by Chris Ryan
Five minutes later, hearing Andreas’s all-clear in their earpieces, Slater and Leon lifted the trunk. Neither was wearing the night-vision goggles; although they were the best Leon had been able to find they were still fairly cumbersome. Instead they were trusting their night-vision. Slowly, they carried the heavy trunk along the mud path between walls of reeds which sighed in the faint night breeze. After a couple of minutes the carrying handle was biting painfully into Slater’s fingers, but if the slighter-built Leon could manage it, then so could he. Eventually though, they lowered the trunk by mutual agreement and swapped places.
‘Heavy fucker, isn’t he?’ Leon murmured, shaking out his fingers.
‘Not for long,’ answered Slater.
It took them more than ten minutes to reach the bay, where Andreas was waiting for them. Carefully, in a pre-agreed position among the trees and well back from the track, they lowered the trunk to the ground. From the cars, Eve reported the all-clear.
‘Keep watching,’ Leon ordered Andreas. ‘Neil, you cut back to the Merc and get the other bag down here.’
Quickly, his senses alert and his night-vision at full aperture, Slater jogged back along the path. When he got to the cars he couldn’t see Eve, but knew that she was lying up in the reeds, watching him. Unlocking the Mercedes he pulled out a heavy 1.5 metre zip-up bag, and swung the carrying strap over his shoulder. Steadying the bag at his side, he jogged back. As he rejoined Leon he felt sweat running down his back and fought to control the heavy rasp of his breathing.
Steadying himself, he put on his night-vision goggles, heard the faint whir as they started up. Leon, he saw, had unlocked the trunk. He had removed the body and pulled off the two sleeping-bags, and was cutting off the clothes with a knife. As he hacked and sawed, a dank smell rose from beneath his hands.
Slater, who had had to undertake similarly unpleasant exercises in the past, unzipped the bag and removed a roll of wide-mesh chicken wire. When this was unrolled and flattened on the ground it made up a rectangle of one metre by five. When Leon had cut most of the clothing from the front of the body, the two men manhandled it on to the wire lengthways.
‘Pliers,’ murmured Leon.
Slater removed them from the bag. The former legionnaire, he mused, seemed as familiar as he himself was with the grim routine. To make the job easier he forced the dead man’s jaws apart with his hands. Slowly, with a sighing exhalation, the mouth eased open.
‘Thanks, man,’ whispered Leon.
As Slater held the mouth open, Leon knelt behind the head, and with some difficulty extracted half a dozen teeth from the corpse’s lower jaw with the pliers. Repositioning himself on the chest, quivering with the effort, he extracted half a dozen more from the upper.
Collecting the teeth, Slater hurled them as far as he could into the river – their entry into the water was barely audible. Taking the knife Slater then stabbed downwards into the guts and sawed a long transverse cut. There was a low belch of escaping gas, and a stench of such foulness that both men involuntarily jerked their heads away.
‘Should save your crayfish a few days’ work,’ Slater explained.
‘Thanks, brother,’ said Leon, taking a three-metre chain and padlock from the bag. ‘They’ll be grateful.’
Wrapping the disembowelled and half-naked corpse and the cut-off clothes in chicken-wire, the two men quickly threaded the chain through the mesh until the corpse was completely contained by the chicken wire. Pulling the chain tight, Leon padlocked it to itself.
From the zip-bag, Slater then took a 10 kg grapnel anchor. Unwrapping it from its towel, he shackled it to the chain binding the chicken-wire, and laid it on the corpse’s chest.
Leon thumbed the transmit button on his comms set. ‘Are we all clear, Eve? Over.’
‘All clear. Over.’
‘Andreas? Over.’
‘All clear here. Over.’
‘Thanks. Over and out.’
‘Right.’ He turned to Slater. ‘Let’s go.’
Lifting the mummy-shaped remains, the two men moved at a crouch across the towpath and along the jetty. Near the end they lowered the body to the planking. Below them, Slater sensed the dark, rushing mass of the river.
‘OK,’ he whispered. ‘On the count of three.’
