A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  However, he was also a world-class master of deniability, so nothing could even remotely be proved. Intel on his more occult connections was frustratingly thin, with sometimes only the conspicuous absence of evidence constituting the only clue. A marked tendency for suspects believed to have had dealings with Roth to die before the authorities could talk to them was one such conspicuous absence. Many died in custody, some disappeared from custody, never to be seen again, and some, most alarmingly, killed themselves, usually after going to extremely desperate lengths to avoid being taken alive. Dougnac believed that they did not merely fear the consequences of giving up information, but that if they were captured at all, they were immediately tainted and thus condemned in the eyes of the people they were afraid of. No amount of swearing you told the cops nothing was going to save you. What it wouldn’t save you from was evidently the stuff of nightmares even to hardened men of violence.

  Throwing another layer of gauze over Roth’s blurred picture was the fact that, even were the authorities to keep a suspect alive long enough to talk, if they were high enough up the food chain to have had direct dealings with the man himself, they wouldn’t necessarily know that they had. It was said that while Roth necessarily maintained a recognisable (albeit low-profile) public identity, in his darker dealings, he was a shape-shifting wraith who never gave the same name to two people, and who altered his physical appearance to further distinguish these multiple personae. Dougnac said they had some extreme-distance zoom shots showing him bald, hunched and pot-bellied; others slim, upright and with a full head of hair. Dougnac reckoned he used not just wigs, but various prostheses too, meaning that no two contacts, even if they were to be so suicidally indiscreet, could compare notes and conclude they had been dealing with the same man. These photos had been taken while the subject was aboard a vast luxury yacht, the ownership and registration of which were needles in a legal haystack of fronts, pseudonyms and shell-companies. Furthermore, it had never been satisfactorily established that the man in them was even the same individual – disguised or not – as turned up at board meetings and parliaments. To put the tin lid on it, Dougnac entertained the truly brain-twisting possibility that his ‘respectable’ public identity could be just another fabricated cypher. ‘There may not even be a Marius Roth,’ as he perplexingly put it.

  A damaging symptom of this frustrating elusiveness was that Dougnac could fall into the trap of imagining Roth’s hand behind anything and everything, especially in the absence of an alternative explanation. Thus he had been inclined to believe his personal bogeyman was responsible for the Lombardy incident, particularly as there was no apparent motive or beneficiary: two factors that Dougnac expected would remain concealed but, in certain elite circles, known and very clearly understood.

  But what if the ‘aviation industry’ killings had been Darcourt: like the murderer attacking the paedophile, his cracked moral compass still functioning enough to point him towards a target that might paint the perpetrator in a better light than the victims?

  The implicit self-righteousness of it was certainly in keeping with Darcourt’s new MO, so there was as much reason to pin it on him as there was Roth. Roth’s tentacles spread far and wide, but that didn’t make him responsible for half as much as Dougnac tended to imagine. Nor was he quite as untouchable as Dougnac’s reverent obsession would suggest. Roth had, after all, been visited by a genuine yacht mystery of his own. A couple of years back, his vessel Corsair – this boat quite definitely registered to the named businessman – was discovered to be drifting off the French Riviera, unmanned in as much as the goons who crewed it had all been shot dead.

  Embarrassing and compromising as this incident clearly was, it was testament to Roth’s mythical stature – and perhaps his people’s spin-control – that the rumour which grew legs quickest explained the killings as an internal punishment: a pour encourager les autres exercise in retribution for some undisclosed failure. Angelique, who was less inclined towards chasing ghosts, preferred the more plausible theory that his team had been humped: that someone had boarded the yacht and ripped them all a new one, with extremely disappointing consequences for one or several items on Herr Roth’s agenda.

