Free Avenger by Andy McNab Page B

laptop was carried out. She didn't see how he could know whether it had been done or not, but it was best to go along with him at this stage, just in case. Every scrap of information stored in its memory had already been downloaded and forwarded to Security Service experts for further analysis.
    She had the hard drive and had taken a hammer from the hotel tool shed. She walked into the garden, dropped the hard drive onto the concrete path and kneeled down with the hammer in her right hand. Three heavy blows were more than adequate to shatter the casing and reduce the copper-plated component board to a twisted, tangled mess.
    As Deveraux thumped down on the hard drive for the final time, something made her look up and glance towards Elena's bedroom window.
    The teenager was watching her, her face expressionless. Deveraux suddenly felt as though she had been caught in some act of mindless vandalism. Or something far worse – in the act of murder.
    She felt exposed and slightly ludicrous, crouched down with the hammer gripped tightly in her hand.
    And as Elena stared, Deveraux was unable to stop herself thinking about the night she had killed Joey. It was unfortunate, but Deveraux didn't deal in regrets. There had been no alternative.
    The memory of those few moments came back to her: Joey on his knees, his nose pouring with blood while she crouched behind him, both hands around his neck, pulling back the thin edge of her Xda mobile phone into his crushed windpipe, gradually choking him to death.
    As Deveraux shook her head to drive away the vision, she guessed that at that moment Elena was also thinking of Joey. It was almost as if the girl knew what had happened; had somehow worked it all out.
    Deveraux looked down at the shattered hard drive and picked it up. She stood up and walked back towards the kitchen door, feeling Elena's eyes burning into her back.

18
    Dudley emerged from his meeting with the Foreign Secretary to find Marcie Deveraux waiting for him.
    He was his usual business-like self, but the pressure was on for everyone in the Intelligence Services. And the higher up in authority, the higher the levels of pressure. Dudley nodded a brusque acknowledgement to Deveraux, and without a word gestured for her to follow him into a room that had been hastily set aside for their conversation.
    It wasn't by any means Deveraux's first visit to the Foreign Office. The main building, with its marble columns, aged colonial oil paintings and heavy chandeliers, always looked to her more like an expensive Parisian hotel than a place of government.
    Dudley led the way into one of the wood-panelled reception rooms. The heavy curtains were closed and they sat in armchairs on either side of an ornate low table, where coffee had been set out for their arrival.
    The concerned look on Dudley's usually placid-looking face was a sign that his meeting with the Foreign Secretary had not gone completely smoothly.
    'Your final arrangements have been made?' he asked brusquely.
    'Yes, sir, everything is in place for tomorrow.'
    'Good. I don't need to stress the importance of your mission, Marcie. And it is your mission.'
    There was no need for Dudley to elaborate; Marcie Deveraux fully understood the implications of his words. It was her mission. A deniable mission. She had planned it, the strategy and the tactics.
    As soon as it had been established that Black Star was in America, Deveraux was the one who had urged that the mission should remain deniable and that no MoU between the UK and the USA should be arranged. She argued that to share the information with American colleagues would delay the mission. The Americans would throw the full weight of their resources into the operation, quite possibly tipping off Black Star that they were on to him in the process.
    Better to keep it small, said Deveraux, compact, the fewer involved the better. Get in, get the job done, and get out. That was the way she operated; it had worked for her in the past