by Jake Cross
‘Don’t bet the house,’ Toni said as she hit the computer again. She quickly found the file. Nate stood by her and looked.
It was a Word document with embedded photos. Thirty-seven pages, according to the status bar at the bottom. Toni scrolled quickly, zipping by text and pictures of street maps and landscapes and buildings and people–
Nate slapped her hand away from the page-down button, causing the document to cease scrolling. He jabbed his finger at the page-up button, and the document scrolled the other way, and onto the screen slipped a photograph of a man with wiry ginger hair and beard and freckles, mid-thirties.
‘I know him,’ Nate said. ‘Jesus. I know what this is about.’
HyperX Customs was an old brick building made to look new with wood panelling. It was a squat block with three entrances. One was a single glass door behind which was a reception, neat and shiny with plants and computers and a TV and a fish tank and, during business hours, a sweet girl in a black suit behind a desk. You got to use one of the other two entrances after talking to this girl. Tell her you had a car that needed fixing up or customising, and she’d send you round back, where a corrugated iron shutter delivered vehicles into a grimy workshop. Say you wanted to buy an exotic ride, and she’d escort you round to the side of the building, where folding glass doors led to a showroom.
Five other people worked here. Two mechanics, both guys in their fifties, over thirty years’ experience between them; two bodykit experts, both brash young egos on legs, and an electrician, whose speciality was mammoth stereo systems and insane gadgetry. The old-school veterans and the tattooed players had left for the evening, but the electrician had hung around to meet the three people who arrived at eight that night. He showed them the coffee machine, the TV, various switches, asked them not to go in the showroom, warned them to stay out of the workshop, and then left.
Even though the building often boasted expensive vehicles, this was the first time HyperX had ever hired security to watch the place overnight, and the three guards knew it, and so the first thing they did was go to see the reason why, and that meant ignoring the electrician’s warning.
The workshop was a long, high space that was surprisingly neat and clean. The three security guards stood in the doorway and stared at what they were here to protect: three Rolls-Royce Wraiths, guests for one night only. Shiny and white, already sold to the British elite and awaiting collection, they were wrapped in what looked like thick cling film. The three guards looked, and then they left to go do other things.
At almost midnight, the guards were killing time. Eight hours to go. Carl Webber was in the reception, watching sci-fi on TV, and he planned to be there all night. On the desk, where his feet rested, was a retractable truncheon. With ironic timing, or a trick of his senses, the sound of a spaceship exploding occurred at exactly the same time that the reception door burst open, and that threw him off. So much so that the four masked men who rushed in had him surrounded even before he fully realised what was going on. £29.99 spent on the truncheon, and every penny wasted.
Achala Kaushal was at the showroom doors, which she’d opened to let her cigarette smoke out. She leaned against the frame and stared at the high dark buildings across the way, and listened to Nina Simone through her headphones. Again, noise was to blame. When she saw Webber stumbling towards her in the blackness, flapping his hands, working his mouth wide and fast, she did not hear his words and didn’t know he was trying to warn her. Only when four masked men materialised out of the dark behind him, one holding Webber’s upper arm, did simple curiosity advance into suspicion on its journey towards panic and terror. By then, too late. £8.49 for a 40ml bottle of Farb Gel self-defence spray – wasted.
Jon Agar was in the workshop, where he shouldn’t have been. He had sliced the plastic wrapping around the driver’s door of one of the Wraiths and had been sitting behind the wheel, pretending he was affluent. And doing so in silence, which meant he heard the commotion from another room. Shouting. He heard his pals, and he heard gruff voices he didn’t know. That gave him plenty of time to whip out his weapon, which hadn’t cost him a penny.
He exited the car, aware that if the voices he heard belonged to robbers, then these cars were their target. So he got out of there. But with the roller shutter that led outside locked, the door into the main building was the only way out – or in. He managed to get himself under a table with a long plastic cloth moments before the door was kicked open.
