Black Ops: The 12th Spider Shepherd Thriller (2 page)

‘To be honest, once a job is done, it’s done. I don’t dwell. It’s like women. I have absolutely no idea how many women I’ve fucked over the years. A hundred. Two hundred.’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember their faces, never mind their names. It’s the same with targets. Mind you, there’s one coming up that I’m never going to forget.’

She looked at him, intrigued. ‘Tell me more.’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Is it for Mercier?’

‘No. Someone else. It’ll probably be my last job. For a while, anyway.’

‘It’s big?’

Tyler grinned. ‘Very big. The biggest.’

She smiled and locked eyes with him. ‘You can tell me,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘I can’t tell anyone. That’s one of the downsides of this job, you know? It all has to stay secret. Otherwise you’re fucked.’

‘You can tell people you trust,’ she said.

‘Yeah, but who can you trust?’ he asked. ‘You can’t trust anybody.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Why is he running late?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The target. Where the hell is he?’

‘He’s here already,’ said the girl.

Tyler frowned. He was about to reply when he realised what she meant. He started to raise his gun but it was too late, way too late. Her Glock was already pointed at his chest and he barely had time to open his mouth before the first shot smashed into his chest, followed closely by a second. He was barely aware of the muffled pops of the suppressed shots and the bullets felt like nothing more than punches to his chest. He fell backwards and was dead even before the third shot hit him in the face and his brains and skull splattered across the wall behind him.

L
ex Harper tapped his pool cue on the side of the table and tried to focus on the balls. ‘Remind me again, am I big or small?’

The three men sitting on bar stools to his left groaned as one.

‘He’s pissed,’ said a big man wearing a Singha beer vest and baggy shorts.

‘He’s taking the piss, that’s what he’s doing,’ said the man sitting in the middle of the three. He was tall and thin with a beard that compensated for a rapidly receding hairline. ‘Lex, mate, time to go home. And don’t use the bike. I don’t want to be visiting you in the ICU.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Harper, struggling to focus on the table. He frowned. ‘Just tell me, big or small?’

‘Small,’ chorused the three men.

The barman put down fresh bottles of Heineken in front of them, each protected with a foam tube stamped with the logo of Noy’s Bar, a red lipstick kiss on a St George’s Cross. The bar was open to the air and even with the large fans playing down on them from the ceiling, the beer wouldn’t have stayed cool for long without insulation. Noy’s Bar was just off Pattaya’s Walking Street. Most evenings Walking Street was packed with tourists eyeing up the red light area’s bars and hookers, but Noy’s Bar was off the beaten track enough for Harper and his pals to be able to enjoy a quiet game of pool and a few beers without being disturbed by crocodiles of Chinese and Korean tourists snapping away with their smartphones. Though in Harper’s case it had been more than a few beers along with half a dozen tequila chasers. It was just after 8 p.m. but the four men had been drinking and playing pool after an extended lunch in the Pig and Whistle and all the signs were that the drinking at least was going to continue into the early hours.

As Harper leaned over the table to play his shot, he felt a vibration from his denim hip pack. Night or day Harper always had the pack around his waist. It contained one of the many mobile phones he used, an Irish passport and two credit cards, and 50,000 baht in cash. The pack, together with the heavy gold neck chain he always wore, meant that he could get out of Thailand or anywhere else he found himself at a moment’s notice, leaving by the airport, by boat or travelling overland to a neighbouring country. He had a larger bug-out bag under the bed in his apartment and another in the back of his SUV, but all the essentials for a fast escape were in the hip pack. Much as he loved Thailand, his unbreakable rule was never to be so fond of a place that he couldn’t leave at a moment’s notice, without a backward glance.

His companions groaned as he straightened up, took out his phone and read the three-word text message from a UK number:
YOU HAVE MAIL
.

‘Guys, I’ve got to go,’ he said, slotting his cue into a rack on the wall.

‘He’s on a mission,’ laughed Singha shirt. ‘It’s that dancer from Anglewitch, the one with the tits.’

‘To be fair, they’ve all got tits,’ said Harper. ‘Real or fake. Okay, I’m off.’

