The Kill Zone

by Chris Ryan

  The rules were the rules. Get it together with some chick on a night out and you never – never – went home with her on that first meeting, no matter what she promised to do for you. Get her name and address, or her car registration number, and put it through the police computer first. Only if she came up clean would you go back to her place next time you saw her. Ignore basic rules like that and the time would surely come when you found yourself sitting on the sofa while your honeytrap ‘got herself ready’, only to have a couple of Provos step into the room to hood you and blow your head off. It had happened to two of the green-army guys Jack knew, sent to meet their maker for the promise of a blowjob. The Regiment lads were bigger game for the Provos, and had to play it a bit smarter. One of Jack’s mates picked up the niece of an IRA quartermaster one night. Good job he checked her out. She might have had great legs, but the relationship didn’t.

  They said Belfast was different now, but you don’t shake off that kind of paranoia easily. Jack realised he had taken his place directly behind the driver’s seat, not the passenger seat. Force of habit – he could quickly wrap the driver’s seatbelt round his neck if things went pear-shaped.

  The driver dropped him outside an apartment block overlooking the River Lagan. As he approached the building, he noticed an old bag lady on the pavement, her worldly belongings stuffed into a supermarket trolley. She had a battered wireless radio switched on, but it hadn’t been tuned in properly and she was just listening to white noise. She gave Jack a look of intense suspicion that made him feel uncharacteristically uncomfortable.

  It felt weird being here – the flat he’d shared with Siobhan when Lily was just a baby. He’d never forget the time he rocked up to find another man there. The fucker had left with a broken nose and a swelling between his legs very different to the one he’d been expecting. Even now the memory of it gave Jack a pang of irrational jealousy. He had never wanted to leave Siobhan, but she’d left him no choice.

  He tried the main door, but it was shut and the intercom was fucked so he called Siobhan to say he was there. She came down to meet him.

  Unlike Belfast, Siobhan never changed. The jeans, the leather jacket, the shoulder-length blonde hair. She hardly looked any different now to when they’d met all those years ago. A slight tightness around the eyes was all. A wariness. A sadness. As she opened the door, the bag lady barked something incoherent. Siobhan looked over his shoulder at her. ‘She’s always there,’ she told him. ‘Nowhere else to go. I give her a few quid sometimes. She just spends it on Cinzano.’

  There was no greeting. No kiss on the cheek. Jack just followed her inside, up the stairwell and through Siobhan’s front door.

  The flat itself hadn’t changed much. He scanned the familiar furniture, the framed picture on the wall that Lily had done when she was a toddler of her dad dressed in green and wearing a helmet. The whole place looked a bit shoddy, as though its owner had her mind on things other than interior design.

  ‘You want a drink?’ Siobhan asked.

  Jack nodded and sat down as she poured two tumblers of Irish whiskey. The tumblers were empty before they spoke again.

  ‘So what . . . ?’ Jack said.

  ‘A friend of hers turned up in the Royal. She had a picture of Lily in her pocket. I questioned her.’ Siobhan closed her eyes. She was clearly finding it difficult to speak. ‘She told me that Lily went with some guy. Some Asian or Middle Eastern guy. That he . . . that he gave her drugs in return for sex.’

  Jack stood up. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘She didn’t know.’

  That wasn’t good enough. ‘She still there? I’ll talk to her myself. A few minutes with me and she might find she remembers after all.’

  ‘Sit down, Jack,’ Siobhan said peevishly. ‘She’s dead. She died just after I left.’

  He stared angrily at her, then swore under his breath and turned to look out of the window.

  An uncomfortable silence. Jack felt nauseous.

  Siobhan rested her glass on top of her boxy old TV. ‘I got myself suspended today. Well, as good as.’

  ‘Join the club,’ Jack said, but Siobhan continued as if she hadn’t heard him.

  ‘I tell you, Jack. You thought working for Five was a nightmare. These guys make them look like . . . ah, I don’t know.’ She waved one arm in the air in frustration. ‘It’s no wonder kids like Lily are killing themselves. There’s more heroin on the streets of Belfast than there ever has been, but the Drugs Squad are half asleep.’

  ‘It was your choice to move out of the Det, Siobhan.’

