I’m back home and this story has been sitting on a back burner for a few months, waiting for some more to be written.
The trouble is, there are also other stories to write, and I’m not very good at prioritizing.
But, here we are, a few minutes opened up and it didn’t take long to get back into the groove.
Chasing leads, maybe
I’m glad she didn’t ask me about Nobbin, or the fact a woman by the name of Josephine was working for him. That went ditto for Severin, and Jan, who was working for him.
It was a tangled web. Now, apparently, I was working for her.
I had another idea, and went back to the computer room to do another search, this time for the names of those who had been on my training course, and who was also assigned to the surveillance job.
I checked the name Jack Temple, and his file was marked closed, with a stark, red, deceased across the first page.
I checked the name Adam Alwin, and it was the same, deceased.
I checked the name Jennifer Underwood, and it had the label inactive, on medical leave. She had been injured and was recovering. There was no reference to her being in a hospital, or a recovery facility so I presumed she was at home.
It was another address to remember, this time what I assumed was a flat in Putney. It was not something she had mentioned in all the time we have been together. She had spoken of a house in Scotland.
But, then, who really told the truth when we were trained and continually told to lie about everything. In the end I don’t think we quite knew who we were. I knew her as Jennifer, but I doubted that was her real name.
Maybe I’d find out when I went to see her. I needed help and from someone I could trust. It was logical to select her. We had, for at least six months, relying on each other to get through.
I cam out into the daylight and it hurt my eyes. The artificial light, not that it was very bright, had queered my sight briefly. No good, because for a minute at least I was vulnerable to an attack.
Good thing it didn’t happen.
But something else did. A car pulled up on the side of the road, one I instantly recognised as the same Nobbin had used when he collected Josephine.
He wound down the rear kerbside window and said, “Sam. Just the man I want to see. Get in.”
I saw him slide over. I opened the door, got in, and the driver drove off.
He seemed pleased with himself.
“How is the hunt?”
“How do you think it’s going?”
He looked quizzically at me. “Why would I ask if I knew the answer?”
“I think you do. I was at O’Connell’s flat when one of your assistants was there. She discovered the same as I did, nothing.”
“What assistant?” He tried to sound surprised.
“We’re not going to be very good friends if you are going to lie to me. She called herself Josephine. I wouldn’t be much of an agent if I didn’t have a few tricks up my sleeve. And, lets be clear about one thing, if nothing else, you want to play games, fine. So will I.”
“What did Monica want?”
“What everyone wants. There appear to be secret documents on the loose. Everyone thinks they’re on a USB, and that O’Connell has hidden them somewhere. They’re not in his flat, and the cat wasn’t talking.”
“Just remember that O’Connell was working for me, and he was getting the documents for me.”
“So you know what these documents are about?”
“No. He didn’t tell me because he didn’t look at them. He couldn’t. They’re encrypted, and he doesn’t have the code.”
Which wouldn’t do much good for me if I tried to see what the fuss was about. Perhaps the best idea would be to destroy the USB so no one had these documents, given the trouble they’d caused so far.
“Anyone check O’Connell’s body properly for the USB? He may have had it hidden in his clothing somewhere.” I knew I didn’t have sufficient time to thoroughly check myself.
“No one knows where the body is.”
“I saw the cleaners arrive to process the scene.”
“Well, if they did, the job never reached the books. According to the cleaners, no one was dispatched to take care of anything at the location.”
Which meant Severin had the body, had checked as I would if I had the time, and it was not on him. Otherwise, he would not have paid me a visit. It was back to Peaslake then, the next step in the investigation.
“Recovery of these documents is time-sensitive Sam. You need to double your effort.”
“A lack of clues is not helping. Nor is everyone working on their own agenda.”
“Then don’t lose focus.”
I saw him motion to the driver to pull over and let me out.
I waved as the car pulled back out into the traffic.
This case has everything: red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.
See below for an excerpt from the book…
Coming soon!
An excerpt from the book:
…
When Harry took the time to consider his position, a rather uncomfortable position at that, he concluded that he was somehow involved in another case that meant very little to him.
Not that it wasn’t important in some way he was yet to determine, it was just that his curiosity had got the better of him, and it had led to this: sitting in a chair, securely bound, waiting for someone, one of his captors had called Doug.
