Line of Fire

by Andy McNab

Genres: War & Military; Mystery

Synopsis

Andy McNab's action-packed series featuring ex-deniable operator Nick Stone returns with Line of Fire. Nick is back in London, but if he thought he was home for a break, he’s very, very wrong. Backed into a corner by a man he knows he cannot trust, Stone strikes a devil's bargain.

In exchange for his own safety – a life for a life – Stone is charged with locating someone who doesn’t want to be found, currently hiding out in one of the remotest corners of the UK. And for the first time in a long time, he’s not operating alone.

But Stone and his team don’t find just anyone. They find a world-class hacker, so good that her work might threaten the stability of the western world as we know it. These are dangerous waters and Stone is quickly in over his head. Before he finally knows which way to turn, the choice is ripped out of his hands.

Most people might think of home as safety but Nick Stone isn’t most people. For him and his team, it’s just another place to get caught in the line of fire...

Release date: January 26, 2021

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 416

Sample

1

Zürich, Switzerland

3 May 2016

The heavy steel door, which the law dictated had to be thick enough to withstand the force of several Hiroshimas, had been nicely veneered in oak to make it look less intimidating. As it swung open, with a hydraulic sigh, I stood and turned to greet the woman coming through.

‘Claudia.’

The door powered itself closed behind her, with a reassuring clunk. The clack of her heels on the shiny white tiles took over, and she approached with an extended hand. ‘Mr Stone. Very nice to meet you at last. May I call you Nick?’

She was as I’d imagined her, early thirties, very smart, businesslike black skirt to just above the knee, big professional smile. Her hair was relaxed and pulled back in a bun.

She was probably running through the same evaluation process as I was and working hard to hide her disappointment.

‘Of course. I thought we were old friends anyway.’

Her polite smile didn’t exactly light up the room. She moved round to the other side of the desk and sat at the same time as I did, maintaining the smile of non-commitment to emotion.

She took a breath. ‘Nick, I’m afraid there’s still no progress on the release of the funds, if that’s why you’ve come to see me.’ Her English was every bit as perfect as, no doubt, her Russian, French, German and Italian were. ‘We have not only the Russian fiscal and probate systems to deal with but also our own regulatory bodies here in Switzerland. They will need to be content with the process of the release, which, unfortunately, isn’t yet a release. When your funds are eventually transferred, they will be held in escrow until we’ve conformed to both countries’ regulations.’

She managed a slight widening of the smile that gave her already prominent cheekbones a little lift. She was West African, maybe Nigerian, but Claudia Nangel, I was sure, would never consider retiring there.

So, no change from what I’d been hearing for months now, not only from Claudia but also from my lawyer in Moscow. Her bank seemed to be making an absolute fortune – not that they were going to see any of it at the moment. ‘You mean I have it, but I don’t have it?’

Claudia rested her hands on her desk and leant forward. ‘Nick, I’m so sorry for the loss of your partner and son. And I’m so sorry we can’t do any more to help you right now. We will try hard to cut through bureaucracy this end when your funds are released in Moscow, but …’

It sounded genuine.

She noticed the brown Jiffy bag I’d placed on the desk. ‘Ah, I see. Is this why you’re here?’

‘Could I ask you to look after it for me?’

She opened the bag without a flicker of interest, concern, or even a smile, and produced a smaller one, white and the size of a CD, sealed, along with a folded sheet of A4. The brown Jiffy bag seemed far too messy for the room. I loved private banking.

‘The three names on that piece of paper each have a different code statement next to them. If any of those individuals calls you and gives their statement, could you please courier the package to the address I’ve written on it? If I call in, that would make four of us who can independently authorize the move.’

She lifted the envelope a little to check the address.

‘Do you need to know what’s in there?’

‘No, Nick, not at all. But there will be a charge for curation.’

‘Ah. The problem for me, Claudia, is that I don’t have any personal money left. I can’t sell the apartment in Moscow because it was in Anna’s name. And even if the court clears probate tomorrow, it clearly isn’t going to be the end of the bureaucracy. I don’t think I’ll be able to find a way through without your help. So I’m skint.’

She eased herself back in the chair, her hands clasped together as if in prayer. Maybe her English wasn’t as good as I’d thought it was.

‘Skint?’

The diamond band with her wedding ring was on the fourth finger of her right hand. It looked like Claudia was German, not Swiss.

I had a flashback to the lesson I’d learnt the hard way as a young squaddie stationed in Minden. I was always getting into trouble trying to chat up women after a casual check of their left hand, but that changed the night I got filled in by a very pissed-off German husband outside a nightclub called Stiffshankers. He explained, in better English than I spoke, that in Germany married women wore a ring on the right hand instead of the left.

