by Peter Temple
Perhaps. Probably.
The job was all he had. If he quit, what would he do? He was gun-shy, there was nothing he could do that he knew anything about.
Think about something else. Think about Special Deployment. Sudden Death. What did these names mean? Deployed to do what?
Kaskis had said: ‘There but for the grace.’
Kaskis had been in Delta Force. He had gone from the Green Berets. Was Special Deployment a unit of Delta Force? Did he mean that he was lucky not to have ended up in Special Deployment?
Kaskis had said something else in Beirut, on the way from the airport. Anselm remembered he had thought it odd, but that was all he remembered.
He stared at a log recording emails sent by a Swiss engineer from his home in Zurich to a company in Palo Alto.
Lourens in a hotel in Zurich with Serrano, snorting coke and meeting Croats. The Hotel Baur au Lac. Lourens burnt beyond recognition. His ex-employee dead in a car with a gun. What did Lourens have to do with all of this?
‘That stuff from last night any use?’ said Inskip from the doorway.
‘The amazing disappearing soldiers and the drug czar?’
‘Good stuff. You’re early.’
‘Can’t stay away. I’m filling in for Kroger.’
‘Any trace on the Lafarge file, bring it straight in. Don’t send without having a word. And anything on Trilling and his Defense Department contracts.’
‘As you wish, o masterful one.’
‘Something else. In an idle minute, see if you can find a Dr Carl Lourens at the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich in 1992. Serrano should be there at the same time.’
‘No minute shall be idle.’
The day went by. In mid-afternoon, Carla came in.
‘Tilders,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I know you and Herr Baader were…’ She opened her hand on the stick for a moment.
‘Thank you.’
‘The English accounts of Dr Lourens, they were cleared yesterday. The money went to the Swiss account.’
‘On whose authority?’
She shook her head, the swish of hair. ‘There’s no record, it must have been done on paper, personally.’
Mrs Johanna Lourens, probably. Had O’Malley got a court order on the properties?
It was almost dark when Alex rang. He had been on the point of ringing her several times.
‘Are you going home on foot?’
‘I am. Too little vertical exercise.’
She laughed. ‘Does that mean too much horizontal? Would you like to stand up more?’
He had discovered that she was a laughing person, something her Frau Doktor Koenig persona tried to conceal.
‘I suggest experimenting until a proper balance is found,’ he said. ‘I’m leaving in a few minutes.’
‘Along the lake?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll meet you. Look out for me. Don’t let me pass in the dark.’
‘No. I won’t let you pass in the dark. Not if I can help it.’
75
…HAMBURG…
It was cold outside but still. Just streaks of day left, lines of light running down the sky like the marks of raindrops down a dusty pane. His breath was mist as he did his rudimentary warm-up, his stretches.
The pain of the start, the complaints of the knees and ankles and hips, of ligaments and tendons and muscles. They did not want to do this any more.
Anselm got into his stride, no one on the path, a good time to be running, the day’s traffic of walkers and runners and tourists and lovers and young mothers with high-speed babycarts and in-line skaters, all gone. Too cold, too dark.
You got used to running with a bag, passing it from hand to hand. It was heavier tonight, the bottle of Glen Morangie he’d bought from the supermarket in Hofweg. He reached the ferry landing, no sign now of what had happened, he shook the thought from his mind. Just run. Try to run at a decent pace. Don’t slop along. Run. You used to be a runner. You could run.
It was dark now. Alex was somewhere ahead, coming towards him. Was she running? I’ll meet you, she said.
A runner coming towards him.
Alex?
No. A thin man. They both grunted, runners’ greeting grunts.
The path turned right, following the lake. There was a moment when he heard the sound of the city, when his brain for some reason registered the noise. A loud hum, a soup of a thousand sounds, like living in the innards of a machine.
Go away, he thought. Would she go away with me? Somewhere quiet. We could read. And make love. Then eat and read.
She would be coming towards him, not far away.
