The Outsiders

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Has been for ever, Boss.’

  ‘He’ll come in a smuggler’s boat, with a smuggler’s cargo.’

  ‘He’ll have a bad crossing. . . Are we going to bring him down, Boss?’

  ‘Give me the fucking keys.’

  Dottie held them. Winnie Monks snatched at them. Both women had a hold on the vehicle’s keys. Winnie Monks hissed, ‘I have to go there and spot for him. I have to be with Sparky. I have to fucking drive there and hold his hand. Give me the keys.’

  The light swept over them. Winnie Monks’s fingers went at Dottie’s eyes. She lashed back, catching the Boss on the upper cheek. It was a hard blow. Winnie’s fist opened and released the keys. Dottie put them into her bag.

  Winnie Monks’s head had dropped. ‘Thanks for that.’

  ‘For nothing, Boss.’

  ‘I’m so cold. Make do sounds good. And Mend sounds better. Are we going to bring him down? It’s in the hands of others, not mine.’

  The Major couldn’t swim. The warrant officer might have managed a width of a hotel pool. The master sergeant could have done some twenty metres in a river or lake.

  There was a soft-drink tin, a canvas bag and a baseball cap that advertised a hotel in Tangier. They used them to scoop out the water that sloshed among the cigarette cartons. It was almost at their knees and spray fell on them continuously. The bastards who ferried them seemed unconcerned – perhaps relaxed about meeting up with their God. They went down into deep troughs, then were flung up and balanced on the crests before tumbling again. At the summit, he could see faint, blurred lights – far away.

  It would not be a hero’s death. He would be choking and clutching at the spray. It would be worse than the death of the Gecko, who had gone out of the plane and fallen. Terror gripped him.

  He could hear them – the bed shrieked.

  It might have been easier for Jonno if he had heard laughter too. Laughter would have meant fun. He didn’t hear either Posie or Loy, which told him it was serious. When she had been with him, she had made little noises and he’d thought she’d felt they were expected of her. It had been the night after the shooting that she had held him so tightly. Her fingertips had gone down his back and she’d been quiet.

  The bed talked for them.

  At first, Jonno had cringed. He’d wondered if he should play Neanderthal man, barge in and rip the bedding off them, grab her hair and drag her out, or just shout that he was trying to sleep and would they pack it in? That had been at first. It was different when they went at it again.

  He could, almost, have thanked her. The second time, Jonno had wrapped himself in the future. The key to the future was the rifle. There had been a girl before Posie, Chrissie. She was a copywriter and had slept over a few times at his place. He and Chrissie had been careful not to jangle the bed’s springs.

  The rifle was Jonno’s salvation. It was a robust piece of machinery that had come off a production line. It hadn’t been treated with reverence, as the flaking paint showed. Jonno wanted to hold it against his shoulder, look through the sight and learn about it. He wanted to understand the science of firing a bullet at long distance. When he’d been at university on the south coast, there had been the usual myriad of fringe societies but one of the most vocal was the Islamic one from the Caucasus countries denouncing Russian occupation: they’d handed out posters of troops in combat gear rounding up prisoners or standing over the dead, holding weapons like this one. Jonno had never given them more than a passing glance. He had imagined, when Sparky had talked of Afghanistan, that the rifle capable of dealing long-range death would be kept carefully away from dust or dirt in a bag. It wouldn’t have been dropped.

  They came to the crescendo. If it had been in his house and the noise had come from Tommo’s room – or Gary’s – they’d have raised the dead – rung the front-door bell, turned up the TV in the front room, bashed on the ceiling or shouted up the stairs.

  They might break the damn bed.

  Now, for the first time, Loy shouted. Jonno looked at the ceiling and a little light had come in. The door opened across the hall – that would be Loy. The stairs creaked, and the upstairs door opened and closed. Jonno imagined Sparky sitting in the corner of the room with his back against the wall, the rifle across his lap. He probably hadn’t slept, and his head wouldn’t turn as Loy came in. Snapper would be pushing himself up, stretched out on the airbed, fully dressed: ‘All right, Loy?’

