by A P Bateman
Reaper
By
A P Bateman
Text © Anthony Paul Bateman
2018
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, printing or otherwise, without written permission of the author.
This book is a work of fiction and any character resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Some locations may have been changed, others are fictitious.
Facebook: @authorapbateman
Website (including contact and mailing list sign-up): www.apbateman.com
For my family
1
Georgia, Black Sea Coast
Fight fire with fire.
King had always undertaken a measured response to violence according to the severity of the attack. A lifetime of judgement. He knew there was no way a war - especially a dirty, secret war - could be won without the stark reality of ruthlessness. He had fought and won many of these wars. Some played out on the desolate terrain of Northern Iraq, in the mountains of Afghanistan or among the ruined streets of Syria. And some of these wars had been fought and won on the streets of Britain. In the back alleys, the shadows. Always ruthless, yet mindful to avoid the slippery slope of becoming nastier, more ruthless than his enemy. King had always been guided by his conscience, his ability to care enough about himself and the people around him over simply getting the task done.
He had never been afraid to question the chain of command. A trait that had made enemies for him within his own organisation, created a rocky road for him to travel, but allowed his horizon some clarity within the shadowy world he occupied.
But, until now, there had never been the personal involvement for him. King had witnessed vendetta and revenge. He had stood back and witnessed what revenge could do. He had seen mothers avenge their sons, husbands avenge their wives. When ISIS had reigned and ruled terror in Syria and Iraq, King had witnessed the tables turn. He had seen the bloodlust of normal people who had lost everything, the horrors of bloodthirsty vengeance satiated only by the hacking and burning of the bodies of the once powerful, suddenly defeated and beaten. For those people, the fight had been personal. And now, for the first time in a life spent plotting and killing in the shadows, King knew how difficult it could be to control that bloodlust. For the first time in his life, he wanted to kill. He wanted it more than he could ever have imagined.
King pulled the car over to the side of the road. The Black Sea shimmered beyond the pine trees on the rocky slopes. It was hot, late June. The sky clear and blue. The morning had been enveloped in a thick fog along the shoreline until well after dawn. The sun had now baked it off and the day didn’t look like it would be anything but perfect. But not for some people. For some people, their day would only be getting worse.
King switched off the engine and got out, his desert boots crunching on the gravel. There was an air of calm, of unnatural silence. He hadn’t seen a single vehicle on the drive across the plateau, traversing from one mountain to another. He stood stock-still, listened. A bird called a shrill tune, fluttered through the pines and disappeared. The slope of the mountain was still once more.
He walked around to the rear of the vehicle. Opened the boot and stepped back. The woman looked younger than her twenty-five years. But her features were familiar, there was no mistaking her. She blinked against the sunlight, strained against the thin rope fastening her wrists. She looked terrified.
King felt the adrenalin subsiding. He was aware of a stinging sensation, followed the woman’s stare to his left arm. Blood ran down his forearm, trickling steadily from a graze above his left elbow. The blood had reached his watch, covered the face and permeated the stainless-steel links of the bracelet in a crimson glaze. He turned his elbow over, looked at the wound, was relieved there was no more damage. He had been lucky. Many men had not.
The girl looked at the pistol tucked into his waistband. She had been around weapons her entire life, but she seemed scared at the sight of it. King took out a handkerchief from his pocket and folded it before pressing it against the wound. He took it away, noted there was more blood soaked into it than he thought there would have been. He pressed it against the open wound again. The woman was watching him intently. King followed her stare, saw the patch of crimson spreading across his stomach. He placed the folded handkerchief against it, then took it away to see how much blood there would be. It wasn’t good. He felt a wave of nausea wash over him, but it was soon replaced by anger.
He couldn’t go down yet.
There was too much left to do.
He couldn’t afford to be taken out of the fight.
The woman tried to talk but her lips were stuck together. Her nose was bloodied and there was swelling to one of her eye sockets. She swallowed like it was an effort to talk and licked her lips with her dry tongue. It must have helped her a little, because she asked, “Are you going to kill me?”
The words hung in the air, seemed to resonate around King, like an extra-sensory experience. King didn’t simply hear her question, more felt a third party to it. It wasn’t until the young woman asked him, that he realised the ramifications of taking her. What scared him most of all, was now she had asked the inevitable question, he simply didn’t know. What he did know, was that she was now his bargaining chip in a game that had long become out of hand.
2
One month earlier
Sodertalje, Sweden
May was a spring month in southern Sweden, yet today was cold. The sky was grey, and darkness threatened to dominate the morning. King stepped out of the hire car, closed the door, yet left it unlocked, and crossed over the street. He adjusted the collar of his coat, smoothed down the front, casually checking the 9mm Browning pistol was securely in place.
