She had picked me up and I, in an unguarded moment, had let her. As classic honey traps went, it ticked all the boxes. My big question was why.
I knew little about her. By her own account, she moved around the world at a moment’s notice with only a passport and suitcase in tow. She was singular and fearless. She took control and, had she wanted to take my life, she had created exactly the right opportunity, although I very much doubt that she could have pulled it off. I wasn’t complacent. In my experience, women in high positions of power are more ruthless than men. Again, her itinerant lifestyle, her high-tech, mobile, minimalist, unsentimental attitude to life bore certain similarities to the life I had so recently abandoned. Did I think she was a contract killer? Absolutely not, because she’d broken a classic rule: she’d got involved with the victim. Did I think she was on someone else’s payroll? Possibly. A quantum leap forward in the suspicion stakes, I knew that however much the woman had crawled underneath my skin and captivated me, I had to take a pace, or even several paces back. If she was the real deal, there was nothing to fear and nothing to be lost. If not, I was going to find out how she fitted and who bankrolled her.
Outside was cold and damp and sunless. Using a popular cut-through, I headed into a leafy road with vast Regency houses and apartment buildings on either side, and crossed into Montpellier, skirting Montpellier Gardens. Only in Cheltenham would you see a man using a croquet mallet to strike a ball for his dog to chase. I paused for a moment and watched as the crossbreed leapt and caught, returning the ball to his master who whacked it once more and sent it flying through the air. Maybe I’d get a dog. The appeal of unconditional love attracted me. It had never been an option before. Now, spending my time in and around one place, I could entertain the possibility.
I arrived at the Queen’s a little after noon and was surprised to find that McCallen hadn’t beaten me to it. Perhaps she was playing hard to get.
I ordered coffee for two, swiped a newspaper and sat in the lounge. Glancing out of the window, I saw nothing more than the war memorial to those who’d given their lives in the Crimea and people walking down the Promenade, McCallen not among them. Ploughing through the first page, I checked my watch. She was now twelve minutes late. Unusual, but nothing that struck me as strange – she could have been hauled into GCHQ a mile or so down the road for all I knew. The coffee arrived. I poured out a cup with plenty of sugar, read the second page and the third, word for word. Time ticked on. I checked my phone. No word from McCallen. I cut to the sports section, caught up on football, tennis, horseracing and golf, a sport I don’t generally follow. My phone remained stubbornly silent. Not so much as a text. She was now running almost an hour late. I poured another coffee and got up, spoke to a receptionist who politely told me that no message had been left for Joe Nathan. Baffled, I sat back down and watched the revolving door like a killer waiting for his victim to show up. At any moment I expected to catch a flash of copper, her pale creamy complexion, the undulating contours of her physique. Nada. A blast of police sirens, not an uncommon occurrence, briefly rattled my senses. It felt like an omen. I gave it another ten minutes and then called the last number I had for McCallen. It went straight to voicemail. Rattled, I paid and left.
Standing outside, hands plunged deep into my pockets, face set to an icy cold wind, my phone rang. I snatched at it.
‘You’re late,’ I said.
‘For what?’
‘Simone, sorry, I was expecting a call.’
‘Sounds important.’
‘From a potential tenant.’
‘You wish me to get off the line?’
‘No. I expect they’ll catch me later.’
‘You left in such a hurry last night, I was worried.’
‘No need.’
‘Would you like to hook up?’
‘For what exactly?’ I made sure that the double-entendre sounded clear.
Her voice tinkled with laughter. ‘For lunch. I’m hungry.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
I wasn’t sure about jumping to her invitation, but then if Simone was involved in something that threatened my security, it was high time I found out.
‘Where?’
She gave the name of a French fish restaurant five minutes’ walk away. I told her I’d be there.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Simone proved a revelation.
She ordered and ate Cornish mussels in a creamy white wine sauce with hunks of bread and devoured both with the same attention to detail and energy she reserved for sex. I settled for steak and triple-cooked chips. Between us, we demolished a bottle of house red.
