by Andy McNab
One of the lads pinched out the tip of his cigarette, tucked the bit he hadn’t smoked into his trouser pocket, and disappeared inside. The other stayed where he was, one thumb hooked in his not-very-fancy designer belt. He took a final drag, spun the stub into the water, and ruffled the tuft of beard on his chin.
I gave him a conspiratorial grin, fished the half-empty pack of Ukrainian Marlboros out of my pocket and offered him one. He nodded his very curly and youthful head, took one, then another for later, and leant forward to give us both a light. I hated the fucking things, but a drink or a smoke has always been the quickest way of making a complete stranger your new best friend.
‘Français?’
He chuckled. ‘Non. Je suis d’Oman.’
I chuckled too. ‘Muscat? I love Muscat.’ I’d been there with the Regiment, training the Sultan’s troops, but he didn’t need to know that.
‘Salalah.’
I shoved out my hand and gripped his. ‘Beautiful.’ I took a drag on my Marlboro and did my best not to cough my guts out. ‘Salalah. Beautiful. Even more beautiful than Muscat.’
I didn’t have all night to swap holiday memories, but I was prepared to waste five minutes finding out whether this guy could point me straight to Mr Lover Man’s door.
‘Really? You have been there?’
I nodded. ‘Visiting my brother. He worked for a bank. HSBC …’
I got the impression the word ‘bank’ had suddenly earned me his full attention. ‘He loved Oman too. Took me all over.’ I paused. ‘So what brings you here?’
He shrugged, and glanced over my left shoulder. Maybe he’d spotted a boat he fancied behind me. Maybe he was about to give me a big fat lie. ‘I go to college. In Lyon.’ Then he sighed. ‘But what brings anybody from my world to yours, Monsieur?’
‘My world isn’t that special, mate. Believe me. But I tell you what – maybe we could help each other out …’
His eyes glistened as I took out one of Frank’s fifty-euro notes and slid it into his shirt pocket. ‘What shifts have you done this week?’
‘The usual. Starting at five, finishing at two in the morning …’
‘In the restaurant?’
He nodded.
‘Room service, sometimes?’
‘Sometimes. I prefer it to the restaurant.’
‘Better tips?’
Time for another fifty. His belt was leather and had a Gucci buckle, but it was probably a fake. The marks on it and the misshapen holes told me he’d got progressively thinner in the last few months, and everything else about him – including his scratched Casio watch – said that every cent counted.
‘I’m looking for a guy …’
He recoiled. Not much, but enough to let me know he suddenly wasn’t enjoying this as much as he’d thought he would.
‘Don’t worry. Not … in that way. And he isn’t in trouble. He’s a friend of mine. I just haven’t seen him for a while. Big black guy. From Nigeria. Dreadlocks. Looks like a rapper.’ I gave him another grin and held up the cigarette pack. ‘Smokes these things too.’
He relaxed. ‘He arrived yesterday. I like him very much. Very … spiritual. A true believer.’
‘What’s his room number?’
‘His room number? His room number is …’ His eyes glistened and his hand twitched.
Another fifty found its way out of my pocket, but before I passed it over I heard a scuffle somewhere above us. Then a shout and the sound of breaking glass. Fuck. Why always breaking glass? But not a car window this time. A wine bottle, maybe. The talking had stopped on the patio. So had the laughter. A woman screamed. We both looked up.
I couldn’t see a thing until I stepped back towards the moorings. I spun the rest of my Marlboro into the water and craned my neck.
The fight wasn’t outside the restaurant.
It was on one of the top-floor balconies.
Two figures had started to beat the fuck out of a third, pushing him hard against the rail. I could only see his back. But it was enough to show me I didn’t need the help of my new Omani mate to find Mr Lover Man after all.
If he had been a smaller unit, it might have been more difficult to tip him over. But he didn’t have a low centre of gravity. So once he’d lost his balance, there was only one way for his dreadlocks to go.
