Hunter Killer (18 page)

The two SAS men sat in sickened silence. If Danny had felt any satisfaction at nailing Sarim Galaid, it was fast disappearing.

‘The Hammerstone lot will be feeling the heat,’ Danny said. ‘We need to get back to the safe house, see if they’ve tried to contact us.’

It took an hour. They were tempted to use their siren, but in the end made the call not to. They’d just have been one of many, and in any case Danny didn’t much feel like drawing attention to himself. By the time they reached Battersea Park, he was ready to explode with tension, and he sensed Spud felt the same. As they pulled up outside the safe house, his mate retrieved his Glock from the glove department. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s check the dead-letter box.’

‘Wait.’ Danny pointed through the windscreen.

At the end of the street was a main road running at right angles. Rammed with traffic, just like everywhere else. On the opposite side, no more than thirty metres from the safe house, was a large billboard advertising
The Lion King
, which sure as hell wouldn’t be running tonight. And standing underneath the billboard, looking quite out of place in this shitty part of town, with his heavy black overcoat and patrician features, was a man they both knew.

‘Piers Chamberlain,’ Spud muttered suspiciously. ‘I thought those fuckers didn’t want anything to do with us.’

‘They don’t,’ Danny breathed. Not as a foursome. But individually, perhaps?

The two men debussed. Danny clicked the key fob and the vehicle beeped itself shut. He didn’t think Chamberlain had seen them yet, but he knew that putting himself in their line of vision was an invitation for them to make contact. Chamberlain might be a rupert, but he was a Regiment rupert who knew damn well he couldn’t expect to go unnoticed by two active SAS operatives. Danny and Spud walked side by side to the end of the street. He clocked them in a few seconds, nodded, and then started walking along the opposite side of the main road. Fifty metres further along, he stepped into a greasy spoon. A good place for a covert RV. Cheap cafes like that never had CCTV, and it was usual to have different clientele of all types each day. They wouldn’t look out of place.

Danny and Spud stopped.

‘Do we join him?’ Spud asked.

Danny nodded. ‘We join him.’

‘Then he’s buying the fucking sarnies.’

They crossed the road. The front window of the greasy spoon was misted up from the inside, but Danny could make out the dark shadow of a big man sitting by the window and instinctively knew it was Chamberlain. With the sound of three different police sirens fading in the background, the two SAS men stepped inside.

It was warm in here, the atmosphere a fug of tea and fried food. Tatty posters of exotic beaches on the wall, torn at the edges. About half the tables were occupied. In one corner, above the serving bar, there was a TV tuned in to BBC News 24. Shaky camera work rolled on the developing scenes in Piccadilly. Danny saw a flash of red as a wounded body was stretchered from the remains of the Trocadero. All the punters inside the cafe – perhaps fifteen of them – were transfixed. One guy had a copy of the
Sun
in front of him. He absentmindedly licked a forefinger and turned the page of his newspaper. But he was staring at the screen, not the paper. A constant babble of reportage filled the air:
Many feared dead . . . extent of the damage not known . . . police appealing to the public to avoid all non-urgent travel to central London . . .

At a table by himself, along the left-hand wall, sat an elderly guy, a workman by the look of his paint-spattered overalls. He had dark skin and Arabic features: his beard was white, his face deeply lined and his bald head covered in liver spots. He looked kindly, but also distinctly uncomfortable as he waited for his breakfast. Some of the other punters cast him the occasional hostile glance.

Danny’s eyes picked out Chamberlain. He was sitting in the corner to the right of the door, his back against the wall and a mug of tea in front of him, the tea bag still floating in the cup. He looked up, but because of his squint it wasn’t immediately obvious if he was looking directly at them or not.

‘Sit down, lads,’ he said quietly, so his voice was drowned by the TV for everyone except Danny and Spud. ‘I’ve ordered the full English for you both. Sounds like you’ve had a busy night.’

Wordlessly, they sat opposite him, Danny by the window.

