Who Dares Wins

by Chris Ryan

  Jamie smiled and almost instinctively moved his hand into the back pocket of his trousers. His fingertips felt money there. Notes. He looked up at the woman. The stare with which she returned his gaze was dismissive and unfriendly, but Jamie didn’t care.

  Stage two of his impromptu night out had just been decided on.

  But at that exact moment he was interrupted by the ringing of his mobile phone. He cursed and pulled it out. Sleek and thin. The latest model. No number flashed up on the screen and he almost didn’t answer. The truth was, though, that Jamie Spillane was not the kind of young man to ignore a phone call. His curiosity always got the better of him. If it was someone he didn’t want to speak to, he could always pretend not to hear them. He accepted the call and put the handset to his ear.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Jamie recognised the voice, of course. The slurring, shouting, barely articulate female voice at the other end, a sound he remembered from his earliest childhood. He sighed and looked up at the neon light in front of him, all enthusiasm for his next adventure instantly dissolving into nothing.

  When he spoke, it was with the stuttering hesitation of someone trying to get a word in edgeways.

  ‘Jesus, Mum,’ he said. ‘What do you want? I told you not to call me. What do you want…?’

  FOUR

  Sam spent a restless night, knowing he had to wake early. He was up with the sun and, his fridge being bare, ate breakfast at a café before heading back to base. He arrived there fifteen minutes before the agreed RV, in time to see the rest of the squadron arriving. To a man, they looked unshaven, hungover and above all thoroughly pissed off to be called in so early.

  He found Mac outside the squadron office. ‘They told you what all this is about?’ Sam demanded. As a troop sergeant, Mac would normally have been pulled in early, had the mission explained to him and the plans presented. But he looked more like he’d spent the evening with a bottle of JD than the ops sergeant and he shook his head.

  ‘Got the call when I was in the boozer.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam observed. ‘You look like shit.’

  ‘The good ladies of Hereford didn’t agree with you,’ Mac replied with a wink.

  Sam shook his head. ‘It’s no wonder your missus won’t let you back in the house,’ he said. ‘Other women would’ve stuck a knife in your back by now. We’d be reading about it in the News of the World.’

  ‘Who dares wins, mate,’ Mac said.

  Sam couldn’t help smiling. ‘You know where the briefing is?’

  ‘Kremlin.’

  He nodded and together they started walking towards the briefing room. As they walked they chatted. ‘Been to see the old man?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Fine,’ Sam lied. ‘Terror of the fucking nurses.’ He said it with a note of finality. Mac took the hint and didn’t say any more.

  The Kremlin was located deep inside the main HQ building, near the records room and the CO’s office. The two men walked in silence. When they entered the briefing room itself, they saw about twenty of the guys already there. Major Jack Whitely was up front: a short, squat man in camouflage gear, with a shock of ginger hair and sharp green eyes. He stood at a lectern, rifling through some notes. As Sam and Mac took a seat at the front row he nodded a greeting to them and then went back to what he was doing.

  Over the next couple of minutes a further ten men arrived and at 07.00 hrs precisely Jack Whitely cleared his throat. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s get started.’ He flicked a switch on his lectern and the lights dimmed. An overhead projector at the back of the room beamed light onto a white screen behind him. Jack picked up a small remote and pressed a button. A map of Central Asia appeared behind him.

  ‘At 12.00 hrs on Thursday you’ll be bussed to Brize Norton,’ Whitely announced. Today was Tuesday. They had about forty-eight hours. ‘From there you’ll be taking an all-expenses-paid flight to Bagram Airbase, northern Afghanistan.’

  Several of the men in the room groaned noisily. Sam felt like joining them and so, from the look his friend gave him, did Mac. ‘What was the fucking point in coming back?’ Sam whispered.

  ‘All right, guys,’ Whitely said firmly. ‘Listen up.’ He flicked the button on his remote again. A new map appeared on the screen.