It was not the name that worried him so much; it was the evil laugh that had come after the name was spoken.
Doug what? Doug the ‘destroyer’, Doug the ‘dangerous’, Doug the ‘deadly’; there were several sinister connotations, and perhaps that was the point of the laugh, to make it more frightening than it was.
But there was no doubt about one thing in his mind right then: he’d made a mistake. A very big. and a costly mistake. Just how big the cost, no doubt, he would soon find out.
His mother and his grandmother, the wisest person he had ever known, had once told him never to eavesdrop.
At the time, he couldn’t help himself, and instead of minding his own business, listening to a one-sided conversation that ended with a time and a place. The very nature of the person receiving the call was, at the very least, sinister, and, because of the cryptic conversation, there appeared to be, or at least to Harry, criminal activity involved.
For several days, he had wrestled with the thought of whether he should go. Stay on the fringe, keep out of sight, observe and report to the police if it was a crime. Instead, he had willingly gone down the rabbit hole.
Now, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, several heat lamps hanging over his head, he was perspiring, and if perspiration could be used as a measure of fear, then Harry’s fear was at the highest level.
Another runnel of sweat rolled into his left eye, and, having his hands tied, it literally made it impossible to clear it. The burning sensation momentarily took his mind off his predicament. He cursed and then shook his head, trying to prevent a recurrence. It was to no avail.
Let the stinging sensation be a reminder of what was right and what was wrong.
It was obvious that it was the right place and the right time, but in considering his current perilous situation, it definitely was the wrong place to be, at the worst possible time.
It was meant to be his escape, an escape from the generations of lawyers, what were to Harry, dry, dusty men who had been in business since George Washington said to the first Walthenson to step foot on American soil, ‘Why don’t you become a lawyer?” when asked what he could do for the great man.
Or so it was handed down as lore, though Harry didn’t think Washington meant it literally, the Walthenson’s, then as now, were not shy of taking advice.
Except, of course, when it came to Harry.
He was, Harry’s father was prone to saying, the exception to every rule. Harry guessed his father was referring to the fact that his son wanted to be a Private Detective rather than a dry, dusty lawyer. Just the clothes were enough to turn Harry off the profession.
So, with a little of the money Harry inherited from one of his aunts, he leased an office in Gramercy Park and had it renovated to look like the Sam Spade detective agency, you know the one, Spade and Archer, and The Maltese Falcon.
There’s a movie and a book by Dashiell Hammett if you’re interested.
So, there it was, painted on the opaque glass inset of the front door, ‘Harold Walthenson, Private Detective’.
There was enough money to hire an assistant, and it took a week before the right person came along, or, more to the point, didn’t just see his business plan as something sinister. Ellen, a tall, cool woman in a long black dress, or so the words of a song in his head told him, fitted in perfectly.
She’d seen the movie, but she said with a grin, Harry was no Humphrey Bogart.
Of course not, he said, he didn’t smoke.
Three months on the job, and it had been a few calls, no ‘real’ cases, nothing but missing animals, and other miscellaneous items. What he really wanted was a missing person. Or perhaps a beguiling, sophisticated woman who was as deadly as she was charming, looking for an errant husband, perhaps one that she had already ‘dispatched’.
Or for a tall, dark and handsome foreigner who spoke in riddles and in heavily accented English, a spy, or perhaps an assassin, in town to take out the mayor. The man was such an imbecile that Harry had considered doing it himself.
Now, in a back room of a disused warehouse, that wishful thinking might be just about to come to a very abrupt end, with none of the romanticised trappings of the business befalling him. No beguiling women, no sinister criminals, no stupid policemen.
Just a nasty little man whose only concern was how quickly or how slowly Harry’s end was going to be.
There was something about this one that resonated with me.
This is a novel about a world generally ruled by perception, and how people perceive what they see, what they are told, and what they want to believe.
I’ve been guilty of it myself, as I’m sure we all have at one time or another.
For the main characters, Harry and Alison, other issues are driving their relationship.
For Alison, it is a loss of self-worth through losing her job and from losing her mother and, in a sense, her sister.
For Harry, it is the fact that he has a beautiful and desirable wife, his belief that she is the object of other men’s desires, and, in particular, his immediate superior’s.
Between observation, the less-than-honest motives of his friends, a lot of jumping to conclusions based on very little fact, and you have the basis of one very interesting story.