I played it straight. If Simone was bait, I didn’t want her to think I’d tumbled to it. Not yet.
‘Are you all right?’ She ejected a mussel from its shell and peeped up at me through her long dark lashes.
I frowned. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘You keep checking your phone.’
‘Like I said, potential tenant.’
She wiped her mouth, paddled her fingers in a lemon-scented finger bowl, dried each neatly and gave me a straight look. I sensed that underneath the calm façade she was angry. ‘Why did you leave?’
It seemed we both had questions.
I shrugged. She topped up her drink and snatched at her glass. Suspecting that she was the volatile type, it crossed my mind that she might empty the contents over my head. I pushed my chair back casually. Her aim would need to be very good to make contact.
‘That is not an answer.’
‘It was your gig and you looked busy.’
‘Not too busy to fuck you.’ Her dark eyes flashed.
I smiled. ‘I don’t understand why you are so upset.’
She let out an angry little sigh. I don’t think she was getting the reaction she expected. ‘Did Zara say something to you?’
‘Zara?’ I made out that I had no idea who she was talking about.
‘The blonde I left you with.’
‘Oh yes, I remember. Who was the man screwing her?’
‘Which man?’
‘Wore a gold mask.’
Simone shrugged. ‘How should I know? He was a guest. Why do you ask?’
I scratched my chin. ‘I thought I recognised him from somewhere.’
She gave another shrug. She looked like she was going to go all silent on me.
‘Zara said that she’d known you for five years yet didn’t seem to know a thing about you. Odd, I thought.’
‘Why? She is not my friend.’
‘What is she then?’
‘A client.’
‘But I take it you have friends. You must make lots in your line of work.’
Simone tossed back her head and laughed. ‘Is this what it’s all about, this petulance?’ She pronounced it with heavy French intonation. ‘You are jealous.’
‘I’m not the jealous type,’ I said, which was true. ‘But if I’m sleeping with a woman, I like to know something about her.’
She fixed me with a Medusa-like stare. ‘You didn’t seem to care when I picked you up two nights ago. I could say the same about the men I screw.’
Touché, I thought, and a fair point. And she’d admitted to picking me up. Perhaps I’d got her all wrong. Perhaps she really was on the level.
‘The simple truth – you do not trust me.’ Her eyes blazed. She was mad as hell.
‘That’s not the way I read it.’ I’d let her do things to me that no other woman had ever done. I don’t play submissive and yet, with Simone, I had allowed her to dominate. I had the bruises to prove it.
Simone wasn’t done. ‘I think you are not as adventurous as you make out. I think you are a little bit scared.’
‘Scared?’ This was not something I’d ever been accused of.
‘You pretend to be mysterious, but you are not mysterious at all. I have no time for games,’ she said, snapping her fingers and gathering up her things. ‘Call me when you, how do you say, man up and g
row some balls.’
And with that, she flounced out, leaving me to pick up the tab. I stared after her in astonishment and wondered how it was that, in the space of a couple of hours, my life had taken such a nosedive. McCallen had stood me up and now Simone. I guessed this was the type of stuff that happened in the real world.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Two days elapsed. It had been a fortnight since McCallen’s path had crossed mine. I called her a dozen times and left five messages. Simone didn’t get in touch and I resisted contacting her. Googling Miss Fabron told me little I didn’t already know. She’d set up Bagatelle ten years ago, held parties all over the world and was viewed as a successful businesswoman and something of an icon for ‘Generation Zero’, whatever the hell that meant. Personally, I thought she’d benefit from cooling her pretty little Gallic heels. I was never one for apologies.
The morning of the third day dawned grey and cold. Varying my route, I walked to one of three gyms I used, pumped iron for an hour, showered and returned home and called McCallen again. This time it didn’t connect at all. McCallen was a games player through and through, it came with the job description, but she wanted something from me and her silence didn’t feel right. A big believer in timing and calculating the odds, what was the chance that someone had knocked off Phipps, threatened McCallen, taken a pot shot at me, and each event was separate and unconnected? Revenge, where I come from, is normally plotted before funerals, but however unlikely, it seemed that Billy Squeeze, dead as he was, held the key.
