by Andy McNab
I scraped up the last bit of scrambled egg and sat back with my mug as the Owl watched the last few seconds of the video. I couldn’t work out his expression. Was he scared, angry, or couldn’t give a fuck? It was impossible to read.
He leant across the table to pass me the mobile. The memory stick went back around my neck.
‘Just so you know, there isn’t anything further on that says about you having Jack’s dad killed for organizing the monitor dig-in for the Russians. No need to get too personal about it, eh?’
It took him a long time but the big smile eventually came. ‘It’s okay, I get it.’ He wagged a finger at me, as if he was telling me off for eating an extra biscuit. ‘Now you make sure your team keeps a good hold of those little stick guys.’
He looked around the walls, taking in Diana’s many faces. ‘This is where we first met, you know.’
‘You met her too?’ I couldn’t imagine him popping in for a coffee on exactly the same day she did. I couldn’t imagine this as one of his places at all.
‘No, my husband. He adores her. We had our first date here.’ He twisted back to face me.
‘Really, mate? On the first date I’d have wanted at least a tablecloth and the odd candle running around.’
He gave me a beaming emoji, full watts. ‘Well, it kind of worked. I thought I’d come here again and see if anything had changed.’ His arm gesture took in the whole room. ‘But no! Can you believe it? I can’t wait to tell him. He’ll be so pleased.’
I wanted to get on with this but he had the brakes on. He loved small talk and I could handle that, but it was his smile I had a problem with. He smiled at everything and everyone but I could read his mind: Be nice, but be ready to cut throats the first chance you get. This man should have been in politics.
20
He’d settled down, hands on the table, like a line manager doing the Monday-morning pep talk. ‘Nick, it’s so nice to see you again, even though you brought along uncomfortable viewing. I was getting worried – you didn’t call.’
I finished the last dregs of my tea. ‘I had nothing to call you about, mate. We were just getting on with our lives. The endeavour of personal improvement and the pursuit of happiness, that sort of thing.’
He thought the last sentence was really heartfelt and approved it with a nod, as his eyes lifted briefly to the People’s Princess. ‘So, Nick, the call? You—’
His coffee arrived, at last. A couple of laptop rechargers came in behind the waitress and plugged themselves in at the next table.
I ordered another mug of tea and she nodded, but turned her attention to the newbies. I was the guy who liked tomato sauce more than her eggs; I’d lost her love.
I leant across the table to get the Owl’s attention, and a better look at his raincoat. ‘I want to talk to you about protecting us from the big kahunas.’ I didn’t even know if they existed. For all I knew, there might be just one, and I was talking to him. It felt like I knew more about the waitress than I did about this man.
‘You betcha, Nick. We’re both just the little guys making our way in life. Am I right?’
‘Just the one little guy, mate, and he’s sitting my side of the table. That’s why I’m here. Last night, we had three fuckers at Rio’s. They were installing devices. You know anything about that?’
He was either on another stream or just diverting the course of the conversation, I wasn’t sure which. ‘I try every day and every night, Nick, to make sure you four are safe. You know what those guys are like.’ He held up his hands. ‘Uncontrollable. Can you believe it?’ The emojis went from worried face to shocked face and back to smiley. ‘What can you do? Jeez, they can be a little scary at times.’
I was listening, but he was diverting. ‘Mate, I don’t believe that team playing electricians at Rio’s wasn’t working for you. But that’s okay, I understand. What I don’t get is who you actually work for. Who are these big kahunas? What’s the set-up? Is it like some kind of international rescue, coming into the playground when everybody starts fighting, sorting it out before the teachers are told?’
The emojis spooled and morphed as the questions hit him, until they settled on one that looked like I’d love to tell you, but …
‘Need to know – it’s an important factor in our lives, am I right? Hey, I’m sorry, but, hey, you know what? I’ve been thinking about you guys ever since you called. I really have, Nick. How I can help us all – you, me, even the big guys.’
He straightened his legs and stiffened his back, dug his left hand into his baggy jeans. ‘I’ve got it somewhere.’
