Unleashed: this summer's must-read crime thriller

by Karl Hill

  “Shit!” exclaimed Nathan.

  “Shit’s the word,” responded Black, from the far corner of the room. “I’ve got plenty more bullets. You’d better phone Grant. Tell him Fletcher’s dead. Tell him I killed the fucker.”

  “We’re here for you, Black! Whether Fletcher’s alive or dead, makes no difference. That’s the way it has to be.”

  “It might make a difference to Grant. Without me, he can’t get his money. Tell him, I know about Abacus. Tell him, the funds are in our client account. Tell him, only two people in the whole fucking world know the account password. Simon Fletcher, who lies at my feet with several bullets in his body. And me. Tell him that – and if you’re still okay about killing me, then you’ve signed your own death warrant.”

  Nathan listened, trying to take in this sudden new information, head spinning with indecision. Was Black trying to play him? His uncle was secretive; Nathan did not know the full extent of his business interests. But he was aware of massive amounts of money moving imminently. He was aware it involved a company called Abacus. And he knew Simon Fletcher was involved. Now Fletcher was dead.

  Nathan pressed speed dial on his mobile, and the sharp tone of his uncle answered.

  “Well? Is it done?”

  “We’ve got him cornered in his office. He’s not going anywhere.”

  “That’s not what I asked!” barked Grant. “Why don’t you just answer the fucking question, Nathan. So, it’s not done. In which case, why are you phoning me?”

  “There’s been a development.”

  “Which is?”

  “He says he’s killed Simon Fletcher. He says only he and Fletcher know, knew, the password for the client account. What do you want me to do?”

  A silence followed. Nathan felt he could almost hear the gears in his uncle’s brain click and grind.

  “He killed his own partner,” said Grant at length, his voice surprisingly calm. “His best friend. I didn’t see that. He’s full of surprises.”

  Nathan waited.

  “Don’t kill him. Capture him. I need him alive. I need to trust you can do that.”

  Grant disconnected. Nathan contemplated the situation he was in and thought – how the hell do you capture a man like Adam Black?

  57

  Nathan ushered his men back from the door, which was drooping off its hinges as a result of Black’s gunshot. And on the floor, the man with half his head blown away, also courtesy of Black’s gunshot.

  Nathan crept forward. “I’ve spoken to Peter Grant! He needs to talk to you. You won’t be harmed. He just wants to talk.”

  “You give me your solemn promise?”

  Nathan was not oblivious to the sarcasm. But he had to respond. “Of course.”

  “Let me think about that.”

  Suddenly the crash of a window breaking. Nathan hesitated. They were only one floor up. It was not inconceivable that Black could leap out a window and survive the landing.

  “Fuck!”

  He gestured his men in, five armed individuals, Nathan following up behind. The window was gone, shards of glass scattered on the carpet. A chair was toppled beside it. One of his men rushed over to the space, and looked down.

  “Is he there?” Nathan asked

  “I’m right here,” came a soft voice from the opposite corner of the room.

  Everyone spun round, to be met by Black, crouched in the shadows, a Glock in each hand, pointing right at them. He fired, moving at the same time, shielded by the heavy wooden table. Nathan watched, stricken, as three of his men dropped to the floor, torsos riddled with bullets. The others got to get some shots off, but Black was a moving target, and the shots went wide. Nathan leapt to the ground, taking shelter under the table. Black darted past the door, and out of the room.

  “Get the fuck!” screamed Nathan.

  The two remaining men ran after him, to be shot instantly as they left the room, each in the head. Black had not run. He had waited for them in the corridor outside.

  “Jesus,” muttered Nathan. He was no fighter. Far from it. He was the one who dispensed orders, at the behest of his uncle. This wasn’t the place for him. He was not the one to get involved at close range. He was so scared, he felt his bowels might loosen right there and then.

  He waited, watching under the table for Black to enter. Maybe he could shoot his feet, he thought. But if he missed…

  He waited, one minute, two. He raised his head above the edge of the table. Nothing. Silence. He stood, body held in exquisite stillness. The place was carnage. Bodies and blood everywhere, glass and smashed furniture. Shredded books. Bullet punctures in the walls.

