by Chris Ryan
‘A friend?’ said Bald, nodding at the guy’s back.
‘A colleague,’ replied Antonia.
She sidled up to the table. Bald plonked himself in a chair that gave him an unobstructed view across the restaurant to the foyer and the entrance of the hotel. He always chose restaurant tables that gave him a view of every other diner. Just as he always sat at the very back of an airplane and secreted a gun under his pillow at night. He told birds who were uncomfortable with the idea of sharing the bed with a fully loaded P229 that it was force of habit.
Bald noticed that the guy in the white suit had left a brown envelope at the table. He peered out to the street for any sign of the Three Zombies. Nothing.
Antonia ordered a skinny latte from the waitress in what sounded to Bald like perfect Spanish. He asked for a triple espresso in a Scots brogue that had the pretty Latino waitress frowning cutely at him. In the end Antonia had to order for him. Bald shifted his legs and ended up kicking something under the table.
He looked down and saw a black gym bag propped between his legs and Antonia’s. ‘Another surprise?’
‘For later,’ Antonia replied.
‘I’ve got a surprise for you now, if you want,’ Bald said sleazily.
‘You need help.’
‘I reckon if you let yourself go a bit, you’d enjoy it,’ he said. ‘You’ve just lived such a shy and rich little life that you’re afraid of the real world.’
‘No. I’m just not attracted to drunk old Scottish men.’
Antonia was still tightly coiled up and Bald got the impression that something new was making her uneasy. He couldn’t help wondering if the Three Zombies had been paid to follow him, and maybe Antonia knew something about that. He thought about asking, but decided against it. She was Firm, after all. And as far as Bald was concerned, no one in the Firm could be trusted.
‘We shouldn’t stay here long,’ Antonia said.
Bald looked mock-upset. ‘But I thought we were getting a room?’
Antonia tipped her head forward slightly and dead-eyed Bald over the top of her sunglasses. ‘You don’t have a chance.’
‘I like a challenge.’
She was still staring at him, but the smile had crawled back into its hole.
‘I’m a lesbian.’
‘That makes two of us.’
‘I don’t bat for both teams.’
‘We’ll see.’
The waitress brought their coffees. A guy had sat down at the next table and was tucking into a fajita. For breakfast. Fucking hell, Bald thought. All Mexicans ever seemed to scoff was some kind of maize mixed with some kind of meat. He decided it was time for his breakfast too. He took out another miniature he’d nicked from the Gulfstream – Chivas Regal this time – and tipped it into his triple espresso.
‘How do you manage to stay alive?’
‘I’m Scottish.’
Bald tasted his alco-coffee. It could fuel a monster truck across the Nevada desert. He reassured himself that his body clock was still running on London time and this was technically a mid-afternoon tipple.
Someone had turned up the volume on a big flat-screen TV hooked up to the wall behind the restaurant bar. It was tuned to one of the national news stations. You didn’t need to know the local lingo to understand the headlines. The pictures told their own story. Eighteen headless corpses lying in a ditch near Acapulco, their hands bound with plastic cord and their bodies bloated from rigor mortis. Another spate of drug-related murders.
Antonia looked away from the TV. She slid out of her chair and dumped three fifty-peso notes on the table. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Nelson won’t hang around.’
‘Where are we meeting him?’
‘The small town I mentioned north of here,’ Antonia said, checking her iPhone again. ‘San Hernando. It used to be a mining centre, but now it’s run by the Gulf Cartel. Anything else you want to know? Good. Then hurry up. And don’t forget the package.’
Bald tucked the envelope under his arm and slung the gym bag over his shoulder. It was surprisingly heavy. He wondered what the fuck was inside. They bugged out of the Sheraton. A silver-haired valet had Antonia’s Nissan rumbling and ready to roll. Climbing into the front, Bald stowed the bag at his feet while Antonia greased the valet’s palm with a hefty thousand-peso note, which Bald knew translated to around $100. The old bastard waved the cash at her and shouted, ‘Gracias, chica.’
