He looked stupid, Tommy King thought. He looked like he didn’t understand why a guy stood three or four feet from him and had a handgun in his fist. Others, at different tables, screamed and some went down on the paving. There were no heroes and no have-a-go tossers. Two shots, like they did in the movies. Two in the head. The arms didn’t go up. The Irishman didn’t look as though a sledgehammer had hit him. He crumpled. He hit the table he’d been sitting at, and tipped it.
The gun was gone, and the bike. A bit of screaming started, not much. The seats in front of that bar were deserted, then the tables at the bar where he was. He made sure he had the tissue in his pocket, the one he’d used on the can, and sauntered away. Bloody brilliant what two grand could buy. And when the MV Santa Maria came in, the money with it, he’d be a big man and have respect and . . . He might even buy the guy from Benidorm a new bike.
He walked away, and thought himself a coming man – something his uncle Mikey had never been.
There was much about the Mad Monk, as the chief called her, that appealed to him, and a little about her that rather frightened him. The word maverick rolled silently on his tongue. He knew its origin: a cattle farmer of the old Wild West had declined to brand his steers and those that had wandered from the herds were called after him – he was Maverick. She was in that tradition, a loner, independent. There was one in pretty much every organisation. He would have said that any corporate building was the poorer if a maverick didn’t walk the corridors. She was indulged and had the protection of seniors, as her rare species always did. Her professionalism was valued and her commitment total. It was the unpredictability that frightened him.
The knock came at his door. It opened before he could respond. Crumpled clothes. No cosmetics. A brush cursorily run across her hair, or maybe only fingers to smooth it. He thought she looked rather wonderful. She dumped two coffees on the desk.
Her chief said, ‘I don’t think, Winnie, you can do any more, except wait. Always the hardest, the waiting.’
‘I won’t argue with that.’
‘We start at the centre of the matter and the world revolves around us. Then it runs away from us. Go down the line, either to success or failure, and control is diminished. It’s as if when the big moves are made it’s in the hands of people we don’t know – people we didn’t realise existed.’
‘Very philosophical, Chief.’
‘If this moves to any sort of conclusion it will have drifted away from you.’
‘Tell me something fucking new.’
‘Mind your tongue, Winnie.’
As a ten-year-old her language had been as choice as that of the deep-shaft miners who brought their kids to her father’s classroom when off-shift. As a fifteen-year-old it had been enough to warrant a visit to a child psychiatrist in Merthyr. At university it was regarded as an affectation. In childhood she had been smacked, had suffered withdrawal of favourite toys, being shut in the shed where the family’s collie slept, and she’d had soap forced into her mouth. There had been an internal disciplinary meeting at Thames House just before her first posting to Belfast: stern faces had gazed down on her as if she’d nicked the Crown Jewels; the charge had been the use of abusive language to seniors and subordinates.
‘What a fucking waste of time’, she’d told them. ‘If you didn’t know it, I’ve work to do.’
Now no one seemed to take offence. She gave an impression of inner contentment, and was envied it. Well, they knew fuck-all.
‘If the sun were to shine on us, Winnie, what’s achievable?’
‘We get a name, we can build a profile. A big player travels. He’s on the move and one day – if we have a Trojan horse in his camp and are forewarned – he’s beyond the protection of Russian frontiers. We can have him arrested on third-party territory, staple an extradition warrant to his forehead and we’ve got him.’
‘That would take a great deal of sunshine, Winnie.’
‘They used Damian Fenby’s head for a kick-about.’
‘You’ll want a team of committed people. Your old colleagues?’
‘I’d like to rake them up.’
‘And the name?’
‘The boy called him “the Major”. He identified him as Petar Alexander Borsonov but we don’t have traces yet. We will. Interestingly, there was a small telephone book of Russians we tried to check out over the years but he wasn’t on any list we made. So, he’s careful, discreet and clever. My girl, God willing, will bring more back.’
