by Alex Shaw
About the Author
ALEX SHAW has lived and worked in Ukraine, the former USSR, the Middle East, and Africa. He is the author of the number one international Kindle bestselling Aidan Snow and Jack Tate SAS thrillers. Total Blackout, the first in the Jack Tate series, was shortlisted for the 2021 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. His writing has been published in several thriller anthologies alongside International Bestselling authors Stephen Leather and Matt Hilton. Alex, his wife and their two sons divide their time between Ukraine, England and Qatar.
@alexshawhetman
/alex.shaw.982292
www.alexwshaw.co.uk
Praise for Alex Shaw
‘Looking for breakneck pace and a relentless hero? Alex Shaw has you covered’
James Swallow
‘Alex Shaw is one of the best thriller writers around! Fast paced, Total Blackout gripped from page one and didn’t let go … as fast as a Hollywood movie’
Stephen Leather
‘Compelling and authentic. An explosive new series with an uncompromising hero’
Tom Wood
‘A perfect mix of hi-tech, high-concept modern action thriller and old school, Cold War espionage where evil Russians are still plotting the downfall of the West and only one man can stop them’
Simon Toyne
‘Jack Tate is a powerful character, a true Brit hero. A cracking start to a new series!’
Alan McDermott
‘Alex Shaw is a master of the action thriller. Grabbed me from the first page and never let go’
Michael Ridpath
‘Riveting thriller with an original plot and surprising twists. Tate is totally convincing as a classic Brit operative. Great drama and characterisation’
Duncan Falconer
Also by Alex Shaw
Cold Blood
Cold Black
Cold East
Total Blackout
Total Fallout
Traitors
ALEX SHAW
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road
Dublin 4, Ireland
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2021
Copyright © Alex Shaw 2021
Alex Shaw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © July 2021 ISBN: 9780008441739
Version: 2021-06-28
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Praise for Alex Shaw
Also by Alex Shaw
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Extract
Acknowledgements
Dear Reader …
Keep Reading …
About the Publisher
For my wife Galia, my sons Alexander and Jonathan,
and our family in England and Ukraine.
Prologue
Central Tunis, Tunisia
Racine confirmed the man entering the hotel was her target. She knew his face and his gait. The French national wore a navy-blue business suit and carried a briefcase. He looked unremarkable. He was anything but. Unseen, as she hung back across the avenue, in the shadow of a large tree, Racine continued to sip from her bottle of Orangina and scroll her smartphone.
The hotel was the tallest building in this part of the capital. Its glass-sided tower looked out of place but afforded panoramic views of the city.
Racine waited for five minutes, to give her target time to get settled into his room. Her encrypted iPhone vibrated in her hand. A message. A random word that had been chosen as her ‘go’ command. She crossed the busy Avenue Habib Bourguiba and entered the hotel lobby. Bright lights reflected against the white marble flooring. Cognac-coloured marble panelling covered the walls and matched the hue of leather armchairs, dotted beside curtained windows. Off to her right was a bar area and to her left the front desk, manned by three suited men, each sporting a short haircut and moustache. They were busy with guests. She strode directly past them to the lifts. The flooring now changed to a brown and white marble chequerboard.
In her peripheral vision, a figure rose from a chair and followed her. Before she could press the call button, the lift doors opened and three men exited. One was dressed in a grey business suit, with a pair of bronze-lensed sunglasses obscuring his face; the others wore matching black Adidas tracksuits and carried large, heavy-looking, identical sports bags. Racine entered the lift and so did the man who had followed her. His clothes marked him out as a businessman but his hair, cut extremely close to his scalp, did not. He made no eye contact and said not one word as he pressed the button for the fourteenth floor and then stood with his back to her. They rode the lift up in silence, the overhead light glinting on his stubbly scalp. The man exited the lift first and immediately turned left into the hallway. Racine followed a couple of paces behind. The man passed three doors before slowing to touch a key card against a lock on the fourth door. It opened with an electronic tone. He carried on walking and vanished from view through the door at the end of the hallway.
Racine entered the room he had unlocked. She kept low, darted towards the bathroom on her immediate right. It was empty. She knew it would be, but a failure to confirm this could be fatal. Moving back out into the sleeping area she noted a shoebox on the bed next to a pair of surgical rubber gloves. Inside the box lay a subcompact Glock 26 pistol, a magazine, a custom suppressor and a dull, metal key. Racine pulled on the gloves, slotted the full magazine into the body of the Glock and then screwed on the suppressor. The Austrian handgun felt unbalanced with the added weight and length of the sound-deadening device, but it was a trade-off she was willing to make, and the combination was effective for close-quarter work.
