‘Don’t be so paranoid,’ said Nat, sipping her tea and looking closely at him, the better to enjoy his discomfort. ‘No one wants it to become public knowledge that we sell arms using dodgy EUCs, especially not with an international criminal mastermind like you appearing in all the paperwork.’
‘You misrepresent me in every imaginable respect, Natalya. And you are quite spoiling my pleasure in these exquisite sweetmeats.’
She studied him for a moment, then said: ‘Claude, this business has got me thinking there’s more to life than Grosvenor Systems. I’m putting a deal together, and I’m hoping you’ll help me.’
‘That seems unlikely,’ said Claude.
‘I’m not trying to sell you something, so there’s no need to be stand-offish.’
He gave her a sceptical look before carefully blowing a little excess icing sugar off the crown of a whorl of pistachio and honey, opening his great jaws far wider than was necessary, and popping it in.
‘One of the items on that EUC was some sort of a hacking device. It’s called the IPD400 – you remember the name?’
‘I believe I do, yes.’
‘It turns out it’s a prototype, and we don’t really know if it works. To tell you the truth, Grosvenor are a bit embarrassed about it.’
‘I should think they are,’ said Claude. ‘Now I learn in such unwelcome detail how thoroughly you have duped me, Ms Kocharian, I am astonished that you are back here asking for favours.’
‘Shortly after I sold it to you, another party was in touch asking if they could buy it and offering me a small margin over what you paid.’ Nat reeled off the lie without a tremor. She didn’t want Zender to know that Grosvenor were trying to retrieve the IPD400 in case he was tempted to sell it back to them direct.
‘And what has all this to do with me, Natalya? You think I keep the thing under my bed?’
‘I’m suggesting I take this piece of junk off your client’s hands and sell it on to mine. I told them it was only a prototype but they don’t seem bothered. So, you get a nice cut and walk away.’
‘How nice?’
‘A hundred and fifty thousand.’ Nat knew that the opening price was the critical number in any negotiation, and spoke with an air that suggested the figure had been predicated by fate itself.
‘Sterling?’
‘US dollars,’ she said sternly.
‘And in return, I help you to a sum of – let’s see, assuming you didn’t leave your negotiating skills on your desk at Grosvenor, your small margin will be somewhere in the region of twenty per cent?’ Nat issued a brisk laugh by way of rebuttal. ‘Which means, if I remember my figures correctly, that there is a profit for you of two million, six hundred thousand pounds sterling. And you propose to buy access to these riches for a hundred and fifty thousand US? A fine way to treat an old friend.’
Claude Zender frowned, causing the fringe of close-cropped hair along the outskirts of his scalp to bristle like the hackles of an angry mastiff.
‘There are other ways of finding out who you sold it to, Claude. And the IPD400 is a dud, don’t forget. Already your client may be sharpening his dagger and cursing the wicked Swiss unbeliever who sold it to him.’
‘A charming image, I must say. Even if the wretched thing is little better than a satellite dish with a fancy laptop attached, that isn’t my fault. My client asked for it, eh bien, I procured it. An offer to buy it back will arouse suspicions in people inclined to be suspicious, and what will I tell them? That a beautiful woman has set her heart on it?’
‘Let them think what they like.’
‘I never allow my clients to think what they like. All kinds of erroneous suppositions might occur and I would be out of business in a trice, perhaps also dead. No Natalya, what you propose is out of the question. Pretending to a valued client that I have sold them something worthless in order to help you re-sell it for a quite disproportionate profit? And for a mere quarter of a million sterling? Inconceivable. Ugh!’
Claude contrived to quiver with indignation at the monstrous betrayal Nat had proposed.
‘I said a hundred and fifty, and it was dollars. You expect me to believe this man-of-principle act?’ said Nat, affecting a huff. ‘You wouldn’t know a principle if it came down from heaven and sat on your knee! You’re the richest man in Africa, yet all you can think of is your precious cut. And I might not even have a job any more.’
She got up abruptly from the sofa, pulling her bathrobe tight.
