The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller

by Peter May

  ‘What money?’ David asked, suddenly interested.

  ‘I think, Miss Robinson, this is a matter we really should discuss in confidence.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to hide from David,’ Lisa said.

  ‘The world,’ Wiseman said evenly, ‘is full of fortune hunters.’

  David contained his annoyance. ‘I am not a fortune hunter, Mr Wiseman.’

  There was just the hint of amusement in Wiseman’s eyes. ‘Then you won’t be disappointed to discover that the young lady has not inherited a fortune.’ He turned back to Lisa. ‘But it is a sizeable sum.’

  Lisa shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. My mother didn’t have any money.’

  Wiseman clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. ‘When your mother divorced your father there was a settlement. A small monthly sum. She opened an account into which she had the money paid direct. The payments have been made, unbroken, for almost sixteen years. But for the last nine or ten years there have been additional, if infrequent, payments of considerable amounts. Your mother always refused to touch the money in that account. She told me that one day it was to go to you, but you were never to know its source.’ He paused, picking his words carefully. ‘She seemed to feel that the money was somehow . . . dirty. And that by denying it to herself she was in some way cleansing it for you.’

  Lisa’s thoughts were confused and uncertain, as though all this was, or should have been, happening to someone else. She had grown up in a cocoon of ignorance, and now that she was breaking free of its protective shell, discovering that she wasn’t who she thought she was.

  ‘She did make one exception,’ Wiseman went on. ‘About four years ago. She lifted enough from the account to pay off the mortgage on the house. Naturally, she has left that to you.’

  ‘So what’s the balance?’ David asked.

  Wiseman sighed, reluctant to impart the information in this young man’s presence. ‘I do not have an exact figure, but it is somewhere in the region of one hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds. With the house, and various other bits and pieces, the young lady should be worth over four hundred thousand.’

  David whistled softly. Lisa sat motionless, filled with a great sadness. It wasn’t right, or fair. She had done nothing to deserve this. She didn’t want the money or any part of it. She wanted her mother back, along with the lost belief that her father was dead. She wanted to climb back into her shell and hide. But it was broken now and there was no way back. Wiseman cleared his throat discreetly. ‘Miss Robinson . . . ?’

  She looked at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I know all this must have come as a bit of a shock to you . . .’

  She cut in. ‘What about my father?’

  ‘I’m afraid I know very little about him. You’ve read the newspaper reports. You know he spent five years in a military prison after the court martial. You know as much as I do.’

  ‘But how did he make the payments during the years he was in prison?’

  Wiseman spread his hands in a gesture that told her he could not help.

  ‘I want to find him,’ she said.

  David looked at her, shocked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s my father.’

  ‘It might be difficult after all this time,’ Wiseman said.

  Lisa looked at him defiantly. ‘You’re a lawyer. You find him. I can afford it.’

  Wiseman sighed. ‘I can try, I suppose.’

  David shook his head. ‘Lisa, this is ridiculous.’

  Wiseman headed off a row. ‘There is one more thing you should know.’ Lisa looked at him, wondering what more there could possibly be. ‘After the divorce your mother reverted to the use of her maiden name. She was ashamed and humiliated by what your father had done, and wished to protect you. But you are still, strictly speaking, Lisa Elliot. It’s the name on your birth certificate. It was never legally changed.’

  *

  Outside, a watery winter sun cast pale shadows in the street. ‘You’re mad,’ David said, trying to keep up with her. But he had seen that determined set of her jaw before and knew she would not be argued with. For a young woman of eighteen years she could be frustratingly immature, almost childlike, with a child’s blindness to reason. The result, he knew, of an obsessively shielded upbringing. Her mother had been a strange woman locked away in a world of her own, a world of protective darkness in which she had forced her daughter to live too. He had wondered why she should unlock the door to him. Perhaps she had known she could not hold on to Lisa for ever. Perhaps she had seen him as her successor. Lisa kept walking, hardly aware of him. She just wanted to walk and walk, run if she could. He said, ‘I mean, along with the rest of them he killed a whole bunch of innocent civilians in cold blood.’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘He was found guilty, wasn’t he? They put him in prison. What more do you need to know?’

