Dead of Night [Full Book]

by Paul J. Teague

  Metre by metre, Jack began to scan the area around him. To his side, a body. Ahead of him the lorry lights shone out into the car park. To his right, the vehicles belonging to his pursuers. In the heart of them, his wife, lying still on the ground, as motionless as Calum.

  Jack wanted to cry. He’d had enough. He was wrung out. And now the horror of what had happened was beginning to break its way through the flow of adrenalin. He’d let them take him now. Whatever it was they wanted, was it worth all these deaths? And who was he to be worthy of living when so many innocent lives had been lost?

  They’d take what they wanted and kill him. He saw that now. Nobody was living through this. Whatever they were after, it was of a high enough value for them to kill. Jack was ready for it. He hadn’t the will to fight any more, not with Lucy gone.

  The man approaching him was carrying a gun – of course he was – and he looked confident and cocksure. They knew they’d got him. They were clearly used to killing, it didn’t seem to concern them.

  He could see that bitch Rosa. She was responsible for Lucy’s death. That bullet had been meant for her. And now must have shot his own wife.

  Olaf was almost upon Jack now. He would have to make up his mind. Would he go quietly, or would he fight it out until the end? He wanted to rest, he needed it to be over now.

  He’d forgotten Hamish. What about Hamish? He’d be orphaned before he even reached his first birthday. He’d never know his parents.

  Olaf was at the front of the lorry signalling him to open up. Jack pressed the button to activate the central locking; he needed to be alone with his thoughts a little longer.

  ‘Open the fucking door or I’ll put a bullet through your head!’

  Jack was confident enough to know that they wanted him alive, for the time being at least. He was Patient Zero in all of this, they wanted him for something important. It had to be to do with pharmaceuticals.

  Ahead of him, he saw a movement. He leant over Calum’s body and changed the headlights to full beam. Olaf held up his hand to shield his eyes, cursing Jack once again. The gun was raised directly at Jack’s side of the windscreen.

  There was a radio crackle in the lorry cab. He watched as Olaf responded to the call. Jack could hear the conversation – of course, he had Blake’s walkie-talkie! He’d dropped it on the cab floor. He rummaged around trying to figure out where it was. It was with Blake’s gun, Calum had stored them safely before he’d started up the lorry.

  —Steady, Olaf. I want him alive. We’ve got him now. He’ll come out in good time.

  The voice was older, more considered and confident. Whoever this was, he was in charge. Then, a few feet away from whoever it was speaking, a voice. A familiar one.

  —Jack? Calum?

  It was Lucy. He could see her right ahead. She was dazed, but moving. She must have only been knocked out by the fall from the lorry. Rosa had rushed straight over to her, gun at the ready, always alert.

  Jack found the walkie-talkie and pressed the orange button at its side.

  —Lucy! I’m in the lorry. I’m coming to get you!

  Olaf had climbed up to the footplate now and was beating the glass on the side window, determined to get in.

  Jack pulled Calum’s body over towards the middle of the cab, dropping him into the gap between the seats. He was heavy, a dead weight, and it took all of Jack’s strength to move him.

  There was a crash as Olaf smashed the glass on the passenger’s side window with the handle of his gun and thrust his arm inside the cab. The angle was awkward, but he was fumbling for the button which would manually unlock the door.

  ‘Fuck it, fuck you!’

  Jack calmly took Olaf’s arm as it thrashed about at his side, and pushed it deep and hard into the splintered glass. Olaf screamed, but continued to fight. Jack rotated the now lacerated arm, twisted it, then pushed down as hard as he could onto Olaf’s elbow. He felt the bones crunch. Was it broken or dislocated? He didn’t care. This is what psychologists mean when they talk about fight or flight. They’d forced him into a fight now, and he was going to take it to its conclusion.

  Jack climbed over Calum’s body and sat in the driving seat. The engine was still running, the handbrake off and the gears in neutral. Olaf was standing in front of the lorry clutching his injured arm, a stream of expletives coming from his mouth, many of them in German.

