State of Honour (28 page)

Proctor flung open the door to the makeshift cell and saw the secretary lying asleep on the bed. He cracked his knuckles loudly. Startled, he saw her eyes flick open, her mouth drawing a sharp breath. But he couldn’t tell now whether she was afraid or curious.

“Time for the game to begin, missus,” he said, grinning.

“What game?”

“Come on, now, you’re an American. There’s only one game you know. Winner takes all.”

As he moved towards her, he saw her flinch. She had a right to, he thought. By the time he’d finished with her, she’d be wishing she were still drugged in a coffin. She raised a hand as he reached her. A half-hearted if defiant act. He grabbed her fingers, snapping them back. He registered the tears forming in her eyes with satisfaction.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she breathed.

“Because I can,” he replied. He clenched a massive fist. “If you relax, it won’t hurt as bad. If you fight it, I’ll get mad and hit harder.”

He saw a blur and felt the fingernails of her free hand rake across his neck, drawing blood.

Grabbing her wrist and pulling it down, he said, “You just made a big mistake.”

Knowing what was to come, he wanted to eradicate any spark of resistance and make her as docile as a lamb. Her last reaction had just confirmed that that was necessary.

The security gate was wrought-iron and about four metres high, with a length of concertina razor-wire fastened along the top. The wire looked brand-new and Tom guessed that it’d been put in place by Proctor and his men, rather than being a permanent feature. Either side of the gate was a high wall, stone-built and encrusted with dull-green lichen. A few beech trees grew above it, their trunks rising from a grassy verge, which eased down to a flint-ridden pathway, but the branches had been cut back so that they didn’t overhang. Beyond the gate, an acre of well-maintained lawns was bisected by a pink-gravel roadway, which led up to the façade of the chateau. The chateau was three storeys high, built in the neo-classical style, with four pillars flanking the arched entranceway.

Two men stood in front of the gate dressed in woollen overcoats. Their hair was cropped, and they had granite faces like bouncers. They carried two-way radios. They chatted to one another and paced about to relieve the boredom.

“They’ll be concealing more than handguns under those coats,” Lester whispered.

Tom nodded.

They lay enveloped in bracken on the other side of the lane that ran past the gate parallel to the wall. Their faces were streaked with camouflage paint. Tom held a field-scope, Lester his suppressed Marine sniper rifle resting on a bi-pod.

“I can make out one CCTV camera,” Tom said, lowering the glass. “Likely to be more.”

The cloud was high, the sky still completely overcast, which was perfect weather as far as Tom was concerned. There was no danger of the lasers that Karen would use glinting in sunlight, which could alert the guards on the gate. He checked the time. They had twenty minutes to get in and rescue the secretary before the deadline, if what the Frenchman had said was true, although Tom didn’t have any good reason to doubt him.

He tapped Lester on the shoulder. “Time for your kickass weapons, buddy.”

They snaked backwards, using their elbows and knees, slow enough not to cause more than the slightest ripple in the undergrowth, although the cool breeze was adding a welcomed dimension to masking their movement. Once they were a few metres from the vantage point, they flipped over and low-crawled another twenty before straightening up in a small clearing beside a brown-coloured stream. Karen was kneeling there, an MI6 carbine fixed with the dazzler in her hands. The two cases with the rest of the equipment that Lester had shown her how to work at the airfield were placed either side of her, her backpack on her back. She wore a camouflage windbreaker and military boots.

Tom tucked the scope into his webbed belt and Lester bagged his rifle before lowering it onto the grass. Tom lifted out the tubes of the large sensor from its case and eased them into his green backpack. Lester took the sound system. As Karen raised herself up Tom and Lester picked up the Frenchmen’s MP7s with flash suppressors and, after checking the magazines, slung them over their shoulders. Lester handed Karen a Browning M1911 semi-auto, the stand-issue handgun of the US Marine Corps Special Operations Command.

“You only got seven rounds, but they’re .45 cartridges,” he said. “So if you meet a smart grizzly in the woods, he ain’t gonna wanna mix it with ya.”

Karen nodded.

“We take out the ugly twins on the gate, Tom, that’ll be six shooters left and the tech.”

Tom glanced over at him. His friend’s eyes were on fire.

Using bracken and ferns as cover, Tom watched Karen scanning the wall along its visible length with the long anti-sensor laser. She signalled that she’d picked up two glints from the lenses of CCTV cameras hidden in the vicinity, in addition to the one that Tom had already located. She switched the military laser off before the cameras were disabled prematurely.

“They’re pointing away from the guards,” she whispered, “covering the wall.”

“Guards first, then,” Tom said. “I’ll go left.”

Tom took out a coiled, knotted rope with a hook at one end and hung it from his belt. He nodded to Karen, who pointed the M16 towards the guards on the gate. She hit both of their faces in quick succession with the disabling light.

