And Then You're Dead

by Dan Latus

  All Ted, and the service, really wanted out of this was to know that Jack Olsson’s killer had not got away with it. Had, in fact, paid with his life. That was what he wanted as well. It was why he was here.

  So hit the guy. Then he and, soon, Ted, too, could get on with their lives in retirement, with Jack avenged, honour satisfied, and the bad guy taken off the board.

  He started fitting the rifle together.

  The cloud hung heavily on the moor that morning. Puffs of it came and went with unseen eddies of cool, damp air. Visibility was poor. The scope he was using kept clouding up. Every half minute or so he had to wipe the lens clear. Sometimes the damned thing was misleading him. Sometimes he imagined he was seeing movement in a small pinewood up to the left, just above the Tait place.

  Shit! There was movement. It wasn’t his imagination.

  He cleaned the scope again and re-focussed it carefully. Yep. Someone there, all right. A guy. And – would you believe it? – he was studying the Tait house through field glasses.

  Riley frowned. What the hell was this? Competition? Someone else wanting revenge, or to know what had happened to all them bucks?

  He kept the scope focussed on the pinewood. It was definitely a guy. Just the one. And he was watching, just as he was himself.

  He pulled out a camera and with the zoom lens took a few photos of the watcher, his face only partly obscured by twigs and branches.

  Ten minutes later, the guy moved back through the pinewood and disappeared. Riley stayed where he was for some time after that, deep in thought, ignoring the rain that had begun to fall steadily now and was coming across the hillside in hissing sheets.

  This altered things. It could be a game changer. Someone else interested in Tait. A rival outfit? Or was it a repeat burglary? Ted had told him about the burglary earlier that year. A voyeur even, hoping to catch sight of Tait’s wife coming out of the shower? What the hell was it?

  Impossible to know. But it did alter things. Demanded more thought, more time. He would put things on hold. Something unexpected was going on. He needed to know what it was before he pulled the trigger.

  A half hour later, he began to ease himself back through the thicket of gorse. There was nothing more he could learn from here. He needed to look elsewhere. In the meantime, he would send his photos back to Ted in DC, and see if the people there could come up with a name to go with the face.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next day started off just the same, weather-wise. The drizzle was incessant, and the low cloud didn’t look like lifting at all. It would be another cold, wet day on the moor. Riley donned his wet weather gear again and set out to maintain his vigil once more.

  The day started off normally for the Taits, which he found surprising given the watcher he’d spotted the previous day. Back then, he’d wondered if something out of the ordinary was about to kick off, but it hadn’t. Not yet, at least.

  The Tait family got up, had breakfast and went about their business. Tait himself set off in his truck again to the house he was working on. The woman got herself and the boy ready, and then took the boy to school. After that, she did a bit of shopping in the village before visiting someone who lived near the pub, probably for coffee.

  That was when Riley decided to switch his focus back to Tait. He set off for the building project.

  It was an old stone farmhouse where Tait was working. Riley’s guess was that it had been empty a long, long time. The roof had collapsed, in part, and the chimney stack looked ready to fall in the next high wind. High grass and scrub had grown right up to the front doorway, and in the nearby shelter belt of Scots pine there were a lot of fallen trees. Tait had his work cut out, and so far had not made a lot of progress. Much hard work and patience were going to be required, in Riley’s humble opinion.

  He left his car a good half mile away, in a layby the highway authority had earmarked as a good place to store gravel for maintenance purposes. He walked around the edge of a couple of fields and made his way into the woodland near the house.

  Then he settled down to wait, keeping one eye on the house, where Tait was busy clearing out debris and fallen timbers. With the other eye, with his ears and with a sniper’s extra sensitivity, he monitored his surroundings constantly, searching for anything that shouldn’t rightly be there.

  Mid-morning it happened again. He was just beginning to wonder if he was wasting his time. Thinking maybe he should call it a day, ice Tait and get the hell out. That was when he spotted two guys watching Tait from behind a hedge alongside the road, some distance away. They didn’t stay long. And nothing else happened. But it was enough. He knew now for sure that he had competition – and that Tait was in even greater trouble.

  The day after that was different almost from the start. The Taits got up and made themselves ready for the day, as usual. But when Tait left the house he was wearing a dark business suit and he slipped into a saloon car, a VW Passat, instead of climbing into his old truck. Then he took off fast, seemingly in a hurry to have a different kind of day for once.

  Riley grimaced. He had been caught flat-flooted. He hadn’t expected anything like that. What the hell was the guy up to?

  He stayed where he was for a while, wondering what the rest of the family was going to do today. The same old thing, it looked like. At 8.30, the woman and kid emerged, and set off for the school. Reassuringly, it looked like being a normal day for them.

  There was no sign of anyone else watching the family home. He gave it a good couple of hours before withdrawing from cover, but no-one else had appeared in that time.

  None of the Taits had come home, either. The house was empty.

