Last Line (16 page)

Anzhel knocked his hand away. “Nice,” he said. “You look it too. The thug who thinks he can’t be seen behind the pillar over there is my tail. I finally caught up with Dmitri Sergeyev. He was high up in Lukas Oriel’s chain of command. Now he’s dealing crack in the Zemel immigrant ghetto in Kennington.” Anzhel smiled. “He seemed quite pleased to see me.”

“An old soldier’s reunion. How touching,” John said, with every appearance of sincerity. “How does that help us?”

“He’s expecting a massive delivery tonight. Big enough to pull in Zemel illegals from all over London and the poor street scum they use as their runners. They all knew Oriel. He’ll be a major topic of discussion—in Zemel-dialect Russian, of course. Don’t worry, John. I’m sure Mikey will translate for you. Be in the Black Bear pub at seven tonight. Someone will come and get you.”

He was gone. Michael watched him merge his height and his vibrant beauty seamlessly into the crowd on the South Bank esplanade and disappear. Glancing to one side, he saw that John was watching too. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” John said. They both enjoyed the spectacle of the thug who’d been sent to tail Anzhel darting frantically after him. “He’s good.”

Michael nodded. Personal differences aside, they both could appreciate the sight of a fellow professional at work. And, other than a little verbal sparring, Anzhel hadn’t given John much obvious cause for complaint over the last few days. Hadn’t flaunted his intimacy with Michael—had even kept undemonstrative distance when they had been alone together. If Anzhel had had a point he had wished to make to John, Michael supposed he had already done so with unforgettable force. “You okay with this setup?” Michael asked awkwardly, turning back toward the river, resuming his role of a man with nothing to do and all day to do it in.

John followed his movement. They were elbow to elbow on the rail again. The medieval dolphin was still grinning. “Yeah, fine. Why not?”

“It’ll be dangerous. Oriel’s operatives were ruthless back then. I don’t suppose they’ve improved morally since.”

“Well, it’s two birds with one stone, isn’t it? We’ll get a lead on Oriel tonight, then go back and bust the drug ring some other time.”

“Yeah. After we’ve assisted them by acting as errand boys for a week.”

“At least we’ll get paid.”

Michael nodded. “Pity it all goes into Webb’s Christmas charity box, but yeah. Our cover will probably stretch to a B and B tonight, if it’s cash in hand. You can get cleaned up.”

“You know, I’m not all that bothered.” John pulled off his black wool hat long enough to scratch at tangled curls. He yawned. “Life seems simpler like this sometimes.”

Michael looked at him in alarm. John never minded getting dirty in the course of an op, but he would wash like a cat when conditions improved. The sun struck ripples of light off the surface of the water. In their shifting, scalloping patterns, Michael saw that his partner was ashen with weariness, his eyes hollow. Had he even lost some weight in the last three days?

In another world, a world where Michael hadn’t placed their partnership on a knife’s edge, he would have put an arm around him, and to hell with passing tourists who wanted to stare at their first gay English tramp. He would have asked him if he was all right. But even that question—the ordinary commerce of their shared days—seemed wrong now, as if he’d sacrificed the right. Sorrow, keen as a spear, passed through him.

What could he do? Anzhel possessed him, body and soul. They had run like wolves together, touched the same pitch, and been forever tarred. If Michael wanted that darkness contained, he had better make sure Anzhel’s attentions were focused solely on him. He looked across the river, blindly taking in the familiar skyline: the immortal elegance of St Paul’s, as outrageous in its day as the St. Mary Axe tower—the Gherkin—which had controversially risen to the east of it. His elbow brushed John’s, and they waited in the floating river light like strangers.

* * *

Michael had to admit, there was more of a party atmosphere in the warehouse than when the English equivalent of all these drug lords and their sidekicks got together. No one had gone so far as to lay on a buffet, but unmarked bottles had appeared and were getting passed around among the cold-eyed, watchful men. If Michael closed his eyes, the scent of it would put him back into a frosty forest night. Pine resin, breath rising visibly on the air, the stolen contents of someone’s backwoods still going from hand to hand…

He kept his eyes open. This place had been well chosen. Semiderelict but not so abandoned that the scattered arrival of cars in the surrounding alleys would draw attention. Anzhel’s contact had led them down from the Bear to the dockside until they were in sight of the river—the same Thames whose progress they had watched that afternoon. But this stretch of it, a mile to the east, was a different world, smelling of darkness, moss, and decay, not expensive perfume trailed by tourists leaving the Festival Hall. They had been inconspicuous. Plenty of men just like them shuffling about the alleyways. Michael had found himself wondering, as he often did, where the hell these people went when each successive tide of docklands regeneration swept through their former refuge. A few of them found jobs with entrepreneurs like Dmitri Sergeyev.

