For The Death Of Me ob-9

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘I don’t want your fucking money!’ she snapped. ‘I want to stay alive.’

  ‘Then let me do this, and you’ve got a chance.’

  I listened to her breathing. I felt Prim’s eyes on me, and Dylan’s, but I kept mine fixed on the house, looking for anything, the faintest twitch of a blind or curtain.

  ‘Okay,’ Maddy said eventually. ‘Send her across. But no tricks, or her brains will be all over the hall.’

  I ended the call and turned to Prim. ‘She’s says she’s armed and we have to believe her,’ I told her. ‘Plus, she’s very emotional. If you say no, I’ll drive away right now, but I don’t know what we do to help her after that.’

  ‘You give me as long as it takes,’ she replied. ‘While I’m in there, you do not phone again. If either of you gets out of the car, you keep your hands where they can be seen from the house at all times.’

  ‘All of the above,’ I murmured.

  She squeezed my hand, leaned over and kissed me quickly on the cheek, then opened her door and slid out.

  We watched her as she walked away from us, her brown body seeming to glow with health, her hips moving rhythmically, encased within the skin-hugging shorts.

  We watched her as she stopped at the door of number seventeen. Almost at once, it opened. ‘There’s only one place she could possibly be carrying a weapon,’ said Dylan, as she stepped inside, with a flash of the crudity for which he had been famous in Scotland, ‘but no way could she ever get it out in time.’

  43

  We waited there for thirty-seven minutes. I know this because I must have checked my watch at least thirty-seven times. My patience control was set at one out of ten, but I managed to keep it in check. After half an hour I stepped out of the car, laying my hands on the roof as Prim had specified. The metal was burning hot, but I didn’t care: it gave me something else to think about.

  I jumped when my phone rang. I snatched it from my pocket and flipped it open. ‘Yes? I snapped.

  ‘Hey,’ Susie exclaimed, ‘what’s with you?’

  ‘Can’t talk now, love,’ I said. ‘We’re almost there. I’ll call you when it’s all sorted.’

  It rang again two minutes later, and this time it was Prim, calling from the house. ‘Okay,’ she whispered. ‘Maddy says you can come in, but only you.’

  ‘Sorry, pal,’ I said to Mike. ‘You’re not invited.’ He wasn’t bothered. He’d started on my book; looking for ideas, I supposed.

  I crossed the street quickly and took the steps in front of the house three at a time. Prim opened the door for me. Maddy was in a sitting room to the left of the entrance hall. She bore no resemblance to the assertive, well-groomed woman I’d met on Sentosa Island; even her hair was a mess. A gun lay on a coffee-table, a big Colt automatic, forty-five gauge at least. I’d fired one in a movie, blank rounds. If she’d tried to use it, the recoil would have taken it right out of her hand.

  I held up both of mine. ‘Hello,’ I began. ‘I am the Lone Ranger, honest. Tonto’s out in the car.’

  After everything that had happened to her, she managed a laugh. A weak one, but I took it as something positive, a sign that she didn’t feel alone any more.

  ‘What do I do now, Oz?’ she asked.

  ‘Whatever I say, would be a good place to begin. I think we should all get out of here. This is a dead end, Maddy, we don’t want to be cornered.’

  ‘Where do we go?’

  ‘Anywhere out of Princeton. Pack what stuff you have, and let’s move. We can make decisions on the road.’

  ‘Will I be safer?’

  ‘Sure. The Triads may be looking for you, but they’re not after me. With me, you’re less visible.’

  She agreed, and she didn’t have a lot to pack. We were heading out of Princeton inside ten minutes. She was going to leave a note for her sister but I vetoed that. Just in case the opposition arrived and broke in (classic security: the key had been under a big flowerpot in the back garden) I didn’t want to leave any clue that she’d been there.

  I decided against going back to New York. Instead I went back to Highway One and headed south for Trenton, the state capital, less than fifteen miles away. We didn’t shop around for a hotel: I spotted a big Marriott, almost on the Delaware River, which at that point divides New Jersey from Pennsylvania. We headed straight there.

