by John Connor
‘So I go in alone and I apologise. Then what? He gives us a price?’
‘No. And then we move on. The apology is the price. We repay the fee, of course – all four hundred thousand. Compared to the amounts we’re set to gain from this alliance it’s a drop in the ocean.’
‘And this is not about his son? You’re sure of that?’
‘He has never suspected you of involvement in that—’
‘I wasn’t involved—’
‘—because I protected you from suspicion. You know I did. As far as that goes the danger was always to me. But no longer.’
‘Because you told him it was the bodyguards that killed him?’
‘Because of the money involved. It will make both of us as strong as Mikhael Ivanovich. That’s a powerful incentive for Zaikov. And for me.’ He smiled. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
Carl sighed. The money. It was nothing to do with honour or connections, he thought, everything to do with the money. It always was. ‘Did you find out the reason he wanted Rebecca’s family dead?’ he asked.
‘That’s his business. I didn’t ask.’ He stood up. ‘Obviously, I would never wholly trust Zaikov. But I trust what’s at stake here. Believe me, the money will mean more to him than the life of a little girl.’
28
Julia stood in the steadily moving queue of people waiting to go through UK passport control in Heathrow, with Drake just behind her. She had in her hand the passport he had given her. It had got her onto a plane in Seville without any problems, but now she was more worried. She turned back to Drake and whispered quietly into his ear, ‘They will have some electronic checking device – they will check it against my face.’
He put a hand on her elbow and smiled, ‘They don’t.’
The passport, he had told her, was valid and real, not stolen. She didn’t know how that worked, but the picture in the back bore only a very superficial resemblance to her. ‘It was issued ten years ago,’ Drake said, when she pointed that out. ‘You are bound to look a bit different now. They take that into account. If they notice at all.’ He seemed unworried.
He had been a model of calm, controlled efficiency since she had got into his car, nearly five hours ago. Places had already been booked on a flight out of Seville and to get through the gate in time he had driven far in excess of the speed limit once they got onto the motorway. When she had asked him what might happen if the police stopped them he had simply said, ‘I’ll get a ticket,’ and shrugged.
‘You don’t think they’ll recognise me?’
‘You clearly don’t know how useless they are. Besides, the information I have is that they’re not even looking for you.’
She had told him what had happened with Molina in a kind of desperate confessional rush which she had later regretted, because when he had it all he had simply commented, ‘OK, that’s way more information than I expected. More than you ever need to say again, to anyone. For future reference don’t ever tell anyone the knifing bit. Not ever. If you have to give an account of it, say he went out to make a call and you ran, stole his car. That’s a safer version.’
There had been a long silence between them then, and she had sat fretting about it and the possible consequences until a few minutes later he had said, ‘But I’m impressed. You handled it well.’ She had started to cry. He had passed her some tissues but hadn’t slowed down.
After that he had showed her the documents they had prepared for her. She had no idea how he had arranged everything in the time available but imagined they must have a pre-prepared stock of false documents they could choose from as need arose. ‘They’ being people who worked for Michael Rugojev, people back in Spain, she supposed, but wasn’t clear about that. Things Drake said seemed to suggest he was usually based in Germany.
The papers were all in the name of Alice Rogers, someone five years older than her, British. She wondered what had happened to the real Alice Rogers. In a brown envelope he had given her Rogers’ passport, a selection of visas, three of her credit cards, a London tube pass, an AA membership card, a driving licence, and other paperwork, all in Rogers’ name.
‘The credit cards draw on Mr Rugojev’s funds,’ he said.
‘This woman doesn’t exist?’
‘She exists. But she doesn’t know she exists in two places.’ He smiled again, then added, ‘It’s harmless. Don’t worry.’
The woman checking their queue looked Somalian, very tall and thin, in a blue uniform. She scanned the passport as Julia held her breath, wondering frantically if Drake had any idea what to do if they started questioning her. But the woman only looked at her as she handed the passport back, without any interest at all, saying nothing. Julia walked through, sighed, turned and waited for Drake. They then both walked past the one-way customs windows without any problems, out into the circle of people holding signs, or watching out for relatives. ‘Told you,’ he said.
