Tango One

by Stephen Leather

  "You up for it?"

  The driver grimaced.

  "That's a long drive and my wife'll have the dinner on at six."

  "Use the meter and I'll treble it."

  The driver's eyebrows shot skywards. He nodded at the holdall.

  "Not got drugs in there, have you?"

  Donovan grinned.

  "Chance'd be a fine thing. No. But I've got a plane to catch. Do you wanna go or shall I give the guy behind the biggest fare he'll have this year?"

  "I'll do it," said the driver, 'but the wife'll have my balls on toast."

  "Buy her something nice," said Donovan, settling back into the seat.

  "Usually works for me."

  The driver laughed.

  "Yeah, wives, huh? What can you do with them? Can't live with them, can't put a bullet in their heads." He laughed uproariously at his own bad joke and started the car.

  Donovan looked out of the window, tight lipped. Flecks of rain spattered across the glass. It always seemed to be raining when he visited Dublin, and he couldn't remember ever seeing blue skies over the Irish capital.

  The taxi pulled into the afternoon traffic and Donovan closed his eyes. He'd forgotten to call the Spaniard, but he could do that when he reached Belfast.

  Stewart Sharkey nodded towards the bar.

  "Do you want a drink?" he asked Vicky. Their flight hadn't been called and the boarding gate was only a short walk away.

  Vicky shook her head.

  "It's a bit early for me. You go ahead, though. I'm going to use the bathroom."

  "Are you all right?" asked Sharkey, putting his hand on her shoulder.

  Tears welled up in her eyes.

  "I don't know, Stewart. I don't know how I feel. I'm sort of numb, it's like I'm going to faint or something. Like I keep stepping outside my own body."

  "Good sex will do that every time," joked Sharkey, but she pushed his hand away.

  "This isn't funny," she hissed. They'd checked into one of the airport hotels, and the sex had been quick and urgent, almost frantic. Sharkey hadn't even given her chance to get undressed and there had been no soft words, no caresses. Just sex. It was as if he'd wanted to show that she was his. That he could take her whenever he wanted. She'd wanted him, too, but not like that. She'd wanted to be held, to be comforted, to be told that it was all right, that he'd protect her.

  "I know it isn't," soothed Sharkey, 'but there isn't much else I can do just now except try to lighten the moment, right? We've got a plane to catch, then we can plan what we do next."

  Vicky forced herself to smile.

  "Okay," she said.

  Sharkey hugged her and she rested her head against his chest. He nuzzled his face into her. He could smell the cheap shampoo from the hotel room.

  "You know I love you," he whispered.

  "You bloody well better," she said, slipping her arms around his waist and squeezing him.

  "I wouldn't want to go through all this for the sake of a quick shag."

  "It's going to work out, trust me."

  She squeezed him again, then released her grip on him and wiped her eyes.

  "I look a mess," she said.

  "Go get your drink. I'll see you in a couple of minutes."

  She walked away quickly, her skirt flicking from side to side. It was one hell of a sexy walk, thought Sharkey. Vicky Donovan was a head-turner, and that might turn out to be a problem down the line. Men looked at stunning blondes with impressive cleavages and shapely legs, and the more men who looked at her, the more chance there was of someone recognising her.

  Donovan thrust a handful of fifty-pound notes at the driver, making sure that he couldn't see inside the holdall.

  "Sterling okay?" he asked.

  "I don't have any Euros."

  "I suppose so," said the driver, carefully counting the notes. His face broke into a smile when he realised how much money he was holding. He reached into the taxi's glove compartment and handed a dog-eared business card to Donovan.

  "You need a lift again, you call me, yeah? The mobile's always on."

  "Sure," said Donovan.

  "Pop the boot, yeah?" The driver unlocked the boot and Donovan pulled out his suitcase. He walked into the terminal building and bought a business class ticket to Heathrow at the British Airways desk.

  Before checking in he took his holdall and suitcase into the toilets and pulled them into a large cubicle designed for wheelchair access. He put most of the money into the suitcase, since it was less likely to be noticed there than in the holdall. He wasn't committing an offence by flying from Belfast to London with bundles of fifty-pound notes, but he didn't want to attract attention to himself. He kept one passport, one of the UK ones, in his jacket pocket and hid the rest in a secret compartment in his wash bag.

