by Conrad Jones
“Yes, Major. I have a problem with leaving eyewitnesses behind when it’s a clear breach of protocol.” Adams flushed red as he spoke. He knew that his behaviour in the field would be questioned when the unit arrived back at base, and he thought it was best to put his side forward before anyone else did.
“This is the Terrorist Task Force – we don’t have protocol.” Tank laughed as he spoke but Adams could see the venom in his eyes was very real. “When were you told that we kill kids?”
“He was an armed militia member, it doesn’t matter how old he was.”
“Oh it matters all right.” Tank stepped closer to him, aggression flaring in his eyes. Adams wouldn’t last two seconds against a giant like Tank and he knew it. “You see that’s the difference between us and them Adams: we can take out the bad guys without becoming like them.”
“I’ll deal with this John, please go and join your unit,” the Major said without looking at him. Tank smiled at Adams and turned towards the door. There was no love lost between the two men. Tank didn’t rate him and Adams knew that. It was only a matter of time before he was dumped back into the regular army, which was something that he was desperately trying to avoid.
“He compromised the mission, Sir. The boy could have escaped and alerted the militia to our presence in the city.” Adams dived in at the deep end.
“I’ll be straight with you, Adams: I wanted you to be given your papers months ago. You’re a good soldier, but you’re not a team player and the whole unit knows that. John Tankersley was the one who wanted to give you another chance and he picked you for that operation to see how you would respond to extreme pressure. Unfortunately you have shown your true colours and as such I’ll be arranging for you to be transferred back to your regiment on our return.”
“I followed procedure, Sir, Tankersley didn’t,” Adams snapped.
“John Tankersley is the best soldier in the best unit in the best army on the planet, Adams, and you’re not even the best soldier in this room at the moment. You’re dismissed.” The Major brushed past him and opened the door. “Join the others for the refreshments. I’ll keep my decision secret until we reach base to keep you from any embarrassment.”
Adams frowned and stepped out of the room into the grey metal corridor. It was one of thousands of corridors which made up nearly two hundred kilometres below deck. They threaded their way through the huge aircraft carrier. The Major followed behind Adams and walked with a spring in his step, as a good paratrooper should.
“It’s a fabulous vessel this, don’t you think?” The Major made chitchat as they walked as if nothing had happened.
“I haven’t really thought about it, Major.”
“Did you know that she has two nuclear reactors which power her and she doesn’t need to be refuelled for twenty years? Amazing.” The Major shook his head at the ingenuity of the engineers.
“Fascinating, Major.”
“Fascinating indeed, Adams, now let’s have that beer.” They entered the mess hall which was only one of seventeen others. It was filled with enough long tables to seat five hundred service men at one sitting. The task force members sat to the right hand side of the mess hall. Some of them were sitting down and talking excitedly across the long table, while others were gathered beneath a flat screen television, watching the football results from home.
“Any results?” The Major asked as he helped himself to a cold Budweiser.
“Liverpool beat Chelsea four nil again,” Grace replied. The sport finished and a review of the main news was playing. Tank looked at the Major to see if there was anything he wanted to say about Adams but he remained impassive. There would be time for all that when they got back to base.
“Have you got any fishing trips planned when we get home, Major?” Grace made conversation.
The Major was focused on the news and he didn’t reply. Grace followed his gaze and noted the picture of two blond children on the screen. There was a news conference being set up, with a blown-up picture of the children behind it. A distraught woman was talking silently to the cameras because the volume was turned down and her red-eyed partner was seated next to her, but an unusual distance away. They didn’t appear to be united in their grief.
“Major, have you got any fishing trips planned?”
“Be quiet, turn up the volume on the television.” The Major raised his voice and everyone stopped talking.
“What?”
“I said turn up the volume on the television.” The muscles in his jaw line were pulsating wildly and he had a panicked look on his face. The volume was turned up and the last few words of a distraught mother’s appeal for her children to be returned to her played out across the mess hall.
“Jesus Christ Almighty!” The Major looked like he was going to fall over. His mouth was open, as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t find his voice. His face turned ashen and his eyes glazed over with a liquid film. He reached for the table in front of him for support, the muscles in his wiry arms standing firm beneath the skin.
“What is it, Major?” Tank moved to his side and poured a glass of iced water.
“Jesus Christ Almighty!” The Major whispered as he looked around at the stirring faces. He felt like he was in a terrible dream, one from which he had to escape from at all costs, but his limbs were filled with concrete and he couldn’t run away.
“What happened then?” Tank asked Grace but she just frowned and shook her head.
“He was watching the news then he flipped,” she replied quietly. She touched the Major’s shoulder tenderly, his shoulders sagging beneath her touch.
“Major, what’s wrong?”
“The missing twins on the news… I have to get home immediately,” he rambled. The colour was returning to his cheeks and he seemed to stiffen up as he composed himself.
“I don’t understand, Major,” Tank said. He looked at the screen and recognised the woman immediately. His eyes widened in shock as he digested the headlines at the bottom of the screen.
