by Adam Thorpe
‘It’s not philosophical. It’s a bunch of concrete. Armaments kill and maim, whoever fires them. They cause pain, terrible pain. Did you make a copy of the logbook?’
One of the squash players was glancing across at them from his table, talking into his mobile. Bob looked away, eyes following the waitress. A sudden diamond twinkle from the obesities, and their photograph had been taken – or at least a snapshot in which the two of them were central. He leaned forward towards Sharansky.
‘Keep looking the other way. We’ve been caught on camera. Basically, I think we’re being shadowed.’
‘What?’
‘You’ll have to forgo your summer-fruit yoghurt bomba and think of a way out of this mess. What day is it?’
‘Friday,’ said the journalist, looking puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘The same as last time. I’ve got until Monday.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what they said to me on my mobile in Istanbul, two years back. You will be dead by Monday. If I blabbed. They don’t work weekends, apparently.’
‘Who?’
‘Mossad. Evron’s boys. The Syrians. The Iranians. MI6. Whoever. Lighten up. Guys in squash kit, obese couple. Don’t do more than glance.’
Matt Sharansky glanced, then chuckled. ‘My heart’s down in my pants. They look really like Mossad.’
‘Mossad don’t always wear black zip-down combat gear and do stunts. Not in public. Anyway, it might not be your countrymen. It might be mafia, the Russians, aliens, the super-rich who have the universe by its balls, who knows?’
‘This is almost like the time in the Sudan when I was kidnapped.’
‘Kidnapped? You’re joking.’
‘Well,’ Sharansky admitted, ‘I was kind of politely told I couldn’t leave this shack. Twenty-four hours. It was OK.’
‘So, Matt, I’m not blabbing to you and never will. What do you suggest? Just in case.’
‘Play a game for the tab?’ said the young man, drawing out a pack of cards. ‘I’ll teach you yaniv. I have a simplified version.’
He explained how to play and the game began. The obese couple paid up and waddled out. Surprisingly, a few minutes later, the squash players, Tallie and Shortie, followed them. The only people remaining were a French-speaking family – parents, grandma and two weenies. He waved the waitress over and asked her about the squash pair. She flashed a becoming smile at his breakfast partner, who flashed one back.
‘They are lawyers,’ she said, raising one butter-smooth shoulder. ‘They are coming every week for at least two years. Why?’
‘I may want a game,’ Bob said.
‘Let me know,’ said Sharansky, giving her a wink.
She cleared the plates and left. Sharansky pursed his lips. ‘What a bomb. Too bad you’re leaving Dubai,’ he said. ‘Yaniv! Show me your hand. I think I’ve won.’
He had. Bob checked the multi-dirham tab and shrugged. ‘You know me,’ he said. ‘I never walk away from a deal.’
When he got back to his apartment, not in the greatest shape, there was a surprise waiting for him. It was in the form of a couple of strangers in his sitting room, lounging back either side of the coffee table in expensive long-sleeved shirts with fancy cufflinks, their jackets neatly folded beside them, their crossed ankles ending in white socks and mirror-finish dark leather shoes. They were thirtyish, clean-shaven, smiling. Bob froze with shock. His pistol was in the safe, behind a fiddly combination lock. But at least he was thinking ahead, clarity kindly supplied by Adrenalin Inc., seconds treated like minutes. He regretted slipping his own shoes off, as he would always do inside the flat: it was hard to feel like James Bond in socks.
The chap sitting on the white leather sofa, his arms stretched amiably along the back, asked him to sit down. No apology for breaking in. There was a sort of creak behind and a third man stepped out from the bathroom, rather bulkier than the other two and with a shoulder holster sprouting a pistol grip, and stood between Bob and the front door. There’s always one of them, he thought: a muscular oaf. It was precisely the same in Africa, except that there everyone was in uniform and shouted a lot, the worst that had ever happened being a brief spell in a Nigerian jail until the release cash arrived, most of it destined for the colonel’s son’s fees at Harrow. Or so they explained. This was different. This was a little more serious.
‘Mr Windrush, do sit down. We must have a chat.’
‘As long as it’s just a chat.’
