by John Connor
39
The bike was in sight when it happened. He was walking, quickly but carefully, on the twisted knee, just over the Esplanadi at the other side of the market. There were no stalls there now, the space was empty, the wind whipping litter across the cobbles, but the road he had crossed was full of the night-time, rush-hour traffic, a glare of headlights. He had asked someone the time and been told it was quarter past six, so he was in a hurry. He had less than an hour to get up to the conference centre, maybe not even that if someone told Zaikov he had escaped. It was feasible Zaikov would react to that, feel a need to take precautions.
He turned the corner past the City Hall, saw the bike about one hundred metres ahead, still there, then felt it in his chest: a quick flutter, followed by a pain that lanced into his left arm. It was severe enough to stop him. He put a hand up and could feel his heart doing something, beating too hard, too fast, too uneven. An effect of the electricity, he thought, willing himself to dismiss it.
He stepped forward to continue, sure it would wear off, but right then he felt it stop – felt his heart actually stop. He could feel the pulse, hear the beat in his ears, then it just stopped. In the split second between it happening and the rush of wrenching fear that followed, he took a deep breath and collapsed gently to the ground. He was on his knees before a wave of blackness swept over him, like he was fainting. Then he was gone.
A fraction of a second later he was conscious again. That was his impression – but it can’t have been accurate, because he was on his back now, with a circle of anxious faces looking down at him, someone saying something to him with quiet concern, another person pressing down on his chest, starting the CPR routine.
His eyes cleared and he sat up. He heard gasps of relief from someone.
‘We thought you were dead,’ a man said.
Carl focused on him, saw a police uniform. ‘I’m OK,’ he said, confused, unable to even place where he was. He took deep breaths, put his hand up to his chest. The heartbeat was there, beating normally, a little fast, but regular.
He muttered thank you to the group, or something like that. His head felt fuzzy again, disorientated, like it had been right after they had tasered him. He could remember that immediately, the tasering, then most of the rest – where he was, where he had been going – but other things were lost: the wider situation. In view were a couple of men, a woman, the policeman. Behind the policeman a police bike, stopped at the kerb, blue light flashing.
‘You cut your head as you fell,’ the policeman said, in broken English. ‘I called an ambulance. Just in case.’
Carl brought his hand up, put it on the gash behind his ear, felt the wet, warm blood. But that was from before, from falling into the bilge of the boat. He remembered that now as well.
‘I’m OK,’ he said, in Finnish. ‘I think I just tripped up. I don’t need an ambulance.’
‘You weren’t breathing,’ the woman said. ‘For about ten seconds you weren’t breathing.’
He tried to stand up, got to his knees, paused to make sure he wasn’t going to collapse, then stood. He looked around, saw his bike, further up the road. He laughed, trying to make light of things, thanked them again. He could recall he was in a hurry, but not why. Get to the bike, get going. Get away from the policeman. Work it out later.
But would the policeman stop him getting on the bike? He was already losing interest, Carl thought. He had turned away, started speaking into a shoulder-clipped radio, talking about some traffic situation somewhere. Carl thanked them again and started to walk off. This was Finland. People didn’t speak much, not even to people they knew. No need to hang around discussing it. He said something curt, more in keeping with the national character. Thirty metres further on he looked back and saw them walking off, two of them speaking to each other. The policeman was still on his radio. Somewhere in the distance he could hear an ambulance siren. How long had he been lying there?
At the bike he turned the corner, not going anywhere near the machine. He leaned against a wall, out of sight, sank down on his haunches, listened to his heart. Was it going to happen again – that it would just stop like that? If it happened when he was on the bike he was fucked.
He tried to remember where he was going but for a minute or so nothing came into his head. Then he recalled the gun, in the box of the bike. He had to get to the conference centre where Zaikov was. That was what he had been trying to do.
He walked over to the bike, looked left. The police bike was already gone. He unclipped the helmet and put it on, got on the bike and tried to look for the keys in his jacket. The jacket was soaking. Had they asked him about that – the policeman, those people? He couldn’t remember. He was shivering now. He no longer had the fleece beneath the jacket. He found the keys under the seat, where he had left them.
He started the bike, pushed off. If he felt the flutter again he would stop, immediately, call emergency services. He paused, slowed, put his foot down, searched for his phone. But they had taken his phone. He couldn’t contact anyone. He wanted to contact Viktor, to ask him something. Something important. But what? That was gone. He had to try to remember it. And something else – something teasing at the back of his mind, something they had said on the boat.
He rode all the way to the Kalasjatorppa conference centre with the feeling persisting that his brain wasn’t working properly. But not the part of it that coordinated his driving. He drove fast, weaved between cars, used the throttle, had no problems staying on the bike and reacting to traffic. That wasn’t it. The sensation was of a gap behind all that. He could do everything on the surface as if he had already recovered from what they had done to him, but behind it all he wasn’t placing thoughts where they should be, or in the right order. It was an abstract feeling of unease.
