Betrayed: (A Financial and Conspiracies Thriller – Book 1 in the Legacy Thriller Series)

  BETRAYED

  A THRILLER NOVEL

  by

  WILLIAM WIELD

  Author’s note

  ‘Betrayed’ was first published as ‘Komarov’s Conspiracy’ in November 2015, but has been rewritten to allow it to become part the Legacy Thriller Series. I have written all of the books in that series to be fast-paced, page-turners – the kind of thrillers I myself like to read and hope they meet your expectations in this regard. Happy reading – William Wield.

  For further information and news of my other books, please visit my website williamwield.com or email me at william@williamwield.com

  Betrayed

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © David Stuart Black 2016

  All rights reserved. Except as provided by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

  Chapter 1

  7.30am, Thursday, 24 March 2016

  Makati City, Manila, Philippines

  The instructions to the SWAT team were explicit. They were to take their target alive ̶ there was much vital information to get out of him. Sergeant Aquino, the leader of the team crept forward silently along the narrow alley. Carefully he counted down the numbers on the doors. Just as he and the team were reaching the address they’d been given by the anonymous tip-off, a short but large Filipino woman burst through the beaded curtain that served as her front door and into the alley in front of them. Brazenly, she crossed her arms over her ample chest, her feet firmly planted on the ground, intent on blocking their way.

  ‘What you doin’ in my alley?’ She gave Aquino one of her matriarchal stares.

  Aquino halted the team and, as silence was an absolute requirement of the raid, he resisted the risky option of forcing her aside. Instead, he stepped quickly forward, towering over her, his chin just inches above her head. Slowly she tilted her face up towards his, her expression still defiant.

  ‘National Security,’ he whispered – as harshly and loudly as he dared. ‘If you don’t want to spend the rest of your miserable life in jail, you’ll get back to where you came from right now, do you understand?’

  Apparently she did understand. This close to him, she could see the discrete label on his left shoulder: the initials SAF – the Special Action Force. Obviously she had heard of them – the Tagaligtas. Their reputation was enough for her; she dropped her arms and went back into her house.

  Above them, in the first floor apartment that had been rented for him for the duration of the job, Antonio Ramos caught a slight echo of this exchange. He frowned; strange for there to be any activity in the alley at such an early hour. Rising from the trestle table where he was working, he tip-toed as silently as a cat across the bare floorboards to the half-open window above the alley. He winced and pulled a face as he stepped on a squeaky board; his presence here was supposed to remain unknown. On reaching the window he used just one finger to move the curtains apart a couple of inches. Peering down, he could now see the five of them – charcoal-grey helmet tops, gun muzzles, bulky body armour - and was just in time to see his neighbour Imelda going back into her house. He felt his pulse rate rise swiftly; sixty, one hundred, a hundred and twenty, and, suddenly, there it was, throbbing in his throat.

  He had known there were risks working for ‘the foreigners’ – as his partner called them – but the money had been too good to let caution decide. What worried him at this moment was how they had located him. The foreigners had rented this place for him, equipped it, bought the sparse furnishings – and all of it in supposedly absolute secrecy. Still, no time to think about that now; he knew instinctively, that the squad had come for him.

  Letting the curtain drop, he ran back across the room to the front door. On his way he pulled his mobile phone from his pocket, and, despite fumbling fingers, managed to press a speed-dial number. Whilst it was ringing out, he reached the door, turned the heavy key in the old lock and grimaced again at the noise this made. Reaching up, he threw the heavy bolt across the top of the door. Neither of these actions would stop the squad, of course, but they might give him an extra minute or so to make his escape.

  The mobile was answered as he ran from the door back to the trestle table,

  ‘Don’t talk,’ he whispered. ‘There’s an SAF hit squad on their way up here to get me – not sure if they’ll try to take me in or shoot to kill,’

  There was a babble of noise from the mobile.

  ‘Don’t have time for any of that, gotta go. You know where all the money is… no, no the money the foreigners paid me…’

  More babble from the phone,

  ‘Yes, take the lot, get the hell out of Manila, get down to Uncle Paolo’s in Boracay, I’ll meet you there.’ He slammed the clam mobile shut and thrust it into his pocket. On reaching the trestle table, he tried to work his feet into sandals with their straps still done up, while, at the same time, pressing down on the power buttons of the two laptops he had been working on – no time to shut them down properly but vital to turn them off, to give the authorities the trouble of having to crack the passwords and the special defences he had installed on both of them.

  ‘Come on, come on.’ He waited for what seemed like an age for the machines to die – though, in fact, they did so in just four seconds. With a flicker of a relieved smile, he shut their lids and gave each a tap as though to reinforce his defences. As he bent down to kiss one of them, he whispered, ‘Think they’ll get my secrets from you easily do they? You’ll hold out, won’t you, my clever little babes?’

