The Twelve Lies of Christmas Read online

  Dedication

  To Sugar and Spike, the best present I ever had.

  Prologue

  “So what the hell are you going to do when you retire, old man?”

  I ignored the “old man” from my partner, who was less than ten years my junior, and said, “I dunno. I figure something peaceful.”

  “Like Cornwell? He teaches PE now.”

  I stared in horror. “What, are you kidding? I meant, like…alligator wrestling or something. Shark diving. You know, something tranquil.”

  Luke laughed. “Gotcha. How about lion taming?”

  “It’s on my list.”

  I stirred my coffee and stared out through the misted window across the square. It was December, and bloody freezing. Dirty, iced-over chunks of snow piled up in corners, against lamp posts and the base of the statue in the center. Some dude on a horse. I didn’t know who. No doubt Luke would and be able to detail the dude’s entire life history, too.

  The square was swamped in mist, the freezing kind that turned your eyelashes into icicles after ten minutes outside. Too cold for more snow, the freezing fog just descended and shrouded the whole city in misery.

  “I bloody hate Russia,” I grumped.

  “Don’t we all?”

  I gave him a sideways look. A spy from the old school, Luke was the one who hobnobbed with the big men, the arms dealers and politicians. He looked perfectly at home in a designer tuxedo, mixed a delicious martini, spoke Russian flawlessly and was a terrific ballroom dancer.

  Whereas I look perfectly at home with an AK-47 slung over my shoulder, tend to get assigned as someone’s bodyguard, have a terrible accent whatever language I speak—English included—resemble a bouncer whenever I wear a suit and have spent most of my career trying to avoid killing people.

  “Anyway, you’re going home soon,” Luke lit up a French cigarette.

  “Those things’ll kill you,” I said mildly, and mostly from habit.

  “Well, they can take a number.”

  I wafted the smoke away and toyed with my coffee cup. Home. That wasn’t to say the mission was over, but being back in a country where it was possible to take a piss outside without getting a frostbitten penis would be a definite plus.

  “Looking forward to it?” Luke asked.

  “Home, or retirement?”

  “Both.”

  “Sure,” I said, but I was only telling the truth about one of them.

  Chapter One

  My name is Nate Kelly.

  For years, I was a spy with a tiny British government agency known as SO17. But only until the end of this mission. After that I’d be free. Wonderful freedom—no more lies and plots and politics and guns. I’m tired of getting shot at.

  God knows what I’d actually do with my time, though. Maybe I’d take up painting, or, er, read the classics or something. I figured War and Peace should carry me well into my fifties.

  Right now, I was looking forward to going home. Oh God, was I. For four months, I’d been out in this godforsaken concrete jungle, perpetually cold, pissed off and thoroughly sick of pretending to be something I wasn’t. Paddy Murphy, thick-as-shit Irishman, vague allusions to IRA thuggery, great bodyguard and all-round musclehead, just needs orders. Of course, I was here to find out what I could about Anatole Simonov, art collector, football enthusiast and arms dealer.

  It wasn’t our usual field of operations. SO17 had been set up to protect and observe London’s third airport, Stansted, which is a big gateway to northern Ireland. Time was, the IRA posed a continuous threat, and SO17 was a pretty big operation.

  Now, the secret services have other things on their minds. Ceasefires have held, and the terrorist threat is coming from a different direction. And while we were still supposed to be watching the airport, wasn’t not uncommon for SO17 operatives, like me and my partner, to be lent to other government agencies.

  Which was how I ended up in Russia. Anatole had been on the watch-list for a while, and Luke, with his special skills of being upper class and indefinably brilliant at everything, was sent to infiltrate his organization at a higher level. But since Anatole didn’t tell all his people everything or take them everywhere with him, when word got out that he was planning a jaunt to merry old England, I got sent in to accompany him.

  Rumor, a little while back, was that Anatole wanted to buy an English football team. My people didn’t think this was a very good idea. Especially since the team he wanted to buy was currently owned by an East End dun-good-boy called Darren King, “King Daz” to the tabloids, one of those irritating self-made men who worked his way up from rags to unbelievable riches, mostly through his mobster connections and plenty of illegal activity.

