by Chris Ryan
Jamie felt stupid. He must have still been drunk the previous morning when he came clean to Kelly. Either that or just desperate to tell someone. But that had been the one thing they’d told him not to do. He remembered their words. ‘It’s not called the Secret Service for nothing. If you tell anyone, you won’t only blow your cover, you put them in danger as well. So remember that, and keep your fucking mouths shut.’
In the darkness his own stupidity hit him yet again.
At least she hadn’t believed him. That was something. Kelly wouldn’t go blurting it out to anyone. She’d just bitch about him to her friends, tell them what a useless bastard he was. He didn’t mind that.
Or did he? Truth was that the idea made him feel a bit uncomfortable. If he was honest with himself, he’d have to say that he liked Kelly. It wasn’t just the sex, although that was good; he liked the way that she just… looked after him a bit. He felt bad now about taking the money from her, bad that she knew about it and had something else to chalk up against him. The few weeks he’d spent with Kelly had been all right. He’d been kicked out by girlfriends before now, of course he had. But he felt particularly gloomy about this one.
Not least because he had nowhere to go. Home wasn’t an option, obviously. Jamie had decided he was never going back there. His mum and dad were the last people in the world he wanted to be with. He felt embarrassed that he had made that stuff up about them, but Jamie wasn’t so naïve about himself that he couldn’t admit that these were little fantasies about his parents that he’d had since he was a child. That his dad was, well, someone. Not just a pathetic, pissed-up waste of space. And his mum? He sneered in the darkness. Jamie didn’t even want to think about her.
Maybe he had tried to tell Kelly his secret because he knew he could never tell his parents. They always thought he was worthless. As a kid, when he’d gone off the rails, it hadn’t made them pay more attention to him. It had just reinforced their opinion. When he’d spent three months in a young offenders’ institute for joyriding and smashing up someone’s motor, they had seemed totally unsurprised. They didn’t visit him once. When he got out, the petty crime had continued. He got a buzz out of it. And somewhere deep down he wanted his parents to take notice. They never did.
Which was why he was here. A cheap, faceless bedsit. Rooms rented by the week. When he had been targeted by the Security Service and told he’d be put on a retainer of a few hundred pounds a month, paid directly and anonymously into a bank account, it had sounded like a deal too good to be true. But a few hundred pounds, he soon realised, doesn’t get you very far. He wouldn’t mind if they’d just give him something to do – anything to do – but since he’d got back from the training camp, there’d been nothing. Silence.
He’d been warned that this would be the case. ‘You won’t hear from us,’ he’d been told. ‘Not until the time comes for you to be activated. When that happens, we’ll find you. Just carry on as normal. Live your life. And remember: don’t tell anyone.’
This wasn’t living his life, though. Nothing like. He wanted some excitement. He was hungry for it. And he wanted something to do.
Jamie wouldn’t be able to tell his parents about it. He knew that. But he would know. He would know that he wasn’t the useless kid his mum and dad saw.
The moon continued to shine into the attic. Jamie continued to lie awake, waiting for morning, whatever it might bring.
*
A podgy man with square, thick-rimmed spectacles sat in the leather driving seat of his large, comfortable car. The coldest hour, he thought to himself, was always just before sunrise. He was glad of his coat and glad, too, that sunrise was just around the corner. He had spent too much time for his liking in this bland estate on the outskirts of the monstrosity that was Milton Keynes and he was looking forward to this particular engagement being over. That would happen – if everything went according to plan – very soon.
The Americans called what he was about to do the Boston Brakes Technique. Trust the Americans, he thought to himself, to claim the credit for everything. The technique in question, or course, had been used all over the world, not just in Boston. He himself had performed it five times and though he was not one for conspiracy theories, it did not take a genius to understand that the famous car crash under the Pont de l’Alma in Paris bore all the hallmarks of what he was about to do.
Car crashes, he found, were so satisfactory. They were commonplace, for a start. How many of them happened around the world every day? He did not know the exact statistic, but it was many, certainly. The cynic in him suspected that a small but significant number of these accidents were in fact carried out by the security services of various countries for precisely the reason he favoured them. Nobody would suspect foul play. And nobody would examine in any detail the crushed, crumpled shell of a wrecked motor vehicle; certainly they would not look close enough to find the small electronic device attached to the car’s steering column – if, indeed, the device itself had survived the crash.
He looked a little further down the residential street in which his car was parked. The vehicle he had targeted was on the other side of the road about twenty metres down. He couldn’t see it in the darkness, but as the sky gradually started to move from black to steely grey, the vehicle came into his field of vision. Only two nights previously, in the small hours of the morning, he had broken into it with some ease. It had taken only a few minutes to remove the panel below the steering wheel, attach the device – no bigger than the smallest mobile phone – and walk briskly away, though not before locking the car carefully once again.
It was pathetically easy to kill people sometimes.
