The Siren's Sting (36 page)

‘Krok gets a piece of the action, of course. And in exchange, I get access to the best men and the best firepower.'

John opened his mouth to speak but Marlena cut him off again. It was almost as if she feared she would lose the words if she did not get them out of her head and onto the table.

‘Krok's latest thing is surface-to-air missiles.' Stevie sensed John stiffen. ‘He has Chechen clients, South American clients, now his focus is on Middle Eastern clients. Somalia is a good way of getting their attention.'

John nodded. ‘We can get him on that. Since 2004, a mandatory twenty-five-year sentence is given to anyone who conspires to sell surface-to-air missiles. Even if none of it occurs on US soil. If you're saying what I think you're saying, there will also be conspiracy charges: conspiracy to kill officers and employees of the United States, conspiracy to supply materials to terrorists, conspiracy to supply and use anti-aircraft missiles. We can probably get him on money laundering too. Enough to keep him locked up forever.'

‘That's how you got Monzer al-Kassar,' Stevie said quietly. Kassar had been one of the world's most prolific arms dealers and it had seemed he could not be caught. Agents had set up a sting operation, and used the same charges to convict him.

‘Like with Monzer, we have years of traced calls, paperwork, everything, but so far we've never managed to get anyone to roll on Krok.' He looked at Marlena. ‘What changed your mind?'

‘Never
you
mind,' Marlena smiled. ‘What matters is that I have.' She glanced at Stevie, her face unreadable in the shadows cast by the ancient fig.

There was a pause as a waiter brought more wine, then John said, ‘The fewer people who know the details the better.' He looked pointedly at Stevie.

‘She's the reason I'm talking to you,' Marlena snapped, ‘so spit.'

‘I have two agents in mind. Both very experienced field agents. They'll pose as urgent buyers for—'

‘It'll never work.' Marlena sighed impatiently. ‘Krok always says that whenever there's any urgency to do something, that always means a trap.' It would take your agents months, if not years, to earn his trust, and I'm not sure even then that they would have the skill. The man is a shark. He can smell the smallest drop of blood in the sea. The last man who tried to betray him was fed to a white pointer.' She drained her glass, lifting her chin and exposing her throat. Her eyes glinted in the lamplight as she put the glass back down on the table. ‘The only person who can do this is me. I am already close to him. I'll wear your wire. We'll discuss the SAM shipments, his clients, anything else that is pressing that day—just like any other day.'

Stevie was silent. She preferred the idea of John's agents, but she also knew Marlena was right.

‘What if he finds the wire?' she said.

‘He won't find it because he won't search me. Why would he? We've worked together for fifteen years. He's never had cause to doubt my loyalty. He has never searched me, and he has never hidden anything from me. He knows I am a creature like him.'

‘You were,' Stevie said quietly.

Marlena looked straight at John with her strange eyes. ‘This is my show.'

The breakfast room was on
the top floor of the hotel and opened out onto a terrace. The Caspian glittered just over a tree-lined boulevard and gulls were wheeling over the foreshore. In the half-mist of early morning, tankers moved slowly and powerfully, like elephants at the waterhole; beyond them, hovering over the shining sea, Stevie could see the skeletal platforms of the oil rigs. The room was empty, save for a sad-looking waiter in a polyester burgundy cut-away who hovered around the Bunsen burner, waiting for the stale coffee to warm up. At the sight of the mini breakfast buffet Stevie's spirits rose. Not for long. Although several food types were represented at the buffet, there was very little actual food: the cheese plate consisted of four paper-thin slices of cheddar, three tiny slices of salami made up the meat plate. There were some cucumber slices—maybe six—and a small cup of milk sitting mysteriously apart from the rest of the food.

Stevie took two slices of cucumber and a piece of salami. The waiter, after some persuasion, found a slice of black bread and the palest egg Stevie had ever seen. She was wondering if it was perhaps a seagull egg, when in strode Marlena, in her tight suede jeans and lilac cashmere wrap, smelling of violets and taking the waiter's breath clean away.

She sat at Stevie's table and lit one of her cigarettes. ‘Interesting man, our John,' she said, with a strong note of sarcasm in her voice.

