The Outsiders (45 page)

‘Everything I see?’

‘Everything you see, Major. Eight million square metres of land, nine thousand hectares. The site would be the most prestigious in the south of Spain. You play golf?’

‘No.’

‘Neither does Pavel, nor his people. I have never played golf. I’m told it becomes an obsession. Men pay well to satisfy the compulsion, which they say is better than being with whores. Permission has been obtained for two courses, a large five-star hotel and other accommodation for the affluent who will come to indulge their passion. The plans are for four hundred villas and four hundred apartments in small blocks. That is the scale of the project. We’re told it will destroy a wildlife habitat and a wilderness of great value. We counter that with an argument that’s hard to dismiss in harsh economic times. We will bring jobs to this place where there is nothing.’

‘Who made the initial investment? Why am I, an outsider, invited to take a profit?’

‘It’s a difficult climate. Two of the prime investors have been declared bankrupt. Additional investors have faced “misunderstandings” with the financial police and are awaiting trial at the Palace of Justice, in Málaga. Others contributed earlier but have become shy of further exposure. A new investor, who kick-started the project – which has considerable potential for profit – could have an excellent wall of anonymity.’

‘How is that done?’

‘I can register a company for a fee of three thousand euro. Or I can register a similar company cheaper in Gibraltar, which is UK territory, not policed. I would suggest that the investment is in Spain, and we can provide the names for directors. We’ve learned here, Major, that foreign investors do best when they work through a discreet network of local personalities. There are other services we can offer our clients.’

‘They would be?’

‘I would not refer to such matters had I not Pavel’s assurance of your reliability. My legal practice has a fine track record in cleaning money. I can promise you that a suitcase filled with five-hundred-euro notes will reward its owner with a most considerable sum after washing. An equivalent of a million pounds sterling, converted to euros, in low-value notes, weighs fifty kilos and fills two big suitcases. With five-hundred-euro notes we have the equal of two kilo bags of sugar. We would handle any currency, and offer favourable rates.’

‘I have friends who seek out such opportunities.’

He thought of them, walking the inner corridors of the Kremlin, labouring in large rooms in the Lubyanka where they occupied wide desks. They had
dacha
homes on land ‘bought’ from its old owners. They ran utilities and ministries but needed the bagmen and gave, in exchange, a roof and good rewards.

‘The people I might direct to you would be irritated if monies were misplaced.’

The lawyer paled. It was a reaction with which the Major was familiar. Many who had known him in the KGB’s Field Security had shuffled in his presence. If he smiled, everyone smiled. If he scowled, they backed away.

Pavel Ivanov intervened: ‘Anyone I deal with has my utmost confidence and is of the highest integrity. It’s a good deal, as you can see.’

He thought it a place of extraordinary beauty. Grigoriy, too, was captivated, as was Ruslan, but the Major’s eyes didn’t linger on the wild valley, the small farms where cattle still grazed among the scrub and where the sheep would soon be brought in for the winter. His astonishment that a scheme for two golf courses, a hotel and eight hundred units of accommodation could be contemplated was scraped from his face.

He spoke in Russian: ‘If the bastards who believe themselves to be the élite, the
siloviki
, were ripped off, I would be held responsible. I wouldn’t last a week. No contact could save me – or you.’

‘This week a mother-fucker came to my home and was casual about an investment that had failed. He went into a chipper and was given to the gulls in the mountains. I would do that to my lawyer, if I thought he had stolen from or lied to me. He knows it. An old man came to me this week and told me I had lied. His body was burned in an old car, but not his legs. We left them on the beach. My lawyer knows he cannot run far or sufficiently fast. Have you seen enough?’

‘I have.’

‘With the financial collapse much can be bought cheaply. They would concrete the whole coast for cash.’

They walked to the cars.

‘May I ask one thing?’

The Major grimaced. ‘Many things if you wish it.’

‘You threatened the Gecko with the open door, and he jumped. Had you been blind to him? Had he already betrayed you?’

‘No, he had not.’ The Major looked away from the valley and the hills, the grazing beasts and the ground climbing to the rock walls. ‘I’m certain of it.’

‘I won’t go,’ Winnie Monks said.