He looked at his watch. A quarter-past five. In one hour and thirty minutes, the door of the house outside which the vehicle was parked would open. A louche youngster in his mid-twenties would walk out, approach the car and slouch into the driver’s seat. Until then, he just had to wait. He would have liked to listen to something – there was a cassette of sacred choral music slotted into the dashboard – but if he did that he risked attracting attention. So he just sat there in silence.
A quarter to seven. The house door opened and a figure appeared. He wore sunglasses, quite unnecessarily, and a T-shirt with the logo of a pop group that the man didn’t recognise. No doubt his target’s musical tastes were buried somewhere in the details that had been supplied to him – the man’s employers were extraordinarily thorough – but he had not retained them. It wasn’t necessary for what was to happen today.
The car – an old silver Ford with shiny alloy wheels and certain other modifications intended to make it look like a much more desirable object than it actually was – pulled out into the road. The man didn’t follow. Not yet. Instead, he switched on a small visual display unit that was gummed to the front windscreen. It looked like a satellite navigation unit; indeed that’s what it was. It just wasn’t the kind that anyone could buy in the high street.
A map appeared, and on it two green dots. One did not move. The other, which was flashing, did. At the side of the screen a digital display showed some constantly changing numbers: the other car’s increasing speed. The man waited for the vehicle in the road to disappear from sight. And then he followed, using the tracking screen to stay behind his target, but at a distance.
He knew where the young man was likely to go, of course. On to the motorway and then north towards the service station where he had worked for precisely seven months and two weeks. His take-home pay was £180 a week, £130 of which was spent on rent. He bought his food from the local Tesco – the cheapest brands of everything except, it seemed, cigarettes. No doubt he found the extra money – the retainer, paid into his bank account anonymously – immensely useful. However, as was so often the way with these people, he squandered it on trinkets for his car, expensive evenings in nightclubs and, more than once, prostitutes. Whether his target had ever been activated, the man didn’t know. That was information which was neither useful to him, nor suppli
ed.
He drove slowly. Safely. If his target forged too far ahead he didn’t worry. It was not his intention to stay close, after all. At least, not just yet. The early morning traffic had not built up and it didn’t take long for the flashing green light on his screen to reach the blue map line that indicated the motorway. As soon as it did, the speed indicator started to blur. In the space of about ten seconds, it went from a steady 35 mph into the decidedly unsteady nineties.
The man’s own car stayed well within the speed limit. Even when he himself reached the motorway he stayed in the slow lane at under 50 mph, allowing more impatient drivers to overtake him.
On the passenger seat lay a little black box. Had a child seen it, they might have thought it was the control unit for a radio-controlled car. In fact it wasn’t far off. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, the man stretched out the other one and picked it up. He glanced back at the screen: his target’s car was doing nearly 100 mph now. That would be just right. He flicked his thumb on to the switch; it moved with very little resistance. Then he carefully put the unit back on the passenger seat, his free hand back on the steering wheel, and continued his slow, steady journey.
The green light continued to flicker. That was as it should be. The man pictured what was happening inside his target’s car. The steering column would have been disabled, as would the brakes, and at that precise moment the driver would be struggling with the newfound realisation that he was unable to control his car.
The man watched the screen intently. Ten seconds passed.
Fifteen.
And then, without so much as a blip, the green light disappeared.
He smiled. About two miles, he calculated, between himself and the place where the accident had happened. In about a minute the traffic would start slowing, almost to a standstill. He had no desire to get caught up in that, so when he saw an exit signposted up ahead, he switched on his indicators and prepared to leave the motorway.
The traffic started to slow. By the time he bore left it was grinding to a halt. He drove his car up the slip road at the top of which there was a roundabout, one exit of which led to a bridge passing back over the motorway. He took that exit, and as he passed over the road he looked out to his left. There, scattered across the motorway, was the result of his morning’s work.
He continued to drive, but as soon as he could he pulled off the main road and into a lay-by before leaving the car and walking back to the bridge. It was a weakness, he knew, something he really ought to master; but he couldn’t resist examining exactly what he had achieved. He stood at the side of the bridge, peering through his square glasses onto the devastation below.
There were three cars involved in the crash, as far as he could tell. It was difficult to determine exactly, because they no longer resembled cars so much as smouldering chunks of scrap metal. He ran through the crash in his mind. The car would have slammed directly into the back of the other two motors; he imagined the target jolting forward in his seat at the moment of impact, the sudden jerk of the neck and then the contorted metal of the second car’s chassis plunging through the windshield and driving through the skull. He could see something shiny, red and sticky, lying on the road. Lumps of brain matter, perhaps, or the bowels of one of the other victims. A few members of the public had left their own cars and were approaching the wreckage. It was clear, though, that there was nothing they could do. It was clear that the occupants of all three cars would be dead. So much the better. If anything was likely to dilute people’s attention away from one death, it was the occurrence of several others at the same time.
He imagined what the eye witnesses would have to say. The nutter in the Ford was driving like a lunatic. A hundred miles an hour, easy. It was his fault. Stupid bloody idiot.
