The Black Art of Killing

by Matthew Hall

  ‘It’s not a matter of principle, Leo; it’s one of practicalities. Can you imagine the press?’

  ‘You would prefer that students learned their military history from someone who has never been near a conflict?’

  ‘Now you’re being contrary.’

  ‘I’m simply stating the obvious.’

  ‘There’s a limit to how far I’m prepared to stick my neck out, Leo, especially when I have absolutely no access to the facts.’ He sighed and pressed his long, delicate fingers to his temples. ‘Leo, this is nothing personal. I like you. The students like you. I admire your work. I’m prepared to keep the door open, but for the sake of the college’s reputation we can’t take on a fellow embroiled in this much controversy. I propose you do what you can over the summer to resolve these accusations. You can keep your rooms in college. We’ll meet again at the start of September after your address to West Point and reassess the situation. That’s the best I can do.’

  The two men looked at each other across the room and silently agreed that there was nothing more to be said.

  Black rose from his chair and, accepting the Provost’s handshake, offered his thanks. He had secured himself a lifeline. A slender one, but it was better than falling into the abyss.

  Towers remained incommunicado throughout the morning, failing to answer calls or emails. Only when Black had given up hope and was loading a hastily packed holdall and a cardboard box loaded with books into his Land Rover did his phone finally ring.

  ‘Sorry not to have got back to you earlier. Wanted to work out what the hell was going on.’ Towers sounded irritated rather than apologetic but Black let it pass. ‘Had a word with the Libya desk in ’6 and they’re going to send someone along to have a chat with him.’

  ‘A chat?’

  ‘They don’t want the embarrassment any more than you do, Leo. All these claims were meant to have gone away years ago. I think Mr Mahmoud might be one of those who thought he didn’t get his fair share when the government cheque book came out.’

  ‘But why now?’

  ‘It’s possible some unscrupulous lawyers of the kind who trawl for incidents of imaginary wrongs committed by British soldiers put him up to it, or, I fear, it’s something by way of an inducement to you to get our job done.’

  ‘Freddy?’

  ‘The Committee wants this dealt with. As quickly as possible.’

  Black slammed the tailgate closed and marched to the cab. ‘Why should I work for people who treat me like that?’

  ‘If my fears are correct, it strikes me they’re people who think exactly as we do, Leo. What better way to stimulate a man to action than to threaten all that’s most precious to him? In your case your reputation.’

  Along with the one person in his new life that mattered to him.

  ‘Ours is a strange calling, I admit,’ Towers said with a trace of wistful regret.

  Black remained silent. He climbed on to the hard bench seat behind the wheel and pulled the creaking door shut. His view through the windscreen was of the small apple orchard that bordered the fellows’ car park. A gardener was carefully clearing weeds from the base of a recently planted sapling.

  ‘What do you want me to do for you, Leo? I’ll try my best to put the lid on it, but you know what the price will be … Leo? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered shortly.

  ‘Sorry to change the subject, but you might be interested to know that Stein and her friends slipped the net. Their plane changed course mid-Atlantic and made it to Cayenne, French Guiana. From there they seem to have flown on to Puerto Ayacucho. Had to look it up – a one-horse town in southern Venezuela.’

  Black made no comment, afraid of where Towers was heading.

  ‘This you’ll find very interesting – what you said in your message was bang on. I looked up the list of private contractors operating out of Baghdad back in ’05. There were a dozen or more. Triple Canopy, Vinnell, Blackwater, all the usual suspects, and an outfit called Sabre. Started by a retired French colonel, Auguste Daladier, as far as I can gather. Daladier spent his career in the Foreign Legion, much of it in Africa. It seems he was particularly active in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the nineties through to ’03. According to my man in the Foreign Office, the French took advantage of the civil war and got themselves a bunch of mineral rights in return.’

  Black listened. He couldn’t help but be intrigued.

  ‘It seems Sabre have stayed in business ever since. Contracts all over the world. All the rough stuff that pays the most – they were first in securing the Libyan oil fields; the French government employed them to counter insurgents in Mali and Chad; they’ve been busy in northern Nigeria. We suspect they’ve also been involved in Central and South America, policing the drugs business – the kind of stuff we used to do back in the eighties, knocking out the cartels and seizing their assets. We haven’t got a location for Daladier at present, but my money would be on a rather agreeable tropical villa overlooking the southern Caribbean. If he’s our man and he’s spent the last dozen years recruiting the finest and best to his private army, it still begs the question, what’s he doing with our scientists? Is he taking them to order or what?’ Towers paused briefly to give Black time to assimilate. ‘I thought you might have a theory, Leo.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Black lied.

  ‘Can I tempt you to formulate one? Isn’t this right up your alley – modern warfare?’

  He glanced right out of the driver’s window and saw Silvio Belladini strolling out of one of the college buildings, accompanied by a beautiful young woman who appeared to be hanging on his every word. Seeming to sense his presence, Belladini glanced over, inadvertently caught his eye, then quickly looked away again. He put a hand in the small of the young woman’s back and moved her along.

