Текст книги "48 Hours"

Автор книги: Jackson J. Bentley

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Chapter 90

Thames House, Millbank, London November 20th 2010, 3pm.

Timothy Madeley stood in his second floor office looking out over the Thames with his mobile phone to his ear. He listened as one of his operatives checked in from Turkish Cyprus, one of the favourite destinations in the sweep, won by Audrey in administration.

“Mr Hammond has done his part, sir. Hickstead is now in possession of the means and he has sufficient motive.”

“But does he have the courage, Boyle, or will he need helping along?”

“Hard to say, sir. I guess if he doesn’t do it this evening he might rally tomorrow and start considering his options.”

“We can’t allow that to happen, Boyle. Either he goes himself or someone will have to help him along. But it must look like he took his own life, or Hammond will smell a rat. Giving the old man the means to take his own life was one thing, but knowing he had participated in his execution might just be more than Hammond’s morality can take.”

“Understood, sir. I’ll be in touch again before you retire for the night.”

Madeley clicked off his phone and sat down at his desk. In his view, Hickstead had two options. First, accept that he was penniless and defeated and end it all before he lost what was left of his self-esteem. Second, get drunk tonight and wake up tomorrow realising that the tabloids would pay a small fortune for his story.

The second option was unacceptable. Lord Hickstead would be reported as having taken his own life in Madeley’s report to the Prime Minister tomorrow, one way or another.

Chapter 91

The Janus, Northern Cyprus. November 20th 2010, 5pm.

Dee climbed off the jet ski onto the jetty and removed her life jacket. She was still laughing. I suspected that she had used jet skis before when she continued to circle my jet ski and spray me with surf as she banked. I tried banking my jet ski just the once, and fell off. I wondered if the whole of our married life would be as competitive as this, or whether two weeks after the whitest of weddings her affection for me was waning.

I had to admit, however, that for a wedding arranged at just four weeks’ notice, Dee, Jayne and Lavender had done an amazing job. We tied the knot in a historic chapel which had probably looked much the same nine hundred years ago when it was built in the grounds of Falsworth Hall near Reading. My heart skipped a beat when I saw Dee in the dress for the first time. She looked spectacular. When I heard that Jayne’s friend, and Avant-garde fashion designer, Li Li Sung, was making the dress, I had imagined something offbeat and probably weird. I was wrong. It was a traditional white bridal gown, decorated with white Swiss embroidered love symbols from every continent.

Now to be honeymooning on a private yacht – well, my parents would be boasting about it to their friends in the Midlands for years to come.

Dee lay on the recliner, covered with a towel to dry off. I sat on the recliner beside hers. I stared at her but couldn’t tell if she had her eyes open or closed through her densely tinted sunglasses. My eyes were drawn to her recent wounds; the scarring would diminish over time, but she had refused reconstructive surgery. Her arm had circular scars front and back, but her thigh had only one noticeable scar, at the front. The emergency surgery in the Tottenham Press office had been done so well that there was now just a small line of scarring where the stitches had been.

Dee wasn’t worried about the world seeing her scars, and had been moving around the deck in her swimsuit the whole voyage. She had seen me looking and beckoned me closer, pulling me onto the recliner and pressing her lips to mine.

“Josh, it seems to me that you’ve done your job for Queen and Country, and now is the time for some recreation.”

“We’ve just been jet skiing,” I pointed out.

“Bedroom based recreation,” she said coyly, before sitting up and nodding towards the stairs to the lower deck.

***

Arthur Hickstead fully understood the message that the Establishment wanted him to take from Hammond’s visit. Essentially, it was expected that he would take the quick way out, drink the Clés des Ducs Armagnac, watch his last sunset over his panoramic window view, and blow his brains out with his service weapon.

He had to admit they had given him little option. With just a couple of thousand Euros left to his name, he would be penniless in a month.

It had crossed his mind to go to town and use his gun to rob a bank, but he knew he would be no good at it, and on this small part of the island they would probably track him down inside an hour. There was nowhere to run to.

But Arthur Hickstead had come up with a different plan. The Establishment hadn’t won yet.

***

Stuart Boyle rang Thames House. He needed instructions. Madeley answered the phone.

“Sir, Hickstead in on the move, and he is carrying.”

