by Guy Adams
He leaned back in his seat and tried to think of something innocuous to fill the awkward silence left by his clumsy flirtation. He had just struck on the idea of mentioning the recent reshuffle of the long-haul roster (as close to verbal paint-drying as he could imagine) when they were both startled by the sudden appearance of Oscar Lupé.
The man was embedded in the flight controls in front of them, a single clenching hand outstretched towards Roger.
‘Inside me,’ the soldier said, his voice cracking. ‘Feel it inside me.’
‘Jesus!’ screamed Roger. ‘Where the hell did he—’
Which was all he managed before the Boeing 747 with its full complement of passengers went into free fall and such questions were pushed far away.
Two
There are many pleasurable things a man can do in Nassau. A lot of them involve oil, sunshine and staring at beautiful people in swimwear. If the pleasure of the sands palls, there are restaurants, bars and a casino where the aforementioned beautiful people go to lose all their money in nice surroundings. One thing you will never find recommended is sitting in the back of a white van surrounded by enough electrical equipment to stock a small branch of Radio Shack. This is because vans, as large metal boxes, are extremely stupid things to sit in while the sun shines. The only people unfortunate enough to do it are pool-cleaning contractors and CIA operatives pretending to be pool-cleaning contractors.
‘What the hell have you been eating in here?’ Rex sniffed again, the need to pin down this odour going beyond self-preservation. ‘Boiled sneakers?’
‘I had a wrap earlier,’ Ted replied.
‘A wrap? What sort of wrap? Fried goat?’ Rex snorted deep. ‘I think I actually bruised my nose, it’ll bleed in a minute. Seriously, your smell is that bad.’
‘My smell? How do you know it’s me?’
‘Because I’m a civilised son of a bitch and I only just got here.’ Rex shook his head, ‘Unbelievable, like someone stood in a dead guy and tracked it in.’
‘I can’t smell anything.’
‘Burned out your glands. Probably never smell again.’
‘So let me get out, get some fresh air.’
‘OK, but you make it quick and keep out of sight. The Russians see a fat white boy in a cheap suit they’re going to know the CIA’s in town.’
‘Screw you.’
Ted stepped outside, and Rex snatched at the brief guff of fresh air before the doors closed again.
‘Ambrosia,’ he said.
He lifted the headphones and placed one ear to them. There was the second-hand sound of tinny gangsta rap. A weedy Russian voice attempting to sing along.
‘You’re so cool, Dmitri,’ said Rex. ‘If only your friends in St Petersburg could hear you now.’
Dmitri Lakhonin’s ‘friends’ were the Ukrainian Boiko family, major players in the heroin trade. The CIA had decided to groom Lakhonin as a potential source of intelligence. Intelligence in the espionage sense, of course – you only had to hear him sing to realise the word wouldn’t be appropriate any other way.
Rex wrapped the headphones around his neck and reached for a magazine Ted had discarded. He kept one ear on Dmitri as he flicked through its pages. There was nothing worth reading, movie stars and fashions. He peeled out a sample sachet of aftershave and slipped it into his pocket. He had established that Ted had no interest in improving body odour, so it would be a waste to leave it. There was the sound of knocking from the headphones, and Rex tipped his head slightly to listen. Dmitri switched off the music.
‘Who is it?’ he asked in highly accented English.
‘Room service,’ a voice replied, chuckling.
Rex pulled the headphones on. Since when did room service find itself funny? He heard the sound of a semi-automatic being racked and guessed Dmitri was wondering the same thing. Either that or the turndown service put him on edge.
The bedroom door opened, and Rex heard a Bahamian voice: ‘Here you are, my friend. I bring her safe and sound, yes? You got a nice tip for me?’
Rex sighed. Looked like Dmitri had ordered up some company. If there was one thing worse than listening to the man’s singing… There was a rustle of paper as money was exchanged and the door closed.
‘Hey, honey,’ Dmitri said, now alone with the girl. ‘You got some sugar for Daddy?’
There was no reply, and Rex began to feel uncomfortable. Something about this wasn’t right.
