Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3)

by David Hickson

  Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed Fat-Boy gliding across the carpet towards Lebogang who stood frozen by surprise. He turned as Fat-Boy charged towards him, his head low. Fat-Boy’s solid skull struck Lebogang on the cheek. The two of them staggered backwards and Lebogang’s head made a resounding bang against the glass wall of the aquarium. For a moment I thought he might have cracked it, but there was no rush of water, only the squeaking sound of Lebogang’s bald head sliding down the glass.

  I flung a glance at Chandler. He was using the zip-ties to bind the hands of the soldier he’d overpowered. The soldier beneath me struggled to shake me off, but I used his movement to flip him over and held him to the floor with my knees. Chandler came over, caught his flailing hands, and bound them together with a tie, then caught the legs and bound them too.

  I glanced up to see how Fat-Boy was faring and saw Robyn. She had her Glock in both hands, staring down it with a killer gaze. She opened her mouth and uttered a cry that might have been a command. I looked to where she was pointing her Glock. Lebogang had an arm around Fat-Boy’s neck, holding him before him like an enormous rag doll. Fat-Boy’s eyes goggled at us and spluttered as Lebogang throttled him. In his other hand, Lebogang held a pistol, the barrel at Fat-Boy’s temple. He was pushing so hard that he’d drawn blood.

  “Drop it,” shouted Robyn again, her hand holding the Glock steady.

  “You going to shoot your friend?” jeered Lebogang between gasping breaths.

  “Do it, Robsy.” Fat-Boy’s voice was only a hoarse whisper. “Do it,” he begged her.

  Robyn was perhaps five metres from the two of them, and she could see only a sliver of Lebogang beyond Fat-Boy. But she could have done it, I knew she could. I’d seen her shoot. It was a shot well within her capabilities. But she did nothing.

  “Shoot him,” wheezed Fat-Boy.

  Lebogang sneered. “Put your gun down,” he ordered Robyn.

  Robyn didn’t move. We’d lost our advantage. Lebogang started making an indistinct sound that might have been the beginnings of a laugh. His attention was still entirely on Robyn and her gun.

  I covered the distance to Lebogang and Fat-Boy in less than a second. I launched myself like I was diving off a cliff, and leapt for their feet. I struck just below the knee, and both Fat-Boy and Lebogang toppled onto me. There was a deafening bang. I wasn’t sure whether Robyn had taken the shot or whether Lebogang’s finger had squeezed the trigger as he dropped. The sound of glass cracking behind me answered that one. Lebogang’s bullet had gone wide and shattered one of the bulbous columns. Lebogang squirmed to the side and rolled off me, reaching for his gun, which he had dropped as he fell. I kicked at it and sent it spinning away. Fat-Boy was sprawled on the carpet beside Lebogang. They both had blood streaks down the front of their silk jackets now, and it felt like I was seeing double as they struggled side by side on the carpet.

  Chandler was behind me, cutting through the zip-ties that bound my hands. Then he had a knee on Lebogang’s chest. Lebogang cried out, but a punch from Chandler cut the cry short. I grabbed at Lebogang’s legs and the two of us rolled him over. Chandler bound his hands, and I bound his ankles. Lebogang cried out again with more force. I grabbed the pillowcase that had been over Fat-Boy’s head, and forced it over Lebogang, then pulled the drawstring tight to gag him. Lebogang’s cry became an indistinct mumble.

  I helped Fat-Boy to his feet and Chandler cut the zip-ties binding his hands. Robyn was still training the Glock on Lebogang, her face white and drawn. Then Chandler and I checked the ties on the two soldiers, who were alive but not conscious. Lebogang got himself onto his knees, moaning like a stricken animal.

  “You’re my prisoners,” said Chandler to us. “Got it? I’ll escort you off the boat.”

  I nodded, Fat-Boy grunted, and Robyn tucked her Glock back inside the waistband of her FCD uniform.

  “Take these.” Chandler gave us each a zip-tie. “Make it look real. Now go.”