‘You know what I can’t abide?’ Chamberlain said. ‘Go to Glasgow, they’ll place a portion of haggis on the plate and call it the full Scottish. Dublin, you’ll have a slice of white pudding and it’s a full Irish. Load of bloody nonsense if you ask me.’ Only now did he glance up at the TV. ‘You’ve heard the latest?’

They nodded.

‘Mark my words, lads. If this carries on, we’ll have an extremist with a bomb on every street corner. The royal protection boys have already moved the senior royals from the palace and Clarence House. Her Majesty is spitting blood – this is far worse than the glory days of the Provos. Medals all round for the person who stops these little shits, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He gave them both a meaningful look.

‘I’d have thought Her Majesty would be pissing rainbows,’ Spud said coolly.

A flicker of irritation crossed Chamberlain’s face, but he quickly mastered it. ‘Don’t quite follow you, old man,’ he said.

‘Didn’t that pretty boy who was banging her granddaughter get a lump of shrapnel in his skull at Paddington? Nice neat solution to a nasty messy problem.’

Typical Spud. Zero tact. But it didn’t seem to bother Chamberlain. He looked up at the approaching waitress – a sour-faced woman in her sixties with an egg-spattered apron, carrying two immense plates of food. He indicated that she should set them down in front of Danny and Spud. Only when the food was in front of him did Danny realise how hungry he was. Sarim Galaid’s butchered body was just a memory. It hadn’t affected Danny’s appetite.

Chamberlain watched them eat for a couple of minutes before speaking again. ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here,’ he said finally. Danny didn’t feel inclined to give him the satisfaction of admitting that was true. Clearly Spud felt the same. They continued to wolf down their food. Chamberlain looked round the cafe, obviously checking that nobody was paying them any attention. When he spoke again, it was in a quieter voice.

‘That Hammerstone lot,’ he said. ‘All very well for them to give out edicts from on high. Don’t think they quite realise how difficult it is to make these little . . .
events
. . . look like accidents. Can’t have all your targets blowing themselves up while they’re taking a leak, eh? Thought you might appreciate a bit of input. Three heads better than two, and all that.’

Danny scraped the remnants of food from round his plate, finished it off, then pushed the plate forward.

‘I’m all ears,’ he said.

‘The Province was my hunting ground, back in the day,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Had to be bloody careful, of course. The Micks were all hot under the collar about internment at the time. Not sure they’d have been quite so vocal if they’d seen some of the animals in Long Kesh, but there you have it.’

Spud belched and pushed his empty plate away. Danny kept quiet. Northern Ireland was a sensitive subject for him. He certainly didn’t want to discuss his own family’s involvement in the Province with the arsehole across the table.

‘Handful of Provos we couldn’t bang up, of course.’ He traced two imaginary speech marks in the air. ‘“Lack of evidence”. Or they’d have caused more trouble inside than out. Not unlike this bloody ridiculous situation with Abu Ra’id. Had to see to it that they “met with an accident”.’ Speech marks again. ‘Happy to share the fruits of my labours.’

‘Like I say,’ Danny answered, ‘I’m all ears.’

Chamberlain put his cup of tea to his mouth and drained it in one gulp. ‘Shark’s eye,’ he said. ‘Worked every time.’

Danny inclined his head. What Chamberlain said made sense. The shark’s eye was very simple, but very effective: a black tube, not much more than a foot in length. Fire it at night-time and it would give a directional burst of dazzling light that would blind anyone. Fire it towards the driver of a moving vehicle and, nine times out of ten, it would cause the driver to lose control. Net result: road kill, and very little in the way of evidence.

‘I’ve done a bit of homework on your second target,’ Chamberlain continued. ‘They’ll have sent you his details already, I shouldn’t wonder, but the DVLC have a motorbike registered to his name. Shark’s eye would be ideal, I’d have thought.’

‘Sounds familiar,’ said Spud. ‘All we need now is a tunnel under the Seine and a pack of paparazzi chasing after him, we can do the full Diana.’

A poker face from Chamberlain. ‘I rather thought,’ he said, ‘that the gentlemen of Twenty-two were immune to that sort of gossip.’

‘The gentlemen maybe,’ Spud drawled. ‘But not me. What about that Regiment fella who said he saw one of your lot in Paris the night before the hit?’

