Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Anyway, you’re no longer short of a bloke.’

  ‘That’s um, that’s Nico.’ She shrugged as if saying she didn’t really know him. ‘Bumped into him at a bar we’ve just been in. Look, won’t you join us anyway?’ she suggested, colouring.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m looking out for someone. A chap who’s supposed to come here a lot.’

  He could see she didn’t believe him and was convinced he’d really come here because of her.

  ‘Amazing coincidence meeting Nico,’ she explained uncomfortably, ‘because we sort of know him. He chaired a seminar this afternoon. About lettings. We’re travel trade, you see.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Trade fairs. Exhibitions.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘You go back to your friends,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll pop over in a minute.’

  ‘Great. Thanks for being so understanding.’

  ‘No problem.’

  The blonde pony tail jerked and danced as she looked round to see where her party had got to.

  ‘Name’s Terry, by the way,’ he added, before she moved away. He held out his hand.

  ‘I like the name Terry,’ she commented. Her handshake was on the limp side. ‘See you in a minute then.’

  She crinkled her face as if saying she’d much rather be spending the evening with him than Nico. Another flash of a smile and she was gone.

  Sam watched her trim figure cross towards the bar, weaving between the tables with deliberate slowness. Nice enough girl, he thought. And keen for it. There’d been a few like her that he’d scored with over the years. But relationships like that could never become close. When the woman started asking questions he would finish it, before she began to suspect what he really did for a living. That was why it had lasted with Chrissie. No need for secrecy with her. One of the reasons it had lasted . . .

  He drained his beer glass. The bosomy waitress was nowhere to be seen. Out of the corner of an eye he saw one of the whores who’d targeted the soldiers a few minutes ago heading his way. She stopped by his table, one hand on the back of the second chair.

  ‘Hello.’ Her green eyes, black-ringed with mascara were cold and unsmiling. ‘Like to buy me a drink?’

  ‘No.’

  A hooker rejected by a squad of randy soldiers couldn’t have much going for her. The girl twisted her mouth in annoyance.

  He stood up and moved to the bar. The crowd by the counter was three deep. He edged along the throng as if looking for a way through, but in reality was checking faces again. Still nothing. This was pointless. The Russian had probably left the country like the Mondiale barman had said.

  Sophie, in the midst of the crush and pretending to her companion that she was interested in what he was saying, caught his eye suddenly and beamed broadly.

  Sam pushed towards her.

  ‘Get you a drink?’ he shouted, still a couple of bodies away.

  ‘Brandy and coke would be ace.’

  ‘And your friends?’

  She held up four fingers and grimaced.

  ‘We’re all on the same.’

  Sam spotted a gap to his right and elbowed to the counter. The barman was serving someone at the far end. Sam held out a banknote to draw his attention. To his left and right the other customers were mostly in their twenties and thirties, mostly not Cypriot. The barman acknowledged his presence and headed his way, stopping briefly to collect used glasses and dunk them in a sink. Sam glanced to his right again. There was an older man standing a couple of metres distant. Late forties, he guessed. The same sort of age as the Russian in the photo. On his own. Seemed a little preoccupied. And there was something familiar about the face . . .

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  Sam looked at the barman, but his mind still saw the man to his right.

  ‘Yes . . .’

  He shot a glance sideways again. The scar on the cheek shaped like the letter Y – yes. He’d seen it before. That lopsided jaw too. He knew this man. But where the hell from?

  The barman tapped the counter. ‘Sir? What you want to drink?’

  ‘Er . . .’ Sam stared back as if paralysed. ‘Four er . . .’

  That face. He knew that damned face. And the man was wearing a green jacket for God’s sake, like the creature who’d been sitting with his back to the camera next to Chrissie in the photo.

  Jesus! He knew who it was.

  He whipped his eyes right again, but the other man had seen him too. He banged his glass on the counter and pushed off the bar stool, startled.

  ‘Hey . . .’ Sam croaked. ‘Viktor!’

  Viktor Rybkin. Last seen in a gangster-filled steam-bath in Kiev a year ago.

  ‘Four what, sir?’ the barman demanded, increasingly irritated.

