by Mark Dawson
None of it was new to Milton.
He stayed there until six o’clock, paid his bill and got back onto the Ducati.
He rode further into the city. It was awake now, with commuters setting off to their offices, trucks delivering produce, queues of traffic that clogged up the main roads and jockeyed impatiently as they waited for the lights to change. Milton rolled up to the front of the queues on the outside, the engine of the big bike grumbling restively.
The hotel was on the crossroads where the Via del Grande Archivio was bisected by another, smaller road. The street was narrow, a canyon that ran between opposing ranks of grand five storey buildings. Cars were parked on both sides meaning that it was only possible to pass along it slowly, and in single file. The hotel was set back a few feet from the thoroughfare, sheltered behind a double row of parked cars and a collection of small trees. It, too, was five storeys tall, painted in cream and brown, boasting a chocolate covered awning upon which its name, Il Palazzo Decumani, was stencilled in tasteful gold letters. It was a luxury, boutique establishment.
Milton positioned the Ducati in the smaller street that ran into the Via del Grande Archivio. He wheeled the bike backwards so that the front end was pointed out, rested it on its kickstand and then sheltered from the rain in the recessed doorway of a branch of the Poste Italiane. It offered him a good view of the hotel and the road that approached it but it would be difficult to notice him.
He took out a packet of cigarettes, put one to his lips and lit it.
HE HAD been waiting for forty minutes when he saw the four men emerge from the front door of the hotel. They were expensively dressed, wearing suits that they might, perhaps, have had tailored for them during this trip. Two of them were big, obviously serving as muscle, following a few paces behind the pair of smaller men in front. Milton recognised both of those men from the information that Control had provided him with. One of them, slender and with an acne scarred face, was Curtis Patterson, the scion of the Patterson criminal family that ruled the drug market in the northwest of England. The man to his right was his brother, Leon. Both of them lived in big mansions in the Wirral and had fortunes that measured in the seven figures. The police knew very well that they controlled the family’s affairs, but the men were shrewd and careful and they had been unable to lay a glove on them.
That was unfortunate. A life in prison would have been preferable to what was about to happen to them.
Milton flinched as he saw a fifth person emerge from the hotel. It was Antonietta Agosti. She was wearing jeans, tight enough to accentuate her natural curves, and vertiginous high heeled shoes. She kept a few paces behind them, aware of what was about to happen—aware of some of what was about to happen—and keen, no doubt, to make sure that she could easily get out of the way. Curtis Patterson paused, though, and turned back to her. He said something that Milton couldn’t hear and then held out his hand. She managed a thin smile, caught up with him and took it.
Milton felt a flicker of irritation that she was involved. She was a proud, strong-willed woman, and it struck him as offensive that she should be used by the Camorra in this fashion: as bait, effectively, prostituting herself in order to entice the victims to their doom. But he caught himself. What else was she to do? Say no? That, he knew, was not a choice that she would have been able to make.
He reassessed.
She was a complication.
He would try and protect her but, ultimately, she was not his problem.
He checked his watch.
Eight-fifteen.
Milton prickled with anticipation and the first tweak of adrenaline.
He watched, continually reassessing.
The street was beginning to thicken with traffic from the Via Duomo and the Corso Umberto. A refuse lorry was slowly making its way from the south, municipal workmen in orange boiler suits transferring the contents of the overflowing bins into the gnashing jaws of their truck. Pedestrians were about, some of them carrying styrofoam cups of coffee, others with their phones pressed to their ears or held out in front of them so that they could read from the screens.
The four men and Antonietta were walking towards the row of parked cars.
“Mi scusi,” a woman said, standing before him with a key for the post office door in her hand.
“Scusate,” Milton replied, standing aside.
Milton saw Antonietta looking down the street.
He followed her gaze, looking for the shooter, and saw the motorcycle rumbling across the uneven cobbles towards them from the south.
