Circle of Death - Strike Back Series 05 (2020) Read online

  Former SAS corporal and the only man to escape death or capture during the Bravo Two Zero operation in the 1991 Gulf War, Chris Ryan turned to writing thrillers to tell the stories the Official Secrets Act stops him putting in his non-fiction. His novels have gone on to inspire the Sky One series Strike Back.

  Born near Newcastle in 1961, Chris Ryan joined the SAS in 1984. During his ten years there he was involved in overt and covert operations and was also sniper team commander of the anti-terrorist team. During the Gulf War, Chris Ryan was the only member of an eight-man unit to escape from Iraq, where three colleagues were killed and four captured. It was the longest escape and evasion in the history of the SAS. For this he was awarded the Military Medal.

  He wrote about his experiences in the bestseller The One That Got Away, which was adapted for screen, and since then has written three other works of non-fiction, over twenty bestselling novels and a series of childrens' books.

  Also by Chris Ryan

  Non-fiction

  The One That Got Away

  Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book

  Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide

  Fight to Win

  Safe

  Fiction

  Stand By, Stand By

  Zero Option

  The Kremlin Device

  Tenth Man Down

  Hit List

  The Watchman

  Land of Fire

  Greed

  The Increment

  Blackout

  Ultimate Weapon

  Strike Back

  Firefight

  Who Dares Wins

  The Kill Zone

  Killing for the Company

  Osama

  In the Danny Black Series

  Masters of War

  Hunter Killer

  Hellfire

  Bad Soldier

  Warlord

  Head Hunters

  Black Ops

  In the Strikeback Series

  Deathlist

  Shadow Kill

  Global Strike

  Red Strike

  Chris Ryan Extreme

  Hard Target

  Night Strike

  Most Wanted

  Silent Kill

  Circle of Death

  Chris Ryan

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Coronet

  An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Chris Ryan 2020

  The right of Chris Ryan 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.

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

  Hardback ISBN 9781529324853

  Trade Paperback ISBN 9781529324891

  eBook ISBN 9781529324860

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  ONE

  Julian Cantwell sat in his lavishly furnished office and felt the fear twisting like a knife in his stomach.

  He knew he shouldn’t be worried, of course. Cantwell had faced down dozens of major crises in the past. In twenty-plus years as the country’s most expensive political consultant, he’d helped to ward off countless threats to his clients. Enemies had been blackmailed or paid off. He’d buried scandals. Masterminded the downfall of political rivals. Overseen campaign strategies. Those tactics hadn’t made Cantwell many friends, but by god, they had worked. He’d helped his clients win elections in countries around the world, from Senegal to Lithuania – and in the process, he’d grown extremely rich.

  When it came to looking out for his clients, there was no one better than Cantwell; no problem that he couldn’t fix.

  Logically, he knew he shouldn’t be anxious about this new threat.

  It was nothing at all.

  But the feeling in his guts told him otherwise.

  He shifted his mouse, checked the time on his screen: 13.57.

  Three minutes until the meeting.

  Three minutes until his world potentially shattered.

  Cantwell’s office was on the third floor of an art deco property situated on a quiet side street in Fitzrovia. The heart of London, but you wouldn’t guess it from looking out of the window. The view from his office overlooked a betting shop, a yoga studio and a block of crumbling redbrick flats. Except for a handful of pedestrians, the street was empty. You didn’t get many tourists in this neighbourhood. Most stayed within the orbit of Oxford Street several hundred metres to the south, or Marylebone to the west, or Regent’s Park to the north.

  The offices for Cantwell’s company were not well advertised. There was no large sign outside the building, no corporate branding. Just a small metal sign fitted next to the buzzer outside the ground-floor entrance, bearing the name of Cantwell Consulting Group.

  Few people knew that his business existed. Fewer still understood the power that he wielded.

  He had worked his way up from a modest background, with none of the privileges of his Eton-educated colleagues. He had grown up in Coventry, in a modest three-bedroom house on the outskirts of the city. His parents were strictly middle class. Both were teachers; both regularly attended church. They were proud people, but their horizons were limited. Cantwell himself had been determined to make more of his life.

  He had shown promise from an early age, eventually going on to study PPE at Merton College, Oxford. After graduating, he’d taken a job as a junior journalist at Sky News, then spent six years working as an adviser in Westminster. Nine years ago, he’d left the firm to start his own political consulting company.

