Headhunter

by Robert Young

FIFTY FOUR

  He feels like he is back down there in the brutal churning jaws of the ocean at the wall, trapped and rolling and disoriented.

  And then he’s back on the surface, clarity restored.

  Of course she does.

  Again those suppressed instincts that he should have trusted, that alarm bell sounding off before they got together and that night over dinner, before the mugging.

  Was that part of it too, this whole charade? He began to question everything now. The drugs thing, this trip, the job itself even. What on earth had he got himself into?

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know how far it would go. They just wanted to me to keep you close, because you were new and they needed to know what you were up to and what you knew.’

  He nods dumbly and stares up at the darkening sky.

  ‘It seemed reasonable. Or, not too outrageous anyway. But then you asked me out and it seemed like saying no would have made it harder. And saying yes was easy. Would have been easy without the job I mean. It just got out of my control then and anyway, it wasn’t like a job, it was fun. I wanted to.’

  ‘If I had one joule of energy left in me right now, I’d get up and walk away,’ he says and she rolls her head to look at him, tears spilling down her face.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea what was happening Dan. I just thought I’d keep an eye on you, stay close. It was just part of the job.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’d say you might have lost the job.’ He points back out over the waves. ‘That right there is what you call a severance package.’

  He chuckles darkly at his own joke for a moment, then falls silent again.

  The sound of her sobbing rises above that of the surf and Campbell does nothing but listen. He feels hurt and vengeful, as though she somehow deserves this for what’s happened, as though she nearly killed them both.

  Raising himself up on an elbow he looks at her. She has rolled on her side and gone foetal on the sand and she looks so small and wounded that his hardened heart yields a little.

  ‘It isn’t your fault,’ he says and his hand hovers over her shoulder a moment before he withdraws it.

  She keeps weeping, those four words insufficient consolation. Or, he reflects, maybe it’s the fact that someone’s just tried to drown her that’s upsetting her. Rather than the guilt of having been unwittingly involved in something she can’t possibly have foreseen.

  Could she? Campbell cannot be sure that she didn’t know what was coming for him but if she did she hid it phenomenally well. And the fact of their attempt to kill her should say something about what sort of role she might have had, or any value.

  But he was barely through processing any of this. The attack was shocking enough and he could only imagine that the motivation was that he knew too much, had found all the information in those brochures and prospectuses that was supposed to be buried and made connections that were supposed to be invisible.

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  But then if she had been detailed to watch over him - to whatever extent that brief ran, be it office or bedroom - the real question was why? Was every new employee subject to the same secret scrutiny? It was one thing to shadow someone or double-check their work whilst in a probationary period, but that’s not what she was saying. She’d been assigned to be closer to him than that. Close to him the person, not him the employee.

  It was too clandestine, too cloak and dagger, even in the cut-throat world of finance and investments. For an outfit like Scorpio, would they really have the resources to pay someone to look over the new boy’s shoulder like that? He was an analyst too, not a decision-maker. He wasn’t placing trades or running money.

  ‘Who is they?’

  ‘What?’ she says after a sob.

  ‘They? Who is the “they” you were watching me for? What did they want to know?’

  ‘Giles. Whoever’s his boss. They just wanted to make sure you were working on the right things and not chasing after your own ideas. Giles said that we were too small to have someone going off-plan and that they hired you because they knew you were good and curious and sharp but they needed to keep that on course and focused.’

  ‘Giles.’

  ‘Yes. Pretty much everything ran through him.’

  ‘And he has a boss? Who’s that? Where is he?’

  She sits up and wipes at her eyes. Shakes her head. ‘I never saw anyone else.’

  ‘Phone, email? Any sign of a chain of command?’

  She thinks for a moment but it is clear that whatever she knows it is not very much. She has been given a limited brief and one way or another, she has delivered it. Delivered him.

  ‘It’s cold,’ he says and stands up. He reaches down to help her to her feet and she rises and then stands in front of him, head down, shoulders slumped.

  She won’t ever know the struggle that plays out inside him, but the heart wins and he puts his arms around her and draws her close. He doesn’t want to be so emotional and impractical as to drop his guard at all now, but he knows that what happened was no hoax. She was lost and panicked and sinking to her death when he found her and stuffed the Spare Air into her mouth. She’s been drawn in and used just as surely as he has.

  She stands limp and sags against him and he takes her arms and moves them up around his back where suddenly they take a firm hold and she stands and pulls tight against him.

  There’s nothing he can find to say to her, no words of reassurance or forgiveness, no promise of safety. He does not know where to start with unravelling the mystery of this new horror or why after one previous brush with death and men who kill, he has come face to face with it again on the other side of the world.