Not that my cultural lesson was going to help me today.

‘No money at all. I’m going to have to start working for a living.’

Either the joke wasn’t understood or she didn’t like the idea of her clients soiling their hands. She smiled, a little less widely than even last time, and logged the word in the English dictionary inside her head, filing it with ‘broke’ and ‘brassic’.

I knew what she was going to say before she said it. I’d heard it often enough before.

‘I’m so sorry, Nick, but we can’t help you in any way financially. We can’t advance any sums of capital. It would be illegal.’

She smiled enough to display a perfect set of teeth. ‘Not yet, of course. But we will hold your package for you and we can talk about our consideration in, say, two months?’

Why didn’t banks talk about money? Maybe if you had to ask about costs you shouldn’t be in that room.

Whenever I’d phoned, I’d pictured her gazing out of her window at some shimmering Swiss lake as she talked to me at all hours of the day and night.

The bank’s foyer had kept the dream alive, a riot of beige and gold topped off with a crystal chandelier the size of a small planet. There hadn’t been a cashier in sight. It wasn’t the kind of set-up where you dropped in to deposit your pocket money. You either transferred it electronically or delivered it in a bulletproof attaché case handcuffed to a man mountain with biceps like wrecking balls.

But the lake view and opulence hadn’t been for me today. I was sitting in the basement, surrounded by concrete walls painted white, glossy white floor tiles, no pictures, no plants. In front of me there was a smoked-glass desk and, behind that, what was probably the world’s most expensive leather swivel chair. The desk was bare apart from the Jiffy bags and still folded sheet of A4. No telephones, no computers, not even a clock or a photo-frame. I was in the bank’s confidentiality room.

‘We should then, hopefully, be able to cast some light on your situation. We are working on it, Nick, believe me.’

I did, but I also knew it was the end of the conversation. So did the door, which began to open as if it had read her mind. We stood up.

‘Shall I call you a taxi for the airport, Nick, or are you staying in Zürich?’

‘No. I can’t even afford to breathe the air.’ I knew she wouldn’t get the joke but thought I’d give it a try anyway. ‘A taxi would be great, thanks.’

We came out into a windowless corridor of more white tiles and walls, and she walked me towards the shiny stainless-steel lift that would take me up to the ground floor and its sumptuous marble, leather and crystal.

The doors opened and I shook hands with my banking relationship manager for possibly the last time. At least now I had the fifth part of our security blanket in place for all four of us. My plan was to send the memory stick to the New York Times. They had a great system for whistle-blowers. I would also dump its contents with the papers in all the different ways they had ready and waiting, and all at once: WhatsApp, SecureDrop and Pretty Good Privacy. I would avoid the mailing address headed Tips, New York Times. That was where Claudia would send the white Jiffy bag.

2

Tulse Hill, London

I came out of the station in South London and got mugged by grime, decay, and air thick with diesel. Discarded copies of Metro swirled around my feet. There was still quite a lot of coverage in the broadsheets of the four coordinated Islamist suicide bombings in Brussels, which had left thirty-two dead and hundreds wounded, but these front pages were full of Brexit doom or joy and how some C-list celeb wanted us to vote. The chic spotlessness of Switzerland was five hundred miles away, an hour and forty minutes by plane.

I was heading for Rio’s. He had bought an ex-council maisonette close to the station. Way back when I was fifteen, nicking money from gas meters and dreaming of owning a second-hand Ford Cortina, these places were the height of social mobility round here. My claim to fame was that a mate I used to bunk off school with lived in one.

There were only two comprehensive schools the kids from Brixton, Peckham and Tulse Hill went to, so if you went to school, you went to one of them. I didn’t put in too many appearances, but I made a few mates along the way, and one, Pete, had lived on the same estate I was heading for now.

We were the same age but that was where any similarity between us ended. Pete had had all the kit – he’d worn his cuffs and butterfly collars outside his blazer, just like Jason King – and I’d thought he was smooth as fuck in his baggy trousers.

I put my card into an ATM on the main road and asked for five hundred quid. There should have been the best part of seven million US dollars tucked away in the Zürich account. Drug money, it had fallen into my hands years ago, and since no one had ever asked for it back, I considered it mine. I’d kept a few quid in reserve for my partner Anna and myself, but the lion’s share had gone into a trust fund for our son, Nicolai. They’d been murdered two years ago, and the trust should revert to me after probate was granted. The problem was, my lawyers in Moscow had been more interested in dragging things out, maintaining their income stream.

