by Andy McNab
But I couldn’t piss about. I had to leave him in no doubt that extracting him from the gangfuck in Somalia and then the one on the mountain wasn’t the same as doing the whole dad thing. I didn’t know how to look after my own son. Some days, I didn’t know how to look after myself.
‘No, mate. It wouldn’t work for me. And, believe me, it wouldn’t work for you either.’
I gripped the wheel again, concentrating hard on the brake-lights of the wagons in front of me. I was pretty sure he was doing the same. I knew I had to choose my next words with a fuck of a lot more care than usual.
I hoped they’d come out right.
‘The thing is, Stefan, I can do my best to protect you against the bad guys. It’s my job. And us pretending to be father and son is part of that. But it’s an act. It’s a performance. In real life, I’m not your dad. In real life, your dad is dead. Me, I’m a gun for hire. And that works, when it works, because I can’t do all that stuff dads are supposed to do. The stuff your dad did. I can only do what I do. I can’t do the mathematical challenges. I don’t have any of the things a bright guy like you needs. I don’t have the skills.’
I listened to the hum of the engine. The rasp of the tyres on the tarmac. The silence inside the wagon was like the silence that fills the gap between the whoosh of an RPG launcher and the missile sending a jet of molten copper through the side of a fighting vehicle. I felt a sudden need to fill it.
‘Also, I don’t have a home. I have some mates, I have some contacts. I don’t really have friends. A lot of the people I called my friends are dead now, so maybe it’s better that way. Maybe it’s …’
I was blabbering now.
I shut the fuck up.
When I did glance at him, I saw that he was still staring straight ahead, chewing his bottom lip between his teeth and nodding to himself. He was processing what I’d said to him, like he always did.
Eventually, he turned and looked me straight in the eye. ‘So I guess that means we’re both in the shit, eh, Nick?’
‘Nothing new there, mate.’
3
St Gallen was a sizeable place, east of Zürich, close up against the German border. We arrived there shortly before dark o’clock. It was less than forty-five minutes, by my reckoning, from Lyubova’s country pile.
Stefan’s mouth fell open as I headed towards the centre. He pointed at a square in the business district where everything seemed to have been covered with red carpet, including a couple of wagons. A group of teenagers huddled together on big red banquettes, too busy texting to talk. Lights flickered on above them, suspended on wires, like baby barrage balloons.
I remembered reading something about a couple of designers winning a competition to create a public living space that looked and felt like a room where you could hang out with your mates. Fuck knew where their inspiration came from. The only rooms I’d ever seen like that had been in Iraq and Afghan, when the grenades had detonated and we’d had to scrape what was left of the inhabitants off the walls.
I drove past a big fuck-off cathedral and found a very shiny shopping mall a few blocks from the train station that advertised a cyber café and a McDonald’s. I parked up on the street a couple of hundred beyond the entrance, opposite a tram stop the size of a suspension bridge.
He made to get out but I gripped him. ‘No, mate. You stay here …’
Then I thought, Fuck it. This might go on for ever. He can’t spend the rest of his life living on takeaways, staying off the radar. Even if his photograph was on the Net now, we had to get used to hiding in plain sight.
I threw on my baseball cap and jacket and guided him inside. Stefan still limped a bit, but I didn’t need to carry him.
We got some Big Macs, fries and Coke down our necks and practised our father-and-son act. That was the trick. We weren’t the only ones doing it. Some of the dads in the restaurant area were in jeans and T-shirts. A few others were in grey suits and looked less like they were in the mood for a Happy Meal than we did. It was after seven p.m., but they had probably only stepped away from their desks for a quick break between currency swaps.
Stefan told me that what we were eating had zero nutritional value and I told him not to talk with his mouth full. Whatever, I don’t think either of us gave a shit. It filled a space.
The cyber café was on the floor above, and felt like a designer schoolroom. I paid for an hour, chose a keyboard and monitor in one corner and began by checking out the location of its most obvious competitors. I might need them later, and I never liked going back to the same place twice. Three names and addresses went into the Moleskine.
