66 Metres: A chilling thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat!

Chapter Five

Danton nursed his big right knuckle. The blood on it wasn’t his. But his flesh had been grazed. So the soon-to-be-dead Irish shit in front of him, Sammy, was going to pay. He picked up the hammer and watched the bloodied and battered curly-haired prick’s eyes go wide.

‘I’ve told you everything, Christ Almighty. For the love of God, please!’ His supplication descended into sobbing.

Danton smirked. This was the point he liked best, when they realised that even after confessing everything, they were still going to die, and painfully too.

‘Not his jaw. I want to go through everything one more time.’

Danton turned and glowered at the CIA spook, seated far away enough to avoid getting bloodstains on his Hermes suit. He’d like to get one of them under the hammer one day, just to show them what it felt like. But this agent clearly had ideas above his station, paying a couple of grand for a suit. Danton doubted he wore it back at the office. No, he probably saved it for his European trips, believed he was a cut above the rest. His bosses back home would recognise it meant he was a risk. But for Danton it meant he knew the guy’s weak spot, his ego. Which meant they could do business together.

He raised the hammer backwards in a theatrical arc, then shattered Sammy’s knee. The screaming soothed him as it always had. He sat back, watched him writhe against the chains, incoherent with pain, and then the spook went to work, talking in soft tones, asking Sammy the same questions, promising not freedom, not even survival, merely an end to the pain. This was how it usually went, when the truth came out, as if the victim saw Death standing in front of him. Lies were no longer an option. They no longer held currency, because they belonged to life, not to where this prick was headed.

Danton heard nothing new, but the spook seemed content, nodded to him, deposited a stack of bills on the table by the heavily padded door, and left. Danton crouched down so his face was close to Sammy’s blood-and-tear-stained cheeks. The shivering wreck stank of fear, and wouldn’t look at his torturer, his lips trembling, murmuring the Lord’s prayer.

Danton walked behind him and uttered two words. The only kindness he ever offered. The last words those in the chair ever heard. The same ones his pig of a father had always said to him after the beatings, until at fifteen Danton had stuck a knife in his old man’s drunken guts and watched him die.

‘Sleep now,’ he said, as he raised his arm one last time, and aimed the hammer at the back of Sammy’s skull.

***

Adamson left the terraced three-storey house, and walked up the short steps onto the maple-lined street in one of the southern suburbs of Frankfurt. He was hugely relieved to step into the daylight, out from Danton’s soundproofed, below-ground interrogation chamber. Away from the stench of Sammy’s sweat and fear, and most of all, away from his screams. He inhaled the scent of drying leaves after last night’s rain, and gazed around, eager to reinsert himself into the normal world most people inhabited. Mothers walked their kids to school, hurried them along, and bent over every now and again to talk to them. A garbage truck jerked to a stop in front of him, its yellow lights flashing. Two black men leapt off the back to empty the environmentally-sorted trash from black, blue and yellow bins. The truck’s engine whined, and the men shuffled another ten metres down the street. Normality. Not reality for him. He’d seen too much to ever forget. But this was where he wanted to be, where he needed to be, with his family, with Sandy and little Arnie. Hence his retirement plan. He walked towards the city centre.

He still had time to turn back. It wasn’t too late. And now things had gotten complicated. Janssen was supposed to have killed Sammy and the girl, and then handed over the Rose to him, so he could take it to South America where one of the major drug cartels, the Kilanoa family, wanted it for leverage with the US authorities, to stop them fucking with their cosy cocaine business model.

The Rose should have been in his hands by now. He’d be boarding a plane to Bogota, and his CIA partner back in Langley, Jorgenson, also in on the deal for a cool two million, would meet him there with Sandy and Arnie. And then… No more reality. Instead, a lifetime of luxury in a coastal villa. But now it was complicated. But what the hell wasn’t these days? He’d handled complicated all his life. He closed his eyes a moment, recalled the hilltop villa near Cartagena where the deal had been sealed. He could almost smell the sea, feel the sun burning on his forehead in the warm breeze, the buzzing of the cicadas in the afternoon, fresh crushed mint in the mojitos.

Screw it, it was worth a little risk.

He called Jorgenson on the scrambled cell. ‘Her name is Nadia Laksheva. Probably not her real name, but he swore he’d seen her passport… He said Land’s End, Cornwall, south-west England, that’s where she was headed… It fits… All right. Listen, I have to call in… Right, next call in twenty-four.’

He pulled out the other phone, called the office at Langley, to give an update. The Joint Chiefs were seriously pissed that the Brits had developed the Rose without sharing. Hence his mission, to keep an eye on the Rose from a distance. Sweet. But now the office knew it was missing, and it was just a matter of time before they put more patent leather soles on foreign soil. He spoke to the boss’s aide, said he was following a new lead, needed seventy-two hours. Told her he was headed to London. Nothing doing in Frankfurt. He hung up. Closing his eyes, he rubbed the bridge of his nose with forefinger and thumb. Danton had rattled him as usual. But now, more than ever, he needed to stay focused. He headed towards a Thai massage parlour, one of several he knew in the district. The door jangled as he entered. A forty-something Thai woman appeared and beamed, recognising him.

‘Full body massage. One hour. Pretty girl,’ he said in fluent German.

A young girl in a short white skirt and purple tie-dyed tee shirt arrived and led him to the back of the parlour into a small room with a cushioned massage table, a padded oval hole at one end for his face. He inhaled the comforting smell of lavender body oil. Soft Chinese music tinkled from a cheap CD player. She left him while he stripped naked and lay face down. She returned and began massaging his back, commenting only once on the scars, picking up that he wasn’t in the mood for conversation. Sammy’s screams still echoed inside his brain. Sammy had been in the wrong team at the wrong time; crappy luck. For the girl too, when he found her.

The masseuse asked him to turn over, and he lay on his back. She massaged his thighs, her fingers occasionally nudging his balls. He hardened. She massaged him some more, her deft fingers ‘accidentally’ touching his penis, making his breathing deepen. She paused, leaned closer to his closed eyes.

‘You want happy ending?’

He nodded.

‘Fifty?’ she said, testing the water.

He nodded again. Today she could have asked five hundred. She went to work on him. When he was about to come, she placed her left hand firmly over his mouth, quietening his groans of ecstasy.

Adamson lay panting while she fetched hot water and towels. He relaxed. The screams were gone. He wouldn’t have to see Danton again – ever – if all went to plan. His mind drifted to his wife Sandy back in DC, and to Arnie, not doing so well in school. Attention Deficit Disorder. Adamson knew his being away so often didn’t help Arnie. He’d call later. They’d be waking up and having breakfast in a few hours.

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