Two Serial Killers, A Wedding And A Funeral: T14 Book 4

By Marcus Freestone

It's been nearly a year since the first one. The break has been more than necessary. Too many mistakes last time. It was only a test run, but still.
It turns out that becoming a serial killer is more difficult than I'd expected. All these years of studying the 'greats', honing my plans, and I still almost got caught first time out. I need the magic number four to become a 'proper' serial killer and I'm getting impatient; there will not be a gap of a year between numbers two and three. I'm thinking more like days, to get the police and the media properly interested.
And to get the public thinking, which is the whole point after all. I doubt many people will get it but I'm placing it on record that this is a moral crusade. I know that I'm going to be killing people but this is the only way I can think of getting the message across. Surely it's worth sacrificing a few lives to potentially save many more and change the world for the better? A small price to pay for the opportunity to create a better world for all of us. Is it immoral to kill a few rats in order to find a cure for cancer? Of course not, so how can it be immoral to take a few insignificant lives in order to cure the moral cancer that is killing the world?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcus Freestone
• Release date: Aug 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311373526

Marcus Freestone

My main work is the T14 series of thrillers about a futuristic, high tech counter terrorism agency headed by a man with a computer implant in his brain. The first book "The Memory Man" is permanently free in e-book. I also have a series of novellas on the subject of mental health and psychology. My most popular book is "Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life" which has had 200,000 downloads. It deals with psychology, philosophy, depression, anxiety, mental health in general and the human condition.I have also released more than 50 albums, ranging from metal and rock to jazz and ambient/electronica. And last but not first I also produce the "Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life" podcast and "The Midnight Insomnia Podcast", a comedy show with ambient music and abstract visual images.

Book preview

TWO SERIAL KILLERS, A WEDDING AND A FUNERAL

T14 BOOK 4

by

MARCUS FREESTONE

ALL MATERIAL © COPYRIGHT MARCUS FREESTONE 2015. THIS WORK MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED OR RESOLD IN ANY FORM.

ISBN 9781311373526

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ALSO AVAILABLE BY MARCUS FREESTONE FROM SMASHWORDS:

FICTION

The Least Resistance

The Memory Man: T14 Book 1

Random Target: T14 Book 2

Just Murder: T14 Book 3

Never Kidnap A Serial Killer: T14 Book 5

Ethelbert's Sunday Morning (short stories)

What To Do If Trapped In A Lift With A Dentist (poetry)

NON FICTION

Positive Thinking and The Meaning of Life

101 Ways To Happiness

Tell Depression To #@%! Off

The Psychology Of Happiness: Unraveling Self Help Nonsense By Understanding Your Brain

Donald Trump and Brexit: Misguided Rebellion

101 Completely Made Up Untrue Facts

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

PREVIOUSLY ON T14...

It all began the day I read my obituary.

We need to leave this building immediately, there's a bomb nearby.

Before I had finished saying the word 'nearby' three Close Protection Officers had lunged at the PM and virtually thrown him towards the door.

Three of the front thirteen took that as a signal to get clever and none of them had rucksacks so I shot them in the head.

On that first day, the day my tormentors announced themselves, I had no idea that anything was coming for me; no inkling that my life was about to be turned into a nightmare directed by Salvador Dali.

What will they do next? An exploding pizza leaflet? An email that gives me AIDS?

The former PM has been found in his prison cell. He's been decapitated.

By the time Lars arrived I'd polished off more than a bottle of wine and eaten enough garlic bread to kill Dracula.

Are you saying they have a 'real' UFO?

Keeping the gun to his head I dragged him outside and removed my second bomb of the morning.

Maybe it had been murder but it had definitely been a just murder.

NOW READ ON...

CHAPTER ONE

July 26th 2026

Eventually I broke the awkward silence. You killed Peterson? Why? Well not why, I'd have gladly killed him but... you know, what exactly happened?

In my defence, Jennifer, he was going to die anyway. I went to see him in the hospital and he just wouldn't stop...

I noticed the characteristic eye movement which indicated that his implant had alerted him to something. Not for the first time, I wondered what it was like to have a tiny digital assistant in your brain. Not that I'd have wanted to go through the trauma, in every sense of the word, of being shot in the head and nearly dying; nonetheless, like half a dozen of my fellow agents, I had signed up to have the operation if I ever found myself in such extreme circumstances.

It had never occurred to me before but I suddenly found myself trying to imagine what he actually felt about his implant. In the immediate wake of the operation we were all so pleased to still have him with us that we suppressed any desire to enquire into the nature of the implant. Then we didn't want to draw attention to it or upset him so we never mentioned it unless he brought it up himself. I now realised that years had passed and we all took it for granted. We only ever spoke of it in terms of how it could benefit T14; nobody had ever talked to Arthur about what it actually felt like to have a computer inside his brain. If he had experienced any psychological trauma he'd never mentioned it to anyone inside the organisation. I couldn't help feeling that we'd all let him down in some way. I know Adam felt guilty about how suspicious he had been of Arthur a couple of years ago when Peterson had sabotaged the implant and he'd ended up in America with his memory wiped. To Arthur's credit, once the problem was resolved he had never mentioned it again and never shown any indication that he bore a grudge against Adam.

