Deathlist (25 page)

‘How much longer we gonna be here?’ Petrovich asked.

Kavlak shrugged and knocked back his Grey Goose. Poured himself another measure. ‘As long as it takes, nephew. As long as it takes. Calm down. The Tiger will tell us when it’s over.’

Petrovich pulled on his Marlboro, scratched his four-day-old stubble. ‘What if they’re onto us? What then?’

Kavlak smiled. ‘They’re not. If they were, our faces would be on the front page of every newspaper and TV station from here to Moscow. Trust me. We’re in the clear. We covered our tracks. Now we just have to wait.’

‘I don’t like it. We shouldn’t be here. We should be back in Belgrade.’

‘No, we shouldn’t. Not unless you want the Tiger to feed you into a meat grinder.’

Petrovich smoked and paced. ‘I’m just saying, uncle. I don’t like it.’

Kavlak sighed. Blowing up those Brit soldiers should have toughened his nephew up. Put a set of balls on him. Instead Petrovich had turned paranoid. The kid had seen too many Hollywood films. Now he constantly panicked that the cops would come crashing through the door at any moment to arrest them. Kavlak knew better than to entertain such thoughts. He’d done this kind of thing before, and he knew the score. They’d been careful not to leave any loose ends. The hard part was over. Now they simply had to wait. But Petrovich didn’t see it that way. Kavlak was finding it hard to stay calm despite the stack of porno mags and bottles of vodka and cocaine on tap. About the only thing keeping him from going mad was the steady supply of hookers.

There were plenty of good whores in Valletta, and in the past fifteen days Kavlak had been an enthusiastic user of their services. The high-end ones, mostly. He liked his women clean and obedient, and for a few extra lira the premium ones would let you slap them about a bit. And since they were on the Tiger’s clock, they didn’t have to spend a cent of their own money. They could have a woman or two whenever they wanted, for free.

For the past two weeks Kavlak had spent his days knocking back Grey Goose, doing lines of coke and watching EuroNews on the TV. He passed the daytime thinking about all that money sitting in his off-shore bank account in the British Virgin Islands. Kavlak liked to think about how he’d spend his money. On whores, mostly. He was thinking he’d move to Nicaragua once this was over. Or maybe Belize. Half a million dollars could buy a lot of whores in a place like Belize. Maybe all of them. Maybe for life. These were the sort of thoughts that occupied him during the day.

In the evenings, Kavlak fucked whores.

There were three decent agencies in town. They worked at the classy end of the market, catering for the wealthy Russian and Chinese businessmen who’d recently put down roots in the city. As such, their services were reliable and discreet. Kavlak alternated between the three agencies, because if too many girls left with bruises and nosebleeds the agency madams would maybe stop taking your calls.

Kavlak necked his vodka and felt the stirring in his groin again. He poured himself another drink and reached for the landline. Then he punched in a number. It was seven-thirty in the evening and Kavlak needed another whore.

Nine hundred metres to the east, Porter waited for the phone to ring.

He was sitting in the kitchen of a rundown apartment on the first floor of a block on the corner of St Joseph’s Street and North Street, spitting distance from the bleached ruins at Fort Saint Elmo. Bald sat across the table from Porter, eyeballing the phone. As if he could make it ring just by staring at it. They’d been waiting for the call to come through for the past three hours, and still they hadn’t heard a peep.

‘How much longer?’ said Bald.

‘No idea,’ said Porter. ‘Could be a while yet.’

‘Fuck’s sake.’

Porter took a sip from his bottled water and said nothing. Six days had passed since the Puerto Banus job. Six days since they’d tortured Bill Deeds and dumped his body in a storm drain. Six days since Porter last had a drop of booze.

Spain had been a wake-up call. A sign. On the flight out of Malaga he’d ordered a Jack Daniels and Coke from the stewardess. He cracked open the miniature and went to tip the contents down his throat. But then something had stopped him.

The voice.

The one telling him,
You can’t afford to fuck this up
.

There are no more chances, John. It’s time to clean up, or go home
.

