The Hunter’s Oath

by Jason Dean

  To Bishop, she looked as beautiful as ever.

  He opened the door and stepped inside. Amy turned and saw him. The big grin she gave him immediately lit up her whole face. ‘Hey, Bish,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, yourself,’ Bishop said. And as he went over to his sister, he found he was grinning as broadly as she was.

  Keep reading for the thrilling opening to the first James Bishop novel

  ONE

  When James Bishop regained conscioussness, he raised his head from the floor to look at the wall clock and calculated he’d been out for thirteen minutes. His next thought was that almost anything could have happened to the Brennans in that time.

  Maybe everything.

  Using the kitchen island to pull himself up, Bishop picked up his Glock from where it had fallen next to the refrigerator and pushed the catch on the side that released the magazine. It was still full, with a round still in the chamber. Frowning, he checked the rubble for his knife. No sign. Which made no sense at all. If anything, he figured it should have been the other way round. You don’t leave your enemy with his gun unless it’s for a good reason. The thought weighed on his mind, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it. Not now.

  He made an effort to control his breathing. Whatever he’d inhaled had left a sharp, metallic taste in the back of his throat. His head was throbbing and he still felt woozy. The attacker had come from behind, just as the rear door had blown inwards, and he’d forced the damp cloth over Bishop’s mouth before he could react. Before the drug had completely invaded his system, Bishop had managed to use his knife to stab at his assailant’s arm around his neck, but he hadn’t had the strength to drive the blade in further before he’d blacked out.

  The October light was fading now. Bishop moved to the blown-out doorframe and saw Thorpe’s legs and boots sticking out of the small gazebo in the distance. One man down, at least, he thought. But what about Neary at the gatehouse? Chaney? Tennison? Oates? Bishop couldn’t believe his whole protection team was down. Fourteen minutes had passed since he pressed the panic button, which meant the Long Island estate should have been swarming with cops by now. But everything was quiet. All he could hear was the beat of his own heart.

  For now, he had to assume he was on his own. But he still needed to find his clients.

  He turned towards the hallway, his gun leading the way. As he advanced, his rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the polished floor and he shifted his weight to his toes. At the front of the three-storey house was a large entrance foyer with a grand staircase leading up to the second floor in two graceful semicircular sweeps. When Bishop reached the end of the corridor he jammed a heel hard into the floor and waited for a moment. When no shots came he moved into the open space.

  A figure dressed in black lay at the base of the left staircase, head covered by a ski mask, a stubby Heckler & Koch MP5K inches from his hand. Surrounding him was a congealing pool of blood. Bishop checked his pulse and found no sign of life. Fifteen feet away, leaning against the front doors with his legs splayed out and his chin touching his chest, was Tennison. That makes two then, he thought. The man was bloody but alive and Bishop could hear a faint whistling sound as he breathed.

  Bishop moved quickly up the white-carpeted stairs. At the top, two passageways ran off the landing. He turned down the left-hand one and pushed open the third door on the left. Inside, an unused bedroom led to another smaller room: the safe room – a small space surrounded by seven inches of concrete. No windows. Only one entrance. No way to break in. Once the interior button was pressed, a reinforced steel fire door slammed down over the doorway. Randall and Natalie Brennan should have been inside, but the steel door had not been engaged. The room was empty.

  He clenched his jaw tight. Not possible.

  At the first sign of trouble, the first sign, get the principals to the safe room. It had been drilled into his team enough times. He couldn’t believe both father and daughter had been left exposed during the assault. Oates had been using the room to grab some shuteye, but he would have woken immediately at the sound of gunfire. Then he should have grabbed them both, brought them back here and sealed them in in less than a minute. Just like he’d been trained. Which meant he’d either screwed up big time or the hostiles had top intel. Neither option made Bishop feel any better.

  He heard a faint thump from the floor above. Then a familiar creak on the metal staircase at the end of the other passageway. He ran back towards the landing, stopped and raised his Glock with both hands, his light blue eyes fixed on the exit from the right-hand corridor.

