Her Fugitive Heart Read online

  “You really need to chill out there, mate,” Ken said.

  I stopped to take some deep breaths while Clive went over to open the freezer unit.

  “We were very careful,” he said. “Took off our suits and put on leather aprons and everythin’. So’s not to get blood on the clothes, yeah?”

  “I don’t need to know the details, thank you. And I really don’t need the image of you two wearin’ nothin’ but aprons and swinging chainsaws in my head. I bet the after-dismemberment sex was fantastic, wasn’t it?”

  My phone rang. It was Olivia calling to remind me about the fitting for our outfits for your wedding. Such a stickler for rules, that girl.

  “Benjamin,” she said. “Do not be late. I don’t want any excuses. You are going to wear that tux I picked out for you if it kills you. It will be a rental. You don’t need to pay for it. I’ve put it on my card already. All you have to do is put it on and keep your mouth shut during the wedding. Is that too much to ask of you?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “Did I say I wasn’t going to wear it?”

  “Only for the last two bloody weeks,” she said.

  “Come on, sweetie . . .”

  “Don’t you ‘sweetie’ me, you arsehole. After all that fuss you kicked off, now you’re just going to roll over? Are you planning something, Benjamin? If you are, I swear I’m going to make your life hell.”

  “Nah, babes, it’s just that I’ve come to see how much work you’re puttin’ into everythin’, not to mention this is Ravi and Julia’s wedding, I ain’t gonna make it all about me, yeah?”

  “What’s with this sudden attack of maturity?” she said.

  “Well, I can’t be a dickhead all the time, can I? Like you said, it’s exhaustin’.”

  “Too bloody right,” she said.

  “Love you, babes.”

  Click.

  “Now you’re actin’ so suspiciously Olivia’s bound to think you’re up to somethin’,” Ken said.

  “Leave it out,” I said.

  We had to go through a change of plans now. We were going to have to ditch the body parts somewhere, preferably in the river to be recovered by the authorities later. We could report back to Roger and Cheryl that we’d heard al-Hassah was somehow intercepted by some extremists who were pissed off at him, who chopped him up to try to stop his proposed defection to the infidel West, and we would direct Marcie, who would then have to direct her CIA colleagues, to recover the parts. We would be then paid for fulfilling our brief, even if we didn’t find the fucker alive, which probably meant we wouldn’t get the full twenty mil, and that would be the end of it. I would probably spend the rest of our days rubbing it in at Ken and Clive that if they hadn’t snuffed al-Hassah, we still would’ve had a shot at the original reward for capturing him.

  I noticed that for the last few seconds, the two of them had gone silent, which was never a good sign.

  “Um . . .” Clive said, standing over the freezer unit.

  “Now what?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, he’s bloody gone?”

  “Just that. He’s gone.”

  Ken went over to take a look.

  “I need more. Do you mean some of the parts have been misplaced?”

  “More like all of him.”

  “All of him?”

  “He’s gone! The fucking body’s gone, man! All of ’im!”

  “Okay, let’s just think for a minute,” I said, very calmly. Again. “Are you sure you didn’t just put him someplace else and forgot where?”

  “Fuck, yeah!” Clive said. “Ain’t too many places to misplace a fucking body in here!”

  “You weren’t hopped up on uppers or caffeine and just mis-remembered where you stashed him?” Ken said. “We know what you’re like when you imbibe your pills on the job . . .”

  “No! I wasn’t takin’ any bloody pills!”

  We looked all over the warehouse for any errant body parts, blood trails, anything that might have indicated where the pieces might have strayed to. Clive assured me that he’d put them all in black plastic bags and wrapped them up all nice and snug and put them away in a neat pile in the freezer unit, if that sort of thing could be considered reassuring. Could he have absentmindedly put them in the cupboard by mistake? Could he have put them in another container? The answer was a firm no to all the above.

