War Games

  WAR GAMES

  By Douglas Jackson

  First Kindle edition 2014

  ©2014 Douglas Jackson

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or part, without written permission from the author.

  This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events in it are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, or events is entirely coincidence.

  Cover image by Megan Fitzgerald

  Also by Douglas Jackson

  Enemy of Rome (Valerius 5) 2014

  Sword of Rome (Valerius 4) 2013

  Avenger of Rome (Valerius 3) 2012

  Defender of Rome (Valerius 2) 2011

  Hero of Rome (Valerius 1) 2010

  Claudius (Rufus 2) 2009

  Caligula (Rufus 1) 2008

  As James Douglas

  The Samurai Inheritance (2014)

  The Excalibur Codex (2013)

  The Isis Covenant (2012)

  The Doomsday Testament (2011)

  Introducing Glen Savage: the last resort after all the other last resorts have struck out

  In loving memory of my dad Bill Jackson, Malayan veteran, wanderer and dreamer, who gave me my love of books and words

  CHAPTER 1

  I could see his face floating two feet above me, grotesque and swollen, the eyes sacs of white pus between half-closed lids. He was young – twenty they’d said, though you wouldn’t know it – and dressed in a grey suit that had once fitted a youthful, even athletic body, but now stretched tight over his gas-distended belly and chest. A thin, dark line scarred his throat like a knife wound where a knotted blue tie cut deep in the flesh of his neck. As I watched, an eel, its skin as dark and sinuous as his was pale and lifeless, slithered effortlessly from the open mouth and swam off to my left. Breathe, I had to breathe. I’d been here too long in this watery tomb. If I didn’t breathe soon I would be as dead as he was. But I couldn’t. If I breathed, my mouth would fill with icy, snow-melt river water and my oxygen-starved lungs would draw it deep until they were filled beyond filling any more. Suffocate or drown?

  ‘Avenge me.’ The unexpected words rang in my head like the tolling of a church bell, and I knew it was his voice I was hearing, impossible though that was.

  I wanted to shout back at him. How can I avenge you if I’m dead? Let me go. You don’t need me. My head shook from side to side as I tried desperately not to breathe. Not to give in to that most automatic of human impulses.

  ‘Avenge me.’

  This was insane. I couldn’t hold on any longer. I felt a groan begin low in my chest and something expanded inside me, increasing the pressure in my throat until it was unbearable. My head was going to explode.

  ‘Avenge me.’

  Please. Let . . . me . . . go.

  ‘Avenge me. Promise.’

  Yes!

  I screamed it. I opened my mouth wide though I knew it was the last word I would ever say. By acceding to his foolish, impossible plea I had condemned myself as surely as if I’d put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. The icy water would fill my throat and my lungs. My heart would stop. My brain function would fade and ultimately die. Worse, I would never see Aelish again.

  ‘Mr Savage?’ The voice came not from inside my head, but close to my right ear.

  ‘Mr Savage?’ The pitch changed and I could tell he was genuinely frightened. I sucked in a huge gulp of air and my eyes snapped open to be blinded by a glare of white light. I put up a hand to shield them.

  ‘Will you put that fucking light out?’

  A blurred figure moved across what remained of my vision and the light clicked off. ‘Sorry.’

  I allowed my head to slump onto my chest, throwing the well-worn, olive-green rugby shirt that had given me the connection aside. My hands shook and my whole body was convulsed by involuntary movement. I had to clench my teeth to stop them being rattled out of my jaw. Christ, I was getting too old for this.

  When the shaking fit passed I looked up at the two men who shared the room with me. The first, tall and lean and the younger of the pair, had the sleek, well-groomed air of someone who knew exactly where he was going in life. It was late afternoon, but his white shirt was as pristine as when he’d carefully buttoned it up that morning and his dark Lothian and Borders Police tie was knotted at the throat in just the right way. He sat perched with his backside on the front of his desk so that he was silhouetted against the smoky clouds that filled the window behind, and he had his arms folded across his chest. I knew he hadn’t moved an inch from that position all the time I was trying to suffocate myself to death.

