NO KISS FOR THE DEVIL (Gavin & Palmer 5) (21 page)

‘Yes. So?’
Riley felt her gut react. If Richard or his ‘principals’ knew she had been to
see the Egyptian-born entrepreneur, there was only one way they could have
found out. She had been followed.

Pechov.

At the
admission, Varley’s expression underwent a change. A flicker of disappointment
crossed his face. ‘That’s unfortunate. It would have been better if you hadn’t
done that.’

‘Why? I told
you when we first met that I do my own research. And speaking to the subject of
a profile piece comes pretty high on the list, don’t you think? No ethical
journalist takes someone else’s notes as gospel – and certainly not with a man
like him. What’s the problem? More importantly, how do these ‘principals’ of
yours know I’ve seen him?’

Varley shifted
in his chair. ‘It came to their notice. How is not important.’

‘It is to me.
Were they watching him? Were you?’ She desperately wanted to ask him if they
had been keeping her under observation, but it might be best not to let them
think she harboured suspicions in that area. If he thought she was merely a
working reporter trying to hang on to an assignment, he might say more than
he’d intended.

He ignored the
question. ‘By going to see him, and possibly alerting him to the fact that a
story is circulating, you’ve made the whole project more…difficult, don’t you
see?’

Riley wasn’t
sure exactly what he meant, but opted to play dumb. ‘But I haven’t submitted my
copy yet. How do you know what line I’m going to take? If it’s his Batnev bid
you’re worried about, it’s already public knowledge. Al-Bashir is hardly a
wallflower when it comes to his business intentions. The man’s desperate for
recognition.’

‘That’s not the
point.’ Varley’s tone took on an almost desperate note. ‘Now he knows what’s
happening, he’ll have time to prepare… to hide anything he doesn’t want aired
in public.’

Riley very
nearly blurted out that copies of the magazine currently being prepared for
mailing would soon blow that hope out of the water, but she managed to control
herself. And there had been no actual mention in the editorial tease of any
scandal attached to Al-Bashir’s wife. So what was the real problem?

Fortunately,
Varley unwittingly supplied the answer.

‘It’s a
question of timing,’ he continued seriously. ‘Too soon and Al-Bashir can brush
off bad news. His PR people can work on his backers and supporters, and
convince them that everything’s peachy. Too late and… well, that’s even worse…’
His voice tailed off as if he had suddenly realised what he was saying.

Riley suddenly
saw what he was driving at. She recalled what he had said at their last
meeting, about how if Al-Bashir failed or pulled out right on the wire, it
could drag everyone else down, too.

‘But either
way, he still wins,’ she said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t want him to
win!’

‘Riley, you
don’t understand. We’re just a journal – we’re right in the middle, here. We
need your copy to go in urgently. We’re simply trying to avoid being the cause
of any problems, that’s all.’

‘That’s easy:
delay the piece until after the bidding.’

‘We can’t. It’s
too late.’

‘Why? What’s
the deadline?’

‘It’s very
close. There have been…delays, and now we need to move along on this.’ He gave
an unconvincing smile.

‘What sort of
delays?’

‘I can’t go
into that. I know I should have mentioned this before, and I’m sorry. I thought
you’d be able to put the piece together very quickly from the data we provided.
There’s a lot riding on it.’

Riley nodded
and stood up. She so wanted to believe him. ‘So you said.’ Then an unbidden,
unwanted thought squirmed slowly to the surface. Something she suspected Palmer
had been thinking about all along. ‘Richard, who else was on this project
before you contacted me?’

His expression
gave nothing away. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Who gathered
the material on Al-Bashir… the stuff about his wife?’

For the first
time, Varley seemed unable to meet her eye. ‘Various people.
Researchers…freelances – we went to several sources.’ He stood up and moved
alongside her, his aftershave lingering in the air. ‘Are we okay on this?’ The
way he was looking at her was different, almost nervous, and she wondered how
much he had riding on this business.

‘I’ll call
you,’ she said. He was crowding her too close and she needed time to think.
‘Let me have until tomorrow.’

Varley nodded,
but with obvious reluctance. ‘The hotel where we first met? How about noon?’

‘If you wish.’

He nodded and
walked out. It was only when Riley closed the front door behind him that she
realised she’d been holding her stomach and felt sick with tension.

