The Payback (7 page)

She wondered then if her house had been bugged. It was fairly secure, with decent locks on the doors and windows, but she hadn’t got round to getting an alarm system installed yet, and knew from experience that it wasn’t that hard to break into somewhere without leaving a trace if you knew what you were doing.
And she had little doubt that anyone hired by Paul Wise would know what he was doing.

Tina cursed herself. She of all people should have known that you could never underestimate someone like Wise. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have the capability to check that her house was protected from electronic eavesdropping. In her bedroom drawer she kept a shop-bought bug finder that could pick up almost all over-the-counter listening devices, but she hadn’t bothered using it for months now. If she was honest with herself, she hadn’t expected Wise or any of his associates to be checking up on her. She and Nick simply hadn’t unearthed anything that would make it seem worthwhile.

There was only one way to find out whether or not her suspicions were justified, but as she started up the stairs to get the bug finder, her mobile rang.

It was DS Weale. He asked her how she was doing.

‘I’ve been better. Any news?’

‘Only that I’ve managed to get hold of those phone records you wanted. I’ve just emailed them through to your personal account.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, suddenly feeling worried that she was being listened to and taking care to choose her words. ‘And there’s nothing on there that stands out?’

‘It’s just the numbers, I’m afraid. No names attached. You’ll have to check them yourself.’

‘Thanks. I appreciate what you’ve done.’

She raced up the stairs, aware that she needed to access her account fast to intercept his mail. If there was someone bugging her place, he may well have planted spyware on her PC capable of picking up every keystroke, which meant he’d have access to all her email.

Which meant that . . .

‘I don’t want anyone to find out I’ve helped you, ma’am,’ continued Weale, sounding a little unsure of himself now. ‘So if you could delete the email and not tell anyone about it . . .’

Reassuring him she wouldn’t, she rang off and strode into her bedroom, switching on the light.

Then froze as she heard movement behind her.

Tina didn’t even have time to turn round, her assailant was that fast. An arm encircled her neck, dragging her backwards into a choking headlock.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a gloved hand come into view at waist height, holding a syringe. She was still wearing her thick winter coat, so her assailant pulled it back to expose the top of her jeans-clad thigh and turned the syringe round in his fingers, ready to jab it into her leg. At the same time he increased the pressure on her neck so that she could barely breathe as she was pulled into his chest.

But Tina had been on the wrong end of violent assault too many times before, and she reacted fast, using her forearm to knock the hand holding the syringe out of the way, buying herself a precious second and a half. She kicked her legs up in the air and reached back with her free hand, grabbing her assailant between the legs and yanking his balls with all the strength she could muster.

He grunted with pain and his grip on her throat slackened,
allowing her to wriggle free. She felt him instinctively stab her with the syringe, but this time the coat got in the way, and although it hurt, she knew it hadn’t broken the skin.

He grabbed at her but she managed to dive across her brand-new double bed, rolling off the other side and landing on her back on the carpet.

Now she saw her attacker properly for the first time. He was a big guy, at least six three, with broad weightlifter’s shoulders and powerful arms. He was dressed in a dark hooded top with the hood pulled up, and a scarf covered the bottom half of his face. Above it, his skin was pale and his eyes narrow and cold.

And then a second man, dressed similarly but a lot smaller, came into the room. Now Tina knew she was in real trouble, because he was holding a nine-millimetre pistol which was raised in her direction. Her assailant began to move round the bed towards her, still holding the syringe.

‘Come quietly, Tina Boyd,’ said the gunman calmly in a foreign accent that she recognized immediately as Russian.

She was trapped. There was pepper spray in her coat pocket but she knew it would do no good against people like this. Not when one of them had a gun.

The man with the syringe was smiling now. She could see the laughter lines forming round his eyes. He was enjoying this – the bastard – and she wondered if he was the one who’d killed Nick Penny.

