‘So, my disobedient friend, Mr Tooth,’ a man with an English accent said in a voice that was utterly devoid of charm. ‘It is very good to finally meet you.’
Tooth did not reply.
The man he presumed was Steve Barrey continued. ‘Mr Tooth, you are not in any position to negotiate terms with me. You know that you cannot return to your home in the Turks and Caicos without being arrested. You cannot return to the United States without either the FBI arresting you or the members of a crime family seizing you for what you did to your last employer there. And you are not exactly flavour of the month with the police in England.’
‘But you want me to go there,’ he answered, testily.
‘Of course, because you know it so well, Mr Tooth. You are an excellent choice for the task. But first explain to me, why did you disobey my orders and fail to protect Lena Welch and warn off the Ghanaians?’
‘I did not disobey your orders,’ he said flatly, attempting to wriggle out of the truth that for the first time in his career he had failed in his mission. ‘I was given wrong information. No one told me Copeland would have his shitbag accomplice, Ogwang, with him. Maybe you should choose your intelligence sources better in future.’
Barrey roared with laughter. When it subsided, Tooth saw a flare of light. Barrey had lit another cigarette. ‘Of course. You are such a scary man, Mr Tooth. On your next job for me, Mrs Suzy Driver in Brighton, you will protect her from my former partner, Jules de Copeland, and his sidekick, Dunstan Ogwang. That’s all. End of. Do you understand? You protect her in any way you need. But try not to kill these two. With the police there, killing people in England is never a good idea, as I think you have found out previously, no?’
Tooth risked a glance up. It wasn’t much of a risk, in reality. He had one bodyguard behind him, two in front of him and Mr Barrey behind his desk. He didn’t like being here.
‘You are trying to look at me, are you not, Mr Tooth? You are curious to see my face. Do you not know about curiosity and the cat?’
Tooth felt the tension in the room. All his time as a sniper in the US military, where he’d had to remain hidden for days at a time, had taught him awareness of the slightest movement around him. He could feel the flunkey coming closer behind him. Saw the two in front taking an almost invisible step towards him.
He did not like that.
The gorilla was right behind him now and that was really not good. He focused, tuning out everything except his three potential enemies, two in front, one behind. What he was about to do would not endear him to his employer, but he really didn’t care.
If he had been a scorpion he’d have denied them the pleasure of his company, he thought, by simply exiting the world with a flick of his tail. Instead he had other choices, and only one suited his current mood. He focused hard and fast. One, inches behind him. Two, a couple of yards in front.
Surprise was an element that had always served him well.
He arched his neck back, delivering a fierce reverse headbutt to the man’s face, striking him in the nose, hearing the crunch. He sensed him reeling back, giving him enough space to fire out a powerful reverse kick to the man’s liver, which sent him crashing to the floor in spasm. Then for good measure, with a quick glance, he brutally stamped on his head, knocking him unconscious.
As the two men guarding Barrey advanced towards him, Tooth ducked under a clumsily swung punch and put one guard in a choke hold, using him as a human shield against the punches being thrown by his colleague. As he felt the man he was choking go limp, he dropped him to the floor, leaving him one-on-one with the remaining guard. With clinical precision, Tooth threw out a violent low leg-kick and heard the faintly audible crack of snapping knee ligaments. As the guard fell to the floor, shrieking in pain, Tooth delivered a bludgeoning blow to the temple with his elbow.
Then, with the three guards out of it, he looked at the shadow of his employer. Or rather, at the shadow of the barrel of the Sig Sauer handgun his employer was holding.
‘Nice gun, Mr Barrey,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you shoot me?’
Barrey said nothing.
Tooth opened up his arms, presenting his small frame as the biggest target he could make himself into.
Barrey switched on his desk lamp, turning it towards Tooth, then illuminating the three unconscious men on the floor. ‘What the hell have you done?’
‘You want a detailed medical report or just the press release?’
‘I would happily shoot you,’ Barrey said. ‘But, for the moment, you are useful to me.’
‘I know that. You hired me on my reputation, because you knew I’d get the job done. But your bad intelligence is making everything a lot more complicated than you’d told me. That’s why I feel a renegotiation of terms is due.’
‘Really?’
‘You see, Mr Barrey, I don’t care if you shoot me. But I know you won’t because your scuzzy empire is already starting to fall apart at the seams due to your bad choice of business partner. Didn’t your mother — if you have one — ever tell you that you judge a man by his shoes? If you don’t mind me saying, this Copeland guy was a bad choice, man! And, you know, some of your victims are not stupid people. All over the globe they are doing Google searches and rumbling the scams. You don’t want to be found out, with all the millions you are raking in, do you? All those men and women who are salivating over you around the globe. Or over who they think is you or one of your dozens of phoney images. All those alter egos you have, male and female. The twenty-eight-year-old Colombian fashion model. The thirty-seven-year-old blonde sports trainer. The fifty-eight-year-old seismic shipping guy, soon to be a multimillionaire. The sixty-two-year-old former US Marine.’ Tooth lunged forward and twisted the desk lamp until the beam shone directly onto Barrey’s ravaged face.
Barrey wore a Stetson tipped low. Wisps of fair hair protruded from either side of it. His eyes were bloodshot and his facial skin was all contorted into ridges and troughs, like a partially stretched and deflated balloon. He barely had any lips. His body was large, bordering on obese. He continued holding the gun, but the threat had gone.
‘Does it make you happy to destroy lives, Mr Barrey?’
‘Mr Tooth, after surviving my helicopter crash and spending the next two years on and off in the burns unit at Queen Victoria Hospital in Sussex, England, I had a lot of time to reflect. Do you want to know what I concluded?’
Tooth looked at him. ‘What?’
‘That life is a game. You win, you lose. Lots of people never understand that. But that’s all it is, just a dumb game. I’m helping all those poverty-stricken Ghanaian kids who never had a bean to count in the world, or an opportunity, because for five hundred years European colonialization enslaved them and plundered their country. Now, thanks to me, some of them are rich beyond their wildest dreams.’
‘From scamming decent folk in the West and ruining their lives? And now your trusted business partner has scammed you. You want me to stop him, and his charming lieutenant, Dunstan Ogwang. The machete boys, right? You know their background, don’t you? Boy soldiers. All they understand is brutality. Humanity’s not in their make-up. That’s why you brought them to Germany, right? To run your nasty little training camp.’
‘Academy, Mr Tooth.’
‘Academy. Right. Academy for internet scammers. You know, you have a very skewed moral compass.’
Tooth had visited the place, housed in the fortress of a hilltop schloss in Bavaria, the former residence of one of Adolf Hitler’s least charming buddies, who’d been executed at Nuremberg. Steve Barrey had exploited Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-doors policy to asylum seekers, bringing in over one hundred so-called Sakawa Boys. He arranged coach trips to England for them to help them better understand the culture and hone their skills at targeting their victims.