  The walls of his office were lined with his achievements over the past couple of decades. Almost every spare inch of real estate had a frame hanging from it, displaying campaign posters of the many elections he’d worked on around the world: Namibia, Georgia, Aruba, Guatemala, Montenegro. Several photographs on his mahogany desk showed Cantwell with some of his clients. In one snap, he was shaking hands with the Sierra Leonean president; in another, he was celebrating with the Polish prime minister. In a third, he was lurking in the background, smiling as the future leader of Burkina Faso addressed a crowd of supporters.

  There were a handful of photographs of Cantwell with various figures from Br
itish politics, but he had never truly been accepted by the establishment at home. He was considered too eccentric, too unconventional. Many of his former colleagues failed to understand why he had traded the bear pit of Westminster for the chance to work on less glamorous overseas campaigns, but they missed the point. He preferred operating in the shadows. He was a maverick, breaking new ground. Pushing the envelope and the limits of what was possible. You couldn’t always do that in London. Too much oversight. There was less scrutiny abroad. It was easier to stay invisible in foreign countries.

  Until six days ago.

  When the email had landed.

  Cantwell had been working late at the time. Nine o’clock on a Friday evening in late March. He had been in his office, about to make an important call to a major client, when the message popped up in his inbox. The subject heading had read: We need to talk.

  Which sounded like some kind of spam. A dating scam, Cantwell had assumed. The sort of message sent out by low-rent criminals in some impoverished Romanian backwater, targeting the wallets of desperate middle-aged men. He had gone to delete the email.

  Then he’d caught sight of the sender’s address.

  From: Nick Gregory

  Cantwell had frozen. He had recognised the name immediately.

  Nick Gregory.

  Nick fucking Gregory.

  The journalist who had very nearly destroyed his career.

  Two years ago, Gregory had been working as a freelance journalist, writing articles on Cantwell’s supposed shady dealings. One article, published for an online news outlet, claimed that he had links to the Kremlin. Powerful British fixer linked to alleged Russian spy, the headline had screamed. Gregory had accused Cantwell in print of conspiring with Moscow to dig up dirt on Ukrainian politicians opposed to the Russian President. It was all nonsense, of course, but Gregory was quickly making a name for himself as an investigative journalist, at Cantwell’s expense – and so he had decided to take action.

  After all, a fixer was only effective as long as they were invisible, and Gregory was threatening to bring Cantwell out of the shadows. Into the light. He couldn’t operate in those conditions. Worse, the newspaper reports were beginning to have an impact on his bottom line. Clients began to abandon him. Colleagues stopped returning his calls. Everything he had worked for was coming under threat. Gregory’s one-man war against Cantwell Consulting Group had to be stopped, no matter what.

  So Cantwell had launched a counter-attack. He’d tasked one of his employees with hacking into Nick Gregory’s private accounts. The hacker had struck gold. Along with a few minor embarrassing details, they had discovered that Gregory had been fabricating details in a number of the articles he’d written over the years – inventing quotes and embellishing details in order to jazz them up and sell them for a higher price to his editors.

  Gregory had made his name off the back of several high-profile cover-ups involving key figures in the establishment; the revelation that the journalist responsible for those stories had been making stuff up had been enough to wreck his career. All of a sudden, Gregory became toxic. No self-respecting editor wanted anything to do with him. He had committed the cardinal journalistic sin: writing fiction as fact. His career was in the gutter.

  It had been brutal attack, Cantwell reflected, but necessary. If he had failed to act, Gregory would no doubt have continued to tarnish his good name in the media. Cantwell had managed to salvage his career. Eventually, most of his former clients had returned. He’d managed to add some new ones. Had even moved to a larger office. His business turned a decent profit. He’d weathered the storm.

  But now Gregory was coming at him again.

  In his email, Gregory had explained that he was writing an article. A freelance piece that he intended to sell to one of the daily newspapers. He had spoken with several people, done some deep digging and unearthed some troubling claims. Gregory had briefly summarised them, without going into any specifics.

  Then he’d asked if Cantwell wanted to comment.

  He had given Cantwell a week to respond. Otherwise, Gregory had said, he was going to his old editors with what he had.

  Ordinarily, Cantwell would have dismissed the threat out of hand. That was rule number one for dealing with journalists. But the claims Gregory had alluded to in his email, true or not, were extremely damaging. If published, they would completely destroy Cantwell’s reputation. And that wouldn’t even be the worst of it. The consequences would be far, far worse. There was no way he could risk the allegations being exposed in the media. It would be the end of him.

  He couldn’t simply ignore the threat.

  Gregory had almost killed his career. Cantwell couldn’t afford to risk letting the guy attack him again. Something had to be done, clearly. He could try to discredit Gregory once more, but there were no guarantees that his hackers would be able to find something incriminating.

