by Chris Ryan
And then he collapsed. His attacker caught him as he fell – it wouldn’t do for his body to be too bruised – then laid him out on the floor. By the time he had finished doing this he was red-faced and out of breath.
The newcomer surveyed the scene. The young man’s eyes were still open, still seeing; his limbs, however, were completely paralysed. The injection had done its work. It was a useful compound, suxamethonium chloride – a muscle relaxant that had the effect of completely paralysing the body while leaving the mind aware and remaining difficult to detect in the bloodstream. He did not have the opportunity to use it often, but for this particular job it was just right.
He opened his briefcase, dropped the syringe inside and then put his gloves back on. Walking into the kitchen he searched through the drawers, taking good care to put everything back in its proper place. He grunted with contentment when he found a roll of large, clear polythene bags. He’d brought some with him, of course, but much better for his purposes to use what was already here. He tore off a bag – it shimmied a little under the soft touch of his gloves – left the roll artfully on the cluttered work surface, then returned to the main room.
It was not entirely straightforward to remove the young man’s clothes, but he managed it and dumped them in a pile by the coffee table. Returning to his naked body, he slipped the plastic bag over his victim’s head. He pinched the open end around his neck before inclining his head slightly and looking directly into the young man’s eyes.
It was very hard to read any expression there, but his victim would know he was being suffocated. It was curious to witness the young man making no attempt to struggle. The plastic bag formed a concave hollow around his mouth which popped out and then in again. Over a period of about a minute the movement became gradually weaker until it stopped completely.
The young man was dead, but his assassin’s work wasn’t finished. Not yet. Letting go of the plastic bag his eyes fell upon another door at the opposite side of the room. He went through it to find the young man’s bedroom. It was stark: a chest of drawers, a cupboard and a large, unmade bed in the middle; an iPod left carelessly on the floor and a laptop computer next to it. The man took the laptop and switched it on. Opening the Internet browser he searched through the history of recently visited websites. They were largely what he expected: links to details of fast cars and gadgets, information on handguns and other weaponry, military websites and of course a good deal of pornography. He smiled. It looked like he wouldn’t be needing those magazines after all. Using the wireless connection that the laptop had automatically picked up he navigated to what looked like the young man’s favourite – it was nothing too specialist, he noted as he started to play a long video. He did, however, allow himself a few guilty seconds to watch the three naked, entwined bodies before placing the laptop on the coffee table.
Only then did he step back to admire his handiwork. It pleased him.
Auto-erotic asphyxiation. The young man had a history of it. For a moment the fat man wondered what pleasure anyone could possibly derive from the act of bringing oneself almost to the point of suffocation in order to achieve sexual gratification. Then he shrugged. People such as the young man he had just killed derived pleasure from all manner of pursuits that he himself would never consider. Foolish pursuits. Dangerous pursuits. In a strange kind of way it made them easier to eliminate. No doubt some girlfriend from the past would be found to confirm the young man’s penchant for such activities. He felt confident, from his considerable experience of these things, that his death would be put down to a tragic – if unsavoury – accident.
It wouldn’t do to stay here much longer. The man closed up his briefcase, glanced momentarily and with satisfaction at his little production, then let himself out of the flat. He closed the door silently before ascending the stairs, turning right and walking calmly back to the Uxbridge Road.
This really was quite the most unpleasant part of London, he decided. He would be very glad to get back home.
*
Much like the portly man who even now was making his way back up the Uxbridge Road, the car that travelled round the raised, curved slip road and into an almost diametrically opposite part of London was not built for speed. But it was being driven very quickly anyway.
It was a Renault, small and neat. The interior was immaculately tidy and faintly perfumed. It would be easy to mistake this car for one that had just been driven out of the showroom, but in fact it was a couple of years old. It just happened to have been very well looked after. The owner, Kelly Larkin, sat in the passenger seat. Her hair, which she had spent so much time on that morning, was mussed and unruly – at least by her standards. The scream of the small engine roared in her ears and, not for the first time, she found herself shouting. ‘For God’s sake, Jamie! Just slow down!’