‘I suppose I should have known you wouldn’t help.’
Nat ran quickly to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. A perfect start, she thought. Water vapour scented with eucalyptus was swirling off the huge bath so that every surface glistened behind a tissue of mist. She wiped the mirror with her sleeve and allowed the bathrobe to slip from her shoulders so that she could admire the reflection of her slim, half-naked body, lit by the generous warmth of the early evening sun. She began to imagine the deal she was planning already complete and a sum equivalent to ten years of Grosvenor bonuses taking up residence in her bank account. Claude would have Little Sister packed up and ready for dispatch within a fortnight, she predicted. For the moment, he could sip his tea and consider his options at leisure – or at least for as long as he could manage to hold at bay the distracting thought that Natalya Kocharian was lounging naked in the bath next door.
Café Mouloudia occupied a section of Avenue de Lamur devoted to high-end clothes stores, although they hadn’t yet succeeded in displacing the mini-markets that occupied every other corner. James had arrived late the night before and booked in to the Sheraton. In the morning, he took a cab to one end of the Avenue, then got out and walked. He found Café Mouloudia, then turned into a small hotel that was almost opposite. He took a room on the first floor which had French windows with white cotton neatly pinned over the lower panes, giving on to a tiny Juliet balcony. He set a bentwood chair a few feet back from the window and sat down to watch. It was ten now – an hour to go. He’d done forty minutes of t’ai chi that morning, but still there was a low thrumming in his bones, as if he’d been plugged into the mains overnight.
It was a gentle autumn day, the sun slowly warming the air, the cool of night lingering in shade. Above the line of buildings opposite, a band of chalky cloud was forming against the pale, pink-hued blue of the sky. You couldn’t see the sea from here, but you could smell salt and rust and hear muted booms from the loading gear down at the port. Café Mouloudia did a modest trade.
Hamed’s email had said he’d be met by a man wearing a BMW logo baseball cap, but so far the only customers were a frail old man and his vigorous wife sitting side by side at a table on the pavement: she smoked a cigarette and kicked her pointed leather shoes at a stray cat, while he studied a long and complicated pools coupon through a magnifying glass. James stretched in his chair until it started to creak and he realised it was about to snap in half. The Kosovo feeling was back, the feeling he’d had when heading out into hostile territory to do something deniable. Something unspeakable. Exhilaration and dread bubbling in the gut. You’re going soft, he told himself. This isn’t a war zone. Then a man James thought might be Hamed turned up.
The man sat at a table on the other side of the entrance from the old couple and looked around him. He was plump and wore a dark blue suit, cream-coloured shirt and gold-framed sunglasses. He seemed at home, although his demeanour had an oddly reluctant quality – much sighing and leaning back and looking down his nose. He didn’t look dangerous – but then the truly dangerous ones seldom did. The waiter came out with a glass of water and a menu, and the man gave his order without looking at it. He produced a cellphone and started to jab at the keypad, then a moment later tossed it down on the table and folded his arms.
Five minutes passed and he was served a cup of coffee. He sugared it copiously, then as he took his first sip, a tall man in black trousers and a red shirt arrived. Approaching the café, he pointedly adjusted the BMW logo baseball cap
on his head. Hamed nodded and stood up. The two men shook hands, then moved off down the street.
They were no more than fifty yards away when James reached the pavement outside the hotel. He waited until the gap was nearer a hundred, then followed. They turned right and James hurried to the corner in case they turned again. They were ambling along together, the tall man’s hands gesticulating as he talked. They entered a district of seventies apartment blocks with stairwells at either end and covered walkways leading to the front doors. Mats and rugs lay over the parapets to air and James heard snatches of conversation, the tap of a broom. He started to feel conspicuous, but before he could decide whether to hang back further, Hamed and his companion crossed the road and entered a narrow street of older houses on the other side. There was nowhere at all to conceal himself if either of them turned round; but the street curved away to the left, and as soon as they left his field of view, he was able to follow.