  There was only one thing for it, Cantwell knew.

  Which is why he had agreed to meet the journalist. He would make his case to the guy, face to face. Persuade him to drop the story. Which wouldn’t be easy, especially given the history between the two men. It was going to take all of Cantwell’s legendary powers of persuasion. But even then, it might not be enough. Gregory was a stubborn bastard, after all. One of those hypocritical self-righteous types who were hell-bent on exposing every tiny shred of corruption, no matter the truth of it.

  If he failed – if Gregory went ahead and published – the fallout would be catastrophic. His career and business would go down the tubes. He might have to sell the holiday home in Nice. But that, he reflected morbidly, would be the very least of his troubles. Even thinking about what might happen brought him out in a cold sweat. He had hardly slept over the past few days.

  Which is why Cantwell had arranged for a failsafe.

  A backup option, in case the charm offensive failed.

  Either way, he wasn’t going to let Nick Gregory fuck him today.

  No way.

  At exactly two o’clock, Cantwell’s assistant stepped through the door to his office. Elsie was one of his longest-serving employees, joining a week after he’d founded the company. She was nearing thirty, maybe two inches over five feet tall, with plump cheeks and hair the colour of a tangerine peel. A curvy figure, but strangely unattractive. She was also pathetically loyal, a quality Cantwell looked for in everyone who worked for him.

  If someone messed up, he could forgive them. Most things were fixable. But if anyone dared to betray him, God help them.

  ‘Mr Gregory is here,’ Elsie said in her husky Durham accent.

  Cantwell sat upright in his chair, nodded briskly. ‘Very well. Tell him I’ll be right along.’

  His assistant turned on her heels and trotted back down the corridor. Cantwell took a final drag on his e-cigarette – he would have much preferred a hit from the real thing, but at the age of forty-two one had to make certain compromises. He rose to his feet and headed for the office door.

  He was impeccably attired, as always. Cantwell considered himself a man of immense good taste and dressed formally around the office. Today he wore a herringbone jacket, beige trousers, a blue shirt so crisp you could almost snap it in half and a pair of tan leather oxfords. With his short red hair and silk pocket square, he looked like an Edwardian gentleman heading for a day at the races.

  He knew many of his colleagues and rivals gently mocked him for his extravagant wardrobe. The clothes gave the impression that he was a cultural dinosaur, a man out of step with the times. Cantwell ignored their limp jokes. The clothes were in fact part of an image he had worked hard to cultivate over the years, along with the cut-glass accent and the taste for fine wine. Leaders in developing countries, he had discovered, did not generally appreciate being lectured by Brits with thick regional accents and dressed in off-the-rack suits. They preferred the classical look. It made them feel as if they were being addressed by an equal. Someone of great importance.<
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  At the far end of the corner he hooked a left and approached the conference room. He stopped in front of the frosted glass door, took in a deep draw of breath and stepped inside.

  The conference room was more blandly decorated than Cantwell’s office. The floor was covered in some sort of hard-wearing industrial grey carpet. The walls were whitewashed and bare except for a couple of generic landscapes. Sunlight seeped through the tall windows and spilled onto a rectangular oak conference table laid out like a coffin in the middle of the room. There was a projector screen at one end of the room, and a security camera mounted to the ceiling. Half a dozen leather chairs were arranged around the table at regular intervals.

  Sitting at the far end of the room was Nick Gregory.

  For a moment Cantwell didn’t recognise the guy. The man in front of him had aged ten years in two. He’d lost maybe thirty pounds, and most of his hair. A few spidery threads draped either side of his bald pate. Prominent crow’s feet protruded like wings from the corners of his eyes. His face was gaunt and pale and had more cracks in it than a pair of old leather shoes. His jacket was threadbare, with patches on the elbows. He wore no tie and faded jeans, and his shirt had a greasy stain down the middle.

  Life had recently been a struggle for Nick Gregory. That much was obvious.

  At the sound of Cantwell’s footsteps the journalist looked up from his phone – a dated Samsung Galaxy model with a cracked screen, Cantwell noted – and rose to his feet.

  Cantwell put on his most charming smile and strode confidently over to the man who had almost wrecked his career.

  ‘Nick,’ he began in a chummy tone of voice, thrusting out a hand. ‘Bloody good to see you. Thanks for taking the time to come in. How have you been?’

  Gregory looked down at the outstretched hand as if he might get Ebola from it. He kept his arms by his sides and lifted his piercing gaze to the consultant.