“Hell’s teeth! Can’t he take a hint?” Madeley said impatiently. “OK, you’d better follow him. He might have decided to make his exit sitting on the sand watching the sun drop over the horizon. If he doesn’t take care of it himself, you’ll have to make the message a little clearer. Use his own gun, if you can.”

Boyle strode off in the direction Hickstead had taken.

Chapter 92

The Janus, Mediterranean Sea. November 20th 2010, 6pm.

We were still making love when the engines started up. We were both surprised because we had expected to cast off after dark.

“Shall I see what’s going on up there?” I teased.

“Don’t you dare. Your duties down here aren’t even close to being completed yet.” She was becoming excitable, and I was inclined to stay the course.

***

“Lord Hickstead, this is insane. Put the gun down and we’ll talk this out,” Boyle shouted from the jetty.

Hickstead held the gun steady against the first mate’s head as he shouted back. “Radio me when we have a deal that lets me live my life out in luxury. I will kill everyone on this boat if I have to, but this is just to show that I’m serious.”

Boyle took his gun from his holster, but by the time he raised it he had taken a bullet from Hickstead’s gun. At this distance the Browning Hi Power had sent a 9mm bullet through Boyle’s stomach and out of his back, just missing his kidney. Boyle fell to the floor cursing, as uniformed men poured onto the jetty. As one of the men pressed a pad onto his wound, Boyle used his mobile to stutter out a brief report to Thames House.

***

I was lying on the bed with Dee beside me; we were both covered with a sheen of perspiration and feeling dozy when we heard shouting. Dee sat up, immediately alert, and signalled for me to remain silent. A shot rang out. It was unmistakable, and it was very close. A powerful handgun had been discharged from the deck.

Dee quickly pulled on a pair of shorts without taking the time for underwear and then grabbed my sweatshirt and pulled it over her head. By now I had pulled my shorts on and was about to leave the saloon and make my way to the deck to see why we were accelerating away from the dock. Dee pulled me back.

“Josh, it must be Hickstead. Don’t ask any questions, just keep him busy for a few minutes while I get organised. Don’t forget, he’s armed, but we’re not.”

***

I reached the deck to find the Captain operating the yacht from the auxiliary console. Normally the Captain would be in the deckhouse running the yacht from where he had full radar and radio coverage. But there was an auxiliary console and wheel on the top deck for those occasions when the owner wanted to be in the sun and feel the salt in his face. From his position below, Hickstead could ensure Captain Poulter did as he was told whilst still holding the first mate hostage.

When I came up onto the deck I found the first mate sitting down on a bulkhead with his hands fastened behind his back by his own belt. I looked into the distance and saw a group of uniformed men running around with radios. Good, I thought; help would soon be on the way.

“Sorry, Boss.” The first mate’s voice was slurred, and I noticed that blood was pouring down his cheek from a wound on his temple. “He asked permission to come aboard to give you a message from home, and as soon as I turned around he belted me with the gun.”

“It’s OK, Sean, it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I should have shot him myself earlier, when I had the chance. No-one would have cared.”

Hickstead overheard our conversation, and laughed.

“Josh, you don’t have it in you. You’re not man enough. When Sir Max had to go, I dealt with it. Then Andrew was about to cave in and I had to kill him, too. As you said earlier, I am a killer, you are not, and that’s a weakness.”

“Or a strength, for most people,” I retorted.

“Why don’t we give your lady wife a call? I’d like to congratulate her on your recent nuptials.”

“Leave her out of it. You are quite mad. You do know that, don’t you? You’ve strayed way over the line that separates sanity from insanity.” I hoped I was giving Dee enough time to do whatever she needed to do.

“You have a lot to say for a man with a gun pointed at him,” Hickstead spat. “Now, call your wife or I’ll shoot you in the gut, just like your spook friend on the jetty.”

Sean confirmed that Hickstead had fired a potentially killing shot before I had reached the deck. I had heard it for myself, after all. I made a play of shouting for Dee to join us on the deck. I was surprised when she replied.

“Coming, Darling.”

The boat shuddered to a halt, and the Captain looked surprised. Hickstead pointed the gun at him.

“What’s going on? Don’t try me. I have plenty of bullets for you all.”

“I have no idea,” the Captain answered nervously. “I’m not doing this. It should be working fine. All of the gauges are showing normal readings. I don’t understand it.”

“Oh, that might have been me,” Dee said in mock apology, holding up a length of cable with exposed copper cores at each end.

