The Hit List

by Chris Ryan

  bedroom next. Doubling, guessed Slater, as ag room for Branca Nikolic, FanonKhayat's ^-something Serbian bride. A wardrobe stood open on a garish Mexican carpet and Slater

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  caught a glimpse of cellophaned dry-cleaning and expensive-looking shoe-boxes. Tacked to the watered-silk wall were posters of Madonna, Geri Halliwell and a couple whom Slater recognised as the assassinated warlord Arkan Raznatovic and his pop star wife Svetlana 'Ceca' Velickovic. Arkan and Ceca's magic-markered signatures had been scrawled across their portrait.

  Exiting, Slater crept past the half-open door of the drawing-room, from which - to Slater's relief - the music still poured. That, certainly, was where FanonKhayat would be waiting. And waiting impatiently, if Slater didn't get a move on. He would know Slater was here, and he would expect the bodyguards' search to take a few minutes. The desire to appear in control of the situation would lead him to wait until the bodyguards showed him in, calculated Slater, but there were limits. Much longer and he'd come out and see what the hold-up was.

  The first room in the right-hand corridor was the Fanon-Khayats' bedroom, decorated in orientalist style with hanging lamps and drapes. Hurrying in, quickly sweeping the place with the Sig Sauer, Slater checked the dressing area and the gold-accessorised en-suite bathroom. Empty.

  A further spare bedroom. Empty.

  A second bodyguard hutch. The magazines about martial arts and attack-dogs this time, as well as the inevitable wank-mags. A shell-suit on a wire hanger. The smell the same.

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  ilater and Fanon-Khayat, it seemed, were alone.

  the Sig Sauer out of sight behind the fcase, Slater hurried back up the corridor and ped into the drawing-room. It was vast, panelled I flooded with dusty light. Huge abstract canvases the walls with crumbling tapestries. Invisible raced up and down the keyboard of an iible Steinway grand piano. The source of the jic was a quartet of loudspeakers shaped like ilus shells.

  toine Fanon-Khayat looked older than his half iry of years, and a Lacoste tennis shirt and ce jeans did nothing to mitigate this impression. iWas also balder than he had appeared in arson's presentation - his remaining locks i>ed with unconvincing bravado across a billiard Pig, the arms-dealer had risen from an armchair

  f-crossed the room by the time that he realised ag was very wrong, that the man with the se had not been shown in by the bodyguards -- I, that there was no sign of the bodyguards. Clissold ..." he began uncertainly, his hand still etched.

  er revealed the Sig Sauer. Seeing it, Fanon seemed to crumple, to shrink inside his re leisurewear. His hand fell tiredly to his side. ilbu know exactly what I want,' said Slater levelly. it those pictures. This gun is silenced, I've already on those idle shitbags in the lobby, I'm happy

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  to use it again. So get the pictures -- the disc -- now.'

  'I thought we were . . . going to discuss a deal.' Fanon-Khayat looked sulky and disappointed, but not yet truly afraid.

  Til give you a deal,' said Slater, casually bringing up the Sig Sauer, aiming, and reducing a portrait-bust on a plinth to a shower of shattered clay. 'Those pictures against your life.' He turned the Sig Sauer back towards his quarry.

  Fanon-Khayat looked at the pottery shards dispassionately. His eyes flickered. 'You've come from Ridley?'

  Mentally, Slater reeled. He knew Ridley's name? In that case he probably knew what Ridley's department did. And what Slater had come to do. What else did he know? .

  'I've come from London.'

  'For the pictures.'

  'Where are they?'

  Fanon-Khayat tentatively ran his ringers through his thinning hair. 'Suppose they're not here?'

  This was bad, thought Slater. This had to be turned around, and fast. He lowered the gun and took a step back.

  'Look, Mr Fanon-Khayat, make it easy for yourself. You know who I am, you know where I come from, you know we don't fuck about. Just give us the disk and I'll be off.'

  'And if I refuse?'

