by Mark Dawson
#
“MR. SMITH!”
Milton stopped at the exit. He turned. Cynthia Whitchurch was hurrying toward him.
“Are you going?”
“Yes,” he said. “They haven’t seen one another for months. They don’t need me around to get in the way.”
“But you’ve done so much for them. For both of them.”
“There’ll be another time for that,” Milton said. “I’ll wait until you get them asylum.”
“That might be a few months.”
“But you think you can?”
She paused. “It’s possible. I mean, on a compassionate level, there’s no question that they should get it. What’s happened to them—everyone can see they deserve it. But what’s right and what’s legally possible are not the same thing.”
“But?”
“I’m quite confident.”
Milton put out his hand. “I have to go,” he said.
“You have my number,” she said. “Give me a call in a couple of weeks. I think this will all be sorted out by then.” The lawyer shook his hand. “What are you doing now?” she asked him. “I was going to buy you a coffee.”
“It’s kind of you, but I can’t—I’ve got a plane to catch.”
“Somewhere nice?”
“Not that kind of trip, I’m afraid.”
“Business?”
“That’s right,” Milton said. “Business.”
He shook her hand again, told her to call him if there was anything that he could do to help, and pushed the exit door open. He passed through security, nodded to the guard standing by the X-ray machine, and went outside into the cold, bright morning.
EPILOGUE: Libya
Chapter Sixty-Five
ALI TESSEMA OPENED HIS EYES. His bedroom was dark. The window was open, and he could hear the soft susurration of the sea as it rolled against the beach below.
He thought that he had heard something.
He lay still, damp sheets clinging to his sweaty body, and listened. There was nothing. No sound. He must have been dreaming. He had been drinking all night, expensive Russian vodka that he had smuggled into the country to beat the ban on alcohol. There had been rather a lot of it, and he had been drunk when he had finally stumbled into bed. He still felt a little drunk, and now he was hearing things.
He exhaled, allowing his shoulders to sink back against the mattress, and closed his eyes again.
“Wake up, Ali.”
He stopped breathing; his heart felt as if it had stopped beating in his chest. He put down his right arm and levered himself to a half-sitting position. The gentle wind parted the curtains, with just enough moonlight admitted for him to see the man sitting in the armchair on the other side of the room. He was dressed all in black: black combat trousers, a black tactical jacket and black boots. He was wearing a black balaclava that obscured everything save for his eyes and mouth. His left leg was crossed over his right knee and his hands were in his lap. Ali glanced down and saw a pistol in his right hand, the metal sparkling in the dim light.
“Wake up.”
Ali had a pistol of his own in the drawer next to the bed. “Who are you?”
The man turned his head so that a little more light fell down onto him. His lips were pressed together in a tight line.
Ali’s left hand was still beneath the covers. He carefully, slowly, started to slide it toward the drawer. “What is your name?”
“Milton.”
“My guards?”
“Dead, Ali.” The man stood and indicated the room with a flick of the pistol. “This is a very nice place. It must have been very expensive.”
Ali’s throat was suddenly very dry. He swallowed.
“How much did it cost?”
He found that he couldn’t answer.
“You can’t remember?”
His hand was at the edge of the mattress. “Yes. It was expensive.”
The man gestured down at him. “Don’t bother,” he said. “Your gun’s over there.”
Ali looked. His pistol and the box of ammunition that he kept with it were on the table next to the armchair.
The breeze died down and the curtains closed. The light disappeared. The man was a shadow now, a darker shape amid the gloom. Ali could feel his presence, close, but he dared not move.
“How many people had to die so you could have a house like this?”
He tried to swallow. “I run a business. I help people. I give them a chance to find a better life.”
“No, you don’t. You profit from the pain and misery of desperate men and women. Men and women and children. I’ve seen how you do business. I’ve been on one of your boats. I’ve seen the others that didn’t make it to port because they were unfit for the voyage. You are a parasite. You’re worse than a parasite. Did you really think that there would never be a reckoning for what you’ve done?”
The shadow was at the foot of the bed. The curtains parted again and the light glinted off the barrel of a pistol that had been raised and aimed at him.
“Please. What do you want? Money? Please. I give you more money than you have ever seen before.”
“Your money can’t help you now.”
The bullet hit him in the forehead. He was dead before he could hear the sound of the gun.
#
MILTON LEFT THE SPENT round on the floor of the bedroom. He was armed with a Beretta 92FS 9x19mm pistol, the sidearm favoured by the COMSUBIN—the Comando Subacquei ed Incursori—the special forces unit of the Italian navy. The weapons were reasonably exotic, and Hicks had secured them from a dealer who asked no questions in exchange for a significant mark-up on the purchase price. He had purchased their ammunition from Fiocchi Munizioni, the manufacturer from Lecco that had long been favoured by the Italian military. Milton had no idea how vigorous the investigation into the murders at Ali Tessema’s property would be, but, in the event that it was thorough, it would be a simple enough thing to track the rounds that had killed the men back to Italy, and then to connect the murders with the COMSUBIN’s previous assassinations of smugglers in Tripoli and Zuwara. The dots would be easy to join. The investigation would be shelved.
