Read Black Ops: The 12th Spider Shepherd Thriller Online
Authors: Stephen Leather
Black Ops: The 12th Spider Shepherd Thriller
Contents
Pay Off
The Fireman
Hungry Ghost
The Chinaman
The Vets
The Long Shot
The Birthday Girl
The Double Tap
The Solitary Man
The Tunnel Rats
The Bombmaker
The Stretch
Tango One
The Eyewitness
Spider Shepherd thrillers
Hard Landing
Soft Target
Cold Kill
Hot Blood
Dead Men
Live Fire
Rough Justice
Fair Game
False Friends
True Colours
White Lies
Jack Nightingale supernatural thrillers
Nightfall
Midnight
Nightmare
Nightshade
Lastnight
If you’d like to find out more about these and future titles, go to
www.stephenleather.com.
Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers, an ebook and
Sunday Times
bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers including
The Times
, the
Daily Mirror
, the
Daily Mail
and the
South China Morning Post
in Hong Kong. Stephen’s titles have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US and his bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages. He has also written for television.
Visit Stephen’s website,
www.stephenleather.com
, find him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/stephenleather
.
Stephen also has a website for his Spider Shepherd series,
www.danspidershepherd.com
, and for his Jack Nightingale series,
www.jacknightingale.com
.
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Stephen Leather 2015
The right of Stephen Leather 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 73665 6
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
For Laura
R
ob Tyler wanted a beer, but he was working and on a point of principle he never drank on the job. He was sitting in a house in Queens, about ten miles from the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan. The house was in a quiet cul-de-sac, and probably worth a couple of million dollars. Three bedrooms, a nice yard, a garage easily big enough for two cars and a hot tub on a terrace leading off the main bedroom. He was sitting on an Italian sofa and on the marble coffee table in front of him was the rope that Tyler would use to hang the man who was expected home at any moment.
Tyler was dressed for murder. He was wearing white forensic overalls, paper covers over his shoes, and a shower cap. There were blue latex gloves on his hands, and in the kitchen was a black garbage bag into which he’d put all the protective clothing once the job was finished. The job specifications had been clear. The man was to be killed by hanging and everything had to point to suicide. That didn’t necessarily mean a note – it was a fallacy that all suicides left a note before killing themselves – but it did mean that the marks on his neck would have to be consistent with hanging and there would have to be rope fibres on his hands. Tyler had already selected the perfect spot for the hanging – the bannisters around the main hall would do just fine.
Tyler had carried out more than a dozen killings that had looked like suicides. Hanging was the most popular but he had also slit the wrists of a woman in a bath and had done a couple of overdoses. Overdoses were messy. The best way was to force a liquid down the victim’s throat with a large syringe and then follow up with tablets when they were unconscious. The overdoses were two-man jobs, Tyler doubted that one man could do it on his own. He’d done hangings on his own but this time the job had been assigned to two contractors. Tyler wasn’t overjoyed at working with another contractor, especially one he hadn’t worked with before, but the woman seemed professional. She’d said her name was Leila and was vague about where she’d come from and hadn’t given much away. She was pretty, with mahogany brown skin and the blackest eyes he’d ever seen, short, curly hair and a body that wouldn’t quit. She was wearing high heels and a short skirt that showed off a pair of awesome legs and a low-cut top with a cleavage that he couldn’t stop looking at. From her dark skin and hair Tyler suspected Guatemala or Nicaragua but her accent was a puzzle. Her English was perfect but her accent was slightly off, as if she’d been born overseas. He’d tried speaking to her in Spanish but she hadn’t replied. Tyler assumed she’d been hired because of her looks – she was the perfect honey for a honey trap.
Leila had made contact with the target and had been to the house with him the previous night. The target was divorced, she said, and had jumped at the chance of getting between her legs. He’d been so enamoured that he hadn’t realised she had copied his key and noted the burglar alarm code.
Now they were in the house and waiting for him to return. It was seven in the evening and they had been inside for the best part of four hours. Tyler had jokingly suggested that they visit the bedroom to pass the time but she had smiled sarcastically and said that he wasn’t her type. Tyler wondered if that were true. He was a little over six feet and was in the best physical condition of his life, better even than when he’d been in Delta Force. He wondered if it was worth trying again, after the target was dead. Killing could be the ultimate aphrodisiac, with the right kind of girl. He realised he was staring at her breasts again and that she was looking at him. He smiled and looked away.
