Black Ops: The 12th Spider Shepherd Thriller Read online

  Contents

  Also by Stephen Leather

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Black Ops

  Also by Stephen Leather

  Pay Off

  The Fireman

  Hungry Ghost

  The Chinaman

  The Vets

  The Long Shot

  The Birthday Girl

  The Double Tap

  The Solitary Man

  The Tunnel Rats

  The Bombmaker

  The Stretch

  Tango One

  The Eyewitness

  Spider Shepherd thrillers

  Hard Landing

  Soft Target

  Cold Kill

  Hot Blood

  Dead Men

  Live Fire

  Rough Justice

  Fair Game

  False Friends

  True Colours

  White Lies

  Jack Nightingale supernatural thrillers

  Nightfall

  Midnight

  Nightmare

  Nightshade

  Lastnight

  If you’d like to find out more about these and future titles, go to www.stephenleather.com.

  About the Author

  Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers, an ebook and Sunday Times bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers including The Times, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. Stephen’s titles have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US and his bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages. He has also written for television.

  Visit Stephen’s website, www.stephenleather.com, find him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/stephenleather.

  Stephen also has a website for his Spider Shepherd series, www.danspidershepherd.com, and for his Jack Nightingale series, www.jacknightingale.com.

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder and Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Stephen Leather 2015

  The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 73665 6

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Laura

  Rob Tyler wanted a beer, but he was working and on a point of principle he never drank on the job. He was sitting in a house in Queens, about ten miles from the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan. The house was in a quiet cul-de-sac, and probably worth a couple of million dollars. Three bedrooms, a nice yard, a garage easily big enough for two cars and a hot tub on a terrace leading off the main bedroom. He was sitting on an Italian sofa and on the marble coffee table in front of him was the rope that Tyler would use to hang the man who was expected home at any moment.

  Tyler was dressed for murder. He was wearing white forensic overalls, paper covers over his shoes, and a shower cap. There were blue latex gloves on his hands, and in the kitchen was a black garbage bag into which he’d put all the protective clothing once the job was finished. The job specifications had been clear. The man was to be killed by hanging and everything had to point to suicide. That didn’t necessarily mean a note – it was a fallacy that all suicides left a note before killing themselves – but it did mean that the marks on his neck would have to be consistent with hanging and there would have to be rope fibres on his hands. Tyler had already selected the perfect spot for the hanging – the bannisters around the main hall would do just fine.

  Tyler had carried out more than a dozen killings that had looked like suicides. Hanging was the most popular but he had also slit the wrists of a woman in a bath and had done a couple of overdoses. Overdoses were messy. The best way was to force a liquid down the victim’s throat with a large syringe and then follow up with tablets when they were unconscious. The overdoses were two-man jobs, Tyler doubted that one man could do it on his own. He’d done hangings on his own but this time the job had been assigned to two contractors. Tyler wasn’t overjoyed at working with another contractor, especially one he hadn’t worked with before, but the woman seemed professional. She’d said her name was Leila and was vague about where she’d come from and hadn’t given much away. She was pretty, with mahogany brown skin and the blackest eyes he’d ever seen, short, curly hair and a body that wouldn’t quit. She was wearing high heels and a short skirt that showed off a pair of awesome legs and a low-cut top with a cleavage that he couldn’t stop looking at. From her dark skin and hair Tyler suspected Guatemala or Nicaragua but her accent was a puzzle. Her English was perfect but her accent was slightly off, as if she’d been born overseas. He’d tried speaking to her in Spanish but she hadn’t replied. Tyler assumed she’d been hired because of her looks – she was the perfect honey for a honey trap.

  Leila had made contact with the target and had been to the house with him the previous night. The target was divorced, she said, and had jumped at the chance of getting between her legs. He’d been so enamoured that he hadn’t realised she had copied his key and noted the burglar alarm code.

  Now they were in the house and waiting for him to return. It was seven in the evening and they had been inside for the best part of four hours. Tyler had jokingly suggested that they visit the bedroom to pass the time but she had smiled sarcastically and said that he wasn’t her type. Tyler wondered if that were true. He was a little over six feet and was in the best physical condition of his life, better even than when he’d been in Delta Force. He wondered if it was worth trying again, after the target was dead. Killing could be the ultimate aphrodisiac, with the right kind of girl. He realised he was staring at her breasts again and that she was looking at him. He smiled and looked away.

  ‘How long have you known Mercier?’ he asked.

