by A P Bateman
“I can read between the lines, Alex,” Mereweather said.
“You’re reading from the wrong page, then. I got to Caroline in time to save her. I left the parabolic microphone running. You would have heard the conversation between Amanda and Caroline, of myself and Caroline when I reached her. It’s all in my report.”
Mereweather nodded. “You had better come back with me, Alex,” he paused. “There was no microphone found in your car.”
King shook his head. “The man called Giorgi, you have his body.”
“When you returned to the house, saw that Caroline was gone, was his body there?”
“Of course!”
“There was no body, Alex. Now, I’m not disputing gunplay, but there was no body, and the area had been bleached, so no DNA.”
“They covered their tracks…”
“So it would seem.”
“What about Helena?”
Mereweather pulled a face. He reached into his jacket’s inside pocket, froze when he saw the small semi-automatic pistol in King’s hand. He held it low, almost resting it on his hip. “Take it easy,” he said. “It’s just a letter.”
King nodded. But he did not move the pistol. “While we’re at it, let’s see what you’re carrying.”
“For God’s sake, Alex!” Mereweather said. He stared at him, but couldn’t begin to match the intensity he met. King was gaunt, hollowed out and it showed in his glacier cold eyes. Mereweather unbuttoned his jacket, lifted it up and turned a full circle slowly. “Happy?” he asked, but regretted using the word.
“Not remotely.” King pocketed the pistol and took the letter from him. He read it, noted the handwriting. Then he studied it, broke it down line by line, hoping he could infer something tangible other than spite.
May 19th
Mr King,
You have cost me everything. You took away my security, my claim to a fortune rightfully mine. You cost me my freedom. And you ruined my future. You know what happened to my lover, while I lay awake, not knowing of his fate, and that I will likely never see him again. Never feel his touch on my skin, hear his voice.
But I have changed your life too. What a month you must have had! You must ache for your lover. The uncertainty of what happened to her hurts you inside like an infected wound. You are viewed with suspicion by your employers. You have nowhere to go, no friends to turn to. I did this to you. I changed your future also.
I want you to know who did this to you. I want you to picture me in your sleep. In those darkest of hours, where demons goad you, rule over you, control you.
And now to Caroline. Your beautiful, feisty Caroline. I am enjoying her company. You will, by now, know of my past. Forced into becoming a whore. Passed around to filthy men, a prize, a sweetener for business deal after business deal. I escaped that life, but ended up in the same trap, before meeting my husband. Oh, and what a brute he was too. Like the men on the Black Sea coast, those casino goers who would win at the roulette and buy me, my body – though my heart was never for sale. You see, he would beat me and bully me, and no amount of his money was worth that life. Viktor gave me the love and affection that my husband never would. And now, as I look at your beautiful Caroline, I see a woman who has seen none of this. A woman who gives herself to a man only when she is loved. A pristine example of a privileged life. She has loved few, and she has done so with all her heart. Shall I take this woman and make her a prize? Shall I see that she spends the rest of her days chained to a bed, screwing men for her own survival, or drugs, or perhaps just for food? Or shall I use her to gain more. Maybe if there were a man who would do absolutely anything to save her? Maybe if there was a man with skills I could use, manipulate for my own gains?
But there is such a man. And now I own him also. Because I know that you will do what is asked, because for you, Alex King, your payment is here, and I can control you in a way you have never known. I have your life in my hand. I can give it to you, I can take it from you, or I can destroy it in front of you.
There is a post office in the town of Sodertalje, near Stockholm, Sweden. It is on a crossroads with a coffee shop to its right and a sweet shop to its left. There is a safety deposit box number 427. The code to open it is 3367. You will go there on May 22nd and open the box at 0930.
Do not fail her.
Helena
King looked at Mereweather. “When did you get this?”
“Last night,” he said. “We had tests done, the DNA belongs to Helena Snell.”
King screwed the letter, stuffed it into his pocket. He looked at his watch, studied it like he hadn’t seen the time or date in a while. “I need to go,” he said. “That’s the day after tomorrow.”
“I can give you a lift. You’ll need to check into Thames House, we’ll arrange air tickets…”
“I’m doing this myself, Simon,” King interrupted.
Mereweather shook his head. “It needs to be official. We need agents on the ground, electronic tracking, a plan set in place. If we stand a chance of getting Caroline back, we need to mount an operation.”
King shook his head. “No. Just go! I’m doing this alone.”
“You’ll come back to Thames House, that’s an order…” Mereweather stopped mid-sentence, his eyes on the gun.
“You don’t get it, do you,” King stated flatly. The pistol was steady in his hand. “Are you alone, Simon?”
“Yes,” Mereweather said, but seemed to regret it. He quickly added, “People know where I am, what I’m doing. You can’t seriously be threatening me, Alex? You’ll never get Caroline back without help.”
King stared at Mereweather, smiled thinly. “When the time comes, I’ll call you,” he said. “But I’m not finding Caroline anytime soon. I’m keeping her safe. You’ve read the letter. You know what she wants from me. She’s too clever to get caught. She has set the trap, and it’s not baited for her.” He walked past Mereweather, the pistol held down by his leg. He didn’t look back as he stepped inside the cottage and closed the door.
