by Chris Ryan
As they strolled down the side street, Steer consulted his Rolex. No particular reason. He just liked to admire it from time to time. He felt the Rolex was significant somehow. A vindication of his career choice. A physical reminder of why he was out here, putting up with the long periods of boredom and the snide remarks from the principal.
They were halfway down the street when Steer saw the guy.
A shadowed figure, shuffling out of the doorway of a rundown housing block, ten metres ahead of them.
The figure limped towards the two bodyguards. In the faint glow of the street lamps Steer saw that he was black, with dirty matted facial hair, dressed in a tattered pair of jeans, scuffed trainers and a zipped-up hoodie. An unusual sight in Budapest. The city wasn’t a beacon of multiculturalism. Almost every face Steer had seen was white, with the exception of a few dark-featured Roma gypsies working on building sites or sweeping the streets.
The guy looked filthy. Steer caught a strong whiff of eau de piss coming off of him. He was waving at Steer and Hutton with his left hand.
‘Hey, bro!’ he called out in some sort of accent that Steer guessed was West African.
The bodyguards kept moving. The guy stepped in front of them five metres ahead, moving to intercept them. Blocking their path. Hand outstretched. Another beggar, thought Steer. The streets of Budapest were crawling with them these days, especially around the wealthier parts of town.
‘Brother. Hey, man! Talking to you . . .’
The guy was two metres away now. At this distance Steer noticed a large wet patch down the front of the man’s jeans. The stench of urine hung thick in the air, Steer wrinkling his nose in disgust as he shaped to brush past the homeless guy.
‘Bro—’
‘Fuck off,’ Hutton spat.
But the homeless guy blocked their path. He had a mildly threatening posture. His eyes were wild and his dirt-smeared face was nicked with tiny scars from street fights. The guy was on something. That much was obvious. A crack addict, presumably. Steer had seen plenty of them during his days serving as a bobby on the beat.
The homeless guy’s right hand was stuffed inside his hoodie pocket, Steer noticed.
‘Give us your fucking wallets,’ the guy rasped. He jerked his head at Steer’s Rolex Submariner. ‘Dat watch too.’
Neither bodyguard moved.
Steer’s professional eye instantly assessed the situation. They were in an isolated spot, fifty metres down a poorly lit side street. No witnesses. No passers-by. No one to run for help. All the action was going on in the main streets at either end. In the distance, he could hear the faint drone of passing traffic, the occasional distant shout or peal of laughter. The homeless guy had picked a good spot for a mugging.
‘You deaf?’ he growled. ‘I said gimme dem things, bro.’
Steer cold-stared at him, body tensed. ‘No.’
‘Fuck off,’ Hutton repeated. ‘Black bastard.’
The bum hesitated. For a split-second Steer thought the homeless guy might walk away. He’d made a mistake, targeting a pair of well-built bodyguards instead of some fat Yank tourist. Over-confidence perhaps. Or pure greed. Or maybe it was just the deluded thinking of a long-term junkie. Perhaps he’d see sense, turn away and crawl back into his hole.
Then the homeless guy pulled the knife out of his pocket.
He moved fast. Faster than any addict Steer had ever seen. Steer caught a flash of steel as the guy stepped towards Hutton, gripping a folding lock knife. One of the traditional models, with a walnut handle and a stainless-steel blade. Four inches. Long enough to do some serious internal damage, in the right hands.
Hutton had no time to block the first stab. The homeless guy was too close. He was practically in the bodyguard’s face. And he was much faster than his opponent.
The beggar stepped into stabbing range, dropped his right shoulder and gut-punched Hutton before the bodyguard could react, banging him in the vitals. Hutton jack-knifed, his mouth forming a wide ‘O’ of shock and pain as the blade sank deep into his guts. He staggered backwards, clutching his perforated stomach, blood seeping between his fingers.
The mugger wrenched the blade free. Spun round to face his second victim.
No point trying to cut and run, Steer told himself. He was in a knife fight, whether he accepted it or not. And his opponent was surprisingly fast. The addict would surely catch Steer and cut him down before he could leg it to the main thoroughfare.