  “Well now,” I said. “As far as savin’ our arses go, things just got a lot more complicated, didn’t they? This is all my fault. I should have made it a point to tell you not to take the initiative and leave the planning and thinking for this mess to me.”

  “You’re not exactly a brain trust on this kind of shit, mate,” Ken said.

  “You’re good on the hardware, Ben,” Ken said, “but a bit iffy on the big picture stuff.”

  “Well, I’m sorry it wasn’t Mark or Ravi here with you instead of me,” I said.

  “Actually, Ravi would probably just say ‘call the fucking police!’ and be done with it,” Clive said.

  “You didn’t tell anyone about last night or this place, right?” I asked.

  “Course we didn’t. We’re professionals,” Clive said.

  “Could have fooled me,” I said. “You’re the ones who are supposed to be the experts at making sure bodies disappear forever, and here you are fucking this all up! Did the thought of twenty million dollars make your brains flop over and go stupid?”

  “I admit we got a bit carried away,” Ken said.

  “All right,” I said “We have to backtrack. This means someone must’ve followed us last night.”

  “Fuck! Who do ya reckon?” Ken said.

  Ken and Clive had a funny look on their faces. They weren’t looking at me, but over my shoulder. I turned to find four Asian guys running towards us with knives.

  The next few minutes were a bit of a blur, to be honest with you.

  ELEVEN

  Benjamin continued:

  When you have someone rushin’ at you wavin’ a knife, the thing to do is to rush right at them, not try to back away or run. This is because they fully expect you to try to get away from them. They would then adjust their forward momentum to come after you. To suddenly rush at them takes them by surprise, and if they weren’t well trained, you have the edge. Their adrenaline rush will make them clumsy and imprecise, and they will miss you if they try to slash at you, as long as you stay calm, watch their hands, and dodge them.

  This was just what Ken, Clive, and I did.

  Ken and Clive, being big, went right for two of them, while I ran at the third fucker, who was, fortunately, sort of scrawny. There was panic in his eyes as he tried to slow down and slash at me to make me jump back. I let the blade wave past me before I trapped his arm under my armpit as I spun him around and used his own momentum to throw him to the ground. I stomped on his knife arm to make him let go of the weapon, then kicked it away from him. I noticed he was barely out of his teens as I kicked him in the face. That put him down for the time being, while I looked over to see how Ken and Clive were doing.

  Ken and Clive were in their element and having fun. Way too much fun. It was too late for me to save one of the kids, but I was hoping to keep the third one breathing so we could interrogate at least two of them for corroboration. Ken had managed to turn the second one’s knife back on him and stabbed him to death, and as he died, Clive grabbed him and used his body as a shield, swinging his knife arm against the other one, who was freaking out by then. I was coming up to the next one, hoping to grab him from behind and call a halt to the fight, but he saw me coming and panicked, brought his knife around to swing at me to drive me off, and that was when Clive threw the dead one at him like a spear.

  It was one of those moments where what happened was so bonkers that time seemed to slow down so you could fully appreciate how fucking mad the situation was. I saw the dead one hit the kid like a cannonball. He fell forward as his friend slammed into him, pushing his own knife into his che
st before the two of them fell in a heap on the ground.

  Clive and I ran over to him and pulled the dead one off him. His knife was buried in his chest when we turned him over.

  “All right,” said Clive. “What’s the game, eh?”

  “Bastards . . .” he coughed, a spit of blood flecked on his lips. “We’ll get you in the end . . . We are many . . .”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I said. “Do we know you? Have we met?”

  “It’s God’s will that we kill you,” he sputtered.

  “Bollocks,” said Ken.

  “I know who they are,” I said. “They’re pissed-off idiots who got radicalized by reading jihadi sites on the Internet.”

  “Al-Hassah is a great man . . .” the kid choked out.

  “Your great man is a frozen dinner, sunshine,” said Clive. “Who sent you?”

  “Al-Hassah himself.”

  “Bollocks!”

  “He activated us last night. Sent us here to wait for the infidels who would harm him and kill them.”

