Short Range (The Spider Shepherd Thrillers Book 16)

by Stephen Leather

‘How much?’

  ‘I got a text message demanding half a million euros.’

  Pritchard grimaced. ‘Do you have the money?’

  ‘I’m hoping to get it negotiated down to a level that I can afford.’

  ‘Your girlfriend is Slovenian?’

  ‘Yes, but she’s been here for fifteen years or so. I took her on as an au pair after my wife died and …’ He shrugged, not sure what else he should say.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘My wife dying?’

  ‘I know about Sue passing away,’ said Pritchard. ‘I mean the kidnapping.’

  ‘While I was in Serbia.’

  ‘They didn’t tell you they were going to Slovenia?’

  Shepherd shook his head. ‘If they had, I could have driven over to see them. It’s only a five-hour drive.’

  ‘Tell me everything,’ said Pritchard. He picked up his fork and speared another prawn.

  There wasn’t much to tell, but Shepherd ran through it. The text message from Liam’s phone, the call to Slovenia, and the ransom demand.

  ‘How are you supposed to deliver the money?’ asked Pritchard.

  ‘That’s still to be decided. But they have said the money is to be paid in London.’

  ‘Do you think they want you to hand over the money personally?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ve not reached that stage yet.’

  ‘You see why I’m asking?’ said Pritchard. ‘Is it you they want or is it the money? Because if it’s you it becomes a whole different ball game.’

  ‘I don’t think they chose Katra and Liam because of me. I don’t get the feeling they know who I am or what I do.’

  ‘Just wrong time, wrong place?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You have to be sure, Daniel. You’ve worked in that part of the world. Did you make enemies? Because they have long memories out there.’

  ‘I was a faceless SAS trooper when I was in Sarajevo taking out the sniper,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’ve been back since but not as Daniel Shepherd. And I don’t remember crossing anyone.’

  ‘And with your memory, you would remember, wouldn’t you?’

  Shepherd nodded.

  ‘What are your plans?’

  ‘I’ve put in a request for location and usage details of Liam and Katra’s phones. And I’m trying to get the Slovenians to do the same with the mobile we called in Slovenia.’ He stopped as a small smile flitted across Pritchard’s face. ‘You know that, of course.’

  Pritchard shrugged carelessly. ‘You were accessing phone records for family members,’ he said. ‘And then you went on to look at flight records. We might well be the Security Service, but the Data Protection Act still applies. And the fact that I was in the office meant my attention was drawn to it right away. My first thought was that maybe they had run off together.’

  Shepherd laughed. ‘Katra has been like a mum to Liam.’

  ‘I didn’t know that, obviously. Of course when I took a closer look at her phone records it became clear she had problems in Slovenia. And then I saw the message that had been sent on Liam’s phone. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to work out what was going on.’

  ‘You’ve got the phone records?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Pritchard. ‘I can tell you that Liam’s phone was in Ljubljana when that message was sent but it’s off the grid now. The Slovenians have assured me that they will have the location and phone records of the Slovenian mobile by the end of the day. You’ve called the number, I assume?’

  ‘Not me personally. I’ve reached out to a hostage negotiator. He’s made contact already and will talk to them from here while I go out there.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Chris Thatcher. He was involved in a Somalian pirate thing a few years ago and he’s freelance now.’

  Shepherd watched Pritchard carefully, wondering if he knew that Shepherd had been in touch with Charlie Button. And if he did know, how much of a problem would that be? While it had been several years since Button had left MI5, she was still persona non grata at Thames House. ‘I’ve heard the name,’ said Pritchard. He was studying Shepherd with a slight smile on his face and Shepherd waited for the second foot to drop. Pritchard’s smile widened and Shepherd was sure that the director was able to look into his mind and see his inner thoughts, but it could well have been his subconscious playing tricks so he concentrated on meeting the man’s gaze. Years of working undercover had taught him the importance of keeping the subconscious’s misgivings under control. ‘So, this Thatcher has made contact with the hostage-taker?’ said Pritchard eventually.

  ‘Last night, and again this morning,’ said Shepherd. ‘The man he’s speaking to is using the name David. We’re not sure of his accent, but he’s certainly from that part of the world.’

  ‘And you have proof of life?’

  Shepherd nodded. ‘Thatcher spoke to Katra last night and she has confirmed that she and Liam are okay. Under the circumstances.’

