Yana turned to Rozalina and said something that made Rozalina’s blue eyes harden.
‘No!’ George said, realising she had revealed too much. ‘I’m not spying.’ Searching for an excuse for her cross-examination. The last thing she needed to do was draw attention to herself in front of Maritza, who was busy about a pile of chocolate-dipped churros but who, George reasoned, would instantly swap her breakfast for the thrill of a kill and an extra share of the money. ‘It’s just that we transportistas are independent. You know? We’re not slaves or trafficked like you two. We work for Nikolay but, hey! We’re all women, aren’t we? I don’t have to like that you’re being exploited.’
Pursing her lips, Yana sized George up. Lit another cigarette with shaking hands. ‘You don’t have to like it?’ she asked. She laughed mirthlessly. Leaned in with a suddenly stern expression, lowering her voice so that she could not be overheard. ‘Now I know you’re lying. Because that pig who runs the bar told us that about ten Salvadoran girls from another of Nikolay’s brothels managed to escape and ran into the hills to an airstrip in the middle of nowhere, hoping to get a flight back to El Salvador. But they got caught. He said they’ve been rounded up and taken prisoner. And you know what?’
George didn’t like the expression on the Russian girl’s face. It had a fatalistic air of bitter resignation to it. ‘What?’
‘Before you lot showed up, he said your next job would be to travel to the airstrip to meet Nikolay, where you’ll be expected to chop the heads off the escaped girls.’
Opening and closing her mouth, George felt the Coke fizzing unpleasantly in the pit of her stomach. Beheading runaway trafficked women. This was not something she had ever signed up to do in the course of trying to track down her missing father. She swallowed hard. And this Nikolay would definitely be there. Maritza would be expecting her to be on familiar terms with him. Shit. This is getting worse by the minute, she thought. I’ve got to see this through but if I do, I’m definitely either going to have to kill or get killed. Why did I sign up to this? Why?
‘Oh,’ she simply said in answer to the Russian girl.
‘Because that’s what he does,’ Yana continued. ‘Nikolay has earned his nicknames because he’s a brutal, lying monster. El cocodrilo. El silenciador. Human life means nothing to him. He steals everything from you. Your money, your body, your future, your voice.’
Standing, George realised she was attracting attention to herself by talking to the Russian girls. Yana now had her arm around a sobbing Rozalina. Maritza and the other transportistas were looking over at them. But something had struck a chord with George.
‘Hang on a minute. Did you say one of Nikolay’s names was el silenciador?’ She felt the colour drain from her face. ‘And that he lives in Amsterdam?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Silencer?’
‘Yes.’ Yana nodded and blew a plume of smoke into the air.
George stumbled backwards as the enormity of what the Russian girl had said hit home. There was only one Silencer. And he would recognise Georgina McKenzie in a single, rotten heartbeat.
CHAPTER 36
The Caribbean Sea, just off the coast of Mexico, 1 June
‘Look,’ he said to Jorge. ‘You can’t smoke in here. It’s a fire risk.’
The heat on the inside of the sub generated by the engines was already unbearable. Sweat rolled down his face and back, soaking into the uncomfortable ‘Captain’s chair’, which was nothing more than a second-hand typing chair. But Jorge, who was sitting on a mattress, seemed unperturbed.
‘Who’s the one with the gun, mecánico? Me or you?’ Jorge waved the pistol towards him like a dismissive flick of his hand.
‘You.’
‘Exactly. Now, it takes three days and nights to sail to the Dominican. I suggest you worry less about what I’m doing and captain this goddamn tub right. Because if you screw up and we go down, you’re dead whichever way you look at it.’ He set his pistol down on the mattress, struck a match and lit the foul-smelling cigar, examining the glowing end with a satisfied smile.
Turning back towards the console, he wept inwardly with frustration, considering how the next sixty-odd hours might pan out. If the cigar started a fire, the tonnes and tonnes of meth would start to burn and would kill them both with narcotic fumes. If Jorge insisted upon lighting cigars for the next two and a half days, the ventilation system wouldn’t be able to cope with his exhaled smoke – that much was clear. The diesel stink was already overpowering. The bucket that sloshed in the corner with urine was rancid. The conditions were even worse than he had anticipated, and all because that murderous fiend el cocodrilo had insisted he set sail before the semi-submersible had been tested properly and any glitches had been ironed out. Mercifully, the thing was staying afloat and watertight, despite it having been overloaded.
