by Lex Lander
T-shirt spoke to Blue Shirt in Spanish. Lux knew a few words but was too far away to interpret their rapid speech pattern. Blue Shirt responded, and he caught the word ‘donde’, meaning ‘where’.
T-shirt advanced, towards the house. ‘Tomas? Donde estas?’ he called as he walked.
Shit. It wasn’t going to go to plan after all. For a clean result Lux needed all four in the open. If Vazquez and the driver stayed put until T-shirt reached the house and found no Tomas, it was going to get messy. A quick decision was called for. Once they discovered the house was empty their suspicions would be aroused; they would all go on red alert, and probably had some sort of procedure to be activated in the eventuality of a double cross. Whereas, for the moment, they were still more or less cool though wary.
Decision made. Lux was already sighted on the blue-shirted bodyguard, so he would go first. He squeezed the trigger - once, twice - the double phut of the silenced gun probably inaudible to the victim. He toppled with a cut-off scream.
T-shirt went instantly to ground, his super-fast reactions making a mockery of the US Army’s tests, so that Lux’s third shot passed over his prone body. The bodyguard responded with a barrage of fire, but the range was too much for a shotgun. Lux’s next two shots ended the contest.
By then the car was reversing, wheels spinning, throwing up dust. For good measure, Lux pumped four rounds at the driver, the windshield and door window exploding into fragments. It was enough. The Buick swerved, but being locked in Drive it continued in motion, swerving off the track. Inside, signs of frantic movement. Lux wasn’t yet ready to leave his cover. If the intelligence about the numbers was correct, all the bodyguards were dead, and only Vazquez still alive. But he might well be armed.
The Buick ran into a bush and stalled to a standstill, the engine cutting out. Lux replaced his partly-used magazine with the spare, shoved a grenade in each pocket. Bent low, he backed out of the scrub and scuttled along its perimeter, parallel to the driveway. Still nobody exited from the car.
When he reached the limit of his cover, he was beyond the car and at a tangent to it. It was outside grenade-tossing range. Sooner or later he would have to cross open ground, either to blast the car, or rake the inside in the hope of hitting flesh.
He decided to wait it out. With the engine stopped the car would soon heat up. If Vazquez sweated it out, the interior would soon become unbearable. If he tried to restart the engine, he would be visible.
Vazquez opted to sit tight. Half an hour ticked past, then an hour. Even Lux, cooled by a zephyr of wind off the ocean, his head protected from the sun’s rays, began to feel uncomfortable.
A faint metallic sound caught his ear. He peered through the telescopic sight. At first, nothing. Then, on the far side of the car, partly screened by it, a man down on all fours came into view. He was wearing a white shirt and black pants, and crawling away from the car. In his hand, a pistol.
This had to be Vazquez. Lux got up, sighted on him. At that moment, the Mexican glanced over his shoulder. Rolling onto his back, he blazed away with his pistol while yelling in Spanish. Lux didn’t even flinch. The bullets would have sunk to earth long before they reached him. As if realising the futility of his actions, Vazquez scrambled to his feet. At that point he presented a full size target. Lux fired. Four quick shots, every one striking home, punctuated by yells of pain and fear. The last was a head shot. Blood sprayed. Vazquez crumpled to earth like a demolished building.
Still cautious, uncertain whether anyone remained alive in the car, Lux loped across the rough ground, rifle at the ready. He need not have worried. The dead driver was the sole occupant, already attracting a retinue of flies. Beyond the car, Vazquez was curled up on the ground, groaning. Amazingly still alive.
Lux approached him with caution. There was blood on the front of his shirt, at rib level, and on his shoulder; the head wound was a graze.
‘You Federico Vazquez?’ Lux asked, though he recognized the wounded man’s face from a photograph he had been given.
More groaning. Lux treated wounded men the same as wounded animals. He finished them off.
When he put the muzzle of the M25 to Vazquez’s temple the man’s mouth opened weakly, as if to protest. Lux wasn’t receptive to last requests any more than he was to administering last rites. He knew the man’s history and a clean death was more than he merited. He squeezed the trigger.