The bank had issued me with a turbo-charged debit card when I joined it, the sleek black thing without any embossed numbers that the ATM was now spitting out. That shouldn’t have been happening. The link between me and my bank vault was routed through a randomly selected, ever-changing configuration of about twenty-six separate servers, at the end of which I was guaranteed money at any ATM worldwide.

Except in Tulse Hill, it seemed. Maybe it was because a private Swiss bank card hadn’t been shoved into any South London ATM before, but when I tried again, it fucked me off. I tried a third time. Nothing. I knew it wasn’t going to happen, but it was worth a try.

It really did feel like I’d come full circle as I minced along the same pavement on the South Circular Road towards the same estate as I had back then. It was like I’d never left. The only difference was that the trucks screaming past just a few feet from us pedestrians were a more modern shape and had Polish plates.

Rio’s house was on Coburg Crescent, just up on the left. Things hadn’t been all bad back then. One Sunday afternoon when I turned up at Pete’s he was out playing football and his mum and dad were at East Street Market, which left Fay, Pete’s sister, at home. She was seventeen, willing and keen, but it was all very quick, and she made me promise not to tell anybody. I said I wouldn’t, but as soon as I could, like the shit I was, I did.

3

I crossed what was left of the grass bank dividing the crescent from the South Circular, and wove through clumps of parked cars. Rio’s place was one of the scores of narrow 1960s terraced houses with a garage each as the ground floor. From the number of vehicles clogging the street, nobody used them as garages any more. If they were anything like Rio, it was where they housed their freezer, washing-machine and tumble-drier, a set of wheels for a non-existent car, and bags of dog biscuits for a non-existent pitbull that would bite the arse off anyone who tried to break into the house. They had ‘Buy One Get One Free’ labels all over them, which was probably what had given Rio the idea that he needed a dog.

Every time I’d entered the house I’d felt sure it was Pete’s old place. I’d gone into a familiar hall, then, almost by muscle memory, straight upstairs to the first floor where the living room, kitchen and toilet were, and up again to the three bedrooms and bathroom. A blue plaque on Fay’s wall to commemorate our union would have sealed it.

I fished about in my jeans for the door keys. Rio had taken pity on me a couple of weeks ago when I had nowhere to live. He was one of the good guys: he’d wanted to help me and he really liked the idea of setting up a security firm for us four survivors to run. The Special Needs Service, as he liked to call it. He and the other two might not have the correct number of limbs for a private military company’s line of work, but that didn’t matter.

That was as far as it had gone. I’d forgotten about it, but Rio had got the bug. It would be right up his street because he’d be the ultimate undercover operator, a Rasta with only one good arm.

This being South London, there were so many keys in the set Rio had had cut for me that they filled my pocket. The uPVC-framed partly double-glazed door hadn’t been there when I was a kid, but it was about the only thing that had changed. Within the glass was a grid of thin steel mesh and a ‘Beware of the Dog’ decal that Rio had picked up along with his dog-food bargain. Security was so much better now than it had been in my thieving days, when you knew you could just smash the unprotected float glass and grab a fistful of coins from the gas and electricity meters – and then probably take a dump in the sink for a laugh.

Rio was in: only the cylinder lock needed turning.

I pushed the door and entered the small hallway with the narrow stairs in front of me. The smell of vegetable soup was overpowering. The cans were stacked like an art installation against the wall. Above, on the first floor, there was a landing with two doors. The one on the left led into the open-plan living room and kitchen; to the right was the toilet.

I pushed upstairs. The swirly carpet was almost threadbare, and had probably been very smart when Pete’s mum installed it. I shouted up, ‘I remember the carpet pattern, mate. This is definitely the same house.’

Rio appeared in the living-room doorway, all smiles. ‘Mate, don’t believe you. Listen, we’ve got jack shit in. You want to go down to Maccy or get pizza? I’m fucking starving.’

He came down a couple of steps to meet me. On the safe phone he had tapped out a text. Now he held it in front of me. It said, ‘Play safe.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Maccy’s great. Let me dump the bag first and have a piss, and I’m there, all right?’

He locked eyes on me and they weren’t as happy as the voice had been.

4

Rio wasn’t as house-proud as Pete’s mum had been, that was for sure. A half-eaten bread roll sat on the glass coffee-table, along with a spoon and a bowl, both encrusted with dried soup. A week’s worth of the Metroand the Sun were scattered on the old brown settee, most of them folded to the TV page to save us from Brexit and Islamic fundamentalism overload. If Homes & Gardensever did a feature and asked Rio to describe the look he’d gone for, shabby chic wouldn’t cut it. Freshly burgled would be closer.

