Who Dares Wins (10 page)

‘What’s . . . ?’ he started to say.

And then he stopped.

Amid the confusion in his head, one single thought began to crystallise.

What if Whitely
hadn’t
recognised his brother? Or Porteus. Or even Mac. What then? If he alerted them to it, Sam would be instantly pulled from the op.

Whitely blinked, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, Sam?’

He drew a deep breath.

‘Nothing,’ he said. And then, because Whitely was still looking strangely at him, ‘09.00 on Thursday.’

Whitely nodded. Sam walked away. He could feel the Ops Sergeant’s eyes burning into his back. It took everything he had to keep his pace steady and his mind calm.

*

Kelly Larkin awoke, bleary eyed. The room was dark and in her drowsiness she thought it must still be the middle of the night. It was a lovely feeling, splintered only when she saw the orange glow from her bedside alarm clock. Seven-thirty.

‘
Shit!
’ she hissed, suddenly awake. She clambered naked out of bed and hurried to the underwear drawer of her dressing table, pulling on some knickers and awkwardly hitching her bra behind her back, before she finally remembered the revelations of the previous evening. Jamie’s confession; the way he had stormed out of the flat; how she had stayed up waiting for him until sleep finally overcame her. And now, she realised as she turned round to look at her bed, there he was. Asleep. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Quietly Kelly walked round to his side of the bed and perched on the edge. His head was covered with the duvet, his breathing regular and heavy. Kelly gently uncovered his head to look at his slumbering face.

What she saw made her catch a breath.

His upper lip was smeared with blood, dark brown and flaking at the edges. The smear itself extended up on to his right cheek before streaking gradually away. The blood, though, was not the most distressing thing. His skin was purple, bruised and mottled; his right eye was blackened and closed up. Jamie looked like he’d been in the boxing ring.

Kelly shook him by the shoulder – not forcefully, but tenderly and with concern.

‘Jamie,’ she whispered. ‘Jamie, wake up.’

He didn’t stir, so she shook him again. This time he started. His eyes opened and he looked around without moving his body, as though he didn’t know where he was. When his eyes fell on Kelly, he shut them again for a moment before pushing himself up on his elbows.

Kelly touched his face lightly with her fingertips. ‘What happened?’ she breathed. ‘What time did you get back?’ The pungent smell of last night’s alcohol wafted under her nose.

‘Late,’ Jamie replied non-committally.

‘I know it was late, Jamie,’ Kelly retorted a bit more sharply than she had intended. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Nothing I can’t cope with.’ He smiled at her – a peculiarly gruesome expression given the state of his face – then stretched out his hand towards her breasts.

She shrugged him away and stood up. ‘I’m late for work,’ she said. With her back turned to Jamie she walked to her wardrobe and pulled out a charcoal grey two-piece suit and cream blouse; still with her back turned to him she put it on. Tears were coming. She didn’t know if she’d be able to stop them and she didn’t want him to see.

Her eyes were hot now as she finished getting dressed. She felt a riot of emotions all trying to burst out. Confusion; anger; sympathy. Almost on an impulse she turned round, the first tears dripping from her eyes. He was still sitting there, eyeing her up with that self-satisfied look on his face. ‘For God’s sake, Jamie,’ she railed. ‘I just don’t know what to think.’

His expression changed to one of wariness.

‘All I want to do,’ she wept dramatically, ‘is get close to you.’ She knew she was sounding dramatic, but she couldn’t help it. Rushing to his bedside she sat down again and grabbed his hands.

‘Those things you told me last night,’ she continued. ‘It meant so much that you opened up to me.’

Jamie looked down at the duvet.

‘You don’t have to be embarrassed,’ Kelly insisted. ‘I know you’ve been drinking. I can smell it on you. But please just tell me, what happened last night?’

There was a pause. Jamie took a deep breath and when he gazed back up at her, his forehead was creased. He looked for all the world to Kelly like a confused little boy.

‘I can’t,’ he said quietly.

‘Why not?’

