The Rock (5 page)

She went to knock. Hesitated. Her knuckles cast a ridged shadow over the spyhole.

At first the offer had seemed so simple. Take a package onboard the frigate, stash it in her locker – not that easy, considering how stingy the Senior Service was when it came to locker space and the endless dress codes required of the average Wren – unload the package the other side and collect payment.

There’s always an
at first
, she told herself.
At first
it was a good idea to marry Danny, the guy she’d met two weeks before her sixteenth birthday. Danny, the boy in a man’s skin who did lines of coke on their wedding night, and flirted with the hotel staff on their honeymoon in Corfu.

At first
it seemed like a smart call to join the Navy.

Well. No more regrets. She’d already made up her mind that she wouldn’t go back to Danny. And as for paying off his twenty-grand debt with the money from this job, forget it. No, this was her life now and no one else’s.

She knocked on the door four times. Paused. Knocked twice again.

The stress of each trip back aboard the
Lizard
left her exhausted. Having to return to her locker, waiting for the coast to clear.

The crevice of light between the door and the carpet blackened.

He’s standing the other side, she said to herself, taking a deep breath. John Bald scared her. Which was weird, when she thought about it. John was calm, softly spoken. Perhaps he reminded her of her father, the gentlest man in the world one minute and boxing her mother about the head the next.

The door opened and she stood there.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’

John was munching on a red apple, his frame filling the doorway.

Wright froze, glancing up and down the corridor. Vacant.

‘This is the last package.’

‘Tell the whole world, why don’t you?’

Her eyes fell on the carpet.

‘I’m joking, lass. You’re just in time. I ordered room service for two.’ He popped the core into his mouth, pips, stem and all. ‘Hope you like fish, but I figured you spend most of your life on a boat.’

She smelled onion and tuna. Her tummy growled. God, I’m hungry, she realized. What with the hurry to unload the cocaine, she hadn’t touched a morsel of food in the past twenty-four hours.

The room had a Twenties-style wooden desk and chair, a salmon-coloured carpet and an Oriental ceiling fan that threw out waves of cool air. She propped herself on the edge of the bed and picked at food on a tray: white onion risotto, roasted sea scallops, seared bluefin tuna, all of it smelling delicious. John slid the laptop out of the case and laid it on the desk. He fetched a screwdriver from the drawer and removed the screws at the base of the unit. Off came the cover. Inside, where a tangle of cables and circuit boards ought to have been, was a neat row of white tubes.

‘That’s everything?’

‘Uh, let me see. No, I decided to keep some so I could go into dealing.’ Wright rolled her eyes, picked at a scallop. ‘Of course it’s the lot. Unless you want to count and weigh ’em.’

‘No, I believe you. Honestly, you did good.’

The voice was accompanied by a hand sliding across the middle of her back. She flinched a little. Flinched because his hands were colder than those of any man she’d known. A little, because she knew that resisting John was a bad idea. This wasn’t part of the original deal, but the first night they rendezvoused in Rio, she’d been drunk and off guard and curious about the imposing Scotsman with the dark past and the darker features. She knew better now. But now was too late.

He let her unbutton her shirt and take off her shoes. A small mercy. She spent a couple of minutes undressing down to her panties and bra. It took far longer than she’d otherwise have done.

‘When you get into something,’ her mother had once told her, her face all puffed up, ‘it’s hard to pull yourself out of it.’

There were men who liked it rough, and there was John. He ripped off her bra at the seams. He was playful
at first
, because that’s how he liked to start things. Then he slapped her. Then he smacked her. When they were both fully naked, he pushed close to her and gripped her neck with a gnarled hand. As she struggled to breathe he whispered in her ear the unspeakable things he’d do to her if she ever dared betray him.

She could hardly breathe as John fucked her. But she knew if she resisted, he’d only tighten his grip. She let him do his worst. He fucked her hard and his grip only loosened when he finally came inside her. Three minutes that felt more like thirty. She got through it by picturing herself disappearing out that hotel door and into the night, fifty grand in her back pocket. A new life.

The bed sighed as he rolled off her. Then she heard the jangle of his belt buckle as he slipped on his jeans.

‘I need to go,’ she said, her voice cracking like thin ice. ‘We’re off again tomorrow morning and all hands have to be on board by 0300.’

No response.

‘You’ve got my money, right?’

‘Right here,’ John said, patting a travel bag resting on the armchair. He smiled at her. ‘Relax. No one’s suspected you of anything, have they?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No, they haven’t. Or else you’d have been detained by the police. Look at it this way: you’re about to be £50,000 richer than you were this morning. All in all, that’s not a bad deal.’

‘I guess.’

‘The Navy plays such an important role in the war on drugs. Ironic when you think about it.’

‘Yeah,’ she said distantly.

‘All the time the
Lizard
’s seizing shipments, they’ve got the jackpot right on board.’

She stood up. The white bedsheet stroked her figure.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Shower,’ she said.

Hot water stabbed her skin. She blinked soapy water out of her eyes and saw a shape through the frosted-glass frame, half pink and half blue. John. What the
fuck
did that arsehole want now? Wright tugged on the cubicle slider. The glass revealed John grinning at her. Yes,
grinning
. Like she was the butt of some terrible joke.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

The first punch knocked her backwards, water cascading on top of her. She tried to get up, but another fist to the face flattened her. Teeth loosened. Blood swam across her line of sight. Each blow vibrated around her skull. He punched and punched. Her world darkened to a bloody twilight.

She blacked out.

Woke up with no sense of time, or place. But she remembered John’s face. He planned to kill her. Too badly injured to move, she moaned as John drew a razor blade across one of her wrists, then the other.

That man will be the death of me, her mother had said of her father.

