Джеймс Паттерсон: Revenge

“There has been trouble, Dmitry, at one of our studios,” explained Sergei, and he told Dmitry about the girl.

When he had finished, Dmitry processed the news without comment or even apparent emotion, turning lazily in his chair, his eyes flicking over the screens. On one a young girl was removing her bra. Another showed men gambling in a dimly lit room. Another displayed a list of what Sergei took to be prices, but of what he couldn’t say, while yet another rested at a Google search screen. Who knew where Dmitry’s interests might take him? As head of the organization’s London operation, Dmitry had excelled in numerous areas of business: drugs, pornography, prostitution, gambling, protection, and trafficking among them. Having the family connection to the Skinsman had certainly done him no harm, but Dmitry had also earned a reputation as a thoughtful tactician in his own right. Ruthless, maybe, but never willfully cruel. Again, not like his grandfather.

“Is Karen aware?” he said.

“She didn’t mention it when I arrived.”

“Is that so? I thought it was her job to look after the girls.”

Sergei gave him a look that he hoped would convey at least two things. One, that Karen was not exactly conscientious when it came to those duties. Two, that Sergei did not consider it his place to say so.

Dmitry understood. “Stupid bitch,” he said. “But you, Sergei. You have done well.”

“Thank you, Dmitry,” said Sergei. He recalled the clean-up operation with a barely restrained shudder: calming down Jason, trying not to spook the other girls, keeping a lid on the whole thing during a process that had gone on into the early hours of the morning until, finally, they had deposited the body in a hostel in Clapham then left via the fire exit, stepping over an unconscious junkie on their way out.

Oh yes, it had been a very, very long night indeed.

“Which one was she, the girl?” asked Dmitry.

Sergei gave a small half-shrug. “Her name was Faye. She was only with us for a couple of weeks.”

“How did she come to us?”

“From our street people.”

“Good-looking?”

Sergei kissed his fingers, Italian chef style.

“Such a shame. I’ll have to refresh my memory.” Dmitry indicated his screens. “But a junkie, though, yes?”

Sergei nodded. “She owed us money. Our boys referred her to me and I put her to work.”

“I see.”

“Will you tell Grozny, Dmitry?”

Dmitry thought a moment then asked, “It is all taken care of, yes? No comebacks?”

“I believe so.”

He considered. “Then there is no need to upset Alexander,” he said.

Moments later Sergei was excused, and on his way out he bid farewell to Karen and then to Grandfather, who returned his goodbye with a curt nod and a strange and malevolent smile.

Briefly, Sergei wondered if there was anything more to that smile than an old man losing what few marbles he still had left. But then he decided he was way too tired to care.

CHAPTER 2

HE DIDN’T KNOW why, but that morning Shelley had been thinking about the guard in Iraq—specifically what Lucy had done to him.

This particular guard had been posted in what they called an “interrogation suite.” It wasn’t a particularly accurate name for it, not unless you substituted the word “chamber” for “suite,” and “torture” for “interrogation.” And from the intel they’d been given they had known he wasn’t just an ordinary screw doing his duty—he enjoyed the work.

Lucy had slit his throat. It was either that or let him raise the alarm.

It was the sound that Shelley remembered most—blood sheeting from the new mouth in the sentry’s neck as Shelley stepped from the shadows to help Lucy ease him to the flagstones, holding his mouth closed and his legs still until it was over.

It was nothing personal. An operational kill. Even so, nobody deserved it more than that guy. Never was there a bloke who had it coming more than him.

That was what had been rattling around Shelley’s brain that morning; one minute you’re thinking, We need a new light bulb for the kitchen , the next you’re remembering the sound that blood makes when it gushes from a slit throat.

Shelley and Lucy had left the military. He’d been forty-five, chucking-out time for 22 SAS. She’d been just forty. The idea was to apply what they’d learned in the field to the world of commercial security and make pots of cash.

But there was a wrinkle: they wanted a quieter life, which in turn meant avoiding “the Circuit,” the international commercial security pool where ex-soldiers like Shelley and Lucy usually wound up plying their trade. While the activities of any private security company—a PSC—on the Circuit could involve asset tracing, employee screening, security audits, and risk analysis, overwhelmingly the most common service was close protection in hostile environments, which Shelley had had more than enough of during his time in the military.

Shelley had given the SAS a quarter-century of service. But for the last twenty of those years, he’d been teamed with another SAS officer, Cookie, and Lucy—who was in the Special Reconnaissance Regiment—to form a three-blade Special Projects patrol. Operating under the banner of the 22 but otherwise unaffiliated, they were a patrol without portfolio, specialists in deep-cover, covert operations usually carried out under a cloak of plausible deniability: hostage rescue, target acquisition, disruptive incursion, assassination. They were so clandestine that even within the 22 and the SRR, two of the most secretive military organizations in the world, they were thought to be a myth.

The silver lining of all that secrecy? It had made keeping the secret of his relationship with Lucy and their subsequent marriage a lot less difficult.

The bad news? They’d spent twenty years in hostile environments. Two decades of eating ration packs and using baby wipes to wash; twenty years of considering a night in a military cot to be the height of luxury.

Yes, there was the buzz. They’d spent many hours talking about that elusive 5 percent of the time when they weren’t freezing cold, boiling hot, or bored out of their minds, when the adrenaline kicking in made the job worthwhile. But that was eventually outweighed by a desire not to get killed, not to see another kid with his foot blown off by an IED, another rape victim left for dead, her genitals deliberately mutilated.

Of the two, Shelley was keener to turn his back on that world. He never wanted to step in another Chinook as long as he lived. Lucy was ambivalent. “It’s what we do,” she was fond of saying. But Shelley had persuaded her to try it his way first. See if they could go it alone and set up a PSC with no Circuit connections. Maybe it could be the route to a quiet, comfortable life.

Sure enough, a quiet life was exactly what he had. On their books so far was precisely one job, which fell under the category of “information security.” Shelley had to ferry a TV script from a producer to an actor, wait while it was read, and then ferry it back. Literally, that’s all he had to do.

Otherwise? Nada . The problem he had was getting the word out. After all, you couldn’t exactly advertise yourself, not in the accepted sense, because the kind of clients you wanted to attract (i.e., the rich ones) required a discreet, anonymous service. They weren’t going to google “kickass bodyguard” and hope for the best.

Shelley tidied away the dishes from breakfast, lit a scented candle, and sat himself opposite his wife, who wanted to have what she called “a brainstorming session” in order to come up with ideas for generating work.

“A what?” he said.

“You heard.”