Nine Lives (3 page)

THREE

Twenty miles across London, a series of jars and bottles stood on a brick wall in the middle of an empty park. They were stacked in a line, like a makeshift shooting gallery.

Suddenly, one of the bottles exploded. A gunshot echoed around the field and a flock of birds on the grass across the park reacted to the noise of the gunshot, flapping their wings frantically and lifting off from the ground, flying away from the threat of danger.

Twenty yards from the row of glass vessels, a thirteen year old boy stood still as he held the pistol that had fired the bullet. His brown eyes were wide with shock and excitement, having just experienced the sheer power and accuracy of a real handgun for the first time.

He stood motionless, savouring the moment.

Then his dark features broke into a broad smile and he lowered the stolen pistol, turning it to one side and examining it in his hands.

It was a nine-millimetre Beretta 92, the famous Italian pistol. Holding both a fifteen-round magazine and a reputation as one of the most accurate handguns on the planet, the weapon was a firm favourite for law enforcement and military forces around the world, particularly in the United States. It was also just a bit too big for a thirteen year old’s grip. After all, the pistol was designed to be held by a soldier in combat or by a policeman on the street, not by a thirteen year old boy in his local park.

Behind the young man, two of his friends were staring at the gun, wide-eyed and clearly impressed after that first shot. Turning, the teenager carefully passed the pistol over to one of them, who stepped forward and took it in his hands. Raising the weapon, he aimed at an empty
Coca-Cola
bottle on the far right of the targets, lining up the fore-sight on the centre of the glass. He suddenly remembered something he’d seen in a war movie about snipers and started taking deep breaths as he tried to slow his breathing. It seemed to work. The fore-sight stopped dancing around and settled on the Coke bottle, straight and still.

But he was too tense, anticipating the weapon’s response when it fired. He snatched at the trigger and the weapon boomed, pushing him back from the recoil. A plume of dust burst from the brick wall behind the glass targets as it took the bullet but the bottle remained intact. He’d missed.

As his friends laughed, the boy fired twice more in quick frustrated succession. The second shot hit the bottle, scoring a hit and restoring some pride, and the glass vessel shattered, disintegrating into a thousand fragments and sprinkling to the ground like fairy dust.

As the pair of gunshots echoed around the empty park, the boy turned to his friend, wide-eyed and excited.

‘Where the hell did you get this?’ he asked.

‘My brother,’ the kid replied.

‘Saqib? What’s he doing with a handgun?’

The dark-haired boy just shrugged.

He didn’t want to think about it.

His older brother wasn’t the kind of guy to carry around something like this. Only just turned twenty-three, Saqib had been as straight as an arrow growing up, never in trouble and never causing any. But then the riots of last summer had happened and the boy had watched his brother change. On the second night of the anarchy, their father had been killed, stamped to death on the street by a violent group who’d separated from the mob. His father hadn’t done anything to provoke them, he’d just been trying to get past quietly as he made his way home from work. The group knocked him to the ground and kicked his skull in, causing deep cerebral fractures and a resulting brain haemorrhage.

He’d died on the street before anyone could even get him to a hospital.

Despite his age, the teenage boy had come to terms with his father’s passing. True, he felt angry and bitter at what had happened, how unjust and unfair it all was. Not a day went past that he didn’t wish that he’d been there, that he could have at least tried to do something to stop the gang beating his dad.

But despite his age, he already knew there was nothing he could do to change what had happened. His father had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And any lasting feelings of rage he might have felt at the cruelty of it all were swept away with concern for his mother who’d suddenly found herself a widow. Needless to say, she had taken the unexpected death of her husband hard.

As had his brother, Saqib.

Since that fateful night last August, Saqib had become a different man. It was almost as if the incident had planted a seed of hate inside him, and day by day that seed was growing, sprouting weeds that twisted and wrapped their tendrils through all his veins and arteries. His younger brother watched as he drifted away from all his old friends. He started drinking and doing hard drugs; he often wouldn’t come home at night, and his mother would stay up until dawn, worried sick that she was going to lose another member of her family.

And he was spending a lot of time with a new group. There was one of them in particular whom the boy didn’t like, a guy who called himself Dominick. He’d appeared on the scene a few months ago seemingly out of nowhere, and Saqib seemed to be hanging out with him a lot lately.

The youngster would never admit it to anyone, but there was something about the stranger that terrified him. He had a look in his eye that was unsettling, a gleam that contradicted all the smart suits and polished shoes that he wore.

One word came to mind, a word the teenager had picked up from his English class at school.

Psychotic
.

Saqib had called his brother last night, asking him to bring round a takeaway for him and his friends. For some reason, he claimed none of them could leave the house, so the kid had to go and get it for them. That was all bullshit; they were just being lazy. Nevertheless, the boy had reluctantly headed out and picked up a couple of pizzas, taking them over to an address Saqib gave him over the phone.

On the way, he found himself praying that Dominick wouldn’t be there.

He’d been in luck. There were only three people inside the house, his brother and two guys whose names he didn’t know. Whoever owned the place had given up cleaning and maintenance a long time ago. The place was a complete dump. It was dirty and dank, and there was some strange thumping noise coming from the bathroom upstairs. Saqib had grabbed the pizzas without thanks or payment and told him to get the hell out. Pissed off and feeling used, the boy had walked through the hallway to the door, alone.

As he turned the handle he’d suddenly spotted a handgun resting on a table by the entrance.

Like a kid in a sweet shop, he couldn’t resist. Fuelled by his feelings of being used the boy had grabbed the weapon, tucking it into the folds of his coat and then left.
Thank you guys
, he’d thought as he rushed off down the street, the pistol hidden inside his jacket. He couldn’t wait to show his friends.

