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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Adrian Magson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Adrian Magson

  The Marc Portman Thrillers

  THE WATCHMAN *

  CLOSE QUARTERS *

  HARD COVER *

  The Harry Tate Thrillers

  RED STATION *

  TRACERS *

  DECEPTION *

  RETRIBUTION *

  EXECUTION *

  The Riley Gavin and Frank Palmer Series

  NO PEACE FOR THE WICKED

  NO HELP FOR THE DYING

  NO SLEEP FOR THE DEAD

  NO TEARS FOR THE LOST

  NO KISS FOR THE DEVIL

  * available from Severn House

  HARD COVER

  A Marc Portman Thriller

  Adrian Magson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2016 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Adrian Magson.

  The right of Adrian Magson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the Biritsh Library

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8607-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-710-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-771-4 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Ann, who in between everything else,

  finds the time to make this stuff better

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With grateful thanks to Geoff Weighell, all-round pilot and CEO of the British Microlight Aircraft Association, for his helpful advice and information. Any perceived errors are mine alone and/or a case of creative licence on my part.

  Thanks also to KM and EB; two people I never thanked enough for what they did.

  ONE

  Ciudad Madero – Gulf Coast of Mexico

  Competence. It’s a sure-fire way to get yourself noticed by a suspicious security professional.

  Most people on the street look unassuming, engrossed in their own brand of the everyday. They don’t have what’s called ‘presence’ – at least not the threatening kind. Many professionals on the other hand, if they’re not mindful, look anything but. Something in their training and motivation gives them an indefinable aura that sets them apart from those around them.

  To a watchful eye, it’s the heads-up, can-do attitude that spells potential trouble. Like a wolf in a woolly coat, it might look like a sheep and smell like a sheep; but if it walks like something hairy, it’s time to take a closer look.

  Which was why I was shuffling along with my head down, hiding beneath a grubby two-sizes-up faded and beat-up camo jacket and hood with make-do patches on the elbows. I was stopping every now and then to change hands with the box I was carrying, an old television carton which looked a lot heavier than it actually was. But that was part of the plan. Looking vulnerable, which I did by stopping every few yards and flexing my fingers, means you don’t appear to be a threat.

  The man standing outside the gates of the workshop yard didn’t look the sympathetic type. The bulge under his coat told me and anybody who cared to look that he was armed, and he worked hard on living the image; he was big and shaven-headed, and sneered every time I stopped. When he spat on the ground and it landed too close to my foot to be an accident, I figured it was his way of passing the time and intimidating people he didn’t like the look of.

  Sophisticated.

  I dropped my shoulders and wrapped a piece of my sleeve around my hand, then grabbed the string again and went to shuffle past him. By then he’d lost interest and turned his head to check the street the other way.

  Big mistake.

  Just before I drew level with him I pushed my fist through a slit in the cardboard and pulled out a piece of four-by-two hardwood timber I’d found in a dumpster back down the street. It was eighteen inches long and had a nicely balanced feel to it, although I doubt the guard would have agreed. Wh
en I swung it at the back of his head he went down and out without a sound.

  I dragged him off the street and through the pedestrian door set in one of the gates, and rolled him behind an old car body that was slowly rotting into the ground. I slapped a length of heavy tape across his mouth and did the same on his wrists and ankles, and just for luck used a further length to secure both ankles and wrists together so he couldn’t kick out when he woke up.

  Inside his coat I found a Czech-made Browning semi- automatic in a nylon holster. It was a nice piece but hadn’t been cleaned in a while. In his side pocket was an unopened packet of condoms and a fat silencer the size of a small beer bottle. It looked professionally made but unbranded. It didn’t smell used, so I figured he probably got it out when he wanted to impress the ladies, with the condoms on stand-by in case he got lucky.

  I stripped out the magazine and tossed it out of sight behind the car, and threw the gun through the window into the rotting interior. I pocketed the silencer and went back outside for the box. I’d already scanned for cameras on an earlier pass when a couple of cars had driven through the gates, and it had given me a brief glimpse inside before the guard had slammed them shut. I hadn’t spotted any obvious lenses, but that meant the place I was about to hit was either innocent of any wrongdoing or the owners didn’t feel the need because they had a tight control on the entire area.

  I figured the second option.

  I dropped the box out of sight inside the gates and closed the pedestrian door behind me. I took a semi-automatic out of my coat pocket and tried the silencer for size. It had a rubber insert which fitted tightly around the barrel, and the silencer was probably good for one-time use only. But since I wasn’t planning on starting a long shooting war, it would do fine.

  The building had once been a metal workshop, evidenced by a rack of rusting metal sheets at the back of the yard and the remains of an overhead pulley system for hauling heavy loads through a set of sliding doors at the front. These were shut tight with a heavy coating of grime over the inspection glass set in one side. There were no windows overlooking the yard, although I figured there had to be an office of some kind on the first floor – a further indication that the people here didn’t concern themselves with snap inspections by the local police or on anybody else busting in uninvited.

  It told me everything I needed to know about them and this part of the city.

  A set of metal stairs in one corner led up to the first floor and a walkway running out of sight on the side of the building. It would be the obvious way in but I gave it a miss. In old buildings the vibration set up on metal stairs the moment you step on them is a clear give-away.

  Instead I walked down the side of the building, stepping past a pile of twisted metal and ancient car parts, following a concrete path that looked like it had been recently swept of rubbish.

