The Payback

by Simon Kernick

  ‘I’m on it,’ I told him. And hung up.

  Two

  THE AXE STEADIES

  Twenty-one

  The flight from London to Singapore was long, bumpy and full. Tina had managed to get an aisle seat, but the man sitting next to her had been overweight, far too free with his elbows, and had snored loudly on the few occasions he’d dozed off.

  Consequently, by the time she arrived at Changi Airport at 8.30 on Sunday morning, after thirteen painful hours in the air, she was exhausted. She changed into a T-shirt and long shorts in the toilets, got herself a large espresso from the Starbucks in the terminal, managing to pay using US dollars that she’d changed at Heathrow, then found a seat and checked the messages on her phone.

  The first was from Bob Levine at CMIT, in response to the message she’d left for him the previous morning in which she’d said that, following on from his kind offer to give her a week off, she now wanted to take two weeks of outstanding leave, starting immediately. Levine’s message was an annoyed one in which he said she needed to give him more notice if she wanted to take time off like that, and telling her to call him on Monday to discuss her request. He was going to be even more annoyed when he realized she was calling him from the other side of the world, but she’d worry about that later. Tina knew that she was considered to be a generally reliable cop. She was rarely off sick (except through on-duty injury) and, apart from Christmases, she hadn’t gone on leave since the month-long trip she’d taken to central America the previous summer. She was due a bit of slack and, at least on this occasion, she had a good reason.

  The second message was from a blocked number, and the line wasn’t good, but even so she recognized the voice of the Phnom Penh police officer she’d spoken to on Friday night. On the message, he introduced himself formally as Lieutenant Hok Ma of the Royal Gendarmerie of Cambodia, and said that he’d located the officer Nick Penny had spoken to.

  Tina listened carefully while Lieutenant Ma left the details of the conversation that the two men had had, and those details confirmed what she already knew. Tina wanted to find out if the Cambodian police had taken any action as a result of Penny’s conversation with them, even though the tone of the message suggested they hadn’t. Lieutenant Ma had only phoned an hour earlier, and she found his number in her bag and tried calling him back, but there was no response.

  No matter. Because she knew now she was definitely on the right track.

  She finished her coffee and slowly made her way over to the departures gate to begin the next stage of her journey.

  And that was when she saw him.

  Coming out of the first-class lounge, twenty yards ahead. A small, hunched man in his fifties, with thinning hair dyed an obvious black, and sharp, pointed features on a pale, pudgy face, he reminded Tina of an overfed rodent. He was wearing an unfashionable cream suit and a white open-necked shirt that was stretched tight over a prominent pot belly, and he would have looked like any other ordinary middle-aged traveller with his duty-free bag and carry-on luggage if it hadn’t been for the fact that he was accompanied by a powerful-looking bodyguard in a dark suit who was looking round with the studied, humourless air of a professional.

  But there was nothing ordinary about Paul Wise. Nor about the terrible things he’d done.

  For a moment, Tina was too shocked to react. She’d read so much about him, seen so many photos of his face, had spent so many hours making her own savage plans for revenge. Yet in all that time she’d never seen him in the flesh. Seeing him now, and knowing that she was powerless to do anything about it, filled her with an almost sickening rage. She wanted to grab him by his flabby throat and squeeze with every ounce of strength she had, enjoying the look of terror in his eyes, telling him how long she’d waited for this moment, that it was payback for all the people whose lives he’d ended, until the last of his rancid breaths came and went, and he finally went limp in her arms.

  Instead she turned away and quickly took a seat, keeping her head down and pretending to look for something in her bag. Paul Wise knew exactly who Tina was – after all, he’d tried to have her killed barely twenty-four hours earlier – and she couldn’t risk him seeing her now.

  He headed with his bodyguard towards the departures gate, and she waited a full minute before getting up and following, wondering what on earth he was doing here.

  It didn’t take long for the question to be answered. He turned left at gate 70 and was ushered past the long queue of economy-class passengers before disappearing down the tunnel to board Singapore Airlines flight SQ910.

  Paul Wise was on the same flight as her, and he was going to Manila.

  The question was, why?

  Twenty-two

  Manila’s Ninoy Aquino Airport is a tatty and confusing place that was thankfully less busy than usual that Sunday afternoon. Non-travellers aren’t allowed in the arrivals area. Instead, they are forced to wait behind a long fence that’s separated from the main terminal building by a pedestrian tunnel and two access roads. As with most things in the Philippines, however, security’s pretty inefficient and it wasn’t hard for a western man like me, who looked like he knew where he was going, to slip through the crowds and get inside the security cordon.

  I found a seat in the corner at the front of the building from where I could see the passengers exiting through an open double doorway, but where they were unlikely to see me. There were a dozen or so Filipino guys hanging about holding signs who acted as a useful screen between me and the doorway, but no sign of any security.