At the foot of the bed and next to the bulky, outdated television set was a door in the party wall. Behind it was a second door that opened into the adjoining room. Two doors were all that separated Racine from her target – former paratrooper Jean Yotte.
> On leaving the paras, Yotte had become a private military contractor. For three years he had undertaken overseas security and bodyguard positions, but what had pinged him on the threat radar of France’s foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE, were the highly lucrative yet highly illegal contracts he had been taking for the last eighteen months. Intelligence confirmed that the private military contractor had become an assassin. What was more worrying for the French was that his new paymasters had direct links to known terrorist organisations. With the flick of a pen in Paris, Yotte’s fate was determined and without any trace of irony, Racine of the DGSE’s Division Action was ordered to assassinate the assassin.
Racine had no qualms about what she was going to do, of the life she was on the cusp of ending. Her target was a threat to the security of the French Republic. He was a traitor, and there was nothing Racine detested more.
Her phone vibrated. It displayed a new message. It confirmed the water in her target’s room had been running for five minutes. She pushed the phone back into her pocket. She was exactly on schedule. Four days of surveillance had shown Yotte to be a creature of habit. Each time he returned to his room the man took a ten-minute shower. But habits were bad, and her target would find out why in less than five minutes.
Racine silently moved forward. The lock on her side was not engaged. Placing her left ear flat against the door, she listened. A low-level burble emanated from the other side. Racine drew the handle down, millimetre by millimetre, the mechanism pre-oiled to make no sound. She then pulled the door open on silent hinges. Racine stepped back quickly, half expecting the second door to disintegrate as rounds ripped towards her. But nothing happened. Music, the CNN intro theme, and then an excited female voice speaking in American-accented English. On her haunches, Racine peered through the lock. She could make out the foot of the bed, and a sports bag lying on it, nothing more. She could now hear the water running in the bathroom. Rising to her feet, she kept her hand steady and inserted the key into the lock. As she started to turn the key, there was a knocking sound, coming from the other side of the target’s room, followed by an electronic beep.
The shower abruptly stopped. Her hand froze, the key half-turned. She sensed movement and felt footfall. On the other side of the target’s room, the main door opened and a voice called out, ‘Housekeeping.’ The phone in Racine’s pocket vibrated. A warning, she knew, a message that a third party was entering the target’s room, an innocent. It was an order to abort. She didn’t look at it. Racine closed her eyes, swore under her breath in French and quickly turned the key, knowing she had only a matter of seconds. Then she heard him – Jean Yotte – asking angry questions. Racine swung out with the open door into the room. Going low she raised the Glock and acquired her target.
The scene that greeted her made her pause, made her slow, for fear of hitting the wrong person. The housekeeper stood at the door as Yotte, dripping wet and wearing just a towel around his waist, berated her. His right hand, held behind his back, clasped a sub-compact handgun. The maid’s face contorted as she saw Racine and Yotte spun, his towel falling to the floor and the gun rising fast.
Racine was faster. She fired. A double tap. Her suppressed rounds sounded like large books dropping on a tiled floor. The first round shattered Yotte’s forehead and the second shredded his heart. Neither low-velocity slug exited his body.
Racine stood. The smell of gunpowder filled the room. The maid was immobile. Her eyes wide and her jaw slack. Racine pointed the Glock at her and beckoned her to enter Yotte’s room. The maid’s head twitched, and she jerked to the right and ran screaming, away from the door along the hallway.
‘Merde!’ Racine swore.
Things had turned noisy but, she reasoned, she had got the job done.
She shut the door, then stepped back into the room, negotiated Yotte’s corpse and collected her two spent shells. She had to exfil the hotel. Her phone was vibrating in her pocket, but she ignored it again. Racine was in the room and her controller was not. As her eyes took in the scene, she paused … the sports bag on the bed. She had seen the exact same bag before. It was identical to the bags carried by the two men who had exited her lift. She bounded to the bed and opened the zip. Inside were three brick-sized blocks wrapped in a waxy paper. The markings confirmed that she was looking at several kilos of military-grade plastic explosive. It was more than enough to flatten the hotel and most of the surrounding city block.
She took a long calming breath, her heart thumping in her chest as she checked for any wiring or a detonator. There was neither. Moving to the window she looked out at the street far below. She had a view half a mile up the Avenue Habib Bourguiba in either direction. Tunis city centre was a target-rich environment with a myriad of shops, cafés, local attractions, government offices and embassies.
A sudden, shrill sound attacked her ears. Yotte’s mobile phone was ringing. It was on the pillow of the bed he would never sleep in again. She picked it up and inspected the display. Her eyes flicked back to the bag. Had she missed the detonator? Had she missed the wires? Was this the end of it all? The phone stopped ringing and then started again. She pressed the ‘answer’ icon. There was no explosion. She was still alive, and Yotte was still dead.
