Old Enemies

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘That’s the thing. I don’t understand, either. What the hell am I supposed to be doing in all this? It has nothing to do with me.’

  ‘They’ve set up what they call a family negotiating group to decide how to respond. To decide the fate of my child, Harry. And I’m not even on it. I’ve been pushed aside as if I don’t have a role in any of this.’

  ‘J.J.?’

  ‘I know he’s only trying to be kind, to protect me, but . . . He’s struggling to cope. He’s hurting, just as much as I am. I think he blames me. It was my decision to send Ruari to Switzerland, you see.’ Her voice had grown subdued, less controlled. She leaned closer to him and he smelt that perfume again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Terri.’ He meant it. His anger with her was waning, her son’s life was at stake, for pity’s sake.

  ‘They asked J.J. how much we were willing to pay for Ruari’s release, and he said as much as it takes, of course he would. And they said no, they needed a figure to work with. Five hundred, eight hundred thousand? A million? More? That’s when he shouted at them, almost lost it. “My son,” he said, “is not some sort of second-hand car with a price tag on it.” But, they said, that’s precisely what Ruari is in the eyes of the kidnappers. A commodity for sale. It’s business, and that’s how it has to be dealt with. Oh, Harry . . .’

  She was on the verge of tears. It took all his resolve not to reach for her hand.

  She gasped for air, sank more of the wine. ‘It seems like there’s a going rate for these things.’

  ‘If you need any help with cash . . .’ he began, remembering what Sloppy had told him.

  But she shook her head sharply. ‘No! That’s not why I’m here.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘The risk assessor, Hiley, tells us we ought to contact the police, to let them know Ruari’s been kidnapped. Archer thinks so, too, but J.J. won’t have it. It’s the one thing the kidnappers have said so far, don’t contact any authorities, otherwise . . .’ She couldn’t finish the thought. ‘Archer says the police business would all be done very quietly, no one would ever know, but J.J. says someone always knows, that it would leak, these things always do, that there’s not a town in the world where you can’t find a dodgy policeman willing to sell a story.’

  ‘To the newspapers.’

  She nodded, accepting the irony. ‘So J.J. says no.’

  ‘And you?’

  She turned to look at him, her eyes welling. He remembered those same, pain-stretched eyes from Paris, too. In his mind he recalled the tears as nothing more than drops of discomfort, but perhaps the moment had been harder for her than he’d realized. Her words, then as now, came slowly, as though she was having trouble forming them.

  ‘How am I supposed to decide, Harry? How? It’s my son’s life at stake.’ She was very close to breaking down. ‘That’s why I came. To ask you. For advice.’

  It was his turn to gaze into his glass, to avoid the fear in her eyes that was ripping her apart and trying to drag him in, too. ‘These security companies always face a dilemma. In many countries it’s against the law to deal with kidnappers without informing the police. They can get themselves thrown in jail as accessories if they don’t cooperate with the authorities, and it happens. They walk a fine line – what are they really doing, helping the family, or the kidnappers? In any event they always risk being accused of above all helping themselves, of profiteering from misery. So they prefer to do things by the book.’

  ‘And you, Harry? I don’t ever recall you being a man who did things by the book.’

  ‘Flying in a straight line,’ he muttered, thinking of geese.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Nothing. Just something someone said.’

  ‘What should I do?’ she demanded urgently.

  ‘Listen to the advice. Those men are the experts in the field. But in the end it’s you who have to decide, isn’t it? You and J.J., together. Ruari’s your son, not theirs.’

  Her nostrils flared, as they did when she was summoning up the courage to make a confession. ‘That’s not so easy. J.J.’s a complicated man, keeps a lot to himself, locked away inside that Irish soul of his.’

  He thought she sounded bitter. The fault lines of a marriage, now being torn wide open.

  ‘You are Ruari’s parents. The buck stops with you, no one else.’

  The words seemed to affect her. Her bottom lip wobbled and hesitated, as though she wanted to say more but then changed her mind. ‘I must go, before they miss me and I run out of excuses.’ Her eyes clung to him, trying to hold him, to close the distance between the two of them. She laid her fingers on the back of his hand but he could see nothing but the sparkle of her wedding ring. ‘I’ll remember what you said, Harry. I promise you I will!’

