To Kill a Grey Man (8 page)

“In conclusion, it looks like we are in trouble.
 
I cannot find anything inside The Firm
that says this is official so we have an enemy or enemies staking us.
 
I assume
Mr
Sea is
the culprit with Sir Thomas backing him up.
 
Give me two more days to see if I can get the exact reasons for all this
work and then I will send in The Firm to sort this matter out.
 
Is that okay with you two?”

“Yes, no problem,” said Surge and Collins.

“In the meantime,” said The Grey Man.
 
“Let’s assume we are operational and protect ourselves
at all times.”
 
With that the phone went
dead.

Chapter 13

D- Day

The next morning The Grey Man woke from a fitful sleep to total
darkness.
 
He reached for the light
switch and clicked it on.
 
Nothing
happened.
 
A cold sweat swept over him.
 
In a panic
he
realized he was completely and utterly blind.
 
This was his worse fear, his room 101 torture.
 
Of all things, for him to go blind took away
all his skills, everything he had built up over his life.
 
He reached for the phone and had to orient
himself with the outside buttons to know which way up it was.
 
“How do you phone a number,”
he
thought, “When you have a smooth, touch keyboard?”

Slowly he started to control himself.
 
He still had his mind, his greatest tool.
 
He worked out the buttons for volume on the
right,
the main menu button was in the middle.
 
He pushed it.
 
He reasoned the icons would now be showing, he worked out roughly where
the phone icon would be and touched the screen.
 
Now he worked out where the phone numbers would be.
 
He had used this phone hundreds of times, he would
let the memory of it guide him.
 
He then
held his finger down on what he hoped was the number three.
 
This was the speed dial to The Firm.
 
He was relieved when he heard a familiar
voice at the end of the line.

Without any preamble he ordered a car to come as soon as possible to
his address and an urgent appointment with an eye doctor.

“Understood,” said the voice.
 
“I will call you back in five minutes.”

The Grey Man put down the phone and moved carefully round the room
banging into chairs.
 
He finally managed
to scramble into some clothes.

.
  
.
  
.
  
.
  
.
  
.

In Whitehall Sir Thomas received a call.

“Morning Sir,” said a voice.
 
“We have had a unusual request from The Grey
Man.
 
He is asking for a car and to see
an eye doctor.
 
I thought you might like
to know.”

“Thank you very much,” said Sir Thomas with a smile and
hung up.
 
He could feel his adrenalin
pumping as he made his next call.
 
If The
Grey Man wanted a car he reasoned that meant he could not drive and was now, hopefully,
fully blind.
 
He got straight through to
John Sea.

“You are a GO,” he said.

Martin got the call thirty seconds later.
 
Two minutes after that both Land Rovers were
loaded and were barreling away from their hideout.

Surge had just started his morning run.
 
Collins was eating his breakfast.

The five miles to The Grey Man’s
place
were covered in seven minutes.
 
Both Land
Rovers were pushed to the limits down the country lanes.
 
Martin in charge of one, Big Rob the other.
 
Martin crashed through the front gate, stopped
and spun the vehicle round with the back pointing towards the house.
 
Him and his two men de-bussed.
 
Both fired grenades through windows in the
top floor of the house.
 
Martin took out
a special shotgun which was designed by the
special forces
for this very job and blew off the hinges of the front door.

Meanwhile Big Rob and his opo had crashed the back gate and
swept across the field.
 
They both jumped
from the Land Rover and threw grenades through the upper back windows.

The explosions were deafening.
 
Big Rob and his guy then dropped to the ground
laying behind the Land Rover as flat as possible as Martin and his team dropped
their weapons and opened the back of their Land Rover.
 
Mounted on a strong tripod was the L1A1
12.7mm (.50) Heavy Machine Gun (HMG), developed from the best machine gun ever
made, the Browning M2.5 caliber.
 
This
weapon was belt driven and could fire 635 rounds a minute.
 
Martin swept up the stock as his number two
fed the belt and he racked the ground floor of the house from one side to the
other.
 
Walls, doors, windows and bricks
would not stop the huge rounds and the house started to disintegrate with smoke
and dust billowing into the air.
 
The
bullets passed right through the house and over Big Rob’s head.

After thirty seconds of continuous fire and as prearranged,
Martin stopped and both teams took up their Heckler and Koch Sa80’s assault
rifles and ran towards the crippled building.
 
Anyone inside would surely be dead but they had to make sure.

As soon as the Land Rovers had crashed the gates, the
alarms had sounded in the basement.
 
The
Grey Man had made plans, once he knew that he was under surveillance, to
protect himself and his computers but he had no idea they would come with so
much firepower and no idea he would be blind.

He scrambled around on the floor searching for his
emergency rucksack and as the noise grew louder and louder he focused on
finding the secret exit.
 
One of the
reasons he had chosen this house was the fact that it had been used by rebels
during the Jacobite risings in the 18
^th
Century and it had a concealed
bolt hole and passageway which was not on any plans.
 
He thought of the old adage taught to him so
many years ago at Spy School.
 
‘Never
enter any building that you do not have at least two exits from.’

Yesterday he had found it, cleared away the cobwebs, oiled
the hinges and checked the passageway was clear.
 
He was glad he did as it was still fresh in
his memory.
 