  ‘Good to know,’ said Pritchard.

  ‘The negotiator spoke to Katra on the guy’s mobile. The first time we made contact, David said he was some distance away from where they were being held. He called him again later and he was with them and he persuaded David to put Katra on the phone.’

  ‘That was very stupid of him,’ said Pritchard. ‘Of David, I mean.’

  ‘We don’t think he’s a professional,’ said Shepherd. ‘Not a professional kidnapper, anyway. Obviously if we can utilise the GPS function of the phone he was using, we’ll get the location of where Katra and Liam are being held.’

  ‘Fingers crossed,’ said Pritchard. ‘Now you said this David wants the ransom to be paid here in London?’

  ‘Yes. In cash. Euros. Thatcher says it isn’t unusual.’

  ‘It’s actually an advantage, from our point of view,’ said Pritchard.

  ‘Yes, it means they have people here which might be helpful in terms of identifying them. But it means I’ll be paying the money without being able to see Katra and Liam,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’ll be taking it on trust.’ He shrugged. ‘Trust probably isn’t the right word.’

  ‘No, but it means the people here will have to be in communication with whoever has them hostage in Slovenia, and I can get GCHQ involved.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘I can. And I will.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Shepherd. ‘I didn’t expect that, I really didn’t.’

  Pritchard took out his mobile phone. He tapped out a number and then spoke without introducing himself. ‘I have a mobile in Slovenia that I red-flagged with immediate effect,’ he said. ‘We think that it will be used to phone a London number, probably a mobile, can you prime GCHQ to be watching for that? Ideally we’d like a recording but at the very least a location.’ He looked over at Shepherd. ‘I’ll need the number. I don’t have your trick memory.’

  Shepherd told him the digits. Pritchard repeated them into the phone, listened and nodded. ‘Good, okay then, I’ll leave it with you.’ He put his phone away, then smiled sympathetically at Shepherd. ‘You must be going through hell.’

  Shepherd grimaced. ‘I’m running on autopilot at the moment, trying not to think of the implications.’

  ‘Well you can rest assured that I will help,’ said Pritchard. ‘I’ll do whatever I can.’

  ‘Thank you for the offer, really, but other than checking the phones I’m not sure that there’s anything you can do. There’s no point in contacting the authorities in Slovenia,’ said Shepherd. ‘If the kidnappers even think I’ve done that, they’ll kill Katra and Liam.’

  Pritchard nodded. ‘Going through official channels was the last thing on my mind,’ he said. He waved at Shepherd’s plate. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in doing anything on an empty stomach, in my experience.’

  ‘I don’t really have an appetite, to be honest.’

  ‘I thought soldiers always ate on the basis that they never knew where their next meal was
coming from?’

  Shepherd smiled. ‘True enough,’ he said.

  ‘And I’m not sure if we’ll get the chance to eat when we get to Ljubljana.’

  Shepherd looked up from his plate. ‘I’m sorry, what?’

  Pritchard smiled. ‘We’re booked onto a 5.05 p.m. flight from Heathrow that gets into Ljubljana at 10 p.m. with a forty-five minute stop in Amsterdam.’ The director smiled at Shepherd’s confusion. ‘Come now, Daniel, don’t look so surprised. As I said, a good interrogator never starts an interrogation without knowing the answers to all his questions.’

  Shepherd didn’t get a chance to talk to Pritchard about what was going on until they were sitting in the bar of the Grand Hotel in Ljubljana, with coffees in front of them. The car that took them to Heathrow had an office driver, and as he would obviously have been positively vetted he wouldn’t be a security risk, but the questions Shepherd needed answering were best asked in private. The airport was busy, the plane to Amsterdam was packed, and they only had enough time at Schiphol Airport to walk between gates and board the plane to Ljubljana. The second plane was also packed, and Shepherd and Pritchard said barely a dozen words to each other during the flight. They had taken a taxi to the hotel, a large art nouveau building a few steps away from the central Prešeren Square, checked in and then went straight to the bar. Shepherd waited until the blonde bartender had walked away before turning to Pritchard. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ said Shepherd, keeping his voice low. There were a dozen or so people in the hotel bar, mainly men in cheap suits and a redhead in a low-cut dress who may or may not have been a hooker on the make.

  ‘We’re here to rescue your girlfriend and son,’ said Pritchard. ‘That seems pretty straightforward to me.’

