The Payback (27 page)

In desperation, I tried to manoeuvre the screwdriver into the hole between the notches and the ratchet one last time, contorting my wrists into a position they should never have been in.

I heard a single click as the screwdriver moved in a notch and immediately leaned back in the seat and pushed my arms against the cuffs, forcing them open.

I’d done it.

Just in time, because the next second Frogface leaned in and grabbed me by the collar, dragging me out. I didn’t put up any resistance and kept my hands behind my back so that it looked like I was still cuffed. At the same time, I opened up the main blade on the knife.

We were close to the edge of a deep-looking swamp about twenty yards across, beyond which were more trees. Only the patrol car’s headlights kept the place from falling into total darkness. As I stumbled in a pothole and steadied myself, I felt a drop of rain on my face.

Frogface pushed me in the ribs with the shotgun and motioned with his head towards the swamp. ‘Walk,’ he grunted.

The driver was coming round the front of the car, and he’d drawn his revolver, which he was keeping down by his side. The rain began to fall harder, great cool drops of it splattering on the dirt.

The fear of death surged through me then, at the thought that
this might be the last rain I ever felt on my face, but so too did the adrenalin that comes with it. Fear’s good. Let it get the better of you and it makes you slow and useless, but if you know how to harness it, it can be used to keep you alive.

And I did know.

In one sudden movement, I grabbed the barrel of the shotgun, aiming it away from me, and drove the knife up to the hilt into Frogface’s gut, ignoring the sick feeling I got from the soft splitting noise it made. This was about survival, pure and simple.

Frogface looked temporarily startled and stumbled back. His grip on the shotgun weakened and I tried to yank it out of his hand, but he held on, even when I stabbed him again three times in quick succession. Sometimes it takes time for someone to know they’ve been stabbed, their own adrenalin temporarily masking the damage being done to them. Frogface was a case in point.

If anything, my attack seemed to galvanize him, and he propelled himself forward and drove his head up into my face. I managed to dodge the worst of the blow by turning my head but he still hit my cheek with a painful thud that wasn’t that far away from breaking a bone. He was trying to shake me off, and I could see the driver standing only a few feet away, taking aim with his revolver, waiting for a clean shot, and I knew that if I let go of Frogface, I’d be dead. So I held on, keeping one hand fixed as firmly as possible on the shotgun barrel while I searched for an opening with the other.

Frogface slammed the side of his head into mine, bellowing in anger and frustration, and I lost my footing.

But as I slipped in the dirt, I rolled with the momentum, letting go of the shotgun in the process, then quickly launched myself back up at him, the two of us stumbling all the way back into the
car. In the process he turned his head away from mine, exposing the dark flesh of his throat.

I was operating entirely on instinct as I jammed the knife into his neck. For a second there was no blood; then, as he staggered unsteadily, a narrow geyser of red shot out in a long spraying arc, his grip on me weakened dramatically, and the shotgun fell to the ground with a metallic clatter.

Frogface’s colleague – clearly, as I’d guessed, no ice-cool killer himself – yelled something and came towards me, revolver outstretched, anger and shock in his eyes, the end of the barrel now only feet away from my head.

I yanked Frogface round, using him as a human shield, and ducked down as the driver pulled the trigger and the night exploded in noise. The bullet missed, and I thrust Frogface forward into him. For a moment the two of them became entangled, and as the driver pushed his colleague aside and turned back towards me, I jumped into him, grabbing his gun arm and butting him full in the face.

The gun flew out of his hand, but he still managed to throw a quick left hook that sent me crashing to the ground. I raised my head and saw him lean down and pick up the shotgun.

Desperately I looked in the rain and darkness for where his gun had fallen. I spotted it lying beside a pile of dirt-encrusted bottles at the side of the road, and scrambled over on my hands and knees, hearing him pump the shotgun behind me. Grabbing the revolver in both hands, I rolled round on to my back so that we were facing each other through the rain, fifteen feet apart.

