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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

  “Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times

  “Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —GQ

  “While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail

  “Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —The Scotsman

  “Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness

  “A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Books on Heat

  “Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig

  “A full throttle adventure thriller.” —The Guardian on Mambo

  “A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka

  Silencer

  Campbell Armstrong

  This novel went through the careful editorial hands of the following people: Marianne Velmans, Alison Tulett, Leda DeForge and my wife Rebecca. I’m deeply grateful for their counsel and advice.

  1

  At an intersection in the middle of nowhere a stop sign appears in the headlights, and Reuben Galindez thinks, OK, this is heebie-jeebies time, I had enough, and he opens the passenger door and steps out onto the narrow blacktop.

  ‘What the fuck?’ the bearded guy at the wheel says.

  ‘I changed my mind,’ Galindez says.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I been thinking. I ain’t stacking groceries in some supermarket in Scranton or whatever you got in mind. I don’t need that shit.’

  The guy on the back seat, the guy with silver-yellow sideburns, leans forward and says, ‘Let me remind you, Reuben. You signed on the dotted line. This ain’t something where you got the option of changing your mind and strolling the hell away.’

  ‘Watch me,’ Galindez says and he slams the door and begins to walk down the blacktop, thinking he’ll hitch a ride as soon as a vehicle comes along this lonely road, which may take some time out here, granted, but no way is he going back inside the van with the tinted windows. No way is he stacking shelves or installing cable TV in Queens or anything like that. Four weeks he’s been locked up in the safe house in Phoenix, climbing walls. Closing his eyes nights and seeing the flowery pattern of wallpaper behind his lids. Trapping cockroaches in beer bottles and suffocating the fuckers just for the sport. Watching TV, spinning through the channels until you’re brain-dead. Four draggy weeks waiting for ‘arrangements’ to be made, and that’s enough. Imagine living the rest of your life restricted. It ain’t for me, thanks all the same.

  ‘Reuben!’

  Galindez looks back. The guy with the beard is outside the van now. ‘You made a deal, Reuben. You can’t just walk.’

  Galindez calls back. ‘Whatcha gonna do? Sue me?’ He laughs, eh-eh-eh, turns and keeps on walking, the darkness of trees pressing in on him from either side of the road. This is the sticks, he thinks, but he couldn’t hack sitting in that van a second longer, had to get out. His patience was stretched to breaking point and a voice he associates with the willies was rising inside his head.

  ‘Reuben! Get your fat ass back here!’

  Galindez glances round again. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’

  ‘This ain’t smart, Reuben.’

  Galindez pays no attention. It’s a free country. You’re at liberty to change your mind. OK, he signed some documents, so what? You scribble your john hancock on a few papers, that means chickenshit to him.

  He’s 50 yards from the van and the bearded guy is still calling. ‘Hey! Reuben! This is a real dumb fuck thing you’re doing!’

  Just keep walking, Galindez thinks. Keep cruising. Sooner or later they’re gonna get tired shouting and they’ll drive away, and then somebody’s gonna come along and you’ll hitch back to civilization. Happy days.

  ‘Reuben!’

  Galindez hears a faint breeze whisper in the trees. He doesn’t look round. Screw them. Screw their documents and their promises, you got a life all your own to live.

  The sound of gunfire freezes him. A single crack gouges the blacktop near his feet, and suddenly the night’s filled with birds panicked out of trees and some scared furry four-legged thing dashes in front of him. He turns his face and there’s a second shot that whizzes somewhere to his right and it’s like the darkness is punctured and leaking air, and his heart is hot and thudding. This is some kinda joke, he thinks. But he’s stunned and confused by the fact of gunfire because by rights – by rights – he ought to be able to stroll away, if that’s what he wants to do, and fuck the agreement, which was only paper anyhow. And these guys – they shouldn’t be shooting at him.

  ‘Just walk back, Reuben,’ the bearded guy shouts.

  Galindez doesn’t move. Walk back, he thinks. Yeah, right. Walk back to what exactly?

  Another shot and the air around him fractures, and this time Galindez blinks at the flash of light and thinks, I’ve been hit. Dreamtime. Except it’s no dream, it’s no little carnival of the mind, because there’s a pain in his arm and he feels blood against his skin. Jesus fucking Christ, he thinks. I’m shot. It ain’t supposed to be this way. The world’s all upside down and I’m bleeding.

  ‘The next one goes in the brainbox, Reuben!’

  They’re going to kill you, Galindez thinks, and it’s like a light going on inside the open refrigerator of his head. They’re going to murder you just because you don’t want to be a member of their goddam club. You did them a good turn, you paid your dues, but now you want out – only they won’t let you. You’re in, the door’s bolted, and that’s that.

  Fuck them! Fuck Scranton, Queens, wherever!

  Under a moon fogged by cloud, he suddenly runs down among the trees, crashing between trunks and overhanging branches, and there’s blood streaming down his arm but this is no time to think Band Aid. This is a time for running and running and if you bleed, you bleed, and so what.