  He hung around all day, checking back periodically, but nothing else happened to or around the Tait place. The guy was gone, somewhere. The boy was in school. The woman was out shopping, and visiting. That was it. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Riley did some thinking, and he did some more wandering around the village and the surrounding area. The place was beginning to feel familiar to him, but there was always some little corner he hadn’t explored. That day he spent some time in and around the eleventh century church, admiring the stone carvings and the wood panelling, the tombstones and the ancient yew trees. Then in late afternoon, he returned to his station on the hillside, ready to resume his watch on the Taits, and curious to see if anyone else showed up.

  They didn’t.

  And that was how it was for the next few days. Tait was gone somewhere. His family carried on as usual. Riley spotted no-one else watching the house.

  But late one afternoon everything changed. The woman and the boy didn’t return home, and the house remained dark as night fell.

  Chapter Seventeen

  George Riley waited with the patience of a sniper. Some-thing had happened, and he knew from experience that once things started happening they didn’t stop. So he waited a long time. He waited until John Tait came home. By then, it was early evening, and getting dark.

  Tait seemed out of sorts. It was soon clear that he didn’t like the house being empty. This was unexpected. He went through every room repeatedly, looking for something. Looking for them, probably. Looking for his family.

  Riley could guess the next step. He didn’t need to stay any longer. So he slipped away and made his way back to where he had left the car, shaking and flexing to shake off the stiffness as he went. It had been a long day.

  He was past his best for this kind of thing. One time it wouldn’t have bothered him, sitting still for half a day. He could have waited two or three days in a row, longer even, if necessary, without stirring or being particularly uncomfortable. Not now, though. Half a day now, and he could feel the arthritis stirring, making itself felt in his back and in his knees.

  Not in his arms or hands, though, thank God. Once that happened, he really would be over the hill. You couldn’t be a sniper any more, or much of a hunter either, once your hands and fingers turned stiff on you.

  He d
rove into the village and sat and waited there. Sure enough, Tait’s car soon appeared. Then Tait started checking around, visiting the school and different shops, looking for them. Looking for his family. Unable to understand why they were not where they should be.

  Something had happened, obviously. Some crisis or emergency? But if it was that, surely there would have been a message or a clue left by somebody?

  Riley pursed his lips and thought about it. Tait had not been expecting this. His wife and son were not where he had expected them to be, and he was deeply upset, verging on panicked. But why?

  His guess was that it was something to do with whoever else it was watching Tait and his house. Had they abducted the woman and the boy? It was beginning to seem possible. He couldn’t think of anything else that fit the bill.

  Whether or not that had happened, though, all this running around like a headless chicken indicated to Riley’s satisfaction that Tait was indeed the guy. Ted, and his sources, had got it right, after all.

  But he still wasn’t ready to take him out. Not yet. He wanted to know what was going on before he did that. Being in possession of only half the picture never was satisfactory.

  While he was waiting to see what Tait did next, a call from base came in on his phone.

  ‘How’s it going, George?’

  ‘OK, Ted. Just going through the checks. Making sure.’

  ‘Right. Those photos you sent?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You wanted a name. Try Alexei Kuznetsov. That fit?’

  ‘Dunno. Should it?’

  ‘He works for Vassily Yugov.’

  ‘Yugov?’ George said with surprise. ‘It’s been a while since I last heard that name mentioned.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Me, too.’

  ‘Don’t tell me he’s around?’

  ‘It looks like he could be.’

  ‘Know any reason why?’

  ‘Not offhand, no.’

  Yugov, he thought afterwards. That bastard! What was his interest in Tait?

  Olsson’s $10,000,000? It was very possible.

  Maybe he was someone else who had linked Tait to events in Ukraine and Slovakia all those years ago. In his case, though, it would be the money trail he was following. Yugov wouldn’t be worrying over who killed Jack Olsson back then, or looking to get even, either.

  Yugov, eh? Well, well. That was something else for him to think about. The job he had come to do no longer seemed quite so simple. He gave a wry smile. Hadn’t it always been like that?

  Riley returned to his hide on the hillside. The rain eased off for a while, and then came back again stronger than ever. I’m getting too old for this, he thought, listening to it pattering on his waterproof hat. Correction: I am too old for it!

  But he stayed where he was. Things had got more interesting. A hot shower, a hot meal and a hot, dry bed were certainly appealing, but something was going on here now. He didn’t want to miss it. If he hit Tait now, he never would find out what it was.

  He was reasonably comfortable. Warm, and dry inside. He had a bottle of water and a couple of sandwiches. He never had needed much more when he was on a job. Even more in his favour, in the dark he could stretch and move without risking giving away his position.

  Beyond that, he still had the stoicism demanded by his old trade. He could sit and watch, almost without movement, for a long, long time, even now.

  The lights went out in the house shortly before midnight. That was when it got even more interesting. A big SUV vehicle arrived in the drive and parked behind Tait’s car, blocking it in. Four men got out and moved towards the house.

  Then some sort of scuffle developed in the shadows beside the house. Figures spilled and sprawled in all directions. One broke free and headed at speed not towards the vehicles in the driveway but down the garden. Three others followed.