‘You’re beautiful,’ said Dmitri. ‘Really beautiful. How old are you?’
The answer was quiet, barely even registered by the microphone.
Rex sat there for a moment, a shiver running through him before he yanked off the headphones, opened the back of the van and ran towards the hotel.
Rex forced himself to stop running when he entered the hotel lobby. This was bad enough, without making a public scene. He moved towards the elevators and hit the call button, grinding the toes of his shoes against the marble tiles of the lobby floor. ‘Come on, come on…’
He watched as the counter worked its way down.
The doors opened. A solitary man stood inside. He was well dressed but local. What the hell, Rex thought, I might as well really screw this up.
‘You just seen Dmitri in room 1204?’ he asked as the man made to step past him. The surprised look on the man’s face was reflected in the elevator’s mirrored walls and more than enough evidence for Rex.
He smiled his best ‘absolutely not up to anything’ smile, glanced around to make sure nobody was watching, punched the pimp in the throat and stepped after him into the elevator. He pressed the button for the twelfth floor, the pimp clutching at his throat and wheezing. Rex brought his knee up into the man’s face and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck to stop him falling to the floor.
‘Stay with me,’ he said. ‘We’re going back upstairs.’
The pimp took a thin breath and reached inside his jacket. Rex thought that was a bad idea, shoving him back against the mirrored wall of the elevator. He stepped in close so the pimp didn’t have room to extend his arms, especially the one that likely now had a weapon at the end of it. Rex grabbed the wrist inside the pimp’s jacket and pulled out the man’s hand.
‘What have we got?’ he asked, glancing at the counter that showed the elevator was nearly at the twelfth floor.
The pimp was holding a small switchblade. Rex pulled a back-handed slap across the man’s face and then reached for the knife, twisting back the man’s little finger to get it. There was a crack and the pimp cried out. Rex slipped the knife, hilt-first, up the left-hand sleeve of his suit jacket, holding it in place with his little finger. With his right hand he yanked the pimp in front of him as the elevator arrived at the twelfth floor.
‘Stand up straight,’ said Rex. ‘If you look nice and presentable when that door opens, I might not kill you.’
The doors opened and a cheerful bell sounded along an empty corridor. Rex looked over the pimp’s shoulder, giving the shaking man a smile.
‘Don’t worry, I could tell you were trying. Back to 1204.’
Rex pushed him out of the elevator, reaching for the handgun that he would avoid using if possible.
‘Knock,’ he told the pimp once they were outside Dmitri’s door. ‘Quickly. Tell him you need to come in.’
The pimp did as he was told.
Inside they could hear Dmitri swearing as he came to answer the door.
‘What?’ he asked, opening the door a crack. Rex shoved the pimp forward so that the door swung open and Dmitri fell backwards, the weight of the pimp knocking him to the floor. Rex kept moving, wanting to overwhelm Dmitri before he could use the loaded gun he knew the man would be holding. He had underestimated Dmitri’s speed – the gun was up and firing before Rex had even cleared the doorway. The pimp took the shot, losing his ear and what remained of his cool.
Rex fired as the pimp started screaming. A small red dot appeared in Dmitri’s forehead, and his rapping skills and sexual prefer
ences splattered over the wall behind him. Rex brought the handle of his revolver down on the back of the pimp’s head, closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed for a second, wondering how best to deal with this.
The sound of crying intruded on his thoughts. In the corner of the room, huddled and afraid, sat a young Bahamian girl.
Rex holstered his gun, and dropped the pimp’s switchblade into his jacket pocket. He yanked a blanket off the bed and walked over to the girl. He draped the blanket around her, wrapping it several times to try and cover her tiny body.
‘It’s going to be OK,’ he said to her. Though he was damned if he knew quite how.
He walked over to a standard lamp that stood in the corner of the room, stuck his head beneath the lampshade and said, ‘As you may have guessed, we have a slight problem.’
