Kenny said, ‘Which means that alternatives are tucked away in the Boss’s mind. We might be be told, we might not. Perhaps that matters and perhaps it doesn’t.’
He had met her off the flight at Aldergrove. She’d been a slip of a girl, but the only time Kenny had seen her fazed was when they’d sat in his car and he’d produced a service pistol, a Browning. He’d told her to put it between her legs and drop her handbag over it. She’d gazed into his eyes and asked what he’d do if they were jumped. He’d said he’d grab the weapon, and mischief had sparkled in her eyes. He’d learned to accept that the RUC men who rode shotgun when they went on asset meets in forestry car parks worshipped her. They queued to go out with her. That hadn’t happened with anyone before and probably wasn’t repeated with any other officer shipped in from London. He was twelve years older than the Boss and had never queried her decisions: there were still papers on his desk, abandoned when he had answered the call. He thought her unique.
‘She liked the boy – we all did – but it’s about more than liking him.’
‘The team governs everything. Spill the blood of anyone on her team and you spill hers. There’ll be alternatives.’ Kenny chuckled.
They followed Winnie Monks and Dawson to the car.
‘We’re honoured that you’ve devoted so much time and energy to this matter.’
The Major was a meld of tsar and commissar in Pskov. ‘It gives me great pleasure to serve my community in this small way.’ He had the power that came from extreme wealth and connections. He was about to leave the near-completed building site where the four walls and most of the roof marked a state-of-the-art children’s hospice. It was a project with which few could argue. That some two-thirds of the money for the project had come from the sale of refined heroin and the movement of teenage girls from Moldova or Romania to West European bars and brothels was not important.
‘It is a much-needed facility and will be envied by many communities,’ the future director said, his hands clasped nervously – he knew the source of the benefactor’s affluence.
‘I’m proud to help,’ he said, with what appeared to be humility. The same conversation had been played out earlier that morning at a new kindergarten for the children and babies of town hall and municipality workers on Lenina Street, and would be repeated at the next location. His wife was with him. She wore jewelled earrings. They were not suitable for a woman of her age, and were out of place on a building site.
Officials bobbed their heads to the Major and his wife. She was the daughter of a former general. The general met others of similar status at drinking clubs in Moscow. In the clubs there were links to the siloviki, the men who prowled the Kremlin’s corridors and provided ‘roofs’, protection. One of the roles the Major played – which endeared him to the siloviki – was that of an enforcer. There was a loose association, an obshak, of groups who would arrive, ‘sort out’ a problem and depart; a benefit of a strong roof. Through his wife, the Major had the roof and a reputation as an enforcer who solved problems. A journalist had written scurrilous articles in a blog about the conduct of special-forces troops in Chechnya and did not listen to warnings. The Major had fired the shots, the warrant officer had been his back marker and the master sergeant had driven the car. There had been a gang leader from Murmansk who had believed himself too powerful to have to sweeten the siloviki: he had been fished out of the oily waters of the docks, having floated to the surface between two half-sunken ice breakers. And there had been a young British agent, with the case handcuffed to him, who had investigated weapons shipments on barges down the Danube . . .
The Major, his wife and his entourage were driven to the clinic where a new scanner, made in Japan, had been installed three weeks earlier. He had paid for it. The town was his fiefdom, and he had the support of the National Tax Collection agency in Moscow to run the local service in Pskov. He was supreme, and no clouds ranged above him. The morning was crisp and clear.
Natan stayed in his room. He worked. He was alone in the world that offered him privacy, success and confidence. The meeting with the girl in the back-street café and his memories of Liz, the girl in Baku, were shut out.
His paymaster, the man with three fingers and presence, did not trust his one-time employer – the FSB. That organisation, which controlled much of the Major’s work, could have supplied secure communications. But the Major did not trust anything promised by the security apparatus. In the absence of trust an opening had appeared, and Natan had crawled through it.
He typed on his keyboard, sent messages.
It was only when he typed that he could avoid his memories of the meetings. Natan understood that the life of the Major was divided into two separate sectors: there were days when the traffic he worked on involved officers in the Lubyanka, and there were more when his business did not reflect the state’s priorities. For it to work, in the void where no trust existed, there had to be secure communication. Natan gave it. The Major understood nothing of the new technology.
The Major believed the majority of his money came from traditional trafficking along the routes smugglers had used over centuries. It was not admitted that the Gecko had the skill to break into bank accounts, utilise cloned cards, transfer cash. Perhaps the Major feared what the Gecko could achieve. Natan had explained the intricacies of the computer as if he was talking to a child. The Major’s eyes had glazed. Natan had reeled off the titles of Internet Service Providers and Internet Protocol; the police had neither the resources nor the manpower in the US, Britain or Germany to monitor, follow and decode conversations. He had promised them that the providers stored ‘Word documents’ but did not bank ‘speech connections’. When he used jargon and spoke fast he lost the Major and was supreme.
But he had done it. Natan had gone to the embassy in Baku and had denounced the hand that fed him. It could not be undone.
