The Double Tap (Stephen Leather Thrillers) (13 page)

       
Cramer massaged the bridge of his nose and blinked his eyes. Even if the killer had a favourite weapon, and even if he could identify it, the knowledge wouldn’t do him any good. By the time Cramer was staring down the barrel of whatever gun it was the killer was using, it would be too late. Bang. One bullet in the face. Bang. The second in the heart. Then nothing but darkness.

       
There was a knock on the bedroom door. ‘Come in, Mrs Elliott,’ he said, closing the file and dropping it onto the bed. He recognised her knock, two taps in quick succession, like the double tap in the Killing House.

       
Mrs Elliott carried a tray into the room and put it down on a chair by the bed. ‘A snack for you, Mr Cramer,’ she said. ‘Hot milk and ham sandwiches.’

       
‘Thank you, Mrs Elliott. You shouldn’t have bothered.’ Most of the food she brought up to his room ended up being flushed down the toilet, though he usually drank the milk. Her glance barely passed over the bottle of Famous Grouse but Cramer could sense her disapproval.

       
‘It’s no bother, Mr Cramer,’ she said, and disappeared out of the door, her dress cracking like a sail in the wind.

       
Cramer poured a double measure of whisky into the milk and sipped it as he picked up the file again. Cramer wondered what significance there was in the fact that the Miami assassination had been the first. The only links between all the killings in the files that Cramer had read were the handgun and the placing of the two shots. The Miami assassination had been quick and efficient, as if the killer knew exactly what he was doing. Cramer wondered if he’d actually killed before, but using a different method so that the deaths hadn’t been included in the investigation. The killing seemed too professional to have been a first. Perhaps he’d killed in many different ways before focusing on his preferred method?

       
There was also the question of how the killer had been hired in the first place. Becoming a contract killer wasn’t like setting out to be a doctor or an accountant – you couldn’t simply move into an office and put a sign on your door. Contract killers had to have a track record, they had to prove that they could kill and get away with it, and they had to prove that they could be trusted. Cramer had heard of former soldiers and mercenaries who’d become contract killers, but generally such assassins were Mob-trained, career criminals who had served their apprenticeships before becoming fully-fledged killers. Killers didn’t just appear from nowhere. There were skills to be acquired, techniques to be mastered. Cramer knew, because he was a killer, and he’d been trained by the best.

       
He dropped the file on the floor and picked up the next one. It was several times thicker than the Miami file, and as Cramer flicked through it, he soon realised why. The victim had been a British Member of Parliament, a Scot earmarked for a ministerial post who had been a close friend of the Prime Minister. Cramer vaguely remembered reading about the assassination, but at the time he’d been more concerned about the pain in his guts and the grim faces of the Spanish doctors. He scanned the police reports. The killer had been dressed as a motorcycle cop and had flagged down the MP’s official Rover as it drove away from a newly-opened semiconductor plant. The killer had calmly waited for the driver to wind down his window, then he’d shot the MP’s minder in the shoulder and killed the MP with two shots, one to the face, one to the heart. The descriptions provided by the injured bodyguard and the driver were worse than useless – the killer had kept his full-face helmet on, the tinted visor down, and he’d been wearing black leather gloves. Medium height, medium build.

       
Strathclyde Police had started a preliminary investigation but a team of Special Branch officers were sent up from the Metropolitan Police to take over. Despite the heavyweights, the investigation stalled. A burnt-out motorcycle was discovered in a field outside Carlisle a few days later, but it provided no forensic evidence.

       
Cramer read a memo from Special Branch to the Security Service requesting possible motives for the assassination and the reply, sent two days later, was noncommittal. The MP was married with two teenage children, had no known sexual liaisons outside the marriage, was a lawyer by profession and had no controversial business interests.

