Hunter Killer (46 page)

She heard voices outside the house. For some reason they made her jump and she realised she hadn’t heard anybody in the street since she arrived here. This was a place people avoided. A now-familiar cold shadow of dread passed over her. She found herself, almost involuntarily, standing up and creeping towards the broken window. She peered through it.

There were three figures on the pavement outside the house. She couldn’t see their faces, but one of them had the same lanky gait as the junkie who had left that evening. She strained to listen. She could hear two different voices. At first she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then she realised why: they weren’t speaking English. She tried to work out what language it was. It sounded harsh and angular. Russian, perhaps? Or Eastern European?

She swallowed hard. She was no linguist, but she suddenly knew, beyond doubt, that they were speaking Polish.

She hurried over to Kyle and shook him. ‘Wake up.
Wake up!
’

Kyle groaned and lashed out.

‘Wake
up
! The Poles are here!’

Kyle opened his bloodshot eyes. He stared at her, uncomprehendingly.

‘
The Poles are here!
’

Kyle’s expression changed. He was scared. He scrambled to his feet. ‘How did they find me?’ he slurred.

‘That junkie, of course,’ Clara hissed. ‘He knew you.’

Kyle was looking around the room, searching for exits like a hunted animal. But there was only one: the main door. He headed towards it, clearly thinking only of himself and not of Clara. He stumbled over one of the milk crates and cursed as it clattered noisily.

Then he stopped.

There were footsteps coming up the stairs. More than one set. Kyle looked around the room again. To the window. Back to the door. He shrank against one of the walls. Clara found she was holding her breath.

Ten seconds passed.

Figures in the doorway.

They entered the room.

They were broad-shouldered men. Shaved head. Donkey jackets. Through the gloom, Clara could see that one of them had a tattoo on his neck. It was the head of a black raven, and the sight chilled her. He stepped further into the room and gave Kyle a look of total contempt. The junkie was loitering in the door frame, clutching his shaking hands together.

The tattooed Pole put one hand into his jacket. He pulled out a flick knife, which he opened with a well-practised move. Then he strode up to Kyle, grabbed the front of his clothes with one big hand, and pressed him up against the wall. He rested the blade of the knife against his cheek.

There were a few seconds of absolute silence.

‘Where’s my fucking money?’ said the Pole, his voice slow, the English almost incomprehensible beneath the Polish accent.

‘I . . . I’ve got it,’ Kyle whispered. He slowly put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of the notes he had taken from Danny’s wardrobe. The Pole looked over at his mate, who had fat lips and a pockmarked face. He walked up and took the money from Kyle. He counted it out with quick, well-practised fingers.

‘
Piecset
,’ he said, and stuffed the money into his pocket.

‘Five hundred not enough,’ said the Pole. ‘You still owe me five
thousand
.’

‘I’ll have it soon,’ Kyle said. ‘I promise.’

‘Promise, promise, promise!’ the Pole shouted. ‘All you ever do is promise.’ He flicked the knife quickly downwards. Kyle hissed in pain as a streak of blood appeared on his cheek.

Clara gasped at the sudden violence. The Pole turned to look at her.

‘Is that girl?’ he asked the junkie in the doorway.

‘That’s her,’ the junkie said.

The Pole nodded at his mate again, who turned and started walking towards Clara.

Clara felt a sudden fire in her gut. ‘Don’t you
touch
me,’ she said, jutting out her chin in defiance. The Pole just grinned. He stretched out one big hand and grabbed her by the throat. Clara’s reaction was instant. She raised her knee sharply into his crutch. The Pole swore as he doubled over, letting go of her neck as he did so.

Clara looked quickly towards the door. The junkie was still standing there, but she knew she could push her way past him. If she moved now, she could escape. But then she looked over at Kyle. His face was bleeding, and he wore a pitiful expression of terror. She thought suddenly of Danny, and of how she couldn’t leave his brother here to the mercy of these two awful men. She started striding towards him, her intention to grab him and pull him from the room.