  Nathan realised he had been holding his breath. He took a long exhalation.

  His mobile phone suddenly buzzed, breaking the eerie silence. He jerked his hand up and looked at the name showing on the screen. It was Peter Grant.

  58

  We train you for primarily two reasons. To kill. And to endure.

  Black waited by the conference room door – or what remained of it – pressed against the wall, gun aimed at head height. Two men ran out, and it was a simple double tap, almost execution style, and they both dropped. Black couldn’t wait any longer. The gunshots and the window smashing would not have gone unnoticed. He reckoned he had about five minutes to leave the building and get far enough away to avoid getting caught up in the mayhem to follow – from either more hired thugs, or the police. He had just dispatched six men, and his partner, Simon Fletcher. He felt no guilt. He knew Simon’s wife and kids, had bought Christmas presents for them, spent holidays with them. But at least they were alive. Black’s family no longer enjoyed that experience.

  He left the offices, taking the stairs again, moving warily, watchful, but the way seemed clear. He got to the main reception area. Everything seemed normal. Nothing was out of place. Who would have thought a gunfight had erupted in the floor above?

  He waited at the entrance. The double doors were closed. They were solid, without any glass panelling. No one could see in, but then he couldn’t see out. He took a deep breath, opened the door a fraction, then wider. The way was clear. He slipped out, closing the door behind him, and started walking down the street, casually, as if he were going nowhere in particular, both guns tucked back in his coat pockets.

  A jogger came up towards him, appearing as if from nowhere. Black tensed but kept moving. The jogger was running at speed, wearing a dark-green hoodie, face hidden in shadow. Black slowed as he approached. The jogger ran straight by. Black stopped, turned, watching him go. He did not see the people in the parked car. The car door opened. Black spun round, but too late! A man fired something directly at his chest – two darts pierced his coat, connected by conductors to a hand weapon. A taser. Suddenly an electric current coursed through Black’s muscle fibres, causing instant contraction. He was still conscious when he fell, but his muscles were locked rigid. He hit the pavement hard, entombed in his own body.

  The man holding the gun loomed over him. Black looked into a face he recognised – Peter Grant.

  “You don’t send a fucking boy to do a man’s job.”

  Black heard car doors opening and shutting. He was lifted quickly by four men and carried over to the boot of a Range Rover. He was bundled in, his coat and jacket removed. One of the men produced a cosh and rendered a fearful blow to the back of his head.

  Black lost consciousness, his world tumbling into oblivion.

  59

  You don’t send a fucking boy to do a man’s job.

  The words repeated themselves over and over in his mind. He was not awake. But he was not unconscious. He was in a grey place in between.

  A sound penetrated his head. Laughter. Or at least a sound which resembled laughter. It faded in and out of his consciousness, one moment distinct, next a faint echo, a glimmer of a sound. He swallowed back a tidal wave of pain.

  He had been careless.

  He was going to die.

  He cracked his eyes open a fr
action, finding the light almost blinding. He clenched his teeth against waves of nausea. And pain – a throbbing pain, beating like a base drum in the middle of his head.

  Memories seeped back, at first slowly, then like a flood. The paralysing pain of electrocution from the taser. Being grappled and bundled into the back of a car. The crack of the cosh on his skull. He swallowed, but even that simple act was painful. His throat was parched. He tried to move, but discovered he was bound. He surveyed his position in an almost detached fashion. He was sitting on a chair, hands tied behind his back painfully tight with what felt like rope, his ankles bound to the chair legs. His shirt had been removed, as had his socks and shoes. His knives discovered and taken, he thought ruefully. His eyes gradually adjusted to the light, and he began to make sense of his surroundings.

