Final Target

My mobile phone rang. It was McCallen. ‘Where are you?’

‘Back at the flat.’

‘I’ll come round.’

I let her in and she sat down opposite and let her beautiful eyes meet mine. ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘For doing something you didn’t want to do.’

I fixed her with a cool stare. ‘It was pretty much a pointless exercise.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘None of my observations are rocket science. Any interested amateur would draw the same conclusions.’

‘Which are?’

I shook my head. ‘No trade until you answer my questions.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Who are the couple?’

‘India Griffiths-Jones and her toy boy lover Dylan Woodgate.’

‘Their occupation?’

‘Griffiths-Jones was a banker, Woodgate a city trader.’

‘Have you followed the money trail?’

‘It’s clean.’ She unexpectedly dropped her gaze. Meant she was lying.

I arched an eyebrow. McCallen glanced up at me with a cold look, lips zippered. Planning to return to this point later, I pressed on.

‘Where are the deceased from?’

‘Griffiths-Jones, born O’Malley, is originally from Newry, Northern Ireland. Woodgate from Kent. Both worked in the City.’

‘Political motivation?’

‘Police considered a possible connection to the Real IRA in the early part of the investigation, but it’s been discounted.’

‘The relationship between the two – illicit or otherwise?’

‘Smart of you.’

‘That’s what you expect from me, isn’t it?’

She smiled. ‘Illicit. Griffiths-Jones’s husband had no idea about her extracurricular activities until his wife’s untimely death.’

I gave my eyebrow another workout. Giving an order to kill one’s spouse on account of an affair was an obvious motive for murder. I’d never got involved in domestics, but I knew men who would and did.

‘He checks out,’ McCallen said, attempting to head off that particular line of enquiry.

‘As in, he has an alibi?’ Which meant damn all in my previous line of work. Those who gave the orders were nowhere near the crime scenes and they always ensured their alibis were watertight.

‘As in, he didn’t do it.’

‘So they simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?’ I said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because the cyclist was the target.’

‘That’s not what the police believe.’

‘Well they’re wrong. He was killed first.’

‘How do you know?’

I wondered whether McCallen was really dumb or acting dumb. Had to be the latter. ‘His death was played out in a distinctly different fashion. Whereas the occupants of the car had been treated to a spray and pray approach, the cyclist was coldly and surgically removed.’

‘Two killers?’

‘One killer who panicked when he had company.’

‘Amateur?’

I paused because I couldn’t be certain. ‘A professional, new to the job.’

‘Does he have a signature?’

I paused for a second time. I’d always favoured a three-shot approach. One in the head, one in the body, one to finish off. Sounded gruesome now, as if it had nothing to do with me. The tops of my cheekbones flushed hot to the bone in shame. ‘He didn’t favour a pistol, which is highly unusual for a hit. My guess is that he used one weapon, an automatic primed to fire single shot for the original kill, then he switched to multiple fire when he ran into trouble.’

She frowned. ‘Sub-machine guns are cumbersome.’

I shrugged. It depended on the weapon. The Heckler & Koch MP5K short version could easily be concealed under clothing or fired from a specially modified suitcase or bag. It had been one of my favourite methods for jobs where the target employed bodyguards. I didn’t tell her this.

‘There was nothing random about the hit. The killer had prior information about the cyclist’s movements. Odds on, he knew that the cyclist was touring the New Forest.’

McCallen’s eyes danced with interest. ‘What makes you say the New Forest?’

‘Ponies and donkeys.’

She didn’t say yes or no, just tilted her chin.

I explained my theory, then said, ‘The pattern of shell casings provides the clincher. The killer thought he’d done the business and then Mrs Banker and her lover show up. No witnesses equals no loose ends.’

‘Collateral damage?’

‘Rules of the game. If you’re good at the job you shouldn’t need to indulge in it.’

‘What about you?’ A sudden frosty note etched her voice.

‘I was good at the job.’ We’d hit rocky ground so I decided to change direction. ‘Who was he?’

‘A German tourist.’

‘Does he have a name?’

‘Lars Pallenberg.’

‘So what’s his story?’

‘He was a tourist who happened to be an artist.’