He managed to grip the rail for a moment, and bought himself a few extra seconds.
Then, arms and legs flailing, he arced into space.
21
He bounced once, on the stone balustrade that bordered the paved area above us. I heard the cracking of bone – maybe his ribs, maybe his back, maybe both – as he crashed down in a heap on the planking that lined the marina, less than four metres away.
The waiter gasped, and started to gibber. I couldn’t blame him. Not everyone can deal with a twenty-stone body falling five storeys and hitting the deck beside him. Even if he had immigration papers. I batted him away. ‘Go. You don’t need this shit …’
I didn’t need this shit either. I wanted this fucker alive and talking. I couldn’t fuck about. If he wasn’t unconscious already, he soon would be. Plus the crowd wouldn’t spend all night rubbernecking from the gallery above me. They’d find their feet any second now.
I knelt by the body. I saw the waiter hanging around in the kitchen doorway, and I sensed a growing audience on the level above me, but I didn’t look up: iPhones would soon be recording, and when they did, I didn’t want anything visible beneath my baseball cap.
He’d landed face up. His eyes were open, but the back of his head wasn’t healthy. The dreads were like snakes, swimming in a pool of blood.
Most of the damage seemed to be low down, though, so I reckoned that, with a little encouragement, he’d still be able to talk.
His left arm didn’t look too clever. The chunky gold chain hung limply from his wrist. And his leg was folded back underneath him at a severely terminal angle.
I touched the pulse in his neck with my fingertip. His heart was pumping like a piston, doing everything it could to oxygenate his failing body.
I leant my ear right up close to his mouth and heard him let out a halting, pain-racked breath. His eyelids fluttered. I was pretty certain he wouldn’t be able to feel anything from the chest down, so I put some pressure on his smashed-up arm.
His jaw clenched. Then his lips parted and a crimson bead rolled down his cheek from the corner of his mouth.
‘Why did you kill Frank?’
He tried to suck some air into his lungs. It wasn’t working. He only got enough to whisper four syllables. ‘Ly … u … bo … va …’
Four syllables that made up one word. Lyubova. I’d never used it myself, but I knew what it meant. Lyubova was the Russian word for love.
‘Who wanted him dead?’
His chest quivered and his eyes closed.
They sprang open when I gripped his arm again. Gave it a twist.
‘Who?’
‘You … ran …’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘You … ran …’
His voice was so weak it was almost drowned in the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
Then I heard the sirens.
For the benefit of the spectators, I shook my head sadly as I got to my feet. It also gave me a couple of seconds to decide on my next move.
Hesco and his sidekick would be legging it as quickly as they could now that the gendarmes were getting closer, and so should I, if I was going to have any chance of gripping them.
I turned and walked swiftly to the far corner of the hotel, past the rear of the section housing the plunge pools. On this level all I could see through the windows to my left was cool lighting and empty massage tables.
To my right sleek yachts were hitched to a series of floating pontoons. A grass bank sloped up from the hard standing that bordered the water. Clumps of evergreens had been planted along the top of it, to provide shelter from the wind or maybe to hide the moorings from
people who didn’t like boats.
There was a shout as I reached the bank. I ignored it, climbed into the treeline and went left, towards where Hesco had left his wagon.
On the far side of the trees a row of hard tennis courts, surrounded by a high chain-link fence, stretched down towards the lake. A string of blue flashing lights bounced off the night sky beyond them.
As I reached the front of the hotel, two dark blue Land Cruisers screeched to a halt four hundred short of the resort entrance, and eight lads in combats leapt out. They split up almost immediately, and spread themselves across the southern flank of the complex, advancing towards the marina in pairs, weapons in the shoulder.
The Maserati had disappeared, but I kept walking until I got to the Polo. Like Hesco and his shiny-headed mate, I needed to get the fuck out of there before the GIGN established a cordon.