  She gave him a sharp look. ‘Give me a break, Jack. You wanted me out of there years ago. It’s why you left us, isn’t it?’

  ‘I left,’ Jack said quietly, ‘because you couldn’t keep your hands to yourself.’

  Siobhan jutted her chin out at him. ‘You were never there, Jack,’ she said.

  Jack shrugged. They’d had this conversation before and it always ended the same way. It wasn’t something he felt like repeating now.

  Siobhan paced the room, then turned to look at him. ‘Listen, Jack. I think I might have a lead. The name Cormac O’Callaghan mean anything to you?’

  Now that got Jack’s attention.

  O’Callaghan was one of those names any Regiment guy who’d served in the Province was unlikely to forget. Back in the early ’90s, O’Callaghan’s crew had been one of the PIRA’s most feared nutting squads. The kind of punishments they dealt out to any of their fellow Republicans were brutal enough to make anyone feel queasy, but what the bastards did among themselves wasn’t of much interest to Jack and his colleagues. O’Callaghan was on their radar for a very different reason: his men’s penchant for nailing off-duty policemen when they were with their families on a Saturday afternoon. One of his lieutenants had mown down one poor sod in full view of about twenty witnesses when he was picking up his kid from football practice. By all accounts the lad had got to his knees and tried to stem the blood flowing from his dad’s neck, and when it was clear the copper was dead, his son hadn’t stopped screaming for an hour. None of the witnesses had dared say a word; at least not until Red had got his hands on one of them and encouraged him to reveal the name of the shooter. Red had tracked O’Callaghan’s boy down, then driven the bastard over the border by himself – he wasn’t the kind of guy to ask anyone else to do his dirty work, though he’d have had pretty much everyone in the Regiment queuing up to lend a hand – forced a confession out of him and put one in the back of the head. O’Callaghan, though, the ringleader, had gone to ground. The bastard knew what was good for him, and he knew what would happen if he ever crossed the path of a Blade.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jack said, his face dark. ‘The name means something to me. You know it does.’

  ‘He’s Belfast’s Mr Heroin these days. The stuff that put Lily’s friend in a hospital bed, you can bet your house it was part of his little enterprise. When they found her, they found a dead boyfriend in the same flat. He used to be part of O’Callaghan’s crew, before he started using.’

  ‘You know where O’Callaghan is?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Jack started to move. ‘All I need is an address. It’s not too late to get him on to tomorrow morning’s obituary pages.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Siobhan snapped. ‘Just sit down.’

  A pause. Jack unclenched his teeth slightly, but he didn’t take a seat.

  ‘Things have moved on, Jack. You can’t just stick these guys in a shallow grave and blame it on sectarianism. And anyway, killing Cormac O’Callaghan won’t do anyone any good. Take him out of the picture, someone else from his organisation will just take his place.’

  ‘That fucker’s had a bullet with his name on it for a long time, Siobhan.’

  ‘Look, Jack. I don’t care about your Regiment bravado, OK? I care about our daughter. About finding her. Believe me, if I thought taking O’Callaghan out would achieve that, I’d do it myself.’

  And the look on her face �
�� half fury, half tears – gave Jack no cause to doubt it.

  He got control of his anger. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So what do you want to do?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to bring him down,’ she replied. ‘To get enough evidence against him to make him start squealing. That way, I can dismantle the whole damn organisation, not just cut one head off the Hydra.’

  ‘Well it sounds like you’re in the right job, Siobhan. I don’t see what I can do. I’m a soldier, not a copper. Why don’t you just . . . I don’t know.’ He searched for the words. ‘Work the case.’

  ‘Listen to me, Jack, OK? Just listen to me.’ Another deep breath. ‘I’ve got a tout,’ she said. ‘O’Callaghan’s nephew. One of the crew. He’s come good with a few bits of intel. One of them is that we’ve got a nark in the squad. Could be anyone, I just don’t know. And even if we didn’t have a bent cop . . .’

  She faltered.

  ‘What?’ Jack demanded.

  ‘They think I’m flogging a dead horse, that there’s no point going after O’Callaghan because he’s the original Teflon don, all that lame shit. They think we should be putting our resources into the small fry – low-level dealers where we get a better chance of conviction, keep our numbers up. But that’s bullshit.’ She pronounced the last word as though she was spitting. ‘Everyone knows why I joined the squad, Jack. I’m on some kind of personal vendetta. They think that because Lily went missing, I can’t see the wood for the fucking trees.’

