Blackout (Sam Archer 3) (18 page)

FIFTEEN

A long silence followed as everyone in the room absorbed what Fletcher had just said. In the bed, the man's eyes were vacant, like looking at two windows with nothing beyond, his mind taken back all those years to that terrible night.

Eventually, Cobb broke the silence. This was all news to him too. Across the room Jackson was leaning against the desktop by the television, his arms folded, his head down.

He already knew all about this.

He knew what was coming next.

‘So what happened?’ Cobb asked. As he spoke, he glanced over at the American, but the CIA agent kept looking at the floor, avoiding eye contact.

'They took us back to their camp, tied us up, then beat the shit out of us,' Fletcher said. 'The whole group, punching, stamping, pistol-whipping. I thought I was going to die. They almost killed us there and then. Broke my nose and both my orbital bones. Broke Carver's arm. But then their Captain appeared. Most intimidating guy I'd ever seen. He was huge, camo paint covering his face, big AK in his hands. Even through the darkness and the paint, I could see the rage in his eyes. He looked at me and I almost pissed myself with fear. He ordered his men to do something in Albanian, and the next thing I knew we were thrown into one of the huts and locked up.’

He paused.

‘So what happened?’ Archer asked.

‘They left us for a day. They even fed us, and gave us water. But then one of them walked in and said we were going to play a game. He was a big guy, almost as big as their leader. I think he was his right-hand man. He had big spider tattoos on his elbows. He spoke in English. He said the game was called
eeenie-meenie-miny-mo
. The guy did it with his finger, and it came to a rest on me.'

He swallowed.

'Straight afterwards his men dragged me outside and four of them held me down on the soil, no one else around for miles,
I was
looking up at the stars.' He blinked. 'Then they got a set of bolt cutters and took off my small toe. One snip, and it was gone.’

With a great effort, he pushed back the bed covers and lifted his feet out of the bed, laying them on the sheets.

The men looked at his feet.

Seven of his toes were missing.

‘The guy with the spider tattoos told me no one knew we were there,' Fletcher continued. 'No one was coming for us. And they were going to kill us over the course of the next three months. A piece at a time. First the toes. Then the fingers. Then the feet, and the hands. Then the arms. Then the genitals. Then the eyes and tongue. Then the head.’

The room was silent.

Fletcher's chin trembled.

‘They dragged me out there each night and took seven of my toes, one by one, over the course of a week. They didn't touch Carver and Floyd. They let them watch, telling them that once I was dead, they would be next.'

Pause.

'Then, on the eighth night, we were rescued. Six men came in the dark and got us out. The other two could move, but I had to be carried.’

He shook his head weakly.

‘Neither of them paid any sort of price for what they did, unlike me. I never recovered properly. My body started to heal, but my mind and conscience didn’t. My whole life ruined because of Carver and Floyd.’

By the windows, Chalky shook his head, his arms folded. His face was hard.

‘Bullshit,' he said. 'You were there. You could have stopped them. But you stood there and let them kill those women and children.'

There was a long silence.

Fletcher didn't respond.

‘So what happened next?’ Archer asked.

‘We were taken out of there by chopper. Not to Bondsteel, but somewhere else. They gave me morphine for the pain as we took off and the next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital in Birmingham, back in the UK. There was a man sitting there beside my
bed dressed in a suit. I didn’t recognise him. He told me I had to sign a form, even before I was fully awake. He said that if I left the army immediately without a fuss, there would be no follow up to what happened that night.'

He paused.

'But he said if I ever spoke about it to anyone, anyone at all, the punishment that would come my way would be incredibly severe. And from then, until this moment, I've done exactly what he said. I’ve never said a word about any of it to anyone, ever. Gladly, I might add. I just wanted to move on as best I could and make the most of a second chance. Minus seven of my toes.'

He coughed.

‘Guess it doesn’t matter now. Nature is getting rid of me for them. Dead men don’t talk.’

He paused.

'But it’s always confused me,’ he said. ‘Why would they go to so much effort to save the three of us after what we did? We weren’t important. Just three grunts, a Corporal, Private and Captain. Why weren't we punished and hung out to dry? The whole world deserved to know what happened to those people. At the very least Carver and Floyd should have been court-martialled.'

‘So should you,’ Chalky said.

Cobb turned and looked at Jackson.

'I think this is where you fill in the blanks,’ he said.

Silence. His arms still folded, Jackson looked up at him.

'Why weren't we punished?' Fletcher asked him from the bed.

Pause.

'Because Carver's father was in the CIA,' Jackson said, eventually.

'So what?' Chalky said, by the window. 'They still murdered all those women and children. Who cared if his father worked for the government?'

Jackson said nothing.

'How high up was his father, Ryan?' Cobb asked Jackson, his voice even, putting two and two together.

Pause.

'How high?' he repeated.

'Deputy Director,' Jackson said, eventually.

'Holy shit,' Fox said, as every man in the room looked at Jackson.

'I don’t believe this,' Cobb said, almost at the same time. 'No wonder everyone was sworn to secrecy. Carver's father was one of the heads of the damn CIA?'

Jackson nodded.

'That's right.'

There was a long, somewhat uncomfortable pause as each man processed what they had just been told, none more so than Fletcher, lying in the bed.

‘You know three of the men who rescued you have died today,’ Cobb said, looking down at Fletcher.

The sickly man looked up at him in surprise.

‘What? How?’

‘One shot himself. Another was garrotted, and the third was executed in his sleep.’ He pointed at the television. 'You saw the reports of the attack on the police station?'

