The Payback (2 page)

Penny swallowed. He felt physically sick. ‘You can’t do this,’ he groaned, his voice shaking.

‘We can, and make no mistake, Mr Penny, we will – unless you do what you are told.’

‘But they’re just bloody kids,’ he said desperately, rubbing his hand across his forehead, wanting to launch himself at the man opposite and tear him apart limb from limb, but knowing, in reality, that he was utterly impotent.

The gunman shrugged. ‘That’s not my concern. And in case you think I’m bluffing, I have to tell you that my associate is both psychotic and sadistic. Luckily for me, he’s also reliable. He has killed on my behalf on three separate occasions, and neither the age nor sex of the victims means anything to him.’

‘Oh God . . .’

‘But if you do what I say, no harm will befall them.’

‘How do I know you’re not lying? How do I know you won’t kill them anyway?’

‘Because my client wants only you to die. And he wants your death to look …’ He paused a moment. ‘Unsuspicious. Can you say that?’

Penny found himself nodding.

‘If you write suicide notes and hang yourself, then it will look unsuspicious, but if we are forced to kill your family, then obviously it won’t, which would cause my client problems. Therefore we would prefer to avoid such an outcome. Of course, your death will be unfortunate for your wife and children – they will no doubt be very upset – but it will be considerably better for them than the alternative.’

‘I know who your client is,’ said Penny, his mind, like his pulse, racing. Like any human being in his situation, he couldn’t accept that he was going to die. Instead, he was hunting for a survival strategy. Any strategy. ‘Look, I know now I’m out of my depth, so I’ll stop everything to do with the investigation right now. I’ll never write another bloody word about it. You have my word on that.’ He slapped a hand on his heart to signify that he meant what he said, hoping above all hope that it was enough.

But it wasn’t. The gunman simply smiled again. ‘I don’t believe you, Mr Penny. Nor does my client. I’m afraid either you write those notes, and do what I say, or I will give my associate the order to butcher your family. Take a good look at his knife and imagine it slicing across the throats of your wife and daughters while they scream for mercy, knowing that no one will hear them, because your nearest neighbours are more than a hundred metres away. That’s the problem with living somewhere isolated, isn’t it?’

Penny shook his head from side to side. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he sobbed as
it finally hit him that his life was almost certainly about to end. ‘Oh God.’

‘You have ten seconds to make up your mind.’

Before he’d become a father, Penny had always scoffed when his friends who were parents had told him that they wouldn’t hesitate to die for their children. He’d always been unable to understand the enormity of such a concept. But now that he had two beautiful daughters of his own, he knew with absolute certainty that they were right. In all honesty, he wouldn’t have died for Natalie. Their marriage had long since degenerated into a meandering, loveless routine. He wouldn’t have died for his lover, either. He was infatuated with her, maybe even loved her; but, in the end, he’d always known it wasn’t going to last for ever. But Ella and Amelie . . . there was no question. And he knew the man seated opposite him was deadly serious, because he knew exactly who the gunman’s client was, and what that monster was capable of.

Penny cursed himself for ever getting involved, for making himself so easy to follow and to trap, for buying an isolated cottage where the massacre of his family could take place without a soul knowing about it. He cursed himself for everything, even though it was far too late to change a thing.

Then he stared into the pale face of the gunman, trying to locate a chink of humanity in the cold, professional demeanour, but finding none.

‘How can you live with yourself?’ he asked with a final, instinctive show of defiance.

The gunman allowed himself a small, knowing smile. ‘Far more easily than you could understand,’ he answered, removing a length of rope from the briefcase as Penny opened his notebook and began writing.