The man on the motorcycle wasn’t wearing a helmet. His face was black with ink, almost as if it had been stained. Heavily tattooed, like a Maori warrior. It was only as he drew closer that Milton could make out the shape of the spider that had been drawn there, the legs reaching back around his shaven scalp, on his cheeks and beneath the line of his jaw.
Antonietta saw him too. She was looking in that direction and, had the four men been paying closer attention, or had they displayed the wariness and suspicion that should have been automatic when dealing with the Camorra, they might have seen him, too. As it was, they were distracted and by the time they saw the man, it was already too late.
Antonietta blanched.
Milton pushed away from the doorway, stepping around the woman with the key and reaching into his leather jacket for the P226.
The man on the motorcycle was less than ten feet away when he rolled to a stop.
Antonietta yanked her hand from Curtis Patterson’s grip and started to run.
Milton was behind the man with the tattooed face, unseen.
The rider reached into his open jacket for the 9mm mini-Uzi submachine gun that he wore on a sling. The buttstock was folded back and he held the weapon in both hands.
He fired, fully automatic, six hundred and fifty rounds a minute. The Pattersons were the main focus of his attention, the brothers taking the majority of the rounds, arms windmilling as they stumbled backwards, tripping over the curb and landing on their backs. The two security men reached for their hidden weapons but they were too slow and there were more than enough bullets for them, too.
The woman from the post office screamed.
Milton raised the P226 and drew down on the rider. He was too close to miss. He aimed into the man’s body and fired. The round hit home, punching into the man’s ribs. He swung around but the pain in his side robbed him of his ability to rotate quickly and the Uzi was in the wrong hand.
Milton took another step, aimed again, and fired.
A killshot.
The bullet punched into the man’s temple, a plume of blood following after it as it exited through the opposite side. His body jerked and then went limp, his standing leg collapsing and the bike tipping over. He fell to the road and lay still, the bike pinning him there.
Milton stepped up so that he was over him, aimed down, and fired a final time. The spider tattoo was punctured, blood running down and obscuring the lurid ink. It trickled down his scalp, dripped down, and pooled between the cobbles.
He looked up at Antonietta and raised a finger to his lips.
She stared back at him in terror.
Milton holstered the pistol, walked quickly to the bike and swung his leg over it. The woman from the post office backed away from him. He saw other pedestrians, some pushed against the wall as if praying to be absorbed by the bricks, others turning tail and fleeing. He gunned the engine, released the brakes and bounded forwards and away into the traffic.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE LADY VICTORINE was a large thirty-four metre catamaran. It had four decks and offered six well appointed staterooms, a separate dining room and lounge with a cocktail bar. It had cost Ernesto Gorgi Di Mauro twenty million Euros, but it had been worth every cent.
Ernesto was on deck, dressed in a pristine Egyptian cotton robe, staring at the shore with an abstracted expression on his face. He was troubled. Antonietta had just called to report what had happened in Naples that morning. The Eng
lishman, Smith, had executed Tarantula just after he had eliminated Curtis and Leon Patterson and the men that they had brought with them from England. He had been waiting for him to arrive, had watched him go about his work, shot him and then disappeared on a motorbike.
There was plenty that he did not understand about what had happened, and Ernesto had not risen to his position in the organisation by being ignorant about such things.
How had Smith known that the hit was going to take place when it did?
And why had he done what he had done?
He could speculate about that second question. Revenge. Smith must have discovered that Tarantula had killed his colleague and he was evening out the scores. He hoped that he was right. Vengeance was a motive with which he was intimately familiar and one that he could live with, especially if the money was right.
But how had he known about Tarantula?
Only a handful of people knew who he was.
And what if he was wrong?
What if it wasn’t just revenge?
What if it was something else?
He felt uneasy.