  He was in a large, heavily-furnished room. To his left was a log fire, set beneath a dark oak surround, the flames reduced to dull embers. Black noted a poker was resting on a metal grille, one end burrowed deep in the smouldering heat. Everywhere was wood. Wooden flooring, with scattered rugs; walls of deep oak panelling; high wooden ceiling with dark beams. The place looked cluttered – leather couches and tapestried chairs and small tables, positioned in no particular order. In fact, they had been pushed back, he realised, to provide clear space around him. For fun and games, he thought grimly.

  The room was lit by various lamps and downlighters from the ceiling. In a corner was a grand piano, polished until the wood shone, gleaming. Windows and wide French doors stretched across almost the length of a far wall, heavy drapes at each end drawn open and fastened by tiebacks. Above the fireplace was a large painting of Peter Grant, gazing into the middle distance, a shotgun resting against his shoulder, dressed like a country squire in a brown three-piece tweed suit, standing with a Labrador at his feet, and a mountain in the distance, and a blue sky above.

  Black licked his lips. They felt cracked and swollen. His whole face felt painful. Perhaps someone had already vented their anger on him, while he was unconscious. It felt like it.

  His thoughts drifted back, to another time, another world. Old memories surfaced.

  Dungeons deep under a prison in Iraq, carved out of the cold stone. Starving, waking up every morning to a ritual beating. Hanging by the wrists for hours on end. Every so often a mock execution. Waterboarding, just for fun. Watching beheadings of other inmates. He had been trained to endure. The SAS understood that in their particular line of business, capture was a real possibility. Training had included psychological and physical torture in simulated conditions. But despite how harsh those conditions were, ultimately, it was just pretend. No one died. Nothing could prepare a soldier for the real thing. For Black, facing death as he did then daily, the fear of dying became something he grew accustomed to, until he was able to manage it, contain it. And once contained, it gradually changed to a new and vibrant emotion. Rage. He escaped from that hellhole, and in the process, took great pleasure in slitting the throats of three of his guards. He wondered if he would be so lucky this time.

  Laughter again, from another room. Two men entered. One he knew he’d seen before. He picked through his memory, trying to place him. It was like trying to swim through a fog. He remembered. The man in the BMW. The man who’d been waiting outside his house in Eaglesham . The man whose friend Black had stabbed through the eye with a key. The other he also recognised. Vaguely. A tinge of recollection. A face he’d seen in a room in a police station an eternity ago, when his bloodstained clothes had been removed; when he’d just killed Damian Grant outside a pub in Eaglesham. A burly, round-faced man with hair so fine, he looked bald. The man who never smiled.

  DS Lomond.

  “You’re awake,” said the BMW man.

  Black rolled his tongue around his teeth. “I’m in a nightmare. I’m looking at two fat goblins. Can I have some water?”

  “What the fuck did you just say!” shouted Lomond, specks of saliva flying off the corners of his mouth.

  “Easy, Jack,” said the other one. “He’s a lippy bastard, but just ignore it. He won’t be lippy for long.”

  BMW Man stepped close to Black, and leaned over him, his face six inches away. “Do you remember me?”

  “How could I forget, with a face like yours.”

  “Do you remember what you did to my pal? He lost an eye. He lost a fucking eye! Now he has to wear a fucking patch. He’s not very pleased. He is what you would describe as fucking outraged! He wants me to pass on this message – that when Mr Grant is finished doing what he has to do, he wants me to scoop out your eyeballs with a fucking spoon, and put them on a key ring, so he’ll have nice memories of you.”

  Black gazed up at the man looming over him. “Here’s a message for your handsome one-eyed pal.” Black spat in the man’s face.

  The man recoiled, lips curled back in a mixture of anger and disgust. But he did not retaliate. He daren’t, probably on the orders of Grant, surmised Black. He wasn’t to be critically damaged, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to talk. And Black knew that Grant was desperate for him to talk.

  Another door opened, somewhere in the vicinity behind Black. Eight men now entered the room, forming a semi-circle round where Black sat. One of them was Peter Grant. Another was Nathan.

  Grant fixed Black with a long stare. “A bit different from Giovanni’s. Doesn’t quite have the same ambience.”

