MERCENARY a gripping, action-packed thriller (Johnny Silver Thriller Book 1)

by PAUL BENNETT

‘I am being allowed to leave soon. Next week or the week after. Will you come and see me when I have gone, Johnny?’

  ‘I would like that very much, Anna.’

  ‘I would like that very much too. I will give you my mobile number. Please give me a ring. And don’t worry, I will get a proper job. Not this. You understand?’

  I smiled at her. ‘That would be good.’

  She read out the number and I wrote it on the back of the piece of paper she had given me.

  It was then that another thought struck me.

  ‘You said that Natasha’s passport is here. Where exactly?’

  ‘There’s an office on the fourth floor. Room 417. What are you thinking of doing?’

  ‘I want to get Natasha’s passport back. If we find her and Carlo, I don’t want any ties back here. I want her to be free to choose her life wherever she wants to spend it.’

  ‘The room is guarded. Big man. It won’t be easy.’

  ‘Nothing worthwhile in life is easy. Let’s go back inside.’

  I checked my watch. Not much time left of my hour.

  ‘Let’s have the pillowcases,’ I said.

  ‘Why, Johnny?’

  ‘I need something to tie you up with to convince them that you’re not involved in what I’m going to do.’

  She laughed. ‘You don’t need pillowcases. Look in the wardrobe.’

  I did as she asked and saw why she had laughed. There was a full bondage kit inside – handcuffs, straps, gag.

  ‘You had better strip off and put the gear on,’ I said.

  ‘My pleasure,’ she said.

  She slid off her dress. I turned my back. She giggled at my discretion. I heard the soft swish of silk as her underwear floated to the floor and the padding of her bare feet as she went across to the wardrobe.

  ‘OK,’ she said, a couple of minutes later. ‘You can look now.’

  I turned around and nearly hit the floor. Her outfit was basically a very small leather bikini edged with mink – no more than three triangles. Her shoes had the highest pair of heels I’d ever seen. They had flimsy straps across the top and two-inch wide straps around the ankles so that they resembled manacles.

  ‘Do you approve, Johnny?’ she laughed.

  She handed me the cuffs and the gag – both in mink. I led her swaying on the heels to the corridor.

  ‘Are there stairs so we don’t have to use the lift?’

  ‘End of the corridor,’ she said.

  ‘And can you cut out the giggling. You’re supposed to be my prisoner.’

  ‘Yes, Johnny,’ she said, smirking now.

  We went to the end of the corridor and opened the door to the stairs. I looked up and down and saw no one in sight. We started up the stairs with me supporting Anna to stop her falling over. At the fourth floor I peered round the door and saw that the coast was clear. We made our way to room 417. I knocked on the door.

  ‘Tell him you need help,’ I whispered.

  ‘Don’t forget he’s big.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’

  She called out something in what I presumed was Russian. The door began to open, slightly at first but then fully when the person must have seen that it was Anna and that no threat was present. He stepped outside.

  Big wasn’t the word for him. I’d seen barns smaller than this guy. He was around six foot and so wide that I reckoned he had to turn sideways to get through the door. Not trusting my left arm, I threw him a right hook, making sure that all the weight came from as far back as my shoulder. I even turned my fist as I connected to increase the impact of the blow.

  I heard the crunch as his nose broke, not for the first time judging by his appearance. He staggered back a few feet, shook his head and looked at me, grinning.

  Hell.

  I closed in and hit him again, this time on the chin. His head went back and he shook it again. Then stepped forward. He didn’t bother dodging the next blow, just stood there and rocked a little before stepping closer. He grabbed me in a two-arm bear hug, pinning my arms, and began to squeeze. I gave him a Glasgow kiss, the dome of my head connecting with his forehead. He squeezed harder. It was going to take a tank to stop him and I didn’t have one of those. He was squeezing so tightly it was becoming hard to breathe, my lungs compressed by the force he was applying. I tried to knee him in the groin, but he was too near and I couldn’t get any power behind it. He was so close that I could smell garlic on his breath. He squeezed ever tighter – all the time with that stupid grin on his face. Sooner or later my ribs were going to break.