He sent messages to computers in Mauretania, Morocco, and Marbella, and confirmed the visit of the Major, his minders and himself. Without him they were juveniles and could not survive. He had betrayed them.
When he had closed down the computer he would take out the Nokia phone, tap in the password, open the directory, find the single entry and click on it. He would hear her clipped voice giving recorded instructions. Then he would speak into the void and say when he would arrive in Nouakchott. She had told him she would be there.
At the back of the garden there had once been a chicken-wire fence and a stile. The cat trailed him. The fence was now crushed by the weight of foliage and the stile had collapsed, its supports rotted.
Jonno found it.
They would talk about it later. The exchange last night had been brief. ‘I hate this place,’ she’d said.
‘It’s a cess-pit,’ he’d answered.
‘I could walk out tonight and go to the airport for the first flight out.’
‘Paradise, not lost but broken,’ he’d answered. They’d gone to bed, taken the bottle with them, a rough red Rioja. He’d held her until she fell asleep. All night Jonno had seen the gunman’s back, the spine of the Irish man who carried a pistol but had been vulnerable, and cursed himself.
She’d woken, still in his arms. ‘If it doesn’t get any worse . . .’
Jonno had said, ‘If it doesn’t get any worse, we’ll try and hack it.’
She had said, ‘Not any worse and we’ll stay . . . I thought we were dead.’ Jonno had slipped awkwardly out of the bed and gone to make the tea.
The sun was up and they’d had something to eat. She was going to try to remove the stains from the dress she’d worn last night. There was dried blood on her knees and elbows. He’d gone outside, and the cat had followed him.
At the back of the garden, where the stile was, the ground rose enough for him to see over the bungalow’s tiles. The vista took in the upper floors of the derelict hotel, an expanse of disappearing roofs, then the higher buildings along the coast. The mountains beyond showed up – Morocco, he reckoned. They could h
ave been dead, or close to it. Instead they had dirty clothes, were grazed and bruised.
He understood the lay-out of the Villa Paraiso’s garden. It was narrow at the gate on to the track, as if the two large villas alongside it had wanted the best aspects. There was an angle in the boundaries that meant the Villa Paraiso’s grounds were wider round the bungalow’s sides and wider still behind the building’s back, which enclosed the garden, and it finally narrowed among scrub where the fence was. There was a pathway beyond it, and steep, rough steps that disappeared into the undergrowth.
The cat led him.
Jonno straddled the fence. What little weight he put on it brought down the posts and collapsed the remnants of the stile. He passed old heaps of grass cuttings, now mature compost, and vegetation that had once been cut back. The steps went higher.
He climbed and the cat was half a dozen footholds ahead.
Jonno thought that the lower steps were hand-made, perhaps the work of the retired flier when he’d had the strength, but they petered out and he found himself scrambling up what might have been a goat track, which hugged an almost sheer cliff. He should have turned back, but the cat drew him higher. He went on, dislodging stones that cascaded down the rockface to the ground.
The place he came to, where the cat waited, was hidden – he couldn’t have seen it from the garden of the Villa Paraiso. It was a small plateau with, behind it, a shallow cave, little more than a shadowed space under an overhang. He crawled inside . . . and found three black plastic bin-liners neatly stowed at the inner extremity. One was knotted less securely at the neck.
He opened the bag. He found a rucksack. Inside it there were clothes that he did not examine, a well-filled wallet, a passport, a torch and two mobile phones. He reknotted the bag and came back out into the sunlight. The cat had gone. From the plateau, he could see down into the garden of the villa beside the bungalow, its patio and a pool with a cover. The man who had brought the jump leads sat on a hardwood chair, with his back to the mountain. Jonno saw the snub barrel of the rifle lying across his thighs. He assumed another track climbed higher from the cave, and that he had found the escape kit for the three men. When he came down, he found an additional route that veered to his right and would lead to the Villa del Aguila’s garden.
When he got back, he saw that the cat was following him again.
‘What did you go up there for?’ she called, from the open kitchen door.
He shrugged.
‘I saw you climbing.’
‘I wondered where it went. There’s a path out of the garden.’
‘Where did it go?’
‘Nowhere,’ Jonno said.
‘Have you considered going to this elderly couple and asking them for access to their home?’
She looked at him scornfully.
‘I only asked, Winnie.’
‘Sorry, Chief. They live next door to a serious player in organised crime. If there’d been any trouble between them the old people would have been long gone. I’m not saying they cuddle up every Saturday night, but I’d reckon there’s a polite relationship. Are you worried?’
‘I don’t want a wheelbarrow-load of manure in my face.’
The bags were in the basement, the equipment in rucksacks, with flight tickets and the petty cash he had sanctioned. He had asked a few questions and been told a few half-truths. He would have swung for Winnie Monks.
‘I think we’ll be fine. The boys who are going in – that’ll be Snapper and Loy – are house-trained.’
‘Like no one was ever there.’
‘When the old people come back, they’ll not know anyone was in the property.’
‘Winnie, what should I hope for?’