  Lucy was now on her feet, Rosa was holding her arm. He placed his foot on the accelerator. He’d expected the pedals to be bigger, but sitting in the driver’s seat, it felt much like a car. He revved the engine. It was automatic so he didn’t have to work out how to operate the gears. He moved the dial into Drive and the lorry slowly began to move forward. Crazed with pain, Olaf was too busy hurling abuse at him to realise what was happening. Jack seemed to recall that automatics had something called kickdown, he and Lucy had had great fun with it in their single days when they were on holiday in Greece. They’d used it to overtake other cars, it could give a real speed boost when you needed it.

  Well, Jack needed it now. Olaf had finally realised what was going on. Although the windscreen had been shattered by the shot which killed Calum, Jack was still able to look him directly in the eyes. Olaf turned to run towards the safety of his colleagues.

  ‘You won’t be able to hide over there, you little bastard!’

  Jack floored the accelerator. The vehicle was heavy, the acceleration completely different from a car. He’d expected to strike Olaf at speed, but his death was slow. The lorry struck him in the centre of the front grille. He fell onto the ground and was immediately hooked up by the lorry’s undercarriage, his head banging on the tarmac as they moved across the car park.

  His attackers were on the defensive now, heading for the safety of their vehicles. The car park was big enough for him to perform a wide turn, and as he swung the lorry round, a car drove into the car park from the motorway. When he saw what was happening, the driver slammed the car into reverse and roared back up the exit that he’d just come from.

  Call the police, call the police! was all that Jack could think of as he swung the lorry round and headed for the vehicles abandoned in the middle of the parking area. He lined up the lorry, pushed down on the accelerator and aimed directly at the open door of one of the vans. He smashed straight into it, wrenching it from its hinges. It slid across the tarmac to land on the verge. He made a sharp turn, clipping a curb and dislodging Olaf’s shredded body. He was herding them away from the vehicles, giving those bastards a taste of their own medicine.

  To his side he saw Rosa breaking away with Lucy and an older man. Damn it, that was the guy Clive had been talking to in town that lunchtime. Jack did a double-take. It definitely was him. Clive! Had Clive landed them in this? Jesus, Clive was in his house right now, with his child.

  Jack straightened out the lorry, aimed at the vehicles once again and smashed off another one of the open doors. The van pivoted awkwardly and this time the door stayed on its hinges. At the end of the car park he turned and took his foot off the gas. His two pursuers had seen what had happened to Olaf, they were cautious now, taking cover at the side of their damaged vans, anxious not to get caught out in the open. He could see Stefan, still bloodied from their earlier encounter.

  Jack looked ahead. Lucy had been taken into the café and was sitting at one of the tables with Rosa at her side. Rosa was carrying a gun. The older man was speaking to somebody on a mobile device, looking agitated.

  Jack leant over, moved the walkie-talkie closer and began to rev the engine. The two men took cover between the vans, expecting him to ram them. Good, if they thought he’d gone crazy it might serve him well. And, in a way, he had.

  Jack thought through what he was going to do next. He made certain he knew out how to put the vehicle into reverse. He checked the café entrance, confirming one last time that it was set in light metal, rather than brick. Then he moved the lorry forward.

  Jack swung the lorry towards the two vans. He was b
luffing, buying himself time. The two men took cover, waiting for an impact, but Jack had no intention of causing further damage to the vehicles.

  He saw the moment that Rosa realised what was going on, as he careered away from the cluster of cars and directly towards the café window. Jack wanted them to think he was coming straight at them on some kind of suicide mission. As he neared the café, he turned the steering wheel to head straight for the entrance doors. He took his foot off the accelerator and clicked the button on the walkie-talkie.

  —Remember India, Lucy. Remember the goat. Be ready.

  He prayed that she would remember. They were much younger then, on holiday, deliriously in love. She’d been late for the tuk-tuk outside the hotel and the driver got so impatient he started off without her. She came out of the hotel door to see the tuk-tuk driving off. To Jack’s amazement she ran alongside the vehicle, leapt onto its side, almost pulling it over in the process, and glided in next to Jack. It was a cross between Steven Seagal and Sebastian Coe, a remarkable manoeuvre, even more so because she’d had to leap over a goat to reach the moving vehicle. They’d laughed about that many times. He hoped she remembered, of course she would, it was one of their shared memories, a safe place they could return to whenever they seemed to be drawing apart.

