Fallout

by GJ Moffat

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers

Synopsis

Logan Finch has made a new life for himself with his daughter Ellie. But a blossoming relationship with DC Rebecca Irvine is about to be put to the test when Irvine's old flame, drug-addicted rock star Roddy Hale, enters her life again. And there's the small matter of a professional killer following her every move. Alex Cahill, close-protection operative and ex-US army special-forces soldier, hates babysitting celebrities. Maybe this time will be different. Tara Byrne is a Scots girl about to break into Hollywood and is back in Scotland for the premiere of a low-budget film as a favour for a friend. She is the target of a disturbed stalker and needs Cahill and his team to watch her back. As the clouds roll in to blanket the sky at the end of an Indian summer, violence erupts all round, putting everyone at risk. For Logan, there are impossible choices to be made: between his best friend and the woman he loves. Between who lives and who dies.

Release date: May 13, 2010

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 482

Sample

‘How long is it now that you’ve been killing for me, Carl?’

Carl Hudson had never met the man sitting across from him but he knew the type: trying to be provocative just to get a reaction. Hudson ignored the question, lifted a white cup and sipped at his espresso.

‘Don’t be shy, now, Carl,’ the man said. ‘You’re among friends here.’

He spread his arms out and smiled at his own joke because they were the only two people using the pavement tables of a nondescript coffee shop. The place had just opened for the morning trade and the baristas were still putting the last few tables in place outside.

It was a warm day in late August and the man sitting across from Hudson removed his suit jacket. The label inside flashed as he placed it over the back of his chair, disclosing that it was a very expensive piece of bespoke tailoring. He cinched up the cloth of one leg of his trousers and then crossed his legs, summer-weight wool brushing softly as he did so.

Hudson sipped again at his coffee and pushed his sunglasses up his nose with the index finger of his free hand. He looked at the other man and, taking in the details as his companion leaned back in his chair, decided that he needed to give him a name.

Tag Heuer watch.

Armani glasses.

Silk tie by Paul Smith.

‘I need to call you something,’ Hudson said, still ignoring the man’s question. ‘How do you feel about Paul?’

‘Fine. Whatever.’

‘I’ll admit that I’m curious,’ Hudson said. ‘Why is it that you want to meet me now? What’s so special about this job?’

‘I like to study history,’ Paul said, lighting a cigarette and drawing in a deep lungful of smoke. He picked a piece of tobacco from his tongue and flicked it on to the ground; smoke from the cigarette drifted up into the glare of the sun.

‘I mean, you can learn a lot from history,’ he said finally. ‘Let me give you some examples by way of illustration, OK?’

Hudson was beginning to feel the heat of the sun on his shaved head and wasn’t really in the mood for small talk. But he had to give Paul his place; he was the one who wrote the cheques – figuratively speaking.

‘This is one you might know about, given your …’

Paul’s eyes darted around as he searched for the right word, ‘background.’ He smiled, satisfied with the word he had come up with, and carried on with his train of thought. ‘Did you know, for example, that the first use of a car bomb in the West was …’

He paused and looked at Hudson. ‘Sorry, that was a bit crass, wasn’t it? What is it that you soldier types call it?’

Hudson knew that he was being toyed with but he had to play the game. ‘Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device,’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘God, it sounds so utterly banal when you say it like that, don’t you think?’ Paul asked.

Hudson took it for a rhetorical question and said nothing.

‘Anyway,’ Paul went on, running a hand through his thick grey hair. ‘The first time one was used in the West was in 1920 in New York. Some Italian lunatic took a horse-drawn wagon loaded with explosives into the heart of the financial district in Manhattan and killed forty people. Terrible thing.’

Hudson wondered where this was going, but he could see that Paul was in full flow and that it would be a mistake to interrupt him at this point.

‘But you’ve seen the results of one of those things up close, haven’t you? Where was it – Iraq or Afghanistan or … ?’

Hudson nodded, but said nothing.

