Heartbreaker: Love, secrets and terror Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Publishing details

  About the author

  What readers have said about Bite, by Nick Louth

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Book Two

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rifat

  Chapter Sixteen

  Book Three

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Book Four

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cantara

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Book Five

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Book Six

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Book Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Have you read...?

  Publishing details

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Ludensian Books

  www.ludensianbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Nick Louth 2006-2014

  www.nicklouth.com

  The right of Nick Louth to be identified as the author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  9780955493942

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

  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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

  No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher or by the Author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters herein and real persons living or otherwise is purely coincidental.

  For Louise and in memory of my father

  About the author

  Nick Louth is a best-selling thriller writer and an award-winning financial journalist. A 1979 graduate of the London School of Economics, he went on to become a Reuters foreign correspondent in 1987. It was an experience at a medical conference in Amsterdam in 1992, while working for Reuters, that gave him the inspiration for Bite, which was published in 2007 and went on to become a best-seller in 2014. Freelance since 1998, he has been a regulator contributor to the Financial Times, Investors Chronicle and Money Observer. Nick Louth is married and lives in Lincolnshire.

  Heartbreaker is his second thriller. He has also published two investment books and the Bernard Jones financial comedy trilogy.

  Nick Louth is the author of:

  Multiply Your Money

  The Investment Diary of Bernard Jones

  Bernard Jones and the Temple of Mammon

  Dunces With Wolves: The third volume of the Bernard Jones Investing Diaries

  Bite

  What readers have said about Bite, by Nick Louth

  “A fast-paced and explosive thriller about a subject that really matters.”

  “This was up there with the best thrillers I have ever read.”

  “Bite was a gripping, entertaining read which kept me enthralled right until the end!”

  “The whole book is an excellent, gripping read. Get one – you won't be disappointed!”

  “I absolutely loved this book, it is well written and keeps you on your toes all the way to the last chapter.”

  “It grips you from the first page to the last. Excellent book.”

  “Well constructed, good page turner, very well researched, excellent holiday read.”

  “Exciting, interesting and unpredictable. highly recommended.”

  “Superb! Couldnt put the book down. Really was one of the best thrillers I've read in years.”

  “Had me hooked from the start! I would definitely recommend this book.”

  “ Very exciting and enjoyable. Thoroughly recommended read for anyone who enjoys fast-paced books.”

  * Taken from reviews by readers, as posted on Amazon.co.uk

  Foreword

  This was intended to be a work of fiction, but it is so tightly bound in the events of the day, developing as I wrote it, that there are inevitably both real, recognisable people and real events in the backdrop to the fictional journey described. As I write this the second round of Egypt’s presidential elections are in the balance, the Supreme Court has forcibly dissolved the newly-elected Parliament, and the army has surrounded the Parliament building just a few streets away from where I am sitting. Having been shot at, and dived for cover, while researching this book in Cairo, I feel that the thrill I hope to put across is a real one.

  Almost everything that I describe in the broad scope of this book, the issues of terrorism, technology and identity either have already happened or will, and perhaps sooner rather than later. The main characters, tightly bound to each other, are my own invention, and any resemblance to particular individuals is unintended. But if they are alive, and if you care about whether they live or die, I will be satisfied.

  Tahrir Square, Cairo

  June 2012

  Prologue

  It is 2011 and the Arab world is in uproar. In an anonymous room, in a hotel in the Middle East, a hunted woman removes her veil. She shrugs off the dark, heavy, full length abaya. Her slim body trembles. She spreads a blanket over the bed, and then over that places a towel. She strips to her underwear. With her fingers, she feels the place. Just above the line of her pants. Feels the edges of the bump. She positions the mirror on a chair, to see exactly what she is doing. If only the tremors of fear that are pulsing in her abdomen would cease. She looks at her resources. A darning needle, which she has threaded with cotton, a miniature bottle of eau du toilette, some cotton wadding, a roll of sticking plaster, a tube of antiseptic cream and a leather belt.

  A knife.

  A Stanley knife, for cutting carpets or boxes. She presses the button and slides the triangular blade out, wipes it in perfume to sterilise it, then retracts it smoothly into the metal shaft.

  Slide. Retract. Slide. Retract.

  She doesn’t know how long she has sat there, trying to pluck up the courage to do what she has to do. If there was any other way, any alternative, she would take it. But there is not. It has to be done. Her pursuers are hot on her trail. They may be here in this hotel already. They might find her at any time.Then all would b
e lost.

