The Desert Eagle blasted the house, punching through windowpane and weatherboard. Finisterre emptied the magazine, and as he was reloading, Lex leaned out from cover and almost casually selected a target: a hand that was visible at the rear of the Jeep, supporting its owner in a crouch.
The henchman screamed as two fingers were obliterated. A string of patois curses filled the air.
Then, distantly, another sound filled the air. The whoop of a police siren.
A neighbour, hearing the gunfire, had called the cops, and by some miracle a squad car had been close by.
Finisterre swore. “We got to run, boys.”
“But boss...”
“I know. It’s only the Babylon. Nothin’ cash can’t solve. But I don’t need to be caught in the middle of a fuckin’ shoot-up. There’ll be paperwork an’ lawyers an’ maybe some prick of a reporter wantin’ to write a story. I don’t need that bullshit. Englishman!”
“Yes?” Lex called out from behind the door.
“This isn’t over, you know that? It’s far from over.”
“I’m quaking in my boots.”
“Don’t be so smug. Nobody crosses the Garfish an’ gets away with it.”
“As threats go, that’d be far more effective if you didn’t have such a stupid nickname,” Lex said. “The Barracuda—now that’s a scary fish name. The Tiger Shark, that’s another good one. But the Garfish?”
The three crooks were climbing into the Jeep. “I know where you live,” said Finisterre. “Sleep with one eye open from now on, because you won’t know where, you won’t know when, but I’m comin’ for you.”
“You just told me, you daft git. My house, at night. I’ll be waiting for you.”
“You goin’ to die. Slow an’ horrible.”
“Oh, give it a rest.”
The Jeep started up and roared away. Moments later, the police car came into view, siren blaring, lightbar flashing. Lights flicked on in windows up and down the street. Heads poked nervously out from behind window blinds and front doors.
Lex sighed. What a monumental fuck-up. The perfect end to a shitty night.
FIVE
FOUR HUNDRED PER CENT
LEX GAVE THE police a selective and largely inaccurate version of events. He omitted to mention that he had been carrying a weapon. He maintained that he had turned up at Wilberforce’s house for a visit, surprised some men who were hurting his friend, and scared them off. They had shot at him—an unarmed man!—as they were fleeing, and had accidentally killed one of their own.
The detective constable who took his statement was sceptical, to say the least.
“How do you account for the broken glass on the ground outside, Mr Dove?” he asked. “The bits of a car mirror? You’re saying, in all the confusion, the intruders not only shot one of their own men but their car too?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, officer. It was chaos. Bullets flying everywhere. Frankly, I was lucky to survive.”
“And did you happen to recognise any of these men?”
“Complete strangers to me. Never seen them before in my life.”
Wilberforce claimed much the same. Taking his cue from Lex, he said it had obviously been a random home invasion. The burglars had tied him up and started hitting him in order to get him to tell them where he kept his valuables.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Mr Allen,” said the detective constable, “but it isn’t what you’d call a high-class neighbourhood. What sort of valuables do you think they were after?”
“Who knows?” replied Wilberforce. “I’m no robber. I’ve no idea what goes on inside these people’s heads. Maybe they thought I got some secret stash of gold bullion or something.”
“And do you?”
Wilberforce laughed, then winced, because laughing was painful. “Yeah, right. I’m sitting on a fortune. That’s why I live in this palace.”
The detective constable left with a parting shot. “Your stories don’t add up. Neither of you gentlemen is telling me the whole truth. You’ll be hearing from us again, sooner than you think. Maybe by then you’ll have decided to come clean.”
“Or worked out some better lies,” Lex muttered to Wilberforce as he closed the front door.
He retrieved his SIG from the bathroom. He had dumped the gun in the toilet cistern as the police arrived, and taken the precaution of scrubbing the telltale gunpowder residue off his hands before going out to meet them.
As he dried off the SIG with a towel, he said, “All right, Wilb. Out with it. What’s going on?”
