Act of Vengeance

by Michael Jecks

  Jack climbed out of the cab near the water, and walked along the roadway until he was close to the railings by the sea. The breeze was chill on his neck as he stared up north and east towards the skyline. From here he could see all the buildings clearly. The strange tower piercing the sky, the tall tower blocks housing offices, the array of harbour front shops and restaurants.

  And the ferry terminal.

  Jack stared out over it with his thoughts in turmoil. He should never have called Claire, but the message had demanded it. He couldn’t leave her wondering what was happening. But the response he had gained was plain enough. She was deeply hurt. Starck had presented her with proof that Jack had been there, indisputable proof in the form of his telephone.

  Except he knew that his phone had not left London. It had been there all the time. So how had Starck found proof that was untrue? It was easy enough to falsify a report on a computer, of course. Just type up something into a genuine-looking form, and print it. It would not have to be terribly detailed or clever to convince Claire, after all.

  Jack shook his head. This was crazy! He had no idea what was happening, but he did know that someone was setting him up for the murder of Jimmy McNeill. But just now, he didn’t have time to worry about the implications of that. He must first see whether there was a risk from Orme.

  Behind him was a park, and he saw a tourist binocular up at the top. Dismissing Claire from his mind, he climbed to it. A sign told him this was Hamilton Viewpoint Park, and mentioned something about a newspaper owner who’d given his name to it. Jack wasn’t interested. He was more taken by the metal binoculars on their plinth in front of parked cars. Crossing to it, he put in his money and studied the distant pier. There was a large building to the south of the ferry terminal, but he could still see the entranceway distinctly in the clear air. No sign of anything as yet, he thought. And then, as he watched, he noticed that on the Alaska Highway, the flyover freeway that was only a short distance from the terminal, a car had stopped, and two men were peering over the concrete wall to the ferries. From this far, even with the magnification of the binoculars, he couldn’t see what they were doing, but it was plain that they were not fixing a puncture. One climbed back into his car and drove away, but the second remained where he was. As Jack watched, another pair of figures moved along the roof of the large building to the right of his view.

  ‘You’re early, lads,’ Jack muttered as he let the binocular lenses face skywards. He stood a moment, his forearm resting on the binoculars as he stared out towards the ferry, before shouldering his bag again and setting off to the road back to Seattle.

  Orme had given him away, somehow. His last contact in the US had betrayed him. He pulled out his pay-as-you-go phone and was about to drop it into a little bin, when he reconsidered. He turned it off, and put it into his pocket again.

  With his job gone in London, with Claire deserting him, and now knowing he was being hunted by American agencies, he was left with a sense of utter loneliness, and a perverse calmness.

  Because now he had nothing to lose.

  *

  16.12 Seattle; 00.12 England

  Frank Rand waited in his car with the tension mounting. At his hip, his Glock 27 dug into the soft flesh and made him shift in his seat occasionally. It didn’t matter how much you spent on a holster, the damn things were always literally a pain in the ass when you sat in a car.

  He looked over at Debbie who was parked in the road over the other side of Yesler Way, in a car park of an Italian restaurant. Her eyes were not on him, but flitted about the roads, occasionally glancing up at the overpass.

  There were twelve of them around here. Four on the ground at the ferry, in case they had to head the guy away from the passengers waiting in line, two more up north of the terminal, two south, both with drivers waiting in their cars so that no matter where Hansen or Case, or whatever his real name was, tried to go, there would be bodies on the ground to stop him.

  But he wasn’t here yet. Frank felt the first pricklings of adrenaline-fuelled sweat. He had a hollowness in his belly at the thought that this might all go wrong. To divert himself, he called Roy Sandford.

  ‘Roy. It’s Frank. The call you were talking about, you’re sure that the guy mentioned he was going to be here?’

  ‘That’s what he said, yes.’

  ‘There’s no sign of them. No one at the fountain, nothing.’

  ‘Oh. Well, just in case, I am running a check on all the phone calls made to the guy who phoned Britain. The one called Orme. There was only one call to him or from him in the moments before he made that call.’

