Hunter Killer - Alex King Series 12 (2021), A BATEMAN [urban books to read TXT] 📗

the remains of the man’s heart, speckled with holes from the lead shot, was still beating and pumping blood outside his chest. The heart gradually stopped after a few more beats and Fortez tensed, then slumped in the chair. The guard complied with her orders and the Beretta clattered at her feet. Relieved she had fooled the guard - the custom weapon could only fire one shot - she picked up the pistol, flicked off the safety and shot the man in his right leg. He fell to the gravel screaming and clutching his shattered kneecap. Caroline thought it payback for the revolting way he had placed his hands on her intimate areas, and she turned and placed the crutch on the table. King’s weapon contact in London, who he only ever referred to as ‘The Man’, had sleeved a 24 inch, 12-bore smooth barrel inside the crutch and a simple spring-powered pin and cap assembly in the handle of the crutch would fire a single 12-bore shotgun cartridge filled with number five shot. A twelfth of a pound of lead balls, two-hundred and twenty in number, fired at fourteen-hundred feet per second at a distance of just eight inches. It was a one shot, one time deal. Reloading would require complete disassembly of the weapon with specialist tools. ‘The Man’ had texted Caroline with the plans and instructions on releasing the safety and firing the weapon, which she had promptly memorised before deleting the series of messages.

Caroline picked up the other crutch and stood up from the chair. She could hear a helicopter in the distance and when she looked for the direction of the sound, she could see a Robinson R44 coming in fast and low across the water. On the other side of the villa sirens approached from nearby Navale where the Guardia di Finanza-Comando were based, but they did not get discernibly closer. Caroline imagined Big Dave pulling the lorry he had ‘borrowed’ across the road and tossing the keys over a hedge as he walked calmly away, blocking the traffic in both directions. It would be enough to hold up the police until the chopper put down safely on the lower terrace.

Caroline made her way down the steps, using the crutches, although the heavier adapted one slid on the stones, the rubber cap somewhere inside Fortez with almost two ounces of lead shot behind it. She watched Flymo pull up vertically, then bank the helicopter hard, the tail spinning around so he could put down with the left-side doors facing her. He couldn’t simply fly in straight and steady – it wasn’t in the ex-army pilot’s nature - but the man had style and lived up to his nickname. Like the lawnmower of the same name, nothing could hover lower than a helicopter with Flymo on the stick.

Caroline tossed the pistol off the cliff and into the lake, then hobbled the last few feet to the helicopter, the rotor wash billowing up her headscarf and her mousey blonde hair across her face. She opened the door and slid onto the seat, removing the headscarf completely and smoothing her hair back before putting on the headset and shutting out the terrific noise of the spinning rotor blades.

“Your taxi to Switzerland awaits, Miss Darby,” Flymo joked playfully. The helicopter lifted and set forward before she got the harness on, dropping down off the edge of the cliff, where he settled it at fifty feet and powered out across the water.

“I’m certainly pleased to see you,” she commented with relief. The gunshot had alerted Big Dave and he had made the call to Flymo, who had been flying a lazy circle a couple of miles to the south. She had spent most of her savings on hiring the helicopter in Switzerland, but Flymo had been glad to travel out and provide his services free of charge. He had fastened some white tape over part of the registration to corrupt the numbers and would land and remove it once they were out of Italy. She would not meet back with the team, her flight from Geneva to London was scheduled to leave in just over three hours and she already had a connecting flight booked for Poole in Dorset. Giuseppe Fortez had been a killer. From the moment Ramsay had told her about the contract on King, she knew there was only one way it could be settled. She imagined the team in disarray. Big Dave had known her intention from the start and had collaborated with her throughout, and right now he would be heading south in a hired Fiat where he had a flight booked from Pisa to Dusseldorf and planned to lie low for a week or so. Caroline had asked him what was waiting for him in Dusseldorf, and he had simply told her that he had never tried curried bratwurst, fast becoming the national dish. He hadn’t decided whether he would return to London and continue to work with MI5, although he had doubted that would be an option after her handiwork at the villa.

Caroline was sure that Neil Ramsay would come around. They had been through a lot together. Captain Durand would be on the same page and likely help concoct a story with Ramsay when they got clear and had time to revaluate. Milo Noventa would be the link between them, and it wouldn’t be a stretch for the investigating officers to think that whoever killed Noventa had killed Fortez, and that it concerned dark web dealings or payback for a mafia boss’ earlier life. Ramsay would be capable of leaving the relevant traces for an investigating team to discover. Which just left Sally-Anne Thorpe. Caroline knew that Thorpe would not condone what she had done. There was too much police officer in her for that. Part of her imagined the woman on a personal vendetta, blowing the whistle on MI5 and outing rogue agents such