To kill Serrano and Kael, they would trigger a bomb in a ferry. Kill anyone near the pair. Tilders had been close. He had managed to get within two metres, a few seats. Wearing glasses and an invisible hearing aid.
Two figures ahead, coming towards him, walking, heads together.
He felt the familiar alarm, the signs of panic.
There was nowhere to go here, no sideways escape.
He slowed. Heart beating much faster than it should from running. Dry mouth, the tightness of skin.
Relax. The pair from the other night? He picked up his pace. No, it wasn’t, just two people out for a walk. One medium, one small, they parted to let him through. He was close, he started to say Guten Abend.
The bigger one on the left had his right hand in his coat, high up, at his chest.
A few paces away. The smaller man smiled at Anselm, white teeth. Polite.
The bigger one’s hand came out of his coat, something caught the light, a blade, Anselm saw it clearly, the man’s arm was back.
He tried to get out of the way, go to the left, but the blade came across him, it felt as if an ice cube had been passed over his flesh. He looked down. The old tracksuit had opened across his chest, parted.
He had stopped. He had not intended to stop. He stood there, bag in hand.
The knife man had the blade upright. Just a sliver of steel.
A thin expressionless face. Moustache and eyebrows of thatch. The man was in no hurry.
He’s cut me and now he’s going to knife me, Anselm thought. The traditional way of doing things. Not a German tradition but this is the new Europe. He had no feeling of panic or fear. It had happened. He was glad. All the waiting was over.
The man said, ‘Tschus.’
The cheerful chirping goodbye.
Anselm swung his bag at the man. It knocked the knife hand back, the full weight of the whisky bottle caught him in the face. He went backwards, his knees bending.
Anselm hit him with the bag again, heard the bottle meet bone, felt it, turned, saw at the edge his vision something in the smaller man’s right hand-a pistol, a pistol with a silencer.
Awkwardly, off balance, Anselm swung the bag at him.
Missed.
The man had stepped back, out of range.
He raised the pistol.
Anselm heard nothing but he felt an impact against his chest.
The smell of something.
Whisky.
He had raised the bag without thinking and a bullet had hit the bottle of whisky.
‘Leg den Beutel fallen,’ said the man. He had both hands on the pistol now, but not sighting, holding it at his chest. Unhurried, confident.
Anselm threw the bag at him, it missed, went into the dark.
‘Stupide,’ said the man.
‘Shit,’ said Anselm and it came into his mind that it wasn’t an awful thing to die here, in the open, beside the lake. He could have died in a stinking hole in Beirut.
‘Nochmals Tschus,’ said the man.
He raised the pistol, sighted.
Nothing to do, thought Anselm.
The man grunted and pitched forward, came towards Anselm, falling, the pistol pointing down, someone behind him.
Alex. She’d hit the man with her left shoulder, run into him at full stride.
As the man fell, met the ground, Anselm, the
calm still upon him, stamped on the hand holding the pistol. He wished he wasn’t wearing running shoes.
The pistol came free.
Anselm picked it up and pointed it at the man’s head. ‘Bewegen Sie sich nicht,’ he said.
Alex was standing behind the man, winded, bent at the waist, holding her shoulder, looking up at Anselm.
‘O mein Gott,’ she said.
Anselm held the gun on the smaller man and walked backwards to the knife man, bent to look at him. He was breathing. There were blood bubbles at his nostrils, foamy blood bubbles.
‘Was is los?’ said Alex.
Anselm said to the gunman: ‘Steh auf. Zieh die Hose aus.
’ ‘Was?’
‘Ziehen sie Sich aus oder ich tote sie.’
The man had to take off his shoes to remove his trousers. He stood awkwardly, pale legs ending in short black socks.
‘Machen Sie schon,’ said Anselm, showing him the direction with the pistol. ‘Bewegen Sie sich.’
The man took off at a half-run.
‘Come,’ he said to Alex.