Kneeling, face pressed to the pitted concrete so he could see out of a thin gap between floor and tablecloth, he watched in horror as his two colleagues stumbled into the workshop, followed by blurry black forms that shimmered in the glass as they moved. Just black shapes, but he could tell them apart by flashes of colour on the ends of their arms. Four men in black jeans and tight black pullovers and black balaclavas, but each wearing gloves of a different colour. Blue, white, green, red.
He heard them shouting for his colleagues to sit against the wall, ‘Don’t move! Do fucking nothing!’
Then he heard one say, ‘Where’s the other guy?’ and saw a red glove waving something at them. A long blade. A damn machete. So, they had come prepared, because they knew there were meant to be three guards here.
The black shapes moved. They swarmed over and inside the three Wraiths. They used tools to take the vehicle apart, quickly, like a piranha stripping a carcass. Agar froze in fear, gripping his weapon and hoping the raiders would take their booty and vanish.
Time dragged. Agar controlled his breathing lest ragged puffs gave him away, and his colleagues sat with their heads in their hands, wishing this nightmare away. But eventually the men moved away from the Wraiths. Car parts from the engine bay and the interior, even the three drivers’ seats and the steering wheels, had been scattered across the floor. Two men carried armfuls of loot out of the workshop, returning a few minutes later for another batch. In four trips, everything stripped from the Rolls-Royces was gone, probably in the back of a van outside. And then, beautifully, the four masked men looked ready to leave.
This knowledge put a loosening in Agar’s muscles, and he suddenly felt terrible pain in his knees. He got a hand under him, to raise his chest from the cold floor and relieve the pressure, but that hand held his weapon and it made a soft clack against the concrete. Impossible for the men to have heard it at such a distance, above their own noise, but Agar saw a head flick around, eyes alighting immediately upon the table. If there was a gesture from him to the others, Agar missed it. But he watched all four move towards him, spreading out, planning to circle the table. The pain in his knees sank away once more. With no good escape scenario to promote, his whirling mind settled for praying that the men would somehow overlook the table as they searched the sparse workshop. But he heard their boots from all sides as they encircled the table.
He expected the tablecloth to be whipped off, but instead the entire wooden table flipped away at a kick, and he was exposed like a magician’s rabbit. Four men, staring down at him. The one in front of him, Green Gloves, lifted his machete and grinned. ‘Enjoy the show, did you?’ he said. ‘Up you get.’
An order he wouldn’t dream of disobeying, of course, but Red Gloves wasn’t convinced and instantly lurched forward. When the man took a handful of hair and jerked him upright on his knees, Agar was aware of the weight of the gun in his own hand. But not the arm attached to that hand.
Not until Red Gloves jerked backwards did Agar realise he’d fired. The other three robbers backed away and raised their weapons, yelling. But Red Gloves, some kind of Terminator, this guy, snarled and rushed forward again. This time Agar saw his own outstretched arm, and felt his finger crush the trigger.
Bullet number two made the balaclava flutter as it entered Red Gloves’ face. He staggered back again, and once more made a snarling noise, but there the replay ended. He collapsed as if suddenly boneless, and a pool matching the colour of his gloves started to spread out around his head.
Bl
ue, Green and White ran.
‘His name is Jon Agar. He’d been in prison for firearms offences and a Post Office robbery when he was young. He was a big guy, mean-looking with wiry ginger hair and a ginger beard and tattoos on his neck and the backs of his hands, and I thought he just looked like he’d be good at security. I gave him a job. And he was good at it. Polite to customers, always eager for overtime. He had the patience to sit and watch a place all night alone, or to stand around in a supermarket and smile at old ladies and look mean at groups of teenaged hoodies.’
They had moved to the back of the caravan and were standing close together so the hitman couldn’t overhear as Nate recounted the story of HyperX. Toni was watching his eyes, but Nate was looking over her shoulder, trying to stare out the large window. But it was night and the interior light was on, and that meant he could only see his own paled face. He knew that he would be visible to anyone outside, but at the moment didn’t care about that.