He heard a scuffed footstep. Someone behind him. He slowed in the hope that the person would pass and offer him some cover, but they hung back. He quickened his pace, then bent to tie his shoelace and took a look behind him. The street was silent, empty.
He walked on. Suddenly Hamed and the other man were thirty yards away, entering a doorway on the left. They only had to turn round to see him, but they kept their eyes ahead. James looked back again, listened. A pair of seagulls shrieked at each other from the rooftops. Then. . . A faint slap-slap on the polished cobbles? He stood close to the wall of the house beside him and waited. No one came.
He ran to the place where Hamed and his companion had disappeared: a large wooden door with iron straps and hinges. The latch disengaged with a click and he felt that it was not locked or bolted. He pushed the door open and stepped into a dingy courtyard with a paved stone floor and rough rendered walls, barely six feet across, lit by a square of sky four storeys above. He heard the babble from a television, then voices talking somewhere on an upper floor. To his left was the door to the ground-floor apartment; ahead was a concrete staircase.
He crossed to the stairs and climbed the first flight, then turned on to the second. The conversation was clearer now. He reached the first landing, and heard a muffled knock behind him, as if someone had pulled on a leather glove and tapped on the big wooden door.
That was the third time. It was all wrong. Everything. How many warnings did he need?
Again he heard the voices, quite distinct in the hushed building. If there was someone below, blocking his exit, then he’d have to get past him anyway, whether or not he found Hamed and the man in the BMW cap. He carried on up, reached the third floor. A doorway covered by a rippling plastic strip curtain. The voices came from beyond it, talking French with throaty North African accents.
‘Go inside, please Dr Palatine.’
He swung round to find a small man with close-cropped hair pointing a semi-automatic at his chest. A shemagh wrapped round his face. No tremor in his hand and his eyes said he would shoot.
‘All the effort you’ve put into following me,’ said James. ‘I don’t think you want to kill me.’
‘I do not want to kill you, no. Inside.’
A hand pulled the strip curtain aside and a large figure emerged.
‘Je peux vous aider, Etienne?’
He was James’s height and fifty pounds heavier, but all James saw was that he was young and had a look of excitement in his eyes.
‘Get out of the way,’ the man with the gun hissed through his shemagh.
James moved fast on the big man in the doorway, who shot out a fat fist to stall the attack. James caught him by the wrist and used the momentum of the punch to pull him off balance. He bent at the knee and swung the man round until his bulk stood between himself and the gunman, then dropped his shoulder into the man’s ribcage and hurled him across the landing. The man in the shemagh tried to dodge but the big man knocked him sideways before spinning head first into the concrete wall. James ran for the stairs. The gunman swung the barrel of his weapon up into his face. James parried and the blow thudded into his shoulder. The gunman jabbed at James’s eyes and he drew his head back, swept his left arm across to deflect the extended fingers. He felt a fingernail catch in the corner of his eyelid, but the late parry worked in his favour – the man had expected to get to James’s eyes and didn’t have another move. James closed in tight to neutralise the gun, smashed his forearm down into the bridge of the man’s nose. He staggered back and James kicked him in the stomach. He hunched over and James swung the side of his fist into the man’s temple, saw his eyes wobble and roll.
The strip curtain rustled behind him. He turned. Another man. In his hands, a weapon that looked like a toy gun.
The wired barb twitched between his ribs.
Taser. In a flash he felt the scrubbed lino floor of the training camp outside Kettering cold on his cheek. Who’s first for the big jolt? Smelled vomit. Went into spasm. The jangle of voltage searched his spine. You won’t like it, lads. Like someone plucking at the nerves with a pair of pliers. Laid out prone at the top of the stairs. The need to move not getting translated into movement. The spasms dying away now, but not the paralysis.
