The John Milton Series Boxset 2 Read online

The window shattered, shards spilling out onto the road like handfuls of diamonds.

  Milton was supposed to be doing the same but he had stopped.

  Beatrix noticed but didn’t have time to direct him. She was completely professional. Even as the machine pistol jerked and spat in her hand, her aim was such that every round passed into the cabin of the car. The gun chewed through all thirty rounds in the detachable magazine, spraying lead through the window.

  The driver somehow managed to get the Mercedes into gear and it jerked forwards. He must have been hit because he couldn’t control the car, slaloming it against the delivery van, bouncing across the road, slicing through the inside lane and then fishtailing. It slid through one hundred and eighty degrees and then wedged itself between a tree and a streetlamp. The horn sounded, a long and uninterrupted note. The car had only travelled twenty feet but Beatrix couldn’t see into it any longer.

  “Milton!”

  She was fresh out of ammunition and he was the nearest.

  “Milton! Move!”

  He was still on the bike, frozen.

  The passenger side door opened and SNOW fell out. The car’s wild manoeuvre meant that the body of the car was now between Beatrix and him; he ducked down beneath the wing, out of sight.

  “Milton! SNOW is running.”

  “I’ve got it,” Milton said, but she could hear the uncertainty in his voice. He was corpsing; Beatrix had not anticipated that. She ejected the dry magazine and slapped in another, watching through the corner of her eye as he got off the Kawasaki and drew his own UMP.

  Beatrix put the kickstand down. There was a terrific clamour all about: the Mercedes’s horn was still sounding, tourists on the bus—with a clear view of what had just happened—were screaming in fright as they clambered to the back of the deck, and, in the distance, there came the ululation of a siren. Too soon, surely? Perhaps, but it was a timely reminder; the plan only allowed them a few seconds before they needed to effect their escapes.

  She approached the car, her gun extended and unwavering.

  It was carnage. The driver was slumped forwards, blood splashed against the jagged shards of windshield that were still held within the frame. The full weight of his chest was pressed up against the wheel, sounding the horn. DOLLAR was leaning against the side of the car, a track of entry wounds stitching up from her shoulder into her neck and then into the side of her head. Her hair was matted with blood and brain. Beatrix strode up to the car and fired two short bursts: one for the driver and one for DOLLAR. She kept moving forward, the machine pistol smoking as she held it ahead of her, zoning out the noise behind her but acutely aware of the timer counting down in her head. The man and the woman were unmoving. She looked through the driver’s side window and saw a briefcase on the passenger seat. They were not tasked with recovering intelligence but it was hard-wired into her from a hundred similar missions and so she quickly ran around to the passenger door, opened it, and collected it.

  “Control, One,” came the barked voice in her earpiece. “Report.”

  “The driver and DOLLAR are down.”

  “What about SNOW?”

  “He’s running.”

  There was panic in his reply: “What?”

  “I repeat, SNOW is on foot. Twelve is pursuing.”

  Chapter Five

  MILTON LEFT the bike behind him and sprinted. SNOW was already fifty feet ahead, adjacent to the Battle of Britain memorial. The great wheel of the London Eye was on the other side of the river and, ahead, a line of touring coaches had been slotted into the bays next to the pavement.

  SNOW dodged through the line of stalled traffic; nothing was able to move with the shot up Mercedes blocking the road ahead. He turned his head, stumbling a little as he did, saw Milton in pursuit and sprinted harder. He was older than Milton but he had obviously kept himself in good shape; he maintained a steady pace, driven on by fear. Milton’s motorcycle leathers were not made for speedy running and the helmet he was wearing—he dared not remove it for fear of identifying himself—limited his field of vision.

  He took out his Sig and fired a shot. It was wild, high and wide, and shattered the windscreen of one of the big parked coaches. It inspired SNOW to find another burst of pace, cutting between two of the parked busses. Milton lost sight of him. He ran between a truck and the car in front of it, passed between the two busses behind the ones that SNOW had used, and saw him again. A second shot was prevented by a red telephone box and then a tall ash tree.

