Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel)

by Giles O'Bryen

  ‘Nice work, friend,’ he told the half-naked man. ‘Take my advice and hide before he wakes up.’

  They hurried on, but without paying attention to their route, and within five minutes were standing arguing at the junction of two alleys and a yard being used to store building materials. Heat was gathering between the densely packed buildings. They crossed the yard, and found themselves inside a dark, cavernous concrete shell. The air had the caustic smell of wet cement. To their left was a mixer next to a pyramid of sand, a stack of cement bags, two concrete-encrusted shovels and an oil drum full of water. Anton went over, cupped his hands and dashed water over his face, taking some of it surreptitiously into the corner of his mouth. Mikhail joined him.

  ‘I wouldn’t drink that,’ said James.

  The tall army officer turned up with the little doctor in tow. She showed not the slightest hint of remorse, but stamped around the room – her room, from which she had been unjustly ejected – deliberately treading on Nat’s makeshift bed. Reviewing the contents of her cupboard, she scowled and cursed in her cramped English. When Nat ordered her to stitch the wound up fully, she refused, insisting that this would bring on gangrene in an instant. Neither Nat nor Nikolai knew how to assess this warning, but the army officer stepped forward and confirmed that it was indeed sound practice to stitch up a wound in stages, so they let her get on with it. She told Nikolai with ill-disguised pleasure that she did not have local anaesthetic and it would be uncomfortable.

  ‘I’ve been stitched up before,’ Nikolai told her, ‘and I know exactly how much it hurts.’

  Nat turned to the tall, angular figure who had taken up station by the door. ‘I should thank you for saving my life last night,’ she said.

  The doctor sniffed contemptuously.

  ‘We were never introduced. I am Nat Kocharian.’

  ‘Colonel Nejib Sulamani, of the Army of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. You know us, perhaps, as the Polisario.’

  Colonel Sulamani gave a small bow, and as their eyes met, his grave, drawn face reddened just a tinge under its sun-battered exterior. Perfect, Nat thought, he fancies me. She looked at him with the interest she naturally felt in men who might fall into her bed: late fifties, six foot three or four tall, but slightly stooped, with wide, curved shoulders that stretched the cotton of his sand-coloured shirt. His expression was guarded and his manner formal, lugubrious even; but these traits were belied by the compelling richness of his voice and the desire swirling in his eyes.

  ‘Can you help us get out of here?’ said Nikolai. He saw perfectly well what was going on; and while he didn’t begrudge Natalya her pleasures and rated her sexual manipulativeness highly, he had no inclination to witness the ground being laid.

  ‘The situation is complicated,’ said Sulamani, without taking his eyes from Nat’s. ‘Monsieur Zender will make the arrangements for your return to Marrakech.’

  ‘And here was I about to pack my bags and head for the bus stop,’ said Nat. ‘Do you have a satphone I could use, Colonel?’

  ‘Monsieur Zender—’

  ‘Zender and I are engaged on a complicated business deal, and I’m afraid I don’t trust him not to listen in. But I’m sure he wouldn’t dare tap your phone.’

  ‘We would not allow it, no.’

  They agreed to meet at five, when Nat could make her calls from Sulamani’s office. The doctor had finished and was inspecting her work with evident satisfaction. ‘I do not have the equipment or the skills to deal with the damaged ligaments,’ she said, ‘but I have saved the leg.’

  ‘Halle-fucking-lujah,’ said Nat. ‘Out you go.’

  The woman’s pinched face glared up at her, then she turned and marched through the door, with Sulamani at her back.

  ‘I feel like a corpse, lying here,’ said Nikolai when they had gone. ‘Help me onto that chair. You going to fuck the old boy?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  Nat lowered the gurney, then manoeuvred him into the wooden chair by the doctor’s desk. She arranged his bad leg on another chair, trying not to look at the flesh that was puckered like a blanched aubergine and the livid puncture marks left by the doctor’s needlework.

  ‘It is good to have this pain,’ Nikolai said stoically. ‘My leg is mine again, you know?’

  ‘Not really, my hero.’

  They told each other what had happened since they’d parted at the airport a week before.

