Fair Game (8 page)

‘Pretty much everything,’ she said.

‘Including the fact that the whole operation was a cock-up?’

‘That’s not the word she used,’ said Stockmann. ‘But I gather that was the drift.’

‘I went into a situation where there was another undercover operative that I wasn’t aware of. The men I were with were going to execute him.’

‘You saved his life.’

‘I saved one and I took two, which any way you look at it means I’m one down on the deal.’

‘It’s not the first time you’ve taken a life in the line of duty, though, is it?’

Shepherd looked at her steadily. ‘It’s not what I did, that’s not what I’m angry about. It’s the way that it happened. Yes, I’ve taken lives before, but it’s always been because there was no other choice. In Northern Ireland, I was in a situation that could have been avoided if people had been behaving professionally.’

‘And who do you blame for that?’

‘What, you want me to blame Charlie, is that it?’

‘Do you think she was at fault?’

Shepherd frowned as he considered the question. Eventually he shook his head. ‘I think she probably did everything she could, it was the Northern Irish cops that screwed up. They ran their operation without letting Five know. Five is responsible for all anti-terrorism operations in the Province so the cops must have deliberately not shared their intel. And by doing that they put their agent at risk.’

‘Do you think that’s what has made you so angry? You can empathise with the agent?’

‘Probably, yes. That could have been me. I could have been the one facing an execution squad and I might not have been so lucky.’

‘It wasn’t luck that saved him, Dan. It was you.’

‘Did Charlie tell you that one of the Special Branch cops left his phone in a pub and that’s how they found out there was an undercover agent?’ He scowled. ‘Bloody idiots,’ he said. ‘Lions led by donkeys, isn’t that what they said about the infantry during the First World War? That’s what it feels like, Caroline. Like I’m being run by idiots who couldn’t find their own arses using both hands.’

‘Are we talking about Charlie now?’

Shepherd shook his head. ‘Charlie’s sound,’ he said. ‘I trust her completely. But that doesn’t mean to say that I trust her bosses.’

‘Is that what’s happening, you’re losing confidence in the people you work for?’

Shepherd sighed. ‘It’s a worry, but it doesn’t prevent me from doing my job,’ he said. ‘Now it’d be a different matter if I was working for the PSNI and they dropped me in it the way they dropped their guy in it.’

Stockmann smiled. ‘You know that they were going to be called the Northern Ireland Police Service until they realised that people would be grabbed by the Nips?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘It was well down the legislation route before it was pointed out how ridiculous it would sound.’ She took another sip of her beer, watching Shepherd carefully over the top of her glass.

‘I’m not bitching about the job,’ said Shepherd. ‘The job’s fine and I’m perfectly capable of doing it.’

‘I understand that, but you’re clearly unhappy.’

‘You kill two people, Caroline, and tell me that you’re happy about it.’

‘Is there anything you could have done differently?’

‘Me? No, nothing. They were going to shoot the cop and I only had seconds to react. And once I’d shot the first guy, the second guy was getting ready to shoot me. It was me or him.’

‘It was combat?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘And is that why there’s no guilt? Because it was kill or be killed?’

‘Guilt isn’t the right word,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’m very conscious of why I did what I did and I would have preferred not to have done it, but if I hadn’t shot the first guy then the cop would have died and if I hadn’t shot the second guy he would have killed me.’

‘So it’s the fact that you reacted instinctively that takes away the guilt?’

Shepherd smiled. ‘You sound like you’re planning to do a paper on the subject.’

Stockmann’s eyes sparkled with amusement. ‘Funnily enough, I was thinking of doing something on post-traumatic stress disorder. But my question was more about finding out what makes you tick.’

‘The training removes the guilt, pretty much,’ said Shepherd. ‘The Regiment trains you over and over until you react instinctively.’

‘But that just makes you carry out the task effectively,’ said Stockmann. ‘It’s like training conscripts to use a bayonet. Teach them well enough and on the battlefield they’ll do it instinctively but the training doesn’t help them cope with the guilt they feel years later.’

‘Different sort of training, different sort of combat,’ said Shepherd. ‘Wars with conscripts pit ordinary men against ordinary men. That’s why they could climb out of the trenches on Christmas Day and play football. Professional soldiers are a different thing altogether.’

