“No, Max, you fucked it for me. Congratulations.”
We stood in silence for a moment. He looked back down at me. They must have hacked the CCTV at the 360˚ Roof Bar and tracked me back to the Garden Suites in real time. Why not kill her then and there themselves? Jim Jones was about as likely to have a crisis of conscience killing a pretty girl as to start whistling “Danny Boy.” Perhaps dyed-blond Ana María had been the real target all along, and Frank had wanted her dead. Or maybe he’d had second thoughts, too.
“So, Max,” he sighed, “I’d be enormously grateful if you’d unfuck it for me.”
“How so?” It was hard not to sneer. It felt like I was winning.
“King is going to offer you another job, and, if you want command of Raven Hill, your last job off the books.” Seeing my eyebrows shoot up, he added quickly, “And no, it’s nothing to do with this bloody blonde that got away.”
“Offer or order? And she wasn’t blond. Trust me.”
“Offer. But it’s a good one. You’ll like it.”
“Sure it will be. Don’t tell me—I get thirty pieces of silver for betraying some other poor sap with a kiss and then get to hang myself in the officers’ mess at Raven Hill. And to think I actually believed for a moment that you were making me an offer. I kill for you; you throw me a bone. Same as it ever was. It’s a good job I like you, Frank.”
“And it’s a good job I have the patience of bloody Job. Raven Hill isn’t a bone. It’s the fattened fucking calf. Jesus.” Frank sighed deeply, almost desperately. “It’s been a long time that we’ve worked together—what, twenty years?”
“Twenty-three,” I corrected.
“Mind if I tell you a story?”
“Knock yourself out. But if you’re going to tell me that once upon a time there was a wee Irish lad who pulled the trigger when you asked him to, you can fuck off.”
He folded his arms, and then let them hang loose by his sides.
“No. Once upon a time, when I was a subaltern, and long before you and I met at Raven Hill, there was a girl. A young girl, mind. Eight? Nine? Dirty feet, scraped-back greasy hair. Up in the hills, during Aden. Can see her clear as a bell. She flew at my mate with a knife as we were searching a bus. It all happened so fast, but the thing was, I had my Browning out already, waving the locals off the bus with it. I got a bead on her immediately. I can still see the look on her, screaming above the sights as she ran at him.”
Now Frank was looking out the window. There was no air-conditioning. The room was boiling.
“I didn’t do it, Max. Couldn’t. Just couldn’t do it. Not to a girl, d’y’see? I just stood there like a damned fool not doing or saying anything while she clobbered him.”
He turned back to look at me. His eyes were wet, but whether it was from sweat or tears was impossible to tell.
“She took a chunk out of him, all right. He was lucky not to lose his eye. But it turned out it was just a bloody comb. A hair comb. Not a knife.”
I stubbed the cigarette out on the empty packet.
“And what did he say to you afterward, this mate of yours?”
“He said, ‘Next time, shoot the bitch.’”
Frank crossed the room and pulled open the door, pausing as it rasped on the deep-pile carpet. An RAMC nurse in civvies followed its slow swing into the room, small black medical bag in one hand, clipboard in the other, ready for my post-operational medical assessment.
“Think about the offer, McLean,” Frank said as he slid into the darkened hallway beyond. “Much misunderstood, your kind. I’d say right now you need all the breaks you can get.”
3
“Chateau Musar, 1988. From the Bekaa Valley, no less.” King, Major General Sir Kristóf King, Director Special Forces, poured the thick red Lebanese wine himself, swatting away the hand of the lance corporal who had the unenviable job of waiting on him.
“You had some . . . difficulties, I know, in Venezuela.” A quick smile tightened across his teeth.
He pressed a heavy glass into my hand and raised his own without taking his eyes off me.
“Your very good health.”
“Thank you, sir.” I put the cut crystal to my lips, hesitated and lowered the glass a little. “And to yours, General.”
“Please, call me Kristóf.”
I siphoned a mouthful of the near-black liquid into the back of my throat. King waved his hand almost imperceptibly. With a nod the lance left us alone, his white serving jacket vanishing behind the heavy sweep of a teak-paneled door.
