The Outsiders (7 page)

‘What happened to you?’ Not that the Major had much interest.

The boy said he had tripped on the pavement. He was not asked whether he wanted to go and clean up or whether his toothache had gone. He was given the notes. He could interpret the Major’s writing, knew the codes and ciphers to be used, and where the messages should be sent. Before he was out of the suite they were talking among themselves, and he was ignored.

‘I’ve typed the message,’ Liz Tremlett said. ‘What now? I’m still shaking. What do I do?’

‘It’ll go to the cipher room and the clerk’ll shift it – he’ll know where to. I’ll run it down to him.’ The Bear smiled.

She might not have been the brightest star in Foreign and Commonwealth’s firmament, but she was not stupid. She realised that the old marine, for all that he had done combat, was as excited as he had been at any time in his career. Her printer was spilling the pages.

‘Did we do all right?’

‘I’d say, Liz, you did a bit better than ‘‘all right’’. You did well. My take on it: he made an earth-moving decision to come in off the street, with his future, his very life, hanging on it. He expected to find an intelligence guy, a professional, but likely the questions would have come like a machine-gun firing at him and he might have run. You didn’t threaten him and you started him down the hill. Now he’s in free-fall and the proper people can leech on to him. He won’t be allowed off the slide. You did well.’

It was said gruffly, and she blushed, then scooped up the four typed sheets and gave them to him. He had the disk in his hand that held the photo images of the boy in the lobby. The Bear went out. She could see, from her desk, the corner round which Natan had walked. He had seemed so vulnerable. She had wormed into his confidence, and doubted she’d ever hear of him again. She sat for a long time, very still, and wished she smoked. It was like it had never happened. She wondered how many others it would touch, when her signal hit VX, the eyesore by the Thames.

Late morning, and the sun shone on the gardens of the Villa del Aguila. He wandered slowly, contemplatively, across his lawns and avoided the area where the water spray played. Pavel Ivanov now lived far from his ethnic roots, and his new life left him with few regrets. A half-dozen passports carried his photograph – Russian, Bulgarian, Israeli, Australian, Paraguayan and Czech. They were stored in the cellar safe, along with title deeds, more than a million euros, three automatic pistols and two machine-guns, with the documents that made legal the presence in Spain of the forty-four-year-old who had once called St Petersburg home. It was where his wife and son were. They were permitted, twice each year, to join him for a holiday on the Costa.

He thought his garden looked well. Pavel Ivanov was a multi-millionaire but not yet a euro billionaire. Huge success and vast wealth left one constraint, not negotiable, on his behaviour. He should not humiliate his wife. He should not behave in any way that would cause her to be sniggered at. Their marriage, nineteen years before, had brought together a wing of the Tambov gang with a limb of the Malyshev group at a time of internecine feuds and killings over the valuable gasoline and heating-oil contracts that dominated their lives. They were more important than drugs, weapons and the protection industry, which provided businessmen with roofs. She came from a prominent limb; his wing had less influence. The match, though, had opened doors, provided big opportunities. He had been ruthless, had gained authority, had earned the name ‘the Tractor’. Had Pavel Ivanov belittled his wife, Anna, by flaunting a mistress he would have invited assassination. He did not flaunt the woman who analysed investment opportunities in his lawyer’s office, or his affluence.

It was five years, shy of three or four weeks, since Pavel Ivanov had first arrived in Marbella and been shown the villa. He had walked in the garden, sat on the patio and seen the view, the privacy the location guaranteed. He had been told its name, had had it translated – the Villa of the Eagle – and had not queried the asking price. The owners accepted five million euros and the deal had depended on the paperwork going through in a working week. In the holiday complexes to which the tourists came, it would have required three months to get more than a sniff of the keys. He was at the main patio now, built around the pool, and there were kids’ water toys. He had known of the big villa close to his at the time of purchase, that the owner was a banker of old wealth and modern discretion, resident most of the year in Madrid.

