And, as she lit a cigarette and took a long, hard drag, she felt a weird but intense feeling of euphoria – the kind she sometimes used to get from a few good hits of vodka. She’d almost died only minutes ago, yet the shock that she knew would have to come eventually was nowhere to be seen, and she almost wanted to laugh out loud because, by God, she’d survived. They’d tried to kill her and she’d survived.
She thought of that evil little runt Paul Wise, wondered how he’d be feeling when he found out that she was still standing, then pointed her cigarette at the bruised but unbowed reflection in the rear-view mirror.
‘I’m coming for you,’ she said out loud. ‘This time I’m coming for you.’
Ten
The man known by those who hired his services simply as Nargen picked up the payphone and waited while the man on the other end spoke.
‘Is this line secure?’ demanded the caller.
‘Yes. It’s a public phone, and I’ve swept the booth for bugs. There are none.’
‘Good. What is the status of our situation?’
‘Target One is dealt with,’ answered Nargen, choosing his words carefully. ‘The police officer in charge of the case has accepted that he took his own life. However, there might be a complication.’
The voice at the other end was impatient. ‘What kind of complication?’
‘Target Two.’
‘What about her?’
‘We were unable to carry out the termination. And our cover has been compromised.’
‘What happened?’
‘We waited for her at her house. We almost had her but she managed to get away.’
‘You mean you failed.’
‘The instructions we were given meant that it was a very difficult task,’ Nargen countered defensively.
‘That’s why I chose you to perform it,’ said the caller. ‘You often boast of your reputation, and you charge very highly for your services because of it. Therefore, I do not expect failure. Nor will I tolerate it. Where is she now?’
‘We don’t know. We were forced to abort the operation.’
The caller cursed loudly. ‘This is not good. She knows too much.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Nargen. ‘We left a listening device in the target’s office. It picked up a conversation she had with the investigating officer. All she has are suspicions.’
‘So she has no way of finding out what Target One knew?’
‘We made him give us all the information he had. He deleted all the files on his laptop while I watched. He also gave me his backup tapes and the phone he’d been using to make his calls to her. They are destroyed now, but Target Two knows about the phone, and has asked the investigating officer for the records of the calls made and received on it – a request he has agreed to.’
‘Then you need to find her. And fast. Those are the orders. Do you understand?’
‘I do. My associate is working on it.’
‘Good. Keep me informed of progress.’
The caller cut the connection, and Nargen replaced the receiver, before crossing the road to the hired Lexus.
In the passenger seat, his associate sat hunched over a laptop, a look of painful concentration on his face. Nargen had got him to run a location trace on the mobile number they had for Tina Boyd, using a specialist UK-based website that promised to give the current location of any mobile phone in the UK – a process known as reverse look-up, which only required the number itself.
Tumanov had the powerful build and the arrogant good looks of a young Dolph Lundgren; it was he who’d been standing with the knife outside Nick Penny’s family home the previous night. Everything Nargen had told the journalist, Penny, about Tumanov was true. He wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Penny’s wife and children one by one. After all, he’d done such things, and worse, in Chechnya while serving as a paratrooper there, and it was known in the tight-knit circles they moved in that he enjoyed killing in a way that was sometimes considered unhealthy. Usually Nargen would have avoided such a man, but Tumanov was also a professional who could be relied on to carry out the kinds of tasks that other men would have baulked at.
‘He’s not pleased,’ said Nargen, getting back in the driving seat. ‘How far have you got?’
‘I’m just waiting for them to come back to me with the trace,’ Tumanov grunted.
Then, as Nargen switched on the engine and pulled away from the kerb, Tumanov smiled. ‘Got it,’ he said triumphantly. ‘She’s on the move.’ He stretched his bulk in the seat and lifted up his immense hands, slowly clenching and unclenching them. ‘I want to see that bitch die.’
Nargen chuckled. ‘You’ll have your chance soon enough.’
