The Payback (34 page)

She nodded.

‘The essential thing is we keep Wise alive until we’ve located the bomb, if there is one, and found out where and to whom it’s gone. After that . . .’

I let my words trail off. We both knew what would happen after that.

Payback.

I steered the boat past the rocks, giving them a wide berth, and a few minutes later we came round on to the eastern side of the island. There were even fewer lights on here but I could make out the shapes of houses, spaced far apart, up on the top of a long
winding ridge, beneath which was thick forest. I recognized Wise’s place from the Google Earth photo earlier. ‘That’s it,’ I said, pointing to the first house, a grand-looking stucco villa with a well-lit access road leading up to the front from a secluded palm-fringed beach a little way down the coast.

I slowed the boat to a crawl and turned off the lights, moving quietly towards the adjacent beach, remembering it as a place we used to bring divers in the surface interval between dives on the southern rocks. There were no houses here then, but that had been a long time back now.

When we were fifty yards short of the shore, I cut the engine altogether and let the boat drift in on the waves, before dropping anchor in clear shallow water next to some rocks.

The night was quiet and peaceful, and above us a crescent moon shone down from a starry sky. It was the kind of night for relaxing with a beer in good company, not for killing.

I looked across at Tina. ‘Ready?’

She nodded, the determination set hard on her lean, angular face. ‘Ready.’

Without another word, we slipped out of the boat and waded to shore, guns drawn.

Paul Wise looked at his watch. 7.35 p.m.

He was standing on the veranda at the front of the villa looking down the hill towards the sea. Beside him stood Schagel’s man, Nargen, while one of his local people, Rico, stood guard by the steps down to the driveway, a pump-action shotgun in his hands. A single access road, lined on both sides by thick, natural foliage running for more than a hundred yards on either side, connected the villa to Wise’s private beach and dock where the men he was meeting would be landing. Wise felt a little better with Nargen there. The Russian had a natural calm about him that was reassuring under the circumstances. Even so, he was still extremely keen to get this whole thing over with. Having outsiders on his land, men he didn’t know, felt like a violation.

A few minutes earlier, he’d seen a speedboat come round the tip of the island, but it had pulled in before reaching his beach. He wondered whether it was the men he was waiting for. If so, he couldn’t understand why they would have stopped short of the rendezvous point. And the fact that the lights had clearly been
turned off before the boat reached the shore set off his nerves again.

‘Do you have cameras covering the route up here?’ asked Nargen, interrupting his thoughts. He had a soft, cultivated Russian accent that was nothing like Wise’s idea of how a Russian special forces soldier should sound.

Wise nodded. ‘There are cameras covering all the approaches, including through the woods. They’re linked to a control room inside. I have a member of staff watching them full-time.’

‘How many are you expecting?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. Liaising with them had been Schagel’s job – and now, typically, Schagel was nowhere to be seen.

‘It doesn’t matter. If we can see them coming, we can take precautions.’

Wise nodded, and glanced over at Rico, who was clutching his weapon tightly as if he feared he might drop it. He was trying to look calm and professional, but was fooling nobody.

The phone in the pocket of Wise’s cream suit rang. He pulled it out and checked the number. It was Delon, his camera operator.

‘Boss,’ said Delon breathlessly, ‘I’ve picked up intruders on camera 7.’

Camera 7 was housed in thick woodland on the south-eastern approach to the villa, some two hundred metres distant. Anyone coming that way didn’t want to be spotted.

‘How many?’

‘Two. A man and a woman.’

‘Describe them.’

‘They’re westerners. The man’s tall with dark hair. The woman’s blonde.’

‘Keep them covered,’ snapped Wise, and hung up.

So, somehow Milne and Boyd had found him. His first reaction
was anger that they’d managed to locate his precious hideaway, but that anger only lasted a few seconds. Then a more familiar emotion took over. Pleasure. This was an opportunity, and one not to be missed.

‘What’s happening?’ demanded Nargen.

Wise told him. ‘I want them intercepted.’

Nargen smiled. ‘It will be a pleasure. I owe both of them for what they did to my colleague.’ He removed a long black pistol from a holster beneath his jacket, and screwed on a large silencer.

‘And I want the woman, Boyd, alive.’

Nargen coolly met his eye. ‘I’m only here because I’m being paid to protect you until you’ve exchanged the package for the money. If I can get the girl alive, I will, but I’m not risking my life over it.’

Wise wasn’t used to being talked back to, but he was also pragmatic enough to know that he had to tread carefully here. ‘I will pay you one hundred thousand dollars in cash, money I will have as soon as the exchange is made, if you bring her to me conscious and in one piece.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Nargen with an infuriating shrug, cocking the pistol and turning away.

‘A hundred thousand dollars,’ repeated Wise, thoughts of all the terrible things he could do to Tina Boyd flooding his brain. He’d waited years for this moment. It would be his reward for successfully making the exchange.

And for that bitch, it would be the beginning of a nightmare that would last until he’d squeezed every drop of pain from her, leaving her begging for death.

Tina crept through the trees in silence with Milne ten feet in front of her. The foliage was less thick than it looked from a distance and was mainly made up of palm and acacia trees that hissed gently in the sea breeze. They moved slowly and carefully, both of them keeping a tight hold of their guns as they looked left and right, checking for any sign of ambush.

Tina felt a terrible heaviness in her heart. The quest for justice she’d first set out on more than six years ago with the murder of her partner DCI Simon Barron, and then of the only man she’d ever really loved, John Gallan, was finally coming to an end, and once again she found herself wondering whether she had the strength to do what had to be done. If Paul Wise was unarmed and begging for mercy, would she be able to kill him, or would she instead rely on the man in front of her to do her dirty work?