  He’s overweight and his flabby pecs bounce and his lungs don’t know what to do with all this clean, up-country air. He’s a city guy and a chain-smoker, but these are minor inconveniences, because the only goddam thing that matters is getting away. He hears a small voice inside his head urgently repeating the phrase, Chug, chug, keep going. Down through the trees and don’t stop.

  Branches whip at his body and exposed roots curl raggedly underfoot and a few more spooked birds flap blackly on huge wings out of nowhere. But chug chug, you keep going.

  Thinking, It ain’t supposed to be like this.

  His head’s like an overheated radiator. Gotta stop a moment. Gasping for air, sweating, he leans against a tree, face down. He’s wheezing like a busted accordion. Gotta move. Gotta keep moving.

  ‘Hey, Galindez!’

  The voice is what, 20, 30 yards away? Too close.

  Then there’s the second guy’s voice. ‘This is plain stupid, asshole!’

  Thirty yards. You can’t gauge distances in these woods, not after a lifetime spent measuring everything in terms of city blocks. Go three blocks west, two blocks north. But here it’s different, no stars and the moon shrouded in the sky.

  Galindez pushes himself away from the tree. Chug chug. Running. Arm going numb. For all he knows he could be chasing round in circles, clattering thro
ugh fern and undergrowth and getting nowhere. And there’s a funny taste in his mouth – which is fear. Bone-dry, metallic, like powdered rust in his throat.

  And then next thing there’s a flashlight scanning the trees and he ducks his head low, but his yellow silk shirt might as well be a beacon out here in the woods. He hears a gunshot and it echoes – boomoomoom – and he drops down on all fours and crawls through fern and fallen branches.

  Another sound reaches him. Water. Fast-flowing. So, there’s a river nearby and he thinks, If I can reach it I can float away. Downstream and outta sight.

  The beam of the flashlight illuminates branches all around him. He hears the two guys clumping towards him, twigs snapping.

  Galindez crawls towards the sound of the water. Sharp things snag his shirt and lacerate his body.

  The flashlight is 10 yards from where he’s crawling. He tries to make himself smaller, hunches his body, hauls in the band of blubber and just concentrates on believing he’s a whippet of a guy who’s in a hurry to reach the water. He also tries to divert himself with pleasing thoughts: playing the slots at the casino on the Gila Reservation, screwing some plump, nut-brown Indian chick in a trailer smelling of joss-sticks and maybe a little reefer.

  Who’s he kidding? This is life and death. This is all about survival.

  Gunfire again. It blasts through the trees with a noise like a nuclear weapon, and there’s a sizzle of red-hot light on the edge of his vision. The water. Get to the goddam water. Submerge yourself and hold your breath and let the currents sweep you away from these armed maniacs behind you.

  Suddenly holy shit! – no more trees.

  Suddenly a smooth pebbled shore and a suggestion of white water frothing through the darkness.

  Big Problem. He’s exposed now and the yellow shirt’s like a goddam distress rocket. He pads over the slick pebbles, grunting, scrambling. Get to the water, the goddam water.

  He crawls to the edge of the river and eases himself into the chill current, but the water’s only 18 inches deep and he finds himself half in, half out of the river, and oh Jesus the flashlight is right on his face like a malevolent eye, and he’s blinded and electric pings of panic vibrate through him.

  ‘I spy with my little eye,’ one of the guys says in a singsong voice. ‘Somebody beginning with R.’

  Galindez takes a few jittery steps back, the bank dips abruptly about 2 feet, and just as he’s about to draw himself under the surface a gun goes off again with the sound of a thunderclap.

  And Reuben – who thinks he sees the cylinder of a slot-machine revolve in front of his eyes and all the jackpot cherries appear simultaneously in the magic window – cries out, falls and slips away, turning over and over in relentless currents, leaving a spiralling trail of blood in the white wake of the river.

  2

  Amanda had been fishing since daybreak with no luck, trying to keep in mind what Rhees had told her about patience. You learn how to wait, he’d said. Remember, you’re under no pressure.

  Rhees lay on the bank with his eyes shut, raising a lazy hand now and again to brush aside a fly. A man in repose. A man on first-name terms with patience. Amanda studied her line in the water, concentrating on the little red plastic float that shivered on the surface. She was coming to the conclusion that either there were no fish in this river or else they were cunning little jokers who knew a trick or two about survival.

  She looked up at the cloudless blue sky. Heat was beginning to build, the sun climbing above the trees. On the opposite bank of the river sandstone already shimmered. She nudged Rhees, who opened his eyes.

  ‘Maybe they’ve all migrated,’ she said.

  Rhees said, ‘It’s not the catching that counts, Amanda.’

  ‘Tell me it’s the waiting.’

  ‘The waiting’s part of it, sure. But there are other factors: how to contain a sense of expectation, an ability to be alone with your own thoughts.’

  ‘It’s a whole fishing philosophy,’ she remarked. ‘I bet it’s called pisceology or something like that.’

  Rhees smiled at her. ‘This is more to do with self than landing a fish.’

  ‘Do you charge by the hour?’ she asked.

  ‘Just watch the float.’

  ‘I haven’t taken my eyes off the float. My whole life is centred around the goddam float. I’ll dream floats tonight.’

  ‘Think about this as part of a simple healing process, if that helps.’