  ‘The number we were given for his UK phone?’

  ‘No. This is different. It’s unlisted, but it’s not on contract, and registered in the US.’

  ‘Where is that cell phone now?’

  ‘Moving away from you, heading south.’

  ‘How close can you put me to him?’

  ‘I’ve only got triangulation from a couple towers, but within a few yards, for sure.’

  Frank stared ahead at the fountain. He should not leave this site, but he also couldn’t afford to run the risk of losing the phone. ‘OK, you lead me to him. Put a call through to Daniels and Markham, and get them to join me and Debbie. You keep an eye on that phone, and we’ll chase him down.’

  ‘I think I can help,’ Roy suddenly said with excitement. ‘It’s heading to the airport!’

  ‘Shit! Forget Daniels and Markham – I’ll go with Debbie,’ Frank said, turning the key in his ignition. He blasted his horn three times rather than calling, waving to her as he gunned the engine until he was alongside her. ‘Get in!’

  *

  17.12 Seattle; 01.12 England

  Stephen Orme worked in a small office near the Union Lake, in a shop front on Eastlake East. The place suited him well, because not only was it an ideal site for him to maintain his cover as a tourist officer, his apartment above the shop looked out over Fairview to the water, and he could walk down the stairs to his little boat at the jetty beyond. From there, on his days off, he could carry on his clandestine surveillance of the ships entering and leaving Puget Sound while he maintained the fiction of going fishing. It was a job he adored.

  He had spent much of his young adulthood as a naval officer, and if he had been told that in a few years he would be here, living in one of America’s most beautiful, friendly and attractive cities, so that he could indulge his fascination for submarines, he would have laughed out loud. But after some years in the navy, he had suffered a bad fall when his helicopter was blown by a gust as he was transhipping, and he was thrown from the open door to the deck. He still had a slight limp from the damage done to his pelvis. Shortly after he had been warned that his active service in Her Majesty’s Navy was at an end, a grey little man with a grey smoker’s complexion visited him, and soon recruited him to the Service.

  His work was done here in his office for the day. Stephen locked the doors, shut down his computer, turned off the plug sockets, and picked up his phone as he walked out to the back. There was a private staircase from here that led upstairs to his apartment on the second floor, and he walked inside with that feeling of freedom. Out behind his apartment there was a deck, and from there he could see out over the water to the Gas Works Park. A nineteen acre site dedicated to the firm that had once taken in coal to make gas for Seattle’s lights. Odd to think that people wanted to celebrate the industry of the past, Stephen thought, staring at the dark bronze tanks and pipes. Yet it was always quite full of cars and sightseers.

  He walked through to his bedroom and pulled off his suit, carefully hanging his jacket on a hanger, dangling his trousers by the legs until the creases lined up, and inserted them into his press, before pulling on a pair of old blue jeans and a thick pullover. It was an old one his parents had given him when he first became a submariner, and he was as proud of the jumper as he had been to pass the rigorous entrance tests. The only test he had failed was the infamous escape.
Each submariner was forced to enter a column of water, and swim up to the top. It was supposed to simulate an escape from a damaged sub, but in Stephen’s case it only simulated a bar fight. He had always had a weak vein in his nose, and it burst as he rose through the water. A common enough fault, though, and all he needed was a minor operation before he was eligible for the additional money a submariner could earn.

  Tugging on his boots, he crossed to the French window leading to his deck, and unlocked it. As soon he had slid the doors open, he hurtled down the steps to Fairview, crossed the road, and was on the jetty. He loosened the ropes, and dropped into the boat, pulling open the door to the tiny galley and entering. He set the switches on, returned to the outside to turn on the small diesel engine under the deck, and stopped.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here, Stephen,’ Jack said.

  *

  17.34 Seattle; 01.34 England

  ‘He’s leaving the airport now – he’s turned around and leaving!’