‘An artist, or asset?’ My expression was neutral. McCallen’s answer might explain why she’d come to me and nobody else. Her kissable lips parted very slightly. Only someone familiar with her could divine that McCallen’s first instinct to lie was rapidly substituted by the truth.

‘Both. I was his handler.’

‘Tough for you.’ No intelligence officer liked having an asset bumped off. Unfortunately, it was an occupational hazard. Recruit, use and let go, Reuben my mentor, once told me. ‘But there’s nothing you can do about it. You simply disavow, pretend he never existed and walk away.’

‘He was also a friend.’

The warmth in her eyes made me feel as if I had something cold and wet and slippery crawling through my intestines. I didn’t ask the obvious question.

CHAPTER THREE

‘It’s not what you think.’

‘You have no idea what I think.’ How could she possibly know? ‘Your relationships are nothing to do with me.’

She paused, cleared her throat. ‘What I mean –’

‘You allowed yourself to be compromised.’

She fixed me with a blizzard of green. ‘The association was finished before you and I met.’

‘Makes no difference to me.’ For a woman who’d once implied that there could never be anything between us, I thought she was labouring a point. But then that was a woman’s prerogative. ‘But you’re going to have to help me out. Why are you discounting the obvious? Lars got made and paid the ultimate price.’

‘Maybe.’

From McCallen’s monosyllabic answers, I got the impression that she was holding back. I looked at her hard. If she wanted me to help her, she’d have to trust me and tell me what the hell was going on. ‘Was he vetted?’

‘No.’

‘You kept him secret from MI5?’ I was fairly incredulous.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I love the way you lie.’

She flinched, but didn’t elaborate.

‘Were you careful? Could you have been seen?’ I’d always thought McCallen crazy, but there usually seemed to be an internal logic to her actions. Mixing business with pleasure, if that’s what she’d done, was as dumb as it gets. She’d exposed him to danger and herself to blackmail with all types of criminal permutations in between.

‘Possible, but unlikely.’

I thought about it. As an intelligence officer, McCallen could be on any number of bad guys’ radar. That meant whoever was seen with her was also at potential risk. But then she already knew the score in that regard. She was the expert. I was merely an educated outsider.

‘Are the police doing their job properly?’

‘Yes.’

‘Examining relationships and connections?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Her eyes met mine once more.

‘Which could lead straight back to you.’ And when the truth was out, her job would be on the line. Now I got it.

‘Precisely.’

‘Presumably you covered your tracks, gave Lars assumed code name.’

She swallowed and nodded. ‘The police are concentrating their efforts on the couple, which buys me a little time.’

‘Why the focus on the couple?’

‘Griffiths-Jones had a large sum of money that can’t be accounted for deposited in a private Swiss bank account.’

Hence her lie regarding the money trail. ‘Fiddling the books?’

‘That’s my take.’

‘White noise,’ I said. ‘Tell me about Lars.’

‘A German national who split his time between London and Berlin.’

‘So not a tourist at all.’ I was surprised how easy it was to catch McCallen in another lie. Signalled she was under considerable pressure. Typically, she went all pedantic on me. ‘He was touring the New Forest at the time of his death.’

‘Why recruit him?’ An artist didn’t strike me as typical spy material. It had to be down to a connection, the company he kept. I didn’t expect her to reveal operational details and, true to form, she chose her words with care. ‘Let’s say that the UK has seen a rise in right-wing militants. A certain group has energetic links with neo-Nazis in Germany. The latest breed are drawn from all sorts of disparate cliques: the disillusioned and unemployed, flat-earthers, anti-Muslim, anti-capitalist, anti-nuclear, anti-globalisation, animal rights activists, most without clear political aims.’

‘Rent-a-mob,’ I pitched in.

‘We’re talking the extreme end of the spectrum.’

‘And Lars, where does he fit?’

‘Thanks to an old art school friend, he had an in to a particular group of anarchists in Berlin who have heavy connections here.’

‘Then look no further. There’s your answer. He was bumped off because he got rumbled, either by his contacts in the UK or those in Germany.’

McCallen shook her head. ‘Lars had bailed months before. There was no reason to kill him.’

I didn’t like to point out that I’d killed men for weaker reasons. When a seriously bad guy got an idea in his head that someone was for the chop, there wasn’t much that could be done to dissuade him.