The implant by no means turned him into a bionic man, it just gave him a partially digital memory and the ability to process information like a computer and interact with other digital devices using decisions made by the organic parts of his brain. It turns out that placing electronic implants inside the human brain actually goes back to the late nineteenth century, which came as a great surprise to me. Don't ask me how it all works but it had definitely got us out of more than one awkward situation. Indeed, I'd been with Arthur a few times when his implant had saved both our lives.

On this occasion, I soon heard what he had been alerted to seconds earlier - frantic footsteps moving in our direction. For the first time I could remember, Adam entered a closed office without knocking and blurted out a tonne of information so quickly I had to really concentrate to take it all in. Not for the first time at T14, something had suddenly kicked off.

Nova, our intelligence gathering base, had finally tracked down the remaining former CIA agents who'd been acting as an eccentric and unpredictable terrorist cell for the past couple of years. Thus far they had attempted to kill their own president, our prime minister and several of us (Arthur's implant saved the day once again), as well as carrying out a bizarre series of psychological attacks on the UK public designed to cause mass panic. Their recent UFO capers had been especially bizarre but ultimately harmless.

We suspected that they had a personal grudge against T14 because it was mainly us who had disbanded their organisation and killed or incarcerated many of their rogue agents. It was also personal for us, and especially me, as I still felt responsible for the death of our irreplaceable colleague John during their bungled attempt on the president at a British airport.

So when Adam finally calmed down enough to tell us to get ready for the chopper journey, I felt a mixture of relief and anger.

The three remaining men, obviously the most experienced/deranged depending on your viewpoint, had committed another very public act. They had taken twenty hostages in a shopping centre, among them five young children and a cabinet minister who had been on a press junket. It was obviously designed to get maximum press coverage. I couldn't help thinking that it was also a calling card for us; they wanted to take out as many T14 agents as possible, or at least publicly humiliate us.

Maybe they were delusional and thought they really could mount a successful attack on us, or maybe they were just in a corner and looking to go out in a blaze of publicity.

Then again, I reminded myself, we mustn't be too sure of ourselves. Last time we faced down two of them, Jay was almost killed and a number of us, myself included, sustained varying degrees of injury. Okay, so I'd take them seriously, but we'd still beat them at whatever game they were playing.

Forty minutes later we arrived in the centre of Birmingham. The sprawling shopping complex was ugly and not at all designed to make it easy for a task force to go in and bloodlessly rescue hostages from heavily armed people with nothing to lose. Still, I could hardly blame the original architects for that.

One thing was certain, however; with the cordon of more than a hundred armed police, not to mention all the TV cameras, nobody was getting out. Now our job was to get in.

We had already received permission from Downing Street to kill the three men, there was going to be no negotiation. The unavoidable glare of publicity only added to the already immense pressure. This was to be T14's biggest test since the 2014 attacks that led to our inception. If we failed, the whole world would know within minutes.

Further evidence that they were taunting us came from the fact that they hadn't disabled the CCTV in the department store where they had contained all the hostages. They wanted us to see the position they had attained which was, from their perspective, a bloody good one. They had rigged all possible entrances to the area of the floor they had occupied with Semtex and all three of them had detonators on their belts, as well as grenades and machine guns. It seemed an impregnable position.

The rest of the shops had, thankfully, been successfully evacuated. All other CCTV had been disabled and all electronic doors had been switched off in the open position. All non-essential power and lighting in the remaining shops had been cut. That at least meant that we could move around in relative darkness, there being no external windows between us and the hostage area. So we could hopefully get pretty close, but getting close enough to eliminate the three targets before they could act would be a very tall order.

One option was to introduce a sleeping gas into the area, but there was no known chemical which would act quickly enough to prevent carnage. It was also very risky to use it with young children, and killing some of them was a definite publicity no no.

Having sent one of our drones through the floor below, we had a thorough scan of the situation. As the sizeable quota of T14 agents buzzed around the small ground floor shop we were using as our base, there seemed no immediately appealing solution. The piles of Semtex all had trembler devices, so any attempts by anyone other than the experts to deactivate the explosives would be fatal. Alice and Phil were working on a possible electronic method of disabling the detonators, but how long that would take or how close we would have to get in order to implement it was unknown.

Leaving them to it I walked over to join Adam, Arthur, Hannah, Jason, Mike and Chris to formulate a tactic of attack. I was gagging for a coffee but I didn't need to be any more wired than I already was so I settled for some orange juice.

Okay, summarised Arthur, we can't gain direct access to the targets because of the piles of Semtex If even one of them goes off it will bring the roof down on the hostages. We can't get a line of sight to make a shot on all three at once from a distance because of the layout of the department. There's no chemical agent that would work quickly enough on the targets without also affecting the hostages. If we throw smoke bombs in they'll probably reach for the detonators. Any suggestions welcome.

What about some sort of sonic signal, said Hannah. something either high pitched or subsonic enough to disable their immune systems? Isn't there some new device we're meant to be getting?