  Mercier had hired them for the job. Tyler was getting a hundred grand for the gig. He didn’t know how much the girl was being paid. He’d be doing most of the work. As soon as the target turned up, the girl would cover him with her gun. He’d already brought a quilt down from upstairs and laid it behind the sofa. He’d wrap the target with the quilt and then place the noose around his neck and pull it tight until he was dead. That way there would be no signs of a struggle. Once the target was dead it would be easy enough to attach the rope to the bannister and set the scene. Tyler had already selected a dining-room chair. He would put the target’s fingerprints on the back and make it look as if the chair had fallen to the side.

  ‘A couple of years.’

  ‘Done many jobs for him?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘Anything I might have heard of?’

  She tilted her hea
d on one side and scrutinised him with her jet black eyes. ‘Do you always ask this many questions?’

  ‘I’m just curious.’

  ‘Well you know what curiosity did to the cat.’ She checked the action of her gun.

  ‘You do that a lot,’ said Tyler. ‘Check your gun.’

  ‘I like to be sure,’ she said.

  ‘You always use a Glock?’

  ‘For close-up work, sure. You can’t go wrong with a Glock. Plus there’s a lot of them about so they’re harder to track down.’

  ‘They kick their cartridges everywhere though.’

  ‘If you dump the gun, that’s not an issue.’ She shrugged. ‘Horses for courses.’

  Tyler nodded. ‘And what did they tell you about me?’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Not much.’

  ‘And you didn’t ask?’

  ‘Why would I ask?’

  ‘Not curious?’

  She laughed. ‘You’re the curious one, Robert. I don’t have a curious bone in my body.’

  ‘But when they said there’d be two people on the job, didn’t you ask for details?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’ She tilted her head on one side again and fixed him with her eyes. ‘You asked about me?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Tyler.

  ‘And Mercier told you?’

  ‘He just said that you were very pretty and I should keep my cock in my pants.’

  ‘Good advice,’ she said. ‘That’s all he told you?’

  ‘Why, does that worry you?’

  ‘I’d have hoped there would have been some sort of confidentiality. I wouldn’t want an employer to start giving out my personal information to a …’

  ‘Stranger? But I’m not a stranger. I’ve worked with Jules for many years. And it’s not as if he gave me your real name. Other than that he told me nothing.’

  She walked over to the window and looked down at the street, then at her watch. ‘So what do you want to know, Rob?’ She reached into her pocket and took out a bulbous suppressor and screwed it into the barrel of her Glock as she continued to look down into the street.

  Tyler shrugged. ‘You’re a pro, that’s obvious. But you’re young. What are you? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?’

  She smiled. ‘Twenty-four.’

  ‘That’s still young. How did you get the experience?’

  ‘Israeli Army,’ she said. ‘Signed up at eighteen.’

  ‘You’re Israeli?’

  ‘My parents moved there before I was born.’

  ‘So you’re Jewish?’

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  Tyler laughed. ‘Of course not. Wow, I wouldn’t have put you down as a former soldier.’

  ‘It’s compulsory in Israel, national service for everyone. Three years for men, two years for women. But only half go into the military. And a lot of kids duck it if they can. But I enlisted. I wanted to serve.’

  ‘And you got a taste for it?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Combat?’

  ‘There wasn’t much combat. But there was a lot of training. Then I joined Mossad. The Israeli equivalent of the CIA.’

  ‘What did you do for them?’

  ‘That’s classified. But between you and me, pretty much the same as I’m doing today.’

  ‘You were a government assassin?’

  She smiled tightly. ‘Like I said, it’s classified.’

  ‘And now you do it for money?’

  She nodded. ‘A lot of money. And you were what? A Navy Seal?’

  ‘Delta Force,’ said Tyler.

  ‘Were you one of the ones that got Bin Laden?’

  ‘I’d gone private before then,’ said Tyler.

  ‘How many jobs have you done?’

  ‘In total? A couple of dozen.’

  ‘You don’t know for sure?’

  ‘To be honest, once a job is done, it’s done. I don’t dwell. It’s like women. I have absolutely no idea how many women I’ve fucked over the years. A hundred. Two hundred.’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember their faces, never mind their names. It’s the same with targets. Mind you, there’s one coming up that I’m never going to forget.’

  She looked at him, intrigued. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said.

  ‘Is it for Mercier?’

  ‘No. Someone else. It’ll probably be my last job. For a while, anyway.’

  ‘It’s big?’

  Tyler grinned. ‘Very big. The biggest.’

  She smiled and locked eyes with him. ‘You can tell me,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t tell anyone. That’s one of the downsides of this job, you know? It all has to stay secret. Otherwise you’re fucked.’

  ‘You can tell people you trust,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, but who can you trust?’ he asked. ‘You can’t trust anybody.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Why is he running late?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The target. Where the hell is he?’

  ‘He’s here already,’ said the girl.