Tom and Lester sprang up and ran forward. The two men, who’d been blinded temporarily, raised their hands to their eyes before reeling around like drunks. As Tom and Lester reached them, they knocked both of them out with quick sharp blows from the butt stocks of the MP7s, hitting them on the sides of their jaws. After they’d dropped, they secured them with flex-cuffs and gagged them before dragging them over to the nearest tree.

The gate was locked by a central control system and couldn’t be scaled due to the razor-wire. Tom checked for signs of life, but there weren’t any. He jogged over to the wall, signalled to Karen, who activated the probe, which automatically switched to a high-energy laser and overloaded the cameras, disabling them.

He didn’t know what level of security the chateau had or had been added to by the tech. There could be infrared detectors or geophones, which monitored vibrations on the ground. There could be hidden microphones or cameras designed to look like flowerpots or rocks. But he just hoped that if they set something off before they reached the chateau proper, the tech would take them for guards. That was the plan. It didn’t matter what the windows, doors or interior were protected by – pressure mats, broken-glass detectors and the like – since they’d planned to assault the building head-on.

Tom swung the knotted rope hook first over the wall. Once secured, he began scaling it, pushing his body out and taking the strain with his legs. His hands worked mechanically, the odd jutting-out stone assisting his progress. At the top, he lay flat and pulled the rope up before fixing the hook to the front of the wall and letting the rope fall to the far side. He rappelled swiftly down, crouching on the damp soil a metre or so from clumps of light-yellow peony bushes. He took the field-scope from his belt and checked the front of the chateau. It was clear. He wrapped the rope in an oval around his hand and elbow and, tucking the sharp hook into the middle of the coil, swung it over the wall in a wide arc for Lester. He heard a dull thud as it landed on the grass verge on the other side. Waited.

He saw Lester emerge on top a minute or so later, the sound system filling his backpack, such that his friend looked as if he’d grown a shell. After repeating the manoeuvre with the rope, he crouched beside Tom and slid the MP7’s extended butt into his shoulder, aligning his eye with the holographic sight.

“It’s quiet,” he said.

Yeah, like a graveyard, Tom thought.

Karen appeared and rappelled down, leaving the rope dangling from the wall. Tom just hoped they wouldn’t have to use it to escape the place if everything went wrong.

Karen crouched down beside Lester, who took out the sound system and placed it next to her. She would wait for Tom and Lester to reach the chateau, then run up to join them.

“We’re gonna stroll up there like we own the place,” Tom said, handing Lester a wet-wipe before taking out one for himself.

They scrubbed their faces clean of camouflage paint. Lester took out a black ball cap and pulled it down low so that it was no more than three centimetres from his nose. He squeezed out a line of pale foundation cream from a tube, using it to buff his face into something that could be taken for Caucasian, at least from a distance.

Karen took the initiative, using the laser to knock out two security cameras, which, she said, were perched above the eaves of the roof.

With that, Tom and Lester walked casually towards the chateau along the gravel path, still dressed in the black fatigues of the men Lester had shot at the rest stop.

They got about halfway up before a man wearing eyeglasses, jeans and a sweater emerged from a side entrance. Tom took him for the tech, since he wasn’t carrying a weapon. He figured he was checking to see what the problem was after the cameras had malfunctioned. He called out, and Tom and Lester waved. Before he had a chance to register that something wasn’t right, Lester raised his suppressed MP7 and sprayed him with a burst, bringing the gun up in an arc, the rounds cutting into him from waist to shoulder. The man flipped backward and lay splayed on the grey pavestones to the left of the chateau’s decorative façade.

They sprinted the remaining twenty metres or so to the right of the chateau’s main entrance, crouching down in the narrow portico. Tom waved Karen forward.

Proctor sat at an oak desk in front of a flat computer screen, slicing an apple with his Ka-Bar knife. Sixteen centimetres of stainless steel with a serrated edge. The windowless room on the ground floor was a library stacked with musty-smelling books, the high ceiling edged with moulded-plaster cornices.

He glanced at his knuckles. They were a dull red and ached a little. Although he’d worked over the US Secretary of State, something that he’d found strangely empowering, he was thinking that he’d never killed a woman before, let alone at close quarters. He was a sniper, and snipers picked their targets with precision. From a distance. Beheading a woman was something else. He consoled himself by deciding that no one would see the expression on his masked face as the blade sliced through her neck, despite the otherwise macabre theatricality of the spectacle.

A French guard burst in. A pinched-lipped guy with a thin face and a long nose whom Proctor had secretly nicknamed, “The Shrew”.

“What’s wrong with your radio?” he asked.

Proctor put down the Ka-Bar and picked up the PTT radio on the desk, pushed the activation button. “Shit, it’s flat.”

“We have a problem,” The Shrew said.

“What is it?”

“Intruders. Armed.”

“Police?”

“Unlikely. Just two men and a woman. But they’ve killed Jacques already and taken out the CCTV cameras.”