  ‘But why are you here? This is my problem, not yours.’

  ‘You’re one of our most valued officers, Daniel. You’re family. Why wouldn’t we help?’

  ‘But you personally? Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, I just don’t understand.’

  ‘One, I don’t want it widely known what’s happening. Two, I have form in this part of the world. Three, who else is going to help? The British Embassy isn’t in a position to do anything, it’s out of the Met’s jurisdiction, the NCA can’t operate overseas and that leaves what. MI6? They’d see it as a personal matter. Which leaves your friends in the SAS who I am sure would do whatever you asked of them, but they don’t have the sort of access to intel that you’ll need to find Liam and Katra.’

  Shepherd nodded and stared at his coffee. He still didn’t fully understand why his boss had flown to Slovenia with him. It seemed so out of character. ‘You say you have form here?’ he said, still looking at his coffee. ‘And you told me you were in Sarajevo before. I don’t get that. Why would MI5 be involved in Sarajevo?’ He looked up and immediately Pritchard averted his eyes. Shepherd wasn’t sure if that was because he was uncomfortable or because he was being evasive.

  ‘What do you think, Daniel? That I’m a desk man, through and through? That I’ve never been in the field?’ He forced a smile. ‘You know nothing about me.’

  ‘Only what I’ve heard on the grapevine,’ said Shepherd. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘You’ve had enough legends to know that you can’t rely on someone’s CV,’ said Pritchard. He sipped his coffee. Displacement behaviour. But Shepherd could tell that Pritchard wasn’t refusing to talk, he was just gathering his thoughts. ‘Obviously anything I tell you stays between us,’ Pritchard said eventually.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘My CV says career MI5. But that’s not the truth. I was with MI6 for three years prior to that. I was recruited at university, back when things were done that way. A few chats with my tutor, a trip down to London for lunch, then the tests and the vetting. A year after I joined I was in the former Yugoslavia. I was good at languages. I still am. But it’s not something I boast about. It gives me a huge advantage when people don’t realise I can understand them.’

  ‘I’ve never been good at languages,’ said Shepherd. ‘My trick memory is a great thing to have, but it doesn’t work with languages.’

  Pritchard nodded. ‘I’m the opposite. I find it hard to retain facts and figures though I am good at remembering faces, but I really seem to soak up vocabulary. Horses for courses. Anyway, it took me six weeks to get reasonably fluent in Serbo-Croatian and I was already fluent in German, Italian and Hungarian. I was gathering intelligence in Sarajevo but my main task was to get people in and out. This was just before the siege. We knew what the Serbs wanted to do but we weren’t sure of the timing. The siege proper started on May 2, 1992. But throughout the spring the Serb forces were starting to encircle the city. In the year after the siege started they built the tunnel under the airport to get people in and out, but that wasn’t an option in 1992. We had to take people overland and it got progressively more difficult. People never want to believe that the worst is going to happen. A lot of people thought it would blow over. Then by the time they realised it was really happening, it was almost too late.’

  He sipped his coffee. ‘About two days before the blockade started, I was taking a couple of diplomats and embassy office staff out. All men, most of the women had left weeks earlier. At the last moment I was asked to take a doctor and his wife out with us. He was a Bosnian Muslim, lovely man, he’d worked at the local hospital and his wife was a nurse there. They had a couple of kids but they’d sent the kids to live with her parents. But when it became obvious that the siege wasn’t going to be a temporary thing they decided to call it a day. So we’re in the vehicle and right away the more senior of the diplomats started kicking off, wanting to know who they were and what they were doing in a British Embassy vehicle. I explained that they were medical personnel being evacuated and that shut him up but he obviously wasn’t happy. I kid you not, Daniel, this idiot had insisted that we take his golf clubs.’ Pritchard shook his head in disgust. ‘Anyway, we drove out of the city, using a route I’d travelled a dozen or so times before. We got flagged down by a group of soldiers. Nothing to worry about, they weren’t really after civilians at that point. Or so I thought. I recognised one of the soldiers, I’d seen him a couple of times before. His name was Andrej. He knew me as Colin. I started to explain that I was evacuating diplomats but this big bruiser of an officer came over and began shouting the odds. He had two men with him. Tough bastards. I don’t think they were regular Bosnian Serb Army, but they weren’t Scorpions. Somewhere in between. Anyway, the officer insisted we all get out of the vehicle. Fine. We did as we were told. Immediately he saw the doctor’s wife in a hijab and he started pointing at her and wanted to know who she was.’

