Killing for the Company (35 page)

Still on all fours in the aisle, and under the cover of the pews, he scrambled back to where he had dropped the bronze cross – his only weapon. Looking forward, he saw three old men who had formed a ring around five frightened kids. He grabbed the cross and scrambled along one of the pews to his right. He had to try to get his hands on the shooter, but that meant keeping out of sight until he was almost upon her.

It took him ten seconds to crawl the length of the pew. He emerged seven or eight metres in front of the small altar where he’d been talking to Suze. He kept low and peered round to his right, his eyes sharp for the woman in the shadow of the arch, ready to take cover again at the first sign of being in her line of fire.

He saw her, but it was fleeting: just the shadow of a black figure stepping over the cordon of the stairwell fifteen metres away and leading down into the crypt. Was that a dead end? She had made her first mistake. Luke jumped up from his hiding position between the pews and sprinted towards the stairwell, where he stopped.

The stairs were about two metres wide. He could count twelve steps but there were more out of sight. A dim light was flooding upwards.

Was she expecting him to follow? Was it a trap? Was she waiting, weapon at the ready?

Luke gave himself a few seconds to form a sitrep in his head. He was in an impossible tactical situation. If he walked down those stairs he’d be lit up, an easy target, dead before he got to the bottom. If he’d been tooled up, with men at his disposal, with weapons and body armour, they could have just chucked down a flashbang or a frag, laid down fire and gone in noisy. But he had none of that. Just a stupid fucking cross.

He hesitated. Fom beyond the walls of the cathedral, he heard the sound of sirens.

Police.

He looked around. The main body of the cathedral was empty, its occupants crushing round the main entrance to get out. Luke himself had spatters of blood over him from his proximity to the carnage. Was this a situation he wanted to explain to the Old Bill? To his OC?

Like fuck it was.

With a sudden burst of anger he hurled the bronze cross down the stairs and heard it clattering on the hard floor below. His only option was to disappear. Now.

Luke pulled his hood a little further over his brow and put his head down. Nobody, he calculated, would notice another frightened member of the public rushing to escape the carnage, and he was right. A crowd of choristers, visitors and clerics were huddled around the doors of the cathedral, pressing against each other, shouting, desperate to escape.

Luke joined them quietly. Just as it was his turn to leave, he glanced back over his shoulder, ignoring the way the last few stragglers were jostling to get away. He could just see them, the three bodies in the aisle, alone in the massive space of the cathedral. Nobody was anywhere in the vicinity. Nobody was paying them any attention. No churchman was ministering to them. They just lay there, gruesome in death, and alone.

He remembered the face of the little boy. Chet’s boy. Now dead, like his father. The thought was a needle in Luke’s soul as he pushed out into the open air. The sound of sirens was louder, the chaos intense. Luke hurried down the stone steps and disappeared into the night.

TWENTY-TWO

8 December.

The Manhattan offices of the Grosvenor Group occupied the top three floors of a skyscraper on East 43rd Street. From the penthouse the towers of the city were visible all around: the Chrysler Building, the UN, the Empire State. The two men talking there remembered the days when the Twin Towers loomed over everything. They’d been in this very building when the planes hit. Along with the rest of Manhattan they’d rushed from the city in panic; unlike the rest of Manhattan, the events of 9/11 had brought an upward trajectory in their fortunes. War was always good for business.

Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the East River was sparkling blue and the bridges and buildings glittered in the low winter sun. The airspace above the city was buzzing with helicopters. Some were giving tourists a bird’s-eye view of the island; some were ferrying wealthy businessmen to work or play. Some, of course, were there for security. These two men knew there was never a moment when a gunship wasn’t hovering above New York City. It was one of their subsidiaries who supplied it to the DOD, after all.

