by Ted Denton
A new email alert blinked onto the screen catching his eye. He opened it. Sent from [email protected]. A single line read:
DANIEL, PLEASE BE VERY CAREFUL
Why would Matilda be emailing him this? Attached to the email was a scanned newspaper obituary of a veteran Russian investigative journalist. She had published a series of articles in the mid-nineteen nineties about a vast corporation named Rublucon and its links to both serious organised crime and the upper reaches of the post-Soviet Russian government. The huge energy deals brokered had apparently provided a convenient cover and conduit for money laundering for the notoriously violent Russian crime families who had originated in the gulags of the oppressive Stalin regime decades before. They had been formed as a secret society living an alternative, strongly structured and codified way of life. Known as the Vory, they lived by the thieves’ code, rejecting all work or acknowledgement of the state or religion. They had thrived over the years and, as capitalism had spread, many of the more charismatic leaders had seized considerable power and wealth. The journalist had dedicated her life and career to uncovering corruption and the obituary was posted defiantly on the front page of the newspaper she had represented. She had apparently taken her own life, jumping from a bridge in St. Petersburg. She had no record of depression and the authenticity of her suicide had been questioned with calls for an investigation into her death. No action had ever been taken.
Sweat dripped off his forehead, a droplet splashing onto the screen of his device. Daniel punched in a hurried text message to the number he had dialled a little while earlier when he had left his voicemail for Matilda.
Thanks for the warning. Russians do seem dangerous! You have to see the video I just took of Sergei admitting cheating out here on Tour! It proves me and Bob right!! Let’s meet up. XXX
His intense concentration was broken by the sound of a card clicking in the door. The maid had been in hours before. He swivelled in the chair and peered through the glass door of the balcony to see two men step inside the room looking around furtively. He recognised Razor immediately, flashing back to Andy Sharples throwing ‘the mongrel’, as he’d called him, off his chair at the bar. He didn’t recognise the other guy but the man was huge, probably standing around six foot five. Massive muscular thighs bulging through tight jeans, supported a towering frame. He sported a thick leather belt complete with a large metal buckle in the shape of a hissing cobra’s head. Two evil looking fangs protruded menacingly from the serpent’s open mouth. Instinctively, his hand touched tentatively at the tender scratches on his torso. Could that belt have caused the cuts on my chest? The beast stooped naturally to avoid the frame as he came through the door behind Razor who by now was quickly tugging at drawers and opening cupboards, rifling through Daniel’s bags and clothing.
Frozen outside on the balcony, his natural instinct would have been to challenge the men who were clearly breaking into his room. Given the recent grotesque violence he had witnessed, coupled with the menacing presence of this mono-browed giant accompanying Razor, Daniel held himself back. He edged to the side of the balcony further out of sight and peeked through a chink in the blind back into the room. By now, Razor was frenziedly rifling through Daniel’s briefcase, strewing papers over the floor. He was hell bent on finding something specific it seemed. The ‘mono-brow’ twisted his neck to the side, cracking his bones with a sickening, audible crunch. He bent down to lift the bed with a single paw, peering underneath. They’d be coming out on the balcony soon, no doubt about it. Daniel was sweating again. He scurried back to the table and hurriedly grabbed the tablet. Sticking it under his arm he looked around for a way of escape knowing he’d never make it out through the room and past the uninvited guests. It was too far to jump onto the concrete below and besides he seriously hated heights—just the act of looking straight down over the railings made him reel back with his head spinning. There was a four foot gap between his and the next balcony, which was deserted except for an array of brightly coloured swimming shorts, frilly black bikini bottoms and enormous beach towels drying over the back of chairs. No time to waste. Steadying himself against the wall and hoisting his foot onto the balcony rail Daniel strained to pull himself up so that he was standing balanced on the top edge. Puffing his cheeks and blowing out sharply, he bent his knees and sprang frog-like as far as he could towards the adjacent balcony just as the glass doors clicked and slid open behind him.
