Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) (31 page)

Marman looked about the Antelope, searching for he knew not what. I should not have left the Army, he thought; that was when things started to go seriously wrong between us. He looked at his watch: 6:15 p.m. He would have to hurry if he was to make it back for his favorite part of the day: a hot bath listening to Radio 4. He took his leave of the others and left.

At the door to the pub, Marman was suddenly aware of a brawl going on fifty yards down Eaton Terrace and right beside his pride and joy, a brand-new, red and black Citroën 2CV. Two men were slugging it out on the narrow pavement, right against his car. Breaking into a run and ignoring the huddle of jeering bystanders, Marman found his car key and got in. He would be bloody annoyed if there were any dents. The 2CV might look
like an upturned bucket but it was highly economical and that was increasingly important after six months without a job. One of the combatants, a black man with a bald and bleeding skull, bounced back against the passenger door as Marman, swearing, pulled away and accelerated out of Eaton Terrace, vaguely aware of blue lights flashing to his rear.

Past Battersea and well into Clapham, he turned into Blandfield Road. Since his divorce three years ago he had grown close to a lovely girl named Julia, but they lived their separate lives and Marman had purchased his Clapham terraced house with his Army savings. There were usually a couple of art students renting a bedroom, but that evening his only current tenant was out on the town, so he had the house to himself.

Marman’s house was directly opposite the shop of a friendly greengrocer who often looked after his keys and mail. Marman parked as close to home as he could and let himself in. He flung his blazer and tie on to the sitting-room table, poured himself a whiskey and rushed upstairs. As usual, he left the front door ajar, for he was a sociable sort and few days passed by without some friend or other dropping in. Marman was not worried by security. As he often said, “There’s nothing worth stealing, except for my radio, and if they want to get in, a lock won’t stop ’em.” Within minutes Marman was in a foaming Badedas bath with his drink beside him and the radio drowning out all other sounds.

Meier double-parked immediately outside 9 Blandfield Road and, at 7:05 p.m., as soon as the signature tune of
The Archers
began, he nodded. “Davies says Marman never misses the program and likes to listen in his bath. The door is half open. The camera is all set.”

De Villiers carried two plastic salesman’s bags, one containing brochures about life insurance. Once in the sitting room, he went directly to the blazer. Davies had
assured him that Marman’s black
Economist
diary was normally kept inside the inner pocket. De Villiers swore silently after glancing at the handwriting: it was too small for the 1600 ASA film in the Olympus XA4 to cope with without using a tripod or flash. The result might prove too grainy, when enlarged, to be legible. Better to play it safe, especially as there was little danger of interruption. Meier, in the car outside, would find a pretext to stall any visitor and they knew only Marman was at home.

From one of the bags, de Villiers took out Meier’s custom-made foldaway frame. He placed the diary on the table, ensuring that its open pages were kept flat by the strip of piano wire that stretched between the legs of the frame. Next he slotted the Nikon F2 camera into place, pointing down and some seventeen inches above the open diary. Meier had selected a slow, fine-grain film in conjunction with a flash attachment and manually set the optimum exposure. De Villiers pressed the plunger of the cable release and took a single photograph of each set of pages for the month of November. Six minutes later he was once again with Meier and the diary was back in Marman’s blazer pocket.

The surveillance period was the key to success. In Marman’s case, Davies had been patient and professional from the outset. After three weeks, still without a hit plan, he had given de Villiers his considered advice. Go for Marman’s diary, for he keeps it with him and uses it like a yuppy does a Filofax. From his forward planner pick a date when he is out of London and alone in his car, and set up a road accident.

Davies also recommended that they fudge the warning film. Since the days of Kealy, video cameras had become widely available and video film easily edited. In Marman’s case it would be almost impossible to serve him notice of pending death without building a major embuggerance factor into any subsequent accident plan.

The problem with Marman was his unpredictability and his almost obsessive love of human company. He was hardly ever alone. His girlfriend Julia was with him on and off much of the time after she finished her daily job at J&B Whiskey, his art student very often spent all day and night at 9 Blandfield Road, and a constant stream of friends, mostly ex-Army, kept dropping in to converse over stiff drinks.

