Kill a Spy
The House of Killers
Samantha Lee Howe
One More Chapter
a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021
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Copyright © Samantha Lee Howe 2021
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Cover design by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
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Samantha Lee Howe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
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Source ISBN: 9780008444594
Ebook Edition © July 2021 ISBN: 9780008444587
Version: 2021-07-12
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Acknowledgments
Thank you for reading…
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About the Author
Also by Samantha Lee Howe
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About the Publisher
In memory of Jack Harman,
lost to the world too young and too soon.
‘They yearn for what they fear.’
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno (tr. by John Ciardi)
Prologue
Tehrin
Tehrin Kozem smooths back his shower-wet locks, then walks into the bedroom with a towel slung around his hips.
‘Morning babe,’ he says.
His girlfriend Kara is sleeping still, covers pulled around her as she tries to hold onto the dream she’s having. She hasn’t heard his soft greeting and doesn’t respond. She’s like this every morning and Tehrin finds it endearing how reluctant she is to wake.
For months now he’s been living in London with Kara. She has an expensive apartment in the Docklands, and Tehrin knows he’s fallen on his feet in every way. Kara is smart, beautiful and has personal wealth.
They met six months ago when he was visiting relatives in London, and it was a shocking whirlwind that he still hasn’t quite got his head around. Though she’s white and his parents didn’t approve, he just had to be with her and so he didn’t return to his home in Syria. Instead Tehrin came to live with Kara, turning his back on everything he’d always known.
Every day he receives an email from his mother begging him to return to his rightful home, and to marry a fiancée he’s never met. But Tehrin has found love and nothing, not even his considerable inheritance, will entice him back to take part in a life he no longer believes in.
Thanks to his English mother, he has dual nationality. He also has a trust fund, that neither of his parents could keep from him. Not since he turned 21 and his grandparents’ money came into his own control – all four million pounds of it. Though his father had tried tying up his inheritance in court – as an attempt to pull him back in line – this only succeeded in making Tehrin more determined to live as he wished.
Tehrin dries himself and then, naked, goes to Kara’s side of the bed. He looks down at her lovely sleeping face. Such pure skin. So white and smooth next to his warm brown flesh, and those beautiful blue eyes that never appear cold. Tehrin’s heart swells with pride until he almost imagines it bursting from his chest. How has this happened? He is so fortunate. Allah was smiling on him the day they met. He is the luckiest man in the world.
Kara moves and groans as though she objects to his intense scrutiny, but she doesn’t wake and so Tehrin pulls on some boxer shorts and goes out to make his strong aromatic Arabic coffee, while she holds on a little longer to sleep.
The apartment is large and open plan in the main living areas. It reminds him of the TV shows Kara sometimes watches on home improvements. It’s clean and modern, no character at all, except for the slight touches of feminine glitter here and there.
He’s never asked her about her style but now, as he waits for the small metal pot to bring his coffee to the right temperature, he thinks about the home they will one day buy together: when he finally persuades her to marry him.
The pot begins to boil, and Tehrin takes it off, pouring coffee into a miniscule cup. He adds sugar and then, sitting at the breakfast bar, sips the hot drink.
From the bedroom he hears Kara’s mobile phone ring and her half-grumpy response as she answers. Probably her mother, he thinks. Kara is close to her, and they often talk on the phone. Tehrin has yet to meet his future mother-in-law, but Kara says she’s happy for her daughter nonetheless.
Life is good. Tehrin has everything he could ever want and he’s never been happier.
His own mobile phone is charging on the kitchen counter. He switches it on and begins to wade through his emails, pushing aside the pleading ones from his mother. He sees one from his solicitor asking him to call. Then he receives a notification for voicemail.
He calls the message service and listens.
‘Tehrin, I’m afraid your payment didn’t ar
rive. Can you call me? This account is a little overdue now.’
Tehrin frowns. He set up the BACS payment himself, ready to go yesterday. He opens his bank account app and logs in.
The account opens and Tehrin is shocked to see the balance of his account reduced to zero, and a message from the bank telling him his account will be closed now that he’s moved his money to another bank.
‘Father! Damn you!’ he says, but this is irrational. His father couldn’t touch his money, that would be fraud! He can’t believe he’d resort to that.
‘Is that coffee I smell?’ Kara says.
‘Yes,’ says Tehrin, but he’s distracted and doesn’t look at her.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asks. Kara comes over to the breakfast bar.
‘The money. My inheritance. It’s gone.’
‘What do you mean, gone?’ she asks.
‘My bank account is empty.’ There’s an edge of panic in his voice.
‘That must be an error,’ she says.
‘Yes, of course. It must be,’ he smiles at her in an attempt to dispel his own anxiety. ‘I’ll call the bank.’
He searches for the helpline number and rings it but as his phone connects to the call centre, Tehrin looks up and sees that Kara is holding a gun and pointing it directly at him.
He almost laughs, thinking this is some kind of joke.
‘You’d better hang up,’ she says. ‘I know exactly where your money is. I opened a new account in your name. An account that only I have the access codes for.’
Tehrin disconnects the call. He stares at the gun. A feeling of anxiety replaces the emotion of love and pride that he’d been enjoying just moments before.
‘How?’ he asks.
‘Remember the parcel you signed for last week? You gave your money away in that very second.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Tehrin says. His mind flashes to their loving sex the night before, but this woman, with such coldness in her eyes, does not feel like the same one he made love to.
