Dead Men

by Leather, Stephen

  Salih sat down. ‘No coffee for me,’ he said.

  ‘Tea, then,’ said Merkulov, standing up.

  ‘Tea,’ agreed Salih. ‘No milk. No sugar.’

  The Russian went inside to fetch it. Salih shivered and folded his arms. He was wearing a reefer jacket over an Aran sweater but the wind chilled him. An elderly woman walked past with a Jack Russell on a tartan lead. She looked at him suspiciously and he smiled amiably. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘Lovely dog.’

  The woman’s jaw dropped, then her face creased into a smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and hurried off. Salih’s smile tightened as he watched her go. All Muslims were regarded with suspicion in London, following the bombings on the Tube system. It didn’t matter that the terrorist attacks were the work of a very small minority of Islamic fundamentalists, every brown face was treated as a potential threat.

  Merkulov returned with a mug of tea and two chocolate muffins. He put the tea in front of Salih, then sat down heavily and held out the plate.

  ‘I always worry about eating with former KGB people,’ Salih said. ‘I feel I should be checking everything with a Geiger counter.’

  Merkulov scowled. ‘Just because a Russian dissident gets radiation poisoning, everyone blames us,’ he said. He took a bite from a muffin and continued to speak with his mouth full. ‘Do you really think that if Putin wanted someone dead, he couldn’t arrange to have it look like an accident? There are experts who can make any death look like an accident. Look at what happened to Princess Diana.’ Muffin crumbs splattered across the table and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Salih grinned. ‘You’re not taking credit for what happened to Diana, are you?’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t the KGB, we had no reason to harm her. But the British Establishment, now that’s a different matter.’

  Salih slid a folded piece of paper across the table. ‘I need someone to track this mobile phone for me. Can you do that?’

  ‘It belongs to the American or to the woman?’

  ‘The woman,’ said Salih. ‘She might be in Northern Ireland.’

  ‘Do you know which phone company she’s with? Vodaphone, T-Mobile? Orange?’

  ‘All I have is the number,’ said Salih. ‘I need to know where she is.’

  ‘That’s easy,’ said the Russian. ‘Do you know what make of phone she has?’ Salih shook his head.

  ‘Some of the new models have GPS capability, which means we can pin her down to a few metres in real time. If not, we’ll know which transmitter she’s near. In the city that could be a hundred feet or so.’

  ‘And would you be able to get a list of calls, incoming and outgoing?’

  The Russian pulled a face. ‘All things are possible, my friend. For a price.’

  ‘And get me the locations of the numbers?’

  ‘The landlines, of course. It is harder to get the locations of mobiles.’

  Salih took a brown envelope from inside his jacket and slid it across the table. ‘Ten thousand pounds on account,’ he said.

  Merkulov picked up the envelope. ‘It will take me a day or two at most.’

  ‘I want to know by tonight,’ said Salih. ‘I will pay whatever it takes.’

  ‘This is why I’d never feed you a radioactive soda,’ said Merkulov, tapping the envelope on Salih’s shoulder. ‘You are too valuable a customer.’

  Shepherd checked that no one was on the pavement, then used his keys to open Elaine’s front door. He was carrying the pole he’d found in his garden shed. He closed the door behind him and tapped the four-digit code into the keypad on the burglar-alarm console.

  On his last surreptitious visit to Elaine’s house he’d searched the ground floor. He still had to do the bedrooms but he decided that the attic was a better bet. He used the pole to open the hatch and pull down the folding stairs, then went up and switched on the light. The layout was a mirror image of his own attic, with the water tank in the far corner, next to the dividing wall with his own property. Half a dozen cardboard boxes had been stacked against the tank, and there was a wooden cabin trunk with a combination lock. Shepherd had a quick look through the boxes but they contained junk – old lamps, toys, ornaments, several children’s annuals and some schoolbooks, scuffed handbags and winter coats.