  He washed his hands and face, checked his reflection in the mirror, and put his dark glasses back on. Belfast Airport was saturated with CCTV cameras, and like all British airports was equipped with the face-recognition system that he had successfully evaded at Stansted. He took the Panama hat from his holdall and put it on his head at a jaunty angle.

  He checked in for the flight and winked at his suitcase as it headed off on its lonely journey down the conveyor belt.

  He bought aUK telephone card and called the Spaniard from a payphone. This time the Spaniard answered.

  "Fuck me, Juan, where the hell have you been?"

  "Hola, Den. {Que pa saT "I'll give you que pasa, you dago bastard. My world's going down the toilet tit first and you're sunning yourself on some bloody beach."

  "I wish that were true, amigo. I have only just got back from .. ." the Spaniard chuckled to himself.. . 'wherever I was," he finished. Like Donovan, Juan Rojas had a serious distrust of the telephone system.

  "You will no doubt read about it in the papers, manana. So what can I do for you, my old friend?"

  "Same old, same old," said Donovan.

  "I'd like a face to face."

  "Amigo, I am only just off a plane," said Rojas.

  "Don't fucking give me amigo, you garlic-guzzling piece of shit, are you gonna help me or do I have to call the Pole? The way the currency is, he's a lot cheaper than you are."

  "If this is your idea of romancing me, I have to tell you, old friend, it's not making me wet between the legs." He paused, but Donovan knew that he'd got the Spaniard's attention so he said nothing. Eventually Rojas broke the silence.

  "Where?" he asked.

  "Remember the last time we met in the UK?"

  "Vaguely. My memory isn't what it was."

  "The park."

  "Ah. Where the animals were."

  Donovan frowned. The animals? They hadn't met at the zoo. It had been on Hampstead Heath. Then he smiled. It was the Spaniard's idea of a joke. They'd seen several cruising homosexuals, and when they'd walked past one, Rojas had pulled Donovan close and planted a noisy wet kiss on his cheek.

  "Yeah, Juan. The animals. Tomorrow, okay? Same time as before, plus two, okay?" Nine o'clock at night. Dark.

  "I will be there, amigo, with a huge hard-on for you."

  Donovan laughed out loud and hung up.

  He sat in the business class lounge sipping a Jack Daniels and soda until his flight was called.

  Vicky splashed water over her face and then stared at her reflection in the mirror above the washbasins. She looked terrible. Her eyes were red from crying and her skin was blotchy around her nose. She put her hands on her cheeks and pulled the skin back. The wrinkles vanished as the skin tightened across her cheekbones. Twenty-nine going on fifty is how she felt. She hated what she saw in the mirror. She looked tired and scared and hunted.

  She took a lipstick from her handbag and carefully applied it, then brushed mascara on to her lashes. She put her face close to the mirror and admired her handiwork. Even if she looked like shit, she might as well look like shit in full warpaint. She stood up straight and pulled her shoulders back, then turned her head right and left. Twenty-nine. Thi
rty next birthday. God, how could she be thirty? Thirty was halfway to sixty. She shuddered at the thought of grey hair and mottled, wrinkled skin and receding gums and brittle bones. Or maybe not. Maybe with a good plastic surgeon and if she ate right and gave up smoking and drinking she could put off the decay for a further decade.

  She walked out of the ladies'. To her left was a rank of public phones. She stopped and stared at them. No calls, Stewart had said. Calls could be traced, and he'd insisted that they both throw away their mobiles before leaving for the airport. She fumbled in her handbag and pulled out her purse. She had a British Telecom card that still had several pounds on it. She picked up the receiver of the phone in the middle of the row and slotted in the card, then tapped out the number of Robbie's mobile. It rang through immediately to his message bank and she cursed.

  It was three o'clock, so he was probably still at school, and the teachers insisted on penalty of detention that all phones were switched off in class. They were the new must-have accessory and had long passed the stage of being a status symbol. Virtually every pupil now had a phone, so status came from having the latest model, and Robbie's was state of the art, a present from Den.

