Constantine Legacy (Jake Dillon Adventure Series)

by Andrew Towning

  “Especially as you have taken it upon yourself to destroy my lucrative little venture down here in Dorset. For that, I am going to take great pleasure in destroying you – blow by blow.”

  He moved slowly, ensuring he kept his balance. His eyes stared into mine, sizing me up, judging my probable actions. We faced each other no more than an arm length apart. He brought his hands slowly and easily upwards in front of him, fists clenched. He widened his stance and turned his shoulders very slightly.

  It confirmed what I had suspected. George was a street brawler; his stance was that of a boxer, one hand and one foot slightly advanced.

  Rivulets of seawater caught in the light meandered across the deck under George’s feet. I brought my left arm up in front of me in a basic block, sweeping it across to the left, deflecting George’s right fisted punch. I watched his eyes, he was deciding whether I was going to be a pushover. He came at me with a short left hook in the ribs, followed with a jab at my face.

  His fist scraped my cheek, but my body was wide open. I ignored the pain in my side, bringing my left leg around in an arc, and the top part of my foot made contact just behind his knee.

  His leg buckled with the blow. As he went down on one knee, he spun round in an attempt to kick my feet out from under me.

  I stepped back quickly out of his reach. It was the correct counter but he was slow, far too slow. A man off balance thinks of nothing but getting balanced again; aggression disappears. He lunged forward, knees slightly bent, body forward, eyes keeping constant contact with mine.

  My left hand blocked and gripped his right forearm as he came in for another punch, and my right fist made contact with his stomach, just under the ribcage. George doubled over, my knee smashed into his nose, bone crunched and splintered, and blood began instantly pouring onto the teak deck.

  Still holding onto George’s right arm, I stepped around and behind him twisting the outstretched limb up at an angle. I heard a sharp intake of breath as I applied upward pressure to the point of dislocating or breaking George’s arm.

  The girl turned and looked over her shoulder, her eyes like belisha beacons as Fiona Price came crashing through the open salon doorway. She moved like a cat, low and crouching until she was out in the open. Then she stood up and fired her pistol into the air.

  Even at that instant George did not allow the pain to influence him. He still tried to struggle out of the hold I had him in. He was a tough man, this George Ferdinand. He fell away as I released him and sat on the floor holding what was left of his nose.

  He said, “You know I could easily throw you over the side – and no one could ask any questions?”

  “Of course you could, George, but there is just the possibility that I’ll break your neck while you’re trying or the lady over there will shoot you.”

  “We’ve got no power on that side.” the young girl pointed to the starboard side. The cable from the sonar had probably wrapped itself around the screw. I retrieved my automatic, motioning George down towards the dive platform.

  “Fiona, cover the girl while I attend to our friend here.”

  I tied George to the steps with the rope from a life buoy and went back up to the bridge. I told the girl to head back towards Poole Harbour and Sandbanks, using only the port motor. It would be a slow journey and the wind had got up, coming at us with the dawn sun. This floating gin palace was definitely not the type of boat to be in at sea with only one propeller.

  “You’ve got nothing on me,” Ferdinand shouted.

  “When we hand you over to the police, or perhaps those gentle souls from drugs, you might think differently.”

  “There’s nothing linking me to Harry Caplin or anyone else, so dream on, Dillon, and another thing, the authorities won’t be holding me for too long when we get back. Once I’ve phoned my lawyer,” said George, with a twisted sneer, his eyes flitting in all directions and beads of nervous sweat all over his face.

  “Who’s to say that you will get a phone call, George?” I said. “It’s like this, certain parties that I know want to question you about your involvement with the distribution of class A drugs across the country. I’ve no doubt they will also want to know where and from whom you obtained the list that enables you to blackmail some of the countries most influential and wealthy people.”

  The wind howled all around us. George was getting the full force of it where I’d tied him up. The girl sat at the wheel keeping close to the coast as we made our way back to the harbour.

