by Chris Ryan
The colonel was worse than all these. Boorish, aggressive and pretty much always arseholed, he took out the frustration of his enforced incarceration on his bodyguards. There was never a word of thanks. Never a word of anything, except a slurred put-down. The colonel had his first slug of whisky with his cornflakes and it was downhill from there. So yeah, Sandy was seriously considering taking the advice of that dark-haired SAS man who’d turned up with the chick from MI6 the other day, and getting himself a different job. There were plenty of freelance opportunities out there, he reasoned, where you could be your own boss and turn the gig down if the principal wasn’t showing you the proper respect.
He frowned at the memory of the SAS guy. He’d met a few of those Hereford boys and they were generally a laugh with their black humour and callously cynical way of looking at the world. This one was different. Super-serious, even grim. He’d managed to put the shits up Sandy when he emerged from his meeting with the colonel and told him to keep his weapon cocked and locked, asked him if he had kids and to consider getting himself put on to another job. It didn’t work like that, of course. You did what you were told to do. But Sandy was a little more alert over the next twenty-four hours. Every creak of the house made him jump, every shadow concealed a threat. But none of his fears had materialised and now he felt more at ease.
He and the other two members of his team were in the habit of rotating their positions. It eased the monotony, kept them more alert and meant that nobody perpetually had the chore of standing outside the colonel’s drawing room, as he called it, during the day, or in the corridor outside his bedroom at night. The other positions were at the iron gates in the charming old perimeter wall that surrounded the colonel’s residence – his word again – and here, half a mile from the house, on the only road leading up to it. He’d parked the Range Rover across the road and at right angles to it, so that nobody could pass. And nobody did. Nobody had even approached, apart from the SAS man and his MI6 companion. The colonel was not a popular man.
Sandy was sitting in the Range Rover now. The radio was on low and his weapon – locked but not cocked, despite the SAS man’s warning – was on the passenger seat next to him. His phone was mounted magnetically on the dashboard. He had the car heater on to keep him warm. The snow that had fallen during the week had thawed, and now the weather was dramatically different. It had been dark all afternoon, the bubbling clouds overhead a deep grey. Occasionally there were heavy droplets of rain, but Sandy couldn’t help feeling the sky was holding something back. The storm was rolling around the surrounding hills, belching its distant rumbles of thunder. Silent flashes of sheet lightning occasionally pulsed across the sky, but this was just a prelude. The main event, when it came, would be spectacular. Sandy hoped he would be home by then.
He was occupying himself by watching a couple of spring lambs follow their mother uphill on an adjacent field when he saw the glow of headlights from the south-west. A vehicle was approaching.
Sandy put on his woollen hat and holstered his weapon across his chest and under his windproof coat. He exited the vehicle, walked round from the driver’s side and stood in the middle of the road. He blew on his hands and stamped his feet. The road turned out of sight to the south-west about fifty metres away. He only had to wait thirty seconds for the vehicle to reappear. It approached at a steady speed and stopped about ten metres from where Sandy stood. The headlights were on full beam. They made him squint and illuminated tiny droplets of moisture in the air. And when the door opened and a figure emerged, it was slightly silhouetted and Sandy couldn’t quite make out its features until it was a couple of metres in front of him.
It was a woman. Sandy recognised her face but couldn’t immediately place it. ‘Hello again,’ she said, and it was her voice that did it.
‘I was just thinking about you,’ Sandy said. ‘Have you dyed your hair?’
‘Change is as good as a rest,’ said the woman . . . ‘Do you like it?’
‘I’m a married man, love. Not allowed to have opinions like that.’
She gave him a flirtatious look. ‘Doesn’t matter where you get your appetite, as long as you dine at home. Isn’t that what they say?’
‘That’s not what my missus says,’ Sandy replied, hoping he was successfully disguising how flustered she’d suddenly made him feel. ‘Your friend not with you today? The big fella?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s otherwise engaged.’ She nodded in the direction of the house. ‘He’s expecting me, I think. I’d like to get in and out before this storm hits.’
