by Chris Ryan
The most important moment in any job was the mental preparation. That, ultimately, determined whether the dice rolled with you or against you.
He noted it was fast getting dark. Slamming the door shut, he started walking down the street: fast enough to look like he was going somewhere, slow enough that he could examine the house. A light was shining from the front room of Number Seventeen, and a couple of lights were on upstairs. According to the information he had been given, Alan Thurlow lived with his wife and twelve-year-old daughter. Chances were all three of them were going to be home at nine o'clock on a Thursday night.
Let's hope he talks easily, doesn't try to do anything stupid or brave. The last thing I need is a fight.
Matt paused outside the house, bending down, pretending to tie his shoelace. In this part of Essex all the big family houses were worth a million, and it was convenient for the office in the City: the train ran straight into Liverpool Street. The windows were open in the front room. Like everyone in Britain, the Thurlows were desperate to get some air into the house. The sound of the television was drifting out into the street. Even from here he could recognise the voices of the actors. Thursday night. That meant The Bill on ITV. A nice regular evening in, for a nice regular family.
Thurlow worked for the Deschamps Trust, a small private bank headquartered in Luxembourg. A hundred years old, it provided banking and financial advice for a small group of wealthy clients. Like every bank based in Luxembourg, its main strength was secrecy: accounts were numbered, they didn't pay any tax, and there was no way of finding out who owned them.
Not unless you were prepared to bang the door down.
Standing up, Matt started walking towards the end of the street. The two girls were still fighting over the Barbie scooter in their front garden: the bigger one had taken it, but the smaller one was crying, shaking her tiny fists in anger. We're always fighting over something, thought Matt, as he doubled back, walking back down the street in the other direction.
There were different ways into the house. Round the back there would be a garden. Or up on the roof, there was probably a skylight: most houses with large attics had them, so people could see their way around.
Matt scanned the street. At Number Fifteen, there were no lights. Perhaps they were on holiday, he figured. He checked the house. The dustbins were empty as well. Definitely on holiday. He hopped over the bins, and climbed through the wooden gate that led through the back garden. The lawn was parched and drying out. No one to water it, he decided. They're away.
Examining the back of the house, the drainpipe looked the best way up. Looking up, he could see one skylight. If this one had one, so would Number Seventeen. All these houses were identical.
Slipping off his shoes, he climbed the pipe and started to crawl across the roof: no point in making any more noise than he had to. At the edge of Number Seventeen, he clung on to the guttering to steady himself. Safe.
The skylight was just a few yards away from him: a five-foot rectangle of glass, framed with metal. There was some rust around the edges. Nobody ever bothered to check their skylight, judged Matt: they couldn't see them so they didn't worry about them. The only people who ever used them were the guys who came around to put your Sky dish on the roof.
This one will break like a piece of jelly.
Matt stabbed his six-inch hunting knife into the space between the frame and slate. The putty was old and flaking, and came away easily enough. A crack opened up between the skylight and roof: enough space for Matt to dig his fingers in, grip, then pull it free. It made a noise, but not enough to be heard over the TV. Levering himself down with his forearms, Matt dropped into the attic.
A mess, he thought, switching on a miniature torch and looking around. The loft had been converted into a spare room, a snooker room and a shower, but it didn't look like anyone came up here very often. He glanced at the old toys, a pram, boxes of papers and books: it looked as if the Thurlows had lived here for years and never thrown anything away. He picked his way through the debris, suppressing a sneeze.
At the back there was a stairway. Matt checked to make sure there was no one below, then scuttled down to the first floor of the house. He glanced along the corridor. Downstairs, he could still hear the noise of the TV: the news was on now, and he could hear something about how Tony Blair was appointing a Heat Tsar to cope with the hot weather. Ahead of him, there was a door displaying a Justin Timberlake poster, and the sound of some music.
Matt approached the door, his breathing slowing. He took another moment to compose himself. The next few minutes were going to be a short, nasty outbreak of anger and pain. There was nothing he could do to soften the suffering he was about to inflict on these people. It was in a greater cause maybe, but that wouldn't make it any better for them. It never does.
It's soldiering, he told himself. You might have been out of the game for a while, but you still know how to do violence. And sometimes innocent bystanders have to get hurt.
Matt pushed the door aside. The girl was lying on her bed, listening to some music coming out of her computer. A mobile was in her hand, her fingers tapping out a text message. Twelve, with short black hair, and a soft, chubby face that she still needed a few more years to grow into. Nice normal kid, thought Matt. She'll get over this one day.