  She was about to hang up, but then she changed her mind.

  "Robbie, it's Mum. I just called to say hello. You I know I love you, don't you?" She paused, as if expecting an answer.

  "I am so sorry about what happened, love, I really am. If I could turn back the clock .. ." She felt tears well up in her eyes and she blinked them back. A family of Indians walked by, chattering loudly: an old man in a grubby turban and a bushy beard, a young married couple with three young children and a grandmother bringing up the rear, all dressed in traditional Indian garb. She turned away from them, not wanting them to see her pain.

  "I'm going away for a few days, Robbie. Not far, I promise. But I'm going to see you again soon, I miss you so much .. ." The answering service buzzed and the line went dead. Vicky put a hand up to her eyes and cursed quietly. She replaced the receiver and pulled out the phone card.

  "What are you doing, Vicky?"

  Vicky jumped and almost screamed. She whirled around to find Sharkey standing behind her.

  "What the hell are you doing creeping up on me like that?" she hissed.

  "Who were you phoning?"

  "It's none of your business who I was phoning," she said, trying to push past him.

  "You shouldn't be spying on me."

  He put a hand on each shoulder and lowered his head so that his eyes were level with hers.

  "I wasn't spying, I just came to see where you were," he said quietly.

  "I didn't creep up on you, you had your back to me. And in view of our situation, I think I do have a right to know who you were phoning. You know as well as I do how easy it is to trace calls."

  "We're at the fucking airport, Stewart. We've left the car outside. He's going to know we were here, so one call isn't going to make a difference."

  "That depends on who you called."

  "I didn't call Den, if that's what you're worried about."

  "I'm not worried, I just want to know, that's all."

  She glared at him for several seconds.

  "I was calling Robbie."

  "I told you, no calls. No fucking calls!"

  "I wasn't going to tell him where we were going!" she protested.

  "Vicky, you can't tell him anything. Period. Okay?"

  "I just want to talk to him." Her voice was a tired croak, almost a death rattle. She sounded at the end of her tether.

  Sharkey kissed the top of her head.

  "And you will do, Vicky. I promise, but let's get ourselves sorted first. Let's make sure we're not vulnerable. Then we can approach Den from a position of strength."

  He straightened up and put an arm around her shoulder.

  "Come on, you need a stiff drink."

  He half pushed, half led her towards the bar. All the fight seemed to have gone out of her, and once she stumbled and Sharkey had to grab her to stop her falling. He guided her to the bar and helped her on to a stool before ordering her a double vodka and tonic. She drank it with shaking hands, almost in one gulp, and he ordered another for her.

  As Vicky Donovan was downing her third vodka and tonic and Stewart Sharkey was anxiously looking at his watch, Den Donovan was less than a hundred yards away, collecting his suitcase from the carousel in Terminal One. Even though he was wearing his Panama hat and sunglasses, he kept his head down until he was out of the terminal building. The sky was a leaden grey, threatening drizzle if not an outright shower. Donovan joined the queue for a black cab, and forty-five minutes later he was being driven down the Edgware Road. He told the taxi driver to drop him in front of a small rundown hotel in Sussex Gardens. The reception desk was manned by a bottle-blonde East European girl with badly permed hair and a large mole on the left side of her nose. She had a pretty smile and spoke reasonable English. She told Donovan that they had a double room available and that she'd need to see a credit card.

  Donovan told her that his credit cards had been stolen while he was on holiday, but he had a passport and was happy to leave a large cash deposit. She seemed confused by his request, but after she'd spoken to her manager on the phone she nodded eagerly.

  "He say okay. Three hundred okay for you?" Three hundred pounds was just fine. Donovan never used credit cards if he could possibly help it they left a clear trail that could be followed. He gave her six fifty-pound notes and she held up each one to the light above her head as if she knew what she was looking for. He checked in under the name of Nigel Parkes, which was the name on one of the UK passports he was carrying.

  Once in his room, Donovan opened his suitcase and took out a reefer jacket and an old New York Yankees baseball cap and put them on. He peeled off several hundred pounds in fifties from one of the bricks of banknotes in his suitcase and shoved them into his wallet. Then he put his sunglasses on, locked his door and went out with the door key in his pocket.

