Killing for the Company

Chet nodded.

‘Which room?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Come on, we don’t have all day.’

‘Take your pick. They’re both clean.’

The American looked at the two doors, shrugged, chose the closest, then stretched out one arm to indicate that the Prime Minister should enter.

Stratton, however, waited for a moment. ‘Ex-military?’ he asked Chet.

Chet wasn’t surprised the PM could tell. He knew he had the bearing. He nodded.

The PM held out his hand for Chet to shake. His skin was cold and dry, his grip firm. ‘Thank you,’ he smiled. ‘I, er… I don’t believe people say that enough.’

The bald man looked a little surprised that Stratton had taken the time to stop, but he quickly followed his lead. He slapped Chet’s upper arm in a comradely way. And if he noticed that Chet was unimpressed, he didn’t show it.

‘Shall we, Prime Minister?’

Stratton nodded and followed the American inside, closing the grey door firmly behind him.

The muscle immediately took up position: one outside the room, one where the corridor entered the open- plan area and the third by the lift. None of them even acknowledged Chet’s presence. He shrugged. If they wanted to stonewall him, fine. He needed to stick around till the meeting closed, so he took himself off into the empty room to wait.

Chet sat on the edge of the large meeting table, facing towards the windows looking out over Whitehall. It felt good to take the weight off his leg. He pulled a fifty-pence coin from his pocket and started flicking and catching it as he tried to make sense of what he’d just seen. Chet made a habit of not asking too many questions about these meetings the Grosvenor Group wanted to keep so secret. It suited him just to do the job and get paid. He couldn’t help wondering, though, what Stratton was doing here and what conversation was being held in the adjacent room.

He walking over to the window, absent-mindedly tapping on the tinted glass as he looked down on to Whitehall. It was full of buses, taxis and pedestrians, silent from this height. Number 10 was just up the road. The Houses of Parliament too. Stratton had any number of places he could conduct meetings. Why here? Unless he didn’t want this meeting to be common knowledge…

He flicked the coin again and caught it.

He remembered a conversation he’d had years ago, sitting in a Serbian bar. Luke Mercer was speaking quietly so as not to be overheard. ‘Stratton is a politician. Therefore Stratton is a wanker. End of.’ Chet had seen Luke three weeks ago as he was preparing to go away on ops. He’d asked where, but Luke had given him an apologetic look. ‘Sorry, buddy. You know the deal.’

Yeah, Chet knew the deal. With the Americans and the Iraqis squaring up to each other, and the Brits showing every sign of wanting to come along for the ride, Chet could make an educated guess about what Luke was up to. But a guess was all it could be. He was out of the Regiment and out of the loop. Get used to it, buddy.

It was as these thoughts circulated in his head that something caught his eye. A flash of sunlight reflecting off something on the opposite roof.

Movement.

Chet squinted, trying to make out what was up there. Partly hidden behind a railing was a figure. He grabbed his bag, pulled out a pair of binoculars and quickly focused them. The blurred figure grew sharp.

A woman. Long red hair. Cute nose. Stud on the left. Some kind of machine in front of her.

‘Cleaning lady, yeah right,’ Chet muttered.

And as he said it, he was already hurrying towards the door.

FIVE

Chet moved as quickly as his leg would allow him — out of the door and past Stratton’s security people.

‘Hey — where you going?’ the guy outside the meeting room shouted.

Chet ignored him and walked on.

His mind turned over. What had he just seen? The woman on the roof opposite was in no position to make an assassination attempt: the angle was ridiculous. And whatever the apparatus was that she had set up in front of her, it hadn’t looked to him like a sniper rifle. She was up to something else.

The lift took an age to get to the ground floor, and the moment the doors opened he half ran, half limped out of the building. The PM’s black limo was parked outside, with two more security men standing next to it. As Chet ran past, one of them put a sleeve to his mouth and started talking; Chet ignored them and hurried across the road towards the building opposite. He didn’t enter. The reception area was crowded, with thirty or forty office workers milling around and a security check-in. There was no way he’d talk his way through that. The same went for the girl. There had to be another access.

He looked back across the road. Stratton’s security hadn’t left their positions, but they were watching him and updating someone on the radio. Fine. He could explain his actions later. Right now he needed to get up to the roof. He hurried round to the side of the building, where a thin passageway separated it from the next one. It led to a much smaller side street running parallel to Whitehall, and as he turned left he found the rear of the building had a fire-escape door with an external metal staircase leading up to the roof.

He was fit enough to climb the five storeys to the top of the building in less than a minute, but his leg hurt like hell all the way. As he stepped out on to the roof, he felt the wind blowing strongly. It brought with it the honking and roaring of the traffic below. The top of the London Eye rose in the distance.

He saw her immediately. Suze, or whatever her name really was, had her back to him and was slightly bent over, with her hands over her ears.

The howling of the wind was so strong that Chet didn’t bother with stealth. He strode straight towards the young woman. When he was about a metre behind her, he saw that she was crouched over what appeared at first glance to be some kind of photographic equipment on a tripod. Chet quickly twigged what it actually was, though: a long-range laser listening device. All you had to do was point the viewfinder in the direction of a window. The device would pick up the vibrations on that window caused by people speaking inside, then convert them back into sound. Linked to it was a little black cassette machine that was recording whatever the listening device picked up.

Chet had used something similar once himself, during a short tour in Northern Ireland just before he was dispatched to the Balkans. On that occasion he’d been treated to the sound of a PIRA bomb-maker in flagrante with some slapper he’d picked up in a pub a few hours previously. He was still getting stuck in when they burst into the flat.

Back then, the laser listening device had been supplied by 14 Intelligence Company, surveillance experts with all the latest equipment at their disposal. Where the hell this girl had acquired such a piece of kit was anyone’s guess. Maybe he’d just ask her.

Chet tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped and spun round. She was wearing headphones connected to the apparatus, and her eyes were slightly wild.

‘OK, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Her eyes darted from Chet, to the apparatus, to the office on the other side of the road — through the window of which Stratton and the American couldn’t be seen because of the tinted glass. She seemed unable to speak. ‘Oh, God…’ she breathed.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Chet said calmly, holding his hands palm outwards to try to calm her down. He found his eye drawn to the curve of her neck. The smooth, unblemished skin.

‘No…’ Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. ‘Please. Please! ’

‘Just come with me and we’ll sort this out.’ She seemed terrified, so he tried to sound as reasonable as possible.

‘Please…’ Her tear-filled voice was hoarse now. ‘They’ll kill me if they find out. I swear, they’ll kill me…’

She was desperate. That much was obvious. Desperate or nuts. Why was it always the cute ones that ended up being loonies? Chet could tell by the way she glanced over his shoulder that she was preparing to bolt; when she