Too Far Gone (Sam Pope Series Book 4)

by Robert Enright

  But she needed to blend in tonight.

  To disappear.

  As she opened the door, she could still see the markings of where Wallace’s men had broken into her flat, reinforcing her need to fade into the London night life.

  They would be watching.

  They were always watching.

  With a deep breath she stepped out of her flat and made her way through the block, stepping out into a surprisingly mild spring evening. Adjusting her bag over her shoulder, she scanned the street, noticing the black SUV parked a few cars further down.

  Inside, a man sat, dressed in black, his attention drawn to her.

  For a professional, he was pretty sloppy, and Singh walked briskly towards Canon’s Park Station, the streets of North London filled with traffic. Her tail tried to follow, but with the rush hour traffic proving too impatient to let him pull out, she glanced over her shoulder to see him exit the car and begin to follow her by foot, his hands stuffed in his black bomber jacket.

  She picked up the pace.

  As she rounded the corner, she saw the entrance to the station and clambered the few steps and disappeared into the station.

  She only had a few seconds.

  Quickly, she pulled a red scarf from her bag and wrapped it over her head. Singh then slid her jacket off and hunched over the ticket machine situated just on the inside of the doorway. Directly in front of the door, the ticket barriers awaited, before leading to two platforms which lead to the Northern Line trains.

  She’d timed it perfectly.

  A train had just arrived, and a swarm of city workers were slowly descending the steps, like a pack of lifeless zombies trudging towards their next feed. Behind her, the pursuer entered the station clearly panicked that she’d slipped through the crowd and onto the train that sat patiently on the platform. With a sense of urgency, he barged through the crowd, hopped the barrier, and bounced up the steps two at a time, ignoring the angry yells of the attendant.

  Singh smirked, before turning and exiting the station and approaching the Uber she’d booked before she’d left the apartment. She greeted the man with a smile and dropped into the back seat.

  This time, she hadn’t failed, and the sense of victory was enough to make her question what she was doing.

  She’d always been a phenomenal police officer, working her way to a position where she could really make a difference. As a Detective Inspector, she was already on her way.

  But this, if it ever got back to her, would end any hope of a return.

  As the car crawled through the traffic towards her meeting, she relived every moment of her spiral. Her relentless pursuit of Sam Pope, the shoot-out in Paul Etheridge’s home, the siege on the Port of Tilbury.

  The very real threat of General Wallace.

  The betrayal of Pearce.

  Living in fear since then that everything she’d worked for was about to be ripped away from her for trying to do the right thing.

  With regret, she knew there was no way back. Unless she did something monumental, the career she’d given her life to, was over.

  At least this way she could go out on her sword, knowing that despite the corruption and clear illegality of her dismissal, she’d still done the right thing.

  With a chuckle, she realised she was walking the same path as Sam Pope, just she wasn’t armed to the teeth with military grade weaponry.

  As she stepped out of her cab and entered the bar, she scanned the booths. She recognised her ‘date’ from the profile picture used on The Pulse website that proudly topped all his articles.

  As she approached Helal Miah, he looked up at her, slightly taken aback by the gorgeous woman walking towards him and then he offered her a charming smile.

  She wasn’t armed with weaponry.

  But with information.

  With a deep breath, she sat down in the booth and nodded, ready to tell him everything.

  Chapter Nine

  The sexual encounter was one of inevitability.

  As Wallace thrust powerfully into Assistant Commissioner Ashton, he grinned. Her moans of pleasure gave him vindication as a man, but the feeling of dominance was what he craved. Propped up on his powerful arms, he didn’t even look at her as he thrust as hard as he could.

  Ever since he’d stormed into her office, he knew Ashton had been thinking of this moment. A combination of her attraction to power and the possibility of having Wallace’s backing when the top job came up was an alluring cocktail.

  One which Wallace would have been happy to sit on.

  At first, having her use her officers like his own personal police force had been enough.