Eleven
Chivas Regal Amora owed his first two names both to his father’s love of whiskey and to the fact that by the time he came along, the youngest of thirteen children, the family had long since run out of preferable alternatives. Brought up dirt-poor, Chivas had had to work his way out of the ghetto the hard way. Now he drove a truck that he part-owned with his wife’s two brothers, and was finally making ends meet.
But money was still tight. Chivas had seven children of his own to feed, and he had to split the profits and the jobs three ways, which was why when Benny Magsino had approached him with the business proposition, he’d said yes immediately. Benny was the foreman at a warehouse in Manila docks that Chivas and his partners regularly took deliveries from, and what he was offering seemed very simple.
All Chivas had to do was turn up at the warehouse and make one of his usual pick-ups – in this case, six pallets of materials for a building company he often delivered to in Angeles City. The only difference was that one of the boxes in the final pallet to go on the truck would be marked with a red cross, and Chivas’s instructions were to drop this box off en route. He’d then be given another identical box and would continue with the delivery. For this small diversion, he was going to be paid twenty thousand pesos – a huge sum of money for someone in his position.
Chivas was no one’s fool. He knew that whatever was in the box had to be illegal – drugs, or something similar. But that wasn’t his concern. He considered himself an honest man and a good Catholic, but his first responsibility was to his family, and this money would help them greatly.
However, as he turned off the main road and began heading down a winding, dusty backstreet, the uneven, shoddy buildings of a shanty town on one side, and a high fence topped with barbed wire on the other, Chivas began to grow nervous. His truck, though far from new, stood out in a place like this.
The fence to the right ended, giving way to a stretch of garbage-strewn wasteland that sloped down to an ink-black river, beyond which were the broken concrete and corrugated-iron buildings of another shanty town. Even though it was four in the morning, a handful of ghostly figures, illuminated by the head torches they wore, moved in the darkness among the garbage hills, carrying bags in which they collected anything of value. Otherwise all was silent.
Ignoring the stench of rubbish and human waste that seeped into the truck, and which reminded him of the grinding poverty he too had grown up in, Chivas drove slowly along the pothole-scarred track until he came to a turning next to a burnt-out shell of a building that looked like it might have been a factory once. A single dim light glowed in one of the first-floor windows.
This was the place.
Chivas stopped the truck and got out, looking round warily, wishing he was home with his family, fast asleep in bed, and telling himself that he would be as soon as he was finished here. And twenty thousand pesos richer too.
Forcing down his fear, he walked round to the back of the truck and unlocked the rear doors. The box with the red cross marked on it was on the top row of the nearest pallet, placed there deliberately for easy removal. Chivas took down his trolley, then climbed inside and used his pocket knife to cut the pallet’s strapping. Carefully, he manoeuvred the box free. It felt heavy, but not excessively so, and with a grunt of exerti
on he got it first to the floor of the truck, and then, with a final heave, on to the trolley.
Looking inside the box was not an option. Chivas was as curious as the next man, and he couldn’t deny that he was interested to know what it was he was handling, but he was also sensible, and didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize his twenty thousand pesos. So he did as he’d been instructed and, having relocked the truck doors, he wheeled the trolley round the side of the building, conscious of the loud noise it was making over the potholed ground.
A high cement wall, cracked and graffiti-strewn, bordered the rear, and in the middle of it was an open double gate. Taking a deep breath to suppress his nerves, Chivas wheeled his cargo through the gate and into an empty courtyard that was shrouded in darkness. Rats scuttled about in the shadows, darting among the piles of garbage and broken glass, but they appeared to be the only occupants.
Squinting in the gloom, Chivas spotted an identical box to the one he was wheeling propped up against the far wall. Such was his hurry to do the swap and get the hell out of there that when he parked his trolley next to it, his own box toppled over and hit the ground with a loud bang before he could grab hold of it.
