Silent Kill Read online

  Silent Kill

  Chris Ryan

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Chris Ryan

  Non-fiction

  The One That Got Away

  Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book

  Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide

  Fight to Win

  Fiction

  Stand By, Stand By

  Zero Option

  The Kremlin Device

  Tenth Man Down

  Hit List

  The Watchman

  Land of Fire

  Greed

  The Increment

  Blackout

  Ultimate Weapon

  Strike Back

  Firefight

  Who Dares Wins

  The Kill Zone

  Killing for the Company

  Osama

  Masters of War

  Hunter Killer

  Chris Ryan Extreme

  Hard Target

  Night Strike

  Most Wanted

  In the Alpha Force Series

  Survival

  Rat-Catcher

  Desert Pursuit

  Hostage

  Red Centre

  Hunted

  Black Gold

  Blood Money

  Fault Line

  Untouchable

  In the Red Code Series

  Flash Flood

  Wildfire

  Outbreak

  Vortex

  Twister

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Coronet

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Chris Ryan 2015

  The right of Chris Ryan to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 77695 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Acknowledgements

  To my agent Barbara Levy, publisher Mark Booth, Charlotte Hardman and the rest of the team at Coronet.

  One

  Lisburn, Northern Ireland, 1993. 2014 hours.

  The voice came down the line like a shiver.

  ‘Avery, thank fuck,’ the voice said. ‘Arseholes had me on hold for ages. I’m freezing my bollocks off here.’

  Avery Chance jerked upright in her chair at MI5 HQ in Thiepval Barracks. She recognized the voice at the other end of the line immediately. John-Joe Kicker was a lieutenant in the Provisional IRA’s Internal Security Unit, otherwise known as the Nutting Squad, responsible for monitoring intelligence within the Provos’ ranks. Chance had flipped Kicker three months ago. For her, as a novice intelligence officer in the field in Northern Ireland, recruiting a guy like Kicker had been a big deal.

  ‘Joe,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Backstage with fucking Bono. Where d’ya think?’ Kicker said with a snort. It came down the line heavy and fast, like a sudden blast of wind. He went on, ‘A phone box on the Falls Road. Listen, I can’t stay on for long. Eyes all over the estate.’

  Something in his voice alerted Chance. He sounded afraid. But Kicker was an IRA hard man and a convicted murderer, she thought. He’d done his time at Long Kesh. Kicker didn’t do fear.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Chance said.

  ‘Not on the phone. Come and meet me.’

  ‘The line’s secure.’

  Kicker forced out a laugh, like a one-man audience doing studio cheer. ‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘This line surely wasn’t secure when Martin Sheedy spilled his guts to you. In fact it was so bloody un-secure poor Marty got a pair of bullets in the back of his head for his troubles. I might be betraying my own kind, but I ain’t thick.’

  Chance leaned back in her chair. ‘I’ll meet you then. The usual place. Nine o’clock.’ She paused. Massaged her brow. ‘But you can’t keep me in the dark, Joe. I need to know what this is about.’

  Kicker was silent for a couple of seconds, then said, ‘You know how I said I’d call you if I had something big?’

  ‘That was the deal.’

  Another long pause. Chance listened to the line crackling, the wind blasting, police sirens in the background, the machine-like hum of life in east Belfast. Then Kicker took a deep breath and said, ‘Well, I’m sitting on something big this time. And if you don’t get your arse down here right now, this time tomorrow you’ll be picking through a heap of dead soldiers.’

  Two

  2057 hours.

  Chance was at the RV three minutes early. She hated being late.

  She’d bombed up from Lisburn, willing her silver Vauxhall Cavalier to go faster as she threaded her way north up Prince William Road, towards the south-west corner of Belfast. A thin fog had started to spread like a net across the landscape by the time she bounced off the B101 and onto the A501 heading for Andersonstown.

  Someone had once told Chance that Belfast was more British than the Queen’s Christmas speech and more Irish than a pint of Guinness. That was still true. But times were changing. Bill Clinton had been elected President. Reagan made Irish jokes; Clinton wants to make Irish peace, ran the joke in the tobacco-choked social clubs up and down the province, and there was a kernel of truth in it. Clinton was pushing hard for a ceasefire and wooing Gerry Adams. Closer to home for Chance, the Whitehall rumour mill was working overtime. Whispers abounded that the British and Irish were poised to make a joint declaration on the peace process. Belfast was now divided between those who wanted to hang up their rifles and those who vowed to keep up the armed struggle.

  The streets were empty as Chance reached the junction of Andersonstown Road and Suffolk Road. She shunted into Park but kept the engine running and the heater on full blast, the heat caressing her neck and face. She was grateful as outside it was the kind of cold that needled your skin and chipped away at your bones.