When it all comes to a head, Alison finds herself in a desperate situation, and she realises only the truth will save their marriage.
But is it all the truth?
What would we do in similar circumstances?
Rarely does a book have me so enthralled that I could not put it down until I knew the result. They might be considered two people who should have known better, but as is often the case, they had to get past what they both thought was the truth.
And the moral of this story, if it could be said there is one, is that nothing is ever what it seems.
I’m back home and this story has been sitting on a back burner for a few months, waiting for some more to be written.
The trouble is, there are also other stories to write, and I’m not very good at prioritizing.
But, here we are, a few minutes opened up and it didn’t take long to get back into the groove.
Chasing leads, maybe
She gave me a minute to think about the situation, and then said what I was thinking, “So he could be anywhere?”
“He was dead. I felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one.”
I could interpret that expression on her face, ‘you’re not a doctor’.
She turned another page, read a few lines, then made a note at the bottom.
It read, if my deciphering was up to scratch, ‘doesn’t know if subject dead or not’.
She looked up again. “It appears these documents are out there,” she waved her hand in the air, “somewhere. Fortunately, they have not turned up, not has someone tried to sell them back or to the newspapers, so we’re lucky. So far. That isn’t going to last for much longer. Every extra day out there is another chance for the government to be embarrassed.”
“You know what the contents are?”
“Don’t be silly. That’s above my pay grade, and besides, you and I are better off not knowing. So, what you need to do is find O’Connell and/or find the documents on this USB drive.”
She slid a card across the table. It had a name and a telephone number. Monica Sherive. A mobile number, a burner no doubt that couldn’t be traced back to her.
“You find either, you tell me first.”
“Nobbin?”
“Second, and when I tell you.”
“So you don’t trust him either?”
“At the moment, for both you and I have to be careful who we trust.”
I added her to the list of people I couldn’t trust, not that she had told me I could trust her. Yet.
“And if I get contacted by Severin again?”
“Have you?”
I had thought about not telling her about that brief meeting where he told me about the USB drive, but it couldn’t do any harm. At least she hadn’t asked me if I knew about the USB, which was something, I suppose.
“Yes. Once. Told me to keep my head down. And asked me if O’Connell had time to talk to me. It was the same answer I gave him back in the alley. No. I’d just managed to corner him when he was shot.”
“By Severin, or this other fellow,” she shuffled back several pages, then said, “Maury?”
“No. That was what was odd about it. The shot came from somewhere else. A sniper I would have thought.”
And, my brain suddenly moving into overdrive, piecing together what might be a coincidence, but in our business, they were rarely coincidences. A sniper shot him., say Nobbin or one of his people, he looks dead, waits for a call to the cleaners, intercepts it, and collects the so-called dead O’Connell. It was a good conspiracy theory.
And as far-fetched as one.
Severin had to have the body somewhere, trying to figure out how to bring O’Connell back to life so he could torture the USB location out of him.
Hell, that was as twisted as the conspiracy theory.
Time to change the subject. “Do you have any idea who Severin and Maury are?”
She went to the back of the file and pulled out some photographs, mug shots perhaps of staff members. She put five faces in front of me and asked me if the two were there.
They were. The first, with the name of David Westcott, and the fourth with the name of Bernie Salvin.
“Who are they?”
“They used to work in the training department for ten or so years ago. Westcott was also a handler for several years. They both requested a transfer to operations, and we give a mission. Six agents were assigned, and all six were killed, an investigation after the fact found that their identities had been leaked to the enemy before they reached the target.”
“They gave them up?”
“Nobody knows for sure. There were others in that group, but in the end, the department retired them all. All their years in training served them well. We found the place where you were trained.”
Another photograph of the main building. I nodded.
“It was an old training facility closed down five years ago. It was just sitting there waiting for an enterprising crew. It won’t happen again. Needless to say, we haven’t been able to find either of them, only the people they employed, who believed it was in good faith. A mess in other words. Now, go. Find me answers.”
With my attention elsewhere, I walked into a man who was hurrying in the opposite direction. He was a big man with a scar running down the left side of his face from the eye socket to the mouth, and he was wearing a black shirt with a red tie.
That was all I remembered as my heart almost stopped.
He apologised as he stepped to one side, the same way I stepped, as I also muttered an apology.