  Silence.

  And then, even though he knew what sort of reaction it would get, Jack spoke. ‘Maybe they’re right,’ he said.

  It was like taking the pin out of a fragmentation grenade: several seconds of ominous silence, and then an explosion. Siobhan picked up her empty whiskey glass then threw it to the floor where it smashed into countless pieces. ‘Jesus, Jack!’ she yelled. ‘You’re as bad as the rest of them. Of all people in the whole fucking world . . . Lily’s father . . . Of all people, I thought you’d get it.’

  ‘Get it?’ Jack shouted back. ‘Of course I fucking get it. You think I haven’t thought about Lily every day since she went missing? You think it doesn’t rip me apart too? But what are you going to do, Siobhan? Take on every drug dealer in Ireland? Every scumbag in the Province?’

  ‘Of course not—’

  ‘You know where I’ve just been? Afghanistan. Poppy fields as far as the eye can see. That’s where you fight heroin, Siobhan. With guns and fast air. Not on the streets of Belfast with Provo touts—’

  ‘Don’t give me that shit, Jack. Just don’t give me it. Guns and fast air? Is that your solution to everything? You know where I’ve been? In an O’Callaghan lock-up with a pile of guns, a pile of cash and enough drugs to put a hundred girls like Lily in the ground. You don’t believe me? Go and look for yourself.’ She stuck her hand into her back pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper, which in her fury she scrumpled up, and threw it at him like an unruly schoolkid. Jack just watched it fall to the carpet. ‘You can go off playing soldiers all you like, Jack, but it’s here where the real war is, not fucking Afghanistan.’

  ‘You don’t know what’s happening in Afghanistan,’ he shouted. But he knew Siobhan wasn’t in the mood to start hearing about Regiment ops. She wasn’t even listening any more. Her head was in her hands and though there was no sound of weeping, Jack could see her body shaking.

  He swore under his breath. There was something about seeing Siobhan in tears that messed with him. He had to suppress the urge to put an arm around her, but he knew what sort of reaction that would get him. So he just tried to keep his cool and waited for her to raise her face to him once more. The skin around her eyes was streaked and red, and she looked at him with a kind of begging.

  ‘Do you want to help me,’ she asked, ‘or don’t you?’

  Jack gave a deep sigh. He knew Siobhan. He knew she wouldn’t let it lie until he’d heard her out. And even then . . . He helped himself to more whiskey. ‘What I want,’ he said, ‘is to find Lily.’

  Siobhan looked apologetically at the broken glass on the ground. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said.

  Jack shrugged. ‘It’s your glass,’ he replied. He waited a moment while she opened a wooden cabinet and pulled out a sheaf of papers. She flicked through them, pulled out one sheet and handed it to him. It was a printout from a news webpage containing the picture of a man Jack recognised – Middle Eastern origin, round glasses, a neat beard – but couldn’t place. He read the news story underneath.

  MUSLIM PEACE CAMPAIGNER TO TAKE ON THE TERRORISTS Habib Khan, leader of the Islamic Council for Peace, has undertaken to visit the war-torn city of Mogadishu in an attempt to raise awareness of the dangers of fundamentalism within the UK’s Islamic community. Somalia has no functioning government, and as such is known to be a haven for Al Qaeda and other Islamist factions. In a statement, Khan expressed his hope that his trip ‘will highlight the fact that those who threaten our peaceful way of life are no more than common criminals’. When asked whether he feared for his personal safety, he replied: ‘I fear for the safety of us all if we do not unite to weed out terrorism.’

  Jack handed the paper back to Siobhan. ‘I saw this guy on TV,’ he said. ‘He’s a fucking idiot. They’ll make mincemeat out of him out there. But what the hell’s he got to do with Lily?’

  ‘Khan visited O’Callaghan yesterday. I bugged their conversation. He’s O’Callaghan’s supplier.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘For God’s sake, Siobhan. It’s obvious you’ve got the guy mixed up with someone else.’

