Absence of Mercy

  ABSENCE

  of MERCY

  By Joe McCoubrey

  ABSENCE OF MERCY

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 Joe McCoubrey

  The right of Joe McCoubrey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way by any means without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  ISBN: 978-0-9576965-2-5

  Cover Art copyright © 2015 Book Graphics

  Dedication & Thanks

  To my dear sisters, Betty and Anne, and to my beautiful niece, Kellyanne, who have gone on ahead.

  Thanks are also due to fellow Irish author, Brad Fleming, and to my first editor, Colin Crichton, for helping me on the path to writing.

  My heartfelt appreciation goes to my editing team of Mick Keane, Brad Fleming and Martin Graham for putting a much-needed final polish on the manuscript.

  I am lucky to have four important women, and three very special young men, in my life. This book is dedicated to Teresa, Brenda, Lynda, Lisa, and the next generation, Alfie, Rory and Ellis.

  About the Author

  Joe McCoubrey is a former journalist who reported first hand the height of the Northern Ireland “Troubles” throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, firstly as a local newspaper editor, and then as a partner in an agency supplying copy to national newspapers and broadcasters. He switched careers to help start a Local Enterprise Agency, providing advice and support to budding entrepreneurs in his native town, and became its full-time CEO. He retired to concentrate on his long-time ambition to be a full-time writer. His first two novels, Someone Has to Pay, and Absence of Rules were published to critical acclaim.

  He lives in Downpatrick, County Down, and is proud of its historic connections to Saint Patrick, Ireland’s Patron Saint.

  Chapter 1

  DAVE CARPENTER KNEW he was dying.

  For the past five minutes he had tried to convince himself that he would be one of the lucky ones. He knew better than most that no two shootings were the same. Just because you get shot doesn’t mean it has to be fatal.

  Jeez, who am I kidding!

  Carpenter slowly worked his fogged brain around to the realisation that no-one got to walk away from the effects of a .44 Magnum fired at near point blank range - okay, it was twenty yards away, but that’s about the same as twenty inches for any other handgun.

  Why am I even thinking like this?

  As he lay on the concrete apron of a deserted airport hangar, squinting against the harsh mid-afternoon sun, he could feel the blood pooling under his back. It had been like that for some time now, though he had lost track of how long he had been stretched out, helpless and immobile.

  He tried to think of Clare. He wanted his last moments to be filled with her images, but he couldn’t bring a picture forward from the recesses of his mind. He knew his recall was being blocked by anger, but he couldn’t fight it down.

  How did the fucker get the drop on me so easily?

  He remembered watching the man disappear through a door that someone had once cut crudely into the side of the deserted airport hangar. The next moment, he heard a noise behind him and there he was!

  Carpenter had spun quickly, but not quickly enough. Behind the Magnum’s menacing barrel he watched the face of his killer break into a grin.

  Seeing the features up close, Carpenter knew he had been right to follow his gut. When the man had earlier pulled alongside him at traffic lights in the centre of London, Carpenter sensed there was something familiar about the tossed black hair and sharp-nosed profile. He was sure it was among a number of one-dimensional images he had seen posted on the noticeboard in the agency’s incident room.

  Carpenter had knocked off work early to pick up flowers for his wife’s birthday. He had already bought and parcelled a diamond-encrusted necklace he knew she had admired several times in the central display cabinet at the House of Fraser store. It was worth half a month’s salary, but when it came to Clare, who was counting?

  He had just left the florist stall and was inching his way forward to the traffic lights when the blue Mercedes stopped in the traffic flow. Carpenter had been idly glancing around at the afternoon city-centre rush of cars and pedestrians when his eyes fell on the driver, who was staring fixedly ahead, oblivious to the ebb and flow of humanity around him.

  Something immediately piqued Carpenter’s interest. The white snaking outline of a scar running from below the man’s left ear to the corner of an upturned mouth was an absolute clincher.

  When the lights turned green, Carpenter found himself shifting lanes and falling in three cars back from the Mercedes. Thirty minutes later they were on the M4 heading towards Slough, taking Carpenter farther and farther away from his home in Watford. He had convinced himself to stay with it just a while longer. He still had plenty of time to double-back, grab a shower, and take Clare to the new Italian restaurant for her birthday surprise.

  As the cityscape disappeared in the rearview mirror Carpenter decided to call a halt. He had already noted the number plate of the vehicle and was just about to call in a report when the Mercedes signalled an exit from the motorway towards Maidenhead.

  Carpenter followed.

  Twenty minutes later on a narrow country road the Mercedes turned off into a laneway leading to a disused airfield. Carpenter maintained a safe distance and waited several minutes before entering the lane. He knew he couldn’t risk going much farther; the chances of being spotted were just too great. He pulled off through an open gate into a grazing field, parked up behind a hedge, and decided to explore ahead on foot.

