The Long Shot

Also by Stephen Leather

Pay Off

The Fireman

Hungry Ghost

The Chinaman

The Vets

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

Fair Game (July 2011)

Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thrillers

Nightfall

Midnight

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 1994 by

Hodder and Stoughton

An Hachette Livre UK Company

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.

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 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. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Leather, Stephen
The Long Shot
I. Title
823.914 [F]

Epub ISBN 978 1 84456 861 1
Book ISBN 978 0 34063 237 6

Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette Livre UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH

Dedication

For Marie

CONTENTS

The Long Shot

Also by Stephen Leather

Copyright

Dedication

Book

About the Author

Special Offer

Book

The tyres of the Boeing 737 bit into the runway, squealing like dying pigs and sending spurts of dust into the air. The plane taxied towards the terminal building which shimmered in the midday heat. In the First Class cabin the passengers began to unbuckle their seat belts before the plane had come to a halt. A dark-haired stewardess left her seat and went over to the occupant of seat 3B. She bent down and gave him her professional smile. “Mr Ahmed?” she said. The man continued reading as if he hadn’t heard. “Mr Ahmed?” she repeated. He looked up and nodded. He was a typical First Class passenger: middle-aged, overweight and seemingly bored with the whole business of flying. He’d scarcely touched the inflight food and rejected the complimentary headset with an impatient wave of his hand. He’d spent most of the three-hour flight with his nose buried in the Wall Street Journal. “Mr Ahmed, the pilot has requested that you remain behind while the rest of the passengers deplane,” she said.