The Outsiders

by Gerald Seymour

  He thought it a place of extraordinary beauty. Grigoriy, too, was captivated, as was Ruslan, but the Major’s eyes didn’t linger on the wild valley, the small farms where cattle still grazed among the scrub and where the sheep would soon be brought in for the winter. His astonishment that a scheme for two golf courses, a hotel and eight hundred units of accommodation could be contemplated was scraped from his face.

  He spoke in Russian: ‘If the bastards who believe themselves to be the élite, the siloviki, were ripped off, I would be held responsible. I wouldn’t last a week. No contact could save me – or you.’

  ‘This week a mother-fucker came to my home and was casual about an investment that had failed. He went into a chipper and was given to the gulls in the mountains. I would do that to my lawyer, if I thought he had stolen from or lied to me. He knows it. An old man came to me this week and told me I had lied. His body was burned in an old car, but not his legs. We left them on the beach. My lawyer knows he cannot run far or sufficiently fast. Have you seen enough?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘With the financial collapse much can be bought cheaply. They would concrete the whole coast for cash.’

  They walked to the cars.

  ‘May I ask one thing?’

  The Major grimaced. ‘Many things if you wish it.’

  ‘You threatened the Gecko with the open door, and he jumped. Had you been blind to him? Had he already betrayed you?’

  ‘No, he had not.’ The Major looked away from the valley and the hills, the grazing beasts and the ground climbing to the rock walls. ‘I’m certain of it.’

  ‘I won’t go,’ Winnie Monks said.

  ‘To the bitter end?’ Kenny intoned.

  ‘Has it screwed things up even more, Boss, with Xavier bunking off?’ Dottie had her screen on, her feet on the desk.

  ‘I’m staying,’ Winnie said. ‘I’m hoping for blood in the gutters and I’ll stay until it’s settled.’

  ‘Boss, if Xavier’s quit then who’ll hold Sparky’s hand when he runs?’ Kenny asked.

  She gazed across the graveyard and watched the dribble of old ladies who came each afternoon with fresh flowers. ‘Fuck Xavier. Sparky’ll have to do his own hand-holding – he’s a big boy.’

  Dottie swung her feet off the desk. ‘I’m suggesting more thought, and a conclusion. You should be out of here tonight, Boss, all wrapped up, gone. If the shit’s in the fan, I’d want you back in London, lost from view.’

  Kenny chipped, ‘It hurt, Boss, but it’s for the best. There’s a flight this evening. If a witch-hunt starts you shouldn’t be here, exposed. It’s a worst-case scene, but—’

  ‘It was for the Fenby kid. Dottie, Kenny, you stood with me on that hillside in Buda-bloody-pest, and in that morgue when we saw him. We saw how those people had kicked the life out of him and hacked off his hand. We pledged ourselves to get them. Didn’t we owe it him, all of us – me, you two, Xavier and Caro? To leave him, walk out on it, not sure I can.’

  ‘Not a lot you’re doing here, Boss,’ Dottie said.

  ‘Best you’re on the evening flight,’ Kenny said. ‘I wouldn’t fret about Sparky. Bit of a passenger. I’d put my shirt on it that he’s already gone. I’m not often wrong.’

  She reached for the telephone but Kenny’s hand caught her wrist.

  Around her, they started to pack. They’d have read their answer in Winnie Monks’s eyes. She sat at her table and lit a cigarillo. She didn’t doubt what she’d been told.

  In the corridor, Kenny said to Dottie, ‘It was a good slap you gave her.’

  ‘She’ll tell the world she walked into a door. Suppose he hadn’t run for Málaga and she was there. Can you imagine if she’d been at that bloody villa, breathing balls into Sparky? A disaster on a mega scale. I had to hit her.’

  Kenny took Dottie’s hand, leaned forward and kissed her cheek. She blushed. ‘It’s the end, survival time, and she knows it.’

  Posie stood at the edge of the group. She heard Snapper say, ‘I’m really surprised. I’d have called it a certainty. Do you reckon Sparky’s stuck in traffic, maybe couldn’t get a taxi?’

  Loy said, ‘He’ll be hard on our heels.’