Lifting the weighted bundle by the chains, they lowered the remains of Antoine Fanon-Khayat to the black surface of the water. There was no splash.
Leon thumbed his transmitter switch. ‘Job done, people. Over and out.’
For a moment, exhausted, they sat there at the end of the jetty.
‘I’m impressed,’ said Slater. ‘You thought of everything.’
‘Thanks,’ said Leon, throwing the knife, the pliers, and the plumb-line far out into the river. ‘Now let’s all get the fuck out of here.’
On the towpath, they reconnected with Andreas. The three of them were light-headed with relief now – whatever happened at least they didn’t have a corpse in the back of the car.
Ducking under the trees, Andreas picked up one end of the trunk. Slater took the other. As it now contained only a duvet, two sleeping bags and the zip-up holdall the effort involved was not great. Andreas lit a cigarette, and the party moved jauntily back along the path. As they approached the parking place Eve stepped from the reeds, her night-vision goggles still in place.
‘Talk about a herd of bloody elephants,’ she said reprovingly. ‘Honestly, guys!’
‘We’re tourists, lady,’ said Andreas. ‘What do we know?’
As they approached the Peugeot and the Mercedes, Eve and Leon pulled out their keys and activated the remote unlocking devices. Opening the Peugeot boot Slater and Andreas slung the trunk inside. Andreas flicked the stub of his cigarette to the ground and trod on it.
‘See what I mean about this job?’ he grinned. ‘Piece of piss, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not sure I’d call it that,’ said Slater. ‘I hate these fucking disposals.’
‘But you’re glad you joined, aren’t you? I mean, I was right to tell them that you were the guy for the job?’
Slater nodded. The other man was a dim outline beside him. ‘Yeah. You were right. And I haven’t really thanked you for that. When we get back to the land of proper beer I’ll buy you a pint or ten.’
Andreas punched Slater’s shoulder. ‘It’s a deal! And just in case you’re wondering, Cadre operations aren’t always as fucking seat-of-the-pants as this one has been. Usually we just whip it in, whip it out and wipe it.’
Slater shrugged. ‘We’ve done what we came to do. That seems good enough to me.’
And they had. Fanon-Khayat had vanished from the face of the earth, and the disc was back at the OP under the watchful eye of Chris. To be precise, it was in the Bottega Veneta bag that Eve had bought for Debbie. It shouldn’t have been beyond the capabilities of six resourceful agents to get an Italian handbag from Paris to London.
Slater exhaled. Fuck, but he was glad they’d got rid of that body.
Slater was just turning to find Eve, and perhaps to squeeze her hand in the dark, when a torch shone directly and blindingly into his eyes. Several others flicked on around them until it became apparent that they were surrounded. Slater’s first irritated assumption was that this was some kind of local posse suspicious of their night-time activities, but a second glance drained from him every last vestige of optimism. The torches, he saw, were attached to suppressed MP5 Heckler and Koch machine guns. One of the lights behind him illuminated the figure in whose unwavering sights he now stood. A figure he recognised immediately as Branca Nikolic.
‘Alors,’ she said. ‘Monsieur Neil . . . Clissold.’
This was a different Branca. Like her four companions she was was wearing a leaf-patterned windproof smock, combat trousers and hiking boots. No trace now of the fashion-victim or the party-girl. At a pinch, but for the MP5s and the unwavering stares, she and her team might have been returning from a weekend’s birdwatching.
‘Madame Fan
on-Khayat!’ said Slater, his heart lurching in his chest. ‘How are you?’
In reply she raised her weapon to her shoulder. ‘You have something belonging to my husband,’ she said. Her voice was like gravel, and strongly French-accented. ‘A compact disc. Where is it?’
Slater said nothing. He felt sick. Beside him, Eve, Andreas and Leon stood in expressionless silence.
‘We know why you come here, Clissold, and we know you have just . . . sunk Antoine’s body in this river. Of that je m’en fous – I’m not interested. He was a stupid and greedy man and you have saved us the trouble of getting rid of him ourselves. Je vous remercie.’
She spoke several words in a language Slater assumed to be Serbian, and the others smiled.
‘Who are your friends?’ Slater asked her.
