Reports from Brazil seemed to indicate that everyone was dead – the research team, the tribe, the men of the hired security team, and John Lee himself. It was all a bit confusing, but it seemed that a local drug gang armed with SAMs had something to do with it. And now Dunford and Bakula were dead too, before they could start asking any awkward questions.
When she’d originally heard about the report from Guzman and organized the research mission, it had been with all good intentions; but as she’d discussed it – in disguised terms, of course – with certain people, she realized how much money could be generated by such a discovery.
And then she had been approached by a man who claimed to represent the world’s top five or six pharmaceutical companies, whose combined value was worth over a trillion dollars. They had, somehow, caught hold of rumors surrounding this secretive research trip, and at first, she’d thought they might be offering to help fund the expedition; but it quickly became clear that this was something very, very different.
They were, the man had told her, scared. Terrified, actually, that the team would discover something. They knew that if their own company was the one to develop a product from the discovery – if there was one – then the rewards would be fabulous, undreamed-of. But if it was one of their competitors, then their own companies would be ruined. After all, who would need drugs to battle disease, if there was no disease? It was a scenario that was nightmarish to the management of these companies and – even if these rumors were just rumors – they had come together as one and decided that the danger was too great, that they must act.
She remembered her first meeting, when – after her initial thoughts about them offering to help fund the trip were proved false – she’d then assumed instead that she was just being warned off sending the team in the first place. But then it transpired that they wanted the team to go, they wanted the tribe to be found – and then they wanted it to be eradicated, wiped clear off the face of the earth.
The original plan was for the team to locate the tribe, send information back to the university – which Darrow would then feed back to her contact – and then for a “security team” to be sent to the given location for the “clean-up” operation.
The first offer of one million had already been tempting, but when she understood that some of her own people were going to die, she’d managed to bump the figure up to ten. Was it immoral to take the money? She didn’t know, but what she did know was that ten million dollars was ten million dollars, and who could argue with that?
And then the plan had started to go wrong. The team had gone missing, and nobody had any idea where they were, or how to find them. Her contact told her that the companies he represented were considering sending in a larger force to raze the entire area – and just blame the resulting destruction on an underground explosion, possibly due to illegal, unauthorized oil prospectors. But then Tom Bakula had thought about hiring John Lee, after reading a piece on him in Time magazine.
And so the plan had been changed. Lee would go in, and – when he tracked them down and reported their location – the word would then be sent for the security team to move in. But Lee could never know what the real aim was, hence the subterfuge with the watch, which had been arranged by Darrow’s contact. They had lifted Garfield’s fingerprints from glasses found in her home, and created the mechanism by which to activate the beacon when she was found. The inscription on the back, Darrow had thought, was a nice little touch.
The security team was monitoring radar and communications at all times, and there were several methods they were relying on to find the lost researchers, but in the end, it was the watch that did it.
And now they were all dead – including Dunford and Bakula, who had been killed to tie up the loose ends; any potential “cure” for disease was lost forever; and Sylvia Darrow had ten million dollars in her bank account, a possible Deanship in the Biological Sciences Division coming her way, and the eternal gratitude of Big Pharma.
It was, she thought as she passed through the grey city streets, good to be Sylvia Darrow. Yes, sir, it was good to be Sylvia.
Just then, her car rolled slowly to a halt by the side of the road. She looked out of her window, wondering what the problem was; they were nowhere near the hotel, where she was headed for her final meeting with her contact, the car having been sent to collect her by the big firms.
“Why are we stopping?” she asked the driver. “Where are we?”
The driver turned in his seat, taking off his chauffeur’s cap and sunglasses, and Darrow’s blood ran cold.
The driver was John Lee.
Then her head snapped around as the door opened next to her, and she almost cried out at the supposedly dead faces she saw there, climbing into the limousine next to her.
Gale Rhodes. Eva Turner. Lisa Garfield.
Up in the front, she watched as John Lee got out of the driving seat, and Greg Karlson climbed in to take the wheel.
She looked at the three women next to her, their faces hard, as Karlson pulled out into the traffic. She went for the door handle, but it was too late. Locked.
And then she saw something appear in Lisa Garfield’s hands, something small and black, and then it touched her body and she felt herself convulsing in agony as the Taser shut down her nervous system.
“To Sylvia,” Darrow heard Garfield say, just before she lost consciousness. “With love.”
Lee strolled down the streets of Chicago, body still aching from his recent ordeal but already on the mend.
He didn’t know what the remains of the research team were going to do with Sylvia Darrow, but it would be nothing the woman didn’t deserve, he was sure.