He had heard the throb of a veteran engine through the line of pines and high shrubs that marked the eastern boundary of the property. Alex had been with him – Marko had stayed to protect the open doors on to the patio – and they had gone off the lawn, through the bushes and trees to the concrete wall that had tumbler wires and coiled razor wire. Pavel Ivanov had climbed on to Alex’s shoulders to peer over the top – like the Berlin wall, before it had come down. He had laughed. An old man, in drill shorts, a sweat-stained shirt and a colonial hat, was behind a motor mower that coughed and spluttered. His immediate neighbours were Flight Lieutenant and Mrs Geoffrey Walsh, and their home was a small bungalow. That evening he had sent Alex round to collect the mower and bring it back for servicing in the garage, beside the two Mercedes. It had been returned in a week and worked a dream. The old couple existed in poverty.

It was said in Marbella, most particularly in the office of Rafael, Ivanov’s lawyer, that the views from his patio and from the main windows in the ochre-coloured villa were the most sought-after in the district. He would have thought himself at peace there, except that an email had come earlier that morning. A visit was planned. Marko appeared from the side of the villa with Alex’s wife. They went down the steps and towards the garage. The electric gates were opening. He did not have to look about for Alex, who would be armed and watching the gate.

The visit he had been alerted to was not one he could refuse lightly. The prospect made the only cloud in a clear sky. He watched the Mercedes, black, with privacy windows, slip out of the gates, which closed immediately after it. The visit would be, almost, a return to old times.

The two Serbians, Marko and Alex’s wife, were recognised at the school gate. It was a good meeting place, and the street that ran up the hill between the schoolyard and the Guardia Civil headquarters was well filled. There was a babble of conversation and the squeals of children. Cigarette smoke hung over them, parents admired their children’s art work, and they were acknowledged, as they waited for the two little ones to emerge. It was hot, and Alex’s wife wore a halter top that exposed her arms, shoulders and much of her back, her only protection a small-brimmed hat. Marko wore a poplin windcheater – there was no threat of rain but he needed something to cover his left armpit, where the CZ99 semi-automatic handgun nestled. It was now three years since his son and Alex’s daughter had been enrolled at the school.

That date had marked a major change in the lives of the Russian organised-crime leader, Pavel Ivanov, his two permanent bodyguards, their wives and children: their breakout from life inside the Villa del Aguila.

Men, most of them unemployed because of the economic crisis, greeted Marko and asked his opinion of the Málaga football team, and women talked cheerfully to Alex’s wife about the price of cooking oil and whether the chicken-pox epidemic would spread west from Fuengirola. He kept the windcheater zipped to the middle of his chest and held a folded newspaper over the left armpit. There were more children from eastern Europe in other Marbella schools, and down the coast at Puerto Banus, Estepona and Mijas, but no more at this school opposite the Guardia Civil barracks.

There were ironies and Marko – a forty-two-year-old with a hard, chiselled face, a man who oozed strength, had throat tattoos and a skull shaped like a hammer head – was not blessed with the humour that would have pointed to them. Threats stalked them at the villa on the hill. Few of the deals Pavel Ivanov had struck in the last three years had involved the transhipment of drugs, weapons, girls, or the laundering of money at which he had become a supreme expert. His business had been cleansed and he had achieved – almost – legitimacy. Threats came from others who were less successful – burglary, mugging or ‘protection’ demands. The children could have been kidnapped for ransom. Ivanov had the household’s security down to a minimum but enjoyed the loyalty of the two Serbian families. Matters involving the police, prosecutors and the specialist UDyCO team he could handle, but criminals made him anxious. So his men were always armed and well trained in the use of firearms.

The children came. He did not lift either of them, or hold a small fist, but let Alex’s wife do that. There was little point in holding a child’s hand when his own should have been dragging a handgun from its shoulder holster. They hurried to the car. It was only when they were inside the bulletproof, blast-proof vehicle, the doors were locked and the engine running, that he listened to the kids chatter about their morning’s classes.

