Death Count: A Kat Munro Thriller (The Kat Munro Thrillers Book 1)

by SL Beaumont

  “Damn, we’ll have to go out the way we came in.”

  Chapter 30

  Nathan entered the offices of Forensic Accounting Associates via a side entrance. He showed his credentials to the lone security guard and made his way up the stairs to the first-floor office.

  Something about CIP had been bugging him. When he woke that morning, another line of inquiry had emerged in his thoughts. He just had to prove it. CIP’s hidden Ponzi scheme appeared to operate like their other funds. Clients deposited their money to purchase units in the fund, which accrued dividends, interest, and growth to each client’s account. When a client requested a withdrawal, the funds were paid out. Nathan and the team had been working their way through the clients invested in Fund 4. The early investors were individuals like Kat’s father and his golfing buddies, but the later investors were all companies and trusts. It was some of these later investors that, Nathan had discovered late on Friday afternoon, existed in name only. The directors were ghosts, and the registered offices were fictitious. Nate would have continued working into the night, but Stevenson insisted that they all go home and get a good night’s sleep. The investment funds had been deposited by electronic transfer from legitimate bank accounts in the name of these companies, so local and offshore banks had somehow been tricked into opening accounts for shell companies.

  Nathan sat down at his desk and switched his computer on. He inserted his ear pods, selected his latest dance party playlist, cracked his knuckles, and got to work. Over the next, hour he submitted formal requests to DI Greenwood to obtain transaction details from the bank accounts of thirty-seven different entities going back four years. He logged into the firm’s secure data storage. He opened a file downloaded from the CIP servers showing the transaction details of all the money paid out from Fund 4. He clicked to expand the detail of the fifty most recent withdrawals of more than one hundred thousand pounds from the various portfolios. He let out a loud exhalation of disbelief and sat back in his chair. Without exception all withdrawals, regardless of company name attributed to them, had been made to a single offshore bank account.

  “This isn’t a Ponzi; it’s an elaborate money-laundering scheme,” he muttered.

  Nathan sat forward and began to work on the remaining data to see how far back the pattern went. He was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t see the two men creep up the stairs or hear the splash of liquid from the cans they carried as they spread it around the room before creeping back down the stairs.

  Just as the smell of fuel hit his nostrils, flames engulfed the room.

  Chapter 31

  The cable tie snapped, and Adam pulled his hands free. He rushed to join Kat at the window of the small room where they were trapped. “Here, let me help you,” he said, dropping to his knees and pulling at the tie holding her right hand to the chair, with his teeth. After a minute, it began to split and fray, and he broke it apart.

  “Thanks.” Kat rubbed her wrist on her shirt for a moment. She reached out and touched Adam’s cheek. “The side of your mouth looks sore.”

  Adam leaned into her hand and held her gaze. “As much as I’d like to indulge in your sympathy, we need to get out of here before they come back.”

  Kat nodded and dropped her hand, colour brushing the top of her cheekbones. She took a step back.

  “Options, as I see them, are one, chair through the window, but someone would hear us, and we wouldn’t get very far,” Adam said.

  “And we’d still have to jump one storey,” Kat said.

  “Then, it’s option two.”

  “Which is?”

  “Overpower them when they return.”

  “Which might be sooner than we think. Listen?” Kat said.

  “Close the curtains,” Adam said, lifting Kat’s chair back into the centre of the room again, back to back with his. “Sit as though you’re still tied up.”

  Kat sat facing the door and placed the rope back on her lap with her hands at her sides as the key turned in the lock. Adam flattened himself against the wall. The door opened, and Steve walked into the room, followed by Benny.

  “What?” Steve began.

  Kat launched herself out of the chair, kicking out and landing a solid strike just above his right knee. Benny fumbled for his gun, as Adam’s fist connected with the side of his head, sending him sprawling into the open doorway. Adam followed through with the series of body blows taking Benny to the floor. Adam fell on him, pinning his arms. Benny bucked, twisting his legs around Adam’s and throwing him off, but not before Adam had liberated his Glock.

