Exploitation: Book One of the One World Government Series

By George Walley

Set in the late 1980’s Tom Newbold gets his first job working at the stables of a private country estate in Herefordshire . He is soon submerged into a world of murder and mafia in-fighting.
Approached by MI6 is he to help the British Secret Service or does his loyalty lie with his generous and seemingly honest employer?
The prize of ultimate mafia overlord is what Tom Newbold has become involved with and both the American and the Soviet administrations are intent of achieving that prize.
From that struggle emerges a new organisation, one intent on the future realization of a singular society run by a singular government, one that would ultimately make the the world a better place to live in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244396091

Book preview

Exploitation

Book One of the One World Government Series

Exploitation – Book One in the One World Government Series

First Edition

Copyright © 2018 George Walley

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-0-244-39609-1

1966

Chapter 1 – 1st January 1966

Maites awoke and instinctively knew that something was wrong. She quickly twisted in her bed to look over to the bed that Tomas was sleeping in. It was the middle of the night but the waning moon and the left-over redness from the embers of last night's bonfire still gave off light.

Tomas was intact and intermittently snoring. That's what her husband did when he'd drunk too much and, with last night being Argentina’s ‘Ano Nuevo’, he'd had more than his usual intake of alcohol.

It wasn’t his snoring that was the problem, but the silence of everything else other than his snoring; that was the problem.

It had been more than thirty-three years since she'd slept in the Callejón Seguro, her family home, situated on the Argentinian coast, fifty kilometres south-east of Bahia Blanca. Maites had run away from this home on the 7th August 1932 at the age of seventeen. It was a long time ago but, even after all that time, she knew this silence meant that something was wrong. She couldn't exactly identify which sounds were missing but the house was unnaturally quiet.

Somehow those years of growing up in the Callejón Seguro had made her aware of possible dangers. Nothing had been said, but Maites and her elder brother Enrico, had gradually become aware that they were very privileged. A terrible economic depression had befallen Argentina in 1929. Millions of Argentinians were without work and there was poverty and starvation throughout the country, but she never saw it at Callejón Seguro and neither had any of her father's or her grandfather's club members seen it.

El Club had been started by her grandfather back in the 1890's. Both her father and grandfather had the same name of Guido, albeit her grandfather had always been referred to as Gramps by all of the family. Initially El Club had the commendable aim of uniting the farmers of the Pampas to protect themselves against the outlaws and gangs that were, at that time, preying on the hard-working farmers who were scratching out a new and better future for themselves and their families. During that depression of 1929 it had achieved what it had set out to do which Maites regarded as admirable, but it had gone further than that and had unfairly privileged its members to the detriment of other hard-working Argentinians. Her father and grandfather’s buddies rode the depression in relative comfort whilst millions of other Argentinians were ignored and left to fight for an existence.

As a 17-year-old, it disgusted her; she couldn't possibly live with being a part of it and that had been the reason that all those years ago, she had run away.

When Maites was a child there had always been sounds at night, sounds of her father's men walking up and down the beach, the distinct noise of boots crunching down on sand and pebbles. Where were those sounds now and where was the sound of the waves breaking on the beach?

That was what was missing, the sound of the sea. If she couldn't hear the sea that meant that the house doors, the ones folding out onto the beach, were closed and they were only closed if there was either a gale or if the guards considered there to be danger. There wasn't a gale, so Maites knew – the family was in danger.

The main thing, from Maites' point of view, was that Tomas was alright. The Salazar family was her family and she took responsibility for being a member of that family. The only connection that Tomas had with this family was that when she had run away to Mexico City and when she was totally destitute, Tomas had been there to pick her up. Within six months of landing in Mexico City, Maites had ceased being a member of the Salazar family and had become Mrs. Costillas, Tomas' wife.

She got up, her feet feeling for the slippers that she knew were somewhere around or under the bed. She pulled a crocheted wool shawl over her silk nightdress and silently exited the room closing the door behind her.

She was under no illusion, there was danger in the house. If there was danger for her, that same danger would be there for Tomas and, once it had consumed him, that danger would go back to their home in Mexico City and would become a danger to their three remaining sons and two daughters, Jonathan, their eldest son had died two years earlier. She didn't know in what form that danger would come but she knew that she had to protect her family from it and that concreted her resolve.

The Callejón Seguro had been the home of her childhood and that had been a place of warmth, of comfort and of love. The Callejón Seguro of her teenage years was not so comfortable, it was a place of dispute with her parents, a place that she was not prepared to tolerate because it was built on strength; the strength of her father and her grand-father, it was built on their intimidation of everyone else, it was built on fear. That fear was present tonight, trying to intimidate her, threatening her family.

