by Andy McNab
I pointed at the beautiful dark-haired woman in the pictures. ‘Where’s your mum?’
The boy’s face clouded again. Wrong question. The light went out of his eyes. He retreated further into himself. What was that about?
I put both my hands on his arms and gripped him. Fuck it, I didn’t have time to piss around. And he was his father’s son. ‘Stefan, I need you to help me. I need to know who killed your dad …’
Now he was in real pain. His face went rigid, then looked like it was starting to melt. He opened and closed his mouth, but still no sound came out.
He pointed at the photo again.
Pointed straight at Mr Lover Man.
‘The black guy? Are you sure?’
Another stupid question, but it had to be asked. Maybe his memory had been fucked, a bit like mine. Maybe it was playing tricks. The more I looked at that big protective clasp on Stefan’s shoulder, the more clearly I could picture the Nigerian constantly putting himself in harm’s way to save Frank’s son.
But the shots that had killed Frank had come from inside the wagon.
By a body in the driving seat.
Mr Lover Man wasn’t right-handed. He held his cigarette in his left. Which meant he would have been able to just turn and fire.
Stefan’s mouth opened again. This time a word spilt out. ‘Yes.’
I picked him up and put him on a designer wing chair with a foot rest that sprang up when you tilted it back. I found another chocolate bar in the top drawer of Frank’s desk and lobbed it at him. It was the closest thing to a happy pill that I could come up with. ‘Chew on that, yeah? I need to have another look around.’
There were two remotes on the desk top. They controlled the screens on the opposite wall – a huge flat-screen TV and a security monitor. I fired up both. The monitor split into a dozen constantly shifting images, covering every approach to the chalet and every room inside. I fucked around with the remote for a bit. It was a great bit of kit. At the press of a button I could choose which camera to focus on; I could zoom in and out. I could wind the thing backwards and then forwards again at 2x, 6x, 12x and 30x speed.
I wished I could do the same thing with the screen inside my head. The distant past seemed to be less of a jigsaw, but I was still finding it almost impossible to pin down the events of the last forty-eight hours.
My journey here last night was a blur.
So was most of this morning.
How did the flatbed know we were on our way? The driver – or whoever launched the stripy pole at me – must have been told our route in advance, and had comms with an insider. And if Stefan hadn’t lost it, I now knew who that was.
I pictured Mr Lover Man looking over the edge of the precipice after my wagon had taken its nosedive.
Him and Hesco giving it a huge high-five.
Frank’s body.
The bubble of blood at the corner of Stefan’s mouth.
Legging it downhill.
The fight in the barn.
Carrot-cruncher number two raising the muzzle of my weapon.
The dead man’s click …
When you’ve got your pistol raised and a big fucker coming down an alley towards you with an AK-47, it’s the worst sound in the world. But when a big and very angry Frenchman fails to blow your brains out with your own weapon, it was the best. I had no idea whether he’d pulled the trigger on purpose or by accident. I just knew it hadn’t fired.
I took the Sphinx out of my waistband, put it on Frank’s old-school blotter and gave my temples a rub.
The gunmetal glinted dully in the flickering light from the monitors. It had done that when Mr Lover Man had handed it to me that morning. Mr Lover Man, not his boss. He’d smiled as he did so.
I picked up the weapon and unclipped the mag. Then I ejected the round from the chamber and held its base up to the light. It didn’t matter what angle I held it at: the copper percussion cap was totally unmarked. The ammunition wasn’t defective. Something else was.
I removed the top slide, turned it upside down and took out the spring and the barrel. With a little help from one of Frank’s platinum-sheathed Mont Blanc ballpoints I pushed out the stub that anchored the firing pin and popped it out of its housing.
Shit.
It didn’t matter how many times I ran through my NSPs (normal safety precautions), I’d just see the base of the firing pin, where it came into contact with the hammer. And the big lad with the dreads would have known that. Only by dismantling the working parts could I tell that it was five millimetres too short to strike the round. These things are made of turned steel. Their tips don’t just fall off, and this one hadn’t. A grinder had taken it down. I’d have bet a fistful of Frank’s euros on where that grinder was kept.
