THE FIX: SAS hero turns Manchester hitman (A Rick Fuller Thriller Book 1) (31 page)

I hit the right arrow on the laptop and a snapshot of a teenage girl and boy filled the screen. “This shot was taken in 1999, a full three years after my last intel. This picture was important to the Goldsmith family as Susan had kept it for over ten years.”

The image framed two coltish kids standing poker-straight in full army fatigues. It looked like some kind of Cadet Corp gathering. Neither child was smiling. The boy had white blond hair that fell over his face. He needed no introduction to me.

Lauren jumped to her feet. “That’s bloody Stephan! The guy from Joel Davies’s house!”

Des was not so quick but walked deliberately to the screen and examined the picture closely. He tapped the monitor with his fingernail. His voice was quiet but venomous. “And that little bairn there is Susan fuckin’ Davies.”

I stood and my head swam.

“We need to find Gerry Goldsmith Jnr and Charles Williamson."

Des Cogan's Story:

The revelations hit me like a hammer. Deep inside, despite the relationship between Rick and myself, I had never really wanted to believe that Williamson, a respected army officer, a man’s man, had been involved in anything so deeply disturbing. It was one thing to do some dodgy jobs once you retired, Jesus, glass houses and all that, but to apply your power and influence whilst a serving senior officer; to actually use Her Majesty’s Forces to murder and steal for your own advantage, well that was another matter entirely.

I had always been convinced Rick’s theory had been the ranting of a disturbed and bereaved soul.

As far as I was concerned, my best mate in the world had just fallen on the hardest of times. He had lost his wife in the most unspeakable of circumstances and, in turn, had lost his way. I had always told myself that it was so. It had kept me sane the last ten years.

At that moment, that picture, the two bairns, those unsmiling, youthful ‘All American’ children, bathed in sunshine and middle-class Massachusetts values, opened wounds and turned all our lives upside down once again.

The man who stood in front of me was not my blood, nor did he believe in my God, but he was something else to me. Rick’s shoulders were extraordinarily slumped. I grabbed his T-shirt and pulled him upward.

Our eyes met.

My voice was calm but my heart raced in my chest.

“We’ll find them, mate, and nail the fuckers to the wall.”

Lauren North's Story:

Rick had printed out copies of the Gibraltar file for each of us. He’d also Googled all he could find on the Rock and any properties in the area that had been sold, or were currently for sale by Crowder and Madden.

I returned to my room with his instructions ringing in my ears, dropped the substantial file on my bed, switched on my pink Motorola and began to read.

After two hours I needed to clear my head, so I pulled on my jogging kit and a very unflattering woolly hat and hit the street.

I swung left onto Sackville and immediate right toward St Anne’s Square. It was eight-forty p.m. Diners, theatregoers and street people all bustled around the tram-stops bathed in fluorescent light from advertisement boards. I pounded past them, any hope of a show and dinner as far from my mind as it could get.

Next, the Midland Hotel’s lights bathed the pavement in front of me. The Stones had stayed there the night before after another final date in a final tour at the MEN Arena. A tacky white stretch was double-parked and the doorman was remonstrating with the driver. My breathing was beginning to find pace with my feet and I felt the first flush of endorphins spur me forward. I ran past the famous Coronation Street Soap set and I was flying.

My mind turned to Gibraltar.

Gibraltar or ‘The Rock’ was named Mount Calpe by the Greeks, with Abila Mount sitting on the opposite side of the strait in Morocco. Hercules pushed the two apart and made the strait the entrance to his home, that being the Atlantic Ocean. Him being a Sun God of course.

It’s been brawled over ever since; the Moors, English, Spanish, Dutch, French and Arabs have all spilled blood over the six-square-kilometre rock.

It was of key importance in the First and Second World Wars and its economy still relied heavily on the fact it is a working naval base and free port.

I did a left and headed toward Salford, I felt a slight chill as the city fell away. A burned-out old cinema cast an eerie shadow on my pavement but there were still plenty of cars and people around. Besides I still had my Glock tucked into my trackies.

