Hit List

by Chris Ryan

  Repelled by the future implications of this policy Leon transferred to the Legion’s 3rd Infantry Regiment in French Guyana, whose nominal task was to guard the Ariane Rocket launch site at Kourou. There, having qualified as a jungle warfare instructor, he earned French citizenship by serving out his five-year contract with the Legion. At about the same time he was awarded a BA by the Open University. His plan on leaving the Legion was to train as a schoolteacher, but things did not quite work out that way.

  ‘I went back to France . . .’ he began, but Slater silenced him with a gesture.

  ‘I may just be paranoid,’ he said, ‘but I think we might have picked up a tail. There’s a large grey or blue car I’ve just seen which I’m pretty sure was there about fifteen minutes back.’

  ‘Well, this is a motorway,’ said Leon. ‘What kind of car?’

  ‘Looks like some big German thing. An Opel or something – it was too far away to get a make on.’

  ‘And it was . . .’

  ‘It was just at the extreme of visibility. I might be imagining things, but it just seemed to me that it was tucked in perfectly for a long-range tail.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Let’s pull off at the next exit,’ said Leon. ‘See if we can get a fix on it. Why don’t you ring the others, warn them that’s what we’re going to do?’

  Slater did so, and five minutes later they left the motorway by a slip-road. As they waited at traffic-lights on the exit round about. Slater watched the passing motorway traffic. There was no sign of the car he thought he had seen. The lights turned green and they progressed a kilometre up a country road to a lay-by, where they drew to a halt. Behind them the Peugeot did the same.

  ‘Let’s give it five minutes,’ said Leon. ‘After that I’m going to get nervous. The last thing we need is for some bored cop to drive past and start asking questions.’

  The two cars sat motionless in the afternoon heat. Cars drove past at intervals, but none resembled a grey or blue Opel, and Slater began to wonder if his senses had been overtuned to danger. When on enemy territory, as they undoubtedly were now, the mind had a habit of conjuring up enemies. At the same time you disregarded your instincts at your peril. The line was a fine one.

  ‘We should move,’ said Leon eventually. ‘We’re beginning to push our luck.’

  Slater agreed. They returned to the motorway and drove for five minutes in silence.

  ‘So you decided to train as a teacher,’ he began eventually, still watching the wing-mirror.

  At the wheel Leon nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That was the plan . . .’

  Returning to France and hooking up with a former REP colleague in a bar in the Rue St Denis in Paris, Leon allowed himself to be talked into driving the getaway car for an armed robbery. The attempt to hijack a wages delivery-van went badly wrong, with a security guard and a gang-member both fatally wounded in the firefight which ensued. As the unarmed driver, Leon got off comparatively lightly, and ended up serving less than three years.

  It seemed long enough at the time, however. The twenty-three-year-old ex-Legionary served his sentence at Clairvaux prison, some 250 kilometres east of Paris. The former monastery, a notorious dumping-ground for hard cases, is often described as the French Alcatraz, and the regime was brutal. To make matters worse Leon realised that with better planning – planning he himself would have been happy to undertake – the robbery attempt would have worked perfectly and no one would have got hurt.

  In between reading books of political theory in his cell, Leon passed the time by planning – and mentally executing – increasingly complex and ingenious crimes. Or, as he himself prefered it, ‘events’. Packed into the jail were experts in fraud, larceny, embezzlement, kidnapping, drug-smuggling and every other field of illegal activity. Leon consulted them all. He would submit imaginary scenarios to these criminal tutors – scenarios detailing companies to be defrauded, banks to be robbed, officials to be kidnapped, and rivals to be executed – and invite them to pick holes in his plans.

  For the first six months the experts were able to suggest better solutions than Leon, but not thereafter. When interviewed by the prison rehabilitation board at the end of his second year, he informed his questioners that he intended to retrain as a risk assessor in the private security sector. One of the board must have had connections in the field, for a month later he was requested by the prison governor to undertake a voluntary ‘exercise’. On the basis of given data, he was asked to assess the vulnerability to armed assault of a microprocessor fabrication plant in Bordeaux. He was given pencils, paper and the use of an office.

