by Alex Howard
The roof had a metre-high parapet. On this, the uzkoglazik had folded his jacket to rest the .243 rifle he was using. A slug from this rifle could drop a red deer stag at five hundred metres. He had Anderson a moment ago perfectly in the cross-hairs of the sight when he held his breath and gently squeezed the trigger back.
The rifle kicked against his shoulder, the suppressor on its barrel reducing the sound of the shot to that of a .22 air rifle. It would be inaudible at street level. Mounted on a tripod was a pair of binoculars he had used to check the target area; the field of vision in a sight was so narrow it was often hard to locate a given object in a wider field.
A lesser shooter would not have bothered with checking where the bullet had gone. They’d have fired and almost immediately, and unconsciously, raised their heads. The Chinaman didn’t. He wanted to know exactly where his shot had gone.
He could still see Anderson standing. The Chinaman had unaccountably missed. He put the rifle down hurriedly and squinted through the binoculars. He swore, ejected the casing, pocketed it and put another round into the breech of the rifle. The day before he had painstakingly centred the sights at five hundred metres, adjusting them so they were perfect, putting several bullets one after another through the bullseye at the centre of the target to make it as sure as sure could be that the sights were accurate. They had been; now they weren’t. Someone had almost certainly knocked the telescopic scope out of alignment.
That someone had to be Nikita, the balding idiot that Belanov had foisted upon him. Well, there wasn’t time for recriminations. God knows how long he had now. It should all be over. Anderson should be lying on the ground, a small hole in the front of his black jacket, a much larger one in the rear, while the mourners milled around wondering what, where and who.
Should, should, should. Now he’d have to readjust the sights or he might as well go home.
‘You. Here. Look through these.’ He pointed at the binoculars. ‘See that black angel?’ To save time he kept his sentences short; he also mistrusted the Russian’s ability to understand English. Nikita did as he was told, then nodded. The Kitayets, the Chinaman as they called him, could see his scalp where the few sparse long hairs had been trained over the top of his head where they grew on the side, glued down to keep them in place.
‘Tell me where the shot hits.’
The body wasn’t yet buried. He had maybe five minutes before they moved away from the graveside. The mourners were oblivious to the drama behind them and the danger from the rooftop overlooking the cemetery.
Five minutes to recalibrate the sights and finish the job. Three hundred seconds. He didn’t really care about Anderson one way or another; it was a question of pride. He did not want to be known as a man who missed targets. He slid the bolt back, put a shell in, closed the breech, aimed, the black marble angel filling the sights as he centred on the angel’s navel, where it would have a navel were it human, and fired.
Two hundred and forty seconds to go.
‘Top left,’ said Nikita. He moved the barrel slightly, scoping that direction. He could clearly see the mark the bullet had left where he said. His practised fingers twirled the screws to adjust the sight. He reloaded, fired again. This time the angel’s gown was marked dead centre. He could see the fractured, chipped impression that the bullet had left.
The muzzle of the rifle depressed slightly as he adjusted his aim. Anderson’s face filled his telescopic sight: the cruel, chiselled structure of his face framed by the lank, shoulder-length hair. He toyed with the idea of a head shot; it would be elegant. But heads could move quickly; there was an increased chance of a miss and one miss was bad enough. He dropped the muzzle down to focus on the gangster’s body, the slight breeze playing with his black tie.
But this Anderson wasn’t the target. It was the brother. He moved the scope so he was focused on the body of the remaining sibling.
His breathing, as always, was deep and even. His mind floated free and serene. A line from the Taoist texts came to him.
Only through purity and tranquility can the world be ruled.
He was aware of the breeze on his face, of the sun in the sky, the throng of people at the graveside.
In the midst of life we are in death.
The speed of a bullet is round about two thousand miles an hour. Even if Anderson were able to hear the rifle, the bullet would arrive before the sound.
By non-action everything can be done.
The Chinaman’s finger started to tighten on the trigger.
