Tina knew she’d made a mistake taking him on but she still had one free hand and she used it to deliver a single rapid uppercut to his jaw. It wasn’t the best of shots but it knocked him off her, and she used the split second it afforded her to scramble away from him, roll through the undergrowth, and jump to her feet, keeping low.
A shot rang out, the sound partly muffled by the suppressor. It passed close, but Tina kept on running, relying on the fact that with mud in his eyes and darkness all around it was going to be hard for him to hit her. Another shot rang out, but this time it sounded further away.
Finally she reached the road. In the absence of any street or house lighting it was impossible to tell whether or not it was the one they’d parked on, but there wasn’t any time to hang around trying to work it out. She tried to get her bearings, made a guess in which direction the car was, and started running along the road in that direction, conscious of the sound of her footfalls on the uneven tarmac as she scanned the trees on either side for any sign of her assailant or the car he’d driven here in.
And then, thank God, the track up which she and Milne had parked barely half an hour earlier appeared, and she saw the vague blue glint of the rental car’s paintwork, partly obscured by the palm tree.
Pulling the keys from her pocket, she raced up to the driver’s door and yanked it open. Having seen far too many scary films in her time, she had a quick look in the back, saw it was empty, then got inside. Panting heavily from her exertions, she started the engine and drove slowly on to the road, without turning on the lights. She looked both ways, saw no one, and accelerated away in the direction of Manila, putting her foot down and keeping her head low, knowing her assailant was still in the vicinity, and wanting to present as small a target as possible.
The side window exploded inwards, showering her with glass, and she screamed as the car momentarily veered out of control. She hit the verge and narrowly missed a tree before righting the wheel and stealing a look in her rear-view mirror.
He was out in the road now, a grim silhouette with gun outstretched, and as she watched, a flame shot out of the barrel and glass shattered in the back window. The bullet ricocheted through the car, flying out of the top corner of the windscreen, and Tina floored the accelerator, bent down so low in the seat now that she could barely see over the wheel.
The car veered off the road on to the scrub and hit branches and bushes, even an ancient road sign, before she managed to pull it back on to the tarmac, her speed hitting eighty km/h as she slammed into a pothole and negotiated a bend in the road.
And at that moment, as the man who’d tried and failed to kill her twice now was swallowed up by the darkness behind, she felt a burst of elation which was better than any drug, even the booze. She might have been alone and hunted in a foreign land, but once again she’d made it.
Right then, nothing else mattered.
Thirty-nine
Sitting in the back of the police car, it didn’t take me long to work out what the plan had been. When we turned up at the house, I was supposed to get shot with the police-issue revolver that one of our assailants had been firing at me. That way it would look like the police had disturbed me, a murderous fugitive, in the midst of robbing the place, having first killed its occupants, and gunned me down. I guessed that they were supposed to get Tina out of there alive, or at least remove her body afterwards, since her presence in the house would have been harder to explain. It would be easy enough in a country like this to make her disappear, and that would have been that. Job done. And us out of Paul Wise’s hair.
Thankfully, Tina had escaped – or at least I hoped she had. My situation, however, was far more precarious. The cops who’d cuffed and bundled me into the car had told me that I was under arrest, but I knew I wasn’t. These guys were going to kill me, there was no doubt about that. In the Philippines, the hunt for justice simply isn’t carried out with the same enthusiasm you and I are used to in the west. Corners get cut. Cops get corrupted. People die.
The car moved slowly along pitch-black back roads, the older guy driving while Frogface watched me from behind the steel grille separating us, his eyes blank and cold, until eventually he got bored and started talking to his colleague in Tagalog.
I was exhausted from my earlier exertions, and now carrying an injured shoulder – though thankfully it was a flesh wound and nowhere near as bad as it could have been. But I knew I had to move fast. The doors were locked from the inside so my options were limited. At least the cuffs they’d placed on me were the old-fashioned metal ones with the hand-restraints linked by a short chain, which were the easiest to pick. The driver had also made a big mistake. By being in too much of a hurry to search me properly, he’d missed the small Swiss Army knife in my front left pocket that I was in the habit of carrying round with me.
The knife, I realized, was my one and only chance of getting out of here in one piece, and I experienced a sudden wave of panic – the first I’d had for a few years, since being held in that stuffy little room at Phnom Penh Airport – at the thought that this could finally be it. The kind of death I’d inflicted on too many others.
I fought the panic down hard. I hadn’t survived all these years by folding in the face of danger.
Trying to move as slowly as possible, I manoeuvred myself round so I could reach into the pocket. As my fingers slipped inside, I held my breath. I was sitting at an odd angle. If either of the cops turned round, I was finished. But as my fingers found the knife, they continued to talk quietly in the front.
I slipped it out and hid it behind my back, turning back round in the seat just as the driver glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. He watched me suspiciously for a couple of seconds before saying something to Frogface, who nodded and said something back. I recognized one of the words he used. Patayan. It meant ‘killing’, and Frogface had turned my way when he said it, confirming what I already knew.
