Chapter 72
Jones was slowly coming round and began to remember what had happened, surely it was a dream. He tried to move his hands but couldn’t. It wasn’t a dream. He remembered getting the call to warn him it would be a least another two hours before the decision and he had wandered out on to the deck.
No sooner had he stepped outside, when he heard a noise in the cabin and had gone back in to see the girl fighting four of his men. He had never seen anything like it. She was tiny but had already incapacitated two men and he saw her almost decapitate another with a kick as ferocious as he had ever seen. She hadn’t even completed her follow-through kick before throwing a punch into the fourth man’s chin which had lifted him clean off the floor and into the cabin wall.
Jones was paralysed, not by fear but by awe. The rest of his team, on hearing the commotion, ran into the cabin. They looked at the chaos and looked for who had caused it, the only person in the room was the young girl. Jones remembered the sweet smile she threw his men, as if completely innocent.
The fifth man moved towards her, reaching his arm out to take hold of her. She let him grab her, and moved so quickly Jones didn’t even see what she did but he heard the arm break and saw the blood spray from the man’s nose before he dropped to the floor. The other men hadn’t even had time to react before another two were knocked unconscious, one receiving a high-kick, the other a bone crunching punch to the nose. Both dropped to the floor to join their unconscious colleagues.
The final two saw Jones standing by the cabin door. They looked at him and he gave them a nod, go for it. They moved together both throwing vicious punches but Jones could see that Lela was playing with them. She moved faster than he thought possible. She avoided the first man’s punch and delivered a tremendously powerful kick to the other man’s abdomen while reverting to the first with a perfect uppercut and laying him flat. Jones couldn’t help applaud her. Nine of his men lay immobile on the cabin floor and she hadn’t even broken sweat nor had they come close to touching her. He asked how she’d learnt to do what she did but she was very tight lipped about how it. When he drew his knife, she warned him that knives made her angry. If he put the knife away, she would be gentle with him. He didn’t, the last thing he remembered was laughing at her and then pain, then nothing until then.
He looked around the cabin. All his men were still alive. Most were beginning to come round but they were all tied up and gagged. His pain was intense. His right hand would never be the same again, it hung limply from his wrist. He really should have dropped the knife. His knee was also gone. He remembered now. One second she was on the other side of the cabin. He went to throw the knife but before he had even had a chance to let it go, she was next to him, had his knife hand gripped like a vice and wrenched it back. The bone had shattered at the same time as she had crashed her foot into his knee snapping it cleanly in two. And as his useless hand dropped the knife, she uttered the words ‘I don’t like knives’. The next thing he remembered was a flash of light as she shattered his nose with the back of her fist. The lights, mercifully, went out.
Jones heard people coming. From the floor of the cabin, he could see the top of sail masts through the porthole. She must have sailed them back into The Academy’s marina. He could not allow his men to be tortured, if they talked, too much was as stake. He looked around, others had also realised what needed to be done. The unconscious men were nudged until they came around. When every man was conscious, on the count of three, they bit down hard on a small cyanide canister concealed in their mouths to ensure a very quick death.
“They’re in here,” said Lela. “I’ve got them all tied up nicely,” she announced as she stepped onto the boat. Papa grabbed her, he could smell death. He went in ahead of her and his suspicion was confirmed.
“They’re all dead, by the looks of it, cyanide,” he announced when he came back out.
“Oh God, I killed them all, ten men!” exclaimed Lela.
“No, they took cyanide capsules, they killed themselves,” assured Papa.
“What are we up against?” asked Kisho. “This is getting scary now.”
“Getting scary?” asked Tom. “Where the hell have you been for the last month!”
“OK, we’ve got their phone and we know about Operations Sandy and David and that Sandy is before David,” said Lela changing the subject. She wanted to get off the boat and go back to her room.
“But it could be anything. Sandy and David are probably just code words for their operations. You’ll probably find every one of them had a first name designation.”
“So I risked life and limb for nothing?”
Tom looked back to the boat, he wondered whose life and limbs she had really risked but with ten bodies behind him he thought better of asking.
McDonald, Murray
Assassin (The Billionaire Series)
Chapter 73
What the hell could Beaumont do now? The Chairman was going to kill him. He couldn’t run, there was nowhere on the planet he could hide, nowhere. How could it have gone so badly wrong? They had Lela, everything had gone perfectly and then wham, she was there. It just wasn’t conceivable, it was impossible. He only hoped that Jones had done the right thing. He didn’t know enough to expose The Committee but he knew too much about the Committee’s army. The men were very well paid and there was an expectation that they were capable of the ultimate sacrifice if they risked exposing their unit or their colleagues.
He still had another twenty four hours to try and pull something out of the bag. The Chairman didn’t need to know yet. Beaumont knew that the hole he was in was very deep and its sides very slippery.
Williams had his men in place, he was delighted with the promotion to number one spot in the Committee’s army. He now worked directly for the boss and had no intention of letting The Chairman down. It was a fairly simple operation, only two targets and from their first reconnaissance, fairly light security.
Williams looked around again, acting like a tourist, soaking in the scenery and his surroundings. It really was a beautiful spot, perfect beach, beautiful hotel and the most spectacular yachts anchored just offshore. One yacht in particular had caught his eye, Williams had never seen a yacht so aptly named, she really was a Beautiful Lady.
Chapter 74
Kisho and Kano took the boat out to sea and after searching them, dumped the bodies. Unsurprisingly they didn’t find anything, every man was clean. Tattoos had been removed or covered over, teeth had been removed and replaced with caps, fingerprints removed by acid. It was as though the men did not exist and as far as Papa was concerned, they didn’t anymore. Afterall, these were the men who had intended to kill his beloved Lela.
Tom and Lela eventually went to bed at 4.30 a.m. and decided an extra hour in bed was probably deserved. Unfortunately, they didn’t tell anybody else and both woke up to their doors being thumped by Tristan, checking they were OK and explaining that they were waiting for them to start the meeting. They quickly got dressed and rushed down to Conference Room One.
The group sat in complete silence as the events of earlier that morning were explained. Even after they had finished. nobody had a clue what to say. This wasn’t something happening to other people, this was now at their school. Ten men had killed themselves to keep their identity from them. These were not two-bit mercenaries, these were highly motivated operatives.
“Sandy and David,” mulled Daniel. “I’ll get my guys on it and see if they can come up with anything. I doubt it though, using first names is very clever. They’ll be spoken millions of times every second all over the world and