  “Save your fantasies for your report,” said Ferdinand. “You have no interest in drugs.”

  “No? So what am I interested in, then.”

  “Your only interest is in Constantine’s list, the one I would have retrieved from that cove had you not gate crashed the party.”

  “Well done George, that’s exactly right,” I told him. “My brief has always been to locate the list and then to destroy it. But my colleague up there is most definitely wanting to talk to you about the drugs.”

  Fiona looked down at me quizzically at the mention of drugs.

  “It’s not there,” he said, “it’s gone, you’ll never find it, not now – not never.”

  “But you admit that it has been your source of blackmailing inspiration?”

  “Of course, it contains the names of some of the most powerful people in this country. It’s not everyday you get the opportunity to screw those filthy rich bastards, is it now? But, I really can’t recall much of it,” he added for good measure.

  “Let me help you remember,” I said. “I’ll tell you one name that was on it.”

  I named Hawkworth. Ferdinand said nothing. “The man that you served under in the army and whom with your friend Jasper Lockhart you decided to blackmail.”

  “You know about Lockhart,” George’s eyes filled with hate, and he flared his nostrils in a primitive show of anger. “Leave him out of it. He’s all right; he was just trying to help me. He’s not involved in…” George stopped talking and looked out to sea.

  “He’s not involved, eh?” I said, but didn’t push it any further.

  I sat down under the canopy on the lower deck, just above the dive platform. The nagging pain in my side told me that at least one rib was possibly fractured, maybe two.

  George sat slumped on the deck, his hands tied together to the steps. His nose had started to bleed again and both eyes had started to swell. Just to add to his discomfort.

  “Did your friend Flackyard give you the list or did you steal it from him?” I asked out of the blue.

  George slowly looked up at me through swollen eyes before speaking.

  “No,” he said quietly, “Robert Flackyard is the most honourable man I know.”

  “Look, George,” I said, “I rarely interrupt people when they’re talking; especially when they are misinterpretting ‘honour’ and inventing lies and halftruths, because, in fact, they are far more interesting than the actual truth. However, for you I’ll make an exception; either you start telling the truth or I’m going to drop you over the side with your hands still tied together.”

  “What do you or your kind know about honour?” he said tersely.

  “Honour,” I said, “Sure and of course you do; you, Caplin, Hawkworth and Flackyard. An honourable bunch of thugs. Look, Ferlind” – it was the first time I had used his real name – “you’re just trying to break one leg off of a centipede. Behind me is another, just like me, and behind him another. I’m a pussycat compared with some of the others who are going to descend on you in any part of the world you go. All that my boss and those in Whitehall want back is a report stating the assignment is ‘closed’ written in bold letters across the front of the file. Those individuals named in that list can then get on with their sordid little lives, without the fear of being blackmailed. Try and be a bit sensible. I may even tell the authorities what a helpful chap you’ve been. You never know, they may even cut a deal with you.”

  “What do you want to know?” he said.<
br />
  “I don’t know what’s missing until I hear it, if there is anything you don’t want to tell me just miss it out!”

  “How very cunning,” said George, “the gaps tell you more than the story in between.”

  “Something like that,” I said, “I’m really the Chief Constable travelling undercover with a wire taped to my chest, or it could just be George, that you are a little paranoid!”

  Getting up, stiff from sitting on the deck my ribs ached from where Ferdinand had whacked me. I walked to the main cabin, leaving Fiona to watch both the girl and George while I poured him a large brandy from Harry’s well-stocked drinks cabinet. I released Ferdinand’s left hand from the steps but left his right securely tied to the handrail, just in case he decided to jump overboard on his own. He sipped at the big glass of brandy I had given him, lost in deep thought.

  He said, “Bosnia? Do you remember the news footage, the images that came out of the Kosovo conflict? Dying and wounded babies, animals and children, hundreds of dead bodies everywhere, riddled with bullets or torn apart by landmines?” He lit a cigarette, taking a hard pull of smoke into his lungs.

