by P. J. Nash
A mobile phone vibrated on the desk. Quercus jumped back from the phone like it might bite him.
‘Is that him?’ asked James. The young man nodded. ‘Ok, I’ll talk to the shit,’ he said, picking up the phone. ‘Hello, Mr Bain, and how are you this fine morning?’ said James sarcastically.
‘Tell Quercus he’s a dead man,’ said Bain menacingly.
‘Oh, I don’t think so. He’s my best pal at the moment, and we’ve both just become very wealthy men.’
‘You’ll pay for this, you bastard. I got one of your guys, and I’ll get you and your bitch as well,’ snarled Bain, obviously riled.
‘Well, he’s going to have a very nice funeral, thanks to you, courtesy of your little nest egg. And then, I’m going to find you and hand you over to Mr Chan, who’ll take you apart piece by piece over a few days. No cushy Supermax for you. A real bastard like you deserves a slow death. Anyway, I must bid you good day. I’ve got a man to see about an Aston Martin.’
A torrent of abuse came through the receiver. James sat back in an office chair and took a swig of coffee. The line went dead.
‘Unbelievable, a professional criminal, and you can still hook him on the line with an old fashioned male ego pissing contest. What a twat,’ said James.
A few seconds later, Johnson came in wearing a headset and gave them the thumbs up. James replaced the receiver.
‘He fell for it, hook, line and sinker,’ said James.
‘Yes, one minute thirty on the blower. I’ve triangulated him to Repulse Bay. And it tallies with the office of one of his brass plate company’s addresses,’ replied Johnson.
‘Great stuff. I’ll call Hank. It’s going to be a Heath Robinson job. But Bain’s not going to be in a fortress; he’s going to be playing it low key,’ said James.
‘There’s an entrance he uses to bring his goons in through,’ piped up Quercus.
‘You’ve been to Bain’s place?’ asked James. ‘Why didn’t you bloody well tell us, you muppet.’
Quercus looked puzzled. ‘You never asked.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ shouted James. ‘Ok, you take Einstein here somewhere safes. Then we’ll pay Mr Bain a visit.’
Honza Lorenc’s Flat, Zizkov, Prague
Honza woke up to the sound of honking horns. He checked his watch and saw it was just after 8.30am. The working day was well under way. Honza pulled on a dressing grown and went to the fridge in the small kitchen. He took a carton of orange out and swigged from it greedily. He had passed out in the early hours after drinking the best part of a bottle of brandy. Arriving back in his flat around midnight, he had poured a big drink and watched and re-watched the video. Oscillating between deleting it and keeping it, he had had more and more drinks and rolled himself a huge joint.
After a relaxing smoke, he had decided to keep it. He’d uploaded the film to his PC and backed it up on a secure external hard drive and on a web file storage service. A snuff movie. Like everyone, he’d heard the rumours that this had happened, and you could get them for a price on the dark net. Well, now was the time to find out. He’d got fifteen minutes of a couple getting kinky, and then, a woman carving him into a piece of meat like a Black Widow. Curiously, he hadn’t been shocked. It was so surreal that he felt disengaged from it. But he knew it was pure gold for the right market. Ottakar knew about things like this. He went to pick up his phone. Then, he thought again, pulled on a coat and walked to the piss-stained phone box around the corner.
Underground carpark, Sheraton Hotel, Hong Kong
‘Don't swear, boys, the cavalry's here,’ shouted Hank in a deep Texan drawl as he reversed his Aston Martin Vanquis into a car parking space. Hank was an oil executive in his late fifties who worked hard and played harder. He was a dead shot at clay pigeon shooting, an activity that allowed him to combine business and pleasure.
‘Oh, here we again. About you yanks saving our Limey asses in World War Two, blardy blah,’ replied James sarcastically.
‘Damn right. You Brits keep kicking off with the Germans and then expect Uncle Sam to come and bail you out,’ laughed Hank, walking to the car boot.
‘Yes, the Second World War, 1941 to 1945,’ said James. They laughed and slapped Hank on the back. Another vehicle pulled into the car park and three men got out. One of the men was Adrian Marsh, former journalist and a key part of James and Sandersen’s efforts to catch “The Dingo”. The other was Toohey, an ex-Northern Territory cop who now worked for James and Sandersen’s firm. The third was Johnson who'd picked them up at the airport.