  I came to a window and ducked beneath it. A conversation was going on inside, but it was just a rumble of voices and I couldn’t understand the words enough to follow the subject. I counted three different speakers, all male. One of them sounded pissed off and kept interrupting the others, who shut up the moment he began speaking. He was either the boss man or the biggest and meanest; it didn’t make much difference to me.

  I crept along to the rear of the building and found another door and a path leading to an outside toilet. It smelled awful and hadn’t been cleaned in years. No surprise there.

  I turned back and tried the door handle. It felt smooth and well-used, and moved without a sound.

  The door opened outwards, and brought with it a smell of mould, damp and oil – and cigarette smoke. I slipped inside and found myself in a tiny lobby with a wooden door facing me. A flight of concrete stairs to one side led up to the first floor.

  The voices were coming from the other side of the door.

  I took the stairs on my toes, careful to avoid a layer of grit where the plaster had crumbled off the rotting walls, and reached a single door on a small landing. It was open a crack and I edged it back until I could see inside.

  The room had once been an office. All it held now was an armchair, a wooden table and a camp-style bed. The air seeping out from inside smelled of stale bodies, ditto food and quiet desperation.

  The armchair was currently filled with a reclining twin of the gate guard downstairs, dressed in creased pants and a filthy shirt. He had a three-day growth of beard and a big gut and was snoring softly, and sporting a pistol on his chest with one hand resting on the butt.

  The bed held the slim form of a teenage girl, her hands tied with rope. Her name was Katarina, and she was the thirteen-year-old daughter of local federal judge Antonio da Costa. Just weeks before, the judge had declared war on the cartels in the region and vowed to bring them to justice for their murderous, racketeering activities.

  Kidnapping Katarina had undoubtedly been intended to ensure that particular war got stopped in its tracks. The message was simple: Judge da Costa either pulled his head in or he never saw his daughter alive again. The tactic had worked before in other parts of Mexico, and the kidnappers were probably counting on a satisfactory repeat outcome.

  The grim truth, however, was that the judge would probably never see his daughter again, whatever he did. The cartels didn’t take prisoners for fun and rarely returned them even when they’d got what they wanted. To them, violence of a kind that would have made I S look almost restrained was the only thing that mattered, and they performed it with chainsaws, just so everybody got the message.

  I’d been called in on this job by a local security contractor working for da Costa. He’d quickly found he and his colleagues were too well-known, so he needed an outsider. He told me that the kidnap gang had been identified as a small spin-off cell from the Los Zetas cartel centred on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Formed after the arrest of the cartel leader, Alejandro Morales, or ‘Z-42’ as he was known, this particular cell was taking a huge risk, not least from the Los Zetas, who were still a ruthless force throughout the country, but from the northern-based Sinaloa Federation who were looking for a way of taking over the Los Zetas business and would deal ruthlessly with any competition.

  The security firm had discovered through a local mouthpiece that Katarina was being held on a little-used industrial area on the south-eastern edge of Ciudad Madero, where the sprawl of low-cost housing began to leech into the surrounding hills. The infrastructure here was poor and the area almost abandoned by the local politicians, and the only people remaining on the industrial site, which was gradually being cleared by heavy-handed developers, were a few die-hard businesses and homeless families with nowhere else to go. It made a police or army raid virtually impossible to carry out successfully as these hangers-on had no choice but to do the bidding of the cartel.

  Thus it had to be a one-man mission and pray for good luck.

  Katarina looked okay to me. It was hard to tell, but her clothes were still clean and she didn’t look in pain, so I was guessing the men hadn’t touched her. What her state of mind might be was a different thing altogether. Right now, though, she was looking straight at me, eyes bulging imploringly over the gag that had been stuffed into her mouth and secured by wire looped around her head and cutting into her cheeks.

  I held a finger to my lips and signalled for her to turn her head away. If the guard woke up and saw her face, he’d know instantly what was about to happen. I also didn’t want her to see what would go down if things went wrong.

  I checked the wooden floor in front of me; it was bad news. The planks looked thin and unstable, warped by time, heat and decay. The moment I stepped through the door, unless the men downstairs figured it was Mr Sleepy up and about, I’d be on a twenty-second countdown to get the girl off the bed and out of here.

  And our only way out was back down the stairs.

  TWO

  The rumble of voices was still going on, with the main man still holding forth. I had no idea what they were discussing but it had to be what they were plannin
g to do with the money. There had been a ransom demand of $3 million, along with the judge’s promised silence against the cartels, but that was pretty much standard; in the end, unless the judge openly gave up his daughter’s life for the sake of his job, they’d get what they wanted.

  Getting the girl back in one piece still wouldn’t happen.

  That was why I’d been called in; the judge knew perfectly well the kind of people he was dealing with, and whatever their demands he was well aware of the likely outcome. His daughter would be found, like so many previous kidnap victims, in a storm drain somewhere, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

  I took a deep breath. These men were highly dangerous and would be ready to start shooting at the slightest provocation. If the ones downstairs realized I was up here, they wouldn’t bother coming up to find me first; they’d start shooting through the floor.

  I stepped carefully across to the man in the armchair, testing the boards for give. As I did so he stirred, alerted by a sixth sense to danger. He came up out of the chair in a rush, lifting the gun off his chest towards the girl on the bed, and I knew his instructions had been simple: at the first signs of a rescue attempt, waste the hostage.