‘What if it wasn’t combat?’ said Stockmann quietly, as if she feared being overheard.

‘You’re talking hypothetically?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then I think outside of a combat situation, the taking of human life is probably harder to deal with. I don’t think I could ever be a sniper, for instance.’

‘Because?’

‘Because a sniper is killing when his own life isn’t on the line. A sniper lies in wait and then shoots when his victim isn’t expecting it.’

‘You were shot by a sniper, in Afghanistan, weren’t you?’

Shepherd rubbed his shoulder. ‘It was more of an ambush than a sniping,’ he said. ‘The guy had a regular assault weapon rather than a sniper’s rifle but yeah, we weren’t in a firefight and he only took the one shot and then vanished.’ He grinned ruefully. ‘Though I doubt that he is losing any sleep over what he did, me being an infidel and all.’

‘I guess that’s the answer to my question, isn’t it?’ said Stockmann. ‘If you feel morally justified in killing, there shouldn’t be any guilt.’

Shepherd nodded slowly. ‘I guess so.’

‘So have you killed outside a combat situation?’

Shepherd didn’t reply. He took a long, slow drink of shandy.

‘Is that a question you’d rather not answer?’ asked Stockmann.

‘Is this you asking, or Charlie?’

The psychologist frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Did she ask you to ask me that question?’

‘It doesn’t work like that, Dan. This isn’t an interrogation. It’s an assessment.’

Shepherd took a deep breath, forcing himself to relax. Stockmann wasn’t the enemy, but the question had caught him off guard.

‘So why would you ask me a question like that?’

‘Because of the nature of your career. You were a soldier, you were in the SAS, you moved to the police, then the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and now you’re with MI5. I was wondering if during the course of those different jobs you’d ever been asked to take a life in a situation where combat wasn’t involved.’

‘Because?’

‘Because I’d be interested to know how you reacted. Whether guilt kicked in afterwards.’

Shepherd nodded slowly. He didn’t like lying to the psychologist, but she had given him no choice. Yes, he had been in situations where there had been no combat, where he’d helped to cold-bloodedly take the lives of men who were no immediate threat. And no, there had been no guilt afterwards. But he couldn’t tell Caroline Stockmann. He shrugged carelessly. ‘It’s never happened,’ he said.

‘That’s a relief,’ she said. ‘From your point of view, I mean. It’s not something I’d want to put to the test.’

‘What about you, Caroline? Do you think you could take a life?’

She laughed carelessly. ‘Me? Good gracious, of course not,’ she said. ‘How on earth could I? I don’t have the strength, mental or physical. I’m one of life’s victims.’

‘That you’re not,’ said Shepherd. ‘But say you were at home and a rapist broke in and you had a knife.’

‘That’s a lot of ifs.’

‘It’s only two,’ said Shepherd. ‘Rapist. Knife. Do you stab him to save your life?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘And suppose someone was about to kill your husband or wife. Would you kill them?’

‘Yes,’ she said, more confidently this time.

‘See, you do have what it takes,’ said Shepherd.

‘If pushed, anyone can kill, is that what you’re saying?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘And if you were defending your child, I don’t think there would be any guilt. Do you?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Now let’s take it a step further. Suppose someone murdered your child. And you knew without a shadow of a doubt who’d done it. Would you kill them if you could?’

‘That’s too hypothetical, Dan.’

‘How can anything be too hypothetical? It’s a simple question.’

‘But not one that I can answer in the abstract. We can’t take the law into our own hands.’

‘You think the criminal justice system is working, do you?’

‘You’re very good at that, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘Good at what?’

‘At deflecting questions by changing the subject. You do it so subtly that one’s hardly aware of you doing it.’

Shepherd chuckled. ‘It’s a necessary skill when you’re undercover,’ he said. He put up his hands. ‘Sorry, go ahead. Ask away.’

She raised her glass. ‘Thank you so much,’ she said, before taking a sip. She put down her glass. ‘Let’s talk about your career path,’ she said. ‘I know that joining the police from the SAS was a big step. Because of your late wife.’

‘She wanted a quiet life, she was fed up with me risking everything for Queen and country. I don’t think she realised it was going to be out of the frying pan into the fire.’ He smiled at the memory of his wife, Sue, who’d died in a senseless car accident when Liam was just seven years old.