I kept my eyes down. He was not the sort of man I wanted to recognise later in a lineup. I stepped to the other side, and so did he. It was one of those situations. Finally getting out of sync, he kept going in his direction, and I went towards the bus, which was now pulling away from the curb.
Getting my breath back, I just stood riveted to the spot watching it join the traffic. I looked back over my shoulder, but the man I’d run into had gone. I shrugged and looked at my watch. It would be a few minutes before the next bus arrived.
Wait, or walk? I could also go by subway, but it was a long walk to the station. What the hell, I needed the exercise.
At the first intersection, the ‘Walk’ sign had just flashed to ‘Don’t Walk’. I thought I’d save a few minutes by not waiting for the next green light. As I stepped onto the road, I heard the screeching of tyres.
A yellow car stopped inches from me.
It was a high-powered sports car, perhaps a Lamborghini. I knew what they looked like because Marcus Bartleby owned one, as did every other junior executive in the city with a rich father.
Everyone stopped to look at me, then the car. It was that sort of car. I could see the driver through the windscreen shaking his fist, and I could see he was yelling too, but I couldn’t hear him. I stepped back onto the sidewalk, and he drove on. The moment had passed, and everyone went back to their business.
My heart rate hadn’t come down from the last encounter. Now it was approaching cardiac arrest, so I took a few minutes and several sets of lights to regain composure.
At the next intersection, I waited for the green light, and then a few seconds more, just to be sure. I was no longer in a hurry.
Next, I heard what sounded like a gunshot. A few people looked around, worried expressions on their faces, but when it happened again, I saw it was an old car backfiring. I also saw another yellow car, much the same as the one before, stopped on the side of the road. I thought nothing of it, other than it was the second yellow car I’d seen.
At the next intersection, I realised I was subconsciously heading towards Harry’s new bar. It was somewhere on 6th Avenue, so I continued walking in what I thought was the right direction.
I don’t know why I looked behind me at the next intersection, but I did. There was another yellow car on the side of the road, not far from me. It, too, looked the same as the original Lamborghini, and I was starting to think it was not a coincidence.
Moments after crossing the road, I heard the roar of a sports car engine and saw the yellow car accelerate past me. As it passed by, I saw there were two people in it, and the blurry image of the passenger was a large man with a red tie.
Now my imagination was playing tricks.
It could not be the same man. He was going in a different direction.
In the few minutes I’d been standing on the pavement, it had started to snow; early for this time of year, and marking the start of what could be a long, cold winter. I shuddered, and it was not necessarily because of the temperature.
I looked up and saw a neon light advertising a bar, coincidentally the one Harry had ‘found’ and, looking once in the direction of the departing yellow car, I decided to go in. I would have a few drinks and then leave through the back door if there were one.
Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.
I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.
But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.
Once again there’s a new instalment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.
…
The aftermath and goodbye
…
No one in the room, of those who had been forced to remain, could quite comprehend what just happened.
You could read about it in a newspaper, or hear about it on television during the news hour, and think, well, I wasn’t there but it must have been traumatic for those who were, but traumatic didn’t even begin to describe what I just witnessed.
It took everyone more than a few minutes to process those last few seconds before they could move, let alone think about what they were going to do. With the threat incapacitated, there was no reason to, at least, not straight away.
I was surprised then, that after however long it had been since those events, I heard Charlene’s voice cutting through the fog.
“Are you alright?”
She was shaking me by the shoulder, sitting on the floor next to me, and she looked, and sounded, visibly upset. I was surprised she was still in town much less anywhere near here.
“I wasn’t the target,” I said, and then realized that was hardly relevant to anything; it was just the first response that popped into my head.
I could then suddenly hear everything as if someone had turned up the volume, and the first background sound was Benderby’s daughter crying.
“You were almost in the line of fire for one of the marksmen. I thought he’d misaimed. For a moment there, when I saw you fall…
She still cared, which was something I should appreciate. I took a moment before lifting myself off the floor to sit beside her.
“This was a disaster. Your father should have realizeda woman with a gun would be hell-bent on revenge and wasn’t going to be talked down. She probably used the time it took to get me to mentally prepare so she could kill the pair of them. And I’m surprised you didn’t see it coming.”
“It might not have come to this if she hadn’t known Alex and Vince were suspected of killing her son. Did you tell her about Alex and Vince?”
