by Henry Porter
‘Who’s Bukov?’ she asked.
‘The man in charge, the man I’ve been talking to. Where the fuck is he?’
‘You mean Kirill,’ she said. ‘He stayed back there.’
‘This man had his phone.’
‘Yes, Kirill gave it to him. He wouldn’t risk himself out here.’
He took hold of her around her waist. ‘We’re going to walk to the other side. Everything’s good. You’re going to be okay.’ He felt her nod against his chest and they started walking. They were doing fine, keeping close to the side and moving steadily, then Samson guided her across the tracks to collect his phone. As he reached for it, he heard a crack behind him and instantly felt a scalding pain in the arm that held her so tightly, lurched forward and fell, taking her with him. Both of them cried out. There had been only one shot but she had been hit, too, and he realised the bullet must have passed clean through him and torn into her shoulder. They lay face down on the stones, entangled and helpless. ‘Shit! Shit!’ he gasped with the pain. ‘Shit.’ But Anastasia didn’t make a sound. Right there, on that old creaking skeleton of a bridge between West and East, Samson felt her reserves finally give out. When Kirill appeared in his hunting hat and casually kicked her in the ribs, she didn’t even cry out. She could not react, because she wanted him to get it done: she’d had enough.
Samson had his face in the ballast stones but he knew it was Bukov who had approached them from behind and shot him because the man was already muttering his usual sadistic crap about killing her in front of him. Now he told them that he had considered reversing the original plan so that Anastasia would watch him die. It was a finely balanced question, he said. Which of them loved the other the most? He was tempted to say it must be Samson because of all the trouble he had taken to free her, and yet he must give her credit for having put up such a decent fight these past few days. The spirit she had shown was fired by love for Samson, not by the hope of seeing again her war-criminal husband, he was quite sure of that.
He discovered the iPad at the back of Samson’s jeans and pulled it out with a chuckle. He poked them with his stick a few more times, rammed the gun into their backs, circling them, and talked and talked. This all seemed to go on for a very long time, but in fact it was only a few minutes, at the end of which Samson raised his head and saw something move at the portal to the bridge on the Estonian side.
Bukov was oblivious. He told them that Crane’s death did not matter in the least because he now held the device in his hands. And right then and there he, bizarrely, turned to politics, briefly outlining the stupidity of the Western public and telling them about Russia’s coming glory. He was enjoying himself and so caught up in his flow that he didn’t notice a tiny red light dance among the stones on the braces and struts behind him. Samson, turning his head as much as he dared, saw it land on Bukov and the Russian furiously trying to brush it off. When he realised what it was he jumped and fired his gun, a crazy shot that zinged into the steel structure above them. This provoked several flashes in the dark about twenty metres away from them. Nikita Bukov, known as Kirill, fell hatless and dead on to the stones in front of them.
And now a short man wearing a parka with a hoodie underneath it was with them. Holding the gun away, he helped Samson to a sitting position with one hand then gently rolled Anastasia and brought her upright. She groaned and seemed to be trying to make sense of what was happening, staring wildly at Samson through the damp snowflakes that fell and melted on them. Samson, his mind spinning, noticed a bar of greenish light over the town of Ivangorod in the east. Dawn was breaking. He turned back to Anastasia and flopped a hand in her direction.
The man waved a light over them. He seemed agitated about something and uttered the word Dio several times. ‘Devo prendere questa giacca – la giacca di mio cugino,’ he said quickly. ‘Sua moglie lo vorrà.’
Anastasia stirred and said, ‘He wants the jacket. He says it belonged to his cousin – one of the dead men on the boat. He’s going to take it back to his wife.’
‘Si, signora, è corretto’ – that’s correct.
Although it cost her something to take off the jacket, they discovered that her wound was much less serious than Samson’s, just a nasty gash on her shoulder. The bullet had lost most of its force when it passed through Samson’s body. She handed the bloody jacket to the man and said, ‘Mi dispiace anche.’ I am sorry, too.