  ‘We have a training camp in southern Kazakhstan,’ Whitely continued. ‘An area called the Chu Valley. We ’re expecting there to be about twenty individuals there. Our orders are to make sure they don’t wake up in the morning.’

  The men were silent now. Listening hard.

  ‘Mode of insertion,’ Whitely announced, ‘HALO. Air troop, this is your gig. Rest of the squadron to remain on alert at Bagram in case of problems.’

  All of sudden, Sam was in the groove. He’d been in hundreds of briefings like this before and any tiredness or annoyance he had felt when he first arrived had been shed. He listened keenly, his senses alert, knowing that he had to be on the ball. Air troop was his. He needed to be on top of things.

  ‘There’ll be a further briefing at Bagram,’ continued Whitely. ‘We have spooks on the ground who’ll give you more detail on the geography. But first off, you need to be made aware of something.’

  Whitely looked out over the briefing room. In the dim light Sam could see that the Major’s face had suddenly gone serious, as though he were judging the mood of the men.

  ‘MI6 have supplied us with pictures of the targets we expect to find there.’ He pressed the button on the remote for the third time.

  It was not in the nature of Regiment men to express surprise. They’d been asked to do enough morally ambiguous things in their time to be largely shock-proof. But Sam knew, as the image beamed out by the overhead projector changed, they would be taken aback by what had just appeared. On the screen in front of them were twenty grainy photographs. They varied in their quality. Some looked like passport photos, taken in cheap booths; others looked like they had been cut and pasted from bigger pictures. But they all had one thing in common. White skin. Caucasian features. The squadron wasn’t being presented with the usual brown skin, beards or turbans.

  ‘Your targets,’ Whitely announced firmly, ‘are British citizens. They’ll be speaking English. That shouldn’t distract you from the job in hand.’

  There was a brief silence before a voice called from the back of the room. ‘What’s the story, Boss? Who are they?’

  ‘That, I’m afraid,’ Whitely replied, ‘is for our masters in the Firm to know, and for us not to find out. It’s an in-an-out job and is strictly under the radar. The UK ’s relationship with Kazakhstan is good, but fragile. Any whiff that this is our doing and we’ll be giving the suits in Whitehall a right headache, and I know how upset you’d all be if that happened.’

  There was a smattering of cynical laughter.

  Sam didn’t join in.

  He had barely heard what Whitely was saying, and laughter was the last thing on his mind.

  His attention had been grabbed by something else.

  Something on the screen.

  Sam Redman had a good eye. A mind for detail. As soon as the photographs had appeared on the screen he had methodically and meticulously studied each one for a few seconds. His gaze fell on one picture. It was halfway down the group of images, no bigger than the others, no less indistinct. And yet when he saw that photograph, his blood turned to ice in his veins. The man had dark hair and a beard, flecked with grey, that covered most of his face. There was a bruise to one side of his forehead. It was the eyes that gave him away, though. Dark eyes, with shadowy rings dug underneath them and thick-set eyebrows.

  Sam would know those eyes anywhere, because they belonged to his brother.

  It was like a dream – a dream in which he urgently had to do something, but couldn’t force his body into action. This was a mistake. It had to be. Sam looked over his shoulder at the guys congregated in the room around him. Their faces glowed in the dim light of the OHP, but their e
xpressions registered no surprise as they gazed at the screen. Sam’s eyes darted from one face to another. None of them, he realised, would recognise Jacob even if they saw him. They were either too young or never knew him.

  All of them, he realised, except one person.

  Sam faced forward again and glanced to his right where Mac was sitting. His friend looked up at the screen. There was no twinge of recognition in his face.

  And then the room was plunged into darkness as the OHP was switched off. ‘All right, guys,’ Whitely announced brightly as he turned the main lights on again. ‘RV back here 09.00 on Thursday. Rest up before then. Tell your missus to keep her hands off you – everything goes right you’ll be back for tea and blow jobs Sunday lunchtime.’ He straightened his papers on the lectern and headed for the door.