The following week she died in a car crash.

That man will—

2222 hours.

At its most south-easterly point Sir Herbert Road abruptly ended and the Rock became a sheer cliff, offering no passage along the south coast. Gardner knew he had no choice but to loop back north along the Devil’s Tower Road. With Terry Gill already en route to the King’s Hotel, Gardner needed to be there fucking yesterday. On foot wouldn’t cut it.

A Ford Focus drifted towards him. The only car in sight. He hid the Sig behind his back and ambled into the middle of the road. The Focus came to a halt eight metres from Gardner, the headlights blinding him. Shielding his eyes with his left hand, he scoped the driver. Male, balding, forties. Beer gut threatening to burst out of his buttoned-up Hawaiian shirt. No threat.

‘Help you?’ the guy said as he stepped on to the road and approached Gardner.

‘Give me your car.’

‘Oh shit.’

The man was determined to leg it. By the time he’d returned to the car and flung open the door, Gardner had whipped out the Sig. The gun snatched the guy’s attention. He paused, one foot inside the car, his body shivering with fear.

‘Don’t… don’t kill me. I have a wife and two daughters.’

‘Make yourself scarce then.’

The man ran towards the beach faster than his fat body had ever run. Gardner hopped into the car and raced back up Devil’s Tower Road and down Winston Churchill Avenue. He dumped the wheels outside the King’s Hotel and scrambled up the steps.

The automatic doors couldn’t open quickly enough. A woman at reception asked if she could help him.

‘Maintenance,’ he shouted back to her as he broke through the emergency doors to the right of reception, then bolted up the stairs. Screw this one up and you can wave goodbye to a future in the Regiment, he told himself.

I won’t.

Three flights up. His calves and quads had healed since the gruelling slog through the favela, muscle fibres enlarging as they repaired themselves. He scaled the treads effortlessly. His palms depressed the crash bar. The door obliged.

He faced a wide corridor, musty and air-conned and flanked by a series of rooms. A sign on the beige wall indicated left for rooms 30–34 and straight ahead for 35–39. So, the fifth door. Forty metres, end of the corridor, next to the lift.

Gill was standing outside room 39. His left hand rested on the door knob. In his right was a Glock 9mm pistol, a Gemtech Tundra suppressor fixed to the end of the barrel and a GTL-22 tactical light attached to the underside, shining a white-hot spotlight on the carpet. The bang of the crash bar had alerted him. His head shot up. His face did a flip book of emotions as Gardner unhooked the P228 from his jeans.

Thirty-five metres and closing. Gill raised the Glock. Gardner knew he had to peel off a shot before the Glock was fully level: the tactical light acted as a powerful flashlight to disorientate targets, and would blind him when he fired.

Twenty-five metres. Gardner went for the shot.

Ca-rack!

Clink!

Gill hissed as the bullet pinged his Glock, knocking it from his hand. He gripped his wrist with his left hand.

‘What the fuck?’

‘Step away, Terry.’

‘Fuck it. Get it over with then.’

Gardner would have happily pulled the trigger. But first he wanted to find out the link between Gill and Hands. Killen’s waffle about the blood-diamond gig didn’t ring true, because Hands had been blacklisted on the Circuit for a good few years. He was more likely to be down the bookies’ in Dagenham than in some African hell-hole.

‘How the fuck did you find me?’

‘I met Johnny and Eddie. On a fishing trip.’

Gill grunted. Time hadn’t been kind to the ex-Para. His muscles were flabby, his pecs drooping halfway to man-boobs. Love handles sloped out at his sides. His ginger hair was thinning, the whites of his eyes grey and dull.

‘Who hooked you up with Dave Hands?’ Gardner asked. ‘Killen and Stone reckoned you met on some diamond job, but them boys talk such shit.’

‘Fucking do one.’

Gill glimpsed the Glock lying two metres behind him. He has any bright ideas, the walls get a fresh lick of paint.

A
click
to Gardner’s six o’clock. The noise distracted him and he half-turned, spotting a woman in his peripheral vision as she ran out of her room. ‘He’s got a gun!’ she screamed.

Gill shoulder-barged the walnut door of room 39. Busted it and lunged through the gap.

Gardner hesitated. John can’t know you’re alive, he told himself. But if I don’t stop Gill, he’s a dead man.

He had no choice, and dived inside with the Sig close to his chest, the elbow of his shooting arm tucked in at his side.

He expected to find Gill. But the room was pitch-black. A strip of light from the bathroom outlined the bed, desk, wardrobe. Then he saw movement ahead. He steadied himself, depressed the trigger a little, and as his eyes adjusted he made out net curtains flapping like a dress above an air vent. The doors leading on to the balcony were open.

Gardner stilled his breath. Heard blood rushing in his ears. Stepped deeper into the hotel room. It looked for all the world like Bald had jumped.

He felt a pressure in his right ear. The horizon slid like a boat on its beam ends and next thing he knew, his head was crashing into the wardrobe. Gill.

The fucker stood in the bathroom doorway. He swung a boot at Gardner’s torso. Something cracked. He felt a rush of air shoot up his windpipe, and, shit, everything hurt.

Gill gave it everything he had and then some. He stomped on Gardner’s right hand, grinding the knuckles under his heel.

He then started to aim a kick at Gardner’s gut. But the slow backlift gave Gardner enough time to expel the air in his body. He pushed out his abs, honed by years of crunches, creating a rock-solid wall between his stomach and Gill’s Caterpillar. The blow was painful, steel toecaps meeting hard flesh, but it didn’t knock him for six.

Gardner took a hold of the leg pressing down on his gut, flung it high into the air, shoulder and forearm muscles working overtime. Gill unbalanced. Fell flat on his arsehole.

In for the kill.