‘Just a friendly chat, Mr Windrush. I like this name, for a pilot. The rushing wind.’
The man smiled more broadly, revealing dental work that involved much gold. Bob ignored both the obliteration of his rank and the usual inaccurate version of his name, and sat down on a chieftain’s stool he’d bought years before in Douala; he’d always fancied it had some sort of mystical force, encircled as it was by carved heads, authentically cracked and wood-wormed. Gold Teeth’s partner looked as if he’d had a flare pistol fired at his face, but it was probably acne. The heavy stood in the little hall, leaning on the door jamb. For the first time, Bob regretted living on the twenty-fifth floor: falling off Dubai balconies was something of a local speciality.
‘So?’
‘We have come to ask you some questions.’
‘ID? This is my private home.’
‘Irrelevant.’ The expression hardened. They were doubtless of Middle Eastern origin, as the papers say, but God knows where. Emirates, Israel, Syria – anywhere. Central Asian, even. Their English was heavily accented but good. They reminded Bob of the sharks in the aquarium. ‘You’ve been meeting up with a journalist.’
‘Quite untrue.’
‘We saw you.’
‘Obese or squash-playing?’
‘Sorry?’
‘He’s not a journalist. He’s a friend of my son’s.’ What a very silly thing to say. Dragging in David.
‘He writes articles concerning the trade in arms.’
‘I told him nothing. Ask him. I’m very good at forgetting all about it. I told him, as we say, to get lost.’ He felt dream-like, a little floaty. His rear end was tingling, just as it had at school before a caning. ‘You don’t fly freight around the world and then blab, if you want to stay out of trouble. My aim is to stay out of trouble.’
The other man, Flare Pistol Victim, leaned forward and said, in an accent thick enough to make interpretation challenging, ‘You should not have met with him at all. Why do you do such things?’
‘For personal reasons.’
Gold Teeth raised his eyebrows – rather patronisingly. Bob felt like pulling rank.
‘All I try to do is my job, as captain. It’s a highly skilled job, too.’
‘You don’t do your job well enough.’
‘You’re a pilot, are you?’ Bob felt pretty nettled.
‘A pilot flies a plane. You refused. We don’t know why.’
‘I didn’t like the look of it.’
Flare Pistol laughed, which means that he laid his tongue between his teeth, shook his body and wheezed, gazing at his expensive shoes.
‘What’s so amusing?’
His partner explained: ‘On one side, a hundred thousand bucks. On the other, not liking the look. This is funny.’
‘Your money or your life, I think it’s called.’
‘So you knew what the cargo was, who was the broker, who was the client.’
‘Are you the Dubai police?’
‘Yes,’ he said, after a telltale pause for reflection: an amended thought plan, clearly.
‘I’d like to see your ID.’
‘In our own time.’
‘OK,’ Bob said, trying to keep ahead. ‘I can tell you exactly what I knew: that the cargo was military, that it was being sold to the Taliban, that me and my crew would be paid, as you so rightly pointed out, a lot of bucks. I didn’t like the look of it, so I quit halfway.’
There was a pause. ‘You’re quite a bad liar,’ said Gold Teeth. ‘You see, your eyebrows go in,
’ he explained jovially, indicating his own rather thin pair and helpfully frowning. ‘Next time, you control your eyebrows and we might believe you.’
‘Next time,’ chortled Flare Pistol, shaking his head at the sheer, outrageous drollery of it.
This little speech and its response got Bob shivering. He shifted on the stool and took a grip on himself by folding his arms. ‘Maybe my eyebrows went inward because I’m stressed. It’s not pleasant coming home and finding strangers. Even the police. I love your country, by the way.’
Gold Teeth narrowed his eyes a little, perhaps feeling he was being mocked. Bob suspected his country was Israel, but he could hardly start heaping plaudits on Israel. He was stuck. Gold Teeth glanced at his partner, a glance Bob didn’t like. He remembered that Israelis are banned from the Emirates – at least, they can’t get visas – so these two must have entered on false passports. Given the country’s welter of queue-manufacturing bureaucracy, of documents required and form-filling and God knows what else, this was a disappointing lapse.
Flare Pistol sighed, reached into a briefcase next to him, and dropped Bob’s logbook and last year’s diary on the coffee table.