  The council estate was a bare-knuckled sprawl of mean-looking houses and a parade of shops. Rusted shutters h
ung like heavy eyelids over the windows of a rundown betting shop and a cab office. A republican flag flew from the roof of every house. Murals on the end walls of the terraces commemorated hunger-strike victims and Palestinian terrorists, vivid splashes of colour amid a sea of grey, while mountains sagged on the horizon like a pair of casually shrugged shoulders. A sign on a nearby building carried a quote from the Old Testament: ‘Prepare to Meet Thy God.’

  Andersonstown was the kind of place where peelers were dragged from their vehicles and knifed in broad daylight and well-meaning civvies were kneecapped just because they had the wrong surname. Belfast in those days was one of the four Bs, along with Baghdad, Bosnia and Beirut. Places that festered like open wounds. Places the world had left behind.

  Chance knew she was taking a big risk arranging the RV in the enemy’s back yard. But she figured this was the perfect meeting spot for her source, working on the principle of hiding in plain sight. It would protect her source better than having him march up to the gates of the nearest RUC constabulary with every conspiring Jack and John in west Belfast looking on.

  Besides, she got a kick out of the risk. From an early age, when her father walked out on her university lecturer mother to shack up with his PA, Chance had learned that if she wanted to get ahead in life, simply matching her male rivals was simply never going to cut it. She had to be better than the men. She had to work harder, longer, and above all smarter. And she had to be prepared to put her neck on the line.

  Chance knew that she was not classically attractive. Still, she had something about her. She was the kind of woman that intrigued men, rather than made them fawn over her. Her cropped brown hair was streaked blonde at the fringe and her small lips parted a little to reveal a prism of pearly-white teeth. She wore a dark suit that accented her hips and disguised her small breasts – the one part of her body that she hated. At sixteen she had been accepted by St Hilda’s College, Oxford, to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She’d gone on to get a PhD in Logic at the Sorbonne, before joining MI5 at twenty-two.

  She was one of the new breed of female fast-trackers: career women ready and able to climb the previously male-only intelligence ladder. Stella Rimington had blazed the trail for her sex in the security services in the late seventies, and her appointment as Director General in 1992 meant that MI5’s glass ceiling had been smashed at last. Already the place was filled with highly capable female graduates determined to make the most of the opportunity.

  There was just one problem. The men didn’t like the fast-trackers.

  For the first couple of years in Five, Avery Chance fast-tracked her way to nowhere, real fast. She transferred from one menial desk job to the next, sifting through reams of pointless int. She was an office junior in everything but name. The men had succeeded in pulling the rug from under the female fast-trackers. For a while, Chance considered leaving the service. That was in 1990, when the Cold War was over and MI5 felt more and more like a relic from a bygone age.

  Her luck changed on a snow-caked February morning the following year. That day Provisional IRA terrorists parked a van on Horse Guards Avenue and fired three mortar rockets at Downing Street. They failed in their mission to assassinate Prime Minister John Major, but the attack signalled a ramp-up in PIRA’s bombing campaign on British soil. Under pressure from a badly shaken government, MI5 was instructed to crush them from the inside. Chance volunteered for assignment to Belfast. A month later she finally got her wish. The fast-tracker was back on track.

  She was tasked with identifying PIRA members who might be lured into working for the security forces. Keeping her ear close to the ground, she got to know just about every Mick and Shay north of the border dealing brown to the blacks, or getting some Proddy slag from the Shankhill Road up the duff. The more dark secrets Chance learned, the more leverage she had with potential recruits. Kicker had been her first success. The first of many, she hoped. Like several young women in Five, Chance had adopted a siege mentality towards her male colleagues. She lived and breathed a compulsive desire to better them. The victory the old boys had achieved proved their downfall. In the long term they didn’t stop the fast-trackers. They just made them mad.

  Two minutes and thirty seconds after she arrived at the RV, a figure slid from the shadows and walked quickly towards the Cav. The guy wore a light-coloured anorak, a dark sweater and grey trousers. He could have been any fucking Jack on his way to get pissed. His face was thin and angular, as if someone had carved out his features with the tip of a blade. His skin was stretched tight across his gaunt cheekbones and a neatly brushed mullet trailed down past the nape of his neck. All things considered, John-Joe Kicker looked like a two-pound shit stuffed into a one-pound bag.

  Kicker stopped by the side of the car and rapped his bony knuckles impatiently on the front passenger window. Leaning over, Chance flipped open the door. A blast of chill air bit her nose, slapped her cheeks. Kicker climbed inside, rubbing his hands together like he was trying to get a fire going.