‘Oh Tehrin. It would have been so much better if you hadn’t checked today. I was going to take you out somewhere. Now you’re going to make a tremendous mess on my rug. Mother won’t like that at all. Plus, it means I’ll have to bring a cleaner in to dispose of you. Such unnecessary trouble.’
Kara sighs.
Tehrin climbs off the breakfast-bar stool and backs away from her.
‘You’ll kill me? After all we’ve meant to each other? All you had to do was ask. My money would have been yours if we married…’
‘I don’t love you, Tehrin. I can’t feel anything like that about anyone. But for what it’s worth, I never faked it in the bedroom,’ Kara says.
‘Kara…’
She smiles and then in a moment of elucidation, he knows: this isn’t even her real name. His mother had warned him about women like this. She’d known who he was and had gone after him. Everything about her is a lie.
Flight mode kicking in, he turns and runs for the bedroom.
The gun goes off: two near-silent pops. Sharp punches smash into his back. By his own momentum, and from the impact of the bullets, Tehrin is propelled forwards. His legs give under him and he drops hard onto the hardwood floor. He tries to get up but his legs won’t work. His arms are weak and he can barely move.
Kara walks towards him.
‘You’re such a pretty boy,’ she says. ‘It was fun while it lasted.’
She presses the gun against his forehead.
Fear surges up into Tehrin’s chest as he realizes this is the end of his life: 21 and he’s barely even seen the world…
He closes his eyes but it doesn’t stop Kara from pulling the trigger and plummeting him into darkness.
Chapter One
Beth
Bethany Cane’s hand trembles as she turns the key in the lock. The door opens and she enters her home for the first time in weeks. Beth looks over her shoulder at the car posted outside. Her ‘new norm’ for the foreseeable future in the form of a twenty-four-hour security detail. Beth is grateful for them.
A few weeks ago, she was rescued from a mental health ward. This secure medical facility had been told by her kidnappers that Beth had had a mental breakdown. She’d laid low at the unit, showing no signs of aggression, not knowing if the place she was in was real or fake. It could all be part of some elaborate set-up to make her believe she was in an actual hospital. It turned out she was all along. She’d been trained to avoid being tricked in this way, and she knew without doubt that she had been abducted. Just not why or by whom.
She’d just started to believe that this place was real, and was working on the doctor to try and get him to call MI5, when, much to the confusion of the doctors and nursing staff there, her new boyfriend, the pathologist, Elliot Baker turned up with colleagues to free her. He was a much-needed familiar face given the circumstances.
After they found and rescued Beth, her boss, Ray Martin, had launched an investigation into who had put her there and how this had happened in the first place. All the paperwork appeared to be genuine, even the name of a legitimate police surgeon had been used as that of the person who officially sectioned her. The only problem was, this particular man hadn’t even been on call that night. In fact, he’d gone away for a short break with his wife and hadn’t even been in London at the time. It remained, therefore, a mystery as to how the kidnappers had arranged the scam with such skill. All they knew was that the Network – a terrifying conglomerate running a lucrative operation involving the kidnap and brainwashing of children – were behind it, and Beth had been taken as leverage to force her colleague, Michael Kensington, to hand himself over to them.
Life changed a lot after that as Beth and Michael were forced into a safe house to protect them both over the next few weeks.
Now they’re just trying to normalize, something that in Beth’s case has always been easier said than done.
Beth takes a breath and closes the front door. She lives in an end-terrace house, with more garden than most have in the outskirts of London. She looks down the hallway. Just to the right are the stairs leading up to the three bedrooms and family bathroom. To her left is the living room, and further down on the right is a small water closet built in under the stairs. Beyond, and directly ahead at the end of the hallway, is the kitchen. She heads towards it, passing all of the other closed doors.
Beth glances around the kitchen. The room is so familiar and yet it is strange to be back here after all these weeks – almost a month – of being cooped up with only Michael and bodyguards for company. But the kitchen is almost as she left it. She notes the differences. A checked tea towel is folded, and not scrunched as it was before, on the counter top. The mug she’d used for hot chocolate is now washed and left upside down to dry. And the window that had been broken by her assailant has been fixed – all thanks to Elliot.
Beth glances at the back door, wondering if she’ll ever feel safe here again as a painful anxiety churns her stomach.
‘But of course, I will,’ she says aloud in order to dispel the nervousness.
Her voice trembles, giving away the falseness of her bravado. She hasn’t been back to work since the first night when they brought her back to Archive’s offices, in the MI5 building near Borough Market. Despite insisting she feels well, she’d had to have the obligatory counselling to help her deal with the trauma of a home invasion.
She’d been to see a woman called Mary Blake a few times since.
‘Just because you weren’t physically hurt, doesn’t mean you aren’t traumatized,’ Mary had explained. ‘In fact, this sort of attack can create all sorts of deep-rooted emotions that can have a terrible impact on your mental health. That’s why you’re here, Beth. To try and make sense of them, talk them through so they no longer have an effect on you.’
Beth had listened, and talked, and shared how she felt, but always remained aware that she really couldn’t show any intense signs of anxiety, because this could have a bearing o
n her ability to do her job. Or at least might be viewed that way by her superiors. Nothing had meant more to her than her position at Archive until recently, not even her two sons whom she’d given up in a divorce agreement. Even now Beth has no regrets about that. How much better it was that Cal and Philip hadn’t been there that night. The thought of them seeing anything, or even being taken, was almost too much to bear, and it reminds Beth that she does in fact love her children. She just wasn’t the full-time mother sort. Hence she’d allowed her ex, Callum, to have full custody. And now, while she may still be in danger, it is even more important that they stay away from her.
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