  An insufferable loneliness weighs her down. There is no one to help her. No one to take the responsibility. No one to do the job that has to be done. She just has to do it herself. She has prayed for strength and, inshallah, she will find it. She doesn’t know whether she can bear the pain, but she knows she must try. It isn’t just her own life at stake. The lives of others, perhaps many others, depend on her having the courage to cut her own flesh.

  And to remove the evil within her.

  She folds the belt and grips it between her teeth. Then she brings the blade to the edge of her quivering coffee-coloured flesh. And begins to cut.

  Book One

  Chapter One

  BBC Radio 4 Studio Broadcasting House London

  March 2009

  ‘My castaway today is a man who surely needs no introduction to Radio Four listeners. For ten years he has been a warm and comforting early morning presence on the Today programme, his earthy Yorkshire voice easing many of us into our daily routines with a balanced and good-natured probing of the great and good. Before that he was an outstanding BBC foreign correspondent, in Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and in the Bosnian War. I’m sure many of us will recall him giving us a chilling eyewitness account of the 1995 discovery of hundreds of bodies, civilians massacred in Bosnia. During the course of his reporting he has had a grenade thrown at him, lost the top of an ear, and survived having his tent run over by a Serbian tank. But these days he says his most difficult task is to get up at three in the morning without sounding grumpy on air,’ presenter Kirsty Young said. ‘He has, he says, never been good at getting out of bed.’

  In the background there was a familiar baritone laugh, liquid and infectious.

  Young continued: ‘His abiding passion though is the charitable work for refugees in Lebanon, to which he has devoted himself for almost twenty years, and for which he was awarded the CBE last year. Looking back, he says, he was always struck by the hospitality and humanity of those caught up in wars, their generosity to strangers, and it is something that he says he has tried in his own small way to pass on.’

  ‘He is, of course, Chris Wyrecliffe.’

  Wyrecliffe squirmed slightly as she went on to outline his junior schooling at Ripley in Yorkshire, where the geography master once called him ‘too clever by three-quarters’ and then his time at Bradford Grammar School, where he was caned on at least four occasions. His school report, mostly glowing, still made frequent use of the word ‘insolent.’

  He laughed again.

  ‘So, when you were growing up as a little boy in the Yorkshire Dales, had you always wanted to be a reporter?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ he said, describing instead a boyhood passion for cricket, and with adolescence, rugby. ‘A place beside Geoffrey Boycott would have suited me fine.’

  Desert Island Discs, the oldest and most reflective of celebrity shows, asks the interviewee to imagine they were marooned on a desert island with little more than a record player for company, and to pick the eight pieces of music that would help them survive. Wyrecliffe’s first choice was Bach’s B minor mass, which brought back memories of his time as a chorister. After broadcasting an excerpt, Young probed his days at Oxford’s Balliol College, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics. ‘You gained a 2:2, which some would say was a disappointment of early promise.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that…’

  ‘Oxford, you have said, was where you discovered girls,’ she said. ‘Indeed one of your contemporaries said your success with women was the cause of much envy.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure about that. At that age, it’s the central pre-occupation of most males. I wasn’t much different.’

  Kirsty Young referred to the substantial fan mail he now received as a radio personality. She alluded to an excerpt from one letter addressed to him at the BBC back in 2006 which the Daily Mail had got hold of and published. It was from a woman who despite being happily married to a barrister, wrote ‘I fancy you rotten’ and wouldn’t mind being serenaded along Venice’s Grand Canal just to listen to ‘your rich, chocolatey voice’. Another had written that while listening to him introduce a news item on the grouse-shooting season, she fantasised about being ‘borne away to the moors on a dark horse by a large hirsute Heathcliff figure with the voice of Mr Wyrecliffe’ and under whom ‘she was prepared to suffer any beastliness, any depravity.’

  Relief arrived with a recording of Humphrey Lyttleton jazz, and then a series of still more personal questions. Had he been expected to lose his Yorkshire accent during his early BBC days? It wasn’t true, and he hadn’t. No, there’d been no voice coaching either, though an early nicotine craving, dispatched almost the day he gave up his addiction to war zones, had perhaps added a deeper timbre. What about that beard?

  ‘I started wearing a beard out of laziness when I was reporting in the field,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit more neatly trimmed now. I’m always surprised when listeners discover my picture on the Radio 4 website and see I have facial hair, and say they are surprised, even annoyed, because that isn’t how they imagine me.’

  ‘Annoyed?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve destroyed a piece of mental furniture. You imagine someone one way, listen to them every day for years, and they turn out to look different. It scrambles the picture you get in your head next time you listen.’

  Desert Island Discs, traditionally famous for fawning to the famous, was now expected to get underneath a guest’s skin. The next question didn’t come as much of a surprise.