Next I ran through the budget accommodation directory. The Swiss didn’t really understand the meaning of ‘cheap’, but there was quite a bit of choice. I got scribbling again.
On balance, I thought we’d avoid the B-and-Bs. I liked their anonymity, but preferred the idea of being able to disappear into a crowd. Top of my list was something that called itself a hostel, with four storeys and an external staircase leading to each one. It was in a stretch of open ground dotted with trees on the far side of what was apparently the oldest library in the world. I pointed at a picture of visitors in blue felt slippers admiring ancient illuminated manuscripts in display cabinets. ‘What do you think? We could pop in there if we get short of reading material.’
He was still stressing about our visit to Lyubova, but he managed a weak grin.
I googled Adler Gesellschaft. Laffont had been right. Their glass and steel executive HQ was on the northern edge of town. Their manufacturing bases – which seemed to turn out everything from aircraft fuselages and wing panels to fence posts and stripy poles – were mostly in Eastern Europe and their distribution depots were scattered across the continent, but their tax returns were definitely filed in the canton of Zürich.
They weren’t the kind of outfit to broadcast precise details of their ownership, but I found my way to the glossy PR section of the corporate website and discovered that the George Michael lookalike I’d spotted at the Albertville depot was IC logistics. His name was Adel Dijani, which sounded more Lebanese than Swiss to me.
I was about to leave the site when I pinged a shot of their head of security at a recent event – maybe the opening Frank had been invited to. The first thing I noticed was a flash of red and silver on his ring finger. I zoomed in on it.
A silver double-headed eagle on a red enamel background.
An Albanian eagle.
I’d definitely seen that ring before. When its owner’s hand was clapping Mr Lover Man on the back. Celebrating the fact that me and a Nissan X-Trail had fallen off a cliff.
As far as I knew, this was the first time I’d been able to have a good look at Hesco’s face. Sideburns that had been given a little too much love and attention. Dark, tightly curled hair. A neat white scar running down his nose that looked like someone had shoved a stiletto up his nostril and taken it out sideways.
I stared at the photograph.
He was definitely one of the two on the hill. He was definitely at the Aix marina. Had he been in the chalet? On the road before the crash? The harder I tried to remember, the less I could. That part of my recent past was still splintered and remote.
But now I had the fucker’s name.
Zac Uran.
Zac Ur-an.
You … ran …
That settled it.
Mr Lover Man had known he was dying. He knew he’d been fucked over. He had nothing to hide. He had given me the name of the guy who had fixed for him to kill Frank.
But Zac wasn’t at the top of the food chain. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been bouncing about on the hill. He wasn’t simply chomping around in the pondweed though. It took more than that to drive a Maserati.
I surfed the news sites, starting with the sport and UK-based shit, as any Brit would. Then I got more local. The assassination victim in the French Alps had been formally identified as Ukrainian multi-millionaire Frank Timis. There were a nu
mber of theories about what lay behind his death. The police had released a photograph of the oligarch’s son, who, sources claimed, had been abducted – possibly by the killer.
Stefan’s picture had been taken from the shot I’d pinged on the wall of the green room. Everyone around him had been cropped, but you could still see the BG’s hand on his shoulder.
I felt myself relax a fraction; it was at least eighteen months out of date. His features had thinned out since then. His nose seemed sharper now, his cheekbones more pronounced, his eyes darker. And a trip to the mini-market on the ground floor, followed by a session upstairs, would help me make him even more difficult to recognize.
I ran through a few of the story links and found some footage of a hillside farm I recognized. A couple of big lads in dungarees were being interviewed by a French news crew. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but that wasn’t a problem. They were so fired up that they mimed the highlights of their recent experience – the fight, the theft of the ATV – vividly enough to leave no need for subtitles.