She had a choice, she could wake Tomas, they could get out of the Callejón Seguro, they could leave it behind, run away, just as she had done thirty-three years ago. But she wouldn’t have escaped it, nor would her children, she would have just distanced herself.

The fear was here, in the Callejón Seguro and it was time for her to defeat it.

Once out in the corridor, her grandparent's room was the first door on the right. Guido and Renata were in their nineties - sprightly nineties. It was the fact that they were coming to the end of their lives that had persuaded Maites to agree to a reconciliation with her father. It had been a wonderful reunion earlier that day and they had hoped for a further three days before she and Tomas had to return back to their family. It had been the first time that she had discussed, with her parents, the death of her brother, Enrico. That had been just over ten years ago, murdered in their home town of Bahia Blanca. That is what she had run from, the continual fear, was she a target as Enrico had been, did the other Argentinian crime families see her, Maites Costillas, as a threat? No, the chauvinism was still rife in the criminal fraternity, Enrico had been killed because he was the male heir to the Salazar family – whoever did it wouldn’t have considered that the little sister could be a threat.

She'd so badly wanted to come home when she had heard about her brother's death. To do so would have re-introduced her family into the endless saga of violence that encircled the Salazar family and had caused her brother’s death.

Maites sensed as she turned the door handle, that her grandparents were dead. Was there a smell of death? She couldn’t detect a smell but she knew that they were dead and she felt the surge of relief that she had made the right decision to keep her children away from this fearful place.

Guido and Renata Salazar lay in bed, both killed by a neat circular gunshot wound to their foreheads. Maites backed out of the room, dreading that the killers already had her in their sights. She turned and went further down the corridor to the last door. It accessed the suite of rooms that her parents, Guido and Abila, slept in.

Maites Costillas knew that she was witnessing the assassination of the Salazar family. An assassin wouldn't have accessed the Callejón Seguro unless he or she had wanted to kill the complete family – a singular hit would happen outside the family home, like when they killed Enrico. This was the complete family being annihilated.

When Maites had been a child, her parents had a large dressing room; to one side was a door leading to a bathroom, and to the other, a bedroom. That had changed; her mother now had a bedroom in the old dressing room and like her grandparents, she lay there, dead - a bullet hole centrally located above her eyes. Maites had had over thirty years to assess her feelings about her mother, she had left the Callejón Seguro all those years ago, she had hated her mother for not standing up to her father. It had been her mother’s responsibility to insist on empathy from her father for all those disadvantaged Argentinians but she had gone along with El Club, she was as guilty or more.

But lying there dead, it was so final, there was no time left to complete the reconciliation that this holiday had been all about. The woman who had always been her mother was lying there dead and Maites Costillas was shocked by how much it hurt.

Maites cautiously walked past her mother's corpse and on to what had once been her parents’ bedroom. Even from the doorway, it was clear to Maites that her father had not benefited from the humane execution that the killer had granted her mother and grandparents.

Guido Salazar had been silently tortured.  It was a dreadful sight. Although she hadn’t had any affection for this man for over three decades, this man that had driven her from her home, now when she looked at his distorted body she was still shocked and she still found a feeling that she could only determine as the last remains of love for this man that was no more than a corpse. His mouth was gagged, and his wrists were tied to the frame of the bed. His face had been cut in a way that suggested a slow, deep, sadistic use of a knife. His eyeball had been removed from his socket, it hung, still attached to his face. Her father had died from multiple stabbings to his torso; too many than were needed to kill him. The killer had been fanatical, releasing some pent-up anger in that excessive stabbing.

Strangely, seeing that calmed her. The killer’s vengeance was for her father, not her.  Possibly she was numb, and the shock would hit her later or possibly she just wasn't that sad to see these people killed. Maites had loved her mother and grandmother but they were distant women living in the shadow of and focusing on their tyrannical husbands. She'd spent a long time deciding whether to visit the Callejón Seguro or not. She'd eventually decided to, in the hope that her children could have some relationship with their grandparents and great grandparents.  What a mistake.

Nothing had changed here. Running away thirty-three years ago had been right. Coming back had not been and it had resulted in her husband being in a position of danger. She could die any second, the spit of a silenced gun, she would have woken earlier if a silencer hadn’t been used. All she could think of was, whether the children would be alright? Would Tomas' family look after them properly? They were good people.

