Who Dares Wins Read online

  WHO DARES WINS

  Copyright © 2019 by Vince Vogel

  All right reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook 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 person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  JOIN MY VIP TEAM

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  WHAT'D YOU THINK?

  READY FOR THE NEXT MISSION?

  WANT TO BE KEPT IN THE LOOP?

  JOIN MY VIP TEAM

  If you wish to be the first to learn about my brand new releases, then please sign up below to my no-spam VIP new releases newsletter, and I'll make sure you'll be the first to know about the next book as soon as it's finished!

  Sign Up Here

  1

  No matter how hard he tried to steady his nerves, Vlad couldn’t stop shivering. Terribly violent shivering shook his whole body. The type that doesn’t go unnoticed. And these guys were the type to notice.

  Two well-fed men oozing out of suit jackets, shoulders level with the top of his head, escorted him through the lobby of an old cinema. He felt tiny in comparison.

  Dorring leaned on the deck railing of a small passenger ferry. Echoing in his ears was the sound of a voice he’d not heard for over fourteen years.

  I’ve found him, it said. Come find me.

  It was played from an old mobile phone, the type that was used primarily for phone calls. Before they became minicomputers. Dorring had obsessively listened to the message since retrieving the phone from his mother’s derelict caravan two days ago. It had been in a box of his things that had been sent to her when he’d left the SAS. For fourteen years she’d kept it.

  Amongst the items—beret, uniform, medals and the sort—was the mobile phone he’d had back then. One he’d left in his locker at HQ when he left. Upon switching it on, he’d found whole pieces of his history imprisoned forever on the answerphone. Voices he’d not heard for many, many years. It was like listening to the past. Then came the final message. Sent only one year ago.

  “I don’t know if you’ll ever receive this,” the message began. “I’ve been unable to trace where you went after you left the unit. I suspect you went into some type of special branch. Wherever you are, if you get this message, then you need to know that for the past decade I’ve done nothing except think about the four months I knew you, Alex. Four months that changed both our lives. I’ve obsessed about that time and guess what, I think I’ve tracked him down. Yes, Alex, I actually believe I’ve found the beginnings of a breadcrumb trail that will lead me to him. I’m sure that I’ve found evidence of his work on a Scottish island. McGuffin. So if by some miracle you get this message, there’s only one thing to say, I’ve found him. Come find me.”

  Dorring rewound it and listened again. It wasn’t so much the words that he listened to—he knew those by heart—but the voice and the memories that its familiar sound held. In truth, he listened to it not so much to conjure the face of the man talking, but the face of someone else that he associated with Kevin Yates, the man on the recording.

  When he listened to the voice, he could almost see her in the background. See her smile. Smell the faint perfume she wore. Witness the sun glimmer off her straight, silky brown hair. Imagine the feel of her body pressed perfectly into his.

  Come find me.

  The message finished and Dorring took the phone away from his ear. He checked the screen and saw that the signal was gone. He’d been warned about this on the mainland. No mobile service available on McGuffin. No internet either. It made him feel alone all of a sudden. He gazed out to where the mainland had been. It was gone, the fog having swallowed the view. Dorring glanced the other way in the direction the ferry was going and saw that there was no sign of anything that way either. Just fog and sea, as though they were suspended in ether. They passed several fishing boats with clouds of gulls over the tops of them, squawking intensely as they looped in the air. The flying rats of the sea, Dorring had once heard a sailor call them.

  It was late spring, but still cold this far north. A bitter wind ran over the icy water and froze Dorring’s face. He was about to go back inside when the wind brought something other than cold to him. It brought the sweet smell of perfume.

  He gazed along the railing and saw a woman settling her elbows on the top bar about three yards to his right. She was very pretty. Or at least to Dorring’s eye. She was late twenties or early thirties. Red, wavy hair finished at her shoulders and blew around in the wind so that it resembled wispy flames. There was a mole on her left cheek, the one facing Dorring, and it resembled a tear falling from her eye, trapping her in a permanent melancholy. In fact, it suited her at that moment, because she did indeed look dreadfully sad, her eyes glazed over and her face solemn.

  She took something from her inside jacket pocket. It was a crumpled photograph and Dorring watched as she removed a glove so that her fingers were free to fold the creases out of it. From where he stood, he could just about see the photo. A young girl of around five stood in front of a man who held her shoulders. Father and daughter, Dorring surmised. Then he spotted the mole on the little girl’s cheek and realized that it was the woman at a much younger age. The little girl was smiling in the photo. But the woman who gazed down at it was frowning. It made Dorring instinctively wonder what had happened in the intervening years between then and now to make her look so grave.

  Someone came and stood at the railing on the left of Dorring. He turned from the woman to find a ferryman dressed in a big, bright yellow coat with a gray knitted billy cap on his head. He was old with squinting eyes and red mottled flesh for a face. The sea wind had clearly dashed him like the tide on the rocks of a coast. He was lighting a clay pipe with a match. When this was achieved and a bail of smoke escaped him, he turned to Dorring.

  “First time to McGuffin?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Dorring replied curtly, wanting to avoid a conversation.

  But the ferryman wasn’t willing to let him off so easily.

  “What brings you here?” he wanted to know next.

  “I guess it would be the beauty of it,” Dorring replied, trying to sound as much like a tourist as he could. “I recently read an article in the National Geographic about the
place. About the plants that grow here.”

  “Aye, it’s unique alright. Got a wee flower—Gordon’s Heather, it’s called. Grows nay’where else in the world.”

  “That’s what the article was about.”

  Dorring had already settled on this as a cover story. Just a tourist here to enjoy the unique plant life.

  “Plus,” Dorring went on, “I’ve never really traveled Scotland. Been almost everywhere else in the world, but never to a place only a few hundred miles north of where I was born.”

  “London boy then, eh?”

  “Don’t hold it against me.”

  “I’ll try not ta.”

  The old man narrowed his eyes and stared out to sea. The shadows of fishing vessels creeped around within the fog like ghosts.

  “You live in London most o’ your life?” he asked.

  “I was born there, but I haven’t really lived in the city since I was eighteen.”

  “Where have ya lived?”

  “Like I said, everywhere.”

  “So ya some sort o’ traveler then?”

  “You could say that.”

  Dorring hoped this would be enough. But as the old man blew his smoke out and then removed a fleck of tobacco from his thick bottom lip, he turned to Dorring from the view and went on.

  “So how comes ya’re into the travelin’ game?” he said. “Ya don’t look old enough to have retired an’ ya’re too young to be takin’ a gap year. Ya got some time off or somethin’?”

  “You like to ask questions, don’t you?” Dorring said with a wry smile.

  The ferryman rubbed a callused hand over the thick, gray stubble of his chin and grinned a mouthful of yellow teeth.

  “Well, ya see,” he said, “when ya spend your whole life in one spot with roughly the same thousand people, ya realize that your only link to the outside world is talkin’ to strangers who’ve been there. They become, in themselves, exotic destinations by their very nature. Ya experience the outside world through them. You, yourself, are a whole country to a man like me.”

  “I guess,” Dorring said.

  They slipped into a fragile silence and Dorring gazed to his right where the woman still stood. The picture remained pressed in her fingers and her eyes gazed at it with a forlorn intensity. The wind caught a tear from the corner of her eye and carried it out into the choppy brown water.

  “So what is it?” the ferryman said, prompting Dorring to turn once more to him.

  “What’s what?”

  “The reason you’re having some time off and traveling.”

  “I was in the armed forces for a long time,” Dorring said to appease the curious old man. “I left and now I travel. I’ve got a little cash stashed away and I use that.”

  They descended into another vulnerable silence and Dorring wondered how long this one would last. He turned right. Disappointingly, the woman had moved. She was now standing farther along, close to the front of the deck. Dorring could see the side of her face. She was gazing forward with a stern expression. Not so sad as before. More angry. He glanced to where she was glaring and saw the first signs of McGuffin, the outline of its tall cliffs a shadow within the fog.

  “In the army, you say?” the ferryman suddenly announced.

  Glancing back at him, Dorring said, “Yes. I was in the army.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “Didn’t like taking orders.”

  The ferryman rubbed his chin again. “Ya know,” he began in a musing tone, “Lord Appleby was in the army. He was big in the Ministry of Defense for a while before his father died an’ he took over the manor. Not exactly a soldier, mind. More into intelligence stuff. He’s a scientist, so I guess he was helping them with weapons an’ things.”

  “Who’s Lord Appleby?” Dorring asked.

  “Why, he’s the lord o’ the manor here, o’ course. His family have ruled these islands for centuries.”

  “Ruled?”

  “Well, ya know what I mean. They’ve been the gentry on the island for as long as people can remember.”

  “And what does he do now?”

  “Has his own pharmaceutical company. The lab’s here on the island. It’s what pays for most things. He makes medicine usin’ the Gordon’s Heather. See, it’s poisonous to most, but Appleby found a way o’ turning it into a drug. Clever boy, that one.”

  Before setting off, Dorring had looked into the island. Appleby Pharmaceuticals came up. Alongside fishing, it was the main industry on McGuffin. And when it’s considered how little is made from industrial fishing these days, you could say it was the one main industry. It employed thirty percent of the island and through its founder, Bruce Appleby, it owned most of the land too.

  “Maybe that’s why you’re here,” the ferryman said.

  Dorring narrowed his eyes at the old man as the latter puffed away on his pipe.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, his pharmaceutical company has a lot to deal with. Needs protection. We get a lot of you ex-army boys comin’ over an’ workin’ for the lord. Helpin’ with security. Ya here for a job?”

  “No. Just a holiday.”

  “That all?”

  “Yes. I’m a tourist. Do you get many?”

  “Not a huge amount. Specially not this time of year.”

  “What about all the other people on the ferry?”

  “They’re islanders,” the ferryman pointed out. “You’re the only one tha’s nay a local. Hence me comin’ over to talk.”

  “What about in the last year?” Dorring asked in a solemn tone. “You seen any other Englishmen come and stay on the island?”

  He gazed into the old man when he said this, looking for a reaction of some type. But the old face, cracked and wrinkled from years of harsh winds and salt air, was like a stone statue. He rubbed his chin and took in a lungful of the pipe before answering.

  “Probably,” he said. “We get the odd one. Ya thinkin’ of anyone particular?”

  It was the turn of the old man’s milky eyes to study Dorring this time.

  Giving the same stone-like expression that the old man had worn a moment ago, Dorring said, “No. I was merely wondering how many people visited the island.”

  The old man was about to say something when someone called out the name Joe and he turned rapidly towards a man almost as old and threadbare as himself.

  “Time to get her ready,” the other man called out to him.

  The ferryman tapped Dorring gently on the shoulder and went off. “You be having a nice time on McGuffin,” he said in a solemn tone.

  Dorring wasn’t sure if it was a threat.

  Most of the passengers went to the front of the ferry, as did Dorring. Like the others, he gazed forward at the island as it emerged from the fog and water like the tip of some sunken volcano. The coastline they headed towards was steep. Stone buildings clung to its edges like barnacles to the side of a boat. A tall, craggy hill rose up behind the gray cliffs. Standing to attention at its peak was an old whitewashed church, its huge cross shining out to sea like a beacon.

  Dorring couldn’t help gazing at the woman, who now stood at the very front of the boat. He sidled through the crowd to be close. When he was, he watched her. She was stock still and held what could only be contempt in her eyes. Dorring got the impression that if she could, she’d use that look to blow the whole island into little pieces.

  2

  The ferry came to a small quay. It was made from old stone that had been stained green by the sea and jutted out some fifty yards into the water. Steps worn by years of passing feet led up from its end to a waterfront. Dorring let the rest of the passengers get off before following with his rucksack over his shoulders.

  At the top of the steps was a lot filled with cars. He watched the woman with the mole climb inside one. Some people standing in a group nodded at her as she passed. She nodded back, but no words were exchanged. When she’d reversed out of her parking space, Dorring followed her car with his
eyes as it drove out of the lot. When it was gone, he made his way to a small wooden hut that had the word Taxi written across it.

  “Can you take me into town?” he asked an old man who was sitting inside reading a newspaper.

  A gray-skinned face with bushy eyebrows resembling caterpillars looked up at him from the paper. Nothing was said and the man merely folded the paper away and led Dorring to his car.

  “Where aboots in toon da ya wan’?” the guy said in a thick Scottish accent when they sat inside.

  “Is there a public house?”

  “Tha be several.”

  “Take me to whichever one you think is best.”

  “So ya wanna tipple?”

  “I just want to relax somewhere. I’ll decide what to do after that.”

  “Aye,” the old taxi driver said as he started the car.

  They drove from the quay up a steep bank of zigzagging roads that fed into the island like arteries. Dorring checked his phone again. Still no signal.

  “Ya’ll get nay o’ tha’ oot here, ma boy,” the driver said, glancing up into his mirror.

  “There’s no mobile signal at all?” Dorring asked.

  “Nay.”

  They traveled along a road that bent through farmland. It led to a vast area of plastic tunnels. Inside them, the hazy images of workers dressed in boiler suits sprayed fertilizer over small, turquoise flowers.

  “Famous flower,” the driver grunted. “For makin’ medicine.”

  Coming to the end of the fields, they passed a large, iron gate with two stone gargoyles on either side keeping watch. A long, winding driveway led through manicured lawns to a large, red brick manor house lined with stone columns and covered in ivy.

  “Appleby Manor,” the driver pointed out.

  Someway further along, they entered what Dorring understood must be the main town. It was the most densely populated part so far. Gray stone buildings with black tiled roofs were packed together and interspersed with cobbled roads and alleys. A sign proclaimed that no cars were allowed to enter the main causeway, so the driver had to leave Dorring some way from his destination.