Revealing Saint Peter Read online

  Copyright

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

  Copyright © 2021 Hamish Hudson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner, without the written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of quotations in a book review.

  First edition March 2022

  www.hamish-hudson.com

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Want a free stories every month?

  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

  About the author

  Want a free stories every month?

  My philosophy is to give more than I ask. That’s why I created my Premiere Club. As a valued member, you’ll get a lot more from me than I ever ask of you. I look forward to building our relationship over the coming years. Hopefully, you'll enjoy reading my stories as much as I enjoy writing them.

  The Premiere Club is about putting my readers first. So, you'll get:

  ⭐ My new releases before anyone else.

  ⭐ Invitation to join by beta and advance reader groups.

  ⭐ A monthly bundle of free books.

  ⭐ An introduction to another similar author I think you’ll like

  ⭐ Advance notification of author deals and offers I hear about.

  Do you want a piece of this action? Then join my mailing list today.

  www.hamish-hudson.com/free-books

  PART 1: CURTAINS FOR CASSANDRA?

  Chapter 1

  Cassandra Rose pulled a bottle of sparkling water from the mini-bar in my office and slammed the door shut. The rattle of bottles reverberated across the room. She unscrewed the cap, filling the silence with a hiss of escaping gas. She resumed her seat, slamming the bottle down on the dark wood conference table.

  “I’ll get my own drink then,” said Odell Jackson. He rolled his chair back a few feet and reached into the mini-bar.

  I turned away, ignoring Cassandra’s scowl, and stared out the window. Here, in our office on the fourteenth floor of the Plaza building, I had a clear view across Liverpool. The river beyond was bustling with tugboats guiding a giant cruise liner into the dock at Pier Head. What wouldn’t I give to be on a cruise liner right now? Out in the middle of an ocean, far from a life of crime and endless lies.

  What was the point of living in a mansion and driving a luxury car only to lie in bed at night wondering if, one day, the police might come knocking on my door?

  The same perpetual questions playing in the back of my mind... Will I give myself away? Will Janus Angelica finally get sunk by the wrong dodgy deal? Will Cassandra ever quit her schemes?

  “Do you want a Coke, Peter?” Odell was now standing by my side.

  “What? No, I’ll take a ginger beer.” I returned to my seat at the conference table. “Look, Cassandra, neither Odell nor I are keen on this job. Ransomware is not exactly our field. Why don’t you explain it to us again?”

  “Again?” Cassandra, queen of scams, fraud, and extortion, ran her hand over her mousey brown hair and let out a groan of frustration.

  “Ransomware is a huge growth market. We’re missing out on easy money by staying out of it.” She pressed a button on her laptop and replayed an animated representation of a cyberattack. “Ransomware is a virus that encrypts all the information on a computer and the only way to reverse it is to use the decryption tool. The only place to get the tool is from the person who infected your computer – at a cost.”

  “But we’re out of our depth with this stuff.” Odell took off his rimless glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Now, if it was manipulating the share price of a stock or laundering money through a web of interlinked offshore companies, I could do it in my sleep.”

  “We can’t keep doing the same stuff, Odell. We need to up our game. We need to move with the times.”

  I answered before Odell. “We had a record last quarter on our legitimate Ivory Funds. Why do we need to do more?”

  Cassandra shoved her chair back and stood up, nearly knocking over her water bottle. “We can always make more!” She wheeled round and flared her nostrils at me, like a dragon squaring off with the white knight. “You keep blocking me!” Her face flushed red.

  Odell and I shared a knowing look. In the last three months, we’d had two other arguments like this with her. Ultimately, I’d lost both times.

  She tightened her lips into a smile and took two deep breaths. “Look, I know you aren’t happy about this, but I’ll handle everything. I’ve got the contacts and I’ve identified a target that’s perfect for our first attack. And if it doesn’t work out, Peter, then we’ll forget about it. Is that fair?”

  I shuffled in my chair and spun my gold-embossed fidget spinner between my fingers. “Maybe. What’s the target?”

  “It’s the water tower that supplies the seaside town of Blackpool. It’s run by the Western Water utility company.”

  A hit on a water company sounded a more devious job than anything I’d previously let happen. Over the past three months, I’d tried to put my foot down on Cassandra’s schemes, without much success. A water company, for crying out loud! It was another job I didn’t have the stomach for.

  Neither did Odell. “A utility company?” He pulled a face and rubbed his hands through his receding afro hairstyle. “That sounds serious. Surely any disruption to that tower affects all the houses and businesses in the town?”

  “That’s right. They’ll pay quickly enough to have the decryption tool,” said Cassandra matter-of-factly. Her calculated coldness didn’t affect me as much as it used to. After working with her for eighteen months, I discovered this was her defence mechanism. Even so, cutting off a water supply seemed a particularly callous way to turn a profit.