  We took three rooms; Madeleine wanted Prim to share with her, but there was no way I was bunking with Dylan. I filled out the registration forms, using phoney names (I registered Maddy as Ms April July and the clerk didn’t bat an eyelid) and hoping that I wasn’t as famous in Trenton as I was in most other places. I paid for two nights up-front, cash.

  Once we were settled in, I went out and bought a case of beer from a liquor store I’d seen on the way in. Back in the hotel I called the girls’ room; they’d showered by that time, so I went along. I opened a beer, handed it to Maddy and she guzzled it like she’d been dying of thirst. I gave her another; that went the same way. Half-way through the third, there was a knock at the door, and Prim let Dylan in. He’d brought some Miller’s; great minds and all that stuff.

  ‘Were you and Tony really married?’ I asked, when everyone was relaxed.

  Maddy nodded. ‘We did it in Singapore. They can be a bit old-fashioned about living together over there. Plus, I loved him.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He was a gangster, Oz,’ she said philosophically. ‘I suppose danger comes with the job. If he’d bothered to tell me. .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d probably have stayed with him. As it was, he loved me. He gave up his life trying to protect me.’ She started to sob quietly. ‘If only I wasn’t so pathologically jealous. I had a bad experience with that Australian faggot, Sandy. When Tony started keeping odd hours, I thought the worst. . and the worst happened, although not as I’d imagined.’ She killed her third can. I gave her another. ‘Now,’ she belched quietly as she tore it open, ‘I’m royally fucked. Tony didn’t leave me in any doubt about these people. They will keep coming.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to stop them,’ I said.

  She sighed. ‘And just how are we going to do that?’

  ‘Good question,’ Dylan chipped in.

  ‘If you’re writing this book,’ I asked him, ‘what happens?’

  ‘Fuck knows,’ he said wonderfully tactlessly. ‘Maddy keeps on running or, like I said in jest a while back, lives with me in New York till the heat’s off?’

  Madeleine scowled at him: clearly she didn’t fancy that idea.

  I leaned back against the headboard of Prim’s bed. She was reclining beside me, wrapped in a hotel dressing-gown. ‘Way I see it,’ I took time to kill some beer of my own, ‘there’s only one thing you can do to break the cycle. You’ve still got these pics, am I right?’ She nodded. ‘Stored on a PDA?’

  ‘Clever boy.’

  ‘Then use the power they give you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I laughed at her amazing ability to think in everything but a straight line. ‘Maddy, why do these people want to kill you? What did Tony tell you? The man you saw with him, the man in the photographs: his identity is unknown to anyone outside his organisation. The Singaporean government has been trying to identify him for years, and shut him down, but they can’t because he’s too strong, and too clever. At least he was, until you came stumbling into his life.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So put an end to him. Use the fucking knowledge: give the photographs to the Singapore police.’

  She stared at me. So did Dylan: I’d just written a new twist into his book. (By the way, Maddy thought that his name really was Benedict Luker.)

  ‘It’s that simple?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Nothing in life is that simple, but it’s all you can do unless you fancy sharing Benny’s humble loft for the foreseeable future.’

  She frowned. ‘But I’m in New Jersey,’ she murmured. ‘I’m not going back to Sing, Oz. I can’t do that.’


  I shook my head. ‘You don’t need to,’ I told her. ‘I’ll arrange for Sing to come to you.’

  44

  By the time Maddy had been convinced, with Prim’s help, I have to say, that she had run out of healthy options, it had gone eight thirty. We ordered room-service sandwiches and ate them in virtual silence.

  Pretty soon, the effects of the beer started to show on Madeleine. I motioned to Dylan that we should leave the girls to settle down for the night, and led him back to my room. I did a quick calculation and reckoned that it would be mid-morning in Singapore; Sunday morning, granted, but the guy I was planning to call wasn’t the type to go off watch, ever.

  As we’d done in the Stamford, I put the hotel phone on hands-free mode and dialled Jimmy Tan’s mobile number. I’d been wrong: there was no answer. We watched some baseball on TV, then I tried him again an hour later. This time I came up lucky.