Palmer appeared
a few minutes later, brushing dust off his sleeves. Riley suspected he’d
slipped out of the landing window and shimmied onto the wall below to check the
street. One look at his face and she knew.

‘He wasn’t
alone.’

‘No. There was
a black four-wheel drive at the end of the street, with two men inside. Sorry.’

Riley didn’t
know what to say, so she said nothing.

‘I did not expect
this.’ The man known as Grigori stared through the window from the fourth floor
of Pantile House. Another day was dying on its feet. He tapped a thumb on the
plastic sill. The dull tattoo lasted a full fifteen seconds. ‘She has to be
convinced. There is much riding on it.’

‘Perhaps,’
suggested Radko, ‘it would be better to find someone else.’

‘We don’t have
time to find another reporter with her credentials. She was the third,
remember?’ Grigori’s words were savage with impatience. ‘If we continue this
way, there will be no unattached credible reporters left for us to use. You
think there is a bank of them, just waiting for you to work your way through
like those sweets that idiot Pechov is always eating? We must have her name on
that page.’ He drummed his fist on the woodwork in time to the words. ‘We’ve
tried money; what else is there?’

‘She’s a loner.
She has nobody we can use as leverage. It’s the down side of why we chose her –
like the others.’

Grigori nodded.
‘That reminds me – what of the woman friend of Bellamy’s? The one whose details
Pechov discovered in her apartment? Have you dealt with her? Bellamy may have
talked to her about us.’

Radko looked
defensive. ‘It was no good. I went to the address, but the house was empty, the
milk cancelled.’ At his boss’s look of incomprehension, he explained quickly,
‘Over here, milk is still delivered to many houses, especially in rural areas.
When people go away, they leave a note to cancel deliveries.’ He lifted his
shoulders. ‘It was cancelled until further notice.’

Grigori gave a
huff of irritation. A pigeon had flown. And they didn’t have time to go looking
for it. ‘That is unfortunate. You should have gone sooner.’

The matter of
blame was clear, and Radko shifted uncomfortably, but said nothing.

‘We still have
the Gavin woman.’ Grigori reached down and switched on the desk lamp, throwing
a green-tinged glow across the room. ‘Since gentle persuasion isn’t working, we
must try other means.’

‘What do you
suggest?’

‘Everyone has
someone,’ Grigori insisted, ‘or something. Friends, family, a neighbour, even…
there’s always a weak point.’ He looked bleakly at Radko, his meaning
challenging. ‘I suggest you get out there and find out what Riley Gavin’s weak
point is.’

*******

Ray
Szulu stifled a yawn and watched as a dull glow appeared in the fourth floor
window of Pantile House. There were few other lights on, and he’d watched a
steady stream of personnel drifting out of the main door and disappearing along
the pavement or climbing into their cars.

He’d had no
trouble following the men from Lancaster gate. After waiting outside the hotel,
which Palmer had told him was the start point, he’d latched on to them when
they came out and climbed into the big 4WD. The vehicle was easy to track, even
among all the other Chelsea tractors around town, and sitting a steady hundred
yards back in heavy traffic had been a simple task.

The tall one -
the man Palmer had referred to as Varley – had come out first with another man
in tow, and they’d been joined by two more. The security goons, Szulu decided.
Palmer was right: they’d stood out like bouncers at a primary school picnic.

After Palmer’s
crack about the Russian mafia, Szulu had been in two minds about telling him
where he could stick his job. He’d heard enough about their ruthlessness and
didn’t need that kind of grief. He knew the Russians were all over London like
a rash these days; he’d driven enough of their women and kids around to know
they’d made it their home from home. But how many were gangsters and how many
were ordinary people, he had no idea. He’d heard a figure of 400,000
expatriates in town, but that could have been headline hype, tossed out to sell
a few more papers.

In the end,
he’d decided that working for Palmer and Gavin was better than sitting at home
waiting for Ayso to call, so he’d gone round to a friend who ran a garage and
told him what he needed.

‘You doin’
what?’ Steadman was a wizened Rasta in his late sixties, for whom nature had
traded in his dreads for a bald head. He was a dealer in used cars and bikes
across south London. He’d listened to what Szulu told him and shook his head in
dismay. ‘You daft, man, you know that? You followin’ people you don’ even know
what they do? What you gonna do if they see you, huh? You considered that if
this private dee-tective want them followed, they completely innocent men?’ He
huffed out his cheeks and wiped his hands on a filthy rag. ‘You growin’ dafter
every day, Ray. That bullet hole in your arm you so proud of, it must have let
in too much fresh air and let out any brains you had.’

