The Outsiders (18 page)

He should have been preparing for the visit of the man from Pskov, who sent messages in a code Marko and Alex could read. The man would drag him back towards old routes long abandoned. To have refused to meet the man would have been madness because now he had no powerful roof to protect him.

The sun climbed and the shadows shortened. The trees were tight set with flowering shrubs under them and masked the wall between his property and that of the old Briton. He heard no sound from the Villa Paraiso. He did not know if he would ever be able to throw off the old world, once as comfortable as a glove, now strange and unsettling. He went to get the rifle from the basement. He had never known fear when he had walked in the old world.

Winnie Monks’s shoes were dirty when Dawson led the small party through the turnstiles of Madrid Zoo.

Neither Kenny nor Xavier had remarked on her determination to tramp in undergrowth below the university buildings, or on that of the Six man that they should meet a source from the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia among the animal compounds.

‘All fucking skin and bone,’ she murmured, and was rewarded with a savage glance from Dawson, who was approaching a consumptive-looking middle-aged man. Then she grinned. ‘As a community, we spooks are hardly stereotypes.’

She stood back, with Kenny and Xavier, to allow Dawson to greet his contact. She understood. The listing in a station chief’s mobile of one middle-ranking official in CNI or any other intelligence agency could make the difference between a career that went nowhere and one that hit the stratosphere. Her shoes were dirty and she had laddered her tights because she had insisted on scrambling down a hillside to look for shallow trenches, dug seventy-odd years before. She had bellowed up to them, ‘I have a feeling that it was here Emrys the Brigade fell. Close to the university. His people never had the body back, but there were extra flowers put on the family grave in the town. The old socialists still do it.’ There were no trenches.

She’d given up. ‘But he died with a gun in his hand doing what he believed in. He had a cause and got off his arse to do something about it.’

Dawson’s contact planted kisses on Dawson’s cheeks. Dawson said something, and the other laughed. Then Dawson waved her forward.

He did the introductions. She was Winnie and he was Gonsalvo. He had laughed because her mission was to secure close cooperation in the arrest of a Russian national believed to be coming soon, perhaps, to the Costa.

Why was that funny? Silence fell. They walked. Dawson was on one side of the Spaniard, Winnie on the other. Xavier and Kenny were back-markers.

They did the flamingos, some contemplative owls, an overweight lynx on an artificial rock, two leopards, then a Barbary lion. Dawson translated what the man had said, in a reedy whistling and feeble voice: ‘It comes from Morocco. There are none in the wild. He lives with his women and has the best roar of any lion species. It can be heard from eight kilometres. The zebras, gazelles and ostriches live opposite, within the sound and smell of the creature that would kill them. That must be hard for them. They have to pretend the lion isn’t there. You follow me, Miss Winnie?’

‘Why not? See nothing, hear nothing, know nothing.’

They had moved on to north African sheep and Bactrian camels, double-humped, an ‘endangered species’. She accepted what she was told. She valued truth in any briefing.

‘First, there is little stomach for doing the bidding of the English and running errands for your country. We play host to almost a million British people. We like them for their money and little else. The Russian comes here and breaks no law, except possibly illegal entry. Maybe he invests, launders, and his cash goes into our economy. A surveillance operation is launched on the villa at which you tell us he’ll arrive and officers are tasked with the protection of your principals. Very soon it is known throughout the police headquarters in Marbella where the UDyCO are based. The man who lives there, who is to be visited, I guarantee, Miss Winnie, that he owns at least one policeman, maybe a magistrate, and another officer or two in UDyCO in Málaga.’

They were looking at birds of prey. Lightweight chains fastened them to perches.

‘I’m proud to be Spanish, Miss Winnie. I love my country but I’m a realist. Corruption in Spain is endemic. Our word
listo
means “chancer”, someone who crosses the line of legality, but it also encompasses a man who is shrewd, cunning. In Spain it is possible to be a tax avoider and to hold your head high if you’re also an evader. We do not have the Anglo-Saxon horror of illegality. Organised crime is embedded in Spanish society. Corruption is all around you. I tell you, Miss Winnie, we wouldn’t want to help you with this man. Have I disappointed you?’

‘No more so than if I’d stepped in cow shit,’ she answered. She noted that her remark was not translated into Spanish.

‘I wouldn’t expect to see you again on this matter in my country.’

‘Of course not.’

She shook hands with the counter-intelligence officer, and Dawson kissed the man’s cheeks. He walked away and was lost among schoolchildren clustered around a teacher.

Dawson gazed at her. She looked back to the tethered birds.

‘I told you,’ he said.

‘You told me.’

‘Is that the end of it?’

‘Is it likely?’

He chuckled. ‘I’d rather I was kept away from collateral and consequences. What do you plan?’

She looked at the birds again. ‘I’d like to take a fucking bolt-cutter to those chains, cut them free and see them fly away.’

Dawson said, ‘There are things we’d like to do, things that might be right to do, and things we
cannot
do, Miss Monks.’

‘Tell you the truth, Dawson, I feel quite at home among these creatures that are extinct in the wild, or nearly. I’m a dying breed – old-fashioned when a door gets slammed. Means you have to hit it with your fucking shoulder.’

‘We should be on our way.’

He would do a cut-out, he told her, and drop them at a taxi rank. They could go independently to the airport. In normal times she would have said she detested men of privilege, confidence and certainty . . . but these were not normal times. She trusted Dawson. And she’d have the bastard with the mutilated hand.

Xavier said, ‘She didn’t seem too bothered to have it chucked back in her face. Which means . . .’

