Retribution

by Retribution (retail) (epub)

  For a few seconds, they just looked at each other, then Richter lowered the AK-47 and leaned back.

  ‘I’m not armed,’ the newcomer said, a somewhat pointless remark.

  ‘I know,’ Richter replied. ‘I’m one of the good guys, and I could use some help right now. Have you got a medical kit in your car?’

  The man nodded. ‘Hang on there,’ he said, ‘I’ll just go and get it. Have you called for an ambulance?’

  ‘I hope one’s on its way by now.’

  The man returned a couple of minutes later with a small green plastic box, the lid marked with a prominent cross, and snapped it open.

  Richter laid the Kalashnikov on the ground beside him, slid the Browning back into his shoulder holster and rolled over as far as he could onto his left side.

  ‘I took a bullet in my side,’ he said.

  ‘I can see that.’

  As gently as he could, the man pulled Richter’s shirt out of his trousers so that he could see the site of the wound. He gave a sharp intake of breath when he saw the injury, and immediately took a pad from the medical kit and pressed it into place against Richter’s side.

  ‘Can you hold that in place while I wrap a bandage around you?’ he asked.

  Richter propped himself up with his left hand and pressed the pad gently against the wound with his right. It still hurt, but the sharp and stabbing pains he had experienced had now become something of a dull ache, and his whole side was feeling numb.

  Quickly and efficiently, the man opened a packet and took out a two-inch bandage, wound it around Richter’s torso and then secured the free end with a small safety pin.

  ‘The good news,’ he said, ‘is that the bullet isn’t inside you, and there’s almost certainly no deep tissue damage. It’s an in and out, and if it had been another inch to your right, it would have missed you completely. Of course, an inch or two to the left and you’d have been looking for a new kidney and maybe a liver as well.’

  ‘Are you a doctor?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Not exactly. My name’s Jeremy Fairfax, and I’m a vet. I’m more used to problems with geldings and spaniels than human beings, but the principles and most of the bits are pretty much the same.’

  ‘Paul Richter. Thanks for stopping, and thanks for helping.’

  ‘I haven’t done much. You’ve got two wounds. They’ll both need cleaning, obviously, and the exit wound will have to be stitched, but my biggest worry is blood loss. That pad will help, but you do need expert medical attention from a trauma surgeon, and quickly.’

  And as he fell silent, they both heard the sound of a siren getting steadily louder.

  ‘That sounds like the cavalry,’ Fairfax said. ‘If you’re okay for a minute, I’ll go and wait for them by the road.’ He paused for a moment and glanced back at the two bodies lying in the field. ‘I don’t know who you are or what you do for a living – though I can hazard a guess that you’re employed by some kind of secret squirrel outfit – but you do seem to lead an exciting life, Mr Richter.’

  ‘Paul. That’s one way of putting it. Thanks, Jeremy.’

  Five minutes later, two paramedics, one short, blonde, pneumatic, bubbly and female and the other tall, thin, cadaverous, largely silent and male, were cutting away the temporary bandage Fairfax had applied and replacing it with a proper emergency dressing. They’d wheeled a gurney into the field over the rutted ground, with a certain amount of difficulty, and once they’d finished working on him, they helped him to his feet and led him over towards it.

  ‘I can walk to the ambulance,’ Richter said.

  They both shook their heads emphatically.

  ‘You’ve been shot,’ the girl said, ‘and you’ve lost a lot of blood. We will carry you to the ambulance, and that’s an order.’

  With Fairfax and the female paramedic at one end, and the silent male paramedic at the other, the small procession made its way out of the field and over towards the ambulance parked squarely in the middle of the road, hazard lights and roof bar flashing and the rear doors open and waiting. In moments, the gurney was securely locked into place, and the female paramedic began attaching various pieces of medical monitoring equipment to Richter’s body, including setting up a drip to start replacing some of the blood that he had lost.