The sound of the three shots had an electrifying effect on the crowd of mourners. Virtually every one there was either directly or indirectly involved in crime. The crowd was made up of former criminal associates of Malcolm Anderson, other crime families temporarily setting aside their business differences. Everyone in violent crime liked a good funeral; you never knew when yours might be. There was also the added plus that it wasn’t you who was in the box. One day it would be, but not today.
The heightened bonus of being alive.
As well as the criminal guests, there were people the dead man had done time with and, of course, his own crime organization, now run by Dave. Even the handful of non-criminals, friends and family, all went shooting and knew what a gunshot sounded like.
Danny saw the crowd of mourners almost immediately he entered the graveyard. There were so many people they had backed up on themselves as far as the main central pathway through the graveyard. He slid the safety off his firearm, pointed the gun skyward and pulled the trigger three times in succession.
The throng by the grave threw themselves down on the ground. The Anderson brothers, their reactions faster than anyone’s, got there first. The Chinaman’s bullet passed over Terry’s body as he fell. Antony Brooker, a former cellmate of Malcolm Anderson’s, fifty-eight, twenty stone, reactions slowed by the surplus fat, beta blockers and the three pints he’d sunk prior to the service, took the shot in his chest. He died instantly.
Now the crowd was moving, taking cover behind gravestones and funeral ornaments, people pulling concealed weapons from wherever they’d hidden them about their bodies.
Up on the roof the Chinaman looked at the scene far below, a disturbed anthill, with resigned acceptance. Nikita, peering over the parapet, had seen Hanlon and Robby start across the road. He turned to the Chinaman to warn him.
It was his last action on earth. The Kitayets had reloaded and as Nikita pointed and started to speak, he shot him in the heart at point-blank range, killing him instantly.
As Hanlon, followed by Robby, started up the outside stairs of the building, the Chinaman abandoned the binoculars and the body of Nikita, gathered up his rifle and jacket, and thrust the spent shell casings into his pocket before running for the doors that led into the building. Pushing them closed, he entered the internal stairwell that ran down to the ground. Its doors on to the roof were fire doors and didn’t open inwards.
Nikita lay on his back on the tarmacked roof, blood pooling outwards from the exit wound by his spine. His sightless eyes stared at the blue heavens of a perfect London day and the wind patiently unravelled his comb-over, strand by strand.
18
Assistant Commissioner Corrigan looked at the agenda for the meeting which was neatly set out on the A4 piece of paper with its standard crown and portcullis logo. It was helpfully headed Agenda, in bold type. Then he looked at his watch, trying to calculate how long the meeting would last, then at his fellow attendees around the long, rectangular table. Corrigan was not a meetings man.
Back to the agenda. The date: today; the location: the Home Office, Marsham Street, fifth floor. The meeting room, a meeting room like just about every meeting room he had ever sat in, although the table here was real wood, which made a change from laminate.
His eyes dropped down to the list of attendees: Eamonn Corrigan, Metropolitan Police; Francine Edwards, Home Office; Serg Surikov, Thanatos Institute; Paul Fredericks, MOPAC; Sarah Lansdale-Brown, Home Office Immi
gration Compliance and Enforcement.
Apologies: Edward Li, Thanatos Institute.
Lansdale-Brown opened the meeting. She was very tall and slim, made even taller by improbably high-heeled shoes. Balanced on these, she was nearly Corrigan’s height. Even sitting down she appeared taller than anyone else there. Her back was fearsomely erect. She was intelligent, efficient and no-nonsense. Corrigan liked her a lot.
She quickly ran through the agenda of Project Volga, an offshoot of Tomboy, which was the monitoring of prostitution and people-trafficking from Russia and the various republics of the former Soviet Union. Amongst the older generation of government employees there was a feeling that things had been a lot simpler pre-fall of the Berlin Wall. Better, much better, from our point of view. The Cold War might have been unpleasant, but it had been kind of a Garden of Eden time with clearly defined enemies and clear boundaries. You’d known where you’d stood. It had been a more innocent, pre-Lapsarian epoch of good and bad, black and white. Now everything was a dispiriting shade of grey.
There were seven items on the agenda, actions from previous meetings, updates on requirements and legal compliance, current status and tasks in progress, project plans, actions required, financial overviews and AOB.