  She disappeared into the night, accompanied by the wailing of some distant siren, leaving Harry staring after her shadow and wondering what on earth he had said that was so bloody significant.

  Harry had taken a substantial amount of alcohol on board that afternoon, and although Terri’s arrival had had the effect of a cold shower that rapidly sobered him up, once she had vanished into the darkness he poured another glass and allowed himself to sink well below the Plimsoll Line. He was doodling with the damp base of his glass, constructing an Olympic logo on the bar top, when a man slipped onto the stool that until a few minutes earlier had been Terri’s. Harry ignored him, head down, concentrating on the rings, letting the alcohol massage his wounds, until the stranger interrupted.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Jones.’

  Harry looked up, puzzled. To his surprise he recognized the older man, who had arrived back home with J.J. and the gumshoe. Despite the well-cut clothes and the classic Omega he wore on his wrist, there was an unmistakable rawness about him. His frame was wiry, his face weathered, and if he had been an animal Harry reckoned he’d have been an old fox, the sort that is cautious, accustomed to sniffing the morning wind, never sure whether that day he would be hunter or hunted. Harry remembered the eyes from their first brief encounter, cautious, sharp, but the wrinkles around them told of a lifetime of hard living, and they were looking at Harry with contempt. And the accent was unmistakably Irish.

  ‘We were never introduced,’ Harry said, feeling at a disadvantage.

  ‘No, but I know you, Mr Jones – or should I say, I know of you.’

  Immediately Harry was on his guard and began trying to sober up in a hurry. His new ear began to throb along the length of its scar, not so much in pain as in warning, as if it had a sense of its own. There was little surprise in a stranger greeting him, he was a politician, a public figure, no matter how much on occasion he wished he could get a break and look at life through the bottom of a slow-draining glass, but Irishmen of a certain age who knew about Harry Jones formed a special category all of their own, the sort who were unlikely to seek him out merely to ask for his autograph.

  Ireland. Harry knew the place well, too well, at least its northern chunk. Two tours during those dark days of the 1980s, one with the SAS, doing the jobs that others couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. It was a dirty war, crawling through shit-filled alleyways and ditches, dragging scalps behind him. And, in all honesty, it hadn’t always mattered how those scalps were claimed. There were Queen’s Regulations, of course, but it was difficult to read the fine print when you were in a swamp way up beyond your bollocks and some bastard was trying his very best to kill you. It had been a dirty war in every sense, the sort that left marks which wouldn’t wash away.

  ‘You’ve been poking your nose in where it’s not wanted. An old habit, it seems,’ the Irishman said.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Harry muttered, still awash, his mind slow, a long way from being up to full steam.

  ‘Terri.’

  Ah, so she’d been followed after all.

  ‘You’re wrong. I’ve no desire to stick my nose in anything. None of my business, nothing to do with me,’ Harry muttered. Well, it was almost the truth.

  ‘Then f
or once in our lives we’re in agreement,’ the man replied.

  So, there was history between them. The man’s tone was soft, like wind through the heather, but there was no mistaking the threatened bite.

  ‘I’ll say only this to you, Mr Jones. Stay out of Terri’s life. Stay out of all of our lives. Or you’ll be having me to deal with.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ Harry looked askance but not entirely incredulously at a man who was old enough to be his father and at least six inches shorter.

  ‘Threats? Me? Mother of God, I’ve always left that sort of thing to the British. No, what I’m saying is that I agree with you. This is no concern of yours. So don’t go getting yourself involved.’

  ‘And if I decide not to take your advice?’

  ‘Then you and I, Mr Jones, will be falling out, so we will. Very seriously.’

  The barman interrupted, asking if he wanted a drink, but the man shook his head. ‘No, I’ll not be staying. I’m finished here.’ He got up from his seat. ‘Good night to you, Mr Jones,’ he said, turning away.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Harry demanded.