He steered her through the small crowd by gently holding her elbow. She was wearing clothing he had given her in Seville: pale blue slacks and matching jacket, a white shirt, her own boots, a little shoulder bag. In the car at the airport he had even produced a hairbrush and carefully brushed out her hair while she sat in the passenger seat, turned away from him. There had been blood matted into it, he said. Then he had produced the clothing and she had changed into it sitting in the car, with him helping, because her knee was still stiff and there wasn’t much space to pull clothes off and on. The clothes fitted quite well. He gave her a pair of his own black socks from a briefcase. It would have to do, he said, for now. ‘How did you know my size?’ she had asked. ‘I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘These all belong to my girlfriend. We were lucky.’
She imagined she looked like she was on a business trip, and had asked him about that, whether there was a story to stick to. ‘We’re in business together,’ he said. ‘We buy cheap property in Spain. We’re coming back from a trip. But no one will ask.’
Outside the terminal it was a normal, grey, London day. There was a car waiting for them in the drop-off zone. The driver got out as they walked over, handed Drake the keys, nodded and walked off. He opened the driver’s door.
‘Who was he?’ she asked.
‘No idea.’
‘You do this all the time? This kind of thing?’
‘This and other things.’ He smiled at her again. ‘Get in. We’re on a pretty tight schedule now. I have to hand you over to someone else. They’re waiting.’
29
Viktor’s place was on an inlet in Gumbacka, to the west of Helsinki and south of Espoo, so Carl took a bike from the garage – a scruffy twelve-year-old Honda CB500 with a big top box mounted on the end of the saddle. Viktor thought it might belong to the guy he retained to maintain the house, who still hadn’t appeared, but the keys were there, so Carl took it anyway. He got into central Helsinki in just under thirty minutes. Compared to London, Helsinki was a village – on a bike you could get from one end to the other in about forty minutes.
He drove straight through the downtown area, over the Pitkasilta Bridge and up into the area to the north of the city known as Kallio. There was a square there with a large, ugly stone church at one end and high stone apartment blocks enclosing the remaining sides. He squeezed the bike between two parked cars, clipped the helmet to the top box and walked slowly over to a grill kiosk at the eastern edge of the square. Behind it drunks were sleeping on nearly every bench in the square.
The kiosk had a short queue and he waited in line, taking his time to methodically check around the square and the area of park the drunks had taken over. He didn’t really know what he was looking for, what his fears were. How would anyone know that two hours ago he had made an arrangement to meet someone in one of these blocks? To know they would have to have access to the phone he had used, a brand-new, unused model given to him by Viktor. Or the guy he was going to meet might be eithe
r dirty or compromised. He had got the guy’s details from someone he knew well enough to trust a little, but didn’t know the guy himself – and anyway, all these face-to-face arrangements were filled with gaps you couldn’t cover. Would he be able to spot undercover police vehicles parked in this square? He doubted it. But he searched anyway.
When his turn came he ordered a takeaway mess of industrial chips and chopped sausage, dosed with mustard, ketchup and relishes, something of a Finnish ‘speciality’ – it was a long time since he had ever tried it though. It came in a polystyrene container with a plastic fork. He thought the sausage had probably never been near an animal. He sat on one of the few unoccupied benches and picked at it, letting his eyes scan around the square.
The buildings were of a depressing dark stone, rust-coloured, cut in huge blocks, the sky above still grey and low, the trees round the outside of the park area long bare of foliage. Winter came early here. He had on a leather jacket he had selected from Viktor’s wardrobe. It was new – he had to cut off the labels. With a fleece beneath he was warm enough, but the air was freezing, like it wouldn’t be long before the real winter started. He had read that there was already deep snow further north and east, at least a month earlier than usual – it was being put down to climate change.