  This was no sooner said than he heard the faint creak of a board on the stairway. Jolted back into action, he looked around; snatching up an old green canvas shopping bag, he picked a bulky Toshiba laptop from amongst other brand-new machines, and forced it into the bag. Next, hurriedly but carefully, he pushed a printer to one side to make more room on the top of the flimsy trestle table, and with the help of a chair, climbed up onto it. It creaked and moved a couple of inches to the left but, to his relief, it seemed to steady and settle.

  Just then the silence of the apartment was shattered by an explosion of noise from the door behind him, and a blow from something metallic which left a ringing echo. In a frenzy now, he reached forward, undid the latch of the window and threw it open as far as it would go. Putting the straps of the canvas shopping bag around his neck, he cradled the bag itself into his lap, bent double, and began to squeeze through the window frame. As he desperately forced himself through it, a second blow landed on the door, showering the room with splinters of wood and screws. The old-fashioned lock sagged, lopsidedly, now held to the door by just one screw.

  The corrugated roof of an outhouse was only five feet below the window sill and Ramos jumped just as a third blow burst open the door behind him.

  On the far side of the door, the young squaddie had thrown the third blow of the two-handled battering ram in a wide arc above his head. It had torn the bolt from the catch on the door-frame and burst the door wide. The squaddie stepped back to allow Aquino to squeeze past and enter the apartment first.

  Aquino, gun held out in front of him at shoulder level, was just in time to see the silhouette of Ramos as he jump
ed. His first shot hit Ramos in the leg, disabling him as intended. But the strap of one of his sandals had caught in the long arm of the window stay, turning Ramos’s jump into a fall. By the time Aquino fired his second shot, Ramos’s body was horizontal. The bullet entered his groin, tore through his vital organs and exited at his neck, slicing through his carotid artery. He was dead as his body hit the corrugated iron roof below.

  Aquino rushed forward, leant over the trestle table as far he could and peered down at Ramos. The young man lay sprawled like a rag doll, the straps of the shopping bag entwined round his neck. A trickle of blood had oozed from his mouth and his nose, and his eyes looking up, unseeingly, at the blue Manila sky.

  ‘Shit,’ said Aquino. ‘Bloody hell.’

  He backed away from the table, to the VHF from its clasp on his shoulder and rang into Control.

  ‘Stormboy here,’ he said as soon as he was through to them. ‘Mission completed though I’m afraid the target was killed trying to escape.’

  The squaddie standing next to him could hear the torrent of Control’s verbal abuse crackling from the VHF.

  ‘Of course I knew he was to be taken alive,’ said Aquino as soon as there was a break in the din from the other end. ‘Yeah, yeah, I knew we needed to get information out of him. But, Hell, he was already halfway out the window! Seconds later he’d have been gone, never to be seen again in all the maze of alleyways round these parts.’

  More ranting came from the VHF. Aquino was acutely aware that his boss’s boss − those and above him even − had got involved in this incident. Although he didn’t know why, he knew that this was being treated as more than just the apprehension of another young hacker. When he spoke again, he was more subdued.

  ‘I’ll do that right away. He fled with something obviously important in a canvas shopping bag. I’ll get one of the lads to secure it right now. There are two laptops up here. He must have been working on them; they’re switched off but still warm. I’ll get them and anything else back to you as soon as possible. We’ll need a van to the end of the lane, and there’s the hacker’s body to pick up too.’

  There was more `talk from the VHF and when it stopped, Aquino said, ‘Okay, I understand the rush, so the sooner the van gets here, the sooner you’ll have the laptops.’ He clicked the VHF off and returned it to its clip.

  ‘Right, two of you get down and secure the body and the shopping bag till the van gets here,’ said Aquino to the two of his men behind him. ‘And you Felipe,’ he continued to the squaddie beside him, ‘help me collect up all the stuff in the apartment. We need everything – the laptops, the printer, mobiles, the answerphone, the lot, all right?’

  The two of them set about collecting the machines to the end of the table and then rifled through empty boxes pieces of paper, collecting up invoices and delivery notes – anything that might help identify the young man’s employers. In their search, Aquino spotted a new fibre optic internet cable, snaking in through the lower corner of the window frame, almost hidden by the curtain. Outside, he could see that it was but one of a tangle of wires strung along poles running here and there through the maze of alleys and shanty houses – wires used by the locals to steal electricity and cable TV. Tracing the internet cable back would be difficult but, with Ramos now dead, it might still need to be done in order to find out who was behind him and more of what they were planning.

  The tip-off they had received in the early hours of the morning had proved to be right both about this address and about Ramos, ‘the way he had tried to escape proved that,’ thought Aquino. But they still needed to know what the tip-off had meant by ‘the big one’. The caller had said that the recent spate of cyber–attacks on Manila’s smaller banks had just been practice for the ‘big one’ but, as yet, no one knew what it was, nor where or when it would happen.