He went back through the house. It was a large place on the outskirts of Tripoli that Ali had been given by the militia that had confiscated it after the fall of Gaddafi. It had belonged to one of the colonel’s playboy sons and still bore the signs of the opulence that was once a family trademark. The main reception room was a mess, with smashed bottles of Moet and Dom Perignon on the floor and a large pile of cocaine on a white Pearl River baby grand. Milton’s boots crunched fragments of a shattered vodka bottle into the thick carpet. There were six men and two women in the room. All of them were still asleep. Milton had passed through the room without disturbing them, and none of them had stirred while he had attended to his business. His Beretta had been fitted with a silencer, and the cylinder had flattened the noise of the gunshot. The revellers would wake up in the morning none the wiser to the execution that had happened just a few feet from where they had been sleeping off the excesses of the night before. Then they would find Ali’s body, and they would realise how lucky they had been.
Death had passed among them, and they had been spared.
There was a sliding door into the garden. Hicks was waiting for him outside. He was wearing the same gear as Milton, but he was armed with a Beretta ARX 160, the modular assault rifle that the Italians preferred. He was standing by in the event that the drunken partygoers awoke. There had been no need to use it.
Milton exchanged a nod of affirmation with Hicks and descended the steps into the garden. The house was built in a style that would have been more at home in Malibu, minimalist in design, painted white and erected on stilts. They passed bamboo garden furniture and a hot tub installed on a veranda that overlooked the sea. Milton retraced their steps to the guardhouse and glanced in to see the bodies of the two guards that he had shot before they had even had the chance to take out their weapo
ns. He kept on, passing the infinity pool and the body of the first guard; Milton had killed him with a silenced headshot from ten metres that had seen the man’s lifeless body topple into the water.
The guards had been slow and lazy, as if the very thought of an attack on their patron was preposterous.
Milton led the way through the exit and onto the path that overlooked the ocean.
“All done?” Hicks asked in a tight, quiet voice as they calmly walked away.
“All done.”
Milton looked down at the jetty at the foot of the cliff. The jet skis they had used to approach the property were tied up, bobbing up and down on the moonlight-flecked swells. He gazed out beyond them, into the infinite darkness of the sea and the sky, and wondered how many more Ali Tessemas there were, and how many of them had sent out overloaded boats on dangerous voyages that night.
“Let’s go.”
A WORD FROM MARK
Thank you for reading this boxed set. I hope you enjoyed it.
Milton’s story begins in a series of fast paced thrillers that take him (and you) all around the world.
The first story, THE CLEANER, tells how Milton left Group Fifteen.
The next story, SAINT DEATH, sees Milton resurface on the Mexican side of the US border, in a thrilling confrontation with an international drug cartel.
THE DRIVER finds Milton in San Francisco, investigating a series of murders for which he is the prime suspect.
And 1000 YARDS is a dip into his case files. Milton is sent into the most dangerous failed state in the world – North Korea – with orders to assassinate a key military target.
The books are available individually. But you can save 25% by downloading the Box Set (containing all four thrillers).
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But I do have something much more powerful and effective than that, and it's something that those publishers would kill to get their hands on.
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Thank you very much.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to the members of Team Milton for technical advice and support. Thanks to Pauline Nolet and Jennifer McIntyre for editorial assistance. And thanks to you for investing your time in reading this story. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
John Milton will be back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Dawson is the author of the breakout John Milton, Beatrix Rose and Soho Noir series. He makes his online home at www.markjdawson.com. You can connect with Mark on Twitter at @pbackwriter, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/markdawsonauthor and you should send him an email at [email protected] if the mood strikes you.
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John Milton is blackmailed into finding his predecessor as Number One. But she’s a ghost, too, and just as dangerous as him. He finds himself in deep trouble, playing the Russians against the British in a desperate attempt to save the life of his oldest friend.
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On the run from his own demons, John Milton treks through the Michigan wilderness into the town of Truth. He’s not looking for trouble, but trouble's looking for him. He finds himself up against a small-town cop who has no idea with whom he is dealing, and no idea how dangerous he is.
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Salvation Row
Milton finds himself in New Orleans, returning a favour that saved his life during Katrina. When a lethal adversary from his past takes an interest in his business, there’s going to be hell to pay.
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Headhunters
Milton barely escaped from Avi Bachman with his life. But when the Mossad’s most dangerous renegade agent breaks out of a maximum security prison, their second fight will be to the finish.
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The Ninth Step
Milton’s attempted good deed becomes a quest to unveil corruption at the highest levels of government and murder at the dark heart of the criminal underworld. Milton is pulled back into the game, and that’s going to have serious consequences for everyone who crosses his path.
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In Cold Blood
Beatrix Rose was the most dangerous assassin in an off-the-books government kill squad until her former boss betrayed her. A decade later, she emerges from the Hong Kong underworld with payback
on her mind. They gunned down her husband and kidnapped her daughter, and now the debt needs to be repaid. It’s a blood feud she didn’t start but she is going to finish.
