Backlash

by Jack L. Pyke

  If this man had started in control, something said he hadn’t finished that way.

  He wore a blindfold, and every now and again, the long tie drifting over heavyset shoulders and down his back would shift with the man’s sobs. The material looked silk. Foreign.

  The scuff of debris next to where the man knelt showed Sam had been kept there, facing the wall. Clothes were tagged and bagged in a sack not too far away, showing he’d been stripped. A second blindfold was tied to some exposed wiring overhead and Gray reached up and tugged it down.

  “Puh-please...”

  Gray looked down as he slipped the silk blindfold in his suit pocket and took away the man’s too.

  “I know why you’re here, Raoul.”

  Martin shifted first, grabbing the man and forcing him up to face him.

  Gray understood why Martin backed off a few paces, that confusion lacing his eyes.

  “I don’t know you.” Martin looked at Gray. “I don’t even know this fuck.”

  The man cocked his head slightly, almost trying to get a look inside the dark visor covering Martin’s face; he even stepped forward a little. “Your voice hasn’t changed... I still remember it... Martin. You—”

  Gray took his feet from underneath him and made sure the man found his ass amongst the debris when he tried to get a little closer to Martin. Gray knelt, studying the older man’s face, how the light from his own helmet forced worried and tear-streaked eyes into rapid blinks. Gray understood Martin’s confusion, because he didn’t know him either.

  “He... he said I should tell you.” A hand came up to try and block out the torchlight from the masks. Fingers were black, but not because of any dirt. Blisters bubbled on each digit, some on the pads, others lower down near the knuckle, as if he’d had both hands held down in hot fat. “He said if I told you, you’d kill me.” A nod was given, more tears shaken free down a bruised and battered face. “And that would be the end of it. He’d let my wife go. I... I trusted the bastard, but he... he....”

  Gray reached down and started to search his pockets. No ID was on the man, no wallet, nothing. “Name.”

  “He knew I’d found out who Martin was and he was such a gentleman to help work out plans to get at the codes. He even subsidised most of the financial backing. The rest came from the buyer he set up; the money he offered..... I brought Kes in... but didn’t know... didn’t know he wanted the codes for himself.”

  “Not his name. Yours.”

  The man faltered, trails of slime from his nose running over his lips. A shaky hand wiped it away. “You... you don’t know me?” Amongst the tears shone a touch of insult, as though Gray should know him.

  “Should I?”

  “I pay your MI5 wages.”

  Gray raised a brow. “The Government pays my wages, which would make you....”

  “A wanker.” Martin sniffed. “Sorry, manners. A Government banker. A fucking banker did this?”

  Gray studied him for a moment. “One that came across an MI6 list of ops and decided to sell them on. You no doubt needed the money back then... young family? Wife? Struggling on government wages? But today... your suit suggests you don’t need the money, so you must have been selling on other information from MI5 too. Hm, and just how did you avoid the Inland Revenue with this new influx of money? I know the security checks that the government run on their own. Did you get help with diverting funds?” He leaned forward slightly. “Tell me, was the money worth it?”

  “Back then.... Wrong place, it was the wrong time for all of us.” The banker flicked a look up to Martin. “MI6 codes were to be sold later that night, with the money changing hands that would set my family up with a lovely Villa like Richards Junior. But I needed the funds that the Richards’ woman held first, the money that would get the codes to where they needed to be abroad. The money wasn’t stolen; Mr Richards Senior was meant to launder it from Matheson. Richards’ son took after his father for massaging numbers.”

  Matheson. Gray eased back. The man who had recommended that Jan go to Jack’s garage, and no doubt the brains behind shifting money around so the banker’s spending wasn’t noted as a concern by the Inland Revenue. A report from Andrews said that Matheson had left the country and was... untraceable. He’d be found eventually.

  “But you...” Hate was spat out as the banker focused back on Martin. “You had to turn your head and look back that night. You—”

  Martin shifted, a boot coming in for the banker’s head, but Gray grabbed his foot in the same instance that the banker crumpled into a protective ball. Martin found his ass as the banker cried out.