  Two things then happened almost simultaneously. There was the sound of another siren, clearly approaching along the narrow road, but that noise was almost drowned out by the unmistakable egg beater noise of a helicopter. The aircraft was clearly not just passing overhead on its way somewhere else, because the pilot made a swift circuit of the field, presumably selecting his landing spot, and a couple of minutes later a black Jet Ranger, entirely unmarked apart from its registration letters, settled onto the uneven ground of the field about fifty yards from the open gateway. Immediately, the whine of the jet engines began to diminish, and the spinning rotors started to slow.

  A police car pulled to a stop a few moments later, and two uniformed officers pulled on high visibility jackets and strode across to the ambulance. The male paramedic met them at the doors, and in a few brief sentences explained exactly what they had seen.

  And that prompted the precise reaction Richter had expected. One of the officers walked away from the vehicle towards the crashed Vauxhall, while the other told the female paramedic to step out of the vehicle, then climbed into the back of the ambulance and looked down at him.

  ‘Hand over that pistol,’ the policeman said, pointing at the Browning.

  ‘No,’ Richter said simply.

  ‘What? I’m a police officer and I’m giving you a direct order.’

  ‘And I’m disobeying it. You’re not authorised to question me, to detain me, or to take custody of my personal weapon. So go away.’

  ‘Right, sonny. We’ll see about that.’

  ‘I’m sure we will.’

  ‘Where is he? In here?’ a familiar voice demanded from somewhere outside the ambulance.

  The slightly flushed, pinkish face of Richard Simpson appeared at the rear door. He looked at the police officer with a certain amount of distaste – Simpson’s antipathy towards the British police force was legendary within his organisation – and he gestured to him.

  ‘You can get out,’ he snapped.

  The police officer, already running on a short fuse because of the reaction he had had from Richter, was less than impressed.

  ‘You can’t order me about,’ he said. ‘Whoever the hell you are.’

  ‘I can. In fact, I can not only order you about, but I can give orders to every member of your force up to and including the Chief Constable. So if you still want to have a job tomorrow, I strongly recommend that you shut up and do exactly what you’re told.’

  Something in Simpson’s manner and the unshakable conviction in his voice obviously struck a chord with the uniformed constable, who said nothing more but simply stepped out of the ambulance and walked over towards the field, to rejoin his colleague.

  ‘Still doing your best to win friends and influence people, I see,’ Richter said.

  ‘Bloody woodentops. Give them a peaked cap and warrant card and they think they’re two steps below God.’

  ‘Whereas you know you’re two steps below God.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Simpson said. ‘God takes orders from me, as you know perfectly well. Now, I’ve seen one dead man lying on his back, another stiff largely fried to a crisp, and a third one who apparently tried to head-butt a Vauxhall Astra. My Vauxhall Astra, actually. So what the hell happened out here? And are you okay?’ he added as a distinct afterthought.

  ‘One bullet wound on my right side. A fairly clean in and out, according to that chap standing over there wearing the tweed jacket. His name is Jeremy Fairfax, and I’d like you to thank him on my behalf for what he did.’

  ‘A doctor, is he?’

  ‘No, a vet.’

  An unaccustomed smile crossed Simpson’s face. ‘Far more appropriate for treating the likes of you. We
should have one on the staff. So what happened?’

  Richter explained the sequence of events from being aware that he was being followed until the end of the shootout.

  When he’d finished, Simpson looked puzzled. ‘So it was a deliberate ambush, obviously, and there were three of them all carrying Kalashnikovs. That seems a bit bloody extreme, even for this part of the Home Counties. In some parts of Essex I could almost understand it. What you think it was? A gangland hit? Did they think you were somebody else?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Richter replied. ‘It definitely wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, because I know I was the target. The one I shot in the field – not the one who got burnt but the other one – thought he’d got the drop on me, and before he pulled the trigger he said “Goodbye Mr Richter.” That seems pretty conclusive to me.’

  That silenced Simpson for a few seconds. ‘Accent?’ he said eventually.

  ‘Accent?’ Richter repeated.

  ‘Yes. The gunman who spoke to you. Did he have an accent? Was he British or some foreign hood?’