  ‘Who this?’ he asked suspiciously. The readout on his cell-phone wasn’t giving him any clues.

  ‘Oz Blackstone and Benny Luker,’ I told him.

  ‘Ah, you guys. You still chase the lady? If you find her tell her from me there no problem with that thing in Malaysia.’

  ‘We have found her, Jimmy.’

  His chuckle filled the room. ‘There no escape from you bad boys,’ he said. ‘But so what?’

  ‘So plenty,’ Dylan cut in. ‘She has something you’ve been trying to get your hands on for years, and she’s ready to hand it over.’

  ‘What she got that I would want?’

  ‘The picture that started all this off: the one of Tony Lee and the Triad chieftain. We assumed that he had burned it with all the rest, and maybe he did, but Maddy made another copy, on computer.’ We could hear Tan’s gasp.

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘Never more so,’ I told him.

  ‘This is great news; I tell the prime minister about this.’

  ‘You don’t tell anybody, Jimmy,’ Mike insisted, ‘until you have the pictures in your hands and until Maddy’s well clear of pursuit.’

  ‘Okay, he can wait. Where are you?’

  ‘We’re in the US; Trenton, New Jersey. How soon can you get to us?’

  ‘Oz, I never leave South East Asia. I send someone, my most trusted person.’

  ‘Jimmy, we want to deal with you.’

  ‘I send you my right hand. You want me cut off real one, send that as proof?’

  I looked at Dylan. He shrugged and nodded. ‘Okay,’ I conceded. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Where is nearest airport?’

  ‘There’s one in here in Trenton,’ Dylan volunteered. ‘I saw a sign for it as we came into the city.’

  ‘Then that where we meet; you find meeting room in terminal, my person find you, give you letter of introduction from me. You hand over photos and have plane waiting; soon as it’s done, you all get hell out of there, you, woman. .’ he paused ‘. . and Mr Luker.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Simple precaution, Oz,’ Mike said. ‘Jimmy doesn’t like to admit it, but the Triads are everywhere and there’s an outside chance they’ve penetrated his organisation. If his messenger has been followed, well, we don’t want to get caught there. Right, Jimmy?’

  ‘Right,’ Tan growled. ‘But only very outside chance.’

  ‘We won’t risk it, though,’ I decided. ‘I’ll have a private jet on the ground ready to move. When?’

  ‘It long flight, Singapore to eastern seaboard.’ He was silent, calculating. ‘Sunday morning here now, maybe can’t get on a plane tonight. Make it six, Monday evening, USA time.’

  ‘Right; we’ll be ready.’ I frowned, as if he could see me. ‘When you get these photographs, Jimmy, you will shut these people down, won’t you?’

  ‘Oz,’ he chuckled, ‘they not know what hit them.’

  45

  The waiting, again. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were singing in my brain all that night and all through Sunday. Maddy never left her room, and she was never left alone either. The security bolt was on all night and during the day either Mike or I was always with her.

  I left all the arrangements until the Monday morning as a tiny piece of extra security. They didn’t take long to make. I booked a twelve-seater Gulfstream jet, to be on the ground and fuelled up by five thirty, ready to take off on command, destination Newark, ready to connect with a British Airways flight to Heathrow for Mrs Primavera Blackstone, Ms Madeleine January and me, and with the train to Penn Station for Mr Benedict Luker.

  The terminal building at Trenton Mercer Airport is very small, they told me, but they did have a VIP room which they’d be happy to prepare for the private use of my party and me prior to our flight.

  The charter company wanted passenger names in advance: a TSA requirement, they said. I gave them mine, Prim’s and Benny’s, and they didn’t quibble over the fourth member of the group, Doe, Jane, Ms.

  When all that was done, I left Mike guarding our charge and took my ex-wife for a walk, a tour of the State Capitol building, an impressive pile, which is, they say, the second oldest in the US. Neither of us was really interested, though: there were things, I sensed, that we wanted, no, needed, to say to each other, but they’d take more time than we had available.

