Remote Control (40 page)
Authors: Andy McNab
‘Will we see your friend, you know – David?’
‘Maybe some day.’ I putted and it didn’t work. I was stuck on the water obstacle.
‘Have you got any sisters or brothers?’
It felt like Twenty Questions. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘How many?’
I marked my card after six attempts on a par 3 hole.
‘Three brothers.’ I decided to cut the interrogation. ‘They are called . . . John, Joe and Jim.’
‘Oh. How old are they?’
She got me on that one. I didn’t even know where they lived, let alone how old they were. ‘I don’t know really.’
‘Why not?’
I found it hard to explain because I didn’t really know the answer.
‘Because.’ I positioned the ball for her to putt. ‘Come on, or we’ll hold everyone up.’
On the way back I felt strangely close to her and that worried me. She seemed to have latched on to me as a stand-in parent and we’d only been together six days. I couldn’t take the place of Kev and Marsha, even if I wanted to. The prospect was too scary.
It was ice cream for breakfast, then we logged on at 10.15. There was a message waiting for us, telling us to visit a chat room. Kelly hit a few keys and there we were. De Sabatino was waiting for us; or at least someone called Big Al was. A dialogue box invited us to a private room for a one-on-one; thank goodness Kelly was there to do the navigating.
I got straight down to it. Kelly typed, ‘I need your help.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I’ve got something here that I need you to decode or translate – I’m not entirely sure what it is, but I know you’ll be able to do it.’
‘What is it? Work?’
I needed to get him hooked. For him, half the point of nicking all that money had been the sheer kick of doing it – the ‘juice’. Thinking about it now, Pat had probably got the term from Big Al in the first place. This guy enjoyed getting one over on the big boys; he needed to be involved, to be part of something, and I knew that, if I used the right bait, he’d come and see me.
I spoke and she typed, ‘I’m not going to tell you! Believe me, it’s good. If you want to look, you’ll have to see me. I’m in Daytona.’ And then I started to lie. ‘Other people say it’s impossible. I thought of you.’
I’d got him. Straight away he came back. ‘What format?’
I told him all the details.
He said, ‘Can’t see you until 9 p.m. tonight. Outside Boot Hill Saloon, Main Street.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Big Al came back. ‘Yeehah! Yeehah!’
There was fuck all changed about him, then. Kelly logged off and we paid the $12. About a hundredth of what a private eye would have cost me.
Now we had hours to kill. We bought sunglasses, and I also got Kelly a fashionable pair of shorts, a T-shirt and sandals. I had to stay as I was, wearing my shirt over my trousers to cover my pistol. The only addition was a bandana to cover the cut on my forehead. Chrome aviators covered the lower one.
With the wind on our faces, we mooched along the beach. It was that time of day when the restaurants were starting to fill up with people wanting early lunches.
Back at the hotel I made some calls to check flights out of the country. If the stuff Big Al decrypted for me seemed to be what Simmonds wanted, Kelly and I were out of here. I knew Big Al would have the contacts and resources to get passports for our exit, even money.
We had lunch, followed by eighteen holes with the pirates – I let her win – and then it was time to start getting ready for the meet.
At about seven thirty the sun started to go down and the street neon came on. Suddenly it was another world, with music pumping out of the shops and the kids now driving faster up and down the strip than the legal 10 m.p. H.
I didn’t know what it was, the weather maybe, but I felt detached from the situation I was in. It was just the two of us; we were having fun, eating ice creams and walking around looking in shops. She was doing normal kid things, even to the point of looking at something in a shop window and giving it the ‘Look at that!’ act, as in, hint, hint, are you going to buy it for me? I found myself acting the parent, saying, ‘No, I think we’ve had enough today.’
I did worry about her. I felt she should be more upset, shouldn’t really be taking it so well. Maybe she hadn’t understood what I’d said to her about her family; maybe her subconscious was putting a lid on it. At the moment, however, that was exactly what I needed: a child looking and behaving normally.
We stopped outside a toy shop. She asked for a ring in the window that glowed in the dark. I lied and said I had no money left.