We were going to Gibraltar to find Goldsmith and Williamson. Never mind it’s ancient history, Gibraltar is a massive secret intelligence base. The Rock contains over fifty kilometers of man-made tunnels that had been cut into that cliff face since 1782 and there were more satellite dishes on the top than Roman Abramovich’s yacht. What goes on inside those tunnels is one of the reasons the Spanish are never getting it back. Rick’s theory was that the ‘David Stern’ drug base was in those tunnels and on that rock. After reading the file, I pretty much agreed with him. The problem was, we were three, and the people we were up against were heavily armed and many.

I saw a McDonald’s appearing on my left and took it a signal to turn back, ten kilometers should take me less than forty minutes. I had the feeling I was going to have to run a lot further in the coming days. I turned on my heels and my thoughts turned back to my breathing, my head clear.

Tomorrow was another working day and Rick had to pay a visit to a Greek forger. Before I did anything else, I needed to change my appearance, get some passport photos and think of a new name and identity.

We were to take a massive risk and leave all the hard drives we’d stolen from the Davieses’ house untouched. No matter what was on there, we just couldn’t afford the Greek’s price to decrypt them. So, Rick was to swap Joel’s Porsche for three biometric passports and a weapon stash near Malaga. We could always use the hard drives for bargaining chips later if need be. Everything else was a shot in the dark. Would we find what we were looking for in Gibraltar?

Who knew?

I showered and dried my hair with a towel, pulled on a sweater and jeans, found my purse and walked to Tesco. I felt really strange pottering around the little Metro store, a box of Nice ’n Easy hair dye and a packet of Jaffa Cakes in my trolley and a loaded semi-automatic in my trousers. For some ungodly reason, I bought a lucky dip scratch card at the checkout. Once outside, I walked briskly along Oxford Road rubbing furiously and winning a tenner in the process.

I stopped off at a twenty-four-hour chemists, got chatted up shamelessly by the Asian guy behind the counter, and bought a pair of point-five reading glasses.

Despite all the massive changes to my life over the last months, it was good to know some things never changed. I got back to the hotel only to discover I had bought red hair dye by mistake.

I cut myself a new fringe with blunt nail scissors and stood in the shower to apply the colour, which incidentally quite suited me. Once dry and dressed, I popped on the glasses to complete the look.

I nearly fainted when the knock on the door came.

I drew the Glock and clicked the safety to the fire position, pointing the weapon downward as I approached the spy-hole in the door. My heart raced and the gun felt suddenly slippery in my grasp. I supported my right wrist by gripping it with my left hand just as I had been trained to do. I made my approach as quietly as I could and I released a slow breath in the last few paces.

I pressed my eye to the hole and saw Rick, hands in pockets, studying his shoes patiently.

A mixture of relief and irritation tore through me. I could have gleefully shot him for not announcing himself at the door.

All my anger subsided the moment I let him into the room and he gave me a rare smile. I felt myself check my new fringe before making my pistol safe and tucking it away behind my back.

He had the start of a beard which partially covered his new facial scar and he’d gelled his hair into small spikes, which suited him. His eyes sparkled in the dimly lit hotel room and he looked back to his peak: lithe, fit and typically focused.

“Sorry, did I scare you?” he said.

“A little,” I replied. “My nerves aren’t the best I suppose.”

“I just need your passport pictures for Makris and thought the easiest thing was to collect them in person. I should have telephoned to warn you.”

He wandered around my untidy room before adding, “The hair colour suits you, Lauren. It’s,” he fumbled for a word, “effective.”

“Effective? Is that the best you can do, Rick?”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“Yes, you mean it changes my appearance sufficiently for our purposes.” I pointed a playful finger. “You can compliment a girl once in a while, it won’t hurt you, y’know.”

His rock-solid barrier slammed down and he moved a pair of crumpled jeans to one side and sat on my bed. “Won’t it?”