His cellphone was on the table next to him, next to a croissant and a glass of orange juice. He reached down and took a bite from the pastry, chewing it absent mindedly as he looked over to the shore, the sleeve of rock fringed by verdant trees and scrub. The road wound its way along the cliff face and Ernesto watched as a lorry loaded with lemons negotiated it, the bright yellow of its freight a vivid splash against the grey of the rock.
He didn’t know what to do. He needed to see Smith. He needed answers.
He picked up his cellphone. He scrolled through his contacts, wondering who best to call.
It was so peaceful and calm on the ocean that morning that the explosion, when it came, was so unexpected that it took him a moment to realise what it was. There was a loud, rolling boom, the deck shook for a moment and then a plume of inky black smoke unfurled into the perfect blue sky. Ernesto reached for the rail to steady himself as the yacht lurched again, rolling from port to starboard as if buffeted by a sudden gale.
There was a second explosion, bigger than the first, and the deck rolled again.
He fell to his knees.
He looked up to see flames rising from the stern, a conflagration that took hold with frightening speed as he watched. The yellows and oranges crept up to the wheelhouse, releasing a great cloud of smoke. The fire roared as it devoured the wooden deck, a hungry thunder from which he heard another sound: the chattering of an automatic weapon.
He scrambled to his feet.
Another explosion and then another.
Smaller and more contained.
Grenades?
His pistol was in the stateroom, in its holster, slung over the back of a chair.
He felt naked in his robe.
He had to get off the boat.
He crept forwards, the soles of his feet sweating in his slippers, one step and then another as he edged towards the motorboat that was tethered to the railings on the port side of the yacht.
One of his men, a sturdy killer called Paolo, staggered into view, hauling himself towards him, both hands on the railing. Two big blooms of blood were on his white shirt, slowly expanding, meeting in the middle. He groaned with the effort, slowed and then tripped, falling face down onto the boards. He pushed onwards, slithering on his belly and leaving a smear of blood behind him.
Whatever it was that was happening at the back of the boat, Paolo was desperate to get away from it.
Ernesto reached the ladder that dropped down to the launch.
Another booming detonation, the biggest so far, and the deck tipped crazily.
He was thrown against the railing and then fell backwards onto his ample behind.
The flames reached up twenty feet now, a furnace of heat that shimmered the air, bubbled the paint and blackened the deck. Ernesto looked into the maelstrom as a silhouetted figure emerged from the middle of it. It was a man, dressed all in back. He was wearing a wetsuit, a sheen of water on the neoprene as it evaporated in the heat. The man had an MP5 held in both hands, the stock pressed into his shoulder as he stalked forwards. He had a spare magazine held between his left hand and the forestock. It was obvious, abundantly so, that the man was very familiar with the weapon.
It was obvious that the man was a killer.
One of Ernesto’s men burst out from below decks and the silhouette turned, lightning quick, and fired a rapid three shots into his guts, blasting him back inside again.
Ernesto pushed backwards. One of his slippers fell off his foot. He slipped and scrambled on the smooth deck.
The man followed, turning the MP5 and aiming down at him.
The smoke and flames roiled around him.
“No,” Ernesto pleaded. “Stop.”
Ernesto saw that it was Smith.
He stalked him, ejecting the dry magazine and slamming in the fresh one.
Ernesto crabbed away from him until his back ran up against the rails at the prow of the yacht. He reached up, pulled himself to his feet, and raised his hands, fingers extended, palms out, in entreaty.
“Please, signor,” he begged.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
“What do you want? Money? I have money. Inside. Take it all.”
Smith aimed the MP5.
“Please!”