Antonia arrowed the Sentra into the traffic that was steadily flowing east on Juárez, headed in the opposite direction from the Sheraton. After 100 metres they veered north on Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas. Two kilometres down, Antonia took a left, then the first right onto Avenue Insurgentes Norte. The streets were lined with rundown Internet cafés and crumbling cantinas. Throngs of indigenous people were hawking trinkets, playing accordions and demonstrating crap magic tricks.
Bald ripped open the envelope and tipped the contents onto his lap. A sea of papers flooded out. Some pages were yellowed and wrinkled, others were black-and-white photocopies. The top one caught Bald’s eye. It was a background report on an employee at Lance-Elsing Incorporated. A photo clipped to the top-right corner showed a guy in his late twenties or early thirties with thick-rimmed spectacles.
‘His name is Shy Laxman,’ Antonia said, eyes nailed to the road. ‘And he’s the sleeper.’
Bald flicked through the report. It was an inch thick. A man’s life condensed into one inch. There was a photocopy of a graduation certificate, showing that Shylam K. Laxman had graduated from Harvard with a degree in Computer Engineering. A typewritten letter stapled to the certificate informed Laxman that he had been awarded a Special Mention in the Dean’s List on account of his outstanding academic abilities.
‘He was just sixteen when he got accepted at Harvard,’ Antonia said.
‘Yeah? Well, when I was seventeen I got an apprenticeship at a garage in Dundee.’
Antonia gunned the Nissan and skipped a red light. Car horns sounded.
‘A Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, and a PhD in AI from MIT.’ Bald thought, this guy’s got more letters after his name than most people have got letters in their names.
Antonia interrupted his reading. ‘By the time Shy Laxman left the university system he was twenty-four and had a reputation as one of the brightest young minds in his field. Companies were falling over themselves to hire him.’
‘So he threw his lot in with these Lance-Elsing guys?’
‘Defence companies have an ace up their sleeves. Access to the most cutting-edge tech, the stuff that no one knows about. The kind of stuff that makes nuclear submarines look like a relic from the Dark Ages.’
‘So they’re a big company?’
Antonia shook her head. ‘Tiny. They’re based in Clearwater, on Florida’s west coast. Twenty-nine employees working out of a small factory in an industrial park.’
Bald was now skimming through a copy of Laxman’s employment contract. It spanned forty-three pages. ‘Jesus, this thing’s longer than the Disclosure Contract they made us sign in the Regiment.’
They were breezing past a neighbourhood that bore the classic signs of grinding poverty. Dilapidated housing blocks, check. Old men with leathery skin rummaging through rubbish bins, check. Old women carrying babies on their backs and begging for change? Double fucking check.
‘If you look at the signature and date on the contract,’ said Antonia, driving through the slum super-fast, ‘you’ll see that Laxman joined Lance-Elsing four years ago. Around the same time, Congress awarded Lance-Elsing a $240-million contract to develop the next generation of military-grade weapons. The brief was to design weapons systems that would help the US military achieve its number-one goal by 2050.’
‘Which is?’
‘Zero per cent casualties in the combat environment.’
Bald was unimpressed. ‘Lass, I tell you now. Whatever these boffins are cooking up is a load of bollocks. The head shed
had us test-piloting all kinds of shit down at Hereford. Lasers that were supposed to melt tanks. Body armour they reckoned was indestructible. The bottom line is always the same: you win wars with men and bullets and skill. Anyone who says otherwise has never done the business.’
‘This is different,’ said Antonia.
‘Oh yeah? So what exactly are they developing?’
‘All I know is that Lance-Elsing have been working on a top-secret new project and Laxman has been heavily involved in it. And if he smuggles out the technology, things will get very ugly.’
Bald let the files fall to his lap.
‘This is all very fucking nice,’ he said. ‘But I don’t need to know any of it. Look, lass, all I’m going to do is drop in, slot the cunt and bug the fuck out.’
Antonia frowned with her lips. The neat brushstrokes of her eyebrows almost met. Something up, Bald knew.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
Antonia said, ‘Daniel hasn’t told you the whole mission yet, has he?’
thirteen
1139 hours.