  We turned to the door. Robyn in the lead, then Fat-Boy, me, and Chandler covering us with his AK-47. Robyn was only a few metres from the door when it swung open suddenly. I grabbed at Fat-Boy and pulled him down to the floor with me. Behind us Chandler dropped to the other side. But Robyn stopped in her tracks and stood immobile as the door revealed the person beyond.

  Justice Mkwekwe had returned.

  Twenty-Nine

  Justice’s eyes widened with shock as he looked from Robyn to the kneeling, hooded figure of Lebogang, and back to Robyn. He grabbed at his AK-47 and swung it around to firing position. Robyn was backing away, her arms raised. Justice looked again towards Lebogang, and then he saw the prone figures of the two soldiers. In that moment, Lebogang suddenly reared up onto his feet, bellowing through his gag like a wounded animal. He hopped towards the door on his hobbled feet, his bound hands behind him, the pillowcase over his head.

  Justice did not hesitate. His right hand pressed the fire selector of his AK-47 down to the semi-automatic position, and he brought his finger back to the trigger moments before the monstrous form of Lebogang reached him. He squeezed it. Not once, but three times in rapid succession.

  The 7.62 mm round fired from an AK-47 can pass through human flesh without doing much damage, unless the bullet twists and yaws. Two of the bullets to pass through Lebogang probably failed to yaw, but the third did, and the damage it caused to his heart would have killed him before his huge body hit the floor. Justice squeezed the trigger a fourth time, and this bullet flew over the collapsing body and struck the wall of the aquarium, which produced a loud crack, and then split suddenly into a thousand shards, pouring water, fish and coral over the floor. This spectacle provided a momentary distraction for Justice, but when he turned from the aquarium to look around the room, the AK-47 was raised and ready to fire again. He swung around to choose which of us to shoot first.

  And then he saw Fat-Boy for the first time. The shock rippled across his face as he realised that the man he had shot was his cousin.

  Fat-Boy, crouched beside me, raised his hands and stood up very slowly. Justice lifted the AK-47 to his shoulder as if looking through the sights would deliver a more fitting punishment. There was a breathless pause filled with the gurgling sound of water trickling from the aquarium.

  Then Robyn called out. She had her Glock in her hands and was pointing it at Justice.

  Justice ignored her. He drew a breath, and his finger tightened on the trigger of his gun. In the momentary pause before the trigger engaged, Robyn squeezed the trigger of her Glock. His head whipped back and the AK-47 fell from his grasp. He dropped to the floor beside his cousin.

  Fat-Boy let out a choking gasp. Chandler and I were silent. Robyn lowered her Glock, looked down at the two bodies on the floor, and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she looked up at me, her dark eyes filled with tears.

  Chandler gave her a few seconds.

  Then he said, “Get moving,” and stepped over the bodies as he herded us out of the room.

  We closed the door behind us, and walked with heads down, shuffling our feet even though they weren’t bound. Chandler walked behind, covering us with his AK-47. We shuffled down the spiral stairs and along the gangway, where we encountered the first two Dark Bizness soldiers running towards us. Chandler shouted at them to hurry and to call the medics. The sight of his uniform seemed to allay any doubts they might have had, and they ran on.

  We continued down the gangway and onto the quay. A handful of soldiers watched us approach from the far end. Chandler called out to them to return to the yacht. They didn’t think to ask questions, and set off at a jog spurred on by the urgency in his voice. At the entrance to the quay, where it joined the main dock, we descended some rough concrete steps that led to the floating wooden jetty where Robyn had tied up the dinghy. It was low tide, and the jetty was several metres lower than the Nkwenya wharf, which provided some cover. Chandler sent me out because Robyn seemed to have been struck dumb, wrestling with her inner demons. The wooden p
lanks of the jetty shifted and clattered as I stepped on them. There was an ominous silence from the hulking concrete wharf above me, as if the Dark Bizness militia were paralysed by the shocking sight of their dead leaders. It didn’t take me long to reach the dinghy. I climbed in, started the motor, and returned to fetch the others.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Fat-Boy said to me, after we had chugged our way back past the still-silent Dark Maiden and reached the safety of the yacht basin.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Saved my life,” said Fat-Boy, gazing adoringly at Robyn.

