Tanker (A Tim Burr Thriller Book 1)

by Nicholas E Watkins

  “Turkish Embassy,” was the reply.

  “Shit,” said Jeff but before he could react a Mercedes pulled up outside the takeaway and the door opened as two men accompanying Tim and Yosuf left the shop. Then three further men appeared from nowhere and began shooting at the group leaving the takeaway. The doors to the black Transit had opened and suddenly a shit storm of gunfire was in full progress. More armed individuals poured from the shop adding to the hail of gunfire and confusion.

  “Fuck me,” said the driver.

  “Fuck me, indeed,” added Jeff. The Turkish Secret Service was the clear winner and Jeff decided to get out the car and break up the party.

  What happened after?” asked Elaine impatiently.

  “Mehmet called a halt not wishing to set back Turkish diplomatic relations with the UK a hundred years and matters seemed more or less under control.”

  “You call that under control? The street littered with dead Turks. You have a very strange idea of the meaning of under control.”

  Jeff ignored his boss’s sarcasm and continued. “As I said, matters were calming down and then Anthony decided to leg it. I ordered the lads to give chase.”

  “So where is our Mr Burr?” asked Elaine.

  “The next thing we know armed response police appear from every direction waving machine guns and they have a bloody helicopter overhead and the lot of us are bundled up and carted off to the nick.” He paused, “Thanks for getting us out, by the way”

  “I repeat, where is Anthony Burr, now?”

  “I am sorry we just do not know.”

  “Well bloody well find him and bring him here” she said. “At least the press have bought the drug war angle and we can forget about the Turks as they are on their way back to Ankara, after the usual expelling of diplomats malarkey,” she continued.

  “Find Burr and try not to start a war, there’s a good boy. I shall now try and sort this out with my Minister,” she looked at her watch. “Bugger I am late,” she gathered up her bag., stood up and felt her feet pinch in her shoes.

  “One final thing,” she called as Jeff left her office. “Take my advice. Make sure you wear sensible shoes.”

  Chapter 22

  The sun flooded in through the crack in the curtains and a shaft of light entered the hotel room. Little dust particles created ever moving patterns. They seem to tumble and rise, changing colour as they rotated endlessly trapped in their prison of brightness in an otherwise darkened room.

  Tim just starred at the light. He was bewildered. Up to this point he had felt a little detached from events. Thinking back after finding Berat’s body in that tiny room in Menton events had taken control of him. Yosuf had guided him through. Shocked and in shock he had more or less been a bystander but with the violent death of his friend on the streets of North London the previous night it was no longer possible to just stay on for the ride. He realised he was now the focus of something very big and very dangerous.

  The night had been long and sleepless. A continuous rerun of the events replayed in his mind in ever increasing detail. Tiny details popped into his head, the sound of a gun, a muzzle flash, an expression on a face, a detail on a face such as a mark or scar. All ran round and round in his mind.

  He just kept starring at the beam of light as it filtered into the room as if it contained some mystic secret. Then recurring was Yosuf, bloody, dying lying beside him. He saw the look of pain, fear and resignation as the life passed from him. He felt hollowness in the pit of his stomach, a mix of fear and grief. He continued to stare at the light unmoving, grieving for hours.

  He felt dreadfully alone and wanted to reach out to someone, feel reassured, feel safe and above all feel hope. He was lost. He had relied on Yosuf to a great extent to do his planning and show the way forward. He had only known the man a few days but the bond had formed and interdependency was part of that bond. They had become friends, trusting each other and relying one on the other. That was the past but Tim needed a future.

  Tim finally roused himself to answer the call of nature. Even when you greave you still need to go to the toilet. He looked in the bathroom mirror. He looked like he felt, like a man who had been awake most of the night. He motivated himself and turning on the shower stepped under the stream of water. He let the warm water bathe his body and standing there tried to order the events of last evening. It was so fast but from the first shot being fired the rush of adrenaline had seemed to slow it all down so he could virtually re-run events in slow motion.

  Who were the three men who appeared firing? They had to be ISIS. They had to be part of the group that had killed Berat and they had traced Yosuf and him all the way from France. It was now clear to Tim that they had shot at the drug dealers and not at Yosuf or him. They wanted them alive or at least they wanted the memory stick before they killed him.

  He recognised the leader of the other group from the Yacht in Monte Carlo. That was Mehmet and he had had no compunction in killing Yosuf. Tim was pretty sure he would have only been kept alive long enough for them to get the memory stick. Of course when the rest of the drug gang poured out of the Kebab Shop armed to the teeth with guns blazing it had turned into the gunfight at the OK Coral, just bullets and bodies everywhere. Then all had stopped, silence apart from that lone voice. Tim remembered getting up and running from the scene and as if he were invisible had walked through the carnage, past all the various gunmen and through the police armed response team. Unchallenged he had just walked away up the road and boarded the underground train back to central London and his hotel.

  He slowly dressed himself and sat on the bed. He got up and drew the curtains back and the beam of light, with its dancing hoard of dust, vanished. His eyes landed on Yosuf’s bag. He felt sadness rush over him but knew he had to sort things out. He opened the bag and spread the contents on the small writing desk before him.