Only one end of the warehouse was lit up, flickering neon casting a surreal glow over the crates on which Dmitri was conducting his business. Packet after plastic-wrapped packet of what looked like pure Afghani heroin appeared on the makeshift table, was weighed, tasted for purity by each customer’s hollow-eyed connoisseur, and paid for in inch-thick wads of cash. Michael dared a glance at his partner. Good as John was undercover, the sight of a deal like this going down under his nose would normally affect him like a shark encountering a fat baby seal.

It didn’t seem to bother him tonight. He leaned just outside the circle of light, his back to the wall, one foot hitched up. The other runners were good cover for him, just as they were for Michael, waiting in the shadows opposite. His eyes were downcast, his whole air passive. His odd beauty was eclipsed. No one would have looked at him twice.

Not so Anzhel. He was made to shine by unnatural light. Leaning almost over Dmitri’s shoulder, he laughed and gibed fearlessly at the other dealers, his flashy suit and jewels only striking sparks off him. Listening, Michael reflected that the Zemel SS must have cut him a good deal in return for his information. Some of the petty gang lords here tonight knew him but only as a confederate of Oriel’s, a refugee like them. Oriel had by now achieved near-legendary status among them. A vanished hero, a symbol of the motherland left far behind.

Anzhel was playing on that expertly. He was bloody good. Michael could see that. For a while he forgot the razor wire tangle that bound them and detachedly watched him at work. Funded by Last Line to be the wealthiest of the assembled dealers, his place at the table was secure, even the normally irascible Dmitri tolerating his proximity and smiling at his jokes. He didn’t ask questions—hinted, rather, that he had half the answers already. Oriel might have confided in Anzhel alone where he intended to go if he had to flee to the West. Anzhel threw out theories and locations casually. Oriel would be a rich prize to whoever did track him down. He had resources and power beyond imagination.

Michael watched and knew that Anzhel was subtly watching too, the changes in one inconspicuous face at the end of the table: a little, ferret-eyed man, dried up by who knew what dissipations. Boredom on his hardened features changed to disbelief and then disgust, and when Anzhel next fell silent—as if giving him his cue—he leaned forward. “You talk horseshit, Mattvei,” he grated in a gutter-level Zemel even Michael was pushed to understand. “You always were a boastful fool. Oriel has nothing. He’s hiding like a rat in a church in Hounslow, only alive because some sap of a priest took him in—”

“Silence!” Dmitri Sergeyev’s big fist banged down on the crates, making the drugs and the piles of bank notes bounce. The other dealers looked likewise outraged—Anzhel most of all, Michael noted with bitter amusement. He had allowed a painful flush to darken his fine skin. There were actually tears in his eyes. “Who says these things of Oriel says them of all of us,” Dmitri snarled, and the little dark man shrank back into the shadows. “Your words will be stones in your pockets, Yuri.”

“It is… It is only what I hear,
gospodin
.”

“You hear lies of envy and spite,” Anzhel said hoarsely. He was bolt upright beside Sergeyev. He was a hell of an actor, Michael thought, watching how the stone-faced villain next to him gave a fervent, respectful nod and reached to clasp his shoulder.

A tiny movement in the darkness opposite. Michael glanced across to John and forgot about Anzhel completely. He repressed his reaction as thoroughly, as instantly, as John had done, but it didn’t change the fact that they were both quite suddenly screwed nine ways to hell. Leaning on the wall beside his partner, whispering in his ear, was a snitch they had used two years before in a drugs op. Used, paid well, then left to take the fall. The little bastard had done time.