  “He activated you?” I asked. “He talked to you himself?”

  “His emissary,” said the kid. “We heard the name of our leader. We were given the honor.”

  “Who’s this ‘emissary’?”

  The kid started to twitch and he couldn’t fill his lungs anymore. His eyes went wide as Clive started shaking him to get him focused again, but the fucker just went limp and expired on us.

  “We better wake up the third one,” I said. “At least he’s still alive.”

  But the last bastard was gone. We saw him rev up a beat-up motorcycle right outside and stream off.

  “Shit!” I said.

  “Didn’t you kick him in the head?” said Ken.

  “You know I did.”

  “Well, you didn’t kick ’im hard enough!”

  “If I’d kicked him any harder, he wouldn’t have gotten up ever again, let alone answered any questions!”

  “Well, we better piss off out of here. This place is starting to get ugly with stiffs.”

  “You’re right,” Ken said. “It’s compromised. We can’t use it again.”

  “Right you are,” said Clive, and his eyes lit up all of a sudden. “Better torch it, then.”

  “Won’t your family or the owners object?”

  “Naah. Everyone’ll be happy to be shot of it. Too many ghosts. Besides,” he grinned, “insurance policy’s still in place. Be a nice little earner.”

  So Ken and Clive poured gasoline over the walls and the dead martyrs and lit a match. They set the place to make it look like a gangland revenge killing and torch job. This was obviously not the first time they’d done this sort of thing. I just sat in the work car and waited. That gave me a few moments to think. In less than twenty-four hours, we already had a body count. That was not good. This was a situation we created, and someone out there knew more than we did about what the fuck was going on. That was also not good. There was a body out there that we had to get back, that had been divided into several portable pieces and may have been distributed to more than one location. That was extremely not good. As I watched Ken and Clive cheerfully walk out of the burning garage, I started thinking this was perhaps getting a bit out of hand.

  “I dunno about you,” Ken said as he got in the car. “But I’m feelin’ a bit peckish.”

  “Now?” I said.

  “Must be the little workout we just had,” Clive said. “I could murder a curry.”

  TWELVE

  The more Benjamin told this story, the worst my expectations became:

  So we retired to Ken and Clive’s flat to regroup and so that they could order a Vindaloo from the local takeaway.

  “ ’Ere,” said Clive from his phone. “Whatcha fancy?”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Aw, go on! Get summink! Our treat!”

  “Okay, okay, order me a couple of poppadoms.”

  Ken ordered a Beef Biryani for himself and a Chicken Vindaloo for Clive.

  “Be round in about ten minutes,” Ken said as he hung up.

  I decided to do some real investigative work for a change by reading over the reports Marcie had given us that I had on my laptop.

  “Marcie said they think al-Hassah brought a laptop computer with him, which promised all sorts of goodies like how the terrorist networks are set up and where the most prominent cells are.”

  “So we ought to find it, then,” said Ken.

  “Well, first we gotta figure out who’s on to us,” Clive said. “Let’s hope it’s not the CIA running a double or triple game. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

  “I reckon they’re just hedgin’ their bets hirin’ us and Interzone and whoever else is in town on their books,” said Ken. “Throw as much shit at the wall as possible and see what sticks. Us racin’ against those other pillocks to see who finds al-Hassah first puts us in the lead. We know more than the rest of ’em.”

  “Well, we better be first,” I said. “Or we could end up as Her Majesty’s Guests at Belmarsh Prison for the rest of eternity, and Olivia will forget me and go marry some tech billionaire from Beijing or something.”

  “ ’Ere, wotcha reckon when that kid said al-Hassah ordered them to kill us?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “It could’ve meant anything. I can’t believe they saw him face-to-face. They could’ve gotten a phone call that used the code words to convince them it was him.”

  “Still, that doesn’t answer how they knew about us.”

  It was at that moment that the doorbell rang.

  “Right,” said Clive. “That’ll be our food.”

  He got up to the door and opened it.

