Authors: Chris Ryan

The Kill Zone (9 page)

BOOK: The Kill Zone

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He sounded like he meant it. She felt her stomach sink, but did everything she could not to show it. Instead she just shrugged. ‘Well then,’ she said, starting to gather up the photographs. ‘I guess that’s that.’ She turned round and made for the door. ‘You can show yourself out, can you?’

Siobhan was glad that her back was turned. This was it – the moment when he would make his decision – and she didn’t know whether she’d be able to keep the nerves from her face.

‘Wait,’ he said.

She turned.

He looked like he was deliberating.

‘It won’t be like the Maze, you know, Kieran,’ she purred. ‘You won’t be with your own. You’ll be with rapists and kiddie fiddlers. It’s a long time to spend with—’

‘You know what my uncle will do if he finds out?’ Kieran interrupted. ‘You know what will happen to me?’

Siobhan shrugged. ‘It’s your choice. But you need to make it now. The offer won’t be on the table in ten minutes’ time.’

He turned and walked to the ancient kitchen units that lined the back wall, clutching on to the edge of the sink. His head was bowed, his shoulders hunched. For a brief, irrational moment, Siobhan wondered if he was going to cry.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he whispered.

Siobhan felt a small surge inside. ‘Well now,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we just sit down and talk about it?’

Kieran turned. ‘I don’t want to sit down. Just tell me what you want, woman, and be done with it.’

Siobhan inclined her head. ‘Information, Kieran. Good information. Gossip is no good to me. I need information that will put your uncle behind bars. You deliver the good stuff and maybe –
maybe
– I can keep you out of jail. Do we have a deal?’

Kieran O’Callaghan looked at her with hatred. ‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘We have a deal.’ He finally took a seat at the table, looking totally dejected.

‘OK, Kieran,’ Siobhan said. ‘I’m going to tell you what I know. It’s all about heroin. The price on the street is down and there’s more high-grade product than we’ve seen for years. Your uncle is at the centre of all this.’

She paused and surveyed his face for any sign of acknowledgement. There was none, so she continued.

‘I’ll give him this, Kieran. Cormac is smart. I know about his building business. I know about his restaurants. They’re all clean, all legit, but he’s using them to launder his drug money so it comes out squeaky clean. What
you
need to give me, Kieran, is something to get at him with.’

‘You’ll never do it,’ Kieran said, his voice curt.

‘You’d better hope I do, Kieran,’ Siobhan replied.

‘Cormac’s too fucking switched on for that, lady. Everything’s at arm’s length. You think you’ll get a picture of
him
unloading crates from a boat? Jesus, I don’t think he’s ever even
seen
a wrap of H, let alone moved a stash. Shit doesn’t stick to Cormac. Sometimes I wonder why he bothers buying bog roll.’

Siobhan nodded slowly. ‘So I’m right,’ she said. ‘It’s all heroin now.’

Kieran looked down at his palms. ‘It never used to be,’ he murmured. ‘Before, it was all coke, in from Colombia. But then, about a year ago . . .’

He looked up at her again, doubt suddenly shadowing his face.

‘Go on,’ Siobhan told him.

Kieran squeezed the bridge of his nose between two fingers before continuing. ‘About a year ago, it all changed. The product changed, the importation routes changed, and the money certainly changed. Cormac’s got more cash than he can damn well spend. Not that you’d know it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’d think someone with all that money would buy himself a few luxuries once in a while. The way my uncle runs the business, you’d think he was damn well broke. He sits in the back room of that pub, giving out his instructions like he was—’

‘So the heroin,’ Siobhan steered him back. ‘Did your uncle tell you where it’s coming from? Who his supplier is?’

Kieran seemed to find that genuinely funny. ‘
Tell
me? You must be shitting me, woman. Cormac doesn’t tell anybody anything. What’s that they say, about the left hand not knowing what the right hand’s doing? That’s what it’s like with him. Nobody who works for the family knows anything more than they need to.’

He gave Siobhan a combative look, but she was a match for it.

‘Sorry, Kieran. You’ll have to do better than that.’

‘I’m telling you, woman. He plays his cards close to his chest.’

‘Then you’re going to have to sneak a look at his hand, aren’t you.’

Silence.

Kieran put his hand in his pocket and Siobhan’s fingers automatically started feeling for her handgun. All he brought out, though, was a pouch of baccy and some skins. Siobhan could tell that the cogs had started whirring again as her new tout worked out the pros and cons. Finally he seemed to decide on something. ‘You’re not the only one with a set of eyes on the inside,’ he said in a low voice as he rolled a ciggy.

Siobhan stayed very calm. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just what I say. Cormac’s got a pig on the payroll. Don’t ask me who. Drugs Squad, that’s all I know.’ Siobhan could tell what he was thinking: what if this bitch is Cormac’s bent copper? ‘How do I know it’s not you?’ he asked.

Siobhan shrugged. ‘If you wake up dead tomorrow morning, it
is
me.’ She didn’t feel at all inclined to put his mind at rest. The more this little shit was made to squirm, the better as far as she was concerned. In any case, she was suddenly distracted by this new piece of intelligence. It didn’t really surprise her that one of her colleagues was playing for the other side – she knew that anyone could be bought for the right price.

‘Find out,’ she told him.

‘I can’t.’

‘Well then maybe I can give you a helping hand. You’ll find I’m very generous like that, you know.’

Siobhan removed an item from her pocket. It looked like a simple black box, about the same size and shape as a matchbox, but several times heavier. She held it up between a thumb and two fingers. ‘Present for you,’ she said.

‘The fuck’s that?’

‘That, Kieran, could be your ticket out of the clink.’ She winked at him. ‘It’s a listening device. You hide this somewhere your dear uncle spends a lot of time and I’ll be able to listen in on him. I’m thinking somewhere in the Horse and Three Feathers. I’d do it myself, but I don’t think someone like me would be all that welcome there. Do you think you could manage that now, Kieran?’

