2016 - Takedown

by Stephen Leather

  ‘This tourist followed you back to the villa and beat the crap out of you? For what?’

  ‘I don’t know. He tried to shake our hands in the bar. I told him to leave us alone. He was drunk.’

  ‘So a drunk tourist you snubbed in a bar follows you home and does this? Does that make any sense to you? Because it doesn’t to me.’

  Grigory closed his eyes. ‘He mentioned a girl.’

  ‘What? Speak the fuck up. I can’t hear you.’

  ‘A girl. He talked about a girl.’

  ‘What fucking girl? If you don’t tell me what the fuck happened I swear to God I’ll break your other arm.’

  Grigory sighed. ‘There was this girl. Valentin had some fun with her. It got a bit rough. The tourist talked about her. Said I’d get a taste of my own medicine.’

  ‘What did he mean by that? What did you do to the girl?’

  ‘We had fun, that’s all. Fucked her, got a bit rough with her. It was Valentin mainly. It’s how he gets his kicks and he asked me to join in.’

  ‘You and Valentin fucked a girl? Together?’

  ‘I’d been drinking. And he’d had some coke. Good stuff.’

  ‘So, drunk and doped up on coke you fucked a girl and beat her up.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘And you fucked her in the arse, did you?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘Don’t fucking lie to me. You fucked her in the arse and that’s why you had a bottle shoved up yours.’

  Grigory closed his eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I bet you’re fucking sorry but sorry doesn’t fix this, does it? That tourist, he did this to you for revenge. And he did a fucking good job, too.’

  ‘He had a gun. He could have shot me.’

  ‘Might have been better if he had,’ said Lukin. ‘At least then you wouldn’t look like such a fucking idiot.’

  ‘He had a fucking gun,’ repeated Grigory.

  ‘Yes, a drunken tourist with a gun. What’s wrong with that picture?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Tourists don’t carry guns, as a rule. Did he say what his name was?’

  ‘Gerry. From Wales. He was drunk. He could hardly stand in the bar.’

  ‘Well, he was sober enough to overpower the two of you.’

  ‘He had a gun.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’ He shook his head. ‘Have you any idea how stupid this makes me look? It says I can’t protect my own family. If they can do it to you they can do it to me – that’s the message it sends – and I’ll tell you here and now that no one, fucking no one, is going to shove a bottle up my arse .’

  He stormed out of the hospital – Mirov had to run to get to the limousine first and open the door for him. ‘Take me to the villa,’ snarled Lukin. ‘I want to talk to those so-called bodyguards.’

  CHAPTER 16

  Harper checked out of Le Meurice early the next morning and moved into accommodation that was considerably less grand: a dingy second-floor hotel room with peeling wallpaper and a damp-stained ceiling, rented from an Arab who was happy to be paid in crisp euro notes. The tenement building also housed a derelict bistro on the ground floor, its steel shutters buckled and blackened by fire. The surrounding quarter of Saint-Denis, about ten kilometres north of the centre of Paris, had also definitely seen better days. A few ageing Pieds-Noirs still lived in Saint-Denis, the dusty-footed last remnants of the expatriate French colonists who had run the North African territories then returned, like swarms of starlings flying in at dusk, to settle in Saint-Denis, part of a ‘homeland’ that many had not seen in three generations. It had not welcomed them with open arms. These days they were far outnumbered by the large North African immigrant population that had followed in their footsteps.

  From his window Harper could see the Basilica of Saint-Denis across the rooftops. It had once been a place of pilgrimage, but few who visited it today cared to venture more than a few yards from the basilica for fear of what might befall them in the surrounding streets. The Saint-Denis area scored highly on every index of poverty and disadvantage. It had one of the highest crime rates in the country – fifteen recorded crimes for every hundred inhabitants – and one of the lowest detection rates by a police force widely seen as incompetent, corrupt and racist. As a result, Saint-Denis was regarded by most outsiders as a no-go area. It suited Harper perfectly. The narrow streets made it easy to detect strangers and conduct anti-surveillance drills, while its flourishing sex industry and thriving black-market for all sorts of stolen goods made the locals very sensitive to a police presence. People kept themselves to themselves, asked no questions and gave no answers if questioned by anyone who smelt even slightly official.