  They walk along the beach in the lowering dusk and stick close for warmth. There are hotels and rows of empty sun loungers but nothing they recognise. After a while they draw close to a fire with a couple of young men sitting round it sipping beers.

  ‘Evening,’ says one with a wave.

  Campbell tells them the name of the hotel and asks directions as the two seated drinkers examine the washed up couple out walking in wetsuits.

  ‘We fell asleep down the beach. Too much sun,’ Campbell says, trying to head off a questioning he has not got the energy to deal with. He has started to notice a headache and nausea and wonders whether that speedy ascent has left him with the bends.

  The drinkers nod a nod that says they don’t believe a word and that their own conclusion is much more sordid. They turn and point down the beach. ‘Keep going. About a hundred yards. They’ll want those wetsuits back.’

  ‘Thanks. Not sure they know they’re missing.’

  ’Sleep tight.’

  They make the final stretch a touch faster, encouraged that they are now so close to what constitutes home.

  ‘We’ll get the receptionist to call the police and then we’ll lock ourselves in the room,’ he tells her.

  From the shadows to the right comes a voice, deep and with the unmistakable accent of home.

  ‘Good plan,’ it says.

  They turn and see a man emerge into the soft light from the deserted back lawn of the hotel. He is dressed in dark clothing and he holds a handgun levelled at them, with a long black suppressor attached.

  ‘Bad luck.

  FIFTY FIVE

  The man whose name Campbell would later learn was Rookes, wagged the gun barrel toward the shadows and Campbell took Lisa’s hand and led her there, amid palm trees and stacks of sun loungers.

  ‘You guys turning up like this - first things first, bravo! You cut someone adrift at the bottom of the ocean, you figure you’ve done your job. But you two… Anyway. Turning up like this, really makes me look bad.’

  ‘They were your guys?’ asks Campbell, though the gun pointed at him is pretty much all the answer he needs.

  ‘You really cannot get the staff. My predecessor made the mistake of being sloppy, so I figured maybe I should go that one step further. What if they act
ually make it back? I asked myself. Surely that’s impossible? But no, not impossible. Just unlikely. Then I came to collect your stuff from the room and saw the receipt for the dive gear and the Spare Air. And I thought, maybe it is worth hanging around. Just in case. Because if I’m in charge when something like that happens, well then I deserve all I get. So here I am.’

  ’What is all this? What’s it about?’ asks Campbell. He can feel Lisa’s hand shaking in his, either from the cold or the fear, probably both. ‘Scorpio?’

  ‘Scorpio,’ says Rookes, but he says it like he’s intrigued by the word. Like Campbell just gave him an answer rather than asked him a question.

  Campbell looks at the evil lump of metal in Rookes’ hand, at the smooth cylinder screwed into the barrel. It wasn’t the first gun he’d seen, but there was no getting used to them. The one thing he couldn’t ignore about this one though, was that it hadn’t been fired yet. If he wanted them dead, what was the wait?

  ‘Well, I’m not going to do it here,’ Rookes says, reading his expression.

  ’The thing is, he wants you dead. I mean he has a hard on for wanting to see you dead. To see you die to be precise. So that leads me to two things; why? What did you do to him?’ Rookes counts off one finger, then raises another. ‘And second; would he pay extra to see it twice?’

  ‘If you need money, I can get you money.’

  Rookes dismisses the notion with the merest frown. ‘Start with the first question. Tell me what you’ve got on him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who? How many other people do you have trying to kill you?’

  ‘Including you?’

  Rookes smiles. ‘I’ve done nothing yet. Talking will keep it that way.’

  ‘But I don’t know who you mean. Who are you? What is all this? Is it Scorpio? Is it Lawson? What?’ Campbell’s temper is frayed with the exhaustion and the fear and either way, he’s not sure how he can really make things worse now.

  ‘My boss. Your nemesis. He’s been on you like shit on a blanket. Glued to velcro. You haven’t noticed anything weird of late?’

  ’Nothing but,’ says Campbell. ‘Why don’t you just tell me who you’re talking about?’

  ‘I just did.’

  Campbell pauses. ‘You don’t know his name?’

  ‘He’s a cautious man.’

  ‘Wait.’ The penny is beginning to drop. ‘It’s him isn’t it?’

  ‘Posh guy, mid-fifties. Quite… establishment, you know? Likes tweed and the sound of his own voice.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘The opposite.’

  ‘Daniel,’ Lisa’s voice is weak and scared. ‘What’s happening? Do you know what this is about?’

  He nods slowly, uncertain. ‘I think so, but… It can’t…’

  Rookes raises the gun into Campbell’s eye line. ‘Oh, yes it can.’

  ‘I thought he was dead.’

  ‘Not dead,’ says Rookes. ‘Just patient.’