She left her parent's bedroom and slowly descended the stairs. She'd never encountered a situation like this before, but weirdly she felt attuned to what was happening. She knew that she needed to be cautious coming down the stairs, but at the same time she also knew that the killer would not attack her on the stairs – maybe it was the threat of her falling down the stairs and making a noise or maybe it was some instinct inherited from her ancestors.

She went down to the drawing room lit by the moonlight and the remaining bonfire that was coming in from the large windows.

Maites Costillas sat down in a chair and waited, she was calm, it was if she had been born to this sort of situation, she regretted it, it was in her blood, she was the product of this violent family and she sat there at ease with the inevitable violence that was approaching her.

It didn’t take too long. It was a man. A lithe man dressed in black with a balaclava to protect his identity, but it didn’t work. Immediately Maites knew that it was Enrico’s son Guilliammo, his stance was Enrico’s, his shape was Enrico’s. She had never met him, but she just knew.

'Hello, Guilliammo,' Maites said, slowly and quite chilled. 'I’m not sure whether you are in a particular hurry to kill me or not, but I would appreciate an explanation as to why you have killed our family?'

'It’s nice to meet you, Aunt. It’s a busy night for me. Can we cut the explanations? I’d like to be out of here with a few hours of darkness on my side.'

'No. That’s not good enough, boy. Why?' It confused Maites that here she was feeling so calm when she was facing a man, a member of her own family, who was going to try to kill her. She hadn’t recognised just how cold the real Maites Costillas was; no that was wrong, Maites Costillas was not like that, it was Maites Salazar that had the deep familiarity with violence! 'And why did you do what you did… to my father?'

Guilliammo moved over to the window and pulled off his balaclava. The light from outside showed his face. It was potentially as lovely as his father's, Enrico’s face. There was enough of Enrico in that face to make Maites instinctively feel connected to the assassin, but that face had suffered. On top of Guilliammo's features was a disfigurement, one that had been inflicted by someone, rather than nature, and Maites Costillas knew the reason why he had tortured her father. 'An eye for an eye, Aunt, literally! I was cut out and that's not right. I’m Enrico’s son. I deserve something. It should not go to you.'

'The Club, Guilliammo? I don’t want the Club. Please, you have it. The Costillas family doesn’t want anything to do with that organisation.'

'That’s a lie.'

She felt that she had never been surer about her honesty, she hated El Club, she hated the world of the Salazars. 'It's not. I left this family thirty years ago. All I wanted was for my children to have met their grandparents once, but you've made sure that that didn't happen.'

'You are a crazy old woman...' Guilliammo didn't have a chance to finish his sentence before his head burst apart, a bullet making a clean entry into his left temple and exploding out through the right side of his head taking great chunks of bone and brain with it. The bullet cracked into the window but didn't break it. Guilliammo's brain splattered all over the reinforced glass and his body fell against it, sliding down to a heap on the floor.

Maites felt no pity or sadness, the boy had made his own choices and had forfeited his life. He had lived as a Salazar and by doing so he had ensured that he was going to die as one. Her grandparents, her parents and now her cousin lay dead within this house, but it wasn’t her family, her family were her children that she had kept away from the Callejón Seguro, away from the poison that flowed in the Salazar veins.

Maites looked to the door and there was Tomas. He was holding a hunting rifle.

1987

Chapter 1 – 15th May 1987

Tom Newbold was driving his Ford Escort back to his bedsit in the city of Hereford, it was Friday but not quite the end of his working week, he had to be back at the stables the next morning. Once he had feed the horses and made sure that the stables were clean, then his weekend would begin.

He was hard-wired to look forward to weekends, it was a method of measuring the week, counting off the hours and days until the weekend, and whilst Tom Newbold did this, he actually dreaded weekends. He enjoyed his job working at the stables of a private estate, called Ty Cradoc Shawls, this was the end of his second week. He didn’t enjoy living in Hereford or living in a bedsit.

He was still only eighteen-years-old and had only left the Oratory School the previous year, most of his school chums had gone onto university but he had decided to get straight into the job market, to gain experience, to see life as it really was. Although he was the only person to ever know it, he regretted that decision. Tom realised that the protected life of living in a boarding school could not last forever, he realised that it was inevitable that he and his three best friends were going to have to go their own ways at some point; Edward was starting at Brasenose College at Oxford, Martin to Southbank Polytechnic reading something to do with computers and Dday to Loughborough to do Sports Science. They were all enjoying a summer break before their courses started in September.