  Then suddenly the pressure stopped. His body leaned into mine and he sagged at the knees. I let him drop to the floor and saw Anna behind him with a large, heavy alabaster table lamp in her hand.

  ‘I told you he was big,’ she said.

  ‘And you weren’t exaggerating. Let’s get him inside.’

  I dragged his body through the doorway and set him down on the floor. Anna closed the door behind me and we were safe for a while.

  ‘Any idea where the passports are kept?’

  ‘The filing cabinet on the left.’

  I slid open the top drawer and looked inside. There were piles of passports. I opened the first one and groaned. They were in Russian and I had no idea what the Cyrillic script represented.

  ‘You better do this,’ I said to Anna. I moved aside and let her hobble over.

  She looked at the first few.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ she said. ‘They’re in alphabetical order. Natasha’s name begins with a z so it shouldn’t be hard to find.’

  I watched her hands move to the back of the drawer and pull out half-a-dozen passports. She flicked through them and found the one we wanted. She handed it to me.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Lie on the floor and I’ll cuff and gag you. You’d better say that there were two men and one of them hit the guy from behind.’

  I fitted the cuffs and rolled up the gag.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘You’re fun, Johnny Silver. I like you.’

  ‘And I like you, Anna. We may not meet again after this. The guards at the main door will be watching out for me. It’ll be too dangerous for me to come back. I’ll phone you and maybe we can meet up when your time here is done.’

  ‘No maybes, Johnny.’

  I nodded my head and kissed her on the cheek. Pushed the gag in her mouth and laid her gently on the floor.

  ‘Good luck,’ I said.

  She mumbled something through the gag. Good luck to you too, I interpreted. I bent down and kissed her again in case we didn’t meet up in the future.

  ‘Thanks, Anna,’ I said, ready to walk through the door. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’

  She nodded her head and her eyes lit up with a smile that couldn’t come from the gagged mouth.

  It was a lovely smile that I would miss if our paths did not cross again. I walked through the door without looking back. Doesn’t do to make friends in our business.

  ‘Ciao,’ I said.

  Ciao. Hallo and goodbye in Italian. I hoped for the former.

  17

  The three of us sat round the breakfast table planning the day. Scout and Bull hadn’t arrived back from the hospital till nearly midnight. Scout looked drained, but was determined to go there again this morning. Didn’t seem that we had anything better to do. We might be getting closer to Carlo’s trail, but only because we had narrowed his whereabouts down a bit. A hundred-mile stretch of border, that’s as close as we had got. Needless to say, Natasha didn’t answer her mobile when I tried calling so there was no lead coming on that front.

  Bull poured coffee while Scout and I looked at an unappetizing platter of meat and cheese that from its colour and texture seemed like it had been standing on the table for the last week. The coffee wasn’t much better – had that bitter taste that came with standing on a stove keeping warm too long. The hotel owner said it was fresh. I should have asked her, ‘Fresh when?’ We were going to have to establish some ground rules,
and probably cross her palm with silver – or the Silvers credit card.

  ‘What was the latest on your father when you left last night?’ I asked.

  ‘Whatever drugs he had been given should be out of the bloodstream sometime today. Then he will be in a lot of pain. The burn on his back might be the worst. Probably give him a morphine drip. All in all I don’t think we’ll get much out of him today. I’d still like to go though, if that’s all right with you guys?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Bull will go with you again.’ I looked at him to check that was OK. He nodded.

  I took them through my conversation with Anna and asked Scout where she would try to get a passport and cross the border.

  ‘I’d go south,’ she said. ‘The northern border is too close to Amsterdam that they might be seen while they’re hanging around waiting for a passport. That leaves anywhere on a stretch between Arnhem and Maastricht. Getting a false passport is tricky. My guess would be for Carlo to park Natasha somewhere and hop into one of the big towns in Germany or Belgium. Pick up a passport at some port – air, rail or sea. Trouble is you can’t just walk into a bar and tap the first person on the shoulder and ask for one. He’d need to gradually build up a chain of contacts. The only thing in his favour is that he has bags of money. That can buy a lot of useful contacts.’

