Retribution Read online

  Retribution

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Copyright

  Retribution

  James Barrington

  Prologue

  It should have been routine, and when they looked back on it afterwards, it pretty much was. Right up until the moment when routine went straight out of the window and the quiet London street echoed with the sound of gunshots.

  They called it fact finding, but nobody with an IQ that needed three figures to express it would have failed to realise that it was just a junket. The principal was a minor member of a shiny new royal family from an African country that half the population of Britain had never even heard of, and those that had heard the name before would – just like George W Bush looking for somewhere like France – have needed prior notice and maybe some tuition to find it on a map.

  He was a prince – allegedly – with an instantly forgettable and largely unpronounceable name that contained a mass of Os and Ms and Ts, accompanied by wives numbered three, nine and eleven, so presumably he was working his way through the odd numbers that week. They were there for the shopping, and he was there for the high-stakes gambling at the expensive private casinos in the West End and, predictably enough, the almost equally expensive hookers who were a permanent fixture in most of those same casinos.

  Normally, nobody would have given a toss about some bigwig with more money than sense hitting the bright lights of London, but there were a couple things about Prince Whatever-the-hell-his-name-was that made him different. And important. But not for what he was, but because of what his country had.

  A couple of exploration wells off the coast of the nation – which was about the size of France and Spain combined – suggested potential yields measured in the trillions of barrels of crude, not the usual paltry few billion. That was important to Britain, just like any new and largely untapped reservoir of black gold.

  Another factor was real gold. Tons of it, in rich seams buried in the hillsides around the capital city. That was another obvious tick in the right box. In exchange for mineral prospecting rights and permission to drill a series of wells off the coast, the British government was prepared to overlook the fact that the prince’s father, a murderously violent and bigoted local tribal chief who’d massacred his way to the top of the local greasy pole and then proclaimed royal status for himself and his family, was using slave labour to dig out the gold-bearing ore. After all, the workers who were being beaten and whipped and murdered on a daily basis to encourage them to dig faster were just faceless and nameless natives, not the kind of people that anyone outside the continent, and precious few in Africa, actually cared about. In fact, nobody really knew what was happening in that nation, because foreign correspondents weren’t allowed there and a local news blackout meant the only thing the local papers published was good news, most of it entirely fictitious, about the royal family.

  But oil and gold were important to Britain, and so when the prince and his wives and his entourage and his hangers-on flew into Heathrow in a chartered 747, he was met by a small flock of black limousines and an armed team from the Diplomatic Protection Group. Perish the thought that anything should happen to this unpleasant specimen of humanity whilst he was abusing the hospitality of Great Britain. The DPG people had been briefed to guard the prince and his wives, while the rest of his team were provided with cars and drivers but no guards, and largely left to their own devices.

  And for the five days that the African group had been in London, the routine had been pretty much unchanged. The prince rarely surfaced before noon, by which time his wives were up, dressed, breakfasted and already chauffeured to Harrods or Regent Street or Oxford Street or whichever part of London was going to benefit from an assault by them and their unlimited platinum credit cards. Back at the hotel, once he was awake and largely recovered from the triple excesses of the night before – unfailingly financial, sexual and alcoholic – the prince would demand breakfast from room service.

  The West London hotel had found it difficult to cope with the man’s demand for goat, this not being a food item commonly found on their extensive room service and restaurant menus, and a small farmer in Wiltshire had unexpectedly benefited when the hotel’s catering manager, desperate to find a source of supply, had purchased his entire herd of four males. There was no way that the prince could actually consume four entire goats in a single week, but he had indicated that he might well stay longer in London if he enjoyed himself, and so a ready supply of goat’s meat seemed like a good idea.

  Once he had consumed three or four thick slices of prime rib of goat covered in a kind of grey sauce – he had supplied the recipe for this, which contained a number of other unexpected ingredients, two of them technically illegal as food items, to the head chef on arrival – the prince would dress with the assistance of his personal valet and then descend to the lobby where one of the armoured Jaguar limousines would be waiting, along with the driver and two armed DPG bodyguards wearing plain clothes. And then he would be conveyed, in almost complete silence, to his casino of choice for that day.

  Once he had left the hotel, the housekeeping staff would enter his suite and remove the debris left from the night before, which normally included at least one and sometimes as many as three bleary eyed call girls, their bodies still fizzing with a combination of alcohol and chemical kicks that they frankly needed to survive the prince’s unusual – and that was the polite way of putting it – sexual demands. The hotel manager would ensure that they were at least able to walk in a more or less straight line and were fully and properly dressed before he allowed them to leave the suite and the hotel: the establishment had a reputation to maintain, obviously.

