Stalkers (42 page)

Though every molecule in his body was screaming at him to do otherwise, he began to edge along the canal bank in the direction he’d been shown. There was no sound. The only light came from the moon, just visible through the interlaced branches above. He’d advanced maybe a hundred yards, before a narrow-boat came into view, moored on the other side of the water. Curtains were drawn on its windows, but muffled lamplight could be seen inside. Then Heck spotted something else – a stocky figure waiting on the tow-path, just across from the vessel. A thrill went through him when he realised that the figure appeared to be leaning on a stick.

‘That’s far enough,’ came a voice. It was clipped, resonant; Heck remembered what Ian Blenkinsop had said about Mad Mike Silver once being a member of the officer corps. ‘Empty your pockets onto the path in front of you. Every single thing you’re carrying – weapons, mobile phones, notebooks, recording devices. Everything.’

Heck hesitated, his fingers caressing the Colt Cobra under his jacket.

‘It’s up to you how you play this,’ the figure added. ‘But we hold all the cards, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

‘Are Lauren and Dana alright?’

‘I know no such persons. Now do as you’ve been told.’

Realising he had no choice, Heck took the gun and both Deke’s mobile phone and his own, the latter of which was still waterlogged from the river, and placed them on the path in front of him.

‘That’s a good chap,’ the figure said, slowly approaching – definitely walking with a limp, definitely using a stick. ‘But that had better be everything. I’ll shortly be searching you. If you haven’t done exactly as you were told, there’ll be a severe outcome. Likewise, if I find you’re wired … trust me, that will prove to have been a big mistake.’

The man was now about ten yards away. Heck saw the moonlight glinting on his short, silver-grey hair. It was uncanny the way this fellow fitted the image that Blenkinsop’s brief, drink-sodden description had put into his mind.

That was when he sensed movement behind him.

Heck swung around. Two other men had stepped from the bushes a couple of yards to his rear. Both wore gloves, hoodie tops and knitted masks with holes cut for their eyes and mouths; one was purple, one orange. The taller one was armed with a machete, the shorter one with a small submachine gun – it looked like an Uzi. Heck heard a
click
as a firearm was cocked somewhere behind him. The sweat on his brow turned swiftly to ice.

It was the guy with the Uzi who came forward first. He raised the weapon and pointed it directly at Heck’s face. As he did, his sleeve cuff slipped away from his glove, and Heck saw the tattoo of a black scorpion on the exposed wrist.

This was the kick-starter. Before a shot could be fired, Heck had thrown himself sideways and dived into the canal.

It was rank, brackish, filled with weeds and floating rubble, but he’d got used to such discomforts over the last few days and didn’t surface again until he’d swum clear to the other side. There he pounded on the hull of the narrow-boat and shouted at the top of his voice for help. To his surprise, there was an immediate response. A door banged open and he heard the sound of feet coming out onto the upper deck. A figure gazed down over the gunwale, finally extending a hand towards him. Heck took it, and was hauled up. But then moonlight fell on the face of his rescuer – it was a raddled patchwork of scar tissue. There was no nose; there were no eyelids. The mouth, though crimped in an amused grin, was a monstrous parody of humanity.

‘Klim!’ Heck shouted, trying to drag himself free.

But Klim wouldn’t release him; in his other hand he held a heavy implement, something like a monkey wrench. Heck tried to flinch away, but it was impossible to avoid the crashing blow that impacted on his cranium.

Heck remained dazed even after he’d regained full consciousness. The top of his head throbbed, his vision was blurred and strands of blood-gluey hair dangled in front of his eyes.

‘Detective Sergeant Heckenburg,’ a vaguely familiar voice said. ‘I must say, I’m impressed.’

Heck jerked upright, so quickly that it made him nauseous. He was briefly blinded by the well-lit room, which seemed to be long, narrow and sparsely furnished. The floor was bare wood; he thought there might be steel shutters over the windows. Gradually, he became aware that five people were standing in front of him. One was the grey-haired man with the stick who’d confronted him on the tow-path. The others were equally recognisable: the tall black guy with the pearl earring – the one he’d seen on the Victoria Line, though now he was wearing a hoodie top and dark overalls; the swarthy, bullish guy in desert combat fatigues, who they’d also encountered on the Victoria, also now in a hoodie and overalls; and Shane Klim – with his hideously scarred visage, dressed in a sweatshirt, jeans and trainers. The fifth person was positioned
behind
them, and she wasn’t standing up. She was hanging by the wrists from a hook in the ceiling. She was unconscious and naked; her sleek brown body blotched from head to toe with livid bruises. It was Lauren.