It was an impressive leap and Daniel cleared the metal railings of the adjacent balcony with inches to spare, landing on his toes in a squat. The force of the jump banged his knees up into his chin hard. He grunted as his mouth filled with the bitter iron taste of blood, as teeth bit into tongue. The tablet remained tightly clenched into his chest.
‘The fucking computer’s not here, is it Razor?’ came a deep Russian accent above him, spitting out like a machine gun. Staccato. Cold. Stone on stone.
Daniel held his breath and, twisting his neck uncomfortably for a better view, peered upwards through the crack in the railing. Razor stood on the balcony just a few feet away, wiping sweat from his forehead in the heat. On his wrist glistened a slim gold watch with an old cracked black leather strap. Daniel swallowed hard. His granddad’s watch. No doubt about it. The bastard must have stolen it on the night out at the Irish bar. The night when he’d passed out. Had he been drugged? He’d certainly been robbed. And sliced up, he now presumed, with the snake’s teeth on that monster’s belt buckle as he was probably dragged back and dumped in his room. He wanted to scream, to fight, to exact some form of retribution. He checked himself. Closing his eyes tightly instead, Daniel waited. Frozen still with fear, sweat dripping off his nose and onto his shirt, desperately trying not to breathe, to make no sound whatsoever.
The door slid closed above him and after another few minutes of no further movement or sound Daniel figured he could finally dare to move. Crawling across the concrete floor of his neighbours’ balcony he tugged on the door handle. His only chance of escape. It opened first time, the heavy door smoothly gliding across the well-oiled gear mechanism. Stolen glances inside the room revealed it was empty and he slithered inside. Steam swirled, billowing around the floor. The sound of the shower and a woman humming a lazy, sweet melodic tune emanated from the bathroom. Without waiting to be announced Daniel covered the floor of the bedroom in just a few short strides and entered out into the hotel corridor, peering nervously around him. His heart pulsed urgently inside his chest.
He had no idea where the room invaders were but he needed to get out of the corridor. Fast. Rather than take the elevator down into the main lobby Daniel took a strategic decision to head quickly in the opposite direction and darted down a maze of eerily deserted corridors past endless rows of identical rooms until a heavy door marked with the green sign for an emergency exit came into view. He ripped it open and lunged into the back stairway panting hard. In stark contrast to the opulence of the hotel rooms and finely wallpapered corridors, the stairs were left cold and bare; an unloved functional afterthought. But they were empty and Daniel needed to escape the hotel without being seen. His footsteps clattered a noisy echo, reverberating around the concrete stairwell and filling him with fear, unable to separate his own noise from the sound of any pursuers. He knew he was now embroiled in something dangerous and no matter what Silvio had ordered him to do, this was now about survival. Daniel had to look after himself.
He cleared the stairs in just over two minutes, keeping a consistent rhythm trotting down through the floors, twisting and turning down towards the ground. On arriving at the ground floor Daniel dropped his shoulder and slammed into the metal bar of the fire escape at the end of the stairwell, not stopping nor caring if it triggered an alarm. He burst out into evening dusk. Night was closing in.
He scoured the immediate surroundings for Razor and the mono-browed giant. Nothing. Gripping the tablet in his hand he walked briskly away from the hotel as naturally as he could in the direction of the only
person he felt he could trust out here. Matilda. A pair of well-nourished middle-aged women in brightly-coloured shorts chatted animatedly as he passed by in silence, head down. He assiduously avoided eye contact with them as he trod the winding cobbled path towards the service truck park.
Daniel rapped his knuckles on the door of the physio-truck. The door was unlocked but no one was inside. He tested the locker with Matilda’s name stencilled on it, but it was locked shut. Looking around at the empty space, he considered for a moment the best course of action. It was clear that he needed to find a safe, discreet place to hide the tablet which was the focus of so much apparent unwanted attention. At least until this was all sorted out. Remembering how he had watched Michael store some equipment in the space beneath the bench-seats at the side of the truck, Daniel flipped the cushions up and eased the quarry inside, covering it with some discarded towels. He’d let Matilda know later.
