by Matt Hilton
Beside him, Imogen was as still as a mannequin. Her face was pale and waxen. After the troubled moans she'd made minutes ago, she was silent; even her breath was barely audible. He wished now that he hadn't doped her so deeply; he would do to her what he planned to do to Alisha on his return. Imogen, he knew, would show him the correct amount of terror.
Among his tools he had brought an antidote to the tranquilliser and he was seconds away from administering it. But he decided no. There would be time for Imogen later. He had other things to do first.
He punched numbers into his phone.
'I have the woman,' he said.
'Is she dead?'
'Not yet.'
'Is there a problem?'
'Slight hiccup, but nothing I can't handle.'
'You were told to kill her, Rickard.'
'And that's what I will do. But it's better this way. You wanted Joe Hunter punished. This way I get to make things much, much worse for him.'
'Maybe our plan to make him run worked too well. Hunter has dropped off the map.'
'We expected him to. Not to worry, though, he'll come to me when I'm ready.'
'You're sure that you are his equal?'
'No.'
'No, Rickard?'
'I'm better than him.'
'I hope so.'
This time it was the other person who hung up first. Rickard stared at the phone, his left hand curling into a fist again.
'You hope so?' He spoke into the unresponsive phone. 'You fucking hope so?'
Twice he'd been disrespected in as many minutes.
Rickard punched the steering wheel. When it didn't break, he punched it again and again in a frenzy that didn't halt until his blood slicked the wheel.
Chapter 14
Imogen's house was situated on the bluffs above Little Kennebec Bay, the nearest town being the tiny harbour of Machiasport. To get there we had to put down at a private airstrip outside the small town of Holden, because there was no way we'd get through security at Bangor International, then we drove up the rugged coastline in a 4?4 supplied by Rink's contact at the airstrip.
Icy rain thundered on the cab. The heater was cranked high, blowing hot, dry gusts against my face, but outside it looked cold. Wearing my Florida get-up, I might succumb to hypothermia in an hour. Rink's flamboyant shirt would be no protection at all.
'We need to stop and get kitted out,' I said.
Bryce was perhaps the best equipped for the cold, but even he nodded. We needed coats and hats that were designed for keeping the heat in rather than the sun out.
There were plenty of places on the way up to Little Kennebec Bay, and taking twenty minutes out of our journey, we restocked at a fishing tackle store. We bought fleece-lined coats and hats with ear-flaps, and we rigged Bryce out with a new pair of boots. Rink and I lived in our boots, so we were OK in that department. We paid with a credit card with a faked name. It sounds bad, but there was actually money I'd deposited into the account, so it was a genuine transaction: it would just never be traced back to me.
Behind the counter a radio was playing. A newscaster regaled his audience with the latest news. The top story centred on a gunfight where one cop had died and another was critically injured. It came as no surprise that my name was thrown into the pot, but I walked out of the store pretty thankful. There was no mention of a woman having been found mutilated.
Because mobile telephones are deceptively easy to trace, I turned off the one I'd used in Tampa, removing the battery for good measure, and purchased another with prepaid credit at a service station a little further along our route. I tried Walter Hayes Conrad again, but with similar results.
'You don't think Walter's involved, do you?' Rink asked when we were back in the 4?4 and on the road again. His tone told me that he didn't give his words much credence.
'Stuff like that only happens in the movies,' I said. But I did wonder where he'd gone to. My greatest fear was that he'd already been targeted by the people we were up against, but it was highly unlikely. Walter rarely travelled anywhere without an entourage of bodyguards. I preferred to think that he was simply too busy with his own investigation to reply to my calls. Then a thought struck me. I stared directly at Bryce.
'When we first met, you said you wanted to check whose side I was on. Again, back at the safe house, you also mentioned that "according to some people" I was the one responsible for killing our team. Was Walter one of these people?'
'No. Walter argued that it wasn't you. It was why he contacted me and sent me to find you instead.'