  “You did the right thing,” said Chandler to Robyn, who had not spoken a single word. She seemed not to hear him and gazed steadfastly out to sea.

  “What were they doing?” asked Chandler, his eyes on Fat-Boy. “What were they doing to you? Why did they take you with them?”

  “They were loading those boxes onto an old boat,” said Fat-Boy. “Getting ready to sail them out to sea.”

  “Why?”

  “You think I know, Colonel?”

  “I don’t understand what they were planning to do with you.”

  “They said I was going out to sea with the boxes. I told them I don’t do sea, but then they put that bag over my head.”

  “You were there when they discovered the boxes didn’t have the gold in them?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “There was a lot of shouting. Then they took the bag off my face so they could hit me again.”

  “But they kept loading the boxes?” I asked.

  “Kept right on loading them.”

  “What were they playing at?” asked Chandler angrily.

  “We need to look at that gold, Colonel,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ben’s right,” said Robyn, turning from the horizon to face us with her damp eyes. “They’ve been playing us.”

  “Playing us how?”

  “They figured out how to do the one thing we’ve not been able to do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Let’s look at the gold, Colonel,” said Robyn. “I have a feeling it’s not what we think it is.”

  By the time we had reached the far end of the yacht club, we could hear distant sirens approaching. We climbed ashore, tied up the dinghy, and made our way to the lock-up. Robyn unlocked it, and then I cut open one of the boxes and used the knife to scrape the soft gold.

  There was only a thin layer of it. Beneath was a silver metal.

  “Tungsten,” said Chandler with disgust. “The same weight, but a fraction of the cost. All these bars would come to less than five hundred dollars.”

  “Now we know why he wanted five days,” I said. “Can’t have been easy finding someone to make this number of fake bars in the time he had.”

  The four of us gazed down at our pile of useless metal.

  “But why was he sending them to sea?” asked Chandler. “And what did he want with Fat-Boy?”

  “He wanted to lose them,” said Robyn. “Lose the gold, and Fat-Boy at sea.”

  Chandler looked up at her.

  “Lose them at sea,” he said, testing the idea by repeating it. Then a look of realisation spread across his face. “You’re right. He figured out how to do the one thing we could not.”

  A feeble amount of afternoon light was trickling in through the door, making Robyn’s face no more than a blur in the gloom.

  “I need light,” said Chandler, his voice tight with anger. “Light and air, goddamn it.”

  He turned from us furiously and strode outside.

  “I don’t understand,” said Fat-Boy. “Why lose the fake bars?”

  “What has been our biggest problem?” asked Robyn. “Ever since we first laid eyes on the gold.”

  “Breytenbach,” said Fat-Boy.

  “Exactly. You said there was someone taking photos at the warehouse, when the colonel was pretending to inspect the gold?”

  “Like a tourist,” agreed Fat-Boy. “Snapping pictures of us.”

  “He wanted a record of the whole thing,” said Robyn.

  “For what?”

  “To show Breytenbach. Why else?”

  “You’ll have to run that by me again,” said Fat-Boy.

  “I think he told Breytenbach that we were selling the gold to him.”

  “But he would never convince Breytenbach with fake bars.”

  “I don’t think he intended to. Breytenbach wouldn’t know they were fake if they were lost at sea. Something was going to happen to that old boat with the boxes of fake gold.”

  As we turned to look at our pile of fake bars, I went over it again in my mind. Robyn was right. It was the only way to make sense of what Lebogang had done. He had intended to show Breytenbach the evidence of the carefully replicated gold bars being weighed on the scale that Chandler had rigged so he could look like an expert. Perhaps some fake paperwork about the deal he had negotiated to buy the gold from us. Then would come the photographs, video, or news report of whatever disaster he had planned at sea.

  “Lost at sea,” said Fat-Boy. “With me. Now you understand … that’s why I don’t do sea.”

