The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller Read online

  As she stepped past him into the cool shadowed interior, he walked toward the veranda edge, the empty cup back in his hand held as if full.

  “That’s far enough!” he called.

  But they kept coming, the man in the sports jacket flanked by the other two. He looked at Quayle, recognition flashing through his eyes. The brief hadn’t said to expect an ex-service man.

  “I need to talk to Mrs Clements,” he said. “Get her out here.”

  He was relieved, in a way, that subterfuge was now unnecessary, but at the same time concerned about the man opposite him. He had seen Quayle once or twice a few years before and certainly heard the stories over tea in the canteen.

  Quayle looked at him as if he was something that had been scraped off the bottom of a shoe. “What for?” he asked, his voice low with menace.

  “She’s coming back to London with us. They want her.”

  “I don’t think so,” he replied. “She has nothing they want. She is a civilian.”

  “Hand her over, Quayle.”

  As he said it, one of the younger men moved round to his right side. “Quayle?” he said, giving a cocky laugh. “This is the Quayle? Looks like Dads Army to me!”

  “Shaddup!” the leader said, adding softly, “Stay away from his hands…”

  “Na, he’s a section eight.” He looked at Quayle, tapping his finger against his head, “Gaga, aren’t you Dad? Shell-shocked!”

  “Button it!” the leader snapped, then looked back at Quayle. “Hand her over...”

  The third man had moved up on the left and the leader flicked a look sideways at him. Quayle was quick; he used the distraction to edge forward a pace. He was waiting for the trigger word. Something out of place, something pre-arranged that would mean action. He needed to be close, very close.

  “I said no, Weaselface. Now, why don’t you take your snotty little yobbos and go back to Milburn and tell ‘em I said no?” As he spoke, he moved forward another half pace. Get personal, he thought. Get them angry. Hot blood is stupid blood…

  “Who you calling snotty?”

  “Hand her over, Quayle, or we’ll take her,” the leader said, stepping ahead of his hot tempered associate, a step nearer Quayle.

  The man suddenly seemed to realise that he was close, much too close, and he smiled quickly. “Can’t we discuss thi..”

  The word. That was the word. Quayle recognised it as fast as the other two. As the man reached under his coat, Quayle smashed the tea cup into his face with his right hand, gouging at the eye while his left shot out and grabbed the moving hand of the man on the right, snapping two of his fingers with a vicious downward flick of his own wrist before it could reach the gun.

  In his peripheral vision, he could see movement to his right. He pushed both injured men sideways towards the other and turned, lightning fast, to get first cover behind the table as the third man side-stepped his falling partners and pulled his gun clear. The other two were not out of the fight yet, but the last man had been faster than he looked.

  As he landed, rolling towards the door behind the falling table, the man fired twice, the muzzle blast deafening at eight feet, the bullets knocking chips of whitewashed concrete out of the wall and hitting him in the face as he scrabbled through the door. Then, suddenly, there were more shots, snapped off very fast, muffled by something.

  Quayle dodged around the door jam, his mind racing. Jesus! He hadn’t expected either of the others back into it so fast. He slipped through into the bedroom and cleared the window in one graceless motion, then dropped into the rocky side garden, his fingers seeking and finding a large stone the size of an orange. Holding it tightly, he ducked back against the wall of the house, then began to move towards the front. One would come this way. Take the guns away from them. He didn’t like guns, but when you needed one there was nothing quite like it. On his own, he would have kept moving into the rocks, but Holly was already there. He needed to keep them here. He took a breath and moved forward. It was quiet, very quiet. In short, shuffling, silent steps, he reached the veranda wall. Above he could hear nothing, but something was moving further along.

  “Mr Quayle. Please show yourself. It’s finished.”

  He recognised that voice. It was Pope.

  “Where are you?” he called. That’s why the shots had seemed muffled, he thought. They’d been fired from a distance. If Pope had opened fire then there were dead men there.