  ‘I want to know why.’

  ‘Does there have to be a why?’

  ‘Of course there does.’

  ‘What, just because he’s your father?’

  She stopped suddenly, turning to face him, tears of frustration welling in her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said defiantly. ‘Just because he’s my father!’ And she turned and ran off through the shoppers as the tears began to spill.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A rare blink of winter sunshine sparkled on the slow-moving waters of the Thames. The slightest breeze rattled among the leafless branches of the willows that wept along the embankment. London seemed a long way away here, in the quiet affluence of this Upper Thames village. In the summer, lovers would pass idly by in punts, drifting gently among the backwaters, somnolent and languid in the afternoon sun. Picnics on the embankment, the murmur of bees. But now it was cold, deserted, save for one old man swaddled in coat and scarf walking an equally old dog along the riverside.

  Elliot watched them absently from the warmth of the sun lounge, large windows that in hot weather would open on to the garden, now providing a winter panorama across the river. ‘You still take lemonade in your whisky?’ Blair turned from the drinks cabinet.

  ‘Nothing changes,’ Elliot said.

  Blair grinned. ‘Heathen!’ He turned back to pour lemonade with reluctance into a generous measure of amber liquid. He was a tough, wiry, old Scot approaching his middle fifties, a fine head of grey hair over a lean, tanned face. He wore a faded army-green pullover, leather patches at the elbow, and a pair of baggy trousers that concertinaed over dirty white tennis shoes. ‘How’d it go in Africa?’

  ‘Bloody disastrous.’ Elliot ran a finger gently along the line of his scar. Even after all this time it still occasionally hurt, like toothache. ‘Lost nearly half my men before we crossed the border.’ He snorted his disgust. ‘Freedom fighters! A rabble. No training, no discipline, no balls. Last time I’ll take on a job like that. Barely got out alive myself. Didn’t get bloody paid, either!’

  Blair chuckled. ‘Times are tough, eh?’ He handed Elliot his whisky and Elliot noticed he hadn’t poured one for himself.

  ‘You not joining me?’

  ‘Too early.’ Blair eased himself into a deep leather armchair. He paused, his smile fading. ‘I saw the death notice in the paper.’ Elliot nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It was all too long ago to mean anything now.’

  Blair eyed the younger man with affection. ‘What about the girl?’

  ‘She’s well provided for.’ Elliot sipped his drink. ‘I need weapons and kit.’

  Blair smiled ruefully. No matter how hard you tried you never got beneath the skin. ‘Where this time?’

  ‘Thailand.’

  Blair whistled his surprise. ‘Jesus Christ! What are you doing in Thailand?’

  ‘Thailand’s just base. I’m taking a team into Cambodia.’

  The older man laughed. ‘Taki
ng on the Khmer Rouge single-handed, are we?’

  Elliot smiled. ‘It’s a small private job. Man’s paying me a lot of money to go in and get his family out.’

  ‘How far in?’

  ‘About a week there, a week back. It’ll be a small team. Just three of us. I’ll want automatics, pistols, grenades, knives, kit, radio, rations and medical supplies. And maps. Can you do it?’

  ‘Thailand’s tricky. Can’t get anything in. Have to procure locally.’

  ‘I don’t want to know how difficult it is, I want to know if you can do it.’

  ‘’Course I can do it. Have you ever know your old sergeant to let you down?’ He rose. ‘I think I will have that drink.’ He crossed to the cabinet to pour himself a stiff measure. ‘Can’t guarantee what I get you, though. Be either Russian or American. Probably Russian.’

  ‘I’d prefer American.’

  ‘Might cost more.’

  ‘So, it’ll cost more.’

  Blair sipped his whisky and rolled it around his mouth. ‘Who are you taking?’

  ‘Slattery.’

  ‘That bloody Aussie! Man, he’s aff his heid!’

  ‘He’s good. I phoned Sydney this morning. I’m meeting him in Bangkok.’