‘What about him?’ she said, pointing at the man on the ground.
‘His friend will be back for him,’ said Anselm. He took the pistol by the barrel and threw it into the lake.
They walked back towards the office. Anselm put his hand to his chest and it came away black with blood.
He was beginning to feel nausea rise.
She took his arm and they walked back along the lake shore towards the cheerful lights.
‘Where’d you learn to knock someone like that?’ he said.
‘Gridiron. I played in the States.’
‘We didn’t pass in the dark,’ he said.
She leaned towards him and touched the side of his face with her lips.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But it was close.’
76
…LONDON…
Caroline found the note on her desk:
See me soonest. Halligan.
End of the road. Goodbye Fleet Street, hello Leeds.
Family, McClatchie once said, you always start with the family. But Jess Thomas didn’t have any family.
The architect in Singapore had said something.
She goes back a long way with Natalie, with the family, I think.
Natalie Zampatti had a family.
She rang Sandra Fox at Craig, Zampatti.
‘Nat’s got a sister somewhere, a doctor,’ said Fox. ‘Hang on I’ll ask the secretary from whom no secrets are hidden.’
Caroline waited. The longest possible shot. The most fucking impossible shot.
‘There? Try St Martin’s Hospital. Apparently sister and husband are both doctors. Her sister’s name’s Virginia.’
It took a long time and she couldn’t get hold of Virginia but she got the name of her mother. Finally she was speaking to Mrs Amanda Zampatti in Cardiff, a thin voice, uncertain.
Caroline gave her the Detective Sergeant Moody of Battersea Police line.
‘Oh my God, she’s all right is she? Poor girl, she’s got no one, you know.’
‘We’d like to be sure. There’s no actual cause for alarm at the moment. But we thought she might have gone somewhere to get away from everything.’
‘Well, Virginia and David have a place, a farm sort of place. She’s been there, I know that, Ginnie told me on the phone.’
‘And where’s that?’
‘To tell you truth, I don’t know. They wanted to take me but really I can’t be…’
‘No idea where it is?’
‘Well, Wales, but that’s not much use is it? Up north, I think. She said it was away from anything, no phone or telly or anything. I can’t think why you’d want to have a place…’
‘Thank you, Mrs Zampatti. I’ll get back to you if we find out anything.’
Caroline slumped again. There was no quick way to do this.
77
…HAMBURG…
Baader’s doctor was in Mittelweg, a small, bald man, impassive. He looked at the wound under Anselm’s pectorals and made clucking noises.
‘Das ist nicht ubel,’ he said. ‘Da konnen Sie von Gluck reden.
’ Light-headed, Anselm watched as he cleaned the long cut, sprayed it with anaesthetic and stitched it up with the quick movements of a tailor. He wound a bandage around Anselm’s body.
‘Don’t get it wet for forty-eight hours,’ he said. ‘Then change the bandage ever day. Any sign of infection, come and see me straight away. Otherwise, in a week. Tell the receptionist you are Herr Baader’s associate.’
He went to a cupboard and came back with two packets of tablets. ‘This one twice a day. That’s important. The others are for pain. If you have pain.’
Baader was waiting, sitting in an uncomfortable chair reading a fashion magazine. They walked to the car, drove in silence for a while.
‘This is deep shit,’ said Baader. ‘Dieter says we’ve been opened. He doesn’t know for how long.’
Anselm tried to focus on the meaning of this. ‘What can they know?’ he said.
‘Where we go, what we want. Everything. Everything we know.’
‘Won’t make much sense.’
Baader turned into Schone Aussicht. ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘everything makes sense if you’ve got enough of it.’
Not life, thought Anselm, not life. ‘Who would they be?’ he said For a second, the sad wolf face looked at him. ‘People who are offended,’ Baader said. ‘People who don’t mind blowing up a ferry full of people to kill two men. The people who want to kill you.’
