The Outsiders

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘You can sit outside in the sunshine, or at night under the stars, and know the great emptiness of the skies. I’m alone most of the time. A visit to my lawyer is a high spot. There’s a woman I sometimes go to in the afternoons at weekends, but she’s busy during the week, even though I give her the fucking apartment she lives in . . .’

  He drank, felt warm and comfortable. ‘May I walk in your garden?’

  ‘The dog is loose.’

  ‘I like dogs.’

  ‘He’s a guard dog, not a pet. He’s good with those he knows, aggressive with strangers.’

  His smile was wry. ‘I’ll take my chances with the dog.’

  He went towards the french windows. The garden was lit and the dog was in the centre of the lawn, chewing a bone. There was more laughter behind him, in the kitchen. The Tractor reached past him to open the door. The dog’s ears and hackles rose.

  At the edge of Sparky’s vision, the door slid open. The villa owner came first and called sharply to the dog. It rose to its haunches and its hackles bristled. Sparky had the sight up to his eye: he could see each nuance of movement, and the blemishes on each man’s cheeks. The target eased past his host.

  Sparky could have exchanged the darkened room for a scrape on a hillside. Instead of opened curtains there might have been a draped scrim cloth, camouflage-marked, over his vantage-point. He could have swapped a hundred-metre range and a view under an evening sky for a distance of a kilometre and more, the magnification distorted by the bounce of fierce heat from gritty sand. There were constants. The Dragunov did the same work as the rifle issued to a marksman of the Parachute Regiment. The men who walked in the cross-hairs were governed by similarity: they didn’t know they were being watched. He heard Jonno’s hard breathing behind him, and felt the heat from the body of the girl who pressed herself against his chair. He held the rifle loosely – it was neither tight enough in his fists nor clamped firmly enough at his eye for a shot, but he could watch. A sniper never hurried, the instructors had said. To force the pace was criminal. Time was in the sniper’s corner. He knew all of his targets’ faces, and none had seen his. He’d heard it said that a political killer or a gangland hitman would always stand in the path of the victim and not shoot before terror had been gouged into the face. His victims were calm and unsuspecting. They went about their business or cared for their families in ignorance of the cross-hairs tracking them. He could remember, too, the explosion of sound and heat, the sing of the shrapnel and the leaden climb of the smoke, when a bomb had detonated. He could see the face of Bent, his friend, with the pallor of death beneath the dirt and the blood. He could hear the accusations of others in the platoon that he had brought it down on their heads. Memories convulsed in Sparky’s mind.

  The shake had started in his hands.

  The target was not an Afghan or an Iraqi insurgent – no one he could regard as vermin.

  It seemed to Sparky that the old rules, drilled into him by those instructors, were not applicable. He wore no uniform. He had no back-up team. Now he had a Positive Identification and the back-up was a pair of rubberneckers who were not a part of it. His uniform was trainers, a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt.

  It was clear to Sparky now that the target was an officer: the host had swept his arm towards the coast below and the target had turned to follow the gesture. He had seen, then, the straight back and the man’s bearing.

  The photograph did the target no justice.

  The man was ramrod straight and his clothes hung well on his shoulders. The contrast was clean cut between the target and the host, who slouched, his shoulders drooping.

  He would have been a company commander, a leader in the field: he was the sort of man squaddies respected.

  The dog had snarled. Sparky hadn’t heard it but had seen the flash of the teeth as the animal tensed and moved forward. It would have been able, if it had launched itself, to fell the target. The host had not been at the target’s side and the man was alone with the dog.

  The dog came close. Its tail swung in wide arcs and the hackles had subsided. Its tongue lolled over its teeth. It sat beside the target, lifted its jaw, exposing the throat, and seemed to beg for a scratch. The sight, through the cross-hairs, showed its affection. He had not cocked the weapon and had not eased his thumb off the safety.

  Sparky saw the mutilated hand. The stump of the finger scratched at the dog’s ruff. He could have fired.

