The Hit List

by Chris Ryan

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  Chris Ryan

  motions of checking for incoming messages. A new driving licence and European community passport, he 1 saw, had been placed in his in-tray, as had a first-class JEurostar ticket. All were in the name of Neil Clissold. Manderson arrived ten minutes later, murmured | general greetings and disappeared into the briefing

  froom with Debbie. He looked tired, strained and in no

  i,

  I mood to suffer fools.

  Eventually Debbie emerged and ushered the sembled company into the briefing room. They loved slowly -- most were carrying styrofoam cups of 3t tea or coffee. At the far end, trailing wires, a large, janoramic TV/DVD set stood on a wheeled stand.

  Manderson raised his hands for silence and the faint lurmur evaporated.

  'Good morning, everyone. I hope I haven't iterrupted too many breakfasts.' Silence. A few taut smiles.

  'Before this briefing gets under way I'd like to take opportunity to welcome a new member to the jartment. Neil is already known to some if not most you, and I'm sure you'll all, er, make him feel elcome and so on.' I^Manderson gave Slater a peremptory nod. Around table six faces directed polite smiles at the /comer. Apart from Leon there was only one person snt that Slater hadn't met - a nondescript dark ed woman whom he guessed to be in her late ^enties. Catching Slater's eye she leaned over the table one hand extended. 'Hi,' she said. 'I'm Chris.'

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  From his place on Eve's left hand, Andreas raised his styrofoam cup an inch or two and gave Slater a stealthy wink.

  Manderson turned to Ray, who was inserting a DVD into the player. 'When you're done, I'd like to lock down. No calls, no visitors, no interruptions. When was the place last swept for bugs?'

  'An hour ago,' said Debbie. 'AH clear.'

  Manderson nodded, and Ray and Debbie withdrew from the briefing room, closing the soundproof glass door behind them.

  'Right, ladies and gentlemen,' said Manderson, thumbing a button on the remote control, 'I'd like you to study these images.'

  A photograph from - of all things - Hello! magazine. In the foreground the portly figure of the arms-dealer Adnan Khashoggi, canape in hand, and a dark-haired woman in a cloth-of-gold dress. Others present, Champagne flutes in hand, all dressed in black and gold.

  'This photograph is eight years old,' said Manderson. 'It was taken at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. Now the man I want to draw your attention to' -- he took a laser-pointer from the table 'is this one.'

  The tiny arrow showed a smiling figure in a black dinner jacket, black tie, and gold cummerbund standing in a group behind Khashoggi. Slater guessed him to be in his mid-forties. He looked tanned and prosperous; his spectacles were gold-framed, his

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  ling hair expensively barbered. 'His name,' said Manderson, 'is Antoine Fanonlayat. He is an arms-dealer and fixer, Francoebanese in origin, Christian by denomination, place "birth, Beirut, 1950. Educated at the French Lycee, suth Kensington, and at the Sorbonne in Paris.' Manderson flicked the remote again and a silent aper-8 home-movie played .across the screen - a liddle-Eastern rooftop with parasols, sky-signs rertising BOAC, the sea blue in the distance, and a ithful Fanon-Khayat mugging for the camera in a ite suit.

  I 'A bright young man. Bit wild as a student - drugs, atest marches and so on - and in 1972 gets a French I pregnant. Fellow student at the Sorbonne. She has atched abortion and nearly dies, Antoine legs it to Beirut. In '75 he inherits his father's import art empire and becomes involved in the arms less when he allows one of the F-K companies to 5 used as a front for sanctions-busting operations in Africa. We wait until we've got enough Idence to put him out of business and then suggest : there are ways in which he can help us.' . brief colour-film sequence on the screen showed eva Airport, an anonymous office block, and a e-plate: Services F-K Commerciaux. This cut to a i of still photographs of Fanon-Khayat in a top-hat morning-coat in the enclosure at Royal Ascot, ampanying him was a chic, rather strained-looking ie woman in an ostrich-feathered hat.

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  'Marries Solange de Cotigny June '75. Buys her a house in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. None of which inhibits him from undertaking a series of extramarital liaisons.'

  A series of grab-shots, mostly black and white, of Fanon Khayat with other blonde women in hotel lobbies, outside night-clubs, and on resort beaches.