“The missing twins that were on the news… The woman making the appeal was my daughter, Hayley, and the twins are my grandchildren.”
Chapter Ten
Taking the twins had been one of the easier abductions that he had executed. Things had fallen into place nicely: the parents arguing and then separating, combined with his decoy of course, which was a stroke of genius. He’d stolen the idea from an American serial killer. It worked like a dream by luring the father away from his children. The other adults were too preoccupied by their drink-fuelled passion to be of any consequence. Carrying the sleeping bag through the woods with the unconscious twins inside was physically taxing but adrenalin and pure greed drove him onwards to his waiting van. The van was a white Ford, one of millions that congest Britain’s roads every day. The journey home was uneventful and he stopped only to re-medicate the twins and to change the plates. He swapped the registration plates three times to prevent the police tracking him via the motorway’s closed circuit television cameras. Each set of plates matched a Ford of the exact make and model he was driving.
He had a caravan parked up in a quiet lay-by a few hours away. Anyone curious enough to have stopped their car on the quiet back road would have been satisfied that it was a tired tourist resting on a long journey, or a traveller stealing a free berth for the night. The bland caravan was inconspicuous enough when he hooked it up to the back of his Transit and an ideal place to stay one step ahead of the law enforcement agencies. He smiled as he watched his portable television. The televised appeal for information by the parents had just finished and the child taker knew that his internet inbox would be filling up with messages. The buyer and the unsuccessful bidders would now realise that the merchandise had been acquired and the bidding war would begin again in earnest. The buyer would be furious of course – after all a price had been agreed and a deal had been brokered, but he wasn’t selling microwave ovens and there was no integrity in this world. It always happened that way in
this business. Interested parties were sceptical as to whether the children would actually materialise or if it was another internet fraud. The early bidding reflected their scepticism. There was nothing like a good televised appeal to whet their appetites and stoke up the bidding war again. The same thing had happened with the last four children that he had taken, and the price more than doubled once the second round of bidding opened. It was the same bidders that usually competed. He had customers from four different continents but the buyer this time was also the highest bidder the last time around. In fact, they had mentioned that they wanted twins, specifically mixed-sex twins, and that they would pay handsomely for them. They were also kind enough to give him the details of the family. Jack wondered why at first, but an order is an order. It was only when he realised how valuable they were that he decided to renege on the deal and put them on general sale.
He checked the pictures that he’d taken with his digital camera. There were twelve in total, three of the twins sleeping in their pyjamas and nine of them naked. The child taker was tempted to indulge his own sexual desires but the twins were too valuable to spoil. It was difficult but he resisted the temptation. He didn’t class himself as a real paedophile because it wasn’t only prepubescent children that he liked to abuse. He wasn’t fussy who he abused: men, women or children were all the same to him. As long as they were thoroughly unhappy about what he was doing to them then he was sexually satisfied. It was ironic that he frowned upon real paedophiles as he saw them as being somehow more perverted than he was. At the end of the day, what they did with the children once he was paid was their own business. The pictures would fuel their interest further and he scanned them from the camera into his laptop, and then saved them onto a memory stick. He needed to go to a site with public internet connection facilities to send them, that way no one could trace where the upload had come from if the police discovered them online. It was forty-eight hours since the twins went missing and the newspapers and television were full of little else. Police investigations into any associated activity online would be intense and he would have to be careful.
The child taker slipped the memory stick into his pocket and slipped the laptop under his arm. He turned off the portable television. A small lamp radiated the only light in the caravan and created long shadows in the confined space. He walked from the U-shaped seating area into a small kitchenette. The curtains were closely drawn, which gave the caravan a claustrophobic feel. There was a permanent smell of must and damp which permeated the mobile dwelling. No matter how many windows he opened it always seemed to be there, lingering. He flicked off the lamp and walked towards the bedroom. The caravan vibrated in time with his footsteps. He opened the bedroom door an inch and peeped inside. The twins were sleeping like spoons in their sleeping bag. Zak had his arm across his sister, protecting her while she slept. A pink mobile gyrated above them, playing a lullaby that he didn’t recognise as it turned. The mobile had a subtle nightlight beneath it, which cast the room a pink colour. Under different circumstances it was a peaceful scene, but the twins were blissfully unaware of the terrible evil that hung over them.
The warm glow of the nightlight and the dulcet tones of the lullaby made him envious. He tried to replicate his ideal boudoir for the children he kept; somewhere that he would have liked to sleep, peaceful and safe. His own memories of childhood were nowhere near as comfortable as the scene he was looking at now. The dormitory that he shared with nineteen other boys was cold and dark and there were no lullabies playing. The only sound he remembered at night was the sobbing of his companions and the desperate cries of whichever poor boy Father Paul chose to discipline. He remembered the sound of those tormented boys vividly. It was their cries which twisted his mind irreparably. Hearing someone else suffering meant that he was safe. Father Paul would not hurt him while he was hurting another. Somewhere along the line while growing up the lessons of his abusive childhood mutated and made him the man he was today. He watched the children sleeping and a tear ran down his face. His tears were not for them. He didn’t care about them. He cried for himself. Jack closed the door gently and locked it with a key. He opened the caravan door and stepped outside into the night. The sky was visible in places, stars twinkling briefly before puffy black clouds concealed them again.
