Slingshot: A Spycatcher Novel (8 page)
N
ot far now, sir.” The London cabbie drove his vehicle onto Vauxhall Bridge. “Was it a long flight?”
From the rear passenger seat, Will answered, “Not too long.” He looked along the Thames. It was evening, and the walkways on either side of the river were tastefully illuminated by old-fashioned streetlamps. On the north side of the river, lights within Thames House, a landmark building that was the headquarters of Britain’s Security Service, otherwise known as MI5, were beginning to go out as employees were packing up for the day. Beyond the building, the Houses of Parliament were bathed in the golden glow of carefully positioned halogen lamps. He looked ahead. On the south side of the river, adjacent to the end of the bridge, was the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6. Despite being prominent, imposing, and palatial in design, it had always amused Will that the MI6 HQ had been positioned at arm’s length from London’s political district. It also amused him that he’d only been allowed into the building twice—as a new recruit before he’d been selected for the Spartan Program, and years later when he’d been guided to a secure part of the building by men after they’d placed a hood and shackles onto him.
The cabbie increased the speed of his windshield wipers. “Still, bet you can’t wait to get home though. Long flights, short flights, it’s still bloody travel, ain’t it? And those blinkin’ queues at the airport . . . drives you crazy, don’t it?” He reached the end of the bridge, drove alongside MI6, and pointed at the building. “I blame those boys. Seven
P.M.
and the place is all shut up. They should be out catching Al Qaeda and the Taliban and all of the other nutters who’ve made it impossible to take a bottle of aftershave through airport customs. But no, looks like the spooks have gone home for the night.” He drove south. “Just a minute or so now. Business in Europe, was it, sir?”
Will yawned. “Yes, Germany. My company’s setting up a new factory there. I had to go to sign off the paperwork.”
“Long way to go just to give a few signatures.”
“True.”
The cabbie chuckled. “You know, in my business I have to put up with all sorts of crap—yobs, drunks, tight-arse tourists, City boys who talk to me like I’m some lowlife. But it ain’t all bad. I reckon the best part of the job is getting travelers like you”—he pulled into West Square and stopped adjacent to Will’s house—“home safe.”
W
ill walked slowly up the flight of stairs, avoiding three steps that he knew creaked. Reaching his front door, he put down his bag, moved to the side, listened, heard nothing, placed a hand flat against the entrance, and pushed. The door remained firmly shut. Withdrawing his keys, he eased one of them into the lock, waited, then gradually began turning it until he felt the lock spring open. He placed the keys back into a pocket, put a hand onto the door handle, tried to calm his breathing, and began easing the handle downward.
His heart was beating fast.
He wondered if there was a man on the other side of the door, waiting with a heavy-gauge shotgun.
When the handle was fully depressed, he pushed the door open and simultaneously moved away from the entrance.
Nothing happened.
Out of habit, his hand moved toward the place where he would often keep a handgun on his person. His hand stopped midair. Because he had no handgun, no weapon at all.
Lifting his travel bag, he held it before him. Inside the soft canvas carrier were clothes and toiletries. The case wouldn’t stop a .22 target round, let alone a high-velocity pistol bullet, but he held it anyway, ready to hurl it into the face of an intruder. He took a deep breath and swung into the doorway.
Everything before him was as he’d left it—a hallway full of packing cases and little else. Placing the bag on top of one of the cases, he pulled the door shut behind him and locked it. If there was a man inside his home, he had to make sure that person didn’t escape.
Moving through the pitch dark, he reached the kitchen, stopped, and placed fingers over the hallway light. He hesitated, knowing that the moment he turned the light on would be a likely opportunity for him to be attacked.
He switched the light on and braced himself.
But nobody came at him.
The light illuminated the kitchen and one of the bedrooms. Both looked empty. He moved back down the hallway and crouched beside the entrance to the second bedroom. Reaching into the room, he flicked on its light, instantly withdrew his arm, waited for two seconds, glanced into the room, and pulled his head back out.
