The Hit List

by Chris Ryan

  found in the breast pocket of a jacket slung over air. A compact disc, which Eve immediately feeted.

  ission accomplished?' Slater asked her. fell, there's a bit of tidying up to do, but basically , As soon as we've packed this guy away we can go to the restaurant and have a good meal. Would two nip upstairs and get the trunk?'

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  Slater nodded, and he and Andreas took the lift to the ninth floor. Inside his and Eve's room, Slater unlocked the trunk. Inside were two sleeping bags and a large double duvet. From each of the sleeping bags he dragged a twenty-litre plastic jerrycan of water.

  'Heavy in, heavy out, eh?' said Andreas.

  'That's right,' said Slater, lugging the jerrycans towards the bath. 'It would look a bit odd if our trunk somehow put on eleven stones in weight overnight. If anyone asks me and Eve about it we're book collectors. Book collectors having a passionate sexual affair.'

  'When did you last read a proper book?' smiled Andreas. v

  'I'm reading one by Salman Rushdie right now,' said Slater.

  'Fuck off!' said Andreas.

  The water gurgled from the jerrycans and splashed into the bath. 'Just check, would you, if Leon remembered to put in a knife,' said Slater. 'We'll need to hack these up to make room for FanonKhayat.'

  'He remembered,' said Andreas, tossing a Stanley knife on to the bed. 'He's Mr Forward Planning, is Leon. He also knows Paris like the back of his hand, which is useful when you need trunks and jerrycans at six o'clock on a Saturday evening.'

  Finally they were ready.

  'You call the lift and hold it open,' said Slater. 'I'll get the trunk over there.'

  They had to let three lifts go but eventually an.

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  one arrived, and they got the trunk down to

  427 unobserved. Both Slater and Andreas were

  Sous that porters, rather than guests, hauled the

  in five-star hotels. Eve and Andreas emptied the trunk, Slater 1 to manhandle the dead man into the smaller of to sleeping-bags. With Andreas's help, he then Ivred the first sleeping-bag into the second, [ the hacked up pieces of plastic jerrycan in after crammed the mummy-like result into the , With the duvet tightly packed around the body allow no shifting when the trunk was carried, . was then forced shut.

  erimentally, Slater and Andreas then lifted an ch. The trunk was heavy, but not noticeably than when it had been carried into the hotel, unlikely event of the same porters carrying it no difference would be detectable. Nor, jfhen they tilted the trunk sharply, did the body

  c,' said Andreas, 'we're cooking with gas.' an!' said Slater, remembering. i> others stared at him.

  ing the schoolgirl on the TV when we first The guy in the cowboy hat. His name's He did the same to a woman I used to guard.' Grace Litvinoff, by any chance?' asked Eve |fl believe she's quite keen on the odd bit of

  Slater's turn to stare.

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  Eve smiled sweetly. 'If the cowboy hat fits,' she said, 'wear it!'

  They made it back to the ninth floor room without incident. Leon had taken care to buy them a trunk with comfortable carrying handles, and Slater and Andreas were able to carry it to the lift as if it weighed much less than Fanon-Khayat's eleven and a half stone. In the event, no one took any notice of them, and the trunk was soon ritually laid on the floor at the end of the bed.

  The atmosphere, Slater thought, was a weird one. In the Regiment, after a terrorist kill or a successful contact, they'd all pile into the bar and get hammered. Right now, .however, the three of them were planning to celebrate a day of quite extreme violence with a quiet dinner.

  Eve had called the back-up team to report that Fanon-Khayat was down and the disc recovered. Terry, she discovered from Chris, had followed Branca FanonKhayat.

  Although Branca gave a convincing impression of being a shopaholic trophy wife, Leon and Chris had agreed that it was essential to keep tabs on her. How would she react when her husband's bodyguards failed to reappear? Would she seek the help of the French police or security services? Would she attempt to contact associates of her husband's? Anything was possible.