There was a fast food restaurant on the outskirts of Warrington, the nearest town, which provided free Wi-Fi for its customers. It would be the ideal place to upload the pictures for his potential customers to view. His buyer had offered twenty- five thousand Euros for each twin and a ten thousand euro bonus if they were mixed sex. With the children in his possession and the pictures online he could demand double that price at least.
“Are you going somewhere, Jack?” A gruff voice startled him as he descended the small metal steps which led down from the caravan. The dark clouds raced across a new moon, casting shadows as they blocked her radiance.
“What’s it got to do with you?” He replied. The sudden interruption of his thoughts startled him and his heart quickened. He ran his skeletal fingers through his greasy hair nervously. He couldn’t see where the voice came from but he sensed the malice in its tone. “Who the fuck are you anyway?”
“That’s very rude, Jack, considering my client is your best customer. I’m Alfie, and this is my colleague, Brian.” The man stepped from the shadows, joined by another man who appeared from the opposite side.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jack tried to sound aloof but there was tension in his voice. “I don’t have customers, I’m retired.”
“Really?” Alfie smiled. “What about the little Asian boy you sold last month, surely you remember him?”
“Go away, I don’t know you. You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.” The child taker went pale with fear. He stepped off the last step onto the grass. They were thickset men and tall too. The child taker was no fighter, and he needed to get away from them quickly. He was confused to say the least. He had moved the caravan twice in the last two days, never staying in one place for more than one night. He couldn’t understand how they had found him, but he knew that they weren’t here to socialise. Jack was careful not to give his location to anyone, especially not the people that he did business with. They were dangerous men. He took a deep breath and tried to walk past them.
“Where do you think you’re going, Jack?” A heavy blow hit him in the solar plexus, and he creased up. The wind was knocked out of him by the force of the blow. “Now then, my client thinks that you might renege on the deal again. He wasn’t best pleased the last time around, and so we’ve taken a few precautions to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.” Jack felt a strong hand on his collar, and it lifted him effortlessly from the damp grass. He couldn’t breathe, his jacket garrotted him. A choking sound came from his throat as they dragged him. The heels of his loafers slid on the damp grass, finding no purchase there.
“Let’s see what’s in the caravan, shall we Jack?”
The two men opened the caravan door and dragged him up the steps. His knees scuffed painfully on the grated metal, but he didn’t cry out. There was no point. He had picked this spot because it was miles away from anywhere. No one would hear him shouting for help, and at the end of the day, he didn’t want to attract too much attention to the caravan because of the precious cargo it contained. He clung to the doorframe for a second, but a sharp kick to his skinny fingers halted his futile resistance.
“My fingers!” He complained loudly. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”
“Search him.” They dropped him heavily onto the floor and he heard the door closing behind him. He felt rough hands fumbling around in his pockets.
“Let’s see what we have here… Keys for the van, a random door key, a wallet with ten pounds in it, and a memory stick. I wonder what sick shit you’ve got on there.” Jack recognised the man’s voice as he inventoried the contents of his pockets. He’d spoken to him on the telephone during his last deal.
The fact that he’d identified one of them didn’t offer him any comfort – in truth, it had the opposite effect. The people that they worked for were evil sadistic businessmen. They had set up an online live feed where fellow perverts could pay-per-view and watch the young boy that he’d sold being subjected to things that even the child taker himself couldn’t stomach watching. He had watched it, out of a morbid curiosity, to the point when the poor child had died, but when they continued to abuse the corpse he’d turned it off. Everyone had a line that couldn’t be crossed. While he didn’t get any kicks out of necrophilia, it was obvious that some people did – but that didn’t mean that he had to watch. These people made him look like an angel in comparison.
“The bedroom door is locked.”
“Try this,” Alfie handed Brian the key, which he’d taken from Jack.
Brian walked back down the small corridor and opened the door with the key. “They’re in here.”
“So, Jack, or should I call you the ‘child taker’?” Alfie said in a gruff voice. He held his face by the cheeks and squeezed tightly. Jack didn’t fear torture or abuse; he’d experienced it all his life. His mind switched off and took him to a dark place where he waited until the pain stopped and then he could return to his body safely. He’d developed the technique when Father Paul was offering him the love of Christ by buggering him. “My client thinks that you may have been about to restart the auction.”
“I wasn’t. I was about to contact you.”
“You were supposed to contact me yesterday, Jack.”
“I had a few problems.”
“You had a few problems?”
“Yes.”
“What type of problems?”
Jack’s mind went blank. He didn’t know where the line of questioning was going, but he was sure that it was going to involve him being hurt badly, or probably killed. Hurt wasn’t too much of a problem, but dead he didn’t want at all. He saw death as a place where he would have eternity to dwell on the things that had been done to him, and the things that he’d done to others, and that frightened him.