Avenue Insurgentes Norte transitioned into Mexico 85. The five-lane motorway forged its way between banks of clay and long grass. The road smoothed out and the crammed mass of Mexico City faded to a ghostly outline. Bald hardly noticed, pissed off that Danny Cave hadn’t been straight with him.
‘What else did that cunt have in store for me?’ he asked.
Antonia studied the road very hard. ‘Daniel wants you to monitor Laxman before you take him down.’ She cleared her throat. ‘With a view to obtaining information.’
‘Why?’
Now she looked at him. Did a thing with her eyes that reminded him of his ex-wife. The look said, ‘Are you really that drunk and stupid?’
‘Intelligence,’ she said. ‘Daniel wants to know what Laxman’s links are. Who he’s working with. If the terrorists are trying to extract American technology, they’ll aim to do the same at British sites too. The more intel we have from you, the more chance we have of uncovering sleeper cells in the UK.’
Bald felt his neck muscles tighten. The heat inside the Nissan smashed the mercury. He was working himself up into a rage. But rage had got Bald nowhere in the past and he tried to stifle it. He turned back to the front page of the file and studied the photograph in more detail.
‘Laxman is Pakistani?’
Antonia said, ‘Indian by birth. His parents emigrated to Boston from Delhi when he was three.’
‘And now he’s a good old American boy?’
‘He has US citizenship, if that’s what you mean.’
A road sign announced they were entering Tizayuca. Bald knew from studying maps of the area around Mexico City that the town was about thirty kilometres north-east of Mexico City. They were still an hour away from San Hernando.
Bald rested the file on the dash. Suddenly everything seemed out of focus. His breathing was getting out of control. He felt a searing pain, like someone was firing staples into his skull. He felt in his pocket for the amitriptyline.
The container wasn’t there.
He closed his eyes. Tried to bury the migraine. ‘Are you sure this is the guy?’
Antonia looked at him curiously. ‘You’re saying you have doubts?’
‘He might be a specky twat.’ Bald studied the face once more. ‘But this guy’s story . . . it’s not ringing true, lass. I’m not so sure he’s a fucking terrorist.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Grooming a sleeper takes years. For a start you need to find the right person. Right psych profile, right character, good fucking liar, smart, able to work alone without any contact for years, loyal. That’s a lot of boxes to fucking tick. Terrorist groups aren’t famous for their patience or forward planning. Danny says Lashkar-e-Taiba are more organized. A new breed. Anyway, Laxman is Indian, right?’
‘Uh-uh.’
‘India and Pakistani aren’t the best of friends. Why the fuck would he do their dirty work?’
‘Maybe he’s a secret sympathizer. Maybe he’s being bribed. Or maybe he’s doing it for the same reason you’re here. Five million of them, in fact.’
‘I’m not doing this because of the money.’
‘Of course you’re not.’
Bald didn’t pursue it. His efforts to squash the pain inside his head were futile. He figured he’d left the meds on the Gulfstream. In his boozy haze the container must have slipped out of his pocket and fallen down the side of the seat. No meds and no fucking booze. Bald was losing the battle. His skull was throbbing. Ever since the migraines had started, a week after returning to England, he had told himself that he could deal with them. The pain was crippling but as long as he was sitting behind a desk or playing a round of golf, it didn’t fucking matter. But now he was back in action a voice chipped away at his brain like a pickaxe on a block of ice. What happens if you suffer a migraine in the middle of a firefight? What then?
Need to take my mind off my mind, he thought. He hauled up the gym bag he’d stashed at his feet, unzipped it and took a wee peek inside.
‘Fuck me,’ he said.
The bag weighed mostly nothing and was mostly empty, except for a single bundle of American dollars, Benjamin Franklin smugly looking at Bald from the face of each one. Bald dug a little deeper and found a pack of UK passports bound together with an elastic band. Like some kind of intelligence Secret Santa.