  Not even when he had been a novice, firing a standard infantry rifle on a range in the Brecons, had Sparky been offered as simple a target as the officer presented. His breath came fiercer and the panic grew.

  He heard the obscenity behind him, and her murmured call for calm. He did not know what his future would be if he fired. The cross-hairs were on the side of the target’s skull and it would be one bullet used.

  The Tractor came back outside. He noted where the dog was. He had refilled their glasses. He had thought he might be called upon to rescue his visitor and would have liked to play that role, but the man had an aura of control and the dog sat at his leg, its head against his knee. If the Major moved, it shifted to right or left as he turned. Since the chipper’s motor had been powered up he had yearned for the old excitements. His visitor, the Major, seemed to want to turn his back on them and bed down in what his lawyer had once called ‘the vapid boredom of the Costa life’ that Ivanov endured. He imagined the Major was bowed to, that men’s eyes showed their nervousness until they knew they had pleased him.

  The dog stayed at the Major’s knee.

  He said that the Major had too many secrets, knew of many skeletons, had been too long the servant of the siloviki. They would not lose control of him.

  Very few in Petersburg, or any other city, would remember the Tractor, and he craved to strut again.

  He took the Major’s arm. ‘If you come here you sever past connections. That’s not possible for you, Major. Those whose money you massage, whose enemies you remove, would not welcome your disappearance from their control. I would suggest, Major, that you’ve been inside that camp for too long. They wouldn’t let you go free. Do I read the methods of the apparatchiks correctly?’

  ‘You trust the boys who live with you?’

  The question surprised him. ‘Of course – and their wives and my lawyer. They feed off me.’

  ‘They wouldn’t turn against you?’

  ‘Why should they?’

  ‘Can’t every man be bought?’

  ‘Not my people – yours?’

  The Major shrugged. ‘The computer boy . . .’

  ‘You doubt your own men?’

  The Major said, ‘Pavel, each time there is a killing in Moscow – in any city – when a group leader is shot or bombed there is one constant. The bodyguards survive. You go to a funeral and at the graveside you will see the bodyguards. They appear to mourn. For me trust is weakness. I want to sleep without waking each time a leaf is blown against the window or a car back-fires. I don’t know how to find what I want.’

  ‘We’ll drink some more. You can trust me. You’re safe here.’

  He went with the glasses back towards the door. The Major was left in the garden, thoughtful, with the dog resting its head against him.

  The telephone rang in the hall.

  Sparky wouldn’t go, of course.

  Jonno had jolted. He said to let it ring.

  Posie reckoned it had to be answered. She went.

  Dawson heard the voice, nervous, querying. He answered with his own question: was that Posie? It was. Was Sparky still there? A longer pause. He was. Had a visitor arrived at the neighbouring villa? A blunt answer: yes.

  Dawson did not introduce himself. He used a formal tone, which smacked of the official. He gave the impression that he would not negotiate or debate. When he had driven with the package into Marbella, he had waited a few minutes in the parking area for the pick-up man, and had stared up the hill. His eye had tracked beyond the urbanisation, and he had seen the walls of th
e villa. His satellite photographs showed the squat little roof of the bungalow and the gap in the trees separating the properties. He thought of the darkness there, the quiet, and he said what should happen. He spelled it out clearly. He said what the window of time would be and for how long it would remain open.

  He rang off.

  Xavier led the way through the terminal. The passport checks were perfunctory. Away from the crowds who were meeting the late-night flight, they stopped. The farewells were brief. It was not an occasion when they would be met by drivers happy to snap open the back doors of cars and treat them like demi-gods. No result, no welcoming committee. Xavier would take a mini-cab home. Snapper and Loy would ride on the airport coach into central London, then take a taxi to the depot south of Vauxhall Bridge where SCD11 were based and where the photographic gear was stored. Would they meet again? Xavier doubted it. Failure, in his experience, was contagious and sufferers were quarantined away from each other. He imagined that, having dumped the weapon, the marksman – sad, lonely, ill-chosen and a sizeable blot on Winnie Monks’s reputation – would follow on a later flight.