Porter had listened to the voice. Reluctantly. For the last six days he’d been sticking to water and black coffee. The first forty-eight hours had been pure torture. But after the third day, the shaking in his hands and the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach began to pass. Slowly, Porter could feel some of his old sharpness returning. The puffiness on his face disappeared. His eyes started to glow again. He felt leaner. Clear-headed. Ready to perform.

All four guys on the strike team had taken separate flights out of Malaga. They’d changed at Zurich, taking connections to the airport at Luqa, six miles due south of Valletta. Then they’d RV’d at the apartment. Devereaux had sourced the place courtesy of one of his contacts at Templar. A local fixer and retired cop who ran a side-business selling unregistered weapons and forged documents. Under instructions from Devereaux, the fixer had paid cash to rent the apartment in the old town under his own name, handing the keys over to the Aussie as soon as he’d landed at Luqa.

As soon as the strike team had RV’d at the apartment, they started running surveillance on Kavlak and Petrovich. There was no time to lose. Deeds’s body might be discovered any day now, and the team had no idea how long the Serbs were planning on staying holed up inside their penthouse. But it didn’t take them to long to realise that Deeds had been bang on the money. Kavlak and Petrovich never left the penthouse. Not for a stroll, not to check out the local watering holes. Not even to take out the rubbish. They were more locked down than Wormwood Scrubs during a prison riot. Getting to them outside the penthouse was out of the question.

‘What about triggering the fire alarm?’ Devereaux had suggested three days earlier, when the team had sat down to study the layout and the int they’d gathered on the targets. ‘Force ’em out into the open, mate.’

‘That’s a non-starter.’ Porter pointed to the blueprints. ‘There must be seventy people living in those apartments. Even if half of them are out when we trip the alarm, that still leaves us with a bunch of witnesses at the emergency gathering point. And Valletta’s small. We’re talking four hundred thousand people in an area the size of Camden. If someone hears a gunshot, we’ll have every fucking cop on the island on our case in the time it takes to make a brew.’

‘What about people going in, chief?’ Coles had asked.

‘There’s two we know about. A cleaner, and a runner who delivers supplies to the Serbs every few days. The runner’s some local thug. He delivers vodka, beer, fags, dirty mags, pizzas. All that shit.’

‘Can we use him to gain access?’ Devereaux asked.

‘No chance,’ said Bald. ‘He doesn’t have a regular schedule.’

‘That leaves us with the hookers,’ Porter said. ‘Kavlak and Petrovich get them in every other night, as far as we can tell. They always order two of them, and it’s always a couple of blondes.’

Devereaux said, ‘Same agency?’

‘No. They use a couple of different ones. But they always ask for the same type. The Serbs like their tarts leggy and blonde, and they like them European. They don’t go for anything exotic.’

‘Amen to that, brother,’ said Coles. ‘White is right.’

Bald had arched an eyebrow at the South African. ‘Says the bloke who comes from the rainbow nation.’

Coles made a screw-face. ‘Piss off, chief. That’s just some crap the darkies came up with. Make themselves feel better about stealing all our land and jobs.’

‘Now you know how we feel about the English.’

Devereaux shook his head and said, ‘So what’s the plan?’

Porter said, ‘There’s only one thing for it. We can’t lure the fuckers out. And we can’t go in noisy. We’re going to have to use the hookers to get in.’

They moved quickly after that. Porter had reached out to Lakes via the emergency number she’d given them at the mission briefing. The number put him through to the antique dealer in Berlin. Kovacs Antiques. No one answered the phone, just as Lakes had said. The call went through to voicemail. Porter left a message outlining their plan and hung up. Then he waited for the Firm to pick up the message and respond.

