A Deadly Trade: A gripping espionage thriller

A Deadly Trade

E. V. SEYMOUR

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright

Killer Reads

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Cutting Edge Press 2013

This ebook edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Eve Seymour 2017

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Eve Seymour asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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ISBN: 9780008271527

Ebook Edition © November 2017

Version 2017-09-21

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by E. V. Seymour

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Female blowflies can scent the moment of death. I don’t understand how this works. But like the blowfly, I had a premonition that the woman I’d come to kill was already dead. I sensed it from the moment I slipped into the darkened room.

Yet I couldn’t be certain.

Senses alive, I crossed the floor without sound. Silence is important in this wicked game. And preparation. I’d memorised the precise location of the wardrobe and dressing table and the rocking chair that crouched in the corner. I’d charted the distance from the doorway to the bed: four point eight seven metres. A man my height and build with a smooth gait and a size eight shoe should cover it in less than six seconds. Basic law of motion. I had no fear of interruption. On entry I’d double-locked the front door.

The room was November cold. I could smell booze, brandy at a guess, the fainter scent of expensive perfume almost entirely smothered. When watching her I’d noticed the target appreciated expensive clothes, good quality shoes. She was particularly fond of a charcoal-coloured leather jacket. Personally I never wear leather for a job. It makes too much noise. I’m a clean, crisply ironed open neck dress-shirt with jeans and loafers kind of guy. When flush I buy my suits from Cad and the Dandy, Canary Wharf.

She lay on her back, one limp arm hanging down. Light from a fading four o’clock moon illuminated her face, neck and the fleshy slope of her shoulders. I leaned over – my eyes are pretty quick at adjusting to night vision – and stretched out a hand towards her, the same hand that would have smothered and suffocated and extinguished life. The cool skin felt inert against the latex of the surgical glove. No breath. No movement. No pulse.

Did I feel cheated? No. Was I angry? No way. I was confused and bunched up with alarm. I had been sent to kill her. Chances were so had someone else. And maybe they’d come for the same reason. Not easily fazed, something coiled slowly in the pit of my stomach.

I crouched down beside her. In death she neither looked serene nor at peace. Her mouth was ajar as if she were mid-snore. Marionette lines ran from each corner to her chin like two deep incisions. The blonde hair splayed across the pillow, dark at the roots, indicated a woman who once cared about her appearance but had lost interest. To establish the rigidity of her flesh, I touched her mouth and jaw. There was some stiffness but not much. There were no visible signs of violence that I could see. No vomit or bruises. No broken nails. No lacerations. I suppressed an involuntary shudder, an earlier memory threatening to erupt. This was now, I reminded myself, not then, not with the blood on the wall and…

Part of me wondered if by strange coincidence she’d died from natural causes. Unusual, not impossible, but as a general rule people in middle age don’t succumb with the same unexpected haste as those in the first flush of fickle youth. There was, of course, another possibility.

I took out a pocket torch, slid open the drawer of the bedside table and found a pack of Temazepam. Commonly used to treat those with a history of severe depression, the pills are seldom prescribed for insomnia although many insomniacs take them. Habit-forming and potentially dangerous when mixed in large enough quantities with alcohol and other medications they can kill you. Had she taken her own life? I checked out the blister pack and saw that only three were missing. Not suicide then.

A glance at my watch told me that ninety-five seconds had passed, eighty-five to go. Ideally, I like to be in and out within three minutes.

Moving noiselessly across the floor, I glided out onto the thickly carpeted landing and headed for the study. Ranks of laptops and a high-security computer, massive and squat, glowered accusingly as I sped past. The intelligence stated that the safe, concealed by a rug, was set into the floor at the back of the room. As I approached the combination numbers clattered through my brain like windows in a fruit machine. It would take twenty seconds to open, leaving a little over a minute to steal the portable hard drive and escape. With fingers pumping like a honky-tonk pianist, the door opened and I reached in and connected with empty space. I peered inside, shone the torch around.

Nothing.

Then it hit me; this was no ordinary killing. Anyone can commit murder, but to fake death, to make it look like natural causes, requires skill and subtlety. Whoever had carried it out was a professional assassin, a class act, someone like me.

Footsteps.

Retreating into the shadows behind the now open door, I slowed my breathing, listened hard. This was not part of the plan. But the plan was already fucked. Anything could happen. In readiness I took out the length of cord carried in my jacket pocket for emergencies.

