by Andy McNab
6
For the first time since we’d started doing this shit, Stefan didn’t seem too happy about his morning in the boot of the wagon. I rewarded him with an extra-large takeaway sausage, a roll and a bottle of Coke, but it didn’t seem to make much difference to his mood.
We sat in the parking area alongside a greasy spoon on the main back to St Gallen while I got a big frothy coffee down my neck and he ate. When one mouthful started to feel like it was going to last for ever, I gripped him. ‘OK, what’s the problem?’
He concentrated very hard on the next bit of sausage. ‘You’re hoping to leave me with her, aren’t you?’
Fuck. I’d been focusing so much on keeping him in the dark that I’d let his imagination run wild. ‘Mate, I told you I won’t lie to you.’ I put down my coffee and gently lifted his chin. It wasn’t easy, but I finally got him to look me in the eye. ‘There was a moment when I thought a nice Swiss chateau might be what you needed. But after you told me what you told me, and now I know more about the woman, I’d rather sell you to the circus.’
What happened next was an amazing thing to watch. It was like I’d lifted the world’s heaviest Bergen off his shoulders and he’d become two feet taller. He gave me a mega candle-power smile and demolished the rest of the wurst in no time.
We didn’t hang around long after that. I was about to go into the decorating business, and time was money in that game.
The second cyber café on my list wasn’t that far from the first, but it always paid to ring the changes. Stefan cheered up a bit more when I steered him into an artists’ store a few doors down and said I needed his help on a new mission. When he asked me what sort of help, I told him to wait and see.
He wrinkled his brow when I bought a plain A4 pad, two soft pencils and a rubber. Then his eyes lit up as we stopped by a display case of folding Laguiole knives with bone handles and good-sized blades. The assistant spotted us and went into overdrive. Yes, they were expensive, but the quality … Every man should have one … You never knew when they would come in useful … You could take them on picnics … You could sharpen pencils with them … How could I resist?
I couldn’t. But not for the reasons he had in mind.
He beamed as I looped the leather sheath for mine on to my belt, and Stefan put his in his pocket.
The café was a bit more like a café this time around, so I ordered a coffee and a milkshake as well as Internet time. Me and Stefan pulled up our chairs in front of the monitor furthest from the till and I kicked off by googling the contractors’ names I’d taken down at my linden lookout point.
Only two of the outfits weren’t owned by Adler, and boasted about their independence. One of them went on for ever but seemed to be mostly about konstruktion. I chose the other. They called themselves Hochfliegend, and had the simplest logo – three thought bubbles: small, medium and large – and the simplest lettering.
‘Mate, what does that mean?’
‘Hochfliegend? Great Ideas.’
That explained the logo. I hoped what I’d planned turned out to be one of mine.
I pointed at the decal on the side panel of one of their Peugeot vans and handed Stefan the A4 pad and pencils. ‘Draw that, will you, mate? The company name, the address, everything except the contact numbers.’ I didn’t need some nosy fucker ringing Head Office to complain about my driving.
He looked at me as if I’d had another blow to the head. ‘This is our mission?’
‘Trust me. It’s important. I can’t draw for shit, and I remember you being pretty good with crayons and a paintbrush. I need the thought bubbles and the lettering to be as accurate as possible.’
He shrugged and got on with it. Out came the tip of his tongue and he wedged it between his teeth. I remembered him doing that when he was younger, and Frank had sat him down in front of yet another mountain of homework.
He went wrong once or twice and had to get busy with the rubber, but came up with the goods in twenty minutes flat. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a fucking sight better than I was ever going to be able to manage.
I picked up the sheet of paper and smiled. ‘Brilliant, mate. I should put you on hard routine more often.’ I folded it carefully, twice, and put it in my pocket. Then I motioned him towards a sofa on the other side of the room and told him to catch up on his Dostoevsky.
