Free Return Fire (Sam Archer ) by Tom Barber Page A

of the head hard before he could react.
    Dazed and groggy, he’d tried to fight back, but he’d been pinned down and injected with something, passing out moments later.
    He’d woken up this morning, duct-taped to a chair with a strip of tape over his mouth and a cloth bag over his head. He’d strained at the binds, trying to loosen them, but they were too tight and he’d soon given up realising it was hopeless, spending the rest of the day fighting to breathe inside the confines of the bag.
    Only one person had come into the house all day, and that was early this morning. Pulling the bag and gag off, the man had withdrawn Payan’s phone and ordered him to call his girlfriend and tell her he’d been out of town for the night but would see her later. The temptation to somehow use the opportunity to ask Mischa for help had been enormous, but the razor-sharp flick knife to his throat had persuaded him otherwise.
    After that brief conversation, the man had replaced the tape, put the bag back over Payan’s head and departed.
    No one else had entered the house all day.
    However, someone had arrived a minute or so ago. Payan had heard the lock being opened on the front entrance, a brief sound of cars on the street outside, then heard the sound of the front door being closed, followed shortly by footsteps walking into the room. Just seconds ago the bag over his head had been pulled off, his eyes burning from the sudden ligh t, but before they could adjust the suppressor to a silenced pistol was shoved into his mouth, the silencer grinding against his lips and teeth as it was rammed inside.
    As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw two men standing in front of him, neither of whom he’d ever seen before. The one holding the pistol was Middle Eastern and somewhere in his thirties; he was brown-skinned, his face a woven patchwork of scar tissue, the texture patchy and translucent from what looked like horrific burns. The man was dressed in cream-coloured khakis and a loose black shirt, the sleeves rolled up and revealing more of those disfiguring scars.
    Looking at his face, Payan saw dark rings under the man’s eyes, the cause of which looked to be a badly broken nose. He had a strip of tape over the top and it was swollen and bruised. The guy stared down at Payan impassively, his knuckles tight around the grip of the pistol.
    Beside him, his companion didn’t have the same burn scars or broken nose but he looked just as tough and uncompromising; he was blond and stocky, dressed in a dark shirt and khakis with a pistol in a holster on his hip. Wearing a thin set of latex gloves, he was sitting on a chair just to the side of Payan and was dialling a number into the landline beside them. He also had his sleeves rolled up in response to the early evening heat, revealing thick tanned forearms ridged with muscle and criss-crossed with a variety of scars.
    His heart racing and struggling to breathe around the suppressor, Payan watched the blond man finish dialling a number. The guy then pushed the loudspeaker button and held up a piece of paper with instructions written on the sheet, pointing at it and looking straight into Payan’s eyes.
    ‘When they answer, you say this,’ the man said, his accent South African and gravelly. ‘One wrong word, you die, my friend.’
    The man with the burn scars and broken nose pulled back the hammer on the pistol to emphasise the point, and Payan’s eyes widened in terror. As the call connected, the man kept the pistol where it was then pulled it out, Payan immediately taking deep lungfuls of air.
    The Middle Eastern guy then held the silencer an inch from the terrified Slovakian’s face, pushing the suppressor into his forehead.
    ‘One wrong word,’ he repeated, echoing his partner’s warning as Payan looked at the sheet of paper in the South African’s hand.
     
    At the ARU HQ, the group was still gathered in Operations and watching the news feed when the phone on Nikki’s desk