The Kill Zone (40 page)
Authors: Chris Ryan
It was late in the afternoon when the relentless sand gave way to a smattering of buildings, the total absence of life to the occasional black-clothed Bedouin and their thin, filthy-looking livestock. Khan knew that these buildings must indicate the outskirts of Dakhla: this country was so sparsely populated that you were only likely to come across settlements on the edges of what passed as cities. They would not be travelling, however, into the city itself. Khan had no business there. Instead, their tedious, uncomfortable road took them to the airport on the edges of the city – a busier place than the strips he had been used to over the last twenty-four hours, but still a poor shadow of the major hubs of the First World.
The airport was made up of a number of modern concrete blocks surrounded by a perimeter road that was newly tarmacked. There were lorries driving up and down, and the occasional rundown white minibus full of passengers that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any African city. By the side of this road was a hotel. This too was made of concrete. Two palm trees had been planted outside, perhaps in an attempt to make it look a little more welcoming. The driver parked outside, then escorted Khan into the hotel where the reception was cavernous and entirely empty apart from the receptionist. Khan’s driver spoke to this man, who glanced with suspicion at Khan and his dirty, blood-spattered dishdasha, but immediately handed over a key. Moments later they were walking into a first-floor room that overlooked an aircraft hangar and was, by any standards, basic.
‘Wait outside,’ Khan told the driver.
Once he was alone in the room, he unpacked his bag and checked the contents. Everything he needed was there. Khan removed his stained dishdasha, then stepped underneath the weak trickle of the shower in the adjoining room. Once he had cleansed himself of the blood, sweat and dirt that covered his body, he stood in front of the mirror and rubbed shaving foam into his neat beard. It felt strange to hold a razor and know that he was about to remove the beard that had covered his face since he was old enough to grow one, but that was precisely what he did, scraping away the whiskers in short, determined strokes.
Once he had removed the beard, he returned to the bedroom, leaving his round spectacles by the sink. He wouldn’t be needing those any more. He dried his naked body, then started to get dressed – not back into his dirty
dishdasha
, but into the new jeans, T-shirt and trainers that had been in the bag.
dishdasha
, but into the new jeans, T-shirt and trainers that had been in the bag.
His transformation was complete. There was no need for him to look in the mirror. With no beard, no glasses and new clothes, he knew he would be unrecognisable.
A mobile phone lay on the bed. He picked it up and dialled a number he knew by heart: the commander of a small cell in London who was ready to do anything Khan needed.
‘It is me,’ he said when the call was answered.
No reply.
‘All is going well,’ he said. ‘But I must ask you to do something. There is a man called Jack Harker. Find out who he is and where he lives. Watch his house. Watch the airports. And when – if – he returns home, eliminate him. If there is a woman with him, kill her too. The same goes for Caroline Stenton, should she return.’
There was no acknowledgement, but Khan wasn’t expecting one. He threw the handset back on the bed, then picked up the final item he had unpacked. A passport – not British, but German, in the fake name of Arif Samaha. Not even a forgery; it had been newly issued by the German passport office and would allow him free travel from Western Sahara into Morocco.
And from Morocco, it was just a short flight back into Heathrow.
To all intents and purposes, he had left Habib Khan back in Somalia, hidden in the backwaters, negotiating with so-called terrorists. ‘Arif Samaha’, on the other hand, had other plans. He would be safely in the UK by the following day.
22
A pall of thin drizzle hung over Belfast. Fat Betty wiped a clammy rag over the surface of the bar, which didn’t so much clean it as redistribute the grease. A few old men huddled in the dark corners of the pub, nursing pints that had already lasted them most of the afternoon.
The door opened and a man entered. He was young – mid-twenties, probably – and lanky. He had loosened his tie a couple of inches, and had the collar of his jacket pulled up over his head to protect him from the rain. Once inside, he pulled the jacket back down, looked around the gloomy pub, then approached the bar.
Fat Betty pretended not to notice him and continued wiping.
