But this wasn’t a beheading. In many ways, it was worse.
Worse because the torture being inflicted was clearly protracted. The prisoner, an Arab, wore just a pair of filthy shorts and was hanging in the bazoona position, suspended from an overhead beam with his hands tied behind his back. It looked like he’d been there a while. Probably his shoulder was already dislocated, but that wasn’t stopping the man who was beating him, a man who was shirtless but nevertheless wore a balaclava. The length of metallic cable he held dripped with blood, and as they watched, he used it on the back of the hanging man, opening up a vicious strip of fresh, raw redness. Once, twice, a third time. The man’s screams were given an unreal, tinny edge by the phone but still they went through Abbott. Still they made him flinch.
The guy with the metal cable took a breather. The victim’s head slumped. Now the camera view shifted to reveal that nearby lay a body. Also shirtless, also badly messed up.
‘Say the name,’ came a shout on-screen.
‘I have told you already,’ pleaded the suspended man. His feet were tied. They hung just a few inches shy of the concrete floor of the room, and Abbott could see that the soles of his feet had been beaten. As they watched, he rotated, and for the first time, Abbott got a good look at his face. He couldn’t be a hundred per cent certain, but it looked like one of the guys he’d seen attacking and killing Jeremy Robinson.
And then it was confirmed. ‘Say the name anyway,’ called the torturer. ‘Who ordered Jeremy Robinson’s death?’
‘Mahlouthi,’ screeched the victim. ‘Mahomet Mahlouthi paid us to kill him.’
So that was it: Mahlouthi had been behind Jeremy Robinson’s death the whole time. Why? Abbott didn’t know.
From the side of the picture came another man, also wearing a balaclava. He raised a pistol, put it to the hanging man’s head, and the hanging man said one word and that word was ‘No,’ before the killer put a round in his head.
The film ended.
Abbott thought. This was sent to terrify Mahlouthi. But it still didn’t answer the question of how Stone knew that Mahlouthi had ordered the hit, nor how he knew that Abbott was in the mix. An inside man, perhaps?
One thing was for certain, Stone hadn’t come to play. And wherever Mahlouthi was right now, he was in a world of pain.
* * *
Burton produced a handheld device that enabled them to keep tabs on the locator as they dealt with the bodies. The two men in the pool carried no form of identification, but they were both Westerners. What’s more, they had the look of PSCs, which meant that they worked for Executive Alliance Group.
How many men did Stone have on the payroll? they wondered. How many did he trust? How many trusted him and how much was he paying them to help cover up his faked death and launch attacks on men they would once have fought alongside? Baghdad had a way of doing that to you. It warped your morals. It took you to dark places.
Abbott and Burton dumped their bodies, along with that of Tommy, in the bed of a Daihatsu pick-up in Mahlouthi’s garage, covered them with a tarp secured with bungee cord, and returned once more to the ops room. And as morning turned to afternoon and Abbott and Burton sat anxiously, their hopes beginning to fade, Abbott felt the thirst creep upon him.
He yawned theatrically. ‘How about we get a drink?’ he proposed, trying to keep it casual. ‘Something to take the edge off.’
Burton liked to drink, he remembered. They all did. Just that Abbott liked to drink more. Abbott didn’t drink as a means of socialising, he socialised as a means of drinking. He liked to continue drinking when the party was over. He liked to drink alone because that way nobody got to see how much he drank. He could surrender himself to it without the anxiety of What Other People Thought.
‘Nah, how about we don’t,’ said Burton, pretending he wasn’t bothered. ‘Might as well keep ourselves sharp, eh?’
Abbott knew Burton would love a drink. When he spoke, his voice was low. ‘What’s this all about, then, mate?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Burton.
‘I mean, you want a drink as much as I do. You’re not my sponsor all of a sudden, you know.’ He couldn’t help it. A surge of anger. Burton was right. In any sane universe, Abbott wouldn’t touch a drop of drink, not when the life of his son hung in the balance.