  ‘Freddy, for the last time, I am not going to bloody Venezuela. Enjoy your weekend.’

  He switched off the phone, tossed it to the far side of the passenger seat and started the engine. Oxford was starting to feel like a prison. He needed to break loose.

  Late afternoon rolled into evening and finally faded to dusk. Black came to a halt for the first time in four hours and looked out from the top of the ridge at a Welsh landscape dissolving in shadow. His lungs burned and his muscles were screaming, but the anger inside refused to subside. He had set out from Ty Argel intending to reason each cause of it away but at some moment during his long tramp across the countryside he had abandoned the effort and accepted that was just how it was, who he was: a man caught in an endless loop of promise and frustration. Doomed by his past.

  Then, as if in response to the setting sun, the vengeful rage that had propelled him up hillsides and through valleys seemed to retreat from his extremities to settle in his core, where, slowly, it coalesced into something hard, cold and flint-edged. Like an object he could weigh in his hands.

  The cacophony of voices in his head reduced to one. It told him he had been here before. Many times. The dilemmas had been different but the choices the same.

  Attack or retreat.

  Live or die.

  Reluctantly, he chose his path.

  With a feeling, if not of peace, of purpose, Black watched the day snuff out and turned for home.

  36

  Midnight had come and gone. Sarah Bellman was alone in the now well-equipped laboratory, stooped over her computer screen, staring at the latest sequences of DNA code that Sphyris had introduced to his infinitely detailed map of the brain. They belonged to tiny clusters of cells grouped in the ventral tegmental area towards the base of the skull. These were the Holy Grail: the cells that he and Holst had been attempting to isolate and distinguish from those grouped around them. A few short lines expressed in the genetic language that comprised only four letters, C, A, G and T, lent them their uniqueness and held the keys to dopamine production. When mildly stimulated, the cells bearing this section of code brought about a sense of warmth and well-being. When excite
d more vigorously, they could provoke a high that was more intense and overwhelming than any caused by an intravenous shot of heroin.

  Now they had their target, her and Professor Kennedy’s task was a purely mechanical one. Over the coming days, with the help of gene-splicing machines that could do in hours what even ten years before had taken teams of technicians months of painstaking manual work, they could set about creating their microscopic containers, woven from strands of DNA, that would deliver charged nanoparticles to exactly the cells, and only the cells, they were targeting.

  When she had started her work the objectives had been entirely noble. Her delivery systems would attack cancer cells wherever they lurked without the need for drugs that indiscriminately destroyed everything in their path. She had never for a moment contemplated their destructive capacity.

  She heard footsteps outside the door. She turned to see Dr Holst’s face framed in the observation pane. He smiled at her and came through.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep?’ he said, rubbing his tired eyes beneath his reading glasses. ‘Me, too. Exciting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very,’ Bellman murmured.

  Holst wandered towards her, admiring the newly installed banks of equipment. ‘This must feel like home from home. Possibly better. It would take me years to persuade the funding committee back home to come up with something like this.’ He perched on one of the stools at the workbench at the side of the lab. ‘It makes you realize just what can be achieved with enough money and determination.’

  Bellman nodded, finding his presence unnerving.

  ‘Forgive me, Sarah, but do I detect some misgivings about our work …? I know none of us chose to be here, but now that we are –’

  ‘I need to know how you got this data.’ The words seemed to come out of her mouth without conscious thought. She immediately regretted them and felt her cheeks burning as Holst regarded her with an even more searching gaze.

  ‘You know how we got it, Sarah. I took biopsies. On a purely human level it’s not a pleasant task, but for the betterment of mankind …’

  She felt the urge to hit him. To wipe the look of false sincerity from his fleshy features, but she remained paralysed, too frightened and unsure of herself to do anything but stare at him like a resentful child.

  Holst struck his most mollifying and avuncular tone. ‘Of course you feel squeamish. We all do. But many of the greatest breakthroughs have the bleakest of beginnings. Wernher von Braun was the Nazis’ chief rocket scientist. His creations rained death on London but two and a half decades later put men on the moon. Don’t you find that inspiring …? It’s as if there is a natural order to these things. Knowledge finds its true purpose in the end. We are just its instruments.’

  He eased off his stool and stepped towards her.

  He placed a clammy hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Out of this darkness you are bringing light into the world, Sarah. Never forget that … Goodnight. Don’t stay up too late.’

  He patted her twice on the arm and made his way out, closing the door quietly behind him.

  Bellman sat in silence for a long moment, then lifted her eyes to the screen.

  It was code. Letters. That’s all it was.

  Holst did his work and she did hers.

  No one was asking her to hurt anyone.

  37

  Black pulled up outside Kathleen Finn’s house shortly before midnight. The blind twitched at the downstairs window. She peered from behind it and beckoned him over. He stepped out of the Land Rover, stiff and aching from his long walk. He would gladly have delayed his visit until the morning, but Kathleen had wanted to meet while the children were in bed, ‘So they don’t have to see me crying again.’

  She opened the door and let him in, glancing left and right at the darkened houses of her neighbours.

  ‘It’s all right. I don’t think anyone’s seen me,’ Black said.