The block he was going to meet the guy in was directly opposite him. It looked like something Soviet, he thought. So much of Helsinki looked eastern, though the impression was less dramatic than in the small town where he had grown up, less than thirty kilometres from the actual Russian border. There all the churches had Orthodox domes and spires, all the houses were wooden. There were no garden walls or hedges, and chickens and livestock wandered through their patch of land to the rear of his mother’s house. There was a lake where the men went every winter to fish through holes carved in half-metre thick ice.
That place, that village, that was his home, where he was meant to belong. It had looked exactly like the peasant villages across the other side of the border, like all of rural Russia, in fact. The way of life was the same too. He had spent enough time there to know. He had plenty of family on the Russian side. The occupation of Eastern Karelia during the Second World War meant families had been forced to choose sides. Not many Finnish speakers had remained in Russia, but part of his mother’s family had weathered it and survived – the part that had subsequently flourished with the breakdown of the Soviet state. His mother always said they had a petty, dirt-poor, village mentality, a belief in grudges and vendettas. If they couldn’t be farmers then they had to be criminals – there was nothing else they were mentally equipped for. Carl had taken that message in, from an early age. It was in his head now – because Zaikov was from that background too.
He stood after a few minutes and walked to a rubbish bin, full to the brim with polystyrene detritus from the kiosk, buzzing with flies. He placed his own rubbish on top and wiped his hands on his trousers, then crossed the square, past the snoring drunks, huddled together for warmth on the benches.
He searched the list of names next to the buzzers at the entrance to the flats. Lassi Kinnunen – that was the name he had been given. He pressed the buzzer for a third-floor flat, spoke his name, then pushed the heavy plate-glass door open and went in to a vestibule smelling of boiled cabbage and bleach. He took a creaky, tiny lift up to the third floor and in a dingy, poorly lit corridor knocked on the door with Kinnunen’s name on it. He thought he could hear an accordion playing from the other side. The noise got louder, then stopped, the door was pulled open and he was greeted curtly in Finnish by a thin man with a massive box accordion slung across his chest. No explanation for that was offered.
Carl followed him into a flat that smelled of dust. The man pulled the accordion off, placed it on the floor and said, ‘Wait here.’ He disappeared into another room.
Carl stood in the middle of the floor and looked at some empty bookshelves, then gazed out of the window, back down onto the square he had just come from.
Kinnunen reappeared carrying a small holdall. He put it on the floor in front of Carl then walked over to a desk with a laptop. He used a mouse, typed something, looked at the screen. One hand stroked a beard, cut in the ‘Lemmy’ style, with the chin shaved clean, except this one was short-clipped and very neat. He wore a thin-rimmed pair of glasses. ‘Your money is in,’ he said. ‘You can take it.’
Carl nodded, bent down, unzipped the bag. ‘I’ll check it first,’ he said.
The man turned and watched as he delved into the holdall, but said nothing. Carl took out various pieces of gun and set them on the floor beside the bag. Viktor had decided they could deal with Sergei Zaikov, but Carl wanted an insurance plan. He would try Viktor’s way, he would trust his assurances, go to Zaikov, make his apologies. Because at the end of the day Viktor was right – this was Viktor’s world and he knew what he was doing. If he said it was all about money then it probably was. But if Viktor was wrong – if Zaikov refused to cancel the contract – Carl still had to get what he wanted.
There was a magazine, slightly curved, the gun itself, a silencer, a buttstock. It was a retractable stock but he didn’t want the weight. ‘I don’t need the stock,’ he said. The man nodded.
Carl checked the magazine, slid out all thirty rounds and inspected them, then slotted them back in. He screwed on the suppressor, took it off, fixed the magazine in place. He glanced up at Kinnunen, who was leaning back against the desk now, watching. He didn’t look wary.
Carl took the magazine off, worked the bolt twice, checked the breech, slid the bolt again, pulled the trigger, heard the pin snap forward. He squinted down the barrel, looking for obvious obstructions. One crude way to render guns useless was to plug the barrel with a molten alloy. This one looked good. It looked almost new, in fact. There was no obvious signs of packing grease, but Carl could still smell the traces of it.