       
The Security Service did however point out that the MP had helped organise a campaign to stop an American oil company developing two huge offshore oilfields for Iran. The company had been about to sign the billion-dollar contract when the MP raised the matter in the House of Commons. The British had been pressing the Russian Government not to supply the Iranians with nuclear reactors, and the MP made a stirring speech complaining that it was unfair to ask the Russians to stop trading with Iran at a time when the Americans were about to help the country develop its oil resources. The State Department stepped in and the deal was blocked. ‘It is possible,’ the Security Service memo concluded, ‘that the assassination was revenge for the blocked contract.’ Cramer smiled thinly. The memo didn’t say whether the Iranians or the oil company might have paid for the hit. The way big business operated these days, it could have been either.

       
There was a sheaf of correspondence between Special Branch and the FBI, exchanging information on hired assassins who might be prepared to kill such a high-profile target, but it was clear that the investigation was going nowhere. A memo from Special Branch to the Prime Minister’s office some three months after the killing suggested as much. The Prime Minister hadn’t replied to the Special Branch memo; instead he had written a seven word memo to the Colonel. ‘Immediate action required. Report directly to me.’ The unsigned memo explained something that had been troubling Cramer ever since he had started working his way through the stack of files. Cramer had wondered why the Colonel and the SAS should be leading the hunt for a paid assassin, especially one who appeared to be most active in the United States. Now the answer was clear; it wasn’t just to prevent further killings. The Prime Minister had taken it personally. He wanted revenge for a dead friend.

The mist came rolling off the hills around Crossmaglen, a cold, damp fog that chilled Lynch to the bone. He shivered and looked over at O’Riordan. ‘Nice day for it,’ he said.

       
‘I don’t suppose a city boy like you gets up before dawn much,’ said O’Riordan. He was wearing a green waterproof jacket, a floppy tweed hat and green Wellington boots. Had it not been for the Kalashnikov he was cradling in his arms, he would have looked every inch the gentleman farmer.

       
‘Forecast was for sun,’ said Lynch, rubbing his hands together for warmth.

       
O’Riordan pulled a face. ‘You can’t forecast the weather here,’ he said. ‘It changes from one minute to the next. You should have worn a waterproof jacket, right enough.’

       
‘Yeah, now you tell me.’ Lynch had put on a black leather jacket with a sheepskin collar which was already wet through, and blue denim jeans which were soaking up the damp like a sponge. Beads of dew speckled his beard and moustache, and water trickled down the back of his neck in rivulets.

       
The two men stood by O’Riordan’s Landrover which they’d parked under a chestnut tree, but it provided little in the way of shelter, as the moisture was all around them like a shroud. Lynch looked at his wristwatch. It was just before five. O’Riordan was right, he rarely got out of bed before ten and he disliked mornings, with a vengeance.

       
Davie and Paulie Quinn jumped down from the back of a mud-splattered truck a short distance away, then reached inside and pulled out large spades.

       
‘Think we should help them?’ asked O’Riordan.

       
Lynch grinned. ‘The exercise will do them good,’ he said.

       
‘Didn’t you tell them to bring gloves? They’ll have blisters the size of golfballs by the time they’ve finished.’

       
‘Slipped my mind,’ said Lynch. He sat down on the bumper of O’Riordan’s Landrover and groaned. ‘God, I hate mornings,’ he said.

       
Davie walked over, his spade over his shoulder. ‘Okay?’ he asked cheerfully.

       
O’Riordan stood with his back to the tree and counted off twenty paces. He raked his heel through the damp earth. ‘Here there be treasure, me hearties,’ he growled.

       
‘How deep is it?’ asked Paulie as he joined his brother.

       
‘Six feet. Maybe a bit more. Put your backs into it, boys. We haven’t got all day.’

       
As the brothers began to dig, O’Riordan went back to Lynch. Lynch looked at his wristwatch again.

       
‘We’ll be okay,’ said O’Riordan. ‘Half an hour, then fifteen minutes to load up, fifteen minutes to refill the hole. We’ll be away in an hour.’

       
‘I just don’t like being exposed, that’s all.’ He squinted up at the reddening sky. Birds were already starting to greet the approaching dawn.