A bald-headed man with a shiny scalp and tanned skin sat in a comfortable executive chair with his back to the East River and his feet parked on the solid wooden desk in front of him. He listened calmly to the ranting of his colleague: a fat man, who sweated even when he wasn’t stressed out and whose voice had a strong South African accent. ‘The guy’s got us over a fucking barrel,’ he complained, waving his arms in the air to reveal dark patches of perspiration in the pits of his shirt. ‘He’s acting like some fucking Transvaal mercenary. I’m telling you, man, we shouldn’t be involved in this shit.’

The bald man smiled blandly. ‘You should learn to relax, Pieter. You ever get yourself a massage? I know this girl, comes from Stockholm, got a rack like a fucking balcony. I’m telling you – you could do Shakespeare off it.’

The suggestion only made Pieter more angry. ‘God
damn
it, Nathan. I’m not interested in your fucking hookers. You know what this could do to our company?’

Nathan swung his feet back down off the table, stood up and looked out over the East River. His bald-headed reflection smiled back at him. He knew his silence would infuriate someone of Pieter de Lange’s temperament. The pudgy South African CFO had a brain for numbers but a tendency to see shadows that weren’t there, or at least to see larger shadows than really existed.

‘I said,’ Pieter repeated, ‘do you know what this could do to our company?’

Nathan turned. ‘Sure I know,’ he said. ‘Double its market capitalisation value? Triple it, maybe?’

‘Ah, man,’ Pieter replied. ‘How much of that money do you think you’ll be able to spend in a Federal jail, eh? The only hookers you’ll find in there will be kaffirs with twelve-inch dicks.’

Nathan laughed. Pieter was a crude motherfucker when he wanted to be and the Grosvenor Group’s CEO quite enjoyed that. It made a change from the usual po-faced Brits he spent so many of his days with. But it wasn’t so much the guy’s choice of words that tickled him. It was the suggestion that either of them would face any kind of negative consequences for . . . well, for
anything
, really.

‘Tell me, Pieter, how long have you been with us now?’

‘Five years.’

‘Five years. And in those five years, how many former presidents of the United States have you dined with?’

Pieter shrugged. ‘Two,’ he said.

‘And members of the Senate? I bet you can’t even remember.’ Nathan could tell he was right, because Pieter didn’t reply. ‘How many share options in the Grosvenor Group have you drawn up for prime movers in Washington, Pieter? How many millions in dividends did we pay out to sitting members of Congress in the last financial year?’

‘Plenty,’ Pieter mumbled.

‘Yeah, plenty. You know how the world works, Pieter. You think any of those guys are going to let us go down when they know they could come down with us? Huh?’

Pieter shrugged.

‘I’ve been at this a long time. And I’ve juggled more slippery skittles than Alistair Stratton, believe me. He’s just a greedy little man who wants to fill his boots. You really think he’s going to go public about our arrangement with him? He’d be up in front of The Hague quicker than you can say “war crime”.’

‘Then why are you supplying him? Why are you giving him access to our intelligence networks?’

Nathan gave him a flat look. ‘Think of it as a speculative investment, Pieter. You accountants understand things like that, don’t you?’

‘Don’t patronise me, man. I just don’t see what’s in this for Stratton.’

‘Pieter, Pieter,’ Nathan smiled blandly. ‘You must trust me to handle Stratton.’

‘Ah, I don’t know, man. I don’t like it. I don’t like
him
.’

‘Come on, Pieter. Look what we made from Iraq while everyone else was worrying about oil. Stratton’s like war – good for business.’

He walked round to where the South African was standing and slapped his palm in a comradely fashion against the back of his sweaty shirt. ‘I’m going to get you that chick’s number,’ he said. ‘You look like you could use a good time. All work and no play makes Pieter a dull boy, and we really wouldn’t want that now, would we?’

RAF Brize Norton. 15.00 hrs.

A dull-grey C-17 Globemaster III sat on the tarmac. None of its four jets was yet in motion, but the aft door was open, revealing the massive belly of this packhorse of an aircraft.