For a long, surreal moment, neither of us moved. Our whole lives had been distilled to this one piece of stinking swampland in the middle of nowhere.

And then I fired, half a second before he did, because he was
already going down as the shotgun discharged, its payload going high and wide into the black night sky. He fell to one knee, clutching at his gut, and I pulled the trigger again, the bullet taking the top of his head off, and then kept pulling it until it was empty.

Finally the world fell silent and the only thing I could hear was the incessant ringing in my ears.

Slowly I got to my feet, the cuffs still dangling from one wrist, the revolver smoking in my hands, and walked over to where the two men lay. The driver was at an awkward angle, his head split open like a coconut by the second bullet, exposing a mass of brain matter, one arm down by his side, the other outstretched, fingers still clutching the shotgun. Frogface, though, was still alive. He lay on his front, face in the dirt, a steadily growing pool of sticky warm blood surrounding his upper half, his legs still kicking weakly like a clockwork toy reaching the end of its cycle.

I used my shirt to wipe the handle of the revolver I’d just used to shoot the driver and dropped it to the ground, before un-holstering Frogface’s revolver and taking two speedloaders, each containing six rounds, from his belt. I pushed them into the pocket of my jeans, clicked off the safety on Frogface’s revolver, then leaned down, placed a foot on his neck, and shot him in the back of the head.

It was a mercy killing. I had no desire to leave him to bleed to death, and felt no satisfaction for what I’d just done. I’d killed two men. Men who doubtless had families and people who loved them.

I could smell death in the stagnant air, and I felt sick. I looked around at the silent woodland. The rain was torrential now, and I suddenly felt utterly alone. I had to find Tina.

But when I reached into my pocket to pull out my mobile phone, a terrible thought struck me. I might have got rid of
the phone that Schagel had given me but it was possible, given the contacts he and Wise had within the Filipino police, that they could have got someone to triangulate the location of my phone throughout my current stay in Manila. They wouldn’t be able to trace me any longer, but that didn’t matter. The historical data would tell anyone interested where Tina and I had spent the previous night. Which meant that, if Tina had got away tonight, they could get to her there.

It was only then that I realized she’d never actually given me her phone number.

I cursed at such an elementary mistake and pulled the keys from the driver’s pocket. I jumped inside the patrol car, turned it round, and drove back the way we’d come, knowing I had to get back to Manila as soon as possible.

Tina was exhausted, wet, and in a state of shock when she unlocked the front door to the guesthouse, and went through the empty reception area in the direction of the stairs.

Everything had gone wrong. First, Pat O’Riordan, the man who’d been her best hope of gathering evidence against Paul Wise, was dead. And now so were his wife and her brother, and Dennis Milne, the man who’d been her only ally left alive, had been caught. Either he was under arrest, in which case it was only a matter of hours before the authorities found out who he really was, or he was dead as well, having been dispatched by the two crooked uniforms.

She needed Milne now, because without him she was powerless to move forward. He’d had the address for the man called Heed, Wise’s fixer in Manila. All she had were names: Heed, and Omar Salic and Cheeseman from the pages of O’Riordan’s diary. Names that meant nothing on their own.

She was unarmed and alone in a hostile city, where people were trying to kill her, and with only the barest leads to work on. She
thought about calling Mike Bolt again, to see if he’d managed to find out a location for Wise, but even if he had, what good would it do her? She could hardly turn up and demand he confess his crimes. In her heart, Tina knew she only had one alternative left: to return home, thwarted once again in her hunt for justice, but at least with her life and freedom intact. As soon as she woke the next morning, she was going to call the airline and get on the first flight back. The thought depressed her. Tina had never been one to accept defeat. She was a fighter. But she also wasn’t stupid.

On her way up to her room, she inspected herself in the full-length mirror at the top of the stairs. She looked like crap. Her clothes were soaking, and her hair was matted and sticking to the side of a face that was streaked with dirt. She had a cut above her right eye, with a thick, soft scab, and another one on her right cheek, which was swollen. It was a good thing there’d been no one on the front desk.

She looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. The drive back on unfamiliar roads had taken her longer than expected, and she felt exhaustion taking hold. It had been an intense, draining few days, and she was still jetlagged from her flight halfway round the world.

She had the key in the lock and was just about to open the door when she stopped.

What if someone was in her room waiting for her? It wasn’t as if Wise’s people didn’t have the resources to track her down. Tina had been ambushed three times in the past three days, and caught off-guard every time. It was fast becoming a habit. The first time, back at her cottage, hadn’t been her fault. Neither, you could argue, was the second, when Milne had broken into her room. But tonight she and Milne had made a mistake by going back to the house in Ternate rather than following the lead they already had,
and it had almost cost Tina her life. She couldn’t afford another error. The law of averages was against her enough as it was.

She removed the key and turned away.

Which was the moment when the door was yanked open from the inside.

Tina turned and broke into a run, heading for the stairwell at the end of the corridor.

‘Tina!’

Milne was standing in the open doorway. He looked as tired and rough as she felt.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said quietly.

She felt a lurch of relief so strong it almost knocked her over. ‘Dennis.’ She walked up and had to stop herself from hugging him. In the end, she settled for putting a hand on his arm. ‘When did you get back here?’

‘Ten minutes ago.’ He motioned her to step inside, and shut the door behind them. ‘I knocked on your door, and when you weren’t there I thought I’d check that you didn’t have any unwanted visitors.’

She smiled. ‘Thanks. And thanks for earlier too. You saved my life.’

‘You saved mine as well. If you hadn’t intervened outside the house, those cops would have put a bullet in me. So I guess we’re quits.’

‘How did you get away?’

‘I killed them,’ he said simply, then saw the look on her face. ‘I had to do it. They were going to kill me. You’ve got to understand that.’

They looked at each other for a few seconds without speaking, and once again Tina noticed the haunted look in his pale blue eyes, and the pain he was carrying with him. ‘I understand,’ she
said at last. And she did. She’d killed before, when she’d believed it necessary, and she’d lost sleep over what she’d done. That didn’t make her the same as him – and she was still sickened by some of the crimes he’d committed over the years – but there were definitely similarities between them.

‘We’ve got one serious lead,’ he said, sitting down on a rickety chair next to the bed. ‘The man Tomboy delivered this mysterious briefcase to. Heed.’

‘And Tomboy had no idea at all what was in the briefcase?’

‘No. But because he worked for Paul Wise, and Wise is in the country, I assume it must be en route to him.’

‘So we need to go and see Heed.’

Milne yawned. ‘I’m too tired to go and see him now. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow. And I’m going to go alone.’

Tina immediately opened her mouth to protest, but he held up a hand, and she let him continue.

‘This is over for you, Tina,’ he said gently. ‘I don’t care what you say. You can still walk away from all this. Go home, back to your life, and your job. I can’t. The chances are Bertie Schagel’s already betrayed me to the authorities in Manila, and I’m guessing I’m going to be getting the blame for the murders tonight, as well as Pat O’Riordan. I’m finished. I’ve been finished ever since the moment I made the decision not to shoot you.’

Tina looked at him, startled, as he continued to speak.

‘Which was my choice. I don’t expect you to thank me. But . . .’ He sighed, looking up at Tina with a rueful smile. ‘I’m glad I did it.’

She didn’t know what to say. But she felt for him, then, the intensity of her emotions a surprise to her, even after all that had happened.

‘When I go and see Heed, he’s not going to want to talk,’ he continued. ‘But he’s got the information we need. He knows about
Lene Haagen, and I bet he knows what happened to her, and where she’s buried. He also knows why O’Riordan died, who the person or people he was going to meet were. And I’m guessing he also knows what’s in the briefcase. In other words, he’s the man with all the answers. But I’m going to have to force them out of him, and it’s not going to be pretty. And when I’m finished, I’m going to have to kill him. In cold blood. I don’t want you there when I do that. Do you understand what I’m saying?’