  I sat back and waited with a copy of the International Herald Tribune open in front of me. I wasn’t reading it, though. I was thinking about Bertie Schagel’s offer of retirement. Lying in bed the previous night, it had crossed my mind that it was a trick of some sort – that he couldn’t risk letting me go, but would have me killed instead to make sure I never talked of our association. Since waking up at ten o’clock that morning, however, feeling refreshed and reinvigorated, and with the brilliant tropical sun shining in through my hotel window, my maudlin mood had largely dissipated and I’d spent much of the intervening time convincing myself that he’d meant what he said. Granted, Schagel’s word was hardly his bond, and I wouldn’t trust the guy as far as I could throw him. But on the plus side, killing me would be a hassle. It would be far easier to pay me the money I was owed and let me disappear from the scene. Even if I was arrested further down the line, I knew so little about Bertie Schagel it was unlikely in the extreme that I could provide the authorities with any information that would even identify, let alone convict, him.

  With the money I earned from this job, I could retire in style. And if I ever got bored in Laos, I could always head somewhere else, maybe even buy a new ID so that there was no way Schagel could ever track me down, should he change his mind about letting me go. The point was, if I did this last job, I’d have options, opportunities. I could start a new life.

  A thin stream of people was emerging from the arrivals doorway now, and I positioned the paper so that I could only just see over it, while trying to maintain as casual a pose as possible, knowing that as a copper with more than ten years’ experience Tina Boyd was going to be keeping her wits about her and looking for anyone out of place.

  And then she was walking out in front of me – a lean, pale-skinned figure, her body well-toned beneath the shorts and T-shirt, the shock of blonde hair making her stand out. Although clearly exhausted, she was prettier and younger than she’d looked in the photo, and she had the poised, confident gait of the long-term copper, yet with a hint of latent aggression beneath, as if she was constantly expecting trouble of some sort or another.

  Straight away, I knew I was going to have to be careful around her. She wasn’t the sort of person you should underestimate.

  My eyes returned to the paper as I heard her ask one of the local guys in the hall where she could get a taxi from. I waited while she walked out on to the access road before getting to my feet and f
ollowing her through the doors, keeping ten yards and several people back.

  When she was through the tunnel and at the taxi rank on the second access road, she took a casual look round behind her. I wasn’t sure if she clocked me or not, but it wouldn’t matter if she had. I was carrying my holdall and looked just like any other passenger. Although she’d once been a police officer at the same station in London as me, she’d joined after I’d gone, so we’d never met. It was possible that, because of the crimes I’d committed, my face, as it was all those years ago, would be familiar to her, but I looked a different person now – age, plastic surgery and the tropical sun having all done their work on me.

  I got in the queue for the taxis one person back so as not to make it too obvious that I was following her. Luckily, there was a long line of drivers waiting and my cab was on the move only ten seconds after hers. I greeted the driver with those immortal words ‘Follow that car’, and offered him a two-thousand-peso tip as an incentive.

  It worked. He kept the target cab in view the whole time but was sensible enough not to stick too close to it, and half an hour later we saw it pull up outside the front of the Bayview Hotel on the harbour front, barely half a mile from where I was staying.

  I told the driver to pull up a hundred metres further on, and gave him his money. I’d already changed in the back of the cab, putting the old stuff in the holdall, and was now wearing a T-shirt, new sunglasses and a New York Yankees baseball cap. The driver raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything as I stepped outside.

  By the time I’d walked back to the front of the hotel, I was five minutes behind her. As was always the case in the Philippines, there were security guards on the door but, true to form, it never occurred to them that a western man like me was any kind of threat, and they let me through with a wave and a smile.

  Tina Boyd was at the check-in desk filling in a registration form. As I wandered slowly past, acting as if I was waiting for someone in the lobby, she handed it back to the receptionist, who then told her she was in room 927 on the ninth floor. I carried on walking, before crouching down and rummaging through the holdall, pretending to look for something as she came past on her way to the lifts.

  Only when the doors had closed behind her did I get back to my feet and walk out the hotel’s main entrance, before turning into a quiet side street and dialling Bertie Schagel’s number. I left a message, giving him the target’s current location, and walked up and down the pavement while I waited for him to call back.

  Five minutes later he did, and I listened while he gave me my instructions.

  Then I cut the call and, conscious of the feel of the new gun – a short-barrelled Taurus pistol with a ten-round magazine – pushing into my back beneath my jacket, I started back towards the hotel.

  Twenty-three

  It had just turned three p.m. when Tina finally climbed out of the shower and walked back into her poky little bedroom, rubbing herself dry. She felt a lot better than she had done, but she was still tired and more than a little nervous. She’d seen a western guy at the airport and thought that she’d seen him again down in the reception area. She couldn’t be absolutely certain, but she was concerned enough to consider swapping hotels.

  The thing was, who the hell even knew she was here? She’d booked the flight and the hotel from a new and secure email address and had run sophisticated anti-virus software on her laptop, so there was no way it had been bugged. Maybe she was just being paranoid. After all, she hadn’t slept properly for more than twenty-four hours, and was utterly exhausted.

