Winner Kills All Read online

  For Sarah & Tris.

  Our kind of trouble

  PROLOGUE

  How far would you go to save a loved one? Your own flesh and blood?

  This far, I think, as I ease open one of the art nouveau panelled doors and step inside the ruined building. This is journey far enough into darkness for any rational human being. Except, I can probably delete ‘rational’ from that. I am driven by something that lies much, much deeper in my brain, far removed from the civilised centres.

  My rubber soles make the merest squeak on the stained terrazzo floor. The interior reminds me of a cathedral: a great soaring dome, supported by once-gilded ribs, now cracked and denuded of decoration. At some point, it must have rivalled the great casinos of Europe in grandeur. In fact, it would have made Monte Carlo look like a branch of Betfred. I can almost hear the laughter and the chink of glasses from the fin de siècle beau monde.

  Almost.

  The ghosts are drowned out by the squelch of fresh pigeon droppings underfoot. I glance upwards and one of the perpetrators sets flight, the flapping filling the cavernous space above my head, echoing around the balconies and balustrades.

  I stop and listen as the bird finds a new perch and coos appreciatively. A few of his feathered companions join in, but silence quickly resumes. I listen for any further disturbances in the air. Apart from the drip of water from a breach in the roof and the occasional hiss of waves on the promenade outside, it is eerily quiet.

  Wherever they are, the men I am looking for aren’t in the building. At least, not this part.

  Why would they be? It might be out of season, but the roof leaks, the pigeons shit and there’s always the chance of an idle tourist wandering in. A tourist who would find themselves with a hole in the skull quicker than they could think: ‘Oops, wrong turn!’

  No, if I have guessed correctly, the gathering of men must be below my feet, in the cellars – catacombs? – of this derelict building. The Void, as it is known. I have to go down there. I can hear my partner Freddie’s voice in my head: Wait for back-up, Sam Wylde.

  But there is no back-up. My back-up is either dead or damaged.

  I’m on my own. Not even Freddie at my side.

  I place the holdall I have been carrying onto the floor and crouch next to it. With gloved hands I pull the zip. It comes smoothly. Always lubricate your zips – I’ve watched people die because they couldn’t open a zipped pocket to pull out a weapon in time.

  I peel the sides apart so that the bag gapes at me. From within I take out a gun. It’s the kind of gun that would get me a hefty prison sentence if I were to even possess it in the UK. If they knew what I intended to do with it, what hate was eating up my heart, they’d lock me up and throw away the proverbial key.

  I began this part of my life as a bodyguard: Sam Wylde, Personal Protection Officer. Now, I have moved on to something much more proactive.

  I am here, if necessary, to kill.

  I stand and check over the FN P-90 in the thin light that is streaming through the grimy and broken windows in the hall. It’s a weird-looking weapon, all right. Made of polymer, it could pass as a ray gun in a 1950s science-fiction film. Or a device for vacuuming the interior of a car. But it can be fired one-handed, can penetrate body armour at one hundred metres and its magazine carries an impressive fifty rounds.

  But even fifty rounds won’t last long on full automatic.

  I stuff two extra mags behind my own body armour and switch on the laser-dot system. As I move the weapon, the glowing spot dances on the far wall, over the scabrous rococo plasterwork. I imagine it exploding into dust.

  I make sure the safety is on, just in case instinct – or rage – takes over.

  As I look up and scan the higher floors, I notice a circular space where perhaps an internal window once sat. It is empty now; any decorative glass long gone. I draw the laser over it. It reminds me of the ‘murder holes’ the Taliban favoured in Afghanistan; small gaps in the walls of the compounds through which they would lay lethal fire on our patrols before disappearing into a warren of houses behind them. Shoot and scoot, as it was known. But the dot is lost in empty space. Nobody is up there getting a sighting on me.

  I kill the laser, take out a Glock and put it in my belt, tucked down against my arse. I don’t feel its polymer body because of the thin neoprene wetsuit I’m wearing under my clothes. I have a few other bits and pieces to conceal around myself, but most of the items I will need – including a second Glock – are in the small black rucksack I thread my arms through. I put on a head torch, but leave it switched off. Same with the throat mic assembly.

