The Payback (38 page)

The following morning, she’d picked up the car she’d hired two days earlier and driven it back to the airport, hoping to get a flight back to the UK. However, when she dropped it off at the Hertz office, the fact that it was peppered with bullet holes and she was still battered and bruised had, unsurprisingly, aroused the suspicions of the staff there, even though she’d come up with a story about how she’d been attacked and then shot at in an attempted robbery. She’d still been filling in a damage claims form when four uniformed police officers had entered the building, guns drawn, and arrested her on the spot.

Tina had known things were bad when they took her to the headquarters of the Philippine National Police in Quezon City, on the outskirts of Manila. For the next two days they’d questioned her day and night about her role in aiding and abetting the supposedly-still-at-large fugitive Dennis Milne. Tina was experienced enough to know they didn’t have much on her, so she
denied everything, claiming she was simply on holiday. The main evidence against her, though – the belongings they’d found of hers in the hotel room where she and Milne had stayed on their last night together, and the fact that she’d jumped out of a window rather than wait to answer questions when the police had arrived to arrest him – was pretty damning.

Tina had claimed not to know Milne’s real identity, and said she’d jumped because she didn’t know the men outside the door were police. No one believed her. But the fact was, there was nothing linking her to any of the killings Milne had been suspected of committing, and because Tina stuck rigidly to her story, there was little the police could do, particularly when it became clear to them that Tina was a decorated British police officer with no criminal record, and no known prior contact with Dennis Milne.

Finally, two days later, after several visits from the British consul, during which he too had urged her to cooperate with the authorities, she’d finally seen a welcome face, in the shape of Mike Bolt. He was, he told her, there in an official Soca capacity as part of a new inter-agency anti-drugs partnership, and couldn’t promise to get her out, but would do what he could.

And now it seemed he’d been successful.

When Tina had been signed out of Filipino police custody and she and Bolt were inside his hire car and en route to the airport, he turned to her, a cold expression on his face. ‘So, what really happened, Tina?’

‘Haven’t the Filipino police briefed you?’ she asked, gently rubbing the fresh two-inch scalpel scar on her right cheek, a habit she’d developed over the past few days.

‘They have. And they don’t believe you, and neither do I. You owe me. I want the truth.’

‘Is this off the record?’

‘It depends how far you’ve gone.’

She’d gone a long way, further than she’d ever been before. But Mike was right. She owed him the truth. And, in the end, she trusted him.

So she told her story. All of it. Including how she’d killed Wise. She thought it might make her feel better to get it off her chest, but it didn’t. It made it worse.

When she’d finished, Mike took a deep breath and shook his head. ‘Jesus, Tina.’

‘You wanted the truth. There it is. What are you going to do? Turn me in?’

‘No,’ he said, just as she knew he would. ‘But I’m going to have to speak to the US Embassy about the bomb, and who was involved in the plot. And tell them that Dennis Milne’s probably somewhere among the rubble. Although I won’t involve you.’

‘Was anyone else killed?’ she asked. ‘And how bad’s the radioactive damage?’

‘It’s been contained to a small section of the island, and it’s a lot less than initially feared. They haven’t been able to recover any human remains yet, and I’m not entirely sure there’s going to be anything left to recover.’

She thought of Milne then. She wondered what he’d been thinking when he pressed the button, and how lonely he must have felt. ‘I did what I thought was right, Mike,’ she said wearily.

‘And do you think you can just go back to being a police officer upholding the law after everything that’s happened?’

‘I hope so,’ she said, but she wasn’t sure if she believed it. Or whether she wanted to or not. Her life had changed for ever these past few days and it was difficult to imagine anything ever being normal again.

‘Did you find out anything about Bertie Schagel?’ she asked after a few moments’ silence. She’d mentioned the name to Mike when he’d visited her two days earlier, as the man who’d supplied Wise with the bomb.

Mike shook his head. ‘The name doesn’t appear on any of the databases. Have you got any other information we could use to ID him?’

‘No. All I’ve got is the name.’ She felt deflated. Wise was dead, but Schagel – or whatever his name was – was still out there. It felt as if she still had unfinished business. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Do you have to?’

‘Yes. I think I do.’

‘Go on, then. I suppose in the greater scheme of things, it’s one of your lesser sins.’

Which Tina had to admit, as she lit the first cigarette she’d had in close to a week, was probably true.

‘You also asked me about someone called Emma Pettit who was living in Bangkok. Who’s she in all this?’

