Detonator

by Andy McNab

  ‘Yup, you told me. Any others?’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Rula. She wasn’t kind at all.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if they came here to Switzerland.’

  ‘Do they usually live in?’

  ‘It’s possible … When the girls are there, maybe.’

  ‘Girls?’

  ‘My two sisters. Half-sisters.’

  The pink and fluffy room in the chalet. I’d wondered who that belonged to.

  ‘They are in Moscow. Until the house is finished.’

  I stuck the hair and saliva tell-tales in place before I left, in case the receptionist had been paying us more attention than she appeared to have done. I didn’t plan to be away for more than a couple of hours – long enough to get my bearings in the area immediately surrounding Lyubova’s hideaway – but precautions like that were never wasted.

  On the way out of town I passed a bunch of dossers on a stretch of waste-ground, gathered around a flaming oil drum and sipping extra strong lager. I handed them a fistful of coins and bunged in the pharmacy bag with the empty peroxide bottle and the offcuts of Stefan’s hair. I hadn’t bothered to wipe down everything he’d touched in the motel and the hostel, but leaving a gift pack of his DNA lying around was asking for trouble.

  The chateau commanded a chunk of high ground between St Gallen and Konstanz. It was surrounded by walls you couldn’t leap over, but enough of its floodlit façade was visible through the entrance to confirm that the estate agent’s brochure hadn’t needed to fuck around. One wing was covered with scaffolding and tarpaulin, but it still looked like something out of a fairy tale. You’d need a really good reason not to want to live there.

  I was increasingly sure that Lyubova was the reason, and not only because of what Stefan had told me. When I’d originally thought of hiding him here, I’d reckoned a telephone call and a cup of tea would crack it. Now it was high on my list of hostile environments.

  I slowed as I drove past, but didn’t stop immediately. Lights glowed in a number of the upstairs windows to my left. I took that as a good sign. However much you wanted to show off the place, I didn’t think you’d bother to leave them on if no one was home.

  There was a patch of woodland to my right, split by a formal avenue that led down towards the lake. I guessed it must once have been part of the estate. The massive trees on either side of it looked like lindens. They might not have been, but they reminded me of the things that lined the main that ran towards the Brandenburg Gate. I’d had a few beers in the bars there when I was a young soldier stationed in Berlin.

  I pulled up a couple of hundred further on and walked back, hood up, keeping to the shadows on the far side of the road. The CCTV cameras fixed on each side of the main gates told me to keep my distance, and the pair of Dobermanns that banged against their wrought-iron railings sent the same message, only louder. Someone yelled at them from behind the wall and I decided it was a good moment to fuck off back to the wagon. I was never at my best with furry animals that growled and bit.

  I turned left at the first opportunity and circled the plot, looking out for a vantage-point I could employ in daylight without breaking cover. Unless something else presented itself after first light, I was either going to get eyes on the rear, from the top of the hill, or climb one of the lindens and recce it from the front.

  I pinpointed the Adler HQ on my way back. It was a much simpler target. The security set-up was bound to be high-end, but those guys weren’t hiding from anybody. Lights blazed on every floor. Everything about the building yelled global domination. And there was a multi-storey car park on the opposite side of the street.

  I drove up to the barrier and took a ticket. The Adler executives clearly put in the hours for their top-of-the-range Audis. It was well past the end of the working day, but at least half their marked spaces on the third level were still taken. I followed the arrows to the top, registering the CCTV set-up as I went, then worked my way down and out.

  Stefan was channel-hopping between the rolling news and the Russian Premier League on the TV when I returned to the hostel. He hadn’t legged it to the ERV to do his Sitting Bull impression, so I assumed he hadn’t seen anything that put the shits up him, but I asked anyway.

  He shook his head. ‘More of the same.’

  We watched the highlights of the Spartak Moscow game, which seemed to suit us both fine. I didn’t feel like talking, and he obviously wasn’t keen to ask me anything that might trigger more Lyubova stuff.