‘But when you moved from the police to SOCA, it had more to do with Charlie than anything?’

Shepherd shook his head. ‘I hadn’t met her before I joined SOCA,’ he said. ‘I was with a police undercover unit that got absorbed by SOCA, and she was in charge.’

‘Why did you leave the police?’

‘I wasn’t given a choice,’ said Shepherd. ‘SOCA took over the undercover unit and I was told I could start working with them or start pounding a beat in a uniform. SOCA was threatening to cherry-pick all the big cases so there wouldn’t have been much to do as a regular cop. I have to say that it didn’t work out that way, though.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘SOCA has been a bit of a failure,’ said Shepherd. ‘Too many pencil-pushers and too many box-tickers, too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Can you name any major SOCA successes over the past couple of years?’

Stockmann nodded. ‘I’d be struggling,’ she said.

‘Don’t get me wrong, some of the work was challenging but at the end of the day all the investigations were cost-led. If it looked as if a target was going to be too expensive, we’d let it slide. The powers-that-be only wanted us to chase the cases that they knew we’d win, which basically meant that we never went near the top villains.’

‘That must have been frustrating,’ said Stockmann.

‘I put up three drug barons based in Amsterdam who between them are responsible for half the cannabis and probably ten per cent of the cocaine that reaches the north of England, but I was told that there weren’t the resources to go after them. So that was that. If we don’t go for them and the Dutch aren’t bothered, they effectively have a free pass. And the thing is, they know it. So what’s the point of having a law enforcement organisation if it doesn’t uphold the law?’

‘I assume that’s rhetorical,’ said Stockmann. ‘But I understand what you’re saying. Is that why you were happy to move to MI5 with Charlie?’

‘It was one of the reasons. Better the devil you know . . .’

‘And how are you finding the Secret Service?’

‘It’s not that secret, these days,’ said Shepherd. ‘It’s like every man and his dog knows what we do.’

‘And the work’s challenging?’

‘Espionage, terrorism, major crime.’ Shepherd nodded. ‘Plenty of variety, plus they’re not as budget conscious as SOCA was.’

‘Well, I suppose 9/11 and 7/7 were a big help financially,’ said Stockmann. ‘The government put billions into security and they weren’t overly concerned about where it went.’ She swirled her beer around her glass. ‘And how did you feel being in Ireland?’

‘It’s not my favourite place,’ he said. ‘The SAS aren’t best popular, despite the peace process and all. Plenty of people still bearing grudges.’

‘Was it tough?’

Shepherd shook his head. ‘Not really. My legend was that I was an IRA sympathiser, brought up in the States and with five years in the Marines. That way it didn’t matter if my accent was all over the place. I was introduced through an undercover agent in New York and got close to the Real IRA’s Operations Director. We were gathering evidence against him and the rest of the Army Council.’

Stockmann shuddered. ‘I don’t know how you can do that, get close to men who would kill you without hesitation if they knew who you were.’

‘The trick is to stop them ever finding out,’ said Shepherd. He sipped his shandy.

‘And how are things at home?’ Stockmann asked.

‘Ticking along nicely,’ said Shepherd, ‘though the absent father thing isn’t working out as well as I’d hoped. I’m spending a lot of time away from home.’

‘Your son still misses his mother?’

‘Of course. We both do. But I don’t think either of us is grieving any more.’ He smiled. ‘Liam’s just asked me about boarding school.’

‘That J. K. Rowling has a lot to answer for,’ said Stockmann.

‘I think he realises it’s not all magic spells and teachers with beards, but it caught me by surprise.’

‘How old is he now?’

‘Fourteen next birthday.’

‘He’s growing up.’

‘That he is. I’m just not sure that he’s ready for boarding school.’

‘It might make things easier, job-wise. With your absences.’

‘True. But I like the fact that he’s there whenever I get back.’

Stockmann nodded thoughtfully. ‘Which is great for you, but you have to look at it from your boy’s point of view. He’s forever waiting for you to come in through the front door, or for the phone to ring.’

‘Not much of a life, is that what you mean?’

‘I’m not saying that, but at least if he was boarding he wouldn’t be expecting you every evening, would he?’