Smith fired, just once. The bullet found Ernesto in the forehead, the impact jerking his head and shoulders backwards and overbalancing him. The lifeless body pivoted across the rail, tumbled overboard and plummeted to the crystal waters below.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MILTON RECLINED the chair as the Fasten Seatbelts light flicked off and the climb out of Naples levelled off. He looked out of the window and down at the dusky coastline below. They were twenty thousand feet up. The beaches that stretched away from the city were just narrow, flaxen ribbons against the deep blue of the ocean and the dark green of the interior. The city looked like a model in miniature, the tiny specks of the cars and lorries passing into and out of its curtilage, yachts and motorboats leaving scuds of white foam in their wake. Milton saw a big freighter slide with elaborate care into the harbour, the brown tinge from the pollution visible even from this height. Tugs nudged it towards its jetty and the big cranes hovered, ready to unload its cargo. What was it carrying, Milton wondered? How much of its freight would end up on the black market? How much of it was owned by the Camorra?
He knew that Ernesto would already have been replaced. His line of work bore unavoidable risks and demanded a succession plan. Would it have been a smooth and seamless transition? Would there have been a conflict, more bloodshed?
It didn’t matter. It wasn’t Milton’s concern. He had accounted for his target and met the goals of his assignment. He had done everything that Control had asked him to do.
Milton straightened his legs. The steward had unlatched the drinks trolley from the bulkhead and was wheeling it towards him.
Milton looked at his watch: seven in the evening.
“Sir?”
“Gin and tonic, please.”
“Single or double?”
Milton held up two fingers.
He had already enjoyed three doubles in the airport. Losing himself in a bottle was his preferred way to decompress. He needed the alcohol to help him to unwind, to melt the tension that coalesced in his shoulders and metastasised in his gut.
Milton put the glass to his lips, closed his eyes and took a mouthful.
He thought about the men he had killed. Four of them. Tarantula. Ernesto and the men he had found on the yacht. He knew that they deserved it, that they had as much as invited his attentions. Four men, each of them eliminated with studied dispassion.
It was more blood. His ledger was already dripping with it. The pages were drenched.
He thought of the tattoo on his back. It had been done in Guatemala. He only remembered fragments of that night: the woozy heat, the humidity, palm trees, div
e bars and strip joints. He remembered the squalid tattoo parlour he had found. He had been drunk, out of his mind on Quetzalteca Especial and mescaline. He had slept through most of it.
He had tried to fool himself when he awoke the next day. He saw the tattoo in the bathroom mirror, remembered the night before, and pretended that it was of Michael, the Angel of Mercy.
Who was he kidding?
The tattoo was of Samael.
The Angel of Death.
He had been in Guatemala to put a bullet into the head of a businessman who had refused to cancel an oil exploration contract he was negotiating. He had received some very firm anonymous advice that he should withdraw. He had been told that the business was against British interests and that it wouldn’t be allowed to continue.
He had ignored it the advice.
Control passed Milton his file.
The man had been Milton’s fiftieth victim.
Milton felt the dry blast of recycled air on his face. He kept his eyes closed, put the glass to his lips again, and drank.
The flight would take three hours.
Milton was going to get good and drunk.
John Milton’s adventures continue in THE CLEANER, the first full length novel in the series. Read on for the first chapter.
THE ROAD THROUGH THE FOREST was tranquil, the gentle quiet embroidered by the gurgling of a mountain rill and the chirruping of the birds in the canopy of trees overhead. The route forestière de la Combe d’Ire was pot-holed and narrow, often passable by just one car at a time. Evergreen pine forests clustered tightly on either side, pressing a damp gloom onto the road that was dispelled by warm sunlight wherever the trees had been chopped back. The misty slopes of the massif of the Montagne de Charbon stretched above the treeline, ribs of rock and stone running down through the vegetation. The road followed a careful route up the flank of the mountain, turning sharply to the left and right and sometimes switching back on itself as it traced the safest path upwards. The road crossed and recrossed the stream, and the humpback bridge here was constructed from ancient red bricks, held together as much by the damp lichen that clung to it as by its disintegrating putty. The bridge was next to a small enclosure signed as a car park, although that was putting it at its highest; it was little more than a lay-by hewn from the hillside, a clearing barely large enough to fit four cars side by side. Forestry reserve notices warned of “wild animals” and “hunters.”
