Shredder

by Niall Leonard

  There’d been no reason to stay in London after I’d been released without charge, and plenty of reasons not to. Karakurt wasn’t one of the reasons I left. He’d gone on the run shortly afterwards, a wanted terrorist whose face and many names were plastered all over the media and the Internet. As various whistle-blowers and journalists had learned the hard way, criticize the British royal family, the government or the police all you like, but screw with the British security services and you’ll be hunted down like smallpox. The Brits had called in favors from fellow spooks the world over, and soon Karakurt was number one on every Most Wanted list across Europe and the USA. Even the Russians had been looking for him—presumably because he hadn’t been able to deliver on the deal he’d made with the Moscow mafia.

  I’d headed for Spain, mostly because I had nowhere else to live. My parents’ place I’d long since rented out, and the house I’d been living in—the one that had belonged to my old boxing coach, Delroy—had been reclaimed by his Jamaican relatives. That was when I’d decided it was time to visit this castle I’d inherited when my dad died, the one that had once belonged to the actor Charles Egerton, and which I hadn’t seen since I was eight years old.

  It was a lot smaller than I remembered, of course, but it was still beautiful. Five minutes’ hike from the border with France, in the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees, it was more farmhouse than castle—a ramshackle, wandering farmhouse with its roof collapsed in places, but with some castlelike ruins nearby: stone colonnades surrounding a marble bath left behind when the Moors had retreated to Africa. In the years since Charles had died the bath had been used as a sheep dip by my grizzled ancient neighbor Estaban. When I’d moved in he’d come round to ask nicely if he could carry on grazing his flocks on what had been Charles’s pastures and were now mine, in return for produce from his farm. I said sure, since I hadn’t been planning to use the pastures myself. I think that’s what we agreed, anyway: I didn’t speak much Spanish when I arrived, and I very soon learned that few people in those parts spoke Spanish either—this was Basque country, where everyone spoke Euskara, and all the road signs were in two languages. Trying to read Euskara made reading English suddenly seem straightforward, but between conversations with the locals and videos on YouTube I learned enough at least not to embarrass myself when I drove into town for supplies.

  Yes, drove. I’d taught myself, in a four-wheel-drive that Charles had left behind, which Estaban had also “borrowed.” It was still in good shape when he returned it, if you didn’t mind the faint whiff of livestock, and I didn’t, because for the first few months I smelled pretty ripe myself. There was no running water in the house, so I washed in the icy stream, and that was after spending all day cutting back the jungle that had grown up around the house, repairing the broken windows and fixing the roof with Charles’s rusty tools. I didn’t know much about traditional Basque roofing, so I just copied the bits that were intact, and I’d managed to make it watertight in time for winter. One gable wall of the adjoining barn was unfinished but its fallen stones were lined up on the top floor, waiting for warmer weather, when there’d be less chance of frost damaging the fresh mortar.

  “If that bloody dog brings me one more dead rat I’m going to shoot him,” said Zoe sleepily.

  “It’s a present,” I said. “It’s ’cause he likes you.”

  “It’s you he likes,” she said. “And he’s jealous. He brings me the rats to gross me out and piss me off.”

  “You’d be a lot more grossed out and pissed off if he brought you a live one,” I said.

  It was late afternoon, and we were in bed together, in the dim whitewashed room that had once been a cowshed, having a siesta. The weather wasn’t really warm enough, and we didn’t do much sleeping, but calling it a siesta made it sound less lazy and self-indulgent.

  Zoe was probably right about the dog. He had turned up in the depths of that first winter, so underfed I could count his ribs. I hadn’t encouraged him to hang around, but I had sort of tolerated him, and maybe that was more affection than he had ever been shown, because he stayed. I couldn’t blame whoever it was who had thrown him off their farm; he was the ugliest dog I’d ever seen, with the head of a greyhound, the body of a boxer and the brains of a sparrow. He was good at catching rats—and there were a lot of rats to catch—but he never warmed to Zoe. When she wasn’t around he slept in the kitchen next to my bedroom; when she came to stay and shared my bed he made himself scarce, like now.

