by Adam Thorpe
‘The famous Mr Vebb?’
‘Oh, not so famous.’
The young man’s expression shifted into a simper: there was a plastic quality to his skin, now it was clean. ‘For sure famous in the pub. They told me this Mr Vebb was seeing black-head gulls during the winter. It seemed to be something very difficult about it.’
Maybe he wasn’t so young, Bob thought. Late twenties. ‘They were laughing?’
‘Sometimes the natives of backwards places think of things in pretty funny ways,’ Ulrich said, donning his trekker’s jacket. Bob’s hand tightened around the Makarov’s wooden grip, slippery despite its notches. ‘There of course always are special qualities to natives, that they know much about local experience, and you even can say they are having so much reflections who are wise.’
‘You are so right,’ breathed Judith, almost flirtatiously. ‘Kit was saying just that, before he went off to the cliffs at the other end of the Hebrides.’
Ulrich glanced at her. There was a rasp of Velcro as he undid the double storm flaps on his jacket pocket, and his hand disappeared. ‘The path of return, is it simple? It is growing more darker.’
Bob’s body had gone into a kind of seizure or cramp, which meant the Makarov felt glued to his skin, which in turn was stitched to the pocket lining. This had never happened to him in the cockpit, or even in some of his more hapless moments on the ground. The prospect of shooting someone was quite different from charming your way out of trouble. He kept his gaze fixed on the man’s hidden hand, and then it slid out with his yellow GPS unit. Bob detectably jerked into relief mode.
‘Now it is working,’ Ulrich said. ‘It was playing a trick on me.’
‘No use here,’ Bob muttered. ‘I’ll show you the way to the road.’
‘So will I,’ said Judith.
‘I was having no expectations of such treatment!’
Bob told Judith pointedly that she didn’t need to come. He had no immediate strategy, bar buying time.
‘OK, Geoff,’ she emphasised. ‘Take care on your travels.’
He excused himself and popped into the loo on the way out: nothing stuck on anywhere. Limpet projectile bombs were one of Mossad’s favourite devices, normally carried by motorbike and clamped onto the driver’s window in stalled traffic. He pulled the chain for the sound and went out to find Ulrich joking with Judith in the porch. They left her on the threshold; she waved, looking as if they were setting off for Canada in a storm.
Bob made sure he stayed just behind: the path, anyway, was single file. The man had stepped aside at the beginning to let Bob go ahead, but he’d said, rather unconvincingly, ‘After you. It’s a Hebridean tradition.’ Some of the solar garden lights had gone, doubtless trampled by sheep. Moving helped the cramp. They tramped in silence through the furious gloom. Bob could hear his breath inside the hood, like an astronaut, as he blinked away the rain, which was throwing itself at them in spasms. It was as grey as a winter dusk, although it was not yet seven o’clock in the far north in early May, and he could see the wavering spot of his head torch touch the tussocks and heather and rocks.
As they rounded the hill and approached the gate, Ulrich slowed down, but Bob kept a pace behind, verbally guiding him now and again so that he only squelched a couple of times. The man’s hood was up, but his hands were either on the straps of his little rucksack or swinging loose. Bob guessed German hit men would be from the east, driven to it by unemployment, abuse, misery. Or straightforward greed. Prices ranged from a few hundred euros to well over ten thousand – plus expenses, he assumed. He wondered what Al would be coughing up, with maybe help from the yacht-loving billionaires or some grant from a security service. He was half-enjoying these thoughts, because of course he knew deep down that young Ulrich was just a helpless hiker.
About thirty yards from the gate the helpless hiker stopped and pointed: the black clouds had a rip in them to the north-west, creating a marvel of gold cut into fanned pieces. Bob had transferred the gun to his waterproof, standing close in such a way that he could fire without moving, both hands in his voluminous pockets.
‘It must be completely romantic here,’ Ulrich commented. ‘You can’t complain too much of this.’
‘It’s a job. Kit moans all the time.’
‘Kit?’
Bob’s heart felt as if it was trying to ram its way through his ribcage; a mould of the Makarov’s notched grip could have been taken off his palm. All he wanted was for this guy to hike out of his life. ‘The famous one.’ Bob found himself grinning, water dripping off the end of his nose.