  Her mobile rang. She looked at the screen and said, ‘Arnie.’

  ‘Don’t tell him where we are,’ I said.

  She gave me a withering look. As if I would, it said. She stood up from the table and walked to the window so that we wouldn’t be a distraction. There followed a lot of yeahs and OKs from Scout before the conversation was finally over.

  ‘Arnie wants to talk to us – he’s made some progress.’

  ‘Why couldn’t he tell you over the phone?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s gone nuts about security. Says it’s too easy to tap into a mobile. We’re to meet him at the zoo at half past four.’

  ‘Hell,’ said Bull. ‘We could be wasting a whole day. Doesn’t he realize the urgency of the situation?’

  ‘Maybe he just wants to see Scout again.’

  Scout blushed.

  ‘He said we would understand when we meet him and he explains what’s going on.’

  ‘Nothing to do but wait,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and do a recce on the zoo. If Arnie’s so freaked out about security it might pay to get the lie of the land. Find the best place to meet where we can’t be observed.’ I peeled off some high-value euro notes from my roll and gave them to Bull. ‘Work your charm on the matron and get things sorted out here. We need to make it liveable – we could be here some time. Then you guys go off to the hospital and I’ll meet you at the zoo at four o’clock. Ring me if you need to change plans.’

  I decided to walk to the zoo. It was only a couple of miles from the back streets of central Amsterdam where our hotel was located and I would have preferred longer, for I missed the daily run and swim. The walk took me to the busy junction of Visserplein, past a synagogue and over the canal before leading to the botanical gardens and Wertheim park. From there it was just a few hundred yards to the zoo.

  The Artis Zoo was a Victorian concoction, a throwback to the times when society was unsure how to relate to zoos in general. Was their purpose to exploit the animals and crank up the fear factor of getting up close to savage beasts – being just a wire away from staring into a lion’s mouth? Or was their function to educate people to appreciate and preserve the natural world? The upshot was a place of stunning Victorian architecture and little space for the animals to live and roam. The larger animals, unused to being kept in such confined spaces, did a lot of pacing around and scratching and other forms of displacement activity. Granted there was a recently refurbished aquarium and a planetarium, but overall I just felt sad for the poor cramped animals – not a life one would choose. Freedom cannot be valued too lightly.

  I started by doing a circuit round the perimeter and then worked in a spiral to the centre. Choosing the best place to meet was difficult. Should I be looking for a crowd-free area where the chances of being disturbed or observed were low, but if seen would look suspicious, or would the better alternative be the most crowded – the get-lost-in a-crowd principle? If going for the latter then the restaurant was the best bet: if the former, then it seemed the camel enclosure was the least favoured by the public. Still pondering, I headed for the restaurant and a decent cup of coffee.

  I sat outside at the restaurant and shivered. It wasn’t the coffee – that was good, double espresso, thick and strong; it was the place itself. I’d seen locations like it before – Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, Sinai Desert. It was the perfect killing ground, overlooked high from each of the four corners, great shooting positions. You could lay down fire here and the targets were sitting ducks. It was going to have to be camels – ugly, smelly, flatulent, foul-mouthed creatures that they were, they were preferable to being so exposed to attack. I shivered again, finished my coffee and rang Bull to tell them where to meet me.

  When they arrived I saw that Scout had changed from this morning’s jeans and T-shirt. Back in siren mode for Arnie, she had come as Tomb Raider, khaki shirt and matching trousers tucked into high brown suede boots. Her blonde hair was loose and unstructured – free and easy. If it had the same effect on Arnie as it did on me, he’d do anything she asked.

  Scout and I were looking at the camels, Bull had his back to the fence and was surveying the horizon.

  ‘How was your father today?’ I asked her.

  ‘Groggy,’ she said, sounding disappointed. ‘Didn’t recognize me.’

  ‘It’ll come,’ I said. ‘They must have used some pretty powerful stuff on him.’

  ‘The doctors reckon it was probably some form of truth serum – sodium amytal was their guess.’