  Failure stuck in Xavier’s craw. He found the cab, a beaten and dented Ford, and threw his bag across the back seat, slumped after it and slammed the door. Failure hurt. He reckoned her reputation for unconventional success was holed and deep down from the water line.

  They came to the Blue Bottle bar and a Czech officer from Operations, Organised Crime Network 06, asked his Latvian colleague whether he would take a beer or a schnapps. The offer was declined.

  ‘If there’s something I wish to celebrate, then I’m first in the queue. What is there to celebrate? Across Europe, there are fiscal cut-backs and governments renege on commitments. The most proven consequence of withdrawal of resources is that the big players run free. Their trafficking has open roads. No, I have a mound of expenses forms to complete and, with no celebration, they will be attacked. Tonight, you must excuse me.’

  Pavel Ivanov was at the glass door to the garden. He held the two drinks and watched. The man had no life, no friend, no lover.

  He was unwilling to break the moment. The man sat on the ground, the seat of his trousers soaked with dew. The dog, reared to be savage, pressed against his shoulder. Beyond his guest, he could see the hut at the top of the garden. The chipper was there, and the chain saw, with the blade scrubbed clean. It was a moment for change. He had thought he wanted to escape from the mundane life of the Costa. The Major, who had nothing, sought the affection of a dog. He had once been the Tractor: he thought how the lives of the three men in the Villa del Aguila would be enhanced when the women came back from Belgrade – in two or three days – with the children. The meal was being prepared behind him in the kitchen, and he could picture his men struggling at the table to complete the children’s homework, then playing football in the garden. He would never again invest in such a venture as the MV Santa Maria, and would never again countenance a deal with such scum as Tommy King and his idiot uncle. The Major had nothing. Ivanov was blessed.

  From the man’s own mouth, he had learned that he was riddled with suspicion of those closest to him, whom he paid for protection. He was probably fearful of Pavel Ivanov and reluctant to trust him. He had faith only in the loyalty of a stranger dog. He gazed at them, the hard man and the hard dog.

  He went inside, left the Major’s drink on a shelf and downed his own. He would call the Major when the first course was ready. He felt lightened, a burden put down, and had regained his composure.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ Jonno was hanging over Sparky. ‘How much longer?’

  The rifle was at Sparky’s shoulder, cocked. His finger toyed between the lip of the guard and the bar of the trigger. The safety was off.

  ‘When he’s full face you wait for the side. When it’s the side of the head, you wait for the full face.’

  The sight was at Sparky’s eye. The finger did not shift to the trigger.

  ‘Have you chickened out?’

  The hands still shook, and the breath came fast. Jonno didn’t know how the hands could be steadied or the breathing controlled. He sensed, now, that the finger would not slide on to the bar and squeeze, that the aim would not lock.

  ‘It’s what we’re here for.’

  Posie had come back up and talked them through the phone call. She had listed in a peculiarly flat voice what they should do and what arrangements were in place. Jonno imagined a team hovering at the edges of the picture, in deep shadows but watching them and waiting for them. He rooted for Sparky, Posie and himself.

  ‘It’s what has to be done.’ His temper was rising. ‘Are you going to or not?’ He reached forward. ‘If you can’t, then . . .’ The finger stayed off the trigger bar and the barrel tip wavered. Jonno thrust out his hands. ‘. . . I’ll do it.’

  He had hold of the barrel beyond the sight where the gas vents were. It was smooth there and hard to get a grip.

  The barrel came up.

  Sparky clung to his weapon.

  Jonno tugged. The motion tilted the chair on to two legs, then one. It fell over and Sparky went with it, holding the Dragunov. Jonno collapsed on top of him and their faces were together, the curve of the sight gouging their cheeks.

  Posie gasped.

