The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (3 page)

       
‘Parachuting?’

       
‘Some.’

       
‘Freefall?’

       
‘No, but I made four static line jumps.’

       
‘That’ll be a problem, the job I’m setting up requires a HALO from twenty thousand feet with full kit, at night. And there could be enemy fire.’

       
‘Jesus, what are you planning?’

       
‘I’m not planning anything, the planning has already been done. I’m just handling the recruitment. Two hundred men, hand-picked, for the Sultan of a small but very rich country out in the Middle East. Or more accurately the brother of the Sultan who wants to take over. There’s a lot of money at stake because the country is swimming in oil. Our team will be freefalling in from a couple of Hercules and splitting into three sections, taking out the palace, the oil fields and the communication systems.

       
‘The whole mission should take less than twelve hours, and we’ll be taking no prisoners, on either side. In fact that’s one of the stipulations of the job. A suicide pill will be placed inside a fake tooth. The Sultan’s brother can’t afford to have anything go wrong with the attack, and if it does he wants to make sure there’s nobody around to tell tales. And the sort of money he’s paying he’s entitled to expect that.’

       
By now the young ‘SAS expert’ was sweating and his cheeks were flushed. It was difficult to tell if it was the thought of having a dentist’s drill in his mouth or swallowing poison or the Savoy’s chair which was causing him the most distress. Hell, if he swallowed this story he’d swallow anything, the tooth, the poison, even the chair.

       
‘We’re going in with bazookas, mobile missile launchers, grenades, the works. It should be one hell of a war. And if, I mean when, we take over there’s a good chance we’ll be kept on as the new Sultan’s bodyguard, unless the cunning old bastard tries some sort of double cross.

       
‘He’ll also be looking for help on the interrogation side afterwards. It seems the present Sultan has been tucking away hundreds of millions of dollars in bank accounts all around the world and our employer would obviously like to know where the money is. I hope you’ve got a strong stomach, it’s liable to get a bit messy.’

       
I don’t know what the guy was looking for, cheap thrills, hard experience to beef up his part-time toy soldiering or what, but my Arabian tales had put the wind up him and no mistake. He’d stopped chewing on the stuffed olives and most of his pint was untouched.

       
‘Well, I’m your man,’ he said, and neither of us believed him for a moment. I took a few details from him, told him I’d be in touch and off he went into the wide blue yonder, a first-class prat and a second-class time-waster. I wanted a killer and I’d turned up a pussycat.

I never did hear from the
Have gun, will travel
vet. Maybe it was a joke, maybe he was lying bleeding to death on some far-off battlefield I couldn’t pronounce in a month of Remembrance Sundays, or crouching in ambush high in the hills of Afghanistan, maybe I’ve just got an overactive imagination, who knows? I never found out, anyway.

       
The ex-para got in touch two days after the headbanger. Quiet, confident, no messing about. His name was Jim Iwanek, he’d left the Paras eighteen months ago and had been working as a bodyguard for a casino operator until recently. Where could we meet? I wasn’t superstitious so the Savoy seemed as good a place as any. He agreed. ‘I’m about five-eleven, short black curly hair and I’ll have on a brown check sports jacket,’ he said, like a policeman giving evidence from his notebook. ‘I look forward to meeting you.’

       
He was bang on time and just as he’d described. OK, he missed out the brown cord trousers, the brown brogues, the crisp white shirt and the light brown tie, but who’s counting? I went over and introduced myself, bought him a double Teachers and took him to the table by the piano.

       
There was another thing he hadn’t mentioned, his eyes. They were blue, a cold blue, difficult to read until maybe it was too late. Eyes that looked me over, measuring me up, calculating distances and angles, eyes that could just as easily work out twenty-four different ways of killing me bare-handed as they could spot a lie before it left my lips. You can tell a lot from a man’s eyes: if he’s lying, how he’ll react to stress, sometimes even what he’s thinking. Iwanek’s eyes were as cold and hard as ice daggers and he hardly blinked as he crossed his legs, smoothed out the creases in his trousers and asked me what it was I was offering.

