That was what the attackers had expected, and that was why every man, including the heavily built individual who was directing the operation, was wearing a set of night-vision goggles – NVGs – which meant they had no trouble in seeing precisely where they were going. The NVGs would also allow them to locate their target – Richter – the moment they discovered in which room he was hiding.
There was no need for stealth, because the sound of the explosions would have woken anyone inside the building. In moments, the ground floor of the house echoed with the sound of voices, each calling ‘Clear’ as members of the attacking force checked each room in turn and found nothing.
‘That’s every room on the ground floor,’ one of the men reported, ‘and there’s no sign of him.’
‘He must be upstairs,’ the man in charge said. ‘Get up there and find him. And remember, I want him alive and ideally unharmed. If you have to shoot him, aim for his stomach.’
Like silent grey ghosts, the attackers moved quickly up the broad wooden staircase that led from the hall to the upper landing, weapons held ready and checking everywhere around them for their target and for any sign of danger.
And at that precise moment, with the attackers strung out in a ragged line on the staircase between the hall and the landing, every lamp in the house flared into life, including two matching chandeliers, one in the hall and the other on the landing. Each light fitting held twelve bulbs, and each bulb was rated at 100 watts.
Night vision goggles are optoelectronic devices designed to capture any ambient light that is present and allow the wearer to see a monochrome image even in almost total darkness. Many also include an enhancement that allows the wearer to see thermal infrared images at the same time, allowing vision even when there is no ambient light at all. The NVGs supplied to the assault team were high-end equipment that combined both functions, and the effect of the sudden brilliance of the house lighting was immediate.
Despite the bright light cut-off system within the NVGs, each man’s vision was suddenly subjected to a single blinding flash of light, analogous to staring at the midday sun through binoculars. In that instant, every one of the attacking team was rendered blind, though the effect would only last for a short time.
Screams of pain echoed around the hall and across the landing as the men stumbled and tripped, several tearing off their NVGs, their eyes temporarily useless to them.
Richter’s ambush had worked even better than he had hoped.
The sound of the door opening, the door concealed in the wooden panelling in the hall, was completely inaudible against the background noise. Richter stepped out, followed by two men clad entirely in black, each carrying a Glock pistol in a thigh holster and holding a Heckler and Koch MP5SD, the suppressed variant of the weapon designed for subsonic ammunition.
‘You’re blind and you’re surrounded,’ Richter shouted out, looking at the confusion of men on the staircase. ‘Put down your weapons right now.’
The effect of his shouted command was much as he had expected, two of the men on the staircase swinging their Kalashnikovs to point in his general direction and squeezing the trigger. But even as they fired, the men in black beside Richter aimed and fired at their own weapons, instantly dropping each of their targets with two shots to the torso, the classic ‘double tap’. And as each of the men fell lifeless and tumbled down the staircase, they nudged and tripped two of their companions, still effectively blind and helpless, who also fell, dropping their weapons as they did so.
That left three of the attackers still standing, the two near the top of the staircase carrying assault rifles, and the man wearing a suit who was only armed with a pistol, who was about halfway up.
‘Last chance,’ Richter shouted. ‘Drop those weapons now.’
One man dropped his Kalashnikov and raised his hands, but the man beside him uttered a curse and swung his assault rifle to aim it down the staircase. There was a sound like four heavy objects falling, four heavy thuds, and the back of his jacket flared red as another two figures, also clad entirely in black, fired their MP5SDs from the top of the staircase. The attacker tumbled forward, landing in an uncoordinated tangle of limbs on the stairs, and then lay still.
Richter was aiming his MP5 up the staircase, aware of every action going on around him, but with his attention firmly fixed on the man in the suit. Although he was facing up the staircase, away from him, there was something familiar about his posture, something that told Richter he had had dealings with this person before.
In the brilliant light from the two chandeliers, Richter saw him tense his shoulders and guessed he was about to move. He altered his aim fractionally, and then the man span round, bringing his pistol up to the aim and firing immediately, and then Richter knew exactly who he was. Everything about the situation suddenly fell into place.