  A second later, a heavy-set man dressed identically to the dead man downstairs emerged. Over his right shoulder was a large black holdall, in his right hand an MP5K. With his left he was pulling a cotton ski mask down over the bottom half of his face. On his right sleeve was a blood-smeared rip.

  Bishop stepped out. ‘Halt,’ he said.

  Instead, the man turned quickly and Bishop’s reflexes and training took over. He fired three shots straight at his chest. They all hit home. The man grunted and fell backwards down the curving staircase, bouncing off the banister and landing on the floor, sprawled on his back. Almost a mirror image of his friend on the other side.

  Bishop looked over the railing and waited until blood seeped through the man’s clothing where the rounds had hit. He then ran down the right-hand passageway and leapt three steps at a time up the small spiral staircase. At the top, he pushed through the double doors to Brennan’s office.

  He almost tripped over Oates’s body. The young ex-soldier lay on his back just inside the double doors, three dark stains on his unprotected chest, his light brown eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. His gun lay a few inches from his outstretched hand. Although he’d only been in the team eight months, Oates had been a good protection officer, the soldier in him ever alert. Yet somehow the enemy had managed to take him totally by surprise.

  Bishop saw the large antique desk in front of the window was undisturbed. On it was a state-of-the-art laptop and a small silver-framed photograph of the smiling family. Directly in front of the desk, Natalie had been stripped to her waist and tied to a chair. Her body was drenched in blood from the neck down and the carpet underneath was soaked. Bishop could see straight away she was dead.

  On Bishop’s right the selection of photos on what Brennan smugly called his Wall of Fame watched him. At his left were two floor-to-ceiling bookcases. One had been pushed aside to reveal a thick steel door, partly open. That was when Bishop knew the attackers were professionals. Until that moment he himself had had no knowledge of any secret vault.

  Close to the door, the silver-haired Randall Brennan lay stretched out on his side, his eyes open under a creased brow, his mouth slack. He looked like he was contemplating the crimson pattern on the carpet in front of him, except that his throat had been cut.

  Bishop turned and stepped over to Natalie. Her throat had also been cut and her head had rolled to the side, her long black hair obscuring her features. Countless lacerations haphazardly criss-crossed her torso and breasts above a deep stab wound in her flat stomach.

  Crouching at her side, Bishop looked up at her open blue eyes for a long time and gently touched her cheek. The pale, blemish-free skin still felt faintly warm against his palm.

  ‘Jesus.’ Seventeen years old and her life already over.

  He studied the cuts on her chest. They looked frantic, as if the killer had gone at her in a frenzy. Like you’d find in a lover’s murder, not a professional hit. What the hell was going on? Bishop turned to check Randall Brennan for similar cuts and saw his missing knife lying next to the body.

  Then a voice said, ‘What you doing in here, boss?’

  Bishop rose and slowly turned round, his gun at his side. Sam Chaney stared at him. He was standing with his back against the doorframe, his left arm lying useless against his side and a steady flow of blood dripping onto the carpet from a wound in his right thigh. His Glock was aimed at Bishop, the barrel
steady. Resting his head against the frame he glanced at the knife next to Brennan’s body and said, ‘The one who took me out was carrying a big black bag that was kinda hard to miss. So where is he?’

  ‘Christ, Chaney. Stand down. He’s at the bottom of the stairs with three in his chest.’

  A head shake. ‘There’s only one dead perp down there and there sure as hell ain’t any bag with him. Where were you? You know, while the rest of us were getting our asses shot off?’ He nodded at the bodies on the floor and coughed once. ‘While all this was going on?’

  Bishop studied him as sirens sounded in the distance. Watched as Chaney’s blood began to pool on the carpet and his thigh muscles started to contract. And it dawned on him why he’d been left unharmed. An inside man. A nice scapegoat for the cops.