  Milton heard the up-and-down wail of a police siren. It sounded as if it was on the Embankment, behind him, closing the distance.

  Milton stopped, dropped to one knee and brought up the Sig. He breathed in and out, trying to steady his aim, and, for a moment, he had a clear shot. He used his left hand to swipe up his visor, breathed again, deep and easy, and started to squeeze the trigger.

  SNOW ploughed into the middle of a group of tourists.

  Shit.

  He dropped his arm; there was no shot. He closed the visor and ran onwards, just as he saw the man again: he had clambered onto the wall that separated the pavement from the river and, with a final defiant look back in his direction, he leapt into space and plunged into the water. Milton zig-zagged through the panicking tourists until he was at the wall and looked down into the greeny-black waters. There was nothing for a moment and then, already thirty feet distant, he saw SNOW bob to the surface. The currents were notoriously strong at this part of the river. The riptides were powerful enough to swallow even the strongest swimmer but SNOW was not fighting and the water swept him away, quickly out of range.

  The siren was louder now, and, as he turned to face it, he saw that the patrol car was less than a hundred feet away, working its way around the stalled queue.

  Milton paused, caught between running and standing still. He froze. He didn’t know what to do.

  “Milton,” came Number One’s voice in his ear.

  He turned to his left.

  Beatrix was on the pavement, between the river and the row of busses, gunning her Kawasaki hard. Milton pushed the Sig back into its holster and zipped up his jacket. Beatrix braked, the rear wheel bouncing up a few inches, then slamming back down again. Milton got onto the back; Beatrix had a slight figure and he looped his left arm around her waist and fixed his right hand to grip the rear of the pillion seat. Milton cleared six foot and was heavy with muscle but the bike had a 998cc four-cylinder engine and his extra weight was nothing. It jerked forward hungrily as Beatrix revved it and released her grip on the brakes.

  Chapter Six

  BEATRIX LOOKED out of the window of Control’s office. It was the evening, two hours after the operation. It was a habit to debrief as soon as possible after the work had been done and, usually, those were not difficult meetings. Normally, the operations passed off exactly as they were planned. They were not botched like this one had been botched. Control was busying himself with the tray that his assistant, Captain Tanner, had brought in; it held a tea pot, two cups, a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar cubes. He poured out two cups. Beatrix could see that he was angry. His face was drawn and pale, the muscles in his cheeks twitching. He had said very little to her but she knew him well enough to know that the recriminations were coming. The crockery chimed as he rattled the spoon against it, stirring in his sugar. He brought the cups across the room, depositing one on her side of his desk and taking the other one around to sip at it as he stood at the window.

  “So?” he began.

  “Sir?”

  “What happened?”

  Beatrix had known, of course, that the question was coming. The mission had been an unmitigated failure. The watchword of the Group was discretion, and the shooting had been the first item on all of yesterday’s news broadcasts and the papers were leading with a variation of the same picture: Milton, in black leathers and a helmet with a mirrored visor, his arm extended as he aimed at the fleeing SNOW, his abandoned motorcycle in the background. The headline in t
he Times was typical: MURDER ON THE STREETS OF LONDON.

  “It was just bad luck,” she said.

  “Luck? We plan so that luck isn’t a factor, Number One. Luck has nothing to do with it.”

  “The driver managed to get the car away from us. That was just bad luck.”

  “It was Twelve’s responsibility to neutralise the driver. Are you saying it was his fault?”

  She had given thought to what she should say. The honest thing to do would be to throw Milton under the bus. This had been his first examination and he had flunked it. He had frozen at the critical moment. They had the targets cold, helpless, and it had been his corpsing that had given SNOW the opportunity to make a run for it. And even then, she knew Milton was a good enough shot to have taken him down.