‘She was Milne’s girlfriend for a while, and the mother of his child. He had to leave her, and he never got to see his child. It hurt him a great deal. I wanted to . . .’ She let the sentence trail off. ‘I don’t know what I wanted to do, maybe get a message to her or something. Let her know that he still cared about her and the child.’

Mike turned his head from the road ahead, and for the first time there was sympathy in his expression. ‘Emma Pettit never had her baby. She was killed in a car crash two and a half years ago near her parents’ house in Worcestershire. She was eight months pregnant.’

The words hit Tina hard, and for a few seconds she couldn’t speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mike. ‘At least he’ll never know.’

‘No,’ she said quietly, fighting back the tears. ‘I guess not.’

She was reminded of a saying her mother always used: what goes around comes around. Milne had set himself on his path to destruction as soon as he carried out his first killing. There’d never really been any way back for him, and he’d died as he’d lived, and in reality as he’d deserved. That didn’t mean the world was fair of course. Sometimes bad things happened to good people. Like Emma Pettit and her unborn baby. But there was also justice. Those who sin always end up paying. Like Wise. Like Heed. Like Tomboy Darke. And like Dennis Milne.

And Tina had sinned as well. She’d taken the law into her own hands and killed in cold blood.

One day, it would be her turn to pay.

It was, she thought as she looked out the window and into the traffic, just one more thing she’d have to learn to live with.

Thunder rumbled across the dirty grey sky as Erik Theunissen walked down the steps of his house in Bangkok’s upmarket Thong Lo area and across the gravel driveway to where his car was waiting to take him to Suvarnabhumi Airport. From there a Thai Airways flight would take him to another of his homes in Phnom Penh where, he’d been reliably informed, a particularly attractive young girl was waiting. The girl’s handler had told him that she could be treated roughly and wouldn’t make a fuss as long as the money was right. Theunissen was paying three thousand dollars for the privilege, so the money was definitely right, and as a man who gained huge sexual satisfaction from inflicting pain, he was already getting excited about the night ahead.

In fact, everything was going well for Erik Theunissen. He’d just secured a deal to supply a hugely valuable stolen Georges Braque painting to a Chinese businessman for eight million
dollars, five of which was pure profit. He was also close to success on an even more lucrative deal to supply engines for use in unmanned military drones to the Iranian government, which would net him more than twice as much if it went through. Theunissen was a fixer, a man who could source anything if you had the money to pay for it, and he was very good at what he did.

It was, however, an inherently risky business. Six months earlier he’d done a deal to supply a dirty bomb to a group of Islamic terrorists based in the Philippines, and it had gone spectacularly wrong. The bomb had exploded at the home of his business partner before the deal could be made, and both his partner and the customers had been killed. Without them there’d been no money, and Theunissen had been left more than a million and a half dollars out of pocket. He’d also spent a lot of sleepless nights in the weeks following, wondering if any of the heat from what had happened would get back to him. He knew the Americans were particularly keen to find the man who’d sourced the bomb originally, since they’d been the intended targets, but Theunissen was good at covering his tracks.

His driver, a young, dark-skinned man from the north, was out of the car in a second and opening the back door for Theunissen with a respectful bow, taking his bag and putting it in the boot as Theunissen squeezed his considerable bulk into the back.

His bodyguard, Hans, a huge lump of a man, sat unmoving in the front passenger seat. He didn’t even bother to turn round and greet his boss, which was typical of him. Ignorant fool. But for sixty-five thousand dollars a year, which was what Theunissen paid him, he expected to be treated with respect.

‘What time is our flight booked for?’ he demanded.

Hans didn’t answer.

Nor did he move.

‘Hans, I asked you a question,’ snapped Theunissen, exasperated.

Still he didn’t answer. Had the damn fool fallen asleep?

Leaning forward in his seat, Theunissen slapped him on the side of the head. ‘I asked you a damn question.’

But his words died in his throat when Hans’s immense body teetered to one side and Theunissen saw blood running down from the coin-shaped wound to the side of his head.

At that moment, the driver – a man barely a month into his new job – opened the back door and pointed a gun at Theunissen, a weird little smile on his face. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ he intoned. ‘This is for my brothers.’

And then Theunissen realized that he’d made a fatal mistake by underestimating the reach of the fundamentalists he’d sold the dirty bomb to.

He raised his hands in a desperate gesture of mercy, but he was already too late.

The last sound the man who was also known as Bertie Schagel heard was the loud retort of the gun exploding in his ears.

And then with that, he too was gone.