  ‘Maybe you should put your gun down,’ Chaney said, his right hand beginning to waver slightly. ‘Like right now. I don’t wanna have to shoot you.’

  ‘Lower your weapon, Chaney. Somebody’s setting me up. Maybe you. Or have you already forgotten who’s in charge?’

  ‘The piece, Bishop. I won’t tell you again.’

  ‘You seem real quick to—’ Bishop was beginning when Chaney pulled the trigger.

  TWO

  Thirty-two Months Later

  Bishop opened his eyes and stared at the fluorescent light behind its steel grid in the ceiling. Then he studied the spot-welded railing of the bunk directly above him. Then back to the ceiling. Not that it made much difference. The eight-by-nine cell was hardly brimming over with visual stimulation.

  There was a combo washbasin and john in one corner. A small, barred window with a brick wall for a view. Three shelves weighed down with toiletries and books. A desk built into the same wall. And a plastic stool.

  Stretched out on the bunk in the prison-issue grey shirt and pants, Bishop absently scratched at his goatee before reaching down to knead the muscles around his collarbone. The facial hair was only one example of how he’d changed in the last two years and eight months. In addition, the professional Harvard haircut of his old life had grown into a shoulder-length brown mane. His naturally tanned complexion had become a distant memory too, and his six-foot-one-inch frame had filled out a little thanks to the starchy food. No prison tattoos, though, which was something.

  The room’s other occupant was Jorge, an overweight Latin American forty-something whose last armed robbery meant he might see daylight again in fifteen years. He sat on the stool, carefully rolling a ‘Grand Central Special’ from leftover butts in his improvised ashtray. He was humming to himself as he waited for his call to the visiting room, a part of the prison Bishop had only seen once in the nine hundred and seventy-three days he’d been there. At his request, his older sister, Amy, hadn’t come a second time. Although he’d appreciated the thought, he didn’t like her seeing him in this place. He was fairly sure she hadn’t enjoyed the experience much, either. Further visits would only make things harder for both of them.

  Bishop just hoped his cellmate wouldn’t start talking. He usually did at some point and then Bishop had to try to block him out. But humming he could live with. He’d heard it so many times it had become a sad soundtrack to his life in here. In truth, it actually helped him think, although he’d never admit that to Jorge.

  The so-called evidence that had led to Bishop’s arrest for the murders of Randall Brennan, Natalie Brennan and Ryan Oates had been expertly planned. Whoever set him up had spent a lot of time and effort making sure the cops didn’t need to look anywhere other than at him.

  In Bishop’s rented Queens apartment, they found blueprints of the Brennan house on his hard drive with convenient notations marking the secret vault’s location in the third-floor office. They also found over a hundred pornographic shots of Natalie Brennan that appeared to have been taken in his bedroom. Career-ending ‘evidence’ that had simply added further motive for Bishop’s actions that night. And at the house, there’d been nothing to back up Bishop’s story of his fight with the missing fourth raider or his claim that his comms and pager had been jammed. But it was the knife that really did him in.

  Covered in the Brennans’ blood and with Bishop’s prints all over the handle, it must have seemed like a winning lottery ticket to the homicide detectives when they got the results back. Especially when forensics found enough similarities between the 9mm hollow-points in Oates and Bishop’s piece to add Oates’s murder to the charge sheet, too. He was just surprised they hadn’t tried to pin Neary’s death on him as well.

  Add the three dead raiders and you were left with a body count of seven. The newspapers had loved that, of course. As far as they were concerned, seven bodies constituted a massacre. It might have been nine had Brennan’s wife and son not been holidaying in Malibu with friends at the time. That was something to be grateful for, at least.

  The timing had been perfect, too. Bishop’s team, having completed their four-month rotation, had been expecting their replacement squad that very evening. The impostors had merely turned up an hour earlier with the right identification and the correct authorization codes. Everything seemed to check out. Until the shooting started.