  Loy might shrug a little and roll his eyes: ‘When it’s served up on a plate you don’t chuck it back at the cook. What’s happening?’

  ‘Nothing really, not that it matters.’ He kept staring at the ceiling, and heard her.

  Was she going to the bathroom? No. She crossed the hall, came into the bedroom. Maybe she thought she’d left something in a drawer. No. She had a sheet draped round her. From what he could see of it, her face was vacant, as if she was lost and had nothing to hold on to. He eased across the bed and made room for her. Posie lay down beside him, her head in the crook of his arm. Tommo and Gary would have burst a bloody gasket – ‘You didn’t let her come in your bed, Jonno? How could you?’ He let her head lie on his arm, and thought only of the rifle.

  Rafael was woken. Beside him, his wife stirred, edged away and hugged the pillow, then sagged and was asleep again.

  The lawyer spoke all the languages he needed to use. He had clients who dealt in cargoes brought from north Africa, and his command of Moroccan Arabic was good. He spoke not only the dialects of lawyers in Rabat, Tangier and Marrakesh but that of the boatmen who ferried the cargoes.

  He listened. He was given co-ordinates and a time. He scribbled the figures on a notepad. He had advised strongly against the meeting with these people, but he was a servant, not an equal. He was paid for advice that might not be taken. He had also expressed reservations about the investment, or loan, in the cargoes brought from Venezuela and loaded into containers on the deck of the MV Santa Maria, now riding at the dockside in Cádiz, the section used by Customs and the navy. He had not been listened to.

  It would have been a rough crossing, he suggested, and was rewarded with a laugh.

  He padded out of the bedroom and down a corridor that led past the rooms where his children slept. It was a luxurious house and much of what filled it had come from his association with Pavel Ivanov. He went to his office. He fed into the computer the figures he had been given. The position was located on the map. He made a call.

  The pick-up was late.

  Ruslan said that showed they had no respect. Grigoriy said it was insulting. The Major said it was more important that they didn’t have a single dry cigarette.

  At first light their outer clothing was spread on the rail of the beach hut and they sat on a bench in their socks and underwear, shivering. Their footwear was sodden, as was most of what had been inside their rucksacks. Their stomachs were empty because they had vomited during the crossing.

  It would have been better if the Gecko had been left on the coast of Morocco, as the Major had intended. He could have sent the messages via the codes . . . Instead the café people had done it. The Major said they should dress. They were no longer the veteran fighters of Afghanistan. They were men in their fifties: Ruslan was the eldest and Grigoriy the youngest. Twenty-three months covered all their ages. It was, he reflected, uncomfortable to put cold wet clothing on to cold wet skin. His temper was rising.

  He was thought to understand, better than any rival, where power lay: who was worthless and who was of value. He might have been a recruit, naïve as any conscript. They sat in the cold, in the lee of a small row of deserted beach huts, and waited.

  They came in two cars.

  The Major stood straight – he thought it the right posture. He heard joints creak behind him and knew that Grigoriy and Ruslan had followed him. He waited. He did not call out any greeting. Four men in all. He saw the Tractor, flabby and overweight. There were two men with him – the Serbs he kept. The three wore a uniform of dark
shirts, good-quality jeans and black-leather jackets. The Major thought no man of influence in Moscow or St Petersburg would have been seen in such dress, appropriate fifteen years back. The fourth man was well groomed, in a well-cut suit, a tie and a pure white shirt. He expected them to come to him, but they held back.

  He did not speak. Neither did they.

  He knew there were places where men would build a wooden wall a metre high, a couple of metres across, and put in two cockerels, then bet on which might survive longer. He didn’t gamble. He thought the two birds would eye each other, looking for advantage, and would try to appear big. His men and Ivanov’s would strut, as the cockerels did. Now he and the Tractor eyed each other.

  The smart guy was bored. ‘Good morning, I am Rafael. I am the lawyer privileged to handle Mr Ivanov’s affairs. You are the Major. Welcome.’

  The lawyer came up to him and shook his hand limply. The Major sensed he had created a frisson of fear. The lawyer led him towards the Tractor and brought them together.