‘You!’ he shouted, then squeezed the trigger twice.
One bullet missed but the other hit the man in the stomach and he fell backwards, screaming in pain.
But his own aim had been true, despite the inevitable disorientation caused by the lights going on, and Richter felt a hammer blow in the centre of his chest. The MP5 fell from his suddenly nerveless fingers, and he collapsed backwards onto the wooden floor of the entrance hall as the blackness took him.
Chapter 17
‘Jesus, that hurts,’ Richter said, as one of the SAS troopers helped him into a sitting position against the wall.
‘Yeah, I guess it does,’ the trooper said, ‘but it worked as advertised,’ he added, pointing at the Kevlar vest Richter was wearing.
‘You do seem to manage to get yourself into a shitload of scrapes, Paul,’ the other black clad figure said. ‘You were lucky we were around to save your bacon again. How did you know about the tunnel?’
The four Special Air Service men had arrived at the location early that evening, but had not driven to the safe house. Instead, they’d been sent to the adjoining property, also owned by the SIS. It was some distance away and located on the opposite side of a thick hedge. When the two properties had been purchased, an old drainage ditch had run close to each house, and somebody at Vauxhall Cross had obviously decided to make use of this, covering over the top and concreting the base and sides of the open space and providing access tunnels from it to the cellar of each of the properties, allowing secure and completely undetectable movement between the two houses. Having an entirely secret way of escaping from a safe house was an excellent idea and, unusually for SIS, had been faultlessly accomplished.
The SAS team had waited in the adjoining property until Richter had called to tell them that Carpenter and the other three men had gone, and had then walked through the tunnel to the safe house and positioned themselves ready for the expected assault, two of them in a room at the top of the stairs. The other two, including Dekker, had waited behind the concealed door to the cellar, which was also the location of the master electrical circuit breaker for the house lighting.
‘There’s a kind of user guide for the property that I looked at when I got here. It seemed like a really good idea to make use of it, to spring the trap. Anyway, thanks for all your help.’
‘As usual,’ the SAS officer prompted.
‘Okay, Colin. Yes, thanks for all your help as usual. Is everything secure?’
Captain Colin Redmond Decker, sniper team commander, member of 22 SAS and long-time friend of Paul Richter, glanced back towards the centre of the hall, where his men had already laid out the three dead bodies and disarmed and secured the three live attackers, binding their wrists and ankles together with plasticuffs.
‘Pretty much, yes. The one you shot is still in the land of the living and bleating on about emergency hospital treatment and diplomatic immunity and stuff. Who is he? You obviously know who he is, and you sound like you have some history with him.’
Richter nodded. ‘You’re damn right I know him, and you know of him, though you never met him face-to-face. He calls himself Andrew Lomas, but
he’s Russian by birth and his real name is Alexei Lomosolov. Remember Raya Kosov?’
Dekker looked blank for a moment, then his face cleared. ‘She was that Russian network manager who worked at Yazenevo and then defected. That’s when we first met. You were sent to Italy to pick her up because she wouldn’t meet with anybody who was employed by any part of the British security apparatus, and I went along to cover your back.’
‘Exactly. I was an unemployed Harrier pilot, and Simpson was using me as a stalking horse, to try to unmask a double agent working at Vauxhall Cross.’
‘She was a great girl. I remember the three of us kind of fighting our way out of Italy and across Europe to get back to London. You had something going with her, if I remember rightly, but then she died.’
Richter shook his head. ‘She didn’t die, exactly. She was murdered in a hotel room near Heathrow. She was stripped naked, tied to a bed, gagged and then cut to pieces very slowly. The pathologist reckoned it took her at least an hour to die, maybe longer. And the man who did it is lying over there claiming to have diplomatic immunity.’
‘Lomas. I remember now. But I thought you met him a couple years later in Italy and sorted him out.’
