LITMIR.BIZ

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busy looking for her. Have you any idea how that felt? Do you?’

      ‘What did you want me to do? Leave her? Let her rot in some godforsaken place? You knew her, and you also knew how I felt about her. I loved her.’

      Maddie stepped towards Cooper. Her body weary from the pain which lay heavy. ‘Yeah, I know, but she wasn’t here and I was. And I loved you, Tom.’

      ‘You make it sound so simple. You knew how I felt about Ellie when we got together, but you still went ahead with our relationship.’

      ‘I knew how you felt about Ellie when she was alive, and I also knew about the guilt you felt surrounding the accident. But Jesus Christ, Tom, not for one moment did I think we’d have a ghost in our marriage.’

      ‘Why do you have to say stupid things like that?’

      Maddie stared at him blankly. ‘It’s really never occurred to you that she could’ve drowned that day has it?’

      ‘You know it has. That’s why I stopped looking for her.’

      ‘No, you stopped looking for her because everybody told you to. Told you to let it go.’

      ‘And that’s what I did. I let it go.’

      ‘No you didn’t, you just hid it well… I’m right, aren’t I?’

      ‘For God’s sake Maddie, you’re the one who needs to let things go.’

      There was a heavy silence before Maddie eventually spoke. ‘I do. At least we agree on something. So that’s why I’m going to go now. But tell me one thing. Why now? If you really did let it go. Her go. Why all of a sudden can I see it in your eyes that you still think she’s alive? Why after all this time start searching for her again?’

      ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

      Maddie turned and walked towards the door.

      ‘Goodbye, Tom.’

6

      Ten minutes later, on a deserted stretch of dirt road, Maddie pulled up the ’54 Chevy truck Cooper had bought her last Christmas, and stepped out into the cool of the Colorado night and, looking up to the starry sky and to the silver moon, her legs gave way under her and she fell to the soft earth and cried. Weeping. Hurting. Anguish cutting into her shredded heart. Deep and painful cries and howls coming from her very soul.

      Managing. Just. To go into her pocket, she pulled out her cell and dialled.

      ‘Daddy, it’s me. I need you to come and get me.’

7

      The sunset, a blended color wheel of powder pinks and eggplant purples, splashed with intensity across the Congolese sky, seemed to go unnoticed by the elderly man resting on the isolated red clay shores of the Congo river. The heated mounds of rotting, stinking rubbish now cooled down by the evening air gave the man a place to sit, alongside the raw sewage which flowed down the bank as if from a mountain spring. It was the only place of solace, a sanctuary of quiet away from the squalid living conditions of the Kitchanga refugee camp, home to the displaced, the desperate, where diseases ran through like the east winds.

      The old battered truck pulling alongside, its load covered with blue tarpaulin, went similarly unnoticed by the man, untroubled by its presence. It was nothing to do with him. It certainly wasn’t unusual for the locals to park their vehicles, to take the rest of the narrow road on foot, rather than risk the hazards of the crumbling tracks, risk being another casualty of the snaking and twisting river.

      Unperturbed, and grateful for the peace, the elderly man continued to relax, not bothering to turn round at the sound of the men walking towards the water. It was only when he felt the coarseness of the thick rope, pulling and dragging him backwards, tightening his airways, dragging him through the clay that he tried to turn. Escape.

      He heard a gruff voice, words fused by putrid-smelling breath.

      ‘Stay still. Do not struggle, my brother, it won’t do you any good. It’s too late… Arrête de lutter. Stop fighting.’

      A hood placed over his face began to burn as the cotton, transfused with chilli, irritated and blistered his skin. He squirmed in pain whilst a noise made him jolt. He heard it again. Then again. Only this time it was nearer. Closer. Much closer.

      He swivelled round, panicked, unable to see through the hood, but he suddenly froze. He felt the breath on his back. Warm. A different voice. A gentle voice. Which said,

      ‘Bonjour monsieur…’

      A pain he didn’t think imaginable sped through his body as his eyes were driven down into his skull. He felt the pressure and then the pull and the digging and the gouging and blood streamed down his face. He retched with agony, choking on his own vomit as more quiet words were spoken.

      ‘C’est bon, vomis le diable… Vomit up the devil… That’s it, you did well my brother, you did well.’

      He felt a soothing hand on his head, mixed in with his pain as he was carried. Lifted. Thrown. Hitting a hard surface with force.

      Feeling something next to him, he realized there were others there. And too terrified to speak, too raked with pain to cry for help, he heard the voices of several men followed by the sound of an engine, driving him away, taking him somewhere he didn’t want to go, somewhere he didn’t know. A place he was sure he was never coming back from.

8

      Throwing the empty pill bottle into the glove compartment of his classic Chevrolet truck, Cooper saw the small airstrip of the Onyx Asset Recovery Company come into view as he drove up the dusty, cactus-lined road whilst swallowing, with some difficulty, the two pills in his mouth.

      The office he’d been working out of for the past five years was built in the middle of four hundred acres of wilderness. Hot. Remote. Dry desert land, based just outside North Scottsdale, Arizona, with panoramic views of the Granite Mountain. It was one helluva place.

      It was mainly himself, Granger, Levi and Maddie, along with a scattering of aircraft engineers who worked out of the Scottsdale office. Granger had other investigators out in the field on an ad hoc basis, but his core staff rarely changed. Partly due to trust and partly due to Granger believing he already had the best team in the business.

      There were huge risks involved with every job, with all of them feeling like legal heists. Granger’s motto was, No job is too big or too much trouble, though at times Cooper doubted that was true. Many times. Especially when the jobs he’d been sent on involved trying to recover Russian-bought military jets from a remote, perilous location in Belize, in the middle of a multi-million dollar dispute with an Austrian import-export company. Or when a court order had been acquired to impound a sixty-million-dollar plane from the middle of Ecuador, and the owners happened to be a drugs cartel who were after his butt to the point he’d found himself hiding out in a derelict house in the city of Guayaquil for four days without food or water. Or when he was facing the irate owner of a helicopter who hadn’t kept up with the repayments, in the heart of Mexico, who greeted him with a smile and an Uzi Pro 9mm which could blow his head off in an instant. It was then that Granger’s motto, No job is too big or too much trouble, made him want to stick those words right up his ass and ask Granger, too much trouble for who?

      With Onyx being one of the most successful high asset recovery firms worldwide, with a hit rate of just over ninety-seven percent, several of the companies and banks they dealt with wanted the business to expand, encouraging Granger with monetary incentives to open other branches in major cities, as well as wanting him to take the head office to New York. But Granger, being Granger, refused point blank. Not wanting to risk weakening the firm by expansion. Believing that by keeping it small but

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