  ‘Believe it or not, I was too busy making sure my first shot killed him than checking on his diction. But now you come to mention it, there was a faint accent there, but I couldn’t hazard a guess at the man’s first language based on hearing him say only three words. It could even have been some regional British dialect.’

  ‘You need to be more observant, Richter. And why you? You’re not important enough for anyone to take out a contract on you.’

  ‘Thanks. That makes me feel so much better.’

  Simpson shook his head dismissively. ‘Believe it or not, I’m not trying to be insulting. Not this time, anyway. I know you and I don’t often see things the same way, and I also know that you have an uncanny ability to piss people off. But for you to have got so far up someone’s nose that he’s prepared to send out a three-man hit team armed with assault rifles to take you out – that I don’t buy. There’s something else going on here, and I expect you to find out what it is.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Simpson, but I’ve just been shot, so it may be a little while before I’m firing on all cylinders again.’

  ‘It’s a minor flesh wound. You said that yourself. Get the doc to stick a plaster on it, take a couple of aspirins for the pain and change your shirt. We need answers on this, and we need them quickly.’

  Richter nodded. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘All I am sure of is that whatever the hell is going on, it pretty much has to be something to do with Jacko. And unless I’ve got everything completely wrong, he had to be alive when those two killers shoved him in the back of the Transit, so presumably they used a taser or something to knock him out. If they’d shot and killed him, they’d have left his body where it fell. Taking a corpse away makes no sense. That also most likely means that he was nothing to do with the assassination.’

  ‘That’s stating the bleeding obvious, Richter, unless we’re looking at some kind of coincidence again. I don’t do coincidences, and neither do you. So what could Jacko possibly know that would end up with you getting shot in a field in Hampshire or wherever the hell we are?’

  ‘Buggered if I know. As I told you before, he’s just one of the guys I ran into up in Hereford. He isn’t a friend, and I don’t think he knows too much about me. He knows I’m based in London, and that I’m some kind of a spook, but that’s about it.’

  Simpson shook his head. ‘There must be something more than that. Something you know about or have done, and something that also involves Jacko King. Otherwise, you would never have had a hit team sent out after you. The answer’s in your head, Richter. All you have to do is dig it out.’

  And with that, Simpson turned to leave.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Richter said. ‘You need to brief the plods about what happened here. All I know is that those three guys tried to kill me. You need to make sure that anything they’ve got on them – notes, memory sticks, mobile phones, anything at all – is checked out by our people. If the local chapter of the woodentops have their way, the evidence will end up in a cardboard box in the basement of the nearest police station, and that’ll do us no good at all.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Richter. I’m on it. Oh, you’d better keep the pistol with you, just in case some other team turns up and tries to finish you off. Carpenter flew down with me in the chopper from Hammersmith, and he’ll babysit you until you’re back on your feet. Now don’t fanny around over this. Get yourself sorted out and then start finding me some answers.’

  Simpson stepped out of the ambulance, spoke briefly to the female paramedic who had been waiting patiently outside the vehicle, and then strode over towards the wrecked Vauxhall. The last Richter heard of him was an imperiously bellowed ‘You two. Stop what you’re doing and come here’, clearly addressed to the two police officers.

  The paramedic climbed into the ambulance, checked the equipment that was monitoring Richter’s state of health, including the rate at which the drip was running, and then sat down beside him.

  ‘Can we go now?’ she asked. ‘Or have you got any other meetings you’d like to hold in my ambulance? Anything like that?’

  ‘Sorry, love. My boss can be a little abrasive, and when he says jump, he expects to see people in the air.’

  ‘I noticed that. And don’t call me “love”. My name’s Jacqueline Rogers – that’s Nurse Rogers to you – but I’d be just as happy if you shut up and lay still. And is that gun safe? Can you unload it or something?’

  Richter pulled the Browning out of the shoulder holster and checked that the safety catch was engaged.