Next up was the search for a second-hand auto dealer. I couldn’t just head for the Hochfliegend depot and borrow one of their vans. The word would go out at warp speed, and I’d be fucked as soon as I arrived at Lyubova’s front gate, if not before.
I toyed with the idea of cruising around until I found a Peugeot Expert, then nicking it. But I needed to be in control of this. I didn’t want to put the shits up Stefan any more than I already had done. I didn’t want to get caught doing it. Or to feature on the canton police computer when I had done. Or to go to all that trouble and then discover it didn’t have a plywood-lined load space.
And I didn’t have all the time in the world.
Most of the traders on the site looked like they welcomed more formal business arrangements than I had in mind. I needed the sort you could find underneath the railway arches in south London, run by lads who felt the same way about cash business as I did. I selected three possible contenders and wrote down their details. If they weren’t right, maybe they had a mate who was.
Finally I scanned the news.
The abductor still couldn’t be named, but they were looking for an Englishman who was rumoured to be connected to the murder victim, and had been seen in the proximity of the abandoned Range Rover. One theory was that a paedophile ring was involved.
My brain had been scrambled big-time up there, and I wasn’t getting everything right, but I didn’t think I’d been spotted – except by Claude the carrot-cruncher, and there was no way he’d ID me as a Brit. So someone on Hesco’s side of the fence had to be feeding the investigation to make my life more difficult and theirs easier.
Mr Lover Man must have been their original source from inside Frank’s camp. We’d spent quite a bit of time together, on and off, both in Moscow and Africa, so he knew I was a Brit. I wasn’t sure if he had ever been given my real name. I fucking hoped not. Not just because it would put us deeper in the shit right now, but because I liked it that way.
The paedophile thing was always a good line to throw to the media. They knew it grabbed the public’s attention like nothing else, and they wanted whoever had taken the kid to have nowhere to hide. But it still didn’t explain who was calling the shots here, and why TIGRIS and the GIGN were out in force.
7
I visited a bunch of holes in the wall over the course of the next half-hour. My magic black debit card did the business, now I remembered what it was for, and my fingertips knew the PIN without having to consult my head. The thing had no limit, but the individual machines did.
Next I checked out the used-car-dealer options. The second of the three was ten Ks from the centre of town, with a couple of rusting diesel pumps under a sheet-metal canopy that had also seen better days.
A row of previously enjoyed but freshly polished wagons stood to one side off the forecourt. The one I needed was a three-year-old Peugeot Expert refrigerator panel van with a fair amount of mileage on the clock, a current Autobahn vignette and a handwritten sign taped on to the windscreen asking for SFr 7,999.
The side door was open so a potential purchaser could share the salesman’s excitement about the business end of the vehicle. And I did. The interior had been fitted out with a plywood floor and walls. The insulation made these things the bike thief’s wagon of choice. You could lift a top-of-the-range Ducati off the street and nobody would hear the alarm going off as you drove it away. Even from the road, it looked perfect for what I had in mind.
I cruised on past, keeping an eye out for somewhere to park. Somewhere close enough to walk back from, but far enough away to avoid linking the Polo, Stefan and the van.
‘Can I com
e too?’
‘No, mate. Best to keep you out of sight right now.’
‘Not in the boot, Nick. Please. I hate it in the boot …’
I’d never heard him complain about anything before. I thought I might have to start gripping him again.
‘I try my hardest to think about hard routine, but I can’t help thinking about being trapped under my dad instead.’
The gripping idea went out the window.
I found a space outside a newsagent and gave Stefan two ten-franc notes in case he wanted to buy himself a fizzy drink and a sherbet fountain while I headed back to the used-car lot.
A blond lad who’d stood even further away from a razor than I had over the last few days emerged from the workshop, wiping the grease off his palms on the sides of his faded blue boiler suit. He had a wicked smile and spoke even better English than Stefan did. I knew within seconds that we could do business together.
I got him to fire up the Expert and drive me around the block. He told me the cooling mechanism needed some attention, which was why the price was rock bottom.
