Free The Payback by Simon Kernick

his usual time for arriving home. The place was empty, as I’d calculated, and as he manoeuvred into his spot I strode over to the Boxster’s passenger side, my footsteps muffled by the deep rumble of its engine, pulled open the door and, leaning inside, shot him twice in the face before he’d had a chance to turn off the ignition.
    I still remember the look of shock on his face – the sure knowledge carved all over it that he was about to die – and the flash of doubt that I’d felt as I pulled the trigger. When I walked away, I’d told myself – as I always do – that this man was an embezzler, a fraudster who’d defrauded the wrong people, and he was simply paying for his sins.
    But the point is, I’d taken my time on the job and, harsh as it might sound, that was why I’d been successful. Now I had a maximum of twelve hours, and in a place like Manila it wasn’t going to be easy.
    I shut the window and sat down on the bed, suddenly feeling exhausted. At the very least I needed a couple of hours’ shut-eye before I got to work. But as I started to strip off, a loud, shrill ring came from my trouser pocket. It was the iPhone Schagel had given to me.
    ‘Have you arrived?’ he asked curtly.
    ‘I have,’ I answered, just as curtly. ‘I’m in the hotel room.’
    ‘And the box?’ he said, using our standard code word for a gun. ‘Is that all to your satisfaction?’
    I said it was.
    ‘Then I have some good news. The address of our mutual friend is only six hundred metres from where you are. In the maps section of the phone, you will see how to get there. You might want to go there now.’
    ‘I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as that,’ I said, beginning to get tired of this conversation.
    ‘On the contrary. I think it’s going to be very easy. Have a look under the pillow on your bed.’
    I did as he instructed and saw a key ring with three very new keys attached to it lying on the mattress. ‘Are they what I think they’re for?’
    ‘Absolutely. One opens his main gate, the other two open his front door. See, we’ve made it very easy for you, my friend. All you have to do now is turn up. We want to make it look like a break-in, though. So do a bit of work on the front door when you’ve finished, and then call me.’ And with that, he hung up.
    I put the phone back in my pocket and sat still for a few minutes, thinking that this was going to be a lot easier than I thought. But, easy or not, I wasn’t going to do it without some sleep first. Both Schagel and the target would simply have to wait.
    I set the alarm for five a.m., stripped off and lay back on the bed, shutting my eyes and banishing all the evils of the world from my thoughts – a process that should have taken a man like me a lot longer than it did.
    As it turned out, I was asleep in seconds.

Nine
     
    It was ten minutes before Tina finally plucked up the courage to go back inside her house. No one had responded to her screams, but then it was a wet, windy evening and people would have had their TVs on. In the end, it hadn’t mattered. The men who’d been sent to kill her had failed, and she was thankful for that. But she also knew that she couldn’t stay at home that night. It was too dangerous. Her would-be assassins weren’t just going to give up. The knowledge that she was now a direct target scared her too. Without any witnesses to what had happened, it was going to be hard to secure any protection from her colleagues.
    But she was also excited, because it had to mean that Nick Penny had discovered something significant.
    Still wet and shivering, she double-locked the front door behind her and put the chain across it before hurrying through to the kitchen. She laid a long carving knife on the table beside her and switched on her laptop. Her assailants might well have bugged her home PC – something that was notoriously easy to do with spyware – but she didn’t think they’d have had the chance to doanything to