So why did he feel so pissed off about it? Why did he feel like a kid being denied his favourite toys, like Burton was dishing out some kind of punishment? He wanted a drink, and it wasn’t for Burton to tell him no.
‘I know a problem when I see it, mate,’ said Burton into the cloud of temper that had suddenly descended in the room. ‘My dad was one, wasn’t he? An alkie.’
‘Hey,’ started Abbott, ‘who said anything about—’
‘Oh, you’re not, is that it? Because either you’re lying, or you’re in denial about it, and let me tell you, it had better be denial, because if you’re lying to me when I’m hanging around here waiting to get tagged rather than doing what I should be doing, which is getting the hell out of Dodge, then you’re fucked, mate, because I don’t want any man at my back who tells me a barefaced lie.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Abbott. ‘I’ve been putting it away lately. That’s true. But I’m not a fucking alcoholic, all right? I’m not waking up desperate for a drink, trembling hands reaching for the whiskey.’
‘No, mate, you ain’t doing that, you’re waking up at weird times of the morning hating yourself. You’re spending each day telling yourself that today will be different, that you’ve got a handle on it, right?’
‘Sometimes, maybe, yes. Sometimes. But that doesn’t make me an alcoholic.’
‘Because you care? Because you haven’t given into it? Because you think rock bottom is a long way away just yet?’
‘Exactly because of that.’
‘Which?’
‘All those reasons.’
‘But you tell yourself you’re going to change each day, don’t you? Go on, admit it. You do. You tell yourself you’re going to give the grog a miss today.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Except you never give it a miss that day, do you? You make that promise and you fail to keep it, every time, don’t you, mate? Just like my old man. He was two people: catch him before eleven in the morning and he’d be grumpy – until he’d had his first drink. After that, good for a while, until he ran out of steam and sparked out on the sofa. He was quite a happy drunk, really. Generous with his money. Affectionate in a shaggy dog, drinky way. But he never wanted to do anything apart from sink the booze and sit on the sofa. Wouldn’t remember half the stuff he’d said, even. Wouldn’t know on those days that it got really bad and he started doing weird stuff that scared us kids. And he always, always put it first, you know? Whatever the day held in store. Necking booze was his first priority. Everything after that was just icing on the cake.
‘And what really destroyed him wasn’t the booze itself, it wasn’t the way he used to behave. No, what really destroyed him was the fact that he couldn’t stop. Or he knew that all our lives would be improved if he did, but he couldn’t. That’s what I think when I look at you, Abbott. I think of that bloke. And one thing I know about drinkers like my dad. They don’t just stop at the one. They don’t stop until the job is done. You think I want a drunken Monk fighting by my side? Or do I want the guy I knew from SF?’
Abbott had no answer.
‘Am I right?’
Abbott shook his head.
‘So no drink?’
‘You fancy a drink?’
‘Yeah, of course I fancy a drink. Difference is I like a drink. You need it.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘Prove it by staying dry for now, yeah?’
Abbott said nothing, indicating the monitor instead. ‘No sign yet.’
‘Nothing,’ replied Burton. ‘Mate, we’re going to have to accept that it ain’t gonna happen. It’s been hours.’
‘Either way we’re going to hear some
thing,’ replied Abbott. ‘Stone didn’t take Mahlouthi just for the hell of it,’ although as soon as the words were out of his mouth he thought of Nathan.
Half an hour later he excused himself. He made a call to Cuckoo, filling him in on all the recent developments.
‘It might be time to call in the big guns,’ said Cuckoo.
‘No,’ said Abbott. ‘Nothing that endangers Nathan.’
Call over, he hurried along to Mahlouthi’s office and downed several good gulps of whiskey straight from a carafe.
It wasn’t just the booze, he told himself as his throat worked. It was a fuck-you to Burton. A little secretive way of saying, No, mate, you’re not the boss of me.
