Black Ops: The 12th Spider Shepherd Thriller (33 page)

It was only at the last minute that the man saw him coming but Shepherd was already throwing a punch that connected with the man’s chin and slammed him against the wall, knocking the wind out of him.

The girl screamed and scratched at his eyes but he ducked back and her nails missed him by inches. She screamed again but before she could lash out once more he punched her in the solar plexus and she fell to her knees, gasping for breath.

The man scrambled to his feet and Shepherd turned to face him. The man’s face had gone blank, his eyes focused on Shepherd, his lips forming a tight line as he breathed in and out slowly through his nose. His left leg moved forward, his right heel went up and he bent slightly at the knees. His hands went up in the air and then came down, his elbows tucked into his sides. His shoulders were relaxed and his chin was down. His hands were in front of his face as if he were holding an invisible basketball. As soon as he saw the hand movement Shepherd knew what to expect. Krav Maga, the martial art developed by the Israeli Army. Everyone who studied Krav Maga was taught the same movement. It was a way of relaxing the shoulders and getting the hands to the correct position, and it was a dead giveaway as to what would happen next. Krav Maga was terrific for self defence, the fighting stance meant the man could react quickly to any aggressive move Shepherd made. But in this case the man was the attacker and any movement he made would involve him driving off the back foot.

He launched a punch at Shepherd’s head and Shepherd took a step back, but the man followed him and before he was aware of what was happening, the man had kicked him in the stomach and Shepherd was slammed against the wall, gasping for breath. That hadn’t been a Krav Maga move, he realised. He was going to have to focus.

He pushed himself away from the wall and put his hands up. ‘We don’t have to do this,’ said Shepherd.

The man flashed a half-smile but didn’t say anything. Shepherd could feel the man’s confidence. He knew he was good. But that confidence would be his undoing because he didn’t know how good Shepherd was.

Shepherd threw a punch at the man’s face and he backed away but Shepherd used his momentum to launch a kick. However, the man kept moving backwards and easily avoided it.

The man’s right hand dropped and started to move inside his jacket and Shepherd realised he had a concealed weapon, probably a gun. He faked a kick and the hand twitched back into a defensive position.

Shepherd jabbed with his left hand then punched hard with the right, but the man blocked it and kicked Shepherd in the chest. Shepherd saw the kick coming and managed to start moving backwards, which took some of the sting out of it, but he still staggered back, his arms flailing for balance.

The man reached into his jacket and started to pull out a handgun. Shepherd launched himself at the man and managed to grab the weapon as it emerged from the jacket. He caught a glimpse of a grey Glock and his left hand locked on to it as his right hand went for the man’s throat, pushing him against the wall. Shepherd’s fingers tightened around the man’s voicebox but he was strong and he began to swing the gun around towards Shepherd’s face. The man started to grin with triumph and Shepherd could see his finger tightening on the trigger. Shepherd released his grip on the man’s throat and grabbed for the gun, twisting it towards the man’s chest as the trigger finger twitched. The gun roared and the bullet ripped up through the man’s chin and out of the top of his skull, erupting in a hail of blood and brain matter. Shepherd staggered back as the man slid down against the wall leaving a wet red smear glistening on the wallpaper.

Shepherd heard a noise behind him and turned to see the girl getting to her feet. Her back was close to the breakfast bar and they both looked at the knife block at the same time. She grabbed a large knife and held it low with the blade raised.

Shepherd moved back, knowing that she had the advantage. She slashed the blade, left and right, and moved forward. She handled the knife professionally, no question of that. Holding the blade up meant it would be harder to block any blow. If he did try to block it and got the timing wrong she’d cut his hand or worse.

He didn’t bother saying anything to her. There was no point. She wanted to kill him, no question, and she’d either succeed or he’d stop her, there was no other possible outcome.

The knife slashed again and he moved backwards. There was nothing close by that he could grab to protect his hands. Nothing he could throw at her.

Slash. Slash. Then two more in quick succession. Slash. Slash.

Each time she slashed, Shepherd had no choice other than to move back and he knew that he was running out of space. At the rate she was moving his back would be up against the wall in a few seconds and then he would have nowhere to go.

