The Outsiders (53 page)

‘Your moment, Sparky. Take it.’

He had told her and Jonno. They had not heard him. He had spoken of the
wickedness
of a killing, which stained a man until the day of his death and could not be
undone
. The cross-hairs were focused on the head and the short hair. Occasionally they wavered away from the ear and on to the brush moustache, but the image grew fainter and the light slackened and . . .

‘You have to, Sparky. For all of us. Do it.’

His finger never came off the guard. His mind was filled with faces, Arabs and Pashtuns, and he saw the range targets, figures printed out life-size, with Wehrmacht-style helmets on and snarling faces – the range would be 900 metres or more. Her hands were on his shoulders. She ground her fingers into his flesh and he thought there might have been a sob in her voice. He had not fired. He knew what baggage they would have carried for the rest of their days and had spared them. He thought she cried in frustration.

The voice had a choke, ‘We’ll wait until Jonno comes, then move out.’

He couldn’t see the Major now, or the men who had come with him. But there was a gap between the trees and a torch shone there. Dark figures pushed through a gate. He cleared the rifle, ejected the cartridge, put on the safety and laid it carefully on the table. She did not tell him to do with it what they had agreed before they left the bungalow. Instead, she punished his shoulder and her tears fell on his neck.

He had the perfect view.

They had milled on the lawn and Jonno had sensed their confusion. There was more shooting from the front of the villa. First, two rounds from a pistol, then, in answer, a volley from the assault rifle – he’d heard it when the cat was shot.

Uppermost in Jonno’s mind: the Dragunov’s silence. At that range, a hundred yards or so, he assumed the crack should have been clear, ear-splitting. Why hadn’t Sparky fired? With each step the target took, he had thought of the way Posie had dragged him clear of the marksman, then tongue-lashed him. She’d be pig-sick . . .

He’d lost them.

The dog sat on the lawn. Its ears were up and it watched where the target had gone. In the light, the villa owner used a mobile. The Serb, Marko, waved, shouted and pointed towards the ledge where Jonno was. Only the dog and the target were calm. A torch beam shone below him. It shook, catching the lip of the ridge and the sheer face above it. There was a track away to the right that the light held for a moment. He heard the voices below him and the curses. They came slowly, had to guide themselves. He identified the three voices, and assumed the language was Russian.

Around Jonno, making a carpet, were torn pages from the passports and the shredded banknotes. Anywhere else, and at any other time, it would have been criminal, unthinkable, to destroy an item as sacred as a passport.

What to do?

He understood what was approaching him. He was not in Afghanistan or Iraq. He doubted he would ever again be challenged to this degree. He was scared – excited too. He was beyond the reach of anything he had known before and was changed. The challenge had transformed him, and he revelled in it. He understood what Sparky had said and would ride with it. He had no weapon.

In the darkness, listening to them edge closer, he swept his hand across the ledge for a stone. He found only paper. He shuffled back to the cave on his buttocks, groped around and felt only the empty plastic bags. There was nothing he could hold in a clenched fist and use to protect himself.

Only his foot.

The path came up from the Villa Paraiso and joined the one that led out of the garden at the Villa del Aguila. They merged at the foot of the rockface. There was one set of foot- and finger-holds and a few stretches where a man might scramble on hands and knees, then the last stretch where the crevices were shallow and the drop vertical. The torch was nearer.

He waited.

His eyes caught his watch face. Almost time to be gone but, first, there was business to be done.

Jonno didn’t know if he would look into their eyes when they came. There was another pistol shot and another answering burst of automatic firing.

As Izzy Jacobs wanted it. He was back and in shadow, and Myrtle was behind him. They had gone precariously into the ditch.

Each time he fired a single shot the response was a burst of unaimed sprayed bullets. He had shaken and angered the men. He doubted anyone else had achieved that in recent memory. Now he used the new mobile, pay-as-you-go and untraceable, to call UDyCO in the town. There was always a duty officer in their headquarters on the Avenida Arias de Velasco. They would have heard the gunfire because he’d held the phone away from his mouth. He had given no name but spoke good foreigner’s Spanish: a gun battle was being fought at the Villa del Aguila, a gangster conflict. He cut the call, and imagined young policemen running to their cars in the basement.

‘Excuse me, Myrtle, I think we’ve fucked them. What that girl does is her business. What we’ve done, I reckon, would appeal to old Mikey, bless him. Where I’ve always operated, it’s me – that’s us – first, second and third. The girl has to take her chance. Time to be on our way, my dear.’

‘Well done, Izzy.’

Down the track, he would lose the pistol where the scrub grew thickest. Further down he would bury the little plastic bag with the cigarette ends under foliage, and the phone elsewhere in the undergrowth. He’d peel off the gloves and Myrtle would tuck them into her knickers for disposal in a bin far away. She’d also – it was inbred – wipe each item on the tissues in her bag before it was dumped.

They went down the hill. Twice, without pausing, they had a sip from the flask. Izzy set the pace, hurried as best he could. He wanted to be at the junction below the urbanisation before the sirens and lights filled the road.

Alex had seen the lights. Marko had heard the sirens.

What to take and what to leave? There was money on the hill and identification documents. Since his first months in Marbella, Pavel Ivanov – still living the life of the Tractor – had kept a bag packed in the wardrobe. None of the clothing in it would fit now. He threw down the bag, ran to his office and scrabbled for the key to his safe, then for a plastic bag from the bin. He scooped up documents, computer disks and sticks – no time to filter them. He had called Rafael and told him of the Major’s flight, but the bastard now had his phone switched off. Ivanov had been clean, but not now. Scattered in front of the safe was the debris of his empire. He didn’t know what he should take, what he would need to access his accounts abroad.