Hong Kong. It’s the king of modern, twenty-first-century cities, an architectural marvel that grabs you the moment you leave the airport and travel along the smooth, almost traffic-free road, over immense bridges stretched like steel skeletons across a blue-grey sea that brims with junks and cargo ships heading in and out of one of the great natural harbours of the world. Seven million people live on this scattering of tiny mountainous islands, parts of which are still swathed in the same sub-tropical greenery that was there a thousand, probably even a million, years ago. Yet they’re also home to a forest of glass and concrete skyscrapers that charge upwards, as if in competition, into the swirling white mist that so often clings to the mountaintops. Whether you like big cities or not, you can’t help but be drawn to it.

Personally, I don’t much like them. I spent almost twenty years in London and that was easily enough urban living for several lifetimes. These days home is the hot, sleepy town of Luang Prabang in the forests of northern Laos, only a few hundred miles from Hong Kong as the crow flies but a million miles away in every
other sense, and infinitely more preferable for a man like me. But even so, I still felt a small sense of awe as I stared out of the window of the taxi taking me to Hong Kong Island and my destination.

I’d only been here once before, about eighteen months ago, and that time it had been to kill a man – a brash, corrupt British ex-pat who thought he was invincible but wasn’t. But that’s another story. The reason for this visit was to see the man who was my occasional employer. His name was Bertie Schagel and he was Dutch.

Now normally I like the Dutch. They’re a genial bunch and they always speak excellent English, which makes communication easy. Bertie Schagel spoke excellent English, but he was not a nice man. In fact, he was one of the most repellent people I’ve ever met – and I’ve been unfortunate enough to meet quite a few of them in my life. But I owed him big-time and he’d spent the last three years calling in the debt. It was Schagel who’d sent me here the last time to kill the ex-pat, because that seemed to be one of his primary businesses, liquidating people on behalf of other people, and in the dog-eat-dog world of modern globalized capitalism, there seemed to be no shortage of work.

In truth, I knew very little about Bertie Schagel. For security reasons, we always met in different locations around South East Asia whenever he had a job for me to do, and I had no idea where he actually resided. I didn’t even have a phone number for him. He did all his communication via email from different hotmail addresses, always keeping details to a minimum. When he wanted me for a job, he wrote a message in the drafts section of an email account that only he and I had access to, giving me instructions about where we were to meet. I would read and delete it, then write another message in the drafts section in response, usually
confirming my attendance. That way, no actual correspondence was ever sent across the net, which meant our conversation couldn’t be monitored by any interested parties. Schagel was extremely careful in the way he did business. To be honest, I couldn’t even have told you if Bertie Schagel was his real name, although I suspected strongly that it wasn’t. All I knew for sure was that he was utterly ruthless, and if I could have stopped working for him, I can promise you that I would have done.

But for the moment at least I was tied to him, so that when he called I came running, just like he knew I would.

I got the taxi driver to drop me off in front of L’Hotel, a gleaming forty-storey structure in the Causeway Bay area of the city. Then, when he’d pulled away, I picked up the bag I’d been told to bring containing enough clothes for three days, and doubled back along the Causeway Bay Road, with its monolithic buildings looming up on either side of me, until I came to the green oasis of Victoria Park.

It was late afternoon and unseasonably warm and humid for February, with the sun managing to poke its head through the clouds as it began its descent over Kowloon. A t’ai chi class for senior citizens was in progress on one of the greens, while couples of all ages sat on the benches lining the pathways, some holding hands as they enjoyed both the warmth and each other’s company.

I kept my head down as I walked. I didn’t want to meet anyone’s eye. These people might have been Chinese locals who would probably never in a million years have recognized me as a fugitive ex-police officer from England, a man wanted on murder charges by Interpol for almost the whole of the previous decade, but I’d learned through bitter experience that there’s no such thing as being too careful. Looking round furtively, I felt a pang of
jealousy. Having been on the run for so long, I was in a state of perpetual loneliness, and it pained me to see the settled, shared lives of other people, because to do so served as a constant reminder of what I hadn’t got.