  Shepherd reclosed the cardboard boxes and knelt beside the trunk and examined the combination lock. A three-digit number would open it, which meant there were a thousand possible combinations. Assuming it would take two seconds to try each number, he could do all thousand in two thousand seconds, which was just over half an hour. He had time but … He closed his eyes and went to the file Button had shown him, mentally flicking through the numbers that meant something to Elaine. He tried her birthdate, month and day, then day and month. No joy. He tried her husband’s birthday. Her wedding anniversary wouldn’t work because it fell on 3 May, which meant two digits. Would she have used the date her husband had been killed – 28 August? He tried eight-two-eight and two-eight-eight but neither worked. Her son, maybe. Little Timmy. He tried his birthday, month followed by year, then year followed by month. The lock clicked open.

  Inside the trunk he found three photograph albums, two with a green fake leather binding, the third bound in white leather. He took out the first and flicked through it. There were photographs of Elaine as a baby, as a child and as a young woman. She had been a pretty toddler with long, curly red hair.

  The second album contained pictures of her with her husband, mostly holiday snaps. Several had been taken on beaches, and in every image they were holding each other. They had clearly been a close couple. Half-way through the album she was pregnant, then she and her husband were holding a baby. Shepherd felt dirty as he rooted through Elaine’s memories. He had no right to be handling her possessions, prying into her personal life.

  The third album, the white one, was filled with wedding pictures. The first was familiar – he had seen it on the bookcase in the sitting room. The second was a group photograph of everyone at the wedding, more than a hundred people. John Maplethorpe was standing next to Robbie Carter.

  In the middle of the album he found a photograph of Carter with five men and, again, Maplethorpe was standing next to him. He must have been best man, Shepherd thought, and the others were ushers. There were pictures of Elaine with her parents, Carter with his parents, Elaine with the bridesmaids, the couple inside the church and in the churchyard. Shepherd had a similar album of his own wedding. Like Elaine, he kept it in the attic. He couldn’t throw it away, but neither could he bear to open it.

  Under the third album he found five framed photographs. Two had been taken at the wedding – in one Robbie was holding her under a cherry tree in full blossom, and in the other he and Maplethorpe were both planting a kiss on her cheek. The other three were of Timmy as a baby in his mother’s arms, as a toddler, grinning at the camera, and in his school uniform.

  Underneath the photographs lay a small bubble-wrapped package, which Shepherd opened carefully. Inside he found a stainless-steel Omega watch and a gold wedding band on a thin gold chain. They had obviously belonged to her husband and for some time at least she had worn the ring round her neck. Shepherd felt like a grave robber. Elaine had loved her man with all her heart, and he knew he had no right to root through her possessions. He kept Sue’s jewellery in a box in his wardrobe, next to his gun and ammunition, and knew how he’d feel if a stranger ever touched it. He rewrapped the watch and the ring, then put them on top of the framed photographs.

  He turned back to the trunk and took out several newspapers, all from 1996, with Robbie Carter’s photograph on the front pages. Underneath them were two hardback journals with the RUC crest on the front. Shepherd flicked through them – lists of dates and times, people Carter had met and places he’d been to. In notes of meetings with informers he had used codewords in place of names. He scanned a few entries but they were innocuous.

  A red wool scarf came next, but when Shepherd picked it u
p his eyes widened. A box of ammunition lay beneath it, .357 rounds made by an American company, PMC. He opened it. Inside, there were spaces for fifty bullets. Shepherd quickly counted those that remained. Twenty-six. Two dozen were missing. He took one out and slipped it into his pocket.

  The doorbell buzzed and Shepherd froze. Instinctively he switched off the light even though there was no chance of it being seen from the outside. His heart pounded, even though he knew there was nothing to worry about. Elaine would hardly be ringing her own doorbell.

  He replaced the contents of the trunk, taking care to put them in the position he’d found them. He relocked it and went down the ladder, pushed it back into place and closed the trapdoor. Then he crept into the bedroom. A dark saloon car was driving away from the house.

  He hurried downstairs, reset the burglar alarm, went outside and locked the front door. He hadn’t found a gun but the ammunition was worrying. Why would Elaine keep it if she didn’t have a gun? There was something else too. The Omega watch had been ticking. It was a self-winding model, which meant that after a day or two in the trunk it would have stopped. It had been rewound or even worn in the past couple of days.