  I knew he wasn’t settling again when we’d switched off the lights. There was a lot of tossing and turning and sighing.

  ‘Nick?’

  I didn’t answer for a bit, then gave him a drowsy, ‘Early start tomorrow, mate. Best we get our heads down, eh?’

  I didn’t expect that to be the end of it, and it wasn’t. He waited about five minutes before coming back for more.

  ‘Was my mother beautiful?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘When I was younger, I could see her when I closed my eyes. I can’t do that any more. I can’t really remember what she looked like.’

  ‘Don’t you have photographs?’

  ‘No. No photographs. My father said they made him sad …’ He hesitated. ‘And my … his wife she said she didn’t want them in the house. Maybe there were some, and she burnt them.’

  He might well be right about that, for all I knew. But I doubted there were albums full of the things in the first place. Frank had had a son with Tracy, but waving happy snaps of her in a bikini at Lyubova would only have ended in tears.

  Stefan took another of those deep, halting breaths that was always a sign of more bad things on the near horizon.

  ‘Did she love me, Nick? My father said she did.’

  I didn’t really want to go down this road. Cutting away from the emotional shit was always safest. I’d become less able to do that since my son was born, and it wasn’t good. The people who depended on me needed me to keep them safe, not to give them hugs. And keeping them safe meant doing my job, even if that sometimes involved curling up and taking the pain.

  When I didn’t answer immediately, he repeated his question. There was no escaping this one.

  ‘He was right, mate. You meant everything to her.’

  ‘Why were we in Africa?’

  ‘She took you away on holiday. A special one. You and her. Together. But some very bad people took you both prisoner.’

  That was the simplest version. And it wasn’t a lie, exactly. It wasn’t the whole truth either. Tracy had made the mistake of falling for the wrong guy, and he’d fucked her over big-time. She’d also made the mistake of thinking that she could do a runner with Frank’s son, and that was never going to happen.

  ‘She died too, didn’t she?’

  ‘She did, mate.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She was shot, trying to protect you.’ I probably wasn’t doing him any favours by ramming home the idea that everyone who loved him ended up dead, but I didn’t want to dress it up.

  ‘Like my dad …’

  I turned in my bed and propped myself up on an elbow. ‘I’m pretty sure your dad’s last move was to protect you. But that wasn’t your fault either. He died for different reasons. More complicated reasons. And I’m trying to find out what they were. That way I keep both of us safe.’

  I didn’t mention my family. I’d already pretty much told him I didn’t have a son.

  I don’t know how long it took him to finally fall asleep, but we both went quiet after that.

  5

  The next morning I flicked on the news as Stefan took a piss.

  The latest report about the missing child began with film footage of the border guards in action at the Geneva airport crossing. Every car and every coach was being given a proper seeing-to, passengers and contents on the pavement, sniffer dogs, the lot.

  I was glad I’d had second thoughts about going that route. Especially when I spotted the lads in black combat gear wielding Heckler
& Koch MP5s in the background. The Einsatzgruppe TIGRIS were an elite paramilitary force. They operated in tandem with the canton police, but only on high-risk special ops, so covert that the federal authorities had only admitted to their existence nearly a decade after they’d been formed. Their PR claimed they hadn’t fired a shot in more than a hundred and twenty ops. They probably thought we believed in Santa too.

  First the GIGN. Now TIGRIS. What the fuck were they up to?

  We hit the road before first light. I wanted to be in position before too many people – dog walkers, personal trainers, hikers, sightseers, whatever – were up and about. Even the sausage stands weren’t open for business. I told Stefan we’d have breakfast later. Right now we were going to have to make do with an energy bar or two and one of my remaining bottles of water.

  ‘Hard routine, Nick?’

  ‘Yup, hard routine.’ I aimed for the chateau, but this time followed the route alongside the water. ‘How do you know about hard routine?’ I didn’t want to prolong the conversation, but I had to ask.