  Having taken advantage of Steve’s imbalance to land a second kick on his left thigh, Kat slammed the palm of her right hand into his nose. As he raised his hands to protect himself, she grabbed his shoulders and kneed him in the groin. She stepped away as he doubled over and glanced at Adam, scrambling to his feet with Benny’s gun in his hands. She let out a breath, feeling the adrenaline rush through her.

  “Let’s go,” Adam said, propelling her through the door, pulling it shut and turning the key. Adam pocketed the Glock along with the key.

  Steve and Benny began shouting and pounding on the door.

  “Quick, this way,” Kat said, leading them back along the corridor. Instead of going down the stairs, she took them through another door, which opened onto a second stairwell. It curved up and around several times. “This connects to the main part of the house if my memory is correct,” she whispered.

  Adam peered upwards to check that the stairwell was empty before they climbed to the second floor and cracked open a door leading to the central part of the house.

  “This floor is mostly bedrooms. The main staircase leads down to the next floor, which has a study, library, and family lounges. The ground floor is more formal. I think there is another, smaller, less used set of stairs on the other side of the house, but we have to cross this long hallway to get to it,” Kat said.

  “It’s probably worth the risk,” Adam whispered. “We can’t stay here.”

  They closed the stairwell door behind them with care and crept along the wide hallway, past a table filled with framed family photos and several half-closed doors. Voices floated up from the floor below, and somewhere in the house, a door closed with a bang causing them to jump and exchange a nervous glance. They came to the main staircase and paused, listening before hurrying across the landing. A little further on the hallway split, one part continuing straight, the other turning right at ninety degrees.

  “Come on, nearly there,” Kat urged.

  A door opened on the floor below, and the voices became louder. Kat grabbed Adam’s arm, and they slipped into a room and hid, with the door ajar. The small room was a bathroom painted blue and containing a claw foot bath and hand basin. It smelled fresh and clean. Snippets of conversation drifted up to them.

  “They’ve somehow escaped.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Find them; they can’t have got far. Set the dogs loose.”

  The door closed, and the voices became muffled.

  Kat let out the breath she’d been holding. “They’re looking for us.”

  “Yes, but they think we’re outside, so that gives us a few minutes,” Adam said. “Come on, let’s get moving.”

  They left the bathroom and hurried along the hallway, keeping close to the wall until they reached a door at the far end. Adam eased it open and found himself in an unadorned stairwell similar to the one they’d ascended on the opposite side of the house. They paused and listened for a few moments. There was no noise coming from below. Adam peered over the edge of the railing and turned to Kat, giving a flick of his head. Together they crept down the stairs to the first floor.

  “Where does this staircase end?” Adam asked.

  “One side of the house, I think, rather than the back,” Kat said. “But I can’t be sure.”

  They crept down one more flight. There were three doors on the landing; the one to their left, with a frosted glass panel, led to outside an
d one to their right led back into the central part of the house. The stairs continued down. Adam pointed down and raised his eyebrows in question.

  “Wine cellar,” Kat whispered. “Creepy.”

  Adam put his hand on the outside door handle just as loud voices sounded from inside the house. A man’s voice rose above the others.

  “Sounds like someone arriving,” Adam said. He eased the gun from his waistband and cracked the door leading into the house.

  Three men and a woman stood in the main foyer near the front entrance, partly obscured by a grand sweeping staircase. The woman and one of the men held semi-automatic rifles.

  “Wait here.” Adam slipped through the doorway and rushed across the floor, taking cover by the bannister behind a large potted plant. Hearing a creak on the stairs above, Kat bolted after him, squeezing in with him behind the planter.

  The conversation was more apparent in the foyer, and Adam turned to Kat with a look of shock on his face.

  “I know that voice,” he whispered.

  Chapter 32

  “What’s going on?” the new arrival asked, his tone exasperated.

  “We caught two people snooping at the airfield,” the woman explained.

  “Do we know who they are and what they were looking for?”