Up ahead, Milne stopped and listened. They’d been going for at least five minutes now and she could see the first light from Wise’s villa glinting through the undergrowth, as well as the lights from the access road leading up from the beach.

‘What is it?’ she whispered, stopping behind him.

‘I heard something,’ he whispered back.

And then it happened. Just like that. A figure appeared from behind a fern bush ten yards to their right, a gun outstretched in front of him, already pulling the trigger.

As she turned to face the gunman, she heard two loud pops, and Milne went down on his knees with a loud grunt, dropping his gun.

Tina opened fire, the revolver recoiling in her hands as she let off three shots in rapid succession. But she was aiming too high and the gunman had darted back down out of sight. She risked a rapid glance at Milne. He lay on his side in the dirt, one hand resting on a growing dark patch on his side. He wasn’t moving. But Tina knew that there was no time to dwell on that now. Right now the priority was her own survival. She needed to find cover, and fast.

Squinting against the darkness, and keeping her weapon trained on the spot where the gunman had been, she retreated into the undergrowth, wondering whether in fact her bullets hadn’t been high at all and had actually hit him. She didn’t think so, and she wasn’t going to risk approaching his position to find out. Instead, she slipped into the shadow of an acacia tree, using its hanging branches as cover, occasionally peering round the trunk in the direction of the road. She could no longer see Milne but thought it likely he was out of action, perhaps even dying. But she couldn’t afford to think about that prospect now.

After she’d maintained her position for several minutes and her ears had stopped ringing, she risked reloading the revolver with the spare rounds she’d brought with her, and began moving again in the direction of the house, but in a much wider arc than before, using the lights for guidance, knowing that she was hugely
vulnerable to ambush. Every sense was tuned into her surroundings. This was life and death. She’d been in such positions before, but this was different. Now she was alone on an isolated island. Worse still, the people she was after knew she was here, and had just taken out her one ally.

The edge of the villa loomed up behind the foliage. A flight of steps led to a veranda that looked like it stretched the width of the villa’s frontage. She took a few careful steps closer, her movements slow and exaggerated, and stopped and listened. Amid the swaying of the trees in the breeze she could hear the sound of feet moving on the steps.

Taking refuge behind the trunk of a palm, she watched as a wiry-looking Filipino emerged through the bushes. He was holding a shotgun and looking round, as if he’d heard something.

Ten feet separated them. Tina held the gun by her side and moved her head back so it was out of sight, her heart beating hard.

And then he walked right into her field of vision. He was barely a yard away now. If he inclined his head just a few inches, he’d see her.

Instead, he turned his back and unzipped his trousers, the shotgun dangling casually from the crook of one arm, as if he were out on a pheasant shoot.

She adopted a firing stance, the revolver’s barrel pointed directly at the base of his skull.

But there was no way she could pull the trigger. She told herself it was because the noise would alert Wise and his people, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d had the best silencer in the world on her gun. The fact remained that, unlike Milne, she simply couldn’t kill in cold blood.

She could stun him, though. Make him lie down, then use the
stock of his shotgun to knock him out while she went into the house. It wasn’t exactly foolproof – particularly as she was sure that this guy was far too careless to have killed Milne, which meant that someone else was still out there – but it would have to do.

The gunman was in full flow now.

Tina took a step forward. ‘Drop your gun,’ she said firmly.

‘No,’ said a voice behind her. One she recognized all too well. ‘You drop yours.’

Nargen was thinking about the extra hundred thousand dollars he was going to earn as he told Tina Boyd to drop her weapon. In front of her, Rico, who was supposed to be helping him with security, was desperately zipping himself up.

‘It’s just as easy for me to kill you,’ he told her evenly. ‘Like I killed your friend. Now, if you haven’t dropped it by the time I count to three . . .’

She dropped it, and Nargen kicked her hard in the calf, sending her down to her knees. In one swift movement he picked up her weapon and stuffed it into his waistband before using his boot to force her down into the dirt.

‘Cover her,’ he snapped at Rico as he holstered his own weapon and pulled out a pair of restraints. He didn’t add the instruction to shoot her if she made a move, believing it all too likely that this idiot might hit him instead. She was a difficult one, this bleached-blonde policewoman, so he had to be careful. Under other circumstances he might even have found her attractive, but right now she simply represented money to him. And plenty of it.

Having bound Tina Boyd’s hands behind her back, he hauled her to her feet and pushed his gun into the base of her skull. He gave Rico a contemptuous look. ‘Get back to your post, and keep watch for our arrivals. Make sure you keep them outside until I get back. And don’t get caught out again. Do you understand?’

Rico nodded, and raced back to his position on the veranda, looking far too nervous for Nargen’s liking.

‘Now, don’t give me any more trouble, woman,’ he hissed in Tina’s ear, yanking her bound wrists up behind her back until she cried out. ‘Come on.’ He shoved her forward and, keeping the gun pushed hard against the base of her skull, guided her up the steps. When they reached the front door, he knocked hard on it. ‘Here you are,’ he said as Wise opened it. ‘You owe me a hundred thousand dollars.’

‘Get her inside,’ demanded Wise, moving aside to let them in before slamming the door shut.

He stood there, almost bouncing up and down, hands pressed tightly together, a look of childlike excitement on his pudgy face. He was, thought Nargen, an unpleasant little man with cunning, rat-like eyes, the type you wouldn’t trust under any circumstances. But Nargen had met a lot of people like that – you tended to in his job – and as long as they paid for his services, he didn’t much care.

‘Where’s the other one?’