‘Take a taxi, Lex.’

Harper nodded and waved a thanks for the advice. He was just sober enough to know that he was too drunk to be riding his Triumph Bonneville home. Pattaya’s streets were a death trap at the best of times, but being drunk on a powerful motorcycle when pretty much everyone else on the road was either equally intoxicated or high on drugs was a recipe for disaster. He headed off down the road in search of an Internet café. The nearest was run by a middle-aged former go-go dancer called Rose. Rose was still a stunner, so much so that at least four foreigners had given her the money to start her own Internet café-cum-print shop. Two of her backers were British, one was Australian and one was an Indian. The Indian and one of the Brits thought they were married to Rose, having gone through a traditional Thai ceremony in her home town of Udon Thani. Rose had never followed up with the paperwork, which meant she was free and single and open to offers.

All four of her backers lived overseas and, so far at least, had never decided to holiday in Pattaya at the same time. They all deposited regular sums into her bank accounts and sent her presents to prove their devotion and in return received daily Skype calls where she would shed a tear and say how she loved them and missed them.

When Harper walked in she was sitting at one of her terminals helping a pretty teenage girl with a tattoo of two Japanese koi on her back compose an email to an overseas sponsor.

‘Tell him you cannot dance because you miss him so much,’ said Rose, pointing at the screen. ‘And tell him your mother has to go into hospital soon. Don’t say what’s wrong with her. Wait for him to ask. And don’t ask him for money. Wait for him to offer.’

The girl frowned. ‘What if he doesn’t offer?’

Rose smiled. ‘He will,’ she said, patting the young girl on the leg. ‘They always do.’

‘Can I use a computer, Rose?’ asked Harper.

‘No problem, Mr Lex,’ she said. ‘Take any.’

Harper sat down at the furthest terminal from the counter and logged on to Yahoo Mail. He had memorised the email address and password, but had never sent a single email from the account. Its sole use was for communications with his MI5 handler, Charlotte Button, the only other person who knew the password. They sent messages to each other using the drafts folder – a technique first developed by al-Qaeda terrorists, allowing instantaneous communications that bypassed even the most hi-tech surveillance systems. The National Security Agency in the States and GCHQ in the UK had the capacity to eavesdrop on every phone call and email anywhere in the world, but using the drafts folder trick meant that the emails were never actually transmitted and therefore could not be flagged up by anyone monitoring his communications. Only if a spook had discovered the existence of the email account and hacked into it would the messages in the drafts folder be compromised, and even then, they’d have to be quick because Button and Harper’s SOP was to delete every message as soon as they had read it.

A single message had been added to the drafts in the last couple of hours:
LOCATION ONE. SOONEST. TEXT ME WHEN IN SITU
. Harper smiled to himself as he deleted the message. Even if someone really had hacked into his account, the message wouldn’t tell them much. Location One was London. He waved over at Rose. ‘Rose, coffee, black. Two sugars.’

‘Coming, Mr Lex.’

‘And a bottle of water.’

Harper went back online. There was a KLM flight due to leave Bangkok at two thirty in the morning. He booked himself a business class seat and a connecting flight to Dublin. Rose brought him his coffee and Harper thanked her.

‘And when I’ve finished this one bring me another, and another. In fact, if you can put me on an intravenous drip, that would be great.’

Rose frowned, not understanding.

‘Just coffee, Rose, and keep it coming.’

He sighed and looked at his watch. At this time of night it wouldn’t take much more than an hour to get to Suvarnabhumi airport. He had plenty of time to get a couple of coffees under his belt before heading home to grab what he needed.

T
here were two of them sitting in the back of the van, and the ventilation wasn’t the best. The air quality wasn’t helped by the continuing flatulence of Jamie Brewer, Spider Shepherd’s number two on the surveillance operation.

‘I’m sorry, mate, really,’ said Brewer after breaking wind for the third time. ‘I had a curry last night.’

Shepherd wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘That is awful. Really.’

‘Mate, I’m sorry.’