He watched the third man put down the Taser and pull a sap from the inside pocket of his jacket. He walked over to James, crouched, then raised the sap above his head with ceremonious care. He too was wrapped in a grey and white shemagh. A copious beard bulged beneath it, black hairs sprouting over the hem below his cheekbones. James screamed silently at his limbs. One knee started to straighten. An oily perfume wafted over him. This had all happened much too easily. Much too easily. He was going to get slapped with a pound of ground lead: hard and on the temple, by the look of it. Yes, that was probably how it went.
The Kocharians hailed from the outermost of seven twelve-storey apartment blocks in rust-streaked concrete plonked on the malnourished eastern fringes of Kiev. Four apartments on each floor, forty-eight per block, 336 families in total. About fifteen hundred people, the young Natalya had worked out, looking down from their ninth-floor window over blocks one to six and the lumpy grey outline of the city beyond. Their road was called Pyrochova Street, and it ended at the bus-stop outside Block 6, as if exhausted by the effort of reaching even that far. In order to turn round and take passengers back into the city, the drivers liked to accelerate their buses into a tight circle, careering over the patch of rough ground at the end of the road with the springs compressed and the battered oblong body heeling over in a pathetic parody of vehicular agility. In winter, when the circles they inscribed got churned into ditches full of brown ice, they carved new ones, until, from Natalya’s vantage point, it looked as if the road itself had spewed out huge concentric loops of braided mud.
The Block 7s had to negotiate this quagmire to get to the bus stop. Natalya’s mother would berate the drivers, demanding that they stick to the road and perform a proper five-point turn, as any self-respecting bus driver would. It didn’t make any difference. The 7s were at the bottom of the heap and would just have to put up with it, or find an apartment in Block 6.
Natalya and Nikolai had been born on the ground floor, and it had taken the Kocharians three years of bribing and sweet-talking the caretaker just to get up to the ninth. Then their father had gone back to Armenia – to visit his brother, he said, though he never returned. With him went any chance of moving further up the Pyrochova Street hierarchy. Nat remembered thinking that she didn’t want to live in Block 6, nor Block 1 for that matter, nor even in the city centre that smelt of damp newspaper and exhaust fumes so thick you could taste burnt oil on your lips. She had other ideas – most of them based on detailed study of a copy of Vogue she’d stolen at a Sunday flea market. She asked her mother what she had to do to live in London or New York, and her mother said, ‘You must learn English and work at your books, my little dumpling.’ Her mother was a teacher and this answer was to be expected.
Nikolai had taken a less reputable approach to his career – and h
ere he was now, standing in the passport queue at Marrakech Airport, looking every inch the gangster from Kiev: aviator shades, golfing blouson, Gucci jeans and cream leather deck shoes. He even had an aluminium attaché case swinging from one hambone fist. Despite that, he breezed through immigration and swept past the trestle tables in the customs hall as if arriving at the premiere of his own Hollywood blockbuster. When he saw Nat, he raised his arm in salute, took off his sunglasses and hugged her mightily.
‘My little Natalya, I am happy to see you. What happened to your hair?’
Since moving to London, she’d worn her honeycomb-coloured hair short, to show off the graceful curve of her neck, but her brother always forgot.
‘It’s lovely to see you, too, Nikolai. And how handsome you look. What have you got in your briefcase? Diamonds? Cocaine?’
‘I couldn’t decide, so I got you some of each.’
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had such gifts from her brother, and Nat felt a moment of alarm. But Nikolai was by nature a cautious man. He might cultivate the cheerfully belligerent manner of a stereotypical East European gangster, but he would never try to smuggle anything past anyone he hadn’t paid off first.
They found a taxi and set off for Marrakech. After a short while, her brother became taciturn, and she realised that he was fretting over the driver’s fatalistic approach to navigating the traffic, swaying through junctions at a constant thirty miles an hour and enjoying a richly humorous discourse with those who swerved to avoid him.
‘Why is everyone hooting all the time?’ said Nikolai to his sister. ‘There’s no point. How far to the hotel?’
‘Maybe half an hour.’
‘Shit. I’m hungry. All I had on the plane was a yoghurt and some crackers. Everything else was dog food. And most of the passengers looked like terrorists.’
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 6