I carried on: ‘So, at the house, a couple of them got badly hurt. From our point of view, it was all about getting away – all right? Just so they know, we don’t want these fuckers coming back for retribution. Wrong place, wrong time for them, that’s all it was. It’s got to stop or both of us could lose people.’
He pulled his hand out. ‘Nope, wrong pocket.’ He changed hands, and produced a cheap credit-card holder, the kind of thing that flops open, exposing slots to shove your plastic in, and handed it to me. I put it straight into my jacket pocket, feeling it had more than one card in it, then palmed the coin-sized piece of aluminium, my return gift to him.
‘I’ve been thinking, Nick, on ways I can keep the big guys happy about your situation. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve had a hell of a time reassuring them – I really have.’
I wasn’t buying it, but I liked the friendliness, even the bumbling buffoonery. I knew it was bullshit but it made the day much better. ‘I guess us all having information to hit the real world with controls them a little bit, doesn’t it?’
His head was down as he concentrated on pouring milk into his coffee drop by drop. ‘Well, kinda, but anyhooo …’
Finally. The Owl’s word for: Down to business.
‘I’ve been thinking the way to keep everybody happy is for you guys to work with me.’ He tested his brew, added another couple of drops, tried it again. ‘That way, you’re kind of close. You still have the leverage, of course, but it feels neat that we’re all in the same tent, don’t you think?’
I shrugged.
‘But you guys, look, money and all, our vets, your vets, they don’t get what they deserve. I’m guessing you wouldn’t say no to a few bucks now and again. Just small jobs at first, and then who knows? Kinda makes sense for both sides, doesn’t it? What do you think, Nick?’ The cup came up in both hands, and he finally had a proper sip. He wasn’t too pleased with it.
My tea arrived, and I waited for the woman to leave.
‘So, what’s the job?’
‘Oh, just a simple thing. It wouldn’t be difficult for you guys – a couple of days at the most. And eighty K sterling at the end. Not bad, eh?’
I tried not to look surprised because that wouldn’t have helped me get more. ‘That’s exactly what I was going to ask you, and for the same reasons – to keep together and work together.’
I studied his reaction. Was this a coincidence or had he known? As I was expecting, the Owl’s face gave nothing away so I got back to the job in hand.
‘But at one sixty sterling. Now, that wouldn’t be bad at all.’
No one ever paid anyone what they were worth in this game. Worth had to be defined and justified by the person getting paid. In this case, most of it would be bullshit because I didn’t know what was required for the job to be successful.
His reply was far too quick, and what I wanted was far too easily given.
‘Sure, Nick, why not?’
But the offer helped with other, more worrying, concerns, and I wasn’t going to turn it down. ‘Looks like we have a job, then. When?’
Later I could think about why he wanted us to work for him at all. Getting a little piece of alloy into that coat was the main item on my agenda now.
The Owl was a very happy mattress salesman. ‘That’s great, Nick. Today? It’s all in the wallet. Nice and easy – a kind of trial run, a shakedown cruise. Find someon
e. She’s young, maybe with a couple of guys. It shouldn’t be hard.’
Then the other side of the Owl appeared, the one that could cause pain and death. ‘Bring her to me intact. That’s very important to me.’
I nodded a no-problem that gave him the reason to come back into emoji smiley-face mode. ‘Our woman’s in the UK, no foreign entry, easy-peasy. You deliver, I pay. Kind of like the US Postal Service.’ He smiled. ‘USPS, no? “We Deliver For You!”’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah. Good one. But why do you want her, and intact?’
He tapped his nose. ‘Need to know, Nick. Let’s just say you and I are keeping the wolves from the door, eh? Doesn’t that make you feel warm inside?’
He could see it didn’t. ‘So, hey, look at it another way. During Liechtenstein’s last military engagement in 1886, none of the eighty soldiers sent to fight were killed, and all eighty-one returned. Yup, eighty-one. They picked up a new Italian “friend” along the way. That’s kinda what I do, make friends of the enemy. It’s good for us all.’ He pointed to the frame above me. ‘She would have approved.’