  Xavier said, his back to her, ‘Don’t know why the Boss sent him. Useless, those people. Truth is, he’s out of his comfort zone and knows it.’

  Snapper said, ‘The way I see it, he’ll be on the highway, scampering to catch us, but there’s plenty of flights.’ He waved at the board. Departures were scheduled later for Manchester, Leeds-Bradford, Glasgow, Gatwick and another into Stansted.

  ‘Will he have the sense, before he bugs out, to bury that weapon?’

  The flight was called. Most of the camera stuff was hand baggage, and they shared it out among the three of them. Posie had been introduced to Xavier but he had ignored her. Snapper had done the tickets and shoved hers on a credit card. She’d had to give him the phone number at her bed-sit, so that an accounts department could recoup the airfare. They walked, laden, towards the airside gates and Snapper handed out the boarding cards. None of them had mentioned Jonno – as if he didn’t exist, had never been there. She could see, a half-step behind them, that the three of them were on one side of an aisle and she was on the other. When she squinted over a shoulder, she realised they would be a handful of rows ahead of her. There would be nothing at the far end – no gratitude from Loy, no thanks from Snapper for the sandwiches she’d made him. Tears streamed down her face, but no one noticed.

  Snapper said, ‘It’s the way, isn’t it? You win some and you lose some. Still, my pictures will cause heartbreak. Don’t I always say, Loy, that worse things happened in Bosnia? Right?’

  ‘Or Baghdad or Benghazi – it’s what you say, Snapper.’

  They went through. Had she tried, Posie couldn’t have stopped the tears.

  ‘Of course, we let it slip.’

  ‘Forgive me for asking.’

  ‘No offence. You pulled the rug, Gonsalvo. We had to let it slip.’

  Dawson, with his colleague, circled the wide Plaza Mayor. They walked briskly and spoke occasionally. To get round the rectangular space they had to tramp, in Dawson’s estimate, a quarter of a mile. The Spanish officer had requested the meeting and named the location. He would have travelled into Madrid for the rendezvous and Dawson assumed that the predictable denial of further interest would not be enough. They were now behind the central statue of Philip III astride a horse, erected in 1616. He had immersed himself in the city’s architecture when Araminta had left, taking his son and his dog.

  ‘It crossed my desk that you had gone to Gibraltar.’

  ‘A short visit.’

  ‘I wondered, Dawson, whether Gibraltar was performing the function of Command and Control.’

  ‘A throwback in time, eccentric, with attractions for brief breaks.’

  ‘The attractions?’

  ‘I believe the most popular is whale-watching, with a dolphin safari close behind.’

  The local man coughed, and lit another cigarette. They walked again in silence. The scaffolding for a concert was going up and the loudspeakers were being wheeled into place. The floodlights were already there and miles of cable were draped over the cobbles. The art was to deflect, not to offer an outright lie.

  ‘And the formidable Miss Monks?’

  ‘I’m not her keeper, but I could provide a number at Thames House. You could reach her tomorrow.’

  His long-standing friend gazed into his face. Dawson was usually comfortable in a world of distortions, of deceit. Now he felt queasy. The coughing snapped in his ears.

  ‘If it were not let slip – ’

  ‘The rug came out from under us. You pulled it.’

  ‘ – and a clandestine operation continued with Command and Control in Gibraltar, it would be bad for relations between our agencies.’

  An understatement, Dawson reflected. He himself would be on a flight out within a few hours if the plan for a killing was discovered. A permafro
st would settle on the relationship between his people and theirs. She’d called him. He imagined her sitting in some dreary office on the old RAF base, likely chewing a stale sandwich and killing time before the flight. Sensible to go because she could make no intervention from the colonial Rock that would affect the likelihood of a hit attempt on the Costa. So, if he had not already joined the exodus, it depended on the nerve of a one-time marksman. He’d sensed from her voice that she had reached a cul-de-sac in her life, that the memory of a beaten and bloodied face on a morgue gurney had played out its time as motivation. She wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last.

  ‘Of course, Gonsalvo. Good to meet you again. We must stay close and weather whatever storms blow in our direction.’