Wilberforce looked rueful. He had a swollen eye and significant facial bruising, and was shaken after his ordeal, but basically okay.
“It’s no big thing really,” he said. “Just business.”
“No big thing? How much do you owe the Garfish?”
“Not much. Couple of hundred.”
“Seriously? A couple of hundred Manzanillan? That’s nothing.”
“Couple of hundred thousand.”
“Ah. Well, still, not a huge amount.” Lex did some quick mental arithmetic. At the current exchange rate, roughly £15,000. “I can lend you that, no problem. Clear the debt at a stroke.”
“Yeah, thanks, but you see, it’s not quite that simple. I’m paying it off at a pretty high rate of interest.”
“How high?”
“Works out at around four hundred per cent.”
“You what!”
Wilberforce fetched two bottled beers from the fridge, handing one to Lex. “What you don’t appreciate, my friend, is this is Manzanilla. Things aren’t as straightforward here as they are in a country like the UK. In the UK, you want a start-up loan, you go to a bank, show them a business plan, they either like it or they don’t, and they maybe cough up the money, maybe not. All above board. Here, the banks don’t lend, period. Too much risk. Plus, you got payoffs to make, councillors and planning officials to be bribed, all that sort of thing, which adds to your initial outlay. So you go to a guy like Garfield Finisterre. It’s the only realistic option for a lot of folk.”
“But four hundred per cent? That’s taking the piss.”
“Of course it is. But without it I’d never have had my rum shack. And with my rum shack I earn an income, enough to eat, cover the bills, pay the Garfish what he asks, and still have a little to put aside each month towards my boat—my beautiful boat. So it’s all good.”
“It’s not all good.” Lex took a swig of his beer. It was island-made, strong and sweet. “Now you’ve pissed Finisterre off.”
“To be strictly accurate, you did that, Lex.”
“Only to prevent you having the shit kicked out of you.”
“Fair point. So we’re both responsible. Question is, what do we do about it? Because the Garfish, he isn’t about to forgive and forget.”
There was a solution, Lex thought. Seraphina and her hundred grand.
He shook his head. No way. There had to be something else, an alternative to that. Anything but that.
“Let me sleep on it,” he said. “Maybe I’ll figure out something in the morning.”
“How’s your spare room?” Wilberforce asked. “Bed all made up?”
“You want to come for a sleepover?”
Wilberforce tried not to look pathetically grateful. “If it’s okay. Kind of not feeling so safe under my own roof tonight.”
LEX WAS AWAKE at seven. It had rained during the night, as it often did. The air was muggy, the garden hung with wreaths of ground mist. He ate breakfast in the courtyard—toast, fresh fruit, coffee. Rikki joined him at the table and feasted on a raw egg he gave him.
“Don’t come to rely on me for your food,” Lex warned the mongoose. “You’ll get complacent. Lose your edge.”
Rikki stared blankly at him, then resumed lapping yolk and albumen from the broken shell.
Lex’s mobile lay beside the espresso pot. He half expected it to ring. Seraphina calling. Somehow she would know that he was reconsidering her o
ffer. He kind of wished it would happen that way, sparing him the hassle and humiliation of having to make the call himself.
All of Wilberforce’s problems solved. And the sports cruiser secured outright. Lex wasn’t much of a sailor, but he quite fancied the idea of escorting tourists out to sea and helping them fish. How hard could it be? Wilberforce, having spent a year crewing on a glass-bottomed boat on the reefs, already knew a bit about seamanship, and Lex could pick it up as he went along. He was a quick study. It would be something to do with his days. A change from sitting and brooding and drinking.
He located Seraphina’s number in the call log. His thumb hovered over the green phone icon, and finally came down on it.
It took nearly twenty seconds for the connection to be established. The signal had to be rerouted through several British government exchanges, hopping from one to the next and being scrambled and encrypted along the way. It would be next to impossible for any third party to trace either its point of origin or its destination, or indeed to eavesdrop.