No more than fifteen metres ahead, a car heading towards them moved into their lane to avoid a parked motorbike. Kelly clamped her eyes shut as her boyfriend slammed the engine into fifth gear and swerved sharply to avoid it. The angry sound of a horn filled her ears before fading quickly away. When she dared to open her eyes again the car had completely left the motorway and was on a wide, three-laned thoroughfare that would take them past Walthamstow and into that unfashionable slab of north-east London where she lived.
Jamie had a grin on his face. He was a good-looking guy, there was no doubt about that, but at the moment he looked like a psycho. He chewed on an imaginary piece of gum and held the steering wheel with a single finger. When he glanced into the rear-view mirror it was to admire himself.
At twenty-six, Jamie Spillane dressed like a teenager in his Converse boots and hooded tops. Kelly found herself with him quite against her better judgement; but at her age, thirty-three, she found herself being less and less picky in her desire not to end up on the shelf. She glanced at the speedometer. Ninety-six. ‘Please, Jamie,’ she begged as her left hand clutched the passenger door even more tightly. Perhaps pleading would have a better effect than shouting. ‘Please just slow down.’
Jamie turned to look at her. Instantly she wished she’d kept her mouth shut, because it meant his eyes were off the road. He had a neatly shaved goatee beard, which actually made him appear almost childlike because it looked so inappropriate. It was that look that had first attracted her to him, but right now she wished he would just grow up. He winked at her. Either he was totally oblivious to her fear, or it thrilled him. Whatever, he didn’t slow down. Kelly just closed her eyes again and tried to master the cold sickness that left her body weak. She would have liked to start crying, but somehow she was too scared even for that.
As they entered the outskirts of Walthamstow, Jamie reduced his speed. Not by much, though. He ran two red lights – they were just the ones Kelly counted when her eyes were open – and as he turned into the top of Acacia Street the speedometer was still wobbling around fifty. The tyres screeched as he took the corner; Kelly screamed at the sight of a couple of kids running across the road ahead. But at the last minute he swerved again and by some act of God managed to miss them. Outside her flat he swung the car to the side of the road. One tyre pulled up on to the kerb as he came to a halt, but he didn’t bother to rectify his inexact parking. He flamboyantly turned off the ignition, flung his arm into the air and turned once more to look at Kelly. His grin was still there and he was out of breath, as though he had run all the way from the M11, rather than driven.
Kelly opened the car door and stormed out. The air was cold, but she was too furious to take her coat from the back seat. As her heels clattered along the pavement she found that her mind was bubbling with angry words. Kelly was not the type to have a stand-up argument in the street, but, knowing that if she stopped now she wouldn’t have much choice, she hurried to her front door. If Jamie thought he was coming in after that little display, he had another think coming.
As she approached the door, Kelly fumbled in her handbag for her house keys, then frowned as she realised Jamie had t
hem. She breathed out huffily and, feeling her muscles tense with anticipation of the impending row, turned around.
Jamie was at the end of the little pathway that led up to the front door of her flat. He held the keys up and jingled them as he sashayed towards her. When he was less than a metre away, Kelly tried to grab them, but she was too slow: he jerked his hands out of the way.
‘Just give me the fucking keys, Jamie.’
‘Touchy, touchy…’ he replied.
‘You’re an idiot, Jamie. You could have killed us.’ She made another swipe at the keys; this time Jamie grabbed her wrist. He pushed her up against the door, pressed his body against hers and went in for the kiss. Kelly turned her head to one side to make her lips inaccessible. She wasn’t the type to snog in public any more than she was the type to argue. ‘Just open the bloody door,’ she hissed. ‘It’s freezing.’
They tumbled inside. Kelly stopped to pick up her mail – what looked like a gas bill nestled among a flurry of pizza delivery leaflets – while Jamie opened the main door to the flat, looking for all the world like he owned the place. It wound Kelly up even more – she’d only been seeing the guy for six weeks and he was practically living there, eating her food and channel hopping her television with his feet up on the coffee table. He said he had his own place, but Kelly had never seen it and was beginning to wonder.