  Scotland Yard had been after Daz King for a while. They just needed an excuse. My role? To provide that excuse. And to keep Anatole-the-arsehole out of my goddamned country.

  Unfortunately, that was exactly where we were headed.

  “London calling, eh, Paddy?” Anatole clapped me on the back as the plane bumped to a landing. “Is good to be back home?”

  “Ah, sir, sure it’s not my home,” I said, upping the Irish a notch or two. Why, I wasn’t sure, since neither Anatole nor his right-hand man, Yuri, had any clue what an Irish accent sounded like. Still, the more t’be sure I put into it, the thicker they thought I was, the more they let slip when they talked in Russian.

  Paddy didn’t understand Russian. But I did.

  London was cold, but a normal, bearable sort of cold, not the blood-freezing chill of St. Petersburg, where after fifteen minutes your jaw was locked and your breath had frozen in your throat. A heavy drizzle fogged the tarmac as we stepped off the private plane, and I had to physically restrain myself from crying with joy. All right, crying at drizzle is a little extreme, but come on. It really had been ages since I’d been home.

  And now, please God, I was home for good.

  Anatole laughed and tossed his fur hat into the air. It skittered away under the plane and I winced, because my basic airfield training—not to mention Luke’s snooty RAF know-how—told me that any foreign objects or debris on the tarmac could destroy a plane’s engine or cause a crash on take-off.

  But I kept quiet and plastered a grin on my face. The grin of the stupid. Paddy’s grin.

  London was decked out for Christmas, dressed up like a little girl going to a party. Such a different city from St. Petersburg. It felt like a party. People looked happy. Lights twinkled in every shop window, festooned every house, stretched across every street. It was madly tacky, but for once I didn’t mind. Christmas cheer and all that. Every time I saw a street sign in English I smiled. Well, until I saw the ones which said “road closed” and had to remember my London geography in a pinch.

  “Is very bright, no? London is town with lot of money,” Anatole cheered as I made a mildly illegal U-turn.

  “Ah sir, does my heart good, it does, to see all the Christmas cheer.”

  Yuri, whose English was much better than his boss’s, said with a sneer, “It’s capitalist extravagance. They waste their money on it.”

  “Is West,” Anatole said. “They wasting money on everything!”

  I pulled up outside the brashly expensive private members club where we’d arranged to meet Darren King. A valet came forward to take the car from me, but I declined. That car contained some pretty heavy hardware, and I didn’t want him running to the police about it.

  Inside the club, which had furnishings so up-to-the-minute they were almost unusable, we were shown to a private room where Darren King was drinking vodka and watching his team on a huge flat-screen TV. With him was a guy who had “accountant” written all over him and a woman wearing a few very expensive-looki
ng inches of pink satin, a pair of high heels, a lot of jewelry and not much else.

  One of Daz’s cheap women, I figured, although she sure wasn’t dressed cheaply.

  Her gaze flickered over the three of us, cool, assessing. Okay, she was hot, but I wondered how much of that was grooming, and how glam she’d be in ratty old pajamas with bunny slippers on her feet.

  The thought made me smile, and my smile made her frown.

  She had a pretty sexy frown.

  “Anatole, me ol’ mucker,” Daz leapt to his feet and gave the Russian an exuberant handshake. “How was yer flight?”

  “My flight, it was good,” Anatole said. He glanced nervously at Yuri, then added to Daz, “My English, is not so good. Yuri translate for me.”

  “Right, right, smashin’.” Daz’s gaze flickered over me, dismissed me as hired muscle and moved on to Yuri.

  “Lemme introduce Peter, he’s me accountant, top geezer—”

  And a crook, I thought, watching Peter’s nervous eyes. A pretty useless crook, but a crook nonetheless.

  “And this is the lovely Natalya, treat for you, Anatole, she’s Russian too.”