A few seconds later the car pulled off the road and headed down a narrow potholed track. Foliage brushed against the windows as it closed in on us, and I got the idea we were nearing our destination. Feeling round behind my back, I flicked open the knife’s corkscrew and removed the tiny screwdriver that was wound through it. Now it was a matter of pushing the end between the notches on the swinging part of the cuff and the ratchet on the other, and shimmying them open. But because I’d been cuffed with my palms outwards, as was standard police practice, it was no easy task, particularly when bumping round in the back of a car.
My heart was beating like a hammer and my wrists ached from the effort of trying to force them into a position they weren’t used to, while I tried to keep my face as impassive as possible. The driver kept checking me in the rear-view mirror, and I could see the tension in his eyes as he psyched himself up for what he was about to do. Killing someone in cold blood’s never easy, regardless of what it looks like in the movies. It’s still the final taboo, and even if you’re used to it, as I was, it takes a huge amount of willpower to pull the trigger. The driver, I was pretty sure, wasn’t used to it.
The car slowed as we reached a break in the trees and I saw that we’d driven into a clearing. The sound of insects filled the air, and I could smell stagnant water.
I had to get this damn screwdriver into the hole. If I didn’t, in the next minute I’d be dead.
Slowly. Slowly.
I shut out every thought, every sound, concentrating everything on picking the lock.
The car stopped and they both got out, Frogface clutching his shotgun. I felt the panic come again in an intense wave as Frogface opened the rear passenger door, looking round at the same time to check that there weren’t any witnesses about. He smiled down at me. He was the man who was going to pull the trigger, and I knew by looking into those dead eyes that he’d be able to do it.
In desperation, I tried to manoeuvre the screwdriver into the hole between the notches and the ratchet one last time, contorting my wrists into a position they should never h
ave been in.
I heard a single click as the screwdriver moved in a notch and immediately leaned back in the seat and pushed my arms against the cuffs, forcing them open.
I’d done it.
Just in time, because the next second Frogface leaned in and grabbed me by the collar, dragging me out. I didn’t put up any resistance and kept my hands behind my back so that it looked like I was still cuffed. At the same time, I opened up the main blade on the knife.
We were close to the edge of a deep-looking swamp about twenty yards across, beyond which were more trees. Only the patrol car’s headlights kept the place from falling into total darkness. As I stumbled in a pothole and steadied myself, I felt a drop of rain on my face.
Frogface pushed me in the ribs with the shotgun and motioned with his head towards the swamp. ‘Walk,’ he grunted.
The driver was coming round the front of the car, and he’d drawn his revolver, which he was keeping down by his side. The rain began to fall harder, great cool drops of it splattering on the dirt.
The fear of death surged through me then, at the thought that this might be the last rain I ever felt on my face, but so too did the adrenalin that comes with it. Fear’s good. Let it get the better of you and it makes you slow and useless, but if you know how to harness it, it can be used to keep you alive.
And I did know.
In one sudden movement, I grabbed the barrel of the shotgun, aiming it away from me, and drove the knife up to the hilt into Frogface’s gut, ignoring the sick feeling I got from the soft splitting noise it made. This was about survival, pure and simple.
Frogface looked temporarily startled and stumbled back. His grip on the shotgun weakened and I tried to yank it out of his hand, but he held on, even when I stabbed him again three times in quick succession. Sometimes it takes time for someone to know they’ve been stabbed, their own adrenalin temporarily masking the damage being done to them. Frogface was a case in point.
If anything, my attack seemed to galvanize him, and he propelled himself forward and drove his head up into my face. I managed to dodge the worst of the blow by turning my head but he still hit my cheek with a painful thud that wasn’t that far away from breaking a bone. He was trying to shake me off, and I could see the driver standing only a few feet away, taking aim with his revolver, waiting for a clean shot, and I knew that if I let go of Frogface, I’d be dead. So I held on, keeping one hand fixed as firmly as possible on the shotgun barrel while I searched for an opening with the other.
Frogface slammed the side of his head into mine, bellowing in anger and frustration, and I lost my footing.
But as I slipped in the dirt, I rolled with the momentum, letting go of the shotgun in the process, then quickly launched myself back up at him, the two of us stumbling all the way back into the car. In the process he turned his head away from mine, exposing the dark flesh of his throat.
I was operating entirely on instinct as I jammed the knife into his neck. For a second there was no blood; then, as he staggered unsteadily, a narrow geyser of red shot out in a long spraying arc, his grip on me weakened dramatically, and the shotgun fell to the ground with a metallic clatter.
Frogface’s colleague – clearly, as I’d guessed, no ice-cool killer himself – yelled something and came towards me, revolver outstretched, anger and shock in his eyes, the end of the barrel now only feet away from my head.
I yanked Frogface round, using him as a human shield, and ducked down as the driver pulled the trigger and the night exploded in noise. The bullet missed, and I thrust Frogface forward into him. For a moment the two of them became entangled, and as the driver pushed his colleague aside and turned back towards me, I jumped into him, grabbing his gun arm and butting him full in the face.
The gun flew out of his hand, but he still managed to throw a quick left hook that sent me crashing to the ground. I raised my head and saw him lean down and pick up the shotgun.