'He knew where to find me,' I pointed out.
'News had just come in about the murder of Jessica and Linden Case and how Case mentioned your name before he died. Walter couldn't contact you directly for fear of being implicated in that crime. He was worried that his communications were being monitored.'
'But he felt safe contacting you?'
'We keep in touch on an informal basis: face to face. We occasionally meet up to have a beer and reminisce over the good old days.'
Bryce was obfuscating the way that Walter was also famous for. If a hit on a black ops team was under investigation, the CIA would have been on to Bryce much earlier than they'd been on to me. I noticed that Rink had picked up on the lie by the way he jutted out his chin. I let it go.
But then I laughed.
'You know what this is, don't you?'
Bryce frowned. Rink's chin relaxed and a smile curled his lips.
'Walter – in his own inimitable style – has reactivated us to clear up his shit. He sent you to put me on the right track, Bryce, knowing full well that I'd be like a dog after a bone. He knew that Rink would step up to help me.'
'Figures,' Rink said.
'This is another embarrassment to the intelligence community. He wants it buried, so he's chosen us to do his dirty work for him again.'
'Just like Tubal Cain,' Rink said. He unconsciously thumbed the white scar on his chin – a reminder of said psychopath.
Bryce wasn't party to what had happened with Tubal Cain. Cain was actually Martin Maxwell, a former member of the secret service, better known as a bone-harvesting serial killer. When my brother John was kidnapped by Cain it was inevitable that I hunted the man down, but it served Walter that I bury him without a trace. On that occasion Walter had given me unofficial sanction to kill the maniac; it looked like I was being offered the same terms again.
'I'm right, Bryce?'
'I was supposed to show you the photos and then put you on Abadia's trail,' Bryce said. 'Walter didn't anticipate that you would be a fugitive from the law.'
'If he'd come directly to me those cops wouldn't have died, Imogen would be safe, and I wouldn't be being hunted like a rabid dog.'
'An' we wouldn't have to freeze our asses in Maine.' Rink said. To add validity to his words, he flicked on the windscreen wipers to bat away sleet. 'There is a good reason why I live in Florida.'
'Won't be here long,' I promised him.
'I think we're wasting our time coming here,' Bryce said. 'The woman's already dead.'
'We don't know that. Until we know for sure, we assume she's still alive.'
'You've seen the photos, Hunter. You know what happens to the victims.'
'That's exactly why we're here: I'm not going to let that happen to her.'
'We should concentrate on finding Abadia.'
'No, Bryce. We concentrate on finding Imogen first.'
The woman was in danger through no fault of her own. She'd been snatched as a way of hurting me. Kate and I had been together – if only briefly – before she was murdered, and I thought now that if Kate was still alive I'd be looking at Imogen as an extended member of my family. And no one fucks with my family.
My problem was where to start.
Imogen's house was the obvious place, but for the time being it would be cordoned off behind crime scene tape and a horde of investigators. Going there would solve nothing and most likely see us behind bars.
<
br /> 'Does Walter have any idea who's behind this?'
'Abadia.'
'OK. Let's play make-believe for a minute,' I said. 'Let's just suppose that Abadia survived three point-blank rounds in the chest and he's now looking for revenge: where would he start?'
'He starts by identifying the men sent to kill him.'
'Exactly. But those files were buried. So how does he get to them?'
'He needs someone on the inside,' Bryce said. It was like he'd just confessed a sin and he jerked upright in his seat. 'Hey, now hold on! I hope you don't think I had anything to do with this?'
'Calm yourself, Bryce. If I thought you were involved, I'd have already broken your neck. I'm thinking someone else.'
'There is no one else.'
'There are plenty. There were officers from the Drug Action Service along for the ride. Any one of them could've been forced into feeding him the information he'd need.'
Bryce looked pensive. 'Victor Montoya was the first to die. It's possible that someone led Abadia to Victor and then the other names were extracted from him. Remember he was tortured. Maybe it was because he wouldn't speak that his family were murdered in front of him.'