  ‘Shit!’ Frank said. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

  They had followed the signal for the phone all the way to the airport, and now Frank and Debbie were at the main entrance but, as they threw open the car’s doors and leaped from the vehicle, Roy’s urgent tone came across clearly. They sprang back into the car and Frank jerked the shift into drive again, spinning the wheel and shoving down on the throttle, pressing the bud into his ear. ‘The asshole’s running us on purpose.’

  Debbie said nothing, but she opened her phone and made a call. ‘Hi, it’s Debbie. Any sign of him?’

  She closed the phone a few moments later.

  ‘He’s not there. No show.’

  ‘You thought he could have sent us on a chase?’

  ‘Still do. He threw his phone into a car, left it in a cab, put it on a truck. Who knows?’

  Frank pursed his lips, and then gave a short nod.

  ‘Call Sandford, tell him to patch the signal through to the locals and have them pick up the driver, see when he could have got the phone. Bloody Case must be back in the city itself. Why’d he send us down here?’

  ‘He isn’t a fool. He realised he was being set up,’ she said.

  ‘Who by, though?’

  ‘The guy who called through to the UK, I guess. Can we find him?’

  ‘Get on to Sandford. If anyone has a reason to chase him down, it’s Sandford after this,’ Frank grated and pulled onto the slip road to head back downtown.

  ‘Why him?’

  ‘Because if he doesn’t, I’ll have his balls for golf.’

  *

  17.41 Seattle; 01.41 England

  Jack watched him as Orme busied himself about the boat. It was a small craft, with a galley and cabin that could have fitted inside a wardrobe, and one diesel engine that chugged like an asthmatic bulldog.

  ‘What was the idea?’ Jack asked as they moved away from the jetty.

  ‘You’re persona non grata, Jack.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You need to ask the Firm,’ Stephen shrugged. ‘I’m only a local. They don’t tell me anything.’

  Jack knew that was true. The agents in place would never be told the reasons behind a mission or the planning that went on in the background. Stephen would almost certainly not have any idea about the reasons why he would be thrown to the wolves.

  ‘It makes no bloody sense,’ he muttered.

  ‘You’ve got some enemies, that’s all I can say,’ Stephen said.

  ‘You were told to betray me, then?’

  ‘I was told to leave you in the cold. I was not to go to meet you at the ferry, and not to meet you again afterwards.’

  ‘On whose orders?’

  ‘Jack, you know better.’

  He probably didn’t know. And if he did, he wouldn’t admit to it. Jack looked round at the water opening up before them. The little engine was puttering smoothly now, and they were moving at about ten knots, he gauged. The wind in his face was cold, and the fine spray that occasionally splashed on him made it feel all the more freezing as he surveyed the grey waters.

  ‘I just don’t understand it,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve made too many enemies in London?’

  ‘That’s no reason to discard me.’

  ‘Really?’

  Jack looked up at him. Stephen was staring ahead at the boats, keeping an eye on a yacht that was tacking slowly across the lane.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What did they say to you?’

  Stephen looked down at him and his face was carefully blank. ‘I heard about your wife and Jimmy McNeill.’

  ‘What about him?’ Stephen said.

  ‘He died, didn’t he? Do you think everyone is stupid in the Service, Jack?’

  Jack said nothing. He turned and stared ahead as Stephen continued.

  ‘You were one of the very best, I’m told. The networks you had in the old days were supposed to be used for training purposes, they were so efficient. You recruited only the best, and you maintained them well. But when you joined the Scavengers, your wife didn’t like it. That’s what I heard. She didn’t like it when she heard what your job was.’

  ‘She didn’t understand. She thought I was just a paid killer.’

  ‘You weren’t?’

  ‘No! We were sent in to tidy up when others screwed up, that’s all. And sometimes we had to get a bit heavy, but not all the time.’

  ‘But how heavy did you get with the man who took your wife, eh? When your missus leaves, it makes it easier to kill, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s bollocks. He was riding his horse and fell into the river. That’s all.’

  ‘Not what others think, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I know that. I’m being set up. Starck went to my wife to show her the cell phone traffic on that day. It showed me being near her. Near him, when he died.’

