The Kill Zone (24 page)

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Authors: Chris Ryan

BOOK: The Kill Zone
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‘Yes, DI Byrne. What is it?’
‘Mind if I take a seat, sir?’
‘Will this take long?’
‘Not long, sir, no.’ Siobhan sat opposite the DCI. ‘I’ve been getting my teeth into Cormac O’Callaghan, sir,’ she said.
‘So I’ve heard. It’s a waste of time and resources. We’ve had guys trying to pin him down for years, but it’s like nailing jelly to a wall. I want you to lower your sights. Concentrate on more achievable goals.’
‘I think I’ve stumbled on to something, sir,’ she replied, ignoring his suggestion.
‘I’m not interested in stumbles, DI Byrne. I’m interested in police work.’
Siobhan took a deep breath. Don’t rise to it, she told herself. Keep calm. This is about Lily, nothing else. She handed him two pages that she’d printed out from her computer the night before. It was an article about Habib Khan, his organisation and his forthcoming expedition to Somalia. DCI Robertson glanced at it. ‘I saw this guy on the news,’ he said. ‘What about him?’
‘He’s been in Belfast.’
‘So what?’ Robertson handed the papers back to her. ‘Last time I checked, that wasn’t an off—’
‘I saw him yesterday walking out of Cormac O’Callaghan’s pub. I think he’s involved in the O’Callaghan drug network.’ She kept quiet about the reference to ‘white gold’.
Silence. Robertson stared at her. Then he scraped his chair back, stood up and looked through his glass wall out on to the busy office beyond. For a moment it was almost as if he’d forgotten Siobhan was there. When he did speak, he sounded like he was doing his best to keep his voice slow and measured. ‘DI Byrne,’ he said. ‘I know you have certain . . . certain
personal
issues to deal with.’
Siobhan looked down. ‘That’s got nothing to do—’
‘
Damn it!
’ her boss suddenly exploded. ‘It’s got
everything
to do with this. Look, detective, ever since you arrived here you’ve been a bloody liability. You see shadows at every corner and you refuse to work alongside the other officers in this department.’
Siobhan set her jaw. ‘Do I have permission to interview Habib Khan, sir?’
‘Of
course
you don’t have fucking permission to interview him. Look who he is! Do you have any idea what sort of stink it would cause if we go harassing the guy on some trumped-up idiocy like this.’ Robertson turned to look at her. His face was red and, in the office, people were starting to take an interest in what was going on between them.
‘I’m telling you, sir. I saw him—’
‘Fine,’ the DCI shouted. He stormed back to his seat, picked up the phone and dialled a number. ‘This is Robertson,’ he snapped. ‘I need to know if there’s any record of one Habib Khan entering Northern Ireland within the last week. Get back to me immediately.’
He replaced the handset, folded his arms and looked at Siobhan.
Siobhan looked back. She could feel her face moulding into an expression of disgust for this man. Sometimes she wished she could stop her emotions showing. Right now, she didn’t care.
They sat in silence.
A minute passed.
Two.
And then the phone rang. The DCI picked it up. ‘This is Robertson . . . You sure? OK . . . Good.’ He hung up then gave Siobhan a level look.
‘Not only has Habib Khan not travelled here in the last week, DI Byrne, our records suggest that he’s never even
been
to Northern Ireland.’
Siobhan felt blood rushing to her skin. It wasn’t embarrassment. It was anger. Frustration.
Robertson spoke again. ‘Detective Inspector Byrne,’ he said. ‘You’re clearly under some kind of emotional strain at the moment. Or maybe it’s just your time of the month, I don’t fucking know. I’m putting you on a four-week sabbatical. We’ll re-assess the situation after that period of time with a view to moving you to less . . . less
stressful
duties.’
Siobhan stared at him. For a moment she didn’t know what to say.
She stood up and her chair fell to its back. ‘Fuck you, Robertson,’ she hissed, before turning her back on him and stamping away.
Everyone who saw it happen marvelled afterwards that the glass wall of Robertson’s office didn’t shatter, so forcefully did DI Byrne slam the door as she left.
After seeing Caroline walk up the steps of Thames House it had taken Jack three hours to get back to Hereford, then about ten minutes to get through the doors of the Spread Eagle. He wasn’t exactly surprised she was on Five’s payroll, but having it confirmed left a bitter taste in his mouth. He’d lost men on her account. Men with families who’d never know why their loved ones died. The thought made him want to kick the wall.