His bug-out bag was packed and stowed by the door. He dropped the pistol on top of it as he walked past and took the stairs. He went into the bathroom and started to run a sink of hot water. Out of the narrow window, he could see the tail-lights of Mereweather’s hire car bouncing down the lane. For a moment, he was reminded of Amanda Cunningham tearing away from his cottage in Cornwall.
King splashed the water on his face and picked up his shaving bowl and brush. He looked at his reflection in the mirror. A hollowed-out version of his former self. Dark, gaunt and haunted. He closed his eyes and thought of Caroline. He tried to think of her on a happier day, in a special memory. But he had only been able to picture her on that bathroom floor. For a month, his vision of her had been tarnished by those events.
He could see Helena looking at him as he found the bullets on the patio. Those predatory, almond-shaped eyes. She had stared impassively at him, while Victor Bukov had glowered. She had been calm and calculating, a hunter waiting to strike at her prey.
King dropped the bowl in the sink and punched the glass, smashing the mirror and breaking the cabinet door. He ripped the door off its hinges. Then he looked down at the water in the sink, blood swirling on the surface, before sinking and clouding the water. He turned his hand over, studied the bloodied knuckles, the gashes to his forearm. He plunged the fist into the water and it stung so badly that he grimaced. He caught the sight of his expression in the shards of mirror left holding onto the cabinet frame.
That was what it was like to feel.
That was what it felt like to be alive.
For a month he had been numb. A shadow moving away from the light. He had no emotion, no feelings other than self-pity and despair. He plunged his hand into the water again, then ran the tap and let the scalding water wash over the slashes.
It was agonising, but it felt so good.
He stared back at the shard of reflection. There was light behind those eyes once more. A glimmer. The man loo
king back at him was more intense, more to be reckoned with than the eyes of the half-slaughtered beast he had seen these past weeks. He snatched a deep breath and it felt invigorating. Like he had been barely breathing these past weeks as well. Never filling his lungs fully. And that was it. He had been half-dead
King had played down the stories, played down his reputation. But he knew what a monster he had been, what he had done in his past. He would never have let Caroline know. The traitor in Geneva was right to have found an easier, cleaner way out. He would have begged King to do it if he had been given the chance. Now Helena Snell had released him. He was going to find her. He was going to hunt her to the ends of the earth. He was going to turn her world into an unimaginable Hell. Her very own version of Dante’s Inferno. A wasteland where her soul would even beg for mercy long after he had taken her life. Because she had unwittingly unleashed a demon. A man who had spent his entire life denying what he truly was.
The Reaper.
Reaper
By
A P Bateman
1
Georgia, Black Sea Coast
Fight fire with fire.
King had always undertaken a measured response to violence according to the severity of the attack. A lifetime of judgement. He knew there was no way a war - especially a dirty, secret war - could be won without the stark reality of ruthlessness. He had fought and won many of these wars. Some played out on the desolate terrain of Northern Iraq, in the mountains of Afghanistan or among the ruined streets of Syria. And some of these wars had been fought and won on the streets of Britain. In the back alleys, the shadows. Always ruthless, yet mindful to avoid the slippery slope of becoming nastier, more ruthless than his enemy. King had always been guided by his conscience, his ability to care enough about himself and the people around him over simply getting the task done.
He had never been afraid to question the chain of command. A trait that had made enemies for him within his own organisation, created a rocky road for him to travel, but allowed his horizon some clarity within the shadowy world he occupied.
But, until now, there had never been the personal involvement for him. King had witnessed vendetta and revenge. He had stood back and witnessed what revenge could do. He had seen mothers avenge their sons, husbands avenge their wives. When ISIS had reigned and ruled terror in Syria and Iraq, King had witnessed the tables turn. He had seen the bloodlust of normal people who had lost everything, the horrors of bloodthirsty vengeance satiated only by the hacking and burning of the bodies of the once powerful, suddenly defeated and beaten. For those people, the fight had been personal. And now, for the first time in a life spent plotting and killing in the shadows, King knew how difficult it could be to control that bloodlust. For the first time in his life, he wanted to kill. He wanted it more than he could ever have imagined.
King pulled the car over to the side of the road. The Black Sea shimmered beyond the pine trees on the rocky slopes. It was hot, late June. The sky clear and blue. The morning had been enveloped in a thick fog along the shoreline until well after dawn. The sun had now baked it off and the day didn’t look like it would be anything but perfect. But not for some people. For some people, their day would only be getting worse.
King switched off the engine and got out, his desert boots crunching on the gravel. There was an air of calm, of unnatural silence. He hadn’t seen a single vehicle on the drive across the plateau, traversing from one mountain to another. He stood stock-still, listened. A bird called a shrill tune, fluttered through the pines and disappeared. The slope of the mountain was still once more.
He walked around to the rear of the vehicle. Opened the boot and stepped back. The woman looked younger than her twenty-five years. But her features were familiar, there was no mistaking her. She blinked against the sunlight, strained against the thin rope fastening her wrists. She looked terrified.