Richter nodded. ‘I did, but I only had a knife and I got pulled off him before I could finish the job. This time, I’m going to make sure.’
‘Are you sure that’s a good idea? Simpson will already be on his way here, and from what I know of Lomas your outfit will probably want to pump him dry.’
‘Probably,’ Richter agreed, standing up and shrugging off Dekker’s helping hand.
He walked across the hall, still a little unsteady from the after-effects of the bullet wound and the bruising he had suffered when Lomas’s shot had smashed into his Kevlar jacket.
Like the other men, Lomas had been secured with plasticuffs around his wrists and ankles, and he was curled into a foetal position, his hands clenched over the bullet wound in the stomach.
‘Give me a knife,’ Richter said, and Dekker pulled a combat knife from his belt and passed it to him, handle first.
Richter bent down and sliced the blade through the plasticuffs around Lomas’s ankles, and then freed his wrists.
As Lomas felt the restraints fall away, he looked up, his almost black eyes boring into Richter’s face, his face racked with the agony of his wound.
‘You fucked up again, Alexei,’ Richter said, his voice flat and cold. ‘All these men, all these mercenaries, just to try and take me down. And I’m still standing and you’re not.’
‘I owed you, Richter,’ Lomas said, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘You cut me, cut me badly, and you needed to pay for that. It just took me a lot longer than I expected to catch up with you. And there’s nothing you can do to me now. I’m an accredited Russian diplomat, and I’m ordering you to get me to a hospital immediately.’
Richter nodded. ‘I’ll tell you what’s going to happen in a minute. First, do you remember Raya Kosov? You cut her to pieces in a bedroom in a hotel near Heathrow.’
‘That was just business,’ Lomas said. ‘That bitch betrayed Russia, betrayed her homeland. She deserved to die, as painfully as possible, and it was only right that it should take as long as possible. My superiors in the SVR at Yazenevo told me it had to take at least an hour, and shallow cuts with a really sharp blade seemed the best way to do it. She lasted longer than we expected. But it was just business,’ he repeated.
Richter smiled slightly as he stared down at the wounded man. ‘Somehow, I thought you’d say that.’
He turned away from Lomas and walked back over to where the weapons taken from the attackers had been collected together.
‘Which is his pistol?’ he asked Dekker.
‘That Glock.’
Richter picked it up. The weapon had been unloaded and the magazine emptied. He picked up the magazine as well, reached into his pocket and took out one round of nine-millimetre ammunition, inserted it into the magazine and then pulled back and released the slide to cock the weapon.
‘You’re thinking suicide?’ Dekker asked.
‘Not exactly. More like self-defence.’
He walked back over to Lomas, kicked his leg to attract his attention and then showed him the pistol.
‘We’re not quite finished, you and me,’ he said. ‘Just like what happened to Raya, years ago, this is business. There’s one round in the chamber of that pistol, so you’ve got one chance to end this the way you wanted. Who knows, you might get lucky.’
He bent down and placed the pistol within a few inches of Lomas’s blood-caked right hand, then stood back, his eyes never leaving the Russian’s face.
‘It’s make your mind up time, because one of us is leaving this house in a body bag. And my money’s on you.’
‘You can’t do this,’ the Russian said, his voice quietly desperate. ‘I’m a diplomat, and I have immunity. Check my passport.’
‘You know where you can shove your immunity, Alexei, and your passport. Right here, in this house, and right now, I am the law and I represent justice. I am the judge, your judge, which I suppose is kind of ironic, because when I was at school somebody told me that that is what my name actually means. I’m English, but in German, “Richter” means a judge. So you’ve got two choices. Try and kill me, or just do nothing, and I’ll shoot you right where you’re lying. But if I’m dead, maybe you can talk one of these other guys into calling an ambulance for you. I doubt if they will, but at least you could try.’