  In fact, Terry had discovered, Branca had gone to a

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  in the eleventh arrondissement, where a vast was under way. The host was a FrancoTunisian called Gil Dazat, the music was loud, and the yd -- chic, louche and international -- was spilling | into the street. Terry had simply climbed the stairs 1 in. Branca was there on the arm of an sively dressed young man whom Terry quickly ied as the resident drug-dealer. Business was and quite openly conducted, and from the way jflthe guests greeted them it was clear that the dealer iBranca were an established couple. Terry had ed his intention of staying at the party in order to He young man - it was the kind of information that I well come in useful.

  at amazed Slater was Branca's sang-froid. On the of a day in which she and her husband had held at gunpoint by the trigger-man of a hostile lent - an event that had so traumatised her id that he had gone into hiding - she had elected ss up and go out on the town with her rorld boyfriend. In a way, he thought, you had off your hat to the girl. Having lived through ibing of Belgrade, Branca Fanon-Khayat knew to prioritise. Drink, dance, for tomorrow we

  said as much to Andreas and Eve over the ustine and baby octopus salad at dinner. Andreas iccked Fanon-Khayat's phone and found no text ice messages. Unless the arms-dealer had cleared

  >ne earlier, Branca hadn't attempted to ring him.

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  'I'd love to know what she's wearing tonight,' said Eve. 'That chiffon coat this morning was just too much.'

  'Pity she had to wear all that stuff underneath,' said Andreas. 'Just the coat would have looked better.'

  'You're a dinosaur, Andreas,' said Eve. 'A sexist dinosaur.'

  'A dinosaur maybe, but no sexist!' insisted Andreas. He turned to Slater. 'Am I a sexist?'

  'I wouldn't say so,' said Slater. 'I've never known you discriminate on grounds of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. You've always been very much an equal opportunities guy - happy to kill anyone.'

  Eve turned to Slater. Three glasses of Chablis had admitted a pale sparkle to her sea-grey eyes. 'What about you, Neil? Are you a new man?'

  The? Sure, yeah! I've got my . . . What's that thing you're supposed to have?'

  'Inner child?' suggested Andreas.

  'Exactly. I've got one of those. And I can tell you, my inner child was crapping itself this afternoon before you turned up with your Clock and your velvet jeans.'

  'My pleasure,' said Eve. 'It would have been very embarrassing to have gone back to London without you.'

  'What happened to your predecessor?' asked Slater. 'They went back to London without her, I seem to remember you saying.'

  'Ellis? Ellis was killed in a firefight here in Paris. She . . .'

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  fes?' said Slater.

  The truth is I never really knew Ellis. I'd seen her

  at the place, because I'd been on a kind of informal

  thment to the Cadre, but I never got to know her.'

  turned to Andreas. 'You did, though, didn't you?'

  lis was great. I only knew her for a few months,

  was very much the new boy then, but. . .' he

  9k his head.

  the guys go very misty-eyed when they talk : Ellis,' said Eve.

  iie was the total professional,' said Andreas to 'I doubled up with her a few times for live, CQB sessions at the killing house. I don't know I've had the pleasure yet but we're supposed to do limum of four days a month there as well as ising on the range, and it's at least as dangerous as off we used to do at Pontrilas. Like I said, I I up with Ellis a few times and she was very, t. They throw these horrible things at you -- CS irhite noise, guns that jam as soon as you try and icm - and I never saw her lose it on
ce. She was . cool. Ellis was cool. And afterwards she was and gorgeous, and fantastic company, and letely crazy, and . . .' ; shook his head and fell silent, teryone talks about Ellis like this,' said Eve. 'As i imagine she wasn't the easiest act to follow. It npossible, in fact. Whenever I slipped up, which : the time, I'd know people were thinking: Ellis i never have done that. Ellis would have handled

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  that better. Ellis would never have lost the surveillance target, missed the shot, made the bad decision . . . And of course she was killed in action, so she became a sort of departmental saint.'

  'What exactly happened to her?' asked Slater.

  Eve glanced briefly at Andreas. 'The truth is we're not sure, but we think it had something to do with FanonKhayat.'

  'Fanon-Khayat? As in the guy upstairs?'

  The waiter drew up, removed their plates, and filled their wine glasses. Eve waited until he was out of earshot.