  “Frightened, I was so bloody frightened. People like you don’t understand...”

  “...do you?” he said. He wanted a reply.

  I said, “As long as you don’t say it’s because of my lack of imagination.”

  He went on staring out to sea and smoking. George Ferdinand nodded.

  For a moment I thought he was going to smile.

  “Yes, I was there. There are times you’re so frightened of something that you have to make it happen sooner. I was merely someone who wanted to come to terms with my trauma. Men I had known from the army had volunteered to fight as unpaid mercenaries with the Kosovo Liberation Army.”

  “So I went to join Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian force as a highly paid mercenary, just to be different. They posted me to a small elite unit inside Kosovo which was carrying out assassinations against their own Serbian police officials and Albanian collaborators. Why? I hear you ask. Very simple really. To discredit the Kosovar Albanians, who at the time were part of a peaceful movement. Caplin thought I was working with the Liberation Army.”

  “He liked it that way so I never disillusioned him.” “How long were you with the Serbs?” I said.

  “Long enough. It was just like an exercise really, we’d be told which police official or collaborator to hit. All we had to do was follow him around, see where he went, plant a bomb somewhere convenient and using a remote detonator, execute him. Bombing was always the preferred method, as it always gained maximum shock horror reactions. It made it a nice impersonal fight for me. No close up view of who you were hitting. No one trying to hit you. The best bit was being paid thousands of pounds by the Serbs to actually go out and kill Serbs. Ironic is what I’d call it, bloody ironic.”

  I could see that in some perverse way the destruction and carnage that Ferdinand had experienced in Kosovo had never left him, and probably never would. How he really did believe in his own twisted mind, that working for the Serbs in Bosnia was nothing more than an exercise.

  “When I came back to England, I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing, except getting drunk and doing a little coke more often than not.”

  “Anyway, after a while I got introduced to a local East End lad who operated a string of lap dancing clubs in Soho and was heavily into dealing drugs. It wasn’t long before I had a flat and a flash car. He told me that in return for the lifestyle, I would be contacted when the occasional ‘special job’ had to be done, otherwise my time was my own.”

  Ferdinand looked at me and shrugged.

  “And you fell for this guy’s bullshit?” I said.

  “I fell for it,” said Ferdinand.

  “Then you met Jasper Lockhart?”

  George didn’t fall into the trap; he walked into it slowly and deliberately. He looked at me and said, “Yes, I saw him soon after I’d started. He told you?”

  I tried a simple lie. “No, I guessed,” I said, “when I saw you in London. It was when I met Jasper Lockhart at that lap dancing club.”

  “That was you, was it?” said Ferdinand. “Yes, I sometimes go back there to see some of the girls. Purely for pleasure, you understand.”

  I knew he was lying. He had obviously been there delivering a consignment of drugs that afternoon, but I said nothing.

  The brandy was helping Ferdinand to relax, so I poured him another drink.

  He finally said, “It was the redhead.”

  I handed him the glass. “It was - the redhead,” he said again. As I got up and walked up to the wheelhouse, Fiona was sat on the stowage locker talking to the girl. I stretched some of the tension and stiffness out of my body. George screamed as loud as he could over the force four that was blowing, “It was the fucking redhead, do you hear me?”

  Both Fiona and the girl looked around sharply.

  “OK,” I said.

  “Listen, she’s one of the dance girls I dated when I worked in London, I keep in touch with her because she feeds me little snippets of info about her boss - who used to be my boss. I like to know what he’s up to, especially as we’re - were in the same line of business, so to speak.”

  “Tell me about how you met Robert Flackyard?” I asked him.

