The Kill Zone

by Chris Ryan

  Politicians were arguing on the screen, their suits smartly pressed and their faces fat and ruddy. ‘Men are dying,’ one of them announced. ‘They’re not just statistics. They are people’s sons, husbands and brothers. The terrorism threat level in the UK remains critical. Our streets are being flooded with heroin that comes directly from Helmand Province. And yet the government refuses to acknowledge that its strategy in Afghanistan is failing miserably . . .’

  The junkies lay there, perfectly still.

  A knock on the door.

  Another knock. And then a crash. The door burst inwards as a hydraulic battering ram whacked against it. Police entered, carefully at first. Gingerly. But when they saw the two figures lying motionless on the floor, they moved with a new urgency.

  One of the officers knelt down by the man and pressed his fingers to the junkie’s neck.

  ‘No pulse,’ he said, his voice terse, just as one of his colleagues checked the pulse of the girl.

  ‘Nothing,’ the second police officer said.

  The others lowered their heads slightly.

  ‘Wait. I’ve got something.’ A faint pulse. ‘Get an ambulance here, now!’

  The police officer moved the debris of the drug binge away from the girl’s body, then stuck two fingers down her throat to check for obstructions. Nothing. ‘She needs CPR!’ he shouted. ‘Help me!’

  A third officer bent down, held the girl’s nose and performed two rescue breaths in quick succession. His colleague put his hands, one on top of the other, on her ribcage and pushed down thirty times.

  ‘Go again,’ he said, and the two of them carried out the CPR routine another time.

  It didn’t really look like it was doing much good. The girl’s face remained deathly white; she didn’t regain consciousness; she didn’t move. When the paramedics arrived, they covered her face with an oxygen mask, transferred her to a stretcher and carefully manoeuvred her back down the seventeen flights of stairs and into the back of a waiting ambulance. Her face looked even more deathlike bathed in the glow of the flashing blue lights, as a small crowd looked on in the rain.

  Back up in the flat, a forensics officer took photographs and made notes. ‘What a shithole,’ he observed to no one in particular.

  ‘Yeah,’ one of the cops replied. ‘They didn’t spend their spare cash in Ikea, to be sure.’

  When the forensics officer gave the word, the dead junkie was zipped up into a body bag and taken away to be opened up and examined by the coroner. But with a crack pipe and a hypodermic syringe by his corpse, no one doubted for a minute what cause of death the coroner would record.

  Back to back. A lethal cocktail, if you fuck it up. And as drug fuck-ups go, this was sterling silver. The girl was lucky to be alive, the cops said as they left the scene.

  None of them really thought she’d make it through the night.

  3

  Another part of Belfast. The same evening.

  If Siobhan Byrne was very honest with herself, she had been looking forward to this moment. They were standing in the kitchen of an unassuming two-up two-down in the southern part of the city. She kept her old leather jacket zipped up, not just because it was cold in here, but because it concealed her standard-issue Glock 9 mm. Siobhan, though, wasn’t a standard-issue kind of girl, which was why she also had a PPK strapped to her ankle.

  ‘Now don’t take this the wrong way,’ her companion was saying in his broad Belfast accent, eyeing her up and down like a john checking out a hooker. ‘You’re a fine-looking woman and I’m a sucker for a nice tight pair of jeans.’ He walked up to her and lightly touched Siobhan’s shoulder-length blonde hair; she caught the whiff of cigarettes from his nicotine-stained fingers. ‘They say, don’t they, that gentlemen prefer blondes. Personally, I’m more of a brunette man, but I’d be willing to make an exception in your case. If it weren’t for the fact, of course, that you’re a pig and I don’t know what kind of diseases I’d catch.’

  His smile became a sneer as he let his fingers fall, turned and looked around the room. ‘What is this fucking place you’ve brought me to anyway?’

  ‘It’s just what I said it was,’ Siobhan replied in an accent that was almost, but not quite, as broad as his. ‘A little place out of the way where we can talk. You know what we pigs are like – always wanting to know the craic.’