I thought about what might have happened if they’d been waiting for me on the hill. Mr Lover Man had probably saved my life when everything had gone to rat-shit in the barn. But he hadn’t meant to. He had meant me to be the one squeezing the trigger and not hearing it go bang. And by then I’d have been terminally fucked.
Mr Lover Man.
Stefan’s protector.
His dad’s most trusted sidekick.
Someone must have found a way of getting to him. Someone higher up the food chain than Frank Timis. And there weren’t many of them.
10
I reassembled the Sphinx, then bounced the TV from channel to channel until I found twenty-four-hour news. Every bulletin was about bad things happening in Syria, Iraq or the Crimea. Putin was bent on clawing back as much of the old empire as possible, and he wouldn’t stop at Ukraine. He also seemed to be picking off his least favourite oligarchs and rivals, one by one.
The Crimea report was interrupted by a breaking story. Frank’s Range Rover filled the frame, surrounded by stripy incident tape and blue and red flashing lights. I probably should have saved Stefan from having to watch this bit, but it was already too late. He stopped in mid-bite as a body bag was lifted off a gurney and slid into the back of an ambulance.
It was too early for the dead man to have been formally identified, but that didn’t stop the newshounds from speculating wildly about a connection with the still unsolved murder of Saad al-Hilli, his wife and mother-in-law in a layby near Lake Annecy in 2012. Lake Annecy was spitting distance from there.
There didn’t seem to be a mystery biker this time around; the prime suspect, as far as they were concerned, was a man in a Nissan X-Trail, who appeared to have suffered a fatal accident further down the mountain. Cue footage of more flashing lights and charred, mangled wreckage being hoisted on to a low-loader.
With his passport in my day sack, the police wouldn’t be able to ID Frank immediately. But it wouldn’t take them long. He’d kept a low profile, as far as the outside world was concerned, but you didn’t do the things that Frank did without leaving some kind of trace.
And it would also be only a matter of time before the forensics people got busy with what was left of the Nissan and discovered that there was no body inside it.
I bent and sifted through the desk drawers. None of them was locked, but that didn’t surprise me. Anything Frank wanted to keep to himself would be buried in the safe in the rock face behind me, somewhere offsite, or behind a series of passcodes on the razor-thin laptop he always kept within reach.
Always.
I stopped mid-sift and frowned.
He’d been tapping away on it last night. He’d turned the screen towards me, and shown me something.
Something important.
What then?
I hadn’t seen it in the Range Rover.
And it wasn’t here.
‘Stefan …’
He turned.
‘Your dad’s laptop. Did he have it in the car?’
Another slow nod.
So where had it gone?
I riffled through a few sheets of paper in the third drawer: a fixture list for Brindisi Football Club, an out-of-date invitation to the formal opening of some distribution depot i
n Albertville, a glossy estate agent’s brochure for a Swiss chateau on the shore of Lake Konstanz – the kind of place where if you had to ask the price you couldn’t afford it – and two or three printouts of the kind of puzzles and brainteasers designed to do your head in if a stripy javelin hadn’t done that already. I guessed they were what Frank did with Stefan when he wasn’t reading him Dostoevsky at bedtime.
Something prevented me pushing the drawer shut.
Puzzles …
Brainteasers …
Precision …
Most of us kept out-of-date shit for no good reason. Frank didn’t.
I needed to take another look at that invitation.
The depot was owned by a company called Adler Gesellschaft. Their logo was embossed top centre, inside the card. I rolled back my sleeve, though I didn’t need to. That eagle, with its outstretched wings and talons, was becoming a regular feature in my life. I folded the card in half and slipped it into my pocket.
