“Hello?” he answered, putting the phone on loudspeaker.
“Mr Kennedy, do you have an answer for me?” asked the digitised voice.
“I want to speak to Lela. Unless I know she’s OK, I’m not selling,” said Tom adamantly.
“Hmmm, I don’t think you’re in any position to make demands young man, the question remains do you have an answer?”
“Not unless I speak to Lela,” insisted Tom.
“This isn’t a game. Are you going to sell Alba in return for your sister’s life? It’s a yes or no answer, what’s it going to be?” The digitised voice echoed around the room as the question hung in the air. Tom couldn’t answer. He had to know whether Lela was OK. He had to use Alba to save her. If he sold Alba before he got her back, she’d be as good as dead. However, somebody beat him to it and answered for him.
“NO!!! The Answer is NO!!!”
“Who’s listening to our call?” asked the digitised voice in a panic.
“Lela Kennedy!” she replied coldly.
Tom could not believe that she was standing next to him. He was speechless and Papa was in tears as were Kisho and Kano, the relief was overwhelming.
“But it can’t be, my men captured you, this is a trick!”
“Not it’s not. Now, is there anything else I can help you with before I get back to torturing your men?” asked Lela. The phone went dead.
Two seconds later, a mobile phone rang.
“Hello?” answered Lela.
“Fu,” was all that could be heard before the phone went dead.
Lela threw the phone to Tom.
“You may want Daniel or Zach to check this phone out. I took it off the leader guy.”
Chapter 72
Jones was slowly coming round and began to remember what had happened, surely it was a dream. He tried to move his hands but couldn’t. It wasn’t a dream. He remembered getting the call to warn him it would be a least another two hours before the decision and he had wandered out on to the deck.
No sooner had he stepped outside, when he heard a noise in the cabin and had gone back in to see the girl fighting four of his men. He had never seen anything like it. She was tiny but had already incapacitated two men and he saw her almost decapitate another with a kick as ferocious as he had ever seen. She hadn’t even completed her follow-through kick before throwing a punch into the fourth man’s chin which had lifted him clean off the floor and into the cabin wall.
Jones was paralysed, not by fear but by awe. The rest of his team, on hearing the commotion, ran into the cabin. They looked at the chaos and looked for who had caused it, the only person in the room was the young girl. Jones remembered the sweet smile she threw his men, as if completely innocent.
The fifth man moved towards her, reaching his arm out to take hold of her. She let him grab her, and moved so quickly Jones didn’t even see what she did but he heard the arm break and saw the blood spray from the man’s nose before he dropped to the floor. The other men hadn’t even had time to react before another two were knocked unconscious, one receiving a high-kick, the other a bone crunching punch to the nose. Both dropped to the floor to join their unconscious colleagues.
The final two saw Jones standing by the cabin door. They looked at him and he gave them a nod, go for it. They moved together both throwing vicious punches but Jones could see that Lela was playing with them. She moved faster than he thought possible. She avoided the first man’s punch and delivered a tremendously powerful kick to the other man’s abdomen while reverting to the first with a perfect uppercut and laying him flat. Jones couldn’t help applaud her. Nine of his men lay immobile on the cabin floor and she hadn’t even broken sweat nor had they come close to touching her. He asked how she’d learnt to do what she did but she was very tight lipped about how it. When he drew his knife, she warned him that knives made her angry. If he put the knife away, she would be gentle with him. He didn’t, the last thing he remembered was laughing at her and then pain, then nothing until then.
He looked around the cabin. All his men were still alive. Most were beginning to come round but they were all tied up and gagged. His pain was intense. His right hand would never be the same again, it hung limply from his wrist. He really should have dropped the knife. His knee was also gone. He remembered now. One second she was on the other side of the cabin. He went to throw the knife but before he had even had a chance to let it go, she was next to him, had his knife hand gripped like a vice and wrenched it back. The bone had shattered at the same time as she had crashed her foot into his knee snapping it cleanly in two. And as his useless hand dropped the knife, she uttered the words ‘I don’t like knives’. The next thing he remembered was a flash of light as she shattered his nose with the back of her fist. The lights, mercifully, went out.
Jones heard people coming. From the floor of the cabin, he could see the top of sail masts through the porthole. She must have sailed them back into The Academy’s marina. He could not allow his men to be tortured, if they talked, too much was as stake. He looked around, others had also realised what needed to be done. The unconscious men were nudged until they came around. When every man was conscious, on the count of three, they bit down hard on a small cyanide canister concealed in their mouths to ensure a very quick death.
“They’re in here,” said Lela. “I’ve got them all tied up nicely,” she announced as she stepped onto the boat. Papa grabbed her, he could smell death. He went in ahead of her and his suspicion was confirmed.
“They’re all dead, by the looks of it, cyanide,” he announced when he came back out.
“Oh God, I killed them all, ten men!” exclaimed Lela.
“No, they took cyanide capsules, they killed themselves,” assured Papa.
“What are we up against?” asked Kisho. “This is getting scary now.”
“Getting scary?” asked Tom. “Where the hell have you been for the last month!”