‘Geez, just what we need. Another Limey,’ growled Hank. The men all greeted each other with hugs and slaps on the back.
‘Jessie get off ok?’ asked James.
‘Yeah sure, and I found these two reprobates.’
‘Seems like a bum deal to me,’ said Hank.
James smirked. ‘Hank's got the artillery,’
‘Yeah, we picked a few goodies from Mr Chan,’ said Marsh. He opened a sports bag. Inside were ballistic vests, smoke grenades, flashbang grenades, a launcher, pepper spray canisters and plasticuffs.
‘Good stuff,’ said James.
Hank opened the boot of the Aston Martin. He lovingly picked up a under and over shotgun and gave it to James. He went back to the boot and slid out another gun of the same kind, handing it to Marsh.
‘Walnut stock, etched cheek prices, these pieces are Purdy’s, a match pair,’ said Marsh.
‘Exactly, twenty grand each, in your Queen’s pounds,’ said Hank. ‘And a couple of hundred cartridges for them. And a .22 rifle, really made for foxes, but will shoot a hole in a dime at five hundred yards.’ he beamed. ‘So, what's the plan?’ asked Toohey.
‘Bain’s holed up in a condo. His Range Rover is stashed in the underground car park. Hank’s gonna provide covering fire from a hotel room across the street. One of us will be in the underground car park. Two of us will attack the front door, fire some flashbangs and smoke and put a few shots through the front door. Bain will head for the terrace and try the fire escape. Hank will put a few rounds down and hopefully get him to head back inside and down the stairs to the underground garage. We'll nobble the electric so he can't use the lift. Then, we take him in the underground garage. Dead or alive,’ said James earnestly.
‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Marsh.
‘Let's mount up,’ said Hank, eager for action.
The guy with the camera had gotten a shock. Well, you would pay that peeper a visit. You'd got his car number when you had doubled back. A quick search on the system would find his lair. The red light of the camera blinking had sent you into a rage. You'd knifed him earlier than you wanted. You'd remember when they'd first bought out a camera. You were naked with a businessman from Belarus. You'd stripped for him, and when he got hard, you'd decided to give him some extra. It was supposed to be private, but it soon got out of hand. Four drunken Brits had blundered in and got their wallets out the money in their sweaty hands. And then their dicks. It had hurt a lot. You remember standing in the shower covered in cum and bleeding. You needed stitches. But they would pay. They would all pay.
Little Cobra, Bar, Smichov, Prague
Honza was in over his head, and he knew it. The adrenaline and euphoria of the experience of being near the killing had now subsided. The bar was a Herna Bar, something of which Prague had hundreds. They were a sort of hybrid of a sleazy hotel bar and a gambling arcade. They were a halfway house for drunks and nighthawks when the normal pub and supermarkets were closed. They usually carried bright hoardings and descriptions such as “casino” or “arena”. But once inside, they were tiny and grim. A zinc topped bar, some stools and a handful of slot machines. Honza was seated at the bar staring at the dust and dead fly-encrusted, stuffed cobra which was the main feature of the small window into the street.
‘You should dust that snake some time,’ said Honza, as the barman poured him another beer.
‘You fucking do it,’ the barman snarled and turned his attention to the ice ho
ckey game which was blaring out from the TV set mounted in the corner. The door swung open and in came Ottakar.
‘So, dude, what it is it, you not heard of email?’
Honza stood up, grabbed Ottakar by the shoulders and pushed him into a corner. ‘Listen, you fucking pothead. This isn’t some candid camera up-skirt shit, this is the motherload. I need to get it out of my hands, asap. I need you to connect me with to The Bazaar.’
Repulse Bay, Hong Kong
Hank peered through the scope attached to his rifle. He was watching Cyrus Bain from his eyrie in an empty room in a tailor’s shop, directly opposite to the apartment block where Bain lived. The arch criminal was home alone. His key man, Robbie, he had got rid of himself. And his other loyal lieutenant, Irish aka Jeff McGuire, was out shopping.
