The Final Minute (31 page)

The problem was, she eventually became a liability to her bosses. Pen knew too much, and the way the CIA operated was changing as Obama took over from Bush. A male colleague she trusted tried to set her up for her own assassination in Prague but she got out, making her own way back to the States and resigning from the CIA before disappearing off the grid for a couple of years.

During this time she was offered work by a former agency man who’d set up a niche outfit that specialized in various clandestine services, including murder, for any company or government with deep enough pockets. That man had been Bryan Coombs, aka Tank, and the rest was history. Over the years they’d killed off the other employees, and now it was just the two of them working and building a future together.

Soon they’d have enough money to retire and get married, and then she’d become Pen Coombs. She liked that name. There was something sweet and suburban about it. She and Mr Coombs would buy a beach house somewhere in the Caribbean. She liked the idea of St Thomas or St John, maybe even Puerto Rico, but with their budget it was more likely to be Panama. Their plan was to have enough money to while away their days in the sunshine, making love and living off the land and the sea. She and Tank together. The fairytale ending.

First, though, they had to make enough cash, which was why they needed this current job to work. Kill the man identified as Sean Egan before he was detained by the police and they’d be half a million richer – money that could immediately be invested in property. But things had already gone badly wrong. First they’d missed their chance to kill Egan, and then they’d failed to take out the new target they’d been given, Tina Boyd. It was the first real run of misfortune they’d had in five years of working together, and now the client was furious. Worse still, they didn’t know how to find Egan, and if the police got him before they did – which by now was highly likely – the job was off, and their reputation for getting things done would suffer permanent damage.

Pen had been through enough in her life not to worry unduly, though, and right now she was relaxing in bed, enjoying the warm post-coital glow of an intense lovemaking session with her husband-to-be. It was difficult to describe how satisfied Tank made her feel, and impossible even to think what she’d do without him.

On the hotel room TV, Sean Egan’s ex-wife was talking at a police press conference, encouraging her former husband to surrender to the police for the sake of their young daughter who, apparently, was very worried about him.

Pen looked up as Tank came into the room, a towel wrapped round his waist, beads of water still clinging to the perfect contours of his body, and immediately she felt another stab of pure desire.

He motioned towards the TV. ‘What’s happening?’

‘That’s Egan’s ex-wife. Apparently they have a kid together.’

Tank nodded. ‘Yeah, I saw that in the dossier. I wonder if he even remembers he’s a dad.’

Pen smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter if he does or not. As soon as he sees this, he’s going to want to get in touch with her.’

Tank shrugged. ‘The cops will know that though, won’t they? They’ll have people watching the ex-wife’s house in case he shows up. Standard practice.’

‘True, but it still gives us an avenue. A parent will do anything for their child. Don’t you remember that doctor back in Vermont? The one who went underground and wouldn’t show his face until we sent him footage of his son with the razor?’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Tank with what looked to Pen like a slight shudder. ‘I still can’t believe you did that to him.’

‘It worked though, didn’t it? Daddy came running even though he knew what was going to happen to him.’

‘Yeah, but we were able to get a message to that guy. We’ve got no way of contacting Egan.’

‘So what? We don’t need to. Remember. If we take the wife and kid and get the client to keep them alive somewhere, we can get an anonymous message to Egan, even if he’s in custody, to let him know that if he opens his mouth to anyone, they die. He hears that, he won’t say a damn word, I can guarantee it. The beauty is, the wife and kid can be kept like that for weeks, months even, while we work out a way to finish off Egan.’ She looked up at him. ‘It’s foolproof. And we get to keep our money.’

Tank whistled through his teeth, then ran the back of a hand softly down her cheek. ‘Jeez, sweetcheeks, I’ve got to hand it to you. You think of everything.’

Pen leaned over and pulled his towel away. ‘It’s all for us, baby,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all for us.’

Forty-seven

Tina wasn’t sure giving Sean the contact details for Jack Duckford was a particularly good idea, but she was intrigued to find out more about Duckford’s background. With the death of Jeff Roubaix, she’d lost her best inside contact in the force, but she still had people who owed her favours.

