The Ninth Step - John Milton #8 (John Milton Thrillers) (31 page)

Hicks recoiled. “He only cares about money. Fabian paid well. He said maybe you’ll pay better. He said he’ll help you get your property back in exchange for half of it. It’s not just your property, though. It’s half of everything they took. Milton says it’s millions. He says you’ll come out of this ahead.”

“Anything else?” Higgins asked, not trying to hide his scorn and anger.

“He said you needed to remember him. What he’s capable of doing. He said accept what’s happened, that it was just business. If you’re not interested, then he said you should let it go. If you don’t, he’ll come after you.”

“He’s warning
me
off? Who the fuck does he think he is? Who the fuck?” He turned back to them all, his clenched fists resting on the table. Hicks knew that this was it: this was the moment where the decision as to whether he lived or died was to be taken. Had he played the part well enough? He couldn’t say.

Higgins was shrewd. He cleared his head, and, when he spoke again, there was more control in his voice. “Fine. I’ll speak to him. Have a little chat, see what he has to say. Maybe he can help, maybe he can’t. One way or another, I’m going to burn down Fabian’s house and then, when I’ve got my money back, I’m going to find Milton and take my time finishing him off.”

OLIVIA CAME AROUND as they dragged her out of the Ford. Her head pounded, as if she had been out drinking all day and now she was suffering with a brutal hangover. She had no strength in her legs, and she was too dazed to struggle as the men on either side of her carried her across a parking area and into a house that she thought she recognised. She let her head hang down, trying to suppress the bout of nausea that rose along her gullet, and failing. She threw up, hot vomit that spattered down onto the gravel that she was being carried across.

“Shit!” she heard one of the men protest.

“Not on my shoes!”

“Get her inside.”

She heard the crunch of their footsteps and the scrape of her feet as they dug furrows through the stone chips. She felt sick again and started to heave, but there was nothing left to bring up. She spat, trying to get the taste out of her mouth, and blinked her eyes to try to clear away the wooziness.

She started to remember.

“No,” she moaned, much too weak to do anything to disturb the men who were dragging her toward the house. “No. Let me go.”

They carried her into a porch and then into a hall. The difference in temperature was stark, and it made her feel queasy once more. Another wave of lassitude swept over her, and she lacked the strength to even raise her head. She closed her eyes again.

“What’ve you done to her?” a third voice asked.

“Just knocked her out for the journey. Where do you want her?”

“Put her in the kitchen. Give her a glass of water.”

She was carried through the house, aware of the sound of conversation around her, but unable to distinguish the words from the droning buzz. She felt something bump up against her legs and then something firm and flat onto which her weight was lowered. A hand on her shoulder held her upright. She heard the sound of running water and then tasted it on her lips. She sipped it, using it to wash away the taste of the vomit. It gave her a measure of strength, and she raised her head and opened her eyes.

She was in a big country kitchen. She saw a long wooden table, big enough for a dozen people, freestanding units, a large cast-iron range. There were four men in the room with her: one, to her right, was supporting her in the chair; another was to her left, the man who had badged her before she had been taken to the car; the third, the man who had driven the car, was older; the fourth, holding the glass to her lips, was Frankie Fabian.

“Hello,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“You… kidnapped me.”

“I wanted to have a talk. Some things have happened that have caused me a bit of a problem. I think you can help me to understand them.”

She turned her head to look at the driver of the car. “You… drugged… me.”

“Sorry about that,” the man said, chuckling as he turned away, and Olivia remembered where she had seen him before: it was the detective inspector to whom she had spoken in the aftermath of Eddie Fabian’s death. His name was Bruce.

Olivia felt the fatigue returning, and her head fell forward, her chin resting on her chest. There was a gentle slapping on her cheek.

“Wake up, Olivia,” Fabian said.