It had been a dream and it had ended. He couldn’t have policemen searching his home and finding weapons – not those for personal protection. The spotlight would fall on him . . .

The Major climbed, his warrant officer behind him, the master sergeant as back marker. One of them had the torch, he didn’t know which. It wavered and swayed, and he would demand that the rockface was lit. He was the pacemaker, always had been. The bastards relied on him, always would – and leeched off him. The sirens spurred him.

There was a line above him, which he thought was the ledge that had been spoken of. The route was off to the right, a goat track, then a road and the lawyer. He needed four or five more handholds to get to the ledge. His fingers ached, and his right-hand grip was poor. He cursed. The torch beam was off the rockface. It came back and he searched for the small shadow lines where he could insert his fist. His breath came in gasps. Shreds of paper floated in the light and one fell onto his moustache, where it stuck, tickling. He couldn’t free a hand to swat it. Why was all this paper here? He felt the head coming up behind him knock the soles of his feet, almost dislodging him. He swore again, lowered his head and hissed an insult.

And was sworn back at. That had never happened before. They walked a pace behind him. They spoke when he invited them to and were secondary to him, not equals. More paper came down and the beam highlighted it. It was caught in the crevices where he put his fingers and shoe tips. Tiredness ripped through him.

He had only his foot for a weapon.

He was back from the edge and had disturbed the carpet of paper. He waited. A last glimpse of his watch: the window was still open.

The light came up and flickered on the higher rockface. Birds were disturbed and screamed. He heard the curse and the response, and waited.

The head came above the rim.

He had seen it in the photograph and had seen it when the man strode out on to the grass. He had seen it also when its owner was bent low over the dog, and in the chaotics moments before the flight. It came slowly and Jonno could hear heavy breathing. The light below showed the hair, then the ear and a little of the mouth. A piece of a dollar bill was wedged between the moustache and the nose. The head rocked. Jonno realised he had been seen. A question was asked – not in any language Jonno knew.

A hand stretched on to the ledge. The torch beam wavered and threw light off the rockface. The fingers struggled for grip, snatched at paper and had a handful of torn passport pages and banknotes. Their eyes met. The Major gabbled words that Jonno didn’t understand. He said nothing. The hand was in deep shadow but a mutilated finger lay against the paper. The target had no grip.

Another shout came from below, incomprehensible. Jonno understood that two more were on the rockface and had precarious holds and needed to press higher. They couldn’t hold on when the momentum of the climb died. The eyes widened. They seemed to ask spasms of questions. Who was he? Why did he not wear a uniform and carry a weapon? Why was he not barking a commentary into a radio?

Confusion slashed the target’s face.

His target would have realised he didn’t face a special forces trooper, or an intelligence veteran, but a young man who might have worked in the haulage department of a retailer and shifted flow charts on gasoline consumption, and the target would have seen – as the beam traversed – the hint of a smile.

Jonno understood that Sparky’s claims were true. He was changed, altered, addicted and infected. He kept the smile and swung back his foot. He kicked at the head, and the target swayed to the side. Jonno had loathed football and the proof was that he had missed the face twisting away to avoid him.

But he had dislodged the man. He was holding on now with one hand.

The light below flitted between them. It showed Jonno and his target. Beneath the Major his men were bawling, showering him with abuse. Jonno heard the sirens closing.

The hand that held up the target was the one that lacked an index finger.

Jonno saw anger, not fear. He was close to the edge and raised his foot. He’d heard it said that when a man had been asked why he had climbed a mountain, he had answered, ‘Because it’s there.’ Why would he stamp on a hand and break the bones? Because it was there. He felt a terrible shivering coldness, and the fun of it.

He didn’t know himself.

His gaze was on the hand and its loosening grip on the paper and the rock. He readied himself.

20

He stamped.

He was in the glare of the torch beam and his shadow would have been thrown up grotesquely huge on the rockface above the cave. The movement loosed a cascade of the torn paper, which swirled round his leg and onto the hand and face of his target.

It was a gnarled, used hand, weathered, sun-blotched and misshapen. The veins stood erect on it. He felt it underneath his sole. To Jonno, at that moment, the hand was no more than a crushed mess of twigs that might have been in his path as he went through any woodland. He stamped on the hand as if it was debris.

It stayed put. He saw blood ooze from under the nails of three fingers, and from the thumb.

The target didn’t scream. The shouts came from below, as the target’s body heaved and swayed. Jonno thought those behind him were trying to lift him up – and he was obstructing them. He was a man, Jonno knew, who would never plead. The eyes below him blinked hard, and behind them the Major would have been working, racetrack speed, on a solution to a problem: the big problem that was wrecking him.

Jonno was a new man. The damaged marksman had told him that he would be changed.

Jonno had heard the story of the Security Service officer’s death in Budapest and had borrowed it as justification for what he had done now. He regretted that. It had had nothing to do with vengeance and everything to do with exhilaration. Kids caught on CCTV playing football on a pavement with the head of a kid from a rival gang had been wheeled into court where their actions were condemned. Shrinks had queued to talk of deprivation and disadvantage. Now Jonno knew the drug, the power it gave.

He brought his foot a little higher.

The other hand was up and searching for a grip. A shot came from below. The crack went past his face, and there was the wail of the bullet’s deflection off stone. He was in the torch beam. The shouting crescendoed, and he understood none of it. He stamped – not to flatten twigs but to break a man’s hold on a ledge of a rockface.

Stamped again.

Heard the gasp.

Saw the hand slide away as he eased his weight off it.

He felt elation, no shame, and understood all that Sparky had said.