Vazquez’s pulse was still. Laying the rifle across the corpse, Lux extracted a slim Nikon camera from his hip pocket. Ten shots, each from a different angle, of the bloodied body would be proof enough of a contract executed. He was pleased with how it had gone, inasmuch as any pleasure was to be derived from ending a life.
Back at his car he proceeded to dismantle the rifle. As he unscrewed the barrel a faint sound caught his ear. He stood motionless, frowning as he listened. There it was again: sobbing, female for sure. He glanced towards the Buick. No movement there. A three hundred and sixty degree scan of his surroundings yielded no clues either. As a precaution, he screwed the barrel back in place and headed in a crouch for the Buick, his finger on the trigger.
The sobbing grew in volume as he neared the car. One of the rear doors was open; he peeked around it. On the floor, face down, a woman with long black hair in a short black dress. Her shoulders were trembling as she wept.
‘Hey,’ Lux said softly.
The woman fell silent, stiffening.
‘You Vazquez’s woman?’
No answer, just a jerk of her head that he took for a ‘yes’. A single bullet was all it would take, at this range. A head shot, naturally. He never left witnesses, especially not from the opposing camp. He put the silenced muzzle up close to the back of the sleekly-coiffured skull, not quite touching it. At a technical level, killings didn’t come easier. As his finger took in the trigger slack, it struck him that in all his years as a killing machine he had never killed a woman who wasn’t the actual target.
Don’t think of her as a woman, his cold professional self exhorted. She’s a hostile witness. She could identify you.
And yet ...
‘Don’t look up,’ he snapped. ‘Keep your face in the carpet and listen. You hear me?’
A sniff. Another nod.
‘Did you see me?’ he demanded, his voice harsh.
‘No, señor.’ It was a whisper, the two words spelling terror.
‘You sure?’
‘No, señor. I no see you. I am here on floor when you shoot.’
Still Lux hesitated, gnawing his lower lip. To let her live would be a professional sin. In his business, sentiment and emotion were verboten. He killed for money and self-preservation. Nothing personal about it.
‘Okay.’ He breathed out heavily. ‘Okay, now listen good. You stay exactly as you are for ten minutes. You’re going to hear me walk away, and then you’ll hear my car drive off. When you can no longer hear the sound of the engine, then you can get up. Understood? Comprendado?’
‘Si ... si. No look. I wait till your car he is gone.’
‘If you try to look, I’ll be back and you’ll be dead. Get it? Bang, bang - dead!’
‘Si, señor, si.’ Panicky now. Lux had got his point across. ‘I promise I no look.’
A last moment for reflection, for a change of heart. Something moved him to reach out with his free hand and rest it lightly on her head, appreciating the silky texture of her hair. She trembled anew, perhaps interpreting the gesture as the prelude to the coup de grace. With a faint grimace he lowered the gun and backed away. Slamming the door, he retraced his steps to the Toyota. The sun was high, searing his face, his foreshortened shadow beside him, black and hard-etched against the ochre-coloured ground.
Leaving the rifle assembled for now, he stowed it in the trunk. The interior of the car was a crucible of heat, the steering wheel so hot he was barely able to grasp it. He reversed down the driveway in a dust blizzard of his own making. He checked the Buick as he passed. No enquiring head popped up. If he
had made a bad decision letting the woman live, he would know soon enough.
On the road between San Vicente and Ensenada, he dismantled the rifle, repacked it in the brief case. Its burial place was already chosen: a cleft in some rocks facing the Pacific, on a wild stretch of coast a few miles north of Ensenada. Too narrow for a body to enter, too deep for the case to be seen. Practically irrecoverable. Lux abhorred the waste, but disposing of guns used on contracts was just part of the whole process.
At the San Ysidro international border crossing, he endured the usual ninety minutes’ wait. Come early evening, his fake passport attracting no more than the most cursory examination, he was entering the USA on foot. Safe home.