He headed directly to the practice green where he hoped to find Bob Wallace. There, the old gnarly coach was sat in crumpled fashion on an upturned bucket of balls, cleaning a sand wedge with a damp rag, puffing at a tatty, yellow-stained, hand-rolled cigarette.
He cleared his throat to announce his arrival and the old man looked up into Daniel eyes and nodded. It all poured out after that. In a single continuous and emotional diatribe Daniel recounted the nefarious happenings of that afternoon. The break-in. His granddad’s stolen watch on Razor’s wrist. The data pointing to the truth about Bob’s own theory on the tournament fixing. Underpinning it all was the video that Daniel had taken that very day, recorded on his tablet from under the portacabin, of Sergei and Andy themselves discussing their illegal gambling ring and the conspiracy to fix tournaments by the undue influence on players to drop shots. It was cathartic and, by the time he’d finished, Daniel felt emotionally drained. He waited, expecting some profound response.
Instead Wallace coughed up a dose of mucous from deep within the recesses of his beleaguered lungs and spat it quivering onto the grass at his feet. Finally he spoke.
‘Those fucking dirty bastards. I knew it,’ he snorted, taking a final drag of his dying tab before stubbing it out on the side of his golf shoe. ‘I’ve got some thinking to do, son. If we’re gonna get these guys out of the game for good, we’ve got to make sure we do it the right way. I’ve been laughed at and dismissed as a crazy old fool for bringing this to the PGA’s attention before. We need to take your proof and nail them once and for all and that’s for damn sure. Meet me in Muldoon’s Irish bar in town at ten tonight, laddie, and we’ll make a battle plan.’
Tired, conflicted and aching as the adrenaline depleted from his bloodstream, Daniel mooched slowly back towards the hotel complex in the fading light. Dusk was falling and the fireflies danced together in chaotic spirals. As he passed the immense and eerily silent Tour equipment trucks, well-secured for the night, Daniel’s eye was drawn to an attractive woman with bright red lipstick and heels, pink tailored shorts and a snugly filled white T-shirt. She stood alone in the shadows of the trucks fiddling deliberately with a large, wide-lens camera.
‘Excuse me there,’ she called to him as he passed by. ‘Excuse me sir, you don’t by any chance know how to get this to work do you? My husband will be so cross.’ She was smiling now and holding out the camera towards Daniel, imploring him to take it with big, sad, heavily made-up eyes.
‘Technology’s not my thing I’m afraid,’ he replied somewhat untruthfully, holding his hand aloft apologetically and continuing by.
‘Oh, please take a look, I’m sure you’re much better at it than me,’ she continued, batting those long eyelids and stepping towards him.
Daniel softened. He had always been one to assist a damsel in distress even if he just wasn’t in the mood at all. He wondered where she was from. What was that undercurrent of an accent? European? Slavic? Not Russian?
Suddenly a sharp blow to the back of his head sent him sagging down onto his knees. A second clinical strike followed. And Daniel Ratchet became enveloped inside a sickening, velvety darkness. Floundering. Helpless. He was falling in slow motion. Towards silence. And then…
...nothing.
Chapter 18
SPAIN. BAYFIED MANDARIN GOLF COURSE. EUROPEAN TOUR: DAY FIVE. 18.23 HRS.
I had managed to buy a fresh set of clothes and underwear en route from the airport. Looking and feeling now a lot less like an extra from a ‘Die Hard’ movie and somewhere closer to a semi-respectable member of society, I sauntered amongst the dispersing golf fans at the conclusion to the presentation ceremony. Avoiding any eye contact, keeping my head down, studying my phone. People tend to remember a big man with a long nasty scar across his face staring at them. Besides, I was reading updated intelligence from Ella that had beeped through on my device. Even serious messages and highly detailed encrypted data packets were signed off with kisses or some emoji or other depending on her mood. Bemused at first, after a fashion it had begun to really tickle me. Showing that someone cared. In this instance the intel was a steer from HQ outlining a second interview with Bob Wallace taken over the phone. And a detail previously missed: he had recalled that Daniel was upset with regard to the behaviour of some of the golf caddies. His grandfather’s watch had gone missing, presumed stolen by the same. It wasn’t much to go on but it was the start that I needed. Hunter was in the game.
