The Hit List (17 page)

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an eye over them.'

'How did you come to join the Cadre?' Slater asked her.

'I joined Box when I left Cambridge. Started off in Derry - source-handling with North Det.'

'Did you get down to the hangar for any of the piss ups with our lads?'

'No, I was warned off]'

Slater laughed and shook his head. It had been an

insane time: for all the talk of peace the secret war had

been waged right up to the wire, with killings and

reprisals covered up by both sides. There had also been

[some serious mistakes made; a strong mutual distrust

I had prevailed between the various security services,

land this had led to a lack of communication which on

i

|more than one occasion had proved lethal.

'Have you ever worked with a woman?' Eve asked im. It was clear to Slater that they had followed the same train of thought.

'No,' he said. 'Except on surveillance jobs. And I irorked with a couple of female bodyguards last lonth. But never operationally.'

'Would it worry you?' she asked.

'I don't see why it should,' said Slater carefully. 'But rit gets rough, to be honest, I'd be more comfortable rith a couple of experienced blokes.'

'Because the women would need "protecting"?' she ^ked with heavy sarcasm.

'No, just because I've got a theory that women tend i go for their firearms faster than men do. They know

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they're going to lose a fist-fight or a kicking contest, so they pull out a weapon instead. And the thing escalates.'

'Have you got any evidence whatsoever to back up this cute little theory?'

'None whatsoever,' admitted Slater cheerfully. 'Nor for my other theory.'

'Which is?'

'That a man will surrender to a man, when he wouldn't to a woman. A lot of guys will literally risk a bullet rather than put their hands on their heads for a woman. It's a face thing.'

'I see,' Eve said tersely.

'They're just theories,' said Slater, 'but they're very good for winding people up.'

'Oh, that's where we are, is it? The wind-up stage?'

'You drive beautifully,' said Slater. 'I always feel safer with a female spook at the wheel.'

'Was that a compliment? I can't believe it.'

'Seriously,' said Slater, 'the answer to your first question is no. I have no trouble whatsoever with the idea of working with women, any more than I have with the idea of being ordered around by someone younger than me. All I think is that people should do the things they do best. The managers should manage, the planners should plan, and the doers should do.'

'That's all very well in theory,' said Eve, reaching in her bag for her sunglasses. 'But in practice we don't always have the people for that. In this department we all do all of those things.'

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Slater nodded. 'Point taken. So how did you move lover the river from Five?'

'I was . . . sort of recruited. My cover had been Jown in Ireland, I didn't want to spend the rest of my reer doing watcher duties, so I let it be known I was ady for a change. As it happened, the Cadre had just st someone and were looking for a replacement.' 'Lost someone?' queried Slater. 'A job went wrong. My predecessor was killed.' Slater stared at her. 'Killed. How?' 'In a firefight in a Paris car-park. I shouldn't be elling you this.'

'And am I replacing someone?' 'Yes. There are always six of us on permanent jttrachment. Plus two support.'

I 'Eve pulled the BMW off the M3. Soon they were ivelling along a sun-splashed country road overhung trees. Village succeeded village - Nutley, Preston Handover, Chilton Candover -- and the landscape led to broaden, to expand around them. As they lerged from a long tunnel of beeches and oaks Eve I off the road on to a narrow track marked Dunns >rd Only. To either side fields of young corn stched to the horizon. Dunns Ford proved to be a age of no more than two or three dozen houses - all rthem old, all of them graceful, several of them large, longside the road the river Itchen wound its way rer shining gravel and emerald-green weed. The BMW drew to a halt. 'What do you think?' Eve asked Slater.

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Slater shook his head. 'It's like a private world. What would one of these houses cost?'

'Oh, a million or so at least. More with land. More still with a stretch of river. Many, many years bodyguarding, I'm afraid.'

Slater nodded and looked down at his shoes. He would very much have liked the chance to change. There had been a washing and shaving kit in the safe house, but he still felt stale. This Italian gear might have looked cutting-edge in the West End, but in rural Hampshire it just looked flashy and inappropriate.

'Thanks,' he smiled sourly. 'I needed reminding of my lowly status. So, your Mr Ridley is a multimillionaire?'

'No, he's a former civil servant who lives on his pension. He's lived here for ages - long before prices went mad. Are you ready?'