That’s what he should have been doing, instead confident, reliable and mature Tom Newbold had decided to launch himself into the real world of actually getting a job. The problem was that Tom wasn’t confident, he spent a good portion of his time in the bedsit questioning himself, he tried to be reliable, but in no way was he mature. It wasn’t just Edward, Martin and Dday that he missed, he missed his parents, Jerry and Ester, he missed his sister Mary-Lou, he missed their dog, Juno, he missed his home, the farm at Hornton. He would have driven home for the weekend but it wasn’t worth it for one night and there would be all those questions from his parents about how it was going and probably they would see his deception, they would see that he was lonely and that he had made a mistake.

But he did really enjoy his job. His position within the stables was that of Trainee Stables Manager, a temporary position awaiting the appointment of a new Stables Manager, the previous one had been dismissed. Albin Costillas, who was ultimately responsible for the stables, seemed a nice, quiet man, Tom couldn’t really imagine him ever getting cross or dismissing anyone. Albin Costillas had said, earlier that day, that due to the quality of his work, Tom was being considered for that job, which was fantastic news. What was more, Josie Hillman had stopped going on about her wonderful boyfriend, which was also great news.

Josie was about the same age as Tom, he didn’t know how long she had worked in the stables, but she knew the place backwards. They had immediately established a good working relationship and whilst she wasn’t the stereo-typical girl that Tom would normally consider as attractive, but this wasn’t the first time that he had tried to recall her features on the way back home at the end of a working day; her huge brown eyes and her thick mass of auburn hair. He had seen her handling bales of hay without any problem which was quite impressive as she didn’t look particularly strong and was only five foot seven inches tall, he had seen her height in her personnel file, maybe he had been snooping, it hadn’t said much, Josie Hillman, date of birth, 28th of April 1966, her height five foot seven inches, her weight nine stone, she didn’t look anything like as heavy as that now.

He enjoyed working with Josie and it seemed that she enjoyed working with him, the only thing that Tom had found annoying about Josie Hillman was that she was always going on about her boyfriend, the gorgeous Tony Gil-Thomas, but over the last two days that had thankfully, very definitely stopped.

Tom was jolted from his reflections by the realisation that there was an old Austin Maxi behind him, it had probably been there for some time and whilst there shouldn’t have been anything weird about it, it had somehow roused his suspicion. On country lanes such as the one he was on, it had nowhere else to go, if it was behind him, it stayed behind him until one of them found another road to drive on.

Five minutes later, by the clock in his Ford Escort - it had seemed a darn sight longer than five minutes - the car was still there! Tom forced himself to give it a further five minutes, even on country lanes, it was peculiar for a car to be following another for ten minutes! A minute is a long time to not worry about something and when you have five of them all together, it isn't five times as long… time seemed to be subject to compound interest! Five minutes was, for Tom, ages!

He’d been approaching a village called Kingstone, he knew of a good passing place coming up in the road. He very gradually slowed and stretched to the back of the passenger seat to grab a map. To the car behind him he was obviously lost and in need of consulting the map. By the time he reached the passing place, he was hovering at about twelve miles an hour.

The Austin Maxi didn't overtake. That was it!

He announced to himself that he was officially freaked. It was possibly something to do with the Costillas, the family that owned Ty Cradoc Shawls; they were supposed to be gangsters, but what gangsters did in the Herefordshire countryside, Tom didn’t know – lie low, he presumed. 

If he did get the job of Stables Manager, would being followed by cars such as the one behind him be a regular occurrence? And if he did make a mistake, do something that the Costillas family didn't like, would he just suddenly disappear in the same way as the previous stable manager had?

Albin Costillas didn’t seem like a gangster; he was shy and very obviously uncomfortable in any company other than his twin-sister’s, Ayelene’s. Tom doubted very much that there was one cell of gangster in Albin Costillas’ body.

The rumours said that the previous Stable Manager, Owaine Milling, had set up an account at the Hereford branch of the Midland Bank and that suppliers to the stables were depositing money in exchange for supply contracts. It hadn’t surprised Tom, the one time that he’d met Owaine Milling he’d determined that the man was bully. He’d been horrid to Josie Hillman; Milling didn’t like Josie and had made no attempt to hide the fact. It was no surprise to Tom that Josie was pleased to see the back of him.

But it was a bit freaky that he had just disappeared.

All these thoughts rushed through his head and in that instant, he determined that the Austin Maxi was following him. He put his foot on the accelerator… he was going to get into Kingstone as soon as possible. At the end of the road was a pub called ‘The Three Horseshoes’. It had a spacious car park and there’d still be customers in there. He’d just pull into that carpark. If the other car pulled up with him, then... What he was going