Billy’s monstrous bid for power had kicked up a storm of death and destruction and, in its wake, had threatened the lives of hundreds of innocent people. Not for one second did I regret halting his ambitions and removing him from the planet.
I made a list of everyone I’d talked to in my quest to hunt him down. Three names topped the bill: China Hayes, Daragh Dwyer and Faustino Testa. I hadn’t spoken to them since and I was wary of contacting them now. Before I knew it they would be clamouring for my services and all my good intentions would go to rat shit. Based on the strong likelihood that if any had met the same fate as Phipps it would be reported, I quickly trawled the internet. Five minutes later and, as far as I could tell, the trio were in the clear. So far, so nothing, then my eye caught a news item and my blood vaporised.
‘Inger McCallen, a senior civil servant based in Cheltenham, has not been seen since leaving her apartment in Montpellier on 28 January. Colleagues first raised the alarm when she failed to report for work three days ago.’
Spies, often referred to as civil servants among other things, only went missing when their luck ran out, when betrayed, or both. The fact that her disappearance had been so swiftly reported indicated that McCallen was in deep shit and that MI5 were desperate. Either she was dead or she’d been abducted.
I remained calm and thought it through. Abduction was a stretch. I’d often been asked to carry them out and I’d always refused. Fraught with risk, kidnapping posed tremendous difficulties. Not only did you have to pull it off, you had to prevent the hostage or target from making an escape. Messy. Unsubtle. Cruel. In my time, I’d known of people abducted for no other reason than to put pressure on others to change witness statements or to cough up obscene amounts of money. In these instances, the victim often escaped mistreatment. Then there were other stories, tales of blowtorches and knives, electric cables and drugs. Sometimes, if information remained the objective, the abductor would play protector, offering kindness with one hand as his torturer in chief dished up unspeakable pain with the other. Most victims did not survive.
An intelligence officer of McCallen’s calibre on home ground would be almost impossible to abduct. If, by some slim chance, she were, her training would kick in. She’d play dumb, the innocent, resort to tears, act confused, offer a legend that could be checked and checked again, pull out every toy in the spy’s toy box until, lie by lie, her story was broken and her exposure complete. Every professional recognised the inevitability of how these events played out; all break, including the courageous. It was simply a matter of how long they could hold out. Sometimes the cavalry arrived. Most often, not.
The alternative scenario seemed more likely.
And if she were dead …
Breath lurched in my lungs. Sweat exploded across my brow. Sadness swept through me that I believed would never go away. Next up, rage.
Scarily close to dropping off my four-hundred-and-three-day wagon, I knew that if she were dead, I’d kill who was responsible.
The truth was, whatever had befallen McCallen, it wouldn’t be long before the security services were chasing down leads, looking at those she’d last hung out with and banging on my door. Without McCallen to offer an explanation, I’d be first in line for the role of prime suspect.
It seemed, to me, that Billy’s ghost had unfinished business.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Hastily packing a bag, I walked swiftly to the train station. Every road was alive with police, cars tearing past, sirens blaring as if a disaster had taken place. Maybe it had.
It took me two and a half hours to reach Paddington, another twenty minutes to traverse slush-coated pavements and reach my lock-up at Kings Cross. It seemed to me that everything had changed and yet nothing had changed. Danger hovered on street corners. Threat in the eyes of every stranger. The last time I’d set foot in the capital was for my final kill – Billy’s.
Firing up the generator and looking around the dingy walls at the rack of disguises, the pots of coloured contact lenses and props for the tools of my old trade, I felt like a man whose pockets are filled with dirt and stone. My only saving grace: no weapons. I’d disposed of them the day I jacked in my life of crime.