  * * * * *

  A specially convened meeting of the Association of the Asian Bankers of Manila had been called to discuss a number of recent cyber-attacks on small banks in and around the City. Understandably, the attacks were unnerving for the Association’s members. The blinds in the conference room were half down to cut the glare from the sun outside. The atmosphere was the perfect blend of temperature and humidity; the only two sounds were those of the speaker and the faintest whirring from the air-conditioning unit. Those attending were seated round a large oval mahogany table and all were focused on one of their number who was demanding to know what the authorities were doing about these attacks. The Chairman was sweating despite the cool of the room; he appeared anxious, and was fidgeting, for the truth of the matter was that the police had but one lead – one that had come in that very morning about which he still had no details.

  ‘So, Mr Chairman, I hope, that, you have some good news for us – perhaps the cyber police are making some progress at last?’

  A bank messenger entered the room just as the speaker finished asking this question.

  ‘One minute if you please.’ The Chairman turned towards the messenger, ‘I hope this is urgent as…’

  But the messenger merely bowed and, as though he were mute, pointed to the far side of the table.

  ‘Very well, carry on,’ said the Chairman and the messenger went round the table, all eyes following him until he stopped beside the chair of Zhang Wei, Chief Executive Officer of the Manila Beijing Bank. Bending low, he whispered his message into the other’s ear. What little colour there was in Zhang’s face drained away and he put a hand up to his forehead, hiding his eyes from the others. The messenger backed slowly away from Zhang, straightened up gave another shallow bow, and hurried from the room. Zhang looked up and, avoiding eye contact with the others, turned to the Chairman.

  The message could hardly have been worse or come at a more embarrassing time and he made his first decision on the crisis that had just struck his bank − unable to save face by telling his fellow bankers the truth, he lied.

  ‘My wife’s been involved in a serious motor accident’ he said, ‘and is now on her way to St Luke’s Hospital in Global City. I beg that I may be excused to go and be with her.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said the Chairman, ‘I’m sure we all wish her well - of course you must be excused to be with her.’

  Zhang rose, collected his papers and stuffed them into his briefcase. Then, with downcast eyes, he hurried from the room.

  In the lobby outside, waiting for the lift, he shifted his weight back and forth from one foot to the other, his gaze fixed on the lighted box above the lift doors telling him of the lift’s dilatory progress towards his floor. The lift arrived after what seemed an age; he continued to fret the whole way down to the lobby, desperate to get out of the building before someone stopped him and asked what he had just been told. On reaching the marble lobby he half-ran out into the bright sunlight and the wall of heat and going down a couple of the wide marble steps, he stood for a moment, peering left and right for a taxi. Looking alternately left and right, at last he spotted one coming down the street. As it got closer he could see that it was for hire, and he ran down the last few steps, using his briefcase as a weapon to barge through the crowds, hailing the taxi with his free hand as he went. To his relief the car pulled over. He struggled for a second or two with the reluctant door handle, finally won, and clambered in.

  ‘The Manila Beijing Bank, Paseo de Roxas,’ he said in a demanding, abrupt tone.

  Spurred on by the promise of double the fare, the driver pressed the taxi whenever the traffic allowed, the faster parts of the journey exposing both the age of the car and its weaknesses. The bodywork shook as though one half of it were a different vehicle to the other; passing over some of the more severe bumps, the rattling box gave the impression that it might come apart at any moment. Throughout the journey Zhang thought about the message. It had merely said ‘Forced to shut the bank down - you must come back.’

  As the taxi was approached his head office building, up ahead he could see a large gathering of people pressing tow
ards and against the thick glass doors. From their gestures it was clear that they were in a state of collective agitation and as the taxi drew closer, he could hear the shouting too. He made his second decision of the crisis. He sat up, leant forward and told the driver to pass on by the bank’s front entrance and take the first left. As soon as they were out of sight of the crowds, he had the taxi stop, got out and paid. Crossing the narrow street to a small door, he took out a bunch of keys, he selected one and let himself in. He found himself in a narrow passageway with a short flights of steps at the end of it. As he hurried along, sweat held his fine, sparse hair to his whitened forehead. He soon emerged into a narrow hallway with two service lifts; as one of these lifts was at the ground floor, he quickly entered, closed the metal gates and pressed the button for the top floor. After an unsteady ride, the lift ground to a noisy halt on the top floor. Hurrying out, around a couple of corners, and through another set of swing doors, he came at last into the main lobby of the executive suites.

  As soon as he appeared, the crowds of whispering people, gathered in small groups, drifted apart to allow him through to his office which, like the hallway, was a melee of anxious people. They stopped speaking and most sidled away out of the room as he entered. He went round his desk and slumped into his chair. He glanced at the little gold-plated carriage clock on his desk – it was just coming up to eleven-thirty. The remaining people in his room dispersed and, soon his most senior manager, Guan, and one other short darkish man were all that were left of the earlier crowd.

  Eventually, Zhang appeared to have regained some composure, Guan cleared his throat, stepped nearer the desk and introduced the short dark man.