  Blair shook his head. ‘The two of you loose in Bangkok. That would be worth seeing.’ Pause. ‘Who else?’

  ‘A pal of Slattery’s. A Yank called McCue. Vietnam vet. Ex-Big Red One. Tunnel Rat. Stayed on in Bangkok after the war.’

  ‘When you going?’

  ‘Flying out later this week. I want to be ready to move in a fortnight.’

  Blair emptied his glass. ‘You’re aff your heid, man!’ Another pause. ‘Don’t suppose you’d like to take a fourth?’

  Elliot grinned. ‘You’re too bloody old, Sam.’

  ‘I’m as fit as you are.’

  ‘No chance. The only place you’re going to die now is in your bed.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Lisa had not gone back to college. The Christmas holidays were coming up and, anyway, she couldn’t have faced it. The sympathy of her friends, the questions she wouldn’t want to answer. And she was no longer sure she was the person she had been just a week ago. College, and a future in journalism, seemed unimportant, trivial.

  She had wandered around the house for days, unable to settle, picking up a book, reading a few pages then laying it aside. She had phoned Wiseman several times, but he had no news. David had called every day and she had put him off each time. Somehow he belonged to the person she had been before, to Lisa Robinson, the shy orphaned eighteen-year-old who had stood so helplessly at her mother’s graveside only a few days earlier. Lisa Elliot was someone else. Who that person was, she could not yet tell. Just that she was different. She had money, independence, and a father who’d killed women and children in cold blood.

  Then, on the fourth day, came the call she had been waiting for. Wiseman’s voice at the other end of the line. ‘We can’t guarantee,’ he said, ‘that he’ll still be there. But it’s the last address that we can find.’

  *

  Lisa’s mouth was dry and her hands trembled as she stepped out of the taxi into the King’s Road. She had not wanted to take the cab right to the door. She needed time to walk, collect her thoughts, summon the courage to make her way to the mews address Wiseman had given her, to knock on the door and face the man she had always thought was dead. Her father.

  She realised very quickly that had been a mistake. All she’d done was make time for her courage to fail. What would she say to him? What if he didn’t want to know, and shut the door in her face? What would she do then? She walked slowly, dreamlike, through the late evening Christmas shoppers, tinsel flashing in shop windows, Christmas lights tinting the faces of passers-by. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window. A pale, frightened face staring back from the glass. She focused beyond the reflection. An ice-cream parlour. And she shivered. A little girl holding her Daddy’s hand as he bought her a two-flavour cone, her face alight with pleasure, her father’s smile of fond indulgence. Ice cream at Christmas. Moments Lisa had never known. She caught her reflection again and looked quickly away.

  Now or never.

  The cobbled mews lane was deserted, feeble pools of yellow light falling from old-fashioned coach lamps mounted on each cottage wall. One or two lights shone in upper windows. A red Porsche stood parked on her left as she entered through an archway. You needed money to own a mews house here.

  Number twenty-three had a lacquered, oak-panelled door. There was no name plate, no light in the upper windows. She pressed the buzzer and heard it sound faintly within. She waited, but already she knew the house was empty. She tried again, an automatic response, and stepped back to look up. The darkness in the windows mirrored her despair. She turned away.

  A net curtain flickered at an upper window as her footsteps receded down the mews.

  ‘She’s gone. Probably some woman he’s been two-timing.’ The man turned away from the window as his companion again turned on the flashlight and quickly completed the wiring Lisa’s arrival had interrupted. He lifted the top casing of the telephone answering machine and slipped it carefully back in place, dexterously tightening the screws at all four corners.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, and placed each of the specialist tools of his trade into the pockets of a folding canvas carrier which he rolled up and dropped into a soft leather holdall. He switched off the flashlight. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  The other man lifted the holdall and patted the answering machine gently with his gloved hand. He grinned. ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Elliot.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Elliot looked down as his plane circled before coming in to land at Bangkok’s Don Muang international airport. Below, the paddy fields caught and reflected the light of the moon, hundreds of silver-paper shapes arranged in random geometric patterns. The airport was crowded and hot. A sticky heat you could almost touch. It came as a shock after the hours of incarceration in the air-conditioned fuselage of the aircraft that had left London shivering at minus ten. Elliot felt his clothes go limp. He had a long, irritating wait to clear customs and immigration, Thai officers inspecting him with inscrutable dark eyes. Slattery was waiting for him at the international arrivals gate in a short-sleeved, sweat-stained shirt.

