Free Terror's Reach by Tom Bale Page A

drank a pint of water before
sitting down at the island breakfast bar.
The tiny laptop contained the fruits of their extensive research,
including floor plans for all the homes on the island and detailed profiles
of the residents. Studying these documents had become almost a ritual
to Liam, but now the reassurance they offered had been compromised.
If they hadn’t picked up on the estate agent using Dreamscape as a
love nest, was it possible that other important details had been missed?
Liam instantly stamped on that question. There was no room for
doubt at this stage of the operation.
He ran through the targets again. Five homes, hugging the coast
on the south-western corner of the island. The house at the most
southerly point, furthest from the mainland, was a chalet bungalow
belonging to Donald and Angela Weaver.
Donald was a retired civil servant, while Angela had been a university
lecturer and now did some kind of voluntary work. Their only
son, Joe, had died in a car accident in 2007, aged twenty-eight. The
Weavers weren’t particularly high-net-worth individuals: it was their
location that made them important. They were too close to the action
to be left alone.
The house next to the Weavers belonged to Robert Felton, the real
financial heavyweight on Terror’s Reach. After a period in the army
that included a secondment to the Ministry of Defence, Robert had
joined his father’s munitions company in the mid-1990s, bringing to
it the vigour and ruthlessness of youth, not to mention any number
of important connections. Within a few years profits had risen tenfold,
and the Feltons sold their controlling interest to an American conglomerate – just as concerns were being raised about their deals to supply
landmines, grenades and assault rifles to various dubious regimes in
Africa and the Middle East.
While Felton senior retired to play golf and count his money,
Robert concentrated on other areas of the business, most notably
winning a string of lucrative contracts for security and reconstruction
in post-invasion Iraq. He invested some of the proceeds in an
underperforming chain of sports shops and again worked his magic,
selling it on to a private-equity company for three times what he’d
paid.
With a personal fortune rumoured at well over a billion pounds,
Felton had designed and overseen the construction of the house at
Terror’s Reach, a monstrous Gothic pile with eight bedrooms, a squash
court and – crucially – a walk-in safe.
A long-time widower, Felton had acquired the image of an
unabashed thrill-seeker and playboy of the old school. This weekend
he was at his apartment in Monaco, where he could best indulge his
passion for girls and gambling, safe from the disapproving scrutiny of
his two children. Although they were in their early twenties, neither
Rachel nor Oliver Felton had yet shown much desire to make their
own way in the world. Rachel was currently taking a photography
course in New York, while Oliver was spending the weekend with
friends of his father in Oxfordshire.
The third house was Dreamscape, the base for their operation, also
owned and designed by Robert Felton. Built on a scale that dwarfed
every other property on the island, its completion had coincided with
the first signs of a downturn in the property market. For a time it had
been rented by an ageing rock star, seeking refuge while he recovered
from an addiction to prescription painkillers. Since his departure the
house had remained furnished but unoccupied, while Felton sought
a buyer to take it off his hands.
Next to Dreamscape was a more conventional faux-Georgian
mansion, owned by a high-profile Premiership striker whose ex-model
wife, Trina, had boosted their fortunes by putting her name to a range
of swimwear, a fitness regime and three volumes of autobiography.
With the footballer on loan to an Italian club, the whole family had
decamped to Rome, leaving Trina’s father, a retired builder named
Terry Fox, to house-sit in their