  He spent several hours crisscrossing the city on the Métro, visiting phone shops to buy throwaway mobiles and Sim cards, never more than two of each at one place. By midday he arrived back at his room with a half-dozen cheap handsets and a dozen Sim cards. He sat on the bed and over the next hour spoke to four people, all of whom agreed to drop everything to fly to Paris.

  First on his list was the man they called Barry Whisper – a slight, softly spoken figure who also answered to ‘Bravo Whisky’. He had been a 14 Int operative during the later years of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and had also plied his specialised trade with the American intelligence agencies for a couple of years. A trained linguist, he spoke fluent Arabic, German, French, Russian, passable Farsi and Pushto as well. An insular, spiky character, he lived alone between jobs on a remote smallholding on the North Yorkshire moors, tending his pigs, goats and the few crops that would grow on his bleak, rain-washed land.

  The second call was to another Barry. Barry Big was also from Yorkshire but was Barry Whisper’s polar opposite in almost every other way. A loud, hulking figure, he had been a member of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, based in Hereford and used by the SAS for intelligence gathering and surveillance of potential targets. He now lived in the Dominican Republic because he’d met and fallen in love with a Dominican beauty of half his age. He’d bought a beach bar, and the thought of her there surrounded by amorous customers while he was away for weeks on end drove him mad with jealousy, but he loved his intelligence-gathering work so much that he could never refuse the offer of another job for Harper.

  Third on the list was technical and electronics genius Hansfree. In the black humour of the armed forces, he had earned himself his nickname after losing both of his own hands in Bosnia when an IED he had been examining was remotely detonated. He was an intense character in his mid-thirties, always dressed in black, like his hero, Johnny Cash, and wore black leather gloves over his prosthetic hands. He had shown a ferocious determination in rebuilding his life, developing an expertise in electronics that would have made him a fortune in Civvy Street, but Hansfree had loved the military too much to be entirely comfortable working with civilians or corporate career structures. Instead he made a good living working on the margins of society, often for Harper.

  Last but not least, Maggie May was a pale, dark-eyed brunette in her thirties. She was a surveillance professional whose career at MI5 had been curtailed after an ill-advised affair with her departmental boss. It had proved to be ill-advised because, in a story as old as civilisation, she had become pregnant whereupon her knight in shining armour had made it very clear that their relationship, ‘just a bit of fun between two consenting adults’, didn’t extend to him taking any responsibility for the child, if she chose to keep it. She did so, and he had her transferred to a dead-end job in a different department. Maggie had taken maternity leave, and when the time came for her to return to work, she quit her job. A single parent, she looked after her son with the aid of her parents, who had no idea of her real work: they thought she worked for a travel agency because she frequently travelled overseas.

  All four were pleased to hear from him and all agreed to drop everything to fly to Paris. The fact that he was offering them each a hundred-thousand-dollar signing-on fee was an incentive but Harper knew th
ey weren’t just doing it for the money, All four lived for their work and the adrenalin rush that came with the jobs he provided. Life in Lex Harper’s orbit was complicated and often dangerous, but it was never boring.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘You understand what a bodyguard’s job is, don’t you?’ growled Lukin. ‘The clue is in the fucking job description. Body. Guard. You guard the fucking body. You protect it. If necessary you stand between the body and a bullet. Is that so fucking hard to understand?’

  The three men standing in front of Lukin were all staring at the floor. They were big men, broad-shouldered, with hands the size of shovels, each a good six inches taller than their boss, but all three were trembling. Lukin was holding a gun and it was clear from the look in his eyes that he was gearing up to using it. They were in Valentin’s villa. The maids had cleared up so there was no evidence of what had happened, except for a small area of darkened wood that Lukin suspected was a bloodstain. His son’s blood.

  ‘Call yourself Spetsnaz. Special fucking forces? Well, there’s nothing special about you.’ He waved at the bodyguard on the right. ‘You, you big prick. Why the fuck weren’t you in the house with my son?’

  ‘They told us we weren’t needed,’ said the man. His hair was close-cropped, revealing a thick rope-like scar above his right ear.