‘That’s the last time you use my car,’ she stated as she slammed the door shut, more to make it clear that she was still pissed off than anything else. Jamie was helping himself to a beer from the fridge in the kitchenette area that formed part of the main room. She noticed that the surfaces were considerably less tidy than they had been when she left for work that morning. Jamie had clearly been there for most of the day and hadn’t bothered to do much cleaning up after him. Kelly put her large, fashionable handbag down on the cheap blue sofa and turned to face him. ‘I said, that’s the last time you use my car, Jamie. I’m sick of you driving it like bloody Lewis Hamilton.’
Jamie took a pull from his beer. ‘Thought you liked me picking you up from work.’
Kelly bristled. Now was hardly the time to admit it, but she did like the way the other secretaries at the law firm where she worked would congregate not very subtly in the foyer whenever she happened to mention that Jamie was meeting her at home time. He was several years younger than her – than any of them, in fact – and was, by all appearances, a Good Catch. Of course, she had kept quiet about the down side of being with Jamie: the constant sponging. Kelly even found that she would fool herself, whenever her purse was light, that it was down to her own scattiness. But Kelly wasn’t scatty by nature. She was methodical and thrifty. If she thought there were two twenty-pound notes in her purse, there should be two. Not one. Deep down she knew that, but she chose to ignore it. She chose to ignore, too, the time when she had searched through his jacket while he was in the bath. Kelly’s intention had been to flick through the messages on his mobile phone, but instead she had found something else: a thick wad of notes – two or three hundred pounds by the look of it. A lot of money for a young man who was ‘between jobs’.
‘Anyway,’ Jamie continued as he walked louchely up to her, ‘what would you rather be doing? Putting on a nice pair of slippers like all those other boring old cows you work with?’ He hooked his free arm around her waist and lightly kissed her neck. ‘Watching Gardener’s World?’ He said it in a mock high-pitched voice that made Kelly smile despite herself.
‘No,’ she breathed, her voice still a bit surly. And then, ‘You just scared me, Jamie.’
‘Don’t you like being scared?’ he asked.
He kissed her on the neck once more. This time it sent a little shiver of pleasure down her spine. Her boyfriend pulled away, then looked at her with an obviously fake little-boy-lost look. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said with an irresistible half smile. ‘I’ll never do it again.’
‘Liar,’ she whispered.
And then he kissed her again, on the lips this time as his free hand formed an arc around the curve of her buttocks. It was a serious kind of kiss and she could not help but close her eyes. Her tense body became softer, more compliant. Though their mouths were still locked in a kiss, she heard herself gasp.
Jamie was far from gentle as he removed her clothes, but for some reason she didn’t mind that. It took almost no time at all for her trouser suit, blouse and underwear to be relegated to a crumpled pile on the floor. She kept her fashionable glasses on, as well as her bead necklace, because she knew he liked that.
Jamie took a step back and surveyed Kelly’s body. It flashed through her mind that she had gone from utter fury to absolute desire in minutes; a small corner of her brain wondered how Jamie had done that, or what she should think of herself for being so easy. But she didn’t really care that much. She liked the way her young lover looked at her. She liked being desired. She liked the way she could now pretend to be in control.
She gave him a steady, cool stare, then turned and walked into the bedroom, making very sure to sway her naked hips seductively as she went.
TWO
An unmarked white minibus stopped at the entrance to RAF Credenhill. The MOD policeman on duty spoke briefly with the driver, glanced into the vehicle, then nodded and allowed the barrier to open. The bus drove into SAS headquarters and came to a halt. Eight men spilled out.
They crossed the courtyard to the main building, each of them carrying a heavy bergen and walking with the slow gait of soldiers who had been in the field for a long time. Their calves were beasted, their clothes baggy from the muscle mass they had lost on op. Sam Redman was at the back of that little group, his friend Mac alongside him. Both men had deep tans, their skin weathered by several weeks of harsh sunshine. Their beards were bushy – almost comically so – and Sam was looking forward to shaving his off. They’d had twelve hours at Bastion, during which time he’d been able to clean up a bit and wolf down a few platefuls of nosh – hardly Gordon Ramsay, but better than the biscuits brown and Panda Colas they got with their ration packs. Now he needed scalding hot water, rough soap and a proper fry-up from his favourite greasy spoon in Hereford. And after that, come evening, a few beers. Quite a few. It had been a rough two months.