‘Eight British passports, all courtesy of HMG and containing falsified biometric data, plus $7200 in clean bills,’ Antonia said. ‘That should cover any expenses. Although it’ll be a miracle if you don’t blow the lot on Southern Comfort.’
There was something else in the bag too. Bald picked it up.
‘What the fuck’s this?’
He was holding a stubby-nosed Smith & Wesson 637 revolver. It was 16.5 centimetres long and couldn’t have weighed more than 450 grams. So far, so good. But Bald was pissed to see that the grip was pink. The revolver was the type of personal defence gun designed for a woman to fit snugly in her handbag. From the weight Bald understood that the revolver was empty, but he flipped out the stainless-steel cylinder anyway to check. There was also a box of .38 Specials in the gym bag.
‘It’s the only gun I could get at short notice.’
‘Christ, I point this fucker at some cunt and they’re more likely to die of laughter than a bullet wound.’
The road corkscrewed around the mountain corridor and began its rapid descent through the rugged terrain of Hidalgo State, snaking through a basin of mountains covered with a sprawling jungle of pine trees and holm oaks.
‘You’re drinking to get rid of something, aren’t you?’ Antonia said.
Bald rested his head on the headrest. ‘That’s something else we have in common.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re not just a pretty face.’
Antonia said nothing for longer than a little while. Then she piped up, ‘What are the headaches about?’
‘It was after I got shot to shit in Belgrade,’ Bald said. There was a bottle of water on the dash and he took a long gulp. ‘One bullet, the fucker bounced around my skull. Skimmed my cerebral cortex and exited my left shoulder.’ He lowered the collar on his polo shirt and pointed to a patch of whitish skin on the apex of his shoulder blade. ‘The docs said my motor skills were fine, but the damage to the cortex was permanent.’
‘What kind of damage?’
‘Memory loss, headaches, hallucinations, paranoia. The usual.’
‘Does it give you Tourette’s as well?’
‘Some guys in the Regiment swear ten times as much as me.’
‘Does Danny know about the migraines?’
Bald jerked his shoulders. ‘Would he give a flying fuck?’
Bald drained the rest of the mineral water, rolled down the window and tossed the empty bottle out onto the roadside. Bald didn’t do recycling, just like he didn’t do yoghurt, Zumba fitness or pear cider. Far as he was concerned, the world wa
s already fucked, no matter how big or small your carbon footprint was.
They drove deeper into Hidalgo on Mexico 105. The landscape was pockmarked by depressing shanty huts and beat-up old pickups. Bald didn’t see any people milling about, just tired chickens picking at the soil.
Bald checked his Aquaracer. It was 1358 hours. Eighteen hours since he’d departed Lydd. Fifty-four hours to go. By the time he’d made it to the border, crossed into Texas and headed east to Florida, he’d have less than forty-eight hours to observe Laxman and report back to Cave. And then move in for the kill.
He thought, too, about the five million. Whatever he’d said to Antonia, he did care about the money. Money didn’t make you happy, they said. Bald figured only penniless pricks believed that bollocks. He’d seen muckers from the Regiment pocketing tens of millions from selling their private military companies to the big defence contractors. Now they were living the high life in Abu Dhabi and California, and Bald was hungry for a piece of the action. Fuck it, when this mission was over the first thing he’d do was trade in the Aquaracer and buy himself a Porsche Design Indicator P6910. He’d seen one in Forbes magazine. It was built from titanium and finished in rose gold. Price tag $225,000. He wasn’t much into cars. Didn’t see the point of splurging eighty grand on a car only to see it lose twenty K in value the minute you drove it out of the showroom. Watches, on the other hand, tended to go up in value rather than down.
He reckoned it would look nice on his wrist. He’d be pulling birds like Antonia all over the fucking place then. Have them queuing up to blow him.
‘Shit,’ Antonia said, thumping her palms against the steering wheel. Bald looked at her and wondered what the fuck was wrong. Her pupils were wide as poker chips, her gaze fixed on the rear-view mirror. Bald looked too, and saw a white Dodge Charger dominating the mirror.
Engine growling. Racing towards them at full speed.
fourteen