‘But then al-Qaeda,’ Paul said, shaking his head. ‘I mean they really took it to new levels of ingenuity, you know. The American embassy in Beirut in eighty-three. And then look what they went and did on 9/11. The ultimate vehicle-borne device. They cost me a lot of money that year with the hit the stock market took.’

Hudson finished his coffee and wiped at the thin film of sweat beading on his forehead with a napkin. He got the feeling this part of the conversation was over.

‘Like I said,’ he started, ‘what’s so special about this job that you wanted to see me in person? Why not follow the usual lines of communication?’

What Hudson really meant to ask, but could not, was: what are you doing risking a meeting in public like this, you lunatic?

‘It’s …’ again with the dramatic pause, ‘delicate.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, maybe delicate isn’t quite the right word.’

Get to the point.

‘Have you ever killed a police officer?’

‘You know,’ Hudson said, ‘you were absolutely right. Delicate is not the correct word.’

He stood, pulled a ten-pound note from his pocket and put it under his empty cup. ‘The coffee’s on me,’ he told Paul. ‘Let’s not ever do this again, OK?’

‘Five hundred thousand,’ Paul said.

Hudson stared at him, wondering if he’d heard correctly.

‘Five. Hundred. Thousand,’ Paul repeated deliberately.

Ten times the biggest single fee Hudson had previously had from the man. He looked along the street and nodded at his backup waiting in the car thirty yards away, indicating that he should sit tight for a bit longer. Then he sat back down.

‘I thought that might get your attention,’ Paul said.

Rebecca Irvine looked in the mirror and, for the first time in a while, was sort of pleased with what she saw. She’d been letting her hair grow for about a year now – since her husband, Tom, moved out of the house – and the previous blond dye job was gone, replaced with something closer to her natural shade of dark brown.

‘Becky, come on. We don’t want to be late,’ her best friend, Hannah Fraser, shouted at her from the hall downstairs.

Irvine opened a drawer in her dressing-table and looked at the envelope from her lawyer that contained the final court order confirming her divorce from Tom. She felt as if she had lost a part of her life that she would never get back. Not that she regretted for a second the fact that the marriage had produced her son, Connor. But it was going to be tough holding down her job as a detective constable in Strathclyde Police’s CID and trying to take care of her family.

Irvine picked up her mobile phone and scrolled through the contacts list until she found Logan Finch’s number, her finger hesitating over the call button.

‘You better not be calling him,’ Hannah said, now leaning against the door of Irvine’s bedroom. ‘This is a girls-only night, you know.’

Irvine had not heard Hannah come up the stairs; she turned the phone over in her hand and looked sheepishly at her friend.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But it’s still kind of new for us. I mean, we’ve only had five real dates. Plus, with all that Logan went through with Ellie, it’s just, you know …’

She stopped herself from saying any more.

Hannah only knew the official story: that Logan’s old girlfriend, Penny Grant, had been murdered and that her eleven-year-old daughter, Ellie, turned up in a state of shock three days later at Logan’s flat. Logan was Ellie’s father and so he’d taken her in and was doing the best he could to bring her up.

The real story was a little more complex and Irvine sometimes had to stop and remind herself that even those closest to her couldn’t ever know the truth.

Hannah sighed. ‘Look, just call him,’ she said. ‘I know you won’t be happy until you do.’

‘I was going to anyway,’ Irvine said.

She dialled Logan’s mobile number and put the phone to her ear. Ellie answered after a couple of rings.

‘Hi, Ellie.’ Irvine tried to sound cheerful. ‘Is Logan there?’

‘Hold on.’

Irvine was unsure how Ellie viewed this new stage in her relationship with Logan; couldn’t work out if the girl’s occasional bouts of sullen behaviour when she was round at his new flat in Shawlands was because of it or the fact that at thirteen Ellie was technically a teenager and supposed to act that way. Whatever the cause, Irvine was prepared to allow Ellie as much time as she needed to adjust after all that she had been through.