“Sorry, Captain. Is this piece of wire important?” She sounded calm and actually smiled. The Captain was incredulous. He spoke angrily.

“What are you doing, Ma’am? This man has a gun on us and you go and pull the main ignition cable out. It’ll take me an hour to put that back in, and that’s if you haven’t damaged the terminals.”

Dee ignored him and walked straight towards Hickstead, extending her hand.

“Lord Hickstead, we haven’t met. I’m Mrs Josh Hammond. My, you are a handsome man.” She flirted outrageously.

Hickstead, in no mood for this, pointed the gun at her head.

“Not another step, Mrs Hammond. The last time you got close to two of my confederates they needed hospital treatment. I want you to keep your distance.”

Hickstead actually seemed more afraid of her than she seemed of him, even though he was the one holding the gun. He had recognised that Dee was the main danger to his plan, and he was going to neutralise her. I hoped she had a plan, because I had no idea what I should do, and was more than a little worried.

“OK, Sean, stand up and seat yourself against the deckhouse wall.” Hickstead was positioning us where he could cover us all easily. He kept the gun on Dee as he gave further orders.

“Now you, Captain. Sit on your hands until I get a chance to tie you up. Josh, you do the same.” We obeyed, because it seemed sensible to do so. “That’s it, sit on your hands. This is just like Northern Ireland in the 1970s, except I wasn’t allowed to kill them, even though they were killers themselves.”

He removed his leather belt.

“Now, dear lady, turn around, please. I am going to tie your hands.”

Dee giggled.

“Oh, Hicky, I’m not that sort of girl, and I’m married now.”

She held out her left hand to show off her engagement and wedding rings. Old habits die hard, and out of politeness Hickstead looked, as Dee knew he would.

“Shit!” Hickstead shouted, berating himself for falling for the oldest trick in the book.

Before he could look back at Dee’s face and loose off a shot, Dee swung around and whipped him across the face with the cable. Cuts opened up across his cheek. Hickstead fought the pain and brought the gun around, but Dee blocked his swing with her forearm and a shot fired into the superstructure. My new wife grabbed his wrist, and squeezed the pressure points until he dropped the Browning and it skittered across the deck towards the stern.

Hickstead knew that he couldn’t beat Dee like this, and so he decided to use his height advantage. He grabbed her in a bear hug, lifted her up and squeezed. Two of us were on our feet.

“Sit down or I’ll break her back!” He carried on squeezing, and reluctantly we sat down again.

Dee yelled. “Josh! In the lounge…” and then she went limp.

“That’s better,” Hickstead said, relaxing his grip.

But he had been deceived again. Realising that she would not win a battle of brute strength, Dee allowed her body to relax. As soon as her feet touched the deck she launched a vicious head butt into the former Peer’s face. His nose disintegrated and blood sprayed everywhere, but he was fighting for his life and would not let go. She butted him a second time, smashing his cheekbone as he turned, trying to avoid her head. His left eye socket was broken and only skin was holding his eye in place. Still he held on, until Dee took hold of his left arm and forced it backwards to the point where she heard ligaments tear. Hickstead’s left arm fell uselessly to his side, and he moaned.

Unfortunately the double head butt had also disoriented Dee, and they both collapsed on the deck in a heap. Dee was the first to recover and she got to her feet. Apart from Hickstead, we were all on our feet now. It looked as though it was all over. And, still teetering on unsteady feet, Dee looked for the gun.

Her luck wasn’t holding. Hickstead had landed on his Browning. Summoning all the strength he had left, he gripped the gun, pointed it upwards, and without aiming at anything in particular, loosed off a shot.

Dee screamed, stumbled and fell over the rail into the Mediterranean Sea.

***

I looked on in stunned disbelief, standing motionless as I heard the splash of my wife’s body hitting the water. The Captain pushed me towards the lounge and I half fell inside. The Captain dived over the side to save Dee.

I didn’t know what I was looking for until I saw it. I picked it up, set it and stepped onto the deck, aiming at the slowly rising form of an unrecognisable Hickstead.

He had the gun in his right hand and was trying to raise it to a firing position. His face was destroyed and looked like something from a horror movie. The left side of his face had collapsed and the whole of his eyeball was visible.

“Don’t raise that gun or I’ll shoot,” I stated firmly. It was my voice, but it didn’t sound like me.

