The Outsiders (30 page)

‘The British have few friends.’

‘A talent we’ve developed to an art form.’

‘Our magistrates are interested in headlines, news-bulletin stories. Corruption proven against a town mayor outweighs the possible extradition of a Russian gangster. Who cares?’

‘We do.’

‘Why? We are tired of reading that the so-called “head of the Russian Mafia” is held in a swoop, that “a devastating blow has been delivered” against organised crime. Millions are spent, the accused walks free and the evidence founders. The UN’s Office of Drugs and Crime, reported recently on the growth of organised crime to the level of a transnational superpower. It says nation states are guilty of “benign neglect”. I cannot disagree. What did he do?’

‘He beat one of our men to death. It was a scandal on an epic scale.’

‘I liked her, the lady you brought. Thrust, drive, aggression. A fine woman, Dawson.’

‘I’ll tell her that the local legal system will consign her to punching a concrete wall. My love to Bruno.’

He stopped. Another cigarette was lit. Their hands touched and they turned in opposite directions to leave the maze garden. He had already told Winnie Monks, but would now tell her again that the mission was well and truly wrecked.

Always sad when something of worth was abandoned.

She was in a good mood, and the brickbats slung at Winnie Monks seemed not to have damaged her.

She was on the scrambled phone. ‘Yes, I think I have that . . . It’s fuck-all to do with any imagined shortcomings at your door . . . What do I want you to do? Hang about . . . Of course I realise you have other matters to concern yourself with . . . I’m asking you to hang about, and if I call, come running . . . Am I packing up? Not yet. Will I be pulling the mainland crowd out? At some stage but not sure when . . . Thanks for what you’ve done. You’ve achieved fuck-all, but thanks all the same.’ She rang off.

Kenny and Dottie were studying her. Both seemed confused. They might have expected her to be at her desk, with the view over the cemetery and the runway. The call from Dawson in Madrid had come an hour after the link with Xavier.

‘Your assessment. Is this idiot going to do real damage? If not, what’s the problem? Is he going to blow them out of the fucking water? Is he one of those midget submarines with a hold full of gelignite? If he’s not, he doesn’t matter. Xavier, I accept that the boy’s rationality is hard to judge . . . You’ll not be held accountable. Keep close.’

She went to the window, opened it wide and lit a cigarillo. Plenty at Thames House, given the calls coming through to her office, would have crumpled. It didn’t matter because Snapper was an expert in slopping oil on rough water. He’d handle it. It didn’t matter much more that Dawson had come up with final negatives from his soundings in Madrid. Neither had Caro Watson’s news dampened her spirits.

‘Just remember that shit happens, Caro. It’s happened to you before and it will again. It would have been a luxury to know the exact route and time of arrival . . . No, Caro, you aren’t to blame. You extracted the basics we needed from him. I reckon you had pretty much everything that was of value . . . So, the kid showed out. Others have and others will again. It’s an unhappy world for those who ditch their loyalties. It might have been different if you’d been allocated more resources, but you weren’t. This bloody thing is on the cheap. It’s not your problem – we can live with it. Safe home.’

She smoked, hacked. Later, when more pieces had been slotted, she would ring her chief, and get him up to speed – ‘fly it by him’, in the jargon of management. He would be told what he needed to know, and nothing he did not wish to hear. It was unlikely, she reflected, that any other team leader was allowed such rope: in the face of spectacular failure, then the rope was long enough to hang her.

She asked Kenny if she could have more coffee.

She flicked ash to the ground, brought her head inside and told Dottie to call a factory outside Leamington Spa so that a process, already in place, could be activated.

They would think, both of them, that she should be on the floor, squirming. They might struggle to comprehend that these events had been anticipated and that ‘contingency’ plans were in place. The smoked cigarillo was dropped and died on the paving. She eased back inside. She waited for the coffee, then told Dottie and Kenny what would happen. They gaped.

Dottie made the call. She spoke good Russian, interpreter-level German and Italian, useful French and passable Spanish. She could also talk with the accent of her childhood in the north-east, or with the tone of southern England private education. For the former officer, at the factory, she chose a familiar privileged pitch, which amused her. She needed amusement because the plans set in motion by her boss were extraordinary, dangerous and, had there been a betting shop inside the base and had there been odds given on tactical implosion, she might have bet the small change in her purse. Her star was pinned firmly to Winnie Monks. If the Boss went down, so would Dottie. There was nothing in her life but the Boss.

