The Payback (3 page)

I’m not a good man. I’ve killed people in my life who’ve probably not deserved it. In fact, scotch that, I know I have. I’ve acted as judge, jury and executioner when I’ve had absolutely no right to do so. But I’ve also lost a lot of sleep over what I’ve done. Woken up in the middle of the night, sweating and terrified, as the ghosts of the past haunt my dreams, knowing that they’ll always be there with me right up until the end of my life, and possibly even beyond. I’ve got morals. I like to think the hits I carry out are
on people who’ve done some kind of wrong. That they’re not innocent. This woman was guilty of nothing, and I drew the line immediately, knowing that ultimately my sanity depended on it.

Schagel hadn’t taken it well. He’d threatened and cajoled me, claiming that he could have me arrested at any time and then I’d be spending the rest of my life in jail. He could have done too. He knew far more about me than I knew about him, having set me up with the fake identity I now lived under. And, unlike me, he had some very powerful friends. But I’d stood my ground and eventually he’d given up. He didn’t betray me to the authorities, either. I guess, in the end, I was too useful to him for that. Unfortunately, I still read in the newspapers a few weeks later that the headless corpse of a fifty-six-year-old Russian woman had been found floating in the Klang River just outside KL. My stand might have served to make me feel a little better, but it hadn’t done her much good.

I picked up the beer and took a long slug, relishing the coldness and the hoppy taste. Sometimes in life there are few things better than a cold beer.

‘So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Mr Schagel?’

‘Ah, straight to the point, Dennis. That’s what I like about you.’ He smiled, lizard-like, and crossed his hands on his lap, loudly cracking the knuckles. ‘So, I shall be straight to the point also. It’s a job in the Philippines – a country I understand you’re familiar with.’

I nodded. The Philippines. I hadn’t been there in over six years, and I immediately wondered how exactly Schagel knew I was familiar with it. I certainly hadn’t told him, and as far as I was aware no one knew about the three years I’d spent there after I’d first gone on the run from the UK. But for the moment I let it go. ‘Who’s the target?’

‘An Irish ex-pat and long-term resident of Manila. His name’s
Patrick O’Riordan.’ Schagel reached down behind his chair and grabbed a plain brown envelope, which he handed to me.

I opened it and pulled out an A4-sized black-and-white headshot of a fit-looking western man in his early fifties with a shock of bouffant-style curly white hair and high, well-defined cheekbones. He was looking straight at the camera, a confident half-smile on his face, as if all was well in his world. Which it probably was.

‘It should be a straightforward assignment,’ continued Schagel. ‘As far as the client has led me to believe, Mr O’Riordan will not be expecting anything.’

Sometimes the people you target are suspicious of what’s coming and take measures to protect themselves, or check for surveillance, which makes tracking them slightly harder. The good thing from my point of view is that this usually means they’re guilty of something. But if Patrick O’Riordan – whoever he was – wasn’t expecting anything, it was possible he was an innocent man. That, or a foolish one. Either way, it unnerved me a little that right now he was going about his daily business unaware that two people were discussing the mechanics of his murder a thousand miles away.

‘What’s his background?’ I asked.

‘He’s a journalist for the
Manila Post
.’

‘Someone must really dislike his work.’

Schagel smiled. ‘Someone does. Did you know that more journalists are murdered in the Philippines than in any other country in the world?’

‘I didn’t,’ I said, although it didn’t surprise me. In my experience, the Philippines was a lawless, corrupt place where people from all backgrounds tended to use the gun as a first rather than a last resort.

‘Mr O’Riordan lives with his wife in the city. The client only wants him targeted, but if the wife gets in the way …’ Schagel shrugged his
shoulders, and his outsized head seemed to sink into them. ‘Then you will need to get rid of her too.’

My face showed no reaction to his casually callous tone, but by the way he was looking at me I could tell he was watching for one. Testing whether or not I could be relied upon to put a bullet into the woman if she got in the way.