  'Over the years, one way and another, FanonKhayat becomes a good friend to the British government, and a highly important source of non attributable weaponry. We use him in Afghanistan, when he outfits a couple of our training teams with specially adapted SAMs to counter the Sovs' Hind assault helicopters. He equips our people in South America for the Gacha job, he arms the SAS Subversive Action Wing team for operation Waterline in Sri Lanka, and he is extremely helpful to the Firm when we need to place undercover operatives in Azerbaijan to keep an eye on developments regarding the pipeline. He has undertaken never, either directly or indirectly, to supply the IRA, and he has passed on marketplace intelligence to us concerning those who have. A useful asset, all in all.

  'For our part, we have always paid him well and promptly, and avoided stepping on his toes overseas. As Terry and Chris in particular will remember, we fell over backwards ensuring that his name was never mentioned in connection with the Matrix-Churchill and Arms-to-Iraq affairs.'

  Nods around the table.

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  'So far so cosy. Unfortunately all is not so loveyIdovey in our man's private life.'

  A black and white image of Solange FanonKhayat, llooking distraught, climbing into a white Mercedes foutside the Paris house. Cut to an exterior shot of a Paris courtroom, with Fanon-Khayat hurrying up the peeps.

  'In 1992, Solange sues for divorce, citing her Husband's physical abuse, mental cruelty and persistent adultery - which has apparently included unprotected ex with prostitutes and Brazilian transvestites in the Jois de Boulogne. She is awarded a huge settlement, phich as it happens coincides with a falling off in her x-husband's business activities. 'Shortly after the judgement is announced, Fanonlayat sets up a meet with his MI6 handler. He needs Cash badly, he says, and in return claims that he can Fer hard documentary evidence that President lobodan Milosevic of Serbia is providing arms and upport to Radovan Karadjic in the breakaway epublic of Bosnian Serbia. He claims to have an inside ack to the Serbian administration. 'Unfortunately for Fanon-Khayat, we already have [ the evidence we need to that effect, and we turn the eal down. We cut him loose, basically. We distance irselves from him. The general feeling is that he is ecoming too flaky to do business with. And we're it. The next sighting of him is in - of all places - erbia.' f A wedding scene. A small local church. Flower201

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  petals in the air. A portrait of the bride - very blonde, very pretty, barely in her twenties.

  'Within six months of talking to us, we learn, Antoine has remarried. Her name is Branca Nikolic, she is twenty-three, and she and her family are well connected Serbs living in Belgrade. What the cash strapped Fanon-Khayat is doing socialising with Serbs at that point in history I leave to your collective imagination. It is unlikely to be a coincidence, for example, that his new father-in-law Goran Nikolic is a senior officer of the RDB - the Serbian secret service. From this point onwards Fanon-Khayat's former contacts and handlers in London hear nothing from him.'

  Removing his glasses, Manderson briefly polished them with a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket before once again thumbing the remote control.

  Fanon-Khayat and an overweight man in a cowboy hat on a Sheraton-style hotel terrace. Palm trees and a swimming pool visible.

  A low-ceilinged airport lounge, the crowd mostly African. Fanon-Khayat in profile at a car-hire desk.

  A grainy, long-distance street shot. Three men in coats and fur hats leaving a marble-faced office-block. Snow on the steps.

  M
anderson replaced his glasses. 'Six weeks ago word reaches P4, the head of Balkan operations downstairs, that Fanon-Khayat is on the move again, reactivating his old networks. Ten days ago, for the first time in the best part of a decade, he gets back in touch with us.

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  ^Specifically, he couriers a compact disc to C/CEE, the controller of eastern European operations, who will be peaking to you later this morning. This is some of the photographic material from that disc.' A jungle scene. Sunlight filtering through light ib. A South East Asian youth with a red bandanna ed around his head crouching over a dissassembled [47 Kalashnikov rifle. The spare parts on a cloth on ie jungle floor.

  younger man, also wearing a red bandanna, sing with a Dragunov sniper rifle armed with a lescopic sight. Next to him, his faded khaki jacket all it falling apart on his shoulders, a man who might we been his twin, grinning.