When Marman went out, there was absolutely no pattern to his movements. Job-hunting appeared to be the motive of some of his calls but more often he went instinctively to one of half a dozen pubs, such as the Antelope,
where he knew his friends would be. He would join them on extended tours between various “in” watering holes, until a party was mentioned, whereupon the whole group would head off to change for dinner if applicable, or straight to the flat of the party-giver, not returning home until the early hours.

Since the Clinic never reacted to mere happenstance, de Villiers had agreed with Davies and gone for the Marman diary.

At a Tadnams safe house in Trebovir Road, a run-down basement next to a Slav-owned hotel, the photographed pages of Marman’s diary were studied in detail.

“On Saturday he will spend the day wine-tasting at the Hurlingham Club,” Meier observed.

“His girl works there, so she is likely to be with him,” said de Villiers dismissively.

“But afterward,” Meier’s finger stabbed at photographs, “he goes for drinks with Poppo. Saturday night is always good for us. Who is this Poppo?”

“Forget it.” De Villiers flicked to another sheet. “We have only three suitable events in the whole month and all are out of London. He will travel alone in his Citroën. We
know
that. We have the timing, and the routes will be obvious from any road map. I say we concentrate on these and forget his London life.”

There was no further discussion of the diary entries and Meier began to look like a cat anticipating a bowl of cream.

De Villiers pinned a map of England to the wall. “Marman will be making four specific journeys over a three-week period. Two in the west of the country, one to Suffolk and one to Rugby. The most detailed is down here,” he said, indicating the general area of Salisbury Plain. “We know exactly when Marman will be traveling between two known points … Meier,” he looked up at the Belgian, “what are your thoughts?”

The response was immediate.

“The ‘Boston brakes.’ It must be. It cannot fail yet nobody will ever suspect sabotage.”

Davies was shaking his head. “It failed in Boston, boyo, so why not here?”

“It did not
fail
,” Meier snapped. “You know that. Circumstances in Boston changed at the last minute so we abandoned my method. But everything was ready and would have worked. I rehearsed for two months on the old airstrip with the Tighe brothers in the stock cars. I could take over control at five hundred yards and by the end I had a hundred percent success. One hundred percent. That is not failure
 … boyo
!”

De Villiers raised his hand. “Okay, okay, keep your skin on, my friend. I have every faith in your brilliance, but what if we go ahead with your Boston brakes on his Salisbury journey and it does fail?”

Meier nodded violently. “In the impossible event of failure there, I move the equipment to the car of another suitable third party and we catch up with him later here.” He indicated Suffolk. “But I tell you for sure: it
cannot
fail if I am on the controls.”

De Villiers was pensive. “Certainly we need to ensure total lack of suspicion at this stage to avoid any interested party connecting Marman with Kealy and Milling. There can be no doubt that the Boston brakes is perfect from that point of view.”

“If you are both dead set on it,” Davies sighed, “as I can see is the case, then we’d be better off down south. We know some of the coastal geography, at least.”

The previous summer the Clinic had worked for a Paris-based agency that used them from time to time. De Villiers suspected that the client was a drug baron, controlling the Channel route into Britain from Deauville, and wanted a rival group wiped off the map without
creating ripples. Although gang warfare was not exactly the Clinic’s field, the fee was good.

Davies had pinpointed the target’s landing and handover spot as a desolate stretch of Pagham Harbor Nature Reserve to the north of Church Norton, in West Sussex. Having observed two previous handover ceremonies, he decided that a seaborne attack by Tadnams heavies in the narrow harbor, or a land attack as the French rendezvoused with their reception party, would both lead to major mayhem. To achieve a surprise attack, the Clinic had obtained through a Saudi purchasing agency a twelve-seater, forty mph hovercraft with a quiet engine and twenty inches of obstacle clearance. The Tadnams group had approached over mud flats, done away with the four-man French crew using silenced HK53 submachine guns, and towed their boat out to sea without reaction from the land-based reception party. They failed to locate the heroin but sank the trawler in forty feet of water before hovering back to the mainland.