I asked him what the pay was.

‘The remuneration for this particular job is seventy-five thousand US dollars, payable at the end of the task in the usual manner.’

The usual manner was in the form of a deposit paid by a Hong Kong-registered shell company into the numbered Panama-based bank account that Schagel had set up for me three years earlier. I would then move it to an account that I held with the Bangkok Bank (also set up by Schagel), and from there I could send money transfers as and when I needed them to a local Laotian bank. The sizes of the payments made were never enough to bother the authorities, and although it was plenty of hassle, it was a hell of a lot less suspicious than carrying large amounts of cash around between countries.

Schagel puffed lordly on his cigar. ‘In Manila, you’ll be supplied with an unused gun with a suppressor attached. Use that. The client would prefer O’Riordan to be targeted in his own home, and that when you have dealt with him, you set fire to the place.’

I nodded to signify that this was OK, even though it meant that I was almost certainly going to have to kill his wife too – a task that filled me with a hypocritical distaste.

‘The only stipulation with this job is that it has to be done fast. Very fast. I have already booked you on the Cathay Pacific flight tonight at ten p.m. Your flight home is open-ended, but the client wants him dead by two p.m. local time tomorrow. That’s why the pay is higher than usual.’

‘There’s no way I can guarantee that, Mr Schagel. I don’t like hurrying these kinds of jobs. You know that. Too many things can go wrong.’

‘And that’s why the client came to me. Because he wants a professional to do it. Someone who can act swiftly and decisively.’ He waved the stub of his cigar at me. ‘You have proved many times that you are this kind of professional, Dennis. So do this task for me. O’Riordan has to die by two p.m. tomorrow, otherwise the job is off and I am left looking bad.’

I started to say something but he put up a hand, signifying that it wasn’t up for discussion, and I knew better than to try. He motioned towards the envelope in my hand. ‘There’s also a phone in there. In the notes section, you will find Mr O’Riordan’s home and work addresses, and several of the establishments he frequents in the area.’

‘What if he isn’t in the city?’ I asked, rummaging inside and pulling out a new iPhone.

‘I am reliably informed he will be.’

It seemed Schagel’s client knew a lot about the man he wanted killed, but that suited me fine. It made things a lot easier.

‘There’s also a pre-programmed telephone number on there for use in emergencies if you need to get hold of me day or night. Call it, leave a message, and I will be back to you within the hour. When you’ve given me confirmation that the job’s done, delete everything from the phone and get rid of it in a way it can’t be found. Now, have you memorized the target?’

I nodded, putting the phone in my jeans pocket, and handed him back the envelope with the photo inside.

I’ve carried out four hits on behalf of Bertie Schagel in the past three years, and he’s always operated in the same way. Methodically, and with every angle covered. Always in a position to deal with any
unforeseen problems but leaving behind absolutely nothing to link him to the actual crime itself. But at least he was reliable, and in my line of business, that’s something that’s priceless.

I also knew not to ask too many questions. I never did any more. Not since the Russian woman. I still liked to think my targets were all bad guys (and they had all been guys) who’d deserved to meet a sticky end, but I couldn’t put my hand on my heart and swear it with total confidence, especially now that I’d found out O’Riordan was a journalist. But because I’d turned down that one job, I knew that Schagel no longer trusted me entirely. He liked his operatives to be like him, utterly devoid of human compassion. Thankfully I had yet to stoop that low, although occasionally in the dark, solitary moments when I contemplated my place in the world, I wondered if it was only a matter of time before I finally did.

He downed the remainder of his drink, then gave me a look that told me our meeting was over. ‘I can organize a taxi to the airport for you if you wish?’

‘No, it’s OK. But there is something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.’

He looked suspicious. ‘Really? What’s that?’