  Within forty-eight hours he had produced a fully-budgeted plan which, if put into execution, would have seen the company in question relieved of 30 million francs’ worth of stock for an outlay of less than FF750,000. Although he had not been asked to do so, Leon also produced a detailed proposal for the selling-on of the stolen microprocessors.

  He was thanked for his efforts, and heard no more. A week later, however, he found himself on one of the prison’s coveted computer-training courses, and on completion of his sentence was passed the name of a personnel officer employed by the Paris branch of a multinational security group named Nordstrom. A year’s training in their offices at La Défense was followed by a two-year posting to London, where he was head-hunted.

  Even by the standards of the Cadre it was a curious recruitment. Leon was walking home from the Nordstrom office in Sloane Street to his flat in Victoria. It was a five-minute journey by bus, but he liked to clear his head after the overheated fug of the office. It had been a long and dizzyingly dull day – he had been compiling a report on the security needs of a private hospital in Marylebone blessed with an ‘upscale, high-profile clientele’.

  A woman fell into step beside him – a dark-haired woman in a leather jacket, jeans and Doc Marten boots – and invited him to join her for a drink in the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria Station. At first he assumed she was a prostitute, but when she asked after a couple of Nordstrom employees — former M15 officers whose names were very far from being in the public domain – he started to pay attention.

  ‘Ellis?’ asked Slater.

  ‘Ellis,’ Leon confirmed. ‘You’ve heard the stories, then?’

  ‘I’ve heard how she died.’

  Leon nodded, and was silent for a moment.

  Ellis had led him to the hotel’s Travellers Bar, ordered them a gin and tonic each without bothering to ask what he wanted, and set out her stall. She represented a co-ordinating wing of the Foreign Office, she told him in rapid and fluent French, and she had been empowered to offer him a job. Her department needed someone with specialist military skills, the ability to plan and execute covert operations overseas, and an intimate knowledge of the French underworld. The last was perhaps the most important – the service had assets on French soil, of course, but they were not . . .

  Not bien cablés? Leon had suggested. Not . . . connected?

  No, she had admitted. They weren’t. The complex web that linked the French military, mercenary and criminal underworlds was not one that the service she represented had been able to negotiate with ease. They constantly found themselves beholden to the DGSE – the French secret service – for entrées to that world, and the way things were, frankly, they were increasingly reluctant to do so.

  Ah, Slater said. Right.

  In return for joining her department, Ellis had continued – peremptorily draining her gin and tonic – the Crown was offering him British citizenship, a substantial drop in salary, and the guarantee of acute stress and physical danger. And that was about it.

  Leon had agreed almost immediately. At twenty-eight he was not ready to grow stale in an office – whatever the material benefits of his position. He wanted to deploy his old skills. He wanted the thudding excitements and terrors of operational life. The fact that he had not been born French and was free of conventional French loyalties and prejudices, he guessed, had probably encouraged them to approach him.r />
  And so, for the second time in his life, he told Slater, he had assumed new citizenship. He had joined the Cadre seven years ago, become a British national, and never regretted his decision. He even liked British cooking – it was next to impossible, he claimed, to find a decent kebab or vindaloo in France.

  Almost the deciding factor, however, had been the charismatic personality of his recruiter. Something about the lean, leather-jacketed figure, some wild and fundamental nonconformity, had told him that this was the organisation he had been looking for all his life.

  ‘Supposing you’d been approached by Eve?’ Slater asked him. ‘Or by Andreas or someone else? Would you still have joined?’

  ‘It’s academic, man. I did join – that’s all that matters. As you’ll have realised there are some very good sides to this job and some very weird and freaky ones. But I am what I am, just as you are what you are. If you’re good enough to be offered the job and mad enough to accept it, then by definition, brother, you are right for it.’