  ‘It’s what soldiers do, isn’t it? When they’re on ops, and don’t want to light a fire or do cooking and stuff. In case they give themselves away. I read about it.’

  ‘In Dostoevsky?’

  ‘No!’ He was wearing his serious face. ‘I don’t only read Dostoevsky, you know. I read all sorts. My dad said I must. He said knowledge is power. He said that I have to know my enemy.’

  ‘I told you he was smart.’ I figured Frank had been quoting from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, not the Manic Street Preachers album or the song by Green Day. Either way, it was good advice. It was why I planned to spend however long it took scoping Lyubova’s place instead of steaming straight in there.

  He spent the next five Ks listening to Pitbull and grappling with the disciplines of hard routine. I left him to it. Then he turned the volume down on the CD player and sparked up again.

  ‘You have to go to the toilet in a plastic bag, don’t you, Nick? When you’re on hard routine?’

  ‘Yup. Wherever you lie up has to be left sterile.’

  ‘Does that mean no toilet paper?’

  ‘It means no anything. No trace of you ever being there.’

  ‘Wow …’ He whistled softly. ‘That’s great …’

  This wasn’t helping me get in the zone. I didn’t shut him up, though; at least it was keeping his mind off the wicked stepmother.

  ‘Nick?’

  ‘Yup?’

  ‘I think maybe I’d like to be a soldier …’

  ‘Not a footballer?’

  ‘I’m not joking, Nick.’

  Fair one. I hadn’t meant to sound like I was talking down to him. When I was a kid, I’d hated it when people did that to me. It had made me want to hit them. And sometimes I did.

  ‘Mate, you’d make a brilliant soldier. A brilliant officer, probably. There’s a whole world out there for people like you. You’re clever. You’re already more educated than I’ll ever be. You’re rich. You can be anything you want. But right now there’s a job to be done. We’re closing on our target now. And I need to focus on it.’

  I saw him nod at the periphery of my vision. Then he started murmuring the hard-routine mantra to himself. ‘No fires, no toilet paper. And no talking …’

  I hung a left a hundred short of where I thought the avenue of lindens began and scanned the area ahead of us for a secure place to leave the wagon. The houses along there were few and far between, and had no shortage of land around them. I turned into a designated parking area at the edge of the patch of woodland, which seemed to cater mostly for walkers and anyone who didn’t want to pay the outrageous charges for a space by the lake.

  There were only three other vehicles there so I pulled up between two of them, got out and had a good look around. When I was sure there was no one else around, I tucked Stefan into the boot with my day sack and gave him the torch. We were close enough to the wicked stepmother for him to be safer out of sight. And I was planning to stay in cover while I did a more detailed recce of her HQ.

  We didn’t bother with the Dostoevsky jokes. I fished out my binoculars, closed the hatch and headed into the trees.

  The sky was blindingly blue. There was still a chill in the air, but it would be stiflingly hot later.

  The whole area, as far as I could see, was deserted, apart from one dog walker to my half-right. And it didn’t look like a real dog: it was one of those small, smooth-haired things that yapped a lot and belonged on the end of a cocktail stick. By the time I reached the edge of the avenue, he and his owner had found their way back to the parking area.

  Staying inside the treeline, I walked up the slope towards the chateau until I found a linden whose lower branches were within reach of the ground and whose higher ones promised a combination of good cover and a wide enough field of vision.

  I swung myself up into the foliage. My eyes started to leak almost immediately, and I had to stifle a sneeze. It was definitely a linden. The spores from those things could give you hay fever even if you didn’t suffer from it. Its bark was smooth, but sticky with sap. As the temperature increased, that would only get worse.

  I gripped my nose between my thumb and forefinger and managed to strangle another sneeze at birth. I kept the trunk between me and the target until I was about fifteen metres from the ground. Then I worked my way round and climbed high enough to see over the wall and into the chateau grounds.

  I raised the binos and scanned as much of the front of the building and its surroundings as I could through the leaves. We weren’t talking Buckingham Palace here, but all told, it wasn’t much smaller than the south London council block I’d grown up in.