Hickstead gurgled a laugh from the bloody mouth that hung open to gasp at the air.

“I’m the killer, Josh, not you,” he reminded me as he began to level the gun.

I pulled the trigger on my spear gun and the stainless steel shaft flew straight and true. In a fraction of a second the barbs had penetrated Hickstead’s chest and showed through the back of his jacket.

I thought he would be dead instantly, but he fell to his knees, holding onto the bulkhead for support. I took the gun from his hand.

“Finish it!” he yelled, spraying bright red arterial blood all over the deck.

I left him leaning on the bulkhead and went to find my wife. Expecting the worst, I looked over the side to see the Captain assisting Dee to the ladder. With relief flooding through my body I lifted her into the boat. She was soaking wet, but I couldn’t see any blood. She lifted her left arm and there was a new bullet hole just inches from the other one.

I led her to a recliner and laid her down. The Captain bound the wound tightly, but it was difficult because the bullet had entered underneath her armpit and exited behind the shoulder.

The Captain said he would get the yacht started and we would be back onshore in five minutes.

“I thought Dee had damaged the main ignition cable,” I said, a little naively.

“No, she didn’t. She pressed the emergency fuel cut off in the engine room and came onto the deck brandishing the cooker cable. So I had to get inventive.”

I smiled and held Dee tight. I looked across at Hickstead. There was still life in him, although it was ebbing fast. He certainly wouldn’t make it to shore. As he kneeled, breathing his last, he looked up and saw Dee sitting up, holding her arm. He must have realised at that point that he had robbed me of nothing, nothing at all.

Epilogue

I kissed Dee goodbye at the tube station entrance. She made her way to No. 1 Poultry and I headed off to Ropemaker Street. Dee still had her left arm in a sling, but I knew for a fact that she would discard it as soon as I wasn’t looking.

I arrived at the office to find the Times on my desk, open at the obituary page. I read the most prominent of the articles.

‘Arthur Hickstead, formerly Lord Hickstead, has passed away peacefully whilst on a retreat in Cyprus. Former Trade Union President and European Commissioner, he was a committed public servant. Friends say that the reason the Lords withdrew his peerage was so that he could try his hand at helping Labour back into power as an MP.

At his request the burial was a small family affair. A spokesman for the family said that Arthur never liked pomp and ceremony and so didn’t expect it at his funeral.’

I folded the paper and looked at my messages. DCI Boniface wanted a statement to confirm that Lord Hickstead had admitted to the murders of Sir Max Rochester and Andrew Cuthbertson. I would probably walk over to Wood Street at lunchtime and do what I could to ensure that Charlotte Cuthbertson benefitted from Andrew’s life assurance policy.

We loss adjusters have hearts as well.

J Jackson Bentley writes both fiction and non-fiction books and has been a published author for over sixteen years. He now works as a Legal Consultant in the UK, the USA, the Middle East and the Far East. His spare time is spent writing at home in the UK and in Florida. Married with four grown children he is currently writing a new thriller set in Dubai which has a horse racing theme.

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Extract from:

CHAMELEON

A City of London Thriller

By

J Jackson Bentley

Prologue

Vastrick Security, No 1 Poultry, London, Monday 9am.

Dee exited Bank tube station and was assailed by the biting cold wind. Banked snow still lay on the edges of roads and pavements but it was now deep frozen and granite hard. The ground underfoot was slippery where the occasional light rain had speckled the ground with water droplets that turned to ice on contact. She could feel the crunch of ice and frost under her boots.

Luckily, Dee didn’t have far to walk. The office block accommodating Vastrick Security was less a hundred yards away, but even that distance was a challenge in this, the coldest January since records began. Almost everyone was wearing scarves across their faces, and those that weren’t had frost forming on their cheeks where their expelled breath had frozen onto their skin before it could evaporate.

The sky was dark grey and heavy laden with black clouds. The winter solstice had passed just a couple of weeks earlier, and there seemed very little difference in the level of daylight between now and the shortest day. At nine in the morning it was just beginning to grow light, and yet it would be dark again by four. The grey clouds meant that the light levels would remain subdued all day, keeping the street lights illuminated almost constantly. Grey skies, grey weather, grey world.