While Porter was making the call, Devereaux met with Templar’s local fixer. An ex-cop called Cabinelli. The Aussie purchased four Beretta 92 pistols fitted with Silencerco Osprey suppressors. The silencers wouldn’t hush the gunshots to a whisper like in the movies, but they would muffle the deafening crack and reduce it to something more polite. If someone heard a silenced round discharging inside a building, they wouldn’t automatically think,
Gunshot
. The suppressors would buy the team a few precious seconds in the event that they needed to make a quick escape. Along with the guns Devereaux also bought four boxes of Fiocchi 115-grain full metal jacket 19x19mm ammo, with fifty rounds to a box. Plus a few grams of a yellowish powder called GHB, otherwise known as liquid ecstasy. An odourless and colourless drug, in small doses GHB gave a person a dreamlike high. But a higher dosage could knock someone out in a few minutes.

At the same time, Bald and Coles headed over to Rabat on the other side of the island. They found an independent car dealer and paid cash for a blue Ford Transit and a red Alfa Romeo 146. On the way back to the safe house they stopped at a hardware shop in Qormi. Bought a selection of power tools and zip wire, plus a snap gun for picking locks. Snap guns had originally been designed for law enforcement but they were freely available from any locksmith. The gun would come in useful in case the plan went wrong and the team had to force their way into the penthouse.

Twenty-four hours later there was a new message on the numbers station. Porter listened to it twice before decoding it. It simply said,
Message received. Assets en route. Landing tomorrow at 0949 hours. GCHQ listening in.

There were two parts to the plan the team had cooked up. The first part arrived the following morning at Malta International Airport. Two intelligence officers sent down from the Firm, Ophelia Starling and Evelyn Cross. At first glance the two spies didn’t look like much. They were both dark-haired and pale and severe-looking. With their Barbour jackets and dark-blue jeans and suede shoes they looked like a couple of PhD students on a weekend getaway. But slap a couple of blonde wigs on them, some fishnet stockings and a touch of make-up, and they would instantly grab the attention of every full-bloodied male in sight.

Six hours after the two spies arrived the second part of the plan was up and running. Porter had requested that GCHQ tap directly into the Serbs’ landline. It was easy enough to do, even at a distance of two thousand miles. GCHQ had the capability to tap into any phone, anywhere in the world, by accessing the local telephone company’s substation. For the past twenty-four hours an intelligence analyst had been sitting in front of a screen in a drab open-plan office somewhere in Cheltenham, listening in to every phone call the Serbs made and received.

As soon as Kavlak and Petrovich put in a call to one of the escort agencies, GCHQ would pick up the chatter. They would get straight on the blower to the strike team. Then Porter would reach out to Devereaux and Coles. The two guys were waiting in the Transit fifty metres west of the penthouse. Once they had eyes on the hookers, Devereaux and Coles would move to intercept them. At the same time Ophelia and Evelyn would approach the penthouse posing as the whores. Once they were inside they would spike the Serbs’ drinks with GHB and wait for the drugs to take effect. Then they’d let in Porter and Bald. Half an hour or so later, the Serbs would wake up. Then the operators would introduce Kavlak and Petrovich to a world of pain.

‘Them lasses are taking their time,’ said Bald.

He was nodding at the bathroom. Ophelia and Evelyn had been locked away in the bathroom for the past half hour, getting themselves slagged up. Porter took a sip of his water and shrugged.

‘Long as they look the part.’

Bald stared at him for a beat. ‘You sure you’re up for this, mate? Maybe you should sit this one out. Swap places with Davey or Mick.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Porter growled.

‘Yeah, mate. Because you looked fine in Spain. You looked sharp as fuck when you were shoving that hooker out of the way.’

‘I said I’ll be fine. I’ve still got it.’

‘I should fucking hope so,’ said Bald. ‘Because if you’re sloppy again, I won’t be there to bail you out.’

Porter looked away from Bald. Took a swig of his water. I might be old, he thought, but I’m still a bloody good soldier. I’ll show Jock. I’ll show them all. You don’t spend eleven years in the Regiment without having the skills to perform.

At 1938, the phone rang.

TWENTY-NINE

1938 hours.

Porter grabbed the receiver and pressed it to his ear.

‘We’ve got the buggers,’ the voice on the other end of the line said.

Porter recognised the voice at once. Hawkridge.

‘They put in a call?’