  Could that also have been Darcourt? she wonders, for the fraction of a second it takes to remember a conclusive argument to the contrary. To wit, Darcourt is a shite-bag. He always specialises in easy targets: the unsuspecting, undefended and unarmed, so taking on a crew of weapon-toting hired muscle was as outside his MO as it was possible to get. Whoever hit the Corsair had undertaken an assault – from the water, no less

  – against a team of trained mercs armed with automatic weapons and in organised communication via short-wave radio. So while it did prove that Roth was touchable, it nonetheless put him in an extremely low percentile of vulnerability. He had nothing to fear from Simon Darcourt, anyway, Angelique muses, before halting that thought on the proverbial dime.

  She’s staring at the windscreen, the drizzle rendering the glass as opaque as the black surface of a storm-churned sea, but what she’s seeing has absolute clarity.

  Marius Roth dealt in all manner of ‘defence-related’ commodities, including talent. Given the Black Spirit’s ‘have Semtex, will travel’ status as a terrorist-for-hire, it was impossible to imagine that Roth didn’t have a hand – not to mention a finder’s fee – in securing Darcourt’s services on behalf of various bloodthirsty and cash-rich psychopaths. General Aristide Mopoza, for example, who had contracted Darcourt for Dubh Ardrain, and who had, now she comes to think of it, found himself assassinated shortly after its failure. Assassination was an occupational hazard in the post of military dictator to a country such as Sonzola, but Dougnac had commented on there being a spooky familiarity about Mopoza suddenly not being alive to talk about something that might potentially lead back to Marius Roth. Darcourt, having apparently died at the power station, posed no such danger. But now that he has revealed himself to have survived, and revealed this to as wide an audience as possible, then it would be fair to say that Marius Roth does have something to fear from Simon Darcourt. Enough, in fact, for Roth to unleash his dogs in order to get hold of the bastard before his attention-craving atrocities lead the authorities straight to him.

  Marius Roth: the kind of man who has ‘sources who do not even know they are sources’. Marius Roth: the kind of man whose people could at short notice arrange and carry out the kidnap of her parents and render her their puppet inside the police hunt for Darcourt. Marius Roth: the kind of man whose retribution haunts the nightmares of even the worst of killers.

  She feels the fear flood her again, like it did that night inside the taxi. The phrase ‘tortured to death’ insinuates itself, threatening her control as it mingles with thoughts of what methods might drive hardened criminals suicidal with fear.

  She opens the car door, concerned she’s about to be sick, and steps out into the rain, bending over. Nothing comes of it, but the blood rushes to her head, relieving the onset of faintness. She holds still a few seconds, then stands up straight, lets the breezy smir blow about her face. It’s cooling, immediate. She’s focused again.

  This changes nothing, not yet anyway. If Roth wants Darcourt that much, then his people will have to keep her parents alive for now. If it gets that far (and she knows she’ll be doing very well if it does get that far), it will still be all about the exchange, and the key to that was handed her yesterday by Albert Samuel Fleet.

  She lets the cool of the rain play upon her face a little longer, dousing the heat from her cheeks and easing the tightness gripping her chest. Feeling sufficiently composed to commence lying to a mutually trusted colleague, she climbs back into her car and calls Dale, to play her one and only card.

  She briefs him on Baker, adding Ray’s confirmation that Darcourt père knows there is a Darcourt fils. It’s while Dale is reeling from the concept of this newly concerned father reinventing himself as a psychotic combination of Charles Bronson and Mary Whitehouse that
she finally reveals the lead she’s been sitting on for days.

  ‘I think I might have a new angle,’ she tells him. ‘You remember we struck out with the idea of looking into crooked plastic surgeons?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he mumbles, suddenly lowering his expectations of what she might have to offer. What upon suggestion seemed a promising avenue of investigation had very quickly turned into a cul-de-sac, terminating against the concrete wall of medical ethics and confidentiality. There were surgeons out there known to have provided a no-questions service to individuals in urgent need of a new appearance, but not only were they unwilling to tell the cops anything, the slimy bastards also knew there was no way you could access their files.

  ‘Well, I just got a heads-up from a contact back in Paris, regarding a maxillofacial surgeon: one Doctor Guillaume Bouviere.’