Desperately I looked in the rain and darkness for where his gun had fallen. I spotted it lying beside a pile of dirt-encrusted bottles at the side of the road, and scrambled over on my hands and knees, hearing him pump the shotgun behind me. Grabbing the revolver in both hands, I rolled round on to my back so that we were facing each other through the rain, fifteen feet apart.
For a long, surreal moment, neither of us moved. Our whole lives had been distilled to this one piece of stinking swampland in the middle of nowhere.
And then I fired, half a second before he did, because he was already going down as the shotgun discharged, its payload going high and wide into the black night sky. He fell to one knee, clutching at his gut, and I pulled the trigger again, the bullet taking the top of his head off, and then kept pulling it until it was empty.
Finally the world fell silent and the only thing I could hear was the incessant ringing in my ears.
Slowly I got to my feet, the cuffs still dangling from one wrist, the revolver smoking in my hands, and walked over to where the two men lay. The driver was at an awkward angle, his head split open like a coconut by the second bullet, exposing a mass of brain matter, one arm down by his side, the other outstretched, fingers still clutching the shotgun. Frogface, though, was still alive. He lay on his front, face in the dirt, a steadily growing pool of sticky warm blood surrounding his upper half, his legs still kicking weakly like a clockwork toy reaching the end of its cycle.
I used my shirt to wipe the handle of the revolver I’d just used to shoot the driver and dropped it to the ground, before un-holstering Frogface’s revolver and taking two speedloaders, each containing six rounds, from his belt. I pushed them into the pocket of my jeans, clicked off the safety on Frogface’s revolver, then leaned down, placed a foot on his neck, and shot him in the back of the head.
It was a mercy killing. I had no desire to leave him to bleed to death, and felt no satisfaction for what I’d just done. I’d killed two men. Men who doubtless had families and people who loved them.
I could smell death in the stagnant air, and I felt sick. I looked around at the silent woodland. The rain was torrential now, and I suddenly felt utterly alone. I had to find Tina.
But when I reached into my pocket to pull out my mobile phone, a terrible thought struck me. I might have got rid of the phone that Schagel had given me but it was possible, given the contacts he and Wise had within the Filipino police, that they could have got someone to triangulate the location of my phone throughout my current stay in Manila. They wouldn’t be able to trace me any longer, but that didn’t matter. The historical data would tell anyone interested where Tina and I had spent the previous night. Which meant that, if Tina had got away tonight, they could get to her there.
It was only then that I realized she’d never actually given me her phone number.
I cursed at such an elementary mistake and pulled the keys from the driver’s pocket. I jumped inside the patrol car, turned it round, and drove back the way we’d come, knowing I had to get back to Manila as soon as possible.
Forty
Tina was exhausted, wet, and in a state of shock when she unlocked the front door to the guesthouse, and went through the empty reception area in the direction of the stairs.
Everything had gone wrong. First, Pat O’Riordan, the man who’d been her best hope of gathering evidence against Paul Wise, was dead. And now so were his wife and her brother, and Dennis Milne, the man who’d been her only ally left alive, had been caught. Either he was under arrest, in which case it was only a matter of hours before the authorities found out who he really was, or he was dead as well, having been dispatched by the two crooked uniforms.
She needed Milne now, because without him she was powerless to move forward. He’d had the address for the man called Heed, Wise’s fixer in Manila. All she had were names: Heed, and Omar Salic and Cheeseman from the pages of O’Riordan’s diary. Names that meant nothing on their own.
She was unarmed and alone in a hostile city, where people were trying to kill her, and with only the
barest leads to work on. She thought about calling Mike Bolt again, to see if he’d managed to find out a location for Wise, but even if he had, what good would it do her? She could hardly turn up and demand he confess his crimes. In her heart, Tina knew she only had one alternative left: to return home, thwarted once again in her hunt for justice, but at least with her life and freedom intact. As soon as she woke the next morning, she was going to call the airline and get on the first flight back. The thought depressed her. Tina had never been one to accept defeat. She was a fighter. But she also wasn’t stupid.
On her way up to her room, she inspected herself in the full-length mirror at the top of the stairs. She looked like crap. Her clothes were soaking, and her hair was matted and sticking to the side of a face that was streaked with dirt. She had a cut above her right eye, with a thick, soft scab, and another one on her right cheek, which was swollen. It was a good thing there’d been no one on the front desk.
She looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. The drive back on unfamiliar roads had taken her longer than expected, and she felt exhaustion taking hold. It had been an intense, draining few days, and she was still jetlagged from her flight halfway round the world.
She had the key in the lock and was just about to open the door when she stopped.
What if someone was in her room waiting for her? It wasn’t as if Wise’s people didn’t have the resources to track her down. Tina had been ambushed three times in the past three days, and caught off-guard every time. It was fast becoming a habit. The first time, back at her cottage, hadn’t been her fault. Neither, you could argue, was the second, when Milne had broken into her room. But tonight she and Milne had made a mistake by going back to the house in Ternate rather than following the lead they already had, and it had almost cost Tina her life. She couldn’t afford another error. The law of averages was against her enough as it was.
The Payback Page 20