  I hear Freddie again, using my army nickname; a phantom crackle in an imaginary earpiece.

  Ready, Buster?

  Ready.

  Satisfied I am done, I slide the holdall into a corner, then check everything is tight, from bootlaces to bra straps.

  It is.

  I’m ready to go.

  As I head for the stairs, limping to ease the residual pain in my left knee, I try to recall how all this started; how I ended up looking for the men I might have to hurt. Correction: want to hurt. The answer is always the same.

  Albania.

  Albania, a man named Adam and a nagging question: How did I know it was a hit?

  PART ONE

  ‘Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength’

  ONE

  ‘Albania? And you said yes?’

  The sentence, with its imaginary accusatory finger, hung between them. Kath opened the fridge, took out the milk and slammed the door shut. Adam heard the various half-full condiment bottles racked inside rattle together nervously, as if they knew what was coming. He braced himself as he sat at the kitchen table.

  The water hissed from the fancy boiling-water tap into the teapot. It was the latest toy in the house. Cut out the middleman: lose the kettle, scald yourself direct from the tap instead. Adam thought the water came out a degree or two below the ideal temperature for a decent cup of tea. Kath accused him of being ‘too anally Yorkshire’, even though it was many years since he had left Leeds.

  As she fussed with making the tea, Adam looked beyond his wife, through the window, to the rain sweeping across the South Downs. A glorious landscape most of the time, it looked less than inviting with a wind-blown downpour billowing in curtains across the low hills. There was a point in his life when he would have been out there, swathed in Craghoppers or The North Face, head down against the squall, walking the dog. But their flat-coated retriever had expired before its allotted time, thanks to some inbred genetic predisposition to cancer. Six months had passed since the poor animal had been put down. They had recently started to talk about a successor, but only tentatively. In truth, there was a sense of freedom that came with not having to worry about daily walks or who would look after it while they were on holiday.

  Still, right at that moment, he’d rather be out there braving needle-sharp rain on his face than waiting for Kath to blow.

  He glanced at the half-finished crossword and read fifteen down. A confused poet faces a vast emptiness. Four letters.

  ‘When?’ she finally asked, planting the mug in front of him. It was one of the thick pottery ones she had bought in Lewes. He hated the feel of the fat rim against his mouth. It was like drinking from a chamber pot. Not that he had ever done that. The fact Kath was using those mugs suggested she was less than pleased by his news.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘Friday? This Friday?’

  ‘It’s a newspaper, Kath. They like to strike while—’

  Adam never got to complete the platitude. ‘Conor is coming home for the weekend. You know that.’

  He k
new his son too well to allow him to be used as a weapon. ‘Conor is coming home to lock himself in his room between trips out to Brighton getting pissed with his mates. He isn’t coming to see me.’

  Kath pursed her lips and he thought about telling her she shouldn’t. The resulting lines didn’t flatter and . . .

  He smothered the thought.

  He could talk. Neither of them was getting any younger. What’s that coming over the hill? as the old pop song went. Why, it’s fifty. Well, in his case it was. Kath could look in the rear-view mirror and still see forty.

  She sat in front of him, both hands cradling the mug, head over it as if she were hoping the steam would clear her sinuses.

  ‘Did Rory do it just to piss me off?’

  Adam shook his head. ‘What you or I think doesn’t come into it—’

  ‘Oh, bollocks. He must know I can’t even bear to hear the name of that fucking place.’

  Albania.

  ‘Look, he knows I speak the language. Well, sort of. And I’m associated with . . .’ The rest of his sentence deserted him, giving an impression of guilt.

  ‘Associated with? Is that what you call it in the office?’

  Adam closed his eyes. At work on the newspaper, on the five-a-side pitch and in his seat at Brighton & Hove Albion, he had a reputation for . . . robustness. For the odd hard tackle and a command of fruity language. But faced with this, his defences crumbled and he was continually on the back foot.