He moved swiftly across the floor, his hand clamping down on her mouth before she had a chance to scream. Matt could feel her saliva against his palm as he increased the pressure on her lips. Her arms and legs were kicking out, but she had too little strength to inflict any damage worse than a few scratches. With his right hand still stuck over her mouth, Matt flashed the hunting knife out with his left hand, jabbing it towards her, so the point of the blade was tipping into the centre of her throat.
'Do exactly as I say and you will be all right,' he whispered in her ear.
Matram paused in front of the television, turning the sound down. A silence fell over the hotel room, the eight members of the unit looked back at him. 'This is the second time the target has evaded capture,' he said, drawing out the words. 'I want to know what happened.'
Nobody answered.
Matram took a step forward, his hands crossed behind his back. 'I said I want to know what happened,' he shouted.
'The target made a clever escape,' said Snaddon, standing up.
'The man we were tasked to follow confronted us,' said Trench, standing up next to her. 'I think they must have realised who we were and what we were there for, sir.'
'The target started running while we were distracted,' added Snaddon. 'By the time we gave chase, he had eluded us.'
Matram folded his arms across his chest. 'That is not good enough,' he said. 'The Increment does not tolerate failure.'
'It was a public space, sir,' said Snaddon nervously. 'The circumstances made it very difficult to take effective action.'
'It was a failure,' shouted Matram, hurling his coffee cup at the wall where it smashed. 'There are no tolerable circumstances for failure. You are the best, the most elite group in the regiment. This is inexcusable. Any more slipups like this and you will be out of here and on your way to Iraq faster than you can blink. Understand?' Matram's voice dipped dangerously, 'Now get out of my sight.'
Matt could smell the fear from the girl as he walked her downstairs, his hand still clamped across her mouth, his hunting knife still jabbing into her throat. It was sweating out of her, covering her face and her arms in a thin, damp film of cold dread.
She doesn't know who I am or what terrors I might inflict on her, thought Matt. I could tell her I'm one of the good guys, but right now I don't think she'd believe me.
Matt shoved her from the back, making her stumble down the stairs. There was a noise as her heel cracked against one of the banisters. 'Lucy?' shouted her mother from the main room. 'That you?'
Another shove. The girl moved faster this time, tumbling into the hallway. Matt gripped her tighter, edging her towards the doorway.
&nb
sp; 'Don't move,' he shouted. 'Stay completely still, do exactly what I tell you, and everyone's going to be OK.'
They moved. Alan Thurlow started to rise from the sofa, his wife Alice at his side. Civilians, thought Matt. No brains. Tell them not to move and they start wriggling around like a worm on a hook.
He pushed Lucy into the centre of the room. 'I said stay still.'
They sat back in the sofa, their expressions paralysed by shock. Thurlow was a man of almost fifty, in good shape, but with thinning black hair, and glasses that rested on the end of a long, thin nose. Alice was thin, blonde, with sharp blue eyes and an expression that looked to have settled in middle age into permanent disdain. Both of them watched Matt closely, tracking his movements with their eyes, following the blade of his knife as it hovered close to their daughter's throat.
'Just don't hurt her,' said Alice. 'Just leave her alone. We'll do anything you want.' She rose and moved towards Matt, as if she was about to pounce upon him, while her husband was still shrinking back in his chair. When it came to protecting children, Matt noticed, women were always far more courageous than men.
'Get back,' he ordered, and Alice stopped in her tracks.
'Who are you?' stammered Thurlow.
'Doesn't matter who I am, you're better off not knowing,' said Matt. 'I'm not here to hurt you if I don't need to. I just want some information. Give it to me, and this will all be over in a few minutes.'
Matt watched as the man leant forward slightly. That hadn't been the answer he was expecting. A robber, or a rapist maybe: that was what he had taken Matt for. Not a man looking for answers.
'What kind of information?' he said.
Matt pulled on Lucy's hair, so the bare white skin of her throat was thrust up. Better to let her parents get a good look at it: then they could start imagining the kind of damage that would be inflicted on her if they didn't cooperate. 'I'm going to give you the numbers of two accounts with Deschamps Trust.' He paused, looking directly down at the man. 'I want to know who those accounts belong to. Tell me, and I'll be out of here.'
He could see Thurlow looking first at his wife, then at his daughter before looking back at Matt. 'That's impossible,' he said. 'The bank never reveals the names of its account holders.'
'Just do it,' growled Matt.
'Anyway, I'm at home, I couldn't do it from here.'
'We can't,' said the wife. 'We would if we could.'
'Silence,' shouted Matt. He flashed the blade across Lucy's throat, allowing its strengthened steel to press harder into her skin. 'You have a computer, you can access the records from here.' With his left hand, he unfolded a sheet of paper from his breast pocket, pushing it across the room. 'These are the numbers. Now, give me the names.'