I’m not going to abandon my mate.
He dropped into a slight crouch, waited for the addict to take a swing at him. In the next instant the mugger lunged forward and stabbed low, intending to give Steer a gut wound to match the one he’d just dished out to Hutton.
Same tactic. Different result.
Steer was younger than Hutton. And sharper. The early morning training and the strict diet gave him an advantage that the older bodyguard simply didn’t have. He read his attacker’s move and deflected the attack with a downward sweep of his left forearm, driving the knife away from his torso. Then he bent his right arm and swung out with his elbow, cracking the addict on the side of his skull. The first rule of defending yourself in a knife fight: find a way to get rid of the weapon. Stun the attacker, disorientate them. Do whatever it takes to take the knife out of the equation.
The mugger stumbled backwards a couple of steps, momentarily stunned. His grip unclenched. The knife fell from his loosened grip and clattered to the ground with a brittle clang.
I’ve disarmed the fucker, thought Steer. Now the fight’s on.
Except that it wasn’t.
Steer made the oldest mistake in the fighting manual. He got cocky. He stepped towards the mugger, still mentally celebrating the success of his last attack, thinking he’d done all the hard work. He didn’t have any grand strategy. Just a sense that he had levelled the playing field and that all he needed to do now was finish the job.
He charged forward, aiming to deliver a heavy right hook. The knockout blow. But the mugger surprised him by recovering from the previous blow to the temple and adopted a boxing stance. Fists raised in front of him, muscles tensed, eyes laser-focused, left leg slightly ahead of his right. Transforming himself from a limping mess into something much more agile and deadly.
Steer saw the change in his body shape. He knew something was wrong. But it was too late to adapt his game plan. He was already mid-swing, driving his fist round towards the mugger’s face.
His punch never made contact.
The mugger struck out with the speed and coordination of a professional fighter. He dropped low and slipped outside the punch, deftly evading the blow, and in the same motion he sprang forward. Launched a vicious left uppercut at Steer, slammed the hard ridge of his knuckles into the latter’s ribcage. The kind of move that required lightning-fast reflexes, speedy footwork and years of practice.
Not the kind of move you learned on the streets, shaking down tourists.
Pain exploded through Steer’s torso. He heard something crack, like a branch snapping underfoot. He tried to step out of range and defend himself, but the mugger was on him in a flash, unleashing a menacing flurry of body blows, jabbing him in the sternum and ribs. The punches kept coming. Unrelenting. Like a boxer doing some heavy bag work. Steer couldn’t get a shot in, couldn’t block the attacks or fight back. He wasn’t thinking about winning the fight now. He was just trying to survive from one second to the next.
Another punch crashed into his upper left side. The liver shot. His neck muscles clenched, like a fist clamping around his throat. The pain was suffocating, intense. Worse than anything Steer had ever known. He lost his balance and bent forward, arms lowered, arms shielding his torso from further punishment.
Leaving his head exposed.
The mugger accepted the invitation. Steer was coughing and spluttering, gasping for air. He saw the mugger twisting at the waist, arcing his fist round, shaping to throw a right hook.
The blow was devastating. Steer
saw white briefly. He staggered backwards, dazed and stunned, electric pain flaring up behind his eyeballs.
A single clear thought cut through the fog thickening inside his skull.
This bloke isn’t a homeless drug addict.
No one on the streets fights like this.
So who the fuck is he?
The mugger was suddenly in Steer’s face again. He drew his elbow back and shot his right arm up at an angle, aiming at Steer’s skull.
The bodyguard saw the punch coming. But it didn’t matter. Steer couldn’t have avoided it even if he had wanted to. He was too numb and out of breath and confused to react. The last thought he had was to wonder who the hell had attacked them.
The mugger’s palm shot up, slamming into the underside of Steer’s chin, sent his jaw crashing into the roof of his skull. His world shuddered and jarred.
Then everything went black.
