(2013) Collateral Damage (26 page)
The terrorist raised the revolver in his outstretched right hand
and aimed it at his chest. Fouche-Larimand took a deep breath. Koller lowered the
pistol. 'No,' he said.
'Please,'
gasped
the dying man, 'a soldier's
death. I'm a Catholic, I can't-'
'I'm more of a soldier than you,' said Koller tonelessly.
With surprising speed Fouche-Larimand dived forward, unsheathed
the sword stick and lunged at the terrorist - a picador goading the bull.
It was still a pathetic
attempt. Koller turned sideways and the blade nicked the flesh on his right hip.
He brought the gun up and used the barrel to knock the sword-stick out of the old
man's feeble grip so that it
fell
the other side of the
bed. Again he aimed the pistol at the Frenchman's chest and again Fouche-Larimand
tensed himself for death.
They remained frozen in this tableau for a few seconds before
Koller returned the pistol to the waistband of his trousers.
'No,' he said. 'Be an old soldier. Just fade away.'
'Swine,' shuddered the old man, 'fucking swine.'
But when Koller got to the door Fouche-Larimand spoke to him
again. 'Hans,' he said quietly, 'Siegfried didn't die like that. He was very brave.'
'I know,' said the terrorist.
Koller was getting drunk. He had toured half a dozen bars in
the narrow streets around Constitution Square until he found one dark enough and
without the endless, lilting bouzouki stomp on its music system to mock his terrible
despair. He drank brandy, staring straight ahead of him at a firing squad of bottles,
in a way that quickly drove the barman back to his newspaper and made him surface
only when some telepathy established between them signalled a refill.
He felt dirty, used. It was
,
he realised,
an exquisite act of revenge.
Truly, the triumph of the will.
He drank to exorcize the djinn Fouche-Larimand had raised, but the monster's triumphant,
maniacal drumming would not leave his head. Old songs from an old revolution, subliminally
learned as a child, came back with the remorseless tramp of phantom regiments and
a man with a limp used his cane on a boy because he had yawned at a saga of tribal
valour.
In the end, he abandoned alcohol, and by early evening was pacing
the smart streets of Kolanaki, occasionally pausing to study his reflection in the
windows of boutiques where chic Athenians with hennaed hair pretended they were
in Paris. He didn't see them. He saw only the defeat tattooed on his drink slackened
face. 'I have lost,' he said aloud. 'I have lost.'
He returned to his room at the Grande Bretagne and lay on the
bed, the hip wound from the sword-stick bleeding and beginning to stain his clothes,
his mind still racing from what he had learned. He forced himself to get up, pick
up the bedside telephone and place a call to 'Rebecca' in Cyprus. When it came through
he condensed what he had heard to a few short, unemotional sentences as if he was
talking about somebody else.
As usual she did not sound the least bit surprised or even interested.
He asked for instructions and she said she would call back. Yet the brief contact
calmed him and after a while he began to doze, dreaming first of childhood and then
of 'Rebecca', whom he had never met. His hand rested on the gun under his pillow.
Shane.
The telephone bell brought him reluctantly into that false dawn
that is the price of a drunken siesta. In his dream Rebecca had been warm and comforting,
but he couldn't remember her face and that made him feel uneasy. The voice on the
telephone belonged to the real Rebecca: cold, impersonal, code-name Rebecca - an
enigma. She took just thirty seconds to deliver his orders. He was to go to Cyprus
as soon as possible. When he put the receiver down he said to himself, 'No, she
is ugly and you will play the stiff-necked Kraut and call her Fraulein. Comrade
Fraulein.'
He booked himself onto the next morning's flight to Larnaca,
the Greek Cypriot airport. Before he packed he examined again the old revolver the
Armenian in the safe-house had given him. Normally he never risked passing through
airport security checks with a gun - not even in his hold luggage. Nor did he regard
Cyprus as a high-risk area. After all, he was going to be among friends. Now he
was reluctant to part with the clumsy weapon until he had another one at hand. Fouche-Larimand's
revelations had changed the rules. He stripped the weapon down as far as it would
go, removing the cylinder and barrel, unscrewing the butt-plates. He had a very
shallow false bottom in his suitcase which accommodated everything except the cylinder
with its bullets - it had been designed to take a flat automatic. He shrugged and
thrust it inside a wiled pair of socks which he placed in the bottom of the case.