  ‘What’s your name, Shit-for-brains?’

  ‘Peter,’ mumbled the man.

  ‘I don’t need to know your first name, you fucking prick. I’m not asking you out on a fucking date. Your surname.’

  ‘Volkov.’

  ‘Why was my son unprotected in the bar?’

  ‘There is security in the bar. And they offered to escort Valentin home but he wanted to drive your son. We were waiting for him when he arrived and they were alone. They drove in and said we could stand down.’

  ‘And if Valentin had told you to jump off a fucking cliff, you’d have done that, would you?’

  Volkov looked at the floor.

  ‘You, in the middle. Your name?’

  ‘Zharkov,’ said the man. He was the shortest of the three but was still well over six feet tall. He was wearing a tight-fitting black T-shirt that showed off over-muscular arms, which suggested steroid use rather than hours in the gym.

  ‘Can you explain how a man gets into the villa without anyone seeing or hearing him?’

  Zharkov shrugged but didn’t reply.

  ‘He cuts the wire, gets over the wall and no one sees a thing. Is that what happened?’

  ‘There is no CCTV at the back of the house,’ said Zharkov.

  ‘And why the fuck not?’

  ‘The CCTV is to check on the vehicles.’

  ‘And whose idea was it not to have CCTV covering the whole wall?’

  Zharkov looked at the man to his right. ‘Myshkin is head of security,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Myshkin. His jet black hair was tied back in a short ponytail and he had several days’ stubble on his massive chin. ‘I organise the rota, that’s all.’

  ‘Why is there no CCTV at the back?’ pressed Lukin.

  ‘It’s not our system,’ said Myshkin. ‘It was installed when Valentin bought the villa.’

  ‘And why no dogs? Dogs would have spotted the intruder.’

  ‘Valentin doesn’t like dogs.’

  ‘Valentin doesn’t like dogs or CCTV but he has my son sleeping with the Three Stooges as bodyguards. For fuck’s sake.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘Right. This is what’s going to happen,’ he said. ‘I need two of you fuckwits to help me get the bastard who attacked my son. Only two of you. That means one of you is surplus to requirements. You can decide among yourselves who that one is. Two of you work with me, one of you goes to hospital. And I don’t give a fuck which is which.’ He sat down and gestured with the gun. ‘Get on with it. I don’t have all day.’

  Myshkin looked across at Volkov and nodded.

  Volkov stared back at him impassively.

  Zharkov looked at Volkov, then back at Myshkin. ‘You were in charge,’ said Zharkov, his massive hands bunching into fists.

  ‘Like fuck I was,’ snarled Myshkin.

  ‘You said you were the boss,’ said Volkov, sullenly.

  Myshkin glared at him. ‘And I fucking well am, so I’m telling you it’s me and you against him.’ He nodded at Volkov. ‘Okay? You and me, we stand together. Zharkov’s always been shit to you.’

  Zharkov stepped back and put up his fists. ‘You think you can take me, fucker?’

  Myshkin nodded earnestly at Volkov. ‘Come on, you and me. Zharkov has always hated you. And he fucked that girl you like in Lone Star.’

  Volkov glared at Zharkov, who shook his head. ‘He’s lying.’

  ‘Did you fuck her?’

  ‘What if I did? She’s a hooker. I paid her. It’s not as if she was fucking me for free.’

  Myshkin’s fist lashed out and caught Zharkov under the chin. He staggered back and Myshkin followed through with two piston-like jabs to the man’s chest, just below the heart. Zharkov’s hands went up to defend himself but he was in pain and didn’t see the kick until it was too late. Myshkin’s foot caught the side of his knee and Zharkov howled as the cartilage snapped, like a dry twig. He fell to the ground, clutching his injured leg and moaning.

  Myshkin stepped back, hands up, and stared at Volkov. ‘Your call. I’m easy either way. But it won’t be me going to hospital.’

  Volkov breathed in, grimaced, then turned and kicked Zharkov in the ribs. Hard. Myshkin joined in and for the next thirty seconds the two men kicked and stamped on Zharkov until his arms and legs were broken and his face was a bloody pulp. Eventually they stepped back. Zharkov was face down, unconscious, breathing slowly and heavily.