  He walked down Edgware Road past the packed Arab coffee houses and the banks with camels and squiggly writing on the front. Little Arabia, they called it, and Donovan could see why. Three quarters of the people on the streets were from the Middle East: fat women covered from head to foot in black, grizzled Arabs in full desert gear, teenagers dripping with gold wearing designer gear and shark-like smiles. Not a pleasant place, thought Donovan. You never knew where you were with Arabs. He'd almost lost an eye in a shoot-out with three Lebanese dealers in Liverpool when he was in his late teens, and he'd refused to do business with Arabs ever again. Arabs and Russians. You couldn't trust either.

  He walked into an electrical retailer's and bought eight different pay-as-you-go mobile phones and two dozen Sim cards. A CCTV camera covered the cash register, but Donovan kept his head down and the peak of the baseball cap hid virtually all his face as he handed over the cash.

  "You gotta lot of girlfriends?" asked the gangly Arab behind the counter.

  "Boyfriends," said Donovan. He leered at the shop assistant.

  "What time do you finish, huh?"

  The shop assistant took a step back, then looked at Donovan quizzically, trying to work out if he was serious.

  "You make joke, yes?"

  "Yeah, I make joke," said Donovan.

  The shop assistant laughed uneasily, put the phones and Sim cards in two plastic carrier bags, and gave them to Donovan. Donovan walked back to the hotel. He stopped off at a news agent on the way and bought five twenty-pound phone cards.

  There were four power points in the room, and Donovan put four of the mobile phones on charge before heading for the shower.

  Barry Doyle stretched out his hand for his beer and took a sip from the bottle, keeping his towel over his eyes. He was lying by the side of Donovan's pool, recovering from a two-hour workout in his boss's gym. The staff of three a maid, a handyman and a cook stayed in a small house on the edge of the compound and were available around-the-clock even when Donova
n was away, so Doyle figured he might as well take advantage of the amenities on offer. The cook was superb, a rotund Puerto Rican woman in her late fifties who knew her way around a dozen or more cuisines and who could whip up poached eggs and beans on toast just the way Doyle liked them. Just the way his mother used to make them.

  He heard footsteps and Doyle smiled under the towel. It would be Maria, the maid. Twenty-two years old, an hour-glass figure and a Catherine Zeta-Jones smile. Doyle had been lusting after Maria ever since she started working for Donovan, and he'd told her to bring him a fresh iced beer every half an hour.

  "Thanks, Maria," he said, spreading his legs apart to give her a good look at the bulge in the front of his swimming trunks.

  Rough hands grabbed both arms and yanked him up off the sun-lounger. The towel fell to the floor and Doyle blinked in the sudden sunlight. A squat man stood in front of him, brown skinned with a thick moustache and heavy eyebrows. Doyle squinted and his eyes slowly focused. Carlos Rodriguez.

  "Where is he?" asked Rodriguez.

  "He's not here," said Doyle.

  Rodriguez slapped him, hard.

  "Where is he?"

  "What the fuck is your problem?" spat Doyle. Blood trickled from the side of his mouth and he winced as he ran his tongue over a deep cut inside his cheek.

  Rodriguez slapped him again and the men on either side of Doyle tightened their grip on his arms.

  "He flew to Jamaica yesterday," hissed Rodriguez.

  "Why?"

  "Look, Carlos, what's going on? There's no need for this. If you've got a problem with Den, you'll have to talk to him. I'm not his fucking keeper."

  Rodriguez stepped forward and grabbed Doyle's throat. He had long fingernails and they dug into Doyle's flesh as he squeezed.

  "I want to talk to him, you piece of shit. That's why I need to know where he went." Doyle tried to speak, but Rodriguez's grip was too tight and he couldn't draw breath. He started to choke and Rodriguez took his hand away. Doyle coughed and blood splattered over Rodriguez's cream linen suit. Rodriguez looked down at the spots of blood disdainfully.

  "Do you have any idea how much this suit cost?" he said quietly.

  "Any idea at all?"