Paul Johnston - The Soul Collector

“No. It was the year after I was voted off the committee.”

“Jeez, I’m trying to distract him,” Andy said, in a loud whisper.

Rog mumbled something.

“What?” Andy said.

“It was…it was Dave who passed the ball to me.”

Pete groaned. “Look, Rog, we’re all shocked, but we’ve got to be strong now. We’re targets of that madwoman and we’ve got to get her before she picks us off.”

“Yeah, that’s really gonna help, Boney,” the American said under his breath. He glanced at the dirty gray river. Sometimes he wondered why he’d settled in the U.K., not that the part of New Jersey he’d grown up in was any better. He had run with a street gang when he was a teenager and if he hadn’t had a dedicated football coach at high school, by now he’d either have been a low-level dope dealer or dead. His parents had kicked him out when he was fourteen, and they didn’t want to know what became of him, even when he almost made the NFL. His suspect knee had let him down, though it had been good enough for eleven seasons of amateur rugby league. His folks hadn’t believed human beings could change or that everyone had some innate goodness in them. They worked in a meat-packing plant, until they’d both got cancer and died within a few months of each other. Andy had left the States to find a new life, having finished basic training as a chef and able to work anywhere. The fact that he’d met a stunning English-woman in Central Park had made the move easy, even though she’d ditched him a month later.

Andy scratched the light-colored stubble on his chin. His mom and dad had been wrong about people. The world wasn’t full of assholes. Matt and the others were stand-up guys-even Rog, whose curly hair and slim build made him look like a typical computer nerd, despite having put in some of the most bone-shuddering tackles Andy had ever seen. As for Dave, he’d been a hero and he had the medals to prove it, even if he wasn’t allowed to talk about his old SAS operations. But Sara Robbins-it didn’t matter if she’d killed him herself or paid some other fucker to pull the trigger, she was the exception that proved the rule. Poison ran in her veins like it had when she’d killed with her brother, and her mind was still a hive of hate and perversion.

“All right,” Rog said. “I’ll do what I have to do.” He glared at Andy. “But after we’ve finished, I’m going to mourn Dave any way I like. Is that okay by you, Slash?”

“Sure,” Andy said with a loose grin. “We’ll have a wake. Dave would have gone for that.” His expression hardened. “In the meantime, are you both clear about what you’ve got to do?”

Rog and Pete nodded. They’d practiced the drill. No one told the others what they were up to in case they were caught. Everything each of them discovered about Sara or any other adversary would be uploaded daily to a special site that Rog had set up.

Andy opened his rucksack. He unscrewed the silencers from his and Matt’s pistols, and ejected the magazines.

“Okay, my men. I hope we see each other soon.” He punched Rog lightly on the shoulder, then squeezed Pete’s thigh. “Maybe some of us thought Matt was overdoing it on the planning side, but we all knew that Sara would be back eventually. Let’s get the bitch. For Dave.”

“For Dave,” the others repeated.

“Don’t forget to take the SIM cards from your cell phones and drop them down a storm drain,” Andy added. He got out and went over to his bike.

Rog watched him go. “What do you think Matt’s got him doing?”

Andy started the engine and drove away from the heritage site. “We’re not supposed to think about that, but it’s pretty obvious.”

“Is it?”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter what he’s meant to be doing. He’ll be watching Matt’s back.”

Rog nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Pete nodded. “Fuck!” he said, spittle flecking the inside of the windshield. “I can’t believe it! Dave, of all people. She knows what she’s doing. He’s the one we would depend on most in a situation like this.”

“I suppose Matt will have to pick up the slack.”

“Matt will have enough trouble staying alive, Dodger. It’s up to us to track the murdering cow down.”

Rog nodded. He had hacked into enough sites over the last two years to have an idea of what Sara was doing with the large amounts of money and the investments left her by the White Devil, even if she was always at least a week ahead of him. He’d passed that information regularly to Pete, who had used his contacts in the business world to find out more-at one time, he’d even invested in the same company as Sara. She had bailed out a few months later, presumably by chance, since Boney had used a false identity. The fact was, they weren’t so far from Sara, but they had deliberately held back to avoid spooking her. Now she’d made the first real move, the game had changed.

Rog stared out into the rain and felt a wave of loneliness break over him. He shivered at the prospect of spending every night in a different hotel, all of them chosen for their cash-only policies and laxity about registration details. But he would manage because he’d be spending every waking hour on the laptop with Internet access that he would buy later on from one of the shops in Tottenham Court Road. He had no doubt that Pete would be doing something similar, though he couldn’t believe he’d be roughing it. There were luxury hotels that were just as prepared to guarantee anonymity, if you could pay for it.

Pete stopped the Cherokee near Deptford Station and pushed his seat back as far as it would go. He opened his door and got out, bending over a raised area normally covered by the seat. He pulled up the rubber mat.

“Is that a safe?” Rog asked, pointing to the LCD display.

“Correct. Look away, Dodger.”

Pete punched in numbers and there was a dull click. “Thought you might need some spending money,” he said, handing over a wedge of fifty-pound notes.

“Bloody hell, Boney,” Rog said, counting the notes. “There’s five grand here.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll be expecting you to account for it.”

“Sure.”

“Pillock. Of course I won’t. Just be careful you don’t run short.”

“I’m all right. I’ve got accounts at different banks and there are funds in each one.”

“I don’t need to know that, Rog,” Pete said. “But remember-Sara might be monitoring our finances. She has the funds to obtain that information. So keep bank card use to a minimum.”

Soon afterward, Pete was on his own. At least Rog seemed gradually to be coping better, he thought. The poor sod had grown up in a soft, bourgeois family and had never done anything he didn’t want to. Whereas Pete had dragged himself up from a broken home in a drug-ridden estate in Lancashire. He’d been mocked because he was smart, beaten up because he was gay and spat on when he’d started to make money. His mother had died from bad heroin and he hadn’t been back home since he was eighteen, already halfway to setting up his computer maintenance company. That turned into a full-blown computer manufacturing operation by the time he was twenty-three and it had floated on the Stock Exchange on his twenty-eighth birthday. Selling his shares when he was thirty-five netted him a hundred and twenty million pounds, most of which was now invested in blue-chip companies and funds all over the world. The five grand he’d given Rog meant nothing to him.

But getting even with whoever had killed Dave did. Pete wasn’t convinced that Matt’s ex-squeeze had done the murder herself. The woman could easily have bought herself a hit man with the White Devil’s millions. There were forty-two of those the last time Pete had done an informed estimate, the bitch having obviously obtained good investment advice. Now it was time to see if some of his contacts could screw with Sara Robbins’s wealth. Not that she went by that name anymore. She had numerous identities, only some of which he and Rog knew.