When Heck finally focused on Lauren, he struggled to get up – only to find that he too was naked and fastened into place, though in his case he was seated and bound by his wrists and ankles to an iron chair that appeared to have been bolted to the floor.

‘You’re part of a police unit that covers the entire country,’ the walking-stick man said. He smiled almost benignly: he wasn’t as old as his grey hair made him appear from a distance; probably in his late thirties. He could only be Mad Mike Silver. As Blenkinsop had said, there was a steely air about him; he was handsome like an actor – lean featured but with a strong, square jaw, a bronze tan and penetrating blue eyes. His walking stick was of thick bamboo, with an ivory skull for its handle. He was smartly dressed in tan chinos and a crisp, white shirt buttoned to the collar beneath a navy-blue blazer. ‘And I can see why, sergeant. You’re here, there, everywhere.’

‘So are you people,’ Heck retorted. ‘But personally I’m
not
impressed.’

‘You’ve no need to be. We’re nothing special, just a bunch of fellows making a living. It’s all about supply and demand.’

‘Where’s my sister?’ Heck said.

‘She’s not too far away,’ Silver replied. ‘Don’t worry, she’s safe … for the moment.’

‘Why we talking to him and not doing him?’ one of the men muttered – it was Klim; he spoke awkwardly as if his disfigured mouth was stuffed with soggy bread. ‘He’s fucking trouble. Soon as I saw his face, I knew we’d have problems.’

‘Says
you
,’ Heck snorted.

Silver raised his bamboo on high and swung it down, dealing a hard, stinging slash to Heck’s shinbone. Heck just managed to restrain a bellow of agony.

‘Mr Klim may not have been one of us originally, but he’s more than proved his worth since,’ Silver said. ‘Even if he did make a few unwise comments while he was in prison …’

If it was possible for Klim’s mangled features to blush, they did so now. Highly likely, Heck thought, he’d already been made to pay for those comments.

‘Not to worry,’ Silver added. ‘That’s now been taken care of. Either way, I won’t hear him mocked.’

‘No, but you’ll see women and girls raped and killed!’ Heck gritted his teeth on the lingering pain. ‘You fucking animals!’

Silver made an airy gesture. ‘Casualties of war … collateral damage, and … I don’t know … there are lots of other euphemisms they’ve invented for those kinds of unfortunates.’

‘I can see why they call you
Mad
Mike!’

If Silver was surprised that Heck had identified him, he didn’t show it, but neither did he deny that this was his name.

‘You might have made this crackpot scheme work in lawless banana republics,’ Heck said. ‘When you were using tough squaddies that you’d once led in battle. But just because you’re back in Blighty you resort to hiring Johnny Handsome here …’ he indicated the scowling Klim, ‘who’d stand out even among the rank-and-file dickheads? Some pro you are!’

Silver regarded Klim’s ravaged face almost fondly. ‘We value expertise more highly than anything, but sometimes an enthusiastic amateur can be just as useful.’

Heck had pored over many case files detailing the sort of grisly enthusiasms that Shane Klim specialised in. ‘You weren’t just wounded in the leg, were you, Silver?’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve lost your fucking marbles.’

Silver pondered. ‘I’ve had a high-stress career, I’ll admit.’

‘You’re nothing but a cold-blooded murderer.’

‘An interesting comment from a man whose own hands are not entirely clean. I’m assuming you killed Trooper Ezekial? There’s no other reason why he’d simply drop from sight like this.’

Heck sat back as the ache in his leg eased. ‘Hey … another of those unfortunate casualties of war.’

‘And I’m sure a fair one. After all, Trooper Ezekial attempted to ruin your life by framing you for a serious crime. He got exactly what he deserved, yes?’

Heck didn’t reply. Behind them, he saw Lauren’s eyes flutter open. They were bloodshot, watery, but when they fixed on him he could see that she was cognisant of what was happening.