Ulrich turned and looked at Bob, as if reflecting. ‘Oh, OK,’ he said, with a rather sweet smile. As the golden shafts were put out by a thick soot-black coil he started walking again and then, some fifteen yards from the gate, he froze so that Bob almost bumped into him and he said, ‘Skipper!’
‘Yup?’
Bob registered his mistake as the elbow came plunging at his solar plexus in a crackle of impermeable plastic. Sprawled in the sodden grass, his breath somewhere in New Zealand, all he saw was the stub muzzle of a gun pointing at his face in a sudden bloom of light he half-thought was his death but turned out to be a sweep of headlights.
Ulrich crouched down, his shadow rather large on the slope behind as the vehicle rounded the curve and sped by. Bob lunged forward and took him in a dirty rugby tackle that slammed him onto his back, although slamming onto sponge does not hurt, let alone wind. The man showed great strength and determination as Bob, unable to find his pocket, let alone his weapon, attempted to swipe the jutting jaw. His own chin had been hit by a knee and his tongue self-nipped, so the taste of blood warned him of what was to come. He half-noticed a gleam through the rain as they struggled, Ulrich’s face a pair of white eyes and white lower teeth in a mask of streaked peat mud. There were tennis-player grunts as they flailed; Bob had the advantage in strength, the other had youth.
The gleam was a wavering torch with Judith behind it now calling out, ‘Kit! Kit!’ Bob yelled at her to keep back, but his throat was not functional and he choked instead. They rolled over and over, and something, perhaps the man’s elbow, hit Bob’s cheek. He was scrabbling for the gun and slugging the man at the same time, mostly missing, when a chunk of metal slid between them: Ulrich’s gun, not Bob’s, pressing against one of his ribs. When the shot went off he felt the kick as heat travelling down to his toes, leaving his ears to vibrate like loose gaskets. Everything went from tyre-rubber-tight to limp.
The shot had entered under Ulrich’s jaw: his strong chin and lower teeth were yesterday’s news; his eyes were still open, filling up with rain they weren’t blinking away. The top of his hood had a hole in it.
Judith came up, her torch beam catching the dead man’s savaged face.
‘It was his gun,’ Bob panted, on all fours. ‘I didn’t pull the trigger. He was trying to kill me.’
She said nothing. The close-up wind-tossed tussocks went this way and that as he looked at them.
By the time they’d dragged the late Ulrich back into the croft, hands under each arm, his boots bouncing along the track (Bob was too shaky to act the lone fireman), his death stare covered by his own sweater, a strip of horizon sky had begun to clear and a searchlight sun was playing over the exposed stretch, before the hill hid them from the road. A couple of cars and a king-size camper van rolled past: they would have seen, if they’d bothered to peer hard, three figures stretched flat out in the grassland through the sparkling drifts of rain.
Judith went on saying nothing the whole way. Finally inside, soaked through, their faces black from peat mud and bogwater, Ulrich in the spare downstairs room among boxes and bottles, she said, ‘I need a fucking cigarette.’
She smoked three in the kitchen, trembling by the Raeburn in her underwear and Bob’s dressing gown, hair dripping onto her shoulders; he heated some water, washed and changed and nursed his bruises, of which there were many, with an especially stormy one on his cheekbone. His tongue w
as a nuisance: swollen and crusted where the bite had penetrated. But compared to Ulrich, damage was minor.
‘I saw my father dead.’ She shivered. ‘That’s the only time.’
She’d asked who Ulrich was. He’d told her that Ulrich was a contract killer.
‘Hired by whom?’
‘I’m not sure.’
She nodded. ‘I knew you weren’t ever just a sheepskin rug but this is still a very scary thing. Because I am scared. I am scared of you, as a matter of fact. One minute that young guy was standing there, just there, and then … there’s a crime happening. Murder.’
‘Attempted murder, yes. I’ve never shot anyone in my life, OK?’
He stroked her hair, but she flinched. The Raeburn was a happy inferno through the tiny glass window. He poured each of them a large Talisker; Ulrich’s beer was still on the table, virtually untouched. He’d not wanted to blur his aim. The whisky stung Bob’s tongue, but calmed his nerves.