They would have the jump on him. They had known when he would have been coming. They had known before he had even read the letter, so attempting to get there before them would have been a fruitless exercise. He would have to accept that he was on the back foot. Even so, he had managed to skirt the town and monitor movement. He had done this in the darkness on foot, then later at dawn circling the area in a wide loop. Finally, he had driven around, eased the car to a halt and watched. There had been nobody. Nobody out of the ordinary for a small town. Just people starting their days – commutes into Stockholm, school runs – everyday things. No vehicles parked up, the occupants waiting, scouting the streets for him. Which told King that the buildings across from the post office would be the only place from which they would mount surveillance. They would have eyes on for sure. A riflescope maybe, but only as a countermeasure. No, the game was about to commence, and King knew he was not yet walking into an ambush. The answer lay inside the post office, inside the safety deposit box numbered 4478. Soon enough he would know how much he would be played. And whether getting the woman he loved back safely was even a remote possibility.
3
The post office looked like it would have been more fitting in a remote Swedish village. King had noted an old fashioned sweet shop across the road. Perhaps both establishments belonged to a time when Sodertalje was smaller, a quaint township rather than a satellite of Stockholm’s city limits. A place where commuters could afford more than they would in the city. Now that Sodertalje hosted a major industrial complex and commercial town along with housing developments of exponential growth, this part of town would surely change before long.
King stepped inside, closed the door and looked back across the street. He noticed a net curtain move. Encouraging. Only a rank amateur would do that. He waited a moment to see if there was another movement, but really, he knew there wouldn’t be. He would be visible to them, but he w
ould have shown them that he knew he was being watched, and that he had seen them. He stared intently, hoping he would be clear in the lens of a camera or even the sight of a rifle. He hoped they would see his eyes, cold, grey and cruel. They rarely sparkled anymore. They had simply seen too much; the worst that humankind could deliver. He continued to stare, wanted to show he was unafraid.
And he was.
He had crossed the line between self-preservation and recklessness. He would die one day, so it might as well be doing something worthwhile, something personal to him. He had laid on his bed last night, thought of the missions he had played a part in over the years, the risks he had taken. It had all paled into insignificance.
“Kan jag hjälpa dig?”
King broke away, looked at the young woman behind the counter. She was blonde, tall and beautiful. Scandinavian through and through. She wore her hair in plaits with a tight beanie covering the top of her head. “Sorry…” he said.
“Can I help you?” she repeated in English.
King was relieved. He had only visited Sweden once before, briefly. “I have a safety deposit box,” he paused. “Number four-twenty-seven.”
She smiled. “This way,” she said, and she walked out from behind the counter and opened a door to her left. She held it open for him and nodded for him to go through. “There’s a privacy curtain if you wish, but as you can see, it’s quiet today.”
King nodded and walked through. He quickly scanned the room, noted the smoke detector in the centre of the ceiling, two PIR sensors at each end. There would be a camera in one of them for sure. Why else did a room which would be locked when the building was closed need passive infrared sensors?
The woman closed the door behind him and King walked to the end and looked at the numbers. Box 427 was near the far end and King could see that there were no more than fifty boxes in total. He studied the numbering and realised that the first number dictated the row. Row four, box twenty-seven.
King turned his back to the PIR units and the smoke detector the best he could. He studied the door to the box, noted the dial and series of numbers. He knew the combination by heart. Had done since he had read the letter two days earlier.
4478.
He twisted the dial all the way round to 44, back to 78. There was no other way to do it because a single digit four could not be dialled in twice without a reset. The door to the box clicked open and King tentatively opened the door. He looked for signs of a trap – wires, tripping devices leading to an IED – but decided it would be fruitless. If they wanted him dead, they would have had many opportunities by now. They called the shots, held all the cards.
There were two envelopes. King removed them and walked over to the curtained cubicle. He could already tell there was a mobile phone in one of the envelopes – a slimline smartphone. Undoubtedly a burner – a non-contract, prepaid phone with an untraceable number. He glanced upwards and saw another smoke alarm directly above his head. Undoubtedly a hidden camera. He couldn’t reach it to knock it down, so he angled himself the best he could to keep the contents of the envelopes shielded from view. He figured it was good enough and flipped the envelopes over. He discarded the first when he saw the single word scrawled on the front of the second envelope. His heart raced and he took a deep breath to calm himself, quell the adrenalin which now coursed through his veins. One name. Eight letters.
Caroline.
He tore open the envelope and turned over the single photograph. He couldn’t remember having ever felt so nervous. Unsure whether to recoil in disgust and horror or take the photograph as a blessed relief.
Caroline had been beaten. Her blonde hair was matted to her face and her left eye was swollen and blackened. Her lips were swollen too. It was a terrible sight to behold, but the clincher, the relief was in the form of the proof of life. A copy of Le Monde - the leading French newspaper - with the date and front-page story of radicalised asylum seekers. The photo had been taken a week ago.
That meant she was alive, or at least, had been for a whole three weeks after she had been taken.