“Alert the others. I’ll be out in a second,” Proctor said.

The Shrew darted out, a worried look on his ashen face.

Proctor took out his cell and phoned Swiss. After a couple of ringtones, he picked up.

“There’s an issue,” Proctor said.

“Tell me.”

“Two men and a woman with attitude problems.”

“So deal with them,” Swiss said. “Ring me as soon as it’s done. Don’t fuck it up.”

Proctor thumbed the red button, holstered his Slovakian K100 handgun fixed with a red-dot laser sight, stood up and walked from the room.

Lester placed the thirty-centimetre-by-six-centimetre adhesive strip of breaching charge over the lock of the chateau’s large oak-panelled door before inserting the delayed primary explosive devices. Karen moved up and crouched beside Tom. He could smell her hair, a slight waft of deodorant, too. It smelled good. When the door was blown off its severed hinges, she would hit the sonic sound system. She’d wait outside, covering the rear.

They all put in their earplugs, which Lester had supplied, and walked backwards, keeping their distance from the wall. Six shooters, Tom thought. It only took one to kill her. He figured their chances were less than fifty-fifty. But he’d known since he’d spoken to the Frenchman masquerading as a DCRI operative, and then Birch, that they were her only hope. French Special Forces wouldn’t get here in time. I’m doing the right thing, no matter what Birch and the suits on the Hill have waiting for me, he thought.

If I make it back.

The door was flung outwards, sending shards of wood into the air with the smoke as the shock wave careered down the wall. A split second later, they ran forward. Karen knelt and activated the system, the sound like a mixture of a high-pitched wail and a ship’s horn, causing the windows to rattle and ground to reverberate beneath them. Lester edged forward, using the stone archway as cover, and lobbed in a flash grenade. A couple of seconds after it had detonated, he and Tom rushed under the arch where the door had been. Inside, they hunkered down, covering either side of the flagstone vestibule as they moved forward, pointing their MP7s. Stopping just before the large entrance hall, Tom noted the knotted floorboards half-covered by a huge oriental rug, the high ceiling, and the wide wooden staircase leading to a carpeted gallery to the rear.

Once fully inside, he saw a man on his knees to his right, his hands on his ears, blood flowing from them. Lester ran over to him, his boot knocking him unconscious as it connected with his temple. Tom quickly secured his hands and feet with plasticuffs before picking up the man’s weapon and slinging it over his shoulder. Despite the plugs, his eardrums were pounding, the constant pulse of the sound system creating a disorientating rhythm, and he struggled to stay upright and move in a straight line. After seeing an archway leading to a corridor to the left, a flight of uneven stone steps to the right, Lester pointed up to the gallery, the back wall draped in a massive mural of a hunting scene. Two men had appeared from either side with MP7s, but they were moving them around awkwardly, their faces contorted in silent screams.

Tom and Lester bolted for cover towards the left-hand corridor, just as a swath of bullets hacked at the floorboards, sending splinters through the air like a volley of blow darts. They crouched down beside an oak grandfather clock, the gilded woodwork gleaming. Lester unclipped a stun grenade and reached out to throw it. As he let go of the grenade he spun around. His right arm hung limp. A random round had penetrated his bicep.

Tom dived out, falling into a forward roll. The two men were on their knees now, barely able to hold onto their weapons, although one got off a couple of rounds, which hit the lattice ironwork beneath the wooden banister rail, creating a flash of sparks.

Knowing he had just a few minutes to save the secretary, Tom took aim and fired two short bursts, saw them keel backwards.

Struggling up, he swayed back to Lester, who was propped up against the clock, his hand grasping his arm, the blood leaching out in ominous-looking streaks. Abruptly, the sound system stopped. Tom guessed it had malfunctioned. He fixed up Lester’s arm as best he could with a makeshift tourniquet, using a handkerchief he’d pulled from a pocket of the fatigues. They both took out their earplugs.

“That mother coulda used that,” Lester said, gritting his teeth.

“You wanna bleed out or get snot on your arm?”

“Well, you put it like that.” Lester pulled out his SIG. “But I ain’t done yet.”

Tom pushed Lester to the floor, covering him with his body, as two men came running up the corridor behind him.

“Tom?”

It was Karen’s voice. He heard her as she ran through the vestibule, the thud of her boots echoing as they hit the flagstones.

“Get down, Karen!” he shouted.

Covering Lester’s head with his forearms, he let off a burst from the sub-machine gun, hitting one of the men in the legs as the other ducked into an alcove. The man he’d hit cried out and buckled to the floor, his weapon falling out of reach.

“Jesus, Tom. Let me up,” Lester said.

Tom glanced around, saw the telltale red dot on Karen’s chest, emanating from an optical laser-beam sight. She was scanning the hallway with the Browning, but the man with the gun was obviously hidden.

“Karen!”

Lester heaved him off and aimed his SIG at the alcove. “Help her,” he said.