It was about the time that Caro Watson would be touching down in Bucharest and there was a good connection for Constanta. Winnie tried to picture the boy and open his mind, take him beyond the banality of the photo image and give him flesh and colour, build a portrait, but it was beyond her.
‘And I have your authorisation to bring my old people together again for this?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘I’d have expected nothing less. Fenby was ours.’
‘Was ours . . . By the rules, Winnie.’
‘What else?’
The car with the Major was held at traffic-lights momentarily, the driver manoeuvring for a gap in the vehicles ahead, but it gave the escort car the opportunity.
The girl had the door opened for her, and the eldest policeman leered. He gave her a card, and she slipped it into her bag – she didn’t examine it for his rank. In mangled Russian, Natan was told that he was being dropped here, too, and the time he should be back there in the afternoon. He was pushed out and the car sped after the Mercedes. She walked off, hips swinging. She was a free bird, as though a cage door had opened. She didn’t look at him. He was dirt, beneath her. She crossed the road, tripping through traffic, and men braked to let her pass.
He bit his lip.
He could turn round, of course. He had been in Constanta twice before, when the first loose discussions had been under way – before the detail the Major now demanded. He had wandered through department stores, into computer businesses, and had ended in a side-street at a working man’s café-bar, and eaten meat with fried potatoes and drunk Coke. He had had the brochures from Dell spread across the table. In the car they had given him a pocket map of the city and had pointed out to him where the store was. He would remember the rest. He could have turned round, gone to look at another store with the same level of merchandise.
He was a fighter. Always had been. He’d been beaten by kids on the farms round his home, gone home bloodied and been told by his brothers and his father to ‘stand up for himself’. He’d been jeered at by kids at school and had ridden it. He’d been ostracised in Kaliningrad, expelled for ‘academic non-conformity’, and had sworn at his tormentors. He had gone on to the streets, found work and seen off the cold and hunger. In the hotel suite, when they had slapped him, humiliated and not trusted him, he could have lashed out at them, but they’d have beaten him to a pulp and heaved him on to the street. He had fought them by walking into the embassy’s lobby in Baku. He would fight them again in a café in a back-street of Constanta. He liked to fight, on ground of his own choosing.
That ground would be a café used by labourers and peasants behind the St Peter and Paul Orthodox Cathedral. It was ground where he could hurt.
Winnie had begun calling them back.
There was Dottie in A Branch. She handled the allocation of the surveillance teams used for tracking targets, on foot and in vehicles. Dottie, plain as the proverbial pikestaff, had been the Boss’s apparatchik, the most loyal of the loyal. She managed detail supremely well, and had been devastated by the break-up of the unit.
There was Kenny, taciturn and awkward, with few words to contribute. He sifted expenses dockets on the third floor, and would nod to her in the canteen but would not come to sit with her. He would, likely, have given his life to save hers.
She rang Xavier, who now did liaison between Thames House and the Metropolitan Police; he was also a link to the Anti-terrorist Command. He was a thorough and exact investigator but had let it be
known that the winding up and dispersal of the talent had been a crime. He sent flowers to his former Boss each year on her birthday.
They were the key building bricks. She might need others later, but it was a start. She reckoned she had already breathed new life into her Graveyard Team. What pleased her most was that Dottie, Kenny and Xavier had let her know they would be walking out of the door of whatever office they now occupied and demanding reassignment. Winnie Monks reflected that it was many months since she had last preached her creed: that the threat to her country of international terrorism was minimal compared to the dangers posed by organised crime. The first might splash blood and summon the headlines of outrage, but the other moved in darkness, evil and secrecy, contaminating all who came within its reach. She’d said it often enough. Terrorism scratched spectacular but superficial wounds; organised crime caused terminal and irreversible sickness. It was ever harder to find disciples.
She thought of where Caro Watson was. And of how much lay on the girl’s spare shoulders. Already parts of the operation had slipped from her grip – always had and always would. She sat at her desk, the phone beside her, and waited.