  There was money, lots of money in lots of different currencies. There were ID’s about twenty all with Yosuf’s photo on them. No use to Tim. He carried on examining the contents. There were some photos faded. A woman, a man, children and a young Yosuf smiling, his family thought Tim. A pile of credit cards fell from a big envelope. He examined the names, all different. There was a list of pin codes and security answers on a sheet of paper which matched the number on each card. These would be useful if they were useable. Tim needed to check the balances on them. The thing he did not want to do was present a credit card and have it declined as stolen or exceeding its credit limit.

  Then there was the laptop. He switched it on and it came to life. It was pristine, no files no sign of previous use. They had only used it to read the memory stick. The internet icon came up showing connections were available and the hotel name came up. Tim knew that they had been given the password when they had checked in and it was on a card somewhere on the desk. He began to pack the bundles of money and cards into his own bag and tidy up,

  He knew clearly that Jason Delonge was not to be trusted. Yosuf had told all about Jason and the small boy with the oval eyes. As he thought of the child he had killed his loathing for the man intensified. With such a horrendous crime Tim also knew that Jason would not stop at anything to get himself off the hook.

  His mind turned to the voice calling for calm last night. The voice was shouting MI5. Tim could not be sure if Jason had enough influence to convince MI5 that he and Yosuf were perhaps traitors or terrorists. He could only be sure of one thing that MI5 clearly had not been working with Mehmet and the Turkish Security Service. He further realised that they had not been shooting at anyone the previous evening and more to the point they had not been trying to shoot Yosuf or him. He put that knowledge on the backburner for the moment.

  Tim decided he had to eat and plan his next move. He locked the cases and put a do not disturb sign on the door. He worried that the amount of money and valuables in the room would tempt anyone into becoming a thief but what could he do. He needed somewhere to keep everything but that was easier said
than done. Before the terror attacks you could just go into a railway station and leave your luggage in a locker that option no longer existed for fear of a bomb being left.

  Sitting in the dining room, he drank his coffee and ate the continental breakfast and gradually decided the course of his actions. He would ask his ex Lisa, using one of the unregistered mobiles, if she would store some stuff for him either at her office or at her flat in London. He would check the balances on the credit cards left by Yosuf. That would involve logging on the hotel internet service and using the codes on the list to check each one individually. Finally he needed to decipher the last part of the information on the memory stick.

  As he stood he pondered the fact that a large number of suspect Insurance Companies with possible links to ISIS had placed huge bets on a very large ship sinking. If this happened the terrorists would be billions of dollars to the good. He knew he needed help to unravel the memory stick but he did not know who to ask. He had seen, the previous evening, that asking the wrong person would result in a swift bullet to his head and it was evident that neither ISIS nor the Turks had qualms about shooting people on the streets of the Capital.

  Returning to his room, he sat down at the small desk and connected the lap top to the net. He then methodically checked the balance on each card. He was astonished. There were over twenty cards all with approximately ten thousand on each. Yosuf had planed this for a long time. Tim also realised that Yosuf had been a bit of a fraudster helping himself to a large part of his department’s operational budget. Of course corruption was the norm in many of these countries and as everyone was in on it, fingers of blame were very unlikely to be pointed. Yosuf had merely set himself up a pension fund in the event he needed to take earlier retirement before someone like Mehmet retired him permanently and prematurely.

  He made a quick check of his emails before closing down the connection and phoning his wife. He only managed to get her voice mail. He decided to leave it and phone back a bit later. He felt better in himself in the fact that his was doing something. He turned his mind to the list of coded numbers from the memory card. He decided that he may get help from his University and decided that he would look up his old tutor, with whom he had kept in contact over the years and see if he would help him find someone in the mathematics department who could take a crack at deciphering it. A plan at least he thought.

  Chapter 23

  The sky glowed red and orange and the temperature began to drop as night fell over the desert landscape. Annubis lit the little gas stove and emptied a tin of spaghetti into the small camping pan. It tasted like shit but it was food. The Toyota Hilux had taken him for miles deeper into Iraq, after he had left his meeting with ISIS.

  He was going home. When he had seen the photo, of the scum-bag, who had used him and taken his young brother, he knew that this was the time to settle all matters. He had searched for years for Mehmet but could not track him down. Of course he had not known that their abuser was part of the Turkish Security Service and as such would have been impossible to identify. So he had become a killer for hire, a hit man and assassin but with just a single driving force, revenge. Then a gift, a divine gift it seemed from God, in a plain brown envelope, just handed to him, the photograph of his nemeses. Just like that a commission for him to be killed.

  Annubis knew that he was to fulfil destiny. His Father, his uncles, his cousins, grand fathers, wives, children, nieces and nephews killed. Why, God’s will, because they believed in a different branch of Islam?

  He sat in the moonlight looking at the distant village. He had covered the truck with brush so its outline was broken and merged into the background. The journey had been slow. The Country was still run by various militias and he had had to avoid them as he made his way to this point. It was late and the village slept as he walked down the track to the place he had called home. It was a wreck of a place now, walls were down, holes were in the road, rubbish scattered around and buildings partly demolished but still being lived in.