  Pritchard took another sip of his coffee. ‘I explained, and he told her to move away from the group. Her husband started to stand up for her and the officer smacked him with the butt of his rifle. He went down, his jaw broken. His wife screamed and the officer pointed his gun at her. He wasn’t threatening her, his finger was on the trigger and he had murder in his eyes. She was screaming like a banshee and was clawing at his face and I could see that he was going to shoot her so I stepped in and punched him. I knocked him down, probably broke his nose. One of the other soldiers brought his gun up and I knocked his weapon to the side. The other soldier was swinging his gun around so I grabbed the sidearm of the man in front of me. I yanked it out of its holster. The other soldier was about to shoot, no warning, no nothing, so I pulled the trigger. I was lucky, there was one in the chamber and I hit him in the face. As he went down the officer was still on the ground and he was holding his rifle. He shot but he missed and I shot and I didn’t miss. At this point I had no idea what I was doing, I was running on adrenaline. The soldier whose sidearm I’d taken was screaming at me and his finger was on the trigger of his rifle so I fired, two shots in the neck. I swung the gun around and there was only Andrej left and he was standing there with his mouth open, he couldn’t believe what just happened and the next thing I knew I was pointing my gu
n at his face and squeezing the trigger. It was like time stood still, you know?’

  Shepherd nodded. He knew. Often in combat everything appeared to slow down, a result of the brain going into overdrive because of the adrenaline and hormones coursing through the system. It sometimes felt as if the brain, or at least the conscious part, had stepped outside of the body and was watching and processing everything that was going on around it.

  ‘So I was about to pull the trigger and kill a man who, while he wasn’t a friend, was at least someone who had helped me in the past, and he had this look of total surprise on his face as he tried to work out what was happening. His gun was pointing at the ground, his finger wasn’t even on the trigger, and yet I was going to kill him.’ Pritchard shook his head. ‘That image will stay with me until the day I die.’

  Shepherd understood exactly what Pritchard meant. Shepherd’s own near-flawless memory meant that he could recall pretty much anything he had ever said or done, or heard, or seen. But some memories were burned more indelibly than others, and they usually involved the taking of life. His memories of combat were more technical, like recalling a video game, a series of images that ended with death and destruction, but those images tended not to come with emotion. He remembered what had happened, but not how he felt. But there were other times, usually when he’d killed up close and personal, when recalling what had happened brought with it the emotions he’d felt at the time, and more often than not they were the ones that woke him up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with his pulse racing.

  Pritchard held up his hand, his thumb and first finger almost touching. ‘I was this close to ending his life. A man who’d never done me any harm. The opposite, in fact. He’d helped me. My finger was tightening on the trigger and he wasn’t moving, he was just staring at me, and then it was as if I woke up. Bang. Back in the moment. I lowered my gun and I remembered apologising to him. I just kept saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” over and over again. Eventually I stopped and he put his hand on my shoulder and said that I had to go. The diplomats were already back in the vehicle. I asked Andrej what was going to happen to him and he said he’d come up with something and that we should leave. I helped get the doctor into the vehicle and we drove off. I remember looking back and seeing him scratching his head as he looked at the bodies on the ground. The diplomat was on my back all the way, he wouldn’t let up, accusing me of putting his life at risk. He made an official complaint and demanded that I be sacked. I was summoned back to London and my boss read me the riot act. The thing is, I was sure I’d done the right thing. I still am. Luckily my boss agreed with me, but there was no getting away from the fact that I’d killed three Serbian soldiers. MI6 was going to have to let me go, but my boss pulled some strings and found me a slot in MI5. So far as the diplomat was concerned I’d been sacked, and it was made clear to me that I’d never be active overseas. So I was locked away in data analysis and I was actually very good at it. My language skills helped, of course, but I was good at spotting trends and anomalies and I had quite a few successes. I never got the credit, and I’ve always avoided any publicity anyway because what happened in Bosnia all those years ago could still come back to bite me.’ He shrugged. ‘To be honest, career-wise it was a good move. If I’d stayed as an MI6 officer I’d probably be burnt out by now, you know yourself what the job does to your nerves.’