by Mark Dawson
The news seemed to suck all the fight out of Rachel, but Hicks was determined that they would not give up. He had researched available treatments and had discovered one that seemed to offer the best chance. It was available at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. They were offering a targeted treatment involving two experimental drugs—Opdivo and Yervoy—that had demonstrated encouraging results in precisely the same kind of cancer that Rachel had developed. They had visited the clinic and started the program. That had been two months ago. The last MRI found no cancer anywhere in her body.
The drugs, while scouring it away, had inflicted the usual panoply of side effects. The Opdivo and Yervoy had caused colitis and pneumonitis. The additional chemotherapy she had undergone had meant that she had lost her hair, and, over the course of the program, a quarter of her body weight. But there was no doubt about it: her hair was regrowing and she was putting weight on again.
His phone was on the arm of the sofa. It started to vibrate.
Rachel looked over at it. “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know.” He picked it up and looked at the screen. “It’s a London number.”
“You don’t recognise it?”
“No.”
“Leave it.”
“No,” he said. “I’d better answer it.”
He pressed to accept the call and put the phone to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Hicks?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“It’s Milton.”
His wife looked over at him. “Who?”
“Business,” he said, a little flustered.
“It’s eight o’clock, Alex.”
“I know.” He disengaged himself from her and stood. “I’ll take it in the study.”
She nodded, unconcerned, collected the remote control and flicked between the channels. Hicks left the lounge and went into the room that they used as a study. He shut the door behind him and put the phone back against his ear.
“Milton?”
“Hello, Hicks.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. How are you?”
“We’re good.”
“Your wife?”
“She’s better, thanks to you. What’s going on? I didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“I need a favour.”
Hicks felt a twist of anxiety. Milton was not the sort of man to ask for favours, and Hicks knew that he was in his debt. “What do you need?”
“Don’t worry. It’s nothing. A surveillance job.”
“What? A person? A place?”
“A place. There’s a block of flats in Wanstead. East London.”
“Okay,” he said. “Anything else?”
“It’s a brothel. I just want to know if anyone goes in and out.”
“That’s easy enough.”
“And I want to know who runs it.”
“That might be more difficult. How will I tell the proprietors and the punters apart?”
“It’s run by the Albanian mob. There’s a certain look.”
“Big? Nasty-looking?”
“Exactly. If you see anyone you think might be involved, I want you to follow them. Find out where they’re based.”
“I can do that. How long do you want me to watch it?”
“A day should be enough.”
“Starting when?”
“Tonight. Can you do it?”
“I’ll have to check.” He paused, remembering what Milton had done for him and Rachel, and, correcting himself, said, “No, forget it. It’s fine. I’ll drive down now. Where?”
“You got a pen and paper?”
Hicks reached over for the newspaper he had been reading earlier and took a pen from the table. “Fire away.”
Milton gave him an address in East London and Hicks noted it down.
“Anything else I need to know?”
“Yes,” he said after a pause. “Be careful. I broke into the flat yesterday. There was a man there. He tried to kill me.”
“And?”
“He’s not with us anymore.”
“Jesus, Milton. Police?”
“I doubt it.”
“But they might be looking for you.”
“I’m sure they are. I don’t know whether they’ll have a description of me. But they don’t know you.”
“Is there anywhere I can lay up and watch?”
“Not really. You might have to be creative.”
“Is it too late for me to say no?”
“Too late.”
“All right,” he said. “It’s against my better judgment, but I’m in. Anything else I need to know?”
“Not really.” Milton paused, and Hicks could hear the buzz of traffic and voices on the line. “Actually, there is one thing. Your P226?”
The gun was in the garage with the rest of his equipment, hidden in a void beneath the floor. “What about it?”
“Bring it.”
Chapter Fourteen
KOSTANTIN PASKO stepped out of his car. It was ten in the evening and raining, the kind of persistent drizzle that was one of the things that he disliked most about London. It wasn’t proper rain, the sort that would roll in off the Šar Mountains and soak Ljuboten and Brezovica for days. It was a fine mist that wasn’t heavy enough to require an umbrella, but still soaked into clothes and chilled the bones. It was an apologetic kind of rain, and Pasko thought that it suited the country very well. It was a small annoyance, balanced by the opportunities that had been afforded to him since he had arrived in London fifteen years earlier.
Pasko had arrived here after the Yugoslav wars, hidden amongst the tens of thousands of Kosovar and Albanian refugees who had come to London to escape the endless violence back home. He was a veteran of the Kosovo Liberation Army, battle hardened from guerrilla warfare in the mountains and ready to use his experience to make a better life for himself and his family. The Eastern Europeans had flooded London since the nineties, but, of all of them, it was the Albanians who were the most feared. There were hard men among the Poles, for example, but there were stories of Polish builders who had worked for Albanian foremen only to have been beaten to a pulp when they had the temerity to ask for their wages at the end of the week. Pasko’s people were strong and proud and fearless.