  There was a hubbub in the room as the assembled squadron rose to their feet and started chatting. Sam didn’t move. There was a sickness in his stomach, a kind of breathlessness. If he opened his mouth to speak, he wasn’t quite sure what would come out. Everything was confused in his head. Perhaps he’d made a mistake. Perhaps it wasn’t Jacob, just someone who looked like him. That would make more sense. The bearded figure in the picture looked rough and worn. Jacob had always taken care of what he looked like.

  He tried to persuade himself in the few moments that he sat there that he had indeed made an error; but deep down he knew he hadn’t. It was Jacob.

  Sam closed his eyes, took a deep breath and turned to look at Mac. But his friend wasn’t there. He was already walking out of the room, deep in conversation with one of the younger guys. Almost before Sam knew it, he was alone.

  The sudden burst of anger came from nowhere and was beyond his control. With a swipe of his hand he hurled the chair on which Mac had been sitting on to its side, then stood and kicked it a good couple of metres. It was stupid, pointless, and didn’t make him feel any better. He left the chair on its side, though, and, cursing under his breath, stormed towards the door. There was a suspicion at the back of his mind that someone was playing games with him. He didn’t like it. He wanted it to stop. Now.

  The drab, flat corridors of the Kremlin were unpopulated at this hour. Sam stormed through them, a thousand questions bursting from his brain. When he came to Mark Porteus’s office he barely stopped to draw breath before knocking on the door: not a polite rap, but a solid thump with a clenched fist.

  No answer.

  ‘Boss!’ he shouted, banging again on the door. But still nothing. ‘Boss!’

  ‘Everything all right, Sam?’

  He turned. It was Jack Whitely. The Ops Sergeant’s green eyes were narrowed. Sam clenched his jaw and gave him an unfriendly stare. Whitely was an old hand. Several tours with the Regiment. He was organising this mission – surely he knew what was going on. Damn it: if Porteus couldn’t tell Sam what the hell was happening, Whitely was the next best thing.

  ‘What’s…?’ he started to say.

  And then he stopped.

  Amid the confusion in his head, one single thought began to crystallise.

  What if Whitely hadn’t recognised his brother? Or Porteus. Or even Mac. What then? If he alerted them to it, Sam would be instantly pulled from the op.

  Whitely blinked, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, Sam?’

  He drew a deep breath.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. And then, because Whitely was still looking strangely at him, ‘09.00 on Thursday.’

  Whitely nodded. Sam walked away. He could feel the Ops Sergeant’s eyes burning into his back. It took everything he had to keep his pace steady and his mind calm.

  *

  Kelly Larkin awoke, bleary eyed. The room was dark and in her drowsiness she thought it must still be the middle of the night. It was a lovely feeling, splintered only when she saw the orange glow from her bedside alarm clock. Seven-thirty.

  ‘Shit!’ she hissed, suddenly awake. She clambered naked out of bed and hurried to the underwear drawer of her dressing table, pulling on some knickers and awkwardly hitching her bra behind her back, before she finally remembered the revelations of the previous evening. Jamie’s confession; the way he had stormed out of the flat; how she had stayed up waiting for him until sleep finally overcame her. And now, she realised as she turned round to look at her bed, there he was. Asleep. She breathed a sigh of relief.

  Quietly Kelly walked round to his side of the bed and perched on the edge. His head was covered with the duvet, his breathing regular and heavy. Kelly gently uncovered his head to look at his slumbering face.

  What she saw made her catch a breath.

  His upper lip was smeared with blood, dark brown and flaking at the edges. The smear itself extended up on to his right cheek before streaking gradually away. The blood, though, was not the most distressing thing. His skin was purple, bruised and mottled; his right eye was blackened and closed up. Jamie looked like he’d been in the boxing ring.

  Kelly shook him by the shoulder – not forcefully, but tenderly and with concern.

  ‘Jamie,’ she whispered. ‘Jamie, wake up.’

  He didn’t stir, so she shook him again. This time he started. His eyes opened and he looked around without moving his body, as though he didn’t know where he was. When his eyes fell on Kelly, he shut them again for a moment before pushing himself up on his elbows.