It sounded feasible.
'Next question: who does Abadia use to get his revenge? All of us are highly trained; he doesn't send someone incapable of getting the job done.'
'Has to be ex-military,' Rink said.
'A mercenary,' Bryce offered.
'Probably Special Forces,' I said. 'Someone just like us.'
'That doesn't narrow things down very much,' Bryce said. 'There have got to be thousands of ex-Special Ops out there looking to make a buck.'
'Most of them are men of honour. They wouldn't make war on women and children.' Rink stared directly ahead into the growing storm. 'Most of them.'
'Why would they have to be Special Forces?' Bryce asked.
'Could be something else,' I concurred. 'Whoever it is, he's highly trained and highly efficient. He has experience with sniper rifles. It's possible that he's a freelance assassin or a cop or maybe even a run-of-the-mill soldier. But I'm still running with the Special Forces angle.'
'Why are you so sure?'
'The guy I spoke to on the phone sounded Caucasian. I think that Abadia – or whoever – met the killer while he was on active duty in Colombia. British and American Special Ops guys have been in and out of Colombia for years, training and equipping the anti-narcotics cops down there. The SAS were there back in the nineties, more recently it's been the US Army Rangers.'
Beside me Rink grunted. Rink was a Ranger before he joined my unit.
'Next time we stop,' he said, 'I'll get Harvey on to it.'
Harvey Lucas was also a Ranger in his past life. He still had connections: maybe he could draw information from someone that would send us in the right direction. If not, Harvey was still a good man to have at our backs.
'If he's a Ranger, we're in for one helluva fight,' Rink said. He squirmed a little, as though his loyalty to his old troop meant he had to give the killer a modicum of respect. It was an abrasive notion.
'We're surmising an awful lot,' Bryce said.
'Yeah.'
Maybe I was way off base in my thinking. But as usual I was going to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Anything less would be a welcome bonus.
Chapter 15
Culver in Hancock County, Maine is somewhere that you would normally struggle to find on a map, but the small town was where Rickard headed. Following the assassination of the two cops in Tampa, he'd travelled to Bangor on a scheduled flight, but from Bangor had jumped to the coastline on a small seaplane. From Trenton, he'd then used a speedboat to cross the bay to Culver, where he'd collected the FedEx truck that was necessary to his ploy. His boat was moored in a disused boathouse ready for the return trip across the water. At Trenton, the plane was waiting for his return, but there wasn't room in the cabin for the pilot and him, plus an unconscious woman. But that was OK, he never intended for Imogen Ballard to leave Maine alive.
The car he'd appropriated after dumping Imogen's Suburban would have to be torched to eliminate any trace evidence, but that was a task he'd see to prior to firing up the outboard motor on his boat.
'First we deal with you, Imogen,' he said. 'Let's see if we can raise a little fire in you, shall we?'
Imogen was incapable of replying. But that would be rectified within a minute or so.
The boathouse, once used to house a fishing boat, was not one of those fancy type buildings you see in rich men's playgrounds but a wholly utilitarian affair of sun-bleached planks and wind-scoured shingles. It was like a small hangar, open to the bay at one end with a normal door on the side and another two doors where a truck with a winch could drag a boat out of the water on the landward side. Wooden walkways ran the length of both inner walls, while a beaten earth ramp down the centre gave way to the cold North Atlantic. Rickard's boat was moored on the right-hand side; the other walkway was clear.
Upright beams held the shell of the building together and supported the sagging roof. To one of the beams on the walkway opposite the boat, Rickard cuffed Imogen. He fed the cuffs behind the beam, then snapped her wrists into them. A cross-beam held the cuffs from slipping down, forcing the unconscious woman to stand upright. If she awoke her position would be torturous.