  'Ellis was in Paris as part of a ... a check on FanonKhayat's reliability. Things were beginning to go belly-up for him financially, and London needed to know that he was still on-side, and wasn't going to use the information he had against us. His weakness was women, so Ellis mounted an old-fashioned honey trap.'

  'How did she do it?' asked Andreas. 'I never actually found out.'

  'Quite straightforward,' said Eve. 'She drove into the back of his car when his driver was dropping him off at the apartment, and made like she was so upset by the whole thing that he invited her up. Things moved on pretty fast after that, and . . .'

  'They had an affair?' asked Slater.

  'My understanding is that they didn't. Ellis had ; definite theories about using sex to gain information, and her basic thing was that with sport-fuckers like;

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  >n-Khayat - guys who were just in it for the chase the conquest - you got what you wanted by lolding sex rather than granting it. Once you gave someone like that, she felt, you lost your power ' them. So she flattered him. Played him along. She him she was a political science graduate, and gave the impression that she was turned on by his ijiwledge of covert activity. The more extreme stuff sld her, she implied, the likelier he was to get her |fbed. According to the report, though, he didn't He was crazy about Ellis - she could really get going if she wanted to - but he hardly told her ing. He mentioned as an aside that there had a UK and US special forces presence in ttbodia, but then John Pilger had already made that clear. He certainly didn't produce any pictures aything like that, and all in all he seemed well ed to us.

  final decision at the time, based on Ellis's was that his knowledge of our dirty washing -- as it was - didn't represent any kind of security We knew he had made some fairly dodgy i in the Balkans, and that a watching brief had to yt, but that was pretty much it.' ecept that it wasn't,' suggested Slater, tccept that it wasn't,' said Eve. 'On the morning of ay she was due to return to London for debriefing rait to the Science Park at La Villette in north Paris. We don't know why, and we don't whether she went to meet someone or was

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  following someone -- all that we know is that she went alone and without backup.

  'At around 11.20am, according to a statement issued to the press by the French police, a firefight took place in the staff car-park area, resulting in the deaths of three men and one woman. The men had all been shot twice in the head and the woman, who appeared to have been unarmed, had been shot eleven times in the body. Their conclusion was that several people were involved on both sides and the whole thing was almost certainly drugs-related -- rival gangs settling scores over territory, that sort of thing. Maybe an execution. By the time the incident was reported in the newspapers the drug-gang theory had hardened into certainty, and as everyone knows, gangland killings are never solved.

  'The most interesting evidence, though, is buried in a later police report. The car-park at La Villette is huge, and the shooting took place in an area where there weren't many people around. The nearest person to the shooting was a maintenance guy from one of the display halls who was collecting equipment from a van. He didn't see what happened - he was a good hundred yards away -- but he heard it. He said that to begin with there was a volley of shots in quick succession. Different sorts of bangs, perhaps fifteen or twenty in all, and at first he thought it was firecrackers - the fourteenth of July was coming up and the kids start letting them off as soon as they appear in the shops. But he'd done his Service Militaire and he soon realised that what he'd heard was gunfire.

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  ccording to his statement this first volley was ved by silence for about twenty seconds, then : or four bursts of semi-automatic fire, and then, a inute or so later, three double-shots in fast sion followed by another extended volley. And i silence, and people running away, at statement, which we have no reason to doubt, sts the following scenario: Ellis goes to the car kfor reasons unknown. She is carrying her personal Son but has no reason to expect trouble. In the rk she is ambushed by at least five people armed a variety of weapons, all of whom open fire on nultaneously and at short range.

  goes down wounded, but makes it to cover, rambushers move up on her, not sure if she's dead, ig each other by cracking off the odd shot. Ellis, migh badly and possibly critically hurt, realises that ji'only option is to seize the initiative, to move rather than away from the killing group. So, loning whatever strength she's got left, she does Ithat -- pulls out her Clock and goes in shooting. pe double taps in as many seconds, three ambushers on their feet, but there are five of them in total lis time she goes down for good, lere's a picture of the scene an hour or so later ch was taken by the police photographer. There vo lines of cars, and behind the first and hurled yards against the second are three men who do in |look very much like drug-gang enforcers. Each has black holes between his eyes; none has much in

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  the way of a back to his head. On the ground you can see a Skorpion machine-pistol and a couple of heavy automatics.