The gun was an MP5, a type of sub-machine gun made by Heckler and Koch, this one a special forces variant used by the Finnish army. He assumed that was where it had come from, but didn’t ask. He didn’t even ask if it was clean, since that had already been done in the exchange that had led him here, led to his transferring funds to this man. He would have liked to have tested it with live rounds, of course, but that was out of the question.
He dismantled it and put it in the holdall, except the stock, stood up, picked up the bag, nodded at Kinnunen.
‘Let yourself out,’ Kinnunen said.
Carl walked back to the door and went out, closed it and headed back to the lift. As he pulled open the lift door he heard the accordion starting up again, a haunting Finnish love song his mother had sung – ‘Romanci’ – but played in a peculiar way, with a German-type oompah rhythm, as if the guy were mocking his memories.
30
Drake looked worried – the first time she had seen him not totally assured. They were on the Uxbridge Road, in Ealing, afternoon traffic behind them and beyond the road a wide area of open grass and trees – Ealing Common.
She had never been to Ealing before. Her part of London, Woodford, was an hour and a half away on the Tube, a different world. At least, that’s how she would have thought of it as a kid, though now she realised these outlying areas of the capital all looked much the same. For such a huge place, London’s suburbs were disappointingly uniform. Rows of identical semis or terraces.
She had grown up in a house like that. The houses here, by comparison, bordering the road on one side with the common across the other, beautiful plane and chestnut trees lining the pavement, were all Victorian detached mansions. They even had a bit of garden in front. The tube station for Ealing Common – they had passed it driving in – was only a couple of hundred metres away, along with a stretch of road with decent-looking shops and bars. She could see one or two people sauntering around the common, dogs on leashes. Everything looked very neat and comfortable. ‘Good place to have a safe house,’ Drake had said. But
she was sure Ealing would have its estates, tucked away behind the posh bits.
They were standing where the garden had once been – it was converted to a concrete parking stand – at the door. Drake had pulled his own car up alongside another already parked there. Then he had rung the bell and waited, tried again, knocked, been round the side, down a service alley, come back, rung the bell again, decided there was no one in, got on the phone. From his face, she assumed there should have been someone in – the person he was meant to hand her over to. He spoke quickly into the phone and waited. She didn’t recognise the language.
Julia hung a few steps back and felt bewildered. This was London. It was meant to be home. It was the place where she had been born, went to school, where she had met Alex and started out on the life that had shunted her into a kind of exile for nearly ten years. Her brother still lived here, in Uxbridge. There was even a cousin that Rebecca had struck up a kind of friendship with. Yet Julia had never wanted to return here, and felt nothing returning now, no sense of familiarity or relief.
Her mother had died a year before she met Alex, her father six years before that. She had never liked her brother and suffered Rebecca’s contact with his children only because Rebecca was keen. The contact – it had only started two years ago, when she had felt sufficiently relaxed about the dangers – hadn’t led to any closer feelings between her brother and herself. So there was nothing here she really cared about. Yet Spain wasn’t home either, very definitely not. The truth was there was nowhere that was home for her. That had been a significant point in common with Alex, something they had talked about.
After a few moments Drake put the phone in his pocket and looked at her. ‘You’re shivering,’ he said, frowning.
She looked down at herself and saw her hands trembling. It was in her face too; she was keeping her jaw clamped shut but could still feel her facial muscles twitching. ‘I feel mad,’ she said. ‘Fucking insane. I’m not calm. You understand? My husband was killed yesterday. A policeman tried to kill me. But all of that’ – she waved a hand at it – ‘all of that is manageable if I have Rebecca. I need to see my daughter. I need to get her back.’ A tear ran out of one eye, but she felt no emotion she recognised. She had tried calling Rebecca four or five times between the airport and here but the number was always ‘unavailable’. Something had happened to her phone, or it was switched off. But she couldn’t give up trying. It was the only strand of hope she had. It might be lying in a ditch somewhere, but she couldn’t let herself think that. ‘I need Michael to fucking tell me what’s going on,’ she said. ‘You said she was flying here. So what’s happened? Is she here? Has she landed?’
