The Black Art of Killing Read online

  Matthew Hall

  * * *

  THE BLACK ART OF KILLING

  Contents

  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

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Matthew Hall was educated at Hereford Cathedral School and graduated in Law from Worcester College, Oxford. He worked as a criminal barrister before getting his first screenwriting commission with the ITV hit series, Kavanagh QC starring John Thaw. He has since written over 60 hours of prime-time drama. In 2018 he won a BAFTA Cymru for his BBC series, Keeping Faith, which returns for a third and concluding season in 2020. He lives in Herefordshire with his wife Patricia Carswell. They have two sons.

  In memory of Andy Black. A true friend and the first to call me a writer. We still miss you.

  1

  ‘No one thinks about death. Any that do are weeded out at selection. It’s a job. One that ends up with bodies lying about. But if you’re Special Forces material you don’t see a corpse, just an absence of threat. Mission accomplished. Someone has to do it. Move on.’

  This conversation, the one and only that Major Leo Black had ever had with a psychiatrist, or anyone for that matter, on the subject of his attitude to mortality and killing, had taken place five years earlier. He had agreed to it under sufferance and at the insistence of his diminutive commanding officer, Colonel Freddy Towers, after Black’s announcement that following twenty-two years of active service he was leaving the Regiment.

  ‘What the hell brought this on?’ Towers had yelled across the desk in his inimitable voice that could rise from measured baritone to screaming soprano the instant he faced contradiction.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you, Freddy. It just seems like the right time.’

  Towers’ jaw had hung slack as he looked at him with an expression that combined incomprehension with a sense of immeasurable betrayal. ‘You need your bloody head examined.’

  The psych was a top man, a distinguished professor conducting his private practice from sleek modern rooms in Harley Street. He had apparently published a paper proposing that the psychological make-up, even the genetics and brain chemistry, of Special Forces personnel was different to that of the general population. Despite this, his questioning struck Black as touchingly naive.

  ‘When you say “bodies”, do you draw a distinction between those of enemy combatants and those, say, of women and children?’

  ‘A threat’s a threat. Collateral damage is regrettable but inevitable. That’s not to imply an absence of human feeling, but during operations different rules are in play. There is only the objective and the requirement not to be captured or killed. There is no room for emotion any more than there is in the operating theatre.’

  ‘Have you experienced flashbacks? Episodes of anxiety? Insomnia?’

  ‘No,’ Black answered truthfully. He had always slept well.

  ‘Was there a period of depression, low mood or lack of physical energy that preceded your decision to leave?’

  Black thought carefully about his answer. There had been a change, but not of the debilitating kind the professor was suggesting. He was no doubt angling for a hint that Black had been carrying an invisible, ever-increasing burden that had finally broken him, yet the truth was quite different. ‘It was more a sense that there was nothing left in it for me, that I needed new purpose.’

  ‘I understand you want to go back to university. You intend to study for a PhD in military history?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘The nature and purpose of war have always interested me.’

  His inquisitor seemed suspicious. He stroked his immaculately tended beard. ‘Tell me about the feeling of there being “nothing left in it” for you.’

  Black sensed the professor circling around to the same false assumption that had informed his entire line of questioning – that even for a man with his record combat somehow ate away at the soul like acid on tooth enamel, until the raw nerve was exposed. How to explain to him that there was no greater peace than that experienced in the heat of battle; that life reduced to the simple binary of kill or be killed was close to what he imagined a religious experience might be; that in the moment of gravest danger every contradiction of the human psyche harmonized into a single clear note? That combat was a beautiful thing, which, nevertheless, could eventually lose its lustre.

  ‘A number of months ago I was part of a detachment pursuing a target in eastern Pakistan. Unfortunately, our intelligence assets proved unreliable. We were ambushed. I was separated from my team and detained for a number of days by officers of the Pakistan security service, the ISS. I was tortured, beaten, deprived of sleep. They even cut off one of my fingers.’ He held up his left hand. The ring finger had been severed beneath the first knuckle. ‘But my abiding thought throughout was that compared with me, they were amateurs. If I were to detain you, a threat to cut off your finger would probably be sufficient to get you talking. A credible threat to do the same or worse to your wife would certainly be effective. But to make me talk, a professional, you’d have to start butchering far more sensitive parts of my anatomy. And with serious intent.’

  ‘May I ask how it ended?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to spoil your lunch.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind. It may be relevant.’

  ‘Very well. I feigned a breakdown. My two interrogators released my handcuffs so that I could write a statement. I put their eyes out with a ballpoint pen, then ruptured both their windpipes before snapping their necks. One of them had a sidearm. I relieved him of it and there followed a lively period of confusion during which I managed to extract myself from what turned out to be a moderately well-fortified compound on the outskirts of Quetta.’