It was a meaningful look, one that conveyed disapproval because she was right, it had to come from me because I was only one of a very few who knew the actual facts of the matter.”
Better then, to admit it. “No. But I told my mother, while I was in hospital before I had time to consider the ramifications. That was some deal Benderby pulled off, to have Vince strung up and a signing a confession to get Alex off the hook.”
“He didn’t exactly get away scot-free. He still has a string of minor charges to face, and there will be jail time, one way or another.”
I glanced over at Mrs. Boggs spread out on the floor where she had collapsed after being shot at least twice.
Almost before she hit the floor, two deputies were beside her, removing the gun, and checking if she was still alive. I imagine the sheriff, by the door, phone to his ear, had called for medical assistance, perhaps out of deference to a woman who was a friend, or because he had to show all care and respect for her so a good defense attorney didn’t find a reason to have the case dismissed for lack of respect. There had been problems handling perpetrators in the past, perpetrators who got off on technicalities.
But all that was moot if she was dead. She seemed to be alive when she hit the floor, and then hadn’t moved in the last few minutes. My first thought was that they had killed her, but I saw her hand move, which meant she was still alive, incredibly good shooting on the part of the marksmen considering the obstacles, and the inclination to stop the perpetrator permanently.
Around us, several other deputies were escorting the remainder of the patrons out of the room, now officially a crime scene designated by the ‘do not cross’ tape lines going up.
The sheriff had made it his job to escort Mrs. Benderby, and her daughter, out of the room, and, no doubt get a statement after being checked out by a paramedic.
I could hear sirens in the distance, so they would be arriving imminently.
A. Minute or so later, I was the last civilian in the room.
I turned to Charlene, “You do realize that both Boggs senior and Ormiston were in that cave, before Alex and Vince cleaned up.”
She smiled. “Actually, as a matter of fact, I do. I took a forensic team back to see if we could find either of Alex’s or Vince’s DNA, and not only did we fund it, but the skeletal remains of what appears to be four individuals.”
“Boggs, Ormiston, and two pirates. One had a sword through the rib cage so I suspect there was a little dissent when the treasure was being divvied up.”
“I’m sure that will be confirmed soon. I wanted to nail Alex’s ass to the wall, now it appears we might have enough evidence to put old man Cossatino away too. He was picked up at the airport trying to leave the country. An all-around good day for team justice.”
“Except for Mrs. Boggs”
“I’m sure she’ll plead temporary insanity, overcome by the grief of losing her son.”
Flippant, perhaps, or just cynical? It was a bit early in her career to be like that, so perhaps that might be a little of her father rubbing off.
“Perhaps she was hoping the police would kill her. After all, she has very little left to live for. I doubt pleading insanity was her first thought when she walked into this room. You might want to study up on the human condition a little before you start labeling people, and especially if you are thinking of continuing on this detective thing.”
That came out wrong, more a rebuke than an observation, and judging by her expression, she took it as the former.
“There will always be a lot of things we could do better. You might consider next time to dissuade your friends from doing stupid things, like Nadia kidnapping Alex and Vince in the first place.”
“If you had done your job…”
Neither of us had seen the sheriffcome over, and he was there long enough to be privy to the last comments. “I’m sure at the end of the day, justice will prevail despite the convoluted route it took us to get there. But for argument’s sake, neither Alex nor Vince would press charges against Nadia, so it was not kidnapping, and since the mall belongs to the Benderbys, neither wanted to press for trespass, so, all in all, no harm done.”
He glared at his daughter. “I asked you to get his statement, not debate the legalities of the situation. Get it done and get back to the station.”
With that said, he left.
Charlene stood up, glared at me, then said, “no good deed goes unpunished. Do you want to give it here, or at the station?”
I think that most authors are their own worst enemies!
Just when you think that the story is done, and you’re on the third re-read, just to make sure…
Damn!
I don’t like the way that chapter reads, and what’s worse, it’s about the tenth time I’ve looked at it.
It doesn’t matter the last three times you read it, it was just fine, or the editor has read it, and the chapter passed without any major comment.
I think the main problem I have is letting go. For some odd reason, certain parts of a story sometimes seem to me as though they are not complete, or may be missing a vital clue or connection for the story’s continuity.