  Lukin waved his gun at the body. ‘Take that piece of shit to the hospital,’ he said to Mirov. ‘Not the one my son’s in. Now, you two fuckers need to work hard to get back on my right side or you’ll be joining that piece of shit in intensive care. And your first order of business is to find that fucking tourist and bring him to me.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Dr Chanika’s clicking high heels echoed off the walls as she headed towards her car, a two-seater BMW Z4 that was her pride and joy. She was tired and looking forward to getting home for a long soak in the bath and a bottle of wine. Her shift was supposed to have ended at six but a woman who had swallowed a bottle of weedkiller, after discovering that her husband was preparing to leave her for his girlfriend, had been brought in. That had been five days earlier. The woman had expected to die immediately but weedkiller didn’t work like that. Apart from a little nausea she had been fine, for a few days at least, but behind the scenes the poison was systematically destroying her liver and poisonous toxins were building up in her blood. Now it was too late and, barring a liver transplant, she would be dead within the week. All Dr Chanika could do was to try to minimise her pain, and that was easier said than done. Dr Chanika wasn’t looking forward to the next few days and she knew she’d need the bath and the wine to stand any chance of getting to sleep that night.

  Headlights on full beam almost blinded her. She froze. The car was directly ahead of her. She shielded her eyes with her hand and shuffled to the side.

  As she blinked, she realised that a figure was standing between the lights. A man. A big man.

  ‘Dr Chanika?’ said the man.

  ‘Yes?’ she said hesitantly. ‘Who are you?’ He wasn’t Thai, she was sure of that. He was far too big and his accent was foreign. Russian, maybe.

  ‘I need to talk to you about one of your patients. Miss Pear. She’s in intensive care.’

  ‘I’m sorry, are you a relative?’ Her eyes were watering in the light’s intensity.

  ‘No, I’m just a concerned citizen,’ said the man. ‘I need to know the name of the man who came to see her. I understand he’s paying Miss Pear’s bill.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I really can’t help you,’ she said, turning towards her car. ‘You can call the main
office tomorrow.’

  A large figure appeared to her right, blocking her way. She turned to her left but another man stood there, even bigger than the first. The blinding light meant she couldn’t see their faces.

  ‘I need the name, Dr Chanika.’

  ‘I’ll call security,’ she said. ‘Or the police.’ She fumbled for her phone in her handbag.

  ‘You could do that, but by the time they get here you’ll be in a pool of blood and we’ll be long gone. And even if they get here quickly, we’ll be back in a day or two. Maybe we’ll follow you home. Have you got kids, Dr Chanika? Or a family? Parents? Do you want to be responsible for them being hurt?’

  Dr Chanika stopped reaching for her phone. Tears were stinging her eyes.

  ‘I just want a name,’ said the man. ‘Then we’ll leave you in peace. Just a name.’

  She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. ‘You can’t do this to me,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, I can,’ said the man. ‘I can do what the fuck I want. Now stop fucking around and give me the name.’

  Dr Chanika felt the strength go from her legs and staggered back, leaning against her car to stop herself falling. She could barely breathe – it was as if there was a steel band around her chest. ‘Lex Harper,’ she said. ‘His name is Lex Harper.’

  CHAPTER 19

  All four of the people Harper had called were in Paris within twenty-four hours, and one by one they sent him a text to confirm their arrival. The last was from Barry Big, who had flown from the Dominican Republic – he had left for the airport within minutes of Harper phoning him. When he had heard from them all, Harper locked the flimsy door of his room, went down the stairs and out through an entrance lobby that was festooned with cobwebs and carpeted with wind-blown rubbish.

  He was carrying an envelope containing a dozen or so sheets of photographs and intel that Charlie Button had left for him in the drafts folder. He had collected it from an internet café a short walk from his room on the way to an early breakfast of croissants and coffee. He walked slowly through the streets, carrying out his usual anti-surveillance drills. Once he was certain he was not being observed or followed, he entered a side-street café. He nodded to the Lebanese owner, who had received a cash sum equivalent to the whole of his normal day’s takings in return for the use of a private room on the fourth floor of the building, then climbed the stairs.