I neared the 18th green and caught sight of a gangly Spanish teenager polishing the blades on a set of irons, meticulously replacing them into an empty golf bag. I sidled up to him, casually explaining I was the brother of a caddy involved in the tournament and asked where they might typically be found.
Steered in the right direction, I soon reached a sprawling amorphous cluster of oversized trailers and trucks parked to the rear of the hotel, casting oblique angular shadows in the late afternoon sun. Voices rumbled from behind one of the trucks. I flipped onto my stomach and commando-crawled under the supports of the massive trailer. I manoeuvred to a vantage point where I could see and hear the scene playing out perfectly in front of me whilst remaining completely out of sight. A fat man in long blue shorts and white socks was sitting on a red plastic chair which looked as if it might collapse at any point under the strain. He was leafing lazily through a ledger with freshly-licked fingers whilst a slighter man with a head of cropped ginger hair peered over his shoulder. A third man with olive skin and a thick glossy mane sat disinterested on an upturned crate. He smoked a cigarette.
‘I see Michael paid up this week then?’ the fat man chirped in an unexpectedly high pitched Liverpudlian accent, an incongruous fit with the vast bulk of his body.
‘Aye, paid up in full. The big German sausage won’t make that mistake again in a hurry. Account closed shall we say,’ sniggered the ginger rat in a guttural Scottish patter.
‘Good to see we’re on track, Sean. Sharples will be pleased to see we’ve made up the lost ground on shakedowns from the town this week too.’
‘Aye. No bother at all big man,’ came the casual response.
The two men left together. Their remaining companion silently removed a handgun from a clip on his belt, stripped it slowly down to its constituent parts on his lap and began to delicately oil the mechanism with slick droplets from a miniature pipette. He remained seated on his crate and I surmised that he was actually guarding the door to the truck behind him. It would be good to take a look inside and find out more about these ‘payments’ and the ’shakedowns’ that the caddies were making.
Daniel’s instincts had been correct all along. Right now I didn’t have the time though. I needed to contact a number of key individuals on site whom Ella had identified might hold vital information on the background to the agent’s disappearance. First and foremost I needed to locate Matilda Axgren, Ratchet’s girlfriend, and Bob Wallace himself, the coach who had initially contacted the Hand of God about this escalating situation.
I wriggled back out of my hiding place and pushed myself up to my feet, wiping the palms o
f my hands across my trousers. As I turned to leave, I noticed two blonde women walking through the car park together, one older than the other. The first wore a tight pony tail scraped back to reveal a sour scowl of discontentment on her heavily tanned, deeply lined face. Her taller companion glided beside her. The face of an angel, beautiful piercing blue eyes framed with long platinum blonde hair, falling in loose curls around her shoulders. I recognised her instantly from the photograph downloaded from the research file. This was Matilda Axgren. And in real life she was some hot piece.
I let the women pass by a short way and followed at a discreet distance. The older of the two turned and headed towards a green sign which pointed in the direction of the hotel spa complex. Matilda continued further into the car park and finally stopped to unlock the boot to a black Nissan Micra, fishing about for something inside. I came up beside her silently and she spun round startled, incapable of disguising the cocktail of surprise and anger splashed across her face. ‘Who the fuck are you? Get away from me,’ she snapped, recoiling as I outstretched my hand to reassure her.
‘Relax Matilda, I’m a friend of Daniel Ratchet. I’m trying to find him’.
‘Get away from me. Daniel’s got nothing to do with me anymore. Leave me alone’.
‘Please. I just need to ask you some questions Matilda. I need to find Daniel.’
Matilda slid round the side of the car and fumbled with the keys in the lock. She was obviously not in a talkative mood. I followed round the vehicle reaching her as she opened the car door, clambering hurriedly inside. I forced my knee into the gap to prevent her from locking herself in and driving away. She slammed the door angrily against my thigh in petulance.