‘I just . . . I can’t,’ he replied. ‘There’s things I can’t tell you about me. Things it’s best you don’t know. That you wouldn’t believe.’

She squeezed his hand a bit harder. ‘I
would
believe you, Jamie. Just
trust
me.’

Another pause. Jamie’s eyes flickered away from her. He looked like he was trying to make a decision.

‘All right,’ he said finally. He got out of bed, approached the window wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and gently parted the curtains with one finger. He looked outside, let the curtain fall closed and then turned to look at her. He wavered slightly, as though drunk. ‘This is going to sound stupid,’ he said.

Kelly shook her head. ‘No it isn’t.’

He shrugged. ‘All right then. There’s things I can’t tell you because I’m . . .’ He faltered. ‘I don’t know what the proper word is. I’m an agent.’

Kelly blinked. ‘A what?’

‘An
agent
.’

‘What . . . ?’ she hesitated. ‘Like an estate agent?’

Jamie closed his eyes in frustration. ‘No,’ he replied, exasperation in his voice. ‘A
secret
agent. A spy.’

She blinked again. There were no tears now. They had instantly dried up.

‘A spy,’ she repeated.

Jamie nodded.

All the anger Kelly Larkin had felt a couple of minutes ago disappeared. She smoothed the legs of her trouser suit, stood up and turned to face Jamie. He looked so ridiculous there, semi-naked in her bedroom.

‘And your dad was in the SAS?’ she asked. ‘And your mum died of cancer?’

Jamie nodded.

‘And you thought that if I believed all that it would make it okay for you to steal money from my purse?’

Jamie’s lips parted slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

Kelly walked up to him as coolly as she was able. She came to a halt right in front of him.

She smiled.

And then, with all the force she could muster, she slapped him hard round the side of the face.

‘Ow!’ he shouted, but she was already talking over him, her voice a low, menacing hiss.

‘Get out of my house, Jamie Spillane,’ she spat. ‘And don’t come back. I’ve had enough of you, your sponging and your stupid, insulting lies. I never,
ever
want to see you again. You’ve got five minutes.’

With that, she turned her back on him, walked out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. She locked herself in and listened at the door, waiting to hear the sound of her ex-boyfriend leaving the flat.

*

Sam floored it home. He barely saw anyone else on the road, not because there weren’t any cars, but because he was blind to them. He blocked out the angry sound of horns as he cut up the other road users; he ignored red lights and pedestrian crossings. After his encounter with Jack Whitely outside the CO’s office, Sam had walked straight out of the Kremlin and left the base as quickly as possible. He didn’t stop and speak to anyone. He just had to get out of there. And now, as he sped round the roads of Hereford, there was one thought in his mind.
Get home. Get away from everyone else. Then you can try to work out what the hell is going on
.

Coming to a halt outside his flat, Sam parked badly, one wheel on the pavement, the back of the car jutting out into the road. He didn’t care. He just leapt from the vehicle, ran into the house and – for some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on – locked himself inside. He drew several deep breaths before going into the kitchen and opening one of the cupboards. It was empty apart from a half-drunk bottle of Scotch. He poured himself a glass and downed it in one, before pouring another and waiting for the alcohol to do its work on his nervous system.

Jacob had changed. There was no doubt about that. He looked older, more weather-beaten. It probably wasn’t so surprising that Mac hadn’t recognised him. Sam’s brother had just been one of a number of faces and the photos were of poor quality. He sipped at his whisky, closed his eyes and tried to get his thoughts straight.
It made no sense
. Why would the Regiment be sending out a troop to kill a bunch of British citizens; why would they be eliminating one of their own?

As that thought crossed his mind, he stopped. He gently placed his drink on the kitchen worktop and closed his eyes. Sam thought back to the previous day. He was in his father’s room. The old man had said something. What was it? Sam’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember the exact words.

He shook his head. His father’s words were nothing, just grief-induced paranoia, the delusions of an old man with time on his hands coming up with reasons to explain his favourite son’s absence.

