Dead Girl Walking (31 page)

When I opened my eyes again I felt suddenly conscious of my surroundings, afraid of who might have been looking on. A scan of the bar showed only women, which was when I realised what this place was, and what Heike had meant when she said the guys weren’t going to be a problem.

I shed my fears and gave in to a longer kiss, losing myself in Heike’s touch, reassured there were no unwelcome eyes upon us here. She had taken us to a place where we couldn’t be more private, where we couldn’t be more safe.

And where, it turned out, we couldn’t be more wrong.

At around two-thirty in the afternoon, Parlabane was buzzed into the building across from the hotel, and made his way up the stairs to the Bad Candy Berlin office. He carried a cardboard eggbox-style tray bearing four coffees, a box of twelve mini-doughnuts and his very own man-bag. He was all tricked out for subterfuge.

Mairi had chosen the bag, and had picked out the rest of his outfit too. He didn’t merely need different clothes from the ones Boris had previously seen him in, but an altogether different look. The alacrity with which she had seized upon this task on Kurfürstendamm suggested that she considered such a transformation to be a pressing need even without the requirement for disguise.

‘There’s no way he’s going to recognise you now that you look like a person who’s been shopping in the twenty-first century,’ she told him.

He had to admit that the clothes she had chosen looked a lot better on him than his usual wardrobe, but he couldn’t shake a childhood echo of being dressed by his mother for a family occasion.

He reached the half-landing just short of his destination and took a moment to get his game face on. He was on edge, but in a way he liked. A way he had missed.

‘Final check before going in,’ he said quietly.

‘Fine this end. Are you getting me okay?’

‘Loud and clear.’

Mairi’s voice was a little shaky. It was a timely reminder that he had somebody riding shotgun on this venture, someone who wasn’t going to be getting off on the adrenaline buzz. They said the thrill for the gambler was not what he might win, but what he might lose. Mairi’s stake in this was different, and he didn’t want her to be watching through her fingers.

She was positioned on the roof where he had perched yesterday, monitoring the office through his field glasses. She had eyes on Boris, and it was her task to give Parlabane a running commentary of all that was happening outside his own line of sight.

For the first time in his life he was grateful to all those twats who had Bluetooth earpieces clamped to their lugs while going about their daily business, such as queuing at the bank or pushing a trolley round Tesco. It made him look less suspicious to have one attached right then, though he had refrained from sharing his belief that the duds Mairi had chosen also lent themselves to the authenticity of his new image as the type of guy who would go around wearing such a device.

A woman met him at the front door. She was tall, smiling and smartly turned out: definitely more from the boardroom and convention centre side of Bad Candy than the box-humping and unblocking a tour-bus toilet end of the business.

‘I’m Helena Koenig, we spoke on the phone.’

Parlabane was working on the principle that Boris and his associates’ clandestine enterprise was like a parasitic organism attached to Bad Candy, and that any such parasite was inextricably reliant upon its host. Mairi had called up her friend Charlene, who worked for Altar State’s record label, and got her to contact Bad Candy’s publicity department, telling them that there was a journalist writing a major piece on how a tour is put together, top to bottom.

Parlabane knew that Bad Candy’s corporate PR people would be on the blower to the Berlin bureau immediately, instructing them to extend all courtesy regardless of the short notice, and so it had proved. Helena Koenig had phoned him within an hour of Mairi’s initial call to Charlene, saying he should feel free to drop by. Parlabane said he’d be there as soon as he finished up the interview he was working on right then, which was his cover for the fact that he wasn’t going to make a move until they verified that Boris had shown up for work.

Parlabane put down his cardboard tray on the reception desk so that he could shake the hand Helena was politely extending.

‘Alec Forman,’ he said.

‘Lots of coffee,’ she observed.

‘Yeah, I find that if you’re interrupting people’s work, they’re more forgiving if you at least buy them a latte. You want one?’

‘No, I just had lunch, but I’ll see who else might like one and I’ll introduce you to everybody.’

‘Actually, before you do that, do you mind giving me your Wi-Fi password?’ He showed her the iPad that was sitting snugly inside his man-bag, another of this morning’s Ku’damm purchases. ‘I have some files I need to send.’

