The Perfect Kill (A Creasy novel Book 2)

by A. J. Quinnell

  She fought against her emotions, saying to herself, ‘Play your role out to the end . . . to the very end.’ She kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘Take care of yourself, Michael. Make me proud of you.’ Then she pulled away and without looking back, walked across the ramp. She went up the steps to the top deck and stood at the stern rail, looking down at the two men standing by the jeep. She waved and they waved back. The last cars were being loaded.

  Michael turned to Creasy and said, ‘I’m going with her on the ferry. I’ll make sure she gets her taxi all right. Don’t wait for me. I’ll get a lift back to the house.’

  As Michael turned towards the ramp, Creasy said, ‘I’ll wait for you at Gleneagles.’

  At Cirkewwa Michael carried her suitcase to the waiting taxi. During the crossing, he had been very taciturn, simply standing beside her at the rail and looking at the receding island. The driver put her suitcase in the trunk and opened the back door. She turned to Michael. He was about four feet away. He did not come closer. He simply stated flatly, ‘I will see you again.’

  Then he turned and walked back to the ferry.

  Chapter 44

  AHMED JIBRIL LEFT his office ten minutes after receiving a phone call from Colonel Jomah. An armed convoy of jeeps was hastily arranged and instructions given to send on clothing, certain files and his Macintosh computer. The convoy consisted of two jeeps in front of his bullet-proof Mercedes and two jeeps behind.

  As he left the outskirts of Damascus, Jibril considered the situation. He was one of the world’s experts in dispensing terror and of course he knew the possible consequences. During his entire adult life it had been necessary to take extreme precautions. He had learned to live with the nagging physical fear that at any time, a bullet or a bomb could instantly end his life.

  But this was different. He could not define how it was different but when Colonel Jomah had given him the brief details on the phone, he had felt his whole body go cold. He had felt akin to a man in a dark, locked room, knowing that there was a deadly snake somewhere close to him. So he had decided to go to the PFLP-GC training camp at Ein Tazur where security would be even tighter than at his headquarters in Damascus.

  During the drive, his mind ranged over the tactics for his defence. Of course the best defence is attack, but attack where and how? This man Creasy was supposed to be dead. Very obviously, that wasn’t the case. Also very obviously, he was able to call on extremely competent help and direct it brilliantly.

  They arrived at the camp in the early evening. Jibril’s son Jihad, who commanded it, was waiting inside the gates.

  He embraced his father and asked immediately, ‘What happened, father?’

  Jibril shrugged nonchalantly, patted his son’s cheek and said, ‘I decided to spend some time with the fighters. After sitting in an office too long, I need to draw some inspiration from them.’

  Jihad smiled. ‘You will give them inspiration,’ he answered. ‘You always have . . . how long can you stay?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ his father replied. ‘At least three weeks. I’ll get involved with the training . . . it will do me good.’ He smiled. ‘It will make me young again.’

  He took his son’s arm and they walked together to the large, reinforced concrete blockhouse, which was the camp’s nerve centre.

  Colonel Jomah arrived the next afternoon. In the privacy of Jihad’s office, which Jibril had commandeered, he silently handed over a fat folder. Jibril placed it on the desk, but before opening it, poured a coffee for his guest and chatted about other subjects, which is what every well-mannered Arab should do. Then he opened the folder and pulled out the newspaper clippings and photographs. He studied them carefully. When he came to the photograph of the blackened twisted truck, lying on its back, the Colonel murmured, ‘That was an RPG7.’

  Jibril looked up at him and asked casually, ‘Are there any leads at all on this man Creasy?’

  Slowly the Colonel shook his head.

  ‘Nothing. In the old days, we could have asked the KGB for help, but now they’re virtually useless.’ He stood and picked up his braided cap from the desk. ‘You will stay here long, Ahmed?’ he asked.

  ‘As long as necessary.’

  The Colonel smiled slightly and turned to go, saying, ‘I think that’s wise.’