At 8.10pm precisely, he and a hundred and seventy four other passengers and crew were lifting off the floodlit runway at San Diego airport, bound for Miami. There he would connect with an Air France flight to Paris, due to depart around mid-day. As he settled into his business class seat, sipping a mediocre Bordeaux red, he gave no thought to the four men he had killed, nor to the woman he had spared. He was looking ahead, not behind. Ahead to Paris and Francoise, wondering if she had missed him at all.
Five
* * *
When Rafael Simonelli entered the tiled lobby of the Hotel Napoléon, whipping off his sunglasses, the transition from stark sunshine to the shady interior left him momentarily robbed of sight.
‘Hi, Napoleon,’ came a woman’s voice right by him.
He blinked a few times and a face materialised.
‘Sheryl!’
‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ Sheryl Glister said, smiling broadly.
‘When you said you were down the road, I half-thought it was just your American humour, and this was a wild goose chase,’ Simonelli said, his English lightly laced with an American twang. ‘I thought you were probably really in San Diego, or wherever it is you used to live.’
They embraced, kissed cheeks then lips, an act that revived in Sheryl troubling memories of a love affair that had ended badly. The passage of five years had not entirely healed the lacerations.
‘What brings you to Corsica?’ Simonelli asked.
‘You, my love, what else?’
His consternation showed on his face and Sheryl laughed, though there was scant humour in it.
‘Don’t worry, Napoleon, I’m not figuring to take up where we left off. This isn’t a social call.’
Only half convinced, he ushered her across the lobby through the bar and out onto the terrace with its exquisite outlook of white sands and azure seas and bobbing palms, marred only by the airport at Campo Dell’Oro where a silver-bodied executive jet was coming in to land.
Simonelli was known to the all the staff at the hotel, and a waiter popped up the moment his bottom touched down. Sheryl ordered lemon tea and Simonelli un pastis. The waiter adjusted the parasol over their table and departed.
‘It must be three, no, four years,’ he said when they were alone again. ‘You look marvellous.’
Had she not known him for a glib roué she might have been flattered.
‘You always were a fucking good liar, Napoleon. Pity you were such a fucking poor lover.’
Simonelli, who, thanks to his three-year love affair with Sheryl, had as good a grasp of Anglo-American humour and nuance as of the language, was not put out. He chuckled as he positioned a cigarette dead centre between his thin but very red lips.
‘You still smoke?’ he asked, tendering the packet as an afterthought.
‘Given it up. No tobacco, no alcohol.’ A tiny pause. ‘Or drugs.’
‘Remarkable. You are the perfect woman.’
‘Only to the tight-fisted,’ she riposted drily. ‘Tell me something, is this hotel named after you, or are you named after it? Or do you own it even?’
‘As you know very well, my little trinket, Napoleon is only your pet name for me.’
‘Some pet. And speaking of trinkets, I see you have a new ear ring.’
Simonelli fingered the bauble that dangled from his left earlobe, a teardrop-shaped genuine ruby, taken in payment of a large debt.
‘Very becoming,’ Sheryl went on, with a grin. ‘It matches what used to be the whites of your eyes.’
‘And you, I see, continue to scorn such frippery.’
Sheryl made a dismissive gesture. ‘Let’s quit fencing. Let’s come to what was once called the nitty-gritty, way back when you were a young man.’
The red lips squirmed at this reminder of his forty-seven years.
‘Touché,’ he murmured. He had never been able to keep pace with her acrid wit.
‘Anyhow, my friend, in spite of your advancing years you may still have your uses. To come to the point - I need your services.’
‘My services? I see. Actually, I don’t see at all. What, in precise terms, do you need?’
Sheryl edged her chair closer to the table and lowered her voice. ‘In precise terms I need your connections.’ She checked them off on her fingers. ‘I need your leadership skills, your experience in terrorism, and your hatred of France.’
His expression did not alter. ‘You need a great deal.’
She checked her little finger. ‘Most of all, I need you because you are an outlaw, prepared to commit crimes against the State.’
‘Was.’
Sheryl’s brow furrowed. ‘Was?’
‘I was an outlaw. Now I am a retired outlaw.’
As if he hadn’t spoken, Sheryl said, ‘And the pay is very, very good.’