  In fact, the ‘heads-up’ had consisted of a text accompanying another image of her captive parents. Responding to one of her updates reporting the investigation’s lack of progress, it stated simply:

  Suggest you seek Dr G Bouviere, who recently ceased to be of use to the criminal fraternity.

  ‘Is he a reformed character or something?’ Dale asks none-too-hopefully.

  ‘After a fashion. He ran a private surgery near Toulon until three months ago.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He was murdered in the car park of his clinic. Rather than bent surgeons, I decided to put out a filter on dead ones,’ she fibs. ‘He was beaten and stabbed, believed to have been killed by junkies looking for drugs. Reports say they took his keys and started tearing the clinic apart before somebody raised the alarm and called the gendarmes.’

  ‘They get anybody for it?’

  ‘No. The junkies line seems to have stuck as far as the local cops are concerned. However, my contact says Bouviere was known to have done work for the underworld. Bent facial surgeon dies and his place trashed, just before Simon Darcourt makes his grand reappearance. Gotta be worth a sniff.’

  ‘Not if the killer got away with the files, which would be presumably what he was after.’

  ‘Ah, but he didn’t. Like I said, the alarm was raised. Bouviere’s files are now securely in police storage.’

  ‘But presumably still subject to the usual confidentiality laws,’ Dale reminds her.

  ‘Which is why I’ll need seventy-two hours, maybe longer, to go over there in person.’

  ‘What difference will that make?’

  ‘Let’s just say it gives you deniability if you don’t ask me that kind of question.’

  Dale sighs, makes out he’s weighing up his options, but even in her state of enhanced anxiety, Angelique knows he’s buying.

  ‘If you bring back something that helps us find Darcourt,’ he says, ‘I’ll ask no questions at all. That’s a promise.’

  Angelique stares at the rain and is grateful she’s not having this conversation face-to-face. She’ll help find Darcourt, sure, but the real purpose of her trip is to bring back something that ensures they don’t get to keep him.

  ‘Trust me,’ she replies.

  Parental advisory: explicit purpose

  I’m hardly the sentimental sort, but I’ll admit, freeing that child from his kidnappers, I enjoyed making a difference. I experienced something I hadn’t felt in years, and not as strongly since my first kill: that tuppence-ha’penny little schemie gangster Frank Morris, who I murdered to avenge my father. It was the exquisite satisfaction of doing what justice demanded, and doing it at nobody’s bidding but my own. After so long working as a killer for hire, I had almost forgotten how liberating, how much more pure it felt to be driven expressly by my own desire, rather than by simply professional commitment. It was like the epiphany a chauffeur must experience, one day taking the high-end Merc on an open country road just because he feels like it, after years of ferrying suits through the perma-congestion of the city. A sudden, invigorating reminder of the power at your control, the possibilities lying open before you.

  However, at that same time, it said much for my altered psyche that I viewed such power, such possibilities, as merely a consolation. There could be no overt role for me in my son’s life: I understood that. I didn’t even, by that stage, know his name, and by the time I learned it, and had laid my eyes upon him, I knew that he should never know mine.

  Unfortunately, given that he was growing up among that nation of curtain-twitchers and hypocritical, gossiping nobodies, there was no way of guaranteeing he would be protected from this knowledge. Thus I toyed for a while with how I might ease the burden, should he ever be shouldered with it. I sought to offer him a different perspective upon me: something that he and the tunnel-visioned nodding dogs who handed him down their homogenous system of values could relate to.

  Landmines: they were nasty little fuckers, weren’t they? If the late Princess Diana, the true-north on the nation’s moral compass, had taken a stand against them (albeit in between many and various helpings of cock, though the guardians of decency seemed to have a collective blind spot around that), then who could imagine worse transgressors against our shared values than the scum who were schilling those babies?