‘Thank you,’ Bob said. ‘I was wondering where they’d got to.’
‘It’s clear you knew all the positions. So don’t lie.’
‘I told you, my job is to forget—’
‘You quit freight. Instead you fly a rich Arab all about. Why?’
Definitely Israeli: a sour relishing of ‘Arab’. But Bob had no idea whether they were Mossad or rogue elements or simply Evron B’s henchmen. Matt Sharansky’s item about heroin on the return trip introduced all sorts of ugly possibilities.
‘Maybe I’m getting too old. Or tired of being mucked about. Could I just remind you that the agent on that ops, the guy from Sweden, really did muck me about? He sprang the second leg on me at Istanbul. Ask him.’
As soon as he saw Gold Teeth’s smile, oddly like a smug vicar’s, he knew what it meant. ‘Lennart? How can I be asking questions to him?’
There was a pause. Bob had no intention of giving them the satisfaction of reporting how he died. Gold Teeth was showing him a creased passport photo of a dark-haired man in his late twenties or thirties, with large eyes equipped with fatigue bags above a pointed nose and tapering chin. Oddly, he’d be the Mediterranean type that Olivia would go for, but to Bob he looked faintly psychopathic.
‘Who’s he?’
‘You don’t know him?’
‘No.’
‘A pity. His name is Pedro Diez.’
‘May I go to the loo?’ It was a genuine request. His insides appeared to be melting.
Gold Teeth smiled, his eyes moving beyond Bob’s head, its owner reacting too slowly. The heavy seemed to leap like a mastiff let off its chain – it was more instinctual than obedient – and before Bob could so much as flail, had him in a headlock that made him bite his tongue. The stool rolled over and knocked against the wall. Bob’s arms were brought up his back to their sockets’ maximums and then seemingly beyond, judging by the pain.
He was pretty certain he was about to die, if only from cardiac arrest, and just hoped it was quick and clean, that they didn’t mess about responding to various dark and hidden urges. For instance, he’d rather die than have his testicles turned to dried apricots by a firm heel. At the same time, he imagined the episode as having a kind of timetable, that they’d finish him off and then he’d brush the dust off and start again, somewhere a long way away. In these situations, one never quite grasps the finality of it – or rather, the opposite. That there is no end. No arrival. Nothing. Certainly no timetable.
Heavy had him like many a school bully he once knew, and he merely gripped the man’s slippery forearm, feet struggling to find a grip on the floor to relieve the weight of his own body on his neck. This bully had unpleasantly sweet aftershave and peppery armpits. The other two then each grabbed one of Bob’s scrabbling feet and he was carried out to the balcony like a sack full of live eels. Of course he struggled, but his efforts were put paid to by Heavy’s iron-like bicep on his throat, which virtually stopped him breathing. He noticed silly things – the fact that the lounger had dust on it again, that the unwashed whisky glass had been left out. The clumsy caterpillar somehow avoided the latter, and he was taken to the rail, which was at the standard safety height so that in normal times you could rest your elbows on it and watch other skyscrapers inching up to join you. He was raised, trying to catch his last breaths – his struggles exceptionally feeble for a tallish, fit and broad-shouldered man – to just above the rail. An ant scampered along it, which was quite a sight; animal life was rare on the twenty-fifth floor. It was quite unaware of the drama. In a few seconds he would know nothing about ants or drama or anything else. Of course, they ought to have been visible from neighbouring towers, but he guessed they were too small to make out without binoculars, and by the time the Dubai police came he’d be a boneless plop far down.
Up to then, the men had said nothing beyond their grunts of effort, but neither had Bob: he didn’t even swear. He just concentrated on trying to kick, with a faint air of disbelief that this should be happening to him at all.
Long ago, when he was still small for his age and a bunch of older kids were taunting him at school and about to throw him into a heap of Lincolnshire manure, he had shouted, ‘Stop! It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow! I need to send a card!’ He said it with such conviction (it was a lie; his mother was dead) that they looked worried and released him and he ran off. This time, he failed to shout anything at all. He was about to be launched from the twenty-fifth floor, free as a bird. Except birds are never free, of course; they spend every moment of their waking hours on the job, surviving – flicking all sorts of mental switches inside their translucent skulls.