That, of course, happens when you rewrite a section that is earlier in the story, and then have to make ongoing changes.
Yes, I hear the stern warnings that I should have made a comprehensive outline at the beginning, but the trouble is, I can change the ending as I’m writing it and then must go back and add the hooks earlier on. Not the best method, but isn’t that what an editor is for, to pick up the missed connections and out-of-the-blue events that happen for no reason?
I find that often after leaving a finished story for a month before the next reading, the whole picture must formulate itself in my head, so when I re-read, there was always a problem, one I didn’t want to think about until the re-read.
Even then, it might survive a second pass.
I know the scene is in trouble when I get to it, and alarm bells are going off. I find anything else to do but look at it.
So, here I am, making major changes.
But at least now I am satisfied with where it’s going.
50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.
They all start with –
A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:
And the story:
…
It was once said that a desperate man has everything to lose.
The man I was chasing was desperate, but I, on the other hand, was more desperate to catch him.
He’d left a trail of dead people from one end of the island to the other.
The team had put in a lot of effort to locate him, and now his capture was imminent. We were following the car he was in, from a discreet distance, and, at the appropriate time, we would catch up, pull him over, and make the arrest.
There was nowhere for him to go.
The road led to a dead-end, and the only way off the mountain was back down the road we were now on. Which was why I was somewhat surprised when we discovered where he was.
Where was he going?
“Damn,” I heard Alan mutter. He was driving, being careful not to get too close, but not far enough away to lose sight of him.
“What?”
“I think he’s made us.”
“How?”
“Dumb bad luck, I’m guessing. Or he expected we’d follow him up the mountain. He’s just sped up.”
“How far away?”
“A half-mile. We should see him higher up when we turn the next corner.”
It took an eternity to get there, and when we did, Alan was right, only he was further on than we thought.”
“Step on it. Let’s catch him up before he gets to the top.”
Easy to say, not so easy to do. The road was treacherous, and in places, just gravel, and there were no guard rails to stop a three-thousand-foot fall down the mountainside.
Good thing then, I had the foresight to have three agents on the hill for just such a scenario.
Ten minutes later, we were in sight of the car, still moving quickly, but we were going slightly faster. We’d catch up just short of the summit car park.
Or so we thought.
Coming quickly around another corner, we almost slammed into the car we’d been chasing.
“What the hell…” Aland muttered.
I was out of the car and over to see if he was in it, but I knew that it was only a slender possibility. The car was empty, and no indication of where he had gone.
Certainly not up the road. It was relatively straightforward for the next mile, at which we would have reached the summit. Up the mountainside from here, or down.
I looked up. Nothing.
Alan yelled out, “He’s not going down, not that I can see, but if he did, there’s hardly a foothold and that’s a long fall.”
Then where did he go?
Then a man looking very much like our quarry came out from behind a rock embedded just a short distance up the hill.
“Sorry,” he said quite calmly. “Had to go if you know what I mean.”
I’d lost him.
It was as simple as that.
I had been led a merry chase up the hill, and all the time he was getting away in a different direction.
I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book, letting my desperation blind me to the disguise that anyone else would see through in an instant.
It was a lonely sight, looking down that road, knowing that I had to go all that way down again, only this time, without having to throw caution to the wind.
Revenge is a dish best served cold – or preferably so when everything goes right
Of course, it rarely does, as Alistair, Zoe’s handler, discovers to his peril. Enter a wildcard, John, and whatever Alistair’s plan for dealing with Zoe was dies with him.
It leaves Zoe in completely unfamiliar territory.
…
John’s idyllic romance with a woman who is utterly out of his comfort zone is on borrowed time. She is still trying to reconcile her ambivalence after being so indifferent for so long.
They agree to take a break, during which she disappears. John, thinking she has left without saying goodbye, refuses to accept the inevitable and calls on an old friend for help in finding her.
After the mayhem and being briefly reunited, she recognises an inevitable truth: there is a price to pay for taking out Alistair; she must leave and find them first, and he would be wise to keep a low profile.
But keeping a low profile just isn’t possible, and enlisting another friend, a private detective and his sister, a deft computer hacker, they track her to the border between Austria and Hungary.
What John doesn’t realise is that another enemy is tracking him to find her too. It could have been a grand tour of Europe. Instead, it becomes a race against time before enemies old and new converge for what will be an inevitable showdown.