Two more Land Cruisers and an ambulance filled my rear-view as I headed left on the main. As they turned into the entrance behind me, I took the second right and looped back towards Albertville.
22
An hour later I passed the Buffalo Grill. Not a hint of neon. The place was deserted. That was fine by me. I’d rehydrated and got an energy bar down my neck en route, and food was so far down my list of priorities it hardly featured. My head was already filled with the events of the night.
‘Ly … u … bo … va …’
Four syllables.
I let them echo through the darkness as I drove.
Four syllables meaning ‘love’.
At first I’d thought he was telling me that he’d been thrown off the balcony because he had saved the boy.
Now I remembered that Lyubova was also the name of Frank’s ex-wife. The one Laffont couldn’t bring himself to trust.
Was Mr Lover Man saying that she was responsible for Frank’s death?
And what the fuck did ‘You … ran’ mean? Is that what I had done on the mountain? Or had he said, ‘You … run’? Had he been warning me to get away from Aix? To get away from this whole gangfuck?
My head was starting to spin again, just like it had when I was chucking my guts up at 1,987 feet. I opened both front windows, breathed deeply and steadied myself.
I was sorted by the time I reached the motel. I slid the Sphinx back into my waistband and swung myself out of the wagon. A motion sensor triggered the light beside our door. All three hairs had gone missing.
I carried on through the arch and checked the bathroom window from the outside. It was firmly shut.
I went back and pushed gently on the door, but it didn’t give. I went through the knocking routine, then murmured, ‘Raskolnikov…’
Nothing.
I repeated the sequence a little more loudly.
Still no sign of life from inside.
I fired up the Polo and made for the recycling point. A goods train rattled past as I parked up. I did the whole knocking thing all over again, pulled open the door and whispered our code word. This time I got a response.
‘Nick …’
There was a bump and a squeak and Stefan poked his head out from between the wheelie-bins. He rushed over and grabbed me, like I was some kind of lifebelt.
‘Stefan … no …’ I managed to prise myself loose and steered him straight into the boot of the wagon, stopping only to slide his rucksack off his shoulders.
Before I closed the hatch he handed me the room key. The big chunk of metal hung down from it, with the motel’s address stamped on one side. Fuck that. I threw it into the bottle bank and drove north towards Ugine.
I didn’t stop until I got to a truckers’ café off the main. I pulled into a parking space alongside a white van as the first hint of dawn crept into the sky. I went inside and grabbed a salami baguette for both of us, a big frothy coffee for me and a Coke for him, then hauled him out of his hiding place and on to the passenger seat.
He immediately kicked into overdrive, in a completely impregnable combo of Russian and English.
I told him to take a deep breath, get the food and drink down his neck, then start again. Slowly.
He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, then nodded. After three mouthfuls and one gulp of the fizz he rattled out the story of his last few hours.
I gripped his shoulder. ‘Wait. Stop. First things first. Did someone try to get into the room?’
He shook his head. ‘No. But I knew someone would, very soon …’
Either this boy had gone telepathic on me, or he’d seen something. ‘The TV?’
He nodded. ‘They’re saying that the man who crashed didn’t die. That’s you, isn’t it? And they’re saying he stole a boy …’
‘Any pictures?’
‘Some …’ His expression clouded. ‘Of my father. And the chalet.’
‘And you?’
‘Not so far. But …’
My turn to nod. ‘You’re right. It’s your picture next.’
If it was, I’d have to give the boy a very quick makeover. But I wasn’t going to worry about that until I had to. If I tried to second-guess every possible action in theatre and out, I’d spend my whole life frozen to the spot. And right now I needed to get us into Switzerland.
I fished around in my day sack and took out the two matching UK passports in the names of Nick and Steven Saunders, each of which IDed the other as next of kin. They were both renewed recently, but someone had done a good job of making them look as though they hadn’t come straight out of the printer. They even had some Eastern European stamps for places we’d both been.