‘Oh, no problem.’

Helena went behind the desk and handed him a laminated card with the code on it. He was keying it into the iPad when he heard Mairi’s voice in his ear.

‘He’s on the move.’

A moment later, Boris emerged from his office off the hall.

Helena spoke to him in German as he approached. He gave Parlabane a cursory glance, not flickering a hint of recognition, which was gratifying. Less so was the fact that he grumbled something in reply to Helena and headed for the door, his iPad-bearing satchel slung over his shoulder.

Shit.

At least she hadn’t offered him a coffee. It had been Parlabane’s intention to have only one left by the time he introduced himself to Boris, one he would doctor to give a little more kick than just caffeine.

‘Who was that?’ Parlabane asked.

‘That’s Bodo Hoefner. He is in charge of logistical support. Bodo is the one who guarantees the show stays on the road by making sure our personnel always have whatever they need.’

No kidding.

‘He’s an ex-cop, so he’s just the man to keep everybody in line,’ she added with a chuckle.

Interesting.

‘He has been very helpful in our expansion into eastern territories, as he has connections throughout the Balkans and Black Sea countries. He’ll be able to tell you more about it himself: he’s popped out for a cigarette.’

Helena introduced Parlabane to the desk jockeys, who dismayingly claimed all of the drinks and proceeded to fall upon the mini-doughnuts until the box was empty. Parlabane then sat and listened with one ear as they discussed their operations. With his other he was taking in Mairi’s progress report on their target, whom it turned out had gone to the bakery for a coffee and a sandwich to enjoy with his fag.

Bugger. Talk about no battle plan surviving first contact with the enemy: ten minutes in and it was already falling apart. He still had three more mini-doughnuts secreted away in his man-bag, coated in an extra-special frosting, but Bodo was tucking into a late lunch downstairs.

‘He’s on his way back up,’ Mairi warned. This gave Parlabane sufficient notice to wrap up his present discussion, apparently just in time for his next subject to come walking in the door.

A few minutes later (and upon Helena’s insistence, no doubt enforced by authority from further up the corporate chain) Parlabane was sitting four feet from Bodo Hoefner, the man who had been hunting him for days. He felt a tingle of fear buzzing like an old fluorescent tube somewhere inside him. On a rooftop across the street Mairi was looking on in terrified silence.

Bodo hadn’t seen him close up, as far as he knew, and was looking for a scruffily dressed man with blond/grey hair and no glasses. He was also, Parlabane assumed, looking for someone Scottish. Since walking into the office Parlabane had been conversing in his best generic, non-regional English tones, but the extent to which this was part of his disguise depended on how easy it was for a non-native speaker to notice the difference. Bodo had actually only heard Parlabane speak briefly on the phone two nights ago, though everything else he knew would have identified him as Scottish: the Savage Earth Heart connection, the Islay sighting and whatever that sleazeball Jan had told him.

Bodo gave no indication of recognising him. He barely looked at him, in fact, keen to discharge whatever duty he had agreed with Helena and then discharge this inconvenience from his office as soon as possible.

Parlabane had transferred the mini-doughnuts from his bag to the box and placed it on the edge of Bodo’s desk. It sat with the lid hinged back towards Parlabane so that it was obvious they were being offered to his host. They twinkled invitingly, sugar mixed with the special extra frosting he had sprinkled on. The bastard proceeded to give them a damn good ignoring.

He talked about Bad Candy’s logistics operations in impressive English, telling Parlabane little he couldn’t have found on the company’s website or a press release. Bodo knew he couldn’t be unhelpful, but he also knew he ought not to be interesting or memorable: he did not want to be the story here. He prattled on, speaking without saying anything specific to himself, and all the time the only thing going through Parlabane’s mind was, Just eat a fucking doughnut you monkfish-looking cunt.

Eventually it was clear that Bodo had decided time was up. He placed his hands together and asked if there was anything else, in a tone that suggested they both knew his visitor would be seriously pushing it if he said yes.