‘To the bitter end?’ Kenny intoned.

‘Has it screwed things up even more, Boss, with Xavier bunking off?’ Dottie had her screen on, her feet on the desk.

‘I’m staying,’ Winnie said. ‘I’m hoping for blood in the gutters and I’ll stay until it’s settled.’

‘Boss, if Xavier’s quit then who’ll hold Sparky’s hand when he runs?’ Kenny asked.

She gazed across the graveyard and watched the dribble of old ladies who came each afternoon with fresh flowers. ‘Fuck Xavier. Sparky’ll have to do his own hand-holding – he’s a big boy.’

Dottie swung her feet off the desk. ‘I’m suggesting more thought, and a conclusion. You should be out of here tonight, Boss, all wrapped up, gone. If the shit’s in the fan, I’d want you back in London, lost from view.’

Kenny chipped, ‘It hurt, Boss, but it’s for the best. There’s a flight this evening. If a witch-hunt starts you shouldn’t be here, exposed. It’s a worst-case scene, but—’

‘It was for the Fenby kid. Dottie, Kenny, you stood with me on that hillside in Buda-bloody-pest, and in that morgue when we saw him. We saw how those people had kicked the life out of him and hacked off his hand. We pledged ourselves to get them. Didn’t we owe it him, all of us – me, you two, Xavier and Caro? To leave him, walk out on it, not sure I can.’

‘Not a lot you’re doing here, Boss,’ Dottie said.

‘Best you’re on the evening flight,’ Kenny said. ‘I wouldn’t fret about Sparky. Bit of a passenger. I’d put my shirt on it that he’s already gone. I’m not often wrong.’

She reached for the telephone but Kenny’s hand caught her wrist.

Around her, they started to pack. They’d have read their answer in Winnie Monks’s eyes. She sat at her table and lit a cigarillo. She didn’t doubt what she’d been told.

In the corridor, Kenny said to Dottie, ‘It was a good slap you gave her.’

‘She’ll tell the world she walked into a door. Suppose he hadn’t run for Málaga and she was there. Can you imagine if she’d been at that bloody villa, breathing balls into Sparky? A disaster on a mega scale. I had to hit her.’

Kenny took Dottie’s hand, leaned forward and kissed her cheek. She blushed. ‘It’s the end, survival time, and she knows it.’

Posie stood at the edge of the group. She heard Snapper say, ‘I’m really surprised. I’d have called it a certainty. Do you reckon Sparky’s stuck in traffic, maybe couldn’t get a taxi?’

Loy said, ‘He’ll be hard on our heels.’

Xavier said, his back to her, ‘Don’t know why the Boss sent him. Useless, those people. Truth is, he’s out of his comfort zone and knows it.’

Snapper said, ‘The way I see it, he’ll be on the highway, scampering to catch us, but there’s plenty of flights.’ He waved at the board. Departures were scheduled later for Manchester, Leeds-Bradford, Glasgow, Gatwick and another into Stansted.

‘Will he have the sense, before he bugs out, to bury that weapon?’

The flight was called. Most of the camera stuff was hand baggage, and they shared it out among the three of them. Posie had been introduced to Xavier but he had ignored her. Snapper had done the tickets and shoved hers on a credit card. She’d had to give him the phone number at her bed-sit, so that an accounts department could recoup the airfare. They walked, laden, towards the airside gates and Snapper handed out the boarding cards. None of them had mentioned Jonno – as if he didn’t exist, had never been there. She could see, a half-step behind them, that the three of them were on one side of an aisle and she was on the other. When she squinted over a shoulder, she realised they would be a handful of rows ahead of her. There would be nothing at the far end – no gratitude from Loy, no thanks from Snapper for the sandwiches she’d made him. Tears streamed down her face, but no one noticed.

Snapper said, ‘It’s the way, isn’t it? You win some and you lose some. Still, my pictures will cause heartbreak. Don’t I always say, Loy, that worse things happened in Bosnia? Right?’

‘Or Baghdad or Benghazi – it’s what you say, Snapper.’

They went through. Had she tried, Posie couldn’t have stopped the tears.

‘Of course, we let it slip.’