  With Kath making all the running he felt like Superman must whenever Lex Luther plucked out a chunk of Kryptonite.

  Powerless.

  It was the guilt that sucked the energy out of him, of course; the nagging feeling that he had done her wrong, as they said in country and western songs.

  ‘Look, Kath, there are two towns locked in a power struggle. It’s like A Fistful of Dollars: two families facing off against each other . . .’

  Kath gave a hoot of laughter. ‘And you’re John Wayne, are you?’

  Clint Eastwood. But he kept quiet. Pedantry never ended well with Kath.

  ‘In which case, you shouldn’t have given up the gym membership when we moved, should you?’

  Kath had recently commented on his ‘man boobs’, which he thought unfair. He was in pretty good shape for his age, especially compared to some of his colleagues. But it was possible that Tuesday night five-a-side wasn’t enough to combat his red wine and curry (albeit not together) habit.

  ‘And look, I know you went to Helmand and to Syria, but you’re no longer a front-line reporter. No John Simpson, anyway, ploughing the same furrow as an elder statesman. Your cutting-edge days are over. Human interest is your beat—’

  A flash of anger made his words bright and brittle. ‘Don’t tell me what my beat is. I did that exposé on cam girls in Romania, didn’t I?’

  She sniffed. ‘I thought that was just an excuse to look at porn for a week.’

  Angry now. ‘And the people who make their fortunes from trading poor girls as sex slaves – that’s not a cutting-edge story? Or relevant? Or important?’

  She had no answer to that. After a while, her voice modulated somewhat and she said: ‘And you got death threats after that article. And the book.’

  Only on Twitter, he thought. And only if he were to go back to Romania, which he had no intention of doing. Although he wasn’t stupid enough to think Albania was a day at the beach.

  ‘I’m not going there to take them down all guns blazing, Kath. Simply to observe and report. And I’ll get some material for the novel. It’s a good cover. They don’t like journos sniffing around, but if they think they might get mentioned in a book . . .’

  At least she didn’t laugh at that. Adam was working on a semi-fictionalised version of actor Anthony Quayle’s time in the Special Operation Executive (SOE) in Albania during the Second World War. His agent hadn’t achieved a particularly large advance for the novel – ‘Who’s even heard of Anthony Quayle these days?’ the young editor had asked – so it was coming along very slowly. That and the fact Kath huffed every time she stumbled across one of his books on Albania left on the coffee table or next to their bed, as if she had found a copy of Men Only or some such. Did they still publish such mags in the day of the internet, he wondered? It was a long time since he had felt the urge to look along a top shelf.

  The truth was, the novel was a way out. A fresh start. He felt increasingly alienated from the paper and its so-called core values. And the hordes of millennials that seemed to swell on a weekly basis. He doubted half of them were even on a salary. Barbarians in Supreme hoodies at the gates, ready to sweep the old guard away and take the plum assignments. But he didn’t want to go out with a whimper; didn’t want to move to editing the puzzle page or some other remote corner of the enterprise.

  One last big piece, then he’d be off: head held high, dignity intact. Oh, and maybe a redundancy package after so many years of sterling service.

  ‘So this was Rory’s idea?’

  Now, this was the tricky part. The tip-off about the two small communities in Albania supplying nearly all the sex traffickers in Europe had come from a Dutch Europol investigator, whom Adam had interviewed for his article. They had stayed in touch and over a drink in London, the Dutchman had told him about Golan and Cerci, the Sodom and Gomorrah of the sex trade. Apparently, the Kurds controlled the general peoplesmuggling across most borders, but the Albanians were the specialists. They dealt in carnality.

  It was Adam who had pitched a story about it at conference. But it might be better to gloss over that . . .

  ‘I think it came from Martin.’ Rory was the magazine’s editor. Martin was deputy of the whole paper. ‘But the mag is the best home for it, so Rory took it. That bloody Nina wanted it. I’ve still got the marks from her sharp elbows as she tried to get my own bloody story off me.’ Nina was Scottish, abrasive and clearly feeling the same sort of pressures as Adam from the upswell of younger talent. It was a little like fighting for the last seats in a lifeboat. ‘I sent her packing, mind.’