The piece was followed by an e-fit of the fucker who had ruined their day. Apart from the stubble and the head wound – which Claude or the artist had transposed from right to left – it didn’t look remotely like me. Or I hoped it didn’t. The shadowy figure staring at us from the screen looked like he’d be completely at home on the Planet of the Apes.
Neither of them would have pinged Stefan, and the authorities didn’t seem to have joined the dots between the gangfuck in the barn, the events further up the mountain and the chalet in Courchevel. I guessed they would at some point. I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
Next came an update on the investigation into last night’s fatality at a marina in Aix-les-Bains. The text for this one was in English. The police were looking for two men who had been seen entering the victim’s suite. There was no mention of a Brit in a green Polo.
I didn’t expect to find much on the Net about Lyubova Timis, and I was right. When you’ve had a child kidnapped and not quite ransomed, you didn’t advertise your wealth and your whereabouts in Hello! magazine. And Frank had always done his best to keep in the shadows, even when he was up to something legal. All I learnt was that she divided her time between Russia and Switzerland, and had once been an air stewardess.
I sparked up Google Earth to see what was on file for the chateau. The shots had been taken a couple of years ago, and told a slightly different story from the estate agent’s brochure: holes in the roof; a major damp problem in one wing; crumbling outbuildings; a lawn that hadn’t seen a mower for a while. But it gave me a heads-up on the layout.
I also scanned the surrounding area, on the lookout for approach routes, places I could safely leave the wagon, areas of dead and open ground, and to get a more detailed sense of the overall lie of the land.
I already knew Lyubova was no pushover. Now I needed to find out how well protected she was, whether there were points of vulnerability I could exploit, whether I’d have to go in or just wait for her to come out and do a spot of shopping.
I’d have to do a recce before deciding on my next move, but this was a good place to start. I zoomed in on the road that ran along the edge of Lake Konstanz and followed it up to Kreuzlingen and beyond. Before closing down I also checked out some of the mapping and picture-postcard imagery of the Swiss shore. If I had to lift her, I’d need somewhere quiet to read the ex-Mrs Timis her horoscope.
I steered Stefan down the escalator and on to the pharmacy section in the mini-market. I bought a hand towel – I couldn’t be arsed to go outside and get the one he had in his rucksack – a pair of barber’s scissors and a plastic bottle of overpriced hair dye. I’d stick with the hood or the baseball cap until Claude came up with a sharper e-fit, but I needed to treat Stefan to a makeover before the police techies realized that they should fire up the age-progression software on his photograph and bring it up to date.
The toilets were on the top floor of the mall, which suited me fine. It meant that nobody bothered to go up there unless they were desperate for a leak. I locked us inside the parent-and-baby room and lifted the boy on to the mat alongside the sink.
I switched on the mood lighting and the soothing music. I could still hear the occasional footstep and waffle in the corridor outside, but no one hammered on the door, desperate for a nappy change.
The two of us had the place to ourselves for long enough to turn him into a crewcut, peroxide-blond hipster. I managed not to turn myself or my kit the same colour, and took the polythene gloves, packaging, towel and hair trimmings away with us in the pharmacy bag.
He grinned when he checked out his new look in the mirror, and I spotted him admiring his reflection in the plate-glass window by the main exit, so I knew he was pleased with the result. It was blindingly obvious that Frank had never encouraged his boy to take a walk on the wild side. To set the seal on his new relationship with the world he asked me if he could borrow thirty francs and disappeared into a record store. He emerged almost immediately, waving a Pitbull CD.
The central post office in St Gallen was across the road from the main train station. There was plenty of glass for Stefan to admire himself in there too. I found a phone booth and placed a call to Moscow. Pasha picked up after three rings.
‘Mate, I’ve got a couple of names. Could you possibly run them through the system? The first is Zac Uran. Yup. U-R-A-N. I don’t know for certain, but he wears a ring with an Albanian double eagle. He’s the security chief of a construction company that Frank had a big slice of. Adler Gesellschaft. Based in St Gallen, Switzerland. If he wasn’t responsible for the death in Aix-les-Bains yesterday, he certainly had a ringside seat.