  “Fucker,” snarled Martin, but he was soon up and the banker scrambled back, scuffing up his suit.

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” the banker cried again. “Those working for me, they were upstairs when you... you...” He looked sick. “When you did what you did to that young man and his dad, and they waited, just waited for you to leave. But you heard, and you... you had to look back, to come upstairs.”

  Martin shook off Gray’s touch. “So you were there.”

  “I’m a banker; it’s London, we’re everywhere here. But not there in person that night, no. I got to hear about you. I always get to read everything through banking and numbers... even Mr Raoul’s personal account... the funding for the MC, then later how they’d both taken a sociopath under their wing.”

  “Psychopath.” Martin sniffed and shifted his hands down his body to highlight the finery. “Born this way, fuckturd. Jack’s the made in the UK sociopath. Don’t you know the fucking difference?”

  Gray eased to his feet as the banker’s face curled in anger. “After the Richards woman was left unconscious, they said you took the codes and sat on that desk, looking so... so...”

  Martin ran a hand along the man’s jaw, stilling him. “Oh...” He tilted his head. “I remember you now.”

  Chapter 40

  The Known

  In the tunnel, Martin came next to Gray, leaving the banker on the floor. “Not from the warehouse, I didn’t see him there, after I took the codes.” Gray caught the half smile in his voice. “Bastards in there wouldn’t let me play with ‘the big boys.’ So I took away their scribbling paper and well—” He pointed at the necklace. “—found the codes a new home.”

  Gray looked at him as the banker got to his feet.

  “After that night, someone started asking after me and the codes.” Martin leaned closer to the banker. “They mentioned your piss-poor attempts at henchmen. They mentioned you.” He took off his protective mask and Gray got a wicked smile.

  “See,” said Martin, “even I had friends back then. Okay it was one of Cutter’s, but he still counts as a... bud... mate... fuck friend.” Then Martin was back with the banker and he seemed to search for an eternity for something. “Sallows. That your name? It was back then.” He didn’t look impressed. “You weren’t happy when I showed up at yours, were you, Sally?”

  “You fucked with my daughter.”

  Martin glanced back at Gray. “He said ‘fucked with’, not fucked in general. Semantics. I was a good lad for once.”

  “You... my daughter was pregnant.”

  “And I didn’t do fucking anything.” Martin was back in Sallows’s face. “But you did. And is it what pissed off old Kes? He find something out about you that your daughter found out about her father that night? How you like... family. You were so hard as we sat at your dining table... talking. Remember?”

  Martin’s face darkened. “Then afterwards... after the false tears over coming over a picture of her... how you made your little girl cry when I made you say sorry.”

  “You fuck, you twisted fucking little shit. You fucking sick cunting bastard. I’d never... I didn’t—”

  Martin leaned forward. “But I never made you, Sallows. You could have stopped, could have kept your hand off your cock,” he whispered. “Tell me, do you carry on that sickness? In your office, maybe? With young girls barely out of their training bra
s... boys? Please tell me your daughter did the right thing that night and got her and her unborn the fuck away from you?”

  “You ruined my family!”

  “You came looking for mine.”

  “Enough!” That came from Gray and Martin glared back, looking far from finished, but then he eased up to his feet.

  “I blackmailed him that night,” said Martin.

  Gray kept his breathing even. “With what?”

  Martin sniffed. “He takes a few good dic-pics as he tried to fuck a picture of his daughter. But he had friends, or smelled of friends, the sort that could...” He frowned. Seriously. “Could cause trouble.”

  Martin was back with Sallows. “He got to keep the pictures. Never the codes. The deal was that no copy of the codes could be kept. The only source was the notepad. I took it, rewrote it to fit into a better place, and burned the original and told him never to look fucking back. Only you did, didn’t you?”

