Hit List

by Chris Ryan

  ‘You’re a dinosaur, Andreas,’ said Eve. ‘A sexist dinosaur.’

  ‘A dinosaur maybe, but no sexist!’ insisted Andreas. He turned to Slater. ‘Am I a sexist?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so,’ said Slater. ‘I’ve never known you discriminate on grounds of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. You’ve always been very much an equal opportunities guy – happy to kill anyone.’

  Eve turned to Slater. Three glasses of Chablis had admitted a pale sparkle to her sea-grey eyes. ‘What about you, Neil? Are you a new man?’

  ‘Me? Sure, yeah! I’ve got my . . . What’s that thing you’re supposed to have?’

  ‘Inner child?’ suggested Andreas.

  ‘Exactly. I’ve got one of those. And I can tell you, my inner child was crapping itself this afternoon before you turned up with your Glock and your velvet jeans.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Eve. ‘It would have been very embarrassing to have gone back to London without you.’

  ‘What happened to your predecessor?’ asked Slater. ‘They went back to London without her, I seem to remember you saying.’

  ‘Ellis? Ellis was killed in a firefight here in Paris. She . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ said Slater.

  ‘The truth is I never really knew Ellis. I’d seen her about the place, because I’d been on a kind of informal attachment to the Cadre, but I never got to know her.’ She turned to Andreas. ‘You did, though, didn’t you?’

  ‘Ellis was great. I only knew her for a few months, and I was very much the new boy then, but . . .’ he shook his head.

  ‘All the guys go very misty-eyed when they talk about Ellis,’ said Eve.

  ‘She was the total professional,’ said Andreas to Slater. ‘I doubled up with her a few times for live-firing CQB sessions at the killing house. I don’t know if you’ve had the pleasure yet but we’re supposed to do a minimum of four days a month there as well as practising on the range, and it’s at least as dangerous as the stuff we used to do at Pontrilas. Like I said, I doubled up with Ellis a few times and she was very, very fast. They throw these horrible things at you – CS gas, white noise, guns that jam as soon as you try and fire them — and I never saw her lose it once. She was just . . . cool. Ellis was cool. And afterwards she was funny, and gorgeous, and fantastic company, and completely crazy, and . . .’

  He shook his head and fell silent.

  ‘Everyone talks about Ellis like this,’ said Eve. ‘As you can imagine she wasn’t the easiest act to follow. It was impossible, in fact. Whenever I slipped up, which I did all the time, I’d know people were thinking: Ellis would never have done that. Ellis would have handled that better. Ellis would never have lost the surveillance target, missed the shot, made the bad decision . . . And of course she was killed in action, so she became a sort of departmental saint.’

  ‘What exactly happened to her?’ asked Slater.

  Eve glanced briefly at Andreas. ‘The truth is we’re not sure, but we think it had something to do with Fanon-Khayat.’

  ‘Fanon-Khayat? As in the guy upstairs?’

  The waiter drew up, removed their plates, and filled their wine glasses. Eve waited until he was out of earshot.

  ‘Ellis was in Paris as part of a . . . a check on Fanon-Khayat’s reliability. Things were beginning to go belly-up for him financially, and London needed to know that he was still on-side, and wasn’t going to use the information he had against us. His weakness was women, so Ellis mounted an old-fashioned honey-trap.’

  ‘How did she do it?’ asked Andreas. ‘I never actually found out.’

  ‘Quite straightforward,’ said Eve. ‘She drove into the back of his car when his driver was dropping him off at the apartment, and made like she was so upset by the whole thing that he invited her up. Things moved on pretty fast after that, and . . .’

  ‘They had an affair?’ asked Slater.

  ‘My understanding is that they didn’t. Ellis had definite theories about using sex to gain information, and her basic thing was that with sport-fuckers like Fanon-Khayat – guys who were just in it for the chase and the conquest – you got what you wanted by with holding sex rather than granting it. Once you gave in to someone like that, she felt, you lost your power over them. So she flattered him. Played him along. She told him she was a political science graduate, and gave him the impression that she was turned on by his knowledge of covert activity. The more extreme stuff he told her, she implied, the likelier he was to get her into bed. According to the report, though, he didn’t bite. He was crazy about Ellis – she could really get guys going if she wanted to – but he hardly told her anything. He mentioned as an aside that there had been a UK and US special forces presence in Cambodia, but then John Pilger had already made that pretty clear. He certainly didn’t produce any pictures or anything like that, and all in all he seemed well disposed to us.