‘Can’t you steal it for me?’ she said.
We had a serious talk about right and wrong. She was getting along too well with this on-the-run thing.
It was round about a quarter to nine by now; we’d had a pizza and, at that time of night on holiday, the next thing you should always have is a Häagen-Daz. Afterwards, we started to wander to the RV with Big Al. We squeezed past ranks of parked motorcycles and jostling crowds, most wearing T-shirts with bike slogans.
I got us into a position from where I could see both approaches to the Boot Hill Saloon, in the old graveyard on the other side of the road. It was all that remained of the original town that was there in the 1920s, the only thing that couldn’t be ripped apart and have a hotel built on it. As bikers parked up and opened the doors, loud rock and roll thundered from the bar. It collided head-on with the Latin and rap that were blaring from the vehicles cruising up and down; it was that body-fluid time of night, and groups of breakers were hanging out of Jeeps and pick-ups with banks of six or seven speakers in the back. Some even had electric-blue lights fitted under the car; as they drove past they looked like hovering spaceships playing music from Mars. I thought about our friends in the Cherokee. I wondered if they’d got home yet.
Kelly and I just waited, eating our ice creams and sitting on a bank next to Mrs J. Mostyn, who went to Our Saviour on 16 July 1924, God rest her soul.
32
Main Street wasn’t in fact the main drag but a road that led from the sea to a bridge over the inland waterway. Daytona has a bike week each year and this was the street on which the thousands of bikers descended. It was a one-theme street, and that theme was Harleys. If it wasn’t a bike bar, it seemed to be a shop selling spare parts, helmets or leathers. And, even when the convention wasn’t on, bikes with helmets on the seats were lined up by the dozen outside bars with names like the Boot Hill Saloon, Dirty Harry’s, or Froggie’s, where there was even a bike made of dusty bones in the window.
I could spot Big Al a mile off as he shambled towards us from the direction of the bridge. He was wearing a blue, white and yellow Hawaiian shirt and pale-pink trousers, both straining against a body that was even fatter than I remembered it; his outfit was set off by white shoes and the same shaggy hairstyle, looking like an out-of-work extra from
Miami Vice
. In his left hand he carried a briefcase, which was a good sign; he’d brought with him the tools of his trade. I watched him duck into the Main Street Cigar Store and emerge chomping on a huge corona.
Miami Vice
. In his left hand he carried a briefcase, which was a good sign; he’d brought with him the tools of his trade. I watched him duck into the Main Street Cigar Store and emerge chomping on a huge corona.
He stopped outside the saloon, Harleys all around him. He put down his briefcase between his feet and stood there sucking his cigar as if he owned the place. Behind him was an enormous mural of a biker on the beach, which covered one entire wall of the saloon. A board announced, ‘No Colors, Club Patches or Insignias’.
I nudged Kelly. ‘See that man over there?’
‘Which one?’
‘The one with that really big flowery shirt on, the big fat man.’
‘You mean the geekazoid?’
‘What?’
‘Next one up from geek.’
‘Whatever,’ I grinned. ‘He’s the man we’re going to see.’
A Metro bus passed between us. Splashed along its side was an ad for SeaWorld, showing a giant orca leaping out of the pool. Kelly and I looked at the bus, then at each other, and burst out laughing.
She said, ‘Why didn’t we wait over there for him?’
‘No, no, what you do is stand off and watch. See what I’m doing? I’m looking up and down the road, just to make sure there’s no bad guys following him. Then I know we’re safe. What do you think? Reckon it’s OK?’
Suddenly she’d become all-important. She looked up and down and said, ‘All clear.’ She didn’t have a clue what she was looking for.
‘Come on, then, give me your hand. We’ve got to be careful with these cars driving so fast.’
We left Mrs Mostyn and stopped at the edge of the kerb. I said, ‘When we go and meet him, I might have to do stuff that looks horrible, but actually it’s not – it’s stuff that we do all the time; he understands it.’
As we dodged through the traffic she said, ‘OK.’ After what she had been seeing lately this would be kindergarten stuff.