  Promptly at eight in the evening, the limousine would reappear outside the casino and convey the prince and whichever shade or shades of hooker he had selected for the evening – he had an especial fondness for girls with white blonde hair and redheads – to an upmarket restaurant nearby that suited him. The kitchens didn’t serve goat ribs, or indeed any other part of that particular animal, but other items on the menu apparently satisfied his hunger. Once the meal was over, the Jaguar would return the prince and his companions to the casino, where he would spend another couple of hours losing impressive amounts of money at the blackjack and roulette tables before being conveyed back to his hotel, often with a woman on each side and another sitting on his lap.

  It was all just routine. Not too difficult, and not too enjoyable, at least for the DPG men, but just routine. Until the evening that it wasn’t.

  There’s a well-established procedure for handling a high-value target – using the expression in its loosest possible sense – which the prince probably was, at least in the eyes of some British politicians who had clearly seen the imminent arrival of the gravy train and had already booked tickets in the first class section of it.

  While the target is inside the armoured car, he or she is essentially invulnerable, the bullet-proof windows and armour plating in the doors and around the bodywork of the vehicle proof against anything less powerful than a rocket propelled grenade. And people tend to notice somebody walking down the street, even in London, touting a four-foot-long anti-tank missile.

  But the moment t
he target steps out of the vehicle, he is at risk, just like any other pedestrian. To try to minimise the danger, the bodyguards check everything before they open the car doors, and in an ideal world there will be a corresponding team at the destination who will run similar checks before the vehicle arrives. When the bodyguards are happy that there is no visible danger, then they will get out of the car, before the target is allowed to move.

  In the prince’s Jaguar, one bodyguard occupied the front passenger seat while the second man was squeezed into the rear compartment of the car, usually with the thigh and surgically enhanced mammary gland of one of the call girls pressing firmly up against him. The front seat man would get out first, stand beside the open door of the car and scan all around him, the armour plating on the door providing an impressive layer of protection should someone open fire at him, while allowing him to get back into the car in an instant if he felt it necessary.

  Assuming that the coast was clear, he would then gesture to the bodyguard in the back seat, who would open his door and repeat the procedure. Only when both men were satisfied that there was no risk would the target be allowed to step out of the vehicle and then be walked quickly, one bodyguard on each side of him, into whatever venue he was visiting.

  Simple and routine.

  That evening, the Jaguar stopped outside the restaurant as usual, the bodyguards making their checks in sequence, and a few seconds later the back seat DPG man stepped out of the vehicle. He carried out a final check and then nodded to the prince and held the door wide open so that he could climb out of the car, the two women selected for the evening’s entertainment following him.

  And at that moment everything went wrong.

  A white Ford Transit van, probably the second most common vehicle on London streets after a black cab, screeched to a halt right beside the Jaguar, blocking the road. Three seconds later a maroon Vauxhall saloon going the other way, the driver apparently travelling too fast to stop and unable to drive around the Transit, slammed into the front of the Jaguar. The Vauxhall came off worst, but the limousine wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry after that.

  The noise of the collision was almost deafening, an amalgam of metal smashing into metal, tearing steel, squealing tyres and shattering glass, and was immediately followed by an instant of almost complete silence, broken only by the hiss of escaping steam from the Vauxhall’s ruptured radiator, the tinkling of fragments of broken glass falling onto the road, and the faint steady dripping sound of some fluid from the site of the impact.

  Heads turned in the restaurant as the diners seated beside the windows fronting the street stared out at the scene, and the handful of pedestrians in the road who were close enough to have heard the impact all turned to look. In fact, the noise of the crash was so loud that it would have taken a superhuman application of will not to have turned to look at it.

  And that, really, was the point.

  Bodyguards are a long way from being superhuman. They are trained to make their principal their number one priority, but sometimes even the best, most competent and most highly trained individuals can make a mistake and allow their attention to shift.

  And what had just happened was quite enough to shift anyone’s attention.

  The bodyguard closest to the car spun around immediately, his hand reaching for the Glock 17 nine-millimetre pistol he was carrying in a shoulder holster under his left arm. Then he dropped his hand and relaxed, because what he was looking at was a nasty traffic accident, nothing more, and clearly nothing to do with him. The DPG driver could sort it out, organise a replacement vehicle and whatever else was needed. That was his job, or a part of it.

  The leading bodyguard had also turned, and had also reached for his personal weapon, pulling the prince behind him as he did so, to place himself between his principal and the potential threat, the move a part of his basic training and instinct. But, just like his colleague, when he saw what had happened and the aftermath of the violent impact, he relaxed as well.

  That was a mistake.

  He took a final glance at the debris scattered across the road, then turned back towards the restaurant and started walking towards the door, the prince walking beside him and the two working girls following a couple of paces behind.

  And by then, it was all too late. A man carrying a pistol in a holster is effectively unarmed, albeit temporarily. For the weapon to be of any use, it has to be in his hand and ready to fire.

  Two men, wearing blue jeans and loose outdoor jackets, their faces covered by black balaclavas that hid everything except their eyes and mouths, seemed almost to materialise on the pavement just a few feet away, their trainers virtually soundless on the paving slabs.