The shock of being shot had slowed Samson’s thinking but he now recognised the man by the birthmark that ran from his nose to his cheek. He was one of the Camorra crew who had been with Esposito in the car park at Naples airport. He’d worn a hoodie and stood slightly apart from the others.
‘Ask him about our friends,’ he told Anastasia. ‘Are they all right?’
The man understood ‘Amici? Stanno bene.’ Vuk and Harland were okay.
‘They are fine’ said a voice a little distance away. Naji was standing tentatively in the dawn light. ‘They were knocked out by this man and his friend. They are with his friend now.’
‘And what the hell are you doing here?’
‘A deal,’ said Naji. ‘Where is the iPad?’
Samson gestured to Bukov’s corpse. Naji felt in the man’s pockets and withdrew the device. He opened it and started tapping. ‘This is good,’ he said, and showed the Italian, who nodded.
Samson’s mind swam. ‘What’s going on?’
Naji didn’t reply but beckoned to the Italian. Together they walked to where Crane’s body lay and crouched down. Samson pushed himself up on the bridge support to see. ‘What are you doing?’ he called out as Naji took Crane’s lifeless hand and pressed it to the iPad’s screen. He then passed the device to the Italian, who started tapping at the keyboard. They stood together and waited. Then the Italian put his hand on Naji’s shoulder and said, ‘Bravo, ragazzo! Bravo!’
Naji closed the iPad cover and nodded.
‘Tutto bene!’ Everything’s good. He gave them one last look, nodded as though a job had been well done and set off with the jacket of the dead Italian kidnapper tucked under his arm.
Naji returned to them and helped Anastasia to her feet. Then, with Naji between them giving both support, they began to walk towards the lights of Narva and the West.
‘What the hell was that about?’ said Samson when they reached the other side.
‘My deal,’ said Naji.
‘More!’ said Samson.
‘He was hitman. I give them Crane’s money to kill the man who shot you. That was the deal. Without this man you would not be alive.’
EPILOGUE
The events on the rail bridge didn’t become clear to Samson until after he had received surgery for a bullet wound in the shoulder and the hole in his chest where the bullet had exited four inches below his clavicle on its downward path to Anastasia. Harland came into his room wearing a large square bandage at the back of his head that covered the cut he had received when he was bludgeoned at the door of the observation post. He said hello with a slightly sheepish smile and dragged a chair over to Samson’s bed.
‘All right, then?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said Samson.
‘She’s still asleep,’ Harland said. ‘She’s been out for a straight twenty-four hours. Utterly exhausted. But she’s going to be fine. Hisami has been informed, but he has a fresh set of difficulties.’
Samson ignored this. He’d got Anastasia out and he didn’t give much of a damn about Hisami’s problems. ‘Where’s Naji?’
‘With Ulrike. He’s required to extend his stay in the country by KaPo. Ulrike, needless to say, is furious with me, so I’m rather glad of Naji’s company at home. Extraordinary boy. He’s been teaching her the Arab flute.’ He grunted. ‘Oh yes, Vuk sent this in for you.’ He proffered Vuk’s battered silver flask. Samson took it with his right hand and poured a little slivovitz into his mouth. ‘We have a lot to get through. Where do you want to start?’ Harland continued.
‘I’ve been sitting here wonder
ing how they traced us, but of course it was the phone – the Carabinieri gave the number to them and someone in Italian intelligence traced it. That’s how they found me in the car park in Naples.’ He looked out over the roofs of Narva, now lightly dusted with snow. ‘Dumb of me not to realise.’
Harland’s eyes twinkled agreement. In the cold winter light his skin was a ghostly white and he looked his age. ‘How’s your head?’ asked Samson.
‘It’s fine, just a small cut, and I wasn’t unconscious for long. It turned out that being set upon by your Italian mobster friends worked out very well for us. Because they disarmed Vuk and me and tied us up with the guards, we couldn’t possibly be accused of committing any crime.’
‘Except the small matter of the kidnap of Adam Crane?’