She felt water on her face. It was in her eyes, on her cheeks, in her nostrils and her mouth and her eyes. She shook her head and snorted, and blinked to clear her eyes. The sudden coldness shocked her back to awareness again. “Wake up,” Fabian was saying, his voice suddenly purposeful and stern. “I have some questions for you, and you are going to answer them.” He slapped her again, harder this time, and she opened her eyes and looked up into his. His face was close to hers, inches away, close enough to see the hairs in his nostrils and smell the alcohol on his breath. His eyes were blank and pitiless. “Let’s start with John Smith. Who is he, Olivia? Tell me everything.”

The last dregs of the narcotic fugue were blown away, and Olivia started to feel afraid.

MILTON LEARNED ABOUT the death of Leo Isaacs on the news. He was back at the hotel, waiting to hear from Hicks. The phone was charging on the table, and Milton had been casting glances at it in the hope that, maybe, it would make it ring a little quicker. It did not, of course, and, as the hours passed, he had started to worry that Hicks had not been as persuasive as he would have needed to be. If Higgins didn’t believe him, his future prospects would not have been particularly bright. There was nothing that Milton could do to help him now. That would come later. For now, it was all on him.

He had switched on the television because he wanted a distraction. The hotel was budget, with a limited selection, and he had flicked through the end of a football highlights show before settling on the late news. He watched it distractedly, not really paying attention, until the newscaster mentioned Leo Isaacs’s name. Milton sat bolt upright, reached for the remote and turned up the volume. The woman explained that Isaacs, who she said had been a prominent member of the government during the 1980s, had been found dead that evening. She reported that the man’s body had been found in the gardens of the apartment block where he lived, the working hypothesis being that he had fallen over the edge of his balcony and plunged to his death. The police were investigating, but there were no current suggestions of foul play. It was, she said, looking like a tragic accident.

An accident? Milton shook his head. It wasn’t an accident. Higgins was moving quickly to insulate himself.

He was considering how that might change the equation when the telephone rang.

“Hello?” he said.

“John,” a voice replied. It wasn’t Hicks. It was a woman. Her voice was cracked and hoarse. She sounded terrified.

Milton felt a moment of intense worry. He recognised the voice. “Olivia?”

“I’m in the shit, John.”

“Where are you?”

She didn’t answer.

“Where are you?”

Olivia still did not reply.

“Olivia?”

“She’s with me.”

It was Frankie Fabian.

Milton clenched his jaw and tightened his grip on the telephone, but he did not respond.

“Are you there?”

“I’m here,” Milton said.

“You were with Miss Dewey yesterday. We picked her up after you left. I thought it would be helpful to have a discussion.”

“About?”

“Well, you, for one. You are a very interesting man. And then there’s the story she was thinking about writing. I say story—I should say stories, I suppose. The armed robbery and what happened to Eddie when he was a boy. She’s explained what you really wanted in the vault.”

“She has nothing to do with me. If you think you can get to me by threatening her, you’re wasting your time. Do what you like. I don’t care.”

“Really? You’re bluffing.”

“Try me.”

“Please, Mr. Smith, just stop. You
are
bluffing. You didn’t go into the vault for money. I’ve spoken to my boys’ brief. They said you left almost everything there. No diamonds. Some cash, but not as much as you could have had. So what you told me, all that nonsense about extorting Eddie, it was all a pack of lies. You went to get photographs of Eddie from the eighties, didn’t you? I’ve been trying to work out why you would do something like that? Eddie is dead. You don’t owe him anything. And what you did was very, very dangerous.”

Milton knew he shouldn’t rise to the bait, but he couldn’t quench the upswell of anger. “Because Eddie deserves the chance for his stories to be told. Both of them.”

Fabian chuckled. “See, I was right. You have a conscience, Mr. Smith. You have a bleeding heart. You don’t want anything to happen to the girl. Stop pretending.”

Milton clamped his teeth together until the pressure made his jaw ache.

“Mr. Smith?”

“What do you want?”

“A second chance. We got off on the wrong foot. I’d like to start again. Do you think we could do that?”