Corrigan found his attention wandering. Project Volga had seemed to him a typical example of departmental time-wasting, but someone had considered it of sufficient importance to have Charlie Taverner killed. He had been killed to stop him attending a meeting rather like this, as dull as this. Just to protect the name of the vor, the Russian godfather. Taverner had been planning to produce it like a rabbit out of a hat. He wondered when Demirel would get back to him. He wondered if Demirel had found out anything worth reporting on.
He guessed he might have been naïve in blaming a police informant for Charlie’s death. The leak could easily have come from anyone around this table. Was that what had happened? The criminals had so much money to spend and there had been no pay increase for anyone in the room for several years. Had that affected someone’s morality?
His gaze rested speculatively upon Charlie Taverner’s replacement, Serg Surikov. And what about the Thanatos think tank that both of them had worked for? Thanatos monitored criminal as opposed to ideological threats from around the world. It analysed trends and Charlie Taverner, ex-Foreign Office and ex-Moscow Embassy staff, had been their key Russian adviser. Someone from Thanatos could have tipped the Russians off. Possibly even this man sitting opposite him, Serg Surikov.
Tall, thin, a feline kind of face with eyes that were slightly almond-shaped; maybe he had some Tartar blood in him, thought Corrigan. Maybe Chinese. He had a wispy beard and moustache that belonged on a schoolboy rather than a businessman. Corrigan was old enough to remember Bjorn Borg, the Swedish tennis player that women had swooned over. He too had had similar skimpy facial hair. In Corrigan’s view you shouldn’t have a beard unless it was a proper one.
He rubbed his own sizeable chin. It rasped satisfyingly.
Their eyes met momentarily. Surikov seemed to guess what Corrigan was thinking and stroked his straggly beard with an air of self-mockery. His eyes were bright and amused. He obviously didn’t care remotely what anyone thought.
‘Can we start now, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Lansdale-Brown. There was a general shuffling of papers and clearing of throats. Francine Edwards, from the Home Office, short, dark-haired and buxom, had laid her things out in a neatly aligned pattern. Bright and alert, she looked as if she was ready to sit an important exam. An exam she was confident of passing. The man from the mayor’s office for Policing and Crime, Paul Fredericks, pointed at Surikov.
‘Does he have clearance?’ he asked aggressively, and, ‘Where’s Edward Li?’
Li was the Hong Kong-born head of the Thanatos think tank. A shining example of upward mobility, from the dockyard slums of Kowloon to the boardrooms of London, New York and Berlin in four decades. Rumour had it he had once been an enforcer for the Triads. It was a rumour Li never denied.
‘I said, where’s Li?’ repeated Paul Fredericks.
Corrigan knew Fredericks well. He heartily disliked him. He always had to be difficult, always wanting to make some point.
‘I have been exhaustively and painstakingly vetted by DVA and FCO Vetting Unit,’ said Surikov, his voice silky. It sounded very musical after Fredericks’s estuary English accent. ‘I believe I have, to the nth degree, bounded over hurdles put in my way.’
He chose his elaborate phrasing slowly, as though he was picking his way through an interesting maze of vocabulary, thickets of lexis.
‘As to your other point, allow me to elucidate. Mr Li is very unavoidably busy and cannot extricate himself from coils of pressing business.’
‘Well, I think that covers that point, Paul,’ said Lansdale-Brown firmly. Fredericks scowled. Lansdale-Brown scratched her head with the end of the biro she was holding. She had wiry, scrunchy hair that she’d piled up and secured on top of her head, adding to her considerable height.
Surikov smiled sarcastically at the man from the mayor’s office and the meeting proceeded. It covered the areas that Corrigan had outlined to Enver Demirel in the previous week and two things rapidly became very clear to Corrigan.
The first was the extraordinary lack of information held by the Home Office and the Border Agency on the extent of Russian involvement in UK crime, indeed, in UK business in general. Even numbers of Russians in the country appeared to be a matter of conjecture. We’re basing policy on guesswork, thought Corrigan gloomily. I don’t know why I should be surprised.