I hadn’t been looking forward to this part of the conversation, but I also knew that it had been coming for a while. ‘My retirement. I’ve done quite a lot of work for you now, but I’m making a living running my other business, and I want to make a go of it. I’ll do this job for you, but afterwards, I’d like to bring our relationship to a close.’

Schagel looked at me through the cigar smoke with an air of vague amusement, as if I’d told him an inconsequential joke and he was humouring me. ‘You haven’t forgotten, I hope, Dennis, what I did for you?’

I hadn’t. It was why I owed him. If Bertie Schagel hadn’t come to
my rescue, I would have been facing the prospect of the rest of my life behind bars. He hadn’t done it for altruistic reasons, but even so, he’d still done it. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I reckon when I’ve done this job, number five, that I’ll have paid my debt to you.’

‘It cost me a great deal of money and effort to remove you from custody. You are wanted for mass murder by the British authorities, and they have notoriously long memories. Yet I still managed to secure your freedom.’ He paused. ‘There will come a time when your debt to me is repaid. I’ve always told you that. But right now, I need you and the services you provide, and I pay you well for your troubles, do I not? Even though, on occasion, you haven’t, as the Americans would say, played ball.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But if you do this job for me within the timescales you’ve been set, then maybe we talk again. OK? But make sure you do it.’

You had to hand it to Schagel. He was a good salesman and the way he put it almost made me feel guilty that I’d brought the subject up. And the truth was, I had to do what he said, because that was my problem these days: I was in hock to the wrong sort of person.

‘OK,’ I said, and got to my feet, knowing I was about to embark on a journey that would leave another stain on an already blood-splattered conscience.

But if I’d had the remotest clue about the terrible darkness I was about to head into, I would have caught the first plane home and taken my chances, even if it did mean spending the rest of my days in jail.

Their faces were cold and defiant, even though she knew they must have been terrified. They were, after all, little more than kids – the oldest only just turned eighteen, the other two, seventeen apiece – and their guilt had already been confirmed twenty-four hours earlier by the foreman of the jury. According to the rules of the English legal system, there is only one sentence for murder: life imprisonment. It was now simply a matter of the judge announcing the minimum term each of them would serve, and everyone in the crowded courtroom knew that she was not going to be lenient. The circumstances of the crime were too extreme for that. Their victim, Michael Fremi, only sixteen years old, had been a promising student who should have been celebrating receiving nine GCSEs, five of them As or A stars. Sadly, Michael would never know what he’d achieved, because early one Friday evening the previous August, the three defendants, who’d been lying in wait at the end of his street, had ambushed him as he walked home from a friend’s house. Apparently, he’d stood up to one of them, Karl Brayer, the previous week when Brayer had
tried to steal a friend’s mobile phone, forcing him to back down in the process, and this was his gang’s revenge. In a short but extremely violent attack, which witnesses later claimed had lasted barely seconds, they’d stabbed him a total of sixteen times, using three different knives. One of the blows had pierced his heart; another had severed his carotid artery. It was never really in any doubt that they’d meant to kill him.

DI Tina Boyd of Camden’s Murder Investigation Team, or CMIT as it was better known, had been on duty that night and was one of the first to the scene of the killing. One of the things she remembered most was Michael’s distraught mother cradling his dead body in her arms, unable to let him go. He’d had his eyes closed, a peaceful, almost angelic look on his young, unblemished face. And the blood. She couldn’t forget that either. There’d been so much of it that it had still been running into the gutter when she’d arrived.

They’d caught the killers quickly. They always did in cases like this, which always made Tina wonder why on earth these kids did it. Surely they realized that the end result – arrest, custody, conviction – was inevitable? Were their lives really that empty? Sadly, she knew the answer was yes, and as she stood there watching the defendants now, knowing that the guilty verdicts meant another good result for the team, she couldn’t feel much in the way of satisfaction.

Then the judge, a middle-aged woman with a naturally haughty face who looked frankly ridiculous in her wig and robes, began speaking and a stony hush fell over the courtroom.