  Slater laughed. ‘I guess so.’

  A few minutes before two o’clock they swung northwards off the motorway towards Bonnières-sur-Seine, and Slater saw the river to their left – deep, grey and forbidding. At that point the Seine looked about a hundred metres across, and Slater understood instantly what Leon had meant when he said that swimming the corpse out was very much a last resort.

  Pulling off the N13, the two cars followed the sign for Freneuse and Joigny. The minor road led them past a paper-mill and cement-works, both of them with gates padlocked for the weekend. Soon they were driving between stands of pine-forest, with the sun splashing the road only sporadically. Outside the car, after the background roar of the motorway, all was oppressively silent.

  ‘The temperature’s dropped,’ said Leon. ‘I’m glad we bought all that outdoor clothing. It could be a cold night.’

  For the next fifteen minutes they barely saw another car. From time to time, parallel to the road, they caught sight of the steely, baleful glint of the river. Joigny, as Leon had suspected, proved to be little more than a collection of farm buildings. There was a church and a small village shop, but both appeared untenanted. The only sign of life was a new-looking Renault Espace parked outside one of the farmhouses.

  ‘Paris plates,’ said Leon. ‘Well-off Parisians like their kids to watch TV and play computer games in the countryside at weekends. They’ll assume we’re scouting around for property too – that or we’re a pair of antique dealers looking for agricultural scrap to flog to rural-theme restaurants.’

  ‘A mixed-race gay couple, perhaps,’ suggested Slater. ‘Intent on perverting their children?’

  Leon laughed. ‘They’d probably rather the truth than that. Did you catch the National Front posters on that last motorway bridge?’

  As the map had indicated, the track petered out a kilometre or so beyond the village. Leon and Andreas parked the cars, and the four of them climbed out and stretched. They were all wearing jeans, gumboots and hiking jackets. Leon was carrying a knapsack containing biscuits, a flask of coffee and other bits and pieces. Andreas was smoking. In a group, as Leon had intended, they looked like a bunch of middle-class Parisians intent on local exploration.

  A damp path between saw-edged reeds continued ahead of them. Locking the cars, they followed Andreas and his cigarette. The path led down to a weeded towpath and the broad sweep of the river.

  ‘We’ll need a bit of weight,’ observed Eve, eyeing the remorseless flow of the water and the distant bank.

  ‘We’ve got a bit of weight,’ said Leon. ‘As we’re going to discover tonight when we try and haul it all up here from the car.’

  Six or seven minutes later the path led them away from the river, between two dark stands of trees, and back to the bank. Here the river widened on the bend to almost twice its normal breadth. There was a locked boat-house, with a peeling green-painted door, and beyond it, as the map had promised, a jetty extended a clear fifty metres into the bay. In the distance, a couple of kilometres away, the steeple of the church at Thieux was visible between the trees.

  ‘It looks good,’ breathed Eve. ‘It looks very good.’

  Several wooden and fibreglass boats were moored alongside the jetty, and deep grey water swirled around its heavy supporting piles.

  ‘It looks deep,’ said Andreas. ‘That’s the main thing.’

  They spent an hour there, working out the final details. With a ball of fishing line and a lead plumb, Leon took a series of depth soundings along the length of the jetty. The deepest point, which he estimated at seven metres, was shortly before the end. The river was very full, but unlikely – they all agreed – to fall more than three metres in the near future. And that would be drastic.

  ‘One more thing,’ murmured Leon, and took a plastic bag and a knife from the knapsack.

  ‘What now?’ asked Andreas.

  ‘Watch, little bro, and learn,’ said Leon quietly, taking a slab of raw steak from the plastic bag. Carefully, he cut off a cube of meat and tied it to the end of his fishing line, then lowered it into the water, where the lead plumb took it straight to the bottom. After ten minutes he very slowly drew it back through the powerful current, and the others were amazed to see a small black freshwater crayfish clinging by one angry claw to the meat.

