Headhunters (13 page)

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“No talking. Keep it shut unless we ask you a question.”

So Milton observed them both instead. This wasn’t a robbery. If it was, they would have taken whatever they wanted—the Wrangler, perhaps—and left them on the side of the road. It wasn’t a hit, either. They would already have been dead if it was.

So, it was something else.

He watched how they presented themselves. The two of them were professional. Very professional. They were cool and calm, they didn’t get agitated, and they were firm with what they wanted Milton and Matilda to do. It all spoke of them being well-trained and experienced operators.

They had held their weapons easily. The guns themselves were nine-millimetre automatics. The one aimed at Milton now was a brand-new Beretta M9, as he had suspected. Milton was familiar with the weapon; it had been the weapon he had considered along with the Sig Sauer P226 when he was choosing his own sidearm. It was a full-size service pistol, with a 4.7-inch barrel, an aluminium alloy receiver and a steel slide. It had a mechanism that allowed for loading and unloading with the safety activated, along with a long twelve-pound double-action trigger pull for the first shot. That pull might buy Milton a fraction of a second of extra time, but that wouldn’t be long enough to close the distance before it was fired. The gun was oiled and looked like it was carefully maintained.

Milton narrowed his focus. It was a large gun, with the length of trigger reach and the diameter of the butt making it suitable only for medium-to large-sized hands. This man was of average build, and the gun looked comfortable in his grip. The safety was flicked off and the man’s finger was inserted loosely through the trigger guard, the trigger resting lightly on the pad of his index finger. The man’s right arm was braced across his left. The muzzle of the gun would tremble if he was nervous, but it did not; it was steady and unmoving.

That was useful information: both of their captors were comfortable with their weapons. That, too, suggested that this wasn’t their first dance. It suggested that this wasn’t something impetuous, that it had been planned.

And so what did that make them?

Milton thought. It made them either criminals or government operatives.

It wasn’t difficult to think of criminals who might have a motive for wishing him harm. There had been dozens through the years who had fallen within his ambit; plenty of his victims had been dispatched because they were too powerful to be vulnerable to traditional law enforcement, or immune to the prospect of a guilty verdict at trial. He had crossed the Mafia several times, both in the United States and in Italy. There had been assignments that had seen him decapitate the leadership of triad factions that had extended their malign influence into British Chinatowns. And, of course, it wasn’t that long ago that he had killed El Patrón, the paterfamilias of La Frontera, the Mexican cartel that dominated the border town of Ciudad Juárez. These two didn’t look like the type who would work for the cartel, but Milton knew that there were plenty of professionals who would be available for hire, and the really good ones looked like regular guys, just as these two did. They were “grey men,” like Milton, the sort who could just drift away into a crowd and become anonymous.

Government operatives? The list of state actors with a reason to bear a grudge against Milton was even longer. He could have wasted an hour trying to consider all the people who might want to see him dead, but there would have been no way of knowing. There was no profit in idle speculation, so he put it to one side and continued his study of the man and the woman.

The man with the gun was facing him, so he started there. He had been the one who had done most of the talking, so Milton made the assumption that he was in charge. He was broad and thick, with a round head that looked heavy atop his shoulders. Forty or forty-five years old. His hair was cut short and he wore stubble on his chin. He had evenly spaced eyes, heavy brows and a squashed nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times. He was calm, breathing easily. If he was nervous, his breathing would have been shallower and faster, but it was even. There was no sign of sweat, and his eyes stayed on the two of them in the back and did not flicker or deviate in the way that Milton would have expected if he was anxious. His fingernails were not chewed. He was tanned, although the skin around his eyes was a little whiter, as if he had been wearing sunglasses.

The driver was tanned, too, but Milton could see the patch of peeling skin on her forearms. Milton guessed that she and her partner had only been in the country for a short time. A local would have had a deeper, more even tan and would not have been peeling. She was slender, and Milton noticed that she held the wheel with long fingers. Her blouse looked new, and the collar still had that starched stiffness that made Milton think that it had probably still been in its cellophane wrap this morning.

Milton switched his attention back to the man. He looked relaxed, as if they were just going for a pleasant Sunday drive. Milton looked up from the gun to the man’s face.

“Where are we going?”

“I told you—”

“I know what you said, and I’m being cooperative. But it would make me relax even more if you told me where we were going.” He indicated outside the window. “I know we’re going east.”

The man gave a little nod of his head down to the Beretta. “Where we’re going is for me to know and you to keep your fucking mouth shut about.” His eyes showed no emotion and his mouth was fixed in a tight line, his lips thin and cruel. He spoke evenly, without raising his voice, but there was authority and purpose there that Milton did not mistake. He had been concentrating on the sound of the man’s voice rather than the message, which had been easy enough to predict, after all. He didn’t speak with an Australian accent. Nothing about the man suggested that he was native. He spoke with a hard intonation, glottal, harsh-sounding. Milton tried to guess where he might have originated, but he couldn’t place the accent.

Milton pressed him, trying to get a reaction. “Back to Dubbo?”

“I’m not telling you where we’re going, so stop asking me. If you keep talking when I’ve asked you not to, there will be consequences for both of you. Are we clear?”

Matilda reached across and laid her hand over his. “Do what he says. Stop talking.”

Milton didn’t take his eyes off the man. “We’re clear,” he said.

He opened his hand and let Matilda’s slip inside. He squeezed it tight.

THEY DROVE EAST on the Barrier Highway for two hours until they reached the town of Wilcannia. The town was located where the Barrier Highway crossed the Darling River. The A32 bent to the south here. The terrain was arid, bordering on desert, although the landscape—studded with river red gum, yellow box and lignum—suggested that it was prone to flooding when the river was in full spate.