‘Ah . . . I haven’t heard about that,’ Sandy said.
‘We just need to go over one or two security matters. Nothing major. You’ll be out of here soon, I should think. A day or so at the most.’ Sandy hesitated. Her kittenish manner had rather scrambled his brain. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Call the office, they’ll confirm. It’s fine, I’ll wait.’
‘I . . .’
‘Bethany. Bethany White.’
‘Right,’ Sandy said. ‘Of course. If you wouldn’t mind just . . .’
He turned his back on her.
Sandy wasn’t expecting the attack, so when it happened, he really stood no chance, even though he was stronger and was carrying a loaded weapon. He saw it all happen in the side window of the Range Rover. As soon as he turned his back, the woman stepped forward and hooked her left arm around his throat. She was strong, and the grip was tight. Her right arm wrapped itself around his waist. She was holding something. A long narrow filleting knife. Its tip was towards his stomach, the blade pointing upwards. He tried to push the woman’s arm away, but the momentum was already with her as she plunged the blade into his belly.
The knife felt icy as it slipped through his skin and guts. Then the tip touched his spinal cord and the pain was extraordinary: white-hot, like nothing he’d ever imagined. His body went into spasm, but he was still looking down and saw her yank the handle of the knife up towards his chest, like someone engaging a handbrake. The blade, still deeply embedded in his bowels, sliced through layers of skin and tissue, taking with it the folds of his shirt and coat into his abdomen.
His knees went. She withdrew the knife as he collapsed. The headlights of her car were still shining behind him, casting his shadow very distinctly on to the side of the Range Rover. He was clutching his stomach now. He looked down to see atrocious quantities of thick, almost-black fluid spewing from his belly. He felt his face screwing up in puzzlement. Surely it was too dark for blood. Maybe it was something else. The contents of his stomach, or . . .
Or . . .
He collapsed on to his front.
The world was spinning. He felt like he should hang on to something. That way he could stop the spinning, and if he could stop the spinning, maybe he’d have a chance of seeing his kids again. They could watch a movie together. He’d even let them choose Marvel. And eat popcorn.
Yes. If he could just crawl forward and grab the Range Rover’s tyre. That would steady him. It was very close. A metre, if that. But he couldn’t make his limbs move. His arms. They wouldn’t move. Not an inch, no matter how hard he tried, and the world was spinning even faster, and the lights behind him were so bright, and he didn’t know where he was any more, and he just couldn’t work out why.
Danny hadn’t seen a single person since the CO walked out of the holding cells. He’d sat for hours on the plastic stool, staring at the opposite wall, waiting. He smelled bad. It occurred to him that the last time he’d washed was at the embassy in Beirut, and his face was still stained with blood. He remembered how he approached Bethany, he in his towel, she in her dressing gown, and put one hand on her hip. And how she removed his hand and said, ‘Look but don’t touch, Danny.’ At the time, he thought he’d misread the signs, but now he knew he hadn’t misread them at all. Bethany White had played him just right, and he felt suddenly furious at his own naivety. The woman who’d killed three SAS men had been there, in his grasp, and he’d been too blind to see
it.
He didn’t intend to make the same mistake again.
But now he was in the hands of the head shed.
They would come, eventually. The question was, would it be too late?
He heard thunder outside. Thoughts circled in his brain. There was still a missing piece to the jigsaw. If Bethany White had been on a killing spree, why was she targeting the MISFIT team, and not the IS assassins who had tortured and killed Ibrahim Khan? It made no sense to him. No matter how crazed Bethany White truly was, she wasn’t the type to do something without a reason.
So what was it?
That question was circulating as the door to the holding cells opened. The CO entered. He looked troubled. ‘What is it?’ Danny asked.
For a moment the CO didn’t reply. ‘I spoke to a contact in Vauxhall. They agreed to check Bethany White’s schedule.’
