Read Online Clean Kill by Jack Coughlin, Donald A. Davis - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jack Coughlin, Donald A. Davis
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Mystery & Detective, Suspense fiction, Crime, War & Military, Police Procedural, Terrorism, Marines, International Relations, Undercover operations, Snipers, Terrorists, Swanson; Kyle (Fictitious Character)
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French, and Arab. Things were simmering nicely.
The old castle in Scotland lay in rubble, the historic peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel scuttled, and a number of diplomats dead. The first step was complete. Without sitting, he used the remote and replaced the chattering news people with the web site of a private Swiss financial institution that served only very wealthy customers. The agreed sum of a million euros had been deposited to his private account.
He had never met his benefactor, who had argued for a quick and final strike against the Saudi ruling family, wanting to get it all done in a single day. They were fools. With Dieter Nesch acting as intermediary, he had told them that to achieve permanent changes on such a scale, they had to give up any idea of a temporary upheaval or one day of headlines.
Small scale protests were underway already in several locations. As scheduled, the religious leader Mohammed Abu Ebara was emerging as a spokesman, cloaking his fiery words in the mysteries of Islam. The correspondents were getting interviews, and were putting the bearded face and burning eyes before an international audience of viewers. He turned off the television set and decided to take a nap.
The wide windows in his bedroom of his mountain mansion were open to the sea, with the heat of the afternoon broken by the shade of large trees and a nice breeze that stirred through the big house, heralding an evening rain. He dropped the sarong and climbed naked between light sheets of cool cotton.
No one on the island knew his background. There was speculation, but no one ever asked about the webs of white scars that were lined starkly on the tanned skin of his face, neck, and left shoulder. He had the use of only his right eye and wore a patch over the other. The mouth was always down-turned on that side of his face, as if the muscles were awkwardly locked. The left ear was only a shriveled piece of skin. There were no mirrors in his home and the locals felt an unusual presence of sorcery about him, for how could anyone who had endured so much exterior damage possibly still possess a spirit that had not been equally crippled?
The islands of the Pacific were magnets for such broken men. Throughout the years, soldiers and sailors, writers, adventurers, criminals on the run, businessmen, and others who tired of their old lives, wives, looks, and luck drifted to such havens in Asia and stayed. Many would become bent into commas from spending too many hours leaning on bars and drinking away their dreams. Life could be quite pleasant, but those with get-rich-quick schemes always learned the hard way that the poet Kipling did not lie in warning Occidentals of the fate that befell those “who tried to hustle the East.”
Most of them were merely part of the human flotsam and jetsam on the Pacific trade routes, pushed about by the tides of centuries until they eventually were washed away. Nevertheless, generations of gaijin in Tokyo, the farang in Bangkok, the gwai-lo in Beijing, the tipua among the Maoris and generations of expats from everywhere had come to Asia to scrub off their homelands and make a new try at life. The Australians said such men had “gone troppo.” However hard they tried, they would always remain the big-nosed foreigner, a large person who usually had filthy manners, a loud voice and strange customs and would be welcomed and tolerated, but never truly accepted, even by a new bride’s family. There were rare exceptions and the disfigured man on the mountain was one of them.
He knew all about the negatives of living in Asia and did not care. After all, he had to live somewhere and there were not many choices left; certainly none as pleasant as being in this rambling house that overlooked the ocean on one of Indonesia’s more than 13,000 islands. Maybe he had gone troppo himself.
HERE ON THE ISLAND, the scarred man was known as Hendrik van Es, a reclusive Dutch entrepreneur, and
The old castle in Scotland lay in rubble, the historic peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel scuttled, and a number of diplomats dead. The first step was complete. Without sitting, he used the remote and replaced the chattering news people with the web site of a private Swiss financial institution that served only very wealthy customers. The agreed sum of a million euros had been deposited to his private account.
He had never met his benefactor, who had argued for a quick and final strike against the Saudi ruling family, wanting to get it all done in a single day. They were fools. With Dieter Nesch acting as intermediary, he had told them that to achieve permanent changes on such a scale, they had to give up any idea of a temporary upheaval or one day of headlines.
Small scale protests were underway already in several locations. As scheduled, the religious leader Mohammed Abu Ebara was emerging as a spokesman, cloaking his fiery words in the mysteries of Islam. The correspondents were getting interviews, and were putting the bearded face and burning eyes before an international audience of viewers. He turned off the television set and decided to take a nap.
The wide windows in his bedroom of his mountain mansion were open to the sea, with the heat of the afternoon broken by the shade of large trees and a nice breeze that stirred through the big house, heralding an evening rain. He dropped the sarong and climbed naked between light sheets of cool cotton.
No one on the island knew his background. There was speculation, but no one ever asked about the webs of white scars that were lined starkly on the tanned skin of his face, neck, and left shoulder. He had the use of only his right eye and wore a patch over the other. The mouth was always down-turned on that side of his face, as if the muscles were awkwardly locked. The left ear was only a shriveled piece of skin. There were no mirrors in his home and the locals felt an unusual presence of sorcery about him, for how could anyone who had endured so much exterior damage possibly still possess a spirit that had not been equally crippled?
The islands of the Pacific were magnets for such broken men. Throughout the years, soldiers and sailors, writers, adventurers, criminals on the run, businessmen, and others who tired of their old lives, wives, looks, and luck drifted to such havens in Asia and stayed. Many would become bent into commas from spending too many hours leaning on bars and drinking away their dreams. Life could be quite pleasant, but those with get-rich-quick schemes always learned the hard way that the poet Kipling did not lie in warning Occidentals of the fate that befell those “who tried to hustle the East.”
Most of them were merely part of the human flotsam and jetsam on the Pacific trade routes, pushed about by the tides of centuries until they eventually were washed away. Nevertheless, generations of gaijin in Tokyo, the farang in Bangkok, the gwai-lo in Beijing, the tipua among the Maoris and generations of expats from everywhere had come to Asia to scrub off their homelands and make a new try at life. The Australians said such men had “gone troppo.” However hard they tried, they would always remain the big-nosed foreigner, a large person who usually had filthy manners, a loud voice and strange customs and would be welcomed and tolerated, but never truly accepted, even by a new bride’s family. There were rare exceptions and the disfigured man on the mountain was one of them.
He knew all about the negatives of living in Asia and did not care. After all, he had to live somewhere and there were not many choices left; certainly none as pleasant as being in this rambling house that overlooked the ocean on one of Indonesia’s more than 13,000 islands. Maybe he had gone troppo himself.
HERE ON THE ISLAND, the scarred man was known as Hendrik van Es, a reclusive Dutch entrepreneur, and
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