She lunged forward and this time Shepherd didn’t move back, he twisted to the side but not quickly enough and the blade sliced through his shirt and he felt a searing pain as it bit into his flesh. He kept turning, ignoring the pain, and span around, raising his left arm and smashing his elbow into the side of her head. There was a satisfying cracking sound and she fell backwards, arms flailing as the knife span from her hand. She was totally off balance and Shepherd reacted instinctively, stepping forward and punching her in the face with all his weight behind the blow. She crashed backwards and her head hit the coffee table before she flipped over on to the floor. She lay still and Shepherd could tell from the unnatural angle of her neck that it was broken. He wasn’t sure if it had been the punch or hitting the table that had killed her but it didn’t matter. She was dead and he wasn’t. Shepherd stared down at the body. He was angry more than anything. Angry at her stupidity and angry at whoever had sent her to kill him. It was all so bloody unnecessary.

He picked up her handbag and riffled through it. No knife. No gun. But there was a vial of tablets. He tossed the pills and the bag on to the sofa. The plan had obviously been to pump him full of sleeping pills and put the plastic bag over his head. Shepherd had to admire the professionalism. He picked up his phone and called Charlotte Button.

‘
W
ell, will he live?’ asked Button. Shepherd was sitting on a stool as a doctor attended to the wound on his stomach. The cut wasn’t deep and the doctor had cleaned it and closed it with Steristrips.

‘He’ll be fine,’ said the doctor, a woman in her thirties who had arrived with Button and two men in grey suits who had zipped the bodies of Shepherd’s attackers into black plastic bodybags. Ten minutes later another man had arrived. He had used a digital camera to take a photograph of the dead couple’s faces and a portable LiveScan machine to take their fingerprints and he was now sitting on the sofa tapping away on a laptop.

‘Will I be able to play the piano again?’ joked Shepherd, pulling on a fresh shirt.

‘Clearly your sense of humour hasn’t been damaged,’ said Button. She showed the doctor out and then went to the kitchen area to make two cups of coffee. She gave one to Shepherd. ‘How did it happen?’ she asked.

The two men were moving through the room, collecting the wine bottle, the knife, and the woman’s belongings and placing them in a black rubbish bag.

Shepherd sipped his coffee. ‘I met her in a pub, around the corner. The Lighthouse. I had a few drinks, we had dinner. She came back with me.’

‘That’s not like you.’

Shepherd laughed. ‘When did you become an expert on my social life, Charlie?’

‘She is pretty, I suppose.’ She grimaced and corrected herself. ‘Was pretty, I should say.’

‘She was good. She was funny, she was attentive.’

‘And you thought you’d pulled?’

‘I had a pretty good idea what was going on,’ he said. ‘But the man caught me by surprise. The plan was to give her enough rope, but then she let him in and the dynamic changed.’ He shrugged. ‘He was going to shoot me, I didn’t have a choice. She was an accident, sort of. I didn’t mean to kill her.’

‘And she knew you as …?’

‘Don’t worry, I stayed in character. I used the Harry Cartwright legend we set up for the Battersea flat. Told her I was in marketing.’

‘And she said she was what?’

‘She said she was from Brazil and worked in website design. A group of them were over here on a job. She said she was staying at the Premier Inn at County Hall.’ He fished her business card out of his pocket and handed it to Button.

Button studied the card and then turned it over. ‘This is her UK number?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘She said her phone wasn’t working. I let her use mine.’

‘What happened when you got back to the flat?’

‘We had a drink. I saw her put something in my glass. I pretended to drink it. She thought I’d passed out and then she let the guy in. I hadn’t reckoned on that.’

The man with the laptop looked up. ‘Facial recognition has given us a match,’ he said. ‘The girl’s Maya Katz. She’s Israeli. Former army, former Mossad, now freelance.’

‘Does she work for Smit?’ Button asked him.

‘She works for the highest bidder,’ he said. ‘But no intel that she’s connected to Smit.’

‘What about the man?’ asked Shepherd.

‘Nothing yet.’

‘So what do you think?’ Shepherd asked Button. ‘I doubt she took offence at anything I said to her in the pub.’

‘Someone paid them, that’s for sure,’ said Button. ‘The question is, who?’