And that left me vulnerable.
The cash I’d hidden behind loose bricks in a facing wall and was exactly where I’d left it. I counted it out – all ten thousand pounds – and sealed it back up. I also had two false passports linked to a couple of credit cards stashed away. I’d hung on to them as insurance, in case of emergency.
Slipping brown lenses into my blue eyes, exchanging my smart overcoat for a musty leather jacket that smelt of gun oil, and putting on a pair of leather gloves, I headed for the Caledonian Road and a barber’s where I knew China Hayes hung out most afternoons.
Fresh snow dusted the pavements. Sleet clung to my hair like a cobweb. The roads were untidy. None of it registered. All I could think of was McCallen.
Sure enough, China Hayes, his face lathered, sat in his favourite seat, two chairs in from the window, bodyguards on point. Before I’d crossed the threshold, three men with You’re dead expressions reached inside their jackets. To the barber’s credit, he didn’t flinch, simply carried on scraping with a cutthroat razor, like he’d seen it all before.
China spread the fingers of one hand, signalling to the men to keep their powder dry, their trigger fingers dancing. He gestured to the barber to step aside. I stood dutifully, my hands crossed in front of me, relaxed.
‘Search him,’ China said without a flicker of emotion.
The biggest of the goons stepped forward, did his thing and, satisfied I was clean, punched me hard on the top of my arm for reasons unknown. I looked into his slab-sided face and read hatred in his expression.
China regarded me with pale blue eyes. ‘I thought you were dead, Hex.’
It had certainly felt like it. ‘Not me,’ I said.
‘Is this a business call?’
Seemed a strange question. Surely he didn’t think I was going to ask him out for a beer. I nodded, silently maintaining eye contact.
‘Give me a few moments,’ China said.
I watched and waited while he had his face shaved, steamed with warm towels, his ear and nostril hair taken care of. No amount of cologne could mask the smell of blood that hung around a man who ordered others to wield the sword and fight fire with fire.
Next, he went for a manicure. This gave me ample time to study his poker face and pebbled
ash complexion, his red lips like raw offal that matched the colour of his hair. It beat me how a man like that could be a narcissist. For years I’d tried to work out why he was called China. Never fathomed it. His goons, meanwhile, stared at me with the detached hostility that comes from years of mindless killing. It didn’t bother me. To them, I was the human equivalent of a Swiss Army knife, multifunctional. To me, they were poor rusty blades and about as useful.
The barber whipped away the gown to reveal China’s trademark tropical shirt, more Hawaii than California, and locked the door and switched the ‘open’ sign for ‘closed’. China stood up and beckoned for me to follow him through to a back room that smelt of liniment and was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of hair products. At least, that’s what the labels said. If the contents were shampoo and hair conditioner, I’d eat my own jacket.
Standing proud, a desk with a telephone and computer and two office chairs – in other words China Central. Hayes sat down in the boss’s chair, a beast in padded leather with levers and switches. His back to the wall, he gestured for me to take the only other available seat. I sat. He pulled open a drawer from which he produced a bottle of malt whisky and two glasses and filled both three fingers full.
Pushing a glass in my direction, he took a long swallow and looked at me straight. I thought this my cue to open my mouth. I was wrong.
‘Someone tried to kill me three nights ago,’ he said.
I did the maths: same night I was at the party with Simone. ‘Last time I checked,’ I said, ‘there are over seven thousand organised crime gangs in the UK. Could have been any one of several.’
China arched a gingery eyebrow. He didn’t need to ask the question. I knew what he was driving at. ‘Wasn’t me,’ I said.
‘Your style.’
I bit down hard to stop my jaw clenching. Billy back from the dead, someone pretending to be me, McCallen gone – someone had my balls to the wall. ‘What happened?’
‘The brakes on my car were tampered with. By pure chance one of the boys took it to pick up petrol. Lost control on a nice clean stretch and hit a tree. No other car involved.’
Final Target Page 8