Two calls and twenty minutes later she had a direct line for Duckford at his current place of work, the NCA’s Organized Crime Arm. Duckford was a vet. Forty-eight years old, with the full thirty years’ service, he had an unblemished record, which included a citation for bravery during the arrest of a knife-wielding robber fifteen years earlier.

Could Duckford and his NCA colleagues have been running an unofficial undercover operation using a disgraced ex-con, Tina wondered? Sean certainly seemed to think so, and Tina knew from past experience that such things, though certainly illegal, did occasionally happen. However, even if this was one such case, Duckford was unlikely to want to help Sean now. Friend or not, he was already eligible for retirement with a full pension, and if he was involved in something illegal he was going to want to keep it very quiet.

Sitting up on the hill behind her house, with the sun on her face, she took a few moments simply to enjoy the view, knowing that by aiding and abetting a known offender she was risking all of this. But that was who Tina was. She took risks. She had the kind of dogged determination that meant she’d do whatever it took to find out what had happened to Lauren Donaldson, and make whoever was behind her disappearance face some sort of justice, regardless of the cost to herself.

So she picked up the phone and called Sean.

I was on the slow train heading from Cambridge to St Pancras when Tina called. The carriage was almost empty and there was no sign of a ticket inspector, but I was still jittery. It was hard work continually breaking the law, whether it be shooting a man dead or dodging the fare on public transport, because the end result was always the same: if I was caught, it was prison, no question, and I’d regained enough of my memory to know that I couldn’t go back there again.

‘I’ve got a number for Jack Duckford,’ said Tina when I picked up. ‘I’m assuming you haven’t got a pen so I’m going to text it to you when I finish the call. Where are you now?’

I told her. ‘The train’s due in at St Pancras at 17.19. Can we meet as soon as possible after that?’

‘There’s a church called St Mary Magdalene on Osnaburgh Street. Take a right out of the station and keep walking for about ten minutes. The turning’s on the right just past Warren Street tube station. If the main door’s locked, go down the steps into the garden and wait for me there. And if you call Duckford, remember to do it from a phone he can’t trace you to, OK? A call box or something, and not one right round the corner from the church.’

‘I’m not a fool, Tina. Are you going to bring those photos of the struck-off therapists?’

‘I am. But if none of the men in the photos are your Dr Bronson, and your man Duckford can’t, or won’t, shed any light on what’s going on, then that’s it, Sean. I can’t give you any more help.’

‘Sure,’ I said quietly. ‘I understand.’

I put the phone in my pocket and sat back in the seat, keeping my head down as I looked out the window at the passing countryside. Hitching a free ride on a train had been my last resort. I’d rejected the idea of using the car I’d stolen earlier in the day to get to London in case the police were actively looking for it. I did try to steal two others but failed both times and set off the alarm on one, so in the end I hadn’t really had a lot of choice. If you took away the fact that I was in constant fear of being recognized, it wasn’t actually a bad way to travel.

Since leaving the pub my thoughts had been dominated by the fact that I’d been married, and had a three-year-old daughter. I tried to dredge up an image of my ex-wife’s face from my memory but couldn’t, and I still had no recollection of Milly. I wondered if she’d ever been brought in to see me in prison. I wondered, in fact, if I’d ever seen her before. The thought once again weighed heavily on me like a dark cloud and I had to force myself to snap out of it.

The train stopped at a station and two teenage girls who’d been chatting away a few seats down got off. No one got on, and I realized, with a sense of relief, that apart from a single middle-aged man in a suit who was asleep at the far end, I was the only person left in the carriage.

My phone pinged. It was a text message containing a phone number and nothing else. I stared at the screen and remembered the call I’d made to Jack Duckford from the bail hostel just after I’d been released from prison.

‘That job you were talking about when you came to see me. Is it still available?’

‘Absolutely,’ he’d said. ‘In fact we need you more now than we did then.’