  He knew from the way she stiffened that he had said the wrong thing. ‘You fought for this?’

  The temperature dropped as if the weather outside had breached the kitchen walls.

  ‘It has nothing to do with her, Kath. I don’t even know where she is now. Not in bloody Albania, anyway.’

  ‘I’m still going to kill Rory.’ Kath knew Rory of old. Adam and Rory had been something of a double act when they were all at university. Sharing a flat, a high tolerance for alcohol, a love of The Smiths and a lot of women.

  ‘He must have known that it would upset me . . . Oh, fuck it.’

  She got up and strode out with a purposefulness he recognised.

  ‘Don’t give him a hard time. He’s only doing his job. It’ll only be a few . . .’

  There was a rustle of heavy fabric from the hallway as she grabbed her coat. The front door slammed. He heard the throaty growl of her Mini and the spatter of wet gravel against the windows as she wheel-spun down the drive.

  He sipped his tea, relishing the sudden calm. All things considered, that had gone better than he had expected.

  Her name was Roza – Rozafati in full, but she preferred the truncated version. She had just turned nineteen when she had been trafficked from Albania in 2009 with all the usual promises of a soft and affluent life in Western Europe.

  She could be a waitress. Perhaps, if she wanted some extra money on the side, a stripper. Or a table dancer in the West End of London. It wasn’t exactly the promise of an easy life, but it beat the prospects she had at home.

  The reality, though, was much worse than what she left behind when she climbed in a battered Cibro minibus, everything that mattered to her stuffed into a single suitcase.

  After being gang-raped several times along the way – a tried-and-tested device to render sex meaningless to the girls – she had ended up in England, in a brothel above a kebab shop in Ealing. After three weeks – three very long weeks wi
th up to a dozen ‘clients’ a day – she had escaped.

  Unusually, not only did Roza speak English, she was articulate and resourceful. She managed to find a refuge and they contacted the newspaper. At last the reporters had someone who could tell their own tale, without translators; a woman who was traumatised but would unflinchingly explain what had happened to her and thousands of others.

  The magazine article that Adam wrote grew into a book – The Shame Road – using Roza’s story to expose the whole cesspit of human trafficking that was going on under everyone’s noses. Adam estimated that, in London, everyone was within at least half a mile of a trafficked person.

  One night during the book tour, after too much champagne, Adam and Roza had found themselves in the same room and the same bed. He was so drunk he had forgotten that he had invited Kath to join them for the final few dates of the trip.

  TWO

  It was a slow and steady climb through the mountains of Northern Albania to the turning that would take Adam to the rendezvous point where he was to pick up a local ‘fixer’, the newspaper’s person on the ground. The road was wide, but covered in potholes, which meant Adam progressed in a series of sinuous curves until oncoming traffic forced him to endure the suspension-threatening jarring of the craters. There were still dirty patches of snow, like frozen cowpats, dotting the sides of the so-called highway, and much more of it capping the mountains. The sky, though, was a clear, crystalline blue, dissected only by the thin white razor-cut of a jet’s vapour trail. He wondered if the circling dots he could see beneath the airliner were the fabled eagles of Albania. In reality, they were more likely to be common-or-garden buzzards.

  He had been driving for several hours and his arms were growing weary. The further he got from Tirana the more the country looked like the cliché of a place out of time; the way it would have been when the SOE men had landed, only to find themselves pawns in the war between King Zog and the communist partisans.

  He passed villages where the rooftops were made from old drop containers from the war, hammered flat and now rusted to a deep, deep brown. There were goats wandering into the road; horse-drawn carts; scrawny, yappy dogs; tiny farms that could barely feed one person, let alone the six he saw working the land; women in shawls and headscarves, age indeterminate. And then he glimpsed a vulgar monstrosity, all pillars and gables and a satellite dish so large it could be used to search for signs of intelligent life in the universe.