Paul Johnston - The Soul Collector

The fact that she didn’t hear or see them coming didn’t surprise her. She knew they would come well-equipped, and not just with weapons. They didn’t have night-vision gear, but they made it to the center of the clearing by crawling from three different points. When it was exactly six o’clock, one of the men stood up.

The Soul Collector had rigged up a speaker on the opposite side of the clearing. She spoke into the microphone on her cheek.

“Stand up, all three of you,” she ordered. “If you want to see your loved ones alive.”

The other two men slowly rose from the grass.

Now she needed all the marksmanship skills she had learned. She had to take the three of them out in rapid succession. She could see their shapes clearly enough, she had practiced the shots hundreds of time. She aimed at the back of the man on the left’s thigh-she was sure they would be wearing upper-body armor.

She fired once; twice; and thrice. The men grabbed their legs, their gasps audible, then they crashed to the ground. The specially made compound in the darts was both fast-acting tranquilizer and muscle relaxant. The beauty of it-a very expensive beauty-was that the victims would remain conscious and able to feel pain, but unable to speak or move.

The woman collected her auxiliary weapons and walked slowly to the three men. She removed the men’s Uzi machine-pistols, semiautomatics and knives. Then she turned them all on their backs and looked into their glazed eyes.

“It’s time for you to pay for what you did to my brother,” she said. Bending forward, she spat in each of their faces. “Yes, I know I said you’d get a chance to defend yourselves and to save your people.” She laughed. “I lied. They’ll take days to die.” She squatted next to one of them and stripped off his balaclava. “Wolfe. Also known as Sergeant Norman Lashton. You were the man in charge. I’m going to execute your men in the same way you killed my brother.”

The Soul Collector stood up quickly and fired three shots into the heads of Rommel and Geronimo from point-blank range. Then she lowered her face over Wolfe’s.

“But you aren’t getting anything as quick and easy, you murdering scum. I’m going to cut everything I can off you and leave you to bleed out. You’ll still be alive when the crows are eating you for breakfast.”

It took her half an hour to finish with him. Then she went back to the hide, stripped off the mask, coverall and shoe protectors she’d put on before starting the knife work, and packed up. She was still smiling when she got back to the hedge where she’d stashed her motorbike.

Roger van Zandt finished the pot of coffee he’d made and went back to his laptop. Matt had sent a text a few minutes earlier, asking him to hack into the Web site of the Harley Street clinic where the dead man in Oxford had worked. The idea was to access patient records. That could have been a motive for murder.

Rog hammered away at the keys and was soon working on the site’s firewall. He had spent the night transferring as much as he could from Sara’s various accounts. He’d come up against two banks that had security systems he’d need more time to crack, but they were in the Virgin Islands and Manila, and he didn’t think Sara would be able to withdraw cash from them in the U.K. Unless she was traveling with a suitcase full of cash-which couldn’t be ruled out-she was about to become as poor as a church rat.

There was a triple knock on the door. He got up, heart accelerating despite the prearranged signal, taking the silenced pistol from the desk.

“Are you decent, ducky?” came a familiar voice.

Rog exhaled in relief and opened the door to Pete.

“Jesus, Boney, what do you smell like?” He closed the door and undid the chain, then opened it again.

“Sorry, I got too up close and personal with the deceased.” Pete Satterthwaite headed for the bathroom.

“Where’s Slash?”

“He’s meeting Matt. They’re off to check on Sara’s mother. What have you been up to?”

“Draining the deadly Sara’s deposits. I’m going to hack into the database of the Harley Street clinic where your Oxford corpse worked. You can help me go through the files when I’m in.”

“ If you get in,” Pete corrected.

Rog gave him a long-suffering look. “Have you ever known me to fail?”

“I remember you missing a couple of tackles against the Essex Elephants once.”

Pete had stripped to his boxers, his discarded clothes in a garbage bag at his feet. “What do you reckon, Rog? Has Matt got the nerve to pull this off? Without Dave and Karen to help, he’s got a lot on his shoulders.”

Rog stopped typing. “Yeah.” He looked around again. “He’d better. Otherwise we’re up to our necks in dung.”

“Delicately put, Dodger. I’ve never been keen on co-prophagy.”

“What?”

“The eating of ordure,” explained Pete. “Shit-gobbling. Crap-chewing. Excret-”

“I get the picture!” Rog yelled. “Now go and clean yourself up.”

Pete looked at himself in the mirror, a smile on his lips. Then he thought of the ruthless Sara Robbins and got serious at speed.

I’d texted Andy after I left Karen’s place. We were both in baseball caps, with me wearing a false mustache, as well.

“Where are we going, boss?” Andy asked in a low voice.

I looked at him, but he wasn’t being ironic. When I told him our destination, he nodded. It seemed that he had no problem with me running the operation. I was the one who had doubts, but there was no time for them now. I got us each a ticket to Sydenham Hill from a machine. The early train wasn’t full.

“Where did you and Pete go after you got back from Oxford?” I asked as we pulled out.

“Needed a drink. Problem was, we stank. Eventually we found a twenty-four-hour pub next to the meat market at Smithfield. Everyone stinks there.”

I took a sniff. “But you don’t anymore.”

“Good nose, Sherlock. I went back to my place to clean up and change.”

“You what?” I said, raising glances from other travelers. I lowered my voice. “Are you out of your mind? Sara or Karen might have the place under surveillance.”

“Well, they didn’t. Anyway, I took precautions on the way up here. Trust me, nobody was on my tail.”

So much for me being in charge of things.

“Let me see that note you found on the body in Oxford,” I said, my mouth close to his ear.

He opened his bag and handed me an old newspaper. Inside was a plastic bag. I examined the writing, making sure no one else could see what I was looking at. Sorry was the only clearly legible word. The script looked like it could have been Sara’s. But why would she have left a note, never mind a body, in the house she herself had bought? Was she so confident that no one could touch her?

“We’re going to see Mrs. Carlton-Jones, I guess,” Andy said.

“Correct, Watson.”

“Ha. How do you want to handle it?” He was asking me to play general, after all. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that anymore. The idea that my decisions could lead to my friends being injured, or worse, was getting hard to handle.

He nudged me gently in the ribs. “I trust you, Wellsy. Dave once told me that he was certain you’d nail Sara, even if something happened to him.”

I felt my eyes dampen. Dave had said something similar to me, but I’d laughed it off. I never imagined anything would happen to him. He was our strong man, he’d been through SAS service in Northern Ireland and the first Gulf War, he’d won medals. He was our own local hero and now he was gone. I blinked and looked out into the drizzle that was blurring the shapes of the houses and car breakers’ yards.