  He strode away. Dawson did not feel the need to duck or dive for the cover of a shop front to escape machine-gun fire or one-in-four tracer, but he recognised that he had been drafted into a war where the consequences of defeat were as brutal as they were in any setback in the deserts of north Africa, southern Afghanistan or Iraq. He was going towards the Puerta del Sol where smart ladies shopped, and none wore flak vests or carried gas masks, but it was a war that incorporated the usual treacheries, jealousies, heroics and courage.

  He wondered how damaged was the man she had left in the field of combat . . . and what sort of victim she targeted. He made no judgements.

  Pavel Ivanov recognised in the Major an animal’s energy, and envied it.

  The Major was, to him, a figure from a wilderness. Once he had met a man from the east of Russia who knew of the Siberian tiger. He was a photographer and had talked. Others around them had cut their conversations and gathered in a close horseshoe. The tiger hunted mostly wild boar. Ivanov had never gone into the forests after boar but he knew the males possessed tusks that could slit a man’s stomach with a toss of the head. The tiger fed off them. The photographer had talked of how the tiger could kill a brown bear – larger than the black bear but unable to scale trees. It could weigh six hundred kilos, and had great paws set with razor claws, but the tigers killed them. They came from behind, threw themselves on to a bear’s back, dragged back the head and killed it with a bite through the spinal cord. The bears followed tigers in the hope of stealing prey already killed and part eaten. He had thought a window had been opened into a world of extreme survival. The tiger, fearless, could kill a bear or a boar – and would have the deep, remote eyes that characterised a man of great strength, of purpose. He thought of the tiger, and of the man beside him. His eyes were often on the Major’s hand, and the stump of the finger. There was about the Major a dynamism that cowed Ivanov.

  The man slept. His clothing had dried on him. Ivanov had heard enough of the wind through the night to appreciate how the sea conditions would have been, and an open boat would have offered no comfort to its passengers. He seemed to see the tiger go on to the back of the bear and do the killer bite. He seemed to see a prisoner held in the open door of an aircraft and questioned. It had been Marko and Alex who had determined to use the chipper; they had taken out the chain saw, primed and fuelled it. They had recalled the old days and he had been dragged back into the fights for territory in St Petersburg. He had thought those days were over . . .

  He envied the Major. He hadn’t boasted or postured, as so many did.

  He had thought himself blessed when he had bought the Villa del Aguila and settled in with Alex and Marko, their wives and children, when life had been in the garden and beside the pool. He had had weekly discussions about his investments with Rafael, and sex with the law firm’s investment manager. Riding in the car through the countryside, he felt a vacuous boredom.

  The sun was lower. It came over the roof of the villa and flung a heavy shadow across the patio and on to the lawn where the dog was. It wandered about, waiting for excitement. More of the sun was on the rockface and, to Jonno’s eye, highlighted the ledge and the lip of the cave roof.

  He knew they would come soon, but he did not know what part he would play, how he would contribute.

  The rifle was now on the table. Sparky still held it, and the barrel shook with the motion of his hand. Jonno thought he was upset by the clear-out, likely more wounded than Jonno was by Posie hitching a ride with them. He was upset, too, because he had heard nothing from the organisation. Twice Sparky had taken his wallet out of his pocket, opened it, looked down at the photograph, then snapped it shut, and replaced it in his pocket. Beside the magazines was the printout picture. Jonno had not seen it before but the last time he had come up the stairs it had been laid out, the creases smoothed away. The jargon from Snapper and Loy had stuck: he assumed it was the Tango. When the Tango came to the Plot and they Pinged him – or had Eyeball – he could be Taken Down, and they’d quit. The face was handsome; showed a man of authority and strength, who was not devious, cunning or cruel. It was a good enough image, with the brush moustache and the close-cropped hair, to be easily recognisable. If the target arrived through the villa’s front gate, then walked directly into the house, he was safe. When he stepped out on to the back patio to sit in the last of the day’s sunshine, or to see the sunset, he would be in Sparky’s view.

  But the hand shook.

