The Outsiders (46 page)

The man slept. His clothing had dried on him. Ivanov had heard enough of the wind through the night to appreciate how the sea conditions would have been, and an open boat would have offered no comfort to its passengers. He seemed to see the tiger go on to the back of the bear and do the killer bite. He seemed to see a prisoner held in the open door of an aircraft and questioned. It had been Marko and Alex who had determined to use the chipper; they had taken out the chain saw, primed and fuelled it. They had recalled the old days and he had been dragged back into the fights for territory in St Petersburg. He had thought those days were over . . .

He envied the Major. He hadn’t boasted or postured, as so many did.

He had thought himself blessed when he had bought the Villa del Aguila and settled in with Alex and Marko, their wives and children, when life had been in the garden and beside the pool. He had had weekly discussions about his investments with Rafael, and sex with the law firm’s investment manager. Riding in the car through the countryside, he felt a vacuous boredom.

The sun was lower. It came over the roof of the villa and flung a heavy shadow across the patio and on to the lawn where the dog was. It wandered about, waiting for excitement. More of the sun was on the rockface and, to Jonno’s eye, highlighted the ledge and the lip of the cave roof.

He knew they would come soon, but he did not know what part he would play, how he would contribute.

The rifle was now on the table. Sparky still held it, and the barrel shook with the motion of his hand. Jonno thought he was upset by the clear-out, likely more wounded than Jonno was by Posie hitching a ride with them. He was upset, too, because he had heard nothing from the organisation. Twice Sparky had taken his wallet out of his pocket, opened it, looked down at the photograph, then snapped it shut, and replaced it in his pocket. Beside the magazines was the printout picture. Jonno had not seen it before but the last time he had come up the stairs it had been laid out, the creases smoothed away. The jargon from Snapper and Loy had stuck: he assumed it was the Tango. When the Tango came to the Plot and they Pinged him – or had Eyeball – he could be Taken Down, and they’d quit. The face was handsome; showed a man of authority and strength, who was not devious, cunning or cruel. It was a good enough image, with the brush moustache and the close-cropped hair, to be easily recognisable. If the target arrived through the villa’s front gate, then walked directly into the house, he was safe. When he stepped out on to the back patio to sit in the last of the day’s sunshine, or to see the sunset, he would be in Sparky’s view.

But the hand shook.

The house had been cleaned again. Jonno was ready to go out of the front door, slam it, drop the key under the plant pot by the step and run. His bag was by the door, as was Sparky’s.

The shaking hand was encased in a plastic glove, like a dentist used or the girl in the supermarket in Ealing when she was handling cheese. He didn’t know what would happen to the rifle.

Why had Jonno stayed? He hoped he would soon know.

Why was Sparky there after the rest had gone? Jonno thought the answer lay with the woman who sat on a bench in a park. The magazine hit the table with a drumbeat because of the tremor in the gloved hand.

‘Where do you aim for?’

‘They call it the
Medulla oblongata
– we know it as the “chestnut” or the “apricot”. It’s the tissue mass behind the ear. If you hit that the whole motor action of the brain goes. Or you can shoot through the mouth, and that’ll get to it.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sparky said, barely a whisper.

‘And when will you find out?’

‘When I’m looking at him through the sight.’

17

‘How do you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Kill time.’

‘Be patient. Other people aren’t,’ Sparky answered.

‘In my life, what I do, something happens, is always happening.’

‘It is in the garden. I can dig and sweep, rake and load bags with leaves. Where I was, you have to lie so still.’

Jonno said, ‘I’d clear out my phone, or go through my wallet and chuck what I don’t need . . . I was fool enough once to say in the office that I was bored, impatient for something to happen – mail to come, the phone to ring. A woman told me I should try to recall every memory I could. I said it would take for ever. She said it would pass the time. Then she pointed out the dandruff on my jacket and the conversation died. I don’t know how to kill time.’

‘Do that memory thing.’

Bad ones came to Jonno’s mind. A teenager’s rudeness to his mother. A school bully’s hack at his shin. The inquest over a lost library book. He was selective and ditched them. Tried to do feel-good memories . . . shagging girls, the O2 and Kaiser Chiefs, posting the letter of acceptance for a first job after university . . . God, was his life that dull?

‘What about you?’ he asked Sparky.

‘The first time a cell door slammed on me. The first weekend of being banged up in Feltham. I’ve a memory of the first man I shot dead, early Iraq off a rooftop, but that’s as clear as the fifth or the tenth or the twentieth. I can see the first slap I did to my Patsy’s face. I can feel the cold from the first night I slept on the street before the hostel was sorted. They’re the sharp ones.’

‘Do you always do the honesty?’

Sparky looked up at him, surprised. Jonno would have lied. He didn’t think that Sparky was acting a part when he spoke of criminality, killing and brutality. It came to him again loads that he, Jonno, was an innocent abroad and knew so little.

‘It’s what happened. I’m past the lies. Don’t think they help.’

‘I’d have told you about the good times. Sorry . . . A man goes into a chipper, another loses his legs, a cat gets shot . . .’ Jonno spoke quietly. He had a focus point towards the back of the garden where the sun still lit it, highlighting the bright colours of the bougainvillaea, the petunias and geraniums. ‘What’s going to happen . . . if I’m part of it, will I walk away from it and be the same or changed?’

‘I told you.’

‘Contamination.’

‘We learned that talking doesn’t make time go faster.’

Jonno said, ‘Last question. Does it matter what he did, the target? How evil does he have to be to justify being a target?’

‘Doesn’t have to be anything. He’s the
target
. I don’t analyse, I just do what I’m told to do. Jonno, you either buy into it, or you should have gone with your girl and left other people’s arguments behind.’