“Please, sit down.”
I sank into a two-seater chesterfield that had been pulled up close to the hearth. It was a cold March. Slivers of ice still clung to the gutters in Whitehall. Tourists went skidding past the Cenotaph, while apple logs topped with black crystals of coal hissed and snapped in the general’s grate. I hadn’t seen King for over a year and I’d never been invited for dinner. It didn’t bode well. And neither did his first-names charade. I suspected that whatever it was that was going to be asked of me was considerably less likable than Frank had made out.
“May I call you Max?”
“Please, do. I prefer it to Paddy.”
“Paddy? Ah, yes, of course. Forgive me. I expect that being a Free Stater was rather amusing for you in Belfast, what?”
Maximilian Ivan Drax Pierpoint Mac Ghill’ean. God rest my father’s soul. He’d saddled me with the Anglo-Irish equivalent of “A Boy Named Sue.” “Max McLean” the anonymous orphan suited me just fine, and that’s how I’d joined the army—in my English name. In the Paras, of course, my accent immediately and inevitably earned me the nickname “Paddy.”
“It did somewhat confuse the enemy.”
“The enemy?”
“The sergeants’ mess.”
“Ah, yes, I see. An infiltrator in their midst, what? Marvelous! I bet they all secretly had you down as a Catholic spy.” The quick-flash smile played across his teeth like a nervous tick. It was more grimace than gregarious.
“Not so secretly. Being an Irishman in the Paras, it’s a miracle I didn’t shoot myself. Sir.”
“Kristóf, remember?” His voice hardened into an order. “Never forget where you’re from, what?”
A chipped antique mantelpiece loomed over the open fire—rare salvage from the blaze that had consumed the original Palace of Whitehall centuries before. It was burdened with gilt-edged frames showcasing King’s ancestors and children. No pictures of King himself, though. Not advisable in his line of work. Not even here, in his private chambers. Even so, tucked away to one side, half-hidden on a bookshelf straining with green Victorian leather, stood a foot-tall bronze of King as a young man, M16 in hand, right foot forward: a reminder of the days when he commanded G-Squadron SAS and did the trigger pulling himself. One way or another he’d fought hard for his rank, his wine, that statue and the present that betrayed his past. Despite all the what? and I say! gibberish and despite being at the center of the Establishment, he remained very much the outsider. Or so it seemed to me, looking in, or more accurately up, from where I loitered on the sidelines.
A black-and-white portrait of a striking woman in her thirties, all confidence and cheekbones and cradling a Russian submachine gun, sat in the shadows on the shelf above the statue. Pinned to the corner was a frayed half inch of red, white and green ribbon with a hole punched in the center. It was over sixty years since his mother had fled Budapest as the Soviet Army crushed the Hungarian Revolution, but Sir Kristóf was still in exile. He had her looks, too: black hair and black eyes and a skull too close to the skin. Despite so many decades having passed, it was unsettling to see that tiny revolutionary flag with the red star cut out of it here, of all places, in the bastion of counterterrorism.
I wondered what King would make of my mother’s ancestry. If he or Frank Knight had known who my parents were, he might have thou
ght I was the enemy, too. I bit down on a yawn, tired from the flight and the hours of briefings that had bracketed it after everything went wrong in Caracas. Sizing up the almost-empty glass in my right hand, he nodded toward the decanter.
“Don’t be shy. The Office has got a couple of cases sequestered for me at Her Majesty’s pleasure in the bowels of Vauxhall Cross. Most important matériel they ever got their hands on, what?”
I agreed it must have been and poured a refill. No doubt MI6 loved their headquarters being used as his own personal wine cellar.
“Drank gallons of the stuff at college. Damned tricky to find it now.” He paused and cocked his head to one side. A log cracked on the fire and spat out a shower of charcoal that glowed like a dying flare in the fading light of King’s set. It was hard to pick out his eyes beneath his brow; the iris and pupil merged into one black disk. It was like drinking with the devil.