‘Forgive me for asking.’

‘No offence. You pulled the rug, Gonsalvo. We had to let it slip.’

Dawson, with his colleague, circled the wide Plaza Mayor. They walked briskly and spoke occasionally. To get round the rectangular space they had to tramp, in Dawson’s estimate, a quarter of a mile. The Spanish officer had requested the meeting and named the location. He would have travelled into Madrid for the rendezvous and Dawson assumed that the predictable denial of further interest would not be enough. They were now behind the central statue of Philip III astride a horse, erected in 1616. He had immersed himself in the city’s architecture when Araminta had left, taking his son and his dog.

‘It crossed my desk that you had gone to Gibraltar.’

‘A short visit.’

‘I wondered, Dawson, whether Gibraltar was performing the function of Command and Control.’

‘A throwback in time, eccentric, with attractions for brief breaks.’

‘The attractions?’

‘I believe the most popular is whale-watching, with a dolphin safari close behind.’

The local man coughed, and lit another cigarette. They walked again in silence. The scaffolding for a concert was going up and the loudspeakers were being wheeled into place. The floodlights were already there and miles of cable were draped over the cobbles. The art was to deflect, not to offer an outright lie.

‘And the formidable Miss Monks?’

‘I’m not her keeper, but I could provide a number at Thames House. You could reach her tomorrow.’

His long-standing friend gazed into his face. Dawson was usually comfortable in a world of distortions, of deceit. Now he felt queasy. The coughing snapped in his ears.

‘If it were not let slip – ’

‘The rug came out from under us. You pulled it.’

‘ – and a clandestine operation continued with Command and Control in Gibraltar, it would be bad for relations between our agencies.’

An understatement, Dawson reflected. He himself would be on a flight out within a few hours if the plan for a killing was discovered. A permafrost would settle on the relationship between his people and theirs. She’d called him. He imagined her sitting in some dreary office on the old RAF base, likely chewing a stale sandwich and killing time before the flight. Sensible to go because she could make no intervention from the colonial Rock that would affect the likelihood of a hit attempt on the Costa. So, if he had not already joined the exodus, it depended on the nerve of a one-time marksman. He’d sensed from her voice that she had reached a cul-de-sac in her life, that the memory of a beaten and bloodied face on a morgue gurney had played out its time as motivation. She wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last.

‘Of course, Gonsalvo. Good to meet you again. We must stay close and weather whatever storms blow in our direction.’

He strode away. Dawson did not feel the need to duck or dive for the cover of a shop front to escape machine-gun fire or one-in-four tracer, but he recognised that he had been drafted into a war where the consequences of defeat were as brutal as they were in any setback in the deserts of north Africa, southern Afghanistan or Iraq. He was going towards the Puerta del Sol where smart ladies shopped, and none wore flak vests or carried gas masks, but it was a war that incorporated the usual treacheries, jealousies, heroics and courage.

He wondered how damaged was the man she had left in the field of combat . . . and what sort of victim she targeted. He made no judgements.

Pavel Ivanov recognised in the Major an animal’s energy, and envied it.

The Major was, to him, a figure from a wilderness. Once he had met a man from the east of Russia who knew of the Siberian tiger. He was a photographer and had talked. Others around them had cut their conversations and gathered in a close horseshoe. The tiger hunted mostly wild boar. Ivanov had never gone into the forests after boar but he knew the males possessed tusks that could slit a man’s stomach with a toss of the head. The tiger fed off them. The photographer had talked of how the tiger could kill a brown bear – larger than the black bear but unable to scale trees. It could weigh six hundred kilos, and had great paws set with razor claws, but the tigers killed them. They came from behind, threw themselves on to a bear’s back, dragged back the head and killed it with a bite through the spinal cord. The bears followed tigers in the hope of stealing prey already killed and part eaten. He had thought a window had been opened into a world of extreme survival. The tiger, fearless, could kill a bear or a boar – and would have the deep, remote eyes that characterised a man of great strength, of purpose. He thought of the tiger, and of the man beside him. His eyes were often on the Major’s hand, and the stump of the finger. There was about the Major a dynamism that cowed Ivanov.