But what had Jack needed me for? And how had it ended?

I knew Tina was right about me not calling him from a traceable phone. But my memory was also telling me from my undercover days that the authorities could only track mobile phones when they were switched on. All I had to do was switch mine off when I ended the call and, since I was on a moving train, I’d be miles away before they got people to the phone’s last-known location.

As if to emphasize the point the train picked up speed, clattering noisily down the tracks.

I remembered an undercover job Jack and I had done together years ago. I’d spent the best part of three months posing as a professional car thief to get close to a group of Lebanese businessmen who sold luxury cars into the Middle Eastern market, and we’d set up a meeting where I was introducing Jack to them as my senior partner who had dozens of stolen vehicles for sale. The problem was, when we went to the meeting place, a house in Ladbroke Grove, one of the main Lebanese guy’s bodyguards recognized Jack from an earlier undercover role and all hell broke loose. There were six of their people in the room, including four who were muscle, and only two of us, which are never good odds.

Being recognized has got to be an undercover cop’s worst nightmare, and it couldn’t have happened in a worse place. As it was a first meeting with Jack we had no back-up, so no one even knew we were there. But you never panic. And you never, ever admit you’re a cop, whatever the provocation. So Jack told the guy he was mistaken. So did I. We really argued our case.

But the guy had been adamant.

Three of the muscle held Jack down on the floor and beat him, while the fourth – a huge black guy with arms thicker than my legs – produced a piece of lead piping and let it be known that if I intervened, it would be the last active thing I did for a long time. As they beat and questioned Jack, trying to get him to break, I pleaded with my Lebanese contacts, telling them there was no way Jack was undercover, that I’d known him for years. But they weren’t having any of it. We were split up, and I was locked alone in an upstairs room for more than an hour. Occasionally I’d hear Jack scream in pain. I had no idea what they were doing to him but whatever it was, it was bad.

I can still remember the terror of being trapped in a tiny room in a strange place, knowing that I might never get out of there alive. That’s how bad it was.

Finally, after a long period when there’d just been silence, my main Lebanese contact unlocked the door and told me that Jack had admitted to being an undercover cop, and had told them that I was one too. If I just admitted it, they’d let us both go.

I was tempted. God, I was tempted. The idea of being held down and subjected to whatever it was Jack had been subjected to scared the living crap out of me. But you don’t take the easy option. In life, it’s usually the worst one. Instead, I went on the offensive. I screamed; I shouted; I told him that there was no way on earth Jack was a cop, and if they’d got him to say that he was, it was because he was being tortured. And it was an insult of the highest degree even to suggest that I was one too.

For the first time I could see my contact thinking that perhaps his bodyguard had made a mistake. So, with a flurry of apologies, he reunited me with Jack who’d been locked in the basement and who, incredibly, wasn’t too badly hurt. He had plenty of cuts and bruises, but the reason for his screams, he told me afterwards, was because they’d heated up a knife until it was red hot and then repeatedly held it only inches away from his eyes, threatening to burn them out.

Afterwards, we’d headed straight for the pub and both got hopelessly pissed. We’d talked in awe about our lucky escape, and I have a vivid memory of Jack laughing uproariously at how close we’d come to really serious injury, and suddenly that laughter turning to floods of tears as he broke down. I broke down too, and we sat in a forgotten corner of the pub, off our heads, crying together as all the emotions of that day came surging out.

We’d bonded that night – the kind of bond that a civilian who’s never done this kind of work couldn’t possibly understand.

I looked at my watch. 4.45. In just over half an hour I’d be in London. If I was going to call Jack, it would be easier to do it now while I was still on the move. With a deep breath, I keyed his number into the phone and waited.

Forty-eight

‘Duckford,’ said a clear, deep voice just as I was about to put down the phone.

‘Jack? It’s me, Sean Egan.’

He literally gasped. ‘Sean, what the …? Listen, let me call you back from my other phone. It’s more private. What’s your number?’

‘Sorry, that doesn’t work for me. Just talk quietly.’

‘Where are you?’