  ‘I thought I’d been taken to hospital,’ said Nikolai. ‘I fucked this up for you, that’s for sure.’

  ‘It was me who got you into it,’ said his sister. ‘I wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘Kocharians are tough,’ Nikolai replied. ‘We’ll come through, huh?’

  Natalya agreed and they hugged and pledged their toughness to each other. She then had to wheel her brother off to find a lavatory, a task they accomplished while engulfing the building with the noise made by Ukrainians enjoying a bout of vulgar humour.

  ‘I need to eat – I’m weak as a baby,’ said Nikolai when they returned. ‘And get me Zender, I have things to say to him.’

  ‘Remember what Sulamani said: we can’t get out of here without Zender’s help. Anyway, you don’t look very threatening on one leg.’

  ‘Get to work on lover boy, then,’ said Nikolai crossly.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Nikolai, I don’t like being here any more than you do.’

  ‘Yes you do, you like the food and you like the heat. That’s two things you like that I don’t.’

  ‘You’re so childish,’ she said, opening the door to look for the boy Adel, who was usually to be found fidgeting somewhere nearby.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Anton enquired, looking James up and down as he might a teenage recruit in downtown Kiev who had got himself into an unnecessary scrape.

  ‘Zender’s Smara office found me.’

  James noticed the butt of a handgun in the waistband of Anton’s trousers. It looked like a Firestar, a Spanish-made 9mm semi-automatic. The light crack of the charge in its chamber would sound very much like the gun that had been shot at him on the roof – and here it was tucked into Anton’s trousers. James was impressed. I was right about these two, James thought. Clowns, but only up to a point.

  He’d lost track of the men who’d set on him in the café, but now he detected a sliver of daylight winking at the edge of one of the boarded-up windows: there, then gone, then back again. He was about to warn the others when a diesel engine revved hard in the alley. The clunk of a gear engaging, then a corrugated iron sheet cartwheeled from the doorway with a clang like a bathtub dropped into a skip. The bonnet of the white Mercedes lunged towards them. Before he jumped, James saw in the driver’s seat the man who’d knifed him in the calf, his smooth, round face contorted with malice. No one beside him, which meant—

  A bullet spat across the skin of his shoulder as he dived – would have torn his heart in two if he’d moved a split-second later. The big man from the alley stood in the opening where the corrugated iron had been, a heavy calibre semi-automatic levelled in both hands. James pancaked to the ground and three shots slammed into the dirt behind him. A stinging plume of cement dust erupted in his eyes. He rubbed them with his thumb and forefinger and the film of grit cleared enough for him to see the chrome fender of the Mercedes less than ten feet from his nose.

  He rolled, felt the heat off the engine as the wheel arch blasted past his ear. The nearside wheel rumbled over his hand. The big Merc slammed sideways against the far wall. His head swam with diesel fumes. He heard the car’s rear wing screech against the wall and the rattle of flying grit as the rear wheels gouged the dirt, then gripped and sent the oily steel chassis bucking towards him again. He scrambled sideways, feet skidding in the dirt. The Mercedes rocked back on its springs, its back end snagged on a stack of steel joists.

  He spun towards the big gunman, but he wasn’t silhouetted in the doorway any more. James ran for the pile of sand, heard a bullet ricochet off the steel belly
of the cement mixer as he hurled his body into the lee of the mound. Bad place to hide. Already his mind was rehearsing the moment of shock that would come when the bullet struck.

  Shots – but high-pitched, sharp, not the boom of the big semi-automatic. Anton was beside him, stretched out with his elbows embedded in the sand and the Firestar pointing into the corner beyond the doorway.

  ‘He’s down. Not dead,’ Anton shouted over the roar of the Mercedes’ engine.

  The driver had floored the throttle, trying to drag the car free of the joist that had snared it. With a series of heavy, jarring clanks, the Mercedes bounced clear and the black mesh of the radiator grille swung round towards the sandpile.

  ‘Move!’ James shouted.