  ‘Could I have some water, please?’ The words emerged in the cracked, brittle tones of a feeble ancient. Superintendent Dorward stayed just where he was, but the second man appeared at my elbow and handed me a glass. For a moment, I stared at it. About four minutes earlier I’d thought I was drowning in the stuff. Maybe I wasn’t that thirsty after all. I laid the glass down without taking a drink.

  The older man looked in his mid-forties and his thinning hair was at the stage where he wasn’t sure whether to try to hide the fact that he was going bald, or just accept it. The result was a sort of wispy, mohair patchwork that only made him look ridiculous. His clothes marked his vocation as much as his age: shabby tweed jacket worn over mustard-yellow shirt; moleskin trousers struggling to hold in a half-moon stomach; sensible brown shoes. Brogues? Civilian. Academic. His shining button eyes stared at me expectantly.

  ‘Well?’ The voice was Dorward’s; a single word that managed to be economic, official and contemptuous all at the same time. Superintendent David Dorward would never believe in my abilities, but he was a man happy to use any weapon he could lay his hands on to push him towards the next rung on the ladder. He’d once ordered a team of trained marksmen to shoot me. But that’s another story.

  I made him wait a few seconds before I answered. ‘He’s in water, been there for three, maybe four days. Trapped under some sort of ledge, I think.’

  ‘Where? The Teviot?’

  The River Teviot runs through the town of Hawick where Eddie Dunn had disappeared, but twenty miles downstream it joins the much larger Tweed. ‘How the hell do I know? I’m a psychic, I don’t have fucking satnav.’ I closed my eyes and the dead face appeared before me. This time I concentrated on the surroundings. ‘The ledge was made of concrete. Some sort of man-made structure. A cauld or a salmon ladder.’

  Dorward calculated the possibilities and came up with an answer. He reached for the phone, but his hand came up short. He stared at me. He’d brought me in to the investigation, but not willingly, and his every instinct warned him against trusting what I was. This was a one-off test to keep someone at headquarters happy. As far as everyone else was concerned I was still a pariah. ‘How do I know this isn’t some figment of your over-active imagination?’ His eyes and his voice were a challenge.

  Glen Savage never turns down a challenge. ‘He had the number 1514 tattooed on the knuckles of his left hand.’

  His head came up like a Pointer’s on the scent. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He asked me to avenge him.’

  Dorward snorted dismissively. ‘You’re not on TV now, Savage. Why would someone who accidentally drowned need to be avenged?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe the little puncture wound under his left armpit will help you answer that question.’

  That got his attention, and while Dorward called the Lothian and Borders diving unit, his companion fidgeted beside me. He opened his mouth to say something, but I’d switched on my mobile phone and it rang before he could ask his question. It was an unrecognised number and I almost didn’t answer. Dorward’s discouraging glare convinced me I sho
uld.

  ‘Savage.’

  ‘Mr Glen Savage?’ The voice was wary, cultured and with a slight accent I couldn’t pin down.

  ‘That’s right. What can I do for you?’

  ‘My wife . . . that is we . . . need your help.’

  ‘I’m a little busy at the moment, Mr . . .?’

  ‘My name is Assad Ali.’ He said it as if he expected me to recognise it, but it meant nothing. His next words did. ‘It’s urgent and I’m prepared to make it well worth your effort.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, Mr Ali.’ I hung up.

  I turned to find George Stevens, the academic, staring at me. Stevens was another who didn’t really believe in what I did, but he didn’t understand it either, and that annoyed him. I’d been successful often enough to raise questions in his mind and now he was trying to find answers to those questions. I wished him luck. Sometimes the dead talk to me, sometimes they don’t. I learned long ago never to ask why.

