The four men waded through the tall grass towards the lodge. As they reached the door the President took some keys from his pocket and fiddled with a series of locks. Clacks and clangs, then he tugged the door open. It groaned on its hinges as first Pretorius, then the President, stepped inside. Bald and Deet followed them.

  The lodge was the kind of place that gives animal activists douche chills. Hunting trophies hung from the walls: antelope horns, the stuffed heads of rhinos and buffalo. There was enough ivory on display to keep the piano business going for years. The sofa was covered in a genuine leopard skin. The rug was a bear skin. Practically every ornament and decoration in the lodge had been an animal. The table was made from bones. Horns and tusks were used as drinking vessels. There was a black-and-white photograph on the wall – inherited from a previous owner, Bald figured – of a plump white man in a waistcoat and breeches with a bushy moustache standing proudly over a lion, an old Winchester repeating rifle propped against his shoulder as he posed in front of the slain beast. In one corner of the main room was a bar, with bottles lined up on a shelf behind it. Johnnie Walker Red Label, Bowmore, Talisker. Bald licked his lips. He’d hit the jackpot.

  Pretorius said, ‘Where’s the money?’

  The President said, ‘It’s buried. Outside. I’ll show you.’

  Pretorius flicked his eyes to Deet. ‘Grab a shovel.’

  Deet nodded dutifully and stepped into a utility room piled high with equipment. He pulled a shovel out of the clutter and the President led him out to the back yard. Soon the distant chirping of grasshoppers was replaced with the thunk of a shovel cutting into the scorched earth. Bald could hear Deet grunting as he heaped up the soil. Pretorius eased himself down on the sofa. Bald made for the bar. Jesus, he was parched. His tongue was like sandpaper, pasted to the roof of his mouth, his teeth covered in fur.

  ‘You know, it’s funny,’ Pretorius said.

  Bald reached for the Johnnie Walker. ‘What is? Because this whole op has been one big bag of laughs.’

  Pretorius sniggered. ‘I’m talking about the traitor in our midst. Priest, he seemed to fit the bill. The GPS bracelet he wore, the fact he couldn’t pilot a plane. I’d convinced myself he was the guy. But it appears I was wrong.’

  Bald wasn’t really tuned in. He was too busy unscrewing the cap and raising the bottle to his thirsty lips. He was about to neck his first swig when he caught sight of the Beretta pointed at his face. He stilled. Bottle mouth pressed to his lips, the honeyed scent of whisky teasing his nostrils, so close he could almost taste the good stuff. He turned real slow to face Pretorius. There was a peculiar glower to his eyes and his lips were curled in a twisted smile.

  He said, ‘The traitor has been staring me in the face all along.’

  For a beat Bald couldn’t speak. A numb feeling slithered down his spine, spreading to his guts and limbs. His right arm had lowered the bottle and he hadn’t even realized it. A savage pain fired through his temples. The migraine. Shit, it was back. He gripped the bottle, his right hand trembling like an alcoholic going cold turkey.

  ‘I know you’re working for MI6,’ Pretorius added.

  ‘Bullshit.’ But his voice didn’t sound convincing to Bald, let alone Pretorius. The migraine pounded viciously between his temples, a searing pain that seemed to graze his cranium. He sucked his teeth, gripping the edge of the bar with his free hand to steady himself. Questions surged through his mind, amplifying the sharp throbbing in his head. Pretorius stood up from the sofa, took a few steps towards Bald.

  ‘No point lying, John. He told me everything. On the phone. En route to Moroni.’

  ‘Who?’ Bald muttered.

  ‘Grealish.’

  As he said this, Pretorius shuffled closer to Bald, his brow stippled with sweat. He looked weak from the loss of blood. Bald remembered now. The name on the JCB Sitemaster screen. The conversation. Pretorius telling Grealish the name of his new mucker on the team, John Bald. Pretorius drew nearer to him. The Beretta muzzle eyefucking him.

  ‘As soon as I mentioned your name, Grealish gave me the heads-up. Told me that you were tight with Six. That a former colleague of his, some jumped-up bitch, had hired you to find and kill me.’

  Bald shook his head. Coupled with the migraine, it felt like a rack of snooker balls was sliding around his head, crashing against the sides of his skull, splintering his thoughts. He tried to focus. ‘Grealish must have got his wires crossed. Priest was the guy they sent. For fuck’s sake, you saw the GPS tracker he was wearing.’

  ‘I thought about that. Grealish told me he personally requested Priest be included on the strike team.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So he could keep an eye on you.’ Pretorius chuckled. ‘Why else do you think, you idiot? Grealish is forever boasting about his ability to pull strings in Whitehall. He said that once he learned you were being dispatched, he decided to put his own man on the team. Someone he could trust. Someone who could stop you before you carried out the mission.’