I stood up. ‘Mate, I’ve got to go to the toilet. Maybe she used the same one – what do you reckon?’ I moved behind him and the coat.
‘Nope. We checked. She never used the facilities.’
As I turned, I tugged at the raincoat, just enough to make it slip to the floor. ‘Would have been good for business if she had, though, eh? Sorry, mate, it’s got caught.’
I picked it up behind him, and brushed it down so he could see I was making good on my fuck-up. ‘Think of the people lining up to sit on the same seat.’
His face turned up to mine. ‘Oh, gross – come on.’
He’d already missed me slipping a bit of alloy into the Nokia pocket, and now he watched me place the coat back on the seat. I’d made a mental note of how it had folded over the chair and I slapped his shoulder gently. ‘I’m going to pretend she was there anyway. I’ll be back in a bit.’
The cubicle downstairs was narrow. I sat on the pan, elbows on my knees, worried face in my hands. Did the Owl already have a device in Jack’s barn? How the fuck had he known that was what we were going to ask him for, and almost word for word? He’d even said ‘tent’, for fuck’s sake.
It made sense. If he could discover where everybody’s memory stick was hidden, he could seize them in a coordinated swoop and fuck us over. If they did it all at once, maybe the message wouldn’t get out to Claudia. The surveillance log must have registered that the fifth was with a woman. But that was all he would know. No phone number, no security statement spoken.
Did it matter? We’d achieved our aim, and we were working for him. We were getting close.
And then it hit me.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Worst possible scenario.
What if it wasn’t surveillance?
What if it was one of the team?
No time to try to work out the whys, wheres and whens. What mattered was trying to remember if one of the other three had said or done something that would indicate they weren’t even worth pissing on. I couldn’t think of anything, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t later on.
I pulled out the safe phone and punched in the dialling code and mobile number. The key to conjuring up regularly accessed data sequences was to crack on instinctively. Interrupting the process with rational thought only fucked things up. And because I never compromised my security – or anyone else’s – by storing contact details, it had become second nature.
It rang four times, and when it was answered I imagined her glass-framed office overlooking a lake. One day I might get to see it.
‘Oh, hello, Nick.’
21
‘Claudia, listen, thanks for explaining the situation for me. I need a favour from you, and it’s to do with the instructions I left.’
She was still über-efficient. ‘Of course, Nick. What would you like me to do?’
‘Cancel the instructions for now. Keep them, but there’s a temporary hold. If anyone does ring in, take no action, keep the white Jiffy bag until I call you again to take off the temporary hold. That okay with you?’
‘Of course, Nick. Remember, we need to revisit everything when we review your situation in a couple of months’ time. Unless we get some good news in the meantime, yes?’
‘That’s perfect, Claudia. Thank you.’
I closed down the phone, and left the toilet. I hadn’t added that she might come into work one Monday to find a man-sized hole had been drilled into the bank safe and the only thing taken was a small white Jiffy.
Inspecting the coat folds to see if he’d had a little check was now out of the question: the Owl was at the counter, paying the bill, coat on.
We headed for the door and the rain. I pointed to the right, the way I’d come. ‘I’m going to the tube.’ That gave him the opportunity to tell me he was going the opposite way. We shook, and it was like we’d just had our first college reunion in years.
‘Ah, Nick, that was fun, don’t you think? You guys will be family. Kind of feels nice.’
I nodded. ‘We’ve got a name. We’re going to call ourselves SNS – the Special Needs Service.’
Rio had finally got his way.
I didn’t get any emojis as he tried to work out what I was saying, which was a pity. I was watching for any giveaway that he’d already read the expression on the surveillance logs.
He thought for a second longer, then got it. ‘Oh, my Lord, Nick, are you guys even allowed to say that kind of thing here?’
22
The Owl turned left and I turned right. The original plan to follow him had changed, now the SNS might have a mole. There was another way of finding out where he lived or worked, and I’d get on with that later. For now, priorities had changed.
