Free THE FIX: SAS hero turns Manchester hitman (A Rick Fuller Thriller Book 1) by Robert White Page A

front of the main house, the Rover burbling away and raising my spirits.
    I dropped down onto the pale pink gravel path and I was met at the door by Susan Davies. She eyed me suspiciously, I thought. It appeared she’d had a long night.
    “Morning, Susan,” I smiled.
    She smiled weakly. “Mr Colletti.”
    Despite her obvious troubles, she was absolutely stunning. Her hair was gelled, which had changed the auburn to a deep red. It was scraped back behind her ears, revealing the most exquisite sapphire droplet rings. Even their sparkle struggled to meet the blue in her eyes.
    She wore no make-up that I could detect, probably some mascara. I smelled the faintest trace of perfume as she turned. She cleared her throat of a trace of nervousness.
    “This way please, Stephen.”  
    She wore D & G jeans and her hips swayed from side to side in front of me as she walked. She sported a ribbed T-shirt advertising FCUK. Once again, she considered a bra unnecessary.
    I couldn’t lose the tingling sense that something just wasn’t right about the lady who seemed to make a career out of simply hanging around and looking good.
    As far as I could detect, Susan had been with Joel for two years or so. It was a whirlwind romance so to speak. I didn’t know how they had met but I did know that they had married within three months of meeting. She was all too perfect for a short hairy guy who sold drugs for a living. I made a mental note to find out more about Susan. I also convinced myself that it was purely for business reasons. 
    Susan walked me through to a study. It was a room in the cavernous house I had never had cause to visit. A monstrous desk, befitting the ego of Joel Davies, was centre stage. A computer monitor made the whole structure tall enough to hide Joel’s black curly head from view. Susan left without a sound. I found myself in the greenest room I had ever seen.
    I mean green too. Everything was fucking green. The leather Chesterfields, the desk tops, the flock wallpaper and every single book in the massive floor-to-ceiling cases. This man had a serious taste problem.
    Joel pulled himself from the monitor. He was deathly pale. It wasn’t illness. It was anger. I had only ever seen this mood once before and that had resulted in the untimely demise of Joel’s larcenist brothers. 
    He signalled me to sit and rooted in his desk drawer. After some cursing he bawled for Susan to bring him a cigar. Within seconds Susan appeared carrying a box of Cuban panatellas. Davies was brusque and businesslike as he selected a cigar from the open de-humidifier box and nipped off the end with a silver cutter. He waved her away with a flick of the wrist and Susan left immediately.
    I didn’t give a shit if they were the best cigars in the world, they still stank. They made him stink and worse still, made my Versace blazer stink.
    I was busy trying to recall if I’d worn the jacket before, when Joel spun around the computer monitor. The image on the screen was encrypted. State of the art encryption was about to be made available to the masses. The CIA, FBI and MI5 were horrified. They thought that criminals would misuse the system. MI5 and 6 had been misusing it for years. I knew.
    Joel bragged that he’d had access to the program for over a year. He hit a sixteen-character code and the screen turned from gibberish to text and pictures. I memorised the first eight numbers in his sequence. I also made a note to get the next eight as soon as possible.
    A very nice picture of an oceangoing cruiser, ‘The Landmark,’ had pride of place on the screen. Joel talked as he worked the keyboard.
    “I bought this baby from St Tropez, via the Net. It set me back two hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.”
    I recalled his heated mobile phone conversation on my previous visit was about a boat purchase. He took a long pull on the dreadful cigar and filled the area with smoke.
    He pointed at the screen.
    “Here are the details of the buy