‘Eyrie to Holt, target is home alone. No weapons visible,’ whispered Hank into the microphone on his collar.
‘Holt to Eyrie, we copy. We’ll get the party started. Keep an eye out for party poopers and gate crashers,’ replied James.
The three men clad in ballistic tactical vests had climbed out of the back of one of Chan’s many delivery vans and made their way through to the underground car park, where they used a card cloned by Quercus to swipe their way in. Toohey had remained in the basement with one of the shotguns. He was to throw the master switch on the electrics, just seconds before the assault. James, clutching a shotgun, padded quietly up the last few stairs. Johnson had removed the pins from a smoke grenade and a flashbang. They waited for the lights to go out, which was their signal.
Bain had been doing some free weights and a stint on the running machine. He had just made a smoothie and had sat down to watch TV when all hell broke loose. In the basement, Johnson threw the master switch. Bain’s TV went blip, and the picture disappeared. A tangy smell began to enter the room, and he saw smoke pouring under the door. He got up out of his chair to grab an extinguisher from the kitchen. Then, there was a huge bang, and a hole was blown in his front door. He knew it wasn’t a fire and headed for the bedroom where the get out bag and his guns lay.
James and Johnson weren’t planning to enter Bain’s flat, making them easy targets to be picked off. Johnson pushed another flashbang into the launcher. James aimed the Purdey and pulled the trigger twice. The blast blew a dustbin lid-sized hole in the door. Johnson aimed the launcher and fired. The grenade flew into the main room of Bain’s apartment and exploded with a cacophony of light and sound.
Bain had missed the main blast as he exited the bedroom with a sports bag over his shoulder and a 9mm Sig Sauer pistol in each hand. He knew the people assaulting him weren’t regular cops, otherwise they’d have stormed the place by now. But he also knew that sticking around was a stupid idea too.
He opened the veranda doors and then turned and fired a volley of shots at the smoked-filled doorway. Then, he pushed his way out onto the terrace. James, who’d ducked behind the corner of the stairs as Bain fired, shouldered the shotgun and fired twice again. Bain missed the main blast, but pellets from the birdshot stung his back as he made his way outside. He couldn’t return fire now but kept his pistols forward. Suddenly, the glass of the picture windows he was running alongside blew inwards, hit by a high velocity round. As he ducked, a round hit him in the shoulder, and he staggered away from the direction of the fire exit he was heading for. He ducked as another round blew out the screen of the TV, and he made his way to the back stairs. He had just opened the door when another grenade flew into the room. A sheet of light and sounds engulfed him, and he fell to the floor in a pile.
What seemed an eternity after, Hank radioed to say that Bain had gone back inside, and Toohey had reported no sounds on the backstairs. James was getting impatient.
‘Bugger this. Let’s go in,’ he shouted and shouldered open the wrecked door. The two men stormed through into the main room.
On the other side of the open plan kitchen stood Bain, holding an ice pack to his shoulder. Before James had time to pull up the shotgun, Bain snatched a handgun off the counter and fired. Johnson was hit in the chest and was blown back onto the floor. James ducked behind the kitchen counter. Bain took the chance to duck back out to the balcony. But as he did so, he tripped and fell, dropping the first of his pistols. He spun around to pull the other pistol from his waistband only to see James standing in front of him with the Purdey levelled at him.
‘Give up, Bain, it’s over, your little Oriental trip is over,’ shouted James.
Bain sneered and issued a loud scream as he launched himself at James. The Purdey boomed twice. Bain was hit at point-blank range. His body flew back in a parabola of blood and internal organs, hit the safety rail, which broke under the impact, and tumbled down to the ground.
Vaclav Havel Airport, Prague
Sandersen’s flight had landed on time and taxied in. She had spent the flight reading up on the case notes and building up an outline profile of the killer. It was pretty broad so far. But she had defined that the killer was definitely female and clearly attractive to men due to her ability to lure them away. And she was some kind of sex worker who had been raped or suffered some sort of horrific trauma, probably at the hands of British men, given the specific nature of the victims. The airport bus rolled to a stop.