Danny stood up. ‘And?’
‘Ben Bullock’s body was found in Dubai on January 13. Estimated time of death, somewhere between 20.00 and midnight on January 12. Bethany White took leave between the tenth and the fourteenth.’
‘You don’t say,’ Danny muttered.
‘Liam Armitage was found dead in Ghana on February 3. According to MI6 records, White was out of the country then too, meeting a potential contact in Tunisia.’
‘And Ollie Moorhouse?’
‘Found in Palm Beach on March 6. And on March 4 . . .’ The CO pinched the bridge of his nose.
‘What?’ Danny said.
‘She called in sick.’
Danny stared at him in disbelief at the brazenness of it.
‘Flu,’ the CO added. ‘Or so she said. It was March 7 that they put her under close protection.’
‘Plenty of time for her to fly back from Florida,’ Danny said.
‘Plenty,’ the CO agreed.
‘Boss,’ Danny said. ‘You’ve got to let me out of . . .’
He didn’t finish his sentence. The CO’s phone rang. He answered it immediately. ‘Yes, I’ll hold,’ he said. He put one hand over the mouthpiece. ‘It’s Sturrock,’ he said. ‘He says it’s urgent.’
Somewhere outside, the thunder rolled again.
Bethany watched the guard die. Face down on the ground, he muttered something about popcorn as his body twitched and a dark pool of blood spread out from his belly. She felt nothing as his final breath noisily left him. Death, she realised, was completely mundane to her. Even violent death like this. How many was it now? The three SAS men. The girl in Beirut. She had to count to remind herself that this was number five.
By the end of today, she would have more than doubled
her tally.
She’d managed to keep her hands free of blood, but the blade of the knife was sticky and covered with gore. She wiped it clean on the back of his coat, then returned it to the glove compartment of her rented CR-V. She removed his handgun from its holster – somehow it had remained free of blood – and placed it in the footwell of the passenger seat. She hurried back up to the Range Rover and took the wheel. The seat was still warm from her victim’s body. The heat was blowing, the radio playing softly and the keys hanging in the ignition. She took the phone from its magnetic holder and switched it off. If anyone called it, it would go straight to voicemail and they’d assume, to start with at least, that he was on another call. She switched off the radio, pressing the on–off switch with more force than was necessary because for some reason the sound of it profoundly irritated her. Then she started the engine. She turned the vehicle ninety degrees so it was parked up by the side of the road, then pocketed the keys. She exited the Range Rover and walked back to her CR-V, barely looking at the dead man as she passed. Back behind the wheel of her rental car, she moved the vehicle forward. The tyres crunched over the body of her victim. She lurched with the movement of the vehicle, but her hands didn’t move from the ten and two position on the steering wheel, and her eyes stayed resolutely on the way ahead.
She drove carefully and, as she approached the gates to the colonel’s residence, used her engine braking rather than her brake pedal to slow down. The tyres gripped the surface sufficiently, and she came to a complete halt ten metres from the iron gates.
She let the engine idle as the headlights illuminated the gates. The second guard appeared on the other side. He was a stocky fellow with a grey woollen hat and a black coat that didn’t hide the holster across his chest. He peered through the iron gates, half frowning, half squinting in the headlights’ beam. Bethany didn’t take her eyes from him, but stretched out her left arm to open the glove compartment. This time she took the smaller knife with the curved blade. She could conceal the handle in the palm of her hand, and the flat part of the blade with her forefinger. It was just the right size.
The guard on the other side of the gates pulled out his mobile phone, dialled a number and put the handset to his ear. Then he looked at the screen. It was obvious that whoever he’d tried to call hadn’t answered. Bethany lowered her window. She leaned out. ‘His wife called,’ she said.
