Also by Stephen Leather

Also by Stephen Leather

Pay Off

The Fireman

Hungry Ghost

The Chinaman

The Vets

The Long Shot

The Birthday Girl

The Double Tap

The Solitary Man

The Tunnel Rats

The Bombmaker

The Stretch

Tango One

The Eyewitness

Spider Shepherd Thrillers

Hard Landing

Soft Target

Cold Kill

Hot Blood

Dead Men

Live Fire

Rough Justice

Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thrillers

Nightfall

Midnight

Nightmare (January 2012)

Title Page

FAIR GAME

Stephen Leather

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Stephen Leather 2011

The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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

Epub ISBN: 9781444708332

Book ISBN: 9780340924976

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

CONTENTS

Also by Stephen Leather

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

It was a. . .

About the Author

Special Offer

Dedication

For Juliet

It was a. . .

It was a big bomb, a mixture of fertiliser, diesel oil and aluminium powder with industrial detonators and a mobile phone trigger. It had been three days in the making and now took up most of the back of the white Transit van. The explosives had been packed into aluminium beer kegs, each with double detonators. They had been stacked into the van, two dozen in all. Hundreds of six-inch nails had been duct-taped around the kegs to add to the lethal shrapnel. The wires from the detonators led to a central trigger unit which was connected to a Nokia mobile phone. It was a big bomb and a deadly one, designed to destroy its target and kill or maim anyone inside.

The bomb had been carefully constructed by a fifty-year-old man who had driven up from Limerick. The bombmaker had been making explosive devices for the best part of three decades and had been taught by experts. He had been involved in the London Docklands bombing in February 1996 that had put an end to a seventeen-month ceasefire, and had helped build the bomb that had devastated Manchester city centre just four months later. When the IRA had lain down its arms in 2005, he had joined the Continuity IRA but within a year had switched to the Real IRA, whose Republican views were more in line with his own.