  Chapter 45

  ‘DUNGA JUSTO BASNE’

  Michael was lying spreadeagled on his stomach beside the swimming pool. He turned his head to look at the small, brown man sitting on a cane chair a few feet away. He was wearing immaculately creased grey flannel trousers, a starched white shirt and highly polished black shoes. His face was round and unlined, with small, black eyes. His short hair was neatly combed. He looked as though he might have been sitting in a leather chair in an army officers’ club.

  ‘Dunga Justo Basne,’ he repeated. Those three words are the Ghurkha sniper’s bible. They mean ‘still as stone’. Now this is how your training starts, ‘I want you to lie there and not move more than a stone would move for the next half hour. You have to let your brain send the message to every part of your body, even to the tips of every hair on your head.’

  Michael settled his cheek against the hard limestone slabs, narrowed his eyes and lay still. The small man watched him. After ten seconds, he said, ‘You moved.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You moved the little finger of your left hand and also your right foot. Even such a move could be death for a sniper. Stand up a moment.’

  Michael stood up, as did the small Nepalese. He took Michael by the arm and they walked to the edge of the pool deck. They looked down over the green fields and the small man pointed up to the sky and said, ‘A hawk can be as high as a thousand feet, but if a mouse moves its tail half an inch, the hawk will see it. A sniper must have in his mind that he’s being watched always by a hawk. It makes the difference between living or dying. Today you will lie still as a stone for half an hour. Tomorrow, for an hour. The next day for two hours. You will lie over stones and pieces of wood, in great discomfort. I will be here for thirty days. On the day before I leave, you will lie Dunga Justo Basne from dawn to sunset. If you cannot, I will have failed... and so will you.’

  ‘Will I get to shoot the rifle?’ Michael asked with a trace of sarcasm.

  ‘Yes. After you can lie Dunga Justo Basne for more than four hours.’

  The small man had arrived the night before. Creasy had picked him up from the ferry. At the house, he had made the introductions.

  ‘This is my son Michael. This is my friend Captain Rambahadur Rai. Late of the 2nd/10th Gurkhas. He will be your teacher.’

  During dinner that night Michael had covertly studied the small man. He would have placed him at no more than forty-five. He sat erect in his chair and all his movements while he ate were precise and controlled. Creasy had told him that Rambahadur Rai had been decorated seven times by the British, during the Malayan Communist War in the fifties, and in North Borneo fighting the Indonesians, in the early sixties. The decorations included the Military Cross with bar.

  Now Michael lay again on the limestone paving concentrating his mind and body not to move. He was dressed only in his swimsuit. In Gozo, there is a variety of fly that bites with a sting sharper than that of a mosquito.

  One such fly landed on Michael’s right ankle and bit him. His leg twitched.

  ‘You moved!’

  ‘The flies sting,’ Michael said defiantly.

  ‘Do they sting worse than a bullet?’ Rai said. Then he stood up and walked over to a clump of young trees. He tore a long, thin branch from one of them and stripped off the leaves. He pulled his chair up close to Michael, holding the willowy branch in his right hand. Then he sat down and said, ‘Dunga,’ thus shortening the ‘bible’.

  Michael lay still for several minutes and he was bitten again by a fly on his right arm. He twitched involuntarily. A second later he yelped, as the branch thwacked across his buttocks.

  ‘Dunga!’

  Unseen
, Creasy was standing on the balcony outside his study, looking down at the scene. He was smiling. Twenty years before, he thought he had been an expert sniper, trained both by the Marines and the French Foreign Legion. Then he had met Rambahadur Rai and realised that he was an amateur. He had submitted himself to the same training that Michael was now starting out on.

  Over the next ten minutes, the branch thwacked down three more times, until Michael twisted, sat up and said angrily, ‘It can’t be done!’

  Creasy went down the steps, walked past the pool to the garden and picked up three large limestone rocks. He then walked over to the two men and laid the rocks next to Michael, with a gap of about a foot between them. Then from his back pocket he took out a wad of notes, peeled off ten and put them under one of the stones. He nodded at Rambahadur.