  The rain was pelting down in great billowing waves when we joined Chandler outside. He was standing looking up at the sky as he had earlier, but this time his eyes were closed and he was allowing the rain to wash the blood from his face like he was taking a shower. The sound of sirens had stopped now. There was only the sound of the wind, the rain, and the angry clanging of the yachts’ sheets against their masts.

  “If Breytenbach thought the gold was lost at sea,” he said to the sky, “it would take him years to salvage it. If not decades. At an exorbitant cost. And by the time BB discovered it was fake, if he ever did, Madikwe would have disappeared. Didn’t I say we should be careful of underestimating him?”

  “But where is the real gold?” asked Fat-Boy.

  “I imagine the only people who could tell us that,” said Chandler, turning away from the rain, “are the two people lying dead on that yacht.”

  “We’re better off without it,” said Robyn.

  Fat-Boy opened his mouth to protest, but Chandler spoke before he could.

  “No time for all that now, Fat-Boy. They’ll be starting a search at any moment. We must part ways here, and now. Use the yacht club facilities to change. Ten minutes apiece. Angel and Robyn up first, then Fat-Boy. I’ll go last. You remember your locker numbers?”

  We nodded in unison.

  “Change and then disappear. If you need help with that, you call me. You know the number. You understand?”

  He studied each of us in turn, and we each nodded. Then we performed secret handshakes with Fat-Boy, a Mediterranean embrace with Chandler, a kiss on the cheek with Robyn, and turned to go our separate ways.

  “And for God’s sake, Angel,” Chandler called, as I turned to walk to the clubhouse, “sort out your nonsense with the police.”

  “Roger that, Colonel,” I said.

  And I had every intention of doing just that. Because of all the confusing puzzle pieces that had been chasing around my mind the past week, I realised there was one piece that stood out above all others.

  The piece with the two dead men sitting in a burning car. Dead from the knife wounds to their throats.

  Thirty

  The sun had all but given up on bleeding into the horizon by the time I trespassed again on the balcony of my neighbour’s apartment, lit a cigarette, and dialled Leilah’s number.

  “You’re psychic,” she said, after a bit of heavy breathing into the microphone as she moved away from the sounds of laughing colleagues and found a quiet spot to talk.

  “I am?”

  “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

  “Good thoughts?”

  “The best kinds of thoughts,” she said, and sighed as if her emotions were getting the better of her.

  “Are you free?” I asked. “Can we meet?”

  “I’m available.” She gave a small, musical laugh.
“I’m never free, soldier-boy. If it’s tonight you want me it will have to be here at Pandora – I’m on duty, aren’t I?”

  “Tonight is good,” I said.

  “Shall I put you down for the whole night?”

  “No. There’s something I want to talk about. It won’t take very long.”

  “You do too much talking. Isn’t it enough with the talking? Why don’t we move our relationship to the next level?”

  “I’m not sure you’ll want to, after we’ve had our talk.”

  “Words don’t frighten me, Angel. Do they frighten you?”

  “More than anything.”

  “You sound stressed, Angel. Have you had a hard day?”

  “I’ve had worse.”

  Leilah put me down for the full night and announced that she would take a bath. Would I prefer the scent of lavender, eucalyptus or rose? I chose lavender, and she promised to be smelling of it by the time I arrived, then reminded me that her customers were obliged to pay in advance – even her favourite customers.

  Leilah’s teddy bear was still looking disgruntled atop the pile of pillows in the icy wind coming through the open window. Leilah was draped in a diaphanous robe, her green eyes glowing, and smelling, as promised, of lavender.

  “I’ve been clean,” she said, after greeting me with a lingering kiss, her bright eyes gazing into mine as if we were lovers reunited after a long separation.

  I said what a good thing that was and told her I had not been clean in the slightest. She gave a light laugh and pushed me into the armchair, then straddled my lap as if she was about to perform a lap dance, although the effect was disconcerting – a young girl seeking solace on the lap of her father. She tucked her lower lip under her teeth and looked at me solemnly.

  “It’s because of you I’m clean,” she said.

  “The only thing I did was choose the lavender.”