She was connected.

Deep breath. She said she was authorised to call for a plan to be executed. Winnie Monks had no man or woman. Neither did Dottie. She had watched over the Boss and knew of the failures. There had been a City lawyer, Giles something, who had led a team doing an organised-crime seminar that the two of them had attended. He’d taken her twice to dinner but it had all gone sterile. There had been a Special Branch man, who had led the Boss as far as a hotel room. Then he’d sat on the floor and begun to chunter about his wife. Dottie had no one and no other life.

She dressed plainly. She made little of her hair, less of her lips, and wore the sparsest jewellery – a small crucifix on a gold chain and stud earrings. There were plenty of plain women, from young to middle-aged, at Thames House. Lack of decoration tended to keep male predators, married, never going to ditch the wife and kids, at arm’s length. Work, almost, compensated. She appreciated that if the Boss’s plan was activated, and failed, she would go down in the slipstream, with no shoulder to cry on.

The voice answered. ‘The Dragunov, yes? As in the letter you brought to us. The SVD Dragonov 7.62mm, yes?’

‘That’s what she wants, the Dragunov on the move.’

‘It’s not the easiest rifle to use effectively. Has your man sufficient ability?’

She answered brusquely, ‘If he hadn’t, she wouldn’t have asked for it.’

The chief executive officer took it, and volunteered a young man from the sales staff, an ex-Green Jackets officer, to drive him south.

At the factory they made a standard sniping rifle for use by select units of the British Army, special forces only. The Dragunov, with the stock folded on its hinge, was less than a metre long, encased in polystyrene, and had a tinfoil interior that would deflect most levels of security X-ray equipment. The PSO-1 sight, with quality magnification, was detached and housed in a customised slot in the packaging, as were twenty rounds of ball ammunition.

The young man waited until they were on the motorway, travelling at speed, before he broke his silence.

‘Am I allowed to ask where it’s going?’

‘If I said the Falklands, that Pebble Island is overrun by albatross stocks that need culling, would that do?’

‘I only asked. What’s its history? Why do we have it?’

‘Manufactured in 1980 at the Kalashnikov factory, used by the interior ministry forces, and when they had newer versions they were sold off, shipped to Iraq. We picked up mountains of junk in the first Gulf war, and this one came our way when Marksmen’s Training at the Commando Sniper School wanted something more modern. Surplus to requirements twice over. Do me a favour and don’t ask me where it’s going or why because I don’t know. What I can say is that it isn’t an easy weapon to handle, and the guy using it has to know his business. Range is terrific, accuracy is good, but it requires a high-grade marksman if it’s to do the business.’

‘And the ammunition?’

‘In with that stuff we bought from Bulgaria last year. More modern than the weapon because it has to work.’

‘Do we get it back?’

‘I’d like to think so – but you never can tell with her.’

‘And, of course, you’re not going to tell me who she might be.’

‘A very good friend, an old friend – sorry,
correction
, a long-standing friend. You’ll find, Evan – if you stick with us – that there are occasions when those on the inside track go outside their perimeter fence for the little matters that would be awkward for them.’

There was a little chuckle. ‘And you’re not going to tell me who’s going to fire it, and at whom?’

‘See nothing, hear nothing and know
nothing
. I don’t know. It’ll be used at the edge of whatever remit she’s on. Enough.’

They came down the motorway, and would turn off for Oxford, then skirt the northern side of the city, divert west and finally arrive at a rear gate of RAF Brize Norton. They would be met there and the package taken from them by an officer who had no idea of its contents but who had the destination and flight it would travel on.

He said, ‘Maybe when I’m old and dribbling I’ll be told – that’s if it worked. The way these things happen you get to know double quick if it doesn’t work so the less you know the happier you should be.’

‘I think I should explain it to him, do it myself,’ Tommy King said.

‘You do, do you?’

‘I mean, it was bad luck. Could have been a good earner, but wasn’t. I would have thought he’s the sort of man who’d understand that,’

‘Would you?’