  Mikhail ran in from his left, straight towards the rearing white snout of the Merc. Anton loosed off one, two shots into the corner. Mikhail kept on, then just as the Mercedes emblem was accelerating into his pelvis, gave a graceful skip-hop and launched himself head first through the windscreen. The glass shattered with a pop and his head and shoulders disappeared inside the car, his barrel-shaped torso jolting with the impact. The Mercedes heeled round towards the open doorway. The revs died and the car slowed. It clipped the wall by the door and ground its way ponderously into the corner, emitting a final shriek as it came to rest just about where Anton had put down the big gunman.

  ‘He loves to do that,’ said Anton. ‘It’s his party piece.’

  ‘I got him,’ said the former weightlifter, extracting himself from the Mercedes’ windscreen.

  They went over to join him. Anton stooped over the big gunman, while Mikhail, whose face sported innumerable abrasions from the shattered glass, tested his massive neck for damage by rotating it and massaging the tendons and muscle. Satisfied, he dragged the baby-faced man from the car. His head no longer aligned with his shoulders, but lolled.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ said Anton. ‘Here.’

  He passed Mikhail the big man’s weapon, along with three spare clips.

  ‘Makarov. Nice.’

  Mikhail found a place for it in his tracksuit trousers. James pulled another Firestar from the holster in the driver’s armpit.

  ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ said Anton.

  ‘Agreed,’ said James. ‘We’ll take the Merc.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mikhail manoeuvred the Mercedes out of the yard while James stood in the alley and tried to work out which way was north. The sun was moving up overhead, bearing down on Smara town as if in fulfilment of a dreadful curse. They rumbled along the alley, throbs from the engine reverberating through the open windows. The blank walls of the buildings on either side were inches from the car’s flanks. If they hit the slightest bend, they’d be wedged in tight, unable even to climb out and run.

  Eventually the alley released them into a wider street. There was a shop on the corner with a sign saying All Good Things above the door, and James went in to buy flagons of water. It felt dangerously hot inside the Mercedes, so the three of them stood in a narrow strip of shade, like insects hiding from the beak of a hungry bird.

  ‘Every time we step outside,’ said Anton, splashing water over his head, ‘we start to die.’

  ‘You’re wasting it,’ said Mikhail.

  The silence was broken only by a sonorous barking up ahead, and the occasional snort from a diesel engine changing gear somewhere along the main road out of Smara. They got back into the car and navigated towards the outskirts of town, then drove for a kilometre along the road north. Another of the white MINURSO vehicles came past, heading into Smara. James glanced at Anton’s watch: 3.20 p.m. A few minutes later, they pulled off and lurched across the rocky sand until they came to a hut made of lumps of rock stacked in a rough square with a blue plastic tarpaulin doing service for a roof. Mikhail parked up behind it. The hut was occupied by a goat with three kids no more than a week old. The goat looked up and gave a token bleat of protest, but the kids were suckling and she was too weary to move. They clambered in and sat down. The goat examined them one by one, swallowing nervously.

  ‘It’s close, but I think I preferred the hotel,’ said Anton. ‘Will someone tell me what the fuck we are doing here?’

  ‘Going to get Nikolai,’ Mikhail declared, as if this were exactly the way he’d expected the mission to commence.

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ said Anton in Russian. ‘This mad fuck just wants us to help him get his spy thing back.’

  ‘He gets the spy thing, we get Nikolai. S’what we came for, right?’

  ‘Fuck off, Micky. We have no idea what we’re getting into.’

  ‘Never know what’s around the next corner,’ said Mikhail amiably.

  ‘Oh well, that’s settled then.’

  One of the kids had decided to investigate its new companions. Mikhail was charmed. He stroked its belly and pointed out to Anton how astonishingly soft the fur was.

  ‘Will you leave that fucking thing alone and talk to me?’

  The kid nibbled on Mikhail’s finger, then settled against his thigh and fell asleep.

  ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘You are a lump of cow crud,’ said Anton. ‘When did we ever talk about anything anyway? You just do what you have to and I come along.’ He watched Mikhail tickle the kid’s chin. ‘It thinks you’re daddy,’ he said. ‘You’re not, are you?’

  ‘We’ve only been here one night,’ said Mikhail.

  Observing that their pow-wow seemed to have petered out, James asked: ‘So, who is your friend Nikolai? And how did he get on the wrong side of Claude Zender?’