Then I heard the sound of singing, low and haunting, like a chant.

It was so unexpected, so out of key with the situation, my mouth dried as though I’d swallowed coffee grinds. Stranger still, the quiet desperation of the lyrics coupled with the singsong melody awoke sleeping and painful memories of my mother. At that moment it felt as if her ghost were right beside me. But this was not my mother’s voice, not even a woman’s.

The singing stopped. So did the footsteps. I held my breath. I could almost hear the brain of the person less than a metre away making the calculations: door open, rug askew, safe open, trouble.

The light went on. On reflex, my hands flew up, each end of the cord coiled around fists prepared to viper-strike. Raw adrenalin spurted through my veins as the figure shambled into the room. It gave me a couple of seconds to observe the back of my quarry: male, around five nine, a couple of inches shorter than me, wearing a denim jacket, skinny jeans hanging low and exposing the top of the boxers beneath, trainers. I lunged. He turned. Christ.

Pale blue eyes stared out of a long-jawed and heavy-lidded face that had only recently made the transition to manhood. His hair was a mess of bleached blonde over brown. In that split-second I recognised that he was his mother’s son.

He gaped, managed to eject one word. ‘What?’

Instinct told me to kill him. No pointing fingers. No witness. No loose ends. I took a single, silent step forward.

His eyes were wide now, pained, the knuckles on his clenched hands white and shiny. He was probably working out that his mother was either dead or in mortal danger. Suddenly all the dusty years between the boy I was and the man I am now faded away. It was as if the lad had grabbed hold of my sleeve and, against my will, yanked me back to a darker and unholy time. Memories of old grief, misery, rage and helplessness, the seeds for transforming me from an ordinary teenager into a professional killer, swamped me.

‘Who sent you?’ He hissed.

I blinked, confused, the question odd in the context.

‘Are you going to kill me?’ Sweat beaded his top lip. His wild eyes flicked from me to the open door and back again.

My answer should have been yes.

CHAPTER TWO

I fled. Feet punching the stairs, the floor felt on fire, the air around me sucked dry of oxygen. I exited out of the back door the same way that I’d broken in, and tore alongside the fence at the rear, scaling a wall, landing on the other side, feet square. Not too many people about at that time of the morning. Even if there were I’m not sure I’d have paid them attention. The boy had knocked me way off course.

I was more than baffled by my own incompetence. How could I have missed something so fundamental? I did not make mistakes. I was unaccustomed to failure. I did the homework. As the Americans say, I did the math. Except, on this damn job, I hadn’t. Too little time and paid too much money. Greed had made me lazy.

Chill air brought me briefly back to my senses. I needed to get off the streets. I needed cash. Any attempt to access one of my numerous accounts too risky because it would tie me to a location.

I considered my options, which right that moment seemed limited. Truth was, I’d never found myself in this situation before.

It was still dark. Somewhere a dog howled. Shoulders back, I pushed my hands deep into my pockets, affecting a confident stride. No more than five minutes to the underground station, it would allow the wildness to pass and give me time to think. Inexorably, my thoughts returned to the dead woman.

The target, Dr Mary Wilding, a scientist based at Imperial College, London, had crossed up a crime lord. Not so bizarre as it sounds. Fake pharmaceuticals are hot big business, product piracy a prospering market. Without scientists there would be no drugs trade. Rumour had it that Wilding had been paid an exceptional amount of loot and reneged on a deal. My employer clearly wanted what he’d paid for. As for the hard drive, I had no idea what was on it. Not my business. But it was my business to know that Wilding had a son who lived in the house with her. I’d truly screwed up on that score and, if word got out, not only would I be finished, I’d be a dead man. The realisation that I’d committed professional suicide punched me hard in the gut. Whatever could be said about my existence, it beat to its own sick and twisted rhythm. I was used to living out of a suitcase, on the run, stakes high, as if each day were my last. What I’d do if I didn’t do this I had no idea.

What now?

I strode into the underground at Ealing Broadway. It was two minutes past five in the morning. Conscious of close circuit television cameras, I pulled down my cap to conceal my face, and calmed myself that for CCTV to be effective the cameras need to be positioned at the right angle, most CCTV is recorded over every four days so there is a one in four chance the film will be wiped before it is taken out and studied and, even if an image is captured, it still needs to be identified. A lot of film is grainy, of poor quality and indecipherable. Staring at reels of film hour upon hour will send even the most conscientious viewer into snooze-time. I wasn’t really consoled. I’m usually the hunter not the hunted.

