Hit List

by Chris Ryan

  She nodded. ‘Right. Well I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll bring each other up to speed about events in the car, but first we’re going to do to our new friends what they were going to do to you. It’ll be messy and unpleasant but it’s got to be done.’

  ‘But what is this place? Who owns it?’

  ‘No idea. But this is quite a common Mafia set-up for body disposal. Very popular in Russia. Some hard-up pig-farmer gets paid a whack of cash to leave the premises for a few hours — the whole thing arranged over the phone – and when he gets back the place is neat and tidy and his animals have been fed.’

  ‘So we’re not going to have some irate bloke turning up with a shotgun?’

  ‘I doubt it. And we’d see him a mile off, anyway. And he’d see us, and know to keep his distance.’

  Slater nodded. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened? How you got here?’

  ‘Let’s get shot of this trio first.’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Andreas followed Fanon-Khayat, who’s holed up at a hotel near the airport outside Paris. Terry and Leon stayed at the OP to keep an eye on Branca, who’s still in the Rue Molitor flat. I’ll hear if there are any developments. Now do you think you can lift these guys?’

  Slater was amazed at her composure. The entire operation had gone arse-up, she’d just had to shoot three men dead, and she was carrying on as coolly as if they were out on a shopping trip.

  ‘Do you think the pigs will eat the clothes?’

  ‘Not sure.’ Eve frowned. ‘Perhaps best to strip the bodies and drive the stuff away. Let’s do it.’

  They started. By unspoken agreement they worked as fast as they could, and in almost total silence. Soon a pile of clothes and shoes lay beside the three naked corpses. Eve went through the pockets, extracting several thousand francs in cash, the Tokarev and Stechkin handguns, the gold Dupont lighter, and the keys to the Audi Quattro. Slater removed his knife from Suet-Face’s perineum, and washed it under the tap before returning it to his belt.

  There was no question, he knew, of merely setting the car on fire with the bodies in it. There would be inquests and autopsies and the manner of death would swiftly come to light. Then there would be headlines.

  No, there was no easy or pleasant way out. The dead men had to disappear completely.

  ‘Pity we haven’t got a bit more time,’ observed Slater. ‘In six hours they’d be nice and stiff.’

  Eve nodded blankly.

  In the barn, Slater found a square of plastic sheeting. One by one he rolled the dead men on to this, and dragged them, bumping, into the barn. Once there he covered the heads with fertiliser bags, to prevent any blood escaping on to the earth floor. When all three corpses were ready for destruction, he fetched the plastic bin from the enclosure, where Potato-Face had left it. Bluebottle flies were swarming in and around the bin, feasting on the congealed remains of the pig, and rose in a black fury as he lifted it.

  With the bin positioned beneath the funnel, Slater and Eve looked at each other. Eve turned on the generator, and Slater knelt to hoist the first of the bodies in a fireman’s lift.

  The man was very heavy – dead weight – and blood and liquid matter dripped from the fertiliser-bag on to the shoulder and arm of Slater’s jacket. Finally he had the body poised, and tipped it in head first. There was a terrible grinding and roaring from within the machine, and then an obscene pink soup whitened by bone-chips began to sluice into the plastic dustbin. The head disappeared comparatively fast but the shoulders took much longer. Slowly the body inched downwards until Slater signalled to Eve to shut the machine off.

  ‘I don’t want to carry so much that it spills or splashes,’ he explained.

  Carefully, averting his head from the stinking stew around which the flies were already circling in their hundreds, Slater manhandled the bin over to the pigs’ enclosure.

  Smelling the blood the pigs began to trample over each other to get close to him. With care, Slater poured the flyblown contents of the bin into the trough which ran the length of the enclosure. The pigs piled in, lapping and crunching uninhibitedly.

  ‘You haven’t by any chance still got those Gauloises?’ asked Eve, when he returned to the wood-chipper. Slater had. The packet was a little battered but most of the cigarettes were in one piece.

  ‘I always want to smoke if I miss lunch,’ she explained with a quick smile.

  ‘You’re hungry?’ asked Slater. A purple set of genitals and two fat, hairy legs were sticking bolt upright out of the woodchipper.

  ‘Well, you know how pathetic French breakfasts are.’

