Line of Fire: Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Nick Stone 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, ex-deniable operator Nick 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 …

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  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

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  About the Author

  Also by Andy McNab

  Copyright

  LINE OF FIRE

  Andy McNab

  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.