Deception, p.1
Deception, page 1
DECEPTION
A RYKER RETURNS THRILLER
ROB SINCLAIR
Copyright © 2023 Rob Sinclair
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The right of Rob Sinclair to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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First published in 2023 by Bloodhound Books.
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Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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www.bloodhoundbooks.com
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Print ISBN: 978-1-5040-8521-2
CONTENTS
Love best-selling fiction?
Also by Rob Sinclair
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
You will also enjoy:
About the Author
A note from the publisher
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ALSO BY ROB SINCLAIR
Ryker Returns Series
Renegade
Assassins
Outsider
Vigilante
Protector
James Ryker Series
The Red Cobra
The Black Hornet
The Silver Wolf
The Green Viper
The White Scorpion
The Enemy Series
Dance with the Enemy
Rise of the Enemy
Hunt for the Enemy
The Sleeper 13 Series
Sleeper 13
Fugitive 13
Imposter 13
The DI Dani Stephens Series
The Essence of Evil
The Rules of Murder
Echoes of Guilt
The Bonds of Blood
Standalone Thrillers
Dark Fragments
1
‘This traffic will be the death of us,’ Muller grumbled as the sea of red brake lights in front of them blinked on yet again.
‘It won’t,’ Devereaux replied, gripping the steering wheel of the battered Opel that little bit more tightly to hide her frustration. They’d covered less than two miles across the gridlocked Italian capital in the last half hour, but what else did they expect trying to traverse central Rome during rush hour? And even if she was more well travelled than most, these were unfamiliar streets to Devereaux so she didn’t attempt any clever detours.
No need anyway. They neared their destination all the time, and they’d soon be off the main road.
Muller glanced over his shoulder and Devereaux caught his worried eyes as he turned back around.
‘There’s no one following us,’ she said. How many times had she repeated those words?
‘But how do you know?’
She thought before answering because she really didn’t want to have to go through the whole thing again. Particularly as her explanation only opened up holes, and questions in her own mind as to whether she’d done enough.
‘I already checked the car for trackers before you even got in it,’ she said, thinking out loud as much as anything else. ‘I checked my clothes, your clothes, our bags, everything we have with us.’ Which included not a single item of electronic equipment. They’d ditched all that before they’d even entered Italy.
But she couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure. A simple tracker could be a pinprick in size. Impossible to really find something so small in all the nooks and crannies of a car. But how would they have even had the chance to plant something like that?
Still, she was glad that Muller didn’t question her further.
‘We’re turning up ahead,’ she said. ‘We’ll be off the main road. We’ll be there soon enough.’
Muller mumbled under his breath. Devereaux didn’t bother to ask for clarification of what he’d said. She could only give him so much reassurance. Despite her continued pushback to his anxiousness, her heart rate steadily built as the red brake lights flicked off in unison in front of them and they slowly closed the distance to the turning.
She checked her mirrors, one after the other.
‘Who is he?’ Muller asked.
‘We’ve been through this already,’ Devereaux said, hiding her exasperation well, she thought.
‘You told me his name, but not much else.’
‘I told you he’ll help us.’
‘How?’
‘He’s very… resourceful.’
‘Like you?’
She glanced at Muller who stared at her. She wasn’t sure she liked the tone in which he’d said that. A little accusatory. A little derogatory. As though he didn’t like who she was. What she did.
But whatever preconception he had of her, he didn’t even know the start of it really…
‘You think he can help us?’ Muller said.
‘I know he can help us. That’s why we’re here.’
‘And you trust him?’
In short? No. But Devereaux saw trust as a very complicated concept. Most people, most normal people, didn’t understand it at all. They had friends, families, work colleagues, people they shared their lives with. To them trust was almost an interchangeable word for ‘like’. People trusted people they liked, that they thought they knew well. Sometimes, ultimately, that trust was misplaced and it ended in the souring or even the end of a relationship, but that was about as disastrous as the misunderstanding of the concept of trust went for those people. For Devereaux, trust was very different, with much bigger and more severe consequences where it was misplaced. She’d come to learn that she knew no one that she could trust in every possible instance. But she did believe she’d made the right choice this time.