‘Something along the lines of loose ends that need tying up. Happy?’ The Chief thought she cared more for this operation than any other she’d worked on. He stood, walked round his desk and planted a kiss on each of her cheeks. He wished her well, and hoped to God he’d be spared a middle-of-the-night call about a mission unravelling.
‘By the way, what’s it called?’
She hesitated before she answered him. ‘It’ll be Delta Foxtrot. The bastard won’t know what’s hit him.’
She was almost at the door.
‘Anything else I should know, Winnie? Anything else out of Madrid?’
‘We go for extradition, straightforward. That’s all.’
Sparky made coffee. He took a tray of plastic mugs to the little cluster of cigarette and cigarillo ends. While he had been in his hut and the kettle had boiled, more had come. She handed mugs to Kenny, Dottie, Xavier, Caro Watson, and then to the latest to arrive. She did the introductions. They were Snapper and Loy, and he was Sparky – he’d travel with them and mind their backs. When they were alone in the garden, Winnie smoking, he would pause in tending a bed, while she told him his black days were over, that he was, always would be, a Para, one of the best . . . He had packed, and beside her seat on the bench there was a small rucksack with his boots tied to it. The evening was closing round them, and the group around her was listening, rapt. At the end she slid from a file the photograph of the young man, Damian Fenby. The mission was Delta Foxtrot, she said, and told them to ‘fuck off and get on with it’.
She’d said she was coming with a driver and would already have eaten. She’d want to sleep on the floor and would be gone before first light.
Bill and Aggie Fenby split the necessary preparations. She made sandwiches and put on the coffee to warm. He had brought out a malt, the glasses, some blankets from the cupboard at the top of the stairs and had checked the twin beds in what had been their son’s room.
They had not been asked whether it was convenient for Winnie Monks to visit late at night, or whether they wanted the latest information – that a killer had been identified.
She would power into their lives, as she had done five years before and every year on the anniversary. She stayed for no more than thirty minutes, assured them that Damian was not forgotten, that the investigation was not closed, drank a cup of tea and ate a biscuit or a slice of cake, then left chaos in their minds and was driven away. That evening they expected a development. Aggie worked part-time in an antiques shop a couple of miles away. Her husband lectured on the Palaeolithic period at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford. They worked and had – as neighbours remarked – ‘kicked on’ with their lives. His room was not a shrine.
Bill Fenby would have said that the visit was not for their benefit, but for Winnie Monks’s sense of duty; he had not voiced the opinion. And Aggie might have said, but didn’t, that Winnie Monks was coming because she was burdened with guilt.
There was a grave in the churchyard off Manor Lane on the outskirts of the village. They went to it each week but they had not understood the world in which their son had worked. He had never confided in them what he did. They knew nothing of the world inhabited, today, by Winnie Monks.
There was a pile of plastic sacks, supermarket bags and holdalls in the hallway and spilling into the living room at Mikey and Myrtle Fanning’s apartment.
‘It was a bloody bad day when he came out here,’ Mikey said.
Myrtle wrinkled her nose. ‘The room still smells of him and his slag.’
‘He’s not living here, not over my dead body he isn’t.’
‘It’s your family, not mine.’
‘We’ve nowhere to store all that crap.’
‘Maybe put it out on the street for the binmen.’
‘I can’t because he’s family, fuck him.’
It wasn’t often that Myrtle softened, but now she touched his arm and felt the sweat. His chin seemed to tremble and she dreaded another ‘turn’: he’d been out that afternoon and had walked too far. The sweat had been coming off him in rivers – his clothes were in the washing-machine.
‘Come on, Mikey,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to ship you off to Alicante, not just yet.’
She laughed, and he joined her. It was the first time either had laug
hed since the rap on the door the previous evening when they were thinking about bed. The door was on the chain – that was recent, needing a chain in San Pedro. She’d had it a little open and had seen Mikey’s nephew: not panic on his face but near to it.
She’d undone the chain and he’d blundered in, the girl after him. He’d brought in the bags, and had told the story. An Irishman had been shot dead on the pavement in front of a cafe in Puerto Banus and the radio’s English-language station said it was a feud about territory for the supply of drugs. It was where Tommy King did business. He said he’d been fired at, two shots missing, and a man stumbling away. He’d bugged out of his place, packed all that was important and put the key through the letterbox. He needed a bed. The room smelt because Tommy King had slept on the sofa with the girl.
In the morning, Tommy and his slag had gone through the fridge and bloody nearly emptied it: then the biggest insult of all: he’d put a fifty-euro note on the table for what they’d eaten. He’d left, murmuring something about ‘lying low till my ship comes in. I’ll be all right then, you too, Mikey, but that’s for today.’ He’d driven away with the girl beside him. The bags were where they had been left.
Mikey Fanning pointed at the bags, upped the eyebrows and said, ‘I’d like to think there was a drink in that for me, but I don’t think so.’
‘It’s about that ship, right?’
‘About that ship coming in, and the good days starting . . .’ He sipped some water.
The Outsiders Page 14