‘Hey, Becky,’ Logan said as he took the phone from Ellie. ‘What’s up?’

She heard the smile in his voice and couldn’t help but smile too. ‘Just checking in to see how you’re doing.’

Hannah rolled her eyes at Irvine and turned to go back downstairs.

‘I’m good,’ Logan said. ‘We’re just about to go into town to grab a pizza.’

‘OK, listen, I don’t want to hold you up and we’re heading out to the concert now anyway. I’ll give you a call later when I get home. If it’s not too late.’

‘It’s never too late,’ Logan told her. ‘Call me any time.’

They said goodbye and Irvine pressed the end button on her mobile, slipping the phone into her pocket and going down to join Hannah.

‘Hey, look,’ Hannah said, stopping Irvine before they left the house. ‘I do like to kid around, you know, but I think Logan’s good for you. You deserve better than Tom, that’s for sure.’

Irvine smiled and hugged her friend. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And he is good, right?’

‘Seriously. And he’s kind of hot too, which always helps. Have you two, you know …’

Irvine didn’t answer the question.

Ellie grabbed Logan’s hand as they waited to cross the road to the restaurant. He was still getting used to being parent to a thirteen-year-old girl and wasn’t sure yet what kind of relationship they had: somewhere between being friends and being father and daughter. Logan was happy allowing her to be the one who defined their relationship.

They ran together through a gap in the traffic and then walked to the Pizza Express on the corner of the opposite street. Logan felt his phone vibrate and frowned as he fumbled in his pocket for it.

‘Who’s that now, Logan?’ Ellie asked.

She had gradually slipped into calling him by his first name after starting off calling him ‘Dad’.

Logan pulled the phone out and put it to his ear.

‘Can you come into the office tomorrow?’ Alex Cahill asked without introduction.

‘Hi to you too,’ Logan said. He covered the mouthpiece and told Ellie who it was.

‘Yeah, whatever,’ Cahill said. ‘Can you come in tomorrow?’

‘Mr Grumpy. Remind me why I quit my job to come work for you?’

Cahill didn’t reply. ‘Are you going to tell me what it’s about?’ Logan asked. ‘I mean, it’s Saturday tomorrow.’

‘Sorry, I’m a little pissed about this. We got a referral for some actress from London who’s coming up here for a film premiere on Sunday and they want to get a contract signed up, like, right now. Which is messing with my weekend plans.’

‘What’s the story?’

‘I only just spoke to her manager, but apparently she’s been getting some weird shit in the mail; from some kind of stalker or something. And it escalated just in the past few days to some specific threat against her for this trip.’

‘So she’s looking for a close-protection detail?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’ll pay well, then?’

‘Too right. Way that prick of a manager spoke to me, I’ll add twenty-five per cent on top just for the aggravation factor.’

‘Standard contract then?’ Logan asked. ‘I mean I can do that in an hour or so.’

‘If only,’ Cahill said. ‘The manager is e-mailing me a contract from her lawyer. Some big-shot media guy from London. You got time tomorrow to deal with this? I mean, if it’s going to mess up plans with Ellie …’

‘It’s OK, I can do it. Ellie’s going into town with my parents so they can spoil her. Again.’

Ellie screwed her face up at him.

‘What time you want me there?’ Logan asked.

‘Is ten good for you?’

‘Yeah, that’s fine. See you at the office then.’

Logan put his phone away and asked Ellie if she was OK with him having to work tomorrow.

‘Sure,’ she said. Which was her way of saying ‘not really, but you’re going anyway so what can I do about it’. She was economical with her words.

‘I know I’ll have to pay for it later,’ he said, hoping to lighten the mood.

Ellie smiled slyly. ‘Gran said maybe you should give me some money so I can get myself something tomorrow.’

‘Always the cash with you.’

Logan couldn’t help but smile back at her. As she grew (and she was growing fast), he was beginning to see more of her mother in her looks. She was going to be taller, though, because she was almost at Penny’s height, five-two, already.