  Odell placed his can of Coke on the table and stifled a yawn. “This is a new line of work for us. We’ve never got involved in such a proactively malicious crime. I mean, it’s basically creating a water shortage.” He shook his head and leant forward with his elbows on his knees.

  “Innocent people always suffer with these jobs,” I said. “When the government pulled the plug on the Reboot Employment scheme after our DataFeed scam, the unemployment in Liverpool increased.” The reality was that all our Trade Deals created victims, and I knew Odell had reservations about these schemes. Together, we could perhaps persuade Cassandra to pull back on this job. “Would you prefer we just did legitimate work?”

  Since I assumed my brother’s place at the head of the criminal investment bank, I increasingly despaired of carrying out these nefarious scams. Not to mention that the strain of constantly watching my words was wearing me down.

  Odell rubbed his eyes. “You both know my background. I fell into the immoral side of banking by stealing client money at my previous employment.” He put his hands up in surrender before turning to me. “You were good enough to bail me out on the condition that I came to work for you.” A flash of a smile. “I didn’t have any choice, of course.”

  “You do a bloody good job, Odell.” Cassandra raised her water bottle in salute, and then peered at him. “Are you feeling OK? You look a bit pale, and your eyes are bloodshot.”

  “I’ll be fine.” Odell stifled another yawn. “I’ve not been sleeping very well, and I have a splitting headache.”

  From the fridge in the drinks cabinet, Cassandra took a bottle of water and handed it to Odell. “Maybe if you drunk less Coke you’d be in better shape.” She smiled at him. “Try drinking water once in a while – your body will appreciate it.”

  “You don’t need to mother me,” said Odell, gruffly, “but thank you.” He rubbed this temples and closed his eyes. “It’s nothing serious.”

  Cassandra put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “I just want to make sure you take care of yourself. If you need help with anything, just let me know. We can come back to this later if you want.” She smiled kindly at him.

  “No, I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me.” He looked at both of us in turn. He sat up straight in his chair and took a deep breath. “I’m not totally against this job, but the truth is I’d prefer we focused on more indirect crimes – like scamming the stock market or the government. What we did with the Letroniq cryptocurrency was fine.” Odell cleaned his rimless glasses with a white handkerchief. “I know it’s not as sexy as what Cassandra’s planning, but in my eyes it’s cleaner. The victims are institutions, not individuals.”

  Cassandra returned to her seat. “A few thousand people will be without water for a couple of days. No one’s going to die. The water company will pay quickly to get the decryption tool.”

 
I looked sideways at Cassandra. For all her concern about Odell, she wasn’t that worried about the victims of this crime. “People need water. You don’t care about the effect on other people, do you?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me, and her tone changed. “Since when did you care about other people, Peter?”

  Was she using my brother’s name deliberately to remind me that she was the only person who knew who I really was? I was John Black, Peter’s twin. If I went along with Cassandra’s proposed scheme, I’d be complicit in a job that was veering into murkier territory than anything I’d allowed to happen so far.

  But my brother, the man who had hung an associate up with a meat hook under his chin, wouldn’t have batted an eyelid about this job. I understood what Cassandra was driving at. I was on slippery ground, and she knew it. I had to play the role that Odell expected and not let my own feelings betray me.

  I looked at Odell, who was clueless to her insinuation and had a quizzical look on his face. “What I meant was...I’m not worried about the impact on people, but about the logistics and how we’d pull it off. We’ve never done this sort of job before.” I rotated the fidget spinner faster in my clammy hands. I’d messed up, again. Every day pretending to be someone else was a chore. Should I have revealed my true identity to Odell sooner?

  Odell narrowed his eyes at me and stared at me for a few seconds, like he was trying to read my thoughts. He turned to Cassandra. “Where are you getting the ransomware from?”

  She hesitated before answering, screwed the cap back on her bottle and took a deep breath. “I’ve worked with an expert cybercriminal syndicate.” She paused. “Lexi Baryshev.”

  Odell grimaced and his body jerked backwards, like he’d received a tiny electric shock. “The cigar smoking maniac who sent you a box of mutilated frogs?”

  “Yes.”

  Lexi had done me a couple of favours, including neutralising Charles Ward after the DataFeed job – something I still felt guilty for. She was a professional operator with a wide network. After their previous encounter, I was puzzled over Cassandra’s choice of partner. “But she’s the woman you tried to double-cross by selling the same information to her as well as someone else.”

  “The very same woman.”

  “She’s the criminal who threatened to burn your eyes out with one of her lancero cigars if you were greedy again,” said Odell.

  Cassandra nodded.

  “That’s an ... unexpected choice of partner for you to pick. Honestly, I’m surprised you’d want to work with her – or her with you,” I said.

  She laughed lightly and twizzled her ponytail. “That was years ago, and we’ve spoken quite a few times in the last year. It’s water under the bridge. In fact, she complimented me on my ambition – said it’s the sort of commercial acumen she’d like to see in her team.”

