Headhunters

Chapter Sixteen

The driver, the woman, concentrated on the road ahead and said nothing at all. Her companion covered them both with the pistol. He made them sit all the way back in their seats to make sure that there was plenty of distance between his gun arm and his two captives. Milton would have to lean forward and then stretch in order to get to the gun; the man would be able to shoot him three times before he could get to him. Milton didn’t like those odds. He would play the long game.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“No talking. Keep it shut unless we ask you a question.”

So Milton observed them both instead. This wasn’t a robbery. If it was, they would have taken whatever they wanted — the Wrangler, perhaps — and left them on the side of the road. It wasn’t a hit, either. They would already have been dead if it was.

So, it was something else.

He watched how they presented themselves. The two of them were professional. Very professional. They were cool and calm, they didn’t get agitated, and they were firm with what they wanted Milton and Matilda to do. It all spoke of them being well-trained and experienced operators.

They had held their weapons easily. The guns themselves were nine-millimetre automatics. The one aimed at Milton now was a brand-new Beretta M9, as he had suspected. Milton was familiar with the weapon; it had been the weapon he had considered along with the Sig Sauer P226 when he was choosing his own sidearm. It was a full-size service pistol, with a 4.7-inch barrel, an aluminium alloy receiver and a steel slide. It had a mechanism that allowed for loading and unloading with the safety activated, along with a long twelve-pound double-action trigger pull for the first shot. That pull might buy Milton a fraction of a second of extra time, but that wouldn’t be long enough to close the distance before it was fired. The gun was oiled and looked like it was carefully maintained.

Milton narrowed his focus. It was a large gun, with the length of trigger reach and the diameter of the butt making it suitable only for medium-to large-sized hands. This man was of average build, and the gun looked comfortable in his grip. The safety was flicked off and the man’s finger was inserted loosely through the trigger guard, the trigger resting lightly on the pad of his index finger. The man’s right arm was braced across his left. The muzzle of the gun would tremble if he was nervous, but it did not; it was steady and unmoving.

That was useful information: both of their captors were comfortable with their weapons. That, too, suggested that this wasn’t their first dance. It suggested that this wasn’t something impetuous, that it had been planned.

And so what did that make them?

Milton thought. It made them either criminals or government operatives.

It wasn’t difficult to think of criminals who might have a motive for wishing him harm. There had been dozens through the years who had fallen within his ambit; plenty of his victims had been dispatched because they were too powerful to be vulnerable to traditional law enforcement, or immune to the prospect of a guilty verdict at trial. He had crossed the Mafia several times, both in the United States and in Italy. There had been assignments that had seen him decapitate the leadership of triad factions that had extended their malign influence into British Chinatowns. And, of course, it wasn’t that long ago that he had killed El Patrón, the paterfamilias of La Frontera, the Mexican cartel that dominated the border town of Ciudad Juárez. These two didn’t look like the type who would work for the cartel, but Milton knew that there were plenty of professionals who would be available for hire, and the really good ones looked like regular guys, just as these two did. They were “grey men,” like Milton, the sort who could just drift away into a crowd and become anonymous.

Government operatives? The list of state actors with a reason to bear a grudge against Milton was even longer. He could have wasted an hour trying to consider all the people who might want to see him dead, but there would have been no way of knowing. There was no profit in idle speculation, so he put it to one side and continued his study of the man and the woman.

The man with the gun was facing him, so he started there. He had been the one who had done most of the talking, so Milton made the assumption that he was in charge. He was broad and thick, with a round head that looked heavy atop his shoulders. Forty or forty-five years old. His hair was cut short and he wore stubble on his chin. He had evenly spaced eyes, heavy brows and a squashed nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times. He was calm, breathing easily. If he was nervous, his breathing would have been shallower and faster, but it was even. There was no sign of sweat, and his eyes stayed on the two of them in the back and did not flicker or deviate in the way that Milton would have expected if he was anxious. His fingernails were not chewed. He was tanned, although the skin around his eyes was a little whiter, as if he had been wearing sunglasses.

The driver was tanned, too, but Milton could see the patch of peeling skin on her forearms. Milton guessed that she and her partner had only been in the country for a short time. A local would have had a deeper, more even tan and would not have been peeling. She was slender, and Milton noticed that she held the wheel with long fingers. Her blouse looked new, and the collar still had that starched stiffness that made Milton think that it had probably still been in its cellophane wrap this morning.

Milton switched his attention back to the man. He looked relaxed, as if they were just going for a pleasant Sunday drive. Milton looked up from the gun to the man’s face.

“Where are we going?”

“I told you—”

“I know what you said, and I’m being cooperative. But it would make me relax even more if you told me where we were going.” He indicated outside the window. “I know we’re going east.”

The man gave a little nod of his head down to the Beretta. “Where we’re going is for me to know and you to keep your fucking mouth shut about.” His eyes showed no emotion and his mouth was fixed in a tight line, his lips thin and cruel. He spoke evenly, without raising his voice, but there was authority and purpose there that Milton did not mistake. He had been concentrating on the sound of the man’s voice rather than the message, which had been easy enough to predict, after all. He didn’t speak with an Australian accent. Nothing about the man suggested that he was native. He spoke with a hard intonation, glottal, harsh-sounding. Milton tried to guess where he might have originated, but he couldn’t place the accent.

Milton pressed him, trying to get a reaction. “Back to Dubbo?”

“I’m not telling you where we’re going, so stop asking me. If you keep talking when I’ve asked you not to, there will be consequences for both of you. Are we clear?”

Matilda reached across and laid her hand over his. “Do what he says. Stop talking.”

Milton didn’t take his eyes off the man. “We’re clear,” he said.

He opened his hand and let Matilda’s slip inside. He squeezed it tight.