We will shortly be receiving a prototype of a device that fires bursts of light, said Arthur, but we don't have one yet. Besides, anything like that would pose too much risk to the hostages, even if one of the children didn't have epilepsy. It's impossible to direct sound or light waves accurately enough. Besides which it could well set off the detonators.

That set me thinking and Arthur caught my expression.

45?

The detonators – exactly how sensitive are they? Seems to me they're our main problem. What's the reaction time required to press the button?

There's a kind of safety catch on these ones so it's a few seconds.

And once the safety catches are off, if the detonator is touched or dropped it could go off?

Yes. Our director pulled up an enlarged image of the detonator on his laptop. This is the safety switch. In reality it takes about three seconds to activate it.

Okay, so that's our time frame then, I said matter-of-factly, we have to find a way to kill all three targets simultaneously within three seconds of them being aware of our attack.

Any relief I felt at my apparent solution was soon dissipated by my colleagues expressions; nobody had any idea how to enact such a plan.

Twenty minutes later nothing had happened and we had made little progress and so were forced to come up with a radical plan. It sounded insane but we'd run out of options so we started getting ready.

Using their electronic signal, Alice had rigged up a modification for our rifle sights that would show us when we were on target to hit the detonators. We obviously didn't want to do that, we were just using them as a marker. The plan was to fire two feet above and get a good, incapacitating or lethal chest shot. We couldn't get a visual sighting of them but luckily the department they were in was only separated from the rest of the floor on one side by a plasterboard partition. Hopefully the impact of a few bullets travelling through that wouldn't be enough to set off any of the Semtex

Hannah, Chris and I made our way silently towards the targets as the bomb squad worked out which of the exits could be most quickly cleared.

From the CCTV we could see that one of them was keeping a fairly constant eye on the plasterboard wall. They knew that was the only real point of access and were probably expecting us to charge through in some fashion. That meant that we had to execute our plan before they knew what was happening, and also that we couldn't make a single sound that would betray our presence or they would just fire at us through the wall. After that, they would probably panic and, depending on their state of mind, may even decide to blow themselves up. If they had any brains at all they must know that they were never going to get out of this place alive.

We set up sniping positions as far back as we could, each of us watching our individual target on our phones via the CCTV. Our rifle sights were superimposed over the image so that we could tell when we had a bead on them.

With Arthur coordinating us we silently watched our phones and listened to our ear pieces.

Amber, he said after what seemed an age, meaning we were to prepare to fire imminently. I glanced again at my phone to see that my guy was stationary so I adjusted my aim to around eighteen inches above the detonator and braced myself for the shot.

Fire.

I arced the weapon up and squeezed off four shots, raking a bloody line up his body. As I looked at my phone he dropped to the floor, clearly already dead. As I'd hoped, the impact of the bullets made him fall backwards so he didn't fall on the detonator button.

I looked over at Hannah and Chris and they were both clearly satisfied with their respective hits. Just as we were all getting up and preparing to make our way over the piles of Semtex we both heard and felt the explosion.

It was only afterwards that we were able to piece together the subsequent events.

For reasons we'll never know, only one of the piles of Semtex had gone up. It may well have been the panicking movements of the hostages that set off a trembler; certainly none of the targets got near a detonator. The pile in question was blocking the open entrance to the lift shaft so much of the explosive force was absorbed by the shock waves travelling up and down the open space, greatly dissipating the energy.

However, it was still more than enough to bring a large chunk of the ceiling, and a few objects from the floor above, down on a number of the hostages.

One of the children was killed instantly by a falling desk and many hostages suffered burns of varying degrees. Hannah, Chris and I only discovered this afterwards.

Maybe it was his police training kicking in but Chris was the first to move towards the hostages. I began rushing forward, then remembered the remaining two piles of Semtex It would have been possible for the three of us to climb over them without setting them off, but we couldn't be sure that the distressed hostages would be so careful. Therefore we had to forge an exit for them anyway, so we may as well go in that way ourselves.

Hannah and I, helped by members of the bomb squad, carefully held the plasterboard partition steady as Chris cut a doorway into it. We then went through to join the former hostages.

Unlike scenes in films, there wasn't a great deal of shouting and running around; it was mostly eerie silence, smoke and dust from the explosion and some crying.

Everyone remain still, said Chris in his authoritative police officer voice. Your captors are all dead but you are surrounded by explosives, please stay as calm as possible, medical help is on its way.

Thankfully enough of the smoke was being sucked into the lift shaft for everyone to just about be able to see each other. Beforehand I had noted the position of a fire extinguisher and now pulled it off the wall and aimed it at the burning pile of carpet and furniture near the lift. Later on I would discover that two people were also under the pile but there was nothing I could have done about them in any case, they were both already dead.

Hannah instinctively went to the children first and began hurrying them out through the plasterboard partition where many people were now gathering to secure the scene and assess the injuries. While Chris gave first aid to some of the more seriously injured, I carefully gathered the detonators and ran a general check of the area. Once they were in the hands of the bomb squad I helped the remaining hostages who could be moved to get out of harms way.

Once we'd also removed the bodies of the three targets T14's job at the scene was over. The ceiling was still unsafe, not to mention the remaining Semtex, so the