Blackout (Sam Archer 3) by Tom Barber Page A

from, man?
     
    Across London, another man was watching that same news report.
    He was sitting in the dark, and he was alone. Across the wide room to his right, a series of weapons were lined up neatly against the wall. There were six Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles with a stack of spare magazines, each one fully loaded, taped back-to-back in pairs for ease of reloading once the top one was empty. Alongside them were four MP5 SD3s, silenced sub-machine guns, and a stack of spare clips loaded with 9 millimetre Parabellum bullets. There was also a bazooka with spare ammunition in a black equipment case. And finally a Russian Dragunov sniper rifle, unloaded, which used the same ammunition as the Kalashnikovs.
    The weapons had all been bought down at the Docklands illegally three days ago, cash in hand, sufficient threats made to the men who had sold them, warning them in explicit detail what would happen if they ever said a word about the transactions to another soul. Syringes and tourniquets would be used, and a power saw. The message was received loud and clear. No one would ever know about the trade. The serial numbers on all the weapons had already been removed with acid, rendering them pretty much untraceable, and the man in the room had stripped apart, cleaned, oiled and reassembled each weapon, wearing gloves to avoid leaving any fingerprints.
    The figure was sitting in front of a desk with a series of televisions on the desktop in front of him, one tuned to BBC World, the other to the CNN Breaking Newsroom. The sound on both screens was off, but the footage was what mattered.
    On the left, the BBC channel, the screen was still showing the Breaking News banner headline of the politician's suicide. To the right, CNN, a Breaking News report had just come in of a man found strangled in a parking lot in a Washington DC suburb. On the table beside the screens, there was a list of names on a pad of A4 paper, eleven in all, one beneath the other, written neatly in a line down the left margin of the page.
    Charlie Adams was near the top.
    The man reached forward and took a pen in his large hand. He drew a line through the two words.
    Adams was gone.
    He moved his finger down the list slowly and drew a line through another name, the doorman strangled outside the strip-club in DC. The large man had received a phone call from JFK International Airport earlier confirming the death of the bodyguard in the New York City apartment, but he was still waiting for the television to report it before he put his pen through a name. Not that he didn’t trust his man, but he’d learned long ago that a man wasn’t dead until you saw his corpse. He was living proof of that. He wanted to see a body-bag on a gurney on the television before he drew a line through anything. His two men were already in the air, on their way across the Atlantic from the American East Coast, using the best counterfeit passports and identification money could buy. Passing through security and immigration would not be a problem. They would be here in the room beside him within the next eight hours.
    In the darkness, the big man lifted the pen off the page and looked down at the list. With one of them killed in Iraq years ago by a truck-bomb, that was three confirmed down. Three for three. One hundred per cent success. The perfect start.
    Which left eight to go.
    He flicked his gaze to the next name on the list. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a mobile phone and pushed Redial , lifting it to his ear. The call was answered before the second ring.
    ‘Sir? ’ a voice said, down the line.
    ‘Are you in position?’ the man asked quietly, in a foreign language. Hi s voice was deep and low .
    ‘Yes, sir. We're here.’
    ‘The package will arrive soon,' the man said, checking a watch on his wrist, still talking in the foreign tongue. 'You know what to do. Kill whoever you have to if they get in the way. But make sure you shoot him in the head. No mistakes.’
    ‘Yes,