As he stumbled through the
concealed door he threw across the bolt and as quickly as he could he stumbled
along the old passageway to freedom dragging his escape bag.
 
Behind him he could hear shots as each room upstairs
had the door kicked in and it was raked with machine gun fire.

Martin was worried as soon as he got in the house.
 
As destroyed as it was, it was clear that only
one room was furnished, the front room.
 
Everything else was bare boards and empty.
 
“That means the bastard was not using the
house at all!” he thought.
 
Then he
wondered if there was a cellar.
 
He
quickly located the door and threw down two hand grenades.
 
Once the noise had stopped he went down the
stairs two at a time.
 
The cellar was
full of half destroyed computers, an old camp bed,
a
rail
with clothes hanging on it and a small kitchen area but no one there.

He walked round carefully.
 
There must be another exit he reasoned. Finally he saw it.
 
Behind a damaged false wall was a small round
oak door.
 
He pulled the cast iron handle
but it was obviously bolted from the other side.
 
He swung round the SA80 which was on a strap
over his shoulder and sent a burst into the door but this was old iron and hard
solid English oak and all he produced was splinters.
 
He shouted up to Rob, “Get me the shotgun, quick.”

Big Rob sprinted to the Land Rover and was back in under a
minute.
 
Martin took aim.

The Grey Man had
stumbled
the full
length of the passageway.
 
His knees and
shin’s were bloody and bruised.
 
Twice he
had walked face first into the wall as the passageway had curved.
 
He was not a young man and he felt every one
of his years.
 
With his chest heaving, he
threw himself on the grass knowing his pursuers were just behind him.
 
He heard the shotgun boom from inside the
remains of the house.
 
He reached inside his
bag grabbing a small box.
 
He flipped
open the catch and pushed a button.
 
Inside
the house, the explosives that he had laid so carefully yesterday in the
basement went off
 
with an almighty bang and
the whole house lifted up off the ground before disintegrating.
 
The Grey Man was lucky that he was laying down
away from the passage entrance as a blast of superheated air burst from the
opening and screeched into the sky.

Martin and his men ceased to exist in that one blinding
moment.

The Grey Man lay there in the thick wet grass for a full
five minutes recovering.
 
Then, hearing police
sirens he got up and staggered towards the trees that he knew were a little off
to the right.
 
Once in the woods, he lay still
hoping he was hidden under bracken.
 
His
mind was racing.
 
He realized it was no
coincidence that his blindness and the attack came at the same time.
 
How did they know though?
 
The only conclusion was the telephone call he
had just made.
 
Someone in The Firm had
gone bad.
 
It shocked him to think
this.
 
The Firm was his and normally he
would now just make a call to be safe but who to trust?
 
Then he thought of Surge and Collins.
 
They must now be in serious danger.
 
He carefully went through the phone routine
and this time hit speed dial four connecting him with Collins.

Collins had been
existing
day by
day.
 
The shop had helped give him an
anchor as had the work from The Firm but he still felt low.
 
Now though, once The Grey Man had
said they were operational and with the thought of danger, he was pumped.
 
The adrenalin was flowing and he felt alert
and alive.
 
For the first time in a long
time someone was hunting him rather than him doing the hunting.
 
It felt strange and weird and exhilarating.
 
He thought about how he would pull it off and
decided it would almost certainly be at his home.
 
His street was quiet and mostly empty and the
house was big and set back with no noisy neighbors to overlook it.
 
“So how?” he thought.

He decided to set up some traps to give him an edge.
 
He wired in some simple infa-red sensors at
ground level.
 
The beam was invisible to
the naked eye but anyone approaching the back of the house would break the beam
and an alarm on his phone would activate.
 
He then reinforced the windows and doors with stronger locks and placed
pressure sensors at strategic points.
 
None
of this would stop a professional but he did not feel he was up against the
best.
 
If the watchers were anything to
go by, they were just thugs.
 
Lastly, weapons.
 
He taped
handguns under tables and chairs near both exits and entrances.
 
He decided to start carrying the 9 mm
Glock
in a shoulder holster concealed by a loose fitting
jacket as it was an incredibly reliable weapon.

That night Jonathan came home from the shop and saw his dad
was armed.
 
“What’s going on?” he said.

“Not sure.
 
We think
we may have some unfinished business going on and I am taking precautions.
 
The Grey Man is investigating and will bring
it to a head in the next few days.”

“Should I be worried?”

“No.
 
This is part of
the business I am in.
 
Just one thing, keep
your phone with you at all times, fully charged and
be
careful at the shop.
 
I am sure they will
not go there but if they do, you tell them I am at home.
 
Okay? I can then meet them here on my terms.”

After watching his dad in action when they went after his mother’s
killers, Jonathan knew how deadly his dad was but he still went to bed worried.

The next morning Jonathan left for the shop as Collins was
still eating breakfast.
 
As soon as he
left, Collins went upstairs and started his watching routine.
 
Every car, and every person who walked by
he
categorized and discarded.
 
Finally he spotted them - a big man in a coat
far too warm for this weather which looked very bulky, walking from the right
and a thin postman on a bicycle who he had not seen before, approaching from
the left who did not stop at any other houses but made a beeline for Collins
house.