At the end of the park, I crossed the footbridge over the six-lane Victoria Highway and, remembering my instructions, walked along the modern waterfront of Causeway Bay harbour, amazed at how quiet it was, until I came to a flight of stone steps that led down to the water. A motorized white dinghy containing a muscular western man I didn’t recognize, in T-shirt and sunglasses, bobbed up and down below me. The man gave me a cursory nod as I walked down the steps and clambered aboard, then, without a word, he started the engine and pulled back.

The harbour was lined with a varied cluster of boats, with the most expensive nearest the shoreline, while the local junks were relegated to a far corner, next to the outer harbour wall. It was therefore no surprise that our journey lasted all of fifty yards until we came to the back end of one of the sleekest, most expensive-looking yachts in the place. Bertie Schagel was not the kind of man to scrimp when it came to his own comfort.

A second westerner in T-shirt and sunglasses appeared on deck and took hold of the proffered rope as I came up the back steps. I slipped on the fibreglass and almost tumbled backwards, and he had to grab my arm to steady me. I nodded in thanks, recognizing him from my last meeting with Schagel in a Singapore hotel, slightly embarrassed to have lost the cool demeanour I like to portray in situations like this.

The guy pointed towards the lower deck, and taking a last look at the setting sun, I went through an open door and into the air-conditioned coolness of a dimly lit room where a very large man with a very large head sat in a huge leather tub chair that still
looked tight around his rolling, multi-layered midriff. Bertie Schagel’s thinning grey hair was slicked back, and he was wearing a black suit with a black open-necked shirt beneath it, from which sprouted a thick, wiry wodge of chest hair. He had an outsized glass of something alcoholic in one hand and a Cuban cigar, already half-smoked, in the other, making him look uncannily like Meatloaf in a Gordon Gekko fancy-dress costume.

‘Ah, Dennis, good you could make it,’ he said with a loud smile, not bothering to attempt to extricate himself from the chair, which would have taken far too long. ‘Take a seat. Would you like a drink of something?’

Normally I would have baulked at the prospect, as I never liked to mix business with pleasure, or spend any more time with Schagel than I absolutely had to, but the flight from Bangkok had taken it out of me. I told him I’d have a beer. ‘Singha, if you’ve got it.’

‘We’ve got everything,’ said Schagel, before leaning over his shoulder and calling out to someone to bring it through.

A few seconds later, a dark-skinned Thai girl with dyed-blonde hair came through the door behind him, carrying the beer. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen at most, which made her at least thirty years short of Schagel, and she was wearing tight denim hotpants and an even tighter, garish pink halter-top that clung like a second skin to her boyish body. As she set the bottle and a coaster down on the teak coffee table, Schagel leaned forward and, with an unpleasant leer, slapped her behind with a painful-sounding thwack. The girl flinched with shock but otherwise made no move to acknowledge what had happened, and retreated from the room without meeting my eyes.

It was clear that Schagel was humiliating her for my benefit. He seemed to like doing that. Once, at another of our meetings, I’d
been made to wait while he’d yelled abuse at someone in an adjoining room (I never knew if it was a man or a woman because whoever it was didn’t speak once), ending his tirade with an audible slap before lumbering back into the room and greeting me with one of his sly, knowing smiles. I think it was his way of reminding me that he was the boss, the one in control; that he could do exactly what he liked, and there was not a thing that I, or anyone else, could do about it.

Only once had I ever defied his orders. He’d wanted me to kill a middle-aged Russian housewife based in Kuala Lumpur on behalf of her businessman husband, who it seemed didn’t want to have the hassle of a divorce. The husband must also have been mightily pissed off with her about something because his instructions were that she was to be kidnapped, taken to an isolated location, and then beheaded live on film, a copy of the footage to be delivered to him afterwards.

It never ceases to amaze, or sadden, me how twisted human beings can be. As Schagel had told me about the job, I was thinking about how low I’d fallen to be having such a conversation. He’d offered me a hundred and fifty thousand US dollars to do it – triple what I would normally expect – and it was clear he was getting paid a hell of a lot more than that. But I’d turned him down flat.