The Fixer

THE FIXER A LANCE SPECTOR THRILLER BOOK 6 SAUL HERZOG CONTENTS Foreword Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Chapter 61 Grab Book Seven Author’s Note Afterword FOREWORD I’d like to take a moment to thank you personally for buying this book. A lot of time and work has gone into it and I truly hope you enjoy the story I’ve come up with. If you have any concerns at all about this story, if you spot any typos or errors, or if you’d just like to get in touch to say hello, please feel free to contact me at any time. I can always be reached by email at: [email protected] Alternatively, you can sign up for updates from me at: Saul Herzog Notifications I am always thrilled to hear from readers so please stop by, say hello, let me know what you think of Lance Spector and the world he inhabits. God bless and happy reading, Saul Herzog 1 Craig Ritter pulled his rented Škoda Octavia into the lay-by and yanked the handbrake. He’d had his doubts about the car when he first saw it, but so far, it had served well enough. It offered decent power, decent acceleration, and had the added benefit of not drawing attention. It was as anonymous a car as he could have hoped to find in that part of Russia. It was a frigidly cold night, well below negative twenty, and he kept the engine running and the heat blowing while he stepped outside. He went to the back of the car and popped the trunk. Inside was a long, polymer gun case. He flipped it open to reveal one L115A3 Long Range Sniper Rifle. Chambered in the 338 Lapua Magnum, it was the preferred rifle of British snipers. Its accuracy was unparalleled. In the right hands, and Ritter’s were certainly that, it was capable of taking out targets at distances in excess of one mile. Next to the rifle, enclosed in a segment of the case’s protective foam that had been cut out to its precise shape, was a Schmidt & Bender 5-25x56 PM II 25x magnification day scope. He removed the scope carefully, as well as a Qioptiq Thermal Imager, and screwed the two pieces of equipment together. As a pair, they allowed him to make out human targets at night at ranges beyond even that of the gun. He breathed on his hands, something he’d been trained not to, and got back into the car. “Phew,” he muttered, slamming the door and putting his fingers in front of the hot air blowing from the vent. The lay-by was about a mile from the farm, on a rise in the road that gave a good vantage over the compound. He raised the scope to his eye like a miniature telescope, something he did before every one of his visits, and immediately lowered it. “Fuck me,” he said aloud. He didn’t need a piece of precision optics to make out what he’d just seen. There was a light on in the house. It was faint, and he couldn’t be certain, but it seemed to be coming from the kitchen at the back. He’d been in that room multiple times and could clearly picture its bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. Not once had he seen it switched on. “Not good, Craigy boy,” he muttered. “Not good at all.” He knew, of course, what he was supposed to do next—what the protocol said to do. Release the handbrake, put his foot down, and hightail it out of there as fast as the Škoda’s decently powered engine could go. It would mean cutting loose, missing a meet, breaking contact. If contact were not re-established very quickly, that would be it for the mission. He had no other way of passing intel back to Langley. He bit his lip. He did not want to lose the mission. There was a procedure, of course, for re-establishing broken contact. If either party missed a meet, they were both to go to the concession stand at Nikolai Ostrovsky Park at noon the following day. There, they could pass a message, warn of danger, or, if everything was okay, resume contact at the farm. If either party didn’t show up at the park, the worst would be assumed, and the plug pulled. That was all well and good, Ritter thought, but this was not a case of a missed meet, this was a problem with the venue—a light was on that wasn’t supposed to be. “Think, think, think,” he muttered, rapping his fingers on the steering wheel in a steady thrum. He did another pass with the scope. The compound was laid out in the traditional homestead pattern of the region. There was the farmhouse with its pitched roof—squat, solid, hand-built of stone and plaster. Across the cobbled courtyard was a large wooden barn. There were a few other outbuildings—a water well, a cart shed, a rusted-out shipping container used for storage—and the whole lot was enclosed inside a high wooden fence. There were two gates in the fence—one, always open, that led to the driveway, and a larger one, always shut, that led to the fields. Apart from the light, everything was as it always was—no noise, no people, no animals in the barn, no