  He knows, thought Slater. He knows what I'm here

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  j. Knows he has nothing to lose by refusing to cote, ive you heard of the Ustashe, Mr . .. Clissold?'

  ater stared at him, not listening, wondering how to Shooting him in the hand or leg would ably put Fanon-Khayat into shock and accomplish Threatening to hit him might bring some i to the situation - most people were frightened of ; hit. He took a step forward, and FanonKhayat yr cowered, ic Ustashe were a Croatian army, Mr Clissold,

  i joined forces with the occupying Nazis during st war, and turned on their neighbours, the Serbs.

  army whose crimes equalled for sheer horror the Nazis themselves committed. They ted Serbs with knives, with saws, with--'

  listory later,' said Slater, ignoring him. 'The disc

  My cannot wait much longer, Mr Clissold. And are many copies of the disc. Destroying this one accomplish nothing.' er was not going to be drawn into an argument.

  les, he was certain that Fanon-Khayat was bluffing iderson's calculation was that he would not have copies for fear of devaluing his original.

  ic disc now,' he repeated, raising his voice, that moment the door re-opened. His heart 5, Slater recognised Branca Nikolic. From the

  -free bags in her hands he guessed that she had just in from Charles d$ Gaulle airport. She was

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  wearing an ankle-length pink chiffon coat and white trainers and her pretty, spoilt face looked tired.

  Sprinting across the room, Slater grabbed her before her husband had a chance to speak. Gagging her with one hand and wrenching her head backwards, he held the Sig Sauer to her throat. She whimpered, began to shake in his arms.

  'Please . . .' said Fanon-Khayat. 'She--'

  'The disc now!' Slater shouted, jabbing the silencer up beneath her jaw. 'Or I'll shoot her in front of you. I'll blow her fucking throat out.'

  Visibly distressed, Fanon-Khayat raised his hands, crossed the room to the massive fireplace and reached for a carved roundel on one of the side columns. The wooden disc, some nine inches in diameter, turned smoothly beneath his hands. Once removed, it revealed a small barrel-safe with a combination lock. A moment later the circular steel door swung open. From the interior of the safe Fanon-Khayat removed a CD in a flat plastic case. His hands were shaking badly now.

  'Please, Mr Clissold,' he begged quietly. 'Please. Let her go. She doesn't know anything about--'

  'Stay where you are,' said Slater. 'Tell the girl to bring the disc over here to me.'

  Fanon-Khayat spoke to his wife in halting Serbian, and she nodded.

  Slater released her, wiping her saliva from his hand on to his trousers. As she stepped backwards away from him her eyes widened. At the fireplace FanonKhayat

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  Slater had time to half-turn, to catch a blurred se of a descending arm, and then - Itaneously - a sick crunch, a whipcrack of white |tt, and the enfolding bloom of darkness.

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  Slater woke in darkness. His hands were cuffed behind his back, there was blood in his mouth, and the pain in his head was so great that he retched. It was as if a spiked cannonball was rolling in his skull, crushing nerves and bone as it went. His eyes, too, were in agony - seared by the glare of that phosphorescent impact.

  He gagged up an acid, throat-rasping gob of bile. It smeared sourly around his face, mingled with the metallic blood-smell. He was lying face-down, he realised. Was he in bed?

  Reality came stamping home. He was in the boot of a car, the car was on the move, and his vomit-smeared head was rolling around inside a plastic carrier-bag.

  There had been a third man.

  He must have come with Branca. Stayed downstairs, perhaps, to pay a taxi-driver. Followed with baggage. And unlike Branca, he must have noticed that the bodyguards were not
where they should have been, armed himself, summed up the situation at a glance.

  Well, thought Slater wretchedly, this was certainly an impressive debut. Given a chance to distinguish himself he'd fucked up royally. It wasn't good enough

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  blame the comrns -- in truth, he had barely been in sntrol of the situation before Branca's arrival. He had ad the gun, but Fanon-Khayat had had the yrchological advantage. Guessing that Slater had been ered not to leave the apartment without the disc, he decided to call his bluff. And had Branca not awn up ...