Jordan Rowe stepped back as the second bodyguard dropped to the ground. Rowe made sure the guy was out for the count, then turned away to check on the other victim. The older bodyguard was lying on the ground, writhing in agony, blood pumping steadily out of the deep wound to his stomach as he made a lame attempt to reach for the knife that Rowe had dropped. Rowe hurried over to the bodyguard, dropped to a knee beside him. Lifted the man’s right arm by the wrist and then slammed it down over his right leg, breaking his bones. The bodyguard screamed. His busted right arm flopped uselessly to the ground. He wouldn’t be practising his golf swing for a while.
Rowe snatched up the folding lock knife. Rushed back over to the unconscious bodyguard and stabbed him repeatedly, giving him a series of puncture wounds to his thighs. Rowe didn’t want to kill the guys. His orders were to incapacitate them for a few weeks. Make the thing look like a mugging gone badly wrong.
He hadn’t expected the second guy to fight back. The plan had been to cut down the older bodyguard first. Take him out of the picture, get the second guy to surrender. Seize their valuables, bang the second bodyguard with a couple of rapid stabs and leg it.
Then the guy had unexpectedly fought back, and the plan had very nearly gone to shit.
Rowe padded down the comatose bodyguard. Fished out his wallet and phone, unhooked the Rolex from around his wrist. He did the same with the older guy, ignoring the man as he hissed and moaned with pain. Both of their wallets were stuffed full of fifty-pound notes.
He was rising to his feet when he heard voices. More than one of them. English native speakers. Not locals. Rowe spun round and faced the western end of the side street, fifty metres away.
A pair of middle-aged guys stood at the edge of the side street, dressed in wool coats and neatly pressed trousers. Tourists out for a late evening stroll along the Danube, perhaps. Or returning to their hotel from some swish nearby restaurant. One of them stopped and called out to Rowe. He pointed the SAS man out to his friend.
They shouted for help.
Rowe took one last look at the bodyguards and broke into a run, sprinting towards the eastern end of the side street, sixty metres ahead. Heading in the opposite direction to the tourists.
‘Stop!’ someone called out at his back. ‘You!’
He heard more voices now. Rowe risked a glance over his shoulder. Saw a couple of Hungarian police officers sweeping into view around the corner.
He sprinted on, chopping his stride, running for all he was worth. In another thirty metres he emerged from the side street and hooked a right on Nádor Street. He saw the rental van twenty metres away, an unmarked white Opel Vivaro parked in a loading bay at the side of the road. The engine was already running. Rowe ran over to the van, reached the passenger side door in half a dozen strides. Wrenched it open and dived inside.
Phil Lyden was behind the wheel.
He didn’t need to ask Rowe how the hit had gone down. Until roughly twenty seconds ago, Lyden had been lurking in shadows at the far end of the side street, observing the fight. If Rowe had been in serious difficulty, Lyden would have rushed over to lend a hand to his mucker.
‘Go, go!’ Rowe gasped as he slammed the door shut.
Lyden took off the handbrake, pulled out of the loading bay and accelerated south for a hundred metres. They hit a set of lights, slung a hard left at the junction and made a few quick turns and bulleted east on Rákóczi Street, Lyden shifting through the gears.
When they were clear of the scene Lyden checked the rear-view mirror and breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Fuck, that was close.’
‘I had it under control,’ Rowe muttered.
Lyden glanced sidelong at his mucker. ‘Did you have to give that fella a broken arm as well?’
‘He called us a black bastard.’
Lyden looked ahead, nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
They drove on for another three minutes. Lyden drove one-handed, extended his other hand towards Rowe. ‘Give us the phones.’
Rowe handed over the top-end smartphones he’d snatched from the two bodyguards. Lyden caught sight of the Rolexes and cash-stuffed wallets and whistled. ‘Fuck me, we’re in the wrong job here.’
Rowe merely shrugged.
Lyden buzzed down his window. Air rushed through the gap as he tossed out the handsets into the chilly blackness of the night. Getting rid of the phones was a security precaution, in case anyone tried to track the GPS signals from the devices. The rest of the loot would be quietly disposed of later, thrown into storm drains or dumped in public bins. The guys didn’t want to hang on to the valuables for longer than necessary, in case they were stopped by the local plod for whatever reason.