‘The robbers had lethal weapons, and they attacked first, so maybe Jon Agar would have avoided prison for killing the guy. I think he would have, even firing twice. But Agar obviously thought otherwise, what with his record, and the fact that he was not Security Industry Authority licensed. And he wasn’t about to hang around and learn the hard way. So he ran. Ten seconds after he shot the guy, he was out the door and running. And that was the last anyone saw of him. He didn’t even go home to pack. His girlfriend never saw him again. The rumour was that he knew people in America, so he’d gone into hiding over there.’
Nate reached past Toni and pulled the curtains shut, sick now of seeing yet more fear and distress on his own face. He moved back to the sofa and sat before the laptop. Toni sat silently beside him, but with space between them. Nate stared at Agar’s face on the laptop. A face he hadn’t seen in four years, had never expected to see again, yet knew he could never forget. Ten feet away, the hitman was no longer watching, his head turned towards the knife block again, his back to them, maybe pretending to be invisible in the hope they’d forget he existed.
‘That was the big problem. He ran. By running, he was admitting he knew he’d done wrong. A man with prison time for gun offences had now shot and killed a man with an illegal gun. While undertaking duties he wasn’t licensed for. The police ignored that last part until they’d completed their murder investigation, then they came back at us. Pete was listed as company director, so he took the blow. Three-and-a-half grand fine, banned from acting as a director for nine months. I got nothing. Because Agar was not around to answer questions, we used his short time with us, just two months, to claim he had insisted he was licensed and we’d just been lazy in not checking this out and not disclosing information to the SIA. So we were saying he was a liar, and his past criminal convictions bore this out. The fact that our other eight employees were properly licensed probably helped our cause. It could have been worse. It could have been jail time.
‘But shit sticks, Toni. My company might be legit now, but four years ago I employed a known criminal who committed murder and went on the run, and now I’m on the run for murder. You can’t not think that’s suspicious. Nobody’s going to be on my side.’
She kicked his shin, which made him hiss and face her. ‘Get your head in gear. Forget what the public might gossip about over garden fences. Worry about proving to the police that you didn’t kill your brother. And instead of wishing that you’d never hired this Jon Agar, try thinking about why he’s connected to this thing.’
She was right. But he’d already racked his brain on that score, and had come up short. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You were on the right track all along, Nate. This whole thing is all about HyperX. Five people were involved that night. Your brother is dead, Kaushal is dead, you should be dead, and they want Agar dead. That leaves one person. Carl Webber. So we need to know about him. Could he be behind this?’
Nate shrugged.
Toni said, ‘Either he’s a bad guy, or he’s a dead guy. Whichever, it’s all about HyperX. Why? HyperX, Nate. Think. Connect the dots.’
He shrugged again, like a docile and petulant child.
Rising with a grunt of anger, Toni approached the hitman. He heard her footsteps and turned his head and watched her come with wide eyes. She took a knife from a drawer. Not from the knife block. Not a big carving knife. Because anyone could jab one of those bad boys and cause damage. A butter knife. If you could cause pain and bleeding with one of those, there was something a bit wild in your brain. Watching, Nate thought this was the idea she wanted to present. And it worked. Or maybe the hitman was just remembering what she had already done to him and his colleagues. Either way, he started talking, unprompted.
‘That man in the file, Cube wants him dead, that’s all I know. That’s all I want to know. He hired me to kill him.’
She didn’t crowd his space, didn’t wave the knife in a threatening manner. Didn’t even look at him. She just used the blunt blade to scrape dirt from under a fingernail. Like she was keeping to herself, ignoring the world, whittling time. But the threat was there, like an aura, or the electric buzz around a pylon. Nate watched intently. She was off to the hitman’s side, so he had to turn his head ninety degrees to watch her, and Nate watched his profile. The guy licked his lips a lot. Nervous dehydration.