‘How far have we gone?’ Jorge asked.
He checked the navigation display. ‘We’ve been going about nine hours. Seventy-three nautical miles.’
‘Go faster.’
‘We can’t. This thing does eight nautical miles an hour. We’ve got about six hundred nautical miles to go. Jorge, you’re going to have to be patient. This is no speedboat. And please, for the love of God, put your cigar out and stop smoking.’ He scrutinised his guard’s face for understanding or at least a glimmer of interest, if only motivated by self-preservation. But he saw only indifference and arrogance on that sweaty, heavily stubbled face. ‘Well, at least be careful with how you dispose of the smoking materials and try to keep your smoking to a minimum. We can’t afford a fire on here. The cargo will be lost, we’d have to abandon the vessel, and the mighty el cocodrilo will come after you and maybe use your blood to launch the next sub.’
Finally, Jorge shuffled on the mattress, looking contrite. He stubbed the cigar out on the sole of his flip-flop and lay back with his arms above his head, revealing in all their glory the epic sweat stains around the armpits on his vest.
Go to sleep! he thought. Please go to sleep. Surely he’ll drop off at some point.
But Jorge crept on his hands and knees over to the bricks of meth that the transportistas had loaded onto the semi-submersible. He pulled aside the many layers of clingfilm and pulled out several crystals.
‘You never saw this,’ the guard said, winking. Crawling back to his mattress, Jorge crushed the crystals on a plate with the butt of his pistol and snorted the resulting powder through a rolled-up fifty-pesos note.
No. The guy would never sleep. Not now.
An hour passed. He stared blankly at the instruments, mesmerised by their glowing displays. Jorge had grown restless and garrulous, talking endlessly about men he had beaten up or killed for the cartel, women he had fucked to within an inch of their lives and time he had spent in prison, caged in overcrowded cells with other gang members.
‘This is my life, mecánico. My calling. I am totally committed to Coba and el cocodrilo.’ Jorge thumped his chest and rolled over, facing the wall. But still, he continued to drone on and on in his meth-fuelled eulogy. ‘You know what? This makes me proud. This makes my family proud. Because the country … the state offers men like me nothing. No way to feed my wife and kids. No means of looking after my parents now that they’re old and can’t work. You know what my neighbour’s mother does to make money? She goes around the streets in Playa del Carmen collecting empty water bottles from the tourists in a big sack so she can get a few pesos for them. Not my mother.’
Realising that Jorge was utterly absorbed in the telling of his own life story, whether he interjected or not, he started to remember the scene on the beach. The beheading of the scout. The armed transportistas who had loaded the meth onto the sub. Hadn’t one of them knocked into him as he had stumbled towards the vessel? A young woman, tattooed like the others but not pure Latin American. She had been mixed race. Perhaps originally from one of the islands in the Caribbean, Afro-Salvadoran or Mestiza. The memory sharpened. She had touched his hip. Was it pos
sible that she had slid something into his pocket?
Holding his breath, he nervously glanced over to Jorge and saw that his guard was still jabbering away to the wall, to the ceiling, to anything that wouldn’t interrupt his autobiographical flow. Perfect.
Tentatively, he slid his hand inside the pocket of his shorts. His heart thudded inside his chest, feeling like it might explode, for there, at the end of his fingertips, he felt a piece of folded paper. A note. A note! What could it say? Why had that woman slipped him a secret missive? If only there had been a dunny on board the sub. He had no option but to try to read it now.
Withdrawing it with careful, determined fingers, he slid the note out of his left pocket and transferred it to his right side – the side that Jorge could not see from where he lay on his mattress. Unfolded it. It was a handwritten letter of sorts, penned in a very tight hand, and now shaking between his sweaty fingers so violently that he could not read the words. Appearing to examine the clipboard that contained readings of their position, he silently clipped the letter beneath some nautical data. Started to read.