  ‘The final decision at the time, based on Ellis’s report, was that his knowledge of our dirty washing – such as it was – didn’t represent any kind of security threat. We knew he had made some fairly dodgy friends in the Balkans, and that a watching brief had to be kept, but that was pretty much it.’

  ‘Except that it wasn’t,’ suggested Slater.

  ‘Except that it wasn’t,’ said Eve. ‘On the morning of the day she was due to return to London for debriefing she went to the Science Park at La Villette in north-eastern Paris. We don’t know why, and we don’t know whether she went to meet someone or was following someone – all that we know is that she went alone and without back-up.

  ‘At around 11.20am, according to a statement issued to the press by the French police, a firefight took place in the staff car-park area, resulting in the deaths of three men and one woman. The men had all been shot twice in the head and the woman, who appeared to have been unarmed, had been shot eleven times in the body. Their conclusion was that several people were involved on both sides and the whole thing was almost certainly drugs-related – rival gangs settling scores over territory, that sort of thing. Maybe an execution. By the time the incident was reported in the newspapers the drug-gang theory had hardened into certainty, and as everyone knows, gangland killings are never solved.

  ‘The most interesting evidence, though, is buried in a later police report. The car-park at La Villette is huge, and the shooting took place in an area where there weren’t many people around. The nearest person to the shooting was a maintenance guy from one of the display halls who was collecting equipment from a van. He didn’t see what happened – he was a good hundred yards away – but he heard it. He said that to begin with there was a volley of shots in quick succession. Different sorts of bangs, perhaps fifteen or twenty in all, and at first he thought it was firecrackers – the fourteenth of July was coming up and the kids start letting them off as soon as they appear in the shops. But he’d done his Service Militaire and he soon realised that what he’d heard was gunfire.

  ‘According to his statement this first volley was followed by silence for about twenty seconds, then three or four bursts of semi-automatic fire, and then, a half-minute or so later, three double-shots in fast succession followed by another extended volley. And then silence, and people running away.

  ‘That statement, which we have no reason to doubt, suggests the following scenario: Ellis goes to the car-park for reasons unknown. She is carrying her personal weapon but has no reason to expect trouble. In the car-park she is ambushed by at least five people armed with a variety of weapons, all of whom open fire on her simultaneously and at short range.

  ‘Ellis goes down wounded, but makes it to cover. The ambushers move up on her, not sure if she’s dead, covering each other by cracking off the odd shot. Ellis, although badly and possibly critically hurt, realises that her only option is to seize the initiative, to move towards rather than away from the killing group. So, summoning whatever strength she’s got left, she does just that – pulls out her Glock and goes in shooting. Three double taps in as many seconds, three ambusher
s dead on their feet, but there are five of them in total and this time she goes down for good.

  ‘There’s a picture of the scene an hour or so later which was taken by the police photographer. There are two lines of cars, and behind the first and hurled backwards against the second are three men who do in fact look very much like drug-gang enforcers. Each has two black holes between his eyes; none has much in the way of a back to his head. On the ground you can see a Skorpion machine-pistol and a couple of heavy automatics.

  ‘Bundled up on the tarmac twenty feet away is Ellis. She’s wearing the leather jacket she used to carry her weapon in – she just used to stick it in the inside pocket, she hated shoulder holsters – and a black T-shirt and jeans. And the strange thing is that although she’s been literally shot to pieces – eleven short-range shots to the body – you can’t actually see any of the wounds at all. Her face is untouched. She’s just lying there with this blank stare in a shining pool of blood.’

  Eve nodded pensively. ‘When the picture came into the office the atmosphere got very strange. No one talked to each other — everyone sat alone in corners trying to figure the whole thing out. And trying to work out how to deal with their own reactions to it. Your predecessor’ – she looked up at Slater – ‘had worked with her a lot and I think was pretty upset. Leon disappeared to Paris that evening to see if he could get the inside story and came back a week later none the wiser. The dead men, as everyone had suspected, were basically hired triggers. And although Leon soon established the identity of the other two – the two who finished Ellis off and escaped – it quickly became clear that they’d vanished off the face of the earth. They’d been professionally “disappeared”.