‘Pay’, especially ‘very, very good pay’, had enticed Simonelli out of retirement more than once in the past. If the bucks, or francs, or lire, or whatever, were big enough he would even change his plans for the evening, the highlight of which was a cosy supper with a certain Jeanne Mazzetta, wife of his best friend. He mentally cancelled the rendezvous. After all Jeanne was available at the snap of his fingers.
Once a terrorist, specialist in assassination, orchestrator of a string of atrocities on and off the island of his birth, the young Simonelli had committed a series of crimes in pursuit of an independent Corsica. In those days he had been derisive of wealth. Now, having accumulated the means to pursue his idealistic dreams, the dreams themselves had withered away. Now he desired only greater wealth. Corsica, by and large, could look after itself.
For ‘very, very good pay’, he would even be happy to let Sheryl Glister have the use of his body for an afternoon or two, to help her assuage what he remembered as a sexual appetite even more gargantuan than his own.
He stubbed out his cigarette, assumed a suitably alert attitude.
‘You have given me the CV of the person you need. Now tell me, ma chérie, why it is you come halfway round the world to recruit such a person.’
Six
* * *
When the phone rang Julien Barail was dozing on the couch in his living room. He had nodded off watching the news on TF1 - a news that had been short of the kind of drama that could be expected to keep his eyelids from drooping: a crashed airliner, for instance, or a destructive avalanche, or a gunman run amok. Barail, who held the senior rank of Commissaire Divisionnaire in the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, more popularly known as the CRS, and commanded the Corps de Securité Presidentielle, the Presidential bodyguard, had a penchant for human tragedy.
He came awake just as the ringing ceased. He grunted and half-opened a single eye to regard the flickering screen. The news was over and they were showing what appeared to be an old Delon movie, in which the actor played a lone assassin called Jeff who kept a caged canary in his apartment. Even less diverting than the newsless news, aside from which he must have seen it half-a-dozen times. Then the phone trilled again.
It was just out of reach so, grumbling, he abandoned the couch and walked shoeless around it to the half-moon table that stood at its back. Answering the telephone was just one of the chores he was stuck with since his wife had abandoned him in favour of a twenty-three-year-old fitness instructor. Female, to
boot.
‘Oui!’ he snapped into the mouthpiece, making no effort to disguise his irritation.
‘Commissaire Barail?’
‘Who’s calling?’
‘My name is unimportant for now. Let us say I am a man with a large sum of money to spread around. The word is that you are in the market for a little palm greasing - in fact, quite a lot of palm greasing.’
Barail stiffened. ‘How dare you!’
A silky laugh.
‘Do not fear that I am working for those who plot your downfall. On the contrary, I am a friend of the enemies of Chirac.’
The caller’s accent carried a sub-stratum of Italian. A Corsican was Barail’s guess.
‘What is that to me?’ he said. As a top government security officer he was far too wily to give himself away to an anonymous caller over an open line.
‘What is it to you, you say. Just this: if you are prepared to co-operate, my friend, it is ten million francs to you. And I do not mean francs anciens.’
Barail’s grip on the receiver tightened. Still clutching it to his ear, he went around the couch to sit down.
‘You are obviously a lunatic or a practical joker,’ he growled, still maintaining his ingenuous façade. ‘Why don’t you go and pester someone more gullible?’ Yet he stayed on the line.
More soft laughter. The Corsican, or whatever he was, seemed confident of his man.
‘And where the devil did you get my name and this number?’ Barail demanded, massaging the back of his neck in his agitation.
The Corsican named an acceptable source. Barail relaxed a touch. The man’s bona fides were in order.
‘Let us meet,’ the Corsican proposed, all banter leaving his voice. ‘Allow me at least to demonstrate to you my goodwill.’
‘By all means let us meet,’ Barail rapped. ‘Then I can arrest you for causing a public nuisance.’
This was just hot air, as the Corsican would know. A precaution by Barail in case the caller proved to be from Internal Affairs, checking out the CRS Commissaire’s questionable loyalty and even more questionable honesty. Such subterfuges were not uncommon.