  The lorry crashed through the glass doorway. The flimsy metallic framework offered no resistance to the front of the vehicle, which fitted snuggly between the brick walls which had housed the entrance doors. Fragments of shattered glass covered the floor and the tables. Rosa and the older man cowered, giving Lucy the vital seconds that she needed.

  She ran faster that he remembered her doing in India. She leapt from her seat, ran across three tables and jumped from the last to land on the step of the lorry cab. She clung on as he placed the vehicle into reverse and began to pull out of the café.

  ‘Tuck yourself in!’ he yelled at Lucy. Shit, he hadn’t thought it through. She’d get caught on the walls. But with a superhuman effort, Lucy hauled herself up through the cabin window and launched herself into the lorry, her head resting on Calum’s blood-soaked legs.

  The lorry roared backwards, narrowly missing one of the men who’d finally dared to come out of hiding from the vehicles to their rear.

  ‘Hold on!’ Jack shouted. The lorry was going too fast. He had no idea how it would handle with such a long trailer at the back. He slammed on the brakes, moved the gears back into Drive, then headed directly for the exit.

  ‘Are you okay? Luce, are you alright? I thought I’d killed you!’

  Lucy sat up. She had seen so much death and violence that night that she barely registered the sight of Calum’s body.

  ‘I’m fine. Hell, Jack my head hurts. I think I was out cold for a few minutes in the car park, I whacked my head when we fell. That was some bloody rescue!’

  For a moment, they didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She reached over, put her arms round his waist and rested her head on his shoulder. Jack did his best to keep his eyes on the road.

  ‘Thank God you’re okay. I thought I’d killed you. You fell from the cab just as I shot the gun. I really thought I’d got you.’

  ‘They want your fingerprints, Jack. They need you alive. What on earth are you doing up there in Aberdeen?’

  ‘They want my fingerprints? That must be to do with the biometric security project I’m working on. But it’s only a working model. I have no idea why they want to access it.’

  ‘Are we clear?’ Lucy suddenly asked. ‘Anybody behind us?’

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  ‘Pull over. I’ll be fast.’

  Jack stopped on the hard shoulder and Lucy opened the passenger door. Putting her whole body into it, she pushed Calum out so that he fell awkwardly onto the verge below.

  ‘I’m sorry, Calum, but I’m not sharing this cab with a corpse. Let’s get away from here.’

  Jack did as he was told, the lorry jerking as he did his best to catch the feel of the pedals. It was all he could do to see what was ahead of them, the windscreen was badly damaged.

  ‘I think we might have another problem,’ he said. ‘That man back there, the older one. Did you catch his name?’

  ‘It’s Franz. He’s German I think. He’s the guy in charge. He’s the one pulling the strings. Why?’

  ‘I’ve seen him before. In Aberdeen. He was talking to Clive—’

  ‘Let’s get off the motorway here,’ she interrupted him. ‘We need to shake them off.’

  Lucy was right. They’d reached a slip road. There was no point staying on the motorway. Jack pulled the lorry off the carriageway.

  She was studying him intently.

  ‘What’s this about Clive? You mean Clive knows that man back there? For Christ’s sake, Jack. Are you telling me that Clive is behind all this?’

  ‘I don’t know, Lucy, I just don’t know. But I got a pretty good look at that guy Franz, I’m certain it’s him. And then with Matt Rackham involved too, it’s got to be connected with what I’m doing in Aberdeen.’

  ‘Damn it, Jack. We’ve left our son with that arsehole Clive!’

  Jack drove in silence for a few moments, thinking it through. If Franz had been talking to Clive, maybe they were working together. Clive was a jerk, but really? How could he be involved with all of this?

  ‘We’ve got to get Hamish away from him, Jack. For all we know, that’s part of the plan. What if they’re holding him hostage.’

