The Midnight Conspiracy

THE MIDNIGHT CONSPIRACY David Leadbeater CopyrightPublished by AVONA Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd1 London Bridge StreetLondon SE1 9GFwww.harpercollins.co.ukFirst published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2023Copyright © David Leadbeater 2023Cover design by Stephen Mulcahey © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023Cover images: © CollaborationJS/Trevillion Images (silhouetted figure), iStockphoto (street) and Shutterstock.com (all other images)David Leadbeater asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.Source ISBN: 9780008545109Ebook Edition © April 2023 ISBN: 9780008545116Version: 2023-01-30 ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyrightChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29Chapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 35Chapter 36Chapter 37Chapter 38Chapter 39Chapter 40Chapter 41Chapter 42Chapter 43Chapter 44Chapter 45Chapter 46Chapter 47Chapter 48Keep Reading …About the AuthorAlso by David LeadbeaterAbout the Publisher Chapter 1The plan for the heist had been prepared with pinpoint accuracy, right down to the amount of fuel they’d need for the helicopter, the number of spare ammo mags, the weight they’d add to backpacks and the chances of needing a medic and what supplies he should carry … everything. Johann could not remember a better-planned mission.Of course, their mysterious employer had made the consequences of failure pretty bloody clear.‘If you fail, I will hire a team tasked specifically with the job of nailing your entrails to the highest tree, and then hanging you with them. I will see to it that your families burn, that—’ Johann blocked out the rest of the speech. Their employer had to be either downright stupid or incredibly powerful to threaten an ex-military crew that way. Johann and all the others believed the man was the latter.Thus, a job planned with expert precision.Johann travelled in the back of one of two black Range Rovers, his Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun, with its retractable stock, laid carefully across his lap. The Range Rovers negotiated the swooping twists and turns of the lush English countryside with ease, driving at speed, about ten feet apart, gradually closing on their prey. Johann focused on the job ahead.They were a tight, highly skilled team, a product of war that had survived years of action and reinvented itself as a practised, motivated unit. They operated where the money was, usually in military hot spots, but today they were in rainy rural England, where they’d been offered a ridiculous sum of money to obtain a particular object.‘Make no mistake, they will perceive you all as hostiles,’ their mysterious employer had told them. ‘Leave no one alive. Everyone except you who handles my treasure must die.’It all left a bitter aftertaste in Johann’s mouth, like burned coffee. In a war zone you could justify almost anything, you could assault an enemy convoy, kill everyone and still come away with a sense of satisfaction. But here … passing through sleepy old villages and country churches, past Grandma and Grandad tootling down to the local post office, seeing babies being pushed in their prams and hearing schoolchildren hollering in their playgrounds … it didn’t sit right. This was home. This was what you fought to preserve. You didn’t bring the war back here.Unless the money was particularly good.Johann sighed inwardly. He was a soldier. If his commanding officer told him to kill, he would kill. The three other members of his team would do the same. Following orders was how they stayed alive, how they eventually returned to a normal world that they no longer felt part of. Johann much preferred a strident war zone to an anarchic Sainsbury’s. His colleagues felt the same. Johann had found that the downtime between missions hurt their team equilibrium far more than an intense firefight or a close call. And the men he sat alongside now, the men he fought with, were all that mattered. He would go to hell and back with them.The Range Rovers plunged through twisty English backroads, rows of trees on either side. The rising sun disappeared, blocked out by the density of overhanging branches. Johann steadied his weapon as potholes rocked the suspension, listening to the interplay between the boss in the front seat and the helicopter that travelled above.‘Maintain airspeed,’ the boss said. ‘Target is six minutes out.’‘Understood,’ came the reply. ‘With you every step of the way.’‘Stay in constant contact, Air One.’‘Understood, Ground One.’ Johann looked up through the Range Rover’s smoky panoramic roof. The helicopter tracking them was a highly versatile multipurpose Augusta Westland, rented anonymously from a Northumbrian airfield just a day ago, that had an extended cabin and could carry up to seven passengers in addition to two pilots in relative luxury. It was an integral part of the plan.They would hit their targets where they were most vulnerable.‘Four minutes to impact,’ the boss said.Close to the start of this long journey, when they were still negotiating the country lanes of Northumberland, well before they reached the A1 and major roads south, Johann and the other members of his team would attack the unmarked van that carried an unknown treasure. They would take everything, including the other team’s lives. The heist would have to be clean, anonymous, speedy and clinical.‘Two minutes,’ the boss said.Johann blinked as the car passed through a tree tunnel, his face dappled