Headhunters

by Mark Dawson

  Milton looked. It was dark, and the headlights of the car at the side of the road were bright in his eyes. He squinted and saw a silhouetted figure standing in front of them, waving an arm up and down. They drew a little closer and he could see that the hood of the vehicle had been raised. He could see a figure hunched over the engine.

  “We better stop,” she said. “This isn’t the kind of place I’d particularly want to get stranded in.”

  Matilda flicked the indicator and touched the brakes. They rolled off the asphalt and onto the gravel margin, the tyres crunching. The man at the front of the car straightened up. There was enough vestigial light for Milton to see that he was wearing a suit and a white shirt that looked as if it was damp with sweat. The second man walked to them. He was wearing a suit, too, and he had black hair and glasses.

  Milton got out, meeting the man halfway.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know. Think it could be the fuel injector.”

  The man gestured back at the car. It was a big Nissan Navara. The figure who had been looking under the hood was a woman. She stepped away from the engine, wiping her hands on a rag. She was of average height and slender. She was wearing a white blouse, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and a skirt.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Broken Hill.”

  “Not a good place to break down.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What you doing out here?”

  “We work for BHP.”

  Matilda was out of the car, too, now. “Mining?” she said.

  “That’s right. Visiting the facility.”

  “Where from?”

  “We left Dubbo last night.”

  “Dubbo?” she said with surprise.

  “Yeah,” the man said ruefully. “We thought it’d make a change from flying.”

  “That’s miles away.”

  “I know it is. And never again.”

  Matty went over to the car. “You want me to have a look at it?”

  The man nodded. “Sure,” he said, a little uncertainly.

  She looked at him with amused disdain. “What? You think I can’t fix it because I’m a woman?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t worry. I’m a mechanic. I fix all our trucks.”

  The woman stepped aside. Matilda walked across to the open hood and bent over the engine. She poked around inside, muttering to herself.

  “Doesn’t look like the carb,” she said. “What was it doing before it packed in?”

  Milton realised, too late, that something was wrong.

  No, he corrected himself. Four things.

  First: the tyre tracks on the dusty margin on the other side of the road.

  Second: the Nissan was clean. Compared to the dusty Wrangler, it was spotless.

  Third: the man said they were executives.

  Fourth: the clothes they were wearing were clean.

  He connected the deductions just a moment too late.

  The tracks suggested that the Navara had originally been travelling east along the A32 before looping across the road and changing direction so that they were pointing to the west, towards the town. They were lying about their direction of travel. They had been coming out of Broken Hill, rather than heading into it.

  Dubbo to Broken Hill was a straight run of 750 kilometres. A marathon drive like that would take eight hours. The truck should have been filthy. It wasn’t. It was clean, as if it had just been driven off the lot of a rental company.

  And how likely was it that a couple of executives would drive through the outback, rather than flying? Not very likely, despite what the man had said.

  Finally, their clothes were clean. The creases were still in the man’s trousers and his boots looked like they had only been out of their box for a few hours.

  Milton looked at the woman standing by the front of the truck next to Matilda. He must have betrayed his suspicion, for there was a flicker of recognition in the woman’s face as her hand slipped into her jacket, right about the spot where a holstered pistol would be kept.

  The man had paused while Milton had walked on, and now he was just behind him. Milton felt a jolt of adrenaline, but before he could make use of it, something solid with sharp edges clashed against the back of his head. The impact was sudden and unexpected, and it dropped him to his knees. He blinked his eyes to try to clear his vision, and when he looked up, he was staring into the barrel of a pistol. It was a Beretta. It looked like an M9. The man had struck him with the butt of the gun.

  Matilda turned, but the woman next to her had drawn a pistol. She pointed it at her. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said from behind her gun.

  Milton was on his hands and knees. He looked down, waiting for his fuzzy vision to clear, and saw spots of blood as they fell down into the dust. They were red against the dirt, visible even in the gloom. He reached up to his scalp and pressed it with his fingertips. When he looked at them, they were stained with his blood.

  The man spoke again. “Do anything I don’t like and the first thing I’ll do is put a bullet in your right knee. And then I’ll put one in your left knee.”

  “All right,” Milton said. “I get it.”

  “What happens next is up to you.”

  “I’m not going to do anything,” he said, making sure that his voice was calm and reassuring. He didn’t know what was happening, but he wasn’t about to precipitate something by spooking whoever these two were.

  “Very good.” The man took a step back, ensuring that there was more than enough distance between them for him to shoot before Milton could get to him, but not so much that there was any chance that he would miss.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Not just you. Both of you.”

  The woman by the car looked over at her companion. Milton saw the unsaid exchange. It was a look of question, as if a decision had just been taken on the fly. The man who had hit him had made the decision. That meant that he was more senior than the woman by the car. Milton filed that little piece of information away. It might be helpful.

