The other hard bit, potentially, was what Phil and Norm had endured; suspicion, and violence chucked at them. But Andy Knight was clear of that. The life and death moment was sidestepped. He slept deep. Had he dreamed, which he did not, it would only have been as a witness of the final curtain being drawn. If he were there to see, then he’d be hunkered down in the back of a police wagon and would have a vantage-point through a smoked glass window. It would be messy if it were done at the university, inside the Hall of Residence or on campus or in the Students’ Union, and they were more likely to have chosen her home, Savile Town. Not necessary to break down the door, just a ring of the bell and a middle-aged man opening it and seeing a street filled with uniforms, some with firearms, and a bare word of politeness before they surged past him. She would be taken out fast, handcuffed, and then, after she had been driven away, the search team would arrive. She would not see him. It would be the intention to lift the whole nest of them, all of the cell, and to take back the weapon with the bug embedded into the cleaning kit hole in the stock. She would be in shock and whipped into a custody suite and the questions would come flying before she’d the wit to gaze up at the ceiling and break her silence to demand legal representation. He might see Pegs and Gough one last time, might not. He would slip into Prunella’s office and they’d offer him leave, indefinite, but expect to keep a hold on him . . . It would probably be for the last time, but he’d not share his future intentions with her. Was not for ever, was it? Not pensionable employment – fast burn-out with hefty premiums. Prunella would blow him a kiss when he went out through the door with his grip, all that he owned, what he had cleared from the Manchester bedsit, and he would take a train to anywhere or drive to anywhere. ‘Anywhere’ was a place where he was not known, had never worked. There would be a court case, but not for at least a year, water under the bridge by then, fast flowing.
It mattered where he slept, whether he slept with her. Mattered that the discipline of a serving officer stayed firm. Mattered where he was, her bed with her, or his bed and alone. A psychologist had talked to them once: had grinned, then prefaced his lecture – ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’ . . . ‘When you’re on the plot and you start getting close to one of the women there, and she close to you, don’t ever think it is about true romance, won’t be. It is need. You, for all your training, are vulnerable. So is she. It is a way of sharing the burden for both of you. You are both on the edge, nerves frayed to breaking point . . . not love, just something animal. If you can avoid it, then all well and good; if you can’t, then don’t think any the less of yourself. It’ll be, given certain circumstances, difficult to avoid . . .’ And he’d shrugged like there was nothing more to say.
But the hard part of it was done, dusted, and the sleep was good and he felt safe: should have realised that was dangerous at worst, foolhardy at best. Stress leeched out of him and the traffic on the Highway to the Sun swept past the service station, and the sun would be high before he woke, went for a wash, took breakfast, hit the road to where they would meet.
Zeinab was awake.
The New Zealand boy had slept, his head had lolled against her shoulder and his first snore had erupted, and she had kicked his ankle – not as hard as when her toecap had hit the thief’s privates. Firmly enough for him to grunt and flail with an arm, and take a moment to realise where he was. He had the grace to apologise. She did not have another opportunity to sleep because the boy had called his mother. His mother was on the South Island of New Zealand. He told her where he was, where he had been for the last two days; said that she should not worry about him, that Paris was well protected and those goddamn terrorists were kept far away from the main tourist haunts. He was fine, he was safe. They talked a quarter of an hour and he seemed interested in the rest of his family.
Did she want chewing gum? She did not.
Then called his father; his father was somewhere else but also on South Island. She had no option but listen. She did not sleep.
‘What, Dad? The terrorists . . . No, I’ve had no scares. They have troops and police out, all the public places are guarded, and Germany, I feel very secure . . . was talking to a guy yesterday, French. You want to know what he said? He said they need decapitating, the terrorists do. He said they were vermin – that’s the terrorists – they had different governments in the past, but now they’ve toughened up. And, Dad, you there, Dad? . . . In Germany they reckon they’ve too many migrants, don’t know who they are, and everything had gotten too liberal. Should be stamped on . . . Lyon, Dad, that’s where I am going. Good to speak, Dad . . . The baby is okay? You are a bit of an old goat, Dad, don’t mind me saying it. Yes, I’m safe, I’m good. They say, Dad, you can smell these people, the terrorists, and see it in their eyes, animal eyes, sort of dead eyes: I met a sociology guy in Berlin. He said that. Oh, Mum sounded good. This guy, Berlin, he said they can’t hide. What? You have to go? . . . Night, Dad.’
She might sleep after Lyon, his destination, if her anger allowed it.
Light reflected off an opening window. A street-light caught the angle of the glass on a first floor and almost opposite, across the street, from the overturned scooter and the two intertwined bodies underneath it.
Pegs saw the moment the light hit.
She had been alongside police professionals all her working life. She was also, irrelevant to a woman of 47 years, a disappointment to her parents who had chucked money at her education – wasted. She had arrived in the secretive offices off Wyvill Road by chance: a ’flu virus rampant and desk staff dropping like sprayed flies. An impression had been made, doors had opened, an offer of extended work had become a posting, and within a year she had moved quietly, discreetly, into both Gough’s office and his life, had turned her back on Hackney, and a civilian job collating burglaries, knifings. The position was not abused and she had become fiercely loyal, would stay with him until he dropped, was axed, or retired. She had perception, wheelbarrow loads of it – what she called ‘simple bloody common sense’ – and was blessed with a good eye.