  ‘If they used truth serum,’ said Bull, ‘then why would they need to plant a bug in the vase of flowers?’

  ‘The doctors said that there are a lot of misconceptions about truth serums. The latest thinking is that all they do is make the person talk more rather than talk without lying. Some people mix fact and fiction because all they want to do is talk. Any information obtained is at best unreliable.’

  ‘I can’t help but think we’re missing something obvious,’ I said. ‘That there’s an elephant in the room.’

  ‘Or a camel,’ said Bull.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘we’d smell the camel.’

  Arnie arrived looking nervous. He and Scout went through the kissing ritual and that seemed to make him more nervous. He looked at the camel and talked to me while doing so, avoiding eye contact. Maybe there was still that something in my eyes.

  ‘Two of the million-euro bearer bonds have been cashed,’ he said, the words exploding out of his mouth in a fast-running stream.

  ‘Where?’ I asked, thinking that at last we might get a lead.

  ‘Switzerland, Zurich.’

  ‘Do we have a name or an account number – anything we can trace back to Carlo?’

  ‘That’s the interesting bit. The Swiss won’t divulge any account information – you know what they’re like, anonymity above all else. But they have told us the bonds were cashed in two transactions.’

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Bull said.

  I nodded. Looked at Scout and said, ‘I think we know at least some of the information they were trying to get out of your father.’

  Scout shook her head. ‘It would be out of character,’ she said. ‘I don’t think my father has done a dishonest thing in his life.’

  ‘There’s always a first time. A million euros can make any man dishonest. Set him up for life. Make him forget the mission he started with. If you’re going to take a bribe, it might as well be a big one.’

  ‘So your theory,’ said Scout, ‘is that my father found Carlo and took a bribe to let him go?’

  ‘Turn a blind eye,’ I said.

  ‘There’s more,’ said Arnie. ‘Carlo has been using his S
ilvers card. Several transactions at petrol stations – enough to get him to Switzerland and back and beyond. Lots of petrol.’

  ‘But I’ve checked all the hire car companies,’ said Scout. ‘My informants can’t find any record of him hiring a car.’

  And then it hit us all at the same time.

  Scout went white, all colour draining from her face. ‘Crap,’ she said. ‘Crap, crap, crap.’

  ‘We made a blunder,’ I said. ‘We missed the elephant in the room. Carlo didn’t have to hire a car.’

  Scout finished the sentence, ‘Because he has a car of his own. Sorry, Johnny. It’s so unusual for Amsterdammers to own a car, I overlooked it.’

  ‘Any way of checking for the details of the car?’

  Scout took out her mobile and walked a few paces away so that we couldn’t hear the name of her informant. Arnie looked pleased with himself, although he must have guessed that the information he had provided wasn’t exactly what we wanted to hear. After a few minutes Scout put away her phone and walked back to us.

  ‘This is one big elephant,’ she said. ‘Guess what car Carlo has. No, I’ll put you out of your misery. It’s a bright red Lamborghini. He might as well have painted his name on the roof in big bold letters.’

  ‘Or taken out an ad in every national newspaper,’ I said.

  ‘Or booked a slot on primetime television,’ said Arnie, getting in on the act.

  ‘Don’t tell me he’s got a personalized number plate too?’

  Scout nodded.

  ‘No wonder your father found him so quickly,’ said Bull.

  ‘My informant said that my father had phoned him last week. God, I’m so embarrassed. We’ve been wasting our time.’

  ‘OK, no more recriminations,’ I said. ‘Let’s make a plan.’ I turned to Arnie. ‘Can you keep a permanent watch on Carlo’s Silvers card and relay information to us as soon as you find it?’

  He nodded. ‘There’ll be a time delay, but nothing more than a few hours.’

  ‘We’ll need to split up and cover the major roads along the German border,’ I said. ‘Good job we’ve got reinforcements arriving.’ I looked at Scout and smiled. ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s as much my fault as yours. I should have guessed that Carlo would do something impulsive and dangerous. I thought he might have changed – matured – over the years, but I gave him too much credit. People like Carlo don’t change.’