He also wondered if they would ever manage to do anything with the solitary flower they had managed to bring home from the rainforest. He hoped they would; it would, at least, give meaning to the losses that had been incurred over the past few days, and honor the memory of the fallen.
Phoenix joined him from under the awning of a nearby shop, linking arms with him as they walked down the sidewalk, a twinkle in her eye, a smile on her face.
“Can I invite you for a drink?” she said, and John smiled back.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
The strolled together toward the nearest café, Phoenix’s head buried in his shoulder, and he started to feel a vague sense of contentment.
Then he felt the cellphone buzzing in his pocket, and he fished it out. Phoenix looked at him with a raised eyebrow, as Lee checked the caller ID.
“It’s Alex,” he said.
“Oh, no,” Phoenix said. “Don’t answer it.”
He paused, as the phone continued to ring. “It might be important,” he said, to be met with a warning look; Phoenix obviously didn’t want their little date to be interrupted, for any reason.
He answered anyway. “Alex,” he said, “how are you?”
“Good thanks, John,” Grayson replied. “Look, I’ll cut to the chase. I’ve got another job for you.”
Lee looked at Phoenix, who was still giving him that warning look, brow furrowed. He knew it was too soon after the last one, that he hadn’t fully recovered, that he needed the break; and then he flashed back to Iraq, what he had done there, and then to images of his wife and daughter, what had happened to them, and made his mind up in an instant.
“Go ahead,” he told her, ignoring Phoenix’s pained expression. “I’m ready.”
THE END
. . . but John Lee will return in 2018!
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THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN
J.T. Brannan
“The soldiers who didn’t come back were the heroes. It’s a roll of the dice. If a bullet has your name on it, you’re a hero. If you hear a bullet go by, you’re a survivor”
- Bob Feller
“Sometimes when I help people, other people die”
- Colt Ryder
Prologue
Nuevo Laredo was hell on earth.
It had been years since I’d been out of the States, and this little Mexican border town was doing nothing to reignite my love of foreign travel; I’d had nothing but trouble since arriving here just four short days before.
To be fair, though, I had come looking for it.
And I was in real trouble now – blindfolded and bound, I had no real idea where I was, even if I was still in Nuevo Laredo. All I knew was that I was in a building with corrugated metal walls and a smell that took me straight back to my last real job, working as a meatpacker in the largest slaughterhouse in the Midwest. Over twenty thousand bovine carcasses were processed every day in that terrible place, and the smells that came from the rotten meat that accumulated there had been enough to make a man sick. It had reminded me of Iraq. And now, thinking about it, Nuevo Laredo kind of reminded me of Baghdad; and trust me when I say that wasn’t a good thing.
As my nostrils reacted to the stench of the place, I wondered if I was in a slaughterhouse once more and silently cursed; after punching out my boss I’d promised to never set foot in such a place again. But what could I do? My hands were tied – literally.
If it was a slaughterhouse, it was clear that the owners didn’t believe in the benefits of refrigeration – the place was like a sauna, the heat melting my bones and making it hard to breathe. No wonder the meat was rancid.
The blow came suddenly, out of nowhere, and knocked my head back hard. My skull collided with the metal wall behind me; it felt like it maybe loosened a few teeth as well.
I shook my head to get some of my senses back, my body instinctively curling up in a vain effort to protect myself. I’d had worse over the years though. Much worse.
Besides, if they were going to kill me, I wouldn’t be wearing a blindfold. They wouldn’t care if I saw them.
As long as I was wearing the blindfold, I told myself, I’d be okay.
The situation was far from pleasant though, the beating starting now in earnest, fists and feet flying in from everywhere. At least if you can see the punches and kicks coming – even if your hands and legs are tied, as mine were – you can tense the right bit of your body in time, take some of the shock out of the blow. With your eyes covered, it makes things a whole lot worse. The punches and kicks come from all angles, hitting all over your body, and the only chance you have is to tense up everything, all the time it’s happening. But that’s almost impossible, so you tend to relax without meaning to – and then they hit you again.
It wasn’t all bad though – one of the punches had elicited a grunt of pain from one of my tormentors. He tried to cover it up, not wanting to show weakness, but I caught it loud and clear. I might have been blindfolded, but my ears were working just fine.
I knew the guy must have cut his knuckles on my teeth. More fool him for not wearing gloves; I always do when I’m on the other end of this routine. The fist isn’t exactly the best weapon in the world – the bones are tiny and easy to break, and the skin is too thinly spread over those bones to make it anything other than a poor choice as an impact tool. But it seems like a natural thing to do, and people are slaves to their instincts.