  ‘Since then, our assumption has been that Ellis’s killing was sanctioned by Fanon-Khayat, who then had the surviving shooters wiped out in their turn. We’ve never known why – six killings seems like a bit of an overreaction to wounded sexual vanity – but then a lot of things that people like Fanon-Khayat do defy rational analysis.’

  ‘So there’s a revenge angle to this operation?’ asked Slater.

  ‘There’s a tidying up of unfinished business,’ said Eve. ‘Yes. It’s time Ellis’s ghost was laid to rest.’

  ‘I’d say you’d done bloody well,’ said Andreas, picking his words with care.

  Eve smiled at him gratefully. ‘Thank you. If there’s one thing I learned in the short time I knew her it’s that there are no second prizes in a firefight.’

  As the meal progressed, Slater considered their situation. The three of them had agreed with the backup team that they should stay the night in the hotel rather than check out immediately and return to Paris. Leon was working on a plan for the disposal of Fanon-Khayat’s body and until this was finalised, they had decided, the wisest course of action was to stay put. To drive the trunk around at night, when there were far fewer cars on the road than in the day, was to increase the risk of discovery significantly.

  None of them needed reminding that they were on hostile territory. If the DGSE or any of the other French security services found out that an MI6 hit team was operating on its patch, the political repercussions would be appalling. There would be no quiet deal done – instead the French would scream the news to the world. They had never quite lived down the humiliation of the 1985 Rainbow Warrior affair, when Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur – both DGSE agents – were convicted of manslaughter after the bombing and sinking of the Greenpeace ship in Auckland harbour. If any of the Cadre were arrested on French soil and convicted of murder or conspiracy to murder, they could expect to serve very long jail-terms indeed – no matter what the political justification.

  Slater was also increasingly conscious of the fact that he was about to spend the night in a hotel bedroom with Eve. They had joked about the charade of their being a bookish couple, but not with quite as much hilarity as they might have done. Was it his imagination, or had there been a tiny edge of regret in her voice that life was as it was? That the whole thing was an act? That they were not players in some Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan-style romantic comedy, but in a grim game of death – of covert slaughter and counter-slaughter.

  That they were able to relax and enjoy themselves after a day like today was extraordinary in itself, Slater thought, and showed perhaps just how deformed their sensibilities had become. Had his part in the death of Antoine Fanon-Khayat helped prevent another round of Balkan tortures and executions? Or had he merely contributed to a squalid murder whose principal motivation was the desire to save political face? Would the Serbs simply go to the next dealer for their anti-aircraft system?

  Useless to wonder, he decided, watching the way that the light fell on Eve’s hair and painted the soft line of her cheekbone. She was wearing a dove-coloured cashmere sweater and skirt, and the muted tones subtly highlighted the sea-grey of her eyes. There was nothing obvious about her appearance, he thought. Nothing that jumped out and grabbed you in the way that it did with, say, Grace Litvinoff.

  But you wondered. You looked at her and you wondered if you’d ever quite get the measure of her, ever quite get the measure of that distant gaze. There was a self-discipline and a quiet symmetry there that was – he admitted to himself – very attractive indeed. What would it be like to disrupt that cool poise, to see that control thrown to the four winds, to hear her . . .

  ‘You’ve gone very quiet,’ said Eve.

  Slater smiled. ‘I’m just . . . enjoying myself,’ he said.

  She held his gaze for a moment, delivered her oblique smile, and looked away.

  Afterwards they had drinks in the bar. At 11pm Eve was due to call Leon for his suggestions concerning the disposal of Fanon-Khayat. The original plan had simply been to leave him dead in the apartment and trust that the DGSE would clean up the mess. Despite the fact that it was self-evidently the case, the French Government were acutely sensitive to suggestions that their military establishment was overwhelmingly pro-Serbian and anti-Muslim. Any evidence that Issy-Avionic’s Ondine system was heading for Belgrade would be covered up and deleted whatever the cost. Nothing would have linked the Cadre to Fanon-Khayat’s death.