  ‘Do you want to hit that on-switch?’ suggested Slater.

  It took two more hours to process all of the bodies, and by the end both of them were bloodspattered, nauseated, and physically and emotionally drained. Slater was worried that the pigs would lose their appetites half-way through and leave the trough filled with shredded human tissue, but his final visit to the enclosure was greeted with all the squealing enthusiasm of the first.

  When they had finally finished, Eve lit another cigarette and Slater attached a hose from the barn to the courtyard tap. He sluiced down the bin, the pigs, the trough, the plastic sheet, the inside and outside of the woodchipper and the concrete surface of the yard. To further clean out the machine, Slater fed a pile of logs through it, pouring the resulting woodchips into the pigs’ enclosure. Microscopic forensic analysis might have indicated the vestigial presence of human tissue here and there, but why was anyone going to subject this particular farmyard to that kind of scrutiny? Within minutes all the hosed-down surfaces had dried in the sun, leaving no sign of the horror that had unfolded there. A blackbird sang on the baked tile roof of the barn. There was a buzzing of grasshoppers.

  ‘Where are we, anyway?’ Slater asked. The pain in his groin had subsided to a dull ache and the sunshine was making him sleepy.

  ‘Half-way between Chartres and Le Mans. Eighty odd miles south-west of Paris. It’s quite nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe we could retire here,’ said Slater, yawning. ‘And raise pigs.’

  ‘We need to change our clothes,’ said Eve, audibly refocusing herself. She moved to the pile of discarded clothing. ‘What have we got here?’

  Pulling off her short leather boots, she unzipped and lowered her torn velvet jeans. Her legs, Slater couldn’t help noticing, were long and well-toned, with the suggestion of a fading tan.

  ‘Legs courtesy of the Vauxhall Cross gym,’ she said drily, intercepting Slater’s covert glance. ‘And knickers by La Perla. Anything else I can help you with?’

  To replace the jeans, she took Potato-Head’s shiny Adidas pants and belted them round the waist. With the Levi jacket the effect was a bit weird, but not so unusual as to attract attention.

  As Slater stripped to his boxer-shorts and began pulling on the cosh-man’s grey track-suit pants, Eve soberly examined the bruises on his upper body.

  ‘They were really quite cross with you, weren’t they?’

  ‘I think it was the guy whose thumb I shot off that did most of the damage,’ said Slater. ‘To be honest I’d probably have a good go at anyone who did that to me.’

  ‘But nothing broken? You’re not pissing blood or anything?’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ said Slater, pocketing the Stechkin and the Tokarev. The weapons were so heavy that Slater had to tighten the draw-string at his waist to prevent the track-suit pants from being pulled down as he walked.

  When they had taken the clothes they needed, the remainder went into the boot of the Audi. ‘There was a place I passed about half an hour’s drive back towards Paris,’ said Eve. ‘A kind of dump. We can get rid of these there. In the meanwhile’ – she stabbed at the buttons of her mobile – ‘we should get up to date. Andreas, yes, tell me.’ She listened in silence for thirty seconds. ‘Understood.’

  Pressing the off-button she turned to Slater.

  ‘Right. Here’s the posit
ion. Andreas has Fanon-Khayat under surveillance. He’s in a hotel called the Inter-Lux near Charles de Gaulle airport, and as far as Andreas can tell he’s there alone. There’s no sign that he’s going anywhere – he’s just holed up in his room. If he’s got back-up there, he hasn’t made face-to-face contact with them.’

  ‘Fanon-Khayat’s got a hard decision to make, presumably,’ said Slater. ‘Either to go for safety and run for Belgrade, or to go for profit and glory and tie up the Ondine deal. Am I right in thinking that he has to stay here to do that?’

  ‘According to our assets, he’ll want to do the deal here. If he goes back to Serbia and his contacts follow him there, then the RDB will find out straight away who they are and cut Fanon-Khayat out of the deal. By staying here and operating outside their orbit he can keep hold of all the strings, and come out of the whole thing looking like the single-handed saviour of Republica Srpska. This’ll ensure him hero status in Belgrade — never underestimate the need of a middle-aged man to impress his baby-doll trophy wife – and a fat backhander from the supplier.’