‘What kind of attention?’
He grinned sheepishly as he threw it around the first corner.
‘It’s totally fucked.’
I told him I’d sort it.
I was no vehicle geek, but the engine did what it was supposed to when you turned the key, and the gearbox didn’t seem to be about to fall apart all over the tarmac. When we made it back to the pumps he slid open the side door and invited me to take a closer look at the load space.
It was even more impressive close up. The ply on the floor was at least forty mil thick, and thirty on the walls. The previous owner had added shelves and a lockable tool chest on the passenger side, and also lined the partition, leaving a small window into the cab. I wondered whether he had lived in it.
Blondie liked the idea of SFr 7,750 cash and, yes, he did know someone who could fix me up with something very nice on the panels at short notice. ‘If you have some more of these …’ He eyed the roll of notes I’d just handed to him.
He tore a page out of a spiral-bound notepad and wrote down a name and address. ‘Klaus has a very big talent. An artist, really. But not mainstream, maybe. He is like your Banksy. An anarchist.’
Perfect. Klaus sounded like he was going to be even less likely to call in the law than this lad.
We shook on the deal and both scribbled something unreadable on the registration document, which I reckoned would go straight into the bin as soon as I’d left. He wouldn’t want to waste any of his valuable time with the tax people, and he knew I wouldn’t either.
Almost as an afterthought, I asked if he had any degreaser or solvent he could spare. I wasn’t going to use it for cleaning, but he didn’t need to know that. He took me into a mechanic’s Aladdin’s cave at the back of the workshop and gestured at a shelf lined with plastic containers of all shapes and sizes. I examined the labels and chose the 200ml bottle with the highest diethyl ether content. It cost me another fifty.
Klaus was only about a K away, in a wriggly-tin lock-up with huge skylights on the other side of the railway tracks. He wore a T-shirt that told me to feed the world over jeans that hung off his arse and were distressed in more ways than one. The whole fuck-you look was topped off nicely by moth-eaten dreadlocks and beard, and an anarchist’s attitude to physical hygiene.
He rested a roach the size of a prize-winning carrot on the edge of an ashtray that looked like a coiled dog turd. This lad was definitely not going to be in a hurry to call in the law. He slid off his stool to greet me. The air in his lock-up was sweet with cannabis fumes, but it didn’t hide the fact that he badly needed a shower.
The samples of his work on display told me that he was up for almost anything from anti-capitalist graffiti slogans and X-rated cartoons to apparently uncontroversial corporate stuff. I showed him Stefan’s drawing and asked if he could scale it up in blue for the side panels.
‘Hochfliegend … I like zis.’
Klaus liked the idea of cash too. For him it was clearly a political statement. So I offered him a bonus if I could pick up the van in an hour.
He pursed his lips, raised his arms and shrugged.
I tried to lure him back to the real world. ‘How long will it take?’
His eyebrows disappeared into his moth-eaten hair. ‘Zis is not rocket science.’ He poked a nicotine-stained finger at a battered laptop and a machine covered with multi-coloured Post-it notes in the corner. He was right. It looked like a Dalek with a letterbox in its chest.
‘I will design on screen, zen print on self-adhesive vinyl. You can come back in one hour for ze decals. You can apply zem yourself. Piece of piss.’
He reached for a bruised student portfolio and fished out a handful of graphic illustrations of a dominatrix not quite dressed in PVC. ‘Maybe you like vun viz a naked girl instead of sree sink bubbles? Very good for business …’
I massaged my chin with my hand for a moment. ‘Tempting … But no. It’s not really that kind of business.’
‘If you say so, my friend. Zo I never came across a business zat didn’t involve somebody getting focked.’
‘You’re not wrong.’ I tapped the dial of my Suunto. ‘And right now you’ve got fifty-four minutes before you have to add your name to that list.’
He gave me a snort of derision and reached for his keyboard.
I left him to it and walked back to Stefan.