  Siobhan gave him a dangerous look. ‘That’s what my DCI said. But then he doesn’t know me as well as you do. Do you really think I’d make a mistake like that?’

  ‘He’s just a peace campaigner. The guy might be naive, but that doesn’t mean he’s involved in all this shit.’

  ‘Naive?’ Siobhan scoffed. ‘He’s not naive, Jack. He’s just got good cover. What do you expect him to have – a tattoo on his forehead saying “drug dealer”? I’m telling you: I heard him and I saw him. Khan’s providing O’Callaghan with gear on the cheap, but he wants his money in advance before making this trip.’

  ‘It’ll cost him a fuck of a lot just to get the security around him he’s going to need.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Siobhan dismissed Jack’s comment. ‘But there’s something else. O’Callaghan said this thing to Khan. “How’s the white gold you’ve got stashed in a hole somewhere? Seeing to your needs, I hope.” Those exact words, Jack.’

  She looked at him as though Jack should realise she’d just said something blindingly obvious. He stared at her blankly.

  ‘White gold, Jack. They were talking about girls – white girls. Lily’s friend told me that she and Lily were kept in a house where some “Paki” guy took a shine to her. She said that these people ship girls out to Africa where they fetch a price. Her boyfriend had links with the O’Callaghan crew. Don’t you see? That’s where Khan’s going. Africa. What if he’s the Paki guy she was talking about? What if he knows something about Lily? What if she’s . . . Jesus, what if she’s out there?’

  Jack closed his eyes and pinched his forehead. ‘Siobhan,’ he said. ‘You’re putting two and two together and making five. White gold could mean anything.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He shrugged. ‘Heroin? That’s what you think their business is, after all.’

  ‘It’s not heroin, Jack. I could tell from their conversation. They were talking about girls. I know they were—’

  ‘Christ, Siobhan,’ Jack interrupted. ‘You’re not thinking straight. You’re upset. You’re clutching at straws.’

  Her eyes flashed. ‘No, Jack. I’m not.’ She turned her back on him and looked through the window at the darkening Belfast skyline. ‘I’m off the force for four weeks. After that, who knows? I can’t do anything here, so I’ve made a decision.’

  She looked at him again, and a fire danced in her eyes.

  ‘I’m going to follo
w him,’ she said, turning away again. ‘And I want you to come with me.’

  She remained with her back to him.

  Jack blinked. For a moment he didn’t know what to say. He shook his head. ‘Siobhan, have you got any idea what you’re talking about? What do you think you’re going to do – book an EasyJet flight to Mogadishu? Send your friends a postcard and fucking souvenir? Do you know what that shithole of a country is like?’

  ‘Dangerous,’ she said.

  Jack shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Jumping out of a plane is dangerous. Running ex-Provo touts is dangerous. Mogadishu is fucking suicide. You’ve got a white face, Siobhan. They’d kill you before you’d even taken a few steps on Somali soil.’

  ‘I can take care of myself, Jack.’

  ‘You can take care of yourself in Belfast, sure. But Somalia? Fucking hell, Siobhan. Even the American army won’t go near the place. You have heard of the Battle of Mogadishu? That little bit of business with the Black Hawk?’

  ‘That’s why I need you . . .’

  But Jack was shaking his head. If there was one thing he knew about, this was it. ‘Listen, Siobhan. If the Regiment was to do anything in Somalia – and trust me, they’d have to have a very fucking good reason in the first place – they’d send in half a squadron packing as much weaponry as they can carry and a swarm of choppers to get them in and out. You, me and a couple of handguns . . .’ He shook his head again. ‘Just forget it, all right? This stuff might sound good in your head, but it’s not going to happen.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts, Siobhan.’ For a moment he felt like he was talking to a child. ‘Look, Lily’s missing. Maybe her friend was right. Maybe some fucking raghead is giving her drugs in return for sex.’ He paused and drew a deep breath to control himself at the thought. ‘If it’s true, when I get my hands on this man I swear I’ll rip him apart. You can help me do it. But you’ve got to choose your battles and right now you’re chasing shadows. Habib Khan isn’t who you think he is. He doesn’t know Lily, he’s not involved in drugs. If you start chasing him to Mogadishu, you won’t find your daughter – you’ll end up dead by the side of the road.’