At the airport he bought a copy of the English-language Athens
News. There was a story on the front page about FoucheLarimand, the former OAS
man wanted for questioning about a murder in Paris. He was dead. He had impaled
himself on his sword-stick. The terrorist wondered if it had been painful enough.
Koller, a brand new Pentax camera slung over his right shoulder,
was waiting in line at the green sign-posted 'Nothing to Declare' section in the
Customs Hall at Larnaca airport. There was a queue, because almost all the Greek
Cypriots coming home for the Orthodox Easter had decided that they preferred to
enter through this gate - with the result that most people were being challenged.
He watched them go through the belongings of a granny in black,
one of a coven who looked as if they had all been hatched from the same bow-legged
mould. She had three battered suitcases and a huge polythene bag stuffed with clothes
loaded on to one of the self-service luggage carts. They went through each case,
pulling out bottles of fat Greek olives and paper-wrapped smelly cheeses, running
their fingers through her folded underwear as if they suspected she might be running
heroin. Behind the German another of her ilk, perhaps to demonstrate her general
disapproval of mankind, was busy ramming her luggage chariot into the small of his
back. The terrorist turned and scowled at her, but she pretended not to notice.
Koller was trying to gauge his chances of rushing out through
the narrow door beyond the Customs men if the revolver's cylinder was discovered
in his socks. He concluded they were bad.
Opposite the door, in the departure lounge,
stood a young policeman cradling a Kalashnikov.
'Tourist?' asked the Customs man when his turn came. His eyes
were on Koller's camera - as he hoped they would be.
'Yes. Just for a few days. I bought this camera in the duty-free
shop at Athens. Do I have to pay duty on it here?' The German sounded slightly nervous,
anxious to please.
'Not if you take it with you when you go,' said the Customs man.
He was smiling and good-natured. It was the damn women you had to watch with perfume
for their granddaughters.
'Of course.'
'Anything else to declare?'
'Only cigarettes and a bottle of cognac.'
He chalked a mark on to the German's case. 'Have a nice stay
in Cyprus.'
'Thank you.'
It had been agreed that he would be met. He felt in the shoulder-bag
he carried as hand luggage for the copy of the Athens News, folded it in half and
placed it in his left jacket pocket so that most of the cover showed. He put his
case down and stood like this at the main entrance to the small, prefabricated terminal
building, politely fending off gentle and dignified soliciting for hire-cars and
taxis.
'Excuse me, but were you on the Athens or the London flight?'
The voice was much softer than it sounded on the telephone.
'Rebecca?'
'Benjamin?'
She was thought Koller, with all a blond man's superficial longing
for olive-skinned women, quite extraordinarily beautiful. About thirty, he guessed,
a little over five feet with hardly an ounce of spare flesh, her black hair pulled
back in a simple ponytail, and wearing a tightly cut cream-coloured safari jacket
over faded blue jeans. She led him to her car, an old red MGB with the hood down
although, by eastern Mediterranean standards, it was not a particularly warm day.
'I saw you were getting the sharp end of the Lolibs,' she said as she fiddled with
the ignition, and put on dark glasses.
'Lolibs?'
'Little-old-ladies-in-black.
That's
what the English here call them. The British still have military bases here.' She
spoke good American English, not very different from his own.
'Yes,' he grinned.
'Very fierce.
Commando-trained.
One of them was trying to run me over with
her chariot.' 'I know. I was watching.'
After that the slip-stream around the open
top made conversation difficult.
They sped along the mainly flat roads towards
Nicosia in silence, passing below the ridge where a red Turkish flag fluttering
cheekily from an Orthodox church marked the Moslems' southernmost penetration of
the divided island.