The boy had his nose in a Spider-Man comic. He’d stocked up on fizzy apple juice and Kinder Eggs too. The foot well on his side of the wagon was filled with empty wrappers. He was really cutting loose from the curly kale. I leant in through the window. ‘You know that stuff has no nutritional value …’
He looked up. ‘Want one?’ He held out his hand. The wrapper was still in place, but it wasn’t egg-shaped any more.
‘Last one?’
He nodded.
‘Nah. You have it.’ I got in behind the wheel. ‘But you’d better get it down your neck before you have to drink it. We’re going to the beach. You like to swim, remember?’
I knew he thought I’d totally lost it now. And maybe I had. But I’d decided he was right: he couldn’t spend the rest of his life stuck in the boot of one wagon after another. It had taken a lot of courage to tell me he was having nightmares about Frank in there, and I didn’t want him freaking out. Besides, today had turned into a scorcher. I didn’t want him hallucinating or dying of heat exposure.
I followed the signs to Kreuzlingen until I came to a stretch of grass covered with parasols and half-naked bodies. A crescent of trees shielded it from the road on one side, and the lake on the other. An overpriced parking area and a cab rank sat close by.
The primary-school day had obviously come to an end, because the place was crawling with kids Stefan’s age, their mums or nannies, and even some dads. Not many of them were reading Dostoevsky.
I fed the meter, then handed him his rucksack, fifty francs and the keys to the Polo. After a moment I added another fifty. ‘This isn’t all for Kinder Eggs, mate. It’s for a taxi into town, to the ERV, if I’m not back before last light.’ I told him to ask the driver to take him to the cathedral. It was the safest place I could think of. And if I still wasn’t with him by ten tonight, he should go and ask a priest for help – because that would mean I needed one too.
He tried to keep his happy face on, but I could see he was rattled.
‘Nick …’ He did that chewing thing with his lower lip. ‘What are you going to do?’
That was a fuck of a good question, and I had no idea how to answer it. Stefan might have had the IQ of a university professor and the armour plating of a born survivor, but he was still a kid. I couldn’t tell him I thought his stepmother had had something to do with the murder of his dad, and had probably aimed to kill him too. I couldn’t tell him that I was going to persuade her to tell me why.
And I also couldn’t claim that I was about to wave a magic wand over
the whole situation so we could all live happily ever after.
I gripped his shoulder. ‘Listen, it’s a nice sunny day. Enjoy it. Just don’t talk to any bad guys. And remember, I’m only telling you this stuff because it pays to have a plan. You know that. ERV, remember?’
I walked him across the grass and fixed him up with a couple of deckchairs and a parasol near a friendly-looking woman in a sundress, who’d just treated her twin girls to the Swiss version of a Mr Whippy. I went and got one for Stefan while he laid out his towel. It was already melting when I handed it to him.
He seemed to cheer up as he took his first lick.
‘Mate …’
He nodded, dribbling ice cream down his chin.
‘You know that has—’
‘Yup. Absolutely no nutritional value.’ His eyes narrowed in the sunlight. ‘But who gives a fuck?’
I looked for a hint of a grin on his face and couldn’t find one.
I left him surrounded by very healthy-looking families. As long as you didn’t spot the haunted look in his eyes, he blended in nicely. Maybe it would remind him of the things he didn’t have, but there was fuck-all I could do about that.
And he wouldn’t be the only kid in the world to feel like he was on the outside, looking in.
I’d been there too.
8
I took the first cab on the rank and paid off the driver when I was only a brisk walk from the Expert. Next stop was my anarchist sign painter. He’d done a great job, and even helped me press the decal to the metal, without a single air bubble. He stepped back to admire it, but I knew he felt something was missing.
‘Viz tits next time, eh? Big vuns.’ He cradled an imaginary pair in his open palms in case I hadn’t caught his drift. He must have been on the weed again.
I nodded as I brought out his bonus. ‘Without a doubt.’