So he drove with urgency, but when he got to the hotel and saw the rows of Mercs parked up in the big turning circle, with chauffeurs holding doors open and men coming out, he just sat there, in the road, astride the bike, the engine ticking over, not knowing what he was meant to do now.
Get the contract cancelled before they send someone new to kill her. He remembered the contract. But how? Was he meant to shoot Zaikov – would that do it? There had to be a reason why he had the gun.
He felt confused, unclear about what was required. He put his hand on his heart again, under the jacket. It seemed OK, but he was breathing in short gasps. He looked around, squinting into the headlights on the road behind him, then remembered a whole chunk of details – what had happened on the boat. They hadn’t given him a chance to speak about Rebecca, but they weren’t going to cancel anything, clearly. So he needed to put them in a situation where they were forced to consider that. Zaikov was going to travel to the house on the island of Kaskisaari – Viktor had told him that – so if he was going to do something he would need to get there ahead of him. Or find somewhere on the way there, somewhere where he could force things. He needed time with Zaikov, in safety. Time to convince him. Viktor’s way had failed, now he would fall back on something more traditional.
He didn’t wait to see if Zaikov was in the group getting into the cars. Viktor had told him Zaikov would go to Kaskisaari, so that was that. He turned the bike round and took it down to the coast road, driving more carefully, looking for a police presence but finding none. He crossed the bridge to Kuusisaari, the first of a small chain of islands that extended out into the bay – Kaskisaari was the last. The bridge was only a couple of minutes from the conference centre. The traffic was still heavy here because you could use this route to get across the bay to Espoo, a large residential area. There was nowhere anything could be attempted in seclusion.
The second bridge took him over to a larger island – Lehtisaari. Here there were more trees, but still too much traffic. At a junction he took the turn signposted for Kaskisaari and very quickly the traffic was thinning out. Now there was nowhere to go except Kaskisaari.
You could get cars over there, but not off the other end, where there was only a footbridge. But even before he got near the bridge over to Kaskisaari, he was driving through light forest, no houses around. He slowed down, pulled over. They would come this way, driving through the trees. If Viktor was right, they would travel by this route.
He followed a footpath and eased the bike across the sparse forest floor, then cut the engine and got off. He propped it behind a stand of bushes and opened the box. He kept his ears on the road as he got the pieces of gun out and put them together, blind almost, in the light of the moon coming through the branches above. He snapped the magazine in and pulled the bolt. He could hear cars behind him.
He went down low and got back to within five metres of the road. He found a spur of land crested with big old birch trees and lay down flat amongst the leaf litter. There were streetlights on the road but the nearest was thirty metres away. He steadied the gun on the ground and took aim. He saw a headlight poking through the trees, coming from the direction of Kaskisaari. It was a van, travelling slow. He watched it pass, could clearly see the driver concentrating on the road. As it disappeared he was left in silence. In the distance he could hear traffic on the big Lautasaari bridge, about two kilometres away. He waited.
He tried to estimate the minutes. Five minutes. Then ten. The cold was seeping into his wet clothing, coming up from the ground. He was shivering. What was he doing here? He asked himself the question and started to think it through. They would come down the road in a cavalcade of cars. There would be at least three cars. Zaikov wouldn’t be taking chances. The first and last would contain security people. But they wouldn’t be armed, not here in Finland. Or maybe they would. It was possible. It was also possible the cars were armoured. But even without those issues, how would he stop them? Shoot out the tyres? That wouldn’t do it, not if the drivers were professional – they would keep going on the hubs. Kill the engine? He doubted that was certain, even at this range, not with this gun, not if the cars were armoured. They would just keep going, once again, get across the bridge to Kaskisaari, inside their compound there.
He rested his head on the ground. He didn’t know what he was doing. This wasn’t his thing. It wasn’t even a gun he knew how to fire properly. And anyway, were they even going to come here?
The thought freed something up. Viktor had said they would come here. Viktor had set up the meeting with Zaikov. He started to shake and knew suddenly that he had already made a terrible connection, seconds before he had it laid out in his head.
On the boat, they had said something that he thought he hadn’t understood, but his brain gave it to him now, crystal clear. The younger one – Andrei Zaikov – had come in with the bat and demanded of the father if it was some kind of joke, otherwise what had brought him, Carl, there, to them, into their power? And the father had snapped something back at him, very quick. Carl had heard it but hadn’t understood. But he could understand it now, understand it perfectly. Zaikov had said, ‘He has been given some stupid story about a girl and a contract.’
A stupid story about a girl and a contract. That was what Carl had just told Zaikov that he was there about. A stupid story? The truth was right there in the way he had said it, not to Carl, but to his son – so no need for lying or pretence. The story Carl had told him, about the contract on Rebecca, had sounded stupid to him. As if it weren’t true.
There was no need to remember more, but he did. He remembered the son looking down at him, the baseball bat perched on his shoulder, then turning back to the father and saying, ‘His brother says we are village idiots, shit-kickers, but we would never do this to our own.’
They had known he was coming, and they had known who he was, just as Viktor had said they would. But someone had convinced them that he had killed Uri Zaikov.