“I assume Commander Knight warned you about my little proposition?” I inclined my head without actually nodding. “Yes, of course he did. Good chap, Frank. Reliably indiscreet and discreetly reliable. Well, there you have it.” He paused and sipped at his wine. “Raven Hill’s yours. If you want it, of course.”
“Thank you. It’s a . . . it’s a very generous offer.” We both smiled. “You’ll give me time to consider it?”
“Of course. Fools rush in, what?”
“Frank—Commander Knight—might also have discreetly mentioned there was a job you had in mind for me.”
“Quite so. Quite so. We’ll come to that presently. But first tell me, Max, before the others get here”—he spoke matter-of-factly as he reached over to refresh his own glass—“why didn’t you kill her?”
It was a question I’d been asked repeatedly since I walked down the corridor of the Garden Suites hotel and into the embassy SUV waiting outside the green electric gates. Now King sat expectant, unblinking, perched on the edge of his seat. My mind was racing. Make something up, make a joke out of it, or make it real. In a business where all transactions are conducted with pieces of silver, even a speck of truth is priceless. And perilous. So I told the truth . . . or part of it.
Or at least I began to.
“Kristóf,” I said, cautiously, “I’ve killed a lot of people. For you, for Commander Knight, for my men. For my country.” Suddenly I could hear the trace of my Irish accent, hard like so many stones clattering between us. “This country.” I looked at the bookshelf, his mother, the ribbon, and shrugged with my hands open. “But I’ve never killed for me. I’ve killed because I’ve been told to. Sure, sometimes I’ve wanted to kill. But I never did. I never killed for me.”
King’s black eyes, half-hidden, unreadable, stared back at me. I held my words, heavy on my tongue. The truth is precious, but dangerous.
“Yes, Max, go on.”
“She saw my face. I told her my name. And that didn’t matter because I was going to kill her. But then, you know, she was the wrong woman. And then the only reason to kill her was because she knew. And that . . . that would have been for me.”
I breathed out heavily through my nose and looked down into the dark circle of wine. Both he and I knew full well the question he wanted me to answer was why I’d told her my name at all.
“Never mind orders, what?” King snorted a half chuckle.
“Quite.” I gathered myself, and went on, trying to deflect him. “There is a moment, a moment when you either pull the trigger or you don’t.”
“The decisive moment.”
“Yes.”
“From which, one way or another, all else flows.”
I looked up at him, pausing again.
“Exactly. And I thought, in that moment, about what might flow from following orders and killing someone I knew to be innocent.”
“Thought to be innocent,” King corrected me.
“OK. Well, when I thought about that, it felt like I might drown.”
“I see.” King drained his glass impassively and placed it carefully on the inlaid-marble coffee table nestled under the leather crook of his chair arm. “And now you are treading water in the torrent of shit disobeying that order has unleashed?”
We both smiled.
“Yeah, that’s about the size of it.”
It was nighttime now, the windowpanes black mirrors revealing nothing but the faint reflection of the fire settling into the grate. Shadows thrown up from the hearth licked across his face like black flames, and suddenly he wasn’t smiling anymore. I’d come straight to Whitehall from Heathrow in the back of a blacked-out van. I was exhausted.
“You’ve told me what you thought, Max. What do you think now?”
Without warning, the door to King’s set sprang open off the latch, inching into the half-light of my interrogation. Voices filling the hall trickled into his chambers. We both stood. King walked toward the door, while I stood awkwardly cradling my empty glass. A white-gloved hand rose to salute, the arm hidden by heavy oak. The dinner guests had arrived.
Almost entirely enveloped in darkness, King turned to me. I swallowed hard and faced him.
“I think, sir, that next time I’ll shoot the bitch.”
4
I straightened up and looked at the faces around the room. Frank was right: I hadn’t been summoned to dinner just so King could tear a strip off me, fetter me to Raven Hill or impress me with his wine collection. Along with the other guests, I was being briefed on my next job—like it or not.
And what a bunch we were: David Mason, director general of MI6’s operations in Africa, whose mission it was; Regimental Sergeant Major Jack Nazzar, a Glaswegian hard case and one of the most experienced soldiers Hereford had ever seen—he ran the Revolutionary Warfare Wing; Major General King, of course, who had operational oversight for discreet—and deniable—Special Forces operations; and one dead-tired assassin.