The room was unoccupied.
He stood, walked slowly to the bathroom, repeated the same drill, and saw that it was empty.
One more room. The living room.
Pausing by the entrance to the kitchen, he saw the pans, plate, and cutlery he’d washed after cooking the pheasant dish four nights ago. Lying next to them on the draining board was the razor-sharp chef’s knife he’d used to prepare the meal. He grabbed the knife and held it close to his waist.
Beads of sweat trickled down the back of his neck as he inched closer to the living room door. It was shut, just as he’d left it before departing for Austria. He imagined where he would be in the room if he’d come here to kill the apartment’s occupant. Probably waiting flush against the wall, to one side of the door, with a handgun pointing at the height of a man’s upper body. One shot into the side of the rib cage, followed a split second later by another into the temple. Or perhaps he’d be on one knee at the far end of the room, positioned behind a sturdy piece of furniture, his gun pointing at the door, ready to put rapid two-round bursts into whoever came into view.
Or maybe he was dealing with a tough amateur. He hoped not, because their lack of training made them unpredictable.
He placed a hand on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open while keeping his body away from the doorframe and his knife low.
The room was silent.
Though that meant nothing.
More sweat ran down his back. He had to go in the room, had to decide where the man was waiting for him. If there was only one of them.
Placing his free hand against the frame, he readied himself, sucked in a lungful of air, held his breath, rocked back on his heels, and lunged through the entrance while simultaneously spinning and thrusting the knife toward the wall opposite his hand. It sliced into wood paneling. No one was there.
Yanking the knife out, he turned to face the rest of the room, expecting a bullet to strike his head as he did so.
But the room was empty.
He spent the next ten minutes making a more thorough search of his home—in wardrobes, under beds, in cupboards, as well as kicking all of the packing cases to see if any of them had increased in weight. Satisfied that there was no intruder in his home, he moved back to the living room and stared at the two windows. Outside, there were at least nine places where a man could comfortably position himself with a rifle and remove a large chunk of Will’s head—many more places farther afield, if the weapon was a military-spec sniper rifle and its owner was highly trained.
Lowering himself to the ground, he leopard-crawled along the floor, pulled both windows’ curtains shut from his prone position, crawled back along the floor, and stood. Grabbing one of the dining chairs, he positioned it in the hallway so that it was facing the front door at the other end, placed one hand on the living room light switch, the other on the room’s door handle, switched the light on, and immediately slammed the door shut.
If a man was observing the living room through binoculars or a telescopic sight, he’d know Will was home.
But Will was now in the windowless corridor, out of anyone’s sight.
He sat on the chair, stabbed the tip of the knife into its wooden arm, and stared at the front door. In the absence of complete privacy and professional assault gear, no one would be able to enter the property through the barred windows. They’d come for him through the main entrance.
He stayed like this for two hours before checking his watch. It was 9:30
P.M.
He felt hungry and tired but dared not move.
He tried to keep his mind active by recalling memories—any that came to him, it didn’t matter.
He remembered a teacher announcing Will’s high school grades to the rest of his class and saying that they were good enough to take Will to England and Cambridge University; going home later that day to find four criminals holding his mother and sister hostage while they looked for cash; feeling utter fear and confusion after he’d killed the men with a knife similar to the one by his side; his older sister telling him that he had to run away; and flying to France the next morning to enlist in the Foreign Legion.
He recalled the brutal training, the feeling that his transition from boy to man was not supposed to be like this. But over time he became numb to most emotions.
Other images raced through his mind: the day he received his
képi blanc,
placed it on his head, and was officially a legionnaire; earning his wings and being deployed to the Second REP; the mental and physical agony he’d felt as he underwent selection for the GCP; being given instructions by a DGSE officer and two days later placing a bomb underneath a car in Tripoli; and calling his sister from a pay phone in Marseille on the day his tour with the Legion had come to an end and her saying that she’d been wrong to tell him to run away after he killed his mother’s murderers.