“Marman’s Wiltshire return journey is scheduled for the afternoon of Tuesday, November eleventh. Is ten days sufficient time for you, Meier?”

“I will start collecting the gear together immediately with help from the agency. I can see no problem on that score. The difficulty will, of course, be finding a suitable proxy.”

De Villiers did not hesitate. “Marman will be at home this evening, so Davies and I will pay him a visit with the video. You go ahead with a full proposal for Wiltshire on the eleventh that we can decide upon tomorrow.”

Had Meier objected to the timetable, he would have done himself a favor, but his brilliance did not extend to seeing into the future.

The door of Marman’s house was ajar on the evening of Monday, November 3. Inside, oblivious to the draft, he was entertaining an old friend from his days in Dhofar. The two men occasionally met for a drink and to set the world to rights.

“I could always tell he was a chancer,” Marman exclaimed, commenting on the recent resignation of Jeffrey Archer, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, following accusations of involvement in a sex scandal. “That lewd smirk gives him away.”

“You are quite wrong,” said his guest. “I have it on the best information that the woman was put up to it. A prime case of carefully planted disinformation. Once the smear has been disseminated, especially when the dirt is fairly credible, the victim will never live it down. Archer will be tarnished in the minds of the majority long after they have forgotten the actual details of the supposed scandal”—he knocked cigar ash onto the carpet—“and in this case the timing is excellent. The accusation was published on the twenty-sixth in the knowledge that Archer would reply the very next day … and what happens on the twenty-seventh … the Big Bang, of course, the City’s greatest event in decades. Not much space left in the daily rags for Archer’s repudiations at the time when he most needed to scream them far and wide.”

Marman nodded. “His wife’s a good-looker. I could do more than sketch her if she gets fed up with hubby.”

“Not bad, your latest offerings, Mike. Where did you do them?”

The offerings in question were a handful of pencil and charcoal sketches of nudes, mostly reclining on a beach or emerging from the sea.

“Ah yes, did I not tell you? Had an excellent sailing holiday in the Med. It helped me to sort myself out and think positively about life. Indeed a great time was had by all. That lass actually had her bikini on at the time I sketched her, sad to relate.”

“You’re very good at it, you know.”

“Stripping girls in my head, you mean … Thanks,” he laughed. “I do feel much better for the time away. I was beginning to be very down in the dumps after months of negative responses to my job-hunting. Makes you feel you’re over the hill, a has-been with no prospects but the dole.”

He rose to fill their glasses. “To employment,” he said, and they toasted his prospects. “Next week I’ve a couple of good meetings lined up. You’ll remember Searby, Brook and Amoore, all good lads in Oman. Well, they’re helping out with likely leads.”

“How’s Rose May these days?”

“I see her most weekends when I collect the lads.” He was silent for a while, slowly turning his glass about. “I miss her, you know. Julia’s a very good friend, an angel, and Gillie, just up the road, is like a sister to me. But it’s not the same. The loneliness, the regrets, what could have been. Footloose and fancy-free sounds good but it’s not for me.”

“I wouldn’t call you footloose. What about this place?”

Marman’s rather lugubrious expression lightened. “Yes, it’s a lifesaver. That was dear Gillie, of course. It was her
suggestion to get in on the property market, and my God she’s proved right. What with the hugely increased value of the investment and the rental income, it’s been a boon. But I still need a job. Two sons at Bousefield’s and I do want to do my best by them. Rose May’s a good mum but everyone needs a father.”

Marman’s own father, a brave RAF pilot in his day, had emigrated to Australia in 1962 when Michael was seventeen and determined to become a cavalry officer. When his family had departed, Michael stayed with his grandparents in Kingston. A quarter of a century later, apart from one brother in the RAF, he seldom saw his family. The 9th/12th Lancers had given him the best years of his life. They had been his home but now he was on his own, a fish out of water. Never mind. He was a fighter. He would start a new life …

Marman realized he was in danger of appearing morbid. Boring hosts and party-poopers were anathema to him. He changed the subject to that of mutual friends and was soon back to his normal, cheery form.