That was her mistake.

The man she had disabled recovered quickly. He grabbed at her legs as she moved. Clara fell hard to the floor.

After that, she didn’t stand a chance.

He grabbed her hair first, clutching a big clump and twisting it sharply round until she whimpered with pain. With his free hand he struck her a vicious blow on the cheek, then pulled her up to her feet by the hair. Another crushing blow to the face and a third to her left breast: a pain so sharp and sudden that it drew the breath from her lungs and forced her into silence. Just to be sure, though, the Pole put his free hand over her mouth, as his tattooed mate spoke to Kyle.

‘You have forty-eight hours,’ he said. ‘Midnight tomorrow. If I don’t have my money, your girlfriend . . .’ He swiped one forefinger across his neck. ‘I stick her in hole and piss on her. Then I come do same to you.’

He spat in Kyle’s face. Kyle slumped to the ground, one hand pressed over his bleeding cheek. The tattooed Pole turned to his mate and said a single word in Polish. Clara felt herself being thrust towards the door, past the sallow-faced junkie who was suddenly jabbering nervously. ‘We had a deal, mate. What about it? What about our fucking deal?’

From the corner of her eye, Clara saw the tattooed Pole throw a small, sealed plastic bag on to the floor. The junkie dived towards it and started scrabbling around to pick it up. It was the last thing Clara saw of the room. The Pole pushed her roughly towards the stairs.

Down them.

And out into the night.

Twenty-three

Ripley had sounded shocked to hear from Danny when he’d called from Holyhead. It wasn’t just that he’d been speaking quietly to avoid his missus overhearing the phone conversation. Ripley hadn’t said as much, but Danny could hear in his voice that the guys had been told he and Spud were goners. But he’d agreed to do as Danny asked.

‘Where and when?’ Ripley asked.

‘Tomorrow night. On the south side of the Thames between Vauxhall and Lambeth bridges. Bring Barker and Hancock. And seriously, mate – don’t tell
anyone
you’ve heard from me.’

‘You’ve got some fucking explaining to do, pal,’ Ripley said. But Danny knew he’d keep his word.

But there was still a lot to do before his RV with his SAS mates.

From Holyhead he’d made it by train to Birmingham, where he needed to change to get to London. Before getting on a train to Euston, though, he’d headed out of Birmingham New Street station and found a Save the Children charity shop, where he’d bought fresh clothes. Jeans. A jumper slightly too small for him. A waterproof jacket and a black woollen hat. A pair of trainers to replace the sandals he’d bought in Massawa. He even found an old balaclava, threadbare and bobbled, which he bought for 50 pence. Because you never know.

Next to the charity shop was an angling store. Danny had bought a cheap torch with a red filter, intended for night fisherman who didn’t want to compromise their night vision. Then he’d headed to the central library to use an internet terminal. He googled the White Witch. Abu Ra’id had said his wife would find the username and password for the account he shared with his contact ‘in the name of God’. It was clearly a code of some sort. Something that was meaningful only to them. Danny didn’t have the time or inclination to puzzle over what he meant. If this woman had intelligence that he needed, he was going to have to find a way to make her deliver it to him.

Information about the White Witch was freely available. Real name Amanda Ledbury. Born 23 October 1982 to British parents. Converted to Islam at the age of 17. Attended University College London where she studied politics and theology, and met Amar Al-Zain, the man who would later style himself Abu Ra’id.

He started digging a little deeper. Internet chat rooms were filled with praise or bile for this woman. Praise from the Islamists, among whom rumours abounded that she was behind a grenade attack on some football fans in a Kenyan bar during the previous world cup. And bile from almost everyone else – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – who deplored how she was able to live on housing benefits in a large detached house in Ealing with a cleric who preached hate against the very society that was supporting them. Who were disgusted at her ability to fight her way through the courts using a team of lawyers paid for by legal aid. Who couldn’t understand why she and her husband were allowed to stay in the UK, even though it was the country of their birth.