He returned to the ops room, felt Burton’s eyes on him. As he returned the other man’s stare, Burton’s eyes fell away, going to the monitor, more in disappointment than in embarrassment. He knows, thought Abbott, taking his seat. He knows I’m weak. He found himself taking deep breaths, summoning an image of Nathan, putting his boy front and centre.
But isn’t that the way it’s always been, Abbott. You put the bottle before your family. You always have.
Like Burton’s dad, he’d always put it first. He felt a sudden surge of warmth towards his old mate, knowing that Burton, for all his claims of self-preservation, was only looking out for him. But he also knew that the sudden surge of warmth he felt was artificial – a product of the booze – and hated himself for it.
Either way, things were good in the room between them for a while, and Abbott found himself not quite dozing but closing his eyes, his thoughts going back to Tess.
CHAPTER 44
‘So this is what it feels like to commit adultery in a cheap motel room,’ she’d said.
It wasn’t a motel, it was a hotel, and it wasn’t cheap. The rest though? That was pretty accurate.
She was sitting up in bed, having pulled on her work shirt, the same one she’d been wearing the previous night in Kettner’s, before they’d ended up back at his hotel, and the shirt had ended up on the floor. She’d buttoned it up over no bra, just a couple of buttons, not the whole set, enough to cover up. They were no longer living in a world of passion and nostalgia, catalyst: alcohol. They were back to reality.
The sex had been fun and fumbly and slightly drunken, as though they’d only just met in a club rather than being two people with so much emotional hinterland. Her body had felt unfamiliar to him. There were certain moves she had that were new. Of course. She had a whole life without him.
Afterwards, she had fallen asleep, halfway across the bed, as selfish with space as he remembered, and he had lain awake terrified of how she’d be by daybreak, when the morning forced them both to confront what they’d done. Would she open her eyes, hungover and full of remorse, and make her excuses in the name of a quick getaway? Would this be the beginning of something? Or the end?
As it was, she had surprised him. Her reaction was one of bemusement. Curiosity. She must have felt guilt – he knew her well enough to make that assumption – but for the time being at least she kept it hidden. ‘Was that closure?’ she asked, as if wanting to interrogate her own reasons as much as his.
He had no idea how to reply. Only that he didn’t want it to be closure because that suggested something ending and he didn’t want that. He needed more Tessa in his life, not less. He wanted her to save him. ‘I only know that I think about you every day,’ he told her, and even that was an understatement.
‘I think about you all the time, too,’ she said, but without too much conviction.
‘So is this closure for you, then?’
She gave a short laugh. ‘Not sure. Tell you what, though, I always thought we’d get back together that time.’
‘Which time?’
‘The time you went off with Fiona.’
‘I didn’t really “go off with” Fiona. You and I were on a break.’
‘We were on a break,’ she parroted Ross from Friends.
‘Well, we were.’
‘Yeah, and I got that. Which is how come I thought we’d get back together. I sort of assumed we would. And then we just didn’t.’
The realisation hit him like a punch. The whole time he’d thought she’d been angry, wounded, betrayed, and absolutely resolute in her anger, whereas, in fact, she’d just assumed they would drift back together again. ‘Because I suppose you went off to do the right thing, which was so noble of you, and absolutely the right thing to do, to try and give Nathan a proper start in life, and I went back to Cambridge and that was that.’
That was that.
She said it like it was nothing.
‘And then I guess we just forged our own lives. You went off to war, I went off to law.’ She laughed softly at her own joke.
I could have had you. But that was that.
‘So maybe it was closure for me, yes. A last hurrah.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Because, um, I mean, I’m not being awful or anything, but that is, I mean that was the last time. You know, like although I came back here with you, and it’s not like I put up much of a fight, and I might even have been the one who suggested it …’
‘You were.’
‘Well, there you go, and despite all that, and you being you, and everything we had before, I’m still a wife and a mum now, and I’m properly not in the habit of cheating on my husband and endangering everything we’ve built up, and if you still care for me as much as you say you do, then you’ll respect that.’