How different life would have been, he thought – for all of us – if Penny had told me she was pregnant and we’d worked it out. Maybe the strain of having a baby so young would have been too much for us and we would have split up anyway. And then I could have lost touch with Ellie.

But at least Penny would still be alive.

Such thoughts came to Logan frequently; usually at night when he lay awake listening to make sure Ellie was still in the room next to his.

Still breathing.

He tried to push it all from his head and to focus on the positives, on what they had now. But it wasn’t always easy. And other images invaded his head in the night – colours of the dark rainbow: Ellie’s face, black and blue and purple; scarlet-slicked hands reaching for her; claret splatter of blood on snow.

Irvine was determined to enjoy her post-divorce night out. Her mum and dad were looking after Connor, and Hannah was driving so she had the green light for wine over dinner before they headed out to the Exhibition Centre for the concert.

She had dated the band’s singer, Roddy Hale, back when they were teenagers. His dream of making it big seemed like the usual fantasy, except that he’d gone on to global success. Trouble was, if the tabloids were to be believed, he’d also gone on to Class A drugs.

‘God,’ Hannah said, as they walked through the double glass doors of the centre, ‘I need to go to the little girls’ room. Maybe that second glass of wine with dinner was a mistake.’

‘Yeah,’ Irvine said. ‘You’re the designated driver tonight so take it easy, OK.’

‘You’ve been on holiday for three weeks and you still sound like that policeman who came to our school to give us the “road safety lecture” when we were twelve.’ Hannah did the quotation thing with her fingers and left Irvine to head for the ladies.

‘I told you before,’ Irvine shouted after her friend. ‘It’s not a holiday.’

Irvine had put in for a long holiday but her boss, DI Liam Moore, had ripped up the paperwork and told her she was to go away and clear her head and get back on the job when the divorce was done: compassionate leave. She had gratefully accepted.

‘Whatever,’ Hannah said, waving a hand at her as she ran.

Irvine walked to the side of the wide entrance corridor, next to a poster advertising future events at the centre. She watched people streaming in through the doors and noticed how young most of them were. She started to feel self-conscious and pulled at her T-shirt, smoothing it over her stomach, glad that she had managed to lose and keep off most of her baby belly since her son’s birth. It hadn’t been easy given the culture in the CID of long hours and fast food.

An older man with a closely shaved head and wearing faded jeans and an olive T-shirt came in behind a group of girls and glanced sideways at Irvine. He was good-looking in a very masculine way, with broad shoulders and muscled arms. He smiled at her and rolled his eyes a little and kept on walking. Irvine guessed he must be chaperon for the group of girls, and that one of them was probably his daughter.

‘OK, babe,’ Hannah said, coming back from the ladies, grabbing Irvine’s arm and pulling her into the flow of human traffic. ‘Let’s rock.’

The interior of the main hall of the centre felt entirely alien to Irvine. She hadn’t been to a major gig like this for years and had forgotten how cavernous the place was; and that the smell of mass-ranked youth was so distinctive. The queue for the overpriced bar snaked through a temporary roped-off area and the crowd at the merchandise stall was five deep, with young men – teenagers most of them – stripping off their existing T-shirts to expose pale, skinny bodies and putting their new ones on.

The PA system was blasting out while the crowd waited for the band to come on stage and Irvine felt the concussive bass thud of the music vibrating through her whole body. She was content to let Hannah lead the way and allowed herself to be gently pulled along through the ticket checkpoint, past the floor-to-ceiling soundproofing curtains and into the auditorium. She was unaware of the man in the faded jeans and olive green T-shirt, alone now, keeping pace with them about fifteen feet back.

‘Come on,’ Hannah yelled at her over the sound of the music. ‘Let’s get down near the front.’

‘Do we have to?’ Irvine shouted back. ‘We can just stay back and still see everything, and maybe not get killed.’

