‘You shouldn’t encourage me,’ he said, and pulled the Toyota out on to the hard shoulder, flooring the accelerator.
Forty-nine
They killed the boat’s driver almost as soon as they were out of Puerto Galera harbour. It was dark in the bay, and there were no other boats in the vicinity, making their task easy, even though the driver seemed suspicious of the four southerners he’d taken on board. While Mohammed distracted him by talking about the basketball results, Anil had stolen up behind him and yanked his head back like a goat’s, cutting his throat with a single deep slash. The driver – a gnarled old fool, but a strong one – had fought back hard, but Mohammed had grabbed one wrist and Khalil had come forward and grabbed the other, and together they’d forced him to his knees, waiting while he’d bled out until his struggles finally ceased.
After that Anil had taken the wheel, taking them out of the bay, round the Sabang headland, and out into the open sea of the Verde Island Strait, while the others had cleaned up the blood on the deck. Then they’d tied the driver’s corpse to the boat’s anchor, before flinging him overboard. The water, Anil knew, was hundreds of metres deep and it was unlikely anyone would ever find a trace of him. Even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. No one knew them in Puerto Galera, and no one had seen them board his vessel.
Anil felt a rush of pleasure as the wind blew through his long hair. In an hour’s time, they would, God willing, be in possession of a device that would wreak havoc among the Yankee kafir and their northern allies. It had taken months to raise the money to buy it, a large portion of which had come from contacts overseas. Now, thanks to the treachery of their former brother, Omar Salic, their target, the US Embassy, was on alert.
But it would do the Yankees no good. They could double their security. They could triple it. It didn’t matter. Such was the power in the bomb, and such was its lethal payload, that it could be detonated a hundred metres from the front gate and would still cause death and destruction, not only in the embassy itself, but also in the wealthy bay area, and the hotels to which the western kafir were drawn like leeches.
Anil had been given the honour of driving the car containing the bomb. Mohammed would be next to him with his finger pressed against the detonation button. If Mohammed was shot, his finger would automatically release from the button, setting it off. So the plan could not fail. Anil’s group, the Sword of Islam, would be known and feared the whole world over. His name would be spoken of with awe – a just reward for his service to Allah and the cause.
One more hour. That was all it would take. And then he would have the bomb in his hand.
And by nightfall tomorrow, he would be a hero of the Islamic world.
Fifty
And so it had come to this. The final act of a violent life that had started with such promise. But now I had the opportunity to put things right, by killing Paul Wise and – if Tina’s theory was correct, and the more I thought about it, the more I was sure it was – by intercepting a bomb that was destined to kill potentially thousands of innocent people.
I had to succeed. Only then could I go to my grave in peace, knowing that I’d atoned for the many sins I’d committed over the past fifteen years.
Fear pulsed through me. Not fear of failure. Fear of death. I didn’t want to die, to slip into a darkness from which I could never return. Not without seeing my child. Not without one last sight of Emma, the only woman I’d ever loved. Not without breathing the fresh forest air of Luang Prabang. But all of those things were gone now, and I had no one to blame but myself. I’d sentenced too many men to the darkness, including some who’d done nothing to deserve it. Now, finally, it seemed it was my turn.
It was coming up to seven when I turned the Toyota on to a narrow track that wound down a steep hill towards the sea, and a private dock where at one time Tomboy and I had run boat transfers direct to our resort on Big La Laguna Beach. Our plan was a simple one: steal a boat and head straight out to Verde Island. In the far distance, through the trees, I could just make out its vague, hulking shape, barely illuminated by a handful of lights that twinkled in the night sky.
The journey down here had been long and hard going, and had involved me breaking pretty much every traffic law in the Philippines, but we’d made it, and Tina had even managed to fall asleep for the last half-hour. It crossed my mind not to wake her. She looked so peaceful with her head rested against the window, her mouth ever so slightly open. But as I drove into a small car park cut into the trees about halfway down the track and killed the engine, she opened her eyes and yawned.
‘I can’t believe I fell asleep,’ she said, looking round.
I saw the almost imperceptible change in her expression as she remembered what we were here to do, and how dangerous it was. ‘You don’t have to come with me, you know. You’ve done enough.’
‘No,’ she said firmly, looking me right in the eye. ‘We’re in this together. And don’t flatter yourself. You need me.’
I smiled. ‘Come on then.’
We got out of the Toyota, and I stretched, trying to take the stiffness out of my back, while Tina lit a cigarette. At the other end of the car park was an old abandoned jeepney, which now looked like it was being used as a makeshift home. Two local women, one young, one old, were crouched over a small fire next to it cooking a meal while half a dozen grimy-looking kids, none above the age of ten, ran backwards and forwards playing a game of tag, their laughter drifting over to us.
I stood there watching them for a few moments, suddenly remembering my own childhood, when I was part of a loving family. Playing out in the garden with my mates from down the road. And my sister, Mary, too, who was three years younger than me and always wanted to join in our games. If we didn’t let her, she’d burst into tears, and then I’d feel sorry for her and tell her it was OK, she could play. Jesus, my sister. We’d grown apart as we’d reached adulthood, after Mum and Dad died, and I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in more than ten years. I didn’t even know if she was still alive.