4
One week later
Biarritz, France
The second envelope had contained photographs of somebody else. He was a forty-year-old Russian named Pyotr Sergeyev. He was a wealthy man, yet nobody knew his net worth. His business interests ranged from construction, road haulage and nightclubs, through to people trafficking, drug dealing and murder. Sergeyev owned brothels all over Europe, where many young Muslim asylum seekers had ended up working off their passage. They would work there until they were too old for the punters, too worn and abused to appeal with their looks. And then they would simply disappear.
Pyotr Sergeyev had started out as a strong-arm for the early founder of one of the arms of the Russian mafia. His boss had been ex-KGB and when the wall had fallen, the satellite countries broken free and the Soviet Empire collapsed; KGB agents knew where the accounts were, the weapons, the disenfranchised young men with little future ahead of them. The money, contracts and opportunities were there for the taking and many men were catapulted into billionaire status, their sons free to stroll around Mayfair and buy football clubs on a whim.
When the fragile balance of power teetered, Sergeyev had been in the right place at the right time, with a gun in his hand. He had killed his boss, the man’s wife, their two young sons and the man’s closest aides. He had killed the man’s elderly father, his brother, the man’s wife and their daughter. He had thrown down a challenge to the men around him, and they had fallen in behind him. Each of them undoubtedly terrified by Sergeyev’s ruthlessness. Because when someone crossed the young Russian, their family paid the price as well.
That had been ten years ago, and Sergeyev’s power and influence had still not been successfully challenged. There had been attempts, but all had failed. The Russian mafia boss had either killed or put these would-be assassin’s families into prostitution. He spared nobody, spoke loudly of what fate these people had suffered. He had kept two of his challengers alive long enough to see the extent of his retribution.
King looked at the photograph one last time, then put it back in the envelope, along with the dossier on Sergeyev and placed the envelope in the glovebox. He checked himself in the rear-view mirror. He had scrubbed up well enough. A close shave, a brush through his damp hair with his fingers. It was good enough. He had chosen a crisp white shirt to go with the dark blue suit that he had bought in one of the town’s boutique shops, though went with the shirt left open and without a tie. It was a smart look, enough for the casino, and as smart as he had been in years.
King watched the silver Mercedes S65 saloon stop outside the casino. Sergeyev’s security had already arrived in a garishly spec’d Range Rover Sport. Both bodyguards were brick outhouses. Twenty-stone a piece and well over six foot. They saw a lot of gym time. Both struggled to look comfortable in their suits and King could see unsightly mounds above their right hips. Both men carried large handguns in holsters and were obviously right-handed.
King wasn’t armed. He thought it prudent not to test the casino’s security. Sergeyev would have already bribed the house security to allow his own security such blatant disregard of France’s firearms laws. He envisioned a great deal of money spent, both on the tables and on the bar tab, and imagined that the casino’s security would be of no consequence if the Russian decided to merely do as he pleased under their roof. He noted that any action within the casino would not be his best approach.
The security was indeed laughable, because King was both swept with an electric metal detector wand and given a quick pat-down as he entered the foyer. Sergeyev and his two bodyguards had breezed straight through and were now in the bar. One of the guards was fetching chips, the other was clicking his fingers at a waitress while Sergeyev looked bored and impatient. King noted that the waitress left a table in the middle of placing an order to take the Russian’s bar order.
The table, which was made up of two couples, look
ed outraged. One of the men got up and strode over, interrupting the order. He was irate and focused as much on the bodyguard as the waitress as he vented. King admired the man’s tenacity, for the bodyguard was twice the man’s width, but he stayed back and watched to see how it would play out. Inevitably, the bodyguard gave the man a shove, which was something akin to watching someone get it very wrong at the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona. The man travelled a good distance before hitting the mosaic floor with a slap that made King wince from his vantage point. He knew enough about fights to know that the man wasn’t going dancing tonight, or perhaps for the rest of his holiday.
As the man lay still on the floor, his companions getting out of their seats to assist him, there were two things that could happen now, and King watched to see which would follow. Either the maître d'hôtel would be bringing out chilled champagne and a few hundred euros in complimentary chips for the table, or the house security would be taking the two couples outside before they had time to complain and cause a scene.
It was the latter. King watched as both the women and two men were roughly handled out through the bar and foyer by six well-built men with stubble on their faces and tattoos on their hands. They had all put time in at the gym and the four guests didn’t stand a chance. Normally, King wouldn’t have stood by and watched something so unjust, but he had to remind himself of the odds, and what he had on the line.
The Russian had this place sewn-up. His money was everything here. There was no touching him.
King ordered a beer when the waitress hovered over his table. She returned a few minutes later with a frosted glass, but a little too much foam on top. He didn’t complain, but nor did he tip. He drank down half the meagre glass, stood up and walked out onto the casino floor.