  The Ghurkha stood up and took off his shirt. He folded it carefully and put it on a wicker table nearby. Then he took off his trousers, made sure that the creases were perfectly aligned and placed them next to the shirt. Then his shoes and socks and set them neatly under the table. He was naked, except for a pair of white boxer shorts. Michael stood up looking puzzled. Rambahadur walked over to the rocks and lay down over them. One was under his chin, another under his solar plexus and a third under his crotch. It looked extremely uncomfortable.

  Creasy pointed to the chair and said, ‘Sit down, Michael, and watch him closely. If he moves one millimetre during the next two hours, you get the hundred pounds under that rock. You also get to hit him with the stick. If he doesn’t move, he gets the money and gets to hit you with the stick. Six times. And believe me, under those circumstances, he hits damn hard.’

  The young man grinned, sat down and picked up the stick. He leaned forward and gazed intensely at the prone man in front of him. Creasy went into the kitchen, got a beer from the fridge and went back up to his study. First, he wrote a long letter to Senator James Grainger, and then another one to Corkscrew Two, and finally a third one to Blondie. He addressed three envelopes and put them all together into a larger one which he addressed to a poste restante number in Brussels, from where they would be forwarded. He had just sealed the envelope when he heard a thwack and a yelp from below. He lifted his head and waited. When he heard the second thwack and the second yelp, he started to smile. By the time he heard the sixth thwack, he was grinning broadly. After the second yelp, there had been no more. He looked at his watch. It had been two hours and a few minutes. By the time he got down the steps, Rambahadur was walking to his bedroom, carrying his clothes over one arm and his shoes in the other hand. Michael was standing by the pool, rubbing his backside. Creasy walked over and kicked the middle rock aside. The money was still there.

  He looked at Michael who grinned ruefully and said, ‘He wouldn’t take it. He said to leave it under that rock for thirty days. Then if he’s satisfied, it will be mine, but I have to use some of it to take us all out for dinner to the best restaurant.’

  Creasy lifted a foot and rolled the rock back over the money. Michael said, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. He lay there like one of those rocks.’

  ‘I know,’ Creasy said. ‘Dunga Justo Basne.’

  Michael looked up in surprise.

  ‘You speak Gurkhali?’

  Creasy shook his head. ‘No, but I know those three words. They were hammered into my backside about twenty years ago.’ He gestured over his shoulder to the house. I was trained by Rambahadur in exactly the same way.’

  ‘Is he really sixty?’ Michael asked. ‘He doesn’t look it.’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Creasy answered. ‘And I’ll tell you a story about him that I heard from an even older British Colonel, who used to command the 2nd/10th Gurkhas during the Malayan war. The Communist insurgents used to raid local farms and villages for food. There was a large, isolated chicken farm, up near the border of Thailand. The British received intelligence that a guerrilla group was going to raid it. The position was such that it was impossible to mount an ambush. The guerrillas already had the farmhouse under surveillance from nearby hills. The Colonel sent Rambahadur and one other Ghurkha into the farm at night. They gave instructions to the Malayan farmer and his family and then they went into the largest chicken shed and set up a machine-gun at the end farthest from the door. Then they waited. After a while the chickens settled down and ignored them, but if they had moved, the chickens would have been disturbed and the guerrillas would have heard the disturbance and been warned.’

  ‘How long did they wait?’ Michael asked.

  Three days and three nights. And during that time they didn’t move a millimetre. In fact, the chickens began to roost on their heads and their shoulders and on the machine-gun barrel. They were Dunga Justo Basne.’

  ‘How did they shit and piss?’

  ‘They didn’t shit at all. They had fasted two days before the operation and when they pissed, they did it down their trouser legs. And that was only the first day. After that they had nothing left to piss. During the heat of the day the temperature in that chicken shed was over a hundred and ten degrees. The guerrillas came on the third night. They tied up the farmer and his family, then they went into the shed to catch the chickens. There were eight of them in the shed when Rambahadur opened up with the machine-gun. He got all eight and a Military Cross.’