‘Except that Trooper Hobbs here doesn’t share that view.’ Silver indicated the guy who’d worn the desert fatigues. Not only did Heck recognise him from the Underground train, but now – having heard the name ‘Hobbs’ – he recognised similarities in him to someone else. Okay, he looked older, tougher and more rugged than the ‘Kid’ currently lying dead in Belsize Park, and he was a lot more suntanned, but there was no denying that overly prominent forehead.

‘We’re a small outfit at heart,’ Silver added. ‘A tight-knit bunch. Trooper Ezekial wasn’t really part of that – he was an outside contractor, who it suited us to use now and then. But he was also a friend. Trooper Hobbs and he were very close when they were back in Scorpion Company – and what kind of skipper would I be if I didn’t respect comradeship? So …’ Silver sighed as if it pained him, ‘when all this is over, I’ll have to let Trooper Hobbs have the final say.’

Trooper Hobbs moved his gloved hands to his belt and gripped the hilts of two large, hook-bladed knives.

Heck eyed the blades nervously, but still tried to tough it out. ‘He couldn’t have been very handy with those when you got run out of town back in the Middle East. What was it, Silver … local cowboys turfing you off their patch? Local sheriff deciding he wasn’t getting a big enough cut?’

Silver chuckled. ‘What a simplistic world you police officers inhabit.’

‘Well I’m damn sure you didn’t come back here for the climate.’

‘There are political tides out there that people like you can’t even comprehend, Sergeant Heckenburg, but even you must have noticed that the Arab world is changing dramatically. And we don’t do wars and revolutions anymore. So for the last few years we’ve been gradually catching up with former clients over here. Setting up a new base of operations.’

‘One that isn’t as dangerous, eh?’ Heck scoffed.

‘One that pays better too,’ Trooper Hobbs blurted out in broad Brummie.

The black guy now spoke up as well. He sounded more educated than Hobbs – he had no noticeable accent, he was almost refined – but his was the gloating voice Heck had heard on the telephone. ‘You wouldn’t believe how much we earn these days,’ he said, ‘for taking almost no risk whatsoever. And the job satisfaction … well!’

Heck regarded them the way he would the lowest vermin. Despite his attempted boldness, there was only so much that even he could endure. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you, Silver? For Christ’s sake, you and your lads once served Queen and country. You followed an honourable profession. Even when you were mercs – you were doing an honest job. How the fuck …
how the diddly fuck did you come to this?
’

Silver shrugged. ‘Well … I’d like to give you a load of Rambo-type baloney about how tough it is for veterans coming home from foreign wars … having to live in the woods and all that because they can’t integrate back into society. But I’ve never been much of a romantic. The facts are simple. When we all left our respective units, we were still very good at what we did. We were a collective, you might say … of uncommon skills and abilities. In the light of that, it was always going to be a crime if we were just to spend the rest of our days sitting around hotel lobbies sipping mineral water, or driving armoured limousines up and down the nightclub strip, dodging the paparazzi. I mean seriously … would you have let us go to waste like that? Even back here in civilised Europe, it would have been a crying shame.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Heck said slowly. ‘So you’re all about making a British contribution to the world?’

‘That’s a good way of putting it.’

‘Except that Ian Blenkinsop told me you had foreigners working for you out in the Gulf. French, Russian, American … where are they now?’

‘Sergeant Heckenburg, I’m so disappointed.’ Silver glanced around at his men, who sniggered at their prisoner’s innocence. ‘For someone who’s astute in so many ways, you’re amazingly dense in others. Haven’t you heard? We live in a global economy now. There are many more markets than the United Kingdom.’

At first Heck couldn’t respond to that. A truly horrible picture was unfolding in his mind of numerous mirror-image operations to this one – abduct-to-order rackets – functioning efficiently in countries all over the world. In only a few years, Britain’s own Nice Guys had clocked up nearly forty ‘scores’. But what was the figure on a Europe-wide scale? What about if you included Eastern Europe? What about North America?

‘I assume you’re telling me all this because I won’t be leaving here alive?’ Heck said.

Silver’s expression became regretful. ‘Sadly, that’s true.’

‘In which case, you can presumably tell me what happened to the victims?’

‘No I can’t actually. At least, I can’t give you their exact locations. Put it this way, the sea rarely gives up its dead.’

‘The sea?’

Silver indicated the long, narrow room. ‘We’re on a boat, sergeant. Surely you’ve noticed that. And most of Britain’s waterways connect with the sea at some point.’