‘Are they all like that?' Stevie meant, were all the people on the other side of the law chasing Marlena that colourless? It seemed, somehow, an ill-matched game.

Marlena laughed. ‘John is particularly stiff. There are others . . .' She drifted off with a glint in her eye that made Stevie pity the men and women who had been assigned to pin this poisonous butterfly to a board.

‘Gobustan,' she announced, getting to her feet impatiently. ‘There are things we must discuss and we can do it there in safety.'

They roared out in Marlena's Toyota four-wheel drive, heading out towards the oil fields of Mordor. Stevie noticed the car had red diplomatic plates and wondered how Marlena had managed to swing that. She stared out of the window towards the far shore of the Caspian, to Turkmenistan, invisible today. After a time, she asked, ‘What is John doing in Baku?'

Marlena glanced at her with a small smile. ‘Think of the neighbours,' she replied.

Azerbaijan's neighbours were a feisty lot, thought Stevie: Georgia, Armenia and, of course . . . ‘Iran,' Stevie said softly. Marlena did not reply, but Stevie knew she was right: Iran, Islamic Republic and eternal thorn in the side of the Americans. It seemed like the currents of history had crisscrossed the region forever, and they continued to do so. If the famous theory of the geographical pivot of the world had not completely lost currency, and if a navel were to be assigned, a point of stillness around which the energies of the world turned, then that centre of energy had to be Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on the shore of the Caspian Sea.

They passed a wild Soviet mural in the confident block colours of propaganda: Atlases in overalls cleaning sturgeon for caviar, building oil rigs, marching under red flags; huge hands cupping oil, firemen, cosmonauts and factory workers—the glories of the Soviet Union now slowly being eaten by concrete cancer
.
A rusted tank sat in a brown field, next to a beach, complete with rusting lifeguard towers and a mural of people at play. Just off the beach, the oil rigs rose from the sea, a rusted carrier lay dying by the rocks. History, thought Stevie, had not been kind to the Azeris. She supposed it was the curse of natural resources, so well documented.

Massacred by the Turks in World War I, Azeris were then invaded by the Soviets under Lenin. Then came Stalin's mad liquidation of Azeri ‘elites', killing an estimated hundred and twenty thousand people out of a population of three million; home videos had Hitler taking a big bite of his Caspian-shaped birthday cake and swallowing Baku. He had set his sights firmly on the Baku oilfields during the war but got bogged down in Stalingrad on the way. Continuing the cake motif, de Gaulle stopped off there on his way to discuss the anticipated slicing up of post-war Europe with Stalin. The USSR collapsed in 1991 and the Soviets pulled out, leaving carcasses of junk metal and a beach full of the most poisonous snakes in the world, let loose by departing scientists from the nearby poisons laboratory. She remembered that only too well, and shuddered. She would never forget when she herself had been poisoned in St Moritz the previous winter; the feeling of the dark cloud of her poisoned blood closing in on her, lulling her to death, almost succeeding. But for Henning . . .

She missed the man. There was a dull ache in her heart and she realised that it was as simple as that. She missed him and wanted to be with him. What were complications and indecisions in the face of massacre and war, of life and the universe? They were restrictions she had placed on her own heart and her own love that were not real and could vanish at the wave of her hand. The only chains that could bind her were those of her own creation; she was free.

At their last meeting, she had told Henning to leave her alone, to go away. It was too late. This was not a film. Sometimes you could miss chances in life and they didn't come around again.

Suddenly she felt cold despite the desert sun and she turned her gaze to the metal jackets of the oil rigs in the distance. She had messed it all up, realised too late that she loved him. She loved him. With these words, her heart began to ache. Stevie swallowed the lump in her throat and blinked back a tear. These thoughts must be quashed until she was completely alone. She wound down the window and let the air blow through her.

Lakes of warm crude spread along the shores of the Caspian, giving off that distinctive sulfuric smell. In the dustbowl ahead of them were hundreds upon hundreds of old oil derricks, for the most part still, a petrified forest of rusted steel. Marlena swung the jeep down a dirt road that led through the oil field. ‘It's not strictly on the way,' she said, ‘but I can never come to Baku without visiting Mordor.'