  “You should use that stuff Estaban gave you,” she said. As a Christmas present Estaban had brought me a rusting can of white powder and explained in toothless Euskara that it was for killing rats. I thanked him profusely and hid it in one of the outhouses along with all the other rusting cans—mostly banned garden products Charles Egerton had left behind.

  “That stuff’s ancient, and it’s lethal,” I said. “If I put down poison, Zakur will eat it, and it’ll kill him, and he smells bad enough as it is.”

  “Zakur,” said Zoe. “You’ve even given him a name. You’re stuck with him now.”

  “It’s not a name,” I said. “Zakur is the Basque word for ‘dog.’ ”

  She raised her head and looked at me in sleepy indignation. “I can’t get over the fact that you’ve been here six months and you can speak Basque.”

  “I can’t really,” I said. “But don’t tell the dog that.”

  Zoe had come here every spare week she had from her course, and like most students she seemed to have a lot of spare weeks, but I wasn’t complaining. The work she had missed while stranded in the safe house she’d caught up with before the end of that first September, and she had resumed her studies; she said it was going well, but I got the impression she was bored because the course wasn’t challenging enough. Maybe writing essays seemed a little dull after hacking a laptop and blackmailing MI5 with the contents. Patrick Robinson had dropped out and disappeared to the USA, and she’d officially taken over the room he’d rented in that shared house, but when term began she still had the feeling she was being watched.

  As indeed she was: Amobi cheerfully admitted it when she’d contacted him. NCA and “certain other agencies” were keeping an eye on her, supposedly to intercept the Turk if he came looking for revenge. Zoe suspected their real motivation was to ensure that no harm came to her, accidentally or otherwise. She still hadn’t sent out the links to those compromising documents she’d hidden on the Internet, but she had set up an automated routine that would do it for her, unless she logged in every few days. It was by way of a fail-safe—if anything did happen to her, or me, the world would find out about Karakurt’s deal with the British security services. Whenever Zoe stayed with me in Spain she logged on using the wireless Internet connection the local IT geek, Txaparro, had supplied to the farmhouse. It was slow, but it worked, and Zoe seemed happy, and we were never bored.

  The weird thing was that even without Zoe releasing that information, all sorts of rumors and conspiracy theories about Karakurt had bubbled up: that he’d been working for Al Qaeda or the Taliban, that he’d been a double agent who had gone rogue, that he was really working for the Chinese, or the UN, helping to usher in the New World Order. I’d wondered where all this stuff was coming from; Zoe suggested it was coming from British security services themselves, stirring up smoke and mud to create confusion. That way the actual truth, if it ever did come out, would sound like one more loony conspiracy theory.

  If that was really the plan then it was already working, as far as I was concerned, because I didn’t know what to believe. I took a few precautions and laid in some supplies around the house, but as the months passed they began to seem absurd and paranoid, a bad habit from a previous existence I’d already begun to forget.

  Especially after the Turk was caught.

  By February government militia had cornered him in a villa in Cyprus that had caught fire during the shoot-out and burned to the ground; what was left of Karakurt was identified by DNA extracted from hi
s teeth. His only other remains were the millions in various currencies frozen in offshore accounts; millions that were now being squabbled over by the Brits, the Turks, the Russians and even Kurdish separatists. Some of that money was mine, as it happened—stolen from my lawyer’s client account the night she disappeared—but I wasn’t bothered; I had my farmhouse, I had my fields, and I had Zoe…and of course there was the insurance payout I’d collected after the theft.

  And now spring was coming and there was a pot of lamb stew simmering on the stove and Zoe was here in my arms. Which reminded me…

  “We’re nearly out of condoms,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it, I’m sorted. And I’m not seeing anyone else, so we don’t need them.”

  “What about me? I might be seeing someone else,” I said.

  “Like who?” she snorted. “Estaban? Bit old for you, isn’t he? Oh God”—she looked round—“tell me it’s not the dog.”

  “It gets lonely up here,” I said. “And the sheep run too fast.”

