Gough said, never good with words and not crisp, not slick, ‘We want to – hope to be able to – have the target and our boy take delivery, then drive it across your country to a ferry port in the north, and our intention is to have people, our people, on the boat who can fix a tracker, a tracking bug, inside the stock – or several, whichever – and we will then follow it. We intend, hope, to uncover – through the bug – a network.’
Pegs said, to the point and brief, ‘Getting the bug in represents success for us . . . We have a duty of care.’
‘As we do.’
‘We must provide protection.’
‘And myself also . . . Recently, I had investigators inside one of the housing projects and to get them there, with the possibility of making a significant narcotics arrest, we had those officers, men, dressed in the female style, a burqa full veil, but behind them I had a fast response unit, a dozen men from the GIPN. Never more than four hundred metres away, and a limited incursion into that area. But you understand the manpower required to safeguard an officer. You appreciate?’
‘I appreciate it.’
‘Any trade in weapons involves the senior echelon of a principal crime clan . . . It may be that you do not know our city. We have serious players, they have a reputation for grave cruelty, excessive violence, and they settle disputes in a barbaric way. Last night a boy who had transgressed the rules of his gang was burned alive in a vehicle fire. Horrific . . . Do we have informants who tell us who was responsible, where there is evidence to be gathered? We do not. Not even the kid’s mother will talk to us . . . The people your target will need for association, to take delivery, are spare with morality, live in districts known for their barbarity . . . That is where your target may go, and your Undercover, I presume, will not be far behind. I cannot provide the necessary force, open-ended, for you . . . and anywhere in the city, any place, they have the arm’s reach to touch. I am sorry but . . .’
‘Well, fuck this for a game of dominoes.’
She interrupted. He stopped in mid-flow, and a frown broke on his forehead and he looked across at her as she ducked down below the level of his desk. Gough felt her hand grope at his socks, his shoes, then there was a rustle as her grip caught the plastic bag. She heaved it up.
‘Going nowhere,’ she said. Round in circles and nowhere.
The plastic bag was slapped down on the table. It had been paid for from the float of petty cash received from the accountant down the corridor and beyond Three Zero Nine. Good quality whisky, ten years old.
She mimicked a formal response: ‘Don’t want, “I really cannot accept that, it is against our code of ethics to accept gifts in return for favours done. I am sorry, I cannot.” Don’t want that shit.’
Gough said, ‘We are all professionals, all trying to do a bloody difficult job. The old saying, “Better we hang together than hang separately.” We did a bit of work, know about you, know why you were transferred down here, know of endemic corruption in the Brigade anti-criminalité, know all that. Know how difficult it is, and that it’ll all get worse before it gets worse. I understand your position.’
Pegs said, ‘It’s called Rag and Bone because the target comes from a town that used to be the capital market-place in UK for the rag trade. Great heaps of stained or filthy or discarded rags, a couple of centuries ago – back in history. Where we are today, living in the past, and hemmed in with bloody regulations. Guarding our precious territory . . . Come on, Goughie, getting nowhere and bloody fast.’
Gough said, ‘Sorry and all that for wasting your time, Major. Hope your meeting goes well.’
Pegs said, ‘We don’t intend, not on our watch, if we can possibly help it, to let the bastards win. Have a nice evening, Major, and enjoy the drink.’
The telephone rang and was picked up. Pegs was standing, taking her coat off the back of the chair. The Major listened, impassive. Gough stood, saw the dusk coming fast through the window, and saw also that uniformed men – overalls, vests, firearms, helmets – were running from the building to their vehicles. The phone was put down.
The Major was behind them, had dragged on his harness and holster, then his coat, then his vest, and was pushing Gough to the door and using a free hand to pull Pegs along with him.
Out in the corridor, and more men and women stampeded ahead and behind them. The Major said, ‘Whatever is “fuck this for a game of dominoes”, I would like to show you how matters play in our city, and maybe where you wish to put your Undercover, and why I am a busy man.’
A smile had broken on his face, and they moved well and Pegs hitched up her skirt higher so that she went faster. Didn’t bother with the lift, careered down the stairs. Gough panted but kept up. In the yard, no ceremony, they were pitched into a wagon. No explanation. The sirens started.
Why? Because a gang in Saint-Barthélemey had screwed up. A car had speared from a side turning and come into the traffic flow, scattering a group of scooter riders.
How? The gang had screwed up by losing the cash required for payment of a consignment already delivered. How was it ‘lost’? The sum of 120,000 euros, which would meet the necessary payment to a Morocco-based group, had been in the hands of the gang treasurer and he had vanished, was a memory, a fleeting shadow, and might now be in the north of France or anywhere in Germany or might be in the Netherlands where there was a sizable and well-established Somali community. When? Had all happened in the last 72 hours, and the very minimum that the Somalis remaining in Saint-Barthélemey needed – by that evening or dawn the following morning at the very latest – was a clear 100,000. What? The answer, as determined by the Somalis, was to get their hands on that sort of money in that sort of time-frame: not easy, required good planning and good intelligence. Which? It was important they understood, without doubt, which gang of Moroccan suppliers had delivered and was now waiting for payment. They would not be easily fobbed off with a promise of meeting the debt ‘as soon as was possible’. The Somalis would be dead. Death would not be easy. Dying would be hard and painful . . . A way out was finding cash, bank notes – credit was not issued to those Somalis – and taken to a rendezvous up beyond Saint-Antoine at a viewpoint in the hills that overlooked the city and the harbour. Had to be there . . . or face war. The Somalis did not have the fire-power to survive such a feud.