  ‘Now, I must ask you about the ‘A’ level scratchcard incident,’ Young said.

  Wyrecliffe had a particularly unpleasant interview on Today a year ago with a bumptious education minister. The question was asked why it was that ‘A’ level results had got better every year without a break for fifteen years, if not through becoming easier. The minister had doggedly stuck to the party line: good students, better teaching, and restructured education. Marking, he said, had not been softened one jot. The interview made the papers because Wyrecliffe had been heard to say after the minister departed, and supposedly off-air: ‘When ‘A’ levels are given out on scratchcards, he’ll finally be able to get his own.’

  ‘That wasn’t very fair was it?’ Young asked.

  ‘No, absolutely not,’ Wyrecliffe laughed. ‘But the minister and I have since had a good chuckle about it.’ This wasn’t quite true. The ministry had made an official complaint to the BBC and Wyrecliffe had been pilloried by the Head of News. Not so much for what he said, as for not identifying the difference between a microphone that was on and one that wasn’t.

  Young then switched to a different tack, but one which he had prepared for.

  ‘What was the most moving experience you ever had as a foreign correspondent?’

  Wyrecliffe paused, aware that rushing straight in would make his answer seem as prepared as it was. He didn’t want to dispel the impression of spontaneity, the recollection and the weighing of experiences, the catching of sighs and hesitation which Desert Island Discs so values.

  ‘I think it was after an earthquake in Turkey in 1991. We had managed to get to a mountain village that had been cut off for at least a week, and found a family camped by the side of their flattened home, from which they had managed to rescue just a battered settee. It was freezing, with sleet coming in horizontally. A small fire was burning in front of the settee, amid a circle of stones, on which a small blackened can acted as a saucepan. A stout and dignified woman in cardigan, headscarf, wellingtons and improvised skirt would every so often poke the contents of this can with a stick, while a clump of tiny shivering children on the settee stared goggle-eyed at it. We got some tremendous close-up pictures, of the concentrated longing written into the children’s faces, and the snowflakes on their hair and eyelashes. They clearly hadn’t eaten for days, but this food, whatever it was, was taking a long time to cook. When it was finally ready, we stopped filming, to give them some space. It was no more t
han a cupful of rice, clearly gathered from a floor, because it was tainted with soot and grit. The woman then shooed the children from the sofa, indicated that cameraman Rick Baxter and I should sit, and with quiet pride offered to share their tiny meal with us. We, of course, graciously declined.’

  After a long pause, a final question, with an unexpected twist.

  ‘We’ve heard all about your charitable work, and I understand this was inspired by a tragic incident in your early days of reporting. What happened, and what effect has it had on your life. Has it changed you as a person?’

  ‘That’s a big question,’ Wyrecliffe chuckled. ‘It had all begun in an obscure town, deep in one of the world’s most intractable troublespots, twenty years ago.’

  And as he started to talk, he knew there was much he could never tell. This was a story that had shaped his life. And it was a very long way from being over.

  Chapter Two

  Christian Militia Zone – South Lebanon

  November 1989

  Fouad Adwan coaxed the aged Peugeot over the last broken section of baking roadway leading up to the hilltop town of Soultaniye. The chassis grumbled as it negotiated the shrapnel-fractured concrete, and skirted the whitewashed stones laid out to mark the edge of a deep crater.

  Wyrecliffe, thirty-five, and a BBC world affairs correspondent, sat next to Adwan, the twenty-three-year old driver, freelance sound-recordist and general fixer. Behind him was cameraman Rick Baxter, five years Wyrecliffe’s junior. Beside Baxter were three boxes of camera kit, the U-matic tape cassettes, Wyrecliffe’s Tandy laptop, spare cables and within the spare lens box, carefully wrapped in a copy of the Beirut Times, a precious bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label.

  Wyrecliffe had spent most of the hot and uncomfortable journey with his six- foot three inch frame crammed in the front seat where the extra space and working window mechanism was offset by an apparently dead radio and a rebellious seat spring which jabbed him fiercely in the left buttock on each and every bump. The insertion of a dog-eared BBC Style Guide, 116 pages of Reithian bureaucracy, between him and the seat had only slightly numbed the pain. There was much more discomfort to come. A decade of indiscriminate mortar fire and sporadic heavy shelling ensured that there were an awful lot of bumps on this journey. A winding eighty-nine miles from Beirut led to the Israeli security zone, a rugged range of hills controlled by the South Lebanon Army, a paramilitary group that had grown up to protect the Maronite Christians during the civil war, but had become a close ally of Israel.