A potent cocktail of fear and rage surged through her and she sat up suddenly, leaned back, and yanked out one of the drawers from her bedside table. She grabbed something out of it and threw the drawer at the man with the syringe.

He swatted it away easily, the contents spilling over the bed. Underneath the scarf she could hear him chuckling – a deep,
rumbling sound – as he regarded the weapon she’d grabbed: a simple handheld torch.

‘Inject her,’ snapped the gunman. ‘Quickly.’

The man with the syringe loomed above her, a wall of muscle, then leaned down in order to haul her up, speaking a steady flow of Russian to her in excited, breathless tones.

Which was when Tina yanked the lid from the top of the torch, flicked a switch on at its base, and rammed the bulb-end hard against her assailant’s leg, just above the knee. There was a loud, angry crackle as eight hundred thousand volts of electricity surged out of the torch, which also doubled as a stun gun. She’d bought it the previous year in Panama, just to make her feel safer at night, and this was the first time she’d used it in anger.

Tina held the button down to keep the current flowing, but for a couple of seconds her assailant didn’t move, and she thought with a sudden panic that it might not be working. But then he let out an audible yelp and stumbled backwards, falling to the floor and juddering wildly as the shock surged through him.

‘Move and I’ll kill you!’ shouted the gunman, pointing the gun at her head.

But Tina knew that if they intended to kill her so soon after they’d murdered Nick they were going to have to make it look natural, which meant there was no way he was going to pull the trigger. So she grabbed her bedside lamp and chucked it at his head, before jumping over the bed and making straight for him, pressing the button on the torch as she did so.

Unlike his colleague, the gunman knew the damage she could do with it and he reacted decisively, grabbing her wrist and twisting it painfully as they fell together into the wall.

Her wrist felt like it was going to break, and instinctively Tina dropped the torch, but she still had the presence of mind to get
hold of his gun arm so that he wasn’t pointing the weapon at her. Then, recovering as best she could, she drove her head into his face, kicked out at him, and turned and ran out of the door.

He was after her like a flash, and before she could get to the stairs he’d got hold of her again and was pushing her bodily towards the bathroom.

She fought back furiously, lashing out with her legs and trying to kick him in the shins, but he was a lot stronger than she’d expected and the momentum was with him. Together, they crashed through the door opposite and into the unlit bathroom, Tina in front.

That was when she saw that the bath was full, and she realized immediately that they’d run it in order to drown her.

Digging her heels into the newly tiled floor, she tried to turn round, but he had her in a surprisingly tight bear hug, the gun gripped firmly in his right hand, tantalizingly close but impossible to grab. He might have been a lot smaller than his colleague but it was becoming abundantly clear to Tina that this man was the more dangerous of her two assailants.

As if to prove this, he suddenly let her go, and before she had a chance to react he punched her once, very hard and very accurately, in the kidneys, before grabbing her coat by the collar and pushing her into the tub.

The cold water sprang up to meet her and she instinctively held her breath as her head went under. Knowing she only had one chance, she managed to flip herself round in the water so she was on her back and facing upright. Her attacker’s expression was determined as he clambered in on top of her, pushing all his weight into her midriff. A gloved hand covered her face like an immense spider, and she was pushed under again.

She struggled wildly beneath him, making no noise as she
worked to conserve the air inside her and hold down her rising panic. She’d always had a fear of drowning, ever since she’d fallen in the river at the age of four, at an outdoor birthday party. Now those terrifying cold moments came back to haunt her as she felt the pressure begin to grow in her lungs, knowing she only had a matter of seconds before the big attacker with the needle recovered from the electric shock she’d given him and rejoined his colleague. Then she’d be finished.

She managed to slide a hand out from under her and in one movement grabbed the oyster-shaped china soap dish from the top left corner of the bath where she always kept it and slammed it into the side of her assailant’s head.