  ‘How many people did you kill, Leo?’

  Black thought for a moment. ‘Thirty or so. To the best of my recollection.’

  ‘And you managed this alone?’

  ‘I received assistance from colleagues in due course. Thankfully they had been looking for me and weren’t far away.’

  The professor nodded. A faint and nervous smile curled the corners of his mouth. ‘Forgive me, but thi
s does all sound a little fantastical.’

  ‘Could you or I fly an airliner? Or play a violin concerto? Both are incomprehensible feats to the amateur.’ The professor fell silent and shifted in his seat. ‘You seem anxious. Are you worried I might lose my mind, leap up from my chair and kill you?’ Before he received an answer, Leo said, ‘Does the brain surgeon drill into the skull of his fellow commuters?’

  ‘No, but –’

  ‘There are no “buts”. If you’ll forgive me, that’s the whole point – it is just a job like any other. It requires aptitude and practice, but it is only a job, not an affliction.’ Black turned his gaze out of the window and felt the urge to be out in the clear autumn afternoon. ‘I’m forty-five years old. I’ve exhausted all the possibilities the army has to offer. Is it unreasonable for me to think there might be more to life than dodging bullets and killing people?’

  ‘No … indeed.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  And there, their conversation ended.

  Later that afternoon Leo Black had emailed his letter of resignation to Freddy Towers and sent another short message to Sergeant Ryan Finn, the man who for fifteen years had been closer to him than a brother. During operations across four continents they had survived more close calls and saved each other’s lives on more occasions than they cared to remember. Finn took three days to reply and did so with his customary abruptness: Best of luck, you bastard. See you around.

  Time had passed and they never did arrange to meet. Busy lives and a mutual aversion to sentimental reunions had got in the way. Black had now made it to fifty with few regrets, but of those he had, neglecting his best friend and comrade was the one that troubled him the most. And as his guilt mounted so did the subconscious sense that circumstances would one day force them back together again.

  What he couldn’t have guessed was that it was to happen in the worst possible way.

  2

  The runway of Paris–Le Bourget Airport shimmered like molten glass in the heat of the June afternoon. A Gulfstream G450 descended from a cloudless sky, landed softly as a kiss and taxied to a spot on the tarmac where two vehicles stood side by side, their engines idling to keep their waiting drivers cool. The first was a black Mercedes sedan with diplomatic plates. The second was a small white Renault out of which stepped a young officer of the Police aux Frontières.

  A door opened outwards from the rear of the aircraft’s hull, revealing a set of four inverted steps on its inner face. Three passengers disembarked. At their head was a dark-haired woman in her late thirties with an air of confidence that could only have been possessed by an American. She was followed by two tall athletic men of indeterminate nationality. All three were dressed in business suits and carried identical dark navy holdalls bearing government insignia and the words Sac Diplomatique. The police officer glanced at their passports, issued them with permits allowing them to exit the airport and swiftly departed.

  The driver of the Mercedes took care of their luggage, which felt heavy and cumbersome as he stowed it in the boot, like equipment for a mountaineering expedition. He returned to his seat behind the wheel and found the woman sitting alongside him. There was no doubt she was the senior of the three.

  ‘Rue Christophe Colomb?’

  ‘Oui, merci,’ she answered in chilly, though perfectly accented French.

  These were the only words she spoke throughout the forty-minute drive to their destination, an apartment building a short distance from the Avenue George V in central Paris. The two men also remained silent. When, from time to time, the driver glanced at them in his mirror, he noticed their eyes scanning the traffic with a level of unblinking concentration that was scarcely human. Their behaviour bore little resemblance to that of the diplomats he was accustomed to driving and they gave him a bad feeling in the pit of his gut.

  Immediately after he had dropped them off, he felt an urge to call at a car wash in Saint-Denis where he paid twenty-five euros for the full Valet Magnifique. But even after the crew of shirtless Somalis had done their work, the smell of those three still lingered like a dead rat under the floorboards.

  3

  It was at moments like these that Ryan Finn missed wading through a jungle swamp with his finger cocked on the trigger of a C8 Carbine or leaping from the back of a Hercules at 20,000 feet. Standing like a shop-window dummy in the corner of a Paris hotel ballroom watching other people drink was his idea of purgatory. The young woman he was employed to protect was making matters worse by doing her best to disown him. Throughout the three days of the annual conference of the International Association of Nanotechnology, Dr Sarah Bellman had behaved like a spoiled child, making no secret of resenting his presence. The recent disappearance of one of her senior colleagues from Oxford University’s Department of Biomechanical Engineering seemed not to trouble her. Dr Bellman lived in a world all of her own.