A conversation replayed itself in his head.

‘
Personally, Harrison, I’m extremely pleased my children can grow up in a country where the rule of law can be relied upon, and extended to all our citizens, regardless of . . .’

‘Regardless of how many people they’re planning to kill, Victoria?’

The sentiment on these forums was more in line with Harrison Maddox’s than Victoria Atkinson’s, but Danny didn’t want opinions. He wanted an address. And after 20 minutes of clicking through links and scanning the chat rooms, he’d found one. The user who had supplied it called himself SwordOfTruth. A quick glance at his profile told Danny that he held views even the EDF would consider extreme. For the briefest moment, he found himself thinking about Piers Chamberlain. But then he turned his attention back to the screen. In a barely literate call to action, SwordOfTruth supplied Amanda Ledbury’s address in the hope that like-minded psychos would stalk her house and give her ‘what she had coming’. Danny memorised the address: 13 Princess Park Gardens, London W5. He checked the location on Google Maps, then zoomed in on satellite view, as close as he was able. He’d seen that it was a detached house with a perimeter fence. No obvious point of access other than the doors and windows.

Or was there?

He zoomed in on a small patch at the rear of the house, and smiled grimly to himself.

Next he googled the names of the four Hammerstone spooks. Within 15 minutes he’d found a decent picture of each one of them, which he’d printed out on the library’s colour printer. Then he’d cleared the browser history and left the library.

SwordOfTruth had made him think as he headed towards the train station to get the next train into London. His plan was to break into the White Witch’s house. But that wasn’t going to be straightforward. She’d have received death threats. No question. That meant there was a possibility of a police presence outside the house. And if the police weren’t on-site – Danny remembered DI Fletcher’s complaint that they were unable to follow up half the crime being committed in London in the wake of the bombings – there was a very good chance that the security services would be watching her. He’d need to be careful.

He arrived at 13 Princess Park Gardens at 23.30hrs. It was a detatched house in a quiet residential street in north Ealing, a 15-minute walk from the Tube station. There was a single light burning on the first floor of the house which suggested someone was at home, though he coudn’t be totally sure. Similar detached houses on one side, a terrace on the opposite side, with an alleyway heading round the back much like the one behind his own flat in Hereford. Like the mob whose comments he’d read on the internet, Danny found himself wondering how a hateful couple like Abu Ra’id and his missus had managed to arrange their lives so that they were living in a place far bigger than they needed or deserved. He thought of his own little flat in Hereford, and of the number of times he’d been called upon to risk his life for his country. It wasn’t right.

He dragged his mind back to the job in hand.

The house itself was different from the others that surrounded it. More secure. The two-metre-high wooden fence that extended along either side of the front garden had also been erected across the front, serving as a barrier between the pavement and the garden. A wooden gate in the middle. Closed. Locked, he assumed. There was razor wire along the top of the fence, but not above the wooden gate – which meant the razor wire might as well not be there at all. The fence and gate were about 2.5 metres high. Easily scaleable. But Danny wasn’t going to do that. Not yet.

He was on foot, standing at the corner of Princess Park Gardens where it met a busier street with a parade of shops about 50 metres further along. He was a metre from the alleyway entrance on the even-numbered side of the road. The road was lined with cars. A sign on the kerbside indicated that this was a residents’ permit area. Sure enough, the car by which he was standing – an old blue Fiat Panda – had a permit fixed to the windscreen. Danny wasn’t a smoker, but he’d bought himself a packet of Marlboro and a box of matches because he knew that if he was pulling on a cigarette, the eyes of any casual observer would be drawn to that rather than his own features. He lit up and started walking down the street, hands in his pockets, woollen hat pulled down over his ears. The rain had let up for a moment, but he sensed it would be back fairly soon.