Boarding a district line train, I hunkered down in the compartment and glanced around me. My only companions at that hour were solitary, desolate figures wrapped up against the cold and dark, heads down, the kind of people who were scraping by and clinging on by their fingernails, who bust their balls for nothing and knew it was all for nothing.

Like a disorientated homing pigeon, I stumbled out after a couple of stops. Under normal circumstances I’d be covering my tracks and making the all-important call to Wes. I did neither. The boy had seen to that. That I’d let him live when I could so easily have killed him meant that I was unmasked, no longer invisible, that I could no longer hide, not even from myself. From now on it would be like walking down the street stark bollock-naked.

Keen to go to ground, I turned a corner, my eye automatically clocking a café and dossers’ establishment, all white and red plastic furnishings. A wall of heat engulfed me as if I’d walked into a bank in Saudi with the air-conditioning bust. Rammed with men who’d slept rough the night before, their clothes stained, gnarled hands clutching mugs of tea, grease and sweat hung tenaciously in the air. Among the vagabond throng a number of unfortunate Eastern Europeans with beaten expressions. I didn’t exactly fit in, but it was the best place to go to avoid the attention I had no wish to attract.

I ordered tea, builder’s brew, the type you can stand a spade in. When I spoke my voice, so rarely used, felt strangely detached from the rest of me. Low in pitch and without obvious accent, it certainly contained no trace of my middle-class Gloucestershire roots.

‘You, alright, mate?’

I turned towards the man serving, the one who asked the question. He had a fleshy face ripe with folds and creases. All I wanted was a mug of tea. I did not welcome chat. I did not want be his mate. I nodded slowly once. His tongue flicked out, touched the side of his mouth, nervous. As he poured the beverage from an urn the size of a household boiler, I glanced at my reflection in the mirrored glass behind the counter expecting a drastic change in my appearance, some giveaway expression in the eyes betraying the disarray in my head, but I looked the same: cropped dark hair, blue eyes, wide nose that had once been broken in a game of rugby and reset, high Slavic cheekbones care of some genetic kink down my father’s line.

Counting out the exact change, I paid and took the mug to a corner table with a good visual on the door. Wes would be wondering why I hadn’t called. That got me thinking. Wes had insisted that Wilding was unmarried and childless. Had Wes been aware of this crucial piece of information but for darker reasons withheld it from me? Did he presume that any inconveniences would be ruthlessly taken care of? Knowing Wes, he would describe it as ‘collateral damage.’ This did not alter the simple fact that he had a fucking duty to tell me.

Uninvited, my thoughts cascaded, washing me up next to the wretched boy. No doubt about it, he’d supply a description to the police and thereby identify me. My face grew cold at the thought of a squad of armed coppers lifting me off the street, if I were lucky marching me to a station and Wilding’s son picking me out from a line-up. By sparing his life, I’d left myself wide open. I ought to go back, finish what I’d started, except…

Wired, I gulped the tea, scalding the roof of my mouth. By now the lad would have discovered his mother’s body. The thought genuinely appalled me, which came as a surprise. Not because Wilding was female – women can be twice as cruel and vicious and calculating as men – but because I wasn’t accustomed to this level of introspection concerning the relatives of the targets I’d removed. It was as if some unseen force had taken me over and brainwashed my mind. Truth is, over the years, I’d ripped men from life. Some had been rogues and murderers, some cruel and psychopathic. Some were good men who turned into bad men. Mostly motivated by greed and pride, always vanity, many strayed too far on the wrong side of the tracks and paid the ultimate price. Dr Mary Wilding was one of them. But the boy…

He was like a fly buzzing around my head. I couldn’t help but picture his anguish and pain and his devastation at losing his mother. No doubt about it, his life would be changed forever. If he became vengeful one day he’d come after me.

