Gang of Thieves: Jim Thorn Pathfinder Thrillers, #3

By Karl York

Stealing back stolen goods is easy...

For a Special Forces team storming a corporate office.

But as former Pathfinder Jim Thorn and his SAS crew plan the assault, their family members are being snatched from their homes. Events take an unexpected turn when Thorn himself is targeted and the stakes are raised.

Skulking in the shadows, dark forces are keen to kill Thorn at any cost. Both his betrayal and his salvation appear where he least expects. And the final outcome rests on a knife edge.

The little mission into the Texas wilderness rapidly snowballs as the body count rises and the plot thickens.

(Gang of Thieves is the sequel to First In.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karl York
• Release date: Mar 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781507032398

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

‘Sit down there,’ commanded the sharp-suited man-giant.

Shaken, the frail man did as he was told. He squinted up at his bully and used his hands to flatten down his unruly wisps of silvery hair. A pair of round-rimmed spectacles was squashed into his hand, with a fat thumb-print smeared across one of the lenses.

‘Ah, Professor. Thanks for paying us a visit at such short notice. I really do appreciate that,’ said another man as he entered the office. He nodded to his henchman to leave the two of them alone.

The Professor used the sleeve of his woollen sweater to clean his glasses and replaced them on his face, peering back at the stranger before him.

‘I didn’t have much choice considering your goons put a sack over my head and man-handled me over here with threats of violence.’

‘Oh, don’t mind Vincent. He so loves his job. It’s a matter of pride, you understand. Sometimes, he’s a little overzealous.’

The Professor cut in:

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

The younger man, silver-haired too, walked across towards the Professor and extended his right hand.

‘I’m sorry, Professor Dvorak, I have terrible manners. Forgive me. My name is Holtzhuizen. I have invited you here to talk about your cancer research experiments. I have a proposal for you.’

Professor Dvorak suspiciously reached out and shook Holtzhuizen’s hand.

‘Are you offering funding? Because our research is,’ Dvorak paused. ‘Well, we do not require financial assistance for the current work.’

‘I know, Professor. You have already completed it successfully.’

‘How on earth do you know that?’ Dvorak asked, licking his lips and nervously rubbing his fingertips together.

‘Vincent - you know, Vincent - brought Leighman here for a visit yesterday. You emailed him about your breakthrough and we thought we had better find out about the auspicious new cancer cure you have developed.’

‘What? What do you mean, I sent him an email? How the hell do you know that? And I know Leighman. He’s a cantankerous old sod - a little like me. He wouldn’t tell you anything about my research.’

‘Well, let’s ask him, shall we, Professor? He’s still here, you see.’

Holtzhuizen loomed over the old man as he sat in his swivel chair, still scratching at his fingers and palms. With a single arcing swipe of his left hand, Holtzhuizen spun the chair to face the wire-reinforced glass window behind. The office itself was small, with a door leading into the corridor and second, internal door leading into a darkened room - a laboratory.

Dvorak’s eyes hurt as the strip-lights flickered on. As he became accustomed to the harsh lighting, he could see the head of his friend and research collaborator, sitting partially obscured behind a lab bench with his back to them. He stood and turned to Holtzhuizen.

‘What’s he doing here? Can we go and talk to him?’

Holtzhuizen laughed out loud.

‘If you like; as long as you are not expecting any answers from him.’

Dvorak scanned the office, and seeing the internal door joining office to lab, marched over and walked straight in.

‘Eric? Eric! Are you okay? They didn’t hurt you, did they?’

There was an acrid smell in the lab. And weirdly, the faintest hint of marzipan. Dvorak knew something was wrong. Leighman remained motionless in his chair, still hidden from full view. As the old scientist negotiated his way around the bench he gasped and stopped dead.

Holtzhuizen glided in nonchalantly, stopping beside the trembling old man, and shrugged.

‘We wanted answers, and he was, as you said, cantankerous. And then a funny thing happened. I got Vincent to perform a little chemistry experiment to investigate how cantankerousness is affected by submerging the legs - up to the knees - in battery acid. And voila. He stopped being a complete tool and told us what we wanted to know.’

Dvorak fought back tears, transfixed in horror at the seated figure, his legs almost completely digested away below the knees. What flesh still clung onto the corroded bones was discoloured and blistered. He wiped his eyes to clear them, and then licked his lips again, before scratching at them, and rubbing them with the back of his hand. Then he shuffled forward. He knew Leighman was dead. His head was thrown back and his face a twisted wreck of contortions; blue lips and eyes tightly squeezed shut. Dvorak’s visual autopsy finished at the clawed hands, gripped like clamps onto the plastic arms of the chair he was tied to. Blue fingernails. Cyanosis.

‘You killed him? You monster! Why? What did he do to deserve that? And with cyanide? And acid? Even black-hearted vermin usually kill quickly and efficiently. Don’t they? You decided to pick the worst, most wicked way to murder him.’

‘Well, we do our best, Professor,’ said Holtzhuizen.

‘You’re proud of it!’ said Dvorak, a flash of anger animating him. It was but a weak revival of the fiery young Czech who came to America with nothing, expecting to find a land of freedom and opportunity.

In a blink, that young man vanished again, as the tingling and numbness in his hands and lips had begun to spread and incapacitate his tongue.