Rickard dumped his kit in the boat, the dart gun stripped down now and the delivery driver's uniform finished with. Both would be sunk to the bottom of the bay when he travelled to Trenton. His sidearm was holstered in his shoulder rig because he wouldn't need it for what he now planned. From a holder on his belt, he pulled out a small ceramic object with a switch on the side. He slid the switch, baring three inches of razor-sharp ceramic blade. When security measures would detect a gun or other metal weapon, Rickard counted on the undetectable ceramic knife to keep him armed.
'It's not a machete, but it will do,' he said to the unresponsive woman.
When mutilating the others, he'd employed various tools on them: guns, knives, a machete, even a meat cleaver to decapitate one of his victims, but the intimacy that the small ceramic knife brought gave him the most satisfaction. He'd last used the knife on Jessica Case and her father. If he checked he was pretty sure that he would find traces of their blood caught in the mechanism.
He jabbed a hypodermic syringe in Imogen's arm and depressed the plunger. Then he held the knife ready because her return to wakefulness would be almost instantaneous.
He watched her eyelids flicker, then her head snapped up and she was staring directly at the blade of the knife. A siren song began to rise in her throat. Prepared for this, Rickard jammed a wadded rag into her mouth.
'Spit it out and I'll have to gag you in a different way. I'll cut out your tongue.'
She shuddered, pulling against the cuffs. Her right shoulder was twisted painfully towards him. It wasn't for her comfort that he reached out and stood her upright again. He wanted a good view of her. Taking hold of the neckline of her top, he sliced down with the knife. The ceramic blade was sharper than any steel and it parted the material like he was slicing a sheet of paper.
'Nice-looking body,' he noted. 'You keep yourself fit and toned. That's good.'
Behind the gag, Imogen yelled something, but her words were just a garbled shriek.
'That was supposed to be a compliment,' Rickard said.
He slid the knife under the front of her bra, snicked through the elastic band and exposed her breasts. Imogen yelled again and kicked out at him with both feet, one at a time like she was climbing a steep flight of stairs. One foot caught him sharply on his shin, but the other missed entirely as he skipped out of the way. Imogen twisted her head to follow him and he could see the veins thrumming in her throat like harp strings.
Rickard laughed at her. Wiggling the knife at her, he swayed along with it, as though caught in a slow dance. 'I thought it might take a little more to get a rise out of you.'
Imogen gnawed on the rag as if it
was a tough piece of meat. She pushed it free with her tongue, spitting and retching. 'Who are you? What do you want from me?'
Rickard allowed his earlier threat to drop. He would get more out of her if she could talk. 'I want you to see me.'
'I see you. You're a maniac; that's what I see!'
'I need you to look deeper than that, Imogen.'
She wrenched at the cuffs again, the metal crossbar digging into flesh and wood with equal ferocity. The support beam creaked ominously and dust and old shingles sifted down, pitter-pattering in the water. Rickard pounced, grabbing her chin in his left hand and guiding the blade very close to her eyes with the other. 'Stop that. Stop struggling or I'll blind you.'
Imogen went very still, but there was something in her posture that made Rickard step back. Imogen nodded at the knife. 'You do that, you pig. But how will I see you then?'
Rickard stared at her. His breath came heavy, in time with the lapping tide. He allowed the blade to drop by his side. He took another step back, his heels very close to the edge of the walkway.
'Tell me, Imogen. Tell me and maybe I'll let you live.'
She shook her head. 'You're going to kill me whatever I say.'
He folded the blade away and slipped the holder into the pouch on his belt. He showed her his empty hands. 'You have my word.'
'That maybe I'll live?'
'I can't offer more. Satisfy my curiosity, Imogen. Tell me the truth and I will consider what happens next.'
Rickard watched her. He saw the machinations of hope and denial and mistrust make war in her mind. Hope seemed the stronger emotion.
'What am I supposed to see in you?'
'My true essence,' Rickard said.
Tears welled in the corners of her eyes and she shook her head slowly. 'I don't know what you mean.'