He had been with her first in Belfast. He was nine years older and had been captivated. To have a younger woman as their superior would have disjointed others’ noses. Not if it was Winnie Monks. He was married, had a home and a family, and had been on liaison at New Scotland Yard since the killing of the Graveyard Team, but he looked back to the days in the Province as the most fulfilling of his professional life. They had run assets, organised lifts and cajoled co-operation out of stone-faced Special Branch detectives. She’d charmed the boots off potentially hostile army officers to get manpower for search operations. The rules? He wouldn’t have said she knew them. When the call had come, Xavier had cleared his desk in less than ten minutes and been on his way.

Kenny said, ‘Which means that alternatives are tucked away in the Boss’s mind. We might be be told, we might not. Perhaps that matters and perhaps it doesn’t.’

He had met her off the flight at Aldergrove. She’d been a slip of a girl, but the only time Kenny had seen her fazed was when they’d sat in his car and he’d produced a service pistol, a Browning. He’d told her to put it between her legs and drop her handbag over it. She’d gazed into his eyes and asked what he’d do if they were jumped. He’d said he’d grab the weapon, and mischief had sparkled in her eyes. He’d learned to accept that the RUC men who rode shotgun when they went on asset meets in forestry car parks worshipped her. They queued to go out with her. That hadn’t happened with anyone before and probably wasn’t repeated with any other officer shipped in from London. He was twelve years older than the Boss and had never queried her decisions: there were still papers on his desk, abandoned when he had answered the call. He thought her unique.

‘She liked the boy – we all did – but it’s about more than liking him.’

‘The team governs everything. Spill the blood of anyone on her team and you spill hers. There’ll be alternatives.’ Kenny chuckled.

They followed Winnie Monks and Dawson to the car.

‘We’re honoured that you’ve devoted so much time and energy to this matter.’

The Major was a meld of tsar and commissar in Pskov. ‘It gives me great pleasure to serve my community in this small way.’ He had the power that came from extreme wealth and connections. He was about to leave the near-completed building site where the four walls and most of the roof marked a state-of-the-art children’s hospice. It was a project with which few could argue. That some two-thirds of the money for the project had come from the sale of refined heroin and the movement of teenage girls from Moldova or Romania to West European bars and brothels was not important.

‘It is a much-needed facility and will be envied by many communities,’ the future director said, his hands clasped nervously – he knew the source of the benefactor’s affluence.

‘I’m proud to help,’ he said, with what appeared to be humility. The same conversation had been played out earlier that morning at a new kindergarten for the children and babies of town hall and municipality workers on Lenina Street, and would be repeated at the next location. His wife was with him. She wore jewelled earrings. They were not suitable for a woman of her age, and were out of place on a building site.

Officials bobbed their heads to the Major and his wife. She was the daughter of a former general. The general met others of similar status at drinking clubs in Moscow. In the clubs there were links to the
siloviki
, the men who prowled the Kremlin’s corridors and provided ‘roofs’, protection. One of the roles the Major played – which endeared him to the
siloviki
– was that of an enforcer. There was a loose association, an
obshak
, of groups who would arrive, ‘sort out’ a problem and depart; a benefit of a strong roof. Through his wife, the Major had the roof and a reputation as an enforcer who solved problems. A journalist had written scurrilous articles in a blog about the conduct of special-forces troops in Chechnya and did not listen to warnings. The Major had fired the shots, the warrant officer had been his back marker and the master sergeant had driven the car. There had been a gang leader from Murmansk who had believed himself too powerful to have to sweeten the
siloviki
: he had been fished out of the oily waters of the docks, having floated to the surface between two half-sunken ice breakers. And there had been a young British agent, with the case handcuffed to him, who had investigated weapons shipments on barges down the Danube . . .

The Major, his wife and his entourage were driven to the clinic where a new scanner, made in Japan, had been installed three weeks earlier. He had paid for it. The town was his fiefdom, and he had the support of the National Tax Collection agency in Moscow to run the local service in Pskov. He was supreme, and no clouds ranged above him. The morning was crisp and clear.

Natan stayed in his room. He worked. He was alone in the world that offered him privacy, success and confidence. The meeting with the girl in the back-street café and his memories of Liz, the girl in Baku, were shut out.

His paymaster, the man with three fingers and presence, did not trust his one-time employer – the FSB. That organisation, which controlled much of the Major’s work, could have supplied secure communications. But the Major did not trust anything promised by the security apparatus. In the absence of trust an opening had appeared, and Natan had crawled through it.

He typed on his keyboard, sent messages.

It was only when he typed that he could avoid his memories of the meetings. Natan understood that the life of the Major was divided into two separate sectors: there were days when the traffic he worked on involved officers in the Lubyanka, and there were more when his business did not reflect the state’s priorities. For it to work, in the void where no trust existed, there had to be secure communication. Natan gave it. The Major understood nothing of the new technology.

The Major believed the majority of his money came from traditional trafficking along the routes smugglers had used over centuries. It was not admitted that the Gecko had the skill to break into bank accounts, utilise cloned cards, transfer cash. Perhaps the Major feared what the Gecko could achieve. Natan had explained the intricacies of the computer as if he was talking to a child. The Major’s eyes had glazed. Natan had reeled off the titles of Internet Service Providers and Internet Protocol; the police had neither the resources nor the manpower in the US, Britain or Germany to monitor, follow and decode conversations. He had promised them that the providers stored ‘Word documents’ but did not bank ‘speech connections’. When he used jargon and spoke fast he lost the Major and was supreme.

But he had done it. Natan had gone to the embassy in Baku and had denounced the hand that fed him. It could not be undone.

He sent messages to computers in Mauretania, Morocco, and Marbella, and confirmed the visit of the Major, his minders and himself. Without him they were juveniles and could not survive. He had betrayed them.