  Hassan Salih thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat. A cold wind blew down the Thames, rippling the muddy brown waters. On the south side of the river the giant London Eye turned slowly, giving the tourists in its capsules the best view of the city. The sky was cloudless, as blue as it was above Salih’s native Palestine, but the temperature was at least thirty degrees lower.

  Salih glanced over his shoulder, but he was already sure he wasn’t being followed. London was a great place to hide. He had read somewhere that a third of its inhabitants had been born overseas. It was a city of foreigners, a city of strangers. There was no such thing as a typical Londoner any more, so no one stuck out.

  The Russian was sitting on a wooden bench that overlooked the river. He blew smoke as Salih sat down next to him and gestured at the giant wheel with his cigar. ‘It has to be the mother of all targets, doesn’t it?’ he said. Salih assumed that the question was rhetorical so he said nothing. ‘I mean, its full name is the British Airways London Eye, so blowing it up would be on a par with bringing down a 747. And you’d probably kill as many people.’

  ‘Are you planning a terrorist atrocity?’ asked Salih. ‘I didn’t think it was your style.’

  ‘Nor my area of expertise,’ said the Russian. ‘I leave that sort of thing to your kinsfolk. But what do you think? Four suicide-bombers? Blow up individual pods? Or a massed attack at the bottom to see if you could bring down the entire structure. Can you imagine what it would look like? One big bang and the wheel slams into the Thames. Everyone on it would be killed, guaranteed. And such an image! That’s what al-Qaeda wants – images. They didn’t care about the three thousand or so who died in the Twin Towers. They wanted that image of the buildings on fire, then collapsing. Same with the attacks on the Tube. It’s a symbol of the city, and their attacks are all about symbolism.’ He blew smoke, then jabbed his cigar towards the giant wheel. ‘And over there, my friend, is one hell of a symbol.’

  ‘I’ve no interest in terrorist attacks or symbolism,’ said Salih. ‘The only symbols I care about are those found on banknotes.’

  The Russian guffawed and slapped Salih’s knee. ‘We are alike in that respect, my friend.’ He took out a leather cigar case and offered it to Salih, who shook his head. ‘You don’t smoke?’ asked Merkulov.

  ‘A hookah pipe sometimes,’ said Salih. ‘I like my smoke sweet and fragrant.’

  Merkulov put the cigar case back inside his coat. His hand reappeared with a gleaming white envelope, which he gave to Salih. ‘She’s in Belfast,’ he said. ‘At least, she was this morning. She’s moving backwards and forwards between Northern Ireland and London. She visits Glasgow every two weeks.’

  Salih opened the envelope and took out three computer printouts. One was a list of phone calls made and received with the date and time of each. The second showed the location of the mobile when the calls had been made and received. The third was a list of landline locations.

  A group of Japanese tourists walked past, heading for a booth that offered boat trips along the river. ‘And what about getting the locations of the mobile numbers she’s been communicating with?’ asked Salih.

  Merkulov grimaced. ‘That’s tough and expensive. If you want that done you’ll have to tell me which numbers to check and we’ll do them one by one.’

  Salih studied the list. ‘She’s been calling one mobile number a lot while she’s in Belfast. Can you get me a list of calls made and received from that phone? Say, another five thousand pounds?’

  ‘You don’t need locations?’

  ‘Just the numbers at this stage.’

  ‘Then five will be okay,’ said the Russian.

  Salih handed him an envelope. ‘Here’s twenty on account.’

  The Russian put it into his pocket. ‘It is always a pleasure to do business with a professional like yourself,’ he said. ‘Be careful, old friend. I wouldn’t want to lose such a good customer.’ He grunted as he stood up and blew a cloud of blue-grey smoke towards the Thames. Then he walked off in the direction of the Houses of Parliament.

  Salih watched him go. The Russian’s legs moved awkwardly as if he was having problems with his hips. Merkulov was in his late sixties, but he was in a business where age was no barrier to success. All that mattered was the quality of the information he traded. Salih’s profession was much more age-dependent: his survival depended on his fitness and performance. He reckoned he had another five years ahead of him, ten at most. By the time he was forty he would be either retired or dead.