It was the third window onto which light from the street lamp had bounced.
All the time that the boy under the scooter had yelled increasingly dire threats, she had watched the movements of the officer they called Samson. There had been one in London, as she remembered – right place at the right time, or the opposite – who had notched up more kills than any other. It would be interesting to see his work at close hand, had no doubt in her mind that was how it would end. The man had eased down the street and had kept his rifle against his leg so that it would not be obvious, had tried shop doors and found them locked but then had come to a darkened alley between two buildings, barely wide enough for his shoulders, and had disappeared into it. She had seen the first window nudged open, then closed and presumed the alignment could be bettered, and then the second window. The third had opened, left ajar.
Because of her good vision – Gough would not have noticed it and she had not yet alerted him – Pegs had seen the protruding tip of a rifle barrel.
The wound on the leg, where the broken bone had split the skin, would have hurt as bad as Pegs could imagine. She had been through childbirth once, had not enjoyed it nor thought the end product worth the effort, and she had suffered a broken nose – straightened skilfully in Casualty – when mugged in east London, but had not known the sort of pain the kid suffered. He would be irrational, unpredictable, and several times she saw the pistol jerked so hard into the hostage’s neck that the head was tripped sideways . . . it would be a matter of judgement. She liked that, the thought of a decision being taken. Where she worked, a pace behind her mentor, Gough, decisions had to be made on the hoof, not with a committee to refer back to . . . A decision would be made here, perhaps already had been. Time to stir Gough? Probably. Away to her right, she could see the Major intent and listening on his phone. She nudged Gough. She did not point, did nothing to attract attention, just spoke quietly in Gough’s ear and he nodded when he’d se
en the rifle at the slightly opened window.
Gough said, a whisper, ‘You wouldn’t envy him. The bad boy shoots first, and who cares about him being taken down a second later. The operation fails. The marksman shoots and the bullet does the necessary damage to the bad boy and then hits a hunk of bone and is diverted into the good boy’s upper chest. It fails. He cannot be told what is the right time has to make his own judgement, is alone . . . I am thinking, Pegs, of our own man, and we don’t share the weight of his burden, cannot: he is equally alone.’
There was another shout, and the voice was hoarse, like it came from deep in the throat, way into the chest, and the pain must have climbed. She told Gough that it seemed like an end-game. That he’d shoot his prisoner and it would be the same as a suicide. No overdose and no rope slung over a garage roof beam, but a cop doing the job.
‘It has to be now,’ Pegs said. Has to be . . .’
The shot, breaking the screaming insults of the bad boy, cut her off. The report made less noise than she’d have imagined. She looked, not at the target, but at the window. The barrel tip was motionless and protruded no more than a foot from the sill. No emotion, no stress.
And the hit? Hard to tell. The scooter had shifted, was lifted higher. Pegs saw what should have been the head of the target but only half of it and was confused and her hand came up to her mouth. The second head, which had been underneath, was clear to her, and blood spattered, laced with brain tissue. She felt the vomit rising in her throat. She was supposed to be the hard woman, no tears and no fuss, and no visits to the shrinks – and the sight of an agent pulled from a canal, too young and too fresh and too eager to survive, but shoved into harm’s way because it had seemed important, had not turned her stomach. There was a violent motion and one body was pushed and then heaved and it flopped aside.
It had been, she assessed, a dramatically good shot. With the rise of the vomit was a great gasp in her throat. She swallowed. Death handed down. Quick and clinical, like an executioner would have done it. One down and one standing. She did not know his name, his significance if any. A feeble young guy and blood loose on his face, and his clothing messed with it. The street was silent, the shouting over.
He moved like a rat. A satchel bounced on his hip. He was bent low, squirming, and had his hands on the scooter and pulled it up. It was a cheap scooter, an old one, what a teenager would have owned while dreaming of something better, faster, something with style. He had been prone on the tarmac for a long time, had moved hardly at all, had had the weight of the other boy on top of him, and the scooter’s, and now he went fast – and had had a pistol pushed against his neck. Showed no sign of an ordeal – Pegs thought him a street fighter, and marvelled.
The scooter was upright. A leg went over the saddle bar. The key was still in the ignition slot. A twist of it, a wrench on the handle. And again, and . . . The engine coughed, spat out fumes. A body with only half a head was left behind. The scooter charged the police line and the satchel was thrown back to the extent of the strap, like hair in the wind . . . How should it have been? Should have been police with guns going forward and waving the medics to follow them, and then a priest, and afterwards the whole paraphernalia of care consuming the boy who had been a hostage and close to death and unable to intervene for his own life. The boy should have been wrapped in blankets or in tin foil as if he were a disaster victim and in shock and nurses close and a doctor working on him.
He drove towards the police line and guns were raised but not fired. An opening appeared – a Red Sea moment. He was not stopped and was accelerating into the gap. She supposed a juvenile rat would have fled as fast if it had been freed from the claws of a household cat. The scooter engine was not tuned and the carburettor was in need of cleaning out, and its noise was raucous. It disappeared from her sight. Not like anything she had experienced. All that was left in the street were a pair of feet in trainers and they stuck