  They ran up to the group of two men and two women walking towards the restaurant and stopped about ten feet away. The prince glanced incuriously at them, then continued walking. The bodyguard also turned and looked, and then started to react, reaching for his Glock, but by then it was too late. Several lifetimes too late.

  As the two newcomers stopped, their lightweight jackets swung open. On a loose sling, each man was carrying a Mac-10, a short, stubby and ugly submachine-gun, sometimes known as a machine-pistol because of its compact size.

  They stopped side-by-side about three feet apart and opened fire, aiming directly at the prince and the leading armed bodyguard. The yammer of the automatic weapons echoed from the surrounding buildings, as twin cascades of brass – the spent cartridges – poured from the ejection ports of the Mac-10s to bounce and shimmer metallically on the pavement beside them.

  The prince staggered backwards as half a dozen rounds smashed into his torso, ripping through his bowels and rupturing his kidneys and liver. He turned to look at the attackers as he started to fall, an expression of utter disbelief on his face. The last two bullets that hit him tore his heart to shreds, finishing the job.

  The two prostitutes didn’t even have time to scream, getting cut down in mid-stride to fall in an uncoordinated tangle of limbs across the pavement. Ironically, the right hand of one of the hookers came to rest on the prince’s groin, cupping his by then permanently flaccid member.

  The bodyguard was wearing a ballistic vest under his own jacket, but the effect of the bullets on him was similar, despite the rounds not penetrating his skin. The sheer kinetic energy of the bullets knocked him backwards, off his feet, his clutching hand not quite able to reach the butt of his pistol. And, like the prince, he was dead before he hit the ground, one round catching him under the chin as he fell backwards and blowing off the top of his head, taking most of his brain with it.

  But it wasn’t quite over.

  A third man, dressed exactly the same as the other two, had stepped forward at the same moment as the first two assassins appeared, his attention entirely focused on the second bodyguard. But he was carrying a very different kind of weapon: a short stubby pistol with a wide barrel, almost like a scaled down Verey pistol. As the bodyguard turned back from the crashed cars and looked towards the unmistakable clattering fire of the two automatic weapons, drawing his pistol as he did so, the third man fired. The sound of the shot was colossally loud, almost deafening, and the effect on its target instantaneous. The bodyguard collapsed backwards to the pavement, his pistol falling from his hand.

  Twenty seconds later, the Transit van powered away from the restaurant, leaving behind a scene of utter carnage, crumpled bodies, spreading pools of blood and a bizarre silence, as if London itself was holding its breath.

  Chapter 1

  ‘You might want to sit down, Richter,’ Richard Simpson said. ‘I’ve got a bit of bad news for you.’

  For once, Simpson’s waspish and sarcastic manner appeared to be put on the back burner, or at least placed on a lower heat setting, and he looked almost sombre as Paul Richter walked over to his desk.

  ‘I’ll stand, thanks,’ Richter said. ‘My parents are dead, I don’t have any brothers or sisters or near relations, and I don’t even have a girlfriend, so if somebody�
�s dead it probably isn’t going make too much difference to me.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Simpson snapped, his normal demeanour reappearing in an instant. ‘And somebody is dead. In fact, several people are dead, though right now that’s probably not all that important. What we do have is a problem. Or rather,’ he added after a moment, ‘I’ve decided that you have a problem.’

  He settled himself more comfortably in his padded leather swivel chair and hitched his feet up onto the corner of the desk.

  ‘This might take a while,’ he said, his pink and freshly scrubbed complexion appearing slightly paler than usual. ‘You might want to sit after all.’

  ‘Okay.’ Richter nodded, pulled one of the much less comfortable upright chairs away from the front of Simpson’s desk and then sat down.

  Paul Richter was almost as big a contrast to Simpson as it was possible to get. Where Simpson was slimly built, neat and fastidious in his dress to the point of obsession, Richter was stocky and perennially untidy: more than one person in the section had described him as looking like a badly packed parachute. Even wearing a suit, which was something he did rarely and normally under very audible protest, Richter looked scruffy. He was also insubordinate by nature and very rarely saw eye to eye with Simpson, which had led to problems in the past, but Richter’s strength lay in his supreme competence. He was one of those people who just did it, who just went out and got the job done, whatever it was, and that was why Simpson kept him on.

  ‘I assume some kind of shit has hit some kind of fan somewhere or other,’ Richter said, peering at Simpson over the double rank of cacti that formed a spiky and unpleasant living border around the edge of his desk, ‘and I presume that I’ve been chosen as the idiot with the bucket and shovel who has to go out and clear it up. So why don’t you just tell me all about it?’

  ‘You presume correctly. I assume you saw the intelligence summary this morning?’

  It was more of a statement than a question, because the first duty of everyone employed in the section was to read the overnight intel summary each morning when they arrived for work in the anonymous building in Hammersmith. In fact, there were three intelligence summaries – domestic, European and international – each covering the obvious area suggested by its name.