It was in darkness. I was sure I had left several lights on, especially over the door, so I could see to unlock it.
I looked up and saw that the globe was broken.
Instant alert.
I went to the first hiding spot for the gun, and it wasn’t there. I went to the backup, and it wasn’t there either. Someone had found my carefully hidden stash of weapons and removed them.
Who?
There were four hiding spots, and all were empty. Someone had removed the weapons. That could only mean one possibility.
I had a visitor, not necessarily here for a social call.
But, of course, being the well-trained agent I’d once been and not one to be caught unawares, I crossed over to my neighbour and relieved him of a weapon that, if found, would require a lot of explaining.
Suitably armed, it was time to return the surprise.
There were three entrances to the villa: the front door, the back door, and a rather strange escape hatch. One of the more interesting attractions of the villa I’d rented was its heritage. It was built in the late 1700s by a man who was, by all accounts, a thief. It had a hidden underground room, which had been in the past a vault but was now a wine cellar, and it had an escape hatch by which the man could come and go undetected, particularly if there was a mob outside the door baying for his blood.
It now gave me the means to enter the villa without my visitors being alerted, unless, of course, they were in the vicinity of the doorway inside the villa, but that possibility was unlikely. It was not where anyone could anticipate or expect a doorway to be.
The secret entrance was at the rear of the villa, behind a large copse, two camouflaged wooden doors built into the ground. I moved aside some of the branches that covered them and lifted one side. After I’d discovered the doors and rusty hinges, I’d oiled and cleaned them, and cleared the passageway of cobwebs and fallen rocks. It had a mildew smell, but nothing would get rid of that. I’d left torches at either end so I could see.
I closed the door after me and went quietly down the steps, enveloped in darkness till I switched on the torch. I traversed the short passage, which turned ninety degrees about halfway to the door at the other end. I carried the key to this door on the keyring, found it and opened the door. It too had been oiled and swung open soundlessly.
I stepped into the darkness and closed the door.
I was on the lower level under the kitchen, now the wine cellar, the ‘door’ doubling as a set of shelves which had very little on them, less to fall and alert anyone in the villa.
Silence, an eerie silence.
I took the steps up to the kitchen, stopping when my head was level with the floor, checking to see if anyone was waiting. There wasn’t. It seemed to me to be an unlikely spot for an ambush.
I’d already considered the possibility of someone coming after me, especially because it had been Bespalov I’d killed, and I was sure he had friends, all equally as mad as he was. Equally, I’d also considered it nigh on impossible for anyone to find out it was me who killed him because the only people who knew that were Prendergast, Alisha, a few others in the Department, and Susan.
That raised the question of who told them where I was.
If I were the man I used to be, my first suspect would be Susan. The departure this morning, and now this was too coincidental. But I was not that man.
Or was I?
I reached the start of the passageway that led from the kitchen to the front door and peered into the semi-darkness. My eyes had got used to the dark, and it was no longer an inky void. Fragments of light leaked in around the door from outside and through the edge of the window curtains where they didn’t fit properly. A bone of contention upstairs in the morning, when first light shone and invariably woke me up hours before I wanted to.
Still nothing.
I took a moment to consider how I would approach the visitor’s job. I would get a plan of the villa in my head, all entrances, where a target could be led to or attacked, and where there would be no escape.
Coming in the front door. If I were not expecting anything, I’d just open the door and walk in. One shot would be all that was required.
Contract complete.
I sidled quietly up the passage, staying close to the wall, edging closer to the front door. There was an alcove where the shooter could be waiting. It was an ideal spot to wait.
Crunch.
I stepped on some nutshells.
Not my nutshells.
I felt it before I heard it. The bullet with my name on it.
And how the shooter missed, from point-blank range, and hit me in the arm, I had no idea. I fired off two shots before a second shot from the shooter went wide and hit the door with a loud thwack.
I saw a red dot wavering as it honed in on me, and I fell to the floor, stretching out, looking up where the origin of the light was coming and pulled the trigger three times, evenly spaced, and a second later I heard the sound of a body falling down the stairs and stopping at the bottom, not very far from me.
Two assassins.
I’d not expected that.
The assassin by the door was dead, a lucky shot on my part. The second was still breathing.
I checked the body for any weapons and found a second gun and two knives. Armed to the teeth!