‘It has to be the Russians, right?’ Shepherd knew that it would be a lot simpler if he told her about the two Russians who had been following him in Berlin, but that was one can of worms he didn’t want to open.

‘To be fair, you have acquired a fair number of enemies over the years.’

‘Yeah, but it’s a hell of a coincidence that they send someone to kill me now, a couple of days after I get back from Amsterdam. And just after Smit’s money has gone into my account.’

‘I’m not arguing with you. I’m just saying, we don’t know for sure.’

‘Well, with the greatest of respect, we need to find out PDQ because if it was the Russians who put out the contract on me, what’s to stop them sending someone else?’

Button nodded. ‘You’re right, I’ll put out some feelers.’

‘I’m serious, Charlie. I was lucky today. I might not be so lucky next time. I’m going to have to move out.’

‘No argument there,’ she said. ‘I’ll get something fixed up. Now, let’s think this through. If it is the Russians, they must know that there’s a plot to kill Putin. And they can’t have plucked your name from the ether. Assuming that they were sent to kill The Dane, that could only have been because they connected you to Smit.’

‘So if they know about Smit, presumably they also know about Max Jansen.’

‘In which case, the easiest way would be to take Jansen out of the picture. No client, no payment, no contract.’ Button wrinkled her nose. ‘That would be the simplest option, I suppose. Rather than taking out anyone who accepts the contract. That’d be a never-ending job.’

‘Maybe they know about Smit but don’t know who he’s acting for.’

‘You’re suggesting that MI5 knows something that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service doesn’t?’ she said. ‘Unlikely.’

Shepherd knew that she was right. ‘I suppose it depends on how good their Dutch sources are.’

‘As I said, I’ll put out some feelers,’ said Button. ‘My worry is that if we ask the Russians too many questions, they’ll put two and two together.’

‘Maybe that’s no bad thing,’ said Shepherd. ‘If they don’t know already, maybe tipping them off means they’ll just cancel Putin’s visit.’

‘I think they would prefer it if the Dutch authorities put Smit away.’

‘In a Dutch prison? Aren’t they like hotels? Cable TV and weekends with the families?’

‘I’m not going to argue prison conditions with you,’ she said, standing up. ‘You’re going to have to leave this flat, obviously. Tonight. Anything you can’t carry we’ll have moved for you. The flat you used in Hampstead is still there and we’ve kept the John Whitehill, freelance journalist, legend up and running. Credit cards, driving licence, everything is still current.’

‘I’ll miss the river view,’ said Shepherd.

Button ignored his attempt at humour. ‘Now, what do you want to do protection-wise? I can put a team on you, if you want. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to my favourite officer.’

‘I bet you say that to all your people.’

Button smiled sweetly. ‘I do actually. But in your case, I mean it.’

‘I’ll be okay,’ said Shepherd. ‘Just find out what the hell is going on.’

S
aturday night was cold and frosty. It was 3 a.m. when Zelda and Harper left their hotel in a green Mercedes SUV. They had ordered flasks of coffee and a dozen sandwiches from room service because there’d be no refreshments on offer at the firing range. Harper was happy enough to let Zelda drive. She and Hansfree had been busy over the previous forty-eight hours and had been able to provide Harper with almost everything he could possibly need. They had produced a mass of information about the range and its test-firing procedures, from the details of the unit carrying out the firing to the number and frequency of guard patrols around the perimeter of the range, and had even found out the name of the range’s safety officer. The two Billys and Maggie May had also been hard at work, travelling the chosen approach route, checking lines of sight from the observation post and following the various escape routes detailed in the BRIXMIS reports, in case Harper and the New IRA men were compromised as they observed the firing. Harper’s original plan had been to watch the firing from the road but with the information Zelda and Hansfree had come up with, he figured he could get the IRA men much closer to the action.

They picked up O’Brien and Walsh from their hotel. They were accompanied by a single bodyguard, a big man in a heavy overcoat and a fur hat with ear flaps on his head.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Harper, winding down his window.

‘Just one of the boys,’ said O’Brien.

‘Why’s he here?’

‘What’s the problem? There’s plenty of room.’

‘I’m not happy about dealing with people I don’t know,’ said Harper.