  ‘You must have some brass fucking balls, coming down here,’ he said in his clipped west Belfast accent. ‘The only peelers you ever see round these parts are behind the wheel of an armoured Landie.’ He frowned at the back seat. ‘Where’s your mate? The posh wanker.’

  ‘Busy,’ Chance replied quietly.

  It was SOP for all agents to attend meets with sources as a pair. But Charles Grealish, Chance’s usual partner, had been promoted, much to her annoyance, since he’d achieved little of note in Belfast. But Grealish was one of the old guard, one of the good old boys. As long as he didn’t piss anyone off, he’d smooth his way to the top. And Chance was still awaiting a new partner.

  ‘Were you followed?’ she asked.

  Kicker laughed deep in his throat. ‘Was I fuck.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I got a taxi to the cemetery and walked the rest of the way here, sticking to the side streets. Just like you told me to do. I took more precautions than a bird on the pill.’ Kicker’s lips twisted into a bitter smile. ‘Don’t be forgetting that I’ve more to lose than you Brits. If the boyos ever find out I’ve been talking, I’m properly shafted.’

  Chance moved the conversation on. ‘Tell me what’s going on, Joe.’

  Kicker shook his head stiffly. ‘First things first. After tonight, I want out. I’m done working for you. So before I give you the spread, we need to agree a few details.’

  Chance jerked an eyebrow halfway up her forehead. ‘What kind of details?’

  ‘I’m talking about my dues, like.’ Kicker licked his fingers and counted off a list. ‘I want a house. Big, fuck-off garden. Somewhere nice and boring, where nothing ever happens. Like Surrey. A new identity to go with the house. And I want some shekels, too. A little hedge fund, to get me started. I want that in writing and all.’

  ‘You’re on a retainer. That’s what we pay you for.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ Kicker growled, banging his fist on the dashboard. ‘You pay me a couple of grand for the information I normally feed you. But this is different. This is top-level shite and I want to be compensated accordingly.’

  Chance said nothing. She waited for Kicker to finish his rant. Watched the guy slump back in his seat, his muscles jumping with anger, his head thumping back against the headrest. She patiently waited for the rage to deflate, like a slashed tyre. When Kicker had calmed down, Chance looked him hard in the eye.

  ‘You’re done,’ she said evenly, ‘when I say you’re done.’

  Kicker opened his mouth but Chance cut him off before he could get a word in. ‘The only reason you’re here,’ she told him, ‘meeting with an agent of the British government, is because you were dumb enough to fool around with Victor Costello’s wife.’

  Kicker flinched at the mention of Costello. With good reason, Chance thought. Costello was the chief of the Nutting Squad. He was also a notorious sadist. He didn’t just torture people. He took them on a personal tour of the seven circles of hell. He sewed
the severed testicles of informants into their mouths. He cut off eyelids with playschool scissors. As a kid, rumour had it, Costello would tie two cats together by their tails and hang them over a washing line, watching them scratch each other to death.

  ‘You’d better cooperate with me,’ Chance continued, ‘or tomorrow Costello will open his post and find an envelope full of pictures of you getting real cosy with Caitlin.’ She spoke in a delicate but sharp voice. Like a blade slashing silk. Kicker squirmed. Chance paused, milking it. Then she twisted the knife. ‘You’re a big boy, Joe. I don’t need to tell you what Costello would do to you if he found out you were sticking one up his missus.’

  Kicker pulled a sour expression. ‘You’re a bitch.’

  ‘Maybe I am.’ Chance’s bright blue eyes smiled at him. ‘But I’m the bitch who has you by the balls.’

  Kicker chewed on the tepid air for a long beat. He clamped his lips and eyes shut and stewed. Chance left him to it and scoped out the estate. The Devlin Social Club stood on the nearest corner. Its windows were boarded up and graffiti scrawled over a poster to the side of the door read: ‘BRITS FUCK OFF.’ A few old men with too much time and too little money, their hands stuffed in their pockets, miserable faces like picked scabs, shuffled in and out of the place, busily pissing away their Giros.

  Kicker popped open his eyes. Chance looked back at him.

  ‘I’ll do what I can to help you,’ she said. ‘But you’re going to have to trust me.’

  Kicker sighed. ‘There’s a shipment coming in tomorrow. Eight in the morning. On the Galway coast. I don’t know the exact location, on account of the fact Costello ain’t telling.’

  Chance greeted the news coolly. ‘When did you find out about this?’

  ‘Six, seven hours ago?’ Kicker shrugged. ‘I didn’t know anything about it until Costello ordered us all to a meeting. I’ve been trying to reach you ever since. Jesus, you think I’m holding something back from you?’