That was when he heard a man curse in English from somewhere in the shadows behind him. ‘Jesus Christ!’
Chivas jumped at the intrusion and only just managed to stifle an embarrassingly frightened yelp.
‘Don’t turn round,’ hissed the man. He sounded American or English.
Chivas stood still, suddenly scared that he’d destroyed whatever it was that was in the box. ‘I didn’t mean to do nothing, boss . . .’
‘Shut up. Leave the box there and take the other one. Count to ten, then turn round and leave. I have a gun. If you look at me, I will kill you. Do you understand?’
‘Sure, boss.’
‘You didn’t look inside, did you?’
Chivas shook his head urgently. ‘No, boss. I’ve just taken it out now. See, it’s still sealed.’
‘Good. Now get moving. And I repeat: do not look at me.’
Chivas didn’t need telling twice. The stranger had spooked him so much he’d almost wet his pants, so he shoved the new box on to his trolley and backed out of the gate as fast as he could, eyes fixed firmly to the ground as he silently prayed that the stranger wouldn’t change his mind and put a bullet in him.
Barely a minute later, and with relief surging through him, he climbed back into the cab, having literally flung the new box in the back of the truck. He was already thinking about those twenty thousand pesos in his hand, and didn’t hear the movement behind him until it was far too late, and the knife was already being drawn slowly and deeply across his throat.
His last thought as he saw his own blood-spray hosing across the windscreen wasn’t about his children, his wife Mariel, his truck, or even his twenty thousand pesos.
It was what could possibly be in that box, and why he’d had to die because of it.
Twelve
Tina took another long look in her rear-view mirror before coming to a halt, but the road behind her was empty, and she was certain she hadn’t been followed. Her journey had covered a succession of back roads, several of them little more than tracks, and there was no way that she wouldn’t have spotted a pursuing vehicle. Even so, she parked the car more than two hundred yards down the road from her parents’ place, just to be on the safe side. It had taken her three hours to get here, almost twice as long as usual. She’d had to stop at one point as the shock of what had happened took hold, and had sat shivering in the driver’s seat for ten minutes, fighting back the tears, an unlit cigarette in her hand, as the realization of how close she’d just come to dying washed over her, before finally pulling herself together and carrying on.
The clock on the dashboard read 9.31 as she cut the engine and got out of the car. She took a couple of deep breaths and started up the street.
She’d moved with her family to this quiet, tree-lined street on the edge of Winchester when she was just seven years old. Both her primary and secondary schools had been easy walks away, and she always felt happy coming back, because it felt so familiar and reminded her of the happy, easy days of childhood.
She heard a car turning into the road behind her and stiffened. The torch was in her coat pocket, but it was no longer a weapon of surprise, and she wasn’t sure she had the strength for another fight.
A black Mercedes SUV rumbled slowly past and she looked as casually as possible inside, but the windows were blacked out and she couldn’t see the driver. She cursed herself. The last thing she needed was to bring the demons from her own life into those of her parents.
But then the SUV turned into a driveway a few doors further up, and an attractive woman in her late thirties jumped out and flicked back her long, curly hair ostentatiously, before striding up to the front door of the house and letting herself in.
Tina sighed and told herself to stop being so paranoid. She’d taken every precaution possible, and there was no way her assailants would be able to track her down to here. There was nothing in her own home with her parents’ address on it, and Boyd was too common a name to be of any use to anyone intent on finding her. Even so, she still looked round several times, checking those few cars parked on the street for occupants, before opening the gate to her family home.
Her mother was at the door in seconds. An older, slightly darker version of Tina, courtesy of some Spanish blood a couple of generations back, she looked fantastically fit and well for sixty-one, and Tina often hoped she’d look half as good as her mum at her age. She couldn’t see it happening, though. Not the way her life was going. Making thirty-four was going to be challenge enough.