  That’s why Priest sold me out to Pretorius, thought Bald. To take me out of the picture. He now understood why Avery Chance hadn’t told him about Priest wearing a tracker: because she hadn’t known herself. Grealish had gone behind her back, used his black book of contacts and secured Priest a place on the team. A favour from an old mate, no doubt. But Pretorius wouldn’t have known that when he discovered the tracker. He would simply have seen proof that the guy was spying on him. Bald stood perfectly still. Didn’t move a muscle. He was done. No way out. The pistol muzzle glowered at him. Eight inches from his face, Pretorius poised to pull the trigger. Bald felt his entire body constrict with fear – and hate. Grealish had fucked him, again. Belfast, twenty years ago. Now this.

  The migraine exploded. A jarring pain tore through his head. As if someone had buried an axe in his skull and was now trying to jerk it free. Bald dropped the bottle and its base disintegrated in a hail of shards, like someone had fed a block of ice into a log splitter. Whisky darkened the wooden floor. Bald lost his grip on the bar and fell to his knees.

  Above him Pretorius rasped, ‘Get up, you miserable fuck – and die like a man.’

  Bald experienced a moment of clarity through the searing pain. The glass. A dagger-like fragment seized his attention, the point splashed with whisky. Pretorius was still above him, confused by the sudden onset of the migraine. In a flash Bald grabbed the shard of glass and stabbed him just above the knee. Pretorius howled in agony, clamping his free hand to his leg. Bald yanked out the piece of glass. Blood pumped steadily from the wound, impairing Pretorius’s movement and forcing him to stoop forward for a moment as he bit back on the pain. Bald lunged at him, slapping his left hand around the guy’s right wrist and thrusting his arm towards the ceiling. At the same time he balled his right hand into a fist and delivered a sharp dig to the ribs. Pretorius grunted loudly. His reflexes automatically depressed the trigger and he loosed off a round that tore into the beamed ceiling, showering both men in a hail of crisp splinters of wood.

  Then Deet rushed through the door, eyes wide with alarm, bellowing with rage as he charged towards Bald with the shovel in both hands. The Scot gave Pretorius another quick jab to the guts and followed up with a sharp elbow to the jaw. The Beretta tumbled from his loose grip as he fell away. In a rapid motion Bald grabbed the pistol and arced it towards Deet when he was no more than two steps away. The bodyguard was swinging the shovel down past his shoulder like an axe. Bald fired twice. Deet stopped. Like he’d run into a pane of glass. His head snapped back and his brains spat out of the back of his head, painting the hunting trophies a dark shade of red. The lodge shuddered as his giant frame hit the floor. Bald spun away from Deet and saw Pretorius scrambling out of the back door. He shaped to give chase when a roar of pain sounded from the yard. Bald raced outside. Saw Pretorius prostrate on the ground, the rusted jaws of a hunting trap fastened around his ankle, digging savagely into his flesh. The PMC chief clenched fistfuls of dry earth as he fought the pain.

  ‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘Get it over with.’ He glanced up. ‘Do it!’

  Bald said nothing. He was gripped by a sudden fury. Twice Pretorius had put a gun to his face. No one did that to him and lived to tell the tale. A sinister image of Charles Grealish flashed across his mind: the man who had almost terminated his career in the Regiment. Pretorius had been working with Grealish. Both of them had taken him for a ride, screwed with his brain to the point where he couldn’t see straight any more. Now he saw clearly. As if on cue, the migraine started to dissipate. There was only the sound of his breathing, the steady pulse of blood between his ears. This ends now, Bald told himself.

  He knew exactly what he had to do.

  He slipped into the utility room and seized a length of rope. Then he hurried outside and bent down beside Pretorius. With both hands gripping the trap, Bald wrenched the savage jaws apart, releasing Pretorius. He hauled him to his feet. The guy was groggy, delusional from the heavy blood loss. He mouthed words that remained silent on his lips as Bald slung the rope over his shoulder. Then, at gunpoint, Bald shoved Pretorius south towards the national park two hundred metres away. He could hear the incoherent mumbling of the President as he lay slumped next to the mound of earth. In the distance to the east, Bald glimpsed a pair of white smudges on the horizon, shimmering in the heat of the savannah. Eight or nine hundred metres away. They looked like Jeeps.

  Company.

  Better hurry it up.

  Bald swivelled his gaze back to Pretorius. The guy was totally out of it – could hardly stand up. They reached the perimeter of the national park with the Jeeps four hundred metres distant. The park was bordered by a crude wooden fence reinforced with barbed wire. A sign on a metal post next to the fence read: ‘DANGER LIONS.’ Bald shoved Pretorius through a gap in the fence. Now they ventured deeper into the jungle. Strange growls and squawks carried through the air. After two hundred metres Bald stopped beside a tree with a trunk as thick as a man’s chest. Then he pushed Pretorius against the tree with his back pressed against the hard bark, slipped the rope off his shoulder and began wrapping it around the tree and Pretorius’s waist. The wide look in his glazed eyes told Bald that, behind the pain, the man knew exactly what he was doing.

  ‘You can’t do this to me,’ he croaked.

  Bald stayed silent. He continued to bind Pretorius tightly to the tree.

  ‘I don’t deserve to die like this. Like a . . . dog.’ Pretorius let his head drop. Then he lifted his gaze, anger briefly flickering in his eyes. ‘Fuck it, then. Shoot me in the head. Anything but this.’