The place could not, thought Stevie, have been special to anyone but Marlena. It was ruined, derelict, with crumbling concrete bunkers and broken boulders. But, as they drove on, Stevie noticed that the black pools of oil reflected the sky like perfect mirrors, and that they were now driving through a field of blue sky and high cloud. It was surreal.

‘A bit like being in heaven?' Marlena laughed. ‘This is the closest I'll ever get.' She stopped the jeep and they jumped out. There was not a soul in sight. Marlena leant over a pool and dipped her finger into the oil. ‘It's warm,' she said, ‘like the blood of the earth.' She licked her finger. ‘Taste it.'

Stevie put her finger in the pool—it was indeed runny and warm—but chose to wipe it on her handkerchief instead.

Marlena grinned at her. ‘That's the taste of money.'

Back on the road, they passed several police cars and roadblocks but were waved through every time. ‘It's the diplomatic plates,' said Marlena, waving at the last officer. ‘Otherwise we'd be ripe for a shakedown every two hundred metres.'

The road ran alongside a huge pipeline running to Tbilisi in Georgia, then Ceyhan, in Turkey; telegraph poles led in long lines to nowhere. A truck piled to bursting with watermelons swerved past them, then another carrying fat-tailed sheep destined, no doubt, for the shish kebab. By the side of the road, a man was roasting a whole bull, skin and all, with a blowtorch. The land was flat and dry and the horizon disappeared into a shimmering silver haze.

Soon they pulled onto another dirt road and drove until they arrived at a dusty grey field dotted with mud craters. It was as desolate as the moon. ‘Gobustan,' announced Marlena, and hopped out.

They could have been the first—or last—two people on earth. Craters of dried grey mud protruded from the earth. Inside, molten mud bubbled under the methane gas jets. ‘Put your hand in,' Marlena said.

Stevie looked at her. Was she mad?

‘Go on.'

Stevie moved closer to the crater—she could feel no heat, there was no smell. Carefully she leant forward, one eye still on Marlena, watching for sudden movement, and dipped a finger in. The mud was cold. Stevie dipped her whole hand in. The mud felt glorious—cool and smooth. It made her want to leap in naked in the moonlight. Stevie laughed as a bubble of mud popped and splattered her face.

‘It's wonderful for the skin,' said Marlena, dipping both her arms in up to the elbow. She sat back on her haunches, arms drying in front of her, like some glamorous cave woman. Abruptly her smile vanished. ‘Stevie, we are doing something very dangerous with Krok. There is no going back from here. John has already set things in motion.'

Although she already knew this, Stevie shuddered. Suddenly things were no longer funny.

‘Krok is holding a party for his friends and associates. You can imagine what that means. This is our chance. Clémence is organising it and you're invited.' Marlena pulled out her cigarette case with her muddy fingers—now dry and grey like bones—and lit a cigarette. ‘I need you to turn up, as if nothing has changed,' Marlena continued. ‘The slightest thing could make him suspicious enough to blow this. We can't risk him changing anything about his operations; it would make my knowledge worthless and jeopardise the chance of his conviction. My life depends on it and suddenly I want to live, very much.' She exhaled a stream of smoke into the desert sky.

‘Anyway,' she continued, shaking her head, ‘the drama will centre around the fact that Krok plans to announce my engagement to Aristo and Skorpios knows nothing about it. He will be furious with Krok when he finds out his partner is hosting a celebration for his son, and the woman he forbade his son to marry.' She flashed a smile. ‘He won't be thinking that the bride-to-be is out to snare him.'

Stevie wondered if any other woman had used her engagement party to sting a mercenary and doubted it. Marlena was one of a kind.

‘Doesn't he wonder what happened to the Medusa we borrowed?' she asked, remembering her flight from Sardinia.

Marlena waved her hand. ‘I told him the engines were being repaired in a closed dry dock by a friendly boat mechanic. They are not difficult to replace. Krok's more concerned with finding out who tried to kill him. He thinks it might have been Skorpios. I think his insistence on announcing the engagement in this way is his method of provoking Skorpios into trying again—revealing himself. It would fit with the twisted way Vaughan's mind works.'

Stevie wanted Marlena's plan to work; she wanted the man rendered powerless, crushed, but there was a flaw in her thinking.