  “Christ on a bike!” he cried. “Come ’ere!”

  I leapt to my feet and ran to the door, not sure what I was going to do. I had a horrible notion that Hotspur had finally lost it and started attacking hapless delivery boys, and that I might have to do something drastic to stop him. This latter thought had never been far from my mind whenever we worked with Ken and Clive.

  The delivery guy from the local takeaway turned out to be none other than the sole survivor from the band of baby martyrs who tried to kill us earlier. I wouldn’t have wanted to be him at that point, to see Clive open the door, recognize him, and to see those massive hands lunge towards him like God’s Hammers. I almost felt sorry for him, but then I almost felt sorry for anyone Ken and Clive got their hands on.

  Clive bundled the kid into the flat and kicked the door shut. He had him so tight in his vise-like grip that the kid couldn’t move, his face buried in Clive’s chest so any cries he let out were muffled.

  “Finally,” Ken said. “We have somebody to interrogate!”

  “Right, then,” Clive said cheerfully. “I’ll fill up the bath.”

  While Ken and Clive did disgusting things to the kid in the bathroom, I patiently sat in the living and munched on the poppadoms. I put Ken’s Biryani in his microwave to keep it warm for him and tried to block out the splashing and muffled screams coming from the bathroom as I ran the night’s events through my head again. Once the kid was sufficiently softened up, we started the interrogation.

  We didn’t need to put the fear of God into him, since as a fanatic, he had that already. No, what we had to instill in him was a fear of unbearably painful, gory, ugly death where bits go missing. Fortunately, Clive was a master at that. Given that he was in the bathtub, we told him that he would at least leave a very clean-looking corpse by the time we were through with him.

  He was your average Asian teenager, really. Not necessarily the hippest around, probably as into sports as any, but definitely pissed off with the racism he’d encountered growing up, the feeling of Muslim persecution he thought had gone up after 9/11 and the War, and, with his raging hormones and search for absolute answers, probably easy enough to recruit from the local mosque and manipulate. But I could see that there was still a little spark of doubt in his eyes. This had probably been exacerbated by my kick
to his head this morning, and now the waterboarding session Ken and Clive had just put him through.

  It wasn’t hard to get him to sing. He and his friends had been called early in the morning by their handler, who told them they had instructions from the honored and revered leader Hassan al-Hassah, who had come to town and run into a spot of bother. They were told to come to this garage and kill whoever showed up.

  “Yeah, we tend to take it personally whenever people try to kill us,” Ken said.

  I pointed out to him that Clive was always eager to remove pieces off those people. The kid was babbling by now, and unlikely to be lying. We asked him if he was told where al-Hassah was staying. He mentioned Vanessa van Hooten’s address in Earl’s Court.

  “He’s restin’ there, with his most trusted allies . . .”

  I raced over to my computer and typed in the URL for the webpage we’d set up to view the footage from the webcams we’d installed in Vanessa van Hooten’s flat. I clicked on the option to view the cams live.

  “Aw, fuck me!” said Clive.

  There he was: Hassan al-Hassah in his black suit and tie, kicking back on Vanessa’s couch, sipping a glass of the booze he’d brought over the night before. For somebody who was supposed to be in pieces from a posthumous encounter with a chainsaw the night before, he looked remarkably intact and lively. The worst he could have been suffering from, based on his body language, was jet lag.

  The three of us stared at the screen in disbelief for a whole minute. We managed to watch al-Hassah get up and pour himself another drink from the kitchen counter.

  “You know what we’re gonna have to do, don’t ya?” said Hotspur.

  “Damn straight.”

  “I dunno how the fucker did it, but we’re not gonna be fucking fooled again!”

  “Er, Clive . . .”

  “This time, we do it fucking right!”

  “Wait, chaps . . . let’s get on the same page here . . . you’re not suggesting . . .”

  “We’re gonna have to kill ’im again!”

  THIRTEEN

  “You waterboarded a food delivery guy?!” I said.