  She smiled at me. “You’re disgusting,” she said. “Sometimes I think you—”

  “Wait,” I said. In the distance Zakur was barking.

  “What is it?”

  I sat up. “What’s up with Zakur?”

  “You really do care more about that dog than me.”

  “Hsh…”

  Last autumn I’d heard Zakur barking like that, frantic and furious, and it turned out he’d found a hedgehog and was trying to harass it into uncurling. When I’d caught up with him his muzzle was all bloody from biting the spikes, but he was too stupid to stop. I hoped this was another hedgehog, but somehow I knew it wasn’t; I could hear snarling and snapping between the barks, and what sounded like a man’s voice cursing.

  Then there was a single shot, and the barking stopped, abruptly. It wasn’t the blast of a shotgun like the locals used for chasing off wild boars and foxes—it was a pistol shot. Zoe realized that too, and her eyes widened in fear as she turned to me.

  “Go,” I said. “Hide.” She scrambled out of bed and tugged on her clothes.

  We’d talked a few times about what we might do if everything we’d heard was wrong, if the Turk was still out there and looking for us, if somehow he had tracked us down to this place. But lately we’d let our guard down, allowed ourselves to hope the nightmare really was over. Maybe it was, maybe this was a false alarm, but I was going to assume the worst. No point in calling my neighbors or the Guardia Civil; it would take the cops at least an hour to get here, and I didn’t want to get old Estaban mixed up in this. Whoever it was I would have to face them down myself.

  I headed for the old dovecote that poked out of the roof of the barn. From up there I could see in every direction, right down the valley and up the hill trail. I pressed my face up to the slats still dotted with ancient birdshit and feathers, and peered out.

  Damn it. I should have known.

  It was the Turk.

  I could see three men approaching from different directions—one coming down the mountain trail, another limping up the path, but it was the Turk who was coming up from the stream. There’d be another guy coming down from the tree line above the house to the west, I assumed, through the vineyard. I could take all four, one by one, if I was lucky.

  I took another look at the guy limping up the lane with a heavy pistol held in both hands. That was my old friend Dean, his greasy hair grown long again, his face still crooked from the battering I’d given it almost a year ago. I hadn’t seen him since he’d been carried unconscious out of the riot, and if he was still limping now I must have injured him more severely than I’d meant to. That was a comfort.

  I checked the terraces to the west, where the vines were just starting their spring growth, sending delicate tendrils up the struts and wires I’d spent the last few weeks building. There he was, the Turk’s newest recruit—a short, unshaven guy, Spanish by the look of him. He was an ugly son of a bitch, with a squint, and one thick eyebrow across the width of his forehead. I wondered where Karakurt had found him—and how, with every cop in Europe on his trail. Was there some employment agency for thugs, where your criminal record served as your CV? How much was this new guy getting paid, or was this an internship?

  Squinty was following the path I’d beaten into the earth as I’d slogged up and down from the vineyard. It led round the old walnut store, hugging tight to its ancient wall, under the unfinished gable. I scrambled down the dovecote ladder as softly as I could, hoping the creaking wouldn’t give me away, and crept towards the gable where the old stones were waiting to be relaid. Here the roof was held up by rusting steel struts, leaving the attic open to the weather. I peeked over the edge and down. There was Squinty, following the path as I’d thought he would, holding his pistol pointing upwards like cops did in the movies, pausing at the corner to check the courtyard was clear.

  I didn’t waste time thinking whether what I planned to do was right or not—I just did it. The topmost stone of the unfinished wall was not mortared into place, and it took barely any effort to roll it over, and it made no noise at all until it hit Squinty four meters below so squarely on the head it drove his skull down into his chest cavity. I didn’t wait to check my handiwork, but scuttled over to the west corner of the barn, where I’d left the ladder. Squinty had been covering that side, so with any luck the others wouldn’t see me coming down.

  My luck ran out at the foot of the ladder.