‘A slight problem?’ Rex winced at Esther’s slight air of panic in his phone headset. ‘A dead asset, a pimp with concussion and a 12-year old with years of therapy ahead of her?’
‘Less now,’ Rex said.
‘Not to mention a high-class hotel room now in need of a deep clean.’
‘Not that high-class.’
‘I couldn’t afford it, so it’s high-class to me. Luckily, we think the hotel owner wants to be friends with the United States.’
‘Wants paying to let us bug his damn rooms, you mean. Listen I’ll get enough crap today from people way above your pay grade, so if you’ve quite finished?’ He felt slightly guilty at the couple of beats of silence in his ear, but Esther Drummond was easy to dominate and he really wasn’t in the mood.
‘Watch Analysts are people too,’ she said.
Trying to turn it all into a joke, thought Rex, not wanting any suggestion of there being an issue. Next will come the friendly reassurance.
‘This’ll blow over. You’ll be golden boy again soon enough.’
‘Damn right,’ Rex replied with a smile at how easy he found it to predict her. ‘A genius like me can rule the world.’
‘Want to prove it?’
Rex could hear the shift in Esther’s tone. This was going to be good. ‘What have you got for me?’
‘Officially? Not so much. Unofficially?’
Rex sighed. ‘OK, talk to me.’
‘You know Penelope?’
‘Penelope who?’
‘Lupé. She’s worked here for a few years, doesn’t matter. It’s about her husband, Oscar.’
‘This isn’t starting well…’
‘Patience! He was CIA too, S.O.G.’
‘Special Operations? I don’t want to know…’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Not the first, won’t be the last.’
‘He died in a plane crash. A plane he wasn’t scheduled to fly on in fact, wait… I can go one better than that – a plane he wasn’t flying on.’
‘That makes a lot of sense.’
‘I’ve sent video to your phone, lifted from the flight-deck camera. Watch it.’
Rex pulled his phone out of his jacket and scrolled through to his email. He double-tapped the video file. The footage was silent, the two pilots going casually about their work, checking readings, flipping switches, chatting. All of a sudden, a shadow was cast across the flight deck as something appeared in shot. Squinting at the small screen, Rex could just make out the upper body of a man now hanging in front of the two panicking pilots.
‘What the hell?’
‘Freaky, huh?’ said Esther in his ear.
‘H.A.L.O. jump?’
‘No way. Throw a man at the nosecone of a Boeing cruising at 45,000 feet and he would make a dent, yes, maybe even crack the glass. But he wouldn’t end up embedded in the instrument panel. And he stayed there, right up to when the plane hit the water.’
‘So how did it happen?’
‘Who knows? It’s completely beyond anyone’s best guess. Even if he had been shot through the glass of the windscreen, the loss of pressure would have sucked him straight back out again. Interested?’
‘Intrigued, but what’s it got to do with us? If he died on S.O.G. business, they don’t need me poking around.’
‘Unofficially, his unit’s gone off the map. When the flight dropped out of the sky, we flagged it as possible terrorist action. S.O.G.’s not talking – nothing new there – but in the meantime Penelope’s left wondering what happened to her husband and the 450 passengers on flight AA2010.’
‘I sympathise but, still, what business is this of Clandestine?’
‘The S.O.G. unit are still out there and look intent on causing more fatalities.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Penelope had a phone call…’
Mr Wynter wakes to a glorious morning. He steps out onto the front porch. Fresh sun hits old bones, and he thinks it’s like the touch of God. Picking up his copy of the Washington Times, he heads back inside to brew coffee. The name on the newspaper delivery label is not Wynter. But then Mr Wynter is not a man constrained by names.
While the coffee machine percolates, he skims through the leader articles and microwaves a bowl of oatmeal. He eats his oatmeal with syrup. It is an indulgence, but Mr Wynter is a believer in giving in to indulgences. Without indulgence, life can seem endless.
Next door, the volume on the TV is turned up loud and the windows are open. The fat librarian who lives there is watching Good Morning America. It feels like George Stephanopoulos is sharing his damned oatmeal. Mr Wynter does not watch the morning news programmes. He knows better. He doesn’t close his own windows either, that would be a concession, and he does not tolerate those anywhere near as much as indulgences.