  ‘Which he’s going to need when Branca hits the shops,’ Slater added wryly.

  ‘You better believe it! I only saw her for thirty seconds but she looked to me like a girl who knew how to give a gold Amex card a hard workout.’

  ‘So we think he’s going to lie low at the hotel, then?’

  ‘That would be my calculation.’

  Slater nodded. ‘So we have to do him there.’

  ‘That or persuade him to come away with us so that we can do him somewhere else.’

  ‘And he’s got the disc there? The Cambodia pictures?’

  ‘He must have. He wouldn’t leave them in the flat without the bodyguards there. And the bodyguards all went off with you.’

  ‘So one way and another we’ve got a better than average chance of completing the operation as intended?’

  ‘I think so, yes. But the first thing we’ve got to do is make this Audi disappear. You haven’t seen a slurry-pond or anything like that?’

  ‘I haven’t seen anything. I was in the boot. But mightn’t it be a better idea just to dump it? Somewhere it’s absolutely bound to get nicked, replated and sold on. Do you know any really rough Parisian housing estates?’

  ‘Yes, I do. And you’re right, that would be the best way to get rid of it. We’ve got to go into Paris anyway.’

  Slater looked around him, at the farm buildings bathed in afternoon sunshine, at the peace and quiet and solitude of the place.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s get rid of the clothes and the car,’ said Eve. ‘I’ll brief you on the way out to the airport.’

  The dump was a vast, hellish smear of a place, covering several acres. Bulldozers shovelled mountains of refuse, seagulls wheeled overhead, and smoke rose from a score of fires. With the heat of the day the smell was unspeakable. Slater threw the armful of clothes and shoes over a stinking garbage cliff-face, hurried back to the Audi Quattro, and gunned the engine in pursuit of Eve’s Peugeot.

  An hour later he wiped the controls and steering-wheel clean of fingerprints and parked the car in the litter-strewn shadow of a high-rise public-housing block in Arcueil, two kilometres south of the Périphérique ring-road. With his hands inside the sleeves of his sweat-shirt to avoid leaving further prints he let himself out of the car and walked away, leaving the key swinging from the ignition.

  Three streets away he eased himself into the passenger seat of the Peugeot, and he and Eve headed northwards for the Porte de Gentilly and the city of Paris. As she drove, he told her what had happened in Fanon-Khayat’s apartment and at the farm. When he had finished she told him her version of events.

  ‘We got your first transmission,’ she told him, ‘when you said that the two bodyguards were down. Then about ten minutes later we saw Branca arrive in the Quattro. We all spotted her — she’s pretty unmistakable. She got out and started giving instructions to the driver and I called you on the Motorola but got nothing. Walls of the building too thick, you’d switched off, whatever. The others all tried in turn but no one could raise you.

  ‘The driver let Branca out and then drove round the back – presumably to some underground car-park entrance. At that point Andreas and I left the café, got into the two cars and waited. We had no way of knowing what was happening in the flat.

  ‘Nothing for another fifteen minutes and then the Quattro re-appeared. Two passengers, same man driving.’

  ‘The cosh-man,’ said Slater, touching the back of his neck.

  ‘Exactly. So I took off after them. No idea if you’re in the car, Fanon-Khayat’s in the car, what the hell’s happening. Anyway they carry out a couple of rudimentary ploys to lose anyone who’s following them – nothing I can’t handle, though – and I tuck in half a dozen cars behind them.

  ‘At that point Terry comes through on the mobile. Fanon-Khayat, carrying a case, has just walked straight past Andreas and picked up a taxi at the Porte Molitor. Andreas is following in the Mercedes and is pretty sure Fanon-Khayat isn’t on to him. They’re on the Périphérique, heading east.

  ‘I tell him I’m heading at speed down the A10 away from the city. No idea if you’re in the car. The others all reckon you probably are, because as far as they know Branca hasn’t left the flat. Whether you’re dead or alive, Fanon-Khayat’s hardly going to leave her there with you. The consensus at that point is that you’re dead, and that the bodyguards are taking your body out into the countryside to get rid of it.’

  ‘Close enough to the truth,’ said Slater grimly. ‘I hope you were suitably upset!’