‘Damn it!’ he shouted, kicking the kitchen unit so that it rattled. Sam downed the Scotch, then started prowling around the flat like a caged animal. He needed answers, but there was nowhere he could get them – if Sam alerted anyone to what was going on, there was no doubt about what would happen. He’d be pulled from the op and a team of trained SAS killers would fly to Kazakhstan to eliminate his brother, without Sam being able to do anything about it.

Morning passed into afternoon. The effects of the alcohol wore off, leaving only an uncomfortable, nagging sensation in the pit of Sam’s stomach. His phone rang several times; he ignored it.

Afternoon melted into evening. Sam felt like a prisoner in his own home, as though even stepping over the threshold would somehow reveal his suspicions to everyone, like an escaping convict walking into the beam of a searchlight. As the light outside began to fail, so it grew darker in his bare front room. He sat on the old sofa and allowed the gloom to surround him. From where he sat he could see out into the road. His badly parked Audi was just outside; occasional passers-by sauntered across his field of vision.

Evening became night. The streetlamps flickered on outside. Still Sam didn’t move. He had no idea what time it was and he didn’t bother to check. Before long he was sitting in darkness.

By the time he noticed the figure on the other side of the street, Sam couldn’t have said how long it had been there. It was faceless, the head covered with a hood, the kind worn by kids. If this was a kid, though, it was an unusually tall, stocky one. He stood leaning against a lamppost; and although Sam could not see his face, he had the sudden, unnerving sensation that this person was looking straight through the window of the flat and into Sam’s front room.

The unnerving sensation that he was some shadowy sentinel, keeping watch.

Sam froze.

The figure was in the light; Sam was in the dark. Chances were this guy couldn’t see him. Slowly, he slid down the sofa on his back and on to the floor. On all fours he crawled out of the front room and into the corridor. It was very dark in his flat, he used the tried and tested Blade method of not looking directly at objects, but looking around them, using his periphery vision, which is better attuned to seeing in the dark. He made his way confidently to the bathroom without switching on any lights. Once in there, he fumbled towards the toilet. Sam lifted the lid of the cistern and carefully groped inside.

The handgun was there, a fully loaded Beretta 92 9 mm, carefully perched on the mechanical intestines of the cistern. He picked it up gingerly to stop it from falling into the water; but once it was in his hand, he gripped it firmly.

He felt a whole lot better with the reassuring weight of a weapon in his fist.

Chances were it was just some guy waiting for his girlfriend, or his dealer, or who just happened to be standing outside Sam’s house. But there was no doubt that Sam felt a cold, bristling uncertainty, a kind of sixth sense that experience had taught him never to ignore. He checked the weapon quickly before leaving the bathroom and walking back down the corridor, the shallow, steady sound of his breath the only noise in his ears.

He stopped at the door to the front room, pressed his back against the wall and, squinting his eyes slightly, peered across the room and out of the window. Sam gripped the weapon a little bit more firmly when he realised the figure under the lamppost was no longer there.

Out of the blue, a motorbike roared down the street. It made Sam start momentarily, but more than that it messed with his hearing, which had been carefully tuned to the quiet. The noise of the motor took a while to fade; only when it had finally disappeared could Sam readjust his ears to the thick silence of his flat.

But silence wasn’t what he heard.

It was faint, but it was there: the sound of footsteps. They were brisk and they were getting louder.

Sam felt his jaw setting solid. The handgun was pointed out in front of him now as he backed up and headed towards the front door.

The top panel was made of frosted glass. He stood several metres from it and held the gun at arm’s length towards the door. Head height. His eyes twitched slightly as he watched the blurred silhouette of a figure come into view. It was easy to determine the curved outline of the man’s hooded top, the broad shape of his shoulders.

It would take two shots, he calculated, to kill him. One to shatter the glass, one to finish him off. And Sam was ready to do it; ready to defend himself at the first sign of danger.

The figure remained perfectly still. In some part of his brain that was not concentrating on keeping the guy in his sights, Sam wondered if the hooded figure knew he was there.