As he stood up Parlabane stole a glance at the satchel, tucked under the desk next to Bodo’s right foot. It looked like it might be as close as he was going to get.

He thanked Bodo for his courtesy, their eyes meeting close up for the first time. There was a flicker there now, he was sure, and he felt the fluorescent tube start to thrum, warming up the flight reflex. The moment passed, however, and Parlabane walked out, leaving the doughnuts on the desk next to his digital voice recorder, the latter giving him a pretext to return once more before he finally left Bad Candy.

Mairi spoke as he stepped back into the corridor. Her voice was breathy and tremulous.

‘I’ve got good news and bad news.’

‘Fire away,’ he replied quietly.

‘The good news is he just scarfed two doughnuts in one gulp. The bad news is that he made a phone call the second you left the room.’

‘Mobile or landline?’

‘Mobile.’

‘Shit.’

‘I’m worried he made you. You should get out of there.’

‘I only need a little more time. The clock is ticking on him now.’

‘It might be ticking on you too.’

Helena strode along from the main office, asking if he’d got everything he needed.

‘Not quite,’ he answered.

Parlabane asked if he could take some pictures of the place and the staff for the article. He needed a plausible excuse to hang around, and given that these people must have witnessed a photographer at work before, they would surely understand that time had just entered a new realm of elasticity.

He was taking roughly his twenty-fifth ‘pretend I’m not here’ shot of everyone getting on with their work when Mairi gave him the news he’d been waiting for.

‘He just shot up from his desk and sprinted for the door.’

Finally.

‘Would you excuse me,’ he said to Helena. ‘I realise I’ve left my digital recorder in the other office. I’ll only be a moment.’

Parlabane hurried along the corridor, the urgency of his pace hopefully conveying merely his keenness to retrieve his device. Somewhere ahead of him he heard a door bang as a body thundered through. It was the sound of Bodo being assailed by a need to urinate like he’d drunk ten pints of Pilsner and then walked past a waterfall on a cold winter’s night. He’d be in there a minute at least, though Parlabane couldn’t count on wash time. Bodo might not be the kind of guy who worried too much about germs.

Mairi had been less than impressed when he outlined his strategy.

‘Given all the rumours and the accusations about you, I was kind of expecting that your plan for sneaking into his office and stealing his iPad would be a bit more ingenious than simply waiting for the guy to go to the toilet.’

Admittedly it didn’t sound very impressive when she put it that way, but there was a little more to it than her description allowed. For one thing, he had to make sure that Bodo
went
to the toilet, and that Parlabane was free to make his move when that happened. This was not something he could leave to chance during the brief window he had: the guy could be in the office all afternoon and not hit the loo. But an even greater consideration was the possibility that Bodo was so protective of his iPad that he didn’t leave it even to go for a slash, perhaps slinging his satchel over his shoulder and taking it with him every time.

Thus Parlabane had to engineer in Bodo a need to pee so sudden and severe that it would cast all other considerations aside; an urgency that could let nothing slow his path to a urinal in the brief few seconds he had left before he knew he would be pissing like a horse inside his trousers.

He had remembered Sarah telling him about an experiment she did as a medical undergraduate. Everyone in the group was given an identical white pill: one third were placebos, one third were a mild diuretic and one third were furosemide. They all had to pee into bottles, and at the end of the class they were to measure their urine output. Sarah knew very quickly that she’d been given the furosemide, as its effect on healthy kidneys was dramatic to the point of terrifying.

Once Bodo ate those doughnuts it was only a matter of time before he had to go, and with the seal broken he’d be going pretty regularly for the rest of the afternoon.

Parlabane slipped into Bodo’s office and crouched behind the desk, relieved to note that the satchel was still where he’d last seen it. He slid out Bodo’s iPad and removed it from its smart-case, swiftly replacing it with the iPad he’d bought that morning. He popped his prize inside the man-bag and headed for the door, pausing briefly to pick up his digital recorder and to give Mairi a big thumbs-up through the window.

‘That, Miss Lafferty,’ he said, ‘was international-level piss-ripping.’

The tone of Mairi’s response didn’t suggest she was quite sharing his elation.