The Child Taker (2009)

  OTHER TITLES BY CONRAD JONES

  SOFT TARGET

  SOFT TARGET II ‘TANK’

  SOFT TARGET III ‘JERUSALEM’

  The 18th Brigade

  Blister

  Slow Burn

  ‘The Child Taker’

  CONRAD JONES

  GerriCon Books Ltd

  Copyright 2009 Conrad Jones. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

  The places named in this book are real. The fictional events are based on factual ones but have been changed by the author. Any similarity between the fictional characters and people in the public domain are coincidental, and are generated purely from the imagination of the author.

  First published by GerriCon Books Ltd 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-9561034-5-1

  Chapter One

  Coniston Water

  Hayley watched her twins chasing each other around in a circle. They had been playing outside on the grass all afternoon and their olive skin glowed, kissed by the sunshine. Every now and again, the chaser would about turn, and become the chased. They giggled so much as they ran that they could hardly get their breath. Life could not get much better than watching her children laughing and playing in such a beautiful place. The evening sun was setting over the lake and the still water looked like a huge mirror set between two mountains. In the distance, she could see the peak of Coniston Old Man, where patches of snow still clung to the mountaintop despite the glorious sunshine. On the lake, two white sailing yachts were anchored close to the shore and the clear water rippled gently around the hulls, but apart from them, the Coniston Water was as still as could be.

  “Ten more minutes you two, and then it will be sleepy time for little boys and girls,” Hayley reached out and ran her fingers through their blond hair as they raced past her. They were nearly six years old and she could not believe how fast they were growing up. Hayley treasured every minute that she had to spend with her children. Seven years earlier, she had been told that she could not have children and the news had devastated her. Her husband had been like a rock at the time but Hayley thought that she could sense a yearning within him, and it tore her apart that she couldn’t give him the children that he wanted so badly. Two months later, she had conceived. Her husband wept when they received the news that she was pregnant, and they both wept when they were told that they were expecting twins. Things between Hayley and her husband had changed since then, but she soldiered on because of her beautiful twins. They were the most precious things in her world, and she had to try hard not to smother them by wrapping them in cotton wool to protect them from the world.

  “I don’t want to go to bed yet, Mummy!” Sarah chuckled as her identical twin brother caught up with her.

  “I don’t want to go to bed neither, Mummy!” Zak agreed with his sister before tearing off in the opposite direction as the chase began again.

  “Either, Zak, I don’t want to go to bed either; we don’t use the word neither,” Hayley laughed.

  “Either, Mummy, either, either, either,” Zak shouted the word as he zigzagged across the grass before heading toward their tent. Her husband had nagged at her for years to try camping in the Lake District. He had been a frequent visitor to the area as a young man, fishing and climbing the challenging peaks that the Lake District had to offer. Hayley had finally caved in to the idea and she was surprised how much she enjoyed the peace and tranquillity. The stresses and strains of everyday life seemed to melt away as they drove through the breathtaking scenery on the way to their camp. The campsite was situated on the lakeshore. It was early in the season, there were only a handful of tents, and campervans scattered about the site.

  Hayley watched the twins carefully as they careered toward the side of the tent, and the potentially dangerous configuration of guy ropes which held their impressive eight-berth tent in situ. Zak ducked beneath the first nylon line and expertly sidestepped the tent peg, which protruded from the grass. Sarah was not so flight of foot and she stumbled over the peg before crashing head first into the wall of the tent.

  “I’ve told you not to run around the tent, Zak; you should stay at the front where I can see you. Now your sister has hurt herself because you ignored me,” Hayley ran to her daughter and gathered her up into her comforting arms. Sarah had that look on her face that only children can have. She was teetering on the edge of tears but not quite crying. Her bottom lip quivered slightly and her eyes looked watery but she was not going to let it go just yet. As soon as she felt her mother’s embrace the emotion became too much and the tears flooded down her rosy cheeks. She wrapped her little arms tightly around her mother’s neck. Hayley could feel her sticky fingers grasping for some material to hold on to, and then the sobbing began as if it was the end of the world.

  “I’m sorry, Mummy,” Zak tugged at his mother’s blouse with one dirty hand and patted his twin sister’s foot, which was just about in reach, with the other hand.

  “How many times have I told you not to go behind the tents?”

  “Ten times, Mummy,” Zak guessed, but he was way off the mark.

  “I think it’s more like a hundred and ten times, young man!”

  Zak looked confused by the use of such a big number. He could barely comprehend sums at the best of times, and a hundred had way too many zeros to begin to work it out.

  “I’m sorry, Mummy,” he repeated. He was at a bit of a loss for anything else to say, and his little sister was blubbering for England. He patted her foot again but she kicked his hand away grumpily and cried even louder.

  “What’s all the noise about?”

  “We could hear you all the way across the lake!”