  No one lived in this house. It had a history. In the corner of this room there was a white door with peeling paint. Open that door and you’d find a flight of steps that led down to a basement. During the Troubles, if you were one of the PIRA boys – or, on occasion, one of the girls – the last thing you wanted was to find yourself being walked down those steps. All you’d see was a table, a chair and a directional lamp. Special Branch never admitted it was there, naturally; but they were always very happy with the intelligence that the JSIW guys coerced out of known Republican terrorists down in that basement. The room was soundproofed and lined in concrete, with a sloping floor down to a drain in the corner. It made cleaning up after the interrogation sessions a bit easier, but Siobhan was pretty sure that if you looked hard enough, you’d still find traces of blood down there.

  Those days were gone, but the house remained. It was unknown by most of Siobhan’s colleagues in the police, though she supposed it still showed up on a list of government assets somewhere in Stormont. And while it was there, and empty, she was more than happy to make use of it. Not that she needed the underground facilities. The photographs she had in a brown A4 envelope would do the job just as well. At least she hoped they would. She opened up the envelope and started laying them out on the table.

  The man didn’t look at them at first. He just eyed Siobhan warily. ‘What are these?’ he demanded. ‘Holiday snaps? No, don’t tell me. Porno shots. You and your boyfriend. Look, darling, I mean what I say. No means no. You’re just not my type.’

  Siobhan ignored him and continued to lay out the photographs. When she had finished, she took a step back. ‘Take your time, Kieran,’ she said, her voice quiet and calm. ‘Have a good look. Tell me when you’re ready to talk.’

  She smiled at him, and waited.

  Kieran O’Callaghan. She knew more about this slimeball than she’d ever wanted to. Forty-two years of age, though despite his alcohol-reddened nose he looked a good ten years younger, his thick black hair not showing even the slightest sign of grey. His blue eyes, normally full of arrogance, were suspicious now. Despite all his bluster, there was something almost fragile about him. He was thin, quite slight, and you wouldn’t have thought he’d served five years in the Maze, or that he’d still be inside if it hadn’t been for the Good Friday Agreement that let lowlifes like this back out on the street. And they didn’t get much lower than Kieran O’Callaghan. The man had form. Back during the Troubles, you could pretty well divide the PIRA boys into two groups – those who were politically committed to the Republican cause, and those who just used it as a front for their illegal activities. Kieran fell firmly into the latter camp. The O’Callaghan family would pay lip service to the cause, they’d go on the marches and they’d pay their dues, but only because you couldn’t operate as a criminal in Belfast without doing so. When Kieran bought himself a stint in the Maze by putting a bullet into the skull of an RUC officer, it wasn’t because the poor bastard was on the wrong side of the political fence; it was because he’d stumbled across an O’Callaghan arms cache.

  Kieran had been a free man for ten years now, but under the terms of the Agreement he only had to put one foot wrong and he’d be back behind bars before he could so much as whimper. And Siobhan was gambling that beneath the bluster lay the heart of a coward.

  Kieran stood at the table, glancing almost nonchalantly down at the photographs, as if they were of only passing interest. But behind those bright blue eyes, you could see his mind working. Hell, you could practically hear the cogs whirring.

  He said nothing.

  ‘I was reading the papers the other day,’ Siobhan said, keep
ing her voice as conversational as she could. ‘Some psychologist. He was saying that when kids reach the age of three and a half, their memories get, you know, hard-wired. So stuff that happens to them after that age, they remember it in later life.’ She gave him a piercing look. ‘Your boy – little Jackie, isn’t it? How old would he be, now?’

  Siobhan knew the answer, of course, and Kieran knew she knew. He narrowed his eyes at her and didn’t reply.

  ‘Four years of age,’ she continued. ‘And to see his father put away for, what, another fifteen years? And with your previous, Kieran, I think you can kiss goodbye to any chance of parole. That would sure be a terrible thing for a young boy to have to endure, wouldn’t it now?’

  Try and wriggle your way out of this one, you murderous bastard, she thought to herself.

