The Outsiders (33 page)

But it hung over them, unsettling them.

The master sergeant talked of their first major financial enterprise: the liberation of the armoury of a Ministry of the Interior garrison in Moldova, using their outdated KGB identification papers, and the shipping of ordnance, weapons and land mines to the Ukrainian port of Odessa. A boat, hardly seaworthy, had brought the cargo through the Bosphorus, into the Mediterranean and down the Suez Canal to the Yemeni port of Aden. It had been a triumph, a baptism in what was possible.

The Gecko had been, for them, like a used shirt. He had been criticised and humiliated – but a part of them.

The warrant officer had recalled the epic killing of the warlord from the Vedeno district of Chechnya. The man’s son had been a student in Riyadh and he had gone to visit the boy but was not admitted to Saudi territory. The meeting took place instead in Dubai. They had been paid by the new FSB. They had taken two girls from the Russian General Consulate in the city to the hotel room where the man waited for his son and rung the bell. He would have seen the girls through the spyhole – meat for a Chechen bastard far from his wife and younger children. The warrant officer was there as the pimp who would accept payment in advance. The chain had come off and the door opened. The man had thanked the warrant officer, and was shot twice in the head with a silenced Makharov. They had been in Damascus, looking for an onward flight, when the body was discovered by the student son.

The death of the Gecko, and its implications, was an itch that demanded scratching.

The Major breathed life again into the incident that had fuelled his fame. The brigadier on the runway at Jalalabad had congratulated him on his patriotic zeal in holding back the mujahideen and saving conscripts’ lives. He was rewarded with a volley of abuse about the equipment they had been given, and the accusation that Defence Ministry staff in procurement offices took kickbacks. The senior officer’s face had gone purple, as the major made his points, jabbing at him with his finger stump. The officer had turned on his heel to march away with a minimum of dignity, but had lost it when the conscript survivors had chanted the Major’s name – like he was a football player. He loved that story.

They had the Gecko’s rucksack, which contained his clothes, his laptop, which they couldn’t open, a cloth bag full of mobiles, which they had no numbers for, and a sachet of SIM cards.

Were they compromised? the Major asked. The warrant officer shrugged and the master sergeant raised his eyebrows. They had no answers. Should they go – when the transport arrived – to the nearest airport and take a flight for Russia? Could they handle going forward? That was strategy. The warrant officer and the master sergeant did tactics, not strategy and the long-term consequences of a decision. Neither would commit. The man who’d blocked Ruslan from reopening the door to the men’s room when the woman had gone close to the Gecko: what nationality was he? British – from one of the security and intelligence agencies. Why did a British agency have an interest in the Major?
Why?
Then, understanding. So long ago.
Not possible
after so many years. Would they remember it? The Major said he could. The warrant officer remembered the problem with the chain, and needing the knife. The master sergeant remembered that they had opened the secure case, when they had freed it, and it had been empty. They all remembered: that it had been for nothing. The agent had not received the paperwork of the deal for a shipment downstream on the Danube. It was so long ago . . .

The Major scraped the side of his nose with his finger stump – and decided.

‘He didn’t know the detail of our movement into Spain.’

The Gecko had not, it was agreed.

‘We’ll go, but with care.’

Again agreed.

The rewards would be huge. And they were worth millions, yet were hunkered in a hut hit by the wind, sand on the floor and— A horn blasted. There were three vehicles. They were greeted but had no common language, and there were guns. Two of the drivers pissed close to the hut, and they left the door to flap. They headed for their next meeting. Then they would plan the crossing from northern Africa to southern Europe. They were driven away on a dirt road.

Winnie spoke to her chief quietly, without details: he would not have wanted it differently.