Not enough. And John’s time was up. Michael saw it in the resignation with which he got to his feet. Heart heaving, Michael eased back. They’d been frisked on their way in here. No shoulder holster and no way he could get to the weapon strapped just inside his calf without alerting the entire room. But if it came to that, so be it. Better to pick the little fucker off right now and pass it off as a spat between low-level runners than have him expose John and let the whole gang get the drop on them. All attention was still on Anzhel and Dmitri. Carefully, holding his breath, Michael began his move.

But the snitch had a game of his own. He made a tiny gesture at John.
Move. That way
. The shadows swallowed them, and they were gone.

No way Michael could cross the neon-lit space to follow them. Instead he retreated, holding out a hand behind him till he felt a concrete block wall. The door they’d been brought in through had creaked—no good, though it was the nearest one on this side of the warehouse. Silently, not taking his eyes off the group round Dmitri, he felt his way in the other direction. Each step took him deeper into the dark. When the dealers and the crates were a distant tableau, lit up by the neon like some appalling Russian gang lord’s
Last Supper
, he turned and just as silently ran.

He found himself in a corridor, a narrow tunnel leading to disused workshops. The door at the end of it was padlocked and chained. Spinning round, Michael surveyed the rooms that opened off the corridor. Most were pitch black, but one must have connected to the outside world. There was a hatch at shoulder height, maybe for forklift deliveries. The gap was narrow and covered now with chicken wire, but it would do.

He made short work of the wire, clipping it with the cutters on the handyman’s Swiss Army knife John had bought him the Christmas before, smilingly informing him that a part-time bumpkin like Michael was bound to need to take stones from horses’ hooves at some point. Trying not to think about the gift or the giver, he tore the wire back and got a handhold. An easy scramble, though John would have made a more graceful job of it, and then he was poised in the hatchway, unable to tell from the uneasy remains of sunset light beyond it how deep a drop lay on the other side.

Well, no help for that. He swung out and let himself fall—just far enough to grab and lose a breath before his feet hit concrete. Instinctively he let the muscles of his thighs absorb the impact, powering down into a crouch, steadying himself with one hand. He took a moment to let his eyes adjust. He was in a narrow access way between one warehouse and the next, and neither the glow from the western sky nor the faint orange flicker of the single streetlight he could see had made it this far. He listened. Nothing but London’s ceaseless traffic purr and the distant slap of water on the wharfside piers. Of course the snitch—Michael struggled for a name and plucked
Eddie
from his mind,
Eddie Harvey
—might not have brought John outside; might have dealt with him—a hand across the mouth, a swift-moving blade—in a private corner of the warehouse.

John could defend himself, of course. But straightening up, beginning to make his way along the narrow defile, Michael fought a cold conviction that he wouldn’t bother. He prayed that Eddie had some business to transact. A deal to cut, maybe—a slice of whatever Anzhel would buy and give him to trade on in return for his intact cover. Or just a chance to play with him, to scare and humiliate the copper who had helped put him away.

Yes. Voices
. Michael swore silently as he saw that the alleyway terminated five yards ahead of him in a sheer brick wall. Beyond it he could hear Eddie Harvey’s hectoring tones. Occasional replies from John too, though if Eddie had brought him out here to be frightened, that wasn’t working out. John sounded more bored than anything. Relief swept through Michael, pins and needles in a limb he’d unconsciously cramped. He glanced around him. No way out of here except back the way he’d come, unless…

A rusted metal drainpipe, twenty feet or so up the side of the warehouse next door. The worst that could happen to him was that he fell and broke his neck, a matter of indifference to him right now. He shed his heavy coat, gave the pipe one diagnostic tug, and began to climb. At the top was a flat roof. Hoisting himself noiselessly onto it, he ducked low. From here he could see everything he needed to.

For all the good it did him. Harvey was holding John at gunpoint at the end of the alley on the wall’s far side. Michael slipped his lightweight Colt from the leg holster, but he knew he didn’t have a shot. No chance of getting one either, unless John shifted, somehow understood that he was there, and moved through 180 degrees out of the line of fire.

Michael thought about that. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it? If he were to let the name form in his mind—
John
, or better still
Griff
—and simply and unquestioningly push it out toward him… Wouldn’t be the first time John had heard. Their boss had seen the trick in action once and had shaken his head at them, looking as if he might have liked to have been reaching for a crucifix. Michael drew a breath to calm himself and tried.