A few minutes later, after flashing her passport to a glum-looking Czech policewoman and picking up her small case, she made her way through to arrivals. She was travelling light, hoping to get some time to shop in Josefov, the old Jewish Quarter – especially on Pariska, the crème de la crème of European shopping, even giving Paris a run for its money.
Even dressed down in a regular jeans and jumper, Sandersen looked great. Jiri had been scanning the arrivals for the past ten minutes and finally saw the tall willowy woman with her strawberry blonde hair tied back trundling a case across the tarmac. He threw down his cigarette and walked across to her.
‘Dr Sandersen, welcome to Prague,’ said Jiri, offering his hand.
Sandersen stepped back, grabbed him in a warm hug and planted a kiss on each cheek. ‘Relax, Jiri, we’re in Europe, you know.’
He grabbed her case and put it in the boot of the Skoda.
‘You are my guardian angel. I believe you have to come to save me from being sent to direct traffic in Ostrava,’ he chuckled. Sandersen took a seat in the car. Jiri got in the car and opened up a copy of the leading daily DNES.
‘It blew open yesterday,’ said Jiri. ‘The Mayor held a press conference without telling us. They’ve already named her. The Dark Angel.’
The “Dark Angel”, that was what they were calling you. You didn't read the papers normally, but today, you got the lot at the kiosk. From the snooty ‘People's News’ to the smutty tabloid ‘Lightning’, they had covered the murders of the British men. The serious papers had assessments from psychologists saying you were a damaged young woman. Well, they'd got that right enough. The tabloids went with the sex angle that you had lured the men away to a dark place with the promise of sex and then killed them like a Black Widow spider after they'd satisfied your lust. The funniest one was an editorial in the former communist daily. It blamed the killings on the promiscuous nature of capitalism and the sexual objectification of women. It said foreign whores had flocked to the capital to sell their bodies to alcohol-sodden, lust-filled tourists, and that no honourable Czech woman would do such a thing. Well, it made you laugh.
You sat at the kitchen table and cut the clippings out. What interested you most were the profiles of the men. All apparently respectable and hardworking with families and children. Fuck that, they were beasts who were no better than raping and pillaging Vikings. Thinking they can hop on a plane and do their dirty business and go back to their boring staid lives? Well, they didn't, and some more won’t, either. The useless oafs that were cops hadn't got a clue.
Honza Lorenc’s Flat, Zizkov, Prague
Honza sat at his computer with a bottle of beer and lit a cigarette. For 5000 crowns, Ottakar had given him the log-in
to the dark net. This was the internet that sat behind the facade of the internet that most normal people used everyday. Here was the key to the cyber pleasuredome, the cornucopia of every peccadillo and vile taste known in the world. He logged into an innocuous car sales site. Then, he entered the password, and he was in. Well, for twenty-four hours, anyway. He saw the link for The Bazaar. Like a teenage boy getting his first look at porn, he surfed through the eBay of the underworld. He looked at a Desert Eagle Handgun, a box of hand grenades, an orgy with ten-year-old girls in Phuket. Then, he found the Seller's Bazaar. He had edited the video to a few choice seconds and grabbed some stills. He uploaded it and put an asking price of one thousand US dollars per view or fifty thousand US dollars for the whole tape. Ottakar had told him he'd get that easy. A common or garden man being killed with a gun or knife was five thousand. So, getting a woman killing a guy, add in the kink factor of the sex, and you were onto a winner.
FBI HQ, Quantico, Virginia, USA
In the climate-controlled dimness of the basement room, FBI cybercrime specialist John Etherington logged onto his three interlinked PCs. The first was his portal to the dark net, completely unlinked to the FBI mainframe. The second was his work PC with links to the security service networks of the US and agencies such as Interpol and Europol. The third was linked to the HUNTER network, a powerful cyber-crime tracking program that helped locate criminal computers to a physical location. Criminals used sophisticated software to bounce their IP address, the computer’s postcode, as it were, around a system of innocent “zombie” computers to cover their tracks.
Etherington logged onto the The Bazaar. Most days, he had to convince himself that all of this borrow was just a computer game. But he knew at the back of his mind it was all too real. He was an internet fan and believed strongly in the freedom of the web. But he also knew it had a horrific downside. He clicked into the Bazaar.