  “Not quite the same. I’ll bet the food’s a lot cheaper. Can I have a glass of water?”

  “Of course. Nathan, get the man some water.”

  Nathan left.

  Grant stepped closer, and leant forward, his hands on his knees, scrutinising Black’s face. “You’re not looking so good, old pal. Looking a bit ‘fucked up’. That’s what happens when you start meddling about in my business affairs.”

  “I started meddling when you decided to murder my wife and daughter. A fairly natural reaction, wouldn’t you say?”

  Grant shrugged. “You deserved all you got. As did they. The scales were balanced.”

  Nathan returned with a tall glass tumbler of water and placed it at Black’s lips. Black drank greedily, Nathan slowly tilting the glass as Black gulped it down.

  “Now then,” continued Grant. “Refreshments are over. You know exactly why you’re here. My money is in your firm’s client account. You very rudely killed off the only means by which the money was to be transferred, namely Simon Fletcher. That deal is now, like yourself, fucked up. I need the money back. So please. Return it to me.”

  “Sorry about the deal going sour,” said Black. “What was it – a fraudulent land transfer? From one company to another. Another layer added, to make the laundering harder to discover. And then what? Closing the companies down, dissolving them. By then the money has been moved on, to where? A hundred other companies, in legit transactions? And so, the Peter Grant drug and extortion fund is cleaned up and accessible, and all remnants of proceeds of crime almost impossible to trace. So sad that I ruined it all for you. Now it’s a bonus if you even get your money back. Especially when the police start crawling over one major fucking crime scene. I lost count of the dead bodies. Let me guess – the money goes back to where it originated? A Swiss bank account? Virgin Islands?”

  “Cayman Islands, seeing as you asked. And you’ve ruined nothing. A setback is all. A blip. Bent lawyers are almost as common as bent coppers. And they’re as common as fucking turds in a sewer. I’ll find another firm somewhere, some classy corporate outfit that looks good on the outside, but on the inside is desperate for cash. In Fletcher’s case, it was sheer greed.”

  “And Wilson?”

  “That grasping little fuck? I enjoyed having him killed. Just your luck to be a partner in a law firm full of villains. Now both your partners are dead. And here we are. What is the password, please? If you tell me now, then it will be much easier for you.”

  “You’ll let me go, of course.”

  “We’re grown-ups, you and I. You know that can’t
happen. But I could unleash Badger on you, and then the whole thing becomes messy.”

  “You have such cute names for each other. Badger. Tommy Teacup. What’s yours – Drug-Dealing Filthy Scumbag?”

  “You’ve already met Badger,” replied Grant, his tone almost affable. “He’s the one who wants to kill you because you blinded his pal. We could all leave the room, and give him two minutes, and then come back, and ask you again.”

  “Good idea. Badger will kill me, and you know it. And then you can say goodbye to all your hard-earned cash. How much by the way – forty million? More? If you don’t get that back, then I wonder how long the Peter Grant empire will last.”

  “Wonder all you want,” said Grant. “You’re going to tell me the password. Looks like we’re doing it the hard way. For you, that is. Enjoyable for me.”

  He flicked a glance at one of the men, nodding towards the fire. The man knew what it meant. All planned, thought Black. A structured torture.

  The man picked up a towel that had been folded by the hearth and used it to wrap around the handle of the poker resting in the embers. He pulled the poker out. It glowed. He handed it to Grant, who raised it up in the air, gazing at it, swivelling it in his hand, as if he were admiring a piece of artwork.

  “Scream all you want, Mr Black. You’re a guest of my hunting lodge, which is in the middle of fucking nowhere. Though if you’re interested, you’re in the heart of the Cairngorms. Red squirrels and grouse and Scottish wilderness, and not much fucking else. No one will hear you, so scream, my friend. There’s no shame.”

  Black tensed. Grant lowered the fire poker to an inch from Black’s chest. It didn’t touch the skin, but still it felt like he was on fire. He gritted his teeth, clenched his fists.