  ‘You don’t know what gossip is till you’ve lived in this street.’ She gave a strained smile. ‘Hi, Leo.’

  ‘Good to see you.’

  The house was still and quiet and immaculately tidy, as if Kathleen had responded to the turmoil of her grief by obsessively ordering every item she possessed. Black noticed that Finn’s walking jacket had gone from its peg in the hall along with his boots, which the last time he had visited had still been among the collection of wellingtons and trainers now arranged on wire racks. He followed Kathleen into the neat front room, where the children’s toys were stowed out of sight in a stack of newly bought plastic boxes. Every surface was gleaming. He sat on plumped cushions and cast an eye along the framed family pictures carefully arranged along a shelf. There was only one small photograph of Finn – dressed in uniform, looking dignified and dependable. An image for the children to hold on to as other memories faded.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Kathleen perched on the chair opposite. She had tended her appearance as meticulously as she had organized the house. Her nails were polished, her skin was smooth and clear and her black hair had been cut so that it perfectly framed her face. She wore black jeans and a blue cotton top the colour of her eyes. Small, delicate items of silver jewellery completed the impression of a woman determined not to show a chink in her armour.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t mind me coming here?’

  ‘I asked you to, didn’t I?’ She straightened her back as if bracing herself. ‘What do you want to know?’

  Black hesitated, not wanting to distress her any more than he had to, but her defiant posture told him that she was ready for whatever he had to say. ‘Something’s been on my mind, Kathleen. Probably like you, I can’t help thinking about what happened in Paris. Perhaps Ryan was just unlucky, but I’d like to rule out the possibility that whoever did it had a history with him.’

  She stared back at him, her expression impassive. ‘What kind of history?’

  ‘My best guess is that the perpetrators were also in the security business – the dark end of it. Did you ever get the impression he’d made enemies in that world, or had had some bad experiences?’

  ‘None that he mentioned.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who he’d been working for lately?’

  ‘He kept the contracts in his desk. I’ve been meaning to clear it out but it’s the one thing I haven’t been able to face.’ Black followed her through to the kitchen diner. In the centre of the room was a door he had assumed led to a pantry, but it opened instead on to a spacious cupboard beneath the stairs. It was large enough for a desk and chair with shelves above, on which were arranged a number of files containing the household bills and papers.

  ‘He kept all his work papers on this side.’ She pointed to the two drawers on the right-hand side of the desk. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a drink? I bloody need one.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve any whisky?’

  ‘I think there’s some in the back of the cupboard. You bought it for Ryan’s fortieth. He said it tasted like ditchwater.’

  ‘That would be the fifteen-year-old Bruichladdich. He told me it was the best thing he’d ever tasted.’

  ‘You were an officer. He didn’t like to hurt your delicate feelings.’ She smiled. ‘Straight ditchwater, is it?’

  ‘Please.’

  She left Black to the task of sorting through the contents of the drawers. The uppermost of the two was full of the usual accumulated detritus: spent insurance documents, various pieces of official correspondence whose relevance had long since expired and, buried at the bottom of the heap, Finn’s official letter of acceptance into the Parachute Regiment, complete with orders to report to Colchester barracks on his nineteenth birthday. Finn had beaten Black into uniform by several years and was already a battle-scarred corporal of twenty-four when Black had first arrived in the old camp at Stirling Lines in Hereford.

  The contents of the bottom drawer were more promising. There were letters from various close protection and security co
mpanies acknowledging his applications for work, remittances itemizing his fees and a number of standard contracts of engagement. Black glanced through a few. Karen was right – all contained strictly worded confidentiality clauses. They also excluded liability for any injury suffered in the line of duty but gave no detail as to what those duties were to be, instead stating vaguely: to perform such tasks and duties as the employer has prior to signature of this contract set out orally or in writing. Clearly the security business wasn’t keen on paper trails.

  He gave up on the drawers and glanced at the contents of the shelf. Lying on their sides at the end of a row of files were desk diaries for each of the last two years. He picked up last year’s and flicked through. The pages were virtually empty, just the odd entry in Finn’s surprisingly neat hand, noting meetings with people whom Black supposed were prospective employers: 5 Jan., 19 Russell Square, Kieran Grant … 12 March, 35 Mortimer Street, Dan Weirside.

  Kathleen returned with a tumbler half filled with pale amber liquid and a large glass of red wine for herself.

  She handed him his drink. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Not a lot. A few names to check.’

  ‘He preferred to keep things in his head. Army habit. How’s the whisky?’

  Black took a sip of earthy petrol. ‘I’ll let him off – it’s an acquired taste.’

  She gave a wry smile and took a mouthful of wine. Almost at once, it relaxed her. Her eyes softened and her tense shoulders dropped. She leaned against the door frame and watched him turn through Finn’s diary.

  He arrived at a long stretch of blank pages that extended from the previous June through to September.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Kathleen asked.

  ‘Did he have the summer off?’

  ‘No. It was the job I told you about. He went away in July. He was meant to be gone six months but he was back in the September.’

  ‘I remember … You said he got ill.’