‘Hurry up!’ Rio yelled after me. ‘Fuck sake.’

I headed up to the second floor and dumped my daysack and mobile on the bed. I wanted it to look and sound normal, us not wanting to stay in the house any longer than necessary. If Rio wanted us out, then I wanted us out.

Play safe. OK, so who was watching? Who was listening? What was going on? Fortunately, I really did need a piss. I got it over and done with quickly and noisily by aiming into the water, as Rio shouted even louder, ‘It’ll be fucking closed if we don’t get a move on. Come on!’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I bounced down the stairs, through the living room and on down the last flight, taking them two at a time until I was through the front door and he could start on the three deadlocks.

As casually as I could, I checked for bodies in the sea of parked cars. It would have been difficult for anyone to sit out there for any prolonged period. Curtains would twitch. Residents wouldn’t reckon on an assassin sitting in the car, they’d think it was someone from TV Licensing, watching for the glow of a screen, or the Social checking if someone claiming disability allowance was mowing the lawn or doing a spot of street dance. I checked, too, for anyone walking past or waiting at the bus stop across the road, lips moving as they gave the ‘stand by, stand by’ into their mics.

The answer was no, but that didn’t mean we weren’t being watched. Airborne optics would be able to pick us up from so far away we wouldn’t be able to see the helicopter platform.

We strolled towards the station and McDonald’s. His good arm swung freely. The other had done nothing but hang ever since an IED attack in Afghanistan. Just like the other two, Gabe and Jack, he was a casualty of the post-9/11 wars.

Rio was annoyingly taller than me, and far too slim, considering the amount of food he shoved down his neck. The dreadlocks had come on quite well since his medical discharge from the infantry four years ago. He reckoned it would be just another year or so before he had enough to bunch up into a woolly hat.

He looked at me, and forced a smile to reassure anyone watching that we were just bantering, but I could hear the strain in his voice. ‘You left your mobile?’

As if.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I got back from picking the kids up from school, and the tell-tales had fallen, all three of the fuckers.’

The last man out had to put broken cocktail sticks on the two landing doors, and another on the one that led from the living room up to the bedrooms. They were wedged into the gap between the top of the door and the frame so that they were held vertical. If the door was opened, its stick fell and, being so small, would never be noticed.

‘Shit. You’re still controlling your memory stick?’

He looked at me like I was mad. ‘Course.’ His face clouded. ‘We should do what we said we would if he tried to fuck us up. Let’s get the story out there and fuck up the Owl!’

I’d guessed this was coming. ‘No, mate, it’s too early. We don’t know anything about anything yet. The only time we dump that int out there is when we’re about to lose everything. Otherwise we lose any protection we have. We have leverage while we hold the int, but don’t think we’re bulletproof.’

All four of us had a memory stick that held the intelligence the Owl so desperately wanted never to be released into the public domain. But he had a problem. None of us four memory-stick holders knew where the other three were hidden, and Claudia held the fifth copy that all four of us would soon have access to. So far, that had kept us alive.

‘The girls, mate. Phase two was seeing if the missus would let me bring them to the house after school – you know, have their tea at mine, then I’d take them home later.’

Rio had been busting a gut to form a friendly relationship with Simone. His focus was on keeping her onside so he could see the kids. He called her his missus but, really, she was his ex-girlfriend and mother of his seven-year-old twins. These were early days for him trying to reconnect but he’d felt he was winning her round. She had agreed he could pick them up and drop them off at school, and he had been perfect so far.

That was now history.

We took a left. Rio rubbed his face. ‘He’s been bugging and videoing the fucking house ever since we got back, hasn’t he?’

‘Don’t assume anything. Look, I’m with you – it’s probably the Owl trying to fuck us up. But it wouldn’t make sense to re-enter the house if there were devices already planted – why risk compromising something that’s already been a success? It doesn’t matter why anyone was in the house, just that they were. All that matters is what we do about it, okay?’

Rio nodded slowly. He enjoyed learning this stuff. It wasn’t brain surgery: it was just stripping away the rubbish that meant nothing and didn’t help in working out what had happened and what we were going to do about it.

‘You have to think, So what? So what if someone’s been in the house? What does that mean to us right now, this minute?’

Rio didn’t need time to think. ‘We play safe and pretend we don’t know.’

‘Yes. We stay passive, for now. We need to find out who and why for certain, then get proactive and cut it out like a cancer. But that’s for another day. All that matters now is making sure we’re all safe, because we don’t know what his or their next move is.’

