The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 by Mark Dawson Read Free Book Online

between the covers.
    “You are now Mr Michael Callow. You are forty-two years old and a successful businessman. You deal in the buying and selling of crude petroleum, and you have been in the DPRK for a week, negotiating the terms of a contract to supply ten thousand barrels to the Unggi refinery. You have decided to stay an additional few days to watch the parade.”
    “And you?”
    “Tourists are not allowed outside their hotels without a minder. If necessary, I will be yours.”
    Milton opened the passport and studied the photograph. Callow had blond hair.
    “Ah, yes,” Su-Yung said with a smile. “I am sorry about that. You will need this.” She handed Milton a bottle of hair dye and pointed to the back of the room. “There is a small bathroom over there.”

Chapter Twelve
    THE TRANSPORTER was a big eighteen-wheeler, with a fully hydraulic trailer that could accommodate eight cars. The driver, a taciturn Chinese from the border town of Dandong, had no idea that the expensive load he had driven into the North was not solely for the enjoyment of the country’s elite. The cars had been given a cursory search by the customs officials as he waited to cross into the country, and if—in the admittedly unlikely event—they had discovered the real purpose of the consignment, then it would have been very unlikely that he would ever have left the country again.
    He had driven on, ten hours straight. Commercial satellite navigation was pointless in North Korea, so he had relied upon a dated road atlas to navigate the route to Pyongyang. His destination was a goods yard to the west of the city, and he had arrived, more or less on time, the day after Milton’s own arrival. A man at the yard had signed the paperwork to acknowledge that the delivery had been made, and then, with extravagant care, the cars had been unloaded one after the other. It was approaching midnight when the driver was finished, the task made more difficult by the brownout that extinguished the overhead floodlights halfway through the job. The driver had got back into his cab and set back off towards the border. Like most of his friends, he hated the North. They all thought that it was a backwards country, a little hole governed by the latest madman in a family full of madmen, altogether more trouble than it was worth. The sooner he set off, the sooner he would be home. He planned to get halfway to the border, where he would sleep in his cab at the side of the road.
    Kun picked up Su-Yung and Milton at five in the morning and drove them to the yard. He unlocked the wire mesh gate for them and then disappeared; Su-Yung explained that he was going to arrange new transport for them for when the operation had been completed.
    They found the cars parked neatly inside a closed warehouse. They were a very fine collection: a Lexus, two Bentleys, two Mercedes, an Audi, a Ferrari and a Porsche. He found himself nodding his approval: Peter McEwan certainly knew his business. He had arranged the better part of two million pounds’ worth of high-performance automotive engineering. He did not know that British intelligence had been monitoring his communications for weeks and, once they realised he was transporting cargo that suited their particular purposes, the operation had been given the green light to proceed.
    A consequence of that had been his murder.
    “Which car is it?” Su-Yung said.
    “The Enzo, I’m afraid,” Milton said.
    “The Enzo?”
    “The red one,” he said. The Ferrari was a beautiful, gorgeous machine; it was a shame to have to defile it. He opened the door and ran the palm of his hand across the smoothly carpeted floor behind the front seats. He took a knife and positioned it carefully, pushing the tip until it pierced the fabric and then slicing it open. He reached inside and tore the carpet away, revealing a compartment that had been fitted beneath the cabin. It was ten inches wide and reached from the back to the front, extending all