I pulled off the balaclava; a man, early thirties, definitely Italian. I was expecting a Russian.
I slapped his face, waking him up. Blood was leaking from several slashes on his face when his head had hit the stairs on the way down. The awkward angle of his arms and legs told me there were broken bones, probably a lot worse internally. He was not long for this earth.
“Who employed you?”
He looked at me with dead eyes, a pursed mouth, perhaps a smile. “Not today, my friend. You have made a very bad enemy.” He coughed, and blood poured out of his mouth. “There will be more …”
Friends of Bespalov, no doubt.
I would have to leave. Two unexplainable bodies, I’d have a hard time explaining my way out of this mess. I dragged the two bodies into the lounge, clearing the passageway just in case someone had heard anything.
Just in case anyone was outside at the time, I sat in the dark, at the foot of the stairs, and tried to breathe normally. I was trying not to connect the dots that led back to Susan, but the coincidence was worrying me.
A half-hour passed, and I hadn’t moved. Deep in thought, I’d forgotten about being shot, unaware that blood was running down my arm and dripping onto the floor.
Until I heard a knock on my front door.
Two thoughts: it was either the police, alerted by the neighbours, or it was the second wave, though why would they be knocking on the door?
I stood and immediately felt a stabbing pain in my arm. I took out a handkerchief and turned it into a makeshift tourniquet, then wrapped a kitchen towel around the wound.
If it were the police, this was going to be a difficult situation. Holding the gun behind my back, I opened the door a fraction and looked out.
No police, just Maria. I hoped she was not part of the next ‘wave’.
“You left your phone behind on the table. I thought you might be looking for it.” She held it out in front of her.
When I didn’t open the door any further, she looked at me quizzically and then asked, “Is anything wrong?”
I was going to thank her for returning the phone, but I heard her breathe in sharply and add, breathlessly, “You’re bleeding.”
I looked at my arm and realised it was visible through the door, and not only that, the towel was soaked in blood.
“You need to go away now.”
Should I tell her the truth? It was probably too late, and if she were any sort of law-abiding citizen, she would go straight to the police.
She showed no signs of leaving, just an unnerving curiosity. “What happened?”
I ran through several explanations, but none seemed plausible. I went with the truth. “My past caught up with me.”
“You need someone to fix that before you pass out from blood loss. It doesn’t look good.”
“I can fix it. You need to leave. It is not safe to be here with me.”
The pain in my arm was not getting any better, and the blood was starting to run down my arm again as the tourniquet loosened. She was right, I needed it fixed sooner rather than later.
I opened the door and let her in. It was a mistake, a huge mistake, and I would have to deal with the consequences. Once inside, she turned on the light and saw the pool of blood just inside the door and the trail leading to the lounge. She followed the trail and turned into the lounge, turned on the light, and no doubt saw the two dead men.
I expected her to scream. She didn’t.
She gave me a good, hard look, perhaps trying to see if I was dangerous. Killing people wasn’t something you looked the other way about. She would have to go to the police.
“What happened here?”
“I came home from the cafe and two men were waiting for me. I used to work for the Government, but no longer. I suspect these men were here to repay a debt. I was lucky.”
“Not so much, looking at your arm.”
She came closer and inspected it.
“Sit down.”
She found another towel and wrapped it around the wound, retightening the tourniquet to stem the bleeding.
“Do you have medical supplies?”
I nodded. “Upstairs.” I had a medical kit, and on the road, I usually made my own running repairs. Another old habit I hadn’t quite shaken off yet.
She went upstairs, rummaged, and then came back. I wondered briefly what she would think of the unmade bed, though I was not sure why it might interest her.
She helped me remove my shirt and then cleaned the wound. Fortunately, she didn’t have to remove a bullet. It was a clean wound but it would require stitches.
When she’d finished, she said, “Your friend said one day this might happen.”
No prizes for guessing who that friend was, and it didn’t please me that she had involved Maria.
“Alisha?”
“She didn’t tell me her name, but I think she cares a lot about you. She said trouble has a way of finding you, gave me a phone and said to call her if something like this happened.”
“That was wrong of her to do that.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. Will you call her?”
“Yes. I can’t stay here now. You should go now. Hopefully, by the time I leave in the morning, no one will ever know what happened here, especially you.”
