The Payback (32 page)

In truth, Wise was beginning to get a bad feeling, not only about the meeting, but about his current situation in general. The contents of the briefcase terrified him, and the fact that it was here in his home only quickened his constant, nervous pacing. It had even crossed his mind several times in the past twelve hours
to call the meeting off and fly straight back to northern Cyprus.

There was, however, a simple reason why he didn’t.

Money.

At one time, Wise had been an extremely rich man whose net worth had been in the high tens of millions, but thanks to the credit crunch, followed by the controversy engendered by the stories that had come out about him the previous year, he’d been forced to dispose of a large number of his business assets, many at a loss, in an effort to keep a lower profile, and his income had plummeted as a result. The controversy had also cost him his wife. She’d left him within weeks of Nick Penny’s libellous allegations, and was now threatening to drag him through the divorce courts unless he handed over some extortionate sum of money. As a wife, she was no great loss. He’d never been much interested in her, preferring much younger company, but the threats she was making were a huge inconvenience, and a drain on resources that could possibly get far, far worse.

The huge amount of money he’d make tonight would offset much of these earlier losses, and put him back on the path to the serious wealth he’d once enjoyed, and which he had always so desperately craved.

Not a bad return for one meeting.

But there were so many things that could still go wrong. Even if the sale went through, the buyers still had to keep their end of the bargain. And if they didn’t, then he could end up bankrupt and destitute. It was that serious.

It angered him that he’d ended up in this position. It was another thing to blame that bitch, Tina Boyd, for. She truly was a thorn in his side, and now he’d lost the chance to make her suffer. One day, though . . . One day he would have her at his mercy and then she’d die screaming like the annoying little whore she was.

The thought made him shiver with an intensity that was part frustration, part excitement, and he felt himself go hard at the prospect of all the savage things he would do to her if she ever fell into his grasp.

For now, though, her death would have to wait.

He looked at his watch. 3.30 p.m. Four and a half hours until his guests arrived with their money.

The traffic was appalling all the way out of Manila. They were in a Toyota stolen from a back road not far from the Juicy Peach, with Milne behind the wheel.

They rode in silence, both still shocked by the events at the nightclub and the death of the young girl, Layla. They’d had to leave her body where it had fallen, something Tina had found particularly hard. Milne had wanted to set fire to the place to destroy any evidence of their presence there, but Tina had refused point blank. She wanted to make sure the girl was found, so that at least she could be buried properly. They’d compromised by wiping all surfaces clean of fingerprints, which wasn’t exactly foolproof, but would hopefully suffice in a city like Manila, where crime-scene investigations were generally less sophisticated than those back in the UK.

Now, at long last, they were free of the gridlocked city and on their way to Verde Island to confront Paul Wise. Tina could feel the revolver that Heed had used to kill the barman and Layla rubbing against the small of her back where it was wedged into
her shorts. Before they’d left Heed’s hellish basement living quarters, she’d found a box of bullets in an office drawer. It disgusted her to be in possession of a weapon used in two such brutal murders, but she knew she needed it for the task ahead.

There’d been a thousand times in the past six years when she’d fantasized about having Wise at her mercy, putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger, but now that it could soon be a reality her emotions were far more conflicted. She actually felt physically sick.

Over the last hour or so she’d experienced several desperate urges for a drink to steady the nerves. She’d found a quarter-full bottle of whiskey in the Toyota’s glove compartment (which didn’t say much about the owner), and more than once she’d come close to taking a slug, telling herself that just the one wouldn’t hurt, not after all the terrible things she’d witnessed since she’d arrived in this godforsaken country. But she’d stopped herself. Every time. This was not the moment for weakness.

Instead, she lit a cigarette and examined the contents of the laptop on her knee. It was Heed’s. As was the mobile broadband dongle sticking out of one of the USB ports. Unsurprisingly, she hadn’t found any smoking gun on its hard drive. In fact she’d found very little of note, but then she’d suspected that someone like Heed would be careful not to put anything that might incriminate him on a computer.

‘What did you bring that for?’ Milne had asked her. ‘We’re only going to have to get rid of it later. I told you: you’re never going to find the evidence to convict Paul Wise.’

‘I want to know what’s in that briefcase,’ she’d told him.

‘We can ask Wise when we see him.’

‘We may not get the chance, Dennis. To be honest, we have no idea what we’re getting into here. Wise may have security up to the
eyeballs. I don’t think we should rely on being able to question him.’

He’d shrugged. ‘Either way, Heed’s laptop won’t help you. He didn’t know what was in the briefcase either, remember?’

‘I don’t like unanswered questions,’ she’d countered. ‘It’s the copper in me. The solution’s out there somewhere, and right now I’ve got nothing better to do, so I’m going to try to find it.’

After that exchange, they’d slipped into silence again.

Tina clicked on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop screen and waited. The connection provided by the dongle was slow, but eventually she got online, and immediately Googled the name Omar Salic. Even though she’d already Googled it two nights earlier and got no joy, she thought it might be worth trying again, since if he was supposed to have been meeting Patrick O’Riordan, something might also have happened to him.

And it had. After a quick trawl through the usual Facebook and Linkedin hits, she spotted an article from a local newspaper called the
Manila Bulletin
. It was from the previous day’s edition and concerned a double murder in the Tondo area of the city. The bodies of a man identified as Omar Salic and his wife Soraya had been discovered in their apartment. They’d been stabbed to death, and initial autopsy reports suggested that the murders had occurred some time over the weekend. The bodies had exhibited evidence of torture and police were appealing for witnesses. No mention was made of possible motive.