  The stranger stopped, half turned. ‘The name’s Sean Breslin, Mr Jones. I’m Terri’s father-in-law. Ruari happens to be my grandson.’ Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ruari suspected that the two South Africans, de Vries and Grobelaar, had left the farmhouse. He heard a car start up and drive away, and quickly the atmosphere grew more relaxed. Laughter drifted up the stairs, something Ruari hadn’t heard since he’d arrived, with much scraping of chairs across the stone floor and the clatter of conviviality. The duty guard, Toma, a squat, balding man with shoulders of immense breadth and skin like a freshly plucked chicken, scowled in envy as he heard the others enjoying themselves, but soon Cosmin appeared from behind the bedroom door bearing a glass of dark red wine for him. They chatted in their native language as they drank and Cosmin began waving his arms around, theatrically, perhaps bragging – Ruari thought he heard a phrase that sounded a lot like ‘South African’, followed by a word that was spat out like venom and he was sure translated as ‘bastards’. The captors began to relax, the creases of anxiety that had marked their brows slowly lifting as they swapped jokes. When Cosmin returned downstairs he left the door open, and soon the sounds of merriment and the smell of roasting pork began to take hold of the room. Toma sipped, cast his eyes to the door, sipped some more. After twenty minutes of fidgeting, and casting a warning scowl at Ruari, he stamped his foot and followed Cosmin out of the door. He didn’t go downstairs, for Ruari could hear him, perched at the top of the staircase, exchanging banter with those below. Soon they were singing.

  The local wine in these parts was called Terrano, mostly very rough, raw, which coated the tongue and got quickly to work. It was much to the Romanians’ liking. And it gave Ruari his chance.

  He had been spending his hours on his mattress trying to figure out how he might escape. He knew almost nothing of what lay beyond the thick stone walls of the farmhouse and had even less idea where it was located, but he’d never find out unless he could manage to slip his chains. For the hundredth time he searched for any flaw or sign of weakness in the chain, examining the handcuffs that held him to the chain and the locks that kept the chain secured to the bed, but he found nothing that might help. His attempts to fold his hand and squeeze it out of the handcuffs, even with the help of a thick smear of cold grease from his bowl, had done nothing but cause him intense pain. He had finally come to the conclusion that he wasn’t going to escape the chain, so his attentions focused on the bed. It was simple, with a headboard in the design of a seashell made out of metal tubes that were welded into place. He had tested the welds as best he could whenever the guards had been distracted, but the construction was too strong. Cracking them apart wasn’t going to happen. And he had no tools. For a few brief moments he tried to use his spoon to see if he could separate any of the links in the chain, but it was a desperate act that left him with nothing but a pinched finger and a pathetically bent spoon. He had no keys, no pen, nothing but the clothes that he lay in, and not even his boots. His pockets had been emptied, his watch taken from him. He had nothing but his bonds.

  The bed had a cast-iron frame and metal springs, and the frame was fixed to the bed head by two bolts. The bolts were hidden beneath the mattress, he couldn’t see them, but he had been able to investigate them with the tips of his fingers and estimate the size of the bolt head and the nut beneath. And it was this, he concluded, that gave him his chance. So while the singing and laughter downstairs rose in volume and covered his efforts, he took his gamble.

  Kneeling beside the bed, he lifted up the mattress and found the nut. It was old, there was no chance of turning it with his fingers. He tried, of course, got a badly torn nail for his efforts. Yet he had the chain, and as he had prayed they might, the links proved to be just the right size. It was a heavy chain and he had spent most of his time in captivity cursing it, but a lighter chain would have been too small. Now he forced one of the links over the head of the bolt, and twisted.

  It took several false attempts and bruised knuckles before he got anywhere. The chain kept slipping, striking against the bed frame and making a terrible clatter, and at one point the guard’s suspicions were roused. He shouted from the top of the stairs; Ruari told him it was nothing, that he was only taking a leak. Toma went back to his Terrano.

  Ruari had to smother the noise. He slipped his head and free arm from out of his sweater and wrapped it around the chain, then he twisted at the bolt again. It hadn’t moved in forty years and was as stubborn as an Irish wind, but Ruari was persistent, too, and reluctantly, groaning, the bolt set itself free.