  ‘Nothing,’ mouthed Sam, turning away, his muscles tensing. ‘Sorry . . .’

  Rybkin was shoving away from the bar, jolting elbows, spilling drinks, then propelling himself across the dance square. The lights of an emergency door glowed on the far side.

  ‘Shit!’

  Sam barged through the crowd after him, knocking glasses, crushing toes, his eyes locked on the green jacket slipping away beneath the amber smear of the exit sign. The door banged shut before he could reach it. He thumped on the bar and pushed. It opened a hand’s breadth then stopped, blocked by something. He threw his weight against it but the object wouldn’t budge. Cursing, he spun round and barged his way back through the club, aiming for the main exit.

  ‘Terry!’ Sophie’s voice, screeching as he passed the bar.

  Ignoring her he ran past the cash desk in the lobby, and through the main door. Outside, a clutch of elderly tourists was timidly examining tease shots of the dancers in a display panel.

  He stopped on the paving. The narrow lane was a turning off Ayiou Andhreou, Limassol’s main street. Disorientated in the jumble of low-rise shops and flats, he tried to work out the location of the emergency exit Rybkin had used. It had to be in a parallel alley. He began to run.

  Twenty paces to the main drag. He heard the heavy clunk of a car door shutting. As he emerged into Ayiou Andhreou, headlights blazed on dead ahead. A large, pale-coloured saloon parked on the far side began to jerk back and forth, frantically nudging the vehicles that were wedging it in. Sam darted towards it. The side window was down and the driver was Viktor Rybkin.

  ‘Viktor!’ he yelled.

  The tinted-glass window of the old-gold Lexus slid shut. With a final wrench of the wheel and a nudge of bumpers Rybkin broke free from the parking slot and accelerated away.

  ‘Shit!’

  Where the hell had he left his own car? He snorted; it was one of the vehicles the Lexus had been shunting. He fumbled for the key and stabbed it at the door-lock, then threw himself behind the wheel and started up.

  The Lexus was well out of sight by now, but he shot after it anyway. The road was narrow and one way. A crossroads stopped him. Left, right, straight on? Hadn’t a clue. He’d lost the bastard.

  ‘Jees-us!’ he hissed.

  Viktor Rybkin – ex-KGB, now of the Ukrainian SBU security service. A man Chrissie had called a ‘good friend’ during the drugs fiasco in Kiev a year ago. A man she’d trusted and he hadn’t. And Rybkin had been with her two days ago, on the night she was murdered. And, Sam remembered suddenly from their conversation in Kiev a year ago, Rybkin knew about Chrissie’s peanut allergy. They’d been in a bar together and she’d told him.

  A taxi hooted him from behind.

  ‘Which way? Where the fuck are you, Viktor?’ he yelled.

  He chose right, towards the coast road, guessing that if Rybkin had been running back to wherever he was staying in Limassol, then it would be somewhere near the sea. At the coastal promenade he hung a left towards where most of the hotels and apartments were. Eyes raking the kerbs of the palm-lined promenade, he cruised slowly, looking for the Lexus.

&
nbsp; He drove for a couple of kilometres but there was no sign of the car. Worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Pointless him driving around all night. He pulled up to think, parking outside a prestigious-looking apartment block. He debated whether he should get the police involved, but remembered Mowbray’s derogatory comments. And anyway, the manhunt he was engaged in was personal. And becoming more so by the minute.

  But could he be wrong? Was he chasing a phantom? Was it some other man in a green jacket Chrissie had been with? He clicked the vanity light and pulled out the photo. Nothing of the man’s face was visible in the picture – just his back square on to the camera. But a broad back. The build was right. And the age, the hair – yes. Rybkin. He was bloody sure of it now.

  But why Rybkin? What the hell was a senior officer in the Ukrainian SBU doing in Cyprus? He could be on the trail of Mafiya money being laundered here. Which would put a different perspective on things, he realised.