His back was covered because no one could prove he had known what was planned – with what he had colluded. Dawson’s message, sent from Madrid, stated merely, ‘Efforts continue with a view to attracting the support of the Spanish authorities in the matter of bringing Russian citizen Petar Alexander Borsonov to justice.’ Nor did she confirm to her chief that Caro Watson was now in the air, with her escort, flying from Dakar to Paris, having lost contact with a prime prosecution witness, should Borsonov be arrested and go before extradition proceedings. Nor did she discuss with him options for protection of her forward team in view of the considerable arsenal available to the property owner, Pavel Ivanov. Her chief had the wit to interpret ‘efforts continue’, ‘lost contact’ and ‘options for protection’ himself. Winnie Monks was a protégée of his and a loose cannon. He would not have doubted that she possessed the attributes to cover her own back. She wished him well and promised to keep him fully informed of developments.

She went back into the operations area, Dottie’s creation, and dumped the phone, took her coat from the peg, and announced they were ready for tourism – all of them.

Kenny drove.

They went through the built-up zone, skirted the new banking area, where Dottie remarked on the profitability of money-laundering in hard times, the governor’s residence where a soldier stood guard, and past the dockyard.

A sign told them they could go no higher than Jews’ Gate: Kenny ignored it. More signs ordered that O’Hara’s Battery was off limits, also ignored.

A man in a uniform came to demand they leave. Winnie Monks gazed out along the coastline of the Costa del Sol. There were mountains in the haze with steep cliffs, and at the bottom of one was Villa Paradiso.

At the café, she sent Kenny to buy a single packet of salt and vinegar crisps. Apes, big and small, sat hunched and scratching or swinging off the roof.

She opened the packet and threw down some crisps. They hurried over. A sign said not to feed them. One was heavy and muscled, and came close to her. She threw more crisps closer to her feet.

Dottie said, ‘I don’t think that’s very sensible, Boss.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, Boss.’

‘Well, Dottie, on the Richter scale of “sensible”, chucking potato crisps at a Barbary ape doesn’t really register against what we’re doing down the coast.’

‘I was just saying—’

‘Don’t say anything about what is and what is not
sensible
.’

‘Yes, Boss.’

She tipped the rest of the packet on to the pavement and they drove back down the hill. She wondered how far the lumbering C-130 transporter, the Hercules, had travelled, and whether what was ‘lost’ in the cargo manifest could ever warrant the label ‘sensible’.

Xavier had a lunch date. They had met at a seminar in Salzburg three years before. He had been a policeman, then an intelligence officer, and now was working again with the police. She was a lecturer in criminology, attached to the law faculty of the University of Cádiz. He lacked the rank to attract attention and felt himself peripheral to speeches and workshop huddles, and she had no uniform in her wardrobe.

There had been a few emails, but contact had lapsed. He’d called, then fielded the inevitable queries. ‘Where are you, Xav? What brings you to the Costa? How long are you here?’ All deflected. But Xavier could do lunch the next day. She had lectures in the morning, a tutorial in the afternoon – it would be
so
difficult. He hit the quiet bit where she expected him to say that he would drive to Cádiz, take her for a sandwich or a salad in the staff canteen and drink some mineral water with her. He said he was in Marbella, that he would buy her lunch, but no further away than Puerto Banus. She said she’d come. A bright girl, pretty: she hadn’t asked him again what he was doing there and how long he’d be staying.

He felt good.

The contact, the voice and the gentle accent had lifted him. The hotel was already a cage. He came downstairs in the morning, wandered through the garden, was allocated a table for one in the dining room and had a spare breakfast while other guests heaped their plates. He walked a bit more, down the main drag of Marbella, Avenida Ricardo Soriano, and back along the Paseo Maritimo then returned to his room. He’d be there for the rest of the day, with a sandwich and a soft drink, and avoid tourists.

He felt better than good.

His phone rang. He heard Snapper out. Xavier – formerly an ‘undercover’, one of the valued men of his old force – respected the photographer. He listened to a man with a reputation for calm resourcefulness. Snapper, however, was rambling and repetitive, his report punctuated by obscenities and gasps for breath – attempts to regain self-control. Xavier sensed a deep apprehension that bordered on fear. Snapper had described how they’d run the hose through the chipper to flush it, then said he was ‘not too happy with the way it’s going’. Xavier had answered soothingly, ‘Wouldn’t have thought you could be.’ He had been on operations where the wheels had come off, knew how the cancer of doubt crept in. He didn’t think, yet, that the wheels were off but they were loose.