  ‘Still,’ she persevered, ‘there’s always his mother. Janice, isn’t it? Janice and Jackie, together against the world. I suppose your uncle will throw them a bone every now and then, make sure they’re not out on the streets. But you’re looking at a long stretch here, Kieran. Janice has other needs, you know – I can’t help thinking that she’ll find the bed a little too big without you—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Kieran hissed. It was the first time he’d spoken since she had laid the photographs out in front of him.

  It had taken Siobhan a long time and a long lens to get them. Even when she had been snapping – a week ago, hiding out on a clifftop on the southern coast of the Republic – she had doubted that she was going to get anything worth having. And her colleagues, no doubt, wouldn’t have given them a second look. Truth was, any brief worth their salt would get these pictures laughed out of court in two seconds flat – if they ever even got as far as court. Siobhan knew that, but she reckoned that Kieran didn’t. As soon as she’d brought the images up on her computer screen, she had known that she could work with them. He wouldn’t see a mess of legal technicalities. He’d just see the fifteen years in glorious Technicolor before him.

  A moment of silence, then Siobhan tapped her finger on the middle photo of five. ‘That’s the one that’s going to nail you, Kieran. That’s the smoking gun.’

  It showed him by a boat on the beach. He had jemmied open a wooden crate to reveal – you could see it quite clearly – a neatly packaged stash of golden brown powder.

  ‘What would you say the street value of that would be now, Kieran?’ she mused. ‘A few hundred thousand? Half a mill? Enough to keep your uncle very comfortable for a while, anyway. Worth a bit less once he’s laundered it, of course, but still . . . I wonder how much of that you’ll be taking home, Kieran. Doesn’t seem quite right, does it? You take all the risk, and he takes all the profit.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘We’re very close to nailing him, Kieran. But when we do . . .’ She held up her hands in a gesture almost of apology. ‘When we do, it will be difficult to keep your name out of it. So the way I see it, Kieran, you’ve got two options. Prison, or not prison.’ She put one hand to her head. ‘You know what, there’s something I forgot. I took the liberty of transferring a grand into your bank account. It won’t take much for me to make sure the details of that little transaction end up in your uncle’s hand. I’ll wait till you’re banged up, of course, but I suppose that if Cormac thinks you’ve been doing a bit of work on the side, your sentence might be shorter than everyone thinks.’

  She didn’t take her eyes from him.

  ‘Of course, if you go for the prison option, well that’s fine by me. But if you go for the not prison option, I’ll need a little something in return.’

  He looked as if he might hit her.

  ‘I’m not a grass,’ he whispered.

  A pause.

  ‘I’m sure you’re not,’ Siobhan replied. ‘People like you never are. At least, not at first.’

  ‘I said, I’m not a grass.’

  He sounded like he meant it. She felt her stomach sink, but did everything she could not to show it. Instead she just shrugged. ‘Well then,’ she said, starting to gather up the photographs. ‘I guess that’s that.’ She turned round and made for the door. ‘You can show yourself out, can you?’

  Siobhan was glad that her back was turned. This was it – the moment when he would make his decision – and she didn’t know whether she’d be able to keep the nerves from her face.

  ‘Wait,’ he said.

  She turned.

  He looked like he was deliberating.

  ‘It won’t be like the Maze, you know, Kieran,’ she purred. ‘You won’t be with your own. You’ll be with rapists and kiddie fiddlers. It’s a long time to spend with—’

  ‘You know what my uncle will do if he finds out?’ Kieran interrupted. ‘You know what will happen to me?’

  Siobhan shrugged. ‘It’s your choice. But you need to make it now. The offer won’t be on the table in ten minutes’ time.’

  He turned and walked to the ancient kitchen units that lined the back wall, clutching on to the edge of the sink. His head was bowed, his shoulders hunched. For a brief, irrational moment, Siobhan wondered if he was going to cry.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he whispered.

  Siobhan felt a small surge inside. ‘Well now,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we just sit down and talk about it?’

  Kieran turned. ‘I don’t want to sit down. Just tell me what you want, woman, and be done with it.’

  Siobhan inclined her head. ‘Information, Kieran. Good information. Gossip is no good to me. I need information that will put your uncle behind bars. You deliver the good stuff and maybe – maybe – I can keep you out of jail. Do we have a deal?’