  That’s the trouble with the really important things, and time. Too often, there isn’t enough of it; too often, it’s the wrong moment. That, of course, just ain’t true. For matters important enough, there’s always enough time; there’s never a wrong moment.

  But, as it was, we whiled away a couple of hours, looking at old stones in silence, until it was time to gather the team and get the show on the road.

  I drove us the short distance to the airport in the rental car. I’d arranged for Hertz to collect it. It was five forty when we arrived, were greeted by the airport manager and shown into our private room. As he left us, Madeleine stepped up to me. She kissed my cheek, and slipped a small square envelope into the breast pocket of my shirt. ‘Just a little card,’ she whispered, ‘to say sorry and thanks for everything.’

  We sat on our hands for the next twenty minutes. I’d set the alarm on my watch for six exactly. Everybody jumped when it went off.

  Two more minutes went by, before we heard a soft knock on the door. I went across, opened it, and almost cried out in my surprise. Standing there in a silk dress with a slit up the side, a bag over her shoulder and her letter of introduction clutched in her hand was Marie Lin. ‘What the hell?’ I gasped.

  ‘My father sent me,’ she said. ‘He trusts nobody in the world more than me.’

  46

  When I stood aside to allow her into the room, I could see the flash of astonishment in Mike’s eyes, but he controlled it well, and didn’t let it transfer to his mouth.

  She insisted that I read her letter of introduction, and I went along with it. The notepaper bore the embossed crest of the Government of Singapore.

  Dear Oz [it began],

  Allow me to introduce formally my daughter, Tan May Wee, who is my emissary in this matter. I apologise if this has come as a surprise to you, but I ask you to accept that when one’s father is head of the security police it is wise to pursue one’s profession under an assumed name.

  Marie is indeed an aspiring actress, and she was very honoured to make your acquaintance in Singapore, although she was unaware, until I told her of the incident in the Next Page, that you had made mine.

  She is a good, brave woman, and you may trust her to complete our mission properly and to return the material safely to me, so that use may be made of it. Yours truly Jimmy

  When I’d finished, I passed it to Mike; he read it in turn, unsmiling, then put it back into its envelope and handed it back to me.

  ‘Okay,’ I said to Maddy. ‘This is Marie, the agent of the Singapore security service, and she’s here to take charge of your pictures. So, hand them over and let’s get the hell out of here.’

  She looked at me, almost gratefully, then reached into
her bag, removed an HP personal organiser, a state-of-the-art model, and handed it over. ‘Go to “Home” then “Pictures” if you want to see them,’ she offered.

  ‘My father said I must not look at them,’ Marie told her, ‘for my own safety.’ She switched off the palmtop and removed the memory card from its slot. ‘They are stored here?’ Maddy nodded. ‘Then that will be sufficient.’ She handed back the wee silver computer.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now, come on. Let’s board the jet.’

  A second door in the VIP room led directly on to the tarmac. I opened it, and found the co-pilot waiting outside. ‘If you’ll come with me,’ he said. He was a big, beefy lad with a blond crew-cut. His ID said he was called Scott, and he looked as if, at some point in his college career, he could have been a pretty effective nose tackle.

  Mike took each of the girls by the elbow and steered them after the officer towards the Gulfstream, which was parked only thirty yards away. They wheeled their luggage and his was slung over his shoulder. I waited in the doorway with Marie. ‘I want to thank you for this,’ I told her, ‘and your father. You’ve saved a woman’s life here.’

  She looked at me as she had as she disappeared down the escalator at the Clarke Quay MRT station, the last time I’d seen her. ‘Then thank me,’ she whispered. ‘Stay behind with me for a while. I know you well enough now.’

  I felt a tiny shudder run through me. I almost turned and walked away, as I bloody well should have done. Instead I looked at her, or maybe the devil in me looked at her. Again, I almost turned away, and then I heard inside my head a voice, crystal clear, a voice I’d known all my life: Jan’s voice, my sister’s voice, my soul-mate’s voice.