  ‘You should have thought of that. Cell phones don’t lie, Jack.’

  He gave a dry laugh.

  ‘Really? How about the little fact that my phone never left London?’

  Orme looked at him. It was clear that he was struck by the honesty in Jack’s face as he asked, ‘You sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m bleeding sure. You think I’m a moron who doesn’t know phones are guaranteed location finders? Who’d be prick enough to take a phone with him to commit murder in this day and age?’

  ‘Karen told me you’d done it.’

  Jack swore. ‘So you think they’re hanging me out to dry because of that? They’ll see me arrested over here to remove me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Except I’d hardly be less embarrassing if I was in prison over here, would I?’ Jack said. ‘They’d want me professionally silenced. Is that what they thought, that I may get shot if they send in the FBI to catch me at Seattle?’

  ‘You were supposed to have been armed.’

  ‘What, and they told the cops that I was?’ Jack said, shooting a look at Stephen.

  ‘They said you might have had the gun Lewin shot himself with.’

  ‘I had to hand that in, though! Why’d they say that?’ Jack wondered. Frank Rand knew he had no gun, but Stephen’s words implied that the Firm wanted the police to think he was dangerous.

  ‘Starck told me on the phone.’

  ‘But that’s secure, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not that line, no,’ Stephen said, leaning slightly as the wash from a faster craft pushed his boat until it rocked.

  ‘What were you doing on an unsecure line?’ Jack demanded.

  ‘They called me, Jack,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Shit! So they wanted the Yanks to know I was a crook, a killer, and armed, just before they discussed where I was going to meet you?’

  ‘And then told me later on a secure line not to go. I was told you were in the cold. You’d blotted your copy-book, and I wouldn’t have to worry about you any more.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Sorry, Jack,
’ Stephen said, glancing down at him.

  ‘But they wouldn’t want me in prison shooting my mouth off,’ Jack shook his head. ‘So I was supposed to get shot by the cops over here: instant removal of all embarrassment.’

  ‘That’s about it, I guess.’

  Jack stared unseeing at the waves ahead. There were plenty of small pleasure craft strung along the water heading out to the Sound, and he felt a weird unreality as he gazed at them. Here they were, a series of happy sailors in their boats, sailing along in a line towards the sea to go fishing, to enjoy the sea, or just to enjoy the feel of a rolling deck beneath their feet, and here he was, a marked man. The finger was pointing at him, and he had no escape because all the supports, all the companions and friends he would normally depend upon had decided he was disposable. A slimy piece of old garbage, unnecessary, unwanted. He’d been thrown into a bag ready for disposal, and now he was to be left on the street.

  The fucking pricks!

  ‘Starck, then,’ he muttered.

  He’d get that bastard somehow. One thing he was sure of was, he wasn’t going to wait to be caught by the FBI.

  ‘What’re you going to do, Jack?’ Orme said.

  *

  17.51 Seattle; 01.51 England

  Amiss was in the apartment near the Potomac when his telephone shivered in his pocket. He took it out and studied the picture of Stilson before pressing the receive button.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We have them. We followed Orme to his boat and there he met Case. The problem should be resolved soon.’

  ‘Good. Make sure that there is no trace left behind to tie us in. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  *

  17.56 Seattle; 01.56 England

  Stephen Orme was still eyeing Jack between watching the way ahead.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know what I ought to do?’ Jack grated. ‘I need time to think.’

  ‘If London thinks you’re guilty, and they must do if they’re going to lay you out to dry like this, you’d be best to disappear, mate,’ Stephen said. ‘I’d often thought I’d bugger off to Mexico or somewhere, but that’s less appealing now because of the drugs gangs. I wouldn’t want to end up in the bottom of a Tijuana ditch. Perhaps I’d go further south. Colombia is dangerous for some, but I think you’d find places out in the country that would be safe enough. The rebels have been pretty much wrecked in the last few years. Then there’s Argentina. Supposed to be good there. Cheap beef, and good beers.’