  But now the Cadre had a problem. Because Slater, Andreas and Eve had been seen in the same hotel as Fanon-Khayat, and Slater and Andreas had physically handled him before and after his death, Fanon-Khayat had to disappear completely. If his body was discovered and submitted to any kind of forensic examination, there was a risk – a slight risk, but a risk nevertheless – that the trail would lead back, sooner or later, to the three of them. The hotel guests and staff would be questioned, photofit portraits would be made, and a connection established. This must not happen.

  The dead man, the Cadre members all agreed, had to vanish from the face of the earth. Leon had told Eve that he was going to ask Manderson to send a cleaner team to spirit the body back to England, but Eve doubted that Manderson would sanction such an exercise. Taking bodies over borders was risky, and he would almost certainly order them to take care of the disposal themselves. They were on the spot, after all, and they had the expertise.

  Either way, the job had to be done fast: Branca would soon be asking questions about her husband’s failure to contact her, and in this weather it wouldn’t be long before the body began to smell.

  Leon was working on a solution.

  At five to eleven, Eve left the two men in the bar and took the lift up to the ninth floor.

  ‘It must be hard for her,’ Slater said, when she had disappeared.

  ‘What must?’ asked Andreas.

  ‘Well, everything. Following on from Ellis, like she said. And being in charge of a bunch of head-bangers like us.’

  ‘She didn’t actually follow on from Ellis in quite the way she suggested,’ said Andreas. ‘Eve joined after Ellis was killed, but she didn’t step into Ellis’s shoes. Ellis was like us – a footsoldier, one of the lads – but Eve was fast-track from day one. She’s been given more responsibility with each operation, and my guess is that if
she can pull off Firewall and get us all back in one piece, Manderson will hand the Cadre over to her.’

  ‘Tell me about the guy I replaced,’ said Slater.

  ‘Bernie?’ said Andreas. ‘He was SBS. A couple of their guys were pulled in about ten years ago for some very big, super-sensitive operation – presumably something at sea. One left before I joined – went off to live on some Pacific island, I think – and Bernie stuck around until a few months ago. He ended up going overseas too, bought into a boat-building firm in Norway. He was one of those mystical types – thousand-yard stare, dreams of the Far North and all that. A good guy to have at your side if things came on top, but serious, and played his hand very close to his chest. I can’t say I ever got to know him very well. The only person who did, in fact, was Ellis, who used to take the piss out of him. If he got heavy, she just used to laugh at him – which I tell you is more than I would have dared do. But because she was Ellis, she got away with it.’

  ‘What did she look like, Ellis?’ Slater asked.

  Andreas shrugged. ‘Dark hair, prettyish, quite scruffy . . . Like Eve said, she always used to wear this old leather jacket with her handgun in one inside pocket and a couple of spare clips in the other. She always used a nine-mil Glock Seventeen, and I’ve noticed that Eve now carries exactly the same weapon.’

  ‘She knows how to use it, too.’

  ‘She does. And it meant a lot to her that you praised her for that, by the way. Stand you in good stead after lights out, I expect.’

  ‘I’m not daft,’ said Slater. ‘I wouldn’t try anything on with her.’

  ‘You fucking are and you fucking would. I know you of old.’

  ‘I’ve changed,’ Slater protested. ‘I’ve grown up.’

  ‘The great cry of blokes down the centuries?’ Andreas smiled. ‘I’ve changed! I’ve grown up!’

  At 11.30 the three of them met in Fanon-Khayat’s room on the fourth floor. The plan was simple: Andreas was to wait until the reception was at its busiest, pay for his stay with one of the dead man’s credit cards, take a taxi to the airport, and then double back to Central Paris and the OP on a shuttle bus. Neil and Eve, meanwhile, were to check out, load the trunk into the car, make as if they were heading for the airport, and then in their turn double back to the OP. There, Leon would take them through the body-disposal plan. This was not yet finalised in every detail, but the basic elements had been decided on. The body was to be rendered unrecognisable and then sunk in a lonely stretch of the river Seine, some distance outside Paris. The job would almost certainly be carried out under cover of darkness the following night.