Dee looked both ways before crossing the street, and whichever way she looked it was as if Ansel Addams had taken monochrome photograph of a city in winter. Most of the commuters looked as though they were wearing dark colours to match their dark mood. The occasional colourful outfit stood out like a beacon in this conservative area where neon was rare and the colours used for shop fronts were subdued.

Dee entered the office building through the swing doors and felt the immediate heat of the door curtain scorch her head. In the summer the door curtain would blow a wall of cool air across the entrance to stop the heat penetrating into the working areas. Today the wall was a wall of radiant heat which could have cooked a chicken. She passed through the invisible wall of heat and into the lobby area, which was several degrees cooler than it was designed to be. Glass atria may be great to look at, but they don’t keep much heat in.

Dee took the lift to the Vastrick Security offices. She had officially become a Vice President of Vastrick on January 1st this year, mainly, she suspected, because she had managed to get herself shot three times on her last big case.

When she stepped into the lobby she noticed that Andy was on reception duty. Andy was an investigator and so he was usually in the back office, but Dee guessed that the disruption to the roads and trains meant that some of their people would be working from home again. She was right; there were four backroom staff in the office, one investigator and one close protection operative, other than Dee herself.

Geordie, the other close protection operative, had been stuck in London since yesterday due to the failure of the trains to run from Kings Cross up to Newcastle, where he lived, and from which region he took his nickname. Everyone had called him Geordie for so long it was rare for anyone to refer to him by his real name, Pete Lowden, but everyone in the business knew who Geordie was, and he didn’t mind anyway, and so it really didn’t matter too much.

Dee removed her coat, scarf, boots and other sundry outerwear. Replacing her boots with sensible flat shoes, she was dressed in grey trousers, red roll neck sweater and a black tailored jacket. If anyone had seen what she was wearing for underwear they would have found it amusing. She was wearing her new husband’s thermals and had to admit that they kept her warm. At five feet eight inches tall, she was approximately the same height as Josh, her husband, and so the full length leg of the white thermal leggings tucked nicely underneath her socks.

The attractive young woman both missed and envied her new husband. He had been sitting by the pool at his five star hotel in Dubai enjoying Mediterranean style temperatures yesterday, when they spoke using the video service provided by Skype. He appeared to be enjoying himself far too much for her liking. But Josh wouldn’t be back for another three weeks. He was assessing the value of the loss incurred when a small shopping mall on Sheikh Zayed Road had been severely damaged by fire. The insurers were insistent that Dyson Brecht send out a senior loss adjuster, and Josh’s boss Toby had picked him. Dee would have gone along too if she hadn’t recently taken three weeks’ leave to go on honeymoon, and get shot.

Dee was just settling into her desk and booting up the computer when Geordie came in. He was over six feet tall, muscular without an ounce of fat on him, with close cropped dark hair. He was quite striking in his way. He had the rugged good looks that most women favour. He was dressed in his usual Chinos and Vastrick Polo top. Yesterday someone had asked him how he managed in the cold weather with just a polo shirt and a padded jacket. He looked at them with his piercing blue eyes and joked that he had encountered worse weather than this in the summer in Newcastle, which he then assured the London staff was just inside the Arctic Circle. He had said it with a straight face, and found it amusing that some of them actually believed it.

“We have a walk in,” he said with an economy of words that was typical of him. Despite his appearance he was quite shy around women, something that made him even more attractive to a lot of the female clients.

“It might be a time waster who has no idea of our hourly rates, but bring them in to Conference room 1 and we’ll give them fifteen minutes,” Dee said. Geordie headed towards the reception area whilst she walked across the corridor into the conference room and switched on the lights.

Dee was still asking housekeeping to send someone up to take orders for drinks when the ‘walk in’ stepped through the doorway. The woman was around Dee’s height but her hair was stacked on top of her head and wrapped in a colourful scarf that contrasted well with the rest of her outfit. She was accompanied by a handsome middle aged man dressed in a business suit and tie; her husband, perhaps. Although she was heavily built – she was probably too big for a size twenty dress – she carried herself well. Her ebony skin shone with good health and her dark eyes did nothing to conceal the intelligence that lay behind them. There was no hint of a smile, however, and Dee could see the tell-tale signs of worry which had brought her to their offices.

She was obviously a woman who believed in being direct.

“Hello, Mrs Hammond,” she said, in an accent Dee placed somewhere in central Africa.

“I am Victoria Hokobu and if you do not help me I fear I will be killed in the next seventy two hours.”