  The man raised his aim just a fraction so that Milton was looking right into the inky little hole. “Let’s get some ground rules set up right now. You do what we say. No questions. Bad things will happen if you don’t. We clear?”

  “We are.”

  “Excellent. Now, then—you got a cell phone?”

  “No,” Milton said truthfully.

  “And you?”

  Matilda didn’t answer.

  “Give it to her,” the man said, nodding to the woman.

  Milton looked to her and nodded that she should hand it over. Her eyes burned with fury as she reached into her pocket, took out her phone and gave it to the woman.

  “Thank you. Now—into the car.”

  Milton watched the man’s finger on the trigger of the Beretta. It hadn’t moved. Milton kept an eye on it as he edged slowly around to the side of the Nissan. He opened the rear door and held it for Matilda. She got in, sliding across to the right-hand side of the car. Milton looked at the man and woman again. The man gave the pistol a gentle flick, suggesting that he needed to be getting inside, too. Fine. He ducked his head, slid onto the seat and shuffled along. The woman shut the door and went around to the driver’s side. The man got into the passenger seat, arranged himself so that he could look back into the cabin, and raised the pistol again. The driver started the engine, put the Nissan into drive and gently fed in the revs. The car rolled off the margin and onto the bumpy road, turning through one hundred and eighty degrees and gently speeding up as it started to the east.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE DRIVER, the woman, concentrated on the road ahead and said nothing at all. Her companion covered them both with the pistol. He made them sit all the way back in their seats to make sure that there was plenty of distance between his gun arm and his two captives. Milton would have to lean forward and then stretch in ord
er to get to the gun; the man would be able to shoot him three times before he could get to him. Milton didn’t like those odds. He would play the long game.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “No talking. Keep it shut unless we ask you a question.”

  So Milton observed them both instead. This wasn’t a robbery. If it was, they would have taken whatever they wanted—the Wrangler, perhaps—and left them on the side of the road. It wasn’t a hit, either. They would already have been dead if it was.

  So, it was something else.

  He watched how they presented themselves. The two of them were professional. Very professional. They were cool and calm, they didn’t get agitated, and they were firm with what they wanted Milton and Matilda to do. It all spoke of them being well-trained and experienced operators.

  They had held their weapons easily. The guns themselves were nine-millimetre automatics. The one aimed at Milton now was a brand-new Beretta M9, as he had suspected. Milton was familiar with the weapon; it had been the weapon he had considered along with the Sig Sauer P226 when he was choosing his own sidearm. It was a full-size service pistol, with a 4.7-inch barrel, an aluminium alloy receiver and a steel slide. It had a mechanism that allowed for loading and unloading with the safety activated, along with a long twelve-pound double-action trigger pull for the first shot. That pull might buy Milton a fraction of a second of extra time, but that wouldn’t be long enough to close the distance before it was fired. The gun was oiled and looked like it was carefully maintained.

  Milton narrowed his focus. It was a large gun, with the length of trigger reach and the diameter of the butt making it suitable only for medium-to large-sized hands. This man was of average build, and the gun looked comfortable in his grip. The safety was flicked off and the man’s finger was inserted loosely through the trigger guard, the trigger resting lightly on the pad of his index finger. The man’s right arm was braced across his left. The muzzle of the gun would tremble if he was nervous, but it did not; it was steady and unmoving.

  That was useful information: both of their captors were comfortable with their weapons. That, too, suggested that this wasn’t their first dance. It suggested that this wasn’t something impetuous, that it had been planned.

  And so what did that make them?

  Milton thought. It made them either criminals or government operatives.

  It wasn’t difficult to think of criminals who might have a motive for wishing him harm. There had been dozens through the years who had fallen within his ambit; plenty of his victims had been dispatched because they were too powerful to be vulnerable to traditional law enforcement, or immune to the prospect of a guilty verdict at trial. He had crossed the Mafia several times, both in the United States and in Italy. There had been assignments that had seen him decapitate the leadership of triad factions that had extended their malign influence into British Chinatowns. And, of course, it wasn’t that long ago that he had killed El Patrón, the paterfamilias of La Frontera, the Mexican cartel that dominated the border town of Ciudad Juárez. These two didn’t look like the type who would work for the cartel, but Milton knew that there were plenty of professionals who would be available for hire, and the really good ones looked like regular guys, just as these two did. They were “grey men,” like Milton, the sort who could just drift away into a crowd and become anonymous.

  Government operatives? The list of state actors with a reason to bear a grudge against Milton was even longer. He could have wasted an hour trying to consider all the people who might want to see him dead, but there would have been no way of knowing. There was no profit in idle speculation, so he put it to one side and continued his study of the man and the woman.