Lomas’s gaze shifted between the pistol lying by his side and Richter standing watching him. And then he seemed to make a decision. Moving like a striking snake, he grabbed the Glock, aimed it straight at Richter’s face and pulled the trigger. But the weapon only emitted a single click.
Richter didn’t duck or move in any way at all, but then he nodded slowly.
‘A misfire. That’s really unfortunate, Alexei, and unusual, because Glocks are usually so reliable. But as I said, this is business, and we really need to finish it.’
Moving almost casually, Richter pulled the Browning from his shoulder holster. He pressed the button on the left side of the butt, removed the magazine and checked that it was full before replacing it in the pistol. Then he snapped off the safety catch and looked down at Lomas.
The Russian was desperately working the slide of the Glock to clear what he probably assumed was a jam. His hands were slippery with his own blood, and he wasn’t having much luck. Then he finally managed to reject the round that hadn’t fired and checked the magazine. But it was empty. He picked up the ejected cartridge and looked at it. Then he stared back at Richter, despair clouding his gaze.
‘If you’ve got any last words, Alexei, now would be the time to say them.’
But before the Russian could even open his mouth to respond, Richter aimed the Browning at his recumbent figure and pulled the trigger. Not once, but again and again and again until he’d emptied the magazine, the shots coming so close together that it sounded almost like a submachine-gun.
‘Walk away from that, you bastard,’ he said, replacing the Browning in his holster.
Then he bent forward and picked up the Glock and the empty magazine and handed the two items to Dekker. He also retrieved the single nine-millimetre round he’d loaded into the pistol and replaced it in his pocket.
‘Lucky it was a dud,’ Dekker remarked.
‘No, it’s the real thing,’ Richter assured him. ‘But it’s one I reloaded myself, and I kind of forgot to put in powder or a primer. I always carry it with me. It’s handy to check the way a pistol is working because you can dry-fire it without any problem. So, are you okay with self-defence? You saw him aim the gun at me.’
Dekker nodded. ‘I think we all saw that. But you do know that Simpson will be really pissed?’
‘Probably, but right now I genuinely don’t give a shit.’
‘What were those gunshots?’ Richard Simpson demanded, walking into the hall through the open space where the
door used to be. None of them had heard his car arrive. Then he stopped and looked around at the carnage that surrounded him. ‘Jesus Christ, Richter, what the hell happened here? And look at this bloody damage. The accountants at Legoland are going to be really unhappy with us. We only borrowed the place for twenty-four hours, and look at it now. Needs a complete bloody renovation. Maybe a rebuild.’
Then he looked across the hall at the unmoving figure of Andrew Lomas, the only body not placed neatly in a line with the others.
‘Who’s that?’
‘That is, or to be absolutely accurate that was, Alexi Lomosolov, also known as Andrew Lomas. He was the architect of this little scheme. I knew you’d want to question him, and we tried to keep them alive, but he went for his gun and I had no option but to shoot him. In self-defence, obviously, as this officer and all of his men will confirm.’
The expression on Simpson’s face showed clearly that he didn’t believe a single word of Richter’s explanation.
‘Yeah, right. If you had the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope here as witnesses to what happened, I still wouldn’t bloody well believe you. I know you wanted Lomas dead, and my guess is you just executed him. Can’t say I blame you, though.’ He looked around the hall again. ‘Do you have any idea how much sodding paperwork this fiasco will generate? It’ll be a bloody nightmare trying to square this one away.’
‘I’m sorry about that. But at least we know the who and the why about all this, and we also know that now it’s all over.’
Simpson looked at Richter, trying to work out if he was being sarcastic or facetious. Then he shook his head and waved him away.
‘Well you can sod off now while I try and start getting this cleaned up. Carpenter should be here with the van any minute. I’ll want a full written report of the entire sequence of events from you. That’s everything that happened from the assassination of Prince Nasty until right now, and I want it on my desk by nine in the morning the day after tomorrow. And if it has some contact with reality and isn’t completely and obviously a work of fiction, that would be a bonus.’
Retribution Page 12