‘You want to have a good time, don’t you? So let’s go.’

Irvine followed Hannah into the crowd until they stood about ten rows back from the stage. She knew that the noise when the band came on would be thunderous this close to the PA system, but she tried to relax, wanting to let loose and have fun.

The man moved into the crowd directly behind her and stayed there, about seven rows back. He nodded in time to the recorded music but all the while kept his eyes trained on Irvine, feeling the ceramic knife strapped to his leg cool against his skin.

As the minutes passed, the hall really started filling up and Irvine felt the excitement of those around her grow as they anticipated the appearance of the main act. She wondered what it would feel like seeing Roddy again after all this time.

The spotlight operators started to ascend to their perches high above the stage. Irvine looked around and caught sight of the man in the green T-shirt some way behind her. He was looking at the stage and seemed to be on his own, not with the group of girls Irvine had seen him with earlier. Embarrassing-dad syndrome – he was allowed to drive them here and back but could not be seen to be with them inside.

Then the lights went out and a huge roar sounded as the crowd surged forward. Hannah looked at Irvine and laughed as bodies pressed against them on all sides.

A steady drumbeat started up and the crowd surged again. Irvine was shocked at the volume level. Did it use to be this loud, she wondered, or am I really getting older? She hadn’t thought that being in her early thirties was all that old, until now.

Behind her, the man moved with the surging crowd, advancing towards Irvine.

The guitar intro to one of the band’s best-known songs chimed out, undercut by a pounding bassline, and then the stage was bathed in blinding white light. Roddy Hale stood alone at the front with his head bowed.

The crowd around Irvine started to jump in time to the bass-line.

Hannah put her arm around Irvine’s shoulder and they joined in.

Irvine felt alive.

The man in the green T-shirt moved forward until he was directly behind Irvine, then reached down into his sock and slid the knife out of its holder.

Carl Hudson kept all the gear he needed in the boot of his car or on his person.

He had two changes of clothes to enable him to blend into most situations: first, a fairly decent pair of linen trousers and a blue cotton shirt, and, second, a T-shirt and an old pair of jeans. He also had plenty of bottled water and protein-rich snacks; a ceramic knife that would pass through any metal-detector; two fully loaded Glock-19 handguns with spare magazines; a scoped sniper’s rifle by Heckler & Koch and a ballistic vest.

Hudson was not ordinarily given to bouts of self-doubt. He killed people for a living – no point trying to put a gloss on it – and even though he considered himself one of the best, what the boss wanted on this job made him nervous. It was not a mindset he enjoyed and he wondered, not for the first time, if the money he was being paid had blinded him to just how difficult this might turn out to be.

He was working alone tonight because that’s what the job demanded. Low-key was what was required for this particular event. You don’t take out a cop and make a big show of it. You do it fast and ugly so that it looks like something random.

Hudson got the cop’s home address from the boss a couple of weeks after that odd conversation with him at the coffee shop. He was not all that happy that the boss had seen his face. Usually if you saw Hudson’s face it was because you were part of his crew, a genuine friend (of which, given his line of work, there were few), or about to die at his hands. To have someone else out there knowing what he looked like and knowing the name he was currently using, albeit not his real one, was something he could have done without. He might be the boss, but it was often the guys at the sharp end, guys like Hudson, that got sold out when the cops came calling.

He was also concerned about the boss’s state of mind. He was paying well, too well, and it made Hudson think that he might want the job done for more than just sound business reasons. Being dispassionate and cold were solid traits in this line of work. Personal animosity was not. That, in Hudson’s experience, didn’t usually work out too well – for anyone. He’d seen too many guys come to sticky ends. ‘Wetworks’ called for discipline and control, not anger-fuelled, machine-gun kill sprees.

This one with the cop also had to be up close because that’s the way the boss wanted it.

‘Use a knife,’ he’d told Hudson. ‘I don’t care if it’s quick or slow, but you make sure you tell her who sent you before the light fades from her eyes.’

