The Hit List (26 page)

: man was very heavy -- dead weight -- and blood lid matter dripped from the fertiliser-bag on to aulder and arm of Slater's jacket. Finally he had >dy poised, and tipped it in head first. There was ible grinding and roaring from within the ic, and then an obscene pink soup whitened by chips began to sluice into the plastic dustbin, disappeared comparatively fast but the iers took much longer. Slowly the body inched iwards until Slater signalled to Eve to shut the

icoff.

don't want to carry so much that it spills or ies,' he explained.

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Carefully, averting his head from the stinking stew around which the flies were already circling in their hundreds, Slater manhandled the bin over to the pigs' enclosure.

Smelling the blood the pigs began to trample over each other to get close to him. With care, Slater poured the flyblown contents of the bin into the trough which ran the length of the enclosure. The pigs piled in, lapping and crunching uninhibitedly.

'You haven't by any chance still got those Gauloises?' asked Eve, when he returned to the wood chipper. Slater had. The packet was a little battered but most of the cigarettes were in one piece.

'I always want to smoke if I miss lunch,' she explained with a quick smile.

'You're hungry?' asked Slater. A purple set of genitals and two fat, hairy legs were sticking bolt upright out of the woodchipper.

'Well, you know how pathetic French breakfasts are.'

'Do you want to hit that on-switch?' suggested Slater.

It took two more hours to process all of the bodies, and by the end both of them were bloodspattered, nauseated, and physically and emotionally drained. Slater was worried that the pigs would lose their appetites half-way through and leave the trough filled with shredded human tissue, but his final visit to the enclosure was greeted with all the squealing enthusiasm of the first.

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icn they had finally finished, Eve lit another ciga and Slater attached a hose from the barn to the tap. He sluiced down the bin, the pigs, the i, the plastic sheet, the inside and outside of the chipper and the concrete surface of the yard. To clean out the machine, Slater fed a pile of logs it, pouring the resulting woodchips into the enclosure. Microscopic forensic analysis might indicated the vestigial presence of human tissue I and there, but why was anyone going to subject Ifoarticular farmyard to that kind of scrutiny? Within |tes all the hosed-down surfaces had dried in the leaving no sign of the horror that had unfolded A blackbird sang on the baked tile roof of the There was a buzzing of grasshoppers. Here are we, anyway?' Slater asked. The pain in sin had subsided to a dull ache and the sunshine

ig him sleepy.

f-way between Chartres and Le Mans. Eighty Jes south-west of Paris. It's quite nice, isn't it?' ftybe we could retire here,' said Slater, yawning. i raise pigs.'

need to change our clothes,' said Eve, audibly ing herself. She moved to the pile of discarded 5. 'What have we got here?' ig offher short leather boots, she unzipped and I her torn velvet jeans. Her legs, Slater couldn't f'jHoticing, were long and well-toned, with the ion of a fading tan. courtesy of the Vauxhall Cross gym,' she said

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drily, intercepting Slater's covert glance. 'And knickers by La Perla. Anything else I can help you with?'

To replace the jeans, she took Potato-Head's shiny Adidas pants and belted them round the waist. With the Levi jacket the effect was a bit weird, but not so unusual as to attract attention.

As Slater stripped to his boxer-shorts and began pulling on the cosh-man's grey track-suit pants, Eve soberly examined the bruises on his upper body.

'They were really quite cross with you, weren't they?'

'I think it was the guy whose thumb I shot off that did most of the damage,' said Slater. 'To be honest I'd probably have a good go at anyone who did that to me.'

'But nothing broken? You're not pissing blood or anything?'

Til let you know,' said Slater, pocketing the Stechkin and the Tokarev. The weapons were so heavy that Slater had to tighten the draw-string at his waist to prevent the track-suit pants from being pulled down as he walked.

When they had taken the clothes they needed, the remainder went into the boot of the Audi. 'There was a place I passed about half an hour's drive back towards Paris,' said Eve. 'A kind of dump. We can get rid of these there. In the meanwhile' - she stabbed at the buttons of her mobile - 'we should get up to date. Andreas, yes, tell me.' She listened in silence for thirty seconds. 'Understood.'