  “It’s strange,” the woman said. “She’s the ex-girlfriend of Gabriel Huntly-Tait, and he is…”

  “A cop,” the man finished for her. He swore. “How the hell did they find the airfield?”

  “The woman was Kat Munro?” an older well-spoken man asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How?” he began. “I thought…”

  “You thought what?” the first man asked. “What have you done?”

  “I, ah, Mary was worried,” the older man stumbled over his words.

  “What did you do?”

  “I sent someone to take care of her.”

  “You what?” the younger man exploded.

  “She was becoming a problem. I know she was running Internet searches on me and following me. I mean, she even turned up at an art gallery opening that I sponsored, and then I find that she is in the middle of some investigation at CIP. I had someone break into her flat to find whatever it was that she was collecting about me.”

  Kat’s mouth dropped open.

  “You’re mad, she’s just an accountant, and Huntly-Tait, this is not just all about you,” the newcomer added.

  Kat’s expression turned indignant. “'Just an accountant’,” she mouthed.

  “My man ended up unconscious and in custody, so I think we underestimated her,” Huntly-Tait said.

  “She’s not to be harmed. Is that clear?” There were murmurs of acknowledgement.

  Kat touched Adam on the arm and looked at him in confusion. “Is that…?” she began.

  He nodded, and she stared at him, incredulous.

  “Where are they now?” the man asked.

  There was a moment of silence before the woman spoke again.

  “Well, sir, that’s just the thing. They’ve escaped.”

  “Oh, this just gets better.”

  “They could be miles from here by now.”

  “If there is one thing I know about Adam Jackson, it’s that he isn’t the type of man to flee. He will still be around here somewhere. But, first things first, we need to move all of the stock now. They may have found a way to alert the authorities.”

  “We’re only just unloading the most recent cargo,” the woman said.

  “It all needs to go from here, now. H-T, it’s time for your man at the Met to earn his retainer. We need the dispatches monitored and to be alerted as soon as anyone even moves in this direction.”

  He turned to the woman. “It’s getting dark out, so get your men out into the grounds with night vision. Are the dogs loose? Good. Once I’ve checked the factory, I’ll sweep the house for heat signatures. We need to find them before they do any more damage.”

  Adam signalled to Kat with a toss of his head, and they moved on silent feet to the back of the foyer, keeping the stairs between them and the others. They slipped through an archway beneath the grand staircase that led through to the rear of the house. Kat grabbed Adam’s hand and pulled him down into a dark alcove below the stairs just as the group from the foyer strode through a matching archway on the opposite side of the stairs. Kat and Adam held their breath as they passed within centimetres of their hiding place. William Huntly-Tait was in the lead, followed by the woman and one of the men who had detained them at the airfield. A man, well known to both Adam and Kat, brought up the rear. Don Webster.

  Kat shook her head in disbelief.

  The four passed through a doorway, and the sound of their footsteps retreated.

  “What the hell? Donny?” Kat whispered. “What’s going on here? Is he undercover too?”

  Adam frowned. “No. Colonel Wilson would have told me.”

  “But that means…no, not Donny.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Kat. Don will have the contacts in Afghanistan to buy opium. They must be smuggling it out to somewhere in Europe and then flying it in, packaging it up here, before distributing it.”

  “If they’re using Mary McFarlane’s plane, perhaps they’re using her place in Normandy as a drop-off and pickup point,” Kat suggested.

  “And we know there’s a link between Mary and William Huntly-Tait. She’s his client.”

  Kat sighed. “Okay, so what do we do? They’re heavily armed, and they’re looking for us.”

  “I’m going to check out this factory, which must be in that large building out the back at the edge of the forest. You find a phone and call this number.” Adam recited a telephone number and had Kat repeat it back. “If they catch you, they won’t hurt you. You heard Don.”

  Kat shook her head. “We should stick together.”

  “No, we’ll achieve more this way. We need to get the police here before they leave with the drugs. ”

  Kat nodded. Adam started to rise, but Kat pulled him back down so that their faces were only inches apart.