  “But I remembered,” hissed Sallows. “Numbers were what fed my family, and I remembered six of the codes, maybe the ones the buyer never saw. I kept what I could. But it was like playing suicide without knowing for sure. I walked away with a bomb under my car with just those six handed over and messing them around. They would have killed me for giving the wrong ones and screwing their plans up again. All I had to do was find you... they’d leave me alone so long as I could prove I was looking for you, and it took so much fucking time. So much time, and you kept it in a fucking necklace all this time?”

  Martin went in close again. “And when you started looking, so too did Kes. Again.”

  “Again?”

  “You?” Gray stepped in. “What did you get out of this, Martin?”

  A shrug was given. “Peace for Jack. Quiet...” A grin. “And a few empty units in the middle of London for... personal use.”

  Gray stalled, then nearly groaned. Units?

  The Strachan deal?

  Fuck. Jack had never explained how he’d obtained those units in such a prime location. Why he had them.... Would he have even known except for finding the documentation?

  “You had them signed over to Jack,” he said flatly.

  Martin looked over. “Do you think I’m a fucking moron? I had them signed in mine, where they looked after the upkeep and business taxes until Jack took them over.”

  Gray went inches from his face. “Despite Jack going into protective custody after the codes were taken, the necklace too, in many respects, and with Mase moving out of the area, they just waited for Jack to claim the units, then they raped him and Jan in order to get to you, to get to a bit of extra paper—all to kill a few ex-ops who couldn’t keep their fucking mouths shut.”

  Martin never shifted his gaze.

  “Is that your trust, Martin? That your compassion? That you protecting Jack?”

  “Oh... you love turning those tables, huh?” But Martin turned away and rested against the opposite side of the tunnel. “Go on, then. Show me your care now, Welsh,” he heard mumbled into the darkness. “Look after Jack.”

  Gray looked down at Sallows. As he did, the man shuffled onto his knees, hands going into his lap, head down as sobs racked his body.

  “Kes took the photos that Martin took,” he choked out. “It’s why I agreed to look back and tell him about, Martin. And my associates have seen them now. I’m dead anyway.”

  “You kept them?” The disgust in Martin’s voice came through. “What sick fuck would keep images of his daughter stored like that? What father would—oh.” He went quiet. “The wonders of the Internet. And that’s the wonders of this century? You show her off, Sallows? You pass her around to a few net-friends?”

  “Kes gave me no fucking choice but to sort you out, you sick bastard. He—”

  “There’s always a choice,” Gray said quietly and both Sallows and Martin fell quiet. No amount of money could stop this now, Sallows knew that. It’s why he was on his knees. He was saving his own skin and looking for an escape.

  Gray was just looking after those he needed to keep close.

  He pulled out his silencer and pressed it against Sallows’s head. “How did you find about Elena taking the codes?”

  Sallows frowned. “We didn’t know she’d seen them until her solicitors got in touch a few months back. I was sent a letter by her solicitors stating she had them, and that if anything happened to her, that I was the one her solicitors would come after. MI6 would also get the same letter I had. But she... she stole them through her phone.”

  “She Blue-jack your apps, saw the partial codes you’d hidden, and hid them in a cloud storage device.”

  He got a nod. Elena must have have found out what the codes were, or took a guess at least, and the solicitor intervention was how his own father had found out. He would have obtained that letter from Elena’s solicitor, but questioned just why she had disappeared. Everything else had come from Gray’s office drawer. “And for clarity, you were forced to help Kes but you weren’t aware that he was the one that had already killed two agents on that list? That he was Mossad intelligence and the funding he gave you most likely came from the intelligence service?”

  Sallows looked up, startled.

  “You never questioned who it was that you were selling the codes to all those years back? That Kes is the buyer now?”

  “Kes? I... I just thought he was some well-funded Israeli extremist. He was the one who told me about the new buyer—he came highly recommended!”

  “Of course he did.” Gray removed the safety from the silencer. “But you did provide him with the intel to rape mine. To torture... mine.?”