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^Pressing the off-button she turned to Slater. 'Right. Here's the position. Andreas has Fanonayat under surveillance. He's in a hotel called the r-Lux near Charles de Gaulle airport, and as far as sas can tell he's there alone. There's no sign that i going anywhere -- he's just holed up in his room. s's got back-up there, he hasn't made face-to-face ttact with them.'

ifFanon-Khayat's got a hard decision to make,

iumably,' said Slater. 'Either to go for safety and run

Belgrade, or to go for profit and glory and tie up

I^Ondine deal. Am I right in thinking that he has to

here to do that?'

According to our assets, he'll want to do the deal If he goes back to Serbia and his contacts ?w him there, then the RDB will find out light away who they are and cut FanonKhayat i'of the deal. By staying here and operating outside orbit he can keep hold of all the strings, and : out of the whole thing looking like the single ied saviour of Republica Srpska. This'll ensure hero status in Belgrade -- never underestimate jf need of a middle-aged man to impress his baby trophy wife - and a fat backhander from the ier.'

lich he's going to need when Branca hits the s,' Slater added wryly.

fou better believe it! I only saw her for thirty ads but she looked to me like a girl who knew ' to give a gold Amex card a hard workout.'

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'So we think he's going to lie low at the hotel, then?'

'That would be my calculation.'

Slater nodded. 'So we have to do him there.'

'That or persuade him to come away with us so that we can do him somewhere else.'

'And he's got the disc there? The Cambodia pictures?'

'He must have. He wouldn't leave them in the flat without the bodyguards there. And the bodyguards all went off with you.'

'So one way and another we've got a better than average chance of completing the operation as intended?'

'I think so, yes. But the first thing we've got to do is make this Audi disappear. You haven't seen a slurry pond or anything like that?'

'I haven't seen anything. I was in the boot. But mightn't it be a better idea just to dump it? Somewhere it's absolutely bound to get nicked, replated and sold on. Do you know any really rough Parisian housing estates?'

'Yes, I do. And you're right, that would be the best way to get rid of it. We've got to go into Paris anyway.'

Slater looked around him, at the farm buildings bathed in afternoon sunshine, at the peace and quiet and solitude of the place.

'What's the plan?' he asked.

'Let's get rid of the clothes and the car,' said Eve. 'I'll

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Chris Ryan ryou on the way out to the airport.'

: dump was a vast, hellish smear of a place, covering eral acres. Bulldozers shovelled mountains of refuse, wheeled overhead, and smoke rose from a of fires. With the heat of the day the smell was ^eakable. Slater threw the armful of clothes and ; over a stinking garbage cliff-face, hurried back to /Audi Quattro, and gunned the engine in pursuit of !?� Peugeot.

hour later he wiped the controls and steering el clean of fingerprints and parked the car in the ijr-strewn shadow of a high-rise public-housing in Arcueil, two kilometres south of the icrique ring-road. With his hands inside the ; of his sweat-shirt to avoid leaving further prints : himself out of the car and walked away, leaving key swinging from the ignition.

streets away he eased himself into the ger seat of the Peugeot, and he and Eve headed tiwards for the Porte de Gentilly and the city of As she drove, he told her what had happened in KKhayat's apartment and at the farm. When he

led she told him her version of events. ?e got your first transmission,' she told him, you said that the two bodyguards were down. i about ten minutes later we saw Branca arrive in | Quattro. We all spotted her -- she's pretty akable. She got out and started giving ctions to the driver and I called you on the

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Motorola but got nothing. Walls of the building too thick, you'd switched off, whatever. The others all tried in turn but no one could raise you.

'The driver let Branca out and then drove round the back - presumably to some underground car-park entrance. At that point Andreas and I left the cafe, got into the two cars and waited. We had no way of knowing what was happening in the flat.

'Nothing for another fifteen minutes and then the Quattro re-appeared. Two passengers, same man driving.'

'The cosh-man,' said Slater, touching the back of his neck.

'Exactly. So I took off after them. No idea if you're in the car, Panon-Khayat's in the car, what the hell's happening. Anyway they carry out a couple of rudimentary ploys to lose anyone who's following them -- nothing I can't handle, though -- and I tuck in half a dozen cars behind them.