The hitman finally got the clue. She wasn’t going to ask questions. The guy just needed to talk.
He said, ‘Jon Agar is in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. In jail, awaiting trial for delivery of a controlled substance and criminal conspiracy. This is really all I know.’
Now she looked at him. ‘So, this wasn’t to be a slit throat in a dark alleyway behind his local pub. You were going to kill this guy in a prison thousands of miles away? That seems like mission impossible.’
The hitman shrugged. He didn’t seem as scared now. Nate watched the corner of his lip pull back. A smile. ‘Stepping stones are in place. Cube is a powerful man.’
Powerful man. Nate tasted that line in his mind, and something seemed to click into place. He pulled the laptop onto his knees.
‘So Agar was clearly not Cube’s business rival or cheating boyfriend. He must have told you why?’ she said. A wink: come on, spill the beans.
‘No,’ the hitman said. He didn’t need to know such things. Not relevant to the job.
Nate started typing.
‘And when he told you there was the body of a young Indian woman to get rid of, you didn’t ask why she’d been killed, either?’
The hitman hadn’t. No need, not relevant.
Nate hit page-down, searching.
‘How about simple nosiness, then? I’d be mad with curiosity to know what connects a criminal in America with a nice young woman in London. You asked, didn’t you? You had to know, didn’t you?’ That wink again.
No. Safer for his employers if he didn’t know such information. He was a professional.
Nate stopped scrolling and tapped the mousepad. He got up. Toni and the hitman watched him approach. He held the laptop so she could see the screen, and she looked. The hitman couldn’t see it, but he clearly worried about what Nate had found on his personal machine.
An online newspaper displaying a page. A London newspaper. Dated six years ago. She quickly scanned it. A story called ‘Money magnets’, about lottery winners who had already been rich before their moment of good fortune. It listed five London-based businessmen, each with a photo and a mini-biography. A scathing damnation of an unfair society that rewarded the wealthy, rather than a feel-good piece.
But she was puzzled. ‘What’s this?’
He tapped the screen near the bottom. Spawney git number three. He was a handsome white man, maybe forty-five years old. Big teeth, a wide smile, in a suit jacket and jeans, holding a glass of bubbly in one hand and cosying up to a woman in a sparkly dress. An elegant party in the background. The name was James Ryback. The bio said he was a businessman involved in imports and exports. Current net worth: £3,220
,000. Two years ago he had won nearly £15,000 on a scratch card.
‘Repeat: what is this, Nate? Is the lottery something to do with this?’
‘No. This is just the only online photo I know of this man. This is James Ryback. He owned HyperX.’
She still looked puzzled. Nate bloated the picture in the screen, and turned the laptop to the hitman. ‘Who is this?’
The hitman looked surprised at what he saw on the screen. He leaned back, seemed to think, maybe wondering how much trouble his answer might get him into. ‘That’s Cube.’
Nate said, ‘James Ryback lost a lot of money when those Rolls-Royces were taken apart and had their parts stolen at HyperX. Acorn Security took responsibility for their safety that night, so this–’
Toni cut in with: ‘So this is all about revenge. This is a rich businessman with a daft nickname getting back at you and your brother and the rest of your team.’
The phone rang for a long time, and Toni was about to hang up, but Nate shook his head.
‘There’s no answer, Nate. So– Hello?’
Answered. Toni and Nate stared at each other as she said, ‘I’m trying to find Carl Webber. Is he there?’ She looked at the clock.
Nate could hear the crackle of a raised voice on the other end of the phone. Toni’s shocked face told the rest. Then she looked at the phone, and Nate knew whoever had answered it had hung up.
‘She thought I was one of his girlfriends,’ she said. ‘Apparently he’s a lying, cheating scumbag and I can keep him. End quote. He didn’t come home from playing football last night and his phone’s turned off.’