  Six young men. And a pile of several dozen aymore-style anti-personnel mines in satchels. In the cground, slightly out of focus, a Westerner in a red idanna carrying a steel ammunition box and a young . woman toting a Soviet RPG 7 grenade launcher. 'The first young man again, gleefully indicating a jden box stencilled 'grenades - w phos'. Two n soldiers in tiger-stripe camouflage smoking 1-ups and laughing - something very familiar to sr about both of them.

  . dead woman in DPM camouflage trousers, South : Asian of origin, dragged to a sitting position by the by a pair of hands. The freckled forearms shing out of shot, but a Cross-of-St-George tattoo rly visible. Severe burns to the dead woman's face neck. High-velocity round entry wounds to her

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  bared upper chest. A cooking-pot over a fire in the background.

  A dozen dead soldiers, their uniforms caked with dried blood, in a pile in a clearing by a stream. Several with their ears cut off. Around the corpses, like hunters around a trophy display, a group of red bandanna-clad soldiers carrying AK47s. One wearing a necklace of ears. Crouching alongside them, a tall, Western soldier. Jungle smock, droopy moustache, scar on left cheek.

  Three Western soldiers, all known to Slater, crouching outside the bleached stone ruins of an Asiatic temple. On the ground before them a row of sharpened bamboo stakes. Two of these hammered into the ground and topped with human heads. A red bandanna-wearing youth placing a cigarette between the lips of one of the severed heads.

  Manderson turned to Andreas. 'Any doubt in your mind about the identity of any of these instructors?'

  Andreas shook his head. 'No.'

  'Ntil?'

  'I don't know all the names, but I recognise all the faces. They're Regiment guys.'

  Manderson nodded. 'OK. The background to all of this is that during the eighties a rolling contingent of instructors from 22 SAS's Subversive Action Wing, usually referred to in this building as the Increment, were attached to "a non-communist wing of the Coalition for the Democratic Government of Kampuchea". In plain English, to the Khmer Rouge.

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  I The idea - queasy though it sounds now - was that the I struggle against communism could be effectively leontinued by supporting the Khmer Rouge's war of tfesistance against the North Vietnamese, who had Lusted them in 1979. The US started the ball rolling, Ibut the CIA contingent pulled out after Irangate in |1986. Basically Ronald Reagan left Mrs Thatcher folding their joint baby, if that's not too extreme an age to furnish you with at this time in the morning, le SAS team was based on the ThaiCambodian jrder. They fed the Khmer Rouge with weapons - aostly non-attributable AKs and RPGs and white losphorus grenades - and taught them how to use plosives, improvise and lay mines, and make booby aps.

  'It's all old history now, of course, but the agent we cloyed to provide the bulk of that non-attributable Weaponry was Antoine Fanon-Khayat. Unfortunately r us, sensibly for him, he kept detailed minutes of the air. As well as the photographs you've just seen there manifests, banking and shipping documentation -- manner of stuff. And the long and the short of it is at unless his conditions are met, all of this material

  . be made available to the press. I'What those conditions are, you've probably already sed. Two months ago an SAS snatch team lifted lovan Karadjic from Eastern Bosnia and conveyed to custody on the British mainland, where he ains pending transportation to the Hague and trial war crimes. Fanon-Khayat wants us to get the

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  Home Office to accede to Serbia's demands for his release on the grounds that the arrest was technically illegal. Now of course we don't accept that it was illegal and we're not about to give up Karadjic, but illustrated details of our close involvement with an overtly genocidal organisation like the Khmer Rouge would be very embarrassing indeed. A decade ago John Pilger made a TV programme accusing the British government of aiding and abetting the perpetrators of genocide in Cambodia - names were named, et cetera - but the government of the day denied its principal charges on the record and the whole thing faded. This will bring it all back with a vengeance. There's nothing like necklaces of human ears and severed heads on stakes to put the citizenry off their morning cornflakes, and the Serbian PR people would make sure that those pictures went round the world. You can imagine how weighty our accusations against Karadjic and his merry men would sound then.