Thurlow looked back at Matt, their eyes briefly locking together. He's trying to read me, thought Matt. He's trying to judge how threatening I am. If I was robbing him, or raping his daughter, he'd know. But a man who wants information? How far will that man go?
'I'd help you if I could,' said Thurlow. 'But I can't. Now, leave my house, I won't call the police, we can forget about the whole thing.'
Matt yanked Lucy's head back again, a gasp escaping from her lips as the muscles in her neck strained. Cut her, he told himself. That would convince them. Some blood pouring down his daughter's throat. That would start him talking.
But she's a bystander, a civilian. It's not her fault she's caught up in all of this, so why should she suffer? I could get the information, but could I live with the way I got it?
If I don't hurt the girl, though, Eleanor and I are probably finished. Maybe Damien and Ivan too. He thought back to the day in Bosnia when he had walked out on the Increment. Maybe Matram had been right. Maybe I don't have the bottle to make those kinds of choices.
Matt released the pressure on Lucy's throat, letting her fall to the ground, so she was lying just four feet in front of her parents. She was bruised and exhausted, crawling across to her parents, tears smudging themselves across the carpet.
From the kitbag slung around his belt, Matt took out a Tazor as the parents stared at him wide-eyed, both frozen with fear. A small electrical box, powered by its own batteries, the Tazor delivered a short but intense 250,000-volt electric shock. Unless you had a weak heart, it was harmless, leaving no marks, but the pain was horrible, and your skin lit up like a light bulb. So Matt grabbed Lucy's arm. He took a breath then flipped the switch.
The voltage juddered through her body, and her skin briefly shone blue as the power surged into her. She dropped to the floor, collapsing from the waves of pain. Her eyes looped back, and a trickle of urine started to run down her thigh as she lost control of her bladder. She clasped her teeth together, struggling to stop herself from vomiting. It was over in a second, but every nerve ending in her body looked as if it had been set on fire.
'You see,' he said slowly. 'I can inflict as much pain on your family as I want, it makes no difference to me. Now, do as I tell you, and you won't get hurt.'
'Do it, Alan,' hissed the wife. 'He's a psycho. Just do what he says, and get him out of here.'
Thurlow stood up. His expression was blank, as if he was in a trance. 'There's a computer in the study.'
Matt waved the knife at Alice and Lucy. 'You two, follow him,' he shouted.
The two women stood up nervously, holding on to each other. Lucy was undamaged by the shock, but her legs were still wobbling. He watched as they followed Thurlow into the hallway, towards the study. Matt walked swiftly behind them, holding the knife in his right hand.
There was a picture of Lucy on the desk, and another of Alice, taken at least ten years ago when she was younger and prettier: something to remind the guy why he married her. A Dell computer sat in the middle, next to a pile of letters and bills.
'Quick,' hissed Matt.
The computer whirred into life. Thurlow punched up the Internet connection, logging on to a page displaying the Deschamps Trust logo. Alice and Lucy were huddling at the back of the room, Alan still looked blank. 'Two, four, nine, nine, zero, one,' hissed Matt. 'And six, five, four, four, two, eight. Who do those accounts belong to?'
Thurlow turned to look at him, his expression sombre. 'Why do you want to know?'
'Just give the names.'
Thurlow tapped at the screen, then nodded towards Matt. He walked across the study, gripping the knife tightly. Standing behind Thurlow, he rested his hand on the back of the chair.
In thin black letters two names were displayed on the screen of the computer.
'Christ,' whispered Matt. Putting down the knife, he rubbed his aching hand across his forehead. 'This is not what I thought it was.'
TWENTY-TWO
'What happened to you?' said Ivan, looking at Matt's red, bloodshot eyes.
Matt rubbed the sagging, exhausted skin on his face. 'Bad night at the office.'
Matt had driven back from the Thurlow's house in the Volvo. They were meeting at the Little Chef on the Epping Road, just to the north of London. It was just after eleven at night, and they both needed something to eat. Only a few people were in the restaurant at this time: workers from Stansted coming off their shift, and some truckers filling up with food before doing the night run along the Ml to avoid the traffic. At least when they say an all-day breakfast they mean it, decided Matt, as he ordered himself the Olympic Breakfast with an extra egg and some toast on the side.
'You're sure those are the two names the accounts belong to?' said Ivan. 'Abbott and Matram?'
Matt nodded. 'I saw it clearly on the screen,' he replied. 'The man was frightened out of his skin. He wasn't trying to trick me.'
'So it was them all along, in a plot with Lacrierre,' said Ivan drawing out the words. 'That explains why the government hasn't just picked up the men who took the bravery drug. I don't think they even know about the side effects yet. This has been a private-sector operation all along. Lacrierre is using Abbott and Matram to cover up what he's done.'