“Good evening, Major McLean,” Mason greeted me coolly, no doubt sizing me up in light of the Caracas debacle.
I wasn’t even a proper major—that was just an honorific. Only MI6 used it: no one in uniform ever did. Like everyone else who emerged from Raven Hill, I’d never been badged, so I never needed to be de-badged for operations they wanted to keep off the books. I was a civilian and had been since the day I left the Parachute Regiment and shook hands with Colonel Ellard. It wasn’t possible to be an enlisted soldier, SAS or otherwise, and be truly deniable.
We were known simply as “the Unknown”—a score or so of ex-SAS, intelligence and other specialist operators tasked by Frank to do the jobs no one else could be seen to do—because we were never seen and did not exist. The army, of course, couldn’t cope with anything that wasn’t called by a three-letter acronym, so to them we became UKN.
Most of us came through Raven Hill; the rest came from God knows where. Even the Unknown operators I thought I knew, I didn’t. Everyone used a pseudonym. That was the point of Raven Hill. The recruits who came from Colonel Ellard’s black ops hothouse were orphans, misfits and professional liars to a man (and woman). Raven Hill bred deception and loyalty in equal, terrifying measure.
The briefing was being given by a Captain Rhodes, who introduced herself as being from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, “on secondment to the Office.” The only person missing from the scene was Commander Frank Knight—who oversaw all military-MI6-UKN liaison. Frank was most likely still playing hide-and-seek with Ana María in Caracas. I stubbed out a Marlboro and looked at Nazzar. If the shit hit the fan, he’d be the one scraping it, and me, off the walls.
There was only one question worth asking.
“So, who am I going to kill?”
Nazzar smiled, but it was Captain Rhodes who answered.
“You must be tired from your flight, Mr. McLean, but if you’ll forgive us, we’ll press on.” She most likely had no idea at all what the job was really about, which at least made us equal
.
Most of my jobs were assigned to me by Frank directly, so more often than not, I prepped my own trips. If the SAS was involved, I’d be briefed in Hereford with Jack Nazzar’s troublemakers. Known just as “the Wing” inside the SAS and “the Increment” to MI6, the Revolutionary Warfare Wing was a separate, dozen-strong unit of the regiment’s most experienced operators.
MI6 jobs were run by London and based out of Fort Monckton near Portsmouth. Whitehall briefings were reserved for potential political train wrecks. Everyone was invited so everyone could be blamed. They never augured well. On the evidence available, this one was no exception. MI6 was overseen by the Foreign Office, not the military, and the potential for blowback was always unnerving for the suits, who’d deny I’d even been born if the balloon went up.
Like me, Captain Rhodes and Mason were in civvies. Unlike me, they didn’t have a bottle of King’s wine coursing through their veins. King and Nazzar wore uniforms. God only knew what coursed through their veins.
Space was cleared on the old oak table by the lance, who carried away the remains of dinner. When he’d left us, Rhodes popped the lid on a black map tube, which, when inverted, dispensed an aviation chart. It was centered on Sierra Leone, a small—and, as the map revealed, a hilly and densely forested—country in West Africa. It had not long ago emerged from the worst Ebola outbreak the world had ever seen. In the cruelest of ironies, the virus had ravaged a country that Britain had saved a decade and a half before from a marauding army of psychopathic rebels who’d slaughtered tens of thousands while plundering its vast mineral wealth. The SAS had seen action there; so had the Paras.
Fixing her glasses to the bridge of her nose with her index finger, Rhodes cleared her throat and, almost looking at me, began to spread the expanse of green and blue paper across our now-empty place settings. The yellowed skin creeping along her finger joints suggested a forty-a-day habit. She looked the same age as me, but I doubted she could have been much over thirty. That was skin care by Silk Cut for you. I’d never seen her before. I lit another one of my Reds and exhaled upward through a jutting jaw, sending a plume of gray smoke toward the chandelier. Someone tutted theatrically. I took another drag.
The Break Line Page 3