  Ferdinand’s eyes flitted around like a butterfly in flight, first in one direction and then another. He started to talk quickly. “Flackyard was a big man at the Russian Embassy in London, and a group of them used to come to the titty bars in Soho, usually once or twice a month. They spent money like it was going out of fashion, a thousand sometimes two thousand at a time. On one occasion my boss made a point of introducing the Russians to me. The reason, very simple, I was to look after his esteemed guests personally. They all liked to snort coke, just as they liked to touch the girls who were dancing for them. Some of Flackyard’s cronies paid extra to take the girls up to a private room and have sex with them. But, the only thing that Robert Flackyard was interested in was the setups with the clubs and of course a little cocaine now and again, for recreational purposes only.”

  “My break came about three months later. Flackyard came into the bar on his own without his minders, which was very rare because they followed him everywhere. He talked around the houses for hours, never getting to the point, always in riddles. Eventually, he came clean and offered me an opportunity beyond my wildest dreams.”

  “What did he offer you,” I asked.

  “He offered me the opportunity of a life time - to get back at, and get equal, with the stuck up gits in the army who had me kicked out. But most of all he offered me Oliver Hawkworth on a plate. The man I most hated and still hate to this very day.”

  George poured himself another brandy from the bottle I’d brought down from the saloon. He picked up his drink and sipped at it. “You’re probably wondering what the catch was with Flackyard. Well, there wasn’t one, all he wanted from me was my help in setting up a string of titty bars along the south coast.”

  “Did you plant the bomb that killed my friend Charlie McIntyre?” I asked.

  “Kill him? I couldn’t have killed him.” He drank some more. “You can’t imagine a mountaineer cutting the rope of another mountaineer, could you?”

  “Well, it’s like that. I had a lot of respect for Charlie, he was undoubtedly the best explosives expert on the open market as well as a damn good diver.”

  “I didn’t mean to insult you George, but I had to ask.”

  “It was Rumple,” George said, ever so quietly that I almost didn’t hear him say it.

  He poured himself another brandy, shouted up to the girl to cut the engine revs, and told me that we were just wasting fuel. We sat in silence for some time, looking out to sea. Somehow I knew what George had told me was all true.

  Chapter 31

  Ferdinand and I sat on the rear deck of the “Star Dust” in silence for some time. When I finally said it, I tried to make it sound as c
asual as you like. “So were you given Constantine’s list by Flackyard at the very outset, were you, George?”

  “You must be joking; Flackyard would never give anyone that list.”

  “So how did you get the names from it?”

  “You make me laugh,” said Ferdinand. I found that difficult to believe.

  “Don’t you realise even now, that we have all been completely outsmarted by a man who is cleverer than all of us put together?”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “One man and one man only has access to the list, to the only copy that is in existence. One man went to a lot of trouble to get it and even more to putting it somewhere only he can get to it.” He paused, after a long silence he said, “The list is stored on a CD inside a watertight canister made to look like a lobster pot on the sea bed. To retrieve the pot you have to know roughly where it’s located, but because of the tidal currents it moves around.”

  “That equipment in the aluminium case over there,” he pointed to the case laying on the lower deck, “well, that underwater sonar ‘calls’ the lobster pot to the surface by remotely detonating and inflating the pot’s tiny onboard ballast tanks. But you have to be virtually on top of it before the sonar can send a strong enough signal.”

  “And that’s what you were trying to do just now.”

  “I stole that equipment from Flackyard’s house. It’s a portable unit designed for close range locating. Flackyard has the real thing in his study.”

  “He sits there every evening before dinner and gloats because he knows exactly where the list is at all times. All he has to do is bring up a local coastal chart on his computer screen; the homing device he had fitted to the pot interacts with the specially designed software, and bingo the computer does the rest.” Ferdinand’s voice went very quiet.

  “He’d tricked me again.” He looked up at me sharply. “It’s not there in that cove, it’s moved to another location!”

  I nodded. “Tell me about Hawkworth,” I said.

  “Hawkworth was only one,” George went on, “Flackyard forced a lot of people on the list to invest money in his businesses or ensure that lucrative Government development contracts were his for the taking.”