‘I asked, do you trust him?’ Muller said, his question more forceful.
‘He can help us. He will help us. That’s all you need to know.’
Muller sighed and looked out of his window.
Devereaux waited until the last second, making sure the route ahead after the turning was clear – it was – before she pulled on the steering wheel then thumped the accelerator. The puny engine of the Opel whined as the car picked up speed – finally. Devereaux checked her mirrors again a couple of times as they left the traffic behind.
‘See,’ she said.
Muller looked behind him again but didn’t say anything, and Devereaux wished she’d felt more confident too. Why didn’t she? They’d already travelled more than a thousand miles without a hitch, without hint of them being followed.
‘How did you even find him here?’ Muller asked. ‘A man like… I don’t even know what type of man he is.’
‘I found him the same way I found you. It’s something I’m good at.’
He didn’t say anything more. She was glad. She kept on going through the quieter streets, finally covering some ground. Not too fast though. No need to alert the police.
‘Okay, this is it,’ Devereaux said as she pulled the car to the side of the road, deftly squeezing between two other parked vehicles.
She looked out of the window at the sandstone apartment block. Quaint? More like half-abandoned, the building seemed more ruinous than the three-thousand-year-old Roman remains that stood proudly only a few blocks away.
‘When you said he’s resourceful, you didn’t mean he had resources.’
Devereaux didn’t say anything but got out of the car. The air was warm, smoggy, clogged with the fumes from car exhausts, and the stench of food waste sitting in black bin bags that lined the streets, waiting for clean-up. She looked around as her hand brushed against the bottom edge of her leather jacket, feeling the butt of the Glock handgun underneath.
Would she need to use it?
‘We’re good,’ she said to Muller, before she headed for the entrance to the building. The outer doors weren’t locked and they walked into a dingy atrium where one wall was taken over by mailboxes. ‘This way.’
Muller followed a step behind as Devereaux headed up the stairs. Fourth floor. Fourth door along. No sounds from within the other apartments on this floor. Were they empty?
She stopped at the door and looked along the corridor. Quiet, and she couldn’t hear anything beyond the wood. She knocked and shuffled back, looking directly at the spyhole. Muller edged to her side – he’d be in view too.
She heard his footsteps on the other side. Held her breath. Put her hand to her hip once more, but didn’t draw the weapon. Not yet.
The door opened and she peered into his questioning eyes…
2
James Ryker lay in the bed under a thin white sheet. His eyes remained closed even though he’d woken the best part of an hour ago. Relaxation time. Not just this morning, he’d been in that mode for several months really. Relaxation? One way to describe his time here, at least. Transitioning perhaps. Waiting?
The sound of the city never fully died here, and as he lay in the bed he focused on the hum of nearby heavy traffic on the main road a couple of blocks away, and the heavier vibrations of intermittent cars heading down his street. He also heard the chatter of pedestrians here and there, their voices drifting in through the single-pane windows that let in not only plenty of noise, but far too much heat during the afternoon when the summer sun’s rays beat down on the apartment building for several hours without respite. One of the reasons why Ryker was so happy to lie back and relax now, while the bedroom remained cool.
He finally opened his eyes when he heard a car engine close by. Just a normal car, nothing to be excited about, but then the car stopped on the road outside and the engine shut down. Ryker didn’t bother to go to the window to look out, but he did decide it was time to get out of bed. He stepped into a pair of jeans and threw on a T-shirt. He’d shower in the evening rather than the morning. In early summer, Rome was experiencing a mini-heatwave, with daily highs heading past thirty Celsius, which felt all the more hot in the stuffy air of the inner city. Ryker much preferred to get through the heat of the day and shower in the evening, going to bed cool and refreshed.
He moved out into the open-plan living area of the modest apartment. Crappy, in many ways, but he liked it, which explained why he’d stayed so long already – relatively speaking, at least. Despite its current state, the pre-war building had a charm of sorts, the apartment too. Nothing too showy, no extravagances, just functionality. And the location, for the price, couldn’t be beaten. No view as such from his apartment, but from the rooftop he had glimpses of all of Rome’s most famous sights, from the Coliseum, to the Forum. There was no rooftop garden, but on a warm evening Ryker was happy to sit up there nonetheless, watching the sun go down on one of his favourite cities. And the apartment block was more than half empty. Another plus point as far as Ryker was concerned.