“OK, we’ve got their phone and we know about Operations Sandy and David and that Sandy is before David,” said Lela changing the subject. She wanted to get off the boat and go back to her room.
“But it could be anything. Sandy and David are probably just code words for their operations. You’ll probably find every one of them had a first name designation.”
“So I risked life and limb for nothing?”
Tom looked back to the boat, he wondered whose life and limbs she had really risked but with ten bodies behind him he thought better of asking.
McDonald, Murray
Assassin (The Billionaire Series)
Chapter 73
What the hell could Beaumont do now? The Chairman was going to kill him. He couldn’t run, there was nowhere on the planet he could hide, nowhere. How could it have gone so badly wrong? They had Lela, everything had gone perfectly and then wham, she was there. It just wasn’t conceivable, it was impossible. He only hoped that Jones had done the right thing. He didn’t know enough to expose The Committee but he knew too much about the Committee’s army. The men were very well paid and there was an expectation that they were capable of the ultimate sacrifice if they risked exposing their unit or their colleagues.
He still had another twenty four hours to try and pull something out of the bag. The Chairman didn’t need to know yet. Beaumont knew that the hole he was in was very deep and its sides very slippery.
Williams had his men in place, he was delighted with the promotion to number one spot in the Committee’s army. He now worked directly for the boss and had no intention of letting The Chairman down. It was a fairly simple operation, only two targets and from their first reconnaissance, fairly light security.
Williams looked around again, acting like a tourist, soaking in the scenery and his surroundings. It really was a beautiful spot, perfect beach, beautiful hotel and the most spectacular yachts anchored just offshore. One yacht in particular had caught his eye, Williams had never seen a yacht so aptly named, she really was a Beautiful Lady.
Chapt
er 74
Kisho and Kano took the boat out to sea and after searching them, dumped the bodies. Unsurprisingly they didn’t find anything, every man was clean. Tattoos had been removed or covered over, teeth had been removed and replaced with caps, fingerprints removed by acid. It was as though the men did not exist and as far as Papa was concerned, they didn’t anymore. Afterall, these were the men who had intended to kill his beloved Lela.
Tom and Lela eventually went to bed at 4.30 a.m. and decided an extra hour in bed was probably deserved. Unfortunately, they didn’t tell anybody else and both woke up to their doors being thumped by Tristan, checking they were OK and explaining that they were waiting for them to start the meeting. They quickly got dressed and rushed down to Conference Room One.
The group sat in complete silence as the events of earlier that morning were explained. Even after they had finished. nobody had a clue what to say. This wasn’t something happening to other people, this was now at their school. Ten men had killed themselves to keep their identity from them. These were not two-bit mercenaries, these were highly motivated operatives.
“Sandy and David,” mulled Daniel. “I’ll get my guys on it and see if they can come up with anything. I doubt it though, using first names is very clever. They’ll be spoken millions of times every second all over the world and 99.99999 % of it will be completely innocent.” He didn’t hold out any hope whatsoever.
“Did you get anything while you were going through the stuff last night?”
“No. But there’s something there. I can feel it, we’re getting closer,” said Tom, as he began to pace.
He cleared a whiteboard and put his hand in his pocket to get a pen. He had changed jeans and didn’t find a pen but found the business card they had pulled out of Alan’s sofa. He had forgotten all about it. He quickly dialled the number, it was dead, the recruitment consultant had obviously given up on recruitment.
“What’s that?” asked Daniel.
Tom explained where they had got it.
“I’ll do some checking on it, you never know what we might get,” offered Daniel, already dialling a contact.
Tom took a pen, found a quiet spot and began to write down everything he knew and had to date. He went back a year to the very first assassination and considered the circumstances of each. He then overlaid each of the new heads of government and studied the circumstances of each of those.
The day flew past and before they knew it, it was 6.00 p.m., nobody had even stopped for lunch. Tristan was the first to notice and panicked.
“Oh my God, it’s 6.00 p.m. What’s the time in Barbados?”
“Hmm, 10 a.m., why?” answered Tom.
“I promised I’d call my dad before his conference starts at 11.00 a.m.”
“Very nice, sounds like a nice little junket, Barbados in October, lovely!”
“Not quite it’s the Heads of Government meeting for the Commonwealth Nations.”
“Don’t you believe it for a second, I’m sure they’ll be living it up, staying in a lovely hotel.”
“Not sure about living it up but certainly lovely hotel, the Sandy Lane, nothing less don’t you know,” joked Tristan.
“Where did you say?” Tom couldn’t believe it, it couldn’t be that simple.
“Sandy Lane,” repeated Tristan, realising the significance.
Tom checked the board again. He was now also certain he knew who the targets would be, why had he not seen it earlier? The G20, the twenty most powerful leaders in the world.
“Sofie, Jin, I need a copy of your mother and grandfather’s itinerary for the next month. Lela, call Papa and tell him to meet us at the plane. Tristan, Zach you’d better come with us. Daniel can you run things from here? We need to find out who’s behind this and what or where David is.”
Tom sprinted out the door with Lela, Zach and now a very worried Tristan right behind him.