  Kelly touched his face lightly with her fingertips. ‘What happened?’ she breathed. ‘What time did you get back?’ The pungent smell of last night’s alcohol wafted under her nose.

  ‘Late,’ Jamie replied non-committally.

  ‘I know it was late, Jamie,’ Kelly retorted a bit more sharply than she had intended. ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Nothing I can’t cope with.’ He smiled at her – a peculiarly gruesome expression given the state of his face – then stretched out his hand towards her breasts.

  She shrugged him away and stood up. ‘I’m late for work,’ she said. With her back turned to Jamie she walked to her wardrobe and pulled out a charcoal grey two-piece suit and cream blouse; still with her back turned to him she put it on. Tears were coming. She didn’t know if she’d be able to stop them and she didn’t want him to see.

  Her eyes were hot now as she finished getting dressed. She felt a riot of emotions all trying to burst out. Confusion; anger; sympathy. Almost on an impulse she turned round, the first tears dripping from her eyes. He was still sitting there, eyeing her up with that self-satisfied look on his face. ‘For God’s sake, Jamie,’ she railed. ‘I just don’t know what to think.’

  His expression changed to one of wariness.

  ‘All I want to do,’ she wept dramatically, ‘is get close to you.’ She knew she was sounding dramatic, but she couldn’t help it. Rushing to his bedside she sat down again and grabbed his hands.

  ‘Those things you told me last night,’ she continued. ‘It meant so much that you opened up to me.’

  Jamie looked down at the duvet.

  ‘You don’t have to be embarrassed,’ Kelly insisted. ‘I know you’ve been drinking. I can smell it on you. But please just tell me, what happened last night?’

  There was a pause. Jamie took a deep breath and when he gazed back up at her, his forehead was creased. He looked for all the world to Kelly like a confused little boy.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just… I can’t,’ he replied. ‘There’s things I can’t tell you about me. Things it’s best you don’t know. That you wouldn’t believe.’

  She squeezed his hand a bit harder. ‘I would believe you, Jamie. Just trust me.’

  Another pause. Jamie’s eyes flickered away from her. He looked like he was trying to make a decision.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally. He got out of bed, approached the window wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and gently parted the curtains with one finger. He looked outside, let the curtain fall closed and then turned to look at her. He wavered s
lightly, as though drunk. ‘This is going to sound stupid,’ he said.

  Kelly shook her head. ‘No it isn’t.’

  He shrugged. ‘All right then. There’s things I can’t tell you because I’m…’ He faltered. ‘I don’t know what the proper word is. I’m an agent.’

  Kelly blinked. ‘A what?’

  ‘An agent.’

  ‘What…?’ she hesitated. ‘Like an estate agent?’

  Jamie closed his eyes in frustration. ‘No,’ he replied, exasperation in his voice. ‘A secret agent. A spy.’

  She blinked again. There were no tears now. They had instantly dried up.

  ‘A spy,’ she repeated.

  Jamie nodded.

  All the anger Kelly Larkin had felt a couple of minutes ago disappeared. She smoothed the legs of her trouser suit, stood up and turned to face Jamie. He looked so ridiculous there, semi-naked in her bedroom.

  ‘And your dad was in the SAS?’ she asked. ‘And your mum died of cancer?’

  Jamie nodded.

  ‘And you thought that if I believed all that it would make it okay for you to steal money from my purse?’

  Jamie’s lips parted slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

  Kelly walked up to him as coolly as she was able. She came to a halt right in front of him.

  She smiled.

  And then, with all the force she could muster, she slapped him hard round the side of the face.

  ‘Ow!’ he shouted, but she was already talking over him, her voice a low, menacing hiss.

  ‘Get out of my house, Jamie Spillane,’ she spat. ‘And don’t come back. I’ve had enough of you, your sponging and your stupid, insulting lies. I never, ever want to see you again. You’ve got five minutes.’