Milton looked out the window as they passed into the town. It was dark, and there were only a few streetlights, but the moon was bright and it cast enough illumination for him to see that it was a small place. There was a clutch of buildings centred around the junction of the highway, with a pub, café, post office and general store. The buildings were all painted in washed-out yellows, the colour bleached out of them by the fierceness of the sun. They passed a neat and tidy residence that announced itself as the council chambers of the Central Darling Shire, and then took a side street to the south.

They ran on, the ground undulating down as they reached the river. There was an abandoned building on the water’s edge. It was a large brick structure with a tin roof and looked as if it had, at some point several years earlier, been a warehouse. The name of the business had been painted across the top of the second storey, but the black paint had faded away into illegibility. A second painted message, more recent, warned that fire should be kept away.

The driver angled the car off the road and into the dusty space between the building and the river. There was a wide set of double doors and, at a quick toot of the horn, two men came around the corner of the building and opened them.

Four of them now? Their odds were getting worse.

The driver nudged the Nissan ahead of the doorway, put the shifter into reverse and backed up until the car was inside. The doors were closed almost all the way. The only illumination now was the silvery moonlight that filtered inside through the gaps and the glow of the instrumentation on the dashboard.

The two men who had opened the door had flashlights. They switched them on and Milton used the fresh illumination to glance around. It was an empty space, with exposed rafters above and a bare brick wall that showed evidence at regular intervals of brackets that would have supported some sort of industrial equipment. There was nothing else inside save for a white panel van that had been parked against the north wall.

Milton searched for any other means of egress. There was a mezzanine level at the rear of the structure, with an opened door just dimly visible beneath the half landing. The windows were all bricked up. The two men outside stayed next to the doors, and Milton could see that they each held handguns with their flashlights.

The man in the car with them opened his door, stepped out, and came around to the rear of the car on Milton’s side. With his Beretta held in his right hand and aimed through the glass at Milton’s head, he reached out with his left and opened the door.

“Out.”

Milton had hoped that the man might make a mistake, get in too close so that he could take his wrist and force the gun away, but he was too careful for that. He stayed back, out of range, covering him with the same steady aim as he got out of the Nissan. Matilda followed.

“This is a mistake,” Matilda said. “Whatever this is, you’ve got the wrong people.”

The man had his eye on Milton and didn’t respond.

Matilda’s temper overwhelmed her anxiety. “Talk to me!”

“Sit down, please, Miss Douglas.”

Milton registered that: they knew her name, too. He already knew that this wasn’t a random thing, but there was the confirmation. They had done their research. He filed that away with everything else.

Matilda did as she was told and Milton sat down next to her.

“Don’t worry,” he said quietly to her.

“No talking.”

“Stay calm. It’ll all be all right.”

The man came all the way up to Milton and pressed the gun right up close, in the centre of his forehead. Milton was thinking about that extra few pounds of pressure that he would need to exert to fire the first shot, the fractions of a second that that would buy him. The man was close enough now for Milton to gamble, jerk his head out of the way, sweep his arm up to try to knock the gun away. The man left the gun there for five seconds, long enough for the muzzle to leave a faint indentation on his skin, and Milton thought about taking action for every one of those seconds. He decided against it. He was confident that he would be able to disable the man with the gun, but there were three others now.

“I said be quiet,” the man repeated. “I meant it.”

Milton raised his hands in surrender and the man stepped back again. One of the men from the door walked over to him and the two conversed. They spoke quietly, and Milton was unable to eavesdrop. Instead, he looked over at the van. It was parked in a particularly dim part of the warehouse, but there was enough light from the flashlights for him to see that it bore the livery of UPS. He could guess why they had brought them here. They were going to be transferred from the Nissan to the van. It would be easier to transport them covertly in the van. It would have been more difficult to be discreet with them visible in the rear seats of the four-by-four. They had chosen to leave the van, collect them in the Nissan and then make the exchange here. If their abduction had been less smooth, and if a chase had been necessary, the powerful Nissan would have been a much better bet to catch Matty’s Jeep.

More planning. Milton was impressed.

It looked like the man with the gun was in charge of the two new arrivals, too. He said something, his tone assertive, and the other man went to the van, opened the hood and checked the engine.

The leader turned back to Milton and Matilda. “You want to use the bathroom, now’s the time,” he said. “We won’t be stopping again for several hours.”

“Where are we going?” Milton said.

The man smiled humourlessly and ignored the question. “Her first.”

Matilda got up and followed the man to the back of the room.

Milton was about to stand, but the man waved the gun as an indication that that would not be a good idea. He stayed where he was and watched them.

Matilda was five minutes. When she came back, the man asked whether Milton wanted to relieve himself.

“Yes,” he said.

The two newcomers followed Milton to the bathroom. He took a closer look at both of them as he made his way past them. One was around six feet tall, around the same height as Milton, with a head of curly black hair. He was handsome. The other was not; his hair was a messy thatch and his eyes black nuggets, mean and cold, sitting just a little too close together. They followed behind him, their weapons drawn. They had new Berettas, too, he saw. They all did.

The bathroom was a room with a bucket. There was a thin aperture in the wall, just below the line of the ceiling, and a little streetlight was admitted through it. The floorboards had been taken up and he had to step over the exposed joists. He could see from the discoloured earth in the corner that the bucket was just tipped out when it was full. There was enough waste there for him to guess that the men had been here for a few days. This appeared to have been a base for them.

Milton relieved himself into the bucket, zipped up his fly and turned back to them. There was no play for him. They had him covered, and Matilda was alone in the main room. Even if he had been able to disable these two, he wouldn’t have been able to leave without her. Any kind of move would put her in great danger. It was impossible. He dutifully led the way back to the van. The rear doors had been opened. He paused and felt one of the Berettas pushed into the small of his back.