  She picked up her phone and looked at it. She wanted to make a call to Mike Bolt, her ex-boss at the Serious Organized Crime Agency, and ask him whether he knew of any reason why Paul Wise might have been in the Philippines. For a long time, Mike and Tina had been very close. He’d recruited her to his team when she was going through a bad time, and had done more than anyone else to get her back on her feet. Their friendship had almost ended in an affair, which was the main reason Tina had left Soca and rejoined the Met, but their paths had crossed a number of times since. On one of those occasions, Mike had saved her life, risking his own in the process. On another, she’d got him to break all the rules and risk his job in order to get her some information she desperately needed. He’d been disciplined for the help he’d given her then, and although he’d kept his job and rank, Tina still felt extremely guilty about it. Afterwards, she’d called and apologized for putting him in such a difficult situation and he’d told her it didn’t matter, that he’d been happy to help; but something in his tone suggested he regretted it. She also knew he considered her to be a loose cannon these days, ruled by her obsession with Paul Wise and her desire for revenge.

  They’d only spoken once since then, the previous September, when at Nick Penny’s request she’d called him with some questions about Wise’s business interests in Panama. On that occasion, Mike had told her that he’d been explicitly ordered not to give any information about Wise to anyone outside Soca without prior approval from its Director General. He’d added that they were still actively investigating him, but something in his voice had told her that they were no longer trying that hard, which was no great surprise. A great deal of resources had been channelled into bringing Paul Wise to justice, yet Soca were no nearer their goal than they had been when they’d first started looking into his affairs more than four years ago. It was inevitable that they would eventually move on to other, easier targets.

  Tina could imagine Mike’s reaction now if he found out she was in the Philippines chasing yet another obscure lead in her hunt for justice, so she dropped the phone back on the bed, finished drying herself, and slowly got dressed. It was time to explore her new surroundings, get her bearings, and begin her search for Mr Pat O’Riordan.

  ‘You don’t need anyone else,’ she said to herself as she got up from the bed, experiencing that familiar mix of excitement, determination and defiance that had characterized her career so far, and which always seemed to lead her into danger.

  Which was ironic, really, because she’d only taken a single step when she stopped. Dead. Staring at the door as the handle was turned from the outside and slowly began to open.

  Twenty-four

  I stopped outside room 927 and looked up and down the corridor. It was empty. I listened at the door, but couldn’t hear anything. I was guessing the target was still inside, hopefully sleeping off the jetlag, which would make my job a lot easier. If she was awake, I was going to have to be silent and very quick. There’d be no time for hesitation, or second thoughts. Get through this and a new life awaited. Mess it up and I became a liability to Schagel. The stakes were that high.

  In my line of business, you need to know how to break into places, and it’s amazing how easy it can often be. The standard credit card trick of forcing the bolt doesn’t tend to work with a lot of the new locks, but a variation of it still does. I pulled an old iTunes gift card from my wallet. It had an angled, square-inch divot cut out of the bottom and I slid it into the narrow gap between the door and the frame just above the lock. Next I lowered the card so that the bolt slotted comfortably into the divot. Finally, I gave it a couple of hard pushes, and the door clicked open.

  Slipping the gun out of my waistband and screwing on the suppressor as surreptitiously as possible, I turned the handle and crept inside, thinking as I so often had before how sad it was that I’d become so proficient at burglary and murder after years spent trying to fight both.

  I was in a short narrow hallway with the bathroom to my right and the bedroom beyond. The bathroom door was open but the light was off. I took a step forward, peering inside. Empty. I took another step forward. I could now see the bottom half of the bed. There was an open case on it, but no sign of the target. She must have gone out, which meant I was going to have to wait. Never a nice task, to spend time sitting amid the personal effects of someone you’re going to kill, but at least it offered the element of surprise.

&nb
sp; Relaxing a little, I stepped into the bedroom proper, catching sight of her only at the last possible second. She’d been waiting against the inside wall, and before I had a chance to pull the trigger, she slammed the butt end of one of the bedside lamps right into my jaw.

  My head was knocked sideways from the force of the blow, the pain sudden and excruciating, but I did the only thing I could under the circumstances and kept hold of the gun.

  But this girl was fast. She dropped the lamp and threw herself into me so I couldn’t get a shot off, one hand grabbing my gun arm at the wrist and yanking it to one side, while she used the other to deliver a series of short, sharp punches to my already tender jaw.

  Dazed, I stumbled back towards the other wall, with her still clinging to me, trying to knee me in the groin. But I kept my legs tight together, knowing I was going to have to do something soon to turn this around, because she was twisting my wrist with surprising strength, and I was only just managing to keep hold of the gun.

  As I hit the wall, I pushed backwards and launched myself off it headfirst, trying to butt her in the face. She turned away from the blow, so that it only glanced her, but my momentum caused her to stumble and trip over the lamp she’d dropped. She went down, and I managed to yank my gun hand free of her grip. Unable to steady myself I fell over her, landing on the bed and rolling over on to my back.

  She was on her feet in an instant and ready to spring at me again.

  Until she saw that I still had the gun, and I was holding it outstretched in both hands, the end of the suppressor only five feet from her chest.

  She froze. We both did. Staring at each other. Her expression neither defiant nor scared.

  I thought of retirement again. If I just did this one last bloody task . . .