  He crossed his legs and watched a tourist boat battle upstream, dozens of cameras clicking as a bored woman in a red anorak held a microphone to her lips and detailed the buildings that lined the banks. It would be a challenge to go up against a man like Yokely. It wasn’t the first time Salih had been paid to kill another assassin and he doubted it would be the last. It was a job like any other. The problem lay in getting close to the man, who moved between countries leaving virtually no trace. But if Yokely was close to Button, perhaps that was his weakness. If Salih killed the woman,Yokely would attend the funeral. Once he was in the open, he would be vulnerable.

  Salih stood up and headed for Embankment Tube station.

  Jonas Filbin tossed a briquette of peat on to the fire and prodded it with a brass poker, then settled back in his overstuffed leather armchair. ‘They’ll be banning this before long, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘The Government’s legislating all the pleasures out of life. Either that or taxing them to death.’

  ‘Aye, you can’t beat a real fire,’ said Gerry Lynn, swirling his whiskey around the glass. He was sitting on a leather sofa with Michael Kelly, one of his IRA minders. Kelly was a few years younger than Lynn, with a mop of red hair that defied all attempts to comb it into shape. He had taken off his jacket to reveal a shoulder holster with a large automatic under his left armpit. He was drinking a mug of sweet tea. He wouldn’t touch alcohol when he was working. The other minder, Mark Nugent, was in his late twenties and deferred constantly to him. Nugent had been on defensive driving courses and was a crack shot, though he had only ever fired on the range. The IRA had announced its 1994 ceasefire as Nugent had turned thirteen. Although he had been through the organisation’s training programme, he had missed the opportunity to put those skills into action against the British.

  The four men were in a farmhouse in north County Dublin, a large rambling grey-stone building amid acres of potato fields. It had been in Filbin’s family for six generations and he had moved there from Belfast after his release from prison following the Good Friday Agreement. Filbin’s elder sister was upstairs in bed.

  Filbin and Lynn had shared a cell in Long Kesh for almost eighteen months and had been released on the same sunny July morning. Filbin had served just six years for the murders of two policemen and the attempte
d murder of two soldiers. He had refused to recognise the British court that tried him and had been given four life sentences but like Flynn had been released early under the Good Friday Agreement. Filbin was in his sixties with a farmer’s ruddy complexion and watery brown eyes.

  ‘And how’s Sean MacManus, these days?’ asked Lynn.

  ‘Still in Portlaoise, and not a happy bunny,’ said Filbin.

  ‘Aye, well, that’s what you get if you leave your fingerprints on a gun,’ said Lynn. Portlaoise was the most secure prison in Europe, guarded twenty-four hours a day by the Irish Defence Forces. It was also one of the oldest, and bleakest, gaols in Ireland and was where the Irish Government kept its terrorist prisoners. MacManus was a member of Continuity IRA, which, unlike the Provisionals, had been granted no favours under the Good Friday Agreement. He would rot in jail for the kidnap and murder of two Gardai officers.

  ‘Aye, but you can see the irony in the situation, I’m sure,’ said Filbin.

  ‘The irony?’ repeated Lynn. He sipped his whiskey.

  ‘Well, we’re Irish, and he’s Irish. We killed coppers, he killed coppers. He gets sent down, we get sent down. But he’s sleeping on a pissy mattress and getting an hour of fresh air a day, and here’s you and me drinking whiskey and raising our glasses to a job well done.’

  Lynn grinned. ‘Aye, there’s irony there.’

  ‘But did you ever think, when we were in Long Kesh, that we’d be out so soon, free and clear?’

  ‘For the first couple of years I was sure I’d die behind bars,’ said Lynn. ‘But remember in 1998, when Mo Mowlam turned up to talk to Mad Dog and that nutter Stone? That’s when I knew things were going to happen and the Brits wanted rid. Sure enough, three months later the Good Friday Agreement’s signed and we had our tickets out.’ He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to Martin and Gerry, God bless ’em. There were those that doubted them, but the boys came through.’

  Filbin raised his glass. ‘Tiocfaidh ar la!’

  ‘Tiocfaidh ar la? Our day will come? Our day has come, Jonas. It’s here and now.’