  Jonno knew he should have wrested it clear at the first attempt. To struggle with a loaded rifle, entangled in chair legs, was dumb. He could see the outline of Sparky’s face and little else. Posie had snatched his shirt and was heaving at him. Jonno had never been in a serious fight as an adult but he had set himself up against a guy who’d done a paratrooper’s training, jumped out of aircraft and had been in the cells at Feltham. He also had the Dragunov.

  Posie still had hold of his shirt and now grasped a handful of his hair to get him off.

  He let go.

  She pulled him half upright, still on his knees with Sparky splayed below him. It was enough for him to see that the chance had gone. The target had walked back to the villa and voices carried faintly in the night air. The dog was back at the bone.

  He was hit. The rifle stock came up and punched into his face. He was stunned and reeled back. The blow was repeated but the second stroke did more damage. His head jerked and blood went down his throat. Jonno had thought he would take the weapon – cocked, loaded – peer through the sight, line up the shot, pull the trigger. Then? There was a cloud. In his mind he had reached the moment when the trigger went slack and the recoil thudded into his shoulder. He coughed on the blood.

  His eyes had watered.

  Jonno was hit again.

  Like an old fight, gore on the ring’s canvas. But the referee let it go on, and there was no one to throw in the towel. He had no defence and his head took the force of it.

  He dropped to his hands and knees, reached the door and pulled himself up on the jamb. His mind was dulled and the strength had drained out of him. Posie straightened the chair, then reached down, lifted Sparky, hands under his armpits, and worked him back to the chair. He was gripping the rifle, but then put it down roughly, clattering, on the table. Posie laid her hands on his shoulders and stood behind him. They looked out together on to the garden. Other than the dog it was empty . . . except maybe for ghosts: a man who couldn’t scream because a gag was in his mouth as he was carried towards the chipper, and a man who didn’t struggle as he was lifted towards a chain saw.

  She had taken the call. The man had spoken of a window of opportunity. There was a curfew on the opened window. The man had given a time when the window would close.

  Jonno asked, ‘Do we go now?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘What to do?’

  She pointed to the door. His head throbbed and his jaw hurt. When his tongue touched his front teeth they wobbled. The blood in his mouth tasted foul. Her hands came off Sparky’s shoulders. The man’s head tilted to follow her as she edged away, and Jonno sensed his desperation at being left, losing her. She pushed him on to the landing.

  ‘
You were so stupid, Jonno . . .’

  ‘. . . God, what a fool you were.’

  ‘You think he’s still capable?’

  ‘You weren’t bright: hectoring doesn’t do it.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘There’s an hour, maybe an hour and a quarter. He’ll do it.’

  Any other day, Posie pushed paper, tapped a keyboard, wrote odd paragraphs of copy and dreamed about a sunshine holiday. She thought about lunch, worried about her hair and wondered how to reduce her credit-card bill. The matter of steeling a man to kill was some distance away from her usual preoccupations. This confidence was new to her. She would make it happen. The others would be off the plane by now and heading into London. She could have said, almost, that she should be grateful to Snapper for patronising her, and Loy, who had, perversely, freed her. And there had been Xavier, the functionary from a superior world of intelligence gathering, who had not deigned to speak a word to her. To any of the three she was detritus. The best thing she had done was to walk away from them at Departures. The next best thing was pulling Jonno off the marksman’s back and frogmarching him to the door.

  Power embraced her. She gloried in it. ‘You were stupid to think you could shame him into doing it.’

  ‘He won’t do it.’

  ‘Go away. You’ll hear the shot. When the shot’s fired, we’ll go, like the man said, through the window before it’s closed. Anyway, there’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s ridiculous to think you could just take a rifle, hold it correctly, aim it properly, check the sights and line it up. Pull the trigger? You? You’d have missed.’

  Jonno went down the stairs, and Posie sidled back into the darkness of the attic. She let her fingers rest on Sparky’s shoulders and worked at the cord-tight muscles. The weapon’s magazine rattled on the table, which told her his fingers still shook. He was trapped in his past.

  ‘It’s high stakes to kill an officer, whether he’s one of theirs or yours.’