  Suddenly it occurred to him that his whole scenario of what had happened on Tuesday night could be wrong. Maybe there was no link between the men Chrissie had been with and the Iraqis. Maybe the money being unleashed by Salah Khalil was to finance a palace rather than an anthrax attack. Maybe the whole anthrax business was a phantasm – just a hook, as London suspected. Chrissie could have met Rybkin here purely by chance. Could have been having a drink with him and the man with the silver teeth for social reasons – not unfeasible in this age of collaboration between former enemies. It could just have been a night out that went tragically wrong as the police suspected.

  Yet she hadn’t reported in on Tuesday. So totally unlike her. Chrissie was punctilious professionally.

  No. There were too many oddities for there to be simple answers to any of this.

  Suddenly he sat bolt upright. A car had popped up from a ramp in front of him, the exit from an underground car park. It turned on to the promenade and pulled away fast.

  A Lexus. Colour – old gold.

  19

  THE LEXUS DROVE fast, taking the ring road through the anonymous spread of functional architecture that was northern Limassol. To right and left showrooms for motorcycles and swimming-pools blazed with lights. Real-estate companies glowed with neon, some signs in Cyrillic script in recognition of where the customers for their villa developments were coming from.

  Traffic lights slowed the aggressively driven Lexus and Sam was grateful for them. His clapped-out, hired Toyota had the performance of a camel. He couldn’t be certain this was the same Lexus that had shot off outside the Paradiso Club; he’d failed to note its registration and the darkened glass of the car in front made it impossible to see the driver. But there couldn’t be many such cars in Limassol.

  The Lexus sped away again. At the next set of lights, which were at green, it slid into the right lane, the turning for the Troodos mountains. Sam slipped through after it just as the lights turned red.

  The road out of the city was like a wide canyon. Flats and offices towered above each side, gradually petering out the further he drove. As the road gradient steepened, the Lexus pulled away. The more Sam put his foot down, the more the Toyota’s engine misfired.

  ‘Shit!’

  He had a dread feeling he was on a wild goose chase, a conviction that it was some crazy Cypriot in the Lexus returning to his wife in the hills after a bunk-up with the mistress down town.

  Tail lights blazed as the gold car slowed for a roundabout. The Toyota’s dashboard clock said eleven-thirty. Foot hard down, he did his best to narrow the gap, but the limousine sped away on the far side of the roundabout and on up the road that led to the Troodos mountains. He would lose the bugger at this rate.

  A full moon cast a silver glow across the spread of dark hills to Limassol’s north, hills speckled by the lights of villas. The Troodos road wove between them, the tail lamps of the Lexus disappearing and reappearing in the bends, getting ever more distant.

  Sam hugged the verge, telling himself he would give it another ten minutes. Suddenly, rounding a corner, the tail lights were closer. Much closer and swinging sharply right. He stamped on the brakes. The other car’s headlamps swept across a roadside billboard, then began to climb. Sam slowed right down. As he passed the sign, his own lights picked out the words Golden View Estates.

  He drove on a short distance then turned the car round in a yard selling ceramics. Heading back he saw a cone of light snaking up the hillside to his left. It had to be the Lexus – there’d been no other car on the road.

  He doused his own lights. The skein of moonlight was bright enough to show up the white kerbstones lining the access road up to the building plots. He wound down the window.

  The Lexus was out of sight by now. Sam drove faster, eyes flicking between the road and the hill above. The tarmac branched suddenly. He stopped. Along the spur to the right, dark outlines of houses under construction stood out against the sky. But no car. He continued up the hill, keeping the engine revs low. At the next spur he stopped again. More dark shells of villas-to-be. A brief flicker of red – tail lights being extinguished – told him he was there. He killed the engine, listening, imagining the other man doing the same. The hunter and the hunted. But which was he? He had an eerie sensation of being drawn into a trap.

  He let the car roll backwards a few metres until an earth mound blocked the view from the spur. He listened again, holding his breath. A car door clunked, a solid, prestigious sound.

  He got out of the Toyota and began walking quickly up the spur, using whatever cover he could find. The construction site was a mess. Cement mixers, diggers and the shells of uncompleted houses to left and right. He moved from one object to the next, staring into the darkness ahead, trying to identify shapes which the moonlight only hinted at. He still couldn’t make out the Lexus. His heart raced, his breath roared in his ears. He had an unnerving fixation that his progress was being followed through the night sight of a sniper’s rifle.