  “Be careful.” She kissed him.

  Adam slipped his arms around her and held her tight, returning her kiss. Kat relaxed into his embrace, and for a brief moment, the danger they were facing faded, and it was just them. With some reluctance, they broke apart, and Adam rested his forehead against hers for a moment. “Don’t worry about me. Make sure that you don’t you do anything risky, okay?”

  They both stood, still holding on to one another, and Kat unwound the thin scarf she wore.

  “Adam, here take this. The dogs know my scent. I’ve played with them on numerous occasions, so this might buy you some time.”

  Adam took the scarf, slipping it into his pocket. He gazed at her for a long moment and reached out to stroke her cheek. He leaned in to give her another quick kiss before slipping out of their hiding place as quietly as a thief in the night.

  Kat put her fingers to her lips as she watched him disappear into the shadows. Kissing him again had been long overdue, and if ever there was an incentive to get out of this mess, she had it now. She thought for a moment. Where were there phones in this house? All she could think of was William’s study, but the thought of going in there frightened her. She was paralysed by fear for a moment and took several deep breaths and forced down the rising wave of panic. She closed her eyes and made herself think. The bedrooms could have phones, but that would mean going back upstairs, and she figured it was safer to stay on the ground floor. There had to be one in the front room, and as long as she kept away from the windows, she would be fine.

  She strained to listen for any sounds in the silent house. After several long seconds, she crept out from the nook, retraced her steps beneath the arch, and tiptoed into the foyer, keeping her body pressed against the side of the staircase. When she reached the large planter they’d hidden behind earlier, she stopped and peered around it. The door to the formal lounge room at the front of the house was twenty meter
s away across the spacious entrance hall. She craned her neck to peer up the stairs to the first floor. The stairs were empty, but she couldn’t see up to the landing. Not giving herself any more time to second guess, she dashed across the foyer to the lounge’s doorway and slipped inside.

  The room was long with several sofas, armchairs, and elaborate side tables topped with expensive-looking lamps that bathed the room in a soft glow. The large fireplace was unlit. Heavy peach coloured curtains framed the four double bay windows along the front of the house, and the French doors at the far end. The walls were covered in ruby red wallpaper and displayed paintings of rural scenes, some of which Kat knew to be originals; there was a Turner and even a Gainsborough. She scanned the room. There, on a side table on the furthest side of the fireplace from where she stood, was a telephone. Movement outside in front of the house caught her attention. Kat ducked down behind the nearest sofa when a man wearing night vision goggles and carrying a semi-automatic rifle crossed in front of the windows. His head moved from side to side as he scanned the grounds. Breathing deeply, she waited until he had passed before moving out from behind the sofa. She crawled across the room on her hands and knees towards the table with the telephone. Her damaged prosthesis made the movement challenging, but she felt safer keeping close to the ground rather than standing up. She reached the far sofa and collapsed beside it, resting her back against the arm, out of sight of the windows. She could hear the voices of the guards talking outside as she reached up onto the table and retrieved the telephone handset. She punched in the numbers that Adam had her memorise, and after one ring, a voice answered.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Kat Munro, Adam said to call.”

  “Kat, thank God, where are you?”

  She went to answer as the phone was plucked from her hand.

  “What are you doing?”

  She looked up into a familiar face.

  “Gabe?”

  Chapter 33

  Adam crept through the back of the house, past the entrance to an enormous kitchen where four people were seated around a large table, playing cards. He slipped through an open doorway and out a side entrance. He cowered in the porch as a man strode by, night vision goggles affixed to his eyes and a weapon in his hands. Adam briefly considered disarming him and taking his gun and glasses but dismissed the idea. It would take too long, be too noisy, and at the moment, he still had an element of surprise; they didn’t know where he was. Adam calculated the distance across the back yard to the outbuildings at the edge of the woodland to be around five hundred meters. Several vehicles were parked along the way, which would provide him with good cover. He counted thirty seconds until the next guard passed, then thirty before the next. The security was tight, executed with military precision.