  But as the situation with Sam began to unravel, he could feel the control slipping through his fingers like sand.

  Wallace was always in control.

  Always.

  Grunting, he felt her slide her hands across his broad back, her fingertips gliding through the sweat.

  He was under no illusion why he’d called her to his apartment. It had been three days since he’d dispatched a hit squad to Naples in Italy, where one of his ghosts had made contact with Alex Stone. She was immaterial, an unfortunate cog in a dangerous wheel that was spinning rapidly towards disaster.

  Matt Brecker was one of his top assets, as charming as he was deadly. Wallace had given the go ahead for Matt to assemble a small team and to beat Sam’s location out of the poor girl. The last time Wallace had seen Alex, she was lying in the underground room where he’d murdered Carl Marsden, an act that still caused him pain.

  Marsden had been a good man.

  But he stood in the way of the bigger picture.

  The information he’d gained and subsequently passed to Sam would not only bring about his own downfall, it would paint a large target on Wallace’s back. A target that some extremely powerful and dangerous people would quickly take aim at.

  But Sam had slipped through the net.

  The USB stick was gone and Matt’s progress had been his only breakthrough in three months.

  Earlier that morning, Wallace had been informed that Matt and his team had been killed.

  An apparent car chase through the city of Naples in the middle of the night, with Matt’s team of henchman killed with horrifying proficiency. Blackridge operated on an anonymous basis, which meant it took nearly two days for his team to pick up the deceased’s records from the Italian government.

  Matt had been found in an industrial estate just outside of the city, his body broken from the apparent wreckage of the car nearby. There was no sign of a collision, however a bullet was found lodged in the blown tire.

  Wallace knew only one man capable of making a shot like that.

  Sam Pope.

  Wallace gritted his teeth and pushed harder, his slight gut slapping against Ashton’s naked body as she writhed in a mixture of pleasure and discomfort. There was no passion to the intercourse, just a pure, animalistic fury. With every slam of the headboard, Wallace felt the notion of power and control flow back through him. He quickened his pace, the anger of losing control of the situation fuelling his need to assert his dominance.

  They both groaned.

  Ashton let out a squeal of ecstasy.

  As they finished, Wallace tilted his bald head back and roared powerfully, like a lion asserting its dominance over his pride. Shaking slightly through euphoria, he rolled off Ashton and sat on the side of the bed, letting his heart rate regulate.

  The bedroom they’d desecrated was as new to him as it was to her. His ops team had traced several contactless payments made on Matt’s debit card in the previous twenty-four hours, totalling over a hundred euro’s. Which meant Sam had filtered enough money to leave Italy.

  Either to escape.

  Or return.

  Pulling rank, Wallace had made the decision to retreat to an undisclosed apartment in Surrey, heavily guarded by his own private security team. It was one of the governments safe houses, used to stowaway high-risk individuals. Wallace had wiel
ded his power and took the keys. It was safer to be off the grid.

  But the feeling of cowardice had led him to call Ashton personally before sending a car to pick her up. She’d arrived, dressed immaculately in a black dress, undoubtedly expecting a night of fine conversation and charm. Wallace had made it clear he was in a foul mood from the offset, but her attraction to his position had made it an easy encounter.

  She’d gone to the bedroom, undressed, and then called him in.

  There had been no kissing. No foreplay.

  It had been almost transactional.

  But the feeling of control was fleeting and Wallace lifted himself from the bed and wrapped a dressing gown around his naked body.

  ‘Can I have a shower?’ Ashton asked, the bed covers held against chest to cover her modesty. Her words were tinged with regret.

  ‘Of course,’ Wallace responded, a feeling of guilt threatening to take over. She was an admirable woman, who had worked hard for a tremendous career. While her attraction to him had been unrequited, he would make sure he wouldn’t let it hinder her prospects going forward.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Ashton asked sheepishly, sliding herself from under the sheets. ‘Was everything okay?’

