It was, she thought as she looked out the window and into the traffic, just one more thing she’d have to learn to live with.
Epilogue
Bangkok, August
Thunder rumbled across the dirty grey sky as Erik Theunissen walked down the steps of his house in Bangkok’s upmarket Thong Lo area and across the gravel driveway to where his car was waiting to take him to Suvarnabhumi Airport. From there a Thai Airways flight would take him to another of his homes in Phnom Penh where, he’d been reliably informed, a particularly attractive young girl was waiting. The girl’s handler had told him that she could be treated roughly and wouldn’t make a fuss as long as the money was right. Theunissen was paying three thousand dollars for the privilege, so the money was definitely right, and as a man who gained huge sexual satisfaction from inflicting pain, he was already getting excited about the night ahead.
In fact, everything was going well for Erik Theunissen. He’d just secured a deal to supply a hugely valuable stolen Georges Braque painting to a Chinese businessman for eight million dollars, five of which was pure profit. He was also close to success on an even more lucrative deal to supply engines for use in unmanned military drones to the Iranian government, which would net him more than twice as much if it went through. Theunissen was a fixer, a man who could source anything if you had the money to pay for it, and he was very good at what he did.
It was, however, an inherently risky business. Six months earlier he’d done a deal to supply a dirty bomb to a group of Islamic terrorists based in the Philippines, and it had gone spectacularly wrong. The bomb had exploded at the home of his business partner before the deal could be made, and both his partner and the customers had been killed. Without them there’d been no money, and Theunissen had been left more than a million and a half dollars out of pocket. He’d also spent a lot of sleepless nights in the weeks following, wondering if any of the heat from what had happened would get back to him. He knew the Americans were particularly keen to find the man who’d sourced the bomb originally, since they’d been the intended targets, but Theunissen was good at covering his tracks.
His driver, a young, dark-skinned man from the north, was out of the car in a second and opening the back door for Theunissen with a respectful bow, taking his bag and putting it in the boot as Theunissen squeezed his considerable bulk into the back.
His bodyguard, Hans, a huge lump of a man, sat unmoving in the front passenger seat. He didn’t even bother to turn round and greet his boss, which was typical of him. Ignorant fool. But for sixty-five thousand dollars a year, which was what Theunissen paid him, he expected to be treated with respect.
‘What time is our flight booked for?’ he demanded.
Hans didn’t answer.
Nor did he move.
‘Hans, I asked you a question,’ snapped Theunissen, exasperated.
Still he didn’t answer. Had the damn fool fallen asleep?
Leaning forward in his seat, Theunissen slapped him on the side of the head. ‘I asked you a damn question.’
But his words died in his throat when Hans’s immense body teetered to one side and Theunissen saw blood running down from the coin-shaped wound to the side of his head.
At that moment, the driver – a man barely a month into his new job – opened the back door and pointed a gun at Theunissen, a weird little smile on his face. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ he intoned. ‘This is for my brothers.’
And then Theunissen realized that he’d made a fatal mistake by underestimating the reach of the fundamentalists he’d sold the dirty bomb to.
He raised his hands in a desperate gesture of mercy, but he was already too late.
The last sound the man who was also known as Bertie Schagel heard was the loud retort of the gun exploding in his ears.
And then with that, he too was gone.
The Payback Page 29