  Suddenly, up ahead, he detected a faint red dot winking at him. It reminded him of the red-eye light on a flash-camera. He crouched down, grimacing as the scabs on his shins cracked like dry leaves. He watched the light for a few seconds before realising it was the alarm on the dashboard of a car. He stood again and crept forward. Soon the outline of the vehicle became clear. Behind it stood a sizeable villa, complete with roof, but no light inside.

  Why would anyone visit a building site in the middle of the night other than to hide? He felt certain now that it was Viktor Rybkin.

  Ten metres from the Lexus, he heard the clink of its catalytic converter cooling. He inched forward and crouched by the bumper, his shins protesting again. He listened once more, his eyes on the villa. The mansion commanded the edge of the hill like a mini-palace. The view would indeed be golden from here when the sun went down.

  Behind the left-hand downstairs window of the house he suddenly saw a pinprick of fire, then nothing. Then the fire again, and nothing once more. A cigarette. His eyes better attuned to the darkness by now, the house took on a clearer shape. A central entrance porch supported by columns had window bays to each side of it. A cinder drive had been laid, still cluttered with building materials. He paced forward silently, then crouched by some breeze blocks. Again the pinprick of red through the left-hand bay – at the rear of the house, as if the smoker was on a terrace.

  He crept to the corner of the building, then moved gingerly towards the back, painfully aware of his vulnerability. At the end of the side wall he put his head round.

  The man was just an arm’s length away from him. Sam held his breath. Suddenly a lighter flame flicked on. For a couple of seconds it illuminated a face. A familiar face with a scar.

  He jerked his head back. Suppose Rybkin was armed? He himself had no weapons at all. Not so much as a boy scout’s whistle. As he inched back trying to think of his next move, his foot trod on a piece of tile that cracked like a pistol shot. There was a sharp intake of breath from the terrace.

  He stood stock still
for what felt like several minutes, hardly daring to breathe. He was on the point of deciding to make a dash for the road when a thin beam of light pierced the gloom from the front corner of the house, followed a split-second later by a muffled thwack.

  Jesus!

  He was being shot at. A silenced pistol. The torch beam had picked out a stack of roof tiles three paces away. He ducked behind it, his heart exploding through his ribs. Another thwack sent chips of terracotta zinging around his ears. He threw himself on the ground, grunting with pain as his shins hit something hard.

  ‘Viktor,’ he yelled, pressing his face to the earth. ‘It’s Sam Packer, you idiot. Remember me?’

  Silence, apart from the rasp of heavy breathing. He thought it was the other man’s, then realised it was his own.

  ‘Sam Packer! Well I’ll be damned. So it was you at the Paradiso.’ The voice was a growl, the accent half New York, half Moscow.

  ‘Shouldn’t have run off like that, Viktor. We could have had a nice drink together. And a talk about old times.’

  ‘Seeing you there was a surprise, Sam. And in our line of business surprises are not often welcome. Now, come out so I can see your face.’

  To do so might be suicide, but he had little choice.

  ‘Okay, but put that fucking gun down.’

  ‘Just come out. And watch your language,’ the Ukrainian barked.

  Sam stood up carefully and brushed himself down. His shins felt sticky as if they were bleeding again. He stepped into the beam of the torch, half expecting the thump of a bullet in the chest.

  ‘You know, I thought you were a thief,’ Rybkin pretended. ‘This country’s full of them, and most of them come from Russia.’ He laughed, but hollowly.

  Sam shielded his eyes from the torch.

  ‘You’ve lost weight since we last met,’ Rybkin remarked, shining the light at his waist.

  ‘Been on a crash diet,’ Sam retorted, suspecting Rybkin knew about Baghdad. Chrissie could have told him.

  Rybkin moved closer, keeping the light in Sam’s eyes and the pistol with its neat silencer pointed at his midriff. ‘You took a big risk following me, you know. I could have killed you just now.’