  Wallace grinned.

  ‘It was great,’ he replied, reaching for his box of cigars. ‘I need some air.’

  Ashton nodded meekly, understanding that their one-time tryst was firmly over. As she headed towards the en suite bathroom, Wallace walked back through the expensive apartment and slid open the door to the balcony. The chill of the spring evening hit him like a splash of cold water, the wind riding up his gown and causing him to shiver. He looked down at the cigar cutter, reminded of the torture his friend, Marsden, had gone through. Trevor Sims had ordered the removal of several fingers with a similar device.

  Wallace smiled as he remembered putting a bullet through the man’s skull.

  Lighting the cigar, he let the thick smoke cascade around him as he contemplated the next move. While there was every chance Sam would disappear, he knew it was unlikely. The man had an outrageous moral code, one that would never let him rest if there was a wrong to put right.

  Wallace had killed Marsden.

  Sam would want answers.

  While the threat of revenge was enough to make Wallace hide, it was the USB stick that had caused his once unbreakable aura to crack. The device was out there, in a location that Sam would most likely know. While the documents were protected by the very best that cyber security had to offer, it still made him nervous.

  Wallace had put as much in place as he could.

  Amara Singh was being followed.

  Pearce was under surveillance too.

  Etheridge, the man his ghost, Mac, had brutally tortured, had disappeared off the radar entirely.

  Wallace sighed as he thought of Mac.

  There had been no contact since that night in Rome, where Mac was run down by, he assumed, Alex Stone. The man had lived and breathed the idea of revenge on Sam, an idea that Wallace had carefully nurtured ever since he recruited him. While he felt the man’s pain for not seeing the mission through, Wallace knew that Mac’s obsession with Sam was not what he needed.

  Not for this.

  This would require someone of a stable mind, which made their proficiency all the more terrifying.

  It would also require personal investment.

  For the first time in decades, Wallace felt his hands shake with fear as he reached for his mobile phone and made the call he’d promised he would never have to make.

  The tyres of the coach hit a pothole in the road and shook the entire vehicle causing Sam’s forehead to collide with the large, Plexiglas window. He awoke with a start and a frown, his eyes blinking him back into consciousness.

  A few hours of undisturbed sleep had been most welcome, even if his dreams were littered with the memory of his son’s death.

  That and the vast number of criminals he’d put in the ground.

  He remembered them all.

  From the horribly scarred brute in the High Rise, to the fight to the death with Oleg Kovalenko atop a large tower. Even the first bullet he’d fired in Amy Devereux’s apartment, hitting a masked man between the eyes and setting him off on his path of justice.

  It had been a long road home, but the coach had turned off the M25 and as Sam’s vision restored completely, he smiled warmly as they passed a large sign.

  Welcome to Farnham

  Craft Town.

  It had felt like a lifetime since Sam had been in this part of the UK, waiting patiently with a cup of tea while his friend, Paul Etheridge, mocked up his fake passport and complained about his impending divorce. Sam had felt bad, as his shoot-out with the armed police within Etheridge’s house surely hadn’t helped. But Etheridge had made it clear it was the straw that had broken the camel’s back, and that the loveless marriage had long since dissolved.

  He was a wealthy man and a young woman like Kayleigh hadn’t exactly been in it for the passion.

  But since paying for Sam’s ticket to Kiev and passing on the intel of where to find Carl Burrows, Etheridge had gone off the radar. Every phone call Sam had attempted had gone to voicemail and Sam couldn’t help but feel nervous.

  Marsden had entrusted him with a USB stick that he’d given his life for.

  Had Sam put Etheridge in danger by sending it to him?

  He had to know.

  Sam looked around at the rest of the coach, noting only a few other passengers. A small group of Chinese tourists were huddled near the front of the coach, their eyes taking in the beautiful scenery lit up by the street lights. The mild spring evening giving them a nice view of the quaint town. Based in the Surrey Borough of Waverley, it held a number of wonderful tourist attractions such as Farnham Castle and bordered the Surrey Hills.