By ‘your lot’, Spud meant the Firm, and Danny was well aware of the rumour. It was no secret that a small team from the RWW – the Regiment’s precursor to E squadron – had investigated the possibility of conducting a hit on Milosevic back in the early nineties. The method was to be exactly what Chamberlain was suggesting to them now: a shark’s-eye attack on the war criminal’s convoy as it negotiated a particularly treacherous mountain pass. The RWW team had rejected it as a possibility for exactly the reasons that Danny knew the Diana conspiracy was a load of hokum: too many variables. A shark’s-eye hit was fine for a Provo shithead who was heading for an early grave anyway, but for a high-profile target like Milosevic, against whom you’d only get one chance, it was just too blunt a tool.

But the rumour was that the night before Diana’s death, an MI6 agent had been spotted in Paris with one of the RWW guys on the Milosevic ‘hit team’. Enough of a coincidence to get tongues wagging, and wild theories spreading.

‘I can absolutely assure you,’ Chamberlain told Spud mildly, his lips barely moving and his voice little more than a whisper, ‘that an attempt on the life of a prominent public figure such as Princess Diana would require a far greater level of premeditation than was evident during the events of the Place de l’Alma.’

‘Sounds like you’ve given it a lot of thought,’ said Spud.

Chamberlain’s lips went thin. ‘Practically none,’ he said. ‘Although I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling queasy at the thought of a rag . . .’ He checked himself. ‘. . . a Middle Eastern playboy becoming stepfather to our future monarch.’

‘Doesn’t bother me, pal. They’re all German anyway, far as I can tell.’

For the first time, Chamberlain looked as though he was on the point of losing his cool. He drew a deep breath, and scratched the eyebrow above the eye that had a squint. Danny found himself recalling Buckingham’s words of the day before.
Keeps the company of some peculiar types . . . Not saying they’re right-wing, but they do rather make our friends in UKIP look like card-carrying Marxists . . . they’ve been lobbying government to set up a transfer of power to the army in the event of Islamic extremism getting out of control . . .

Behind him, Danny heard a sudden scraping of chairs. He looked round. A couple of burly punters had stood up and were moving towards the old Middle Eastern guy sitting by himself. The TV continued to babble in the background, but suddenly nobody was watching it. The atmospherics in the cafe had changed. The workman looked up. His friendly, lined face instantly acquired a hunted expression.

‘S’pose it’s one of your mates done this?’ said one of the two burly men. The accusation in his voice was ugly.

The old Middle Eastern man shook his head nervously. His eyes darted around, looking for an exit. But the way out was barred by these two menacing white guys, who were clearly looking for trouble. One of them bent over and lifted the edge of the Middle Eastern man’s table. His cup of tea toppled and spilled all over his lap. The man looked confused, then angry – it was an emotion that didn’t suit his face. But then he calmed himself. ‘Please, my friends,’ he said mildly. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss. This is a terrible thing, but it is not done in my name. Please, I don’t want any trouble.’

‘Bit late for that, sunshine . . .’

Danny turned back to Spud and Chamberlain. On his mate’s face he saw an ill-concealed look of disgust. On Chamberlain’s, quite the opposite. Not approval, exactly, nor even enjoyment. Just a kind of bleak satisfaction.

Spud stood up. He walked across the cafe and tapped the two burly blokes on the shoulder. They were both half a head height taller than Spud, and didn’t look like they appreciated the interruption.

‘Sit down, fellas,’ said Spud. ‘You’re blocking the telly.’

The men sneered at him. ‘We’ll sit down when we’ve dealt with the Paki.’

‘You’ll sit down now,’ Spud said, his voice dangerously quiet now, ‘or you’ll fuck off out of it.’

The two men looked at each other with malicious grins.

Neither of them expected Spud’s pre-emptive strike.

He whacked his solid fist against the head of the man on his right. It cracked sharply against the second man’s head and they both staggered, dazed, across the cafe floor. The Middle Eastern man jumped up to his feet. His old bones couldn’t move very fast, but he shuffled up to the door and left the cafe as quickly as he could.