Years later, he’d found out that Alistair and Patrick had covered up what he’d done.
He briefly took his eyes off the door to check the time. Nearly midnight. Outside, London was almost silent.
He remembered his four years at university and the sensation that the GCP legionnaire and DGSE hit man was gradually being turned back into someone more decent, more human. He saw himself, in his final year of studies, walking through the university’s Darwin College, clutching politics and philosophy books, and remembered the euphoric moment of feeling truly normal again.
It was the greatest feeling, and it lasted twenty-three minutes.
Up to the moment he was walking through Cambridge’s shopping district, saw a man try to grab a young woman’s handbag, watched the woman resist, saw a knife, and heard the victim yelp as she fell to the ground clutching her blood-covered tummy. He’d dropped his books, chased the man, grabbed him, and slammed him into a wall with sufficient force to not only make him unconscious but also fracture his skull.
At the moment the man’s head caved in, the euphoria had vanished.
Now, as he sat waiting for a killer to enter his home, he doubted it would ever return.
No other memories came to him. He tried to think about the operation, about what could possibly be happening, but he couldn’t concentrate. Time dragged.
Two
A.M.
He couldn’t hear anything now. No passing cars, nothing.
Three
A.M.
His body craved sleep, but he kept staring at the door, knowing that it would be in the early hours that the man would most likely come for him.
Four
A.M.
He heard a scream, flinched, grabbed the hilt of his knife, then released it as he realized the cry had come from an urban fox.
Five
A.M.
His back and shoulder muscles throbbed from lack of activity.
Six
A.M.
A door opened somewhere in the building, followed by rapid footsteps. Then the downstairs front door opened and closed. Will knew that it was one of his neighbors going to work—David, a recently divorced mortician who usually left at this hour and always did so in a manner that suggested he was late. Three weeks ago the chubby man, who had taken to rolling his own cigarettes and cooking his way through a famous French chef’s book, had met Will in the lobby, introduced himself, and given Will his business card “in case of need.”
Six forty. Another door opening and closing. A woman in heels. That would be Phoebe, a thirty-something art dealer who loved champagne, middleweight boxing matches, and Chinese food, and who rarely went to work without a hangover. She’d met Will in the rather embarrassing circumstances of kneeling by the letter slot in his front door one evening and screaming in a drunken voice, “I know you’re in there, you bastard! You can’t fuck me and leave me!” It was only when Will had opened the door that Phoebe had realized that Will wasn’t the previous occupant, a cad called Jim who’d sold Will the apartment in a hurry.
Six fifty. Retired major Dickie Mountjoy, former Coldstream Guards officer and now retiree, was leaving his home at exactly the same time as he did each morning. Dressed in a suit and moleskin overcoat, and always carrying an immaculately rolled umbrella regardless of conditions, he would be taking a ten-minute walk to his local newsagents, which opened at seven
A.M.
, would purchase a copy of
The Daily Telegraph,
and would then march on to the Imperial War Museum, formerly Bedlam Asylum. There, he would sit on one of the grounds’ benches and read the paper cover to cover, before walking four miles to West Norwood cemetery, standing in front of his wife’s grave, and giving her headstone a briefing on the latest news from around the world.
Major Mountjoy believed that Will was a life insurance salesman and had made it clear on their first encounter that Will’s profession was inhabited by the scum of the earth. Will had agreed and told him that he wished he’d had the discipline and courage to be a guardsman.
The West Square converted house was now empty of all, save Will.
He placed his hand over the knife’s handle and scrutinized the front door.
He heard a man whistling, a stair ledge creak. He frowned.
The whistling grew louder, as did the footsteps.
Will pulled out the knife and stood. He estimated it would take him one second to reach the door to plunge his knife into the man’s gut.
Though he wouldn’t get halfway down the hall if the man was a professional and had a gun.
The whistling stopped. Right outside his front door.