  Cassandra’s explanation was reasonable, like they always were. But a niggling doubt played on my subconscious. Was that really the reason Lexi wanted Cassandra on this job? Surely Lexi’s network included other people just as capable as Cassandra. Maybe there was a more obvious explanation.

  “Is Lexi the one pushing you into this deal? Is that why you’re so determined to do it?” I asked.

  Cassandra’s face flushed red under her makeup. I couldn’t tell if it was anger or embarrassment. She tightened her jaw and said coolly, “It’s just too good an opportunity to miss.” She raised her voice. “We need to do this deal to grow the business.” She pointed her bottle at me. “We’ve lost our edge in the last eighteen months, since the car crash that killed ... John. We’re stagnant with no new ideas.”

  I shuddered at her pause before using my name. She was warning me to back down, and I didn’t have much choice.

  “We’re still doing well, though,” Odell said. “And you can hardly blame Peter. His brother died and he suffered post-traumatic amnesia. He’s practically had to learn the business from the ground up.”

  I smiled at Odell and inclined my head to thank him. He always had my back, since the very first day I woke up in hospital after the car crash and pretended to be my brother. I wished, not for the first time, that I could confess the truth to him and get his advice. God knows, Cassandra was hardly the best confidante – always looking out for her own interests and the next big win.

  “But you push back on every deal I suggest,” Cassandra continued.

  “We need to keep a low profile after Luisa published those articles in The Times.” I’d argued this point before, but Cassandra kept steamrollering through me. This time, I knew it would be the same. I’d have to yield to her plan.

  “There’s a low profile and a non-existent one. And we need to make more money. Every time you veto a deal like this, you jeopardise the future of the firm,” she said quietly to me. “And you know what I’ll do to anyone who gets between me and the company. I’ve put six years of my life into this business.”

  I opened my mouth to reply. Cassandra was staring into my eyes, holding my gaze. I knew what she was getting at and, if I blocked this job, she might be tempted to reveal who I really was. “OK, fine. I can see you’re dead set on this, and it won’t do any harm to try once. Setup a meeting with Lexi and we’ll go over the details.”

  Cassandra relaxed back on her seat, like someone who’s just received the all clear from a terminal illness. “Lexi is down here on Tuesday next week. We’ll meet then.”

  I looked over at Odell and shrugged apologetically. What else could I do? Cassandra knew the truth about me, and she could reveal it anytime. Odell and I had become close over the past six months, and it was a friendship I didn’t want to lose.

  He gave an imperceptible shake of the head and left the table.

  Cassandra picked up her water bottle and followed him. She touched his arm. “Why don’t you take a couple of days off to recharge, maybe go to a spa or something? You’ll feel better for it.”

  Chapter 2

  Odell placed the glass of fresh orange and lemonade on the table in front of me and dropped into his armchair. The Village Gym was across the River Mersey from our office and its restaurant was bustling with gym goers and casual diners. The upbeat workout music on the sound system was muffled by the chatter at the tables.

  My friend sipped his daiquiri. “These aren’t as good as the ones in the Rum Bar, but they’re OK. Although I should probably have drunk more water after our squash match.”

  For the last three months, Odell and I had met religiously each Thursday after work for a game of squash. I’d grown to treasure these evenings, spending time with the jovial American with a penchant for rum-based cocktails. They say it’s lonely at the top – I can tell you it’s even lonelier when even your closest friend doesn’t know who you really are. Our normal routine was to go straight to the gym after work, then have a quick dinner at the onsite restaurant. He’d even stopped calling me ‘Mr Black’.

  I leaned back while the waitress placed a steaming plate of spaghetti alla carbonara in front of me. The warm scent of bacon and mushrooms filled the air. I gulped half my drink in one go, wishing it was something stronger. Cassandra’s plan for the water tower played on my mind. Was it niggling Odell in the same way?

  “Did you invite Cassandra?” I asked Odell when the waitress had left.

  He grinned. “Of course. I invite her each week to join us for dinner, but she never comes. Anyway, I’m glad she’s not here this evening.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The grin vanished. “She walked all over you today, Peter. You keep trying to reign her in, but she just bulldozes straight through you.”

  I concentrated on twirling a forkful of spaghetti for a few seconds. With each turn, I debated my options. Odell was right, but I couldn’t tell him the true reason. I decided to deny it. “That’s bullshit. I’m in control of her.”

  He looked around to check that we were alone. “She wanted to do this new ransomware scam, you said no, and then she twisted your arm and you said yes.”

  “It seems like something we should consider, that’s all.” Could Odell tell I was lying?

  “You’ve a better chance of convincing the Pope to renounce the Holy Mother of God than make me believe that.” He cut into his ribeye steak and spoke with his mouth full. “Cassandra’s always been ambitious – but lately, she’s wanting to do even more. She’s done at least three Trade Deals in the last quarter that I know of.”