The tout took the box and weighed it in his hand. ‘How does it work?’ he asked.

‘There’s a magnetic backing which means it’ll stick to anything made of metal. Down the back of a radiator is good. Just avoid anything electrical that could interfere with the signal. And I suppose I don’t need to tell you to keep it well out of sight.’

Kieran examined the box, turning it round in his fingers and holding it up to the light like it was a glass of wine. Then, with another aggrieved look at his handler, he shook his head. ‘Too dangerous,’ he said. ‘I’d be busted in minutes.’

Siobhan bent down so that their eyes were only a few inches away from each other. ‘Listen to me, you little piece of shit. I want to see Cormac O’Callaghan in prison for the rest of his life, but believe me, putting you away will come a very close second, so you’d better start playing ball. We’re going to meet every two days, here, at midday.’ She pulled a bit of paper from a pocket in her leather jacket. It had an email address scribbled on it. ‘You can’t make it, you leave a message at this email address and turn up at midday the following day. Stand me up more than twice, I pull you in. And let me tell you, Kieran: you’ll be working a damn sight harder for me than you ever did for your uncle – unless you want to spend the next fifteen years sharing a room with the sort of fella little Jackie’s not supposed to accept sweeties from. Have I made myself absolutely clear?’

The two of them stared at each other – a look of mutual contempt.

‘Yeah,’ Kieran O’Callaghan said finally.

‘Good. Then get out of my sight. I don’t want to spend any more time with you than I have to.’

Kieran stood up and walked to the door, then turned. He looked as though he was about to say something, but then thought better of it and slipped out of the house, closing the door quietly behind him.

26 JUNE

Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew it was a dream. But that didn’t make it any less real. He saw a child. His child. She was small – six years old – with mousy, curly hair that tumbled over her forehead. She was looking at him.

‘Daddy?’ she asked.

He tried to answer, but couldn’t.

She looked at him sadly. Accusingly, almost. And then she started to fade away. He tried to reach out for her, to stop her from disappearing. But he couldn’t. She melted away, leaving nothing but an agonising emptiness . . .

Jack woke up.

He didn’t know where he was. Ropes still bound his wrists and legs, and he felt like he was spinning – a mixture of pain, hunger, acute dehydration and the uncomfortable remnants of his dream. It was a relief that he was lying on the floor; if he had been standing up, he’d have just fallen over anyway.

He wanted to vomit, but there was nothing to retch up, so he lay there, shivering for a while despite the heat. He didn’t want to fall asleep again but he couldn’t fight it. It was only a matter of minutes before he passed out again.

This time, he dreamed of fire – Red’s burning body staggering from the blaze of the Black Hawk – and of water. Cool and thirst-quenching.

It was water that woke him. Not icy cold, but cold enough for it to be a shock as someone threw a bucketful over his body. And it wasn’t just the water that hit him, but the bucket too. Jack breathed in sharply and looked up. There was light in the room, streaming in from the open door. Two figures advanced.

A dull thump as one of them threw something on the floor.

Jack’s vision was blurred, but he could see they wore grey dishdashas and full beards and had dark, ugly looks on their thickset faces. They were not muscular, but naturally big. One of them carried a gun, which he pointed at Jack’s head while the other pulled a long, wicked-looking knife.

The blade twinkled in the light coming from the doorway as its owner bent down and held it towards Jack’s body. He grinned horribly, circling the point of the blade in the region of Jack’s face.

Jack did what he could to prepare himself for the sensation of the blade slicing skin.

Instead, his tormentor shuffled down to Jack’s wrists. With a single swipe, the sharp blade cut through the ropes binding them. The knife man stood up quickly, leaving Jack’s legs bound tight. He and his colleague walked backwards out of the door, closing it in front of them and locking it from the outside.

Enough light seeped in from around the door and from a small opening high in the opposite wall for Jack to be able to see. He sat up painfully, rubbing his sore wrists. The bucket they had thrown at him was about a metre from where he was sitting. It was rusty, and touching his face where it had hit him, Jack felt a small stream of blood. He pressed hard on its source to stem the bleeding while looking around the rest of the room.

It was a square space, about five metres on each side. Although it was largely empty, Jack had the impression that it was used as a storeroom. The walls were made of hard-baked mud – the sort of material the inhabitants of Helmand had used for centuries to build the square, high-walled compounds in which they lived. These walls were thick and unbelievably sturdy, often able to withstand the impact of artillery fire. There was a stale smell of animal shit in the air, and along one of the walls was some kind of dried crop and a small pile of firewood. Jack was sitting almost up against the back wall. Between him and the door he saw whatever his two visitors had dumped on the ground when they arrived. Shuffling up towards it, he realised what it was. Food – a large piece of flatbread – and a plastic bottle of what he hoped was water. His mouth was drier than the dust on the ground.

He ate the bread in big, ravenous mouthfuls, ignoring the bits of grit that clung to its underside. The water was warm and stale, but as he gulped it down, Jack felt his body absorbing it like a sponge. When he had finished, he looked around a little desperately to see if they had left him anything else to eat or drink. In the bottom of the rusty bucket there was still a bit of water, so he carefully decanted this into his bottle, then screwed the top back on. He’d leave that for an emergency.

Fuck, he told himself. Like it isn’t an emergency already.

Jack felt a surge of fear. He knew he had to master it. His priority was survival, and fear was his worst enemy. If he let it, it would affect his ability to think, to make intelligent decisions.

He needed to keep a cool head. Not easy. Not very fucking easy at all.

He took a deep breath and tried to work out what the hell was going on.

BOOK: The Kill Zone

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