A little fire in her eyes when she glanced his way.
‘Of course,’ he told her.
She nodded like a weight was off. ‘And now, we need to think about breakfast. You’ll excuse me if I don’t join you in the restaurant. Perhaps you could order in?’
He did, and she dressed while they waited for room service to arrive, tied her hair back, applied some make-up – ‘slap’, as she still called it – and they ate, and he knew this was goodbye. Although he felt calmed in her presence, he knew it was just a temporary state of affairs, that he’d be cast adrift once again, when the morning was over.
‘I guess if this is goodbye …’ He tried to ignore her look which said it was, and pressed on. ‘I’m glad that you’ve at least got a better impression of me than the one I left you with before.’
She looked at him. A strand of hair had escaped from her ponytail and hung down her face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, the whole angry young man thing. Always in trouble. Rebel without a clue and all that.’
‘Well, you were a bit of a handful at times, that’s true.’ She chuckled. ‘I’d tell other boyfriends about you and they’d be terrified of ever meeting you.’
‘Well, there you go,’ he said, trying not to think of her telling successive boyfriends about him, and how they were right to be worried because, yes, he probably would have lamped them. ‘I mean, it’s not a good look, is it? You know, I should have been pleased as punch to be going out with someone as cracking as you.’
‘“Cracking”? What does cracking mean? It sounds a bit lad-mag for my liking.’
‘It’s not. It just means you were far too good for me and I should have seen it at the time; I should have cherished what I had, and maybe if I had, then I wouldn’t have lost it.’
The silence that followed was uncomfortable, because they both knew that he had indeed lost it. That it was irretrievable now.
‘There is something I’ve always wondered, though,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I mean, talking to other guys. They weren’t all as messed up as you. I always used to think it was – what? Hormones. Just growing up. Now I’ve sort of got to wondering if there was something – something that made you that way.’
The sound of cutlery was suddenly loud in the room. She was looking at him intently.
‘Yes, there was,’ he said at last.
‘Something that happened before we met?’
‘Before my family moved to Burton-on-Trent,’ he said.
‘OK,’ she said, drawing out the word.
‘It’s painful,’ he told her, looking away.
‘You don’t have to go there. Look, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be prying.’
‘No. I want to. I owe it to you.’
‘OK.’ She used her napkin to dab her lips, took a sip of coffee.
‘I had a brother,’ he told her. ‘Chris. His name was Chris. He was two years older than me. He was eleven when he died.’
Her shoulders rose and fell. Conflicting emotions played across her features. Shock. Pity. Maybe even a little anger that after all this time it was the first she knew that Abbott had ever had a brother.
‘What happened to him?’ she asked.
Again he looked away, knowing that he was going to tell her the story and summoning the courage to do it, taking a deep breath to start. ‘We were playing by the river one day. Close to our house, like a bike ride away from our house. Our parents didn’t like us playing by the river for obvious reasons, but we applied pretty intense pressure, and so they let us as long as we didn’t go to the second bridge. There were two road bridges along the river, you see: the first one was the OK one. We hung out around there quite a bit. However hot it was outside, it would always be a bit cold and dank under that bridge. I remember it well.’ He shivered in spite of the room’s warmth. ‘The second one, if you got as far as that one, then you’d gone too far, especially if you were just nine and eleven like we were, me and Chris. And it was fucking drummed into us. I mean properly drummed into us that we weren’t allowed to go past that second bridge, not for any reason. The water was too deep and fast-running and the banks either side were too steep. It was pretty dangerous.’
She lowered her eyes, knowing there was only one place this story was going.
He continued. ‘So anyway, there really was no place to play that was more fun than in that river, especially in the summer. You could kick off your shoes, go paddling and stuff. Fish for tiddlers. That kind of thing.’ Tessa smiled along with the memory. ‘But Chris, being older, he was like the one who was constantly pushing, testing the boundaries. You can imagine, yeah? Me, but to the power of five.
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