Another gunshot brought him back to the present, as the second boy fired at the glass targets again. He checked his watch.
8:55 am
. He had to be at work in the shop for his Mum before 9:30am which meant he also had to take the gun back, something he was dreading. But much as he didn’t want to, he didn’t have a choice.

‘Bad news. I need to go,’ he told his friends. He turned to the third boy, who was yet to fire the weapon. ‘Want to try before I leave? I need to take it with me.’

The third teenager nodded eagerly.

Taking the weapon from the second boy, he aimed at an empty jar, closing one eye like he’d seen Clint Eastwood do in all his movies.

He pulled the trigger and the jar exploded.

Four thousand miles away the overweight man from the yacht was about to break the habit of a lifetime for the second time that day.

People called him Henry, but that wasn’t his real name. He’d adopted it at the age of thirteen after watching the gangster movie
Goodfellas
. To this day, he could still remember the first time he saw the film and the tremendous effect it’d had on him. As an impressionable young boy looking for an identity, it had changed his life. He’d started wearing the suits and tracksuits the actor Ray Liotta wore in the movie. His voice suddenly developed a New York twang. And he started calling himself
Henry
after the lead guy in the movie, Henry Hill.

A number of older boys around him had seen this as opportunity for humour. With a short attention span, Henry the boy had never sat through to the end of the movie so he hadn’t discovered that the character Henry Hill ended up being a rat for the FBI. They’d made cheap jokes, mocking him, deriding his stupidity; to his frustration, Henry knew he was too young to retaliate. Some of his tormentors were nineteen or twenty, far bigger and stronger than him.

But he’d been patient and he’d waited, never forgetting who’d ridiculed and teased him.

And when he was sixteen and been given a job as a
halcone
for a Riyadh cartel, he’d asked his new friends for some help on a private matter.

They’d gladly agreed.

To this day, his favourite method of killing someone was lifted straight from the Mafia stories that came out of New York. He had the person held down and sedated, and when they were unconscious their feet were passed through the holes of a cinder block, the gaps then filled with quick drying cement and locking their ankles tight.

He liked to be there when they woke up, watching that first moment of confusion and vulnerability as they wondered where they were. He would wait until the moment they realised their feet were lodged in over seventy pounds of cemented concrete.

By then, they were already being carried towards the water.

He’d often wondered what went through someone’s mind as they went beneath the surface, dropping like a stone. Death was certain. They’d know they had less than a minute to live.
Did they fight to the end? Did they pray? Try to hold their breath?
He smiled. If he could, he would watch every single one of them land on the seabed. He’d seen it once, when he’d ordered an associate who’d betrayed him thrown into an aquarium. The guy had tried everything. Pulling his feet free. Scrabbling at the window, his eyes as wide as dinner plates, his screaming muffled through the water. Henry had watched from the other side of the glass, an inch from the doomed guy’s face, grinning at him.
I should have brought popcorn
, he thought.

He’d killed his first man when he was sixteen. The guy had been one of his chief tormentors as a boy, endlessly mocking the overweight thirteen year old’s new Mafia persona. Seven more of them had followed, one by one, their feet dried into concrete and thrown in the sea, screaming like scared little girls.

Funnily enough, since then no one had made any jokes anymore.

And the name had stuck.

Twenty two years later, Henry had achieved his position as head of the cartel by being cautious. He had a rule never to attend deals personally, letting those beneath him do it instead. He didn’t fancy opening a car packed with millions of dollars worth of cocaine and suddenly find an entire police precinct descending on him out of nowhere. If his men got caught, they either went down without a word or shot their way out. They knew better than to talk to the police.

If they did, everyone they had ever loved would be killed.

His was a business built on two things; respect and fear. But in recent weeks, he’d been getting restless and wary. He could feel eyes on him. He knew the American Drug Enforcement Agency were sniffing about, like stray dogs looking for scraps of food. He’d received a tip off last night about a man who’d recently moved into a house near his compound, in the centre of Riyadh. He’d sent his two enforcers to investigate and they’d struck gold. Inside the house, the two knuckleheads had found a shitload of surveillance equipment, cameras, listening devices, bugs and a DEA agent himself. The guy had somehow wire-tapped all the phones inside the main house, recording and photographing Henry’s every move. Once the two giants had restrained the man, the drug lord had ordered him anaesthetised then carried to his yacht.

He smiled. Drowning the DEA agent earlier that morning had been welcome refreshment. For a brief moment, he felt his mood lift as he thought of the American right now at the bottom of the sea. But his presence confirmed Henry’s concern that the DEA were getting close. Way too close.

Needing to get out of Riyadh and clear his head, several hours ago Henry had set up a quick meeting in Juarez, the first time in a very long time that he’d be face-to-face for a deal. It was an opportunity to make some good money, over four million US dollars, in exchange for 500 keyed bricks. The powder was second rate at best but they wouldn’t know that until Henry was back in the air. It had been sitting in his aircraft hangar for months; now seemed as good a time as any to get rid of it.

Right now, he was standing on the tarmac of his own private airfield. In front of him, the two meatheads unloaded the bricks of cocaine from a 4x4 Escalade, carrying it up a set of unfolded stairs and loading it onto Henry’s private jet. It was broad daylight, just past midday in Riyadh, and they were standing in the sunshine in the middle of the runway but Henry didn’t give a damn if anyone was watching. The local police knew the consequences if they tried to make a move on him. Their own families would pay the price.