  “Spare room, end of the veranda. I am standing now. If you have a firearm, don’t shoot…”

  Quayle dropped and ran the twelve yards to the far end of the wall, still holding the stone in his hand.

  “Hold your gun up where I can see it!” he said, edging backwards to look upward.

  There above him was Pope: grimy, dusty, unshaven still in his city suit. The only thing clean was the gun, black, oiled and lethal in his hand.

  “They’re Milburn,” said Quayle. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Pope said nothing, but his eyes flickered up at Quayle, unable to mask his surprise. Then looked back down at the three bodies. Each had taken a bullet in the centre of the chest and each had a second round either high in the neck or lower face.

  “They pulled guns,” Pope said. “That’s enough for me. I didn’t know who they were.”

  That seemed honest enough for Quayle. Pope was now a friendly. They could think about the other connotations later.

  “I’ll carry ‘em away. You hose down the concrete. Then we better move…”

  Pope nodded imperceptibly. As Quayle dragged the limp forms towards the garden’s edge, he took the green hose pipe and did as he was asked, the cool water turning pink and frothy, laced with bits of bone and tissue, as it ran round the wall’s edge.

  Holly poked her head round the door as Quayle dragged the last corpse away by its feet. It was the man in the blazer and, below the terrible jagged wound inflicted by the smashed teacup, half his face had been torn away by Pope’s wadcutter bullet.

  She threw a hand to her mouth and looked like she was about to vomit.

  “Wait inside,” Quayle snapped.

  For him death was nothing new. He had seen many bodies in his lifetime and had been forced into personally contributing to the tally on five occasions. The Cambodian incident was the worst. He had killed a twelve year old girl. Trapped sixteen miles out of Phnom Pen by advancing Khmer Rouge, he had been caught and, for once, his silver tongue was unable to get him clear. The man he’d been trying to escort to safety had started crying as the interrogation began, and he knew the situation was getting terminal. His charge was a Cambodian academic, prime target for the hysteria. Century wanted him out.

  He had waited until there were only two guards and the girl in the room and came off the floor fast, his hands incapacitating the two guards simultaneously with fingers jabbed at pressure points. They were both armed and speed was critical. As they hit the floor, he turned to the girl, willing her not to point the gun she carried – but she was drunk on her own power, innocence as purely corrupted as only the very young can be. He jerked the gun clear from her hands as the first round went of, the muzzle blast scorching his elbow, and slammed his fist into her face in a millisecond of pure fear. Her head snapped back, her nose spewing a fountain of bright blood, and hit the wall with such force that her skull cracked and she fell dead to the floor. After that, Quayle had not hesitated. He’d simply grabbed the academic and pushed him through the window, out into the dark rubble strewn yard. It was four days until they got to the French Embassy. They saw many dead and maimed along the way.

  Five minutes later, Quayle walked back into the living room. Holly sat on the floor on a magnificent silk Heraki rug, her legs crossed, her face shocked and pale.

  “I told you to wait in the rocks,” he said.

  “I thought you’d been shot,” she said, “so I came down to see if you were OK.”

  “What? So they could shoot you to?” He bent and took her face in his hands. “This is
not over, my girl. Whatever it is, it’s only just started. Now, if I tell you to do something, you do it. Your life may depend on it. OK?”

  She nodded.

  “Right. Go and pack a bag. Quickly now. We have to go. More will come.”

  “Why Titus? What have we done? “ She trailed off in a little girl’s voice.

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly.

  She stood and walked slowly through to the bedroom.

  Plato the cat was left with Nico – who had the key to the house and would go up in the morning to patch and whitewash the bullet chips in the wall. He and his son would move the bodies down to the water and dump them, and Quayle knew he had no need to worry. These were the islands, where people looked after one another – and, by 7pm that evening, the three of them were on a ferry heading for Hydra, Mr Pope never more than three or four feet from Holly, his right hand in the pocket of his coat, inches from his gun.