‘They are loyal soldiers of my country, and they are here to take what is theirs. The disc, Mr Clissold.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘I’m talking about the disc you were in the process of stealing from my husband when I came into the flat, Mr Clissold. The disc you finally stole from him after you murdered him in the Hotel Inter-Lux at Roissy. Now you have a choice. You give me the disc right now — and we have brought the hardware to verify it — or you give us the woman and exchange her later for the disc.’
Could they take them out? Slater wondered fleetingly. If the four of them went in fast and hard and without concern for their own safety? Would there be a sufficient element of surprise? He dismissed the idea out of hand — this was obviously a highly trained, highly professional team. They had played it perfectly, with a silent and invisible approach and clever tactical positioning. As things stood, each of the Serbians had a clear field of fire on each of the Cadre members. Any attempt to rush them would lead instantly to fatalities.
‘I told you, we don’t have any disc,’ said Slater. His voice was calm but inwardly he was screaming.
We’re blown. They know fucking everything. They’ve followed us everywhere.
In response, Branca Nikolic flicked off the safety catch of her MP5, marched over to Eve, and jammed the muzzle of the weapon’s silencer under the point of Eve’s jaw. A second team-member joined her, pressing his weapon into Eve’s back.
‘OK,’ said Branca. ‘This is the deal. You have thirty-six hours to produce the disc, and as I said, we have the hardware for instant verification. If you do not hand over the disc to me in the bar of the Hotel Grand Exelmans at midday on Tuesday – time enough to get it back from London if necessary – this woman will be killed. Evidence also will be made available to the police implicating you, this gentleman here’ — she nodded at Andreas – ‘and the British Secret Intelligence Service in the murder of my husband. Compris?’
Slater shrugged. He caught Eve’s eye. She looked angry but unafraid, and held his gaze even when Branca jabbed her painfully in the throat with her weapon.
‘We’ll be there,’ he said, hoping that Eve understood that his words were intended for her. ‘Don’t you worry, we’ll be there.’
‘Good,’ said Branca, and then spoke in Serbian again.
A member of the team accompanying her walked over to the Peugeot and the Mercedes. One by one, he let down all the tyres until both cars were flat on their wheelrims.
‘We don’t want to slow you down more than we have to,’ Branca explained, ‘but we do have to take this woman away with us. Professional to professional, I’m sure you’ll understand. And understand one other thing, Mr Clissold, if that is your name. Understand that even after all that has happened my country has no wish for lasting enmity with yours. We have been allies before, we can be allies again.’
Surprised, Slater met her hard blue eyes and inclined his head wordlessly. This was a very different Branca to the one he had met in her husband’s apartment. What the hell kind of game was she playing? She clearly occupied a position of some authority if she was in charge of a team as switched on as this one appeared to be.
They had to be Serbian RDB agents, thought Slater despondently. It must have been these jokers who had been tailing the Cadre cars up the motorway. The fact that his instincts had been proved right on that particular point gave him no pleasure at all.
Branca raised her hand in a quasi military salute. ‘Until we meet again, gentlemen. Au revoir.’
And with that, accompanied by Eve, all of the team except one withdrew into the darkness. The remaining man kept Slater, Leon and Andreas covered with his MP5. After fifteen minutes, as the trio stood there in helpless, dazzled silence, they heard the faint, far-distant sound of a vehicle starting up. It came slowly closer, and then halted out of sight. The guard backed away, keeping his torch and weapon trained on the three men, and at the last moment turned and ran into the darkness, where none of the three was inclined to follow him. They heard a door open and close – the vehicle was showing no lights, either internally or externally – a crunching acceleration, and then silence.
‘Fuck,’ said Slater.
THIRTEEN
None of them enjoyed the night that followed. Leon called up Chris on his mobile, and outlining the position in a few terse sentences, gave her their map co-ordinates and asked her to arrange for a breakdown service to come out and inflate their tyres.
They had been waiting for twenty minutes when a man holding a torch arrived on foot. At his side, held on a short leash, was an agitated-sounding Dobermann Pinscher guard-dog.