  They hugged.

  They were Russians, hard men, far from the Motherland, and their cheeks brushed. The Major reckoned he stank of sea-water. Grigoriy went to the taller man and Ruslan to the shorter one. There were more greetings.

  They walked to the cars.

  The two women sat close. Winnie Monks said they’d counted more than nine ships – all sizes and shapes – per hour and Dottie replied they were short of the target. They’d seen dolphins, and Dottie had identified the species. The Customs cutter had gone by, ploughing a wake behind it, and Dottie had given chapter and verse on the squabbles the colony engaged in with the Spanish authorities. It was past dawn.

  Kenny had rung Dottie, asking where they were. Winnie had lost track of how many hours they’d sat together on the rock, gazing at the sea.

  Dottie had waited, it seemed, half the night to ask, ‘You knew it would fail, Boss?’

  She’d had half the night to consider her response. ‘Thought there was a chance.’

  ‘Back on the Thames, what do they know?’

  ‘What they want to. Very little.’

  ‘And the man from Madrid?’ It was said with a whiff of disapproval.

  ‘Likes a bit of theatre. Have we nearly finished?’

  ‘Getting there. Were you justified in calling Sparky forward and putting that thing in his hand, after what happened to him – and his condition?’

  Winnie said, ‘Sparky’ll likely go down on bended knee to thank me. I lifted him out of the gutter – and he’s paying me back. And don’t think I’ve been “cultivating” him all these months because I knew this was going to turn up. Didn’t know – couldn’t have known. But it did, and I’ll take advantage of what is available. Enough?’

  ‘Not for me to say, Boss. Maybe we should go.’

  Winnie hugged her briefly. She could still feel the blow Dottie had struck her – still her cheekbone ached.

  She thought it might be a long day.

  Jonno came back in. He had been under blue sky and heavy cloud, the one constant the fierce wind. It might rain or might end up as a fine day. Jonno didn’t care. They were packing and cleaning.

  He’d left her in bed, having extricated his arm gently from under her head. He had been up the precarious steps carved out of the rock to the flat stone area, and had sat half inside the cave. He had seen them come out and smoke the first cigarette of the day. They were well turned out, with their weapons stuck into the back of their trousers, hidden by the leather jackets. They’d gone in one of the cars to what he’d known was the meeting. The dog had been left in the garden: several times it had raised its head to sniff the wind. It had identified him, Jonno thought, but didn’t know where he was. He had sat on the ledge and watched. Up there, with the cliff in front of him, the town laid out below and the azure sea, decisions had seemed simple, his obligations clear. He’d come down, and the dog had barked raucously but hadn’t seen him.

  He remembered those family holidays and the morning on which they had ended, when the cottage on the Devon or Cornish coast had been given up. His mother had always cleaned it as though she would be taken to task on Judgement Day if she left a speck or a smear.

  Back at the house, the same sort of cleaning was in progress. Loy was in the kitchen with a plastic bucket of warm soapy water. He was erasing fingerprints and DNA: the tops of the units, their doors and the floor shone. Posie was working in the upstairs bedroom – she must have been shown how to do it. Sparky was sitting on the bed with the rifle, cleaning it – not that it could have become dirty overnight.

  Upstairs, Snapper packed. Jonno saw that each item of camera gear had its place and was protected by a plastic shape. Everything was stowed in the rucksacks, with the laptop, the deflated airbeds and their bathroom stuff. It was meticulous.

  Snapper saw him. ‘You’ll take us down.’

  Jonno didn’t argue. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Because of the cameras. We’re on the afternoon freedom bird. She’s with us.’

  Posie worked with the cloth and the last of the spray at the table Snapper had used. Jonno doubted that the bungalow had ever before been so sanitised. He’d pick up merit marks for it – unless the place became integral to a war game between Villa Paraiso and Villa del Aguila.