The muscle flying with Caro Watson had identified themselves as Barry and David, which might have been their correct names and might have been badges of convenience. David was beside her, fidgeting and nervy; he gave the impression of a man who felt undressed because he wasn’t carrying a 9mm Browning in his belt. Barry had been twice round the block, first left to right, then right to left. He’d done the usual crap in the greengrocery and the hardware store, looking and not buying. She would have expected the pair to identify a watcher. Their expertise was to find the trap, if one had been laid, or the meet-point compromised, and evaluate it.
She was late going to him.
It was a tactic. They taught on the training seminars that an agent should understand that meetings were at the convenience of the officer, and that officers did not come running. Officers were never grateful to agents.
He seemed fragile, sitting in the window of the café-bar. A TV was playing behind him, and games machines, and most of the tables near to the counter were taken. A wide-hipped woman moved around them with plates of food and refilled glasses. The photographs from Baku were a good enough likeness for her to recognise him and have no doubt. He had no weight to him, no strength, and gazed into the window. She thought she had allowed him to stew long enough. David said they were clear. If he had enough time to kick his heels, he’d be glad of the officer’s arrival. That was what the instructors said. He would spill more readily what he had to give.
She stared from a doorway at the sparse little sod in his second-day T-shirt with stubble on his cheeks, and said, ‘About time to get the show on the road.’
The head was in her mind, the bruises, contusions and wounds, as she had looked down at the figure on the trolley and put a name to it. Not many days went by when she did not see the face that had belonged to Damian Fenby.
She stepped out of the shadow.
A car slowed as she crossed the street and a cyclist swerved. The boy was looking at his watch.
She pushed open the door, felt the warmth and heard the music from the TV programme. She must dominate, and it must be on her terms.
She went from the door to the table. She sensed that all eyes were on her back. She smelt cigarette smoke, beer and strong coffee, and seemed to taste the sweat of the place. She saw the scrapes on his arm – they’d said in the signal from Baku that he had superficial injuries. One leg was stuck out from the table and the jeans were ripped at the knee. She managed a smile and sat down.
She did not apologise for being eleven minutes late, or reach out a hand to him. He was not her friend. She did not introduce herself but was brusque.
‘You’re Natan?’
‘Yes.’
‘You were in our embassy in Baku?’ She focused hard, caught his eyes. ‘You told them who you worked for, what you’d heard, and you demanded to speak to an intelligence officer. You offered, as a reason why we might travel across Europe to meet you, details of the death of a colleague in Budapest. Well, I’m here.’
She put her handbag between them and the woman with the big hips came forward. Caro Watson waved her away. She slid the bar on the pocket recorder in the bag. The light winked and a spool turned.
She took a deep breath. The boy seemed to shiver. Most did when the reality of a meeting confronted them. Then it gushed.
‘It was a great joke for them. It was a dummy and we were in the lay-by near to where the Major lives – his family is there – close to Pskov. There were the three of them. Him and his best guards. The dummy had been dumped and they found it and they kicked it. They did it until they lost interest but by then the dummy was broken, in pieces. The head could no longer be recognised as one from a dummy that you see in a clothes store. The Major is Petar Borsonov and . . .’
She could see the face of Damian Fenby as it had been when she identified him.
The taxi dropped them at the back of the derelict hotel where the road veered to the left, but the driver pointed to a gravel track.
‘I don’t think it’s very far,’ Jonno said.
They climbed the track, which was too rough for the wheels on the cases so he carried them. When they came to one of the zigzag bends, they saw the towering bluff of a small mountain with a sheer cliff and, below it, on a lower plateau, the façades of two villas. The tiled roofs peeped above the trees and undergrowth that covered the slopes. One was white and the other ochre, the colour merging with the ground. He pointed, and she paused to take in what he showed her. Sweat stained the armpits of her blouse. She carried the two plastic bags they’d filled in a mini-mart by the bus station – milk and bread, some pork fillet, potatoes, salad – a back-stop against the fridge being empty – four beers, a bottle of wine, and some sparkling water. He thought Posie didn’t often carry shopping bags. She was wearing little more than a pair of slippers on her feet, and would have been fine on a pavement but –
Posie trod on a sharp stone and started to limp. Jonno did the decent thing and took the shopping bags with the cases.