  Hayley smiled as she turned toward the voices. Her husband, Karl had been fishing on the lake with his younger brother, Steve. They were both wearing vest tops and shorts, and the sun had reddened their skin, especially on their shoulders. Their rods and equipment clattered as they walked. Zak ran to his dad and grabbed his leg with both arms.

  “What have you done to your little sister Zachariah?” his father asked in a mock stern tone of voice. He only ever used his son’s full name when he was in trouble.

  “She tripped over the guy rope, Daddy, and then she crashed into the tent,” Zak looked up into his father’s eyes and searched them for approval. His sister was a girl after all and she was always crashing into things and crying. Zak didn’t think that this was a bad crash by any stretch of the imagination. Sarah had crashed into a glass coffee table at Granddad’s house last month, and it had shattered into pieces. Now that was a bad crash in comparison to this one.

  “She tripped over the guy rope, and I wonder who was chasing her?” his father ruffled his blond hair and gently clipped his ear.

  “She was chasing me, Daddy, and your hands smell horrible,” Zak had gotten a whiff of fish from his father’s hand. His father responded by rubbing his hand under his nose. “Poo! Stop it, Daddy.”

  “How was the fishing?” Hayley asked. Karl put his rod down and embraced his wife and daughter with his strong suntanned arms. Hayley felt herself flinch slightly as he touched her skin; she didn’t like the feeling anymore, as it turned her insides out. Karl glanced into her eyes and she looked away, guiltily.

  “We caught a couple of tiddlers, but they weren’t big enough to eat so we’ll all have to eat bread and water tonight. How’s my favourite girls?” he said as he kissed his wife and daughter in turn. Sarah stopped crying and flung her arms around her father. She snuggled her sticky face into his neck.

  “I don’t want bread and water, Daddy,” Sarah said forlornly. She forced another li
ttle sob to reinforce her concern.

  “Okay sweetheart, what would you like to eat then?”

  “Alphabet spaghetti and toast,” she groaned.

  “Okay princess we’ll see what we can do,” he kissed her forehead and gently moved her fringe from her face.

  “Daddy,” she whispered.

  “What darling?” he whispered back.

  “Your hands are smelly,” she said. She giggled and pinched her nose to block out the smell. Karl kissed his daughter again and they all laughed.

  Fifty yards away behind the tent, in the trees, a figure moved silently with the stealth of a cat. He was tall and thin with a gaunt face. The skin on his face was pockmarked, riddled with blackheads and postulant pustules. His arms were pale and crisscrossed with blue veins. The figure stared through the leaves and branches at the family gathering. He had received a tipoff from a reliable source that the family were heading for the lakes, and so he had waited, and then followed them from a motorway service station two days earlier. The twins had been eating ice cream when he’d first spotted them. They were priceless and too good an opportunity to miss, so he’d tracked them all the way to their campsite.

  He had rubbed his hands together with glee when he realised that they were heading to a remote spot for their holiday, it could have been so much more difficult if they’d been heading to a busy hotel in one of the many tourist towns in the Lake District. His internet connections had gone ballistic when he first floated a picture that he’d taken with his mobile phone of the blond haired children. When he had put them up for sale, it created a bidding war between men from four continents. Now he had a buyer in place and everything was set. He looked at the little blond girl giggling in her father’s arms and he smiled. The smile became a twisted grin and his pink tongue flicked over crooked blackened teeth. He could feel his heart starting to beat faster, and he ran his skeletal fingers through his greasy black hair. The black dye which he used emphasised how lank and greasy his hair was and the grey re-growth at the roots belied its true colour.

  His name had been Ian once, but that was when he was a young boy, years before he’d been sent to prison. When he came out of the penal system, they’d given him a new identity, and called him Jack, quite an apt choice he often thought. The gruesome stories of the ‘Ripper’, or ‘Jack’, as the police had nicknamed him, fascinated him for all the wrong reasons. Nowadays he used whatever name sprang to mind. Few of the people that he met ever spoke to him anyway especially the children he encountered, they never spoke. He wasn’t sure what he should be called anymore but his latest employers used his internet pseudonym. Jack liked the internet very much. It was a world where he could meet deviants with the same interests as himself, some not quite as sick, but some much, much, worse. It was also how he made his living. He had stumbled into his profession, and business was booming. It was very rare that his customers ever knew his real name. They only knew him as Jack Howarth, the Child Taker, and his profession was stealing children to order

  Chapter Two

  Mogadishu

  Thousands of miles away, on the African continent, Grace Farrington felt sweat running down her spine in rivulets. It was nearly one hundred degrees in the full glare of the Somali sun. Her black skin glistened with moisture as the heat of the sun intensified. Midday was approaching and the temperature continued to climb steadily as she walked through the bullet-ridden streets of Mogadishu. The buildings around her were built from stone, and then rendered with plaster that was made from crushed seashells. She couldn’t help but wonder what the city would have been like before civil war brought it to its knees. Grace had seen many war torn cities during her service, but Mogadishu was in a league of its own.