  And, to be fair, she had a point. It pissed me off that while my lifetime tally remained comfortably below five hundred yet I was unlikely to be invited to any royal garden parties, these devices accounted for an average of seven thousand fatalities per year, and the heads of the firms who made them were feted as captains of industry — even after the Princess had posed in her flak jacket. Plant a couple of them and you get called a murderer. Plant a thousand of them and you get labelled a warlord. Manufacture a million and you get a fucking knighthood – as long as they’re just one sideline in a wide enough range of military or ‘aviation’ products, and your corporate structure is sufficiently byzantine as to conceal precisely who and what you control.

  After the Ottawa Agreement, some of the chancers even had the cheek to claim the high ground, with solemn-faced pronouncements to the effect that they wouldn’t be making them any more. This was largely to spare the blushes of the politicians they were tight with, as this public delousing exercise allowed them to keep up their mutually beneficial back-scratching without fear of PR fall-out. It was like an instant clean sheet, sidestepping the embarrassing fact that the mines these po-faced pricks had already flogged would be killing an average of nineteen people that very day.

  They assured an approving public (and thus terminated that public’s interest in the issue) that they would no longer be making these terrible devices, which could render land useless for decades and kill or maim unsuspecting civilians years after the conclusion of the war for which they were deployed. And as far as these specific devices went, they were telling the truth. However, they had little real intention of ceasing to profit from landmines, any more than they had any intention of ceasing to profit from armed conflict in general. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, after all.

  I had my fun with a selection of involuntary industry delegates at an arms fair near Milan. Did I say arms fair? How vulgar of me. I meant to say air show. That’s a fond front for the murder-facilitation-and-logistical-support industry. This air show was much like an Eighties corner shop, where the majority might innocently browse among the widest spectrum of products: from sweeties in jars to Molly Ringwald flicks on Betamax, via emery boards, oven cleaner and pints of milk; but where the inducted cognoscenti know they can also procure Scandinavian hardcore vids if their face is known and they ask the right guy.

  The under-the-counter selection at Milan was showcasing a number of new products. The slippery fuckers had been through the Ottawa Agreement with a fine-toothed comb and were already engineering their way around its definitions. Being unveiled were a new generation of kinder, gentler anti-personnel devices: self-deactivating landmines, which could be set to turn themselves off after a predetermined number of years. Landmines with in-built notification systems, which could be remotely activated in the event of a pea
ceful, happy conclusion to a conflict. Aaaaw. One firm, with a cynical audacity I couldn’t help but admire, had even developed a device incorporating seedlings, so that within a year of its interment, an identifiable blooming plant would sprout above the mine. The local populace could then be shown pictures of it, and informed not to try picking this particular flower in case it took the huff and blew their legs off in retaliation.

  However, resourceful as their engineers undoubtedly were, these people were always on the look-out for new innovation, or even better: new ways to sell the same old shit. Having gathered a veritable harvest of business cards on an incognito visit to the show, I contacted several executives on their mobiles and, after establishing convincing credentials, invited them to a top-secret demonstration that would, using only existing, pre-Ottawa technology, send shockwaves through the industry. ‘Once you have seen this,’ I promised, accurately, ‘you will never have to worry about treaties, sanctions or embargoes ever again.’

  Six of them turned up, representing four different companies, each disappointed to see the others because this meant it was likely to be a rights auction rather than a free chance to get a jump on the opposition. I had made them give various assurances that they would not divulge the time and location of the demonstration to personnel from other firms, a bluff that they were understandably miffed at having swallowed and largely adhered to. Nonetheless, nobody turned back: with their competitors showing up, nobody could afford to miss out.

  The location was a concrete agricultural outbuilding on some Lombardy farmland. I leased it from the farmer a week earlier, killing him the day before my show. Collateral damage, as the Yanks say.

  I greeted the six delegates, fielding a few grumbles about misleading them as to the exclusivity of the demonstration. I assured them that exclusivity would not be an issue: this was something for the whole of the industry, not any individual or any single firm. ‘As you are about to understand, there will be plenty to go around.’