‘Cormac in?’ the young man asked.
Fat Betty stopped wiping and gave him a jowly stare. ‘Tell you what, sunshine. Why don’t you take your pretty little arse and fuck off out of it.’
Wipe wipe.
The young man took a seat. ‘You see now,’ he said, ‘I could do that, sure I could. But then you’d have to tell him you sent me away, and I really don’t think he’d be very pleased with that.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Danny,’ the young man said.
A look of suspicion fell over Betty’s face. ‘Danny, hey?’
‘You’ve heard of me. I’m flattered.’
‘Don’t be, sunshine. In my book, there’s only one thing worse than a copper, and that’s a bent copper.’
She turned her back on him and disappeared into the room behind the bar. Moments later she returned and lifted up the bar flap. She didn’t speak; she just gave him a curt nod to indicate he should go through.
‘There’s nothing quite like service with a smile,’ Danny murmured as he squeezed past. ‘It warms the heart on a day like this.’
Cormac O’Callaghan sat where he always sat. He gazed at the policeman as he entered. There were no greetings. No pleasantries. ‘You’re an expensive man to have on the books, young Danny,’ he said. ‘And I’ve not heard from you for what, two weeks? I’ve been beginning to wonder if you’re really worth the money.’
Danny shrugged. ‘I can’t just wander down here any time of the day, you know. And what with your aversion to the telephone—’
‘Why don’t you just sit down and tell me what you’ve got for me.’
Danny took a seat opposite O’Callaghan. ‘Let’s just say,’ the policeman noted, ‘that you don’t have a whole lot to worry about in the Belfast police department.’
O’Callaghan remained expressionless. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just what I say.’ Danny looked around. ‘Any chance of a drink round here. It’s a pub, isn’t it?’
O’Callaghan gave him a bleak look, and Danny didn’t push it. ‘Whatever,’ he murmured. ‘You’ve got one less of us to worry about, anyway.’
‘I don’t like talking in riddles, young Danny.’ His words were mild, his tone wasn’t, and Danny was prudent enough to pick up on it.
‘Four days ago,’ he said. ‘Colleague by the name of Siobhan Byrne got suspended. Saw her with my own eyes having a ding-dong with the DCI.’
‘Police officers come and go,’ O’Callaghan said. ‘What’s this got to do with me?’
‘Well, according to my mate Frank – Frank Maloney, he’s my partner you know, old-timer, bit of a lush but knows what’s going on in the department – she was given the old heave-ho for spending too much time sniffing around you.’ Danny grinned. ‘You’re off limits, it seems. No realistic hope of a conviction. The word from on high is that we have to bludgeon the dealers at street level – make our arrest rates look rosy. What is it, man? You don’t exactly look overjoyed now.’
Danny was right. O’Callaghan’s face remained hard. ‘What did you say this girl’s name was?’
‘Siobhan Byrne.’ He slipped his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a few crumpled sheets of paper, which he handed to O’Callaghan. ‘Frank told me she used to be with the Det. Doesn’t really mean fuck all to me, but then he’s more your generation, if you know what I mean.’
O’Callaghan did. Very well.
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ Danny said sarcastically, then immediately regretted it.
The older man didn’t reply. Danny shrugged, stood up and left the room.
Cormac sat perfectly still, his fingers pressed together as though in prayer. He closed his eyes and thought. That wet-behind-the-ears copper might not be impressed that his suspended colleague was an alumnus of 14 Company, but O’Callaghan was minded to take it more seriously. He’d had enough run-ins with those bastards during the Troubles to know that he’d be stupid not to take them seriously. The police – the ones like Danny – were idiots, everyone knew that. But the Det? No. If one of their number was on to him, it was cause for concern, not least because he knew their tactics: surveillance and informants. There was nothing they liked better than a tout. O’Callaghan was mistrustful by nature, but he knew that if a former Det officer was on the scene, he needed to play his cards even closer to his chest, to find out just what she had on him. And he needed to do it himself.