  The floor bucked as the car went over the edge of a pivement, and Slater retched again. His eyes were timing as if rubbed raw with sandpaper and he ised that as well as coshing him they'd taken the ace from his briefcase and given him a liberal blast of at too. Just after cutting themselves out of the sticuffs, Slater guessed. The ones that were cutting > his wrists and ankles so painfully had come straight [Suet-Face and Potato-Head, should have shot Fanon-Khayat straight away, jght Slater miserably. I should have put one 3Ugh his ear or taken off a finger or something to him going, like I did with that Serb. And if he i't produced the disc after that, well, I should have : wasted him and got the fuck out.

  trouble was, he hadn't looked like the sort of ' you shot. In the past, all those against whom Slater waged war had been young men -- tough and tivated volunteers who knew the score and who ild reasonably be expected to survive a bit of rough lent. Torturing middle-aged art-collectors was much a new departure for Slater, whatever their ical sympathies, and he'd held back.

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  Even though they weren't expecting her to be arriving in Paris, both support teams would have identified Branca Nikolic on sight. They would have tried desperately to get through. If he could contact them, they would have reasoned, then they could contact him. And when they couldn't, they must have thought that he'd switched off- that he'd deliberately broken contact.

  And now what? A deserted patch of woodland somewhere outside the city and a bullet through the head, probably. They would use his silenced Sig Sauer - a much sweeter and lighter piece of kit than that Cold War junk they all carried about. They were probably arguing right now about who got to keep it. And who got die Motorola.

  Would Fanon-Khayat and the Serbs question him before killing him? Slater wondered. Unlikely -- there were no useful answers he could give them. They knew where he came from, they knew what he wanted, they knew what he'd been trying to do. If they were not going to look like a bunch of complete pussies, they had to kill him. That would bring MI6 to the negotiating table fast enough.

  They were in traffic now, Slater realised. And every jerked start and bad-tempered foot-brake stop was red hot agony. Someone -- probably the now single thumbed Suet-Face - had given him the mother and father of kickings in the bollocks. Fuck, he was in a bad way.

  Was there any hope of pulling out of this? Precious

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  le. Would the team have got on to him? Were they id him now, tailing this very car? Unlikely. These ale weren't stupid. They'd have known he had c-up and have taken evasive action.

  what to do? Struggle, or go gently? Thrash etically around in his handcuffs and get another ig for his pains? Or bow his head to the bullet, ier to soldier?

  ater considered the quick 9mm round through the ebellum. At that moment there seemed no point in inuing to fight. The vehicle swung through a ale, sending red-hot needles coursing through his sed neck and testicles.

  jo would miss him or notice that he was gone? ^couldn't come up with a single name. He struggled lember his mother, but could barely recall the ed photographic image that he had carried around many years. She had been hit by a police-car in ; Kong and had died the next day in the colony's hospital. Slater had been five at the time ; six - and hoping for a bicycle for his birthday, i distraught father had remained in the army until talcoholism became as apparent to his seniors as it to his fellow-NCOs, and thereafter found jjloyment as a nightwatchman in Aldershot. Bill had died of pneumonia at sixty, while Slater was in Belize, but in truth Neil had started to lose ither on that never-to-be-forgotten day in Hong His sixth birthday had come and gone lebrated -- the bicycle was not mentioned again --

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  and a year later Slater had been dispatched to a boarding school outside Trowbridge in Somerset. His classroom work had been undistinguished - mild dyslexia had seen to that - but on the rugby field he'd proved one of the best fly-halves the school had ever known. He'd enjoyed the place, all in all, with its friendships and conspiracies, and unlike the other pupils had never looked forward to the holidays, which had been spent with his mother's unmarried sister Amy near Bedford.

  Amy was unlikely to have been impressed by the way he had turned out. She had taken him into her house out of a sense of family duty rather than any fondness for children, and her relief when term-time came round again had been obvious. Amy had notably lacked her younger sister's sense of fun and adventure, but she had taught him one invaluable skill: how to iron and fold a shirt to a professional laundry standard. This facility would earn Slater valuable beer-money in the five years that he spent with the Royal Engineers. The Engineers had been his father's regiment, and joining up - Slater had never seriously considered any other career -- had been like coming home. He was flagged almost immediately as an exceptional soldier. Selection for the SAS had followed shortly after he was made up to corporal.