  ‘Mad with grief,’ Eve said with a faint smile. ‘Anyway . . . I follow the Audi from the A10 on to the A11 and I assume we’re going to Chartres, but we bypass it and head on towards Le Mans. Then Terry comes on again. Fanon-Khayat’s going towards Roissy and the airport. It looks like he’s running for Belgrade.’

  ‘Bad news.’

  ‘The worst. It looks as if a hit’s been botched, a sanctioned target’s escaped, and a Cadre member’s been killed.’

  ‘Embarrassing.’

  ‘Just a bit. So I just press on, and eventually the Audi pulls off the A11 on to a minor road and from there on to a series of farm tracks. I’m lying well back, like I told you, so I’m able to pull in and watch their car crossing the fields. After that, well, you can imagine. I work my way across the fields for a half-mile or so and lie up behind that farmyard wall. What’s really lucky is that it’s me that’s got the Glock, not Andreas.’

  ‘How long were you there?’

  ‘Long enough,’ said Eve. ‘The main thing I wanted to discover was whether they were armed or not. As it was I never found out, and so as soon as you put one of them down I reckoned it was my best chance and . . . went in.’

  Slater turned to her in his seat. ‘You were brilliant. That was a great bit of shooting.’

  Eve tried not to show her pleasure, but her eyes gave her away. ‘I do like a Glock Seventeen,’ she admitted.

  ‘There is one question, though,’ said Slater. ‘Where’s the Sig Sauer the bodyguards took off me?’

  Eve considered. ‘My guess is that Fanon-Khayat took it. It would have been the sensible step.’

  ‘Which means,’ said Slater, ‘that Fanon-Khayat is armed . . . and Andreas isn’t?’

  ‘We have to assume that, yes.’

  ‘So we should get up to that hotel as quickly as possible.’

  ‘That’s what’s going to happen. Except that it’s not going to be we. I’m dropping you off at the Montmorency and taking one of the others up there.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’ Slater protested vehemently. ‘I’m fine, I really am. Apart from anything else this whole situation’s at least partly my fault. I was the one who let that bodyguard get the drop on me.’

  ‘It’s not a question of fault,’ said Eve. ‘It’s a question of the team as a whole getting the job done, and I’d be completely irresponsible if
I asked you to carry on at this stage. You had the hit on Fanon-Khayat to deal with this morning, for a start. Then you had a bad knock on the head, a severe beating and a hundred-mile journey in a car-boot, and to top it all off you were told you were about to be fed through a meat grinder. You’re fucked, basically, and no bloody wonder.’

  Slater was silent. As an SAS soldier he had been trained to keep going whatever his state of exhaustion. Exercises had often been designed to run for days without a break, and he was familiar with all the temptations that extreme tiredness brought in its wake: to cut corners and to skimp on detail. To mistake light-headedness for clear-headedness; to let the concentration wander; to make over-emotional decisions.

  Like his colleagues, Slater had learnt to monitor his own condition and to compensate for these tendencies. But there was a point, he knew, beyond which the best soldier’s efficiency was compromised. Today had not been an especially long day but heavy expenditures of adrenaline and terror had taken their toll, and the blazing relief of his deliverance had been replaced by the dull blur of emotional fatigue. Eve was right – he was running on empty.

  She parked the Peugeot outside the Hotel Grand Exelmans, and they hurried in a side-door with the overnight bags they’d taken from the Montmorency that morning. In the room designated as the OP, Leon and Chris gave them a relieved welcome. The pair had barely left the room all day and their faces betrayed the strain they’d been under, listening to the day’s events via radio links and mobile phones.

  ‘Good to have you back, man!’ said Leon quietly. ‘Thought we’d lost you then.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Slater, clasping the other man’s hand. ‘Believe me, so did I.’

  He turned to Chris. ‘The knife,’ he said. ‘Thank you. It saved our . . .’

  ‘Bacon?’ asked Chris with a wry smile.

  ‘I was trying to avoid using that word,’ said Slater. ‘But yes.’

  ‘I don’t want to spoil the party,’ said Eve. ‘But where’s Terry?’

  ‘Left to follow Branca five minutes ago,’ said Chris. ‘She came out of the apartment dressed up to the nines, and headed north on foot.’