On the plus side, I hadn’t told the team about the tracker I’d planted in his coat. The Owl was right: need-to-know was important in our lives right now. I pulled out the cheap plastic wallet to reveal four pay-as-you-go Visa debit cards, a Post-it showing the PIN numbers, and a bright green USB card with a small fold-out connector.
I shoved it back into my pocket and pulled out my mobile to google an internet café. I didn’t care if the Owl had guys following me: I was only doing what he’d expect of me. But, then, why would he need to? It looked like he already had someone in our tent.
‘Mole’ wasn’t the right word to describe what this fuck actually was. ‘Mole’ felt almost quaint, something out of the 1950s when double-agents were recruited at Oxford or Cambridge with a tap on the shoulder and a G-and-T. Even when they were found out and exposed, no one wanted to do anything about it. Basically, they were ‘one of us’.
The reality was much bloodier, and I was angry at the thought. For now it was only a suspicion that one of us was a traitor. But that didn’t calm me down. It just made me want to find proof one way or the other.
At stake was my little fantasy about what this group represented to me: a new start, with people I’d thought I liked and, I’d thought, people I understood. Then I tried to justify it to myself. Maybe it was a good thing this had happened. I’d fallen into the trap of team players before. If this fantasy bubble of the SNS brotherhood was burst, it would knock me back into shape. The only person you can really trust, and even then only to a point, is yourself.
Rationalizing and justifying didn’t help me cut away. Mole, informer, tout, stool-pigeon, grass: however it was dressed up, and whatever the reasons, incentives or coercion that had turned them, there was nothing worse than a traitor. No side liked them, even the one that was using them. They weren’t respected. They were hated.
When I’d worked in Northern Ireland, source information was gathered from many different people for many different reasons. Some did it for money. I never really understood that because they’d never get more than they could naturally absorb into their lifestyle. That usually meant no more than five hundred a month – or most of them would have gone straight out
and bought a brand new car, which might have looked a tad suspicious outside a minging council house. So why run the risk of being burnt alive or getting your head drilled for a couple of beer tokens each week?
Some became sources thinking they were protecting their husband, brother or whichever relation was in an active service unit. ‘If I tell you what he’s doing, can you stop it?’
I had contempt for them all.
They were helping us win the war, but they were traitors. I had no sympathy for them when their side caught them and the Black & Decker was plugged in.
Finally, there were touts who did it for ideological reasons. They were highly placed within the IRA and gave solid information: the most powerful weapon in any war.
But even words like ‘tout’, ‘informer’, ‘source’ – they all felt too tame when it was you being betrayed, when they were inside the tent, pissing in. The only word I could think of that felt good enough was ‘snide’. When I was a kid, it had been worse than ‘cunt’. It was the biggest insult on earth. ‘Snide’ was subhuman. And now that I’d pigeonholed whoever it was, even though it might turn out that the snide didn’t exist, I felt a lot better because the snide would be about two things: giving control of the memory sticks to the Owl, and getting us dead.
Google gave me an internet café, and I turned round. It was only twenty or so metres back the way I’d come.
23
The café was rammed with people printing out visa applications, filling them in, cutting photos to size, stuff you’d expect when trying to comply with hours of bureaucracy for a visa. It was Embassy Central around there and I heard dozens of languages as I walked in, being shouted on Skype. Most of the speakers were pissed off because the sign on the counter announced that the bored-looking Indian guys behind it would witness documents for an extra charge of two pounds per signature.
I bought an hour online but didn’t take a seat. The ones I was interested in were occupied, so while I waited I opened up the tracker app and hit the community option. The tracker was an American crowdfunded device, designed to be attached to keys, wallets, phones, even pets, or concealed in cars and bikes. Paired with the app on your phone and Bluetooth, you could quickly locate whatever you’d lost. My original plan had been to follow the Owl to the general area of his nest, checking I wasn’t being followed myself, then to narrow down the search with the tracker later. It would work only if the device and I were in Bluetooth range, but that wasn’t a problem because I had the tracker community to help me. Once you’d registered your device, you could ask every other user’s phone to track it.
