Payback (8 page)

‘
Being seen out with the boss’s wife...You’ll ruin my reputation,’ he smiled.

She
laughed. ‘Dinner for two here, at the very public Savoy, is hardly a walk on the wild side, you know. But I need a good old gossip. Consider yourself an honorary “one of the girls” for the evening. Let’s order, shall we?’

Tom
Bates had hesitated before accepting Maddie’s unexpected invitation to dinner, but he had sensed how badly she needed to unburden herself. And so it soon proved, as she became emotional, spilling out her most private feelings and worries to him. About being seen as a dowry American in a loveless marriage; about James, his business ethics and erratic temperament since his disgrace; about her relationship with Lydia—still her father’s favourite; about the girls...The twins had arrived seven years earlier, difficult births which had left her infertile. But he had so badly wanted a son, an heir for the baronetcy. The title passed only down the male line and, after three hundred years, would die with him if he had no male issue. His reaction to the news that she had been carrying twin girls was to show complete lack of interest. He had not been at the births, and stayed barely half an hour on a first visit the next morning. They had only infrequently shared a bed since, James having moved to his old rooms in the west wing. Initially this had been so he could get some sleep, away from the babies. But somehow he had never moved back.

‘
And now look at me,’ she pleaded with Tom, eyes filling. ‘Sagging breasts. Stretch marks...and my hair, nails, my skin have never been the same. I’m thirty-two, but feel fifty. I’m thirty-two, and married to a Philistine bully who never loved me.’

He
took her hand to calm her. They had now finished their main courses and, having started on champagne, had almost got through their second bottle of Krug. Her emotional state, made worse by too much alcohol, was swinging wildly between clumsily flirting with him, and sudden, self-pitying anxiety attacks. ‘Maddie. Look at me,’ he said. ‘You’re the most beautiful woman in the restaurant. The most beautiful in the whole of London from where I’m sitting. You’re witty, sophisticated, well read. A brilliant hostess. A great mother to two beautiful girls. You’re just terrific.’

Leaning
forward, she kissed him, lightly cupping his chin in her hand. Closing her eyes, she lingered over the moment before breaking off, embarrassed that others may be watching. Smiling shyly, she whispered, ‘I needed that.’

‘
You also need an early night and gallons of Evian, ma’am,’ he replied, taking a chair and a whip to his own self-control, and gesturing for the bill.

Smiling
back, Maddie pulled herself together, relieved now, and a little surprised that neither of them had made an embarrassing drunken pass. ‘You’re right. As ever. Thanks for just listening. I guess I’m kind of vulnerable right now. You’re not taking advantage of that...’ Her eyes held his, curiously, silently asking why.

He
looked away, his mind racing to find an answer that would neither depress nor encourage her. ‘Someone—Maugham I think—said that morality was the last refuge of the coward.’

She
clucked and corrected him, slightly shaking her head and pulling a face. ‘Patriotism. Patriotism is the last refuge...And it was Johnson.’

Minutes
later, in the cab back to his Chelsea Wharf apartment, Tom reflected on the evening: on Maddie and her worries, but mostly on the private picture she had painted of her husband, the restless, brooding commercial genius who had dominated both their lives for so long. A man each had loved in their way—and feared, in equal measure. A man who, like most tyrants, had somehow attracted wholly undeserved, irrational loyalty from those closest to him.

But
for how much longer? The ranks of the praetorian guard, he mused, were beginning to murmur.

*

There was no moon, so Manuel Ferez had little difficulty in keeping out of sight of the two men. It was also a windy night, and the breakers of the Atlantic crashing just a few hundred yards away, helped further to conceal his surveillance.

It
was his fifth night, watching, waiting, hoping for some kind of night-time delivery to the laboratory at Oeiras, just down the coast from Lisbon. The son of an English wine shipper and a Portuguese mother, he had been educated in England, and recruited by MI6 at Cambridge. After five months at the Lisbon Station, operating out of the embassy as an assistant to the commercial attaché, this was only his second modest field assignment. Like most things in the Service, however, it too was proving boring and routine, and he was pleased when at last the two Temple Lab security guards had emerged. He noted the time: 03.08. Looking through his infra-red night-sights, they just seemed to be wheeling some bagged-up waste out the back. But at least it would give him something to report in his log.

Silently
he shadowed the men, keeping well back. There was no need to get close. They were not going far with the tall factory trolley, its wheels squeaking and crunching across the rubble towards the land site a hundred metres away from the lab which Barton was developing for a new light industrial factory.

Ferez
doubled the chew rate on his gum as he remained hidden behind a digger. ‘03.09. Target takes out black bag rubbish and returns,’ he dictated to himself, cynically. ‘Notify Vauxhall Cross without delay! Man the COBRA centre. Alert the PM!’

They
manhandled the trash, throwing it into a foundation trench, then one jumped down, seemingly taking some trouble to cover it over with soil and rubble being tipped in by his partner. Each was smoking throughout, and as they returned, he noticed the one who had been in the pit had a cold, his handkerchief at his nose. ‘Perceptive, or what? So this is why they recruit double firsts,’ Ferez continued, still jokily bantering to himself.

Suddenly
the powerful flashlight carried by one of the men lit the digger, and he ducked down quickly, cursing his sloppiness. The taller of the two guards nodded in his direction, clearly thinking he had seen some movement over there, and both men changed direction to march quickly towards him.

All
Ferez’s bored cockiness quickly evaporated, as in a panic he tried to calm himself and remember his tradecraft training from Fort Monckton. Damn. Damn! It was all going wrong. His career was surely now humiliatingly over, falling at the very first, very low hurdle. And these men were, he knew, armed and usually drunk by now. His career was not the only thing on the line...