  ‘I think we can count on our man being pretty unrecognisable pretty soon,’ said Leon. ‘There’s nothing those little mothers like more than a side of meat.’

  ‘Dental records?’ asked Eve.

  In reply, Leon wordlessly removed a pair of blunt-nosed pliers from his pocket.

  ‘Oh Mama!’ said Eve.

  ‘You did say you wanted to come,’ Leon said reasonably, tossing the remains of the steak into the river. ‘Coffee and shortbread fingers, anyone?’

  Back at the cars, once they had thoroughly rehearsed their movements for the night ahead, they discussed whether they would attract more attention by remaining in the vicinity or by pulling back into a local town and returning after dark.

  The final decision was to pull back. Cars obviously came and went along the Joigny road, Leon argued, but few remained until dark. They would disappear until 11pm.

  Returning to the cars, they made their way to Vernon, twenty-five kilometres away. According to Leon’s research the town was always full of tourists at weekends due to the presence, at nearby Giverny, of the house and gardens of the impressionist artist Monet.

  His research was accurate. The place was very busy, with American, British and Japanese accents much in evidence. At Eve’s suggestion the four of them behaved like conventional tourists, booking themselves dinner at a small restaurant in town and attending a guided tour of the artist’s house and gardens.

  They stayed there until the house closed at 5.30. At the museum shop Eve bought two tea-towels showing details of Monet’s famous Waterlily paintings, which Andreas described as ‘a nice role-playing touch’.

  ‘We need them for the office,’ Eve said severely. ‘That area round the kettle gets really disgusting at times.’

  Returning to Vernon they walked idly through the town and alongside the river for a couple of kilometres. Returning as the light began to fade, they installed themselves in a café. The minutes crawled past. None of them was able to dispel fully the thought of the night’s work lying ahead of them, and in consequence they found that they did not have a great deal to say to each other. Slater found that he was ravenous, and suspected that the others were too.

  Finally it was nine o’clock and they presented themselves at the restaurant. They lingered over the meal, which featured local speciality dishes of freshwater crayfish and braised pork, and shared a large carafe of red wine. For four adults on holiday in the French countryside to have gone without alcohol altogether, they agreed, would only have drawn attention to themselves. As the designated non-drivers, Slater and Andreas also ordered Calvados to accompany their coffees.

  ‘Right,’ said Leon, as they stepped out
into the night air. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Climbing back into the cars, they drove back the way they had come. Once they were in the Roche-Guyon forest, Leon dipped the headlights of the Mercedes and dropped the speed to forty kilometres an hour, damping the engine-noise down to a faint hum. They proceeded in near-silence along the pine-needled track, and as they approached Joigny, Leon halved the speed again.

  At the house with the Renault Espace outside, upstairs lights were showing. ‘They might wonder who we are,’ said Slater, ‘but they won’t come out and investigate. They’ll just make sure the front door’s double-locked.’

  ‘You saying that because you think it’s true?’ asked Leon. ‘Or because you want it to be true?’

  ‘Bit of both,’ admitted Slater. ‘But what are they going to do? Ring the police and say two cars have driven past their house and could someone come and investigate?’

  Soon they were at the end of the track. The temperature had dropped considerably in the course of the half-hour drive, and as they quietly climbed from the cars they were glad of the warm outdoor clothing they had brought. The interior lights of both cars had been switched off, so there were no sudden bursts of yellow light when the doors opened. Instead, a clear star-filled sky and a nail-paring moon provided a faint illumination of the desolate waterside scene.

  Unhurriedly, taking it in turns to keep lookout through a pair of night-vision goggles, they fitted and tested the Motorola comms kits. Leon then filled a long zip-up holdall with the various items of kit they were going to need, and called them together. For the purposes of this particular exercise, Slater noted, he seemed to have taken charge.

  ‘OK, listen in,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll do the actual disposal with Neil, as we planned. Andreas, you go first and do a quick recce of the location – Neil and I will follow with the trunk on your all-clear. Eve, you stay here and watch our backs.’