Assassin

80

Damon Tyzack was a man for whom the phrase, 'I know where you live,' was more than a figure of speech. He had long known exactly where Bill Selsey went at the end of a working day. Now he was also certain that Selsey had been blown. All the more reason, then, to dispose of him as soon as possible.

One of Tyzack's men, Ron Geary, had trailed Selsey from the moment he stepped on to the street outside the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, obeyed the signals that took him across several lanes of rush-hour traffic and stepped up to the platform at Vauxhall railway station, where he took a train to the terminus at Waterloo. There he made the five-minute walk across to the suburban services at Waterloo East, spent ten minutes browsing magazines at a WHSmith bookstall and buying a cup of Earl Grey tea before getting on his regular evening train to Lee in the south-east suburbs of London.

Like most of Tyzack's more reliable employees, Geary was a Special Forces veteran. He was therefore well able to spot the tail that MI6 had put on Selsey and make sure that he was not spotted himself. Along the way, he sent pictures of both MI6 officers from his phone to Tyzack, who was being driven south in the back of a white Ford Transit van, as anonymous a form of transport as the roads of Britain provide.

Geary stayed on the train, handing over the surveillance to another one of Tyzack's people, who picked up Selsey as he came out of Lee station and turned right on to Burnt Ash Road. Neither Selsey nor his MI6 tail noticed the harassed-looking woman smoking a cigarette and pushing a baby-carriage who followed them along the busy commuter route, still laden with the last dregs of evening traffic trying to get on to the South Circular.

Her name was Raifa Ademovic. She had arrived in Britain five years earlier as an illegal immigrant, imported by Tyzack just as he was establishing his own trafficking network. With her greasy hair, prominent nose and almost permanent scowl, Raifa was never going to be of much value in the brothel to which she was first shipped. But the remarkable number of credit cards, banknotes, driving licences and wallets that she managed to lift from her paltry clients suggested that she might have other, exploitable talents. When she reacted to a john who tried to give her a playful smack by punching, clawing and biting him into the nearest A amp;E department that impression was confirmed. Tyzack had been making good use of her bad attitude ever since.

Raifa turned into the side road on which Selsey lived and watched as he approached and entered his semi-detached home. With a sullen defiance typical of her character, she stopped directly opposite the house, in full view of anyone inside it, or standing guard outside. She walked round to the front of the baby-carriage and briefly made encouraging noises at the small child – borrowed from a friend – who sat there, doped to the gills with motion-sickness tablets. Then she lit another cigarette, turned her back on the captive toddler and dialled a number on her mobile phone. In the genteel, middle-class area where Selsey lived, plenty of respectable citizens might disapprove of such blatantly bad mothering, but none would suspect her true purpose.

'He is in house now,' she told Tyzack. 'I see three other men. One following Selsey, he go inside house with him. Another man, he meet them at door, stay in house also. Final man in car outside. He watch Selsey go by, raise hand to say hello to man following, then make call. I guess he tell boss, OK, they get here.'

'Are they armed?' Tyzack asked.

'Man following Selsey, he carrying gun for sure. Other two, I could not see. But if they trying to protect him, why not carry gun?'

'Why not, indeed. Thank you, my dear. I really don't know what I would do without you, even though you really are quite remarkably unattractive.'

Raifa spat on the ground, loud enough for Tyzack to hear the hawk. 'Hey, fuck you too!' she said, and then hung up.

In his Transit van, now circling London on the M25, Tyzack laughed. There were very few people in the world he would ever allow to be so rude to him. But there was something so relentlessly unpleasant about Raifa Ademovic that he found himself admiring her more than any other woman he knew. There was none of that cringing desire to please that oozed from so many females, not the remotest attempt at seduction, just an unbending hostility. That, thought Damon Tyzack, is my kind of woman.