Rise of the Enemy (The Enemy Trilogy) by Rob Sinclair

Author:Rob Sinclair [Sinclair, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodhound Books
Published: 2022-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight

‘We want you to kill Mackie.’

My heart skipped a beat at Lena’s words. Killing had, unfortunately, become a common part of my life. Something I was good at. It wasn’t that I was being asked to kill that was so shocking to me. There weren’t many other things I expected Lena to want me to do. The shock was hearing Mackie’s name in that request.

And yet was it the idea of killing Mackie that was so hard to comprehend? Or the fact I hadn’t realised this was what Lena had been building up to?

‘You want to be a free man, don’t you?’

‘If I killed Mackie, I’d never be free,’ I said.

‘You’d be free to leave here,’ Lena replied, shrugging.

‘That’s not the same thing.’

‘Well, right now you’re not free, whatever way you look at it. Killing Mackie is your only chance of having a life again.’

‘Why would I want to kill him?’

‘For revenge. Isn’t that what drives you?’

‘I couldn’t do it,’ I said. ‘Whatever reason you think I may have, I just couldn’t do it.’

Mackie meant too much to me – it was that simple. Lena knew that. We’d discussed my relationship with Mackie at length, despite it being such a sore subject that I’d seemingly been abandoned by him. But it didn’t matter. Whatever Mackie may or may not have done to put me in the hands of the Russians, I wasn’t sure I could ever see him as the enemy.

Could I?

‘Mackie put you in here,’ Lena said, as if reading my thoughts.

‘No, you and your people put me in here.’

‘We just brought you here. It was Mackie who sent you on a suicide mission.’

‘So you keep saying. But it makes no sense.’

‘It makes perfect sense. Tell me about your life,’ Lena said.

‘What about my life?’

‘Tell me how you met Mackie. Tell me what it is that makes you trust him so much.’

I didn’t want to be having this conversation. But I had to defend myself. I had to defend being here. I couldn’t face the possibility that the person sitting before me really was on my side. And the person I looked up to, whom I’d trusted for so long, was my enemy.

‘It’s a long story,’ I said.

‘So start at the beginning. How did you meet him?’

‘When I met Mackie,’ I said, aware that she probably knew everything that I was about to tell her; knowing that this was all part of her game, part of her enjoyment, ‘I was just a teenager. I had nothing going for me. I wasn’t some university graduate with a degree in psychology. I was a tearaway, mixed up with the local gangs. Running drugs, carrying out thefts and assaults. Anything they asked, and anything I needed to stay alive.’

‘You certainly have that instinct about you. Survival.’

I ignored the mocking compliment. ‘When Mackie came along, my world was in a mess. I’d just lost a good friend. He’d been killed in a gang fight. Knifed to death before my eyes.’

I paused, looking for a reaction to my words in Lena’s face.

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