Everything had gone very well. He could return home now knowing that his job had been successful. The man allowed himself a brief smile as he wandered back to his own car, put the key in the ignition and, unnoticed by anyone or anything, drove smoothly away.
*
Sam didn’t know where he was. A corridor. Cement walls. There was nobody else around. He was on his own. It was dark. He could only see because of the NV, which cast a sinister greenish hue all around. There was a weapon in his fist. A submachine gun. Heckler & Koch, MP5 – he could tell from the view through the weapon’s aperture sight as he stealthily continued down the corridor.
There should be other people here. Other guys backing him up. But he knew there was none. He felt out of control, but all he could do was continue down the corridor. All he could do was wait and see.
He could hear his breath and his footsteps on the hard, cold floor. But nothing else.
A door. It seemed out of place, here at the end of this corridor. Through the NV he couldn’t tell what colour it was, but it appeared wooden and panelled. The kind of door you’d see in someone’s house. There was a burnished doorknob and no keyhole, which suggested it couldn’t be locked. He stood there for a moment, looking at this door. It seemed familiar, somehow, but Sam couldn’t quite place it.
His weapon at the ready, he prepared to kick it open. But just as he raised one foot, the door swung inwards.
Everything happened in a second. Sam’s eyes focussed on a figure in the room beyond. It was a man whose back was turned to him. Firing the weapon was like a reflex action; Sam’s aim was precise. There was a flash in his NV as the round burst from the barrel of the MP5; he knew that his aim was true and that he had hit the figure directly in the back of the head.
A silence. No movement. From this range, and with this weapon, the figure’s head should have been decimated. But it remained whole.
Sam paused. Then, not knowing quite why, he removed the NV goggles from his face. There was enough light to see. As he did so, the figure turned around. It was with a sickening feeling that he realised the person ahead of him was not, as he had previously appeared to be, a grown man. He was just a boy. It was only when the two of them were facing each other that he saw who it was.
Jacob couldn’t have been more than thirteen, though he had always looked old for his age. His dark hair was scruffy and boyish; his gaze – those dark, intense eyes – was confused. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. Just a choking, coughing sound. And then blood, overflowing from his mouth and dribbling over his chin.
Only then did the rest of the room come into focus. Only then did Sam recognise it. It was a room from his childhood, the lounge of the house where he had grown up. Jacob was standing in front of the three-bar electric fire that had stood for as long as he could remember in the grate. With a jolt he realised that to one side, sitting in a comfortable armchair, was his father – younger, more vigorous. And on the other side, one hand squeezing the other in an expression of undisguised despair was his mum.
Sam didn’t understand. His mum was dead.
‘What have you done, Sam?’ she whispered, and he realised that up till now he had forgotten what her voice sounded like.
Both parents looked at him, and then at Jacob. His thirteen-year-old brother’s face was pale now. When he collapsed it was almost in slow motion. A pool of blood spread unrealistically around his head. Sam couldn’t tell whether he had taken a few seconds to die, or an hour.
He looked back up towards his mother, but she was no longer there. He opened his mouth to call her name, but before he could do so his father was suddenly in front of him. Max looked young and strong. He stretched out his arms and grabbed the barrel of Sam’s gun and pulled it into the flesh of his lean stomach.
‘Kill me!’ he hissed.
Sam shook his head.
‘Kill me now!’ insisted his father. ‘You might as well.’
Sam tried to pull the weapon away, but his father was too strong for him. Far too strong. The older man held the weapon firmly against him and, staring Sam straight in the eye, used his other hand to fumble for the trigger.
‘I didn’t mean it…’ Sam heard himself saying. ‘I d
idn’t know it was him…’
But by then, it was too late.
It was the sound of the dreamlike rounds discharging into his father’s spectral body that woke Sam. He sat bolt upright and as the bright morning sun beamed through the windows it took a moment for him to work out where the hell he was. Then he remembered. He looked to his side: there was no one else in the bed. Climbing out, he pulled on his clothes and only then did Clare appear in the doorway.
‘I got up early,’ she said. ‘Before you could sneak out.’ She smiled to show that it was a joke, but they both knew it wasn’t.
She too was dressed, in the same clothes that she wore last night. Leaning against the frame of the doorway it was clear to Sam that she was trying to look cool. Unsuccessfully. The worry lines in her face were still all too evident.
‘I have to go,’ Sam said shortly.
Clare nodded, unable to hide her disappointment.
‘You’ll be okay,’ he told her. ‘I told you last night, if they wanted to…’ He chose his words carefully. ‘To get rid of you, they’d have done it already. Those spooks that came here, you’ll probably never see them again.’
Clare didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t say so.
‘Can I call you?’ she asked. She looked momentarily surprised that she had blurted out the question. ‘I mean, look, don’t worry. I know what last night was. I’m not going to ask you to marry me or anything. I just mean, can I call you, you know, if I need to? I won’t make a nuisance of myself.’
Sam pushed gently past her, doing his best not to catch her eye. ‘I don’t think you should,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ Clare replied weakly.