CHAPTER 37
The Netherlands, a warehouse in a dockside location, at the same time
The gaffer tape stung as it was ripped from Elvis’ mouth, waking him. Opening his eyes, he realised he was in a warehouse of sorts. Dank and dark with boxes stacked to the double-height ceiling. A well-used fork-lift truck idling unmanned some ten feet away, but otherwise empty. The place smelled of mildew and diesel. Outside, the call of seagulls told him he was by the sea. But where was his abductor? And why did his throat throb so badly? He swallowed and winced. The pain lanced through him. The fear paralysed him.
It was all he could do to swivel his eyes to search for whoever had removed the gag.
To his left, plastic flaps served as a door into some adjacent area. To his right—
‘Jesus!’
The water bit into his skin like an ice pick. He could barely see. His breath came in miserly choking gasps. Shaking his head, he tried to shout out but his words emerged no louder than a whisper. ‘Who are you?’
A man loomed before him, clutching an empty bucket and wearing a sadistic grin. The giant whom he had last seen as a reflection in the mirrored lenses of his informant’s sunglasses. Dressed in all black with a leather jacket, like some B-movie gangster. He even had the buzz cut.
‘What are you doing?’ Elvis asked, his voice an agonising, hoarse rasp that grated his throat raw with every syllable he managed. ‘Let me go. I’ve got no problem with you. You’ve got no problem with me. Please. Take my wallet, if it’s money you want.’ Looking into the giant’s expressionless face, Elvis could see that his words were wasted. This was not a man to barter with.
‘Shut your mouth,’ the man said, planting a right hook on Elvis’ left cheekbone that almost knocked him from the chair he was tied to. ‘We want you to listen and learn, gay boy.’
Elvis spat blood onto the floor, remembering the alleyway. He had been bickering with his informant Sepp one minute and under attack from these brutes the next. Garrotted. ‘Where’s Sepp – the old guy with the long hair? What did you do with him?’
Grinning, the man whistled. The engine of the yellow fork-lift cranked up and the vehicle began to reverse towards him. Panting fast with adrenalin, Elvis noticed that it was being driven by one of the other men from the alley – one of the men who had sprinted after his informant. The fork-lift, which had had its sharp forks pointing in the opposite direction to Elvis, spun around. There, impaled on the end of the raised blades, hung the lifeless body of Sepp, transformed from a hoary old biker to a battered rag doll that dripped blood onto the warehouse floor in a trail. The vehicle moved closer and closer, coming to a stop only a couple of feet away. On closer inspection, Elvis could see that the old junkie was missing an eye. Blood dripped from the empty, ruined socket. A fresh kill.
‘Oh my God!’ Elvis cried. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘This prick was on our payroll,’ the giant said. He folded his arms, looking up at the body and nodding, as though he was admiring an art installation rather than a corpse. ‘One of us. His job was to watch you and your little friends – one little friend in particular, goes by the name of Georgina McKenzie.’
‘George?’ Elvis asked, staring at his abductor’s broken nose.
‘Yes. My boss has got a hard-on for McKenzie. She’s been a naughty girl and cost him a lot of money. So, my boss paid your man here to put the frighteners on McKenzie. Shadow her a bit. Let her know she was under scrutiny. But your little grass got greedy, didn’t he? You can’t take cash off the Rotterdam Silencer and then go running to some gay-boy pig for another handout in return for information on him. That, my friend, is called shitting where you eat.’
‘Why the hell did you cut the poor bastard’s eye out?’ Elvis whispered. Tears leaked onto his cheeks, betraying his show of bravado as nothing more than that. They’re going to kill me and cut out my eye too. Mum’s dying. And here I am, strapped to a fucking chair in some dockside warehouse. I’ll never see Arne again. My one shot at happiness and it’s over though it never really began. Then, it dawned on him. ‘You!’
‘Me what?’
‘The eye in the gift-wrapping in Vinkeles restaurant. You sent the eye to McKenzie and made her think it was her mother’s. But it really belonged to some two-bit dealer that had been killed and dumped on wasteland. Nasser Malik. The pathologist said it was an obvious gang-style execution. You did it!’
The man inside the fork-lift truck started to laugh. ‘He’s not stupid, is he?’ he shouted.