  'Unfortunately, the Cambodia pictures are not the limit of our problems concerning Antoine FanonKhayat. Our intelligence reports suggest that his recent world tour, which took in a number of weaponry fabrication sites and known middle-men, had a specific purpose. Namely, to set up a conduit to provide Serbian defence installations with a state-ofthe-art surface-to-air missile capability. The system's called "Ondine", it's manufactured in France by Issy Avionic, and the material we think will be going to Serbia is nominally destined for the "friendly206

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  designated" Burkina Faso. We're not a hundred per cent certain that Belgrade's the real end user, but we're ninety-nine-point-nine per cent sure. We're also pretty sure that being the kind of operator that he is, Fanon-Khayat's kept both ends of the chain from meeting in the middle. The sellers won't know who they're selling to, the buyers won't know who they're buying from. Fanon-Khayat remains the vital link the man that everyone needs.

  'Basically, our man's decided to throw in his lot with j Serbia. If he succeeds in securing them a high-end |SAM capability as well as brokering the release of |�Karadjic, he can write his own ticket. Serbia would Ireinvade Kosovo on the back of a huge PR victory, id with the Ondine systems in place there's not a in thing -- short of a lethal, costly and quite possibly ansustainable ground war - that we or anyone else Could do about it. The voting public simply wouldn't /ear the sight of Nato fighter jets being blown out of le sky on television night after night, and Milosevic rould win. In Serbia, Fanon-Khayat would be a ational hero, with Branca Nikolic as his adoring ink-draped princess. And let's face it' - Manderson srmitted himself a wintry smile as he re-projected the iredding photos - 'there are worse ways for a balding, irerweight fifty-year-old to live out his days. 'However . . .' he looked at them all in turn. 'We do at intend any of this to happen. We intend - that is say this department has been tasked -- to assassinate itoine FanonKhayat.'

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  A silence of some intensity followed this pronouncement. Slater nickered a glance around the room. Andreas appeared openly amused, Eve expressionless, Leon and Terry thoughtful, Chris almost absentminded.

  'At present,' Manderson continued, 'the target is in Paris, where he is expecting to conduct a meeting with one of MI6's Balkan desk officers. The subject is the handover of the Cambodia images against the release of Karadjic. For the sake of believability we've given Fanon-Khayat the impression that we may be prepared to negotiate some Pinochet-style deal - not mentally fit to stand trial, something like that -- but that we draw the line at conceding any illegality in his arrest. Our best guess is that he will go for that.

  'Now the reason that F
anon-Khayat's in Paris, and that we're seeing him in Paris, is that he's there for a series of meetings relating to the Ondine deal. As I said, he's handling the whole thing himself, so if we can eliminate him before the deal's done, there will be no deal, no Ondine system for Serbia. Our intelligence is that the whole thing is expected to be wrapped up by Monday - Tuesday at the latest - so we have two days in which to get the job done.'

  Manderson leant back in his chair and spread his hands. 'So there you have it. Before I ask Eve to go through the operational details, has anyone got any questions? For example does anyone think that eliminating the target is morally or politically unjustified, given the circumstances?'

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  'Can we be sure that if Fanon-Khayat is taken out the Cambodia pictures won't resurface?' It was Chris i who had spoken. She looked, thought Slater, like a Gwar^i'an-reading, left-leaning teacher from a Hackney comprehensive. He'd have to watch his p's and q's with her.

  Manderson nodded and frowned. 'My guess is that '{he's flying solo on this, as he is on the Ondine deal. He I may have married a Serb, but that doesn't mean he trusts [ them. Those pictures are his pension -- he won't have I handed copies around to his mates in Belgrade. My estifrnation, with which P4 concurs, is that he'll play it straight and give us all of the pictures in return for iKaradjic. He knows us well enough to know that if we Ihear so much as a whisper that copies are still floating ijbout after the deal's done, we'll come for him. Except, af course, the whole thing won't get that far.' , 'Are we certain that he doesn't know that we know |ibout the SAMs?' This time it was Leon, the black ay.

  'If he thought we knew about them, he wouldn't be ing to negotiate with us about the pictures,' said landerson. 'Experience would tell him that the scales were stacked up too high against him. Blackmailing le'd reckon we could accommodate. But rearming Serbia at the same time? He'd know that was a bridge 30 far, that if we knew about the Ondine system we'd ave to get rid of him. And if he suspected that's what are wanted to do, then he wouldn't see us. And he is eeing us.'