Pasko had built that kind of reputation for himself. He had been drawn to the underworld like so many of his fellow soldiers. He had initially served under a man named Adem and, when he had been killed in a shoot-out with the Turkish gangsters who controlled the heroin trade, Pasko’s reputation made him the obvious replacement. He had not retaliated against the Turks for weeks, waiting until they must have assumed that the threat had passed. But Pasko did not forget. He found the man responsible and shot him to death as he had his beard trimmed in a barber shop on Green Lanes.
But Pasko did not want the drug trade. His genius had been to leave the heroin to the Turks and to take Albanian business in another direction. He had long looked at Soho with hungry eyes. The sex trade appealed to him. It had been the province of the Maltese for decades, but Pasko looked at them and saw them for what they were: soft and arrogant, made fat and lazy by their relationships with the corrupt police officers who ran vice from West End Central. He watched them for months, identifying the leaders and those who would need to be removed so that he could usurp their positions. And then, when the time was right and the pieces were all in play on the board, he had made his move. There were four murders in one night, coordinated and executed with precision, and the Maltese mafia had been decapitated. The Albanians swept in and took the vice trade for themselves.
That had been ten years ago. They had consolidated since then, and, once Soho was secure, Pasko had instigated an aggressive program of expansion. He had properties everywhere now.
Hundreds of girls.
Thousands of customers.
His business made millions.
There were challenges, obstacles that ne
eded to be overcome, but the phone call he had received from Llazar tonight was more worrying than most. He had been in the pub he owned in Maida Vale and had come straight away, driving as quickly as he dared as he made the journey from west to east.
He went to the door of the block of flats. Llazar had texted him the code to unlock it, and he entered it and went inside. He went through the lobby to the hallway. There was a cage blocking the door to his property. He reached through the bars and knocked on the wood.
Llazar opened the door.
“What happened here?”
“Drago,” his lieutenant said, swallowing hard and looking away.
“Where is he?”
He swallowed again. “He is dead, boss.”
Pasko looked over Llazar’s shoulder into the flat. He couldn’t remember if he had been to this particular one before. He didn’t believe that he had. That wasn’t surprising; he had more than fifty flophouses like this in the capital, and the same again in towns and cities as far north as Birmingham and as far south as Portsmouth. He had long since delegated the task of managing their portfolio to Drago. This one looked much like the others that he remembered: plain decor, a little shabby. Pasko wasn’t interested in luxury. It was expensive to play at that level, and the return was not as attractive as the amount he could achieve in the budget end of the market. Drago had a head for spread sheets and numbers, and he had explained it all to him.
Pasko corrected himself: he was thinking of his son in the present tense. He felt a flash of anger.
“Get out of my way,” he said as he shouldered his way past Llazar and made his way down the corridor.
The first door off the corridor was closed. He went by it, saw the open doors for the bedrooms and the bathroom, glanced inside each of them, and turned back. He walked back to the closed door.
“In here?”
Llazar nodded, seemingly afraid to speak.
Pasko turned the handle and opened the door. He took it in: the narrow kitchen, the counters on both sides of the room. Simple and utilitarian. Everything as he would have expected apart from the body that was laid out on the cheap linoleum floor. The skin of Drago’s face had been badly burned: patches of it were red, parts had been scratched away, and his forehead was disfigured by a series of florid boils.
Pasko felt a burst of anger so strong that he had to put out a hand against the counter to steady himself. “What happened to his face?”
Llazar pointed to the bottle of domestic bleach that was standing on the counter. The top had been removed. “He was sprayed with that. Then—” he paused, swallowing again “—then, I think, the bag.”
Pasko closed his eyes until the dizziness passed, and then he stood. “Who found him?”
“I did. I came to collect the takings. There was no answer, so I let myself in. The girls were gone and Drago was there.”
“The door?”
“Closed.”
“The police?”
“No. I’ve been here ever since I found him. No one has been here.”
“Good.”
He looked down at Drago and then closed his eyes.
“It is the Maltese?” Llazar asked timidly.
They had had trouble from them over the course of the last few weeks. They had finally found their balls, and now, after all this time, they were trying to take back their business. They had torched two of the flats and had threatened this one. Drago had been here to keep an eye on it.
“Boss?”
It didn’t matter who it was. There would be consequences for what they had done.
“Boss?”
“Get Florin.”