‘It’s pretty much always slow with a knife,’ Hudson had replied. ‘So she’ll know.’

‘Good. If you can make it painful as well, then, you know, all the better.’

It made for a difficult job, requiring more improvisation than Hudson was usually comfortable with. He much preferred a distance shot with a rifle; a single tap to the skull and it was lights out.

When he had followed the two women into town and seen them go into the Indian restaurant he’d thought about calling it off tonight. The boss might set the mission, but Hudson was in control of how it all went down. Then he got lucky. The women were going to the concert, which would be perfect; big crowd, dark, lots of noise and there was always someone with a knife at these gigs.

Some quick thinking was necessary to get the thing in motion; in the centre’s car park he had to change from his relatively respectable short-sleeved linen shirt into the T-shirt; strap the ceramic knife to his leg in case there were metal-detectors in the centre; grab some cash to buy a ticket from a tout and get going. He had to do all of this fast and keep an eye on the women as they walked towards the entrance. If he lost sight of them now it would be tough trying to find them in the crowd of ten thousand or more.

He got done just as the two women reached the door and ran quickly to catch up, paying the first price the tout asked so as to keep moving. The last thing he needed was to get into a negotiation.

He saw that the woman cop was waiting just inside the door. He latched on to the back of a group of teenage girls and got inside, even making eye contact with the cop in the process. That way she’d be more relaxed if she happened to see him later.

Inside the hall, he waited to the side of the doors and followed the cop when she came in with the friend. He figured the best time would be just at the start of the gig with the crowd surging and the sound of the band drowning out any noise. People fell over all the time at these things so it might take a moment for anyone to realise that she was really hurt. By that time Hudson would have faded back into the crowd to exit with everyone else as the panic started to spread when they found that the cop was dead. If he left straight away someone would remember him. The security staff were, by and large, amateurs, but they would at least recall an older guy leaving by himself.

All of which meant that he might not be able to deliver the message the boss wanted. So be it. When it got to this point, Hudson alone called the shots.

Once the band came on, he slowly pushed through the mass of tightly packed bodies, the cop’s back firmly in sight. He was totally focused on the job in hand and ignored what was happening on stage.

He got into position behind the cop and bent slightly to pull the knife from the holder on his leg, his eyes never straying from the soft part of her lower back. That was where he would slide the blade into her flesh and then up into her vital organs in one swift thrust.

Irvine watched as Roddy Hale lifted his head, opened his mouth to sing and then fell forward over the edge of the stage head first into the security pit. The microphone was still in his hand as he fell, the cord yanking out of its socket, whiplashing through the air and bringing one of the amp stacks crashing over on to the stage. The crowd was so pumped up on the adrenalin rush of the moment that no one seemed to notice immediately.

Irvine felt another surge within the mass of bodies and was pushed heavily forward as a group of four drunken teenage boys barrelled past her, heading to the front of the crowd. She swung her head round as the boys passed by and saw the man in the green T-shirt being pushed away from her in their wake. She wondered for an instant why he was so close to her, but dismissed the thought.

The music faltered and descended into a buzz of loud feedback as the band members dropped their guitars and ran to the edge of the stage to see what had happened to Roddy. The stage started to fill up with other crew members who looked unsure of what to do until a thin young woman jumped down from the stage into the security pit.

The man in the green T-shirt lashed out at the last of the drunken boys, hitting him solidly on the back of his head and dropping him straight to the floor with the blow. The crowd started to part around him, no one wanting to get dragged into a fight.

The other three boys turned and squared up to him, the biggest of them lunging at him and getting in a glancing blow to his temple before the man pulled the boy’s head down and drove his knee up into his face. Blood spattered the man’s jeans and the boy went to the floor with a guttural shout.

The crowd started to move more forcefully away from the fight, and Irvine and Hannah were pushed towards the stage. Irvine started to fear that the combination of what had happened on stage and . . .