He was Rafael. He came from a farm west along the coast, close to Sotto Grande. His parents had bred pigs for the best ham, and their third son was the first from the extended family to receive a university education. Sacrifices had been made to achieve it; he had paid them back, with interest, and could afford to. He had law degrees from Madrid and Milan. Because his clients represented an élite, his wealth was considerable. With his wife and two small children he holidayed in the Caribbean, the Maldives and the best Brazilian resorts. He was envied by the legal community in Marbella for his affluence, contacts and the quality of his investment portfolio. He did not see himself as a felon but as a man who was sharp, who saw the main chance and had the nerve to follow his nose. But . . . In recent months several of the lesser lights in the legal profession, a number of town-hall officials, some police officers from the UDyCO and a few accountants had been carted off in handcuffs after dawn raids. He thought himself clean. Now he wondered if he had made a mistake. Across his desk sat Tommy King.

He thought himself clean but could not escape the worrying possibility that he had made a mistake. He had met Mikey Fanning. He had dealt with the old British rascal in his early days. He had helped him to purchase his home, when he had had money, and had set up a licence for the first club, then one of the bars. That had been a long time ago. Fanning was now – he had heard – almost destitute, but he had come back to Rafael, had asked a favour and had hosted a lunch at the Marbella Club, which would have cleaned him out. Rafael had heard of the nephew and had made an introduction. He could not have said why his prime client, Pavel Ivanov, who was rinsed of illegal activities, had made the loan. The money put into the venture was lost, and the vessel, the
Santa Maria
, was under escort and heading for Cádiz. It had been a
loan
, not an investment between partners. It was a mistake to have entertained Tommy King for anything more than the time it took to gulp a coffee.

‘He is a very busy man.’

‘What I’m saying is, I can’t repay him. No way I have that sort of money, and he should be told so to his face. It looked good – no, better than that – but it went down. I want him to know I haven’t anything more than the clothes I stand up in, and a car without insurance. I can’t work my patch because there’s bloody Irish out looking for me. Don’t want him to think I’m walking out on him.  With me?’

He had believed the young man, as his client had. He glanced at Tommy King, lounging in the chair, and sensed risk. Risk always followed a mistake.

He buzzed his secretary to come into the office. When she did, he went out and called the Villa del Aguila. He said what he thought and waited.

He went back into his office. He managed a warm smile. He told Tommy King when he should return.

The flight was due to go non-stop to the RAF base at Akrotiri, on Cyprus – it had been, Dottie said, the home of Aphrodite, the goddess of love – but would, on Winnie Monks’s instruction, be diverted to Gibraltar, which was best known, Kenny said, for bare-arsed Barbary apes. When she had the arrival time, she called, on the scrambler, the number Dawson had given her and told him, as if she was speaking to a hired hand, when he should reach the colony.

It was near the end of the day and the Latvian policeman escorted the visitor, a Greek academic in the field of forensic sciences, to the last appointment before the Europol building emptied.

‘I had hoped you would have the opportunity to meet a Belgian colleague from the organised-crime teams but he’s away on leave. He would have talked to you about the violence of the Mafia clans. He has produced an excellent paper on it, emphasising the extremes of aggression used by Russians and the foot-soldiers from the Balkan states. His work revolves around the thesis that, without the certainty of violence, the major player is weakened. Vile cruelty and torture are used to maintain sole franchise rights on territory and to punish those suspected of deceit when a deal has been agreed. It is employed in any incident where ‘‘disrespect’’ is identified. The crime boss cannot exist without violence, much of it gratuitous, which sends a message that will make rivals apprehensive. He employs killers. In the case of Russia those men capable of ruthless murder may be tasked by the state to remove a troublesome political rival, investigative reporter or an enemy from the Caucasus, or they may be involved solely in propping up the activities of organised crime. The hard men required, who show no mercy, originate from the special forces troops who were once deployed in Afghanistan and from a younger generation that served in Chechnya or Dagestan, where their atrocities were not punished, more likely encouraged. And there are the former paramilitaries from the internecine wars of the Balkans. Men from both those theatres were dehumanised and Europe is awash with them. They cannot exchange their uniforms for factory overalls or the cheap suits of salesmen and return to civilian life. They are contaminated with violence. My colleague says – and he knows this because he shoots deer and boar in the Ardennes forests – that the first killing is the hardest, and the second is easier. By the tenth or twelfth the detail of a killing twelve months before is forgotten. He says it takes a hundred times more effort to kill a fly than to shoot a man. The problem for the killer – and for us in law enforcement – is that it is easier to stay inside the weapons culture long after the conflict is finished than return to civilian life. They are damaged people. Anyway, we’re here, and I’ll collect you in half an hour.’