  'Bundled up on the tarmac twenty feet away is Ellis. She's wearing the leather jacket she used to carry her weapon in - she just used to stick it in the inside pocket, she hated shoulder holsters - and a black T shirt and jeans. And the strange thing is that although she's been literally shot to pieces - eleven short-range shots to the body -- you can't actually see any of the wounds at all. Her face is untouched. She's just lying there with this blank stare in a shining pool of blood.'

  Eve nodded pensively. 'When the picture came into the office the atmosphere got very strange. No one talked to each other - everyone sat alone in corners trying to figure the whole thing out. And trying to work out how to deal with their own reactions to it. Your predecessor' -- she looked up at Slater - 'had worked with her a lot and I think was pretty upset. Leon disappeared to Paris that evening to see if he could get the inside story and came back a week later none the wiser. The dead men, as everyone had suspected, were basically hired triggers. And although j Leon soon established the identity of the other two -j the two who finished Ellis off and escaped - it quickly 1 became clear that they'd vanished off the face of thej earth. They'd been professionally "disappeared".

  'Since then, our assumption has been that EUis's 1 was sanctioned by Fanon-Khayat, who then had the su viving shooters wiped out in their turn. We've neve

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  why -- six killings seems like a bit of an over tion to wounded sexual vanity -- but then a lot of that people like Fanon-Khayat do defy rational is.' there's a revenge angle to this operation?' asked

  lere's a tidying up of unfinished business,' said tt'Yes. It's time Ellis's ghost was laid to rest.' say you'd done bloody well,' said Andreas, ; his words with care.

  smiled at him gratefully. 'Thank you. If there's ing I learned in the short time I knew her it's re are no second prizes in a firefight.' .the meal progressed, Slater considered the
ir Mi. The three of them had agreed with the back that they should stay the night in the hotel ^"than check out immediately and return to Paris, ras working on a plan for the disposal of Fanon t's body and until this was finalised, they had i, the wisest course of action was to stay put. To be trunk around at night, when there were far on the road than in the day, was to increase i of discovery significantly. i of them needed reminding that they were on | territory. If the DGSE or any of the other security services found out that an MI6 hit ras operating on its patch, the political sions would be appalling. There would be no 1 done - instead the French would scream the li> the world. They had never quite lived down

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  the humiliation of the 1985 Rainbow Warrior affair, when Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur - both DGSE agents -- were convicted of manslaughter after the bombing and sinking of the Greenpeace ship m Auckland harbour. If any of the Cadre were arrested on French soil and convicted of murder or conspiracy to murder, they could expect to serve very long jail terms indeed - no matter what the political justification.

  Slater was also increasingly conscious of the fact that he was about to spend the night in a hotel bedroom with Eve. They had joked about the charade of their being a bookish couple, but not with quite as much hilarity as, they might have done. Was it his imagination, or had there been a tiny edge of regret in her voice that life was as it was? That the whole thing was an act? That they were not players in some Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan-style romantic comedy, but in a grim game of death - of covert slaughter and counter slaughter.

  That they were able to relax and enjoy themselves after a day like today was extraordinary in itself, Slater thought, and showed perhaps just how deformed their sensibilities had become. Had his part in the death of Antoine Fanon-Khayat helped prevent another round of Balkan tortures and executions? Or had he merely contributed to a squalid murder whose principal motivation was the desire to save political face? Would the Serbs simply go to the next dealer for their antiaircraft system?

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  sless to wonder, he decided, watching the way i the light fell on Eve's hair and painted the soft line cheekbone. She was wearing a dove^coloured ere sweater and skirt, and the muted tones subtly lighted the sea-grey of her eyes. There was obvious about her appearance, he thought, that jumped out and grabbed you in the way lit did with, say, Grace Litvinoff. at you wondered. You looked at her and you jered if you'd ever quite get the measure of her, quite get the measure of that distant gaze. There self-discipline and a quiet symmetry there that he admitted to himself- very attractive indeed, r would it be like to disrupt that cool poise, to see >