Chapter 75
Tristan phoned his father on the way to the airport, it didn’t go particularly well. His father was confident that his security was tight. He then launched into a debate with Tristan about how sometimes things were hard to accept, despite one’s best instincts, one sometimes just had to accept the cold hard facts. The call had ended, Tristan decided against telling Tom about the last part of the call, his father’s doubt’s about Donald’s innocence. Tristan was very disappointed with his father.
“Zach, what do you think?” asked Tom as they sped towards the airfield.
“I think Barbados is a very long way away and if anything does happen, we may well miss it.”
Tom pulled the cart to a stop and tried to think through what they knew and what they needed to do. Everybody in the cart realised what was happening and stayed quiet.
Tom finally spoke and asked. “What time is it now?”
“It’s 6.20 p.m.,” replied Lela.
“OK, it’s about a thirteen hour flight to Barbados,” said Tom checking his PDA. “And if we leave within the next hour, that’ll get us there at roughly 8.00 a.m. And they’re 8 hours behind us, as it’s still summer time which means we’ll be there at midnight their time…” Tom continued to think through the options.
“I could see if we could get the scramjet?” offered Zach, having done so before. There weren’t many things Zach’s guys couldn’t get.
“No, not yet. I think we should only go down that route when we run out of options. We don’t want to let anyone know we’re onto them unless we really have to. Whoever is behind this already tried to kill your dad. I know we can trust your guys but unfortunately, we don’t know if we can trust their parents.”
Zach was about to object but then realised that Tom was right.
“Wait a minute,” said Tom pulling out his phone and dialling a number.
“Jason, hi, it’s Tom.” He didn’t give Jason the time to even say hello. “What deadline did they give for my response to their offer?”
“You’re not changing your mind are you?” asked Jason, taken aback.
“No! God no! Their little consequences were kidnapping Lela.”
“Jesus! What can I do?” said Jason panicking.
“They didn’t stand a chance, she let them take her, got some info and kicked their arses. They’re all dead now so don’t worry.”
“What the hell do you mean they’re all dead, Lela killed the kidnappers?” Jason asked, astounded.
“No, she beat them up and they killed themselves.”
Jason gave up, he didn’t know which was worse, the guys killing themselves or the fact that little Lela beat up ten kidnappers.
“So what can I do?” he asked.
“What was the deadline the lawyer set on the bid?”
“48 hours from Friday 7.00 p.m. UK time.”
“Excellent thanks,” said Tom, hanging up and leaving a bemused and very stunned Jason to try to work out what on earth was going on.
As he ended the call, three blank faces looked at him. He really had lost them.
“When I received the bid for the company, they stipulated that I had to respond by 10.00 p.m. our time, 7.00 p.m. UK time. It was an absolute. If I failed to respond within that time, the offer would lapse.” The four faces looked even more blank.
“Guy’s, don’t you see? The assassination will be at some time after that time tomorrow.” Tom was becoming frustrated. He would have to spell it out.
“Alba is currently valued at about 30 % less than its actual value because my dad is public enemy number one. But after the new assassinations, my dad will be in the clear. Alba’s value will then jump back up. They wanted me to respond while the value was down so they could buy it cheap. So now we know when they’re going to strike.”
“When?” asked Tristan.
“Jesus!” replied Tom, giving up, he turned to Zach. “Can you explain it to him?” he asked.
Tom started the cart up again and continued to the airfield. Papa and the others were already waiting. Kisho was topping up the tanks on the Gulfstream
jet, getting her prepped for flight.
“Every last drop you can squeeze in, we’re flying right to the limits of this thing. Shame we’re not qualified to fly that one,” said Tom pointing to the 777.
“How far is it?” asked Kisho.
“Let’s just say that that one drop of fuel that spilled on the runway might be the difference between flying and gliding onto the runway,” replied Tom who wasn’t joking.
Twenty minutes later, the plane was airborne and on its way to Bridgetown, Barbados. Everybody settled in, it was going to be long flight. Papa and his three islanders had taken their seats at the back of the plane and the snores were already resonating around the plane. Lela, Zach Tristan and Kano were at the front. Zach was still explaining to Tristan what was happening.
Lela leaned over and whispered to Kano.
“Thanks for saving Tom and I think you were right not to tell him.”
“Tell him what?” he asked, not sure if he had heard her correctly.
“About you saving him.”
“Lela, I’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” he replied.
“In Peru, somebody was about to shoot him but didn’t, maybe it was Kisho then?”
“Definitely not. We weren’t there. Remember, we weren’t allowed to go? You had 20 Special Forces soldiers with you instead.”
“I know that, but who stopped the guy then? When I heard the men say that their sniper had just disappeared, I just assumed you guys followed us as usual. I thought you didn’t tell Tom so as not to freak him out.”
“Will you stop blabbering for one minute and explain to me from the start what on earth you’re talking about,” said Kano holding his hand up to slow her down.
Lela then explained exactly what had happened in the cruiser’s cabin, what she had heard and what she had assumed must have happened. Kano was now as puzzled as she was as to what had happened to the sniper. Both agreed, however, that what Tom didn’t know couldn’t worry him but that they would keep an extra close eye on him.
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