  Up on the foredeck it was virtually deserted, the only sound the throb of the engines and the bow wave tumbling forever outward. Tired day trippers and tourists dozed in chairs or drank in the small smoky bar well aft. Holly sat on one of the wooden benches a few feet away and Quayle stepped up to Pope at the rail.

  “Right,” Quayle said softly. “You pitch up claiming to be guarding Holly, and won’t say why. A couple of days later, three heavies turn up, get nasty and you do the rescue bit. Only it turns out they’re Acton Fairies. You’re in trouble, Mr Pope. Now, why do they want Holly and what the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know much,” he said stiffly.

  “Just tell me what you do know.”

  “I’ve been unable to contact my control. Getting panic signals from Milburn. I made a couple of calls yesterday. Someone got to Mr Black. He’s my control on this one.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr Black. Adrian.”

  Quayle had come across the man.

  “He’s Five, isn’t he?”

  “Was. He transferred a couple of years ago. He was hit. Not dead, but in a bad way. Something’s going on. A safe house was hit a few months ago, then Mr Arnold and some woman who had been selling stuff to the other side…”

  “Henry Arnold?”

  “Yes. Know him?”

  Quayle nodded in the darkness.

  “Then Mr Black takes over, and it’s hush hush. Single controller job, not on the board. My instructions were to guard Miss Morton from any threat. He said that. Any threat.”

  “I don’t think he meant to shoot...”

  “They drew firearms,” he said stolidly. “She is my body, and they drew firearms. He said any threat.”

  “It’s a genuine enough error. I think you should contact London and go back in. Get this sorted out. Whatever is going on, Holly knows nothing about it.”

  “I’ll stay put until Mr Black is up and around. Then he can clear me.”

  “And what if he dies?”

  “Then I am in a bit of bother,” Pope answered. “Because something wasn’t right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’ve had a lot of briefings over the years, but nothing like that one. Report to him and him alone. No-one else. I think Mr Black was onto something. Something big and, whatever it is, it’s close. Very close.”

  “What makes you think that?” Quayle said softly. The hair on the back of his neck had risen.

  “Because he was scared, Mr Quayle. He was scared and watching his own back.”

  Quayle turned and looked over the rail in silence, his eyes fixed on a shimmer of moonlight that lay silver across the oily black Aegean.

  “So, Mr Quayle. Now you know as much as I do. I am staying on the job, like it or not. It is easier for me up close and, if you value her life, you will let me do that.”

  “You may work if you wish, Mr Pope,” Quayle said, turning. In the moonlight, his face had taken on a new expression, hard and full of anger. “But you may wish you had gone back to London. Understand this. I am not going to let them take her in without a bloody good reason and some solid guarantees. That means that things could get nasty. Now, you’re either guarding Holly or you’re working for Milburn. You better give that some thought, because it looks like they may be two different things from here on in. If you’re guarding Holly, I’ll let you work close with one proviso: you contact no-one but Adrian Black.”

  “What are you going to do?” Pope asked.

  “Let them get a smell of the fox. See what they do.”

  “That’s all?” Pope asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “For now.”

  “I have your word?”

  Quayle nodded in the dark. Then it was Pope’s turn to stare out at the dark sea. He tried to imagine what it would be like bent over the railway line every day, nothing to look forward to but a walk up to the tobacconist for a paper, and his sister’s incessant complaints about the bus service and why didn’t he want to come to the bingo. After a lifetime of living on his nerves and his reflexes, a lifetime of discipline and craftsmanship and the eye of the hunter, he knew he could not go back, not yet. To go back would mean to die grey and withered in the attic. He looked round at Holly, sitting with her knees up to her chest on the bench, her hair blowing in the wind. She had said very little since the incident on Serifos, but he knew Quayle was right. She was a civilian and a frightened one at that. It was simple. Her life was in danger and he was a close protection specialist. So be it.

  He turned back to Quayle, pulled his hat down firmly on his head, and pushed his rimless spectacles up with his forefinger.