  “Stand still,” said Karakurt. His voice was behind me, about two meters away, too far for me to turn and jump him no matter how fast I moved. Raising my hands, I joined them on the back of my head without waiting for him to tell me, because I knew from experience that whatever he told me to do I’d feel compelled to do something else. I turned to face him.

  Interesting. He was paler than I remembered, and he’d put on weight. A life in hiding didn’t seem to suit him. Those weren’t his usual designer clothes, either—his jeans were saggy, and his thin leather jacket looked like it had come from a market stall. But his self-satisfied grin was still there, the smile of a man who knew he was finally going to have the last word, and the hand pointing the silver pistol at my head was rock-steady. Was that the same silver pistol I’d seen in the riot? Amazing he still had it. Maybe it had sentimental value; maybe Kemal had given it to him.

  “Who was the guy in Cyprus?” I said. “The one who died in the fire?”

  “I don’t know,” said Karakurt. “I never met him.”

  “I thought he’d be family. Considering the sacrifice he made for you.”

  “Families are a liability,” said Karakurt. “When I need relatives to say that a dead man is really me, I hire them. Where is the girl?”

  “You just missed her,” I said.

  Karakurt smiled and flicked his gun, That way. This time I obeyed, and led the way round to the front of the walnut store. We had to step over the crumpled remains of Squinty, who now sported a boulder for a head, and I took care to avoid stepping in the blood that had puddled around him. If I had to run I didn’t want to leave red footprints. Dean and the other new recruit were waiting in the potholed courtyard in front of the main farmhouse.

  “Dónde está Javier?” said the other new guy. He was tall, bearded and balding, with a long scar on his right cheek where someone had once widened his mouth with a blade. He wore a padded leather jacket—a serious biker jacket, not just for posing—and there was blood on his jeans: my dog’s blood, I guessed. At the sight of it cold rage boiled up inside me; but I forced it down.

  “Javier está muerto,” said Karakurt.

  Biker glared at me, clearly shocked and disbelieving. What had Karakurt told him to expect? Some clueless gringo kid living alone miles from anywhere? And if they turned up at my farmhouse waving guns I’d invite them all in for sherry and tapas?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Was that your boyfriend?”

  I expected Karakurt to translate, but from the look on the biker’s face he spoke en
ough English not to need it, and he moved fast for a big man. I saw the kick coming and I managed to shift my weight, but the toe of his heavy boot still caught me in the balls hard enough to send pain erupting up the length of my body, flipping my stomach over and filling me with nausea.

  I dropped to my knees on the cobblestones and bent forward, trying to absorb the agony and let it wash over me. I wanted to look weak and vulnerable at that point, but I’d kind of been hoping to act the part, and right now I didn’t need to act. I felt my stomach roil and convulse and I went with it, spewing up bile, spitting and retching, all the while keeping an eye on Biker’s big heavy boots a meter from my face. If he pulled one back for a kick to my face I was going to take him before he blinded me; it was a gamble, but I figured at this point the Turk would sooner lose this guy than kill me. For now I kept my fingers laced behind my head; I knew that made me look helpless and cowed.

  “Where is your girlfriend?” Karakurt repeated. He strolled round to stand in front of me, Biker behind him, and stooped so his eye could meet mine, and I could look into that cold empty abyss he had in place of a soul.

  “She ran,” I said. The Turk shook his head, stood up and stepped aside. Biker pulled back his fist; I just had time to notice he’d slipped on a brass knuckleduster before he slammed it into my face, splitting it across the cheekbone and spraying my blood onto the cobblestones. He had opened the old scar Kemal had left. He had little of Kemal’s power or technique, but he had enough; a few more punches like that and my head would start to look like a burst watermelon. From the corner of my eye I saw Dean chuckle.

  “She did not run,” said the Turk patiently. “We would have seen her. She is still here, hiding somewhere, and we will find her sooner or later, and the sooner we find her, the sooner this will be over, for both of you.”

  I knew that was a lie: Karakurt would draw our deaths out for as long as he could, whatever I told him. After six months on the run he might be out of practice, which meant the torture might last a day or two rather than a week, but I wasn’t going to volunteer for either option.