'As I'll ever be,' said Slater.

River House was bounded by high stone walls and set back some distance from the road. Eve rounded a small circular lawn, brought the BMW to rest in front of a pillared entrance, and pressed the brass bell.

The door was answered by a smiling, pink-cheeked figure with a scrubby white moustache and a keen gaze. He was wearing shapeless corduroys and a frayed country shirt, and Slater guessed him to be in his sixties or seventies. The two men shook hands.

'Mr Slater -- Neil -- it's very good to see you. Come on in, hope you're hungry, bathroom on the right if you want a wash. Eve, my dear, what a pleasure.'

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He beckoned Slater into a stone-flagged hall. The place was comfortable rather than grand, and not especially tidy. Bookcases lined the walls, and where there were not books there were photographs: children on horseback, pre-war school cricket teams, officers in uniform, African servants, Scottish rivers and long-demolished houses. There were also mounted antlers and fox-masks, and from its case above the fireplace a vast and snaggle-toothed pike cast a glassy eye on proceedings.

Slater gave himself the once-over in the bathroom mirror, rejoined Eve and Ridley, and accepted a beer. A woman - a housekeeper rather than a wife, Slater guessed -- was bringing food to the table.

'Do you fish, Neil?' Ridley asked.

'I did as a boy,' Slater admitted. 'Not. . . not the sort of fishing you do down here, though.'

It had been poaching, mostly, and eventually he'd j been caught by the gamekeeper, a man with a ', reputation for punching you in the face first and asking I-questions afterwards. Until he went to Iraq Slater had i never been as scared as he'd been when he felt his

n

| collar grabbed that night. His heart still turned over I when he thought about it.

'What I thought we might do', said Ridley, 'is have bite of lunch, and then potter out and spend a couple jf hours on the river. OK by everyone?'

It was. Lunch was steak and kidney pie and a bottle of claret, followed by summer pudding. Slater had been ight, the woman was a housekeeper. Ridley lived alone.

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Department business was not discussed or even mentioned during the meal. Instead the conversation embraced - among other topics - the English countryside, soldiering, books, marriage, whisky and Far Eastern travel. Slater was fully aware that he was being interrogated, and that his answers were revealing more and more about his private loyalties and his secret and inner self, but the whole thing was so skilfully and sympathetically done that he offered himself up without resistance. Aware that Eve was watching him

- unlike Ridley, he noticed, she had not yet learnt how to observe people without their being aware of it

- he made a point of limiting himself to a single glass of wine, and of not quite finishing it.

When coffee was finished, Ridley led them through to his rod room. This was a pleasantly chaotic area with nineteenth-century prints on the wall, elderly Barbour jackets hanging on pegs, and waders and gumboots on the floor. And fishing kit. Reels and flyboxes cluttered a Victorian chest of drawers, nets hung from hooks, and dissassembled and partially assembled rods stood in every corner.

'Now, Neil, how are we going to kit you out? British traditional or American high-tech?'

The question, Slater knew, was a loaded one. 'I'll go for the Brit option,' he said.

Ridley nodded approvingly. 'Eve, would you be so good as to fix Neil up with the eight-foot split-cane Hardy and the Princess reel?'

Five minutes later, in a pair of Ridley's Wellingtons

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Chris Ryan

and with a borrowed bag of tackle over his shoulder, he followed the others through the garden. Ridley owned 500 yards of the fishing in the river Itchen -- a stretch reached by crossing the bridge in the village and walking through a couple of water-meadows. Ten minutes later they stood at the foot of an ancient willow, with the gin-clear water streaming slowly past them.

'First,' said Ridley, 'find your prey. Now how about .him?'

Twenty yards away, hard under the far bank, a dark shape wavered in the current. As Slater watched, it I'drifted upwards, plucked a fly from the surface, and f'returned to its station. Assembling his rod, selecting a My from a battered tobacco tin and deftly attaching it to |$he end of a line of hair-like fineness, Ridley began to t. The line snaked easily out and the fly landed with listledown lightness a yard above the fish. Slowly, as ater held his breath, it drifted downstream, and jually slowly the trout began to tilt upwards. Almost ly it engulfed the fly, and then as Ridley tightened je line, the split-cane rod hooped, the reel screamed the fish raced up-river with electric fury. It fought rd, but Ridley remained in control, and a few lutes later he slid the net beneath its shining, lusted form. It was a beautiful fish, several pounds weight, and Slater gazed wonderingly as Ridley sed it. The trout hung in the current for a moment fee a shadow and then, its instincts returning, raced for water.