King felt the adrenalin subsiding. He was aware of a stinging sensation, followed the woman’s stare to his left arm. Blood ran down his forearm, trickling steadily from a graze above his left elbow. The blood had reached his watch, covered the face and permeated the stainless-steel links of the bracelet in a crimson glaze. He turned his elbow over, looked at the wound, was relieved there was no more damage. He had been lucky. Many men had not.
The girl looked at the pistol tucked into his waistband. She had been around weapons her entire life, but she seemed scared at the sight of it. King took out a handkerchief from his pocket and folded it before pressing it against the wound. He took it away, noted there was more blood soaked into it than he thought there would have been. He pressed it against the open wound again. The woman was watching him intently. King followed her stare, saw the patch of crimson spreading across his stomach. He placed the folded handkerchief against it, then took it away to see how much blood there would be. It wasn’t good. He felt a wave of nausea wash over him, but it was soon replaced by anger.
He couldn’t go down yet.
There was too much left to do.
He couldn’t afford to be taken out of the fight.
The woman tried to talk but her lips were stuck together. Her nose was bloodied and there was swelling to one of her eye sockets. She swallowed like it was an effort to talk and licked her lips with her dry tongue. It must have helped her a little, because she asked, “Are you going to kill me?”
The words hung in the air, seemed to resonate around King, like an extra-sensory experience. King didn’t simply hear her question, more felt a third party to it. It wasn’t until the young woman asked him, that he realised the ramifications of taking her. What scared him most of all, was now she had asked the inevitable question, he simply didn’t know. What he did know, was that she was now his bargaining chip in a game that had long become out of hand.
2
One month earlier
Sodertalje, Sweden
May was a spring month in southern Sweden, yet today was cold. The sky was grey, and darkness threatened to dominate the morning. King stepped out of the hire car, closed the door, yet left it unlocked, and crossed over the street. He adjusted the collar of his coat, smoothed down the front, casually checking the 9mm Browning pistol was securely in place.
They would have the jump on him. They had known when he would have been coming. They had known before he had even read the letter, so attempting to get there before them would have been a fruitless exercise. He would have to accept that he was on the back foot. Even so, he had managed to skirt the town and monitor movement. He had done this in the darkness on foot, then later at dawn circling the area in a wide loop. Finally, he had driven around, eased the car to a halt and watched. There had been nobody. Nobody out of the ordinary for a small town. Just people starting their days – commutes into Stockholm, school runs – everyday things. No vehicles parked up, the occupants waiting, scouting the streets for him. Which told King that the buildings across from the post office would be the only place from which they would mount surveillance. They would have eyes on for sure. A riflescope maybe, but only as a countermeasure. No, the game was about to commence, and King knew he was not yet walking into an ambush. The answer lay inside the post office, inside the safety deposit box numbered 4478. Soon enough he would know how much he would be played. And whether getting the woman he loved back safely was even a remote possibility.
3
The post office looked like it would have been more fitting in a remote Swedish village. King had noted an old fashioned sweet shop across the road. Perhaps both establishments belonged to a time when Sodertalje was smaller, a quaint township rather than a satellite of Stockholm’s city limits. A place where commuters could afford more than they would in the city. Now that Sodertalje hosted a major industrial complex and commercial town along with housing developments of exponential growth, this part of town would surely change before long.
King stepped inside, closed the door and looked back across the street. He noticed a net curtain move. Encouraging. Only a rank amateu
r would do that. He waited a moment to see if there was another movement, but really, he knew there wouldn’t be. He would be visible to them, but he would have shown them that he knew he was being watched, and that he had seen them. He stared intently, hoping he would be clear in the lens of a camera or even the sight of a rifle. He hoped they would see his eyes, cold, grey and cruel. They rarely sparkled anymore. They had simply seen too much; the worst that humankind could deliver. He continued to stare, wanted to show he was unafraid.
And he was.
He had crossed the line between self-preservation and recklessness. He would die one day, so it might as well be doing something worthwhile, something personal to him. He had laid on his bed last night, thought of the missions he had played a part in over the years, the risks he had taken. It had all paled into insignificance.
“Kan jag hjälpa dig?”
King broke away, looked at the young woman behind the counter. She was blonde, tall and beautiful. Scandinavian through and through. She wore her hair in plaits with a tight beanie covering the top of her head. “Sorry…” he said.
“Can I help you?” she repeated in English.
King was relieved. He had only visited Sweden once before, briefly. “I have a safety deposit box,” he paused. “Number four-twenty-seven.”
She smiled. “This way,” she said, and she walked out from behind the counter and opened a door to her left. She held it open for him and nodded for him to go through. “There’s a privacy curtain if you wish, but as you can see, it’s quiet today.”
King nodded and walked through. He quickly scanned the room, noted the smoke detector in the centre of the ceiling, two PIR sensors at each end. There would be a camera in one of them for sure. Why else did a room which would be locked when the building was closed need passive infrared sensors?