  Michael was thoughtful for a while, looking towards the house. Then he smiled. ‘He must have got a few chickens too.’

  ‘I guess he did,’ Creasy answered. ‘I bet the officers’ mess were eating chicken for the next two months.’

  Chapter 46

  IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN like coming home, but it wasn’t. She dropped her suitcase by the door and surveyed the room. All the furniture and objects were familiar, collected over the years. She walked into the bedroom and looked at the bed and felt somehow glad that it had not been necessary to rent out the apartment while she was away She should have felt gratitude to Creasy for that, but the only thing she felt about him was bitterness. She picked up the phone on the bedside table, called Geraldine at her office and arranged to meet her for dinner that evening. Then she soaked in the bath for half an hour and washed her hair.

  Geraldine came into the restaurant fifteen minutes late and sat down apologising.

  ‘A bloody ship sank in the South Atlantic. We’re the main insurers and the whole thing landed on my desk ten minutes before I was due to leave the office. Didn’t even have time to go home and change. Sorry about the snotty business clothes.’

  She was wearing a severe grey skirt and jacket and a pale green blouse.

  ‘You look great,’ Leonie said. ‘Very high-powered.’

  Geraldine grinned and asked, ‘So, the series has finished?’

  ‘It never got started,’ Leonie answered and handed her a menu. ‘Let’s order first and I’ll tell you all about it. My God, I need to tell someone about it and you’re the only one.’

  ‘But you got paid?’ her friend asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes, I got paid,’ Leonie said with satisfaction. ‘And tomorrow, I send a big and final cheque to the building society. It will be one of the great moments of my life.’

  Geraldine studied the menu.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she said.

  An hour later, Leonie was in tears. She had sworn her friend to secrecy. Explained that she was, in a way, breaking a contract, although that contract had technically expired. She simply had to get it out of her head. Somehow bury it forever, then try to resume a normal life. Not that her life had ever really been normal.

  So she poured out the whole story and when she came to the end, to the part where Michael had stood with her next to the taxi and said, ‘I will see you again,’ and then turned away, she lowered her head and the tears started.

  Geraldine leaned over, placed a hand over hers and muttered, ‘It sounds like something out of a film. What are you going to do?’

  Leonie got herself under control, blew her nose and said angrily. ‘There’s nothing I can do. The divorce papers were
prepared a month ago as stipulated in the contract. It will go through almost automatically. I don’t even have to go to court.’

  ‘The man sounds like an animal.’

  Leonie shook her head.

  ‘No. He’s just a machine created by hate. On the outside, he can be pleasant and in some circumstances even fun. I danced with him once at a wedding, heard him tell jokes . . . very funny jokes. But two hours later he was just a machine again.’

  Geraldine was intrigued. ‘Did you have any feelings for him at all?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I never really . . .’ Leonie started to say and then stopped, looking down for a time in silence at her empty coffee cup. She lifted her head, beckoned a waiter and ordered two more coffees and two Cognacs. She didn’t say a word until they had arrived, even though she could tell that Geraldine was seething with impatience.

  Finally she said, ‘I slept in his bed for several months, but he never touched me.’

  ‘So?’

  Leonie shrugged. ‘So I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s possible to be in such close proximity to a man without something happening. Something more than indifference.’

  ‘Is he good-looking?’

  Leonie smiled.

  ‘No. He’s got a face that’s been lived in. If anything, it reflects a battered life.’

  ‘And his body?’

  ‘Also battered. It’s taken a lot of abuse but he’s very fit. As fit as a man twenty years younger.’

  Knowing her friend, Geraldine started to probe.

  ‘So, you felt only indifference?’ she asked. ‘Nothing else at all? Be honest, Leonie.’

  After another pause for thought, Leonie said, ‘I suppose, within the last two months when he was being kinder to me, I felt something. Maybe it was only a reaction to something.’