The two men walked back to the office. Dvorak knew his time was up - somehow. He hadn’t figured out how, or even why. He sat again.

‘You have poisoned me. Why? If you got everything you wanted from Leighman, why?’

‘We’re no ordinary gang of thieves. In our line of business, we remove all the loose ends. We steal what we steal before anybody even knows the item existed. And then we hide it - for our own agenda.’

Holtzhuizen sat in his plush leather chair, and opened a small draw in his desk. Inside were a packet of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter. He placed them gently on the desktop. Dvorak watched and listened in silence. He couldn’t move his arms, and both legs felt the way his face always felt after getting frozen at the dentist’s.

Then Holtzhuizen, with a glance back at the old scientist and a hint of a grin, began picking at his right wrist. He teased very carefully the skin-tight rubber glove from his hand, pulling it inside out as he removed it.

Dvorak shook his head, as much as he still could. He had worked out his last puzzle:

‘Dimethyl sulfoxide?’

The evil genius dropped the glove into a small basket under his desk and pulled a wet wipe from a dispenser mounted on the wall an arm’s length away.

‘And saxitoxin. The poison of champions. It’s what the CIA agents used to carry in the old days. I guess you’re already paralysed now. It’ll work its way through your system and eventually paralyse your respiratory system. Cigarette?’

‘No. I’m a cancer researcher. Bad for the health, you know,’ replied Dvorak.

Holtzhuizen studied the man’s face, and burst out laughing.

‘You know. I think you may be the nicest man I’ve murdered so far. I like you. Pity you’re a loose end and have to go.’

He opened his cigarettes, a packet of Treasurer Black Slims and tapped the end of one on his desktop before gripping the gold filter between his lips. After a long first drag, he spun the cigarette between his fingers and then relaxed back into his chair. He fixed Dvorak in his gaze.

‘In the good old days before the Tenth Revolution - when we still had the Federal Government, and the States were all together - things were easy. We’d just team up with our financier buddies, pay people off and get them into government positions. Money was no object because we printed it. Politicians did nothing. Said nothing. They fell into three groups: the corrupt ones we paid off. The ones with skeletons in cupboards, we blackmailed. The honest ones who threatened to blow the whistle; well, they had nasty accidents, or we unleashed a patsy with a gun. Are you still with me, old timer?’

He scrutinised Dvorak, who was beginning to wheeze as he fought for each breath.

‘Thing is, we see dozens of new inventions. We owned the Patent Office. Something new or promising appears? We go and get it and kill the inventors. Done. That was our job. I have seen over a dozen cancer cures. No doubt they all work. Like yours. But nobody’s ever going to find out about it. Same with an invention to get practically free energy from water and sunlight. I’ve got plans on that one here.’

He opened another desk-drawer and pulled out a blood-stained flash-drive. For a moment, he looked at it, his mind transported to somewhere else.

‘Free energy you can get by pissing in a pot and sticking it in the bloody sunshine. No way! We control the little people. That’s what it’s all about: control. There is no peak oil even though you’ll see it all over the news. We pay for all that media as well. We own the oil drilling rights, which means we own the right not to drill it; which means higher oil prices and higher profits for our friends in the oil companies.

‘And cancer? You’re a fool, old man. We control the food. We control the water. We control the air people breathe. If we wanted people to stop getting cancer, we’d stop contaminating the food, water and air, you dummy. We do it - we cause it all. At some point, we’ll take your invention and give it one of our pharma companies to produce, with an exorbitant price-tag attached. But it will be on our terms. Like I said before: control.’

He chuckled to himself, a self-satisfied chuckle, as he swayed from side to side on his swivel chair. Dvorak began to cough, drool beginning to hang from the corners of his mouth.

‘Things changed when the States got pissed and decided to pull the plug. But it was already too late. We had the money, the infrastructure, the surveillance of practically everything. Hell, that’s how we found out about your cancer cure. Too late, suckers. We’ll have it our way eventually. What do they call their damned abomination? The Confederation of Independent States of America - the CISA. Imbeciles! We’ll just poison them all into oblivion until the few sorry remnants come crawling back, begging for a solution. The good old Hegelian Dialectic. It works for everything. Create the problem; wait for the outcry; push our pre-planned solution.’

Holtzhuizen began to laugh, but stopped and looked intensely at the motionless man in the chair opposite. His face was bright red as he desperately fought to get just one next breath. He lost that fight and became silent. Holtzhuizen sucked one last drag from his black cigarette before stubbing it out. He circled around his desk and closed the bulging eyes of the frail old man.

‘It really was a pleasure to meet you, Professor.’

He left the office, finding Vincent in the corridor waiting for him.

‘Sir, we’ve now pinpointed all the targets on the Vergelding list. Permission to commence the operation?’

‘Be my guest, Vincent. Bring them here alive though. I want to know which one of those bastards blew off my daughter’s head.’

*****

CHAPTER 2

‘Where are you, sweetie?’ asked Cate.

‘You know me, hen,’ said Thorn with a throaty chuckle. ‘Sitting in a right dive of a bar in a council estate waiting for my pal, Kewey, to turn up.’

He lowered his voice.

‘Oops, I’m getting funny looks from the locals. Maybe I should have called it a palace.’

Thorn placed his elbow on the sticky table and turned away from the assortment of yobs and chavs, and the skeletal old men nursing their