He cried out and slipped slightly in the water, and though he didn’t release his grip on her, it loosened enough for her to strike him again in the same place, and with a little more momentum, an increasing desperation in her movements as the urge to breathe grew ever stronger.

Grunting, he grabbed at the offending arm, but in doing so he shifted his weight from her midriff and she managed to break free from the water, knocking him to one side as she slid round in the tub, sending waves of water splashing over the side. Behind her, from the hallway, she could hear staggering footsteps as the big man returned to the fray.

‘Bitch!’ hissed the gunman, losing his cool and striking her in the cheek with the barrel of the gun as they struggled together in the water.

She felt a cut open up but adrenalin overrode the pain of the blow and she forced herself upright, still gasping for breath, and jabbed her middle finger into his eye, feeling its softness as she tried to poke it out. He yelled out in pain and she scrambled over him, yanking at the handle on the bathroom window. She couldn’t
remember whether or not the bloody thing was locked, but knew that if it was, then she was finished, because the big man was already at the bathroom door, a low foreign curse rumbling from his lips.

The window flew open and she started to climb out of it.

‘Get the bitch!’ hissed the gunman, grabbing her by the leg. ‘Put the needle in her!’

The big man ran across the bathroom, syringe outstretched, but Tina could sense freedom now and she used her free leg to stamp savagely on the gunman’s face. As he let go and threw up his hands to protect himself, she rolled out the open window, grabbing on to the windowsill as she fell, so that a second later she was hanging by her fingertips.

The big man thrust out a hand to grab her arm, his eyes narrow with rage, but before he could get hold of her Tina let go and fell the final eight feet on to the patio. A pain surged up her legs as she landed feet first before rolling on to her side, exhausted, bleeding from the cut to her face, but otherwise unhurt.

For a long moment the big man stared down at her as if unsure what to do; then Tina made the decision for him by letting loose a blood-curdling scream for help. Getting to her feet, she stumbled towards the fence that separated her from her next-door neighbours, the Carters. They were on holiday, sunning themselves in the Caribbean, but her attackers weren’t to know that because the Carters liked to keep some of the lights on to deter would-be burglars, and there were also plenty of other houses nearby whose occupants would hear her.

She screamed again as she reached the fence and clambered on to it, feeling a delirious sense of freedom. She took a quick glance back, saw that the big man was no longer in the window, and jumped down the other side and into the Carters’ garden, pausing
to catch her breath. Seconds later she heard a car pull away on the road out front.

Still dripping with water and shivering from the cold, she stayed where she was for a full minute, panting steadily as she listened to the sound of the engine fade into the distance.

Only when it disappeared completely did she finally realize she was safe.

Manila is everything that Hong Kong isn’t. Flattened in the Second World War by both Japanese and American forces as they fought over it, it was rebuilt as an immense featureless sprawl of low-rise concrete and breeze-block buildings, interspersed with dirt-poor, overcrowded shanty towns where extended families live in filthy one-room huts with corrugated-iron roofs that look like they’ve been cobbled together with the contents of a rubbish dump, which in many cases they have. It’s one of the most densely populated cities in the world, with some twenty million inhabitants living on top of one another, and a few very wealthy ones sitting behind the high-security gates of their plush, freshly painted condominiums.

It had been a long time since I was last here. Just over six years. And it hadn’t changed much. Still dirty, noisy and with appalling traffic, even given the time of night. A chaotic jumble of cars, rickshaws, motorbikes, tricycles with sidecars, and brightly coloured converted buses called jeepneys clogged up the roads as my taxi from Ninoy Aquino Airport crawled its way into the city.
It was almost one a.m. when we finally turned into a comparatively quiet backstreet in Manila’s Ermita district, not far from the bay. The taxi pulled up outside a small guesthouse, set back behind a wrought-iron fence topped with coils of barbed wire. The room had been booked in advance for two nights in the name of Robert Mercer, which was the identity Bertie Schagel had set me up with three years ago, and the one I always used now.