Stealing the bodyguards’ valuables would give the investigators a clear motive for the attack, Lyden knew. They’d treat it as a simple robbery. The bodyguards were walking down the side street at night? Carrying all this stuff? Of course they would have been targeted!
They raced on. Past the synagogue and the train station and the national football stadium, until they joined the motorway funnelling traffic south towards the airport.
Lyden and Rowe were booked into a three-star airport hotel. They left the rental van in the long-stay car park and checked into their room under their real names. Cleaned themselves up, changed into fresh sets of clothes. Chucked their old threads in a dumpster at the back of the hotel.
They would spend the night at the hotel. Catch the 06.15 flight to Vienna the following morning. From there they would head back to a friendly military base outside of Graz.
Lyden sent a message on his encrypted phone to a UK mobile number: It’s done. The door is open.
FIFTEEN
Exactly two hours after the attack had taken place, Phoebe Gallent, junior crime correspondent for the Daily Mail, finished writing up her copy for her next story. The article ran to two hundred and fifty words, plus six slightly blurry photographs of the crime scene she’d managed to capture on her phone. It wasn’t her best work, but it didn’t need to be. That wasn’t what her handler had asked for.
Three days earlier, Gallent’s editor had invited her to a secret meeting at the Landmark Hotel. There she had been introduced to a woman called Madeleine, who explained that she was from the Secret Intelligence Service. She said that Gallent had been recommended by her editor as someone who was discreet and trustworthy. And, most importantly, she was on good terms with Derek Lansbury.
Over coffee, Madeleine had explained what she needed. She emphasised that if Gallent wasn’t comfortable with their request, she could walk away at any time. There was no obligation. But Gallent was an ambitious young hack. With rent to pay on a room in a shared house in Hackney Wick, crushing student loan repayments and the endless fear of redundancy that came with working for a newspaper in the age of Instagram. She sensed that if she passed up an offer to work with SIS then she would be closing the door on the opportunity of a lifetime. She agreed, right there and then.
Madeleine had left the details to Gallent. All she had been told was that there would be an incident involving Lansbury’s bodyguards in Budapest,
and Gallent would need to be on the ground to cover it.
The issue was time-sensitive, Madeleine had stressed. The sooner she could get the story out the better. Within reason, of course. Gallent felt that three hours after the event was about right. Long enough for a junior reporter to get to the scene of the crime, interview witnesses, get a statement from the police, make a few calls and type up a first draft. Any sooner and it might arouse suspicion.
Madeleine had said that would be fine.
They had decided it was best if Gallent was close to the attack when it happened. If anyone asked, Gallent could claim to have been drinking in a nearby bar when she had been alerted to a cry for help. It was plausible. The incident was taking place in the city centre, yards away from the throng of tourist-friendly restaurants and watering holes along the riverfront. The kind of place a young, single journalist might find herself at the end of a long day.
At six minutes past midnight, Gallent saved the first draft of her article. She celebrated by pouring herself a glass from the bottle of cheap wine she’d smuggled back into her hotel room from a nearby convenience store. She took a long sip, picked up her phone and called Lansbury on his private number.
He answered on the fourth ring. Gallent apologised for the late hour of the call and wondered if he had heard the news that his bodyguards had been attacked in the street outside his hotel two hours ago. She asked if he was okay. Would he care to comment?
She decided she couldn’t print his response.
An hour later, she emailed the article to her editor.
At seven o’clock in the morning, local time, the story went live.
By eight o’clock, all the other major news outlets were running the same story.
Eight o’clock in the morning in Budapest was seven o’clock in the morning in Wroxham, Norfolk.
Lord Alan McGinn, former Chief of the General Staff, was sitting at the desk in his private study, listening to the morning news on Radio 4. His office displayed the fruits of a lifetime spent in the service of Queen and country. The walls were lined with pictures of McGinn pressing the flesh with various dignitaries and prime ministers, shots of him visiting the troops in Pristina and Basra. Pride of place was given to a framed photograph of McGinn receiving his knighthood from the Queen. On the desk was a pile of signed hardcovers of his bestselling autobiography, Leading from the Front, with a foreword by Prince Charles.