to lie to her, that dead woman drinking. I was growing tired of being everyone except myself.

  Spy fucking is bad for your health in Venezuela, especially for the jilted mistress of the Russian ambassador to Cuba. She was nothing, it seemed, if not consistent in her lousy choice of lovers. Now she’d seen and heard enough to get her promoted onto everyone’s kill list. If we hadn’t got to her first, the Russians would have been close behind.

  She drank and talked, and I laughed and listened hard. I don’t like killing women, and I don’t like doing the Americans’ dirty work for them. I don’t like killing anyone. And after another glass of rum, I didn’t want to kill her. Not because she was pretty, or fun to have a drink with, but because when you’re about to kill someone up close like that, you watch them very carefully first. Whether you want to or not, you get to know them before they are dead. Time distorts. What would normally take weeks—months, even—to pass between two people is compressed into fast minutes; seconds, sometimes. The emotional pressure cooker of near death evaporates every superfluous detail until all you are left with is the essence of the person you’re going to kill.

  And I didn’t want to kill her because that process of reduction didn’t leave me convinced. Instead, it left me with the sense of something being terribly wrong. None of the details of the brief checked out. Her cover story—that she was a doctor on holiday—was repeated with unnatural nonchalance. Her tipsy banter was light and unforced. She was either an exceptional professional or innocent. And very few people are that good.


  I checked in and queried the target. The response was immediate: Verified. Proceed.

  But it didn’t feel right. And it has to.

  To kill at point-blank, to feel a last breath on you as the light gutters out of a person’s eyes, that is something—something to live with forever. I’ve killed a lot of people. Some were holding a bomb or a pistol or a cell phone or a switch; some knew things they couldn’t unlearn, had seen things they couldn’t unsee. Some died for good reason. Others didn’t.

  That was the purpose of training. That was why I had been sent to Raven Hill. Training ensured you pulled the trigger when asked. No questions.

  Most squaddies want to miss their target. My job is different. For me there are no misses. Only consequences.

  But I have to believe in the shot.

  So I didn’t take her to the killing place.

  Instead I plucked her phone from her handbag and excused myself. I took the lift to the hotel lobby on the ground floor, and I checked into the room I’d arranged to kill her in. I ripped the tracker from the hem of my jeans and left it with her cell phone in the bedside drawer. As a precaution I took the battery out of my own phone.

  By the time I’d sprinted back up the fire stairs and scooped her up again, she’d barely noticed I’d been gone.

  Half an hour later, we dropped down to the parking lot and wove our way through late-night Caracas traffic in a private taxi to a low-rent hotel room at the Garden Suites. We arrived just before two a.m.

  Upstairs, I’d held her from behind as we fell on the bed, pushing her mane of dirty-blond hair aside as she sprawled on the mattress to reveal the point, high on the nape of her neck, where I’d meant to place the muzzle. Then I saw it. Or rather, didn’t see it. Ana María Petrova has a scar the size of a bottle top at the base of her skull where the ambassador’s ovcharka took a lump out of her. This Ana María didn’t have a ready-made target carved on her. Squirming around onto her back, she giggled and hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her panties. She wasn’t even a natural blonde.