The car had skidded to the far side of the road and a back door had opened and one guy out fast, armed with a pistol, and sprinted towards a scooter, a Peugeot that seemed on its last legs, ready for a breakers’ yard.
Who else had that amount of money that might be available? Which other group? Not ring-fenced in security, vulnerable? Gossip, rumour, masquerading as intelligence, identified a guy in the neighbouring project of La Castellane who ran a good stairwell, made a decent profit, and moved his takings either himself by powerful motorcycle, or using his crippled brother to take a satchel to a Credit Union. To fight another gang was high risk, but the alternatives for the Somalis were probably harsher. Those escorting the Peugeot, seeing the pistol, fled down the street.
The scooter was on its side and, under it, its full weight pinioning him, was the courier, the strap of a satchel over his shoulder and the bag, bulging with cash, beneath him.
The Somali with the pistol had reached the boy trapped under his Peugeot scooter, the boy did not have the strength in his free arm to shift the machine’s weight, to extricate himself and try to make his escape, with the satchel. Down the road the Somali’s car waited, the door still open. It was not a part of the northern sector of Marseille, the 14th arrondissement, where another motorist would intervene; certainly no pedestrians on the pavement would be so lunatic as to involve themselves.
The boy pinioned to the road was Karym.
It was one of those moments when any individual – young or old, brave or not, heroic or cowardly – was faced with two options and must make a choice. The pistol was waved at him. The satchel was demanded. The Somali stood above him. It was a Somali confronting a
Tunisian, no one else’s business. Now the pistol was aimed at him. The boy was thin, with a concave chest, brittle legs and skeletal arms, and a gaunt, unhealthy narrow face, no spare flesh and his belt loose at the waist, and no evidence of strength. The options beckoned at him. The Somali might have been five years older than Karym, with a fuller fatter face. Traffic was going round them, hooters blasting, and the sound of the horn of the car parked down the road outside the internet café. No one, no school teacher who had ever had charge of him, had ever accused Karym of stupidity; everyone acknowledged a keen mind that could focus attention on what interested him, like a pistol did. The Somali was shouting and his free hand reached towards Karym and took hold of the strap. Looking into each other’s eyes, snarling, full of loathing and defiance. Karym managed to get traction with his feet, but could not lift the bulk of the Peugeot scooter. But he could propel it up and over with the use of his feet.
He pushed and heaved, and could see every stitch in the collar of the Somali’s shirt, and the design of his track-suit bottoms and the embossed badge of Real Madrid on his fleece, and the scratches on the barrel of the pistol, and the nails of the fingers clutching it, and the forefinger wrapped on the trigger, inside the guard. He could see all that, and thrust with his legs . . . and could see the face of his brother, and the pride spreading and the praise, and the respect that would come to him in his quarter of La Castellane, and would walk tall . . . he saw all that. The bike rose, then slewed over and wavered, and the Somali dived to get a better grip on the strap, and the Peugeot fell again, and two-stroke fuel was sloshing on the tarmac. The weight of the scooter, well in excess of a hundred kilos, came down on the Somali’s ankle, and the snap was as clear as a lightweight gunshot, and the break would have been complete. The protruding bone lifted the track-suit leg, there was blood, and the boy howled.
The car that was to have taken away the Somali, happily clutching the stolen satchel, pulled out and disappeared down the hill. The kids on the scooters who had been given the job of escorting Karym, were close enough to see the pistol, and to hear the scream, and stayed back. The Tunisian and the Somali were entwined. Might have been a couple of kids enjoying an illicit coupling. Arms and legs were spread and locked, and the scooter’s bulk crushed them, and the pain must have been too acute for the Somali boy to shout for long. Neither moved. The pistol was steady, its fore-sight lodged in a slim fold of skin on Karym’s throat. The street had cleared.
There were no men and women hurrying past on the pavement, and no cars, buses, vans; just the scrape of metal shutters being pulled down, and then silence as radios and TVs were switched off; a crowd watched from both ends of the street, from windows and from darkened doorways. The pain must have come in surges along the Somali’s leg, and he would have writhed because he could not contain the agony of the break, and his hand holding the pistol began to shake and the sharp fore-sight gouged deeper into Karym’s flesh but he did not dare struggle . . . as if the courage he had mustered to kick over the scooter and pitch it on to the Somali’s leg was all that he could manage and his bravery was exhausted.
It was a groan melded with a whisper. ‘Call them, the car.’
No response from Karym.