They went on up. Below them there were interminable holiday homes and apartment blocks, finished and unfinished, then Marbella’s parks and trees, which went down to the shore. He saw ships out to sea, and a distant landmass. They’d be isolated up here. No bar, no bistro, no dancing, and no late bus back.
At the next corner he saw high retaining walls, with wire on them, and wooden gates. A surveillance camera had picked them up and moved as it followed them. Brilliant: they were on TV. He wondered who was watching them.
There was a pad with keys on it and grille for speaking into. The sign identified it as the Villa del Aguila. He looked up the track to where it ended: another set of gates, more cameras, wire and retaining walls. He noted the gap in the two walls. He and Posie trudged forward and he muttered to her that they were nearly there. Between the walls there was an opening that was little more than the width needed for a car to get through. The gates had been painted once but the deep green colour had faded. There was a chipped, peeling sign and Jonno bent close to it: Villa Paraiso. He said they had reached Paradise.
He pushed open the gates and they went through. He heard her struggle to close them. There was a path with steps that went through a garden that needed care. A cat snarled at them, then bolted. Old pines dominated the house, which was small. First impressions? Call for a bulldozer. It was not a luxury villa. Shit. He would have liked to hold Posie’s hand as they went up the steps to the front door but he couldn’t because he carried the cases and bags. There were plant pots by the door, and he used his toe to move them. The key was revealed. He had beers and a bottle of wine and the sun was shining and he wasn’t in the bloody office doing distribution drivers’ flow charts to show fuel consumption. He dumped his load. He used the key to open the door. He murmured something about an adventure, picked her up and carried her inside. A smell
of decay wafted at them, of soft dirt and old rugs.
She said, ‘Jonno, this is a bit different from what’s usually peddled as Paradise.’
‘We’ll be fine. It’ll be good,’ Jonno said. ‘I promise. The fun starts now.’
4
‘It’s a dump.’
He blinked – the sun was pouring in. They had slept in the spare room – neither of them had liked the look of the vintage double in the master bedroom.
‘Sorry and all that, but it’s a dump,’ Posie said again.
Jonno pushed himself up, let his elbows take the weight. ‘It’s not our offices and we’ve a guidebook, cash . . . Whether it’s a dump or not, it’s where we are.’
‘Yes – it’s where we are.’ She seemed to mock him. Couldn’t blame her. The picture he’d painted was of a villa in upmarket Marbella, the rich kids’ playground on the Costa del Sol where the stars and celebrities had their homes. He and Posie would have the freedom of it for two weeks . . . She sat on the side of the bed. The front of her pyjamas was buttoned, every last one, and the drawstring on the trousers was tied tight. He’d realised before they went to bed that a not-in-the-mood night stretched ahead. He felt crushed.
He’d drunk the beers and she’d killed the wine, they’d had a snack from what they’d bought, fed the cat, before it bolted back outside, and done some cleaning. His mother would have warmed to Posie.
They had started in the hallway, behind the front door, and done the old tiled floor and the woodwork. They had wiped down the walls and the pictures of a little man standing cheerfully alongside his aircraft. They’d taken off the hooks the wooden squadron shields and dusted them, then the ornaments. The shrine to a husband’s career, long gone, had continued in the living room where there were rugs to be vacuumed, with a machine out of the Ark, and windows to be scoured. There were no satellite television channels – a news programme in Spanish, a game show in Spanish, an opera in Spanish, and a football match from Barcelona with Spanish commentary. The furniture, curtains, rugs, décor and tiled fireplace were all of a bygone age, and hideous.
The Outsiders Page 8