The door swung open and closed. My eyes flicked to the woman who’d entered. Middle-aged, stout, tired around the eyes, something in her manner reminded me of the woman I was sent to kill. Had I not skimped on the job, I’d be able to run through the strap lines of Mary Wilding’s life in my head: what she spent her money on, her medical and family history, her career path, her…

The mobile phone I used for the job vibrated. I snatched at it. It was Wes. Coldly furious, I pictured the pretty-boy American with his dark hair, and soft brown down-turned eyes inferring sensitivity that he didn’t possess but rendered women helpless. Part of me was looking forward to breaking the news that I’d aborted the job. It would be Wes’s stupid fault for screwing with me. The other part was not so keen.

‘You didn’t call,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘What the fuck is going on?’

Good question. I didn’t answer. You learn more from staying quiet and letting others do the talking. Frankly, I was too livid to speak.

‘You all right?’ he began, clearly mystified.

No, I was not all right. ‘There’s been a problem.’

‘What sort of problem?’

‘She was already dead.’

‘Shit, you sure?’ I pulled a face at Wes’s loss of volume control. ‘What about the merchandise?’ he ranted.

Wes had an annoying tendency to imitate lines from the latest action adventure film or crime show. This was not an episode of The Wire. ‘The safe was empty.’

‘Fucking holy hell.’

I dislike excitable reactions, but often they lead to the kind of loose mouth talk that yields vital information. I wasn’t to be disappointed.

He lowered his voice in a way that I imagined he might if he were phoning Dial-A-Wank. ‘What about the boy?’

I felt a pulse in my jaw tick, Wes’s lapse in intelligence unforgivable. ‘What boy?’

‘The fucking son, you moron.’

I let the insult pass. I’d been called worse. I kept my voice low and controlled to conceal my rage. ‘You never mentioned a son,’ I growled. ‘The deal was for one target only. If there had been two the price would have been considerably more. Your lack of attention to detail could have compromised me. It could cost me my life.’ I didn’t admit that I, too, had screwed up, that I’d made monumental mistakes.

Faced with the irrefutable logic of my argument, he backed off. I also think he was afraid of me, which was good. ‘Look, I knew about the kid, right?’

‘You fucking lied to me.’

‘I’m sorry, man, but I was ordered not to tell you,’ he whined.

‘Who by?’

‘The guy who’s paying.’

What sort of half-brained lunatic was this man? I said something to that effect.

‘I know,’ Wes said, trying to appease me. ‘So there was no boy?’ he pressed.

One good lie deserves another. ‘No.’

‘Holy Christ, that’s going to be a problem’. Yours, not mine, I thought. ‘The boy is a loose end. He has to be removed.’

This was the equivalent of pouring a can of petrol over my very personal fire. ‘Fuck you. I’m out.’

Wes let rip with what could be best described as a full-on curse. I maintained a contrived and dignified silence so that he could calm down, which he did. ‘Can’t, man. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.’

‘Who am I dealing with exactly?’

‘One nasty son-of-a-bitch.’

My laugh was cold. They were all nasty sons-of-bitches. Came with the territory.

‘And there’s the small matter of the merchandise,’ Wes said.

‘Which is missing,’ I reminded him.

‘Says who?’

I neither cared for the tone nor the inference. ‘Says I. Don’t get smart, Wes. I can track you down any time I like.’ And kill you, I inferred. Wes got the drift.

‘Hey, I’m not taking a pop at you, I’m only saying how the employer is gonna see it, bud. He’s one suspicious dude.’

Most of them were paranoid fuckers. ‘So who do you think beat me to it, apart from me, that is?’ I added acerbically.

‘Search me. You really sure it’s missing?’ The whine had returned.

‘Certain,’ I said, clipped.

Wes let out a big sigh. ‘You gotta find it.’

I swelled with anger. ‘I’m not a private detective.’

‘Yeah, I know, but please, you’ve gotta help me out here. I…’

‘What was on the hard drive?’ I now realised that the hard drive was more than straight business. The hard drive held the key.

‘I don’t know.’

Wes was the kind of guy who says no and does yes and vice-versa. I didn’t believe him. ‘If you want me to find it I need to know.’ I had no intention of doing Wes or anyone else a favour. I was done with them. I was only concerned with me.

Silence descended like a safety curtain at a theatre. I imagined Wes feverishly trying to worm his way out of the mess he was in. Finally, he spoke.

‘Data.’

‘What kind of data?’

‘Chemical, drugs, just stuff,’ he said unconvincingly, ‘Look, I’ll see what I can do, talk to the employer, or something. So you’re in?’