There were weapons, hoods to use them, and a man had been murdered. That had not been in the script written for Snapper and his team – and he had little regard for the muscle Winnie Monks had given him. Xavier rarely hesitated in endorsing a decision of the Boss’s, but Sparky was broken goods. He knew the signs.

And there were Jonno and Posie. He had been close enough outside the mini-mart to hear Jonno thank the Serbs for the gift of the beer. There had been no hostility, no suspicion, and the boy was a liability. The wheels were wobbling. In the garden behind Thames House, within range of the river, it had seemed a good plan, with a high chance of success, and no one had doubted Winnie Monks. Xavier was uncertain which was the greater hazard to the operation: Jonno or Sparky.

‘I went into the Parachute Regiment, thought it would be about as tough as it gets, reckoned if I could hack it I was made. Plenty of people had backed me, given me the chance, and believed in me.’

Jonno had a chair in the hall, beside the table on which he accumulated the post for Geoff and Fran Walsh. Sparky was on the bottom step, talking softly.

‘I had the beret given me in ninety-nine, thought I was the dog’s bollocks, and I’d done well. A year later – two jumps done – they were sending guys off on specialisation courses. You could do signals, anti-tank stuff or mortars, but I was the clever fucker who put a name down for sniping. I already had a marksman’s certificate. It seemed a good idea, and would mean status, respect . . . I don’t know how, but word got around that I had a conviction, had served a prison sentence, and it set me apart.’

Posie was upstairs with the others. Loy had been down once and stepped awkwardly over Sparky. Jonno had wondered if Posie would cook something for them.

‘On the sniping, which we did in the Brecons, I was second in our course. Five more passed and thirteen failed. Our Sunray said I was now one of the most important, influential soldiers in the battalion. I was nearly twenty and starting to believe in myself.’

Jonno could see he was fragile. There had been a reference to the Boss, a woman, who would have known how fragile he was, but he realised that a special trust had been placed in him. The man unburdened himself and Jonno listened.

‘I’d done the training. I could shoot whenever I wanted to. I was excused the basic slog of other kids in my intake and was out on hills and moors, or in the broken buildings we used for urban-warfare scenarios. I had my rifle and my sight, and a spotter who was the best friend I ever had. It wrecked me.’

The man shook, and Jonno held him. He couldn’t fathom why the Boss had sent Sparky and what use he might be.

12

‘We went to Iraq. You’ll not have been there, Jonno.’

He had not been anywhere, before the Villa Paraiso. Nothing in his life had equated with where he was now. He felt gratitude that a man as locked down as Sparky had chosen him as a shoulder, an ear; and was sad that the former soldier was in need of something to lean against and someone to hear him.

‘We thought there would be rose petals chucked at us, and big crowds cheering us. We were in the east, along the A6 highway. Do you know that Brit newspaper hacks were shouting, “Foul!” because they reckoned the Yanks had kept all the choice bits, where the action was, for themselves, and that we were on the sidelines? Fat chance of that. All the ragheads were short of was artillery and missiles. Every day we were in big fire fights. Our Sunray said that a sniper was pretty much worth a platoon of thirty squaddies. I lived on rooftops, was on the move, did what I was trained to do – was an awkward bastard. My top spotter didn’t get the plane with me. He’d broken his ankle on the exercises, bought himself out of the army and gone to his family farm. I went through two or three spotters, and always found fault. Killing came to be a habit.’

Jonno had nowhere better to be, and nothing much to do. He’d slept well, had half reckoned Posie would come back in the night, – but she hadn’t. The cat had been with him, curled near his stomach, but had gone out at first light when Jonno had stirred. There had been singing in the night, and shouting from the Villa del Aguila.