  It was done. Ruari was sweating now, from fear, not just from the effort. His hand was shaking as he put the bolt to one side and tugged at the frame, trying to separate it from the bed head, but there were still unyielding bolts at the other three corners. As he tried to force the pieces apart, the old metal growled mightily in complaint, but the guards were singing one of their native drinking songs and the noise went unnoticed. Yet still the bloody thing wouldn’t shift. So he sank to his knees, squeezing his back beneath the frame, placed his hands around the bed head and with every morsel of youthful rage he tried to separate them. And slowly, so slowly, they gave way. As they came apart, he was able to slide the links around the metalwork of the bed head and down the leg. Inch by inch, desperate not to create any noise, he coaxed them forward. A bead of sweat slid down his forehead to the tip of his busted nose, dangled, and dropped. Then the chain came away.

  He was still attached to the bloody thing, of course, there was nothing he could do about that. He wriggled back into his sweater, wound the metal snake around his body, and for the first time in days was able to stand up properly. He was surprised how heavy the chain felt, how weak his legs had already become. He crept towards the window, and the old wooden floorboards creaked beneath every footstep, threatening to betray him.

  To his horror he discovered that the window was in direct line of sight of Toma at the top of the stairs, and although the man’s back was turned and his concentration focused nowhere but on his glass and what was happening below, it must surely be only seconds before he would turn and spy Ruari. The boy’s hands were trembling so wildly that he scraped the chair across the floor as he placed it in front of the window, while the latch and hinges took it in turn to squeal in protest. The chain made what seemed the noise of thunder as it scratched across the wooden frame. Yet, with one final heave, he was through, into the darkness, and found himself sliding down the tiled roof of a porch. He fell through the air and landed full on his back in slimy, foul-smelling farmyard mud.

  He was free.

  It took many moments for Ruari to recover his wits. After several days of being in a constantly lit room he was, at first, almost blind in the darkness, and suddenly very cold. He had no boots, only socks, and already the dampness of the farmyard was seeping
through. He struggled to his feet, sniffed the air and waited for his heart to stop pounding.

  He had to get away from this place, and quickly, to put as much distance as possible between him and his captors. It didn’t matter very much to him which direction he chose. There was an old moon peering from behind passing clouds and slowly Ruari’s eyes grew accustomed to the demi-light. Carefully he wrapped the chain around himself once more, and set off, into the night and total unknown.

  Two things became immediately apparent. While he searched in every direction, he could see lights in only one, and at a considerable distance. These lights were modest and insignificant, suggesting nothing more than a hamlet. The other thing he quickly discovered was that he would have to keep to the track. The Carso was made for hard farming, its fields scratched out on small parcels of land, while most of the surrounding countryside consisted of untamed shrub that was thick and impenetrable. Ruari didn’t know it, but to wander through the Carso in the darkness could be lethal, as sinkholes would suddenly appear, threatening to suck the unsuspecting into a chaotic maze of underground caves and crannies carved out by millions of years of erosion. Even along the uneven track he was following, every footstep threatened him with violence. At one point, with the lights of the farmhouse still to be seen behind him, he tried to clamber over a low wall into a field that seemed to promise a more direct route to the distant hamlet, but the loose stonework gave way beneath him, falling apart with an outrageous clatter that raised the alarm of sleeping birds. Ruari lay still, like death, his face in the soft ground, listening for the sound of pursuit. There was still none. He turned back to the track, crept forward, and slowly the farmhouse receded into the night until he could see it no more.

  Yet he wasn’t alone. As his ears adjusted to the silence he heard the movements of the countryside, eddies of wind rippling through the trees, stirring them as it went, the calling of owls, the whispering of hedgerows, at one point the barking of a dog or fox. There were other sounds he didn’t recognize, but nothing human, nothing that suggested rescue might be close at hand. He stumbled on, trying to find the safest path, grateful for every break in the clouds that allowed the moonlight through, and shivering with cold.