'At that point Terry comes through on the mobile. Fanon-Khayat, carrying a case, has just walked straight past Andreas and picked up a taxi at the Porte Molitor. Andreas is following in the Mercedes and is pretty sure Fanon-Khayat isn't on to him. They're on the Peripherique, heading east.

'I tell him I'm heading at speed down the A10 away from the city. No idea if you're in the car. The others all reckon you probably are, because as far as they know Branca hasn't left the flat. Whether you're dead or alive, Fanon-Khayat's hardly going to leave her

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with you. The consensus at that point is that f re dead, and that the bodyguards are taking your out into the countryside to get rid of it.' Hose enough to the truth,' said Slater grimly. 'I I you were suitably upset!'

with grief,' Eve said with a faint smile, ray ... I follow the Audi from the A10 on to the | and I assume we're going to Chartres, but we by ?it and head on towards Le Mans. Then Terry ; on again. Fanon-Khayat's going towards Roissy ic airport. It looks like he's running for Belgrade.'

[ news.'

je worst. It looks as if a hit's been botched, a aned target's escaped, and a Cadre member's silled.' abarrassing.'

: a bit. So I just press on, and eventually the Audi jffthe All on to a minor road and from there on ties of farm tracks. I'm lying well back, like I told i$o I'm able to pull in and watch their car crossing s. After that, well, you can imagine. I work my Across the fields for a half-mile or so and lie up that farmyard wall. What's really lucky is that that's got the Clock, not Andreas.' r long were you there?'

ig enough,' said Eve. 'The main thing I wanted aver was whether they were armed or not. As it never found out, and so as soon as you put one down I reckoned it was my best chance and st in.'

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Slater turned to her in his seat. 'You were brilliant. That was a great bit of shooting.'

Eve tried not to show her pleasure, but her eyes gave her away. 'I do like a Clock Seventeen,' she admitted.

'There is one question, though,' said Slater. 'Where's the Sig Sauer the bodyguards took off me?'

Eve considered. 'My guess is that FanonKhayat took it. It would have been the sensible step.'

'Which means,' said Slater, 'that Fanon-Khayat is armed . . . and Andreas isn't?'

'We have to assume that, yes.'

'So we should get up to that hotel as quickly as possible.'

'That's what's going to happen. Except that it's not going to be we. I'm dropping you off at the Montmorency and taking one of the others up there.'

'You're kidding!' Slater protested vehemently. 'I'm fine, I really am. Apart from anything else this whole situation's at least partly my fault. I was the one who let that bodyguard get the drop on me.'

'It's not a question of fault,* said Eve. 'It's a question of the team as a whole getting the job done, and I'd be completely irresponsible if I asked you to carry on at this stage. You had the hit on Fanon-Khayat to deal with this morning, for a start. Then you had a bad knock on the head, a severe beating and a hundred mile journey in a car-boot, and to top it all off you were told you were about to be fed through a meat grinder. You're rucked, basically, and no bloody wonder.'

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Slater was silent. As an SAS soldier he had been

lined to keep going whatever his state of exhaustion.

tercises had often been designed to run for days without a break, and he was familiar with all the femptations that extreme tiredness brought in its wake:

* cut corners and to skimp on detail. To mistake light jjfeadedness for clear-headedness; to let the jncentration wander; to make overemotional ecisions.

Like his colleagues, Slater had learnt to monitor his pwn condition and to compensate for these

idencies. But there was a point, he knew, beyond trhich the best soldier's efficiency was compromised, today had not been an especially long day but heavy

senditures of adrenaline and terror had taken their jll, and the blazing relief of his deliverance had been

placed by the dull blur of emotional fatigue. Eve was it - he was running on empty.

She parked the Peugeot outside the Hotel Grand

telmans, and they hurried in a side-door with the Overnight bags they'd taken from the Montmorency lat morning. In the room designated as the OP, Leon id Chris gave them a relieved welcome. The pair had arely left the room all day and their faces betrayed the

am they'd been under, listening to the day's events ^ia radio links and mobile phones.

'Good to have you back, man!' said Leon quietly. Thought we'd lost you then.'