  And as for motive, a little digging into his email account brought up a cryptic message leading the cops to an offshore account in Bermuda. One opened in Bishop’s name two months before which suddenly became two million dollars healthier on October 18, three days after the attack.

  Tucking his free hand under his head, Bishop could see how plausible it must have all sounded to a cop unwilling to think outside the box. But most of it was just lazy. For instance, if he’d been smart enough to pull the rest off, how could he be dumb enough to leave the knife without wiping his prints off first?

  His thoughts went back to the questions of ‘who’ and ‘why’. Two little words, but the only ones that counted. And Bishop knew that without figuring out one, he would never get the other to reveal itself. He also had a feeling the ‘why’ was going to be easier to solve than the ‘who’, since everything usually came down to money and Randall Brennan had plenty of the stuff.

  In this case two million had been set aside just to make Bishop look bad, an amount that would tempt any number of heist men just on its own. Which meant the vault must have held something more than that. A lot more. After all, Brennan must have had the vault built for a good reason. As a highly successful international arms negotiator, he must have had plenty of income lying around he couldn’t afford to declare.

  But Bishop wasn’t about to rule out revenge as a motive, either. His team hadn’t been hired as a status symbol to impress the neighbours. The family had been receiving threats. Serious threats. Brennan hadn’t reached the top of his game by playing by the rules and it was entirely possible he’d made a dangerous enemy somewhere along the way. Someone who’d do anything to achieve satisfaction and was more than willing to corrupt one of RoyseCorp’s men to get the job done. But that was always when Bishop hit the wall. Because why involve him?

  Even if he was just a diversion, why not somebody else? There had to be a reason good enough to want him locked up for life. It would have been a lot simpler just to add him to the night’s victims. And this was the part that really got him. Not everyone could set up an attack against New York’s top protection firm and bank on Bishop’s getting life for a triple murder charge. Which meant it came down to one of the three survivors from his team. Sam Chaney, Chris Tennison or Martin Thorpe. To influence the night’s events and arrange all the evidence against him, the man needed to be there. On the spot. Without a doubt.

  Along with Neary, all three had been a regular part of his team for years. Private security and close protection attracted more than its fair share of disreputable characters, so you tended to keep the ones you could trust close. Which was why Bishop insisted on handpicking his own crew when he was promoted to team leader less than a year into his RoyseCorp service. His immediate supervisor, perhaps sensing he would have walked otherwise, had consented to
his wishes. Thorpe was the first to be picked, with Chaney and Neary following close behind. Tennison had just two and a half years on the team, with Oates the most recent addition.

  And although he had to sometimes reproach one of them for the occasional lapse, it was never for anything serious or they’d have been out. If anything, he’d gone out of his way to understand their idiosyncrasies. Like red-headed Tennison’s attitude, or Thorpe’s claustrophobia, or Chaney’s wandering eye when it came to little ladies in distress. So after spending his first week inside going through everything he knew about each of his men and getting nowhere, Bishop had decided that maybe he needed to look at it from their point of view.

  It was possible a mild rebuke from Bishop had stuck in one of the men’s craws, and grown until the idea of setting him up for murder seemed a fair revenge. Although Bishop hadn’t believed this angle he’d still evaluated every job they’d done together over the past six years. Another week later he was back to square one. Nothing flagged up. And the one thing he could rely on was his power of recall.

  Bishop never forgot anything. Never had. Not since school. Photographic or eidetic memory, they called it. Found in less than ten per cent of children and usually gone by the time they reach their teens. Usually, but not always. Bishop was living proof of that.

  So, by day fifteen of his sentence, he’d concluded he wasn’t going to find answers by concentrating on Chaney, Tennison or Thorpe. Which just left the guy he’d shot on the landing. The one who’d drugged him. Since the doctors who worked on Bishop had found no trace of any drug in his system, the cops claimed he and the raider had been working together. Which only fuelled Bishop’s anger and made him even more determined to find the guy. And he knew once he found him, he’d be able to trace everything back to the source. To the Judas on his team.