  Anton gave Mikhail a reproachful look, to which the latter responded by folding his arms. By this means, they evidently decided that the time for being cagey was past. Anton gave him a curt explanation, and the connection became clear: Grosvenor had dispatched Natalya Kocharian, their legendary head of sales, to retrieve a computer device which had gone missing; she’d enlisted her brother Nikolai’s help, and they’d both ended up as ‘guests’ at Zender’s desert motel. James remembered Nat Kocharian from a Grosvenor conference he’d been paid to attend: petite, red-gold hair, and a fuck-me-or-die-trying look in her green eyes – sexy, if that was the sort of look you went for.

  ‘So, you guys coming with us?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mikhail.

  Anton looked back at the town of Smara, so wan and friable it seemed it might disintegrate in the heat. Within lay the maze of alleys where the sun scratched and shutters banged, where sad-eyed men assaulted passers-by and pissed on them; beyond, untold miles of hot, sandy desert. They’d already killed two men, and somewhere, no doubt, was a hot cell and a sadistic police chief.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  Having seen her brother restored to consciousness, Nat was beginning to believe that her plan to sell the IPD400 to Grey Tony might also be raised from the dead – and in this, Colonel Nejib Sulamani would make an ideal ally. It was him she had overheard arguing with Zender the previous night: Nat had never heard anyone force Zender to explain himself the way the Polisario officer had.

  Sulamani arrived at five o’clock sharp and escorted Nat to another grand, high-ceilinged room along the corridor from Zender’s. A black leather briefcase sat open on a trestle table, next to a laptop, a satphone and an empty wire tray. Against the left-hand wall was a narrow canvas camp bed heaped with clothes. When they entered the room, Sulamani hurried over, scooped up the clothes, couldn’t see where to put them, and finally made a feeble attempt to hide them behind the briefcase.

  ‘Please don’t do that on my account,’ said Nat. She stretched over the table to retrieve the clothes, taking a little longer than was strictly necessary, then folded them one by one and stacked them in the wire tray.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘I’ve come over all wifely. Whatever next?’

  Sulamani looked aghast, as if this were a question that required a considered answer. Nat recognised the faintly idiotic look that had come over his face as a su
re sign that soldierly reserve was losing a one-sided battle to raw lust.

  ‘It’s such a comfort to find you here, Colonel,’ she said, dropping her voice until it caught in her throat.

  ‘It is nothing. . . You dial seven, six, seven, eight to get a line,’ said Colonel Sulamani, indicating the satphone. ‘Then your number, including the international code. It can be slow to connect.’

  He gave a smart bow and left. Nat watched him go and wondered what he’d be like. Rather shy and eager, she guessed, like a schoolboy who can’t believe his luck. Rough lips, a taste of warm earth and cigars. Something to look forward to. . . She sat at the desk and called the hotel in Smara. None of them were there. She tried Anton’s mobile, but it didn’t connect. Nor did Mikhail’s. She knew she ought to make contact with Grosvenor, but she hadn’t worked out what she was going to tell them. She called Pete Alakhine instead. Grey Tony’s man in Rabat. It sounded as if he were sitting in a cave full of wasps.

  ‘Terrible line,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I have a date for our transaction to complete,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow week, that is, Thursday the third of November. Ten a.m. at the Clement-Dufour warehouse on the Boulevard Moulay Slimane.’

  ‘Let me check my diary.’

  ‘No need. The date isn’t negotiable,’ said Nat, even though she’d only just made it up. ‘I take it the financial arrangements are in place?’

  ‘Sure. You have the goods in hand?’

  ‘You mean, am I carrying it round in my handbag? Anything else you’d like to ask?’

  ‘I have your number, anyway.’

  ‘See you next Thursday,’ said Nat, and hung up.

  She allowed herself a moment to imagine Grey Tony’s reaction when he discovered that Natalya Kocharian was not just alive and kicking, but also required him to complete on the IPD400 deal. At some point, she thought blithely, he’ll work out that handing me $30 million is a much more sensible way of suppressing Magda’s dossier than trying to have me killed.