He needed another cigarette. He sat down heavily at his desk, perspiring. Again.
He drank some coffee, lit a Lucky Strike and instantly felt worse. Jesus.
He wobbled his way across to the minibar, peered at the rack of miniatures inside and pulled out a Jim Beam. Not his favourite bourbon, but better than nothing. He twisted off the cap, necked half the contents and sat back down.
For a few seconds he felt better, then his head was swimming again. The same flu-like symptoms he’d had repeatedly over the past six months. Back in March, due to his own stupidity and Detective Superintendent Roy Grace’s actions, he’d been trapped in a room full of venomous creatures. He’d been bitten by spiders, snakes and suffered a sting from a deathstalker scorpion, one of the world’s most venomous critters. He’d been close to death for some while, so he’d been told by medical staff at the Royal Sussex County Hospital when he’d eventually come round.
He managed to escape, evading the dumb police guard on his room, and make his way under one of his false identities to Germany, where he had work contacts. The specialist doctor he had consulted subsequently, in Munich, was a world authority on tropical diseases and reptile venom. He told him he’d been lucky to survive the scorpion sting, but as a result he was likely to suffer severe flu-like symptoms on a regular basis for the rest of his life. He was experiencing another of these episodes now, he realized.
There was another side effect the doctor informed him of, the bastard barely masking a smirk. That he might find his manhood had shrunk.
Which, to his embarrassment, it had.
Thank you, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace.
One day, I’m just biding my time at present, but one day, I’ll get you — I promise you that.
He badly needed to lie down, but he daren’t. Last time, a month back, when he had felt like this, he’d lain down on his bed and woken, soaking wet and shaking, three days later. Remembering his military training as a sniper, which had enabled him to stay concealed, motionless, behind enemy lines for days at a time, he allowed himself to catnap, seated. Five minutes’ shut-eye and he’d be good to go again. That had been part of his training. He used to be able to function for days like that. Weeks if he had to. But those catnaps were vital. Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic.
He was remembering something else about that sniper course all those years back, too. Almost the first thing his instructor had said. ‘Most times you get just the one chance at your target, one shot. There’s no second chance. The target needs to be dead at first sight. And if he ain’t, you might be.’
Five minutes later he opened his eyes and necked the rest of the tiny bottle, then, forcing himself to concentrate, opened the JPEG. A sequence of photographs. A blowsy-looking woman in her mid-fifties. Long dark hair. Still doing her best to look sexy. And no doubt did, to some. Might have been a beauty in her younger years, but probably spent too much time in the sun, judging from her tanned, wrinkled skin. Or a heavy smoker, perhaps. Or both.
Whatever.
Next was a photograph of his target — his employer’s former business partner who had gotten greedy and gone rogue. A tall, large-framed African, his hair cropped to a neat fuzz, wearing an Armani bomber jacket over jeans, a bling watch and loud red trainers. He was leaning, proprietorially, against the driver’s door of a red Ferrari, his expression confident and arrogant. A long way from his impoverished roots as a boy soldier in a war-torn nation. When he’d moved to the West he’d ditched his old name, Tunde Oganjimi, in favour of Jules de Copeland, a name he had seen on the credits of a television show, and which he wore with a swagger.
This was the man Tooth had seen running from the front door of Lena Welch’s apartment building and jumping into the passenger seat of the Audi.
There was another photograph, this one of Copeland’s colleague and distant cousin, Dunstan Ogwang, whose real name was Kofi Okonjo. Tooth instantly recognized the shorter man with the machete who had hacked out the tongue of the dying woman. According to the file, this man had formerly been a child soldier along with Copeland. He read on.
Both men, at the age of fourteen, had been taught how to rape and then mutilate or cut the throats of their victims. What kind of moral compass did either have, he wondered? More fool his paymaster, Steve Barrey, for thinking he could be in business with them.
Tooth liked always to know who he was actually dealing with, in a world where few people went under their real names. Barrey at some point in the past decade had relocated from his native city of Brighton and Hove to Germany, where he had made his base, and from there to Jersey. Barrey seemed to be his real name, but Tooth was never sure.
After being transplanted from Ghana to Bavaria by Barrey, Copeland had then moved, with a forged passport, from Germany to Brighton, England, where he had an uncle and a cousin who ran an internet café and safety deposit box business. It was behind that front he had set up his own internet scamming business, and brought over his cousin as his lieutenant. He’d taken into his employment, back in Ghana, several of the notorious Sakawa Boys internet scammers, whom he’d been running for Barrey, and he was now both targeting his former employer’s chosen victims, as well as fishing for new ones. Tooth was well aware that, through Copeland’s clumsy approach, the dumb, greedy, arrogant idiot was risking blowing apart his employer’s entire carefully crafted and managed empire. Two of the targeted women had already rumbled the scam. Both had threatened to go to the police. One was now dead.
If Copeland had anything between his eyes other than sawdust and pound signs, he’d have moved on and ended all contact. There were enough firewalls and digital trails for it to have taken any cop a year or more to drill down through them, and still ended up at a dead-end. And no cop had that time to spare. Copeland should have just moved on to the next targets — there were plenty of them out there online, thousands of men and women looking for love, all of them rich pickings. But Tooth knew Copeland’s type, blinded by greed and hubris.
He was so dumb he hadn’t even realized that Barrey was monitoring his computer, phones and his every move. He’d never even thought to throw away the laptop Barrey had given him and get a new one.
Tooth had been hired in Munich to follow the men and stop them. But, stupidly, he had failed, because of all that venom inside his body making him feel crap. Now the first woman was dead.
You will stop them. Frighten them.
His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a Halloween mask and shout boo?
The way he was feeling right now, sick in the pit of his stomach, giddy, too hot, he wasn’t in the mood to frighten anyone. Everything had turned to rat shit. His health, his judgement, his future. He’d been reduced to taking a job paying way beneath his skill set. Way beneath his dignity. At this moment he envied scorpions. They had it sorted. Scorpions had a gap between the armoured scales that covered their backs. When a scorpion wasn’t happy it would commit suicide by stinging itself through that gap. Simple. End of. If he’d had his gun with him, he’d be gone, too.
But he had no gun with him now. Just a view across St Helier harbour.
He never saw the point in views — what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide some place with a beautiful view. They flew or drove across America, and sometimes even from further afield, to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge facing the bay of San Francisco. Or a place called Beachy Head in Sussex, facing the English Channel. Or the Aokigahara Forest in Japan.