One of the lads in front of them, a young Cockney boy new to the Regiment, turned his head. ‘Keep up, you two,’ he called. ‘They’ll be pensioning you off if they think you can’t keep up with the young ’uns.’
‘Don’t you ladies worry about us,’ Mac replied quickly. ‘We’ve got all the energy in the world. Just ask your mum. It were only last week we were taking turns giving her a Bombay Roll. Gave her a right good fucking seeing to. Tell her I said hello, won’t you?’
A few of the guys laughed. Mac just looked at Sam and rolled his eyes before looking around at the bleak, utilitarian surroundings of Credenhill. After the bright blue skies, golden desert and lush vegetation of Afghanistan, it was drab and grey, this featureless compound under a Tupperware sky. ‘Nice to be home,’ he observed without a trace of sarcasm.
‘Too right,’ Sam replied. Unlovely though it was, it was a hell of a sight better than being in the green zone of Helmand Province, not having to worry about some black-robed, bearded bastard taking potshots at you or your mates. ‘Too damn right,’ he repeated.
An hour later, Sam had finished the process of dumping his kit in his single-bunked room and checking his weapons back in. There were no messages for him in the squadron office and he was looking forward to getting to the ground-floor flat on the outskirts of Hereford that he called home. Passing through the mess room, however, he saw Mac again. Unlike Sam, Mac was already cleaned up and shaved. Like many of the troopers they’d just returned with, Mac was bunking down at Credenhill. For the rookies it was because they were relatively new to the Regiment and had not yet bought themselves a place in the town; for Mac it was because his missus had kicked him out of the house for the umpteenth time. Some indiscretion with a Regiment groupie, no doubt – Sam had l
ong since given up asking.
His friend was sitting alone at a table with a broadsheet newspaper spread out in front of him. Sam sat heavily opposite him. ‘What do you think you are?’ he asked, flicking the newspaper with his forefinger. ‘A fucking intellectual?’
Mac ignored him. ‘Listen to this,’ he said before reading from the paper in a mock-posh voice. ‘“Questions are being asked as to how long the SAS can continue operating at such an intense level. ‘There is concern in the Regiment that if they keep going at this high tempo it won’t be long before they suffer a big loss,’ one source said.”’
‘One source?’
‘Yeah,’ Mac scoffed. ‘Your mum probably.’ Then, realising what he had said, he looked up. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said quietly. ‘I didn’t mean…’
‘Forget it,’ Sam replied, reaching to another table and grabbing a tabloid paper. It was the usual stuff, none of which interested him much. His eyes lingered briefly on the topless model on one of the inside pages; he read a report about the war in Afghanistan which used phrases like ‘brave heroes’ and ‘our boys’ – phrases that would never be uttered within the confines of Credenhill, or any other regimental barracks for that matter. His attention was caught by the story of some kid who’d been found dead in his London flat with a plastic bag over his head and a laptop full of porn. Death by misadventure, the coroner had said.
‘Dirty fucker,’ Sam mumbled.
‘What?’
Sam folded up the paper and tossed it on to another table. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He stood up. ‘I’m out of here. Catch you later, yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ Mac replied. ‘Later.’
Sam was about to walk away from the table when someone else entered the mess room. No one could say that Mark Porteus, the burly CO of 22 SAS was a particularly friendly man, but there weren’t many who held that against him. He wasn’t supposed to be likeable. His cropped hair was almost completely grey, his face deeply lined. He had a scar on the left of his chin where the skin was completely white – a souvenir from Northern Ireland – but somehow his features wouldn’t be complete without it. A Sandhurst graduate, Porteus was a career soldier from the tip of his boots to the top of his head and was held in respect by every man in the Regiment – and in awe by quite a few of the younger ones. He was wearing combats – Sam couldn’t remember when he’d last seen the CO out of them.