‘Tina, how lovely to see you, darling,’ said her mother with a huge smile, giving her a hug that was surprisingly painful after what had happened earlier. She took a step back and suddenly frowned. ‘My God, what’s happened to your hair?’
‘I had it cut, Mum. People sometimes do that.’
‘And that colour. You look …’ She pulled a face. ‘Well, you look like a man, Tina. You’ve got lovely hair. Why did you have to do that to it?’
‘I fancied a change,’ said Tina, thinking she should have expected this kind of reaction. She’d decided on a whim a few weeks earlier to have her hair cut ultra-short and bleached blonde, and whatever her mum might have thought, she liked her new look. It went with the new, leaner body she’d been working on with her new four-times-a-week gym regime – something that had stood her in good stead earlier that evening.
‘And what’s happened to your face?’ continued her mother, noticing the cut and swelling on Tina’s cheekbone where she’d been hit with the butt of the gun.
‘It’s nothing. I had a bit of an argument with a suspect, that’s all.’
‘It doesn’t look like nothing,’ she said, ushering Tina inside and closing the door. ‘You know, I don’t know why you do that job, darling, I really don’t. You’ve had so many bad things happen to you. Why don’t you think about doing something else? You’ve got a degree, a good one too. You could do anything.’
Tina smiled and said she’d think about it. Her mother’s concern was hardly surprising, given all she’d been through in the past few years. As well as enduring the deaths of a number of people close to her, she’d also been shot twice in the line of duty; shot at by suspects a few more times than that; even kidnapped. She was therefore a source of constant worry to her staunchly middle-class suburban family, utterly unused to the violence that lurked on the streets of the capital. Her father was the retired finance director of an insurance company; her mother had been a midwife, then a housewife; her older brother, Phil, was a married quantity surveyor with his own business and two small children. All lived the kind of pleasant, uneventful lives that would have driven Tina insane with boredom, but she’d given up trying to tell any of them that.
And she was secretly pleased that she had people who cared for her so much.
‘
Look who’s here, Frank,’ said her mother as they walked into the lounge.
Her father got up from the sofa where he’d been watching golf on his new plasma TV. He and her mother tended to spend the evenings apart watching TV in separate rooms, which seemed somewhat bizarre to Tina but appeared to suit them just fine.
He gave her a smile that couldn’t quite hide the concern, and took her in his arms, holding her there for a few seconds longer than usual. Although not as overtly emotional as her mother, Tina knew he worried about her just as much. They’d always been close, and it felt good to have him hold her now.
‘Good to see you, love,’ he said. Tina sensed that he’d seen the state of her face but had decided to make no comment, though he nodded approvingly at her hair. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘Just thought I’d pay a visit,’ she answered, taking a seat in one of the armchairs and trying to look as natural as possible. It was hard being back in the comfort of the family home, with the same old photos on the walls of happier childhood times, knowing that only three or so hours earlier a man she’d never seen before had tried to drown her in her own bath, and come very close to being successful.
She had a sudden, intense urge for a real drink. To grab hold of a huge glass of silky Rioja – the sort she used to buy when she was feeling flush – and gulp it down in one fell swoop, allowing that sweet, drifting feeling of lightheadedness to wash away all her troubles. She hadn’t been to an AA meeting for more than a week now, and felt her mouth watering at the prospect of booze. But her parents knew about the problem she’d carried around for much of the last six years – it had been well enough documented – so she felt safer knowing she wouldn’t be able to relent here.
Instead, her mum offered her a cup of tea and Tina spent the next fifteen minutes chatting to them – not about the job, a subject her parents both tended to avoid, but about neutral subjects: the neighbours; her brother’s family; her dad’s golf handicap. Such conversation should have been comforting, but she found it difficult to concentrate. There was too much else to think about – most importantly: what was it that Nick Penny had discovered before he died? And why did his killers want her dead as well when she had nothing that could incriminate Paul Wise? These were questions that were going to need answering.
The Payback Page 7