  To Sam’s right, a middle-aged man slept while his teenage son was engrossed in his tablet, watching the latest hit show on Netflix.

  Sam let out a sigh. His entire body ached.

  He had been through the wars.

  But he had a feeling it was far from over.

  After leaving the dead body of Matt Brecker in the industrial park on the outskirts of Naples, Sam had made his way back to the city on foot. Full of regret for how things had been left with Alex, he’d taken Matt’s debit card and purchased two packets of cigarettes from a twenty-four hour newsagents. He had then headed back to the apartment he’d called home for three months and got a few hours rest, before making his way to Naples city centre. There he’d visited a number of different supermarkets, racking up thirty euro’s worth of cigarettes each time.

  As the midday rush of tourists begun to filter through, Sam casually zeroed in on a group of English men outside a bar, asking one of them for a lighter. As he puffed the cigarette, he allowed his genuine disgust to take control and then told them he was supposed to quit.

  He offered them four packets at a discounted price.

  Sensing a bargain, they eagerly handed Sam the cash.

  A few hours later, Sam repeated the act with an elderly Scottish couple, who took the deal and wished him luck with his attempts to kick the filthy habit.

  Sam did this throughout the afternoon until he’d racked up a hundred and eighty Euros. Sam dumped Matt’s wallet in a bin, walked to Naples station, and bought a one-way ticket to Rome.

  Less than two hours later, he was back in the capital, the memories of his car crash and possible reunion with an old friend flooded back to him.

  It couldn’t have been him, could it?

  Mac was dead. He had died in an air strike over a decade ago.

  It had haunted Sam ever since.

  Mac’s death

  The death of Dr Farhad Nabizada, who had saved his life.

  His boys, Tahir and Masood. Orphaned.

  They were all scars that Sam bore and as he paid for a train ticket to Paris, Sam was relieved to be leaving the beautiful city of Rome. Just over three hours later, Sam arrive
d at Paris Terminal. It was the early hours of the morning and Sam checked his money.

  With only seventy euros left, he bought a ticket for the ten-hour coach ride back to London and then found a coffee stall. The warm caffeine was like heaven as he gulped it down and the accompanying croissant was the first thing he’d eaten in over a day. As the coach pulled away from Paris Terminal just after midday, Sam decided to rest.

  He awoke as they came to a stop in the Channel Tunnel, and his counterfeit passport worked a treat.

  Jonathan Cooper.

  That’s who the border control welcomed back to the UK, not realising they’d just allowed the UK’s most wanted vigilante back on their shores.

  As they weaved through the rush hour traffic of the M25, they crawled through the stop-start roads of London until they arrived at London Victoria Coach Station.

  Sam had felt fresher.

  He hadn’t showered since his few hours in the apartment. His long hair was greasy from sweat and his stubble was becoming itchy and unruly.

  But he was almost there.

  Almost at his destination.

  After exchanging the last of his euros into sterling, he boarded the coach for Farnham and fell straight to sleep.

  Now, as the coach slowed to a halt, his legs ached as he stepped out into the brisk, spring evening and stepped around the group of tourists who were arguing over the directions to their hotel.

  Sam knew where he was headed.

  He pulled the collar of his jacket up, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and walked the mile and a half to Etheridge’s street. As he approached, he scanned the road, ensuring there were no stakeouts. It would make sense that Blackridge would keep a lookout on a known associate of Sam’s in a desperate attempt to find him.

  But the street was clear and as Sam drew closer to Etheridge’s house, his heart sank.

  He could see why.

  A large ‘Sold’ sign stood proudly in front of the mansion. Sam walked slowly to the electronic gate of the property and clutched two of the poles with each hand.

  He had no more money.

  Nowhere else to go.

  No other moves.