  The man with the gun was facing him, so he started there. He had been the one who had done most of the talking, so Milton made the assumption that he was in charge. He was broad and thick, with a round head that looked heavy atop his shoulders. Forty or forty-five years old. His hair was cut short and he wore stubble on his chin. He had evenly spaced eyes, heavy brows and a squashed nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times. He was calm, breathing easily. If he was nervous, his breathing would have been shallower and faster, but it was even. There was no sign of sweat, and his eyes stayed on the two of them in the back and did not flicker or deviate in the way that Milton would have expected if he was anxious. His fingernails were not chewed. He was tanned, although the skin around his eyes was a little whiter, as if he had been wearing sunglasses.

  The driver was tanned, too, but Milton could see the patch of peeling skin on her forearms. Milton guessed that she and her partner had only been in the country for a short time. A local would have had a deeper, more even tan and would not have been peeling. She was slender, and Milton noticed that she held the wheel with long fingers. Her blouse looked new, and the collar still had that starched stiffness that made Milton think that it had probably still been in its cellophane wrap this morning.

  Milton switched his attention back to the man. He looked relaxed, as if they were just going for a pleasant Sunday drive. Milton looked up from the gun to the man’s face.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I told you—”

  “I know what you said, and I’m being cooperative. But it would make me relax even more if you told me where we were going.” He indicated outside the window. “I know we’re going east.”

  The man gave a little nod of his head down to the Beretta. “Where we’re going is for me to know and you to keep your fucking mouth shut about.” His eyes showed no emotion and his mouth was fixed in a tight line, his lips thin and cruel. He spoke evenly, without raising his voice, but there was authority and purpose there that Milton did not mistake. He had been concentrating on the sound of the man’s voice rather than the message, which had been easy enough to predict, after all. He didn’t speak with an Australian accent. Nothing about the man suggested that he was native. He spoke with a hard intonation, glottal, harsh-sounding. Milton tried to guess where he might have originated, but he couldn’t place the accent.

  Milton pressed him, trying to get a reaction. “Back to Dubbo?”

  “I’m not telling you where we’re going, so stop asking me. If you keep talking when I’ve asked you not to, there will be consequences for both of you. Are we clear?”

  Matilda reached across and laid her hand over his. “Do what he says. Stop talking.”

  Milton didn’t take his eyes off the man. “We’re clear,” he said.

  He opened his hand and let Matilda’s slip inside. He squeezed it tight.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THEY DROVE EAST on the Barrier Highway for two hours until they reached the town of Wilcannia. The town was located where the Barrier Highway crossed the Darling River. The A32 bent to the south here. The terrain was arid, bordering on desert, although the landscape—studded with river red gum, yellow box and lignum—suggested that it was prone to flooding when the river was in full spate.

  Milton looked out the window as they passed into the town. It was dark, and there were only a few streetlights, but the moon was bright and it cast enough illumination for him to see that it was a small place. There was a clutch of buildings centred around the junction of the highway, with a pub, café, post office and general store. The buildings were all painted in washed-out yellows, the colour bleached out of them by the fierceness of the sun. They passed a neat and tidy residence that announced itself as the council chambers of the Central Darling Shire, and then took a side street to the south.

  They ran on, the ground undulating down as they reached the river. There was an abandoned building on the water’s edge. It was a large brick structure with a tin roof and looked as if it had, at some point several years earlier, been a warehouse. The name of the business had been painted across the top of the second storey, but the black paint had faded away into illegibility. A second painted message, more recent, warned that fire should be kept away.

  The driver angled
the car off the road and into the dusty space between the building and the river. There was a wide set of double doors and, at a quick toot of the horn, two men came around the corner of the building and opened them.

  Four of them now? Their odds were getting worse.

  The driver nudged the Nissan ahead of the doorway, put the shifter into reverse and backed up until the car was inside. The doors were closed almost all the way. The only illumination now was the silvery moonlight that filtered inside through the gaps and the glow of the instrumentation on the dashboard.

  The two men who had opened the door had flashlights. They switched them on and Milton used the fresh illumination to glance around. It was an empty space, with exposed rafters above and a bare brick wall that showed evidence at regular intervals of brackets that would have supported some sort of industrial equipment. There was nothing else inside save for a white panel van that had been parked against the north wall.

  Milton searched for any other means of egress. There was a mezzanine level at the rear of the structure, with an opened door just dimly visible beneath the half landing. The windows were all bricked up. The two men outside stayed next to the doors, and Milton could see that they each held handguns with their flashlights.

  The man in the car with them opened his door, stepped out, and came around to the rear of the car on Milton’s side. With his Beretta held in his right hand and aimed through the glass at Milton’s head, he reached out with his left and opened the door.

  “Out.”

  Milton had hoped that the man might make a mistake, get in too close so that he could take his wrist and force the gun away, but he was too careful for that. He stayed back, out of range, covering him with the same steady aim as he got out of the Nissan. Matilda followed.

  “This is a mistake,” Matilda said. “Whatever this is, you’ve got the wrong people.”

  The man had his eye on Milton and didn’t respond.

  Matilda’s temper overwhelmed her anxiety. “Talk to me!”

  “Sit down, please, Miss Douglas.”