I felt a huge longing for her then. A need to call and speak to her. To let her know that I wasn’t all bad, no matter what she’d read and heard.
‘You know,’ said Tina, coming up beside me, ‘the thing I’ve noticed most about the Philippines is that everywhere you look there are young kids and babies, and all the young women seem to be pregnant. Yet they all live in such poverty.’
‘That’s the Catholic Church for you,’ I said, still watching the kids as they charged round in the dirt. ‘This country’s got the fastest growing population in the world, yet they still preach against contraception. And they’re supposed to be the good guys.’
‘There’s no hope for these kids, is there? They’re going to grow up poor, produce more children, and die poor.’
‘I guess so,’ I said, not wanting to think about that. Thinking instead about happier times.
‘It makes you wonder what the hell the point of it all is.’ She took a long, angry pull on her cigarette, her eyes darkening. ‘I hate this world sometimes. The fact that it’s so full of wicked, greedy, selfish people, and even when you lock them up, more keep appearing to take their place, in this never-ending, pointless cycle.’
‘We see the worst of it,’ I said, ‘because of the paths we’ve chosen. But you know what? For all the shit and pointlessness, for every Heed and for every Wise, it’s still a beautiful world.’ I thought about Laos. Home. ‘I live in this small, friendly old town a long way from here, where the people are poor but also happy. Life’s simple. It goes on day to day. People don’t get murdered, or very rarely anyway. There’s not much TV, no cases of child abuse. No scandals involving philandering politicians making underhand deals for nothing. The town’s surrounded by lush green forest, and rivers you can kayak down. There’s a huge waterfall about half an hour away by car, and sometimes I climb up to the top where there’s a view right across the valley below, and I swim in one of the ice-cold pools carved out of the rocks. And whenever I
’m there, I forget about all the bad things I’ve done; all the losses I’ve had; everything . . . And I’m happy.’
I let the words trail off, wondering whether I’d ever see it again.
Tina put a hand on my arm, and gave it a gentle squeeze. ‘Thanks,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her then, to hold her for a few minutes before we set off, but I stopped myself. There was no time. Instead, I turned and continued down the track, with Tina following.
A high chain-link fence lined the area round the small stone pier, with a guardhouse in the middle. There were lights on inside and I could make out the silhouette of a man in a cap behind the glass. Beyond the guardhouse, a dozen or so outriggers bobbed up and down in the darkness of the ocean. But it wasn’t them I was looking at. It was the brand-new speedboat at the end.
I took the gun from my waistband. I had five more bullets. It wasn’t a lot, but it was going to have to do.
‘I need to deal with the security guard. Wait here.’
Tina took a quick breath in.
‘I’m not going to hurt him,’ I answered, knowing what she was going to say, before turning away and walking over to the guardhouse.
I opened the door and strode inside. The guard – middle-aged, bespectacled, harmless – looked up from the tiny portable TV he was watching, and I pointed the gun at his head as if greeting him like this was the most natural thing in the world.
‘Stand up, take your gun slowly out of your pocket, put it on the desk, then stick your hands in the air.’
It all went smoothly. He wasn’t going to argue. I told him I wouldn’t hurt him, but he must have seen something in my demeanour that made him doubt me, and twice he begged me not to kill him as I bound him with his own handcuffs, before locking him in an adjacent storage room with a bottle of water, having relieved him of his mobile phone and the keys to the speedboat.
Five minutes later we were roaring away from the jetty in the speedboat, and twenty minutes after that we were travelling along the west coast of Verde – a rocky, tree-covered outcrop about three miles long, which looked largely deserted. Tina sat on the edge of the boat, looking down at the deck, an expression of intense concentration on her face, the familiar cigarette in her hand.
I slowed the boat as we rounded Verde’s southern tip. ‘This is the place I used to take the divers,’ I told her, pointing through the gloom to a couple of rocks standing a few feet above the narrow, rolling waves, feeling a tightness in my chest as once again I remembered happier times when, for a while at least, life had been so much less complicated. ‘It doesn’t look much, but underneath those rocks is some of the best fish life and coral anywhere in the Philippines. Have you ever dived?’
She managed a weak smile. ‘A long time back. When I was backpacking. Before I went and wrecked it all by joining the police, and ending up in situations like this.’ She threw the cigarette overboard and pulled Heed’s revolver from the back of her shorts, checking the chamber before clicking it back into place. Our eyes met. ‘I’m ready for this, you know.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘So am I.’
And I was too. I felt much calmer now. Almost at peace with myself. Knowing I was doing the right thing.
‘When we land, we make for the house, OK? I don’t know who’s going to be there. It might even be that Wise isn’t in residence, but if he is, he’ll have security. We’ve got to try to get right up close to them, then try and take them out as quietly as possible. That means using a knife.’ I patted my pocket, where my Swiss Army knife was concealed. I had no desire to use it again as I’d done the previous night. Stabbing’s a method of killing that’s always sickened me by its very intimacy, but sometimes you just haven’t got a choice, and this looked like it was going to be one of those times. ‘It’s going to be messy, and people are going to die. There’s no way round that.’