O’Callaghan studied the pieces of paper Danny had given him. There was a grainy picture of Byrne, and a brief CV that made no mention of her time in 14 Company. There was also an address. O’Callaghan memorised it, then threw the sheets back down on the table.
And then he stood up.
Fat Betty looked surprised when he emerged behind the bar. ‘I’ll be going out now, Betty,’ he said and her surprise only increased. This was an unexpected occurrence.
‘When will you be back?’ she asked.
Cormac shrugged. ‘I don’t rightly know, Betty,’ he said. ‘I don’t rightly know.’
An hour later he was standing by the River Lagan, outside Siobhan Byrne’s apartment block, looking up. An old woman with a shopping trolley stood nearby, staring at him as she listened to the crackling sounds coming from a radio set. O’Callaghan ignored her and stepped towards the entrance of the block. There was a vast set of intercom buttons. He pressed the one marked with Byrne’s flat number and waited for a reply. None came.
He moved round to the back of the block. There were stairs here, tall metal ones. O’Callaghan counted the floors as he climbed them, stopping every minute or so to catch his breath. He was wheezing heavily by the time he got to the tenth floor, where he pressed himself against the wall to catch his breath. As he stood there, looking along the balcony that stretched past the windows of the flats on this floor, he noticed that one of them was broken open. He hurried over to it and looked inside.
There were no lights on, and rain had seeped into the kitchen. It looked to him like the window had been broken for some time and nobody had thought to fix it up. Still, it saved him a job, and he squeezed through the opening with difficulty – his joints were not supple, and he scratched the back of his hand on a jagged piece of glass. Then he moved swiftly through the flat and bolted the front door from the inside.
Once secure, he started to look around carefully. It was Siobhan Byrne’s flat all right – he could tell by a framed photograph of her with some man and a young girl – and it had all the signs of having been left in a hurry. The broken window was more of a mystery. The place didn’t look like it had been burgled, and Cormac did what he could not to leave any hint of his own presence as he meticulously started going through the owner’s effects.
An hour passed. Two. O’Callaghan remained patient as he looked through the drawers in her bedroom and the cupboards in her kitchen. He looked under the bed and behind the sofa. He even opened up the laptop on the coffee table, but those machines were too modern for him. He considered taking it to see if it contained any information that might be useful.
He was almost ready to give up and leave when he saw it: a small scrap of paper crumpled up on the floor. He picked it up and unfolded it. The address scrawled on the piece of paper was familiar, of course, but it was not that which filled his blood with a sudden chill; it was the fact that it was in his own handwriting.
He remembered writing it, of course. And he remembered whom he had given it to.
O’Callaghan shut his eyes. It was always the way. You looked all around for the disloyal and untrustworthy, and they were right under your nose all the time.
He put the scrap of paper in his pocket, left the flat, then crossed the city to the location of the lock-up. It was dark and deserted here, as always, and he used one of the many keys on his keyring to unlock it. A quick search of the cache revealed all he needed to know. The weapons were all there and intact. But the money was light. About £4,000 light. There was only one person who knew about this cache. Either he had stolen money from it, or he had given its location up to the police, or both.
Cormac O’Callaghan left the cache and locked up behind him. There was no doubt about where he needed to go next.
It had been a pleasant afternoon. Kieran had taken little Jackie, his four-year-old boy, to the Dunville playground where he’d had fun on the swings and screamed down the slide. When it started to rain, Kieran had taken him to McDonald’s in Donegall Place for a Happy Meal – his favourite treat. And now, back home, Janice was giving Jackie a bath while Kieran sat in front of
The Weakest Link
, a whiskey in his hand, his pouch of baccy by his side and his feet up on the coffee table. He had just taken his final swig and was preparing to roll another tab when the doorbell rang.
The Weakest Link
, a whiskey in his hand, his pouch of baccy by his side and his feet up on the coffee table. He had just taken his final swig and was preparing to roll another tab when the doorbell rang.
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