  Tyler frowned. He was about to reply when he realised what she meant. He started to raise his gun but it was too late, way too late. Her Glock was already pointed at his chest and he barely had time to open his mouth before the first shot smashed into his chest, followed closely by a second. He was barely aware of the muffled pops of the suppressed shots and the bullets felt like nothing more than punches to his chest. He fell backwards and was dead even before the third shot hit him in the face and his brains and skull splattered across the wall behind him.

  Lex Harper tapped his pool cue on the side of the table and tried to focus on the balls. ‘Remind me again, am I big or small?’

  The three men sitting on bar stools to his left groaned as one.

  ‘He’s pissed,’ said a big man wearing a Singha beer vest and baggy shorts.

  ‘He’s taking the piss, that’s what he’s doing,’ said the man sitting in the middle of the three. He was tall and thin with a beard that compensated for a rapidly receding hairline. ‘Lex, mate, time to go home. And don’t use the bike. I don’t want to be visiting you in the ICU.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Harper, struggling to focus on the table. He frowned. ‘Just tell me, big or small?’

  ‘Small,’ chorused the three men.

  The barman put down fresh bottles of Heineken in front of them, each protected with a foam tube stamped with the logo of Noy’s Bar, a red lipstick kiss on a St George’s Cross. The bar was open to the air and even with the large fans playing down on them from the ceiling, the beer wouldn’t have stayed cool for long without insulation. Noy’s Bar was just off Pattaya’s Walking Street. Most evenings Walking Street was packed with tourists eyeing up the red light area’s bars and hookers, but Noy’s Bar was off the beaten track enough for Harper and his pals to be able to enjoy a quiet game of pool and a few beers without being disturbed by crocodiles of Chinese and Korean tourists snapping away with their smartphones. Though in Harper’s case it had been more than a few beers along with half a dozen tequila chasers. It was just after 8 p.m. but the four men had been drinking and playing pool after an extended lunch in the Pig and Whistle and all the signs were that the drinking at least was going to continue into the early hours.

  As Harper leaned over the table to play his shot, he felt a vibration from his denim hip pack. Night or day Harper always had the pack around his waist. It contained one of the many mobile phones he used, an Irish passport and two credit cards, and 50,000 baht in cash. The pack, together with the heavy gold neck chain he always wore, meant that he could get out of Thailand or anywhere else he found himself at a moment’s notice, leaving by the airport, by boat or travelling overland to a neighbouring country. He had a larger bug-out bag under the bed in his apartment and another in the back of his SUV, but all the essentials for a fast escape were in the hip pack. Much as he loved Thailand, his unbreakable rule was never to be so fond of a place that he couldn’t leave at a moment�
�s notice, without a backward glance.

  His companions groaned as he straightened up, took out his phone and read the three-word text message from a UK number: YOU HAVE MAIL.

  ‘Guys, I’ve got to go,’ he said, slotting his cue into a rack on the wall.

  ‘He’s on a mission,’ laughed Singha shirt. ‘It’s that dancer from Anglewitch, the one with the tits.’

  ‘To be fair, they’ve all got tits,’ said Harper. ‘Real or fake. Okay, I’m off.’

  ‘Take a taxi, Lex.’

  Harper nodded and waved a thanks for the advice. He was just sober enough to know that he was too drunk to be riding his Triumph Bonneville home. Pattaya’s streets were a death trap at the best of times, but being drunk on a powerful motorcycle when pretty much everyone else on the road was either equally intoxicated or high on drugs was a recipe for disaster. He headed off down the road in search of an Internet café. The nearest was run by a middle-aged former go-go dancer called Rose. Rose was still a stunner, so much so that at least four foreigners had given her the money to start her own Internet café-cum-print shop. Two of her backers were British, one was Australian and one was an Indian. The Indian and one of the Brits thought they were married to Rose, having gone through a traditional Thai ceremony in her home town of Udon Thani. Rose had never followed up with the paperwork, which meant she was free and single and open to offers.

  All four of her backers lived overseas and, so far at least, had never decided to holiday in Pattaya at the same time. They all deposited regular sums into her bank accounts and sent her presents to prove their devotion and in return received daily Skype calls where she would shed a tear and say how she loved them and missed them.

  When Harper walked in she was sitting at one of her terminals helping a pretty teenage girl with a tattoo of two Japanese koi on her back compose an email to an overseas sponsor.

  ‘Tell him you cannot dance because you miss him so much,’ said Rose, pointing at the screen. ‘And tell him your mother has to go into hospital soon. Don’t say what’s wrong with her. Wait for him to ask. And don’t ask him for money. Wait for him to offer.’

  The girl frowned. ‘What if he doesn’t offer?’

  Rose smiled. ‘He will,’ she said, patting the young girl on the leg. ‘They always do.’