Today’s lesson on how to live life while constantly in the shit had got Rio past his wave of emotion. ‘We’ve got to tell Gabe, yeah? We need to make him safe, make his family safe.’

We passed the station and the golden arches came into view further up the South Circular.

I shot him a glance. ‘And Jack.’

He shook his head. ‘Mate, he’s still fucking us all off. He’s doing his own thing. Tortured artist and all that.’ He gave a hollow laugh.

I split left, he split right around a couple of young women with buggies, toddlers dragged along in their wake.

‘We’ll get Gabe to talk to him. He’ll listen to Gabe.’

Rio pushed the glass doors as we entered the kingdom of Chicken Legends and fries. For me, anyway. Rio always went for double whatever was on offer, times two.

5

We ordered at the touch screen, grabbed a booth, and Rio put the receipt on the veneered table next to the safe phone. We’d bought two of them from a CeX for forty pounds each in cash, along with a couple of PAYG Sim cards. We used WhatsApp. Most apps only encrypted messages between the sender and the app provider, but WhatsApp’s encryption was end-to-end. It ensured that only you and the person you were communicating with could read what was sent and nobody else, not even WhatsApp. No wonder it was the go-to choice of communication for drug dealers and terrorists. For now, anyway.

Gabe was in Edinburgh, trying to patch things up with his wife and kids. From what Rio was telling me, the patches weren’t sticking.

Rio was still visibly shaken by what was going on at this end. His eyes darted to the large window every time a body walked past. The streetlights came on, and soon he was getting jumpy about shadows as well.

‘Mate, it’s all right. No harm’s going to come to the girls. Look, if this is the Owl …’

Rio took a breath, but now wasn’t the time for yeah-buts.

‘Hear me out, mate. If this is the Owl, that would make him stupid, and he’s not, is he? His priority is to find all five of the memory sticks and take control of them. Why would he do anything that would provoke us into exposing what we have on them, yeah? So, if we switch on, stay focused on the situation, we keep safe.’

‘What if he does get them, Nick? What happens then? We’re fucked, aren’t we? We’re dead like the rest of them.’

A skinny boy, with enough zits on his face to fill a bucket, hovered while Rio lifted the mobile, then placed a tray between us on the table. He left to deliver the second tray he was carrying to a group of kids in my old school uniform. The boys were trying to be hard and the girls were being cool. Nothing had changed, just the lack of big collars, flares and, of course, platforms.

Rio was right that we’d be fucked – but we weren’t there yet. ‘All we’ve got to do is be on top of our game and make sure they’re not found. In time, he’s going to see we aren’t a threat.’

Rio wasn’t convinced and neither was I. But we couldn’t undo the situation we were in because we didn’t know who was on our case, the Owl, his bit of the CIA-within-the-CIA or whoever the fuck it was he worked for, or someone else altogether. Right now, all we could do was control what was happening in our lives based on what we knew.

Rio lifted the bun to his face and, as he always did, nibbled the onions that stuck out. He gazed out of the window in a trance, probably worrying about his girls.

‘Let’s get back to the real world, mate. Hello?’ I waved a hand in front of the bun. ‘Before Gabe logs on, yeah?’

He sort of nodded and looked down at the screen to check there was still power and signal.

‘I’ve got real-world news. There’s no luck with the cash. The lawyers, bankers, everyone seems to be making money out of the money I can’t get to – not for now, anyway.’

Rio sucked sauce off his thumbs. ‘So no little start-up, then?’

I shook my head so there was no doubt. He wouldn’t let go of the idea. Maybe it was because my non-existent cash would provide the funding.

‘C’mon, Nick. The Special Needs Service. The world needs our super-powers, mate.’

It got a laugh out of me as I dipped a chip into the mayo oozing out of my bun.

Gabe, Rio and Jack had all received payouts and a pension from the government for injuries sustained in Afghanistan, but they weren’t life-changing amounts. They still had mortgages or rent to pay, families to feed, McDonald’s and Poundland to keep in business. There wasn’t much going on out there for an amputee. People might love them turning up at fundraisers, but the goodwill soon disappears.

I had no idea of Jack’s circumstances, but I knew for sure they’d be much better than ours. He had dropped out of the group, which was a worry. We really needed to be close, to look after each other even more now. Gabe and Rio certainly had to stand on their own two feet for cash. Well, Rio did. Gabe had only one foot left.

The mobile sparked up and Gabe was on WhatsApp. He delivered his normal welcome: ‘You fuckers there?’

Rio didn’t bother picking up the phone, just tapped with his middle finger, the only one that wasn’t covered with sauce. He tapped the keyboard again to signal to Gabe that he should get out of his hotel room before we made voic. . .