       
O’Riordan leant his assault rifle against the vehicle and ducked his head through the driver’s side window. He took out a Thermos flask. ‘Coffee?’

       
Lynch nodded and O’Riordan poured steaming black coffee into two plastic mugs. Paulie Quinn looked over at them but O’Riordan nodded at the hole. ‘Keep digging, son.’

Mike Cramer lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He was thinking about death. His own death. Cramer wasn’t scared of dying. The act was usually less painful and stressful than what led up to it. Death could often be a welcome release, an escape from pain, a way out. His right hand stroked the raised scar across his stomach as he remembered how he’d been so sure that he was dying as he lay on the floor of the Lynx helicopter, his trousers soaked with blood, his entrails in his hands.

       
It had taken maybe twenty minutes for the chopper to reach the hospital in Belfast and he’d been conscious for every second. Two troopers had tried to stem the bleeding but they hadn’t known what to do about his guts, other than to cover the wound with a field dressing. There had been surprisingly little pain, and that had been why Cramer was so sure that he was dying.

       
He closed his eyes and shuddered as he remembered how Mick Newmarch had died. Death for Mick hadn’t been easy, but then Mary Hennessy hadn’t intended it to be. She’d used bolt-cutters on his fingers and a red-hot poker to cauterise the wounds so that he wouldn’t bleed to death. She’d tortured him for hours like a cat toying with a mouse, then she’d castrated him and watched him bleed to death. It had been Cramer’s turn then, his turn to be tied to the kitchen table in the isolated farmhouse, to be interrogated while armed IRA men stood outside. He remembered how she’d scowled as she’d heard the men shout that they had to go, that the SAS were on their way, and he remembered the way she’d smiled as she’d shown him the knife, letting it glint under the fluorescent lights before stabbing him in the stomach and cutting him wide open. ‘Die, you bastard,’ she’d whispered as the blood had flowed, then she’d left without a backward look. But Cramer hadn’t died. The troopers had bundled him into the chopper and sat with him, urging him to stay conscious as they flew to the city, then the doctors had put him back together again, patched him up as best they could. Six months later he’d left the regiment. A booze-up in the Paludrine Club – the SAS bar at the Stirling Lines barracks in Hereford – a couple of paragraphs in
Mars and Minerva
, the regimental magazine, and back to Civvy Street. Yesterday’s man.

       
No, death held no fear for Mike Cramer. Not any more. He’d stared death in the face and he had been prepared to embrace it with open arms. Now it was only the manner of his death that concerned him. And the Colonel had given him a way, a way to die with honour. In battle.

Seth Reed popped the last piece of black pudding in his mouth and chewed with relish. Reed’s nine-year-old son, Mark, screwed up his face. ‘Dad, how can you? That’s pig’s blood you’re eating!’

       
Reed sat back in his chair and patted his ample stomach. ‘Yup. And it was dee-licious.’

       
‘Yuck.’ The boy was still halfway through eating his breakfast, and Reed pointed at the rasher of bacon and half a sausage that remained on his plate.

       
‘What do you think that is?’ he asked.

       
‘Bacon.’

       
‘Pig. That’s what it is.’

       
‘Yeah, but it’s not pig’s blood.’

       
Kimberlee Reed’s spoonful of cereal came to a sudden halt on its way to her mouth as she glared at her husband and son. ‘Guys, can we please give it a rest?’

       
‘He started it,’ said Reed, pointing at Mark.

       
‘Did not.’

       
‘Did too.’

       
Kimberlee sighed and shook her head. ‘You two are impossible. I don’t know which of you is worse.’

       
Reed and his son pointed at each other. ‘He is,’ they said in unison.

       
The landlady, a tall, stick-thin woman with her greying hair tied back in a tight bun, appeared in the doorway, a pot of coffee in her hands. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

       
‘Perfect, Mrs McGregor,’ said Kimberlee.

       
‘More coffee?’