Szulu sighed.
As usual, Steadman was being an old woman, seeing danger behind every simple
act. ‘It’s nothing like that, Stead. I figured it out, see. What’s the most
common sight in London? Tell me that.’

Steadman
scowled. ‘Traffic wardens – they like fleas on a dog.’

‘Nah, not them.
Transport.’

‘Taxis, then.
Or buses. Don’t tell me you want to borrow a Routemaster – ‘cos you fresh out
of luck, my friend. I sold the last two yesterday.’

‘No, nothing
like that, bro. Scooters. There’s hundreds everywhere. Nobody sees them no
more, they so common. Even those city boys are ridin’ them. It’s the new
thing.’ He jerked his chin towards two scooters standing in the far corner of
Steadman’s yard. They were bruised and scuffed with dirt, but just what he had
in mind. ‘One of them would do. They’ll never see me coming. I’ll bring it
back, no problem.’

Steadman looked
across at the bikes, then sighed in defeat and waved him away. ‘Go, man. Take
the Super 9 – the black one. It was a trade-in and I haven’t done the papers on
it yet.’ He waved an oily finger in Szulu’s face. ‘But you bring it back
without scrapes or record of wrongdoing, you hear? Else I come after you with a
baseball bat. An’ let me tell you, your hex-military friend, no matter how
rough and tough he is, he won’t be able to stop me.’

Szulu grinned
and clapped the old man on the shoulder. He reckoned he could stand the
humiliation of riding a scooter around town for a while. As long as he wasn’t
spotted by anyone who knew him. ‘Great, Stead. Thanks, man. Hey, you don’t have
a bone dome to go with it, do you? And it needs to be big to go over the
dreads, y’know?’

As soon as the men
had parked outside Pantile House, Szulu had phoned Palmer and given him an
update. Then he’d asked what was going on.

Palmer had kept
it short, explaining that the men were using the building illegally, probably
with the connivance of the supervisor.

‘Stay with
them,’ he’d told Szulu. ‘They might be there a while. If they leave, follow
them and let me know. And stay out of sight.’

Szulu had rung
off and chained the scooter to a convenient lamp-post, then gone in search of a
doorway where he could sit and keep an eye on the place. He’d settled on an
empty shop. The porch was jammed with rubbish and old newspapers, and smelled
like an old cat, but it was dry enough for his purposes and suitable for hiding
in without attracting attention.

He’d been
puzzled when the men had parked the 4WD at a meter on the street, when there
was a perfectly good car park at the rear of the building. When he’d taken a
walk round the block half an hour later, he’d seen why: a CCTV camera up on the
wall of the building was covering the car park. If it was working, it would
record every vehicle entering or leaving. Out on the main street, the nearest
camera was pointed at a busy junction and rarely moved. He figured the men were
paranoid and thought they might need a quick getaway. Szulu knew all about
quick getaways; sometimes they worked, other times they went pear-shaped over a
bus-pass holder with a bad hip and a supermarket trolley.

On one of his
other recces, he caught a glimpse of a face up on the fourth floor. It was too
far away to be certain, but he thought it was one of the security goons. Later,
one of the men came out to feed the meter. Szulu stood up, shaking off his
stiffness and ambling along the pavement towards him. There was something he
wanted to try out.

Palmer had
mentioned earlier that the men appeared to have a weak spot: they seemed
oblivious to certain types of people.

‘You mean black
people, right?’ Szulu had been unsurprised. ‘Most whites are, man. We the
invisible ones, didn’t you know that? We don’t exist.’

Palmer had
given him one of his looks, and Szulu had quickly dropped the aggrieved
minority act. Now, striding along the street, he kept his head down but a
watchful eye on the man at the meter. Time to see if Palmer knew his beans or
not. He loosened his shoulders, bouncing off his left foot and singing to
himself as if he was out for a stroll, tugging loosely at one of his dreads. It
was an act, meant to convince himself that he wasn’t about to run into seven
kinds of hell like the sort of grief Riley Gavin and her ex-soldier friend had
put him through the last time they’d met. He shivered at the memory, hoping
Palmer had told the truth about Mitcheson on the other side of the Atlantic.
Best worry, he told himself, about the gunman you know rather than the Russian
hard-face you didn’t.