“Lex,” Seraphina crooned. “It still feels strange calling you that. Lex. Rather sexy, too. Like this is some sort of secret assignation.”
“Isn’t it?”
“When you put it like that, I suppose it is. How’s tricks, anyway? I gather there was a bit of a wild rumpus in Port Sebastian last night. Gunplay in the streets. Nothing to do with you, of course.”
“People are shooting each other all the time in Manzanilla.” Sadly, this was true. The rise in tourism and the prosperity it brought had seen a concomitant decline in lawlessness, but armed robbery and gang violence were still far from unusual. Away from the coast and the hotel developments, crime remained a daily fact of life for many islanders. “Why assume I was involved?”
“I don’t assume anything,” said Seraphina. “I know.”
“Naturally.”
“Names get taken down at such incidents, reports get filed on police databases...”
“And dedicated search engines flag them up whenever they occur,” Lex finished. “Bloody hell, it’s almost as if you’re stalking me.”
“A run-in with local law enforcement, Lex. That’s not like you at all. Hardly what one would call keeping a low profile.”
“It wasn’t intentional, believe me.”
“I can make it all go away, if you like. Just say the word, I can get the investigation dropped. All it’ll take is the foreign secretary to get in touch with the Manzanillan prime minister, him to lean on the chief constable, and hey presto, you’re in the clear, like it never happened.”
“The job,” said Lex, almost wearily.
“Ah, yes. The job. ‘Enough of the niceties, Seraphina. Cut to the chase.’”
“What can you tell me about it?”
“As a matter of fact, very little.”
“You’re not allowed to, or you don’t have the information?”
“The latter. Our allies across the Atlantic are playing this one very close to their chests. What I do know, via back channels—and I shouldn’t really be divulging this before the deal’s sealed—is that a US special ops team of some sort is en route to Manzanilla and they’re going to be staging there in order to carry out a mission nearby. They want somebody resident and amenable—that would be you—to be their local guide, arrange transport, and maybe one or two other things.”
“Amenable? Me?”
“Well, you’re American. At least on paper.”
Lex’s birth certificate stated place of birth as Miami, Florida. His parents had lived there for a couple of years in the late 1970s while his father had been attempting, and failing, to make it as a property developer. Lex’s father’s life had been one long parade of abortive get-rich-quick schemes and collapsed businesses, grand ambitions repeatedly foundering on the rocks of impracticality and lack of commercial acumen.
“And,” Seraphina continued, “you’re a known quantity. The Yanks would rather deal with someone they’ve already met and collaborated with than a complete stranger.”
“So conservative.”
“Or cautious. The vibe I’m getting, Lex, is that this is super-sensitive stuff. Discretion is the watchword here.”
“Two hundred K.”
“Beg pardon?”
“You heard.”
“Lex, you naughty boy, you’re being greedy.”
“No, I’m not. They want me, they should be prepared to pay a decent rate. Besides, it’s extremely short notice. Who else are they going to find in the time available?”
He was hoping she would say no. He was hoping he had priced himself out of the market, in which case it wouldn’t be his fault if the job didn’t happen. He wouldn’t be to blame. He had made himself available, tendered his services, and if the Americans weren’t willing to meet his demands, well, tough. Their loss.
“I think,” said Seraphina, “that that could be arranged.”
So much for that plan. Lex was crestfallen.
“I understand there’s a contingency fund,” she said. “Very deep pockets our American cousins have, especially when it comes to ultra-covert shenanigans. I would be very surprised if they baulk at going that high. As you say, there’s really no one else of the same calibre and skill set available.”
“Why don’t you check, before making any rash promises?”
“Lex, I am checking. I have my laptop in front of me and I’m emailing my contact in the States even as we speak. It’s called multitasking, something we women excel at. There. Sent. I don’t think we’ll have long to wait for the reply. In the meantime... Any lady friends out there, dare I ask? Anyone I should be jealous of?”