  The house had been cleaned again. Jonno was ready to go out of the front door, slam it, drop the key under the plant pot by the step and run. His bag was by the door, as was Sparky’s.

  The shaking hand was encased in a plastic glove, like a dentist used or the girl in the supermarket in Ealing when she was handling cheese. He didn’t know what would happen to the rifle.

  Why had Jonno stayed? He hoped he would soon know.

  Why was Sparky there after the rest had gone? Jonno thought the answer lay with the woman who sat on a bench in a park. The magazine hit the table with a drumbeat because of the tremor in the gloved hand.

  ‘Where do you aim for?’

  ‘They call it the Medulla oblongata – we know it as the “chestnut” or the “apricot”. It’s the tissue mass behind the ear. If you hit that the whole motor action of the brain goes. Or you can shoot through the mouth, and that’ll get to it.’

  ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sparky said, barely a whisper.

  ‘And when will you find out?’

  ‘When I’m looking at him through the sight.’

  17

  ‘How do you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Kill time.’

  ‘Be patient. Other people aren’t,’ Sparky answered.

  ‘In my life, what I do, something happens, is always happening.’

  ‘It is in the garden. I can dig and sweep, rake and load bags with leaves. Where I was, you have to lie so still.’

  Jonno said, ‘I’d clear out my phone, or go through my wallet and chuck what I don’t need . . . I was fool enough once to say in the office that I was bored, impatient for something to happen – mail to come, the phone to ring. A woman told me I should try to recall every memory I could. I said it would take for ever. She said it would pass the time. Then she pointed out the dandruff on my jacket and the conversation died. I don’t know how to kill time.’

  ‘Do that memory thing.’

  Bad ones came to Jonno’s mind. A teenager’s rudeness to his mother. A school bully’s hack at his shin. The inquest over a lost library book. He was selective and ditched them. Tried to do feel-good memories . . . shagging girls, the O2 and Kaiser Chiefs, posting the letter of acceptance for a first job after university . . . God, was his life that dull?

  ‘What about you?’ he asked Sparky.

  ‘The first time a cell door slammed on me. The first weekend of being banged up in Feltham. I’ve a memory of the first man I shot dead, early Iraq off a rooftop, but that’s as clear as the fifth or the tenth or the twentieth. I can see the first slap I did to my Patsy’s face. I can feel the cold from the first night I slept on the street before the hostel was sorted. They’re the sharp ones.’

  ‘Do you always do the
honesty?’

  Sparky looked up at him, surprised. Jonno would have lied. He didn’t think that Sparky was acting a part when he spoke of criminality, killing and brutality. It came to him again loads that he, Jonno, was an innocent abroad and knew so little.

  ‘It’s what happened. I’m past the lies. Don’t think they help.’

  ‘I’d have told you about the good times. Sorry . . . A man goes into a chipper, another loses his legs, a cat gets shot . . .’ Jonno spoke quietly. He had a focus point towards the back of the garden where the sun still lit it, highlighting the bright colours of the bougainvillaea, the petunias and geraniums. ‘What’s going to happen . . . if I’m part of it, will I walk away from it and be the same or changed?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘Contamination.’

  ‘We learned that talking doesn’t make time go faster.’

  Jonno said, ‘Last question. Does it matter what he did, the target? How evil does he have to be to justify being a target?’

  ‘Doesn’t have to be anything. He’s the target. I don’t analyse, I just do what I’m told to do. Jonno, you either buy into it, or you should have gone with your girl and left other people’s arguments behind.’

  Sparky’s hand had started to shake again and the grip on the rifle stock was tighter. This might be the last moment when he could go downstairs, open the front door, drop the key into its hiding place and go down the path, out of the gate and start to run – faster than he ever had before.

  He had cleaned the kitchen and wouldn’t go back into it to make coffee. There was nothing left in the fridge to eat. He wouldn’t dirty anything. He thought himself pathetic. Would the soldier who had lain beside Sparky and done his spotting for him have yapped in the marksman’s ear while they waited for a target to come into view? He went to the back of the room, near to the door, put his back against the wall and slid down to the floor.

  He breathed hard, closed his eyes, tried to make a better fist of killing the time.