  He grabbed a pair of Zeiss binoculars from the glove compartment, climbed out of the car, and began trudging through the heavy grass towards a rise about a hundred yards ahead. He glanced at his watch, noting that it was almost 4.00pm. He would have to abandon the pursuit soon otherwise Clare’s birthday would be ruined.

  At the top of the rise he got lucky. Below, less than two hundred yards from his vantage position, he could see the Mercedes in front of an old hangar. He watched the driver alight and cross to the left side of the corrugated building before disappearing through a side door,

  Carpenter took off at a sprint, covering the distance in little more than thirty seconds. Not bad for a desk jockey, he thought. He had just crossed the concrete apron heading for the side of the building when he had heard the click of a weapon being cocked. He knew there was little point in trying to reach for the shoulder-holstered Glock 19. Instead, he turned calmly to stare into the eyes of a man he knew would kill him.

  Realisation dawned on Carpenter as he watched the mocking grin of his assailant. It had been no chance meeting! Somehow the fucker knew who Carpenter was and had purposely drawn alongside him at the traffic lights.

  He had been suckered!

  Now, as he lay clinging to the last dregs of energy in his body, Carpenter cursed himself for not calling in a sit-rep. His boss, Mike Devon, would be furious at the breach in a protocol he had drilled into the team constantly in all his briefings.

  “Never, ever take unnecessary risks, but above all, never, ever go it alone, without letting someone know what you’re doing.” He could almost hear Devon’s voice, as if he were standing over him at that moment.

  What would Devon have to say now? He knew for sure he would be plenty mad, and would move heaven and
earth to get whoever did this.

  A smile crossed Carpenter’s face.

  Suddenly, the harsh glare of the sun shadowed over Carpenter. He forced open his eyes to look at the figure above him. The man’s teeth were bared like a wild dog getting ready for a fight. Carpenter couldn’t help but think that maybe the guy was pissed at the thought of his first shot not being as instantly lethal as he had intended.

  The barrel of the Magnum lowered towards Carpenter’s face. He didn’t flinch. He’d be damned if he’d give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing fear.

  Without warning, the picture of Clare filled his mind. She was in full-colour HD, smiling at him while running her fingers through her hair.

  God, she is beautiful.

  It was that image he took with him down the spiralling void into the total blackness beyond.

  Chapter 2

  ABOUT EIGHT HUNDRED crow-flying miles from where Dave Carpenter died, Mike Devon was trudging through waist-high grass in a field southeast of the Austrian city of Graz. He was in mission lockdown. No comms, no need for distractions. Just a single-minded focus on the next twelve hours or so.

  Unaware of the fate that had befallen his friend and agency colleague back on a deserted airstrip in England, Devon had already trekked for four miles, mostly uphill, but showed no signs of laboured breathing. A lifetime of punishing daily exercises will do that to a man.

  Especially a man whose life depended on having an edge.

  A fast-fading evening sun dappled the countryside with magical shadows. Each time he crested a ridge he half expected to see Julie Andrews pirouetting through her Sound of Music routine.

  It was that kind of scenery.

  Not that Devon paid it much attention. He was here to kill a man. Nothing else mattered.

  Ahead, less than a mile away, he got his first glimpse of the outline of a chalet built into a mountainside overlooking the valleys below. Nice piece of real estate, if you can afford it.

  But money was hardly a worry for the sole occupant of the chalet. A career as an assassin had brought him untold wealth, secreted in banks dotted across the world.

  After tonight, it was money he would no longer need.

  Devon shifted his rucksack and forged ahead determinedly, angling away from the west side of the house to walk in the shadows of a ravine. By the time he made his final ascent in about twenty minutes from now, he judged the entire mountainside would be cloaked in darkness.

  Just as he had planned.

  He had flown into Hungary the day before, grabbed a hire car at the Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport, and driven west to Szombathely, one of the country’s oldest cities. It was slap bang on the Austrian border, less than twenty-five kilometres from his target.

  He had a pre-arranged booking in one of the city’s smaller hotels. Just another budget tourist. Don’t get noticed. Blend in, stay off the radar.

  A second hire car had been waiting for him in one of the city’s multi-storey parks. He would use this for the drive to Austria and return it to the same car park. It had been acquired under false papers by one of the agency’s European operatives and would remain parked up until the car hire firm filed a “lost property” report with the local police.

  In the event that someone spotted the car in Austria, there was no possible chance of tracing it to Devon. By the time anyone went looking for it, he would be back in Budapest with the original hire car, and safely on a London-bound flight.

  Provided everything went according to plan. You just never knew. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

  The rucksack he was carrying had been left for him in the car trunk. There was no need to check the contents. He knew what to expect.

  Most of the space would be taken up by one of the agency’s standard wraparounds. It was a special piece of kit, designed by Devon himself, and resembled a workman’s tool belt. There was a holster for a Glock 19 with suppressor, as well as compartments for two spare 16-round mags, two flash-bang grenades, a fragmentation grenade, and a small cube of C4 explosive, with det cord and a watch-sized arming device.