The woman drove well, although a little too fast, nervously biting
her bottom lip as she accelerated out of bends. The island was wearing its spring
greenery, the land not yet baked to the biscuit colour of its high-summer metamorphosis
from Southern European to Middle Eastern. 'A nice place for a holiday,' thought
Koller, who had never been here before. He had been thinking a lot about resting
lately. Suddenly he was very tired. A killer tired of killing. The flesh under the
stickingplaster on the hip wound began to itch and he absent-mindedly scratched
it. He looked at the woman, but under her dark glasses she appeared to keep her
eyes glued resolutely to the road as if she wanted to discourage the slightest intimacy.
He wondered what she made of his story and whether she would discuss it with him.
He badly wanted to talk it over with someone before the meeting with their boss.
'That's your room,' she said. Her flat was in one of the new
nondescript concrete blocks that had mushroomed around the Greek Cypriot periphery
of the old walled city since the Turkish invasion. From the small balcony at the
front the distant peaks of the Troodos range were almost dissolved in the day's
dusthaze; from the back kitchen window the green foothills of the Kyrenia mountains,
the other garden wall of the central plain, were almost obscured by half-constructed
tower blocks and the giant, yellow painted cranes that nurtured them.
It was a small room, a child's room.
A single
bed, a chest-ofdrawers with a wall mirror over it, a fitted wardrobe.
It
was plain and impersonal - and for reasons he couldn't fathom Koller felt oddly
disappointed, although it was no plainer than a hundred hotel or safe-house rooms
he had slept in these last ten years. On the plane he had told himself he was coming
home.
He put the camera on the chest-of-drawers and his bags down by
the wardrobe. The woman was standing by the door. 'If you're hungry,' she said,
'there's food in the fridge. I've got to go out for an hour.'
He didn't want her to go. He picked up the camera and gave it
to her. 'Present,' he said. 'I don't know how to shoot one of these.'
She held it in both hands, hardly looking at it. 'Have you got
a gun?'
'No. You know the rules. Never go through an airport with one
unless it's really necessary. Do you have one for me?'
'No. Not here.'
He was annoyed about that, but he didn't say anything. Instead
he said: 'When are they coming?'
'Tonight.
They're on the evening flight
from Beirut. They should be here by eight o'clock.'
'What do they think about what happened in Europe?
The Charlemagne Circle?'
'I don't know. We keep our messages brief.' They had told her
almost everything, subtracted a little and added one lie. They had told her Koller
was a traitor.
'Why are you going out?'
'To make a call.
Tell them you're here.
We always use hotels or a call-box for outgoing calls. Then they can't be traced
back to this apartment. We think the Cypriots might tap calls to certain Beirut
numbers.'
'I see. Maybe when you come back we can go out to lunch?'
'Yes.
Why not.'
'Good.'
She gave him the camera back. 'You had better give this to someone
else. I can't shoot one either.'
'You could learn.'
'I prefer to shoot other things.'
He took it off her. 'Maybe I'll learn,' he said. 'It could be
a new career.'
'You want a new career?'
'I'm worried about my pension.'
When she had gone he put his things away and assembled the old
revolver. It was a .45 made in France about the time of Verdun; its blueing was
scratched and one of the butt-plates was chipped. He examined the bullets that went
with it. The lead in one of them felt loose in the cartridge. He twisted it and
it came out. He looked inside the cartridge. Apart from a few grains of gunpowder
at the bottom, like tiny balls of caviar, the rest had been emptied. He felt the
other bullets. They seemed all right. One dud might be excusable.
From the balcony he could see the rural frontier where city concrete
gave way to agriculture. No more than four hundred yards away there were wheat fields
and avenues of dusty grey olive trees. He left the apartment with the revolver in
the shoulder-bag and walked towards the olives. The city noise was still all around
him: traffic; building labourers hammering and calling to each other from the rising
tower blocks; a pneumatic drill being played on the collective nerve like a machine-gun
in three-second bursts.
Koller found a spot under an olive tree at the edge of one of
the wheat fields that seemed quiet enough. It was evidently favoured by courting
couples because, nearby; a den of green stalks had been crushed flat. He put his
hand in the bag, cocked the revolver, and - still in the bag in the hope that it
would help muffle the shot - aimed it towards the ground. He waited until the pneumatic
drill started up again before he pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a dull
click as it did the next five times. He got up and walked quickly back to the apartment.
