Hit List by Chris Ryan

Author:Chris Ryan [Ryan, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Cornerstone Digital
Published: 2009-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

Slater woke in darkness. His hands were cuffed behind his back, there was blood in his mouth, and the pain in his head was so great that he retched. It was as if a spiked cannonball was rolling in his skull, crushing nerves and bone as it went. His eyes, too, were in agony – seared by the glare of that phosphorescent impact.

He gagged up an acid, throat-rasping gob of bile. It smeared sourly around his face, mingled with the metallic blood-smell. He was lying face-down, he realised. Was he in bed?

Reality came stamping home. He was in the boot of a car, the car was on the move, and his vomit-smeared head was rolling around inside a plastic carrier-bag.

There had been a third man.

He must have come with Branca. Stayed downstairs, perhaps, to pay a taxi-driver. Followed with baggage. And unlike Branca, he must have noticed that the bodyguards were not where they should have been, armed himself, summed up the situation at a glance.

Well, thought Slater wretchedly, this was certainly an impressive debut. Given a chance to distinguish himself he’d fucked up royally. It wasn’t good enough to blame the comms – in truth, he had barely been in control of the situation before Branca’s arrival. He had had the gun, but Fanon-Khayat had had the psychological advantage. Guessing that Slater had been ordered not to leave the apartment without the disc, he had decided to call his bluff. And had Branca not shown up . . .

The floor bucked as the car went over the edge of a pavement, and Slater retched again. His eyes were burning as if rubbed raw with sandpaper and he realised that as well as coshing him they’d taken the Mace from his briefcase and given him a liberal blast of that too. Just after cutting themselves out of the plasticuffs, Slater guessed. The ones that were cutting into his wrists and ankles so painfully had come straight off Suet-Face and Potato-Head.

I should have shot Fanon-Khayat straight away, thought Slater miserably. I should have put one through his ear or taken off a finger or something to get him going, like I did with that Serb. And if he hadn’t produced the disc after that, well, I should have just wasted him and got the fuck out.

The trouble was, he hadn’t looked like the sort of guy you shot. In the past, all those against whom Slater had waged war had been young men – tough and motivated volunteers who knew the score and who could reasonably be expected to survive a bit of rough treatment. Torturing middle-aged art-collectors was very much a new departure for Slater, whatever their political sympathies, and he’d held back.

Even though they weren’t expecting her to be arriving in Paris, both support teams would have identified Branca Nikolic on sight. They would have tried desperately to get through. If he could contact them, they would have reasoned, then they could contact him. And when they couldn’t, they must have thought that he’d switched off – that he’d deliberately broken contact.

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