  There were also a number of other interesting items. There would be a Ka-Bar combat knife, a folding-stock MP5 submachine pistol, night-vision goggles, a compact heat-image intensifier, a small rubberised grappling hook trailing five metres of black nylon rope, a two-metre camouflage blanket, and field rations consisting of power bars and bottled water.

  Devon doubted he would need more than two or three of these items. But it paid to err on the safe side.

  This was a job either for one man or a small army. Devon was happy to fly solo.

  He waited in a gully for darkness to take hold before scrambling carefully up the last crest that would afford him a view of the house below. A metre from the top he dropped on his belly and crawled to the summit.

  Convention for this type of situation tended to go with a 3am entry. It was reasoned that most people, even so-called nightbirds, would be safely tucked up in bed and somewhere north of noddy-land by that ungodly hour. It didn’t always work out that way, of course, but as a general rule it wasn’t bad.

  You could never legislate for someone suffering from a weak bladder and needing toilet trips every hour on the hour. In those situations you just took the hand you were dealt and got on with it.

  Devon bellied across the summit to a row of bushes that offered the best vantage point. He removed the night-vision goggles and began a sweep of the area below, hoping to pick up any trip wires or unusually flat pieces of lawn that might betray hidden pressure plates. Despite the magnification of the scope the detail was too fuzzy to be certain of any such impediments.

  Next, he took out the heat-image intensifier, a small black box measuring six inches by four. He powered up and waited a few seconds for the screen to come alive. Satisfied he was good to go, he swept the box across the width of the house, noting the changing colours on the screen as the controls identified varying degrees of heat.

  After several minutes of a slow traverse he was rewarded with a sharp red dot on the right of the screen. Body heat. The red dot remained static, depicting that his target was either sitting or lying. He continued his sweep across the rest of the house, but found no other red dots.

  It was as he had figured. His subject was alone.

  Devon glanced at his watch. He still had four hours before his planned entry. He spread his camouflage blanket and stretched out ready to assemble his Glock and attach the wraparound belt. After that, he would settle down and grab a few hours of much needed sleep.

  Experience had taught him to block out tension. There would be time to let the juices flow, time to accept the much-needed burst of adrenalin, and time to tune into the job on hand when the moment arrived to push off.

  Right now, he intended to live off down-time. He strapped the Ka-Bar to his right leg and attached the suppressor to the Glock. He turned on his back and gazed for a while at the orangey glow of the Austrian sky. His eyelids immediately felt heavy.

  An hour later he became aware of the throbbing sound of music pulsing from the building below. He snapped upright, grabbed the heat-intensifier and waited for it to go through its power-up routine. The music was loud enough to be heard by neighbours up to a mile away. That is if there had been neighbours a mile away.

  The man had chosen his remoteness well. If he wanted to dispense with earphones and fill the hills with the sound of music, that was his business. But for a man in his line of work it didn’t make a lot of sense.

  Devon swept the heat-image unit once more across the building. Satisfied there was still only a single red dot showing on the screen, he decided to bring forward his operation. The advantages offered by the sounds of a high-powered stereo system in concealing his approach were just too good to pass up.

  He slung the MP5 across his shoulders, holstered the Glock, and pushed through the bushes to begin the descent to the garden behind the house. From his earlier sweep of the property he had already pl
anned his approach down through the rockery and across the well-manicured lawn. Five minutes later he was standing against the building beside a pair of sliding patio doors.

  The suppressed Glock was held firmly in his right hand as he gingerly tested the push handle on the door nearest to him. To his surprise it moved noiselessly across its rubberised runners.

  He moved into the room, the Glock now held two-handed in front of his face as he swept his eyes over the dim interior. Light spilled from an adjoining room and the noise from the stereo seemed to send vibrations across the wooden flooring. He inched across the room, keeping his gaze fixed on the open doorway ahead.

  Devon angled to his left to keep within the shadows on the edges of the light. When he reached the doorway he glanced into the next room, barely able to believe what he was witnessing.

  In the centre of what appeared to be a large study, a massive five-seater red-leather settee dominated the room. Sprawled across the centrepiece furniture he saw the head and shoulders of a man whose arms were thrashing the air in a manic attempt to conduct the raucous music blaring out from surround-sound speakers that threatened to shut down Devon’s auditory system.

  Devon was suddenly assailed by the notion that things couldn’t be this easy. He had come prepared to fight a small army if need be, knowing that on most assignments Murphy’s Law usually threw a spanner into even the best of pre-op preparations. He often found that shit hit the fan when you least expected it to, yet here he was being presented with a situation that even a rookie could deal with. Was he missing something?

  He pushed the negative thoughts to the back of his mind. Sometimes you just get lucky. Maybe this was one of those times.

  The figure on the settee was still wildly gesticulating when Devon strode across the room and pushed the suppressed Glock into the back of a balding head. The effect was dramatic.