‘Doesn’t seem to be a priority to the police – they let Vuk go back to Serbia this morning. The intelligence services are keen to talk to Naji, as are MI6. Things have broken well for us, Samson.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, for one thing, no weapons found on any of us. And there was nothing to tie either of the vehicles to the kidnap and murder outside the bar.’
‘But the bodies on the bridge?’
‘There were none. The Russians collected their dead. And the Italians wiped the CCTV footage of the incident from the system, though they used it right up until they left. In fact, the infrared camera was the thing that saved you and Anastasia because they could see exactly what was happening – we all could. By that time, I’d come round.’
‘And where the hell did Naji come in?’
Harland shook his head in amazement. ‘He just walked in, bold as brass, looking for me, and they didn’t know quite what to make of this lad with an open laptop in his hands. Luckily, one of them had good English.’ Samson remembered the man in the car park who spoke for the Mafia boss Esposito. ‘Just at that moment, we saw you had been shot and a stocky fellow – Bukov – emerge from the shadows. The Italians had got their man and weren’t interested, but Naji explained that he was on the point of breaking into one of the bank accounts – all he needed was the small iPad and Crane’s palm print. They knew about the bank accounts so they were inclined to believe that this might be possible, especially as Naji showed them a lot of information on his laptop that seemed authentic. He bought your lives for the whole amount in one bank account – €2.2million.’ Harland waited for this to sink in. ‘It was extremely fortunate that we took him along for the ride.’
‘He’s some piece of work,’ said Samson.
‘A fast talker, very persuasive and very clever – a natural for our trade.’
‘And where are they now?’
‘The Italians? Oh, I should imagine they’ve taken their friend’s jacket back to Naples. Two men matching their description boarded a plane to Frankfurt early yesterday morning.’
Samson poured a little more of Vuk’s slivovitz into his mouth. ‘And Gil Leppo – what happened to him? Before my surgery Macy Harp told me he had lost a kidney but was expected to survive.’
‘He’ll wish he hadn’t. He’s the subject of several criminal investigations for fraud, money-laundering, wire fraud, conducting illegal arms deals from United States soil and sex with an underage girl and he’ll be arrested on his return to the United States. Macy filled me in this morning. He was working with Crane from early on. The reason he was in Estonia was because Hisami had found out enough about the abuse of a minor and the arms deals to blackmail him to beg for Anastasia’s life, which we now know was a hopeless endeavour. Crane had already given the order to kill her, as well as arranging the release of the video of Aysel Hisami.’
Harland took out a phone, poked at the screen and held it up so Samson could see. The still of the woman in fatigues who he’d seen in Hisami’s email was now animated and in the clip she glanced up to the ceiling. Samson found himself looking at the young Aysel Hisami, as he knew he would. She was probably no more than twenty and was very striking, with a fiercely handsome face. A caption crawled across the bottom of the footage: ‘Aysel Qasim – also known as Dr Aysel Hisami, sister of billionaire Denis Hisami, confesses to American investigators her part in the attack on a Turkish border post in south-eastern Turkey carried out in 1993.’
The interrogation that followed was carried out in Kurdish. Samson saw Aysel nod candidly at the two men as they asked questions. At the critical point, subtitles had been added. ‘Can you explain what part you took in the action?’ Onscreen, Aysel felt in her pockets for something. A man with his back to the camera leaned forward and offered her a cigarette. She lit it and blew the smoke towards the ceiling, then looked at the interrogator. ‘I drove one of the vehicles.’
‘And were you yourself involved in the attack?’
She shook her head and took another drag on the cigarette.
‘But you were armed. Did you use your weapon?’
‘When the army returned fire, yes.’
‘Did you kill anyone?’
She gestured with the cigarette. ‘Maybe – I cannot say for certain. This was a battle and several people were killed. There were many casualties on our side. I helped two of our wounded fighters escape.’
‘And this was an action with the PKK?’
She shrugged a yes.
‘So you confirm that at this period you were with the PKK, not the PUK?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And your brother, was he a member of the terror group?’
She paused. ‘You ask my brother about his life. You talk to Karim.’