  ‘Hey, chief!’ His big hand grasped Elliot’s. Elliot had a great affection for this voluble Aussie, and a great respect too. As a soldier of fortune in the early days of the war in Nam he had adapted quickly and easily to the guerrilla tactics of the VC, realizing long before the Americans that this would be no conventional war for conventional soldiers.

  Elliot grinned. ‘How are you, you ugly bastard?’

  ‘Getting uglier.’ Slattery pulled playfully at Elliot’s scarred cheek. ‘And you get prettier every time I see you.’

  He was a man of indeterminate years, though probably in his early forties. His coarse blonde hair had been crew-cut to little more than a stubble. He was short, about five-nine, but broad-built, stocky, with enormous strength and stamina. He had a striking face, squat and ugly, made almost remarkable by the pale grey of his eyes. His deep tan was ruddy rather than brown, his eyebrows bleached nearly white by the unrelenting Australian sun. But Elliot’s first impression was that he had lost weight.

  Slattery drove the battered Peugeot hire car with a deceptive carelessness, smoking constantly, one hand on the wheel, dodging in and out of the traffic, cursing other drivers. He talked incessantly. ‘There I was, all set to spend the summer on the beach, a couple of girls lined up. You know, the kind who know how to amuse themselves when I’m not in the mood. House rented right on the surf, king-sized bed for three, the works. And then I get your call. Jesus! There goes my summer. And there go the girls. So then I think, okay, a bit of R and R in Bangkok. Can’t be bad. How long we got before we hit the shit?’

/>   ‘A week to ten days.’ Elliot had listened to all this in brooding silence.

  ‘Jeez! Time enough to catch the clap and take a cure.’ Slattery laughed too loudly. ‘What’s the agenda?’

  ‘I want to see your man, McCue.’

  ‘Sure. Tomorrow do?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Aw, hey, chief. The night’s young, and so are the women. I thought we’d break a bit of sweat our first night.’

  ‘I want to see him tonight.’ Elliot spoke quietly. Slattery glanced at him.

  ‘Something bugging you, chief?’

  Elliot said, ‘I don’t rate our chances on this trip at better than fifty-fifty. I want you and the Yank to be under no illusions. If either of you are going to pull out I want it to be tonight. I’ll need time to recruit another team. And I want to see this guy for myself before I give him the green light.’

  Slattery nodded and felt a tightening across his chest. He had calculated the odds differently, had known from the first that this outing would be his last. A quick death in action, adrenalin pumping. It was preferable to the lingering death sentence passed on him by the young doctor. ‘A wee touch of cancer,’ Slattery had joked. But the doctor had not smiled. He had been as cold and clinical as the tiles in his surgery.

  ‘You have six months to a year, Mr Slattery, if you respond to treatment.’

  ‘Fuck the treatment,’ Slattery had told him.

  Elliot’s call had come like a beacon in the darkness. The prospect of a summer on the beach had loomed like a shroud waiting slowly to descend. There had been no girls, no king-sized bed, just long hot months of lonely boredom stretching ahead, leading inexorably towards the inevitable.

  ‘Well, I reckon you can count me in, chief,’ he said brightly. ‘You know me. Try anything once. Suck it and see, eh?’

  Elliot smiled. Slattery had a habit of picking up odd clichés, using one till he had burned it out, and then picking up another. On their last outing it had been bite on the bullet, the time before, the nature of the beast. Everything had been the goddamned nature of the beast! Now he was sucking it and seeing. But Elliot had also detected a false bravura in the Australian, a chill behind his grey eyes that the grin could not hide. It worried him a little, but he said nothing.