  Snapper said, ‘Just so you know. I’ll be in the office tomorrow. I load the pictures – of the chipper and the saw – and crop them. By the time I’ve finished you wouldn’t know where I was. They’ll go in an envelope with a note of the address where the killings were done. It’ll go into a bag to one of our embassies in Europe and they’ll post it to the local Spanish delegation. Which will make for difficult times. But it’s not what we came for.’

  ‘Correct,’ Jonno said impassively.

  ‘Loy and I aren’t crusaders. We don’t follow some moral compass that determines what we do. My guv’nor tasks me for the Organised Crime Agency, the Counter-terrorism Command or the spooks in Thames House. The overtime budget dictates how many hours I do, what shifts Loy can put in. This one was a regular earner. So, it’s a job. Often enough the bad guy walks free from the Crown Court. I go home, and in the morning I get my next assignment. I may be there for a week or a day. What’s important to me is that I work, and Loy, to the limit of my capabilities. Once the Spaniards declined to dance to our tune, we were surplus.’

  ‘You didn’t need to say any of that,’ Jonno said.

  ‘And I’m not talking about that rifle, which is beyond my pale.’

  ‘Just tell me when you’re ready, and I’ll run you down the hill.’

  ‘One more thing. Don’t play silly beggars with me. You have no obligation to get involved here. May go bad for you if you do. The wise thing is to walk.’

  ‘I hear what you say.’

  ‘If he wants to stay, let him, let him stay alone . . . I fancy he’ll be running after us.’

  Sparky didn’t look up, just went on cleaning.

  Jonno went downstairs. He called back that they should shout when they were ready to quit.

  The two cars stopped in a village a few kilometres from the town.

  Pavel Ivanov thought that in the second car, driven by Alex, there would have been icy silences interspersed with boasting, but later photographs of family would come out. In the lead car, he sat beside his lawyer, who was driving, and the man who wanted to be called by an irrelevant military title sat in the back. They’d sparred to find common ground. Ivanov had hoisted names from the past: he had asked about the death of Vyacheslav Ivankov, shot by a sniper in Moscow and given a lavish funeral, then about Vladimir Kumarin, who had trodden on the feet of the siloviki in the Kremlin and was now serving fourteen years. Was Semion Mogilevich still free and ‘untouchable’? Could the regime be trusted, and were the oligarchs still all-powerful? He was answered with gossip, which was welcome.

  He liked the man. He told him why they had come to the town – thirty kilometres north of the coast – what was there for them and what they would see
.

  Inside the car the Major’s clothing had dried and Ivanov apologised for the delay in meeting them at the beach: he had had little warning, no email, coded or uncoded.

  The Major spoke of the Gecko, his understanding of intricate cryptography, of the offence the Gecko had taken, of suspicion building and . . . He rarely confided, but did now. The Gecko had fallen from an aircraft’s open door. They didn’t know the laptop’s password.

  Did they have the laptop? Ivanov asked. They did. Would he give to it Marko? He saw the Major glance behind him at the Serb. He would have seen the bulging fingers, the shaven head and the tattoos. He would have thought the man incapable of handling anything as delicate as a keyboard. The Major nodded. Ivanov called Marko forward, and the Major gestured for his own man to bring the laptop. The questions they asked were innocent: a date of birth, a place of birth. A passport was dug out of the bottom of a bag.

  They went to have coffee, but Marko sat away from them, tapping and studying.

  He let the lawyer speak, and they used English, slowly and with limited vocabulary. He told the Major again what they would find after an early lunch in the town, and why the hillside and the valley were of interest.

  He asked another question: ‘Why was the Gecko at the aircraft door? And why was the door open when the aircraft was in flight?’

  The suspicion was explained. He blanched.

  Marko came over with the laptop. ‘I’m getting nowhere. It’s beyond me and I’m good. Perhaps you shouldn’t have lost him.’

  Anxiety winnowed in Ivanov. ‘If you’re right in your suspicion . . . are you being tracked?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are not followed?’ Ivanov pressed.

  ‘I can guarantee that I’m not.’ The Major smacked a clenched fist into his palm.

  Jonno backed the car as near to the front step as he could.

  Sparky didn’t come down to see them off. Snapper was at the open boot with Loy, loading the bags and cases.