A Tunisian voice spoke in rapid French. ‘We are at the cathedral and in place.’
Racine had never wanted to be a man, until that moment. She had no alternative, she had to risk a reply. She placed her hand over the phone and tried to disguise her voice. ‘Await my command.’
‘D’accord.’ The caller hung up.
Racine checked the phone’s saved contacts. Three numbers only, and one of these she’d just been connected to. She knew she couldn’t call either number if what she suspected was true. She retrieved her own iPhone and with no time to fully explain her suspicions tapped out a text to secure the room. Explosives found. Send cleaner.
Pushing her Glock into the waistband of her trousers, Racine left the room and took the fire escape down. The stairwell walls were unpainted concrete and each footstep kicked up dust, which worked its way into her eyes and nose. As she reached the lobby level, she heard sirens on the avenue outside, not unusual for a capital city but she had no illusions that they were heading her way. She continued down another floor and exited into the underground parking level. Fastening her denim jacket, she sprinted up the ramp. She burst out onto the pavement and into the sunlight, directly to the left of the entrance lobby. At that moment two police cars squealed to a halt in front of the hotel’s revolving doors. She froze on the pavement, but the uniformed men spilt out of their vehicles and pushed past her into the building.
Racine ran.
There was no time for pleasantries or stealth as she barged her tall frame past and between pedestrians on the pavement. Under her jacket, the Glock painfully dug into her stomach with each stride and the warm suppressor scalded her skin. She could already see the Cathedral of St Vincent de Paul. It was at the Place de l’Indépendence, at the end of Avenue Habib Bourguiba and directly opposite the French embassy. She slowed her pace to a brisk walk, attempted to steady her breathing and entered the square.
A group of European tourists stood at the foot of the cathedral steps, listening to a guide holding a red parasol. In between the group and a refreshment stall a man stood. She recognised him from the lift. He was dressed in a tracksuit and had a large sports bag at his feet.
Racine knew it was reckless, but she had no other option but to act. She skirted the square and angled for the stall. As she reached it, the man paid her no attention; she was just another tourist. Turning sideways on to mask her actions, Racine slowly withdrew the Glock from her waistband. Shielding it with her jacket until the last possible moment, she fired twice, at close range, into the man’s head. He dropped. Almost before he had stopped falling, she searched his torso for a trigger or a wire. Nothing.
She felt a wave of panic break around her, as first the tourists and then the locals comprehended what had happened
. They scattered noisily, like startled pigeons. Racine felt a roaring in her ears and nausea build in her stomach. Where was the trigger? Had she been mistaken? Had she executed an innocent civilian? But she couldn’t have. He was one of the men from the lift, wasn’t he? But was he linked to her target at the hotel? He had to be otherwise … She reached for the sports bag …
An angry yell, and then a single shot rang out. Without thinking, Racine spun to her right. Above her now on the top step, another tracksuited man pointed a Kalashnikov at her. The second man from the hotel lift. She saw him flinch as he pulled the trigger again and a second single shot chipped the concrete of the pavement where, a moment ago, she had been. Racine kept moving, as confusion crossed his face, he glanced down at the Russian weapon. Adjusting his grip, he thumbed the selector switch up from “semiautomatic” to “automatic” fire.
Racine came up, firing. Her shots hit him in the chest. The gunman’s finger tightened around the trigger and as he fell, he emptied the Kalashnikov’s magazine into the stone steps and wooden doors of the cathedral, a line of strike marks tracing their way skywards.
Tourists continued to scream and run across the square. Sirens sounded in the distance, getting closer by the second; she didn’t know if they were heading for her or the hotel but either way she wasn’t going to hang around. Racine bounded up the steps and kicked the weapon away from the gunman’s hand. He was still alive and bloody bubbles seeped from his mouth. He tried to speak; however, he didn’t get the chance as Racine shot him in the right eye. She searched him and just like his comrade, found no trigger or wires. His Kalashnikov was the folding-stock version, compact enough to conceal within his bag. The bag …
Racine looked up and through the open door. Inside the cathedral, his sports bag lay open. She ran towards it, crouched down and without giving pause for her own safety, checked the contents – a stack of spare magazines for the Kalashnikov, but no explosives. She put away her Glock, hung his weapon from her shoulder, zipped up the bag and carried it towards the other one still lying on the pavement beside the first gunman. Her eyes scanned the immediate area, for any threats, before she opened the bag. No explosives. No detonator. It too contained spare magazines and also the Kalashnikov that the first gunman had not had the time to use. Were there to be two attacks: a shooting and then a bombing? Or had the two intended to take hostages into the cathedral?