  She could have said all of that and it would have been true. She could have burned him but it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do.

  She had some empathy. She remembered her own introduction to the Group. The operation when she had lost her own cherry had been a fuck-up, too; not quite like this, but then she had been in Iraq and not on the streets of London, far from prying eyes and the possibility of your mistakes being amplified by a media that couldn’t get enough of something so audacious and dramatic. Her own wobble had been between her, the female agent who had been Number Six in those days and her victim, an Iraqi official who was passing information to the insurgency; she had paused at the moment of truth and that meant that the man she had just stabbed in the gut had been able to punch her in the face, freeing himself for long enough to hobble into the busy street outside. Number Six had pursued him outside and fired two shots into his head and then, keeping bystanders away with the threat of the gun, she had hijacked a car and driven them both away. Their Control had been the predecessor to this one and yet he was still just as daunting, and Beatrix had baulked when he had asked her how it had gone. Number Six had covered for her, telling him that it the operation had passed off without incident and that it had all been straightforward. Beatrix would have been cashiered without hesitation if Number Six had told Control the truth. So she understood what had happened to Milton. It did not diminish her opinion of him. It did not make her question her decision to recommend him.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” she told him, looking him straight in the eye. “He did his job, just as we planned it.”

  “So you say. But he went in pursuit of SNOW?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “He never had a clear shot, not one he could take without a significant risk that he would hit a bystander. The rules of engagement were clear. This had to be at no risk.”

  “I know what the bloody rules of engagement were, Number One,” he said sharply. “I wrote them.”

  “If you want to blame anyone, blame me.”

  Control flustered and, for a moment, Beatrix was convinced that he was going to blame her. That would have been alright. She had been a member of the Group for six years and that was already pushing at the top end of an agent’s average life expectancy. It wasn’t an assignment that you kept if you had something to lose. Beatrix had a daughter and a husband and a family life that she enjoyed more than she had ever expected. She had done her time and she had done it well, but all things had to come to an end eventually. She wouldn’t have resisted if he blamed her and busted her out of the Group. There would be something else for her, something safer, something where getting shot at was not something she would come to expect.

  But he didn’t blame her. “It’s a bloody mess,” he said instead, sighing with impatience. “A bloody, bloody mess. The police have been told it’s an underworld thing. They’ll buy that, if only because the prospect of their own government sanctioning a hit is too bloody ludicrous to credit.”

  “The only thing we left was Milton’s bike, and that’s clean. There’s no way back to us from that.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely sure.”

  He took his saucer and cup to his desk and sat down. He exhaled deeply. “What a mess,” he said again. He was frustrated, and that was to be expected, but the immediate threat of the explosion of his temper had passed. “Where is Milton now?”

  “Training,” she told him. That was true. He had barely left the quarters where the Group’s logistics were based since the operation. The rangemaster said that he had spent hours with a target pistol, firing over and over until the targets were torn to shreds, then loading another target and pushing it further out and doing it all again.

  “Are you still sure about him?”

  “He’ll be fine,” she said. “When have I ever been wrong about a recruit?”

  “I know,” he said, leaning back. “Never.”

  He exhaled again and sipped at his tea. Beatrix looked beyond him, beyond the plush interior of his office where so many death warrants were signed, and out into the darkness beyond. London was going about its business, just as usual. Beatrix's eyes narrowed their focus until she noticed the image in the glass: the back of Control’s head and, facing him, her own reflection. She stood at a crossroads, with a choice of how to proceed: she could say nothing, and go back to her family, or she could do what she had decided she had to do and begin a conversation that could very easily become difficult.

  “There was one more thing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I pulled some evidence out of the car.”

  He sat forward. “That wasn’t in the plan.”

  “I know. Force of habit, I suppose. It was there, I took it.”

  “And?”

  “And you should probably take a look.”