She nodded.
‘The essential thing is we keep Wise alive until we’ve located the bomb, if there is one, and found out where and to whom it’s gone. After that . . .’
I let my words trail off. We both knew what would happen after that.
Payback.
I steered the boat past the rocks, giving them a wide berth, and a few minutes later we came round on to the eastern side of the island. There were even fewer lights on here but I could make out the shapes of houses, spaced far apart, up on the top of a long winding ridge, beneath which was thick forest. I recognized Wise’s place from the Google Earth photo earlier. ‘That’s it,’ I said, pointing to the first house, a grand-looking stucco villa with a well-lit access road leading up to the front from a secluded palm-fringed beach a little way down the coast.
I slowed the boat to a crawl and turned off the lights, moving quietly towards the adjacent beach, remembering it as a place we used to bring divers in the surface interval between dives on the southern rocks. There were no houses here then, but that had been a long time back now.
When we were fifty yards short of the shore, I cut the engine altogether and let the boat drift in on the waves, before dropping anchor in clear shallow water next to some rocks.
The night was quiet and peaceful, and above us a crescent moon shone down from a starry sky. It was the kind of night for relaxing with a beer in good company, not for killing.
I looked across at Tina. ‘Ready?’
She nodded, the determination set hard on her lean, angular face. ‘Ready.’
Without another word, we slipped out of the boat and waded to shore, guns drawn.
Fifty-one
Paul Wise looked at his watch. 7.35 p.m.
He was standing on the veranda at the front of the villa looking down the hill towards the sea. Beside him stood Schagel’s man, Nargen, while one of his local people, Rico, stood guard by the steps down to the driveway, a pump-action shotgun in his hands. A single access road, lined on both sides by thick, natural foliage running for more than a hundred yards on either side, connected the villa to Wise’s private beach and dock where the men he was meeting would be landing. Wise felt a little better with Nargen there. The Russian had a natural calm about him that was reassuring under the circumstances. Even so, he was still extremely keen to get this whole thing over with. Having outsiders on his land, men he didn’t know, felt like a violation.
A few minutes earlier, he’d seen a speedboat come round the tip of the island, but it had pulled in before reaching his beach. He wondered whether it was the men he was waiting for. If so, he couldn’t understand why they would have stopped short of the rendezvous point. And the fact that the lights had clearly been turned off before the boat reached the shore set off his nerves again.
‘Do you have cameras covering the route up here?’ asked Nargen, interrupting his thoughts. He had a soft, cultivated Russian accent that was nothing like Wise’s idea of how a Russian special forces soldier should sound.
Wise nodded. ‘There are cameras covering all the approaches, including through the woods. They’re linked to a control room inside. I have a member of staff watching them full-time.’
‘How many are you expecting?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. Liaising with them had been Schagel’s job – and now, typically, Schagel was nowhere to be seen.
‘It doesn’t matter. If we can see them coming, we can take precautions.’
Wise nodded, and glanced over at Rico, who was clutching his weapon tightly as if he feared he might drop it. He was trying to look calm and professional, but was fooling nobody.
The phone in the pocket of Wise’s cream suit rang. He pulled it out and checked the number. It was Delon, his camera operator.
‘Boss,’ said Delon breathlessly, ‘I’ve picked up intruders on camera 7.’
Camera 7 was housed in thick woodland on the south-eastern approach to the villa, some two hundred metres distant. Anyone coming that way didn’t want to be spotted.
‘How many?’
�
��Two. A man and a woman.’
‘Describe them.’
‘They’re westerners. The man’s tall with dark hair. The woman’s blonde.’
‘Keep them covered,’ snapped Wise, and hung up.
So, somehow Milne and Boyd had found him. His first reaction was anger that they’d managed to locate his precious hideaway, but that anger only lasted a few seconds. Then a more familiar emotion took over. Pleasure. This was an opportunity, and one not to be missed.
‘What’s happening?’ demanded Nargen.
Wise told him. ‘I want them intercepted.’
Nargen smiled. ‘It will be a pleasure. I owe both of them for what they did to my colleague.’ He removed a long black pistol from a holster beneath his jacket, and screwed on a large silencer.
‘And I want the woman, Boyd, alive.’
Nargen coolly met his eye. ‘I’m only here because I’m being paid to protect you until you’ve exchanged the package for the money. If I can get the girl alive, I will, but I’m not risking my life over it.’
Wise wasn’t used to being talked back to, but he was also pragmatic enough to know that he had to tread carefully here. ‘I will pay you one hundred thousand dollars in cash, money I will have as soon as the exchange is made, if you bring her to me conscious and in one piece.’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Nargen with an infuriating shrug, cocking the pistol and turning away.
‘A hundred thousand dollars,’ repeated Wise, thoughts of all the terrible things he could do to Tina Boyd flooding his brain. He’d waited years for this moment. It would be his reward for successfully making the exchange.
And for that bitch, it would be the beginning of a nightmare that would last until he’d squeezed every drop of pain from her, leaving her begging for death.
Fifty-two
The Payback Page 25