I left the news rolling. The infrared had kicked in on the security monitor now that darkness had fallen. I told Stefan to keep eyes on while I nosed around. Anything else that might help fill in the blanks in my head was going to pay dividends, so I started with the picture gallery. I needed to fix the images of the key players in my mental databank.
One look and I knew I’d recognize Mr Lover Man and his mate Genghis if I saw them again. I’d spent time with them both in Moscow and Mogadishu, and some other third-world shitholes as well.
I struggled to remember whether I’d ever met Frank’s wife. I didn’t think so. I examined every shot she starred in. Long dark hair. Perfect skin. Catwalk posture. Cheekbones you could cut yourself on. The kind of symmetry that only came with a surgeon’s knife. Strikingly beautiful from a distance, but less so up close.
As always, the clue was in the eyes, and these ones didn’t miss a trick. I saw ambition in them, but not affection. And, judging by the size of the diamonds and rubies she had decorated herself with, her ambition was working its magic.
The TV was telling me nothing I hadn’t already heard so I switched it off. I showed Stefan the remote for the security monitor and began to run through the basic programming options. ‘Look, mate, this is how you shift from camera to camera. And this is the zoom—’
He rolled his eyes and snatched it out of my hand. In case I hadn’t got the message, he went on to demonstrate a whole lot of functions I’d had no idea about. I left him to it, but turned at the door. ‘I’ll be along the corridor. Come and get me if you see anything happening, front or back.’ I gave him a grin. ‘And finish that chocolate bar, eh? Or I’ll eat it.’
From the contents of their cupboards and chests, one of the staff quarters had been set aside for a chef and another for a maid. The remaining two were empty, beds stripped, not even a half-used tube of toothpaste on the glass shelf above the basin.
But this time I spotted another empty Marlboro pack in the waste bin.
Whoever had vacated them wasn’t expecting to come back any time soon. It had been worth the second visit, though. I now knew without a shadow of a doubt who had stayed there.
Mr Lover Man, and me.
I returned to the study. Stefan still looked like you’d expect a kid to look when his favourite BG had just shot his dad. But he was taking his security job very seriously indeed. His eyes were glued to the six key screens in which absolutely nothing was happening, and he was juggling between them like he was playing on an Xbox. I let him know I was going back upstairs.
I pressed the remote and closed the steel roller shutters in the master bedroom before switching on the lamp beside the four-poster. Mr and Mrs Timis watched me from the portrait on the wall above it as I whisked through their handcrafted drawers and wardrobes. Something in her expression left me in no doubt she didn’t approve.
The very expensive contents didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know about Frank’s personal tastes, and only one thing about what might have been happening in other areas of his life. Every single item belonged to him. I found nothing that might have been hers.
The same was true of the en-suite bathroom. A lot of Frank’s man stuff, but no sign of the sort of shit women can’t live without. It wasn’t because she hadn’t popped by for dinner last night.
She’d gone.
Was that why Stefan’s face had fallen when I asked him where his mum was?
I caught sight of myself in the mirror above one of the basins. A scab had formed on my forehead, starting a couple of centimetres below my hairline and running back across my scalp. There was a smear of blood on each side. It was ugly enough to make me open the medicine cabinet, where I found shelves of Factor 60, Deep Heat, and all the things you might need to patch yourself up after a fuck-up on the piste.
I dampened one of Frank’s designer face flannels and cleaned myself up as much as possible, then applied three butterfly strips and a dressing to the crusty bit. It would stop it going septic, and made the whole thing look a bit tidier.
I rinsed the flannel under the cold tap, wrung it out and tucked it into my bomber pocket, along with some spare dressings and sticking plasters, and a blister pack of ibuprofen, a crêpe bandage and Tubigrip for Stefan. He appeared at the door in the same instant I heard the sirens whooping up the road from the centre of town.
I flicked off the light and took Frank’s triumph of Italian design and German engineering double quick down to his study. I wasn’t about to stick my head out of an upstairs window to see if we had a drama on our hands. I already knew that we did.