Shepherd would have loved to open the rear doors but that wasn’t possible, not when it was packed with transmitting and recording equipment. The van they were in had the livery of a courier company and sitting in the front seat was a brunette in a beige uniform. Her cab was sealed and they had to talk to her via an intercom.

Shepherd stared at one of the four flatscreens on the side of the van. It showed an electronic map of the area around them along with six flashing red dots. Above each of the dots was a number from one to six, representing the six watchers on the operation. The watchers had been tasked with following Ahmed Khalaf, a twenty-three-year-old former medical student who had ended his studies early and travelled to Syria to fight alongside the jihadists of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Khalaf had been easy enough to track as he had posted numerous photographs on his Facebook page. He had been allowed back into the country but MI5 had kept him under surveillance from the moment he had arrived at Heathrow. It was clear from the way that Khalaf behaved once he was back in the UK that he had been well taught by ISIS. He didn’t have a mobile phone and he didn’t own a computer. He made calls from phone boxes and twice a day he went to one of several Internet cafés. It was clear he was up to something and MI5 put him high up on their list of priorities. There were three teams of five assigned to Khalaf, working eight-hour shifts. Shepherd had been assigned to monitor the teams and he took it in turns to do ride-alongs. Surveillance was a difficult job at the best of times and long-term surveillance was especially demanding, hour after hour of sitting outside buildings followed by short bursts of frenetic activity. As days turned into weeks and even months, the job got that much harder. Surveillance teams would start to make assumptions and let down their guard. A target might leave the house every day at the same time, walk down the road and turn left. He might do that every day for a hundred days. But on day one hundred and one he might turn right and disappear. Shepherd’s job was to make sure the teams didn’t lose their edge.

For the first couple of weeks of surveillance Khalaf did nothing out of the ordinary. He spent most of his time in a bedsit in Stoke Newington, venturing out only to pray at a local mosque. MI5 had two men in place at the mosque and they were able to ascertain that Khalaf spoke to no one while he was at prayers. He would occasionally shop for food and once a day he would take a walk through the thirty-one acres of Abney Park garden cemetery.

The cemetery was always a difficult venue. There were dozens of paths winding between the 200,000 or so graves and while there were always some people wandering around, it was difficult to stay close without being seen. Dogs were always a good cover and the teams could call on more than a dozen offered up by volunteers prepared to allow MI5 to borrow their pets.

During the third week Khalaf visited Stoke Newington public library in Church Street. On the first visit he had wandered around the bookshelves for ten minutes before leaving. A few days later he visited again, this time making use of one of the library’s six computers. The visit to the library then became a daily event, and each time he would spend up to an hour on one of the computers. The surveillance teams installed keystroke programs on all of the machines and they were able to keep track of his Internet activities. Immediately they saw what he was doing the teams went on to full alert. Khalaf was reading articles on the mass jihadist killings in Iraq, Kenya and India, and spent time studying online newspaper articles about the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby who was hacked to death near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich. During the fifth week of surveillance, Khalaf went to the place where Fusilier Rigby was murdered and spent more than an hour walking around.

During the sixth week of surveillance, Khalaf opened a Yahoo email account and sent an email to an address that was traced to a library computer in Ealing. Khalaf used a drafts folder for the account to contact a British-born Somalian later identified as Mohammed Mahmud. Like Khalaf, Mahmud had broken off his studies and travelled to Syria to fight with ISIS. He had somehow managed to travel there and back without attracting the attention of the security services. From the messages that piled up in the drafts folder it was clear that the two men were planning a beheadings rampage in the London area. In the sixth week they were joined online by a third London-based jihadist who was also a member of ISIS. The third man had been harder to track down, he went online using a pay-as-you-go smartphone and was rarely active for more than a few minutes at a time and changed his SIM card every week.

A second five-man team, also under Shepherd’s guidance, had put Mahmud under the microscope. Like Khalaf, he lived alone, leaving his small flat in a terraced house only to shop, visit a local mosque and the library.

During the eighth week of Khalaf’s surveillance, both teams converged on the Abney Park cemetery. When it became clear that the two men were going to meet, Mahmud’s team pulled back.