Parked no more than twenty metres away were four white minibuses. They’d exited the barriers of Credenhill three hours ago. They were entirely nondescript. See them drive past and you might have thought they contained a local football team, or labourers on their way to a site. And a peek at the men inside wouldn’t have given you much else to go on, all of them dressed in civvies. And although they all wore sturdy boots, there wasn’t a speck of olive drab or DPM in sight.

At the back of the lead minibus, one man had stared out of the window as they left Hereford. There were bags under his eyes as he gazed into the middle distance, seeing but not registering the dingy suburbs as they headed towards the motorway. He should sleep, he knew that. But sleep wasn’t possible. Not with the events of the previous night spinning in his head. Luke Mercer was no longer shocked by death, though he didn’t doubt that the sight of Chet’s lad sliding in a pool of his own blood would stay with him for the rest of his days.

‘If that’s not a professional job,’ he had heard his neighbour saying when they were no more than a minute from base, ‘I’m a fucking Chinaman. Headshots, at that range, no sign of the shooter. You ask me, that’s agency work.’ Luke had turned to see Finn with a copy of the
Sun
open in front of him. He’d already seen the headline that morning – ‘murder in the cathedral’ – and a grainy telephoto shot of the scene that was so sharp in his memory. He hadn’t had the stomach to read any further.

‘Not sure about the kid, though,’ Finn mused. ‘Doubt he was spilling state secrets. Or the coffin-dodger. And it sounds like the priest just got clipped in the crossfire. Don’t reckon he’ll be rising on the third day.’ He carried on reading, his voice becoming slightly distant. ‘I’m telling you – train bombs, snipers – there’s something in the fucking water this winter.’ He looked up from his paper at Luke. ‘Christ on a bike, mate, you look bloody terrible.’

Luke had wondered for a moment whether he should share with Finn what had gone on last night. They went back a long way, after all. They’d seen some things together, and there was no doubt it would do him good to talk about it. But what would he say? He couldn’t even fit the pieces of Suze’s bizarre story together in his own head, let alone explain it to someone else. And to admit that he’d been in St Paul’s last night? That would be plain stupid. Finn was a good lad, but he’d be almost obliged to tell someone.

‘Thanks, buddy,’ he’d muttered. ‘You look like a pissing toad yourself.’

He’d turned away and spent the rest of the journey in silence, ignoring the banter that came from the other B Squadron men. As they travelled, scenes from the previous night kept flashing through Luke’s mind. He kept hearing fragments of the strange woman’s conversation.

You knew Chet. Do you really think he died in a simple house fire?

. . . she works for Mossad . . . Don’t you see? Doesn’t
anybody
see? First the Balkans, then Iraq, now this . . .

They sounded like the ravings of a paranoid fantasist, a conspiracy theorist. Luke wanted to believe that was what they were. But in the light of what had happened just minutes after she’d spilled her heart out, he couldn’t help thinking they had the ring of truth – whatever that truth might be.

Now it was time to debus. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for them to carry the crates which held the squadron’s weapons and ammunition up into the C-17 and secure them inside the webbing. The ops sergeant took a headcount and, once he was satisfied everyone had boarded, he gave the word to the loadie. The aft door closed up and the engines started to rumble.

It stank in the aircraft. Aviation gas wasn’t the worst of it. Luke could detect a vague whiff of rotten meat. The C-17 was a versatile beast. It wasn’t just suited to the wholesale movement of troops and equipment. As it could operate on short runways, and even had capability on those that were unpaved, it was suitable for use close to the battlefield. That meant it was a good choice for casevac, and for its evil twin: the repatriation of the dead. Impossible to say how many corpses this machine had ferried since it had been in service. Impossible, too, to say whether the stench inside the plane was related, but there was something sobering about being strapped into an aircraft which doubled as a hearse – two lines of men, facing each other, silent not only because the increasing noise of the engine made talking difficult.

Flight time to Ben Gurion International Airport, fifteen klicks south-east of Tel Aviv: four hours. Four more hours for Luke to try to make sense of things. But in the end, he tried to put it from his mind by running over the details of this morning’s briefing. The next twenty-four hours were going to be full-on and he needed a clear head.