‘How long have you known Mercier?’ he asked.
Mercier had hired them for the job. Tyler was getting a hundred grand for the gig. He didn’t know how much the girl was being paid. He’d be doing most of the work. As soon as the target turned up, the girl would cover him with her gun. He’d already brought a quilt down from upstairs and laid it behind the sofa. He’d wrap the target with the quilt and then place the noose around his neck and pull it tight until he was dead. That way there would be no signs of a struggle. Once the target was dead it would be easy enough to attach the rope to the bannister and set the scene. Tyler had already selected a dining-room chair. He would put the target’s fingerprints on the back and make it look as if the chair had fallen to the side.
‘A couple of years.’
‘Done many jobs for him?’
‘A few.’
‘Anything I might have heard of?’
She tilted her head on one side and scrutinised him with her jet black eyes. ‘Do you always ask this many questions?’
‘I’m just curious.’
‘Well you know what curiosity did to the cat.’ She checked the action of her gun.
‘You do that a lot,’ said Tyler. ‘Check your gun.’
‘I like to be sure,’ she said.
‘You always use a Glock?’
‘For close-up work, sure. You can’t go wrong with a Glock. Plus there’s a lot of them about so they’re harder to track down.’
‘They kick their cartridges everywhere though.’
‘If you dump the gun, that’s not an issue.’ She shrugged. ‘Horses for courses.’
Tyler nodded. ‘And what did they tell you about me?’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Not much.’
‘And you didn’t ask?’
‘Why would I ask?’
‘Not curious?’
She laughed. ‘You’re the curious one, Robert. I don’t have a curious bone in my body.’
‘But when they said there’d be two people on the job, didn’t you ask for details?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’ She tilted her head on one side again and fixed him with her eyes. ‘You asked about me?’
‘Of course,’ said Tyler.
‘And Mercier told you?’
‘He just said that you were very pretty and I should keep my cock in my pants.’
‘Good advice,’ she said. ‘That’s all he told you?’
‘Why, does that worry you?’
‘I’d have hoped there would have been some sort of confidentiality. I wouldn’t want an employer to start giving out my personal information to a …’
‘Stranger? But I’m not a stranger. I’ve worked with Jules for many years. And it’s not as if he gave me your real name. Other than that he told me nothing.’
She walked over to the window and looked down at the street, then at her watch. ‘So what do you want to know, Rob?’ She reached into her pocket and took out a bulbous suppressor and screwed it into the barrel of her Glock as she continued to look down into the street.
Tyler shrugged. ‘You’re a pro, that’s obvious. But you’re young. What are you? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?’
She smiled. ‘Twenty-four.’
‘That’s still young. How did you get the experience?’
‘Israeli Army,’ she said. ‘Signed up at eighteen.’
‘You’re Israeli?’
‘My parents moved there before I was born.’
‘So you’re Jewish?’
‘Is that a problem?’
Tyler laughed. ‘Of course not. Wow, I wouldn’t have put you down as a former soldier.’
‘It’s compulsory in Israel, national service for everyone. Three years for men, two years for women. But only half go into the military. And a lot of kids duck it if they can. But I enlisted. I wanted to serve.’
‘And you got a taste for it?’
‘For what?’
‘Combat?’
‘There wasn’t much combat. But there was a lot of training. Then I joined Mossad. The Israeli equivalent of the CIA.’
‘What did you do for them?’
‘That’s classified. But between you and me, pretty much the same as I’m doing today.’
‘You were a government assassin?’
She smiled tightly. ‘Like I said, it’s classified.’
‘And now you do it for money?’
She nodded. ‘A lot of money. And you were what? A Navy Seal?’
‘Delta Force,’ said Tyler.
‘Were you one of the ones that got Bin Laden?’
‘I’d gone private before then,’ said Tyler.
‘How many jobs have you done?’
‘In total? A couple of dozen.’
‘You don’t know for sure?’