  Schools and regiments were ultimately the same though, thought Slater. People came and people went. You were there for a time and then you moved on, and in personal terms you ceased to exist. Other boys,

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  joking much like you, sat at the desk where you had at. Other soldiers, looking much like you, trained inhere you had trained. No one was different enough

  i make a mark. Your name was typed on a list, pinned a board, placed in a file, and forgotten.

  It occurred to Slater as the vehicle plunged into yet aother furrow - another red-hot knife in the neck nd the balls -- that he was about to die for his country, id for the first time since recovering consciousness |ie ghost of a smile touched his lips. Hooking the ljumbs of his plasticuffed hands into the back of his elt, he attempted to brace himself against the jotong

  " the car, which was getting worse. They had been riving for over an hour, he guessed, and had moved am main roads to local lanes. They were probably in ie countryside now - the going certainly felt uneven sugh.

  His thumbs found the knife Chris had given hnn.

  ley had searched him, but they hadn't found it. He'd gotten about it himself.

  i No, he begged the trained part of himself - the part

  at had been, and always would be, an SAS soldier. |ease no. Don't order me to go on fighting. [You're not dead, a quiet voice whispered, until bu're dead. This is what it's about. This is what

  parates the wolves from the sheep. This is the

  oment that your entire life has led up to. Fight. Please. Let me close my eyes. Let me die. tOpen your eyes. Whatever the odds, whatever the i. Fight.

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  Another horrendous jolt, banging Slater's cheekbone hard into his own blood, tears and vomit.

  Agonisedly, inch by inch, he fingered the sliver of compound plastic from his belt, pushed it down his left sleeve, fitted it under his watchstrap.

  It was laughable, no defence against anything or any one, let alone a team of heavily armed and quite possibly sadistic RDB enforcers - but when all was said and done it was a weapon.

  When daylight suddenly and violently flooded the car boot, Slater guessed that they had covered about 100 miles. He had been unconscious, he guessed, for about twenty minutes. The bag was pulled from his face and he blinked* painfully - his eyes and sinuses were still acutely tender &om being blasted with Mace.

 
As his vision cleared he saw one of FanonKhayat's bodyguards - Potato-Head -- reaching for him. Noted the gold-plated identity bracelet on the hairy wrist.

  Distaste showed on the Serb's face at the vomit and blood-smeared features before him. Gripping Slater by the lapels of his jacket, he wrenched him from the car and pushed him to the ground.

  They were in a farmyard, Slater saw blearily, and he was lying on a grass verge that had been churned up by cattle and had then dried hard and uneven. The land surrounding them was hilly and sparsely wooded, and there was no sign that they were overlooked from any direction. Certainly there was no other dwelling-place of any kind in sight. The car he had travelled in was a

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  olive Audi Quattro, new-looking. The day : and cloudless.

  l farm itself was in a poor state of repair. Thistles grass grew through the cracks in the yard's etc floor, and the brick outbuildings were badly ted. Beyond the yard several dozen young pigs attently squealed and jostled in a makeshift pen. rutted track beyond them a tractor and trailer | parked. Two cabbage white butterflies tumbled I each other in a looping aerial ballet. There was

  of bees. It was a drowsy and peaceful scene. 6>t for long. From the front seat of the Audi 1 Suet-Face, a bloody dressing round the stump thumb, and a third man, as pasty-faced and set as the first two. This, Slater guessed, was the rfio had bumped him in the apartment. The two s together, Suet-Face spat on the ground and took -bottle of spirits from his pocket, and they stared i, amused.

  8ter was not encouraged. None of the trio had the man who intended to be merciful. With his i hands he felt for the knife. It was still there, iusic?' Suet-Face asked Slater, swigging from the

  and reaching inside the car. 'You like?' 7ithout warning the quiet of the farmyard was ered by the ear-splitting thump of a techno beat, ap of which a woman's voice began to screech a ely amplified ethnic folk-song. It was, thought : as he turned his head away, a truly hideous sound, Audi's top-of-the-range hi-fi did it full justice.