  He said it “Natawya”. Ugh. It’s called an L, idiot, learn how to pronounce it. And your H’s too, while you’re at it. And Th’s, and—

  “Told you I’d got a surprise for you, eh, Natalya?” Daz nudged her forward.

  Anatole’s face lit up, especially when he took in the length of leg and mountains of cleavage Natalya was displaying.

  But Natalya, interestingly, looked like a deer trapped in headlights. Only for a moment or two, but it was there. Maybe she’d heard the rumors about Anatole, I thought, appreciating in a purely objective way how her long, glossy dark hair swung over her shoulders and framed her exquisitely made-up eyes.

  Then Anatole grabbed her shoulders and kissed her soundly on both cheeks and cried, in Russian, “How wonderful to see another of my countrymen! Where in Russia are you from? How long have you been in London? We must drink to this. Vodka!”

  Something about her smile bothered me. Clearly, no one else in the room had noticed, but her lips looked slightly…fixed to me. As if she’d read about smiles, but never actually tried one out before.

  “It’s very nice to meet you,” she said, and I nearly choked, because she was speaking English with the sort of cod-Russian accent my nan’s whiskey-sodden bridge friends would attempt when her fat white cat leapt on their lap.

  I nearly expected her to say, “So, Mister Bond,” but of course she didn’t. She just smiled that slightly inaccurate smile at everyone and announced, in that accent of hers, that she was going to the bar for the vodka.

  “Nah, nah, love, you sit down, someone’ll bring it,” Daz said.

  “I don’t trust the waiters here,” she said haughtily. “They will spit in our drinks.”

  So saying, she stalked off on her vertiginous heels, and all four of us watched her go.

  Yep, she was gorgeous, but about as authentic as Pamela Anderson’s breasts.

  Somehow, “Natalya” managed to avoid conversation in Russian for the rest of the meeting. Whenever Yuri or Anatole asked her something in that language, she responded that she preferred to talk in English. Her speech was peppered with little Russian-isms, a da here, a niet there, which were nice touches, and she was a fantastic actress who never once let slip that she barely understood a word the Russians were saying.

  But, well. Basically, I’m a suspicious bastard. It’s my job to be a suspicious bastard. And I was suspicious of her.

  “Natalya here runs a charity, don’t you, babe?” Daz rattled her golden-tanned shoulders, and she gave every impression that she didn’t mind.

  “Da. Darren is giving half the money from the football sale to my charity.”

  Hello.

  “What kind of charity?” asked Anatole.

  I bet it’s the kind that involves guns.

  “It’s called WarDogs,” Natalya said in her brisk accent. “We rescue and re-home animals who have been left homeless by wars.”

  The information was relayed to Anatole via Yuri, who looked put-out that he was having to mess around with this charade when the girl spoke perfectly good Russian.

  “Ah,” Anatole said. “Is good charity. Is good for my friend Daz King, for…” He trailed off and asked Yuri how to say it was good for Daz’s image.

  Daz, of course, agreed with him, and there was a long, tedious session of one-upmanship where they both tried to out-do the other with their public do-gooding.

  I ran my eyes over Natalya and smiled. She blinked at me slowly, then dismissed me from her sphere of attention. Fine, okay. I knew my place. But I also knew when someone’s faking it.

  Anatole and Daz sure were. It was nauseating, actually. Both of these men were nasty pieces of work who treated human beings like belongings and thought nothing of gunning them down for minor offences. And yet both of them had cultivated images of philanthropy, giving money to charities and building wings on hospitals and being photographed with small fluffy animals.

  My dislike of Anatole had rocketed, irrationally, when I saw him kick one of those small fluffy animals. It probably had something to do with my nan’s aforementioned white cat, who was a whole lot nicer to me than she ever was.

  But don’t get me started on my childhood. Really.

  Eventually Yuri reminded Anatole of his other appointments, which as I understood it, consisted of checking into his swanky hotel, buying some expensive cars, looking at property in Mayfair that cost more than some small European countries and having his hair cut by someone whose hourly wage exceeded my yearly one.