If his hands and knees were still wobbly, it was not just because of the slice of action: he’d gone through the smart hiking jacket and found a passport, scribbled names and numbers, a handkerchief, a small bottle of Dettol and a throwaway mobile; the latter happily glowed when he pressed. The passport had the killer’s name as Franjo, not Ulrich, and his birthplace as Petrovaradin in Serbia, but he’d spent the last few years in eastern Germany and Poland, judging from the visa stamp and various stapled tags.
Bob requested a few moments’ quiet from Judith, and scrolled through the messages. He found several with a BVI code. It was a number he didn’t recognise. Al doubtless had an array of SIM cards: the crew would play a lot of poker and he now saw them fanned out tinily in that freckled hand.
He read the messages sent and received.
Arrivd Oban. Ops confirmed for Sunday after arival Wensday. U.
Repeat: confirm target by name KIT WEBB. Tall, beard, not as in photo supplied.
In my room Ardcorry. Fucking grate weather. Target spotd in cafe of Bargrenan?
Deal with target in his house only.
Target spotd joging, beard and uggly hat, maybe 50 above.
Confirm name KIT before action.
In targets toilet. He and girl say his Jeff Smyth.
Lie? Use SKIPPER. Discard mobile after!!
I tell you × 100 till it go in yr brain, Im top brand product.
Confirm hit successful after, top shit. Then our side will go to work.
Once his hand was steadied again by another squirt of Talisker, Bob sent a message of his own:
Confirm of target disposd with. No problems. Last words was, ‘Tell that shit McAllister his a hypodermic.’ No understand, I say. Then one bullet his brains go out and I have to use mopp. Once recieve yrs, will dispose of phone. Over and out.
An unnerving few minutes later, the reply came winging back over the oceans’ corrugated glaze:
OK. Windrush toast. Second half in yr account tomorrow. I don’t know a McAllister from my ass. I’ll check it.
Bob frowned, wondered for a moment at Al’s cheek, then began to be alarmed. He opened the previous received text, read the final sentence.
Then our side will go to work.
He stood, grabbed the torch, told Judith he’d be back in half an hour, then sat down again. If he phoned Al from the call box, he’d know his former skipper was still alive. If it wasn’t Al on the other end of the phone, then that final message began to look ugly. McAllister was the last of the crew.
Only one way of finding out. He asked Judith not to disturb him for five minutes, went into the living room, stared into the fire, did thirty press-ups and thirty sit-ups, dialled the number from Ulrich’s mobile, blowing hard.
‘Yeah?’
The quality was poor, but it wasn’t Al’s voice. And he would never say ‘Yeah?’ He’d say ‘Hello.’
‘Ulrich here,’ Bob panted. ‘No problems.’
‘Why’re you phoning?’
‘Confirming target disposal. You gonna get Felix now?’
‘How you knowing his fucking name?’
‘Papers.’
‘Burn fucking papers. Get the fuck out the Scottie island, OK? You read me? Dispose of this fucking cell phone and go.’
‘I’m no idiot. Over and out.’
The voice was a mash of accents: all the world was in it.
He had a few minutes left on the throwaway, and dialled Al’s home number. It was a calculated risk: he had no guarantee that his former shipmate hadn’t contracted the job of elimination to some pro in the Virgin Islands, keeping himself at a distance.
A few rings, then the cough of the answerphone. ‘Felix and Georgina Newton here. If you have a message …’
Georgina? That was classy. He let a few seconds pass, cleared his throat, then said in a husky sub-foreign accent, ‘Warning. Your life may be in danger. Take a break abroad. Immediately. Depart in the next five minutes, max. A friend.’
It sounded silly, he thought afterwards.
He returned to the kitchen and sat at the table next to Judith. He held her hand, which was cold. He was reasonably certain Ulrich hadn’t got backup; he was a lone wolf. Twice the cost, otherwise. Judith was peculiarly calm. He said maybe it was best she left; he’d accompany her to the gate.
‘And shoot me dead?’
‘I didn’t shoot anyone.’
‘I don’t believe you. I don’t believe a word you say. I still can’t even scream. What’s the use of screaming? Oh, thinks the sea eagle, that sounds interesting.’
He fetched the Makarov and Ulrich’s stubby pistol and placed them on the table. He turned up the paraffin lamp to full.