‘You said the association was over and that he’d extracted himself from his buddies, so what was Lars doing in Hampshire eight months ago?’

She viewed me with instant suspicion. ‘How the hell do you know the timing?’

‘Don’t be so damn suspicious.’ I indicated the aerial shot. ‘I’m good with trees. If you want a nature lesson, I’m happy to give it,’ I said, arch. Actually, the countryside had never done it for me, but my grandfather ensured that my Gloucestershire roots were not wasted. In later life, it had proved useful.

She looked at me a second longer than was comfortable. I’d often thought that talking to McCallen was like throwing jelly at the wall and seeing if it would stick. ‘I genuinely don’t know why he was in the New Forest,’ she said. She looked quite unhappy. However, this time, I reckoned she was being straight with me.

‘When did you last see him?’

‘End of January, and once briefly two months before his death.’

‘Any particular reason?’

‘No,’ she said, slow-eyed.

‘No subsequent contact?’

‘A couple of phone calls.’

‘When?’

‘March.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘The weather.’ She looked ticked off.

‘Fine, don’t tell me.’

Her expression told me that on this we were in agreement. ‘Nothing you need to know,’ she added.

‘Maybe Lars wasn’t what he seemed.’

‘That’s what I’m beginning to think.’

The penny didn’t drop; two-pound coins rained down on my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘If you’ve allowed yourself to be compromised, that’s your lookout. No way in hell am I going to get involved, investigate, or anything else.’

‘I can’t go to Berlin, but you could.’

‘Which bit of my answer don’t you understand? And aren’t you forgetting something? One step outside the United Kingdom and a Mossad hit team will be snapping at my heels.’ The shout lines of my last job boxed my ears. With McCallen’s help, I’d foiled a plot to sell an ethnically specific biological weapon to an extreme fundamental terrorist group, and had killed one of my old clients, Billy Squeeze, in the process. During the fallout, it had emerged that Mossad was out to get me for an unspecified crime. I’d never properly worked it out. I might have jeopardised one of their operations by taking out a player. I might have unwittingly killed one of their informers. Whatever the detail, they’d only called their dogs off because I’d removed Billy, a man on their hit list, but I knew that it was only a temporary reprieve.

McCallen responded by doing what she does best – she threw me a curve ball. ‘What if Pallenberg was killed to get to me?’

I blinked. Was this the part of the story she hadn’t told me? I knew that there had to be another reason and my curiosity and lust for excitement meant that I was a millimetre from being dragged into her web. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘Threats.’

This was my cue to ask her to spill all. If she did, then I’d be done for. She threw me a look that could best be described as ravishingly doomed. My jaw clicked because all I really wanted to do was sweep her into my arms and tell her that I’d help in any way I could.

‘Not my problem,’ I said.

She stood up. ‘You know how to get hold of me if you change your mind.’

‘I’m not going to change my mind.’

She gave a knowing smile and left.

CHAPTER FOUR

The next morning I passed on the gym, stayed in bed longer than usual and wondered if the activities of the night before had been a dream. McCallen’s anarchic reappearance had awoken long-dead emotions and knocked me off balance. Made me consider what the German had that I didn’t. I let out a sigh and pressed my head deeper into the pillows in a futile effort to evade the simple truth. Lars Pallenberg had not spent fifteen years of his sorry existence knocking people off.

She had nerve, I was forced to give her that. And she knew how to get to me, the ‘personal threat’ argument a blinder.

I finally dislodged myself from my cosy pity, got up, showered and shaved and stared at my reflection. You’re looking good. More rested, McCallen had remarked. My normally cropped dark hair could do with a cut. The rest of me appeared much the same: blue eyes, wide nose, high Slavic cheekbones, but I got what she meant. I’d lost the hunted look.

I dressed in a pair of jeans, open-neck shirt and sweater, black loafers. Standing in the kitchen, eating a solitary piece of toast, I looked around me. I hadn’t really got the hang of homemaking. I had all the right kit, furniture in the rooms, plantation shutters on the windows, yet the deliberate absence of personal touches, anything that could betray my true identity, gave it a slightly sterile air. Occasionally I’d buy flowers – freesias, my mother’s favourite – but that was about as far as my interior design went.

