The Contract Read Free Page B

whip onto the desk alongside her with a strange finality.
    "Get her taken down to Deuvar, now," he snapped as he turned on his heel. He glanced over his shoulder at Max Fielding. "I want to go over the details of Magenta's disappearance again." There was a significant pause before he spoke again. "We need to be ready -" he said.
     
    When the other two had left, Banyon surveyed the girl. She was terrified and in shock, and seemed to have passed out. He took her coat from the stand where she had hung it when she'd arrived, and draped it over her naked body. He pressed a button on the intercom on his desk and asked for the chief of security staff to come and collect a package – with strict instructions that it was to remain 'unopened' on Johnson's personal orders.
    When Emily was gone – unceremoniously bundled away like so much meat – he collected his coat and hat and left the office.
    Outside, the night had begun to darken rapidly; the sky held the promise of snow. Banyon kept to the shadows, pulling his collar up around his throat. He didn't want to be seen: he dare not use the office computer.
    Two blocks away in a public library he logged onto a public access computer and tapped in a message that he hoped would find its way to Peter Howard – if he was still alive…

Chapter 2
    Peter Howard had been unconscious for five weeks, although he did not realise that yet.
    When he did wake up it felt as if his head might just explode.
    As at last he opened his eyelids, a fraction at a time, they felt as though they were scouring his eyeballs. Every other muscle in his body must be joined to them, because they screamed out in complaint as he tried to focus. He wanted to lick his lips but his mouth and tongue were as dry as sawdust. Bright sunlight cut into his skull like a knife.
    A girl's face materialised above him; a pretty blonde with huge brown eyes, a nurse's cap added almost as an afterthought.
    She smiled.
    "So you're awake at last?" she whispered, in a gentle Scots brogue. "We knew you were coming to." His mouth was too coated and unwieldy to form the words. She laid a professional hand on his forehead. "Don't try and speak just yet. I'll go and get the doctor to come and take a wee peak at you, Mr Roberts."
    Peter Howard screwed up his face. Roberts… of course!… memory flooded his mind with images… he had been on the run, they had swopped passports…
    "My friend?"
    "Peter Howard you mean, Mr Roberts?"
    It sounded so strange. He nodded.
    "Dead," she said. "It was bad. Mr Howard was unrecognisable." There had only been the two of them and the pilot. They crashed almost on take-off, they had got nowhere…
    Her eyes were full of sympathy.
    "Where are my things?" he muttered.
    The girl smiled. "Everything that was brought in with you is safe and sound. Now you lie still while I go and get the doctor."
    Peter Howard let his eyes scrape shut, listening to the nurse's shoes pitter-pattering across the hard floor, and tried to get a grasp of what it was he remembered.
    Magenta!
    He shivered as fragmented vivid images came like staccato gunfire – the drone of the engines, a burst of ear shattering static, a loud bang, voices raised in terror, a burning, terrifying sensation of cold water seeping through his clothes, strange unearthly screams of metal on metal, lights, noise – and all the time knowing, at some dark unfathomable level, that whatever else happened, he had to survive and save Magenta…
     
    …he woke again, disorientated and sweating, and pressed the call bell. The little blonde nurse answered, smiling as she opened the door.
    "I should think you're hungry?" she said, helping him up to a sitting position. Peter nodded even though it was a lie.
    He couldn't help but notice the way her heavy breasts struggled against the thin fabric of her uniform. It didn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to visualise her naked. He breathed in her subtle perfume. He would tie her to the bed, watching those