‘Watch,’ he said. ‘Now this Glock is a subcompact, the smallest, for what’s called concealed carry. Handbag stuff in places like Moscow or LA. It’s got a capacity of ten rounds. That means ten bullets. So if one went off, that leaves?’
‘Nine.’
‘Assuming it was full, which I’m sure it would have been. Ten chances to kill me. And you.’
He opened the clip and counted out the cartridges. There were nine, including the fresh bullet in the chamber.
‘Now for my pistol. It’s called a Makarov, made in Bulgaria in the 1960s. Soviet issue. Pretty reliable, if scruffy-looking. One bullet in the chamber, unfired.’ He unclipped the magazine. ‘Full to the brim. Eight rounds. Not a single bullet fired.’ He put the clip back, empty.
Judith picked up the gun. ‘It’s heavy.’
‘Russian. Nice and simple.’
Judith smiled. ‘So what are you doing with them?’
‘The Glock I’m chucking. It’s unreliable. I’ll keep the Makarov in a safe place. That’s a bit more reliable.’
‘Why keep it?’
‘Self-defence. I’m not sure the enemy are going to swallow this one for long. Maybe, maybe not. They might come back.’
‘What about Ulrich?’
‘I’ll deal with it.’
She stayed seated and lit another cigarette. He went through two cigarillos, worrying someone would call round now the rain had stopped. But very few people had called round in the months he’d been here: he should have held a party.
‘All I could see was a wrestling match,’ she added.
‘Yup. I never thought being a prop forward at school would one day save my life.’
‘So the gun went off by accident.’ She sounded unconvinced.
‘No, it didn’t,’ Bob said. ‘Glocks don’t go off by accident; it has safety features. You have to fire it intentionally. I think he thought it was pointing at my chest. But for a few millimetres’ difference, it would have been. If you want to go to the police, I can’t stop you.’
She nodded, her black eyes gleaming in the dim light.
‘If you keep that horrible pistol,’ she said softly, ‘I probably will. You’re an armed man. If you chuck it along with the Glock, I won’t.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Very.’
‘I’ll think about i
t.’
‘There’s nothing to think on, Kit.’
‘The Makarov’s an old friend.’
‘Please yourself. I trust you enough to think you won’t shoot me, but then I’m probably very naïve. It’s just that there’s something about you.’
He smiled. Feeling faint, he went outside without a gun, saying he was checking for further visitors. It was after midnight and almost dark; the wind had got up again and was blowing from the north-north-east, the long cottage heading straight into it. He could hear the crash and churn of the sea against the northward cliffs: distant sighs and moans, the air full of sand and salt and dark distances. He took some deep breaths.
He came back and held her hand again. It was quivering.
‘I’ll chuck both of them,’ he said. ‘They’ll get me anyway, if they want to.’
‘You’ll still be a dangerous feller to hang around with.’
‘Yup. I’ll feel naked, but there we go.’
‘More like an animal,’ she said.
‘You bet, selkie.’
He held her warm hand and tried not to think of the body in the hold as the wind streamed past the windows and on into the night, although the two of them weren’t moving an inch.
9
SHE ASKED FOR another Talisker. He poured it, and a splash for himself. He needed to keep steady.
‘Are you a bad man, Kit?’
He shrugged. ‘There’s a lot worse. But I’m not a really good and beautiful person, like you.’
She smiled, her hand twitching under his.
He said, ‘I feel I can trust you.’
‘Do you?’
‘I do. With the truth. I’ve not got much to lose, anyway. They know my name, my hideaway, even my beard. I thought they knew this through a friend. But now I’m not so sure. It’s a mystery, how they know everything. Gadgets, probably. My friend may well be next.’
‘Why?’
‘I was a freight dog. In ordinary English, a cargo pilot.’
‘I’ve always been wary of pilots,’ she said, shaking her damp black hair.
‘I walked away from a deal. Arms for the Taliban. Illegal, of course. And very embarrassing for some seriously important people if it ever got out. It involved drugs, too. I didn’t know that then, I walked out because the Taliban deal was sprung on me, without warning. One by one the crew have been dealt with, and a journalist investigating the whole thing. My friend was the flight engineer. I flew with him a lot. I think he may well have been up to some shady business, even very shady, but I had no idea until a few days ago.’