‘Call them, I told you, call my brothers.’
Karym looked. It had been a blur of movement when the car had come out of the side street and had ploughed into the little pack of scooters heading down the hill towards the Credit Union branch. They did the same journey three or four times a month; on other occasions it was done by Hamid on his Ducati Monster. Hamid would have assumed that no one from another project would know how he stashed his money, and that no rival group inside La Castellane would have threatened his cash. Karym had seen the car come out, and expected it to brake hard, had expected to give the driver a taste of his tongue and a finger of derision, and it had kept on coming and its fender had nudged his rear wheel . . . They would have to shoot him to get their hands on the satchel. He looked down the street, along the deserted pavement and the empty road. He seemed to remember what model the car had been, what colour, but could not find it.
‘Call them. I told you, call them.’
Looked again, and did not see it.
‘What I fucking told you, shout for them, wave for them.’
The Somali’s face was a few centimetres from Karym’s and he thought he struggled to hold back tears, and the pain would have come in rivers. Would have been like the pain felt by the kid in the car, trussed, seeing the flames around him and feeling the scorching heat. Karym thought he tried his best, and pushed his head up for a better view but that motion would have shifted the Somali’s leg and made the agony worse. He could not see the car.
‘There is no car.’
‘Call it.’ A gasped voice in his ear.
‘Can’t. It’s not there. Gone. Run out on you.’
The Somali fired the pistol. The bullet would have impacted on the road close to Karym’s head, then ricocheted away, and the secondary sound was its impact into metal shutters. A world of silence fell around Karym. The guy still shouted but Karym heard nothing. The face confronting him was contorted, and he was hit with the pistol across the face, but he did not hear what was shouted at him. Spittle frothed at the Somali’s mouth as he yelled.
The sound that Karym could hear was faint, distant, but all his life in the La Castellane project he had known the sounds of police sirens. The Somali fired again, towards the noise. Very slightly, Karym moved his head and could see up the street and the cars and vans with blue lights blocking each direction. He held tight to his satchel, to his brother’s money.
The Margarethe pitched and rolled but made progress.
The captain called for a greater effort from his engineer, reminding him that he had a schedule to keep to. Far out in the Mediterranean sea the visibility was poor and there was a vicious wind from the south causing the Margarethe to buck among the white-capped waves. Would the engine take the strain of the speed needed? The engineer was not a man who committed himself lightly. Watching his pounding machine, clinging to a handrail, he gave an answer that he reckoned was unwise, but which was welcome.
‘It will be all right. We will be there. Off that coastline west of Marseille. It is not a problem, but it will be a rough ride.’
And spat on the deck, and did not know what was so important in a general cargo that an exact timetable must be met . . . had an idea that contraband would figure in any answer. And it would be good to reach, after the earlier rendezvous in darkness, the harbour of the city, where they were to due spend 36 hours – where there was a good cat-house, Scandinavian kids and clean, near the market and off the Canebière – and then they would sail for Cadiz . . . but the only tight time reckoning was for the following night. Two of the crew were vomiting, would be useless if they came to sail the Biscay. It was good to carry contraband because then bonuses were paid.
They were alone, no other ships’ lights in sight, when the captain turned them to the north where the weather would be more challenging, but give them the most direct route to the French coast.
August 1982
‘Is this crap one fit for purpose, Shlom?’
‘We were asked for five hundred, and that’s what you’re getting.’
One was from the junior ranks of the Mossad, Shlomo, and the other was from the Agency, Dean. The Israeli and the American were in a hangar of the air force base that was located far out in the sand and at the back end of nowhere, south of Beersheba. Together they were loading wooden crates with Kalashnikov rifles, with empty magazines and filled ammunition boxes. Their work constituted an act of foreign policy and one seen to benefit the governments of both nations. Their supply would tweak the nose of a familiar adversary, a more appropriate analogy might be the lighting of a firework under the ample arse of the Soviet Union. The Israelis were the suppliers, and the weapons had come the previous evening from Defence Force reserve stocks, and the Americans were the purchasers, generous, and
they were headed for distant Afghanistan, where a mujahideen force was in full-scale combat with the military power deployed by Moscow. The American queried one in particular.
‘Looks like it came out of the Ark.’
‘We fell back on some creative accounting, but it was test fired.’
‘You saying it’ll work, do the business?’
‘Not pretty – but it performed. It works and it’ll kill.’
The great majority of them might never have been used in any life and death fight, might have been chucked away or dropped in the sand as troops, short of food and desperate for water, retreated only to find they faced the barrier of the Suez Canal and had not the kit to cross it. White flags had been hoisted. Most had not a mark on them. One was different, the equivalent, the American thought, of a well-used spade from his parents’ garden shed. He imagined they’d have been short of the contracted numbers and had scoured the store for the last few, rubbish, but still able to shoot. And they were required to make a full inventory of the goods.
‘What number we got for it? Do you understand why I need to have the serials of each one of these? I mean what crazy mother said we had to list the numbers?’
Battle Sight Zero Page 23