‘Tell us,’ said one of the men, not the one who’d just hurt himself; and I amused myself imagining the other guy in the corner, nursing his bleeding knuckles and trying not to cry. ‘Tell us who sent you, and we can stop all this,’ the voice said again, his English heavily accented with the singsong Mexican lilt that betrayed his local background.
I wondered briefly if he was being serious. If I told them, would they stop? It was possible; after all, I was a nobody, a hired hand. They weren’t interested in me, only in who was behind me.
At the end of the day though, their promises didn’t matter; there was no way in hell I’d talk, no matter what they said. It’s not that I’m immune to pain and suffering – although I’ve experienced so much over the years that I can probably handle it better than most – but that this interrogation was too crude to break me. It was just a bit of roughing up, maybe more of a warning than anything else. And I still had the blindfold on.
I didn’t answer, just spat out a mouthful of blood; I wasn’t sure if a crown came out with it as well.
‘Tough guy,’ the man’s voice said, very close to me now, so close that I could feel the pepper and nicotine stench of his breath. ‘Tough guy, you’re gonna tell us everything, sooner or later.’
He was wrong; dead wrong. I wasn’t going to tell him anything, and they weren’t going to do anything too bad to me in return.
Then I felt the man’s hand go to my face, grip the blindfold and rip it off.
I was momentarily blinded again, only this time by the light as it assaulted my rested retinas, its intensity magnified by the hours of darkness that had preceded it.
But the damage to my eyes wasn’t what worried me, as I took in the blurry shadows of the men stood around me.
No, the damage to my eyes might not even matter for much longer.
There were four men stood around me, plus one other off to the side nursing his damaged hand. They were tough-looking guys, the type who’ve seen a lifetime of violence and were completely inured to it.
Some people tell me I have the same look myself.
But it wasn’t the sight of the men which scared me; it was the nature of the building itself, its secrets now laid bare.
It turned out that I was in a slaughterhouse, just not the meat-packing kind; all around me, through the dusty heat-haze, I could see bloody, broken human bodies, the life beaten and tortured right out of them.
Some of the corpses were incomplete, hands or even entire limbs missing. Some bodies were missing their heads.
And to make matters worse, no effort had been made to clean up the mess; blood lay in congealed pools everywhere through the concrete-floored, metal-walled charnel house, and some of the dead bodies must have been there for some time, insects devouring the flesh. Eggs had been laid in the rotting human meat, larvae born inside the body, maggots emerging to consume what was left.
At least the source of the rancid stench was no longer a mystery.
One of the men walked away then, to a nearby table littered with tools of the trade, all far more effective than the fist.
My stomach turned as he strolled back towards me, a small chainsaw now in his hands. The others started shouting at me in Spanish, spitting obscenities in my face, encouraging the other man to get started.
The man nodded at them and grinned through a mouthful of gold and empty spaces, one hand pulling the cord, the other steadying the chainsaw as it roared to life.
So this was it – captured and imprisoned in a drug cartel’s secret little torture palace, about to be carved up and left for the critters.
I shook my head as I thought again of the young girl I’d been sent south of the border to find, saddened and angry that it was all over, her parents never to find the closure they so badly needed.
My blindfold was off.
I was going to die.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.T. Brannan is the author of the Amazon bestselling political thriller series featuring Mark Cole, as well as the high-concept thrillers ORIGIN (translated into eight languages in over thirty territories) and EXTINCTION (his latest all-action novel from Headline Publishing), in addition to the new action series, featuring John Lee as THE EXTRACTOR.
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN – the first novel to feature Colt Ryder – was nominated for the 2016 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award.
Currently serving in the British Army Reserves, J.T. Brannan is a former national Karate champion and bouncer.
He now writes full-time, and teaches martial arts in Harrogate, in the North of England, where he lives with his two young children.
He is currently working on the next novel in the bestselling Colt Ryder series, as well as furth
er books in the Mark Cole and John Lee series.
You can find him at www.jtbrannan.com and www.jtbrannanbooks.blogspot.com, on Twitter @JTBrannan_, and on Facebook at jtbrannanbooks.
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
The Colt Ryder series:
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR HUNT
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR ESCAPE
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR CONTRACT
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR BREAKOUT
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MURDER
The Mark Cole series:
STOP AT NOTHING
WHATEVER THE COST
BEYOND ALL LIMITS
NEVER SAY DIE
PLEDGE OF HONOR
THE LONE PATRIOT
AGAINST ALL LIMITS
Alternative Mark Cole thriller:
SEVEN DAY HERO
Other Novels:
THE EXTRACTOR
ORIGIN
EXTINCTION
TIME QUEST
Short Story:
DESTRUCTIVE THOUGHTS
THE EXTRACTOR: When all else fails, it is time to call in . . . The Extractor Page 15