5
WHAT HE SHOULD have yelled was something sporting and witty, to prove they were no match for his English gentleman’s nerve. Something like ‘I prefer to take the lift, even though it’s slower!’ Or ‘I say, you’ve forgotten the drink before take-off!’ Something scripted, anyway, for a James Bond movie, the kind British Airways used to show on the Atlantic haul, that he and the crew would discuss at some point on the flight deck with the stewardesses in their pyjama-striped kit, along with recipes for the best cocktail or where to find the perfect bagel in New York or how to sleep in full daylight when your circadian rhythms say it’s two in the morning. Bob’s secret regret was that Pan Am pilots had to be American: their sky-blue girls wore white gloves and served hot towels with silver tongs. The grass is always greener, and so on.
No pilot scares easily: they’re schooled in keeping cool. Black boxes prove it. Nerves don’t snap as long as there’s someone to engage with over the radio, except maybe in the last fraction of a second, when a scream is permitted or a ‘That’s it, I’m dead.’ But generally it’s ‘Pull up, pull up, pull up!’ to the last full second. What pilots never do is mess themselves, at least not before the scream. You’ve got a full tube of passengers behind you and the flaps have gone or the rudder’s misbehaving and the plane is converting into sheer tonnage thousands of feet up in the air, and it’s all physics, aerodynamics, mercilessly so – but you don’t mess yourself. Bob Winrush didn’t when he crashed and lost consciousness. But when those three bullies began to lift him so that he could see cars below like slow-motion pellets and feel the drag of vertigo in his gut, he did mess himself. He also squeezed his eyes shut and prayed.
They dropped him. The ground hit so quickly, almost simultaneously, that he felt he must have passed out for a second or two with shock. When he came to, he found Gold Teeth kneeling down next to him on his balcony.
‘Stick to carrying diapers, Mr Rushing Wind. More useful to you than guns.’
Except that he pronounced it ‘driapers’. And the appreciation of his wit from the other two made Bob curl up into a foetus position, feeling damp.
The drop had bruised his coccyx and winded him and made the
back of his skull tender – but it was the good side of the balcony rail. The life-preserving side. His ribs were being rapidly clouted by his heart, but he was alive. Shamed, shivering, but alive. Gold Teeth added some advice about Bob going away, a long way away, because next time they wouldn’t miss, it would be on the correct side. ‘A real long way away, OK? Far over the seas and away.’
Bob nodded, wanting to snivel, and croaked, ‘Nothing I’d like better.’
‘You like living?’
‘I enjoy it, yeah.’
‘Some bugs, they are living only one day, but are more beautiful.’
He snapped his fingers, and the beaming threesome left.
They’d been very nice to him. They could have killed him, and they hadn’t. Yes, he felt like a tenth-rater who’d done six rounds in the boxing ring, his hopes ending with a liver punch, but he was alive. They’d even left his logbook and diary – minus the offending pages, neatly sliced out. That was really quite sensitive.
They were very effective bullies: they’d made him grateful to them. He would have kissed their smart shoes in gratitude. This was how he’d felt when he’d been bashed about a bit in Somaliland, his hotel room turned over, a few years back. Things could have been a lot worse.
It struck Bob during his ensuing power shower that they’d sounded Russian with an American gloss, which could mean anything. They’d sounded like the pilots coming in and out of places like Kisangani back in the 90s; he’d have a drink with them now and again, only those guys were a lot friendlier. Brilliant flyers, too. This lot could have been from Turkmenistan or one of the other ex-Soviet Asian states – they hadn’t been fair enough to be ethnic Russians.
And then he remembered an Israeli friend once saying that Israelis speaking English sound like Russians after a couple of years in New York, and Israelis aren’t exactly identifiable by sight. Whoever they were, they were sent by someone serious. He wondered whether Matt Sharansky had been paid a visit. As Posh Boy had been. Swedish Lennie. The man who’d saved his foot. Expelled from Eton, then from life. A bullet in the temple or run over by a freight truck, body vanished. Tough being an adventurer in the twenty-first century.