  A healing process. A life lived away from all the old stresses. No pressure, Rhees had said. She returned her eyes to her line and watched how it rippled in the movement of water. She envied Rhees’s ability to drift into contented torpor. He could switch off his engine any time he liked.

  She lit a cigarette. A bad habit, one she wished she could abandon, but you didn’t win all your victories at once. It was a sequence of steps, and being up here in the deep isolation of the forest was just one of them. Being here on this granulated riverbank, staring at the float, trying to think of nothing, seeking, as Rhees might have said, an inner zone of quiet, a place where you might find all the hairline cracks in your psyche fixed.

  She felt him touch the nape of her neck. Her hair, pinned back and held by a black clasp, was brown, flecked with touches of red. Wisps of it always strayed from her head. She had problems with hair management, and she knew Rhees found this disarray touching. He was in love with her flaws. There was a sweet easy flow to life with him. Six years along the road and she could barely remember past lovers except for the weird coincidence that at least three of them had been named Robert, and they all wanted to be called Bob. Plain old Bob.

  Even their faces were spectral in recollection. If she considered them at all, she could recall only a sickly medley of deodorants and skin oils. Funny, her past love life reduced to a distillation of odours from bottles and spray-cans, and no memory of any one lover who transported her to a place where comets crashed through the skies and the earth reverberated underfoot. No interplanetary daredevil Bob.

  She lay back, finished her cigarette and stared at the sky. Rhees kissed her cheek, laid a hand gently on her breast. She felt the sun hot against her face. The warmth had a certain tranquillity. She thought how easy it would be to slip into a light sleep, lulled by the fluting of the river. Four weeks up here and she was already becoming accustomed to the luxury of dozing off at odd moments.

  Rhees stroked her breast again.

  ‘Somebody might come along, John,’ she said.

  ‘Way out here? I seriously doubt it.’ He slid his hand under her cotton shirt and she turned her face towards him. The kiss, Rhees’s mouth, his breath, the intimate locking together of familiar parts. She imagined a day might come when familiarity novocained passion and everything became jaded and repetitive, but it hadn’t happened that way with her and Rhees.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. She turned and looked through the trees behind her. The gear-grinding sound of a vehicle was audible in the woods.

  ‘I hear,’ Rhees said. ‘It’s probably a gang of good old boys in a jeep. A keg of Bud and a cassette of Garth Brooks’s greatest hits and it’s party time. Whoop-de-doo.’

  ‘If that’s the case, we’ll go back to the cabin,’ she said.

  ‘And finish what we were just getting into?’

  She smiled at him. ‘I thought you were a master of contained expectation.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ he said.

  ‘You’re such a fraud at times, John.’

  She stood up, brushed specks of sandstone from her cut-offs, then turned once again towards the trees. She could see the vehicle between the trees now, a Bronco that kicked up fine coppery dust as it churned and laboured along a very narrow track. It emerged from the woods in a flurry of broken branches and scattered pine needles and came to a halt on the bank about 20 feet from Amanda and Rhees.

  There was no gang of good old boys. The big man who stepped down from the cab had plump benign features and his plaid linen jacket was crumpl
ed. He wore sunglasses and moved with a limp – a familiar figure – but his unexpected appearance was baffling.

  ‘Willie?’ Amanda said.

  ‘I know, I know. The last guy on earth you expected to see,’ and he smiled, slipping off the shades.

  Rhees was curt. ‘Rephrase that, Lieutenant. The last guy we wanted to see.’

  Willie Drumm glanced at Rhees, nodded, then shook Amanda’s hand two-fisted. He had big soft hands and they dwarfed hers. ‘You’re looking good,’ he said.

  ‘It’s this simple life, Willie.’

  ‘Agrees with you. Anything running? Rainbow? Catfish?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ she said. ‘They must be keeping a low profile.’

  Willie Drumm gazed at the river. There was a moment of uncomfortable tension. Amanda knew what Rhees was thinking. Drumm belonged firmly in the past, and he wasn’t welcome because the past had no place here. He wasn’t a part of her life any more. Those days were dead and buried. Rhees regarded Drumm as a dangerous gatecrasher, a homicide cop from the grim abattoir of the city. Somebody who dragged this environment on his shoulders like a bag stuffed with soiled laundry.

  Drumm said, ‘Boy, this ain’t the easiest place to get to.’

  ‘That’s the whole idea,’ Rhees said.

  ‘Yeah well. Sure. I finally found the cabin, saw your car parked there, figured you couldn’t be far away.’ Drumm fidgeted with his glasses. He was uneasy.

  ‘You’re a detective, after all,’ Rhees remarked. ‘A piece of cake for you.’

  This sour note in John’s voice. Amanda felt a shadow fall across her mind, provoked by Drumm’s arrival.

  ‘You haven’t come all this way to pay a social call, have you, Willie?’ she asked.

  Drumm looked at Rhees before answering. ‘I’d be lying if I told you that.’

  Rhees said, ‘She quit, Willie. Q–U–I–T. She’s no longer involved. She’s out of it.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, John. I just figured she’d be interested in what I have to say, that’s all.’