  She had travelled to the office on her own motorbike and had stowed the case in a rucksack. She opened the drawstring, took it out and laid it on Control’s desk. It had been locked and she had unscrewed the hinges to get it open; it was held together by one of her husband’s belts at the moment. She unhooked it and removed the top half of the case. There was a clear plastic bag with six flash drives and, beneath that, a manilla envelope. Inside the envelope was a thick sheaf of photographs. They were printed on glossy five-by-eight paper and had been taken by someone from a high vantage point, using a powerful telephoto lens. It was a series, with two people in shot. The first person was a man. He was wearing a heavy overcoat and a woollen hat had been pulled down over his ears. The picture had been taken in a park during the winter; the trees in the foreground were bare and a pile of slush, perhaps from a melted snowman, was visible fifty feet away. The man was bent down, standing over a park bench. There was a woman on the bench.

  Despite the distance and the angle that the picture had been taken, it was still obvious that the standing man was Control.

  “What is this?” he asked brusquely.

  “It was in the case…”

  “Yes,” he snapped. “You said. I have no idea why.”

  “That’s you, sir, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  The atmosphere had become uncomfortable, but Beatrix couldn’t draw back.

  “The woman on the bench…”

  Control made a show of examining the photograph more closely.

  “It’s DOLLAR.” He said nothing. “I don’t understand, sir…”

  “Your job is not to understand, Number One. Your job is to follow the orders that I give you.”

  He paused; Beatrix thought he was hesitating, searching for the words to say what he wanted to say, but he didn’t say anything else. He just stared at her instead.

  “Sir?”

  He indicated the flash drives with a dismissive downward brush of his hand. “Have you looked at these?”

  “No, sir,” she said, although that was a lie.

  “Very good.” He shuffled in his chair, straightening his shoulders. “I want you to keep a close eye on Milton. It might be that we were wrong about him—and we can’t afford passengers. If we were wrong, we’ll need to reassign him. Understood?” She nodded that she did. “That
will be all for now. You’re dismissed, Number One.”

  She stood, still uncomfortable and confused, and then turned for the door.

  She was halfway across the room before Control cleared his throat.

  “Look, Number One… Beatrix. Please, sit down again.” She turned back and did so. He had come around the desk and now he was standing by the mantelpiece. “You’re right. I did meet her. A couple of times. Looks like she decided she’d like some pictures to mark the occasion. I can’t tell you why we met and I can’t tell you what we spoke about, save to say that it was connected to the operation. The details are classified. All you need to know, Beatrix, is that you were given a file with her name on it. And you know what that means.”

  “I do, sir. Termination.”

  “That’s right. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”

  She looked at him: a little portly, a little soft, his frame belying his years of service in the forces including, she knew, a distinguished campaign in the Falklands. He was looking at her with an expression that looked like concern but, beneath that, she saw a foundation of suspicion and caution. Beatrix was a professional assassin, Number One amidst a collection of twelve of the most dangerous men and women in the employ of Her Majesty. She was responsible for the deaths of over eighty people all around the world. Bad people who had done bad things. She was not afraid of very much. But Control was not the sort of man you would ever want to cross. She looked at him again, regarding her with shrew-like curiosity, and she was frightened. The thought began to form that she had just made a very, very bad mistake.

  Chapter Seven

  BEATRIX HAD a house in a pleasant area of East London. There were estates surrounding it on all sides, but the grid of streets that included Lavender Grove was a peaceful and safe middle-class enclave that was, she thought, a good place to set up home. The house that she and her husband had bought five years earlier was a three bedroom terrace, slotted between properties owned by a kindly retired couple and a young banker who was often abroad. The front of the house had a narrow strip of garden that was separated from the pavement by a set of iron railings and they had fixed colourful hanging baskets on either side of the brightly painted red front door. There was a larger garden to the rear, long and narrow, just big enough for the chickens that Beatrix had always wanted. It was a warm house with plenty of space for her, her husband and their daughter.