Baader turned into the driveway, parked outside the annexe. He put his head back against the rest, looked at the roof, said, ‘I think you should go away for a while. Tonight. Just go. Fat Otto will get you out of here, we can switch transport a few times. Do a few things like that. Go to Italy. Rome. I’ll give you an address, you can collect cash there.’
Anselm didn’t argue. He felt sick, weak, tingling in his veins, the taste in his mouth he remembered from Beirut.
He was part of someone’s problem now. Whatever the problem was and whoever the people who had it were. He had joined Lourens and his ex-employee, joined Serrano and Kael and Bruynzeel. Yes. And Kaskis and Diab and all the dead soldiers from Special Deployment. They had been a problem for someone and they had been killed for it. Tilders, he had been collateral damage. They hadn’t cared whether they killed him or not.
And he was a target now. Two men sent to kill him. They would have killed Alex too, killed anyone who happened to be there, also collateral damage.
They would come for him again. Tonight. Tomorrow. He couldn’t go home. He couldn’t go anywhere.
At the annexe entrance, Baader rang the bell for Wolfgang to let them in. They were in Baader’s office, both of them standing, when Inskip came to the door.
‘Could I have a word?’ he said to Anselm.
They went to Inskip’s workstation. Inskip pointed at a screen.
‘The Lafarge file. The woman, Thomas, she’s used a card. Twice in the same place.’
‘Where’s that place?’ Constantine Niemand and Jess Thomas. The film, Eleven Seventy.
‘Some godforsaken Welsh hamlet.’
He needed to tell Caroline Wishart.
‘There’s something else,’ said Inskip. He pressed a button on one of the recorders. A monitor came alive, a man in a military overcoat walking across tarmac. He wasn’t smiling for the cameras.
The voiceover said:
General David Carbone, commander in chief of US Special Operations Command today denied the existence of a special unit of the US Special Forces’ super-secret Delta Force called Sudden Death.
A woman was on screen, long grey hair, haggard, talking soundlessly, wiping her eyes with a tissue.
The voiceover said:
The mother of an ex-Delta Force soldier, Benjamin Galuska, found dead yesterday in Montana, has alleged that her son was haunted by things the Sudden Death unit had done but would ne
ver have taken his own life.
Soundbite from the woman:
Ben said they’d kill him, he said they’d killed the others. But we didn’t believe him.
Cut to the man in the overcoat. He was shaking his head.
I’d like to say that I share Mrs Galuska’s grief over the death of her son and I put out my hand to her. And I’d like to say that Benjamin Galuska served his country with courage and honour and pride. But I must also state categorically that the unit she speaks of did not and does not exist. Why Staff Sergeant Galuska invented this story we will never know. He seems to have been a troubled person.God rest his soul. Thank you.
‘Galuska’s one of the two I couldn’t find,’ said Inskip. ‘Are we dealing with supernatural coincidence or what?’
‘What,’ said Anselm. ‘Don’t tell Lafarge anything. Even if they ask.’
He went to his office and rang Caroline Wishart’s number. She picked up on the first ring.
‘John Anselm. I’ve got something on Jessica Thomas.’
He heard her breathe in. ‘Yes?’
He spelled out the name of the place, the business.
Breathe out, a sigh.
‘Any use?’
‘Yes. I think I know where she is.’
Anselm heard himself sigh in return. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’ll come to England tonight. We might make sense of this if we find them.’
He went back to Baader’s office and told him. Baader looked at him for a long time, a finger tracing the line of his upper lip.
‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘Nothing to lose. Kill you here, kill you there. Not a fucking thing to lose.’
Anselm rang Alex.
‘I wasn’t pleased at being got off the premises as fast as possible,’ she said. ‘I have a small interest in whether you live or die.’
‘He meant well. I have to go away for a day or two.’
‘You’re not going to tell me?’
‘No. Would you like to go away for a while when I get back?’
‘To do what?’
‘Exercise in the morning, philosophise in the afternoon.’
‘Leaving the nights free for…?’