Vandals had let down their tyres, Leon explained. They were waiting for assistance.
The word ‘vandals’ had the effect that he hoped: to distract attention from what they had been doing there in the first place. The man offered to ring the police – there had been other incidents, he said. Personally he suspected that drug users frequented the area. He had bought a property up the road a couple of years ago under the impression that he had found a tranquil corner for his family to enjoy at weekends, but it had not been long before they started discovering the condoms and the used syringes on the towpath. ‘What do you say to your children,’ he asked them, ‘when they say, Papa, what’s this?’
Leon admitted that he had no idea. The culprits, he said, were probably zonards – occupants of the public housing estates which ringed Paris. There were, he added mischievously, a lot of immigrants among them . . .
The householder agreed. Wherever immigrants established themselves, problems followed. He had nothing against them personally, but there were just too many of them. It was a cultural question – a question of standards.
Eventually, in a warm glow of nationalist outrage, and having failed to register that Leon himself was one of the ‘problematic’ immigrants in question, the man led his dog back to Joigny.
The breakdown service arrived twenty minutes later from Mantes-la-Jolie, and Leon settled their considerable bill with cash.
‘They were RDB, for sure,’ Leon told Chris an hour and a half later. ‘My guess is that they were in Paris to find out who he was doing the Ondine business with, so that they could knock out the middle-man and take control. And he’d obviously boasted – perhaps to Branca – that he had a disc containg material so damaging to Britain that it could be used to negotiate the return of Karadzic.’
‘So what do you reckon Branca’s part is in all this?’ asked Chris.
Leon shrugged. ‘My guess is that the bimbo act was strictly for her husband’s benefit. That was the real Branca we saw last night. She’s an RDB agent like her father, and the whole marriage thing was a set-up to tie Fanon-Khayat to Serbia.’
Slater agreed. ‘She certainly looked as switched-on as the rest of them this evening – I can’t imagine Eve’s that easy to creep up on. And she looked pretty familiar with that MP5.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Chris. ‘I think we have to agree that you saw the real Branca Nikolic this evening. What she’s doing with this Miko Pasquale guy – the dope dealer – I’m less sure of. That’s where Terry is right now: watching Pasquale’s flat.’
‘Any joy?’ asked Slater.
‘No. There’s no one there at the present minute. He’s the only connection we’ve got to Branca, though. For obvious reasons she hasn’t gone back to the apartment over the road. My guess is that the RDB team followed Fanon-Khayat to the hotel, bribed some staff-member to point him out, discovered that his place had been taken by Andreas and that Andreas was hanging out with a Monsieur Clissold and a Mademoiselle Benbow and . . .’ She shrugged. ‘They’ve been on to us ever since. From what you say they certainly know that we’re based here at the Grand Exelmans.’
Leon nodded in agreement. ‘I’m sure you’re right. I also think we should look pretty closely at our own counter-surveillance efforts. We’ve been pretty badly shown up here. The only one of us who spotted anything was Neil.’
There was silence. Leon had said what everyone else had been thinking – that they all shared the responsibility for Eve’s capture.
‘So what do you propose?’ asked Slater. ‘They’ve probably got us staked out right now.’
‘There’s a good chance they don’t know about Terry – he’s only been in and out once since they’ve been on to us — and I’m almost certain that they don’t know about me, because I haven’t left the room. For the moment all they know is that you, Andreas and Eve use the place. It won’t take them long to figure out that there are more of us here, though, because if they know the names that you checked into the Inter-Lux with – Clissold, Benbow, et cetera – and have found out that there’s no one of that name registered here . . .’
‘And they might have gone to work on Eve, too,’ said Slater grimly.
‘That is a possibility, yes. I’ve spoken to Manderson and agreed that we’ll leave here tomorrow morning, get the hire company to pick up the cars, and regroup later in the day – this time, hopefully, without being followed. Meanwhile, Terry keeps watch for Pasquale, and as soon as he finds him a couple of you guys go in and force him to make a meet with Branca. We’re watching the RV, and we’ll follow Branca back to wherever she’s holed up with her RDB mates – and Eve. Then we go in and extract Eve.’