After breakfast, he does half an hour on the treadmill. Nothing too drastic, a fast walk for a couple of miles. He listens to Benny Goodman loud enough to drown out next door’s TV and imagines a smaller world. A world where, as a black man blows into a trumpet in Carnegie Hall, a dictator invades Poland and plans the eradication of all but his master race. It is a simple world, he thinks. Not his world.
He switches off the treadmill and takes a shower. He looks at his old, old body in the bathroom mirror and remembers when it wasn’t covered in liver spots. He remembers when the skin didn’t hang off him. It looks like it’s melting, pouring off him, like the skin poured off the men in the jungles of Vietnam all those years ago.
He is selecting his clothes for the day, fawn slacks and a cream-coloured shirt, when the phone rings. He answers it, giving an irritated glance through his bedroom window towards next door where the TV is as loud as ever. He can see the big plasma screen flickering through the net drapes that hang in the fat librarian’s windows. It’s advertising Japanese motor cars.
‘Yes.’
‘Mr Wynter, I’m afraid we have a situation.’
Wynter listens for a few minutes and then replaces the receiver with a polite ‘thank you’.
He puts away his fawn slacks and cream shirt. Today will not be the day he had expected. He takes out his light-grey three-piece, a tie and a white cotton shirt. Today is a day for uniform. It will also be a day for travelling, so he packs his small black holdall with a change of clothes (an identical change of clothes so really no change at all) and his washbag.
Next door, the TV continues to shout while Mr Wynter selects a book to take on his journey. He picks Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. He has read it many times, but it fits neatly into his jacket pocket.
He calls for a car to take him to the airport. The car will be fifteen minutes.
He sits at his kitchen table, the sound of next door’s TV still seeping through, even though he has now closed and locked his windows in preparation to leave.
He checks his watch. Still ten minutes until the car arrives.
He gets up, takes a small parcel from his holdall and slips it into his pocket. He leaves his holdall on the kitchen table and walks next door.
He knocks on the door. Loudly because of the goddamned TV.
‘Yes?’ The fat librarian answers, scooting he
r cat out of the way with a slippered foot. She pulls her house coat tighter (the belt bisecting her fat like string around a joint of beef) and looks at him suspiciously. But not that suspiciously, because he is just an old man in a grey suit.
‘I’m from next door,’ says Mr Wynter, cradling his left arm and wincing as if in pain. ‘I fell. I think I broke my arm.’
The fat librarian’s face wobbles into life. ‘Oh, you poor thing!’
‘I wondered if I might be able to use your phone? Mine seems to be dead.’ Mr Wynter offers a pained smile. ‘Knowing me, I forgot to pay the bill. My memory’s not what it was.’
‘Of course, honey,’ says the fat librarian. ‘Come in, come in.’
Mr Wynter does so, reaching behind him to close the door. As she walks over towards the phone, he reaches into his jacket pocket and opens the small case he has put there. Pulling out a syringe, he plunges the needle into her fat ass and steps back as she spins around flailing those thick arms of hers.
‘What was…’ She falls onto her baby-shit brown carpet, eyes wide and staring.
He doesn’t bother to answer. Just watches as she lies there, the chemical working its way through her bloodstream. She gives a sudden, spastic thrash, her back arching against the carpet, her house coat falling open to show him the sort of flesh he hasn’t glimpsed for many long years.
Finally she is still. When examined, it will look to all but the deepest of toxicological examinations as if she has died from a heart attack. Mr Wynter pulls on some gloves and turns the TV volume down on the remote. He leaves it at what he considers a sensible level; he is not, after all, an unreasonable man. The cat meows from where it watches him through the uprights of the stair rail. He checks his watch. Still plenty of time. He goes back into the kitchen and searches through the fat librarian’s cupboards until he finds the kibble. He fills the cat’s bowl, replaces the sack of food and lets himself out.
No need to be cruel.
Three