'Yes, sir.'

'That was my Unit. They were trying to kill me.'

Fletcher stared at him. He was sweating even more, the pillow behind his head already sodden.

‘They’re coming for revenge,’ he said. He looked at Cobb and Jackson. ‘They're after everyone who was involved that night. Which means you’re both on the list.’

'And so are you,' Archer said, quietly, by the door.

Fletcher licked his lips, looking back at Archer, fear in his eyes.

‘Look, I’ll talk to the Met,' Cobb told him. 'We’ll get some extra security here, guarding you, till this is over.'

Fletcher shook his head.

‘Don’t bother, sir. I’ll be dead before long anyway. And if they come for me, no one will be able to stop them. God doesn’t want me to live anymore. Maybe it’s just my time.’

He paused.

'You know, every night that I lay there in the hut in agony, I used to pray over and over again. I promised God that I'd be a better man if I made it out of there, that I would do good, that I would spend the rest of my life trying to help people.' He shook his head. 'But I didn't keep my promise. I've done nothing worthwhile since. So maybe it's about time they came back and finished the job.'

'Can you tell us anything about these men?’ Archer asked him. ‘The Black Panthers?’

Fletcher nodded.

‘Like I said, they are Albanian Special Forces. Once I healed up, I wanted to know who the men were who did that to me. I read everything I could find about them. But I can tell you they were the toughest group of soldiers I've ever seen. Their own army didn't want them, they were so ruthless.'

'How can we beat them?' Chalky asked across the room, from the window.

'You can't.'

Fletcher paused and coughed again. It seemed
as if
his stamina was almost gone. Across the room, the silent television flicked to show a
Breaking News
report of a car-bombing in upstate Connecticut, US. No one saw the screen change.

'How do we find them?’ Archer asked.

‘You won’t. They’ll find you.’

‘OK, so what do we do?' Chalky asked the room, irritated. ‘Just sit back and wait?’

Fletcher turned to him. As the man spoke, Archer found himself looking at the man's severed feet again.

‘You want my honest advice?’ Fletcher said to Chalky, his voice raspy, his throat dry.

Chalky nodded. 'Go on.'

‘Hide.’

Just outside the parking lot of the hospice, a teenager in a matching white
Adidas
tracksuit leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette and looking into the car park. He'd been walking past, heading down to the bookies to place some bets on the Premiership football this weekend, when something had caught his eye. He'd stopped and lit a cigarette, and was now taking a closer look at what had grabbed his attention.

His name was Leon. Just turned nineteen years old, he'd been in and out of juvenile detention centres and then prison since he could remember. He'd just finished his most recent stint twenty two days ago for breaking and entering. He and two friends had gone after an expensive apartment in Fulham that they knew belonged to a Premiership footballer. The guy was on over a hundred grand a week, so they knew there would be plenty of cash-value stuff to steal inside.

Leon had been cautious and planned ahead, waiting outside in the car with the other two and watching the player head out with his girlfriend on a Saturday night. However, every alarm went off the moment they picked the lock and stepped inside the front door. There were cameras all over the building and on the street outside and although they got out, two days later Leon and his two pals were hauled into Hammersmith and Fulham in handcuffs and booked. It was the latest in a growing list of convictions, the first of which was a simple fine for possession of marijuana, and was a list he knew without a doubt would get longer.

He'd started when he was thirteen. Like most kids in his area, he used to go down to the park and sniff glue or smoke puff, drink bottles of cider and try to get lucky with the local girls. But then he'd begun smoking more and more, and by the time he was sixteen he’d developed a fondness for cocaine that had taken all of his money. By that point he'd already stopped going to school. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been. And two months after his sixteenth birthday, his mother kicked him out of the house after finally having enough of him stealing from her. He didn’t only take cash, he stole stuff in the house that was worth anything and traded it in, and the final straw was when he stole a favourite necklace from her dresser and pawned it for fifty quid.

Out on the street, broke and alone, he’d started staying at hostels, with friends or at homeless shelters. He’d also started pick-pocketing to keep himself going. He didn’t have any qualifications and no way was he going to do manual labour or construction jobs for a living. Although he'd been nervous about pick-pocketing at first, worried he’d get caught, he'd been surprised at how easy it actually was. Given the congestion and close proximity of passengers on the trains on the Underground, a simple two finger dip into a handbag or pocket when everyone was jostling to get on or off the carriage reaped great dividends. He often worked with a partner, the two of them standing either side of a target on the train to box them in during the rush hour, pretending to be fellow passengers jammed together in the packed train carriage, but robbing them blind instead.

A lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe had started working the Underground too, and given the increase in thefts
,
the Met had started putting undercover cops down there in an attempt to catch them. A lot of the Poles and Romanians couldn’t spot a copper if he came up in uniform and tapped them on the shoulder, but Leon and the group he ran with could smell them a mile off.

Moving out of the Underground to avoid the police, they used Paddington as another haunt. The station was large and always busy, and its position as a main transport hub meant it was usually full of tourists with their heads buried in maps, disorientated and distracted. It was easy. Pick out a tourist and get one of you to grab their attention. Ten seconds later, when the distraction left and the tourist turned back, they find their bag they’d put on the floor beside them is gone. And whoever had stolen it had now vanished into a crowd of constantly moving, anonymous people.

But it hadn't all been successful. Leon had been nicked a couple of times pick-pocketing, having
t
o pay fines and do a short stint of community service, but as he got older and more confident he'd forgone the secrecy of pick-pocketing unsuspecting victims and moved up a level to armed robbery instead.