They
were now less than thirty metres away, their flashlight still on the digger. He had unforgivably marooned himself there, with no line of escape. In desperation, he took a stone and lobbed it high to the men’s right. In the few seconds it bought as they turned to look, he shimmied up into the digger bucket, suspended four metres in the air. But the men barely paused, and continued on towards him. They looked around the machine, checking it over carefully, the light flooding and picking it out from every angle.

‘
Climb up and look in the bucket,’ the shorter, more senior man ordered the other in guttural Portuguese.

There
came sounds of someone getting on to the body of the machine, then pausing as he figured how best to mount the digger arm that thrust Ferez skyward, like a sacrificial offering. Ferez himself was not armed. Not just for routine surveillance. Not in a friendly EU neighbour state.

Then
the arm began to sway, as the man started to climb up to check out the bucket. Young Ferez was by now shaking too, in fear of what he would have to do. He had no doubt that he could easily take out the climbing man, making the most of the element of surprise, and using the lethal unarmed combat head blows he had been taught. If,
if
he had the stomach to deliver them. Under pressure, he was certainly finding out about himself, as they warned he would. But even if he did now act out a text-book attack on the first one, the man below would be a very different proposition...

Then
there was a shudder and a loud expletive rang out, as the man lost his footing and fell, crashing down on to the engine cover. Unhurt but still cursing, he jumped to the ground next to his partner. ‘There’s a better way,’ he said.

He
picked up a heavy piece of concrete and threw it two-handed high in the air above the bucket. Ferez saw it frozen in the light above him for a millisecond, before it began hurtling down at him. As it did he smashed the night-sight hard, two-handed into the bucket-base beneath him, creating a loud metallic bang, just as the lump of angular concrete plunged silently into his chest. Somehow he stifled the groan in his throat as his ribs broke. Dizzy with agony, close to passing out, his ears oddly became doubly sensitive, and at last he heard them laughing, and pushing the empty trolley back to the lab.

He
waited a quarter of an hour before gingerly easing himself down, breathing shallowly and in excruciating pain. But he had to check out what the men had been doing. Why had they needed to be so secretive about dumping trash in a site their company owned?

Climbing
down into the foundation pit proved harder than anticipated, given his injury. It was over three metres deep and he worried about being able to climb back out. Once in, though, his task was easy. The man had made only a half-hearted job of covering the sack over—but he soon realised why they had both been smoking. The stench of rotting flesh was over-powering. The two men had just been behaving exactly like the burial men working the plague pits of seventeenth-century London, with their aromatic clay pipes, scented ’kerchiefs and pockets full of posies. It was obviously the remains of a butchered lab animal. Something large. A big ape. Or a pig.

Taking
out a pencil torch he tore open the sack.

The
eyes of the dismembered head were still open, and the ivory white teeth reflected back from the young black man’s hanging jaw.

Ferez
dropped the thing in horror. And later, as he wrote up his CX report, he had little memory of how he got out of the pit and back to his car.

*

The native had been sick for most of the seemingly endless series of flights, but to Bolitho’s relief they had not otherwise encountered any major problems. The journey had gone better than he dared hope.

They
had flown scheduled first to Los Angeles, via Guam. Bolitho would have liked to stop over for a few days on the Pacific island. Guam was still a major US naval and air base where he had been stationed for several months over forty years earlier during the Vietnam War. Having left a local girl pregnant, he now had an idle curiosity before he died to try and find the woman, and his grown up son. He just knew it would have been a son. But thanks to the damned native, Banto, this proved impossible. As the pain grew worse, he knew time was running out for him to tie up the many loose ends in his life.

From
Guam, they had flown to Los Angeles, where Bolitho had his greatest concerns over Banto’s paperwork. LA’s immigration is notoriously tight. Securing a PNG passport for him had not been a problem, speeded along with payment of a couple of hundred dollars to a rascal group with leverage on a consular official. The US entry visa had potentially been more difficult. In the end Bolitho had simply taken an English-speaking rascal who looked tolerably like Banto up to the embassy on Douglas Street. There they had waited patiently in line. Purpose of visit; ‘religious tourism’, supposedly to visit a Bible-belt Christian centre. It had taken just half a day to obtain, and suddenly the Stone-Age Banto was a documented citizen of the world.

Bolitho
kept Banto subdued on the flights, partly with dental Mogadon pills, but mostly with fear. Over the days before leaving, he had beaten the little man into submission, like a dog. He had hit him systematically on his legs, arms and back: nowhere that showed. Bolitho was an artist of fear, capable of both subtle and brutal displays of his age-old profession; a profession that had reached its zenith in the West in medieval times; but one still unknown to the primitive world of Banto. His tribespeople may butcher enemies, they may sever heads, and eat their flesh to show conquest, but, exactly like the Peruvians facing the sixteenth-century conquistadors, Banto had been shocked and horrified by the outsider’s strategic use of cruelty. When holding an enemy for execution, primitive people honour, befriend and respect him before the speedy death. But when the Incas witnessed the torture, the atrocities visited on them by ‘civilised’ and ‘Christian’ men, they were bewildered, believing the uniformed horse-soldiers devils. Banto now also believed Bolitho to be a devil: one to be feared and obeyed for now; one to be destroyed later. For himself. Payback. And to protect his tribe.

The
long journey then took them on to New Orleans, for the final hop down to Belize. Banto, who had never before been more than thirty miles from his village, had now travelled half the world and it had nearly killed him. His incessant fear of Bolitho, too many drugs, lack of sleep, the unnatural air, deafening, strange noises and rich food: it all left him weak and utterly disoriented. The shirt, jeans and sandals Bolitho had made him wear left him too hot, constricted and itchy. Added to which he was suffering an illness he had never faced before: the common cold, an alien virus to which he had no natural immunity, and which, when added to his acute diarrhoea, could yet prove life-threatening.