And so he’d started drinking, downing pints of Stella all that afternoon and most of the evening. He couldn’t remember getting back home. It was almost midday when he woke up on his sofa with a head like a splintered bone and a mouth as dry as a shit in the desert. He showered, pulled on some fresh clothes and made hot coffee. It didn’t make him feel much better.
In his bedroom the answering machine continued to glow, like a little beacon reminding him that he still had a call to make. Speaking to Siobhan still didn’t rank high on his list of priorities, but what was it Red had said to him once? ‘If you’ve got to eat a turd, no point staring at the fucker first.’ He picked up his phone and dialled the number.
It rang three times. Four times. Jack felt relieved that it would probably go to voicemail. He could leave a message then switch off his phone. Job done.
But no such luck. A voice. ‘Jack?’
She sounded breathless. On edge. So nothing new there. ‘What’s up, Siobhan? I got your message.’
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Here and there.’
‘Where are you now?’
Jack sighed. ‘What is this? Twenty fucking questions?’
A pause. And then what sounded to an amazed Jack like a sob. From Siobhan? Christ, something must be wrong.
‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Jack, I’ve got a lead on Lily. I think she might be alive . . .’
Siobhan carried on speaking, and Jack kept his phone to his ear. But he hardly heard a word. He was already heading out of the house on his way to the airport.
Jack drove blindly to Birmingham. He bought a ticket for the next plane to Belfast City Airport and didn’t even return the meaningful smile the check-in girl gave him as he handed her his boarding card. ‘Let me know if you need anything, Mr Harker,’ she purred. Jack just took his seat.
And in Belfast, when everyone else was standing at the carousel for their luggage, he rushed straight through to the cab rank. He stared out the window of his taxi as his driver sped through the streets of the city.
Belfast. During the Troubles it had seemed to Jack like he would never leave the place. Even now he felt uneasy travelling through its streets unprotected – back then, he wouldn’t so much as put his nose out the door without a Browning on his belt and a PPK strapped to his ankle. As a member of the Regiment, he’d have been a prime target for any Provo shooters – those fuckers would have done anything for an SAS pelt to show off in front of their mates – and there were certain parts of the city, especially West Belfast, where you just didn’t go. Certain bars where you just didn’t drink. Jack always had a cover story in case some suspicious IRA hood heard his accent and asked him what he was doing in the Province. For their purposes he was a BT engineer, over here on a six-month exchange. A reasonable cover story, but it was much better not to get into a situation where he had to explain himself in the first place.
The rules were the rules. Get it together with some chick on a night out and you never –
never
– went home with her on that first meeting, no matter
what
she promised to do for you. Get her name and address, or her car registration number, and put it through the police computer first. Only if she came up clean would you go back to her place next time you saw her. Ignore basic rules like that and the time would surely come when you found yourself sitting on the sofa while your honeytrap ‘got herself ready’, only to have a couple of Provos step into the room to hood you and blow your head off. It had happened to two of the green-army guys Jack knew, sent to meet their maker for the promise of a blowjob. The Regiment lads were bigger game for the Provos, and had to play it a bit smarter. One of Jack’s mates picked up the niece of an IRA quartermaster one night. Good job he checked her out. She might have had great legs, but the relationship didn’t.
They said Belfast was different now, but you don’t shake off that kind of paranoia easily. Jack realised he had taken his place directly behind the driver’s seat, not the passenger seat. Force of habit – he could quickly wrap the driver’s seatbelt round his neck if things went pear-shaped.
The driver dropped him outside an apartment block overlooking the River Lagan. As he approached the building, he noticed an old bag lady on the pavement, her worldly belongings stuffed into a supermarket trolley. She had a battered wireless radio switched on, but it hadn’t been tuned in properly and she was just listening to white noise. She gave Jack a look of intense suspicion that made him feel uncharacteristically uncomfortable.
It felt weird being here – the flat he’d shared with Siobhan when Lily was just a baby. He’d never forget the time he rocked up to find another man there. The fucker had left with a broken nose and a swelling between his legs very different to the one he’d been expecting. Even now the memory of it gave Jack a pang of irrational jealousy. He had never
wanted
to leave Siobhan, but she’d left him no choice.