I gazed out of the window at a grey, wet January day that was already dark before it got going. Miserable summed it up and it reflected my mood. I might have committed to a home and car and gainful employment, but I had nobody with whom to share my life because I could never reveal my past. McCallen was the only woman who knew me well, understood the way I ticked, and McCallen was off-limits and unattainable. I was the equivalent of a city after a bomb has been dropped on it – ruined and empty.

With no particular place to be that morning, I pulled on a leather jacket and let myself out onto a street of terraced houses. Collar up, I walked with a brisk step past the watchmaker’s, nodding good morning to the guy inside, and round the corner to a short row of shops, my destination the newsagents. Perhaps McCallen had a point, I reasoned, as I picked up copies of the local newspaper and a couple of broadsheets with my standard pint of milk. I couldn’t keep running away from the world now that I’d made a conscious decision to reclaim it. With a particular eye for any development opportunities, I did a quick browse of the window of an estate agent. Nothing grabbing me, I went back home and soon had a mug of fresh coffee and newspapers spread out at the breakfast bar like recently received gifts.

Confronted by the usual suspects: war, economic woes, the Eurozone crisis and failures in various institutions, little seemed to have changed since I’d tuned in last. Marginally bored and about to flick to the business section, a face suddenly stared out that made me skid to attention.

Smoothing out the page, I looked into the dark, heartless eyes of the man I’d known as The Surgeon, the soubriquet earned because Chester Phipps was as physically strong as an orthopaedic surgeon and as skilled at exploring human anatomy in spite of his skinny physique. It was a good picture, one of which he’d have been proud had he been alive to see it. Taken a couple of years ago, it showed him wearing an elegant navy pin-striped suit, shirt loosely open at the neck. He was seated, cigarette rakishly held between his thin fingers, legs louchely crossed, his grizzled, moustachioed features gathered tightly beneath a mane of long grey hair. Staring directly at the camera, thin and intense, he could have been an art connoisseur rather than a crime lord whose interests included, to quote the man himself, ‘cocaine, crack and cunts’. A headline accompanied the photograph: ‘New Killing as Turf War Escalates’.

Phipps had exited the way most bosses meet their maker, his death part of the unseemly scrabble for power in the wake of the vacuum left by Billy Squeeze, a man who once retained a formidable hold on the drugs trade, a man whose ambitions had extended to genocide, a man who had done his best to stitch me up. While alive, Billy’s vicious reputation ensured that nobody dared to piss on his patch or cross him, making the ensuing jockeying for power and subsequent all-out war inevitable. I’d witnessed the destructive power of fear at close quarters. Uncertainty spawns violence. Loose associations, once tolerated, shatter into a maelstrom of killing until a new natural order is established. But The Surgeon’s death had me troubled for two reasons: I’d killed Billy, and Phipps had pointed me in the right direction to enable me to carry it out.

The phone saved me from further brooding. I looked at the number and groaned.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Is that Joe?’

I scratched my head. ‘Yes, Dan, it’s Joe.’

‘We’ve got a problem. The toilet’s blocked.’

‘Again?’

‘The toilet’s blocked.’

‘No, you dope, I meant not again.’

‘Erm … yeah. We’ve tried to sort it, but –’

‘Don’t touch anything. I’ll be round in ten.’

I took my shit-busting kit from the garden shed and walked out of the rear gate to where I parked my Z4. Having never owned a vehicle before – cars were a perk that usually wound up crushed or destroyed – it represented one of the pleasurable upsides of going straight. Opening the boot, I threw in a beast of a plunger, a drain snake, thick rubber gloves and a pair of waterproof trousers and Wellingtons. I couldn’t help but grimly observe that clearing up other people’s shit, of one kind or another, was a constant refrain in my life.

My student let was in St Paul’s, close to the university. As this was my third visit in as many months, I was beginning to realise that renting out property to three young men was a ridiculous idea. They had no sense of hygiene, cleanliness or financial responsibility. Without a parent in tow, they reverted to the behaviour of toddlers. Both species were messy and had a habit of staying up half the night, Dan, the eldest of the trio, being a typical specimen. Likeable, smart and easy-going, he was also an accomplished liar. The rent money was never quite available or where it should be – in my bank account – and yet he always had an entirely plausible reason for delay. I’d once facetiously suggested to him that he would make a good addition to the security services.