  The main part of the house had four storeys. The shutters on the upstairs windows were all open but the curtains behind them were mostly closed. As the Google Earth imagery had shown me, it was flanked on each side by a two-storey wing. The one on the right was encased in a scaffolding frame, covered with blue tarpaulin. A yellow plastic telescopic chute ran from the top floor to a skip on the ground.

  The Dobermanns were still mooching around outside, hoping for somebody to sink their teeth into. The two beasts that had bounced against the railings last night had been joined by a couple of mates, and they were a mean-looking gang. I couldn’t see any sign of a handler.

  As seven thirty approached, a guy in black combats and polo shirt appeared from the back of the house with a pile of metal bowls and a bucket. I had a really close look at his face, but it didn’t trigger a memory.

  The guard dogs bounded towards him and I soon saw why. He put the bowls on the ground and filled them with enough raw meat to feed a battalion. Maybe it was to stop them eating the tradesmen who appeared at the entrance during the next half-hour.

  Lyubova was clearly in makeover mode. Plumbers, decorators, electricians, roofers and chippies in shiny white vans with corporate logos were waved through the electronically operated gates by another couple of uniforms.

  The security people had a good poke around inside the first vehicle to come out, so it looked like they were more concerned about the contractors helping themselves to Lyubova’s jewellery collection than someone or something being smuggled inside.

  I swept the binos from window to window as a squad of identical blonde women in cream shirts drew back the curtains and raised the sashes to let in the morning air. It was like Downton Abbey on fast-forward. Lyubova hadn’t made an appearance yet, but I didn’t expect her to be doing much of her own housework.

  Men in white overalls, hi-vis waistcoats and hard hats swarmed around the scaffolding, either looking busy but doing fuck-all or waffling into their mobile phones. I couldn’t be sure at this distance, but I’d bet they had a smile on their faces. They’d know an earner when they saw one.

  I was about to clamber back down and go in search of a vantage-point at the rear when the phones suddenly disappeared in unison. It was like watching a well-rehearsed troop respond to a barked instruction on a parad
e ground. When I lowered the binos, I saw why.

  A very smartly dressed woman – cream blouse, leopard-print pencil skirt – had just emerged from the front door. She flicked her shiny black hair over her shoulder and made her way across to inspect their work. Lyubova had broken cover. It was obviously still too early for her to be flashing the diamonds and rubies, but no one was in any doubt about who was calling the shots.

  She waved her arms around and gave them shit until they started doing whatever they should be doing at warp speed. Then she turned on her no doubt very expensive designer heel and went back inside.

  I stayed where I was, half hoping she’d decide to take a trip into town. She wasn’t about to wander into the local Spar, even if there was one, and I doubted that she’d wander about on her own, but I reckoned it might be easier to lift her outside the estate rather than in it.

  I gave half a thought to the kid in the boot of my wagon, then dismissed it. The breeze off the water was still cool enough to give me goosebumps so he wouldn’t be baking yet. Besides, hard routine was hard routine. He knew that. And I wasn’t his nanny.

  An hour later a couple more visitors arrived.

  The first wagon through the gates was an Audi Q5. The second was a Maserati. They’d obviously travelled in convoy. I didn’t need to check their registration numbers against the ones I had in my Moleskine. Hesco and Dijani were paying the ex-Mrs Timis a visit. And, judging by their extremely cheery greeting, they hadn’t come simply to offer a grieving widow their condolences.

  Mr Lover Man’s message had just become very clear indeed.

  After she’d ushered them inside, I focused the binos on the white vans. This time, I did bring out the Moleskine and the UZI, and scrawled the name, contact details and website address of every contractor within reach.

  More minutes ticked by. When Hesco and Dijani showed no sign of leaving, I climbed down and went back to the wagon. Whatever they were discussing over coffee and biscuits, I was now absolutely certain that there was a whole lot more to Frank’s death than revenge for his infidelity.