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'The wild brown trout,' said Slater. 'The subtlest of the freshwater fishes. If you can deceive him you can deceive . . .'

'Anyone?' ventured Eve.

'Why don't you have a go, Neil?' Ridley suggested. 'If an old fool like me can manage it, I'm sure you can.'

'I'm not,' said Slater, 'but I'll give it a crack.'

'Let's go upstream,' said Ridley. 'This one will have been disturbed by that last fish.'

Another pool, smooth as glass. And another fish, lying between two waving banks of green weed. Assembling the tackle as he had seen Ridley do, and allowing Eve to select and tie on a suitable fly, Slater began to cast.

Ridley had made it look so easy, but in truth flyfishing proved nightmarishly difficult. Far from snaking effortlessly out over the river the line seemed to be everywhere. Within sixty seconds the fly had caught in the grass behind him, in a bush opposite him, and finally in the seat of Slater's trousers from where Eve smirkingly extracted it. On his second attempt the line lashed the surface like a whip, and the trout vanished in a puff of gravel.

'Don't be discouraged,' said Ridley. 'They're very . . . educated fish.'

At the next pool, at Ridley's suggestion, Eve stood behind Slater and guided his casting arm. Eventually, after a number of mishaps and tangles, he got the feel of it. He also got the feel of Eve's breasts against his back, but decided to file the sensation away for later

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retrieval. He was determined to catch one of these

' bloody trout.

'Why don't we split up?' Ridley suggested. 'Neil,

i you go upriver a hundred yards, Eve can stay here, and I'll go down to the bottom field. Oh and Neil,

, anything over a couple of pounds, knock it on the

1 head and we'll have it for supper.'

Keeping well back from the bank, Slater walked up through the buttercups with the split-cane rod at his side. It was a hot afternoon, bees hummed, and bullocks regarded him incuriously. Finding the pool he had been directed to, he knelt down beside an alder bush in order not to silhouette himself against the skyline, and started to cast. There were two fish in view, swimming side by side in the centre of the river. With no obstruction nearby Slater managed to float his fly past them a dozen times, but they ignored it. Painstakingly he knotted on another on another fly, but with the same result. For half an hour he tried to cast as Ridley had done, but it was no good. The fish

j, seemed to be laughing at him, hovering in the current

[and then lazily scattering as soon as he made a move

towards them. Sometimes they didn't even bother to

swim away, but merely ignored him. Perhaps, Slater

I mused irritably, you had to have been an officer for

them to take you seriously.

But there had to be a way. He was damned if he was

going to return to the house empty-handed.

^Improvise, he told himself- as you have spent your life

^improvising. If fair means don't get you where you

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tris Ryan

-^eneath him, beater five or six feet abov< *.*

and Slater slid fee ian trousers rend ai st, and finding his fc V>eautiful thing, per ; j^ght, and Slater wat yi�lking into shallowc ^ and struck it sharj r^d briefly, and was ^^ver he laid the fi; r pounds tips. Water streame ^^ emptied his wellir y pounds ks when a shadow

kt J'm impressed!'

Jn the end I had to

>

the rod. What fly

','!-. .'

>cj,ded, peering at th of worm was stil]

$yzed Slater. ii in? I think that's g<

i.ies a bit.' 3e^T anyone lay down

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want, try foul. On hands and knees now, he rounded a bend in the river and peered over the side of the bank. Below him, finning placidly over the gravel, was the long, ghostly form of a trout. It was the best fish he'd seen all day. Retreating from the bank, he looked round and made sure that he was out of sight. Then taking the flybox from the bag that Ridley had lent him, he selected the largest fly he could find. Hooking its barbed point into a stick he took his lighter from his pocket and burnt off the feather hackles of the fly until only the bare hook remained. This he attached to his line. Crossing to the bullocks' field he found a splatter of dried dung. Beneath it, as there had always been in his boyhood, he found a colony of lively red worms. Six of these went on to the hook.