  ‘It’s safe,’ he said, ‘but I’m not going to unload it until we’re in a secure location, somewhere that I’m reasonably certain nobody will shoot at us. Oh, and we’ll have a passenger as well,’ he added, as he saw Stephen Carpenter approaching the vehicle.

  The paramedic turned to look, just as a tall and slim black man wearing faded jeans, new trainers and a loose-fitting yellowish long leather coat stepped up into the ambulance, pulling the rear doors closed behind him. On a white man, the coat would look ridiculous: on him, it looked good.

  ‘The more the bloody merrier,’ Jacqueline muttered, then stopped short as Carpenter’s jacket swung open to reveal a much more substantial weapon than Richter’s nine-millimetre Browning pistol.

  ‘The A Team has arrived, my man,’ Carpenter announced, with an accent that made him sound as if he’d just stepped off a flight from Jamaica, though Richter knew he’d been born and brought up in East Anglia, and his normal speaking voice was more Fenland than Caribbean.

  ‘Yeah, right. Simpson must be taking this seriously if he’s let you have an MP5,’ Richter said, gesturing towards the Heckler and Koch submachine-gun attached to a tactical sling under the left side of Carpenter’s jacket.

  ‘He is, man. He’s also managed to get an Apache gunship, loaded for bear, on standby at Northolt, just in case something breaks before we get to the hospital.’

  Richter stared at him. ‘You’re joking, right?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I am,’ Carpenter replied, dropping the phoney accent, his face cracking into a huge smile that revealed a large acreage of very white teeth. ‘The MP5 was as far as he was prepared to go. No gunship, no ARV. Not even a police chopper to check the route. But I gather you’ve shot all the bad guys so we shouldn’t have any trouble, should we?’

  ‘Fascinating though this display of rampant testosterone is,’ Jacqueline said, ‘we need to get moving, so will you’ – she pointed her left forefinger at Carpenter – ‘sit down and shut up, and make sure that bloody gun doesn’t go off.’

  ‘This is Jacqueline,’ Richter said, feeling that some kind of introductions were in order. ‘Jacqueline, this is Steve Carpenter. Do not,’ he added, ‘call her “love” or any other term of endearment, or she’s quite likely to do you an injury.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m quite that bad,’ she said, as the ambulance started t
o move, the atonal wail of the siren making further conversation somewhat difficult.

  Chapter 7

  Consciousness had returned slowly to Jacko King, and when it did, he rather wished that he’d stayed well out of it.

  He’d come round briefly in the back of a van being driven at speed along a smooth road, a road that he’d guessed was probably in a city or built-up area because of what he could hear outside the vehicle. But almost as soon as his eyes opened, he felt a faint prick in his left arm and then the blackness overtook him.

  What seemed like minutes later, he came to again, in somewhere very different to the cargo area of a white van, somewhere completely and utterly dark, his open eyes detecting no sources of light at all. His first sensation was one of pain, of a dull ache in his chest and stomach. But when he tried to move his hand to touch the part that hurt, he found he couldn’t move his arm. In fact, he couldn’t move any part of his body, not even his head, which felt as if it was held in place by a leather strap bound tightly around his forehead. Using what little movement his bonds permitted, he identified similar straps around both wrists, his ankles, thighs and chest, and he appeared to be lying on a flat wooden surface. There was a length of adhesive tape covering his mouth as a rudimentary gag: he could feel the ends tugging on both cheeks and he detected the sticky surface of the tape with the end of his tongue. He was also naked, as far as he could tell.

  He had no idea where he was, or why he was there, but it was very obvious that he wasn’t in a hospital or clinic. Not even the worst possible treatment meted out by the NHS would see him bound and gagged and strapped to some kind of a board and left in pitch darkness. His memory was confused. He recalled driving to the restaurant with Prince Shit-for-brains and getting out of the limo when the coast was clear. He remembered some kind of a bang, and gunfire, but that was all. Then something else swam into his memory. The image of a man with a pistol, but not a revolver or an automatic. Something different, more like a sawn-off shotgun or a signal pistol, and pointing at him. Then nothing.