‘The second is Dijani. Adel Dijani. Same outfit. Head of logistics. Sounds Lebanese to me.’
I could almost hear Pasha’s pencil lead scratching its way across his notepad.
‘Any news on the other thing?’
‘The Crimea crisis is very complicated, Nick. I don’t need to tell you this. The battle lines have been redrawn. And it is very possible that Frank found himself on the wrong side of one. And you won’t be surprised to hear that the supreme leader does not like oligarchs to be confused about who is the boss.’
I didn’t need a lecture on the state of the former Soviet Union, so I asked him to zero in on any possible connections between Putin, Uran and Dijani, and I’d take it from there.
Then I thanked him, and said I’d call back at some point in the next thirty-six hours.
4
The hostel was heaving with kids and mums and dads who wanted to show them a fun time without paying a fortune for it. Stefan and I went into waffle mode as we approached the front desk and did all the stuff you don’t do if one of you is a kidnap victim and the other an abductor. That was stage two of hiding in plain sight.
I’d smuggled Stefan into the motel in Albertville because we were still uncomfortably close to the killing zone, but I couldn’t keep doing that. Hiding in the shadows was sometimes the best way to raise people’s suspicions, and the Swiss didn’t like bending the rules. Someone was bound to spot the kid at some point, and even if they just thought I was trying to avoid paying in full, they’d call in the local cops.
I asked the receptionist if they had a spare ground-floor room and Stefan swung into action. ‘He gets vertigo.’ He gave me a cheeky schoolboy grin. ‘Don’t you, Dad?’
She gave him the kind of smile that Lyubova wouldn’t have understood, and said we could have the last one going.
We checked in as Nick and Steven Saunders. I peeled off enough Swiss francs to cover a two-night stay and handed them over with our passports.
As she flicked through Stefan’s he moved closer to the counter. ‘Please don’t look at the photograph. Not cool.’ He pointed at me. ‘I blame him.’
She was loving this. Handed his passport back and barely glanced at mine.
Our ground-floor room was a twin. The window didn’t offer much of a view, but i
t opened fully, with a bit of encouragement, and was close enough to the nearest patch of cover to give us a chance of legging it if we got any unwelcome visitors.
‘ERV, Dad?’
I ran through our escape and evasion drills. They were boring as shit, but he seemed to enjoy them. We switched off the lights, checked the all-clear and slid out over the sill. Then we hugged the wall, staying under the shadow of the fire escape, and made our way to the corner of the building. From there we paralleled the edge of the car park, the far side of the lamps that ran along it, and disappeared into the trees.
I was hoping for a shed or a lean-to or a log pile, but we did better than that. Ten paces in there was a Native American camp with a joke totem pole and three tepees that looked like they’d been built especially for not very tall seven-year-olds. They were filled with blankets and cushions.
I told him to go inside the middle one and cover himself up. It worked a treat. I knocked three times on the wicker door frame, then three more. ‘Raskolnikov.’
He lifted the blanket so slowly I couldn’t see it move. Checked me out with one eye. Then we looped round behind the coppice and went back to the room.
The decor wasn’t quite as basic as it had been in Albertville, and the en-suite even had a bath. I told Stefan to get into it and give himself a good soak while I went off and did a bit of a recce. The swelling on his ankle had retreated but he still wasn’t going to break any sprinting records.
His expression changed again as I shut the window, drew the curtains and prepared to leave. He gave me the same look he’d worn on the way there. I chose to ignore it.
‘Do you know her BGs?’
He shook his head. ‘They came and went.’
‘How many does she have?’
‘Three. Perhaps four.’
‘Who else might be there? Does she have maids?’
‘I only know two of her maids. One was very kind to me. Natasha. She’s from Kiev.’ He brightened. ‘She taught me to swim. She loves to swim. I also like to swim, Nick. Very much.’