  “Agreed,” he said

  The acting deputy department head of the Fairies at Milburn sat back and read the contact log with some concern, his bushy eyebrows creasing. He didn’t like the ‘no contact’ tag against the three men on the Serifos job. The leader wasn’t too bad, but the younger two had a lot to learn, so it wasn’t the most experienced team he had seen fielded. Even reporting direct as they were to John Burmeister, the drills demanded they called in on a regular schedule. The schedule was sacred, and the second fall-back contact could and would take priority in Embassy coded transmissions back to GCHQ at Cheltenham.

  The three had been due to report in at 6pm that evening, but so far there had been nothing. The second contact would be scheduled for exactly twelve hours later. He didn’t like the hot seat. This was the second time he’d stood in while Jonno Smith went on leave, and the last time had been a real bastard because the wheels had come off the Helsinki job, and Oberon had come in at three in the morning and more men had gone into the field and, by the Monday afternoon, there were two dead Russians in a snow drift near the airport. Dead kilos meant everyone watching their backs in case the KGB retaliated, even though the dead men on this occasion were rogue. Selling secrets and then double crossing the buyer was always risky.

  He looked up at the clock. Nine hours until the next deadline.

  He moved the status on the board from green to amber alert.

  Three floors up, John Burmeister had noticed that his team hadn’t called in since midday – but, with other things on his plate, he hadn’t given it much thought. The Greek telephone service was infamous and, without being within easy distance of the embassy, other communications were difficult. Besides, it was a routine task and, if anything, Oberon had overdone the manpower allocation with three men. He saw no reason to be concerned and pushed on with other active files, all generated by Adrian Black’s list of Teddy Morton’s associates and friends.

  Within seconds of the team missing the second fall-back contact, the acting deputy department head took a deep breath, calmed himself, and phoned Oberon at home. By 6.40pm, after a quick call to Burmeister and a more lengthy conversation with the Station Chief in Athens, Oberon moved the team from an amber status to a ‘red two’: Situation Unknown but deemed Critical. The only other stage left was a ‘red one’: Personnel Dead or Interned, Mission Failed.

  At this time, the mainstream Service at Century h
ouse became involved, because whatever had happened to the three Acton Fairies could be part of a larger effort or have wider implications, and that notification was in the overnight report on the desk of the Director General, Sir Gordon Tansey-Williams. It was the talk of the building that morning – after all, as one administrator pointed out with morbid glee, the Service hadn’t lost three men on one job since 1957 and they were killed when a car crashed in Germany.

  For the service, with its strictly defined areas of responsibility, the situation was now becoming confused. The job was still technically under the control of the Counter Espionage department head, but he was still in hospital and it was uncertain when, if ever, he would be out to resume his responsibilities. He had a small, very talented department – but no one individual was capable of assuming control. Burmeister, as the only other fully briefed senior man, had filled the breach temporarily – but now, with a red two code on the board, there was every chance that Milburn would lose the matter to Century.

  Sir Martin Callows eased his bulk from his seat and walked ponderously to the fireplace. The whole scenario was ugly. Seven dead and one maimed for life – and now a possible three additional bodies on the tally. All his people and, so far, for nothing. Still no real smell of the quarry. All he had was Black’s feel for it. Black had said he thought Henry Arnold was correct in his belief that Meredith Mortimer was an aside to the main issue. Yes she was a spy, yes she had been pillow talking with the Soviet, but that was all. She was simply the method by which Moscow Centre knew that the Service was onto something erased and hidden, something concealed with great care and valuable enough to kill for. Something called Long Knives by the Kilos, and known about by our dead investigator whose main registry files have gone. Callows had asked the question of the Head of the Soviet desk at Century the night before, but had been given short shift. The man was not risking his network to simply try and establish the contents of the Soviet’s Long Knives file.

  “What’s in it?” he asked.

  “Dunno. That’s why we want in.”