  He looked at their old house, shabby neglected with junk piled high in the garden that once his Mother had tended carefully and loved so much. Where they had sat as a family and shared their evening meal, where he had played with his brother and cousins. The walls of the building were bleached and the paint peeled and foliage grew on the neglected walls of the building.

  Sadness ate into his soul as he waited it in the moonlight. He felt emotional and a tear formed in his eye. This was the first feeling he had experienced since he had gone into himself on the loss of his brother. He was now sure what he should do. It was clear. Now was the time. He had weighed the souls of these people and they were heavier than a feather. Judgment was long overdue. He felt the pistol in his hand. It was unbalanced with the weight of the silencer.

  The door was not locked and he entered his old home. His Father’s waiting room had now been refurbished. The chairs that once lined the wall where the patients sat were gone as were the posters that gave medical advice on topics ranging from hand washing to teeth brushing. In his mind’s eye he could see his Mother ushering the patients through and handing their files to his Father. He could see his Father stretching after a day of seeing the sick and walking up the stairs to spend the evening with his family.

  Annubis walked slowly and silently up the same stairs. He could hear snoring and the rhythmic breathing of those sleeping in what was once his home. He stepped through the door of the first bedroom and looked down on the sleeping figure. The moonlight filtered in and he stood waiting for his eyes to adjust. He studied that figure. He knew him well, Gabir, his childhood friend. He remembered the sweets his Father had given him, the games they played and the BBQ in the garden. He placed the silencer to his head and pulled the trigger. The silencer restricted the sound of the discharge to a small cough. He watched as the small thin line of red spread into a large pool of blood. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small white feather. He had weighed Gabir’s soul against it and it was found to be heavier. He allowed the feather to float slowly down and watched it settle on the pool of blood. He watched as it turned slowly from white to red absorbing the blood and the guilt of the sinner in death.

  In the next room lay Gabir’s sister. She had been a baby when his Mother and he had fled for their lives, Innocent, he shot her anyway. He then moved to the next room and shot the other daughter, not even born when his Father died.

  He lay next to his wife snoring. “Wake up,” he said and turned the light on. They struggled from sleep, confused to be faced with him stood there gun in hand. The shock and fear spread across their faces. “Say good bye to your wife,” he shot her in the head. The skin, blood and brains sprayed over Gabir’s Father. The grey and red blubbering mass hung from his face and across his chest. He was in a state of panic, gasping for breath and trembling like a jelly. Annubis remembered his gloating face as he had shot his Father.

  “Stand up,” he waived the gun at the blubbering wreck of a man lying in the bed. He struggled to his feet trying to avoid the remains of his wife’s brains. Annubis could see that he had pissed himself in fear. His Father had faced death like a man, standing defiantly keeping his bowls in check unlike the piece of shit that had murdered him.

  “I should like to show you the cost of renting this house and the price you will pay for murdering my Father.” He marched him to each of his children’s rooms showing him their bleeding dead bodies. He cried and pleaded for his life. Now he knew that the price was the death of all those that he loved. Annubis pulled the trigger and placed a feather on his corpse.

  He then went to his uncles, aunties and grandparents houses. Twenty three further feathers were left before he drove away. He felt a sense of tranquillity and calm, almost of fulfilment as left his old village.

  He knew that this was just the beginning. It was time for all matters to be settled and all bills to be paid. He would be in Turkey soon and Mehmet awaited him.

  Chapter 24

  Tim had he
ard nothing back from his ex-wife Lisa. He was left with the problem of the contents of Yosuf’s bag. He knew walking around London stuffed to the gills with cash and credit cards was not a truly viable option. He needed somewhere to hide it. He emptied the contents onto the table to decide which items he should keep about his person and which items needed to deposited elsewhere.

  He tipped the case upside down on the table and began to build piles. Cash in one, credit cards in another and fake ids in a third. The ids which had photos of Yosuf were clearly of no use to him and would have to be disposed of. He decided that he would find a bin to dump them in. He then noticed the memory stick. He must have missed this when he had previously rummaged through the contents.

  He switched on the PC and inserted the stick. He found it was a video file and clicked on play. He knew instantly what he was seeing. There on the screen was Jason Delonge and the boy with the large oval eyes. He watched as long as he could bear it and was nearly sick. Tim knew if nothing else came from this whole big mess, he had become entangled in, was that Jason needed to be exposed for the piece of scum he was. Tim had not really felt hatred before but now he hated two men with a vengeance, Mehmet and Jason.

  He put the memory stick in his pocket where it joined the other he had been carrying for days. He still had the problem of deciphering the last part of the information. He had had no luck in contacting his old University tutor who was away on a lecture tour.

  He looked around the room for a place to hide the items piled in front of him. He looked for an air vent grill or the like having seen the loot being stashed in such a location in every gangster film he had seen. Sadly this hotel did not provide rooms with the option of storage air vents. He decided he would have to go to his ex-wife’s office and ask her to look after the stuff. He had no other course of action open to him. He packed the case and left to walk to the tube station.