  Precisely why anyone would wish to harm a twenty-nine-year-old scientific prodigy was not something the civil servant who had engaged Finn through the agency had chosen to explain. Having sat through long, tedious hours of lectures in the Académie des Sciences over the past three days, he had begun to get an inkling. Dr Bellman and her colleagues were making things that were small – very small – chiefly for medical purposes. Earlier that afternoon she had given the keynote presentation. Although most of the technical jargon went over his head, Finn had caught the gist: she had built microscopic containers out of woven strands of DNA complete with lids that could be opened and closed using beams of ultraviolet light. These tiny boxes, thousands of which could stand side by side on a pinhead, could deliver drugs to any cell in the body. She had cured brain tumours in rats without surgery and was about to start work on humans. Even to a layman like Finn, it was clear that it was the sort of breakthrough that would make someone obscene amounts of money.

  From his position near the entrance Finn watched his charge standing in the centre of the room shaking hands and accepting the compliments like a princess in a receiving line. With her black hair framing her pretty face and a scarlet cocktail dress hugging a slender, girlish frame, she looked closer to nineteen than twenty-nine. Among those vying for a moment in her presence he identified several corporate types, whose sharp suits and sober alertness singled them out from the relaxing scientists. They moved like hawks through a flock of unsuspecting doves, pressing their business cards into the hands of any they hoped might earn their companies a dollar.

  Sebastian Pirot, the conference’s head of security, stepped away from the group of organizing committee members he had been chatting with and joined Finn. A smile of faintly mocking sympathy creased the scar that ran diagonally from his left ear almost to the tip of his chin.

  ‘I can see this work bores you, Mr Finn.’

  ‘I’ve had worse.’

  Pirot glanced across at Bellman with a mixture of admiration and lust that caused Finn’s hackles to rise.

  ‘Some of the guys and I are meeting for a drink later. Would you care to join us?’ Pirot said.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m on permanent duty. I don’t get to clock off.’

  ‘Too bad. Oh well, next time you’re in Paris. We can swap old war stories.’

  Finn maintained a straight face that masked his surprise. He didn’t recall having told Pirot that he had been a soldier.

  ‘We’ve met before; I’m sure of it,’ Pirot said. ‘It’s been preying on my mind. Now I remember. November 2005. Jalalabad.’

  Jalalabad. Not a name Finn would easily forget. A rare joint mission between American, British and French Special Forces to neutralize a Taliban stronghold in mountains to the north-east of the city. It had been a bloodbath. Hand-to-hand combat with Saudi-trained Arab mercenaries equipped with British weapons. The sort of operation that left Finn confused as to who was fighting whom and for what.

  Finn neither confirmed nor denied his presence in Afghanistan. Like all good former members of the Regiment, he was assiduous in keeping details of his service s
ecret, even from his wife. Nevertheless, he allowed his gaze to linger on Pirot as he tried to recollect his distinctive face with its high jutting cheekbones and strangely empty basalt-grey eyes. A glimmer of memory surfaced: a group of French paratroopers from the 13th Dragoons clustered in a corner of the briefing tent, quiet and intense compared with the boisterous Americans of Delta Force.

  ‘Not good memories, I expect,’ Pirot said, ‘but at least the two of us survived.’ He offered his hand. ‘Au revoir, then, Mr Finn. Next time.’

  Finn closed his fist around Pirot’s. They shook like comrades.

  Pirot turned and left the room. Finn followed him with his gaze as another half-forgotten memory surfaced: a French Dragoon plunging his bayonet between the shoulders of a kneeling, blindfolded prisoner.

  Finn blinked, banishing the image, and turned his attention back to Dr Bellman. She had moved away from her admirers to a far corner of the room where she was now talking to a smiling young woman whose cascade of auburn hair tumbled down her back. They took fresh glasses of champagne from a waiter manoeuvring expertly through the room with a silver tray balanced on delicate fingertips. Her companion said something that made them both rock with laughter. Finn checked his watch. It was still only nine p.m. He feared it would be a long night.

  Dr Bellman and her new friend remained wrapped up in each other’s company for the following hour. The more they drank, the more they laughed and the more they flirted. Finn felt like a voyeur. He couldn’t wait for the evening to be over. Then, at last, the crowd began to thin and one by one the waiters retreated. The stragglers drifted out of the ballroom and across the Hotel George V’s brilliant marble foyer into the bar.

  Eventually, his charge and her new friend drained their glasses and made their way to the ladies’ room. Finn grabbed the chance to pay a visit of his own. In the quiet resplendence of the gentlemen’s cloakroom he splashed his face with cool water and dried it with a soft white towel. He was tired. His feet and back ached. The skin beneath his eyes was sagging. Just a few more hours and he would be on board the Eurostar and on his way back to Kathleen and the kids. He glanced briefly at the middle-aged face staring back at him from the mirror and wondered whether its hunger had finally gone. Perhaps the moment had arrived – time to think about leading a quiet life in his home town?