The MV
Santa Maria
was now five days out of the Venezuelan port of Maracaibo and was seven days from berthing in the cargo harbour of Cádiz, on the extreme south-west of the Iberian landmass. She was Liberian-registered, listed at 10,000 tonnes, had a crew of eighteen, and her holds were filled with aluminium ore from the Los Piriguajos mine. She was in calm seas and her speed would average 14 knots on a 3,840-mile journey. Personal fortunes and futures rested on two containers forward on her decks, the contents listed as ‘hardwood furniture products’. Those who had raised the money, payment up-front, from backers for their purchase had no reason to doubt they’d made a sound investment.

A message had gone via relays on Cyprus and the Rock of Gibraltar, to the building overlooking Vauxhall Bridge. It was annotated with the code of a sub-station at Baku, and passed to a deciphering section. From there it went to an analyst, who moved it on to the Russian specialists. There, like a pebble carried downstream, it was snagged and was held for four hours. When an answer did not throw itself into a specialist’s face, he tended to move on and find material more readily accessible. A remark to a colleague, an older man, challenged by the electronic age: had he heard of a UK agent killed by Russians, somewhere abroad?

The older man knew. ‘The poor relations, the crowd across the river, he could have been one of theirs. Five years ago, I think. They had no local co-operation in Budapest – hadn’t asked for it. They didn’t deign to tell us what they were doing and were burned. Fully deserved to be. Best I can do.’

The message went on its last journey, from south of the river to north, a rider attached: ‘We would not want to intrude on private – well-justified – grief.’

‘Caroline, you deserve a sight of this.’ The deputy director general had come from his inner office and held the sheets of paper over Caro Watson’s desk. ‘You were a part of it, as I recall, the Damian Fenby business.’

He let the sheets fall. She clicked on her screensaver and could not answer him. She had been a broken reed when – her hair dry – she had received the call from the hotel front desk and gone down. There had been policemen with long faces. She had been driven to the hospital and had identified the body before its transfer to the morgue. Then she had roused the Thames House night-duty staffer, and had started to choke through the detail on her phone, encrypted. She believed that some in the office regarded it as a duty of care to continue to employ her but she was of precious little use to her colleagues. The first two years had been pitiful and her effectiveness at little above zero; the third year had been an improvement. For the last two years she had been a woman with a set, humourless face and moods to match. She did her work with almost manic intensity and allowed no colleague close to her – except one. The opportunities for her to have ‘quality time’ with Winnie Monks were rare. She found her old boss once every six weeks on the bench at the back of the gardens. Now she read at speed, and the knot tightened.

He said, ‘I’ve just come off the phone to Winnie. They’re going to do their business up in the north tomorrow or the morning after. She doesn’t need to be there. She’s driving back tonight. You’ll see her here late this evening. We’re sorting out your travel schedule and you’ll fulfil the rendezvous agreed to. You’ll have a two-man escort and your safety is of paramount importance to us. It may be that false information’s been thrown at us or that we’re confronting a breakthrough that has – so far – eluded us. I don’t want to sound like a scratched gramophone record, but there won’t be an army of the SRI at your shoulder. I hope they’ll remain in blissful ignorance of your short spell in that God-forsaken country. Why you? I don’t think, Caroline, that anyone in this building – with the sole exception of Winnie – is better equipped to hear what the boy has to say.’

He was gone. She heard the door to the inner office close. Her hands shook, and she could barely restrain them.

The gratitude expressed for the tray of tea and biscuits was sincere.

They were not founding directors of a firm of chartered surveyors, lawyers or tax accountants. Known to all in their limited and highly specialised trade as Snapper and Loy, they were a photographic surveillance partnership. They were much in demand and their time was bid for at priority auctions by Thames House and Anti-terrorist Command. The elderly lady accepted their thanks and backed out of the front bedroom they now occupied.