“What’s the point?”

“Because there’s a way out of this that would make everyone happy. I don’t want the story about Eddie and my boys to be published. Olivia wants to get home to write the story about Eddie being abused. She should be able to do that. I’d like her to do that. I’d even be happy to help. And you, Mr. Smith, I think that should be enough for you, too. I won’t lie—I’m angry about what you did. But the damage can be repaired. My boys are coming out tomorrow.”

“What?”

“They’re being bailed. One of the benefits of having a bit of cash behind you is that you can hire the absolute best. They’re bang to rights, of course, no getting around the fact they were found in the vault, but there are ways we can manage the fallout. I’m telling you that because I don’t want you to think I’m going to hold what happens to them over your head. I’m bigger than that.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Let’s talk. Work it all out.”

“Where?”

“Come to the house.”

Milton laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Funnily enough, I don’t.”

“Fine. Somewhere public. Lots of people. There’s a restaurant in Covent Garden. Rules. Do you know it?”

“I’ll find it.”

“Be there tomorrow night. I’ll have a table booked for seven.”

A COLD WIND blew in off the Thames and its frequent gusts flung stinging drops of rain against the faces of the few commuters who hurried across the bridge on their way to work.

Milton was in the middle of the span, as he had said that he would be when General Higgins had called him on the number that Milton had given to Hicks. He had chosen this location for several reasons. First, and most important, was that it would be very difficult for him to be approached without being aware of it. There were only two ways to approach him—from the left and the right—and the bridge was three hundred and seventy metres wide. From his placement in the middle, anyone approaching would have to cover one hundred and eighty-five metres without being seen, and Milton trusted his instincts well enough to know that he would be able to detect a threat with enough time to formulate a response. Second, there was an easy escape, should he need it. He would vault the railing and trust that he was strong enough to withstand the treacherous currents in the river ten metres below.

He looked out over the rails toward the National Theatre and, beyond that, the dome of St Paul’s and the skyscrapers of the city beyond. Most of the men and women whom Milton had known who had shared his line of work had at least a passing interest in the golden age of espionage between the end of the war and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most knew, for example, that Georgi Markov had defected from Bulgaria and found a job in London with the BBC. The KGB, displeased with the trenchant views that Markov was now broadcasting, had determined to put an end to them—and him—in 1978. Milton could have pointed to the bus stop, the site of which was unchanged to the day, where Markov had been assassinated by a KGB agent. The man had been killed by a ricin pellet that had been injected into his thigh by a rigged umbrella. Milton knew the case well because Group Fifteen had kept a file on the assassination and had liquidated the main suspect in Copenhagen several years after the original hit. The files were easy to recall, and the possibility that he might face a similar fate to Markov and in a similar spot was not lost on him.

He saw Higgins approaching from the south side of the river. There were twenty-one people between Milton and the general, but he recognised him quickly from the description that Hicks had given him. He was walking purposefully, a black umbrella held aloft to provide some defence against the elements.

Milton waited against the rail as the other twenty people filed past. As he drew closer, Milton noticed more and more about the old soldier: the lines in his face, the way the rain had flattened his hair against his head, a robustness that belied his age.

Milton stepped out to meet him.

“Milton,” Higgins said.

“General, shall we take a walk?”

They set off together, one next to the other. The commuters behind them and the men and women who drove by in taxis and on busses might have seen the two men and mistaken them for work colleagues chatting amiably as they walked to their office.

“Did we ever meet, soldier?”

“Not really, sir.”

“But I do know you. Your reputation, I mean. What are you doing getting involved in something like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Assassinations I can understand, especially with your experience. But theft? It doesn’t match what I know of you.”

“It doesn’t sound as if you know me at all.”

“Well, let me see. I might have been out of the game for a while, but I still have a few connections. I was able to pull your Regiment file overnight, just to fill in some blanks. I remember you went to the Firm after the Regiment. You were a headhunter?”