  Tears fell from Sallows’s eyes. “I just signed his cheques towards the end. He was the one who got in touch with Elena. Maybe sickness attracts sickness, but Kes saw Elena’s illness, her thoughts over her son, and he helped them fester. She gave him all the finer details regarding Martin and their psychological faults and flaws.”

  Martin snorted. “Family.”

  “But like with any illness, there’s good days and bad days,” said Gray. “On a good day, Elena’s head must have cleared long enough to see your threat... Kes’s....” Gray nodded, the finer details now all in place. “Scared?” he said to Sallows.

  There was a shake of head, although urine stained his trousers. “Sorry.”

  “Mostly because you were caught,” Gray mumbled.

  As Gray’s finger went to the trigger, a body came in close, then a hand shaped how he held the gun. A rough kiss brushed his cheek from Martin and....

  The trigger was pulled.

  “Now he’s looked after properly,” Martin whispered in his ear as Sallows hit the floor and red took on a dark grey in the darkened tunnel.

  They made it back to the manor with nothing spoken. Andrews had been waiting by the main gates and followed the Merc in now Gray had changed back from the unmarked car. Yet as they pulled to a stop on the cobbled courtyard, Gray told Andrews to take Sam into the lounge and wait. Jan would still be on lockdown with Trace and the others, and he needed them to stay that way for a little longer.

  His gaze found Martin as he sat there in the Mercedes. Gray had made the culler’s call to get Sallows removed from the tunnels. Full identity would be found and Sallows’s family located to make sure they were left unharmed in all of this mess too. Something in Martin’s quiet told Gray that he knew all of the names, including Sallows’s first name, but he kept it with him, not so much as a trophy, but more through quiet realisation.

  Martin had been bred to take care of Jack when Jack’s world came crashing down, only he’d brought Jack to his knees trying to do just that.

  Gray knew how he felt; he hated that he knew how Martin felt. Gray went over and opened the door for him. “Out.”

  He did, looking over at the manor now he breathed fresh air. “Did all right for himself, didn’t he?” Martin looked at Gray. “Jack.”

  Careful of the bullet graze to Martin’s arm, Gray slipped a handcuff around Martin’s wri
st, then led him into the manor. Andrews had been advised to keep Sam away from the stairs, and low chatter from the one-sided conversation came through from the lounge. Steve’s name was mentioned at one point, and Gray shifted his head in the direction of the lounge to see Sam pick up the phone and call Steve. He wore clothes now, a size too big and looking like it had come from Andrew’s surveillance kit. A nod off Andrews said Sam was okay, and Gray carried on, leading Martin upstairs.

  “He happy with you?”

  The bedroom door shut behind them, and Gray slipped something out of his pocket.

  “He’s always been happy here,” Gray said quietly. “I just missed the signals sometimes.”

  “No more than Jack, I assume.”

  Gray gave a hardhearted smile. “Fuck-ups on both sides, just the bollocks to say how much I need him now.”

  Martin backed up against the glass wardrobe as Gray pressed in close.

  “Everything planned out, eh?” Martin’s voice nearly broke, body shaking as he looked down at what Gray held. The sister device to the electronic tag around Martin’s ankle felt surprisingly light, considering the amount of sedative it would push into Martin’s system. And Martin still carried a lot of Jack’s hurt, that feeling of being drugged even if the details hid behind a fog bank. “I need to see Kes cut in two for this shit. I’ll fight you every fucking way because of it.”

  Gray nodded. “Yeah, I know.” Martin jerked as Gray ran his free hand down Martin’s cheek. “Part of me fucking loves you for it.” He rested his head against Martin’s, and closed his eyes. “I need Jack, though, Martin.” He gave such a sad sigh. “The selfish side of me needs him to hold on to. Please, I’ve missed him enough.”

  Gray winced as a grip to his hair forced his lips up to meet Martin’s and the kiss was hard, done to bleed. “No promises,” he heard breathed. “Whatever you did to get me here, it hurt him. I can feel him looking away from you.”