Chapter Fifteen
ALEX HICKS had made excellent progress. He had left his house in Cambridge at nine thirty, and the roads had been kind. He arrived on the outskirts of London at eleven and finally ran into traffic. There had been a crash earlier beneath the North Circular and the police had closed the outside lane; it had formed a bottleneck, and the cars were beginning to stack up. Hicks drummed his fingers on the wheel, reached up to where he had mounted his phone to the windscreen, and opened the map again. Google was estimating a delay of forty minutes.
As the lines of traffic rolled ahead at fifteen miles an hour, he thought back to the phone call. He had been surprised to hear from Milton again. Two months had passed since Hicks had last visited him in the cabmen’s shelter where he had been working. Things had looked very bleak for Hicks and his family before Milton had become involved in their affairs. Hicks had been a soldier, serving with distinction in the SAS before he had quit to try to build a career in private security. He had been desperate for money: the only treatment that offered any hope for Rachel was the experimental program in America that the NHS would not fund. Hicks had had to find one hundred thousand dollars, and his wife’s deterioration was a daily reminder that time was not his friend.
Before they had been sucker-punched with the news of her diagnosis, Hicks had been approached by General Richard Higgins, a retired senior officer who had put together a squad of ex-soldiers who were working together on jobs that Higgins sourced. They called themselves the Feather Men on account of their light touch, but they were ruthless killers who took down pimps and criminals and robbed them of their assets. Higgins asked if Hicks wanted in. Hicks had been uncomfortable enough with the idea of it when it had first been pitched to him and had said no. But then the cancer came and his priorities were changed. He had no choice. He said that he had reconsidered, and Higgins welcomed him with open arms.
Hicks had been involved in the operation that had led to the death of a senior Turkish drug baron, but any misgivings he might have had about what he had done were ameliorated by the money that the deaths provided. Thousands and thousands of pounds. He put it toward the money he was saving for the treatment. He had half. He needed the same again.
Hicks might have been able to stomach working with Higgins, but it was when he learned that the general was involved in the protection of senior establishment figures who had been involved in a paedophile ring in the seventies and eighties that he had decided that he had to get out.
Milton, who had been investigating the death of one of the victims of the conspiracy, had helped him to extricate himself. There had been a vicious gunfight on the estate of a grand house in the Cotswolds, during which Milton had pitted the general’s men against a small army of underworld goons who were protecting the man whom Milton wanted dead. Hicks had been badly injured during the melee when the general had surprised him, but he had escaped with his life.
Milton’s objectives had been settled, and he could have left Hicks to deal with the general alone. He didn’t do that. Milton used himself as the bait in a trap to lure the old man out of hiding, and Hicks had taken him out in a drive-by that had been executed cleanly, with no witnesses, and with minimal risk that they might be discovered.
Milton had stolen the general’s cash and given Hicks the balance that he needed for his wife’s treatment. That was a reason for lifelong gratitude in itself. And then Milton had saved his life, too. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—forget that.
But there was more, too. Another reason why Hicks was minded to help. Milton was a quiet man, not prone to outbursts of emotion, not really prone to emotion at all. It was difficult to like him because Milton didn’t care whether he was liked. He was solitary and seemingly happy with his solitude; certainly no one would have been able to describe him as a conversationalist. But there was a coldness that lurked beneath the surface, an implacability that Hicks found unsettling. It was expressed in his eyes—icy blue and pitiless—and Hicks had no interest in finding himself in opposition to him. He knew about Milton’s history as an assassin, and his reputation, and he had seen, at first hand, what it was like when he allowed the coldness to find its full expression. John Milton was probably the most dangerous man that Hicks had ever met and, while he doubted that Milton would take offence if he turned him down, he had no interest in testing that suppositio
n.
A day or two conducting low-level surveillance was nothing compared to what Hicks owed Milton, and not enough of an imposition that he would risk upsetting him by saying no.
#
EAST LONDON. MIDNIGHT.
The building that Milton wanted Hicks to watch was in Wanstead, an area that Hicks did not know very well at all. But Milton’s directions were good, and Hicks was able to find it without trouble. It was at the end of New Wanstead, near to the large Green Man roundabout, and, since it was late and the road was quiet, Hicks reduced his speed and crawled by it so that he could take a good look. It was an average sort of place, and Hicks couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The windows were all dark. The lobby was dark.
He drove on, found a road that he could turn around in, and came back again on the opposite side of the road. He parked the car when he was still a quarter of a mile away so that he could return on foot.
He strolled along the pavement, slowing his pace as he passed the building and regarding it carefully. There was nothing out of the ordinary that he could see.
He stopped, took out his phone and pretended to take a call. He glanced around again. There was nowhere obvious that he could make discreet observation of the property save the car park of the vet’s directly opposite. That wasn’t ideal; there were only two other cars in the car park, and a man in a car at this time of night was going to be obvious to anyone who was suspicious enough to be looking. How careful did he have to be? Milton hadn’t given him very much in the way of a briefing.