11
I got back to his monitor in time to see four Toyota Land Cruisers screech to a halt outside the front of the chalet. GENDARMERIE was emblazoned across their bonnets and door panels and their anti-riot grilles were tilted back. It was too dark to tell what colour the carriers were, but I knew they were midnight blue, like the Kevlar assault suits of the lads in helmets who started spilling out of them.
These guys weren’t just our friendly neighbourhood bobbies. I couldn’t see their shoulder flashes, but I could picture them: a blue circle with an open parachute, a telescopic sight, flames and a steel karabiner.
GIGN.
A special-ops outfit bridging the gap between the police and the military. Whoever thought the French were cheese-eating surrender monkeys had never seen the Intervention Group up close. I had. We’d served together, back in the day. They specialized in anti-terrorist and hostage-rescue tasks. Which meant they were taking whatever they thought was happening here very seriously indeed.
They normally operated as twenty-man troops, and it looked like today was no exception. Four of them stayed out front, SIG 550 assault rifles in the aim. They’d have Manurhin MR73s – a 357 Magnum revolver that Dirty Harry wouldn’t have sneered at – in their holsters. I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of either. Or the GIAT FR-F2 sniper rifles that would have peeled off earlier, aiming for the high ground. They could throw a 7.62 round 800 metres.
While it was all very well being able to dredge up this shit, I was beginning to regret not having spent more time planning my exit routes.
The rest of the squad spread out around the sides and back. They didn’t have the pass code, but that didn’t seem to slow them down. A couple swung themselves up over the rear wall and took cover where I’d put Stefan, behind the Jacuzzi. So nipping out the way we’d come in was no longer an option.
Blasting through the garage doors and up the front drive in the Range Rover wasn’t either.
I wondered about climbing out on to the roof and launching myself at the next-door chalet.
I’d be quicker on my own.
It would mean leaving the boy.
The GIGN would guarantee him a place of safety …
But I’d be fucked.
They were top of the heap when it came to hostage rescue, but wouldn’t just give him a kiss and a cuddle. It’d take less than thirty seconds for the little fucker to tell them I was alive, put me in the same
zone as the killing, and give them a full description.
I scanned the monitors. They confirmed what I already knew. Every option was going to end in a gangfuck.
The boss man with the megaphone certainly felt that way. He told us so in three languages. He was now inviting anyone inside the chalet to come out with their hands raised.
What about staying in? Was there somewhere we could conceal ourselves? I scrolled through the possibilities on the screen inside my head. It was finally beginning to work. But it didn’t give me a solution.
Inside cupboards and under beds were strictly for sitcoms.
And the attic was the first place I’d look.
Did Frank have a panic room? I hadn’t seen any sign of one.
No. Frank didn’t do panic. And neither – I now realized – did his son. Most seven-year-olds would have been flapping and crying and hiding under the bed right now. He just rolled his eyes. The kid seemed to have the same part of his brain missing as his dad.
The megaphone kicked off one last time. Same message, harsher delivery. If there was anyone inside, they had three minutes to make themselves known.
I didn’t want to make myself known. I never had. Not even to the postman.
As the assault team moved in, I went over to his chair and gripped him. ‘There must be a way out, yeah? What would your dad do right now?’
The kid got up and limped towards the left-hand end of the photograph display. He opened the storage cupboard beneath it and reached inside.
The front door burst off its hinges at the third strike of the GIGN battering ram. The speakers in Frank’s hideaway captured the moment in cinema-quality surround-sound. But even if it had been dead quiet, I doubt I would have heard the shelving unit rotate to reveal the mouth of a tunnel that had been bored into the mountain.
I took two steps towards it, then turned back to the desk and grabbed the security remote. Fuck it, this thing had more buttons and icons than an Enigma machine. I didn’t know which ones to punch.
Stefan gripped my arm and tried to pull me away. I shook him off. ‘The security cameras. They would have recorded us coming in, yeah?’
