Read The Other Son for Free Online

to start shooting when Mikhail Asmarov and Klaus Köhler burst in and opened fire on them, saving the lives of Sophie, Jens, Hector, and the others.
    Blood, brain tissue, gunpowder smoke, and silence. Those were her clearest memories as she lay on the floor with Hector on top of her, protecting her. Then Alfonse Ramirez’s bloodlust when he managed to persuade the two men not to shoot the gang’s leader, the vile Dmitry. Alfonse and Hector had finished him off in the kitchen, and took their time over it. Alfonse Ramirez was beaming like the sun when he emerged.
    Sophie and Hector fled in his private jet to Málaga, and drove off toward Marbella, where Hector’s father lived. The restaurant’s owner, Carlos Fuentes, then snitched to Hector’s nemesis, the German magnate Ralph Hanke. Hanke’s men caught up with them on the motorway and shot Hector, causing him to slip into a coma.
    Her memories were crystal clear.
    Sophie took her sunglasses off, she needed light.
    A church bell was chiming three o’clock in the afternoon when she parked the car in the little square in the center of the city. She had been told to wait there for a taxi. She barely had time to think about it before it came driving up along the narrow street.
    The driver didn’t speak to her, just drove around the city looking in his rearview mirror, then he made a call on his cell, muttered something, and hung up.
    After a while he stopped on a busy street outside a restaurant and gestured to her to go in. She did as she was told, and inside the door a man took her gently by the arm and led her between the tables, through a kitchen, and out through another door into an empty back street. Another taxi was waiting for her there, its back door open, and she slid in, the door closed, and the taxi drove off. It went on like that. Sophie switched cars three times before she found herself sitting in a silver Cadillac that sped her along a motorway at high speed.
    A pickup with wooden crates on the back was passing her window, anxious chickens clambering on top of one another in the crates in a fruitless and impossible attempt to break out.
    She was struck by a sudden sense of unease, a premonition that she shouldn’t be there.
    The Cadillac turned off the motorway and headed into a forest. The trees were spread out and sunlight filtered through the foliage.
    They came to a security lodge and a barrier across the road. A thin man with an automatic rifle over his shoulder came out, raised his hand in greeting, and lifted the barrier. The Cadillac drove in. She noticed a camouflaged sniper on a small hill among the trees. He was lying on the ground, tracking the car she was in with his gun.
    They emerged from the forest, where the road improved and eventually wound its way up toward a cream-colored little castle with pillars, statues, fountains, and lush rectangular lawns.
    The driver opened Sophie’s door and she got out. The view was immense. Dense, verdant vegetation below her, as far as the eye could see. Mountains in the distance, and a heavy, moist heat weighing everything down.
    A dark-haired man in gray trousers and a white shirt came toward her from the entrance.
    “Sophie?” he said.
    They exchanged a firm handshake. Ignacio Ramirez was faceless in an inexplicable way, impossible to describe. The smile on his lips looked genuine, but there was something different about his eyes, something false, perhaps. His black hair was dyed, his skin pallid, and the stomach bulging under the white shirt bore witness to indolence and a bad diet.
    “Come,” he said, gesturing away from the building with his hand.
    Don Ignacio invited her to sit in an electric golf cart, then drove off through the grounds, pointing and explaining things as they went. They passed a compound containing a solitary giraffe that stood there staring at nothing in the company of a few zebras and two hippopotamuses. The animals looked thoroughly depressed. Tennis courts, a swimming pool