The guard squinted again, but seemed to relax at the sound of a female voice. He walked to the side of the gates and tapped a code into a keypad. The gates opened and the guard approached. Bethany almost smiled. He had that swagger she recognised so well. The swagger of a man about to patronise a woman. The sort of swagger that her Ibrahim would never have displayed. The guard drew up alongside the CR-V, rested one hand on the roof and bent down to look in. He only managed a single sentence – ‘What can we do for you tonight then, darling?’ – before Bethany struck.
The hooked end of the knife sank into the flesh of his neck almost without resistance. All she had to do next was yank it back towards her. The curved blade cut deep into him. It was only when the tip connected with his Adam’s apple that she had to yank a little harder. The blade emerged, bloodied, from his neck, bringing with it a trail of artery and tissue. The man staggered back, one hand pressed against the wound. Blood pumped hard through his fingers as Bethany opened the driver’s door and stepped outside. Her victim was trying to reach for his gun, but he was also clearly trying to stem the bleed with his dominant right hand. His left hand clawed awkwardly at the holster, but he seemed to have lost control of his grip, and a moment later he’d collapsed to his knees in any case.
With her left hand she held a clump of his hair. With her right, she inflicted another wound on the opposite side of
his neck.
He was struggling to breathe now, and his skin was turning waxy. There was a catastrophic quantity of blood gushing down his front and he was staring at it in shocked horror. He seemed to have forgotten all about the gun. Bethany leaned down, pulled open his coat and removed the weapon from its holster. The handle was sticky and she held it between her thumb and forefinger as she took it back to the car and dumped it in the footwell of the passenger seat where she was gathering quite an armoury. There was movement behind her. She looked back. Her victim had fallen forward and was now face down on the road, blood spreading from his neck. There was no movement in his body. She wasn’t certain he was dead, but he was surely only seconds away and she had work to do.
‘Go ahead,’ said the CO.
He stared intently at Danny as he listened to Sturrock at the other end of the phone. His face was expressionless. He listened for thirty seconds, then said, ‘Roger that.’ He killed the phone call. ‘The DNA result came through from Beirut. MI6 had Bethany White’s on file. They ran a comparison. It’s not her. They’ve put out an all-ports warning.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ Danny said. ‘Get me out of here.’
The CO nodded. He disappeared into the guard house and reappeared with the duty guard who unlocked the holding cell. Danny pushed his way out. ‘Can you get a chopper in the air?’ he said.
‘Negative,’ the CO replied. ‘Not from Hereford. Our assets are currently in London.’
‘We need to get a team moving,’ Danny said, as they stormed through the guard room and into the op
en air. It was dark. Sheet lighting flashed across the sky. ‘Shit,’ Danny hissed. Weather like this would only serve to delay a chopper.
‘Since when were you giving the orders, Black?’
Danny stopped and turned. ‘Boss, I’ve been in that fucking holding cell all day while MI6 stare at their navels. Trust me, Bethany White is in the country. She’s killed three SAS men that we know about. She compromised my team in Syria. Her next target is probably the colonel and after that it’s Christina Somers – she’ll do her last because she’ll want to disappear with her kid. We need to get on the blower to both their close-protection teams, tell them to move their principals immediately.’
The CO nodded. ‘I’ll tell Sturrock.’ He dialled a number and put his phone to his ear as he marched across the asphalt to the main Regiment building. There was a sudden, torrential downpour, and the two men were soaked before they got
back inside.
Bethany wiped the knife clean on the back of his coat. She felt inside his pocket, recovered his phone, and switched it off before dropping it on the ground beside him. Then she climbed back into the CR-V. She quietly closed the driver’s door, stowed
the knife back in the glove compartment and drove through the open gates.
As soon as she crossed the threshold, the rain started. It was end-of-the-world rain, heavy and impenetrable. All of a sudden, Bethany could barely see the house, even though it was no more than twenty-five metres away. She killed the engine. The headlights died. Rain thundered deafeningly on the roof of the CR-V. It suited Bethany, because it camouflaged her approach.