“Never you mind.”
“That’s a no, then. You really mean to say some lovely voluptuous Caribbean girl hasn’t caught your eye? I’d have thought you’d be making hay. Handsome, unattached boy like yourself. Do you miss that from the old days?”
“What, the travelling?” He hated this, the bogus small talk they were indulging in. Yet it had been their habit to chat like this during the years when Seraphina would give him his Code Crimson commissions and he would go off and perform them. Their phone conversations had been long and informal, often flirtatious, sometimes quite intimate. Perhaps the intention was to anchor him in reality and make what he did seem normal, even mundane. Just as if theirs was any ordinary employer-employee relationship. “I don’t miss the jet lag.”
“But staying in one place, after roving far and wide across the planet...”
“Yeah, with stop-offs in every known strife-torn, bombshelled, poverty-stricken hellhole along the way.”
“It wasn’t all Third World dictatorships and civil war zones. I distinctly recall trips to Monaco, Singapore, Rome, even the Maldives. You did pretty well out of the Queen’s shilling.”
“Funny. All I remember is flea-ridden hotel rooms, dusty tents in deserts, lying in hides made of twigs and canvas for days on end, and freezing my arse off on rooftops.”
“You’re such a glass-half-empty person.”
“Glass? I never even had a glass. I used to dream of having a glass, never mind something to fill it with.”
Seraphina chortled throatily. “That’s more like it. That’s the man I used to know. Ever ready with a deadpan wisecrack. If you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve lost sight of who you are, Lex. That’s your trouble. You should never have jacked it all in. The soft life’s eaten away at you.”
“No, the job ate away at me,” said Lex. “Retirement’s allowing me to rediscover myself.”
“If that were really true, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” Before Lex could respond, Seraphina said, “Oh, look. Ping! A reply in the inbox. Told you it wouldn’t take long. Just let me open it. Click. There. Yes. Thought so. ‘Dear Seraphina...’ Blah blah blah. ‘Terms are acceptable... funds can be remitted as soon as required... kindly await further instructions.’ There you go, Lex, you lucky sausage. Two hundred grand. I have your bank details. You certainly know how to drive a
hard bargain. Remind me never to buy a used car from you. Now then, happy?”
Lex grunted.
“Delirious, I can tell,” said Seraphina. “Keep your phone fully charged and at your side from this moment on. I’ll text you your orders as they come in. It’s just like old times, isn’t it?” She gave a girlish giggle. “You and me, doing our thing. The dynamic duo. You know, one day I might just fly out there to see you, Lex. Wouldn’t that be nice? We could finally meet in person, there in your tropical paradise. You could show me the sights, I could show you myself in a bikini. How about that, eh, my darling?”
Lex could think of a number of comebacks, all of them snarky. He felt railroaded, exploited, a victim of circumstance and undue pressure. Seraphina had manipulated him, and that rankled. But worse—he had let her.
Finally he said, “One or other of us would be bitterly disappointed, and I’d rather it wasn’t me,” and he cut the connection.
At that moment, Wilberforce emerged from the spare room, stretching and yawning loudly. Rikki took fright and scarpered off into the garden, leaving a mess of sticky eggshell behind on the table.
“I see you’re still hanging out with vermin,” said Wilberforce.
“I am now the mongoose has gone,” Lex shot back. “Sleep well?”
“Like a log.”
“I know. I could hear you snoring through two solid walls.”
“Man, I do not snore.”
Lex laughed scoffingly. “There are pilot whales beached at Plantation Cove right now; they heard you in the night and thought it was one of their own in distress.”
“Oh, ha ha.” Wilberforce helped himself to coffee. The swelling around his eye had begun to diminish. Lex had made him ice it last night, and had dabbed antiseptic on his other contusions and applied adhesive surgical strips where the knuckleduster had split skin. “Someone’s in a grouchy mood this morning.”
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