We got closer and he was certainly looking older. He recognized me from 20 yards away and was suddenly starring in
The Godfather
again. Cigar into his right hand, arms thrown out wide, head cocked to one side, he growled, ‘Aaaggghh! It’s Nicky Two!’ He had a smile on his face the size of half a watermelon; it was probably shit living in hiding, and at last he had somebody from the past he could talk freely with.
The Godfather
again. Cigar into his right hand, arms thrown out wide, head cocked to one side, he growled, ‘Aaaggghh! It’s Nicky Two!’ He had a smile on his face the size of half a watermelon; it was probably shit living in hiding, and at last he had somebody from the past he could talk freely with.
He jammed the cigar back into his mouth, picked up his briefcase in his right hand and walked towards us, his fat thighs rubbing together. ‘Hey! how’s it going?’ he beamed and started pumping my hand, at the same time studying Kelly. He stank of flowery aftershave.
‘And who’s this pretty little lady, then?’ He bent down to greet her and I felt a slight twinge of wariness. Maybe the charm was genuine, but for some reason it made me feel a bit revolted.
I said, ‘This is Kelly, she’s one of my friend’s daughters and I’m looking after her for a while.’
I very much doubted he knew what had been going on up North. He certainly didn’t know Kev.
Still bending down and shaking her hand for a bit too long, he said, ‘It’s great here – we’ve got SeaWorld, Disney World, everything to make a little lady happy. This is the Sunshine State!’
He stood up and said, slightly out of breath, ‘Where are we going?’ He pointed hopefully and said, ‘Main Street Pier? Shrimp?’
I shook my head. ‘No, we’ll go back to the hotel. I’ve got all the stuff there I want you to have a look at. Follow me.’
I held Kelly’s hand in my left and got him on the right. As we walked we made small talk about how wonderful it was to see each other again, but he knew very well that this meeting wasn’t casual – and he liked it. He got off on this sort of stuff, just like Al and Bob.
We turned right and took the first turning left, which was into a parking area behind the shops. I looked at Kelly and nodded to show everything was fine, then let go of her hand. Big Al was still jabbering away. I grabbed his left arm with both hands and used his own momentum to turn him against the wall. He hit it with quite a bounce. I pushed him into the doorway of a restaurant’s fire exit.
‘It’s cool, I’m cool.’ Big Al was keeping a low voice. He knew the score.
Just looking at him it was obvious he couldn’t conceal so much as a playing card under his clothes, let alone a weapon, the material was stretched so tight against his skin. However, I ran my hand down the back of his spine in case he had something concealed in the lumbar region; the natural curve makes it a wonderful place to hide odds and ends, and Big Al’s was curvier than most. I carried on screening him.
He looked down at Kelly, who was watching everything. He winked. ‘I suppose you’ve seen him do this lots of times?’
‘My daddy does it as well, in heaven.’
‘Ah, OK, yeah, smart kid, smart kid.’ He looked at her and tried to work that one out.
Then came the bit that he probably enjoyed most – me running my hand up his trouser legs. I checked thoroughly at the top. I said, ‘You know I need to look in your briefcase now, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ He opened it up; I found two cigars in tubes and all his work bits and pieces – floppy disks, a back-up drive and disks, leads, wires, all sorts of shit. I had a quick feel around to make sure there wasn’t a secret panel.
I was happy. He was also. In fact, he probably had a hard-on.
I said, ‘Right, let’s go.’
‘Let’s get some ice cream on the way,’ he suggested.
We waved down a cab. Kelly and I got in the back and he squeezed into the front, resting a two-pint tub of Ben & Jerry’s on his briefcase.
We got to the hotel and went to the room. His body language was excited, probably because he thought it was like the old days, all spies and sneaky-beaky, and the cheapness of the room only made it all the more exhilarating for him. He put his briefcase on one of the beds, opened it up and started taking out all his gizmos. He fished, ‘So what do you get up to these days?’
I didn’t reply.
Kelly and I were sitting on the bed, not really doing much except watch what was going on. Kelly started to take quite an interest.
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