‘It might have been me,’ the giant said, winking.
‘Where’s McKenzie’s mother?’ The pain of his garrotted throat and the blood that seeped from his split cheekbone were the last things on his mind, now. Elvis was feverish with intrigue as he started to piece the puzzle together. Even his mother had receded to the back of the queue of conscious thoughts as his imagination raced away with elaborate theories. ‘McKenzie thought it was Gordon Bloom that sent the eye. The Duke. But it wasn’t, was it? It was Stijn Pietersen. And you work for him, don’t you?’
‘Clever boy. I already fucking said that.’ The sarcasm was audible in the man’s voice.
Elvis struggled in his chair, his nostrils flaring, working overtime to keep his cortisol-flooded body suffused with oxygen. This was it. The end of his life. ‘I’ve got no interest in the Rotterdam Silencer. Tell him that. You must tell him. I heard nothing. I’ve reported nothing.’ Deep inside him, his policeman’s honour and principles were intact. But they had been temporarily overridden by survival instincts. ‘Please. You’ve got to believe me.’
‘What do you want me to do with this arsehole?’ Elvis’ pleading was interrupted by the driver of the fork-lift, who manoeuvred the forks up and down for clarification. The sad body of Sepp, the duplicitous informant, flapped around like a listless puppet, showering Elvis with thick droplets of coagulating blood.
Elvis tried to scream but could only emit a half-hearted whimper, clenching his eyes shut. Opening them again, willing himself to face his murderers like a man.
His abductor shrugged. ‘Stick him in a body bag for now. I’ll take him to the incinerator when I get a minute.’ He turned to Elvis. ‘Now, there’s just the question of you, gay boy.’
He withdrew from his pocket something wrapped in a red-stained rag that had been placed inside a clear plastic lunch bag. Removing the object from the bag and peeling the edges of the rag back, the giant revealed a ratty, staring eyeball between his fingers and thumb.
‘Open wide,’ he said.
‘No! You’re fucking mad!’ Elvis said.
But the giant pinched Elvis’ nostrils together with his left hand, forcing him to gulp air through his mouth. Briefly, Elvis tried to shake his head around enough to evade the man’s cannibalistic intentions, but he had a strong grip on Elvis’ nose.
‘Pop it in your mouth. There you go, gay boy. A fudge-packer like you s
hould have no trouble putting a ball in your gob, should you?’
He rammed the eyeball into Elvis’ mouth. Quickly produced a roll of gaffer tape from his jacket’s inside pocket and unfurled a strip with deft fingers. Placed it over Elvis’ full mouth in one fluid move.
Elvis started to gag immediately. He could feel the vomit rising in his gullet, realising there was no way out for it. This was worse than being garrotted. In five minutes’ time, he calculated he would have choked to death in any case. A bullet would have been kinder. Kill me, he thought. I can’t take this anymore. This is not what I signed up to. This is not bravery. It’s torture.
‘So, gay boy,’ the man said, leaning over so that his bowling ball of a head was level with Elvis’ face. Gripping his knees with hands like shovels. ‘This is the message the Rotterdam Silencer wants to send to Van den Bergen. And you’d better make sure you fucking give it to him, okay?’
Nodding, the tears streamed down Elvis’ cheeks. Vomit that had no other exit route sprayed through his nostrils, burning his throat on the way up and his sinuses on the way out.
‘Are you listening? I want you to give him and that bitch, McKenzie – especially McKenzie – the message that he’s watching them. The Silencer sees everything. But McKenzie in particular owes him big time for taking down The Duke.’
The man smiled and raised his eyebrows as Elvis fixed him with a quizzical look.
‘Yeah. That’s right,’ he said. ‘Gordon Bloom was the Rotterdam Silencer’s right-hand man. And when you dicks took him out of the picture, you forced the Silencer out of semi-retirement. So, now you’re going to pay. An eye for an eye, right? There’s a shit storm of biblical proportions brewing. It’s coming this way and it’s coming for Van den Bergen and McKenzie.’
CHAPTER 38
The Caribbean Sea, off the coast of Mexico, at the same time
The Girl Who Had No Fear Page 24