  “Yeah yeah, right,” Daz said, which seemed to be his equivalent of a conversational segue. “Party on Saturday, yeah? You coming?”

  “Of course,” Anatole replied. “I will—how you say?—bring a bottle, yes?” He laughed loudly at this hilarious joke, and Daz joined in. So did Peter and Yuri, although I noticed Natalya declined.

  I made a mental note to get myself into that party, not only to dig around Daz’s personal effects, but to find out what the hell was going on with the delightful Natalya.

  Chapter Two

  Saturday dawned, as gray and drizzly as any festive day in England. After a day of meeting the football team’s manager, coach and star players, we set off in Anatole’s newest acquisition, a fully pimped-out BMW X5, for deepest darkest Cheshire and Daz’s country seat.

  It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the average British footballer has the taste and refinement of a dead gnat. Daz, who owned an entire team of such aesthetes, was no exception. The courtyard of his large, ivy-covered house held a statue of three women with enormous breasts, pouring water all over each other and leering. They were surrounded by so many supercars it looked as if they’d been breeding. Whole families of Ferraris clustered together, balefully eyeing up the contingent from Lamborghini.

  Inside, the house was the usual footballer’s insult to all that is tasteful and elegant. The requisite shag pile carpet squidged underfoot, and I felt absolutely sure that somewhere there would be a library full of unread leather-bound classics.

  “Anatole, mate,” Daz greeted him enthusiastically. His pupils looked a little uneven. So it was one of those parties, eh?

  His eyes wandered over me and he said dismissively, “Servants are downstairs, mate.”

  Yuri gave me a superior look. I doffed an imaginary cap and ambled towards the kitchen to find myself some beer.

  I wasn’t planning on drinking the beer. But it was a hell of a useful prop.

  A week or two before, an SO17 operative, posing as a glossy gossip mag journalist, had obtained access to Daz’s home and security systems. She’d provided me with a floor plan and computer codes for the system which ran everything from his automatic lights to the burglar alarm.

  Beer in hand, I passed a couple of rooms where tattooed premier league footballers danced, shirtless, on tables while their painfully thin, bleached’
n’tanned, over-manicured, over-exposed wives and girlfriends lolled about drinking Cristal and gossiping about each others’ boob jobs. Daz’s office was on the upper floor, which was officially off limits to the party-goers. This rule was enforced by a door hidden by the turn of the grand staircase, which could only be opened by means of a swipe card and keypad code.

  But I wasn’t headed there yet. Security cameras whirred in every room, and it occurred to me that if I could sell their contents to the tabloids, I could make a fortune.

  I made my way into the unforgiving night, breath making clouds in the cold, damp air, to the guards hut at the entrance to the grounds. There were a couple of men on duty there, checking invitations and watching C-list celebs making fools of themselves on the CCTV. In the corner, a tacky soap opera was airing yet another Christmas special on a TV so small and tinny it was almost unwatchable.

  I clinked together a couple of beer bottles. They were unopened, but the sleeping pills in my pocket could be added in the blink of an eye.

  “Hey, lads, thought you might fancy a…” I pushed the door open and trailed off. Both men were fast asleep, lolling in their chairs, snoring loudly. One of them was covered in tea from the mug he’d dropped on the floor.

  Someone had already been here.

  Shit.

  I sniffed at the spilt tea, but it didn’t yield any special secrets to me. There was a sweet smell in the air, but it wasn’t anything that had been added to the guards’ drinks. Setting down my bottles, I glanced around for a security camera and saw one pointed at the computer bank.

  Well, that was helpful.

  Tapping into the system, I started to check the records of the guards hut camera, only to discover that it hadn’t recorded anything for the last half hour…and that the preceding ten minutes had been wiped from the system’s memory.

  When I checked the rest of the circuit, I found that while every camera was displaying an image on the screens, none of it was being recorded.

  Curiouser and curiouser. I logged into the system memory to see who had switched off the recording. And discovered that it had been done by Daz King.