       
I took a sip of my whisky. He hadn’t touched his. ‘I’m thirty-two years old and I am what’s called a corporate financier, a sort of merchant banker without a bank. I help arrange bank loans, company takeovers, share flotations, that sort of thing. Sometimes I act as a company doctor, find out where a firm is going wrong, why it’s losing money, suggest a remedy. I make a lot of money doing what I do because I do it well, very well. I’m an expert and in the City I’m a survivor. More than that, I’m a winner. But I have a problem, a big problem, and it’s one that I can’t cope with own my own.’

       
Iwanek hadn’t moved while I talked, but I knew I was being measured up, assessed, and labelled as either truthful or not to be trusted.

       
He leant back in his chair and steepled his fingers under his broad chin. His hands were smooth with long, delicate fingers and perfect, well-manicured nails. A stainless steel watch peeped out of his left sleeve as he gently tapped his two index fingers against his upper lip and looked into my soul.

       
‘I’ve been wronged, badly wronged, and I’m out for revenge. Two men have done me a grave injustice, just how bad I can’t tell you and maybe I never will but they deserve what’s coming to them. You’ll have to trust me on that score.

       
‘One is a drugs dealer and property developer with very nasty criminal connections and a stack of dangerous friends. The other is one of his associates, a business man of sorts, a whizz kid who’s acting as a front for the other guy’s money.

       
‘If these guys had crossed me in the City, if it had been business, then I could have coped on my own, I could have fought back. If they’d broken the law I could have gone to the police, or sued, but they were far too clever for that.’

       
‘What did they do?’ he asked.

       
‘I can’t tell you that. I just need your help, and I’m prepared to pay for it. And to pay well.’

       
‘You want them killed,’ he said, and it was a statement, not a question.

       
‘I want them dead, or put away for a long time. And I don’t want to be directly involved. I have a conscience, Jim, a set of values that was drilled into me from a very early age so no, I couldn’t point a gun at either of them and pull the trigger.’

       
‘You want someone else to do your dirty work.’ Another statement.

       
‘Yes, but not in the way you think. Sure, I could go into any of a dozen pubs in the East End, spend a little money and have their legs broken, maybe even killed. What would it cost me, a few hundred pounds? I could do that, but I couldn’t live with myself afterwards. All my time working in the City I’ve been honest, I’ve never doublecrossed anybody or deliberately hurt them. My word is my bond might sound corny in this day and age but that’s what my father taught me and those are the values that I’ve stuck to. I can’t betray him or myself, and I won’t even try.’

       
‘It’s not corny, but it puts you in a very difficult position. Maybe an impossible position. You want two men dead yet you’re going around saying “thou shalt not kill” like some pious prophet. Either put up or shut up, you can’t have it both ways. And if it’s an assassin you want then you’ve got the wrong man. I’ve killed, but in battle and that’s a whole different ball game. It’s one thing to run down a Falklands hill firing at men trying to kill you, it’s another to sneak up and shoot someone in the back of the neck. Soldiers have standards, too, and backshooting isn’t one of them.’ He started to get up, but I held out my hand and motioned him to sit down.

       
‘You don’t understand, just hear me out.’ He settled back in the chair but there was a tenseness about him, an unease that was making both of us uncomfortable.

       
‘One of the things I do best is to lay down strategies, to calculate how people will react in certain situations. To gauge the reactions of directors and shareholders, to anticipate the actions and reactions of others and to plan accordingly.

       
‘I have a plan, a set of actions which, if I put them into effect, will give me the result I’m looking for. I think I can get my revenge without pulling the trigger or paying someone to do it for me.’

       
‘A set up,’ he said. ‘You’re going to set them up.’ He was smiling now.