As soon as Dan opened the door, I was assailed by the heavy aroma of curry and body odour. Upstairs had its own peculiarly vile tang.

‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ Dan said, as I squeezed into the narrow hall and manoeuvred my paraphernalia past a bike with a puncture in the rear wheel, a skateboard and a full-size supermarket shopping trolley. The open door to the lounge revealed upended furniture. I gingerly peeked inside and saw that one curtain was seemingly held in place by fresh air, the other lying in an exhausted heap on the floor. Carpet and every available surface lay coated in empty cans of lager, cheap cider and overflowing ashtrays. I grunted disapproval and made the mistake of walking into the kitchen.

‘Jesus, when did you last wash up?’

Dan peered through a curtain of dark hair and stroked a fledgling attempt at a beard. ‘I was about to start on it.’

‘And the rubbish?’ I stared out of the window onto a vista of bulging and split bin liners. ‘We have fortnightly bin collections,’ I added, piercing Dan with a look that used to reduce grown men to tears.

Dan beamed and idly scratched his rear in the region where the top of his boxers conspired with his jeans. ‘No stress, Joe. Take a chill pill. Jack and Gonzo are loading all the shit up and taking it to Kingsditch later.’ Kingsditch was the recycling centre.

‘How? On the bus?’

‘Gonzo’s mum is driving down for a few days. She’ll do it.’

I didn’t bother to ask whether or not Gonzo’s mother had been warned of the treat that lay in store on her arrival. I had a feeling that this was another product of Dan’s ripe imagination. Last time they’d vacated for the holidays, I’d removed twenty-four bags of rubbish from the yard and six from an upstairs bedroom. Students.

Dan loped upstairs behind me and hovered on the landing as I pulled on my shit-clearing gear. ‘It’s been a bit iffy for a couple of days,’ he said. ‘Then it overflowed.’

I said nothing. I was busy trying to prevent my gag reflex from going into overdrive. The bathroom floor was covered with filthy water, loo roll and stools the size of elephant shit. Iffy for a couple of days was code for a week. It also told me something else. Nobody could have taken a bath or shower in that time.

‘Where’s Gonzo and Jack?’ I snapped as I waded in.

‘In bed.’

‘Get them up.’

The note of warning in my voice had the required effect. Startled, Dan disappeared as I pushed a plunger into the toilet bowl and created a seal. Working it gently up and down to start with, I then tried a more vigorous approach, pushing the plunger and letting it suck back up in a monumental effort to dislodge whatever was causing the obstruction.

Two sets of sleepy eyes appeared at the doorway, a general fug of unwashed youth melding with the odour of faeces. Nice.

‘Man,’ Jack said, lazily scratching an armpit. Gonzo didn’t say a word, just stood slack-jawed, as though an alien had appeared in his midst.

‘Go to the kitchen,’ I said. ‘Fill up a bucket of hot water and put two parts disinfectant in it. Bring it back with a mop. Either of you own a pair of flip-flops?’ Of course they did. Teenage boys spent their entire lives in them even when it was snowing.

‘Yeah. And?’

Gonzo’s upward inflexion and dismissive delivery suggested that he thought me cracked. I fixed him with a particularly menacing expression from my repertoire. ‘Get them.’

Both lads gawped at each other and shambled off. I continued working the plunger. Nothing budged. Time for the snake.

Dan had reappeared at the doorway and I asked him to pass me the drain snake, a wire coil with a corkscrew tip. On a previous occasion, I’d used a wire coat hanger and dislodged a hairbrush. If the snake failed, I’d have to remove the toilet, not something I was keen to do.

Feeding the snake into the opening, I wiggled it around the S-bend, the place where most blockages occur. Sure enough, and with a sense of eureka, I bumped up against something spongy, like a cushion or piece of foam rubber. Twisting the coil, I drilled in, gained purchase and yanked, the accompanying sound of water draining assuring me I’d literally hit pay dirt.

A plunge bra with enough padding to guarantee the appearance of a 38DD clung to the end of the snake. ‘Yours?’ I said, looking at all three youths.