Tina took a last drag on the cigarette and threw it out of the half-open window as she re-read the article. This had to be the Omar Salic O’Riordan had been planning to meet the previous Saturday. The timing was too coincidental for it to be otherwise, and Omar Salic was hardly a common name. Even so, his murder didn’t provide Tina with any further clues.

She continued trawling through the Google lists for any further references to the murders but there was nothing else about them.

She Googled the name Cheeseman for a second time. Once again, though, there was nothing remotely relevant. She added the word Manila to the search, and got no hits at all. Rather than leave it, she went back to the original search, and methodically went through every hit for Cheeseman listed (and they were many and varied), trying to work out how each one could possibly be connected to their case.

‘Getting anywhere?’ asked Milne, interrupting her thoughts.

‘I’ll tell you when I do,’ she replied testily, trying hard to concentrate. Annoyed, but as yet undefeated. She didn’t like to give up on things. She never had. It was one of the reasons she was such a good detective.

‘Think,’ she told herself. ‘Think.’ There must be a way of finding out what she needed to know. There always was.

She stared out of the window in silence, hardly seeing the buildings as they drifted past, becoming fewer and fewer as they headed south, every part of her focusing on the hunt for clues, anything that could possibly help.

And then, from somewhere in her dim and distant past, she remembered something. At primary school there’d been a kid in her class whose last name was Cheeseman. Except, if she recalled it correctly – and after all these years she wasn’t at all sure that she did – he’d actually spelled it Cheesman. She thought about it for a moment. Was it possible that O’Riordan had spelled the name wrongly in his diary?

Tina took a drink from the bottle of water by her side and Googled Cheesman.

Again, a jumble of names came up, nothing standing out. So again she added the word Manila to the search.

And saw it straight away.

A newspaper article, this time from that day’s
Manila Post
, the same paper that had featured the photo of Milne on its front cover. Next to the headline, in bold, was the name Alan Cheesman. Tina read and re-read the article, feeling irritated that the search engine hadn’t suggested the alternative spelling in the first place. Then, typing quickly, she ran a new Google search.

‘Did Tomboy tell you anything else about the briefcase?’ she asked after a few minutes, without looking up.

‘Like what?’

‘Like, was it heavy?’

Milne thought for a moment. ‘Yeah. He said that it was heavy and valuable and illegal.’

Tina leaned back in her seat and ran her fingers through her hair. Then she slowly exhaled.

‘Jesus, Dennis. This whole thing. It was never about the missing girls.’

He frowned. ‘What? What is it about, then?’

She looked at him, her face drawn tight with tension. ‘I think I know what’s in the briefcase. And if I’m right, then we’re in real trouble.’

‘It’s a bomb.’

They’d come to a halt on the highway in more heavy traffic.

Milne turned round in the driver’s seat. ‘How the hell did you work that out?’

‘The Cheesman Pat O’Riordan was going to meet is a senior member of staff at the US Defense Attaché Office here. He’s quoted in the
Manila Post
today. It’s actually on the front page but neither of us noticed it because we were too busy looking at the photo of you. Anyway, he’s saying in the article that there’s been an upsurge of terrorist chatter, suggesting that a major attack on US interests in the Philippines by Islamic fundamentalists linked to al-Qaeda is imminent. Apparently an informant from within one of the fundamentalist groups had come forward in recent days backing up evidence of a plot, and was going to supply more information, but he was murdered at the weekend.’

‘Did they give a name for the informant?’

‘No, but a man called Omar Salic was murdered along with his
wife in Manila this weekend, which is far too much of a coincidence.’

Tina lit another cigarette with shaking hands, adrenalin-fuelled excitement surging through her.

‘God almighty.’ Milne’s features creased with concern. ‘So Cheesman must have known O’Riordan had information on the plot if they were due to meet, which means that, as the man who killed him, I’m also now a terrorist suspect.’

Tina put a hand on his arm. ‘Right now, I don’t think that’s going to make any difference. You can’t be any more wanted than you are already.’

He snorted. ‘No, you’re probably right. What I can’t understand, though, is why Paul Wise, or Bertie Schagel for that matter, would be involved in something like this.’

‘I can,’ said Tina. ‘Money.’

‘But there can’t be that much money in selling terrorists a bomb, if that’s what you’re thinking Wise is up to. And anyway, surely terrorists can make their own bombs?’

‘It depends what kind of bomb it is. If it’s something particularly lethal – chemical, biological, something like that – then it’s highly unlikely they’d be able to. I’ve just done a Google search and from what I can gather there’s plenty of extremely dangerous material in the old Soviet Union that, put into a briefcase, could create something truly nasty. And by the sound of things, it’s not very secure. Someone like a businessman with extremely good contacts could probably get hold of some.’

Milne nodded slowly. ‘Someone like Bertie Schagel.’

‘Exactly. Say he sourced such a bomb, and either he or Wise set up a deal to sell it to terrorists, then suddenly it all makes sense. Pat O’Riordan found out about the plan – maybe Omar Salic contacted him – and O’Riordan probably then contacted the US
Embassy and talked to Cheesman, and they agreed to meet. I imagine Cheesman had only been given the barest of details of the plot, which is why O’Riordan and Salic both had to die before they gave him any more.’

‘It’s still only a theory though, isn’t it?’

‘But you have to admit, it’s one that makes sense. Wise was never worried about being found out for the abductions of those girls. But he was terrified of anyone getting wind of a plot like this. That’s why everyone, including Nick Penny, had to die. So that it could be kept absolutely secret. It would also explain why Wise is in the Philippines now. To oversee the sale of the bomb.’

Tina took a drag on the cigarette, and blew out the smoke angrily.