He’d agreed a cash deal with the landlord, a smarmy Turkish man named Mahmut. Six months up front for a hefty discount. Ryker wasn’t sure he’d stay in Rome that long, but way cheaper this way than staying in hotels, and Mahmut wasn’t the type to be bothered by identification checks or the like which perfectly suited Ryker. More than half of his tenancy had already come and gone, and quite frankly, Ryker was happy to stay a little longer. The last three months had been quiet, uneventful. Frustrating? Perhaps, but he’d badly needed the respite, both for body and mind recuperation.
He flicked the switch of the yellowed-plastic kettle and a couple of seconds later heard the crackle as the heating element got to work. He poured a glass of water to quench his thirst while he waited then checked the supplies in the near-empty fridge – he never bought more than a day or two’s worth of food in advance, as if keeping stocks low showed this was only a stopover, not a permanent place, despite the weeks passing by one after another.
His hand was on the nearly finished salami packet when yet another sound caught his attention. Footsteps, to be precise.
He left the meat in place and closed the fridge door. The racket from the kettle continued to rise, but above it Ryker focused on the sound outside his apartment door. Definitely footsteps. Why was that odd? No one else lived on this floor. And he never had any visitors.
He left the kettle to boil and moved toward the front door. He took his phone out of his jeans pocket to check the camera feed. He watched the man and woman walking along his corridor. No weapons in their hands. They came to a stop at his door. The woman knocked. The camera angle and her wavy brown hair meant he couldn’t see her face, but something about her was more than a little familiar. The man? Mid-height, casual clothes, a little pudgy, a big bald patch that made him look like a monk. Ryker was sure he didn’t recognise him.
His eyes still focused on the phone screen, Ryker didn’t bother to check the spyhole. Still no sign of this being an ambush, but still… When Ryker reached for the handle he put his right hand to the door frame, leaning forward. A nonchalant pose, except it wasn’t without purpose. Taped to the wall, inches from his fingertips, was a hunting knife with a seven-inch serrated blade. Just in case. He’d hinged a small picture frame by it, which he could quickly close to conceal the weapon. He’d never had to use the knife, but then no one had ever knocked on his door before.
He pushed down on the handle then slowly opened the door a few inches. His eyes found the man’s first, but it was the woman’s face, and eyes, that Ryker’s gaze soon settled on. As he’d thought, he didn’t recognise the man. The woman, on the other hand…
‘James…’ she said.
Ryker said nothing as he stared into the assassin’s eyes.
3
Ryker glanced down to Leia Devereaux’s side. Whatever her motive, she wouldn’t have come here unarmed, even if he had no clue why she had come at all.
Not to kill him, he firmly believed. Otherwise she wouldn’t have simply knocked on the door.
Without his body moving, Ryker shifted his fingers further across the wall, wrapping them around the handle of the knife.
‘You’re not going to ask us inside?’ Devereaux said with her typically seductive yet devilish smile.
‘Why are you here?’ Ryker asked.
‘She told me you can help us,’ the man said.
Ryker’s eyes narrowed as he glanced to him, then back to Devereaux. Whoever the man was, Ryker already figured he wasn’t like her. He was too… ordinary. Not a threat.
‘Help you with what?’ Ryker asked.
Devereaux looked along the corridor.
‘Why don’t we come inside so we can explain?’
Ryker didn’t like that idea at all. He would have said that too, except the next moment more sounds from outside the apartment building grabbed his attention. Hers too. He could tell by the sudden sharp inhale she took. By the way her neck craned ever so slightly, as though angling her left ear to hear better. By the tiniest of dilations of her pupils – a reaction to the chemical change in her body. A spark of adrenaline.
Why? Vehicles. More than one. And they’d approached quickly. Purposefully.
Only one explanation…
‘Shit,’ the man said, his voice and his body language already panicky.
Ryker didn’t shift position at all. Neither did Devereaux.