He stood quickly. The road was very silent and he knew at once that Zaikov was coming nowhere near this island. He was waiting in vain. It was possible Zaikov didn’t even own a house here. Zaikov had never heard of the Spanish contract, never heard of the girl he was meant to have contracted Carl to kill.
We would never do this to our own.
He started to run back to the bike.
40
He drove back to Gumbacka in a panic, passing the road back to the hotel without seeing the Mercs, wondering how much of it had been there for him to see before he had even set foot on Zaikov’s boat.
There were lights on in the house that he could see from two kilometres back, on the forest road. Viktor’s was the only house on that part of the inlet in Gumbacka. The lights gave him a brief hope that they would both still be there, that somehow he was wrong.
He screeched the bike to a halt in front of the twin garages and ran panting to the front door. He shouted for Rebecca at the top of his voice and pushed on the door. It was shut, but not locked – he had only to turn the big handle to swing it back on the huge, deserted hallway, ablaze with light.
He knew the moment he put a foot inside that the entire place was empty. It was like something you could smell. He shouted again, shouted her name, shouted for Viktor. And all the time could feel his heart racing, skipping, pausing, feel the anger welling inside.
There was a huge nineteenth-century factory clock mounted on the wall directly opposite the doorway. According to that, it was just after eight o’clock. He had been gone over six hours.
He ran through the whole house, then down to the dock. The boats were all there. They had not left by boat.
Back in the garages both cars were there, so he took the steps up through the wooded darkness behind the house, to the big concrete helipad, illuminated by powerful floodlights. He had seen it from the circular tower earlier in the day, seen it covered in a carpet of fallen birch leaves. But now he stood in the middle of it and saw the big white H clearly. The leaves had been blown aside, not just off the helipad, but from the skirting and the lawns surrounding it. Viktor had left in a helicopter and had taken Rebecca with him. But how long ago?
He staggered back to the house, his heart doing something again. He had to know where they had gone.
He went through all the drawers in the room Viktor called his office, flinging the contents on the floor, searching for a phone that might have Viktor’s numbers in it. He had none of them in his head, having relied for too long on his phone’s memory. There was a blinking light on the answerphone for the landline and he pressed it and listened to a message from a cleaning company, trying to get through to the caretaker.
He went up the stairs to Viktor’s room and started turning out all his clothes, his drawers of papers, not even sure now what he was looking for or trying to do. He felt a terrible tightness pressing into his ribs, sweat on his forehead.
There were computers lying all over – laptops, desktops, tablets – but they all needed passwords he didn’t have. He leaned against the window, staring out into the darkness, and tried frantically to clarify what he did know.
Zaikov had never heard of Rebecca.
Viktor must have told them he had killed Uri.
He gasped as he thought about it. But there was no other way to interpret it. Viktor had set him up, betrayed him, got him onto that boat knowing that they would try to kill him. It made him flinch, curl up inside and cry out with shock. He couldn’t grasp it properly, couldn’t understand why. That it might just be about money, that Viktor would try to kill his own brother, kill him, for money, as part of a massive deal with the Zaikov clan … That he couldn’t believe.
But there was no other explanation. We would never do this to our own.
There must be something else, something that had forced Viktor into it, that gave him no choice. Because Viktor was his brother, the one person who had always looked out for him, looked after him, cared for him. Was it something to do with the girl, with Rebecca? Viktor had left with her. Neither of them were here. That meant he was running with her.
But Zaikov had never heard of Rebecca so he couldn’t be running from Zaikov on account of her. Was Rebecca just an untimely coincidence? Did she have nothing to do with it at all?
But if Viktor was running now then he must be running from Zaikov. There was no one else who could pose a big enough threat. Which meant Zaikov was trying to kill them both, and in desperation Viktor had tried to buy him off with Carl’s life. But it hadn’t worked, so Viktor had fled, taking Rebecca with him.
But why take Rebecca with him? He screwed his eyes shut and tried to weigh it, put the bare facts together, work out what they meant. But his brain was still too sluggish, his thoughts sifting slowly like a grey mud, everything knocked out of line by the voltage. He couldn’t hack his way through the questions. There was too much that didn’t make sense. Especially Rebecca. What did she have to do with it all?
He stumbled coming back down the stairs and fell into the hallway, skidding onto his back. He was breathing like he had run a marathon. He sat up and tried to control the things he was feeling, the fear gripping at him. It was going to happen again, he thought – the heart thing. He should do something about it or he would never find out where they had gone.
He pushed himself to his feet and walked very slowly towards the kitchen, thinking that at least a glass of water would help. But he didn’t get as far as the door before he felt the waves of dizziness again. This time he was breathing so noisily he couldn’t hear his heart. This time he didn’t manage to get down to ground level before the blackout hit and the floor rushed up to meet him.
41
Almost one in the morning. Julia stood in the darkness and tried to control the flood of emotion. She had seen him from the edge of the forest, through cheap, low-powered binoculars bought in a petrol station. She had rested them on a stone, lay down, made sure her hands were steady, focused them carefully, forced herself to take her time, to make sure it really was him.