  When the first figure passed under an external light at the back of the house, Riley could see it was Tait, moving fast. He reached the bottom of the garden, scrambled over the wall and began to run at the hillside, heading up towards the moor.

  For a moment, Riley wondered if he had been spotted. Then he saw that Tait was taking a line that would bypass him by fifty yards or so. The figures following Tait were also running now.

  He was fascinated. Although the light was too poor for him to have seen everything that had happened, he had seen enough to believe he wasn’t the only one who wanted Tait dead.

  For a few minutes, he had even felt superfluous to requirements. The competition had come in a gang of four, more than enough, he would have thought, to take out one man. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Not yet, at least.

  Through his night-vision scope he had watched the shadowy drama unfold. As Tait’s visitors neared the back door of the house, the door swung open and Tait erupted explosively to lay into them without hesitation or inhibition. One man went down instantly. The others were hurled aside as if by a hurricane force. Within seconds, the ground was clear and Tait was speeding for the hillside.

  Riley nodded, muttered something incomprehensible and clenched his fist, caught up in the sudden violence.

  It looked as if Ted Pearson had been right all along. This was the guy. As he’d noted before, Tait wasn’t much to look at in a physical sense, but he had the mental and physical strength and the power of a Special Forces soldier. He’d just shown how capable he was. So this probably was the man who had hit Jack Olsson all those years back. Whatever he’d been doing since that time, he hadn’t lost much of his capability.

  He watched and listened to Tait powering his way up the hillside for a few moments. Then he turned his attention back to the men who had come to do him harm. Three of them were back on their feet now. One stopped briefly to look at the fourth, who was still flat on his back. There was a brief conversation between those on their feet. A quick phone call followed. Then they set off after Tait.

  Riley quickly considered his own options, and decided to go with the pack. He wanted to see what happened next. But he wasn’t going to run.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tait was stunned by the phone call. When the phone went dead, he slumped against the wall for a few moments, fighting against the despair and panic that were threatening to overwhelm him. This was the nightmare returning, the one he had fought to suppress and deny all these years. It was back. Only it wasn’t actually a nightmare; it was real this time.

  He knew who they were, all right. And he knew what they wanted. After all this time!

  He thumped the wall with frustration. When that failed to make it all go away, he banged his head hard against the wall. Same thing. No difference at all.

  What the hell could he do? He waited for another call. It didn’t come. He wandered around the house, waiting, trying to get some sort of control, trying to calm down and think rationally.

  When he managed to stop beating himself up he returned to the kitchen, where he drew the blinds and switched on the kettle to make himself a coffee.

  Then something occurred to him that he should have thought of earlier. Why hadn’t they told him their demands? Why hadn’t they proposed a deal – his wife and son in exchange for the money?

  He thought about that, and came to a welcome conclusion: they hadn’t got them! They couldn’t have. His wife and son were not in their hands.

  If they had got them, they would simply have told him to hand the money over if he wanted his family back. They hadn’t. So Sam and Kyle must be out there somewhere, in the night, free but unable to come home or let him know what had happened.

  He could be wrong, but the more he thought about it, the more he didn’t think so. It was the only explanation that made sense. Sam must have seen something, and at the first hint of danger she would have grabbed Kyle and ran. Knowing her, she would probably have taken to the hills, as she had occasionally joked she would do if necessary. Until now, it never had been necessary, but now was different.

  So he knew now what he had to do. He would s
earch for them, and find them – and keep them safe. It was as simple as that.

  Hurriedly, but with steady purpose, he ranged through the house, collecting what he needed. Into a backpack went stuff he hadn’t used for years, but that once had been familiar to him as basic survival gear.

  He changed his clothes, donning wet weather gear. What about Sam and Kyle? They could be in need of warm, dry clothing, too, but he had to balance that likelihood against consideration of the weight he would be carrying. Speed over the ground was going to be essential.

  The grim reality, in this weather, was that if they were out there and he didn’t find them soon, they wouldn’t need dry clothing – or anything else, either. Hypothermia would have taken its toll.

  Gloves, boots and socks were what he packed for them. They were going to have to manage with whatever else they were wearing. Hopefully, that included decent outdoor jackets with hoods.

  He added a small stove with a fuel cell to his pack. And then mess tins and a couple of mugs. Some dried food packets. No water, though. There was plenty of that out there.

  All the time, his mental clock was running. He had been packing for fifteen minutes, fifteen precious minutes. It was long enough. He had to get moving.

  Finally, he went to the emergency cache and took out passports and money. He also took the Glock pistol he had acquired from a dead man in Slovakia all those years ago, along with ammunition for it.

  A pause for a final quick think. Then he was out the door, striding into the night, and the wind and rain, heading for the hills. He was gambling. Of all the places Sam could have taken Kyle, he was opting for the one that was most difficult to reach, the one she would feel was safest.

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. As soon as he was outside, he saw the car arrive. They were coming for him. Four of them. He had no doubt who, or what, they were. As they approached, he reached sideways, grabbed a short length of scaffolding pole and laid into them indiscriminately.