The second thing was how impressive Surikov was. Most of us have some, possibly exaggerated, knowledge of what we consider to be a weak spot, and for Corrigan it was lack of a formal education. He had left school at sixteen and that was that.
The older he became, the more it rankled. He was slightly in awe of Hanlon for her relentless autodidacticism, the way she would devour history, geography, anything non-fiction. He envied Mawson for his degree, even though he outranked Mawson astronomically, and he was always intimidated by Lansdale-Brown and Francine Edwards with their respective degrees in PPE (Oxon) and Economics (Cantab). He knew it was stupid of him, but it was there, as irrational but as powerful as his dislike of sports jackets, golf and TV presenters.
Edward Li, whose absence Fredericks had bemoaned, was cut from the same cloth as Corrigan, working class made good, but Li, chamaeleon-like, had insinuated himself into the educated, ruling elite. Suave, distinguished-looking, in his well-cut bespoke suits and handmade shoes, you would never have guessed he had quite literally at the beginning fought his way up and into society. Li had managed to acquire a degree and solid academic credentials, but for Corrigan it was too late.
Corrigan, battered face and raw, pitted features, looked like a labourer dressed up for an unexpected day at the office. He had risen high, but he never felt he belonged and he never felt part of the establishment he represented. He was there as an equal of everyone around the table at the meeting but, deep down, he didn’t feel equal and he suspected that privately they were looking down their noses at him. He guessed it was why he got on so well with Hanlon. They were both, in their own ways, outsiders. Both mistrustful.
Surikov, who was an outsider, dominated the small meeting. He effortlessly laid out facts and figures from what was obviously a prodigious memory. He was insightful, informative, even managing to make the thickets of Russian acronyms, MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), OBEP (Department for Combating Economic Crime), RUOP (Regional Department for Combating Organized Crime) intelligible and interesting. His ornate English, Corrigan decided, was a significant factor in the weaponry Surikov deployed, of charm, intelligence, lucidity.
All qualities that Fredericks, in Corrigan’s opinion, lacked.
Fredericks’s scowl deepened as Surikov held the interest of the women in the room, the Home Office ladies practically flirting with him. Corrigan was quite pleased. He had been hoping to avoid a s
eries of potentially tricky questions about the Metropolitan Police’s contribution to combating the rise in sex-trafficking in London, but all eyes seemed to be on the Russian end. The Home Office because they were swooning over Surikov, the mayor’s office because Fredericks was busy trying, ineffectually, to score points over the Russian.
The meeting finally broke up, Lansdale-Brown and Francine Edwards handing business cards to Surikov.
Corrigan watched them, amused. He wasn’t the kind of man that women made a beeline for, but he didn’t care. Popularity meant little to him, although he was exceptionally good at personal PR. He had hit upon a winning strategy years ago, to be himself. And as he was fundamentally a decent man, it worked.
Fredericks came up to him.
‘Cocky little bastard, isn’t he?’ he said, jerking his head at Surikov. Corrigan shrugged, disliking Fredericks even more than usual. Fredericks had the kind of mouth that held a perpetual sneer, as if there were some kind of specialist curling tongs that he used on his lips on a nightly basis. It was rumoured he had political ambitions. He would become the kind of politician the people love to hate, thought Corrigan.
‘When you’re that good-looking and that bright you can afford to be, Paul,’ said Corrigan, his tone implying Fredericks was neither. ‘Brains and beauty, Paul, God rarely gives both.’
It had been warm in the office and Surikov had removed his jacket. As he left the room, Corrigan noticed Lansdale-Brown and Edwards frankly appraising his backside. ‘I think they like his ass as well, Paul, particularly Francine,’ said Corrigan helpfully. He knew Fredericks fancied Edwards. ‘She’s almost drooling. Oh, to be that good-looking, eh, Paul?’ he added. Fredericks frowned in annoyance, glared at Corrigan and left the room.
Surikov was still waiting for the lift when Corrigan joined him. Surikov smiled politely. ‘Allow me to say what an honour it is to have met you, Assistant Commissioner Corrigan,’ he said.