I ran through them with Stefan, and asked him to rethink his memories of places he’d visited with his real dad as places he’d visited with me. We practised our names a bit. I told him he was Steven now, and I was going to call him Steve. Then I shoved them in the glovebox and pocketed another Nokia, a battery and one of the SIM cards.
I wrapped the new Sphinx, spare mag and rounds in Frank’s face flannel, opened the boot and put it under the spare tyre. I slung the day sack in on top. Stefan was about to follow it on to the dog blanket but I shook my head. ‘If we get stopped, that would be quite difficult to explain. Steve, mate, it’s time for you to ride up front again.’
I assembled the Nokia, texted Pasha and stepped away from the wagon as his call came through.
He kicked straight off. ‘I don’t know for sure about Frank and the Kremlin. But the knives are out.’
‘And the other thing?’
He hesitated. ‘She wasn’t happy, my friend. But she took your advice immediately.’
Trying not to picture the expression on Anna’s face, I punched the red button and chucked the phone into the back of a random cement mixer. I didn’t know where it was going and I didn’t much care, as long as it was somewhere else. The Swiss federal authorities tracked every mobile signal, twenty-four/seven, from the moment you found your first relay mast, and I didn’t want to be on anybody’s radar while I paid Lyubova a visit in Lake Konstanz.
As we headed for the border, Stefan and I continued to build a cover story we could share.
‘If anyone asks you what I do, tell them I’m a collector.’
‘What do you collect, Nick?’
‘I think maybe you should get used to calling me Dad.’ I kept my eyes on the road. ‘Safer that way.’
‘What do you collect …’ he went quiet for a moment ‘… Dad?’
‘Militaria.’
‘Soldier stuff?’
‘Soldier stuff. Medals, helmets, swords, that sort of thing.’
‘And guns?’
‘Only old ones. With the firing pins removed.’
‘Like the one you had in the chalet?’
I didn’t answer, but my expression obviously gave me away.
‘You were away for a very long time tonight, Nick—’
‘You were away for a very long time tonight, Dad.’
‘Whatever. I had time to think …’
I let the silence stretch between us as I focused on the road ah
ead.
‘I thought about what you did with the weapon. At the desk.’
I frowned.
‘I watched you take it apart.’
‘You don’t miss much, do you?’
‘I miss my dad …’
‘Of course you do.’ That hadn’t been what I meant, but it reminded me that he was still seven, not forty-seven.
‘The signs keep saying Geneva. Is that where we’re going?’
‘We’re taking a holiday together, Steve. It’s not a business trip. We’re not … collecting.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Why Switzerland?’
‘It’s a lovely place. Mountains. Flowers. Fresh air. All good.’
I steered him back to the cover story. I told him we’d lived in Moscow for the last few years, which was true, and would be going back to England in a couple of weeks, which wasn’t.
‘Where in England?’
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘No.’
‘Then if anyone asks let’s just say London.’
He gave this some thought. ‘The Houses of Parliament?’
‘Not exactly. I’m more at home on the other side of the river.’
‘The Arsenal?’
‘Close. They started south, but went north.’
‘Highbury. Emirates Stadium.’
‘That’s the place.’
‘Yes!’ He pumped his fist. ‘Olivier Giroud!’
It was only a thin cover story. Our relationship wouldn’t stand up to any real scrutiny, but we had a connection, and it would help us look and act the part. And as we approached Border Control I’d tell him to close his eyes and pretend to stay asleep for as long as he was allowed to.
I switched on the radio when we’d run out of football waffle – which was pretty soon because I knew fuck-all about it. I surfed the airwaves for a moment before hitting a rap channel.
The drumbeat seemed to match our mood. ‘This is not a drill …’
‘Yes!’ Stefan pumped his fist again. ‘Pitbull is the man! This shit is for real!’
I felt myself starting to grin like an idiot. Despite Frank’s best efforts to school the heir to his business empire in mathematics, new technology and classic literature, I was starting to get a handle on where the kid’s heart really lay.