I gave up on any kind of confidence-boosting remark and tried to lighten the mood. I pushed my new glasses down my nose and peered over the rims. “What do you think? I thought I’d call myself Erica.”

Rick pulled out a notebook and scribbled. “Erica what? And what do you do, I need some background.”

He was so serious, he never let up, never gave in. I couldn’t help myself. It just came out without any thought.

“Forsyth. Erica Forsyth and I am a consultant neurologist!”

He looked up from his pad, unsure if I was taking the piss, and raised an eyebrow.

“Seriously?”

I pulled back my shoulders. “Seriously.”

With almost mechanical movement he continued to scribble but muttered under his breath.

“I suppose you were in the field and you were married to a consultant for a while so you could pull it off.”

That was a shock.

“How the hell did you know that?”

“Hmmm? Sorry? What?”

“How did you know I was married to a consultant? Come to think of it how did you know I was even married?”

“Well, Des mentioned a few...”

“Did he now? And did he tell you anything else about me, coz as I recall in the last four months or so, I’ve kept very shtum about my private life?”

Rick looked as shaken as I’d seen him.

“I needed to…well things just came up in…”

He pursed his lips briefly and touched his thumb and forefinger to them. Then, he snapped himself back to his normal composed, assured self and closed his notebook with a deliberate flick of his recently manicured fingers.

His voice was clipped.

“Look, have you got the pictures?”

“No!”

“No?”

“No, I’d only just finished dying my hair, before some buffoon nearly got himself shot through my front door.”

He pushed his notebook into a very nicely cut leather coat I hadn’t seen before, and I thought I saw the merest hint of mirth.

“We’d better go and get them done then,” he said.

“Is that a good idea?” I asked, “Going out together, I mean?”

He patted the SLP tucked neatly in the small of my back. “I think we’ll be as safe as houses, Ms Forsyth.”

“Don’t touch what you can’t afford, Mr. Fuller.”

He stepped back in mock surrender.

“Madame.”

I pulled on my coat, the lining felt cold against my arms and it somehow chilled the rest of me. I checked there was enough change for the photo-booth in my pocket, and, satisfied there was, I looked straight into Rick’s face.

Everything I needed from life had become focused over the last weeks and at that very point another section of my existence became clear. I realised the only thing that was really vital to me was the team and finding the bastards that killed those kids in the cemetery.

New identities from dodgy Greek forgers, weapons drops made by faceless ex-paratroopers, a big posh hotel in the gangster capital of Spain, all felt right. None of it seemed out of place or unusual.

I shrugged my shoulders and felt my chill subside. First we were going to Puerto Banus and then on to Gibraltar. We were to capture or kill Williamson and Goldsmith, and his two murderous offspring we knew as Susan and Stephan. Once that was achieved, we would all return to our normal everyday lives. Yeah, right. The chances of that were slim to none, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to go back. I couldn’t ever go back and that just didn’t scare me anymore. What we had to do though, well that terrified me.

I realised I was still staring into Rick’s eyes and looked at my shoes.

“God help us, Rick.”

He cupped my chin with his hand and brought my face back level with his own.

“We didn’t need a God, Lauren, we just needed a break.”

He sat back on my bed again and pulled my file to him. He quickly flicked to a page showing an aerial photograph of a luxury home inside the old wall in Gibraltar. I had seen it myself but it had no relevance to me.

“Despite the obvious connections to Gibraltar, the file name, the tunnel blueprints, property development etc., it will still be a wild goose chase if Williamson isn’t going to be there, yes?”

Rick pulled a pen from his inside pocket and made a circular motion over the picture.

“You see this?” he said. “You see the driveway, these cars here?”

I peered over at the grainy picture, unsure of what I was looking at.

Rick popped the ballpoint of his pen and circled a white car on the driveway of the property.

“This car is our break, Lauren. This car is the final piece in the jigsaw. This proves that Williamson and Goldsmith operate on the Rock. Because this car is mine!”