The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

evening Christmas shoppers, tinsel flashing in shop windows, Christmas lights tinting the faces of passers-by. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window. A pale, frightened face staring back from the glass. She focused beyond the reflection. An ice-cream parlour. And she shivered. A little girl holding her Daddy’s hand as he bought her a two-flavour cone, her face alight with pleasure, her father’s smile of fond indulgence. Ice cream at Christmas. Moments Lisa had never known. She caught her reflection again and looked quickly away.

Now or never.

The cobbled mews lane was deserted, feeble pools of yellow light falling from old-fashioned coach lamps mounted on each cottage wall. One or two lights shone in upper windows. A red Porsche stood parked on her left as she entered through an archway. You needed money to own a mews house here.

Number twenty-three had a lacquered, oak-panelled door. There was no name plate, no light in the upper windows. She pressed the buzzer and heard it sound faintly within. She waited, but already she knew the house was empty. She tried again, an automatic response, and stepped back to look up. The darkness in the windows mirrored her despair. She turned away.

A net curtain flickered at an upper window as her footsteps receded down the mews.

‘She’s gone. Probably some woman he’s been two-timing.’ The man turned away from the window as his companion again turned on the flashlight and quickly completed the wiring Lisa’s arrival had interrupted. He lifted the top casing of the telephone answering machine and slipped it carefully back in place, dexterously tightening the screws at all four corners.

‘That’s it,’ he said, and placed each of the specialist tools of his trade into the pockets of a folding canvas carrier which he rolled up and dropped into a soft leather holdall. He switched off the flashlight. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

The other man lifted the holdall and patted the answering machine gently with his gloved hand. He grinned. ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Elliot.’

CHAPTER NINE

Elliot looked down as his plane circled before coming in to land at Bangkok’s Don Muang international airport. Below, the paddy fields caught and reflected the light of the moon, hundreds of silver-paper shapes arranged in random geometric patterns. The airport was crowded and hot. A sticky heat you could almost touch. It came as a shock after the hours of incarceration in the air-conditioned fuselage of the aircraft that had left London shivering at minus ten. Elliot felt his clothes go limp. He had a long, irritating wait to clear customs and immigration, Thai officers inspecting him with inscrutable dark eyes. Slattery was waiting for him at the international arrivals gate in a short-sleeved, sweat-stained shirt.

‘Hey, chief!’ His big hand grasped Elliot’s. Elliot had a great affection for this voluble Aussie, and a great respect too. As a soldier of fortune in the early days of the war in Nam he had adapted quickly and easily to the guerrilla tactics of the VC, realizing long before the Americans that this would be no conventional war for conventional soldiers.

Elliot grinned. ‘How are you, you ugly bastard?’

‘Getting uglier.’ Slattery pulled playfully at Elliot’s scarred cheek. ‘And you get prettier every time I see you.’

He was a man of indeterminate years, though probably in his early forties. His coarse blonde hair had been crew-cut to little more than a stubble. He was short, about five-nine, but broad-built, stocky, with enormous strength and stamina. He had a striking face, squat and ugly, made almost remarkable by the pale grey of his eyes. His deep tan was ruddy rather than brown, his eyebrows bleached nearly white by the unrelenting Australian sun. But Elliot’s first impression was that he had lost weight.

Slattery drove the battered Peugeot hire car with a deceptive carelessness, smoking constantly, one hand on the wheel, dodging in and out of the traffic, cursing other drivers. He talked incessantly. ‘There I was, all set to spend the summer on the beach, a couple of girls lined up. You know, the kind who know how to amuse themselves when I’m not in the mood. House rented right on the surf, king-sized bed for three, the works. And then I get your call. Jesus! There goes my summer. And there go the girls. So then I think, okay, a bit of R and R in Bangkok. Can’t be bad. How long we got before we hit the shit?’

‘A week to ten days.’ Elliot had listened to all this in brooding silence.

‘Jeez! Time enough to catch the clap and take a cure.’ Slattery laughed too loudly. ‘What’s the agenda?’

‘I want to see your man, McCue.’

‘Sure. Tomorrow do?’

‘Now.’

‘Aw, hey, chief. The night’s young, and so are the women. I thought we’d break a bit of sweat our first night.’

‘I want to see him tonight.’ Elliot spoke quietly. Slattery glanced at him.

‘Something bugging you, chief?’

Elliot said, ‘I don’t rate our chances on this trip at better than fifty-fifty. I want you and the Yank to be under no illusions. If either of you are going to pull out I want it to be tonight. I’ll need time to recruit another team. And I want to see this guy for myself before I give him the green light.’

Slattery nodded and felt a tightening across his chest. He had calculated the odds differently, had known from the first that this outing would be his last. A quick death in action, adrenalin pumping. It was preferable to the lingering death sentence passed on him by the young doctor. ‘A wee touch of cancer,’ Slattery had joked. But the doctor had not smiled. He had been as cold and clinical as the tiles in his surgery.

‘You have six months to a year, Mr Slattery, if you respond to treatment.’

‘Fuck the treatment,’ Slattery had told him.

Elliot’s call had come like a beacon in the darkness. The prospect of a summer on the beach had loomed like a shroud waiting slowly to descend. There had been no girls,