He tried the main door, but it was shut and the intercom was fucked so he called Siobhan to say he was there. She came down to meet him.
Unlike Belfast, Siobhan never changed. The jeans, the leather jacket, the shoulder-length blonde hair. She hardly looked any different now to when they’d met all those years ago. A slight tightness around the eyes was all. A wariness. A sadness. As she opened the door, the bag lady barked something incoherent. Siobhan looked over his shoulder at her. ‘She’s always there,’ she told him. ‘Nowhere else to go. I give her a few quid sometimes. She just spends it on Cinzano.’
There was no greeting. No kiss on the cheek. Jack just followed her inside, up the stairwell and through Siobhan’s front door.
The flat itself hadn’t changed much. He scanned the familiar furniture, the framed picture on the wall that Lily had done when she was a toddler of her dad dressed in green and wearing a helmet. The whole place looked a bit shoddy, as though its owner had her mind on things other than interior design.
‘You want a drink?’ Siobhan asked.
Jack nodded and sat down as she poured two tumblers of Irish whiskey. The tumblers were empty before they spoke again.
‘So what . . . ?’ Jack said.
‘A friend of hers turned up in the Royal. She had a picture of Lily in her pocket. I questioned her.’ Siobhan closed her eyes. She was clearly finding it difficult to speak. ‘She told me that Lily went with some guy. Some Asian or Middle Eastern guy. That he . . . that he gave her drugs in return for sex.’
Jack stood up. ‘What’s his name?’
‘She didn’t know.’
That wasn’t good enough. ‘She still there? I’ll talk to her myself. A few minutes with me and she might find she remembers after all.’
‘Sit down, Jack,’ Siobhan said peevishly. ‘She’s dead. She died just after I left.’
He stared angrily at her, then swore under his breath and turned to look out of the window.
An uncomfortable silence. Jack felt nauseous.
Siobhan rested her glass on top of her boxy old TV. ‘I got myself suspended today. Well, as good as.’
‘Join the club,’ Jack said, but Siobhan continued as if she hadn’t heard him.
‘I tell you, Jack. You thought working for Five was a nightmare. These guys make them look like . . . ah, I don’t know.’ She waved one arm in the air in frustration. ‘It’s no wonder kids like Lily are killing themselves. There’s more heroin on the streets of Belfast than there ever has been, but the Drugs Squad are half asleep.’
‘It was your choice to move out of the Det, Siobhan.’
She gave him a sharp look. ‘Give me a break, Jack. You wanted me out of there years ago. It’s why you left us, isn’t it?’
‘I left,’ Jack said quietly, ‘because you couldn’t keep your hands to yourself.’
Siobhan jutted her chin out at him. ‘You were never there, Jack,’ she said.
Jack shrugged. They’d had this conversation before and it always ended the same way. It wasn’t something he felt like repeating now.
Siobhan paced the room, then turned to look at him. ‘Listen, Jack. I think I might have a lead. The name Cormac O’Callaghan mean anything to you?’
Now
that
got Jack’s attention.
O’Callaghan was one of those names any Regiment guy who’d served in the Province was unlikely to forget. Back in the early ’90s, O’Callaghan’s crew had been one of the PIRA’s most feared nutting squads. The kind of punishments they dealt out to any of their fellow Republicans were brutal enough to make anyone feel queasy, but what the bastards did among themselves wasn’t of much interest to Jack and his colleagues. O’Callaghan was on their radar for a very different reason: his men’s penchant for nailing off-duty policemen when they were with their families on a Saturday afternoon. One of his lieutenants had mown down one poor sod in full view of about twenty witnesses when he was picking up his kid from football practice. By all accounts the lad had got to his knees and tried to stem the blood flowing from his dad’s neck, and when it was clear the copper was dead, his son hadn’t stopped screaming for an hour. None of the witnesses had dared say a word; at least not until Red had got his hands on one of them and encouraged him to reveal the name of the shooter. Red had tracked O’Callaghan’s boy down, then driven the bastard over the border by himself – he wasn’t the kind of guy to ask anyone else to do his dirty work, though he’d have had pretty much everyone in the Regiment queuing up to lend a hand – forced a confession out of him and put one in the back of the head. O’Callaghan, though, the ringleader, had gone to ground. The bastard knew what was good for him, and he knew what would happen if he ever crossed the path of a Blade.

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