  Jack couldn’t bear to consider the possibility. It was more than he cope with.

  They were driving along an A-road now. They had to be nearing civilisation soon. Jack checked the mirrors and then he checked them again to make sure he’d seen correctly.

  ‘How the hell can they know which route we took?’ he shouted, punching his fist on the dashboard of the cab.

  ‘They’re not behind us are they? Please tell me they’re not behind us already?’

  ‘Unless somebody else is driving a van minus a driver’s-side door at four o’ clock in the morning, then, yes, they’ve found us. How the hell did they do that?’

  ‘It’s that bloody tracker of yours! I’ve told you before to stop broadcasting everything that you’re doing. If they can find you on social media with that damn wristband on, they’ll know exactly where we are. It might not be with pinpoint accuracy, but it’s close enough to know that we turned off the motorway.’

  Jack felt himself go sweaty. It made sense. They would have known that he was doing the run that weekend and that he would be wearing his GPS tracking device. And, if he really was involved in all of this, Clive might have told them about it. Is that how they knew where to find them in the woods. Had they been tracking him all day?

  ‘Here, take it!’ he snapped at Lucy, angry with himself for being so stupid. She had told him over and over again to watch his privacy settings. He’d taken no notice, he had thought it was harmless.

  He looked in the wing mirror.

  ‘They’re holding back,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they want us to know that they’re there. Bit of a giveaway, the missing door.’

  ‘I’m throwing this thing out of the window. I’m sick to death of it. If this is responsible for what’s been happening, I’ll ... I’ll ...’

  ‘You’ll what, Lucy?’

  Jack looked over at her.

  ‘You’ll leave me? Is that what’s on the tip of your tongue? Do you really want to have this conversation right now, Luce? I can think of better times.’

  ‘Woah, be careful!’

  In his anger, Jack had swung over to the other side of the road, quickly correcting himself.

  ‘No, of course I don’t mean that—’

  ‘What do you mean, Luce? Because I’ve been treading on eggshells for weeks now, hoping you’ll snap out of whatever it is that’s bugging you. Look, I get it. We lost a child. Helen, we lost Helen. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about her. I could cry forever just thinking about her. But we have to go on, Lucy, for
Hamish’s sake. He deserves to have two parents who are present for him. He didn’t die, you know – we still have one child who needs us.’

  Lucy began to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry. This isn’t the time, I know.’

  ‘What better time is there, Jack? We’ve been putting off this conversation for months. Look, I’m unhappy, but it’s more than that, I’ve been depressed. I’ve even thought about killing myself. I feel so alone when you’re in Aberdeen. I can’t stop Hamish crying. He knows I don’t love him.’

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ Jack replied, more conciliatory now. ‘I know you don’t mean that. He knows you love him. He senses that you’re unsure, it’s that he picks up on. You mean the world to him, Luce, and you mean everything to me. I need you to—’

  ‘Snap out of it? Is that what you were going to say, Jack? You want me to just snap out of it? Well, it’s not quite as simple as that—’

  ‘They’re getting closer,’ Jack interrupted, looking in his mirror. ‘There are two of them now. The one at the back has his lights off, but I glimpsed him in the street lights.’

  ‘Where are we?’ Lucy asked. ‘We can’t be a million miles from home.’

  ‘I reckon thirty maybe forty miles now,’ Jack replied. ‘We’re about to come into a village. I’ve got an idea.’

  ‘Whatever it is, you’d better make a start on it quickly, this road is narrowing and we’re going to find ourselves stuck soon.’

  Lucy held Jack’s wristband in her hand. She was about to throw it out of the window when a sudden rush of sympathy for her husband made her place it back in her pocket.

  ‘Can you turn this thing off?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s in the privacy settings,’ Jack answered. ‘I’m not sure you can do it directly from the unit. Throw it away, I don’t mind. If that thing is what’s got us into this mess, then I’ll throw it away myself.’

  ‘I’ll hang onto it a bit longer. They know where we are now and it might come in handy later. We might be able to use it to send them up the wrong track.’