  He was a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Edinburgh and the cops had asked him to investigate the reality behind the myth. Glen Savage – psychic investigator: the last resort after all the other last resorts have struck out. The myth was a little tarnished these days, but I’d helped police forces up and down the country find missing bodies often enough to make them curious. Was I, or wasn’t I? Sometimes my successes were publicised, mostly they weren’t. The fact that Stevens was here hinted that someone high up might be prepared to take me seriously.

  ‘They didn’t tell you about the tattoo?’ The way he said it made it not quite the question he intended it to be. He already knew the answer.

  ‘Maybe it was just a figment of my over-active imagination?’

  It was meant as a joke, but his response was serious.

  ‘No, no. You were right. How did . . .’ Stevens shook his head as if he was trying to clear it and when he spoke again there was an intensity in his voice that hadn’t been there earlier. ‘You must tell me the process, the paths that led you there. Every step. I really must know.’

  I almost laughed. How could I explain something I didn’t understand myself? How could I map out steps and paths and processes that didn’t exist except in his imagination? What was, was. But George Stevens would never accept that, never mind understand it. His brain demanded answers I would never be able to give. His intellect gave him the certainty that there must be a reason, when I, Glen Savage, knew that reason didn’t come into it. I am what I am, and they can take it or leave it. I am what I am, because of an accident of fate.

  He glanced at Dorward, who was still on the phone, and whispered. ‘Will you avenge him?’

  This time I did laugh. ‘Why would I do that?’ Just because the dead talk to me doesn’t mean I have to do what they tell me.

  I left Stevens none the wiser two hours later, with a headache for my troubles and without a word of thanks from Dorward. I had provided the clues he needed to find what remained of the unfortunate Eddie Dunn, it was up to him what he did with them.

  The gift is a contrary creature. It can give up its secrets with the ease of a department store Santa handing out presents at Christmas, but sometimes the message is only partial and it demands a heavy payment. Drowning with my dead subject was unusual, and I wondered why I’d been subjected to the ordeal. It’s not something I’d ever talked about, even to my shrink, but I’d had recurring nightmares about being trapped underwater in a confined space ever since I’d sailed south to the Falklands in ’82, with the other poor, unwitting bastards of 5 Infantry Brigade packed like sardines into the previously plush cabins on theQE2. I only have to watch ten minutes of Titanic to break out in a cold sweat.

  Maybe I should explain? I’ve been seeing things and knowing things other people don’t since I was ten years old. It all began with a child falling from a tree, as children do, and cracking his head, as children do. What children don’t do is wake up to find themselves dreaming dreams that come true. The dreams were strange and vivid, and ordinary things were made extraordinary by colours so brilliant and so exotic I didn’t know their names. Psychedelic.

  At first, I made the mistake of thinking the gift made me special and I didn’t understand that being different can be dangerous. The things I saw and knew weren’t important, but the fact that I experienced them at all made me stand out. When I boasted about the strange music no one else heard on a school trip to a local castle, my mother sent me to a man in a white coat who turned out not to be a doctor and tried to play tricks with my mind. He set me tests, made me look at coloured circles and pictures made up of spots. He gave me bitter-tasting white pills, which I kept in my cheek and then spat out when no one was looking. When he began to talk to my mother about more ‘proactive’ treatment, I lied that the visions had stopped. I didn’t know what ‘proactive’ meant, but the hungry look in his eyes told me it was definitely not good news.

  That’s when I decided to be ‘normal’.

  Normal meant not telling the blond-haired boy in the class above he would fall down a disused mine shaft near our houses, break his leg and die a lonely death. It meant the young man accused of burning down the local pub had to go to jail, even though his best mate had framed him for it. I only had to be in the same room as someone to see their future and it tore me apart. My anger and frustration grew until I was going to destroy myself, or someone else. I needed a new me; a new existence, or there would be no me.