       
‘Yes, and for that I’m going to need help, people with skills I don’t have. It’s the same in business. You need advice, you bring in a consultant, you pay him to provide the services and knowledge you don’t have yourself. It works with computers, marketing, public relations, so why shouldn’t it work for me? I need expertise which you have and I’m willing to pay for it.’

       
I leant forward and looked into the ice blue eyes. ‘I’m not going to lie to you and say that I’m putting all my cards on the table. You’re smart enough to know that I’ll be keeping a couple of aces up my sleeve and probably a joker, too.

       
‘I’m going to set these two creeps up to be knocked down, and I need your help. At some point I’m going to get involved with drugs dealers and I need someone who can handle a gun, someone who is obviously prepared to use it. I’m virtually certain that you won’t have to fire it and I’m damn sure you won’t have to kill anyone, but I have to have someone who looks the part. And of course it’ll be useful to have someone who isn’t afraid to shoot just in case anything goes wrong. Are you in?’

       
‘I’m in,’ he said.

       
‘I don’t know when I’ll be going ahead but from start to finish the whole operation should take less than a month. I think I’ll need you for two days, and I’m willing to pay you five thousand pounds. What I propose to do is to give you a retainer of a thousand, a show of good faith on my part. When I know I’m ready I’ll give you a further thousand and the balance on completion. When I ring I’ll need you right away, so if you’re taking on anything else make sure you can leave at short notice, like immediately.’ I took out a brown envelope from my inside jacket pocket and handed it to him. He didn’t even bother to count the twenty pound notes inside. I passed him a card and asked him to write down a number where he could be contacted, any hour day or night.

       
‘You’re forgetting something,’ he said. I raised my eyebrows. ‘The gun,’ he said.

       
‘I assumed you could provide that.’

       
‘You assumed right, but we have to decide what we’re going to use and you’re going to have to pay for it.’

       
‘What do you suggest, something small?’

       
‘No. You want to show we mean business so you want something impressive. If you’re going to kill it doesn’t matter what it looks like so long as it does the job. If you mean what you say about not wanting to kill then you want something threatening. That’s why so many villains use sawn-off shotguns. OK, I know you can get them without individual licences and the shot can’t be identified, but at the end of the day they’re used because they look so bloody big and menacing.

       
‘Look down the barrels of a sawn-off twelve bore and you’re guaranteed to piss yourself. Yet when you actually fire one they do little serious damage unless you’re right up close. The shot spreads out all over the place, painful and uncomfortable but usually they don’t do too much damage beyond a range of twenty feet.’

       
‘That sounds fine by me – can you get one?’

       
‘Sure – but it’ll cost you – another four hundred pounds.’

       
I handed him the cash from my wallet. ‘Look after it until I call you.’

       
‘I’ll be ready – and waiting. And don’t forget, the retainer only holds me for one month.’ He stood up to go, holding out his hand. I shook it firmly.

       
‘Jim, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you.’

       
Two down, two to go.

Highway robbery they used to call it, when a guy dressed in black astride a huge sweaty horse pointed a blunderbuss at stagecoach drivers and yelled ‘stand and deliver’. It was easy money in days of yore, no police, no street lights, no problem. The only thing that could go wrong was the coach driver plucking up enough courage to draw a weapon and fight back. It didn’t happen much. Even Get-Up McKinley could have made a go of it way back then. Things have changed, though.

       
Nowadays there is a much more profitable form of highway robbery, stealing cars. McKinley wasn’t bright enough to break into a car and get the engine started without a key – hell’s bells, he’d taken his driving test eight times – but there are hundreds of men and women around who make a nice living stealing cars.

       
Best profits are made at the luxury end of the market, the same as selling them legally. To make a profit selling Ford Escorts you need a high turnover, with Jaguars and Rolls-Royces you only have to get rid of a few a week to live well. Car thieves know that, so it’s only the joyriders and youngsters who steal anything worth less than £10,000. The professionals stick to the classier models.