  Bald still said nothing. When he was done wrapping he secured the rope with a double knot. Not that Pretorius was in any fit state to escape. Satisfied with his work, Bald took a step back. Deep growls drifted through the jungle.

  ‘Hear that?’ Bald said. ‘They can smell your blood. By the time they’re finished tearing you to shreds, there won’t be anything left except bones and scraps. You’re a fucking animal. Now you’re going to die like one.’

  Pretorius summoned one last iota of strength. Lifted his heavy head and met Bald’s eyes. ‘You’re the same as me. A monster. We’re – brothers.’

  ‘No,’ said Bald. ‘I’m nothing like you.’

  Then he gave his back to Pretorius and retraced his steps out of the park, Pretorius shouting at his back that they were the same, that killing him would be like Bald killing himself. The Scot tabbed back towards the lodge with a clear conscious and a pressing weight lifted from his shoulders. He was a hundred metres shy of the lodge when a roar echoed through the jungle, a chorus of animal snarls followed by a piercing howl of very human agony. The lions were getting stuck into Pretorius. Ripping him limb from bloody limb.

  Bald reached the lodge with a spring in his step. The Jeeps had stopped out front and several figures were debussing, white men and women in dark suits and shades. Poster boys and girls for the Firm. That made a certain amount of sense. The suits were always waiting in the wings to claim the credit. A woman, fortyish and prim, approached Bald. She wasn’t exactly dressed for a safari, wearing a pair of low heels and a black two-piece, her skin pale, her shades blocking out the sun. She gave the impression of a frigid professional – cold and hard-edged – the kind of woman who spoke her mind and seized ruthlessly on the weaknesses in others. But Bald knew her better than that. Knew that once you looked under the hood there was a vulnerability she went to great lengths to disguise. She wasn’t a corporate ball-breaker. But a fighter. The kind of woman who, if backed into a corner, would fight like hell. Bald recognized her immediately. His handler. Avery Chance.

  ‘Hello, John,’ she said. As she neared Bald he noticed that her hair, usually cropped with a touch of blonde at the fringe, now betrayed strands of grey. She was entering middle age. They all were, thought Bald.

  She cast a look at the President, the blood spattered over Bald, and cleared her throat. ‘It appears you’ve been busy.’

  Bald looked down at his shirt and hands. He needed a shower. And a drink. And a shave. ‘Aye,’ he said. And then: ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘Grealish,’ Chance replied as she ran her eyes over the lodge. ‘We’ve been listening in on our old friend, picking up chatter on GCHQ. Once we knew the President was in danger, we had him tapped up, allowing us to trace his signal here. We were hoping that the President would lead us to Grealish too . . .’

  The words drifted silently from her lips. They both knew: sometimes the bad guys slipped through the net. Not everyone paid their dues. That was the way of the world and it didn’t need articulating. They both looked across to where two agents were attending to the President. He was a nervous, animated wreck. Then Chance looked back to Bald and frowned.

  ‘Mind telling me what happened to Pretorius?’

  ‘Went for a walk in the park,’ Bald replied, jerking his thumb in the direction of the jungle. ‘Got a feeling there won’t be much left of him by the time your people have secured the scene.’

  Chance nodded warily. ‘You know, normally, I’d have to launch an internal investigation. There are all sorts of rules and regulations about what we can and can’t do to people like Pretorius.’

  Bald clamped his lips shut. He watched Chance very closely as she went on, ‘But I think we can make an exception in this case.’ She stared at him hard. ‘If there’s no body, then there’s no evidence. No evidence means no crime.’

  ‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ Bald replied, grinning.

  She doesn’t know any of the dark shit that went on, he thought. He’d covered his tracks thoroughly. Priest was dead. So was Stegman. And Pretorius. He was in the clear. Finally he could look forward again. A new job with the Firm. A clean slate, a decent salary. It wasn’t as good as the seventeen-odd million he’d stood to make with Pretorius – wasn’t even in the same solar system as ‘good’ – but under the circumstances he was willing to compromise. He broke out a broad grin.

  ‘I told you, Avery. Back in Poland. Good as my word. I kept my nose clean.’

  Chance looked at Bald in a way that troubled him. She wasn’t smiling. In fact, she seemed unsure about something. Hesitant. ‘If that’s the case,’ she said carefully, ‘do you mind explaining this?’

  She passed Bald the iPhone 5s she had been gripping in her right hand. YouTube was already open and a clip was waiting to be played. Three million hits. Curious, Bald tapped Play. There was an ad for some kind of sports drink, which Bald skipped after five seconds. Then the clip started.

  The footage was sharp. Crystal clear. A child stood among a group of prisoners. He was five or six years old. There was a white-hot flash and the tinny report of a shot being fired, and the boy jolted as a bullet struck him in the centre of his face. An old man wailed off-screen as the boy slumped to the ground. Then the camera panned across from the dead child to the face of the man who had pulled the trigger. Bald went cold. He recognized the face in an instant. Of course he did.

  Bald was looking at himself.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Chris Ryan

  Imprint Page

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

 

 

  Chris Ryan, Silent Kill

 

 

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