  So I joined the Army. On my first tour in Belfast I was naive enough to believe I could use my talents for good, but when I told a mate not to go that way because I was certain there was a culvert bomb, a sniper’s bullet tore out his throat round the next corner. It turns out that fate isn’t going to be overruled by Glen Savage.

  Gradually, I managed to suppress that aspect of the gift. Since I stared death in the face on a freezing blast and bullet-torn night on the slopes of the ugliest mountain in the South Atlantic I’ve never again witnessed someone else’s future. But I still see other things.

  When people come out of the Army with skills, even if they’re skills gained working on Challenger tanks and Bailey bridges, the community can always find a place for them. For people like me it was different. All I had after the Falklands were my scars and my medals. I’d been trained to do two things. To survive. And to kill. Neither of them looked particularly inviting on a CV.

  Eventually, in desperation more than anything else, I turned to the gift. In the euphoria of being alive on the long haul home in the hospital ship, I’d recovered enough to brighten up the endless boring days with a few simple tricks. I would tell someone what was in their pocket and, when I touched the object, relate the life history of who had given them it. Silly things, just conjuring stunts really, but the kind of things that convinced people I should be on the stage. I was never comfortable in front of an audience, but I was good and it brought me to the attention of a former comrade turned cop, who had a murder, but no body. Finding the dead girl’s woodland grave set me on the strange road I travel, gave me the life that I live and the love that will never leave me.

  CHAPTER 2

  I parked the Capri outside the house and waited for a few minutes in the fading light, enjoying the silence of an early summer’s evening.

  The cottage we built for ourselves sits at the head of a steep slope three hundred feet above the river, where I can look out of the picture window up the Tweed Valley towards the three hills the geographer Ptolemy called Trimontium. In a dry summer you can sometimes see etched on the grass the ghost of the red sandstone fortress the men of the Twentieth Legion garrisoned there. The house is low and squat, so the fierce north winds that sweep down the valley in winter don’t do too much damage to the grey, slate roof. I still can’t believe I’m fortunate enough to live here.

  Here, is the border country between Scotland and England. A lovely land of fast-flowing rivers and tree-shrouded valleys. Small towns with big hearts and rivalries going back a thousand years.
The locals are a hardy breed, because history has made them that way. You have to be hardy to survive in country that’s been battled over by two nations for centuries, like two dogs fighting over a bone. Sometimes, when I sit on my deck, I can hear the sounds of horse-brass clinking in the valley below, and I imagine a long column of English cavalry, driven by righteous outrage, marching to give this soft and beautiful land the ‘Rough Wooing’ that set it back a hundred years.

  I saw the light in the porch flick on and off, and smiled. Aelish was getting impatient.

  She was waiting for me inside the front door. Even after two decades of marriage her beauty always takes my breath away. It is more fragile now than when we met all those years ago; delicate, like a porcelain doll, but I think that only makes the impact of it more powerful. She has slightly almond-shaped eyes and sharply defined cheekbones, as if in some distant past a handsome young Thai sailor was shipwrecked on the shore of MacDonald lands and given succour by the daughter of the clan chief.

  ‘You spent so much time in the car I thought you must have a woman with you.’ Her voice had the musical, lilting accent of the Gael and as she spoke she brushed a strand of wispy, harvest-blonde hair from her eyes.

  ‘Aye, that’s right,’ I grinned. ‘She’s still there, poor wee thing. I’ll nip back after I’ve finished my supper and have my evil way with her in the boot.’

  She laughed. ‘You’ll do no such thing. The boot of that impractical monster of yours isn’t big enough.’ She raised her chin and offered her lips to me. I bent at the waist, and kissed her, enjoying the natural sweetness of her mouth and inhaling the scent of her perfume. Then I took the handles of her wheelchair and whirled her around and pushed her towards the dining room.

  ‘So, what have you cooked for me? I hope it’s not fish again?’

  ‘You shouldn’t catch so many if you don’t like to eat them.’ She smiled the reply over her shoulder.