Michael Morley - Spider

'It's no good,' he says, heading out of the room and back down the stairs, 'but thanks anyway, Ma'am. Your cooperation has been appreciated.'

As she shuts the door, Jack thinks how he might have to use Howie's car to block the road if it turns out BRK is in the house, gets spooked and suddenly makes a run for it. While he's working out this endgame scenario, his cell phone rings again.

Nancy's cell number flashes on the display.

Jack's in trouble and he knows it. She's going to go crazy if it turns out that it's her calls he's been ignoring.

'Hello,' he says, frowning as he braces himself for the eruption.

'Hello, Jack,' says a male voice, drawing out the words slowly.

'Who is this?' He checks the caller display again.

Spider lets out a short laugh. 'Oh, I think you know who it is, don't you?'

A bomb of white-hot pain detonates in Jack's head. He struggles to think the unthinkable.

'Your wife's here with me. Would you like to talk to her?' Spider rips the sticky tape from Nancy's mouth, and she gasps loudly for breath. 'Jack!' she says weakly. 'Jack, he's got Zack and…'

Spider puts his hand across her lips. 'I'm sorry, Mr King, but your wife's not at her best at the moment. I've shot her full of drugs, so she finds it a little difficult to talk.' He traps the phone between his ear and shoulder, and replaces the tape around Nancy's mouth. 'You know, Jack, you really should take better care of your young family. Shouldn't you?'

Jack says nothing. His head is pounding and he feels sick. Don't upset him, one wrong word and they're both dead. Stay detached, be professional, not emotional.

'Answer my question!' demands Spider. 'I said: shouldn't you take better care of your family?'

Jack understands the game, and he knows he has no choice but to play along. 'Yes,' he says, feigning humility. 'I should have taken more care of them. My family's very precious to me. I'll do whatever you want, but you have to promise me you're not going to hurt them.'

'No promises,' says Spider, 'but it is good for me to hear that you and I share the same sense of family values.'

Jack squeezes his eyes shut and prays his mind will clear, that he will be able to stay sharp and cope with whatever is about to happen.

'I see you're in the road near my house in Brooklyn,' says Spider, looking at the laptop and its exterior camera views. 'Well done, you're a little earlier than I expected. I had planned to lead you there myself, when the time was right. When the world had witnessed another murder that Jack King was powerless to stop.'

Jack's thrown. He glances across to the nearby house, searching for a camera.

'In the trees, King. The cameras are wired up in the trees and powered by my outdoor security lights.' Spider gazes at Nancy and Zack, then back to the image of Jack on his laptop. 'My plan was that in twenty-four hours' time that nice Arab news channel would be showing some new material; something of a double scoop. First I would have given them the final fatal instalment in the story of the wretched little Russian hooker that you and the fools in the FBI couldn't save. And then, Jack, then I had something even juicier in mind.' Spider laughs darkly and fixes his eyes on Jack's face, before adding, 'I thought the next exclusive footage could be the death of your lovely wife.'

Jack's self-restraint snaps. 'If you so much as harm…'

'Tut, tut, Jacky boy. Don't ruin all your good work, all your professional restraint, by being abusive. You must know that I'm going to kill her, otherwise there would have been no point in bringing you all the way to America, and me coming all the way here to Italy, would there?'

Jack's heart is beating double-quick time, as he realizes now that he has been the victim of BRK's carefully orchestrated plan to lure him away from his family and have him stand impotently by as they are slaughtered. But why?

Spider smiles as he watches Jack painfully putting the pieces together. 'You've been played like a sucker, King. The murder in Italy was merely a ruse to drag you out from your cowardly hiding place, and of course you came, like an obedient, scalded dog. Then poor, sweet Sugar needed to rise from her grave just so I could be certain that your dumb-ass buddies in the FBI would have no doubts that I was back at work. And finally, I added some live bait to bring you skulking back to the city you ran away from. So here we are, a little sooner than I anticipated, but almost exactly as I planned.'

'Why are you doing this?' asks Jack, fighting back another wave of nausea. 'I don't understand why my family is of any interest to you.'

'Aaah, Jack. If only you knew how long I have waited for you to ask that question.' Again the long pause fizzes out, before Spider continues, 'Does the name Richard Jones mean anything to you?'

Jack can't place it. His brain Googles 'Richard Jones'; maybe 'Dick Jones' or 'Dickie Jones'? Nothing comes back. 'I'm sorry. The name means nothing to me.'

'I didn't think it would,' says Spider. 'But it means everything to me. And I mean everything. Thirty years ago, Richard Jones was killed in a car accident. He was run over by a police cruiser turning out on a false 911. Can you imagine that? The cops killed him, chasing a crime that hadn't even happened.'

The name begins to ring a dim and discordant bell in Jack's aching memory.

'Richard Jones,' says Spider, his voice starting to break with emotion, 'was my father. He was killed just weeks after his wife, my mother, died from cancer. That murdering fucking cop left me an orphan, stranded me in this stinking life without any parents and forced me to live in a flea-pit orphanage. Have you worked it all out yet, Mr FBI man? That killer behind the steering wheel, that moron cop who never even had his knuckles rapped for murdering my father, was your old man. Do you understand now?'

Jack slowly starts to make sense of it all. Fragments of his family history flicker through his mind, but he can't form the full picture. Another bomb explodes in his brain. He covers his face with his hands and leans against Howie's car. The pain is unbearable and he is frightened of passing out.

'My father,' sobs Spider, 'was hit so hard by that police cruiser, that by the time his body stopped rolling across the highway, and the traffic had stopped running over him, his head was completely detached from his body. Can you imagine that? Can you?'

Jack is speechless, his mind frozen in shock, his nerves blistering from old pains, his senses overwhelmed and close to shut-down.

Spider wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and looks again at Nancy and Zack. She's now fully unconscious and the boy has pressed his body tight against her. Even though he's still gagged, Spider can see the child is whimpering like a frightened dog. He turns his attention back to the phone. 'I know you're stupid, King, so I'll fill in the rest for you. I saw your old man's retirement feature in the newspaper. At first I thought it was something about you. I'm sure you guessed that I read all your clippings and follow all the nonsense you spout about getting close to catching me, which by the way is horse shit. And then I looked again. And even though you're in the picture along with lots of other cops, I see it's about your father.'

Spider watches Jack on the monitor, pleased that he's visibly distressed. 'What you probably don't know, Jackie boy, is that the NYPD never publicly named the driver of the car that killed my father. So, imagine how I felt to read this piece, in which your old man goes on and on about the wonderful career he'd had, but how he'd trade all his commendations and promotions to have been able to have avoided just one traffic accident thirty years ago in Brooklyn, an accident that had killed a young pedestrian.'