  Grace was the daughter of the first black man to achieve the rank of Sergeant Major in the British army, and as such, she had chosen to follow her illustrious father into the forces. She was a natural soldier, sharpshooter and unarmed combat aficionado. Grace had risen through the junior ranks of the military quickly, impressing her superiors so much that they’d put her name forward for Special Forces’ selection programmes. She was successful and spent the next three years flitting from one elite unit to the next, wherever a female black operative was required at the time. Different missions required different personnel, especially in countries abroad where dark skin was indigenous. Soon Grace was chosen to take the selection programme for the combined Terrorist Task Force Unit, which she passed with flying colours, and now she was the unit’s number one agent. She had led operations all over the world, but this time Somalia was the theatre in which their unit would perform. The collapse of the Somali government seventeen years earlier had led to a brutal civil war which was still raging, and the outskirts of the city had been reduced to nothing but derelict ruins. The square built buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes of every size and shape that you could imagine. The deserted houses were riddled with shell holes, and black smoke stains crept out of every window and smeared the bricks above them. Grace could hear a petrol engine approaching and the hairs on the back of her neck bristled.

  “It’s them,” her Somali guide whispered nervously as he looked over his shoulder toward the speeding vehicle. He was a nineteen-year-old militiaman, as thin as a rake and dressed in a mishmash uniform, which hung from his skeletal frame. Sweat was pouring from every pore on his skinny body, and the smell that pervaded from him was not a pleasant one. “Give me the money now before they get here.”

  “You’ll get paid when I’ve met Said Adid,” Grace hissed. She stubbed her little toe on a stone and cursed under her breath. Rocks and stones protruded from the compacted sand that formed the narrow streets of the war torn city. Her flimsy sandals offered her very little protection against them, and she stumbled.

  “I don’t trust you, English bitch!” her guide snarled. He grabbed her elbow and helped her to her feet again. “Pay me my money.”

  “There are half a dozen marksmen with their sights trained on the back of your head right now. If you don’t calm down and stick to your part of the bargain I’ll signal them to blow your fucking brains all over this godforsaken road,” Grace held him with an icy glare which left him with no doubt in his mind that she wasn’t lying. He tried to match her glare, but she was not a woman to mess with.

  “Are you okay?” Tara asked concerned. Tara was a twenty three year old white skinned European. She was the newest member of the unit, she was also beautiful, and today Grace and Tara were being used as the bait in a honey trap operation.

  “I’m fine, get on with the job,” Grace replied curtly. Although Tara and Grace had worked in the elite counter terrorist unit together for three months now, they didn’t get on at all. She turned back to their guide and hissed, “If you make one move out of line, you’re a dead man.”

  The guide nodded his head slowly and swallowed hard. His oversized Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He was sweating profusely and he wiped his eyes with the front of his khaki shirt. A dark wet smear appeared on the material. The vehicle’s engine roared as it screeched to a halt ten yards away from them. The driver fishtailed the back of the truck and a wave of grit and sand showered Grace and her guide. The guide rubbed sand from his face as he turned to the vehicle and smiled widely. Grace kept her face lowered as she analysed the situation in a microsecond. The vehicle was a battered red Toyota pickup. There were three men in the crew cab, and three more standing on the flatbed at the rear. They were operating a Chinese made heavy machinegun that was welded to a makeshift tripod. Mogadishu was swamped with improvised military vehicles like this one. They were known to Westerners as ‘technicals’.

  “Let me see them.” The man in the passenger seat spoke. He was sporting a red beret on his head, and was wearing a grimy red vest to match. All the men in the pickup had mirrored sunglasses on.

  “She’s Jamaican, and she’s untouched, very clean,” the guide rambled. He put his hand beneath Grace’s chin and pushed her head upward so that the men in the
vehicle could get a proper look at her. “And this one is Swedish. We took them from a boat.” He added, referring to the hundreds of ships that are attacked and held for ransom every year off the Somali coastline. He grabbed a fistful of Tara’s blond hair and twisted her head cruelly sideways. Tara grimaced and thought about putting a bullet through him for a moment, but the mission was an important one, and she would have to play along with it for now.

  The driver of the pickup studied Tara and Grace and smiled as he punched a number into a mobile phone. He spoke a few words and then nodded his head as he ended the brief call. The driver grinned and then saluted the guide. The engine roared again and the wheels span in the sand before finding purchase, and the pickup lurched forward. Grace stepped backward to avoid the avalanche of grit that it had created.

  “What’s going on?” she said to her guide. “Which one of them was Said Adid?”

  “None of them, he wasn’t there,” the guide looked wide-eyed and confused. He held his hands palm upward and shrugged his skinny shoulders. He was about to speak again when they heard a second engine approaching.