‘We have,’ said the interrogator.
‘What he tells you is the truth. He always tells the truth.’ She stubbed out the cigarette half smoked. ‘Karim is too proud to lie.’
‘You confirm that you were a member of the PKK and took part in several actions, which resulted in the deaths of Turkish citizens?’
She shook her head several times and continued speaking for a few seconds longer, but there the sound and the subtitles ended. Samson said, ‘It does what it was meant to do – implicates Denis and makes things much harder for him.’ He paused for a beat. ‘And for Anastasia, too: it’s not going to be easy to run a humanitarian operation that’s named after a terrorist.’
‘Mandela was a terrorist at one time,’ said Harland. ‘And she only admits to firing back at Turkish troops. That’s hardly terrorism. If they’d got anything worse, they would have used it.’
‘But she was with the PKK – that matters. All those months I was looking for her, I had this sense that she’d been more closely involved in active combat than Denis ever told me. The risks she took on the front line three years ago wasn’t the behaviour of someone who’d never seen action.’ He stopped and looked out of the window, Syria and the knowledge of Aysel’s appalling end flickering in his mind. ‘Where’s Denis? Still in jail?’
‘Yes, and if he is released, he’s not going to be allowed to leave the United States until the whole business is settled.’
‘Have Anastasia and Denis talked?’
Harland shook his head. ‘He’s still banged up, no access to a phone.’ They were silent for a few moments. Samson closed his eyes. ‘You can’t go to sleep yet,’ said Harland. ‘There’s much more. There’s Peter Nyman …’
His eyes flashed open. ‘Jesus, yes! And Sonia bloody Fell said I shot him.’
‘She’s withdrawn that. Nyman was only grazed – a fuss about nothing. But you won’t have any more trouble from him for some time, I suspect. Nyman and Fell were acting completely outside their remit. They had told SIS nothing and achieved even less. He has seriously angered his superiors by failing to give them the big picture. It’s the stuff he’s paid to do, but he kept all of it to himself. Now, the Kaitsepolitseiamet – an Estonian government intelligence agency – has scooped SIS and they have to beg for the material, so that’s pissed them off royally.’
‘You gave it all to KaPo?’
‘Of course! My friends have cut us a lot of slack over
the last few days. They needed a reward. Naji has agreed to share everything he’s got on the groups, their finance and all the rest of it. As soon as you’re out of here, we’ll meet for the debrief. You should get some rest – you look bloody awful.’
He rose and did an odd thing with his shoulders and neck.
‘I’ll leave you Vuk’s flask to see you through the night.’ He stopped and laid a hand on his good arm. ‘You won, Paul, you won.’
‘Couldn’t have done it without you.’
‘It was you, Samson. You brought her back.’
Two days later at eight in the evening Samson arrived at the Harlands’ seaside cottage, with a police escort, because the authorities believed he might still be at risk. Anastasia had arrived in very similar circumstances the day before.
Harland was making soup – apparently, a speciality of his – at the stove. He lowered a small silver ladle from his lips, greeted Samson with a wry smile and explained that Anastasia was upstairs sorting through clothes she could borrow during her enforced stay in Estonia, occasioned by the security services, who wanted to interview her a second time, and the need for a new US passport. Earlier in the evening she had spoken to Hisami, who was now out of detention but was still confined to his apartment. It was around that time that Samson noticed he’d missed a call from Denis, followed by a text that thanked him and wished him a speedy recovery. Samson spared himself the embarrassment of returning the call and talking to Hisami in person. As long as Hisami paid what he owed Macy Harp and Zillah Dee and all Samson’s expenses, they were quits.
Naji had bobbed up from the table when he entered then seemed not to know quite what to do or say and returned to his computer. ‘How’re you doing, Naji?’ asked Samson when he was settled with a glass of wine.
‘Good,’ he said, and told him about some work that he had been asked to contribute to at the university – his first job as a research assistant. He was bubbling over with it.
Samson listened and said quietly, ‘Thank you, Naji.’