Sparky’s hand had started to shake again and the grip on the rifle stock was tighter. This might be the last moment when he could go downstairs, open the front door, drop the key into its hiding place and go down the path, out of the gate and start to run – faster than he ever had before.

He had cleaned the kitchen and wouldn’t go back into it to make coffee. There was nothing left in the fridge to eat. He wouldn’t dirty anything. He thought himself pathetic. Would the soldier who had lain beside Sparky and done his spotting for him have yapped in the marksman’s ear while they waited for a target to come into view? He went to the back of the room, near to the door, put his back against the wall and slid down to the floor.

He breathed hard, closed his eyes, tried to make a better fist of killing the time.

The Major listened and Pavel Ivanov talked.

‘I’m a free man here. I don’t walk in fear. I have no enemies along the coast. I live my life and no one interferes. I pay tax. My friend organises it so that I don’t pay a great tax, but I contribute. I’m not frightened of my own shadow.’

The lawyer drove. They were coming down from the high ground and he could see Gibraltar and the hazed coastline of north Africa. The wind seemed to have dropped. He saw small villages, tidy and ordered, where livestock browsed and grazed. The window was down enough for the clean air to play on his face. He had no spare flesh on his body, and neither did Grigoriy nor Ruslan.

‘I have a fine home. I have money that I believe is secure, in cash, bonds and equities. I have property in Spain, in the tourism belt, in the African coastal resorts, in Brazil and the Caribbean. It is washed money and secure. I had an incident this week and dealt with it. There is nothing that could arouse the interest of either the local police or the national squads. And – through my friend Rafael – I have arrangements with local officers and we contribute towards charities involving them. We live discreetly but openly.’

The Major thought the Tractor was overweight but not obese. His stomach was comfortable and the shirt buttons tugged in their holes. He compared the size of the Serbs with his own men. A different life, a different world. Attractive? It might be considered so.

‘But it comes at a price. I’ve cut links. I had relatives in Perm. I’m not saying I want to see them, or that I want to know where my mother is, or to trace my father. I had boyhood friends – they may be in the army, addicts on the streets, dead, married well, in a gulag camp and rotting, I don’t know. I don’t go back. There are consulates for Russians in Madrid and Barcelona and I haven’t registered with either. There’s a Russian community here, but I don’t mix. There are churches for our Orthodox faith, but I don’t visit them. I have distanced myself, cut the ties. It’s not possible to be a resident here and to retain links with our country . . . but I drink Russian beer.’

In his mind the Major saw sodden fields on which the first snow was about to fall and the leaden grey skies of winter in Pskov. Sunshine clung to the slopes that slipped by the car.

‘It was not a half-measure. I made a total break. I would say that we didn’t welcome your first communication. You said you were coming and I wanted to refuse you. You are the first prominent person I have met for four years. Perhaps I’ve allowed too much to pass me by.’

The road was steeper, the bends more acute, and the Major thought the view down to the coast was outstanding. There were no vistas in Pskov that he valued. Could he live here? He twisted it in his mind.

‘We live openly and without fear. How openly? The children of Marko and Alex go to school here. We have no social life, but we’re not in hiding. We don’t feel threatened.’

The Six man stood a little back from the grave, dug freshly in the sand of the Cimitière Le Kasr. He gave his address.

‘I’m sorry, my friend, but I don’t even know your name. I do know that you chose to work alongside our Services and to strike a heavy blow against the forces of organised crime. In life and death you are respected.’

He went unheard. The speech bubbled in his mind but his tongue only moistened his lips in the suffocating heat. The wind blew off the sea and across the dunes; sand stung his face. He didn’t know the name but had been told the nationality. Minimal research had shown him that Georgia was a Christian country. He had persuaded a priest from the one Catholic church, they called it a cathedral, in Nouakchott to conduct the service.

‘In our Services we don’t forget those who put their lives on the line. We honour them. We honour you, my friend. What role you have played in winding up a tentacle of an organised-crime group, I can’t say. We will make certain that your life wasn’t wasted. That’s the least we owe you.’

There was the priest, likely half French, with a reedy voice, two grave-diggers, the driver of the van that had brought the misshapen corpse from the mortuary, a uniformed police sergeant and himself. It wasn’t sentiment that had brought the Six man back to the Mauretanian capital but he was interested to see whether a Russian would show, any big-shouldered bastard with wraparound shades, tattoos and a shaven skull. None had, but he could combine the burial with meeting the new Agency man in the American compound. The sand fell from the priest’s fingers onto the crude surface of the plywood box in the hole. The Six man stepped forward and picked up his own handful. There was not a blade of green anywhere, only sand, stones and wooden posts. He scattered it, and murmured, ‘I hope it was worth it, my friend. I hope enough people appreciated what you did and acted on what you told them. It would be a shame if they didn’t.’

The sun lit the cemetery in front of her, and the runway beyond it. Winnie Monks made what would be her last call from the Rock. She spoke briefly with Caro Watson: what time the flight would leave, the transport they would need. ‘About as far as it can go. Time to call closure. I’ll be in tomorrow and talk you through it. Of course it wasn’t for nothing. There’ll be a time and a place. Now switch me.’

She waited, kicking the radiator. Below the point where her toe hit the ironwork there was a small heap of paint flakes.

She greeted her chief, told him of her movements. ‘Yes . . . I’m fully aware this is a retreat. I’m not dressing it up. I think you were kept in the loop and are, therefore, aware that our best efforts to pull him in, arrest and extradite him, were balked. I regret the summary departure of the surveillance team. Xavier went with them. The way it was laid out was fine while there was back-up for the main man. He needed the surveillance to stiffen him. They chickened. No one’s holding his hand now. Am I in tears? No. Am I kicking the furniture? And some. The main man’ll be on his way home – rats and sinking ships, all that crap. I’m leaving because – sadly – it’s over.’