  Kieran O’Callaghan looked at her with hatred. ‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘We have a deal.’ He finally took a seat at the table, looking totally dejected.

  ‘OK, Kieran,’ Siobhan said. ‘I’m going to tell you what I know. It’s all about heroin. The price on the street is down and there’s more high-grade product than we’ve seen for years. Your uncle is at the centre of all this.’

  She paused and surveyed his face for any sign of acknowledgement. There was none, so she continued.

  ‘I’ll give him this, Kieran. Cormac is smart. I know about his building business. I know about his restaurants. They’re all clean, all legit, but he’s using them to launder his drug money so it comes out squeaky clean. What you need to give me, Kieran, is something to get at him with.’

  ‘You’ll never do it,’ Kieran said, his voice curt.

  ‘You’d better hope I do, Kieran,’ Siobhan replied.

  ‘Cormac’s too fucking switched on for that, lady. Everything’s at arm’s length. You think you’ll get a picture of him unloading crates from a boat? Jesus, I don’t think he’s ever even seen a wrap of H, let alone moved a stash. Shit doesn’t stick to Cormac. Sometimes I wonder why he bothers buying bog roll.’

  Siobhan nodded slowly. ‘So I’m right,’ she said. ‘It’s all heroin now.’

  Kieran looked down at his palms. ‘It never used to be,’ he murmured. ‘Before, it was all coke, in from Colombia. But then, about a year ago . . .’

  He looked up at her again, doubt suddenly shadowing his face.

  ‘Go on,’ Siobhan told him.

  Kieran squeezed the bridge of his nose between two fingers before continuing. ‘About a year ago, it all changed. The product changed, the importation routes changed, and the money certainly changed. Cormac’s got more cash than he can damn well spend. Not that you’d know it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’d think someone with all that money would buy himself a few luxuries once in a while. The way my uncle runs the business, you’d think he was damn well broke. He sits in the back room of that pub, giving out his instructions like he was—’

  ‘So the heroin,’ Siobhan steered him back. ‘Did your uncle tell you where it’s coming from? Who his supplier is?’

  Kieran seemed to find that genuinely funny. ‘Tell me? You must be shitting me, woman. Cormac doesn�
��t tell anybody anything. What’s that they say, about the left hand not knowing what the right hand’s doing? That’s what it’s like with him. Nobody who works for the family knows anything more than they need to.’

  He gave Siobhan a combative look, but she was a match for it.

  ‘Sorry, Kieran. You’ll have to do better than that.’

  ‘I’m telling you, woman. He plays his cards close to his chest.’

  ‘Then you’re going to have to sneak a look at his hand, aren’t you.’

  Silence.

  Kieran put his hand in his pocket and Siobhan’s fingers automatically started feeling for her handgun. All he brought out, though, was a pouch of baccy and some skins. Siobhan could tell that the cogs had started whirring again as her new tout worked out the pros and cons. Finally he seemed to decide on something. ‘You’re not the only one with a set of eyes on the inside,’ he said in a low voice as he rolled a ciggy.

  Siobhan stayed very calm. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just what I say. Cormac’s got a pig on the payroll. Don’t ask me who. Drugs Squad, that’s all I know.’ Siobhan could tell what he was thinking: what if this bitch is Cormac’s bent copper? ‘How do I know it’s not you?’ he asked.

  Siobhan shrugged. ‘If you wake up dead tomorrow morning, it is me.’ She didn’t feel at all inclined to put his mind at rest. The more this little shit was made to squirm, the better as far as she was concerned. In any case, she was suddenly distracted by this new piece of intelligence. It didn’t really surprise her that one of her colleagues was playing for the other side – she knew that anyone could be bought for the right price.

  ‘Find out,’ she told him.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Well then maybe I can give you a helping hand. You’ll find I’m very generous like that, you know.’

  Siobhan removed an item from her pocket. It looked like a simple black box, about the same size and shape as a matchbox, but several times heavier. She held it up between a thumb and two fingers. ‘Present for you,’ she said.