Page 29 of British Bratva: A Russian Mafia Romance

With one eye on the barman who’d been passive-aggressively stacking glasses for the past hour in an attempt to get me to go home, I cricked my neck from side to side and tugged my tie a little looser, tilting the screen of my laptop closed. From this lounge, I could just peer into the private dining room. A decent suit and appropriate credentials were all I needed to walk right in. Valentin had done me proud. As always.

The piece of excrement I’d been following so diligently for nearly three weeks, thumped the table, and his mobile phone crushed against the folds of his jacket as it stretched tightly across his ample chest, sending another wave of static through to my receiver. He let out what can only be described as a guffaw and I tried not to growl. Even across this distance, I wanted to punch him. Everything I knew now made him more despicable than before.

It took all the control I had to keep my distance. I had to bide my time rather than score a cheap point with a fist through his face. When I came for him, I was going to be in and out with a single strike that he’d never see coming, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to make him suffer first.

Three weeks into my surveillance, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that Pierce Sutherland was the kind of man who ordered too many single malts after dinner and groped the waitress’s arse, ignorant to the fact that it was not that kind of Gentleman’s Club. He could have cared less that the smile on her face was pinned there solely because she needed her job more than she needed her pride, which unfortunately, was never going to help her pay rent any more than he was.

He was Oxbridge. He was Eton. And finally he was going to get the recognition he deserved and put the critics who’d torn his last hard-hitting investigation to shreds back in their places. He was on the rise, like a phoenix from the ashes, and he was going to make them eat his dust.

I knew the script by heart. He’d been boring the entire table with it all evening.

Ten o’clock Friday night, and he was already steaming. He hadn’t even made it to eleven to start coming off the tracks. All I wanted was for him to shut up and go home.

Red faced, overweight and prone to sweating in the slightest bit of heat, his breathing got heavier as he warmed to his favourite topic, his own cleverness. He was oblivious to the glazed-over expressions of most of his other dinner companions. I’d been reliving the same conversations night after night, and still I was no closer to getting anything useful from the man.

He liked the sound of his plummy voice too much for just about everyone in most rooms, but he was riding on his secret, getting a thrill out of being the only man who’d dug up the dirt. It was sheer professionalism that kept me tightly tuned to the live stream from the transmitter I’d turned his mobile phone into, and as close to his side as I could be without him noticing instead of putting us all out of our misery by lodging a well placed bullet in his brain.

Had he been saying anything useful all evening, the waitress would have been the perfect mark to help me finish the job off neatly. I had no doubt I could have been distracting enough for the time it would have taken me to slip something lethal into that third scotch, even though her pouting lips and spiderleg eyelashes did nothing for me. I would have loved to put an end to the venerable Mr Sutherland right then and there.

But there was no point cutting the head off the snake when I didn’t know where he’d laid his eggs.

I didn’t need the waitress to find out what he was talking about. Every single word had come right through to me, crystal clear. None of it gave me what I wanted.

Man of the moment, his PR company was going to town, pushing the upcoming launch of his new book, in which he was going to name the Russian oligarchs behind the most expensive empty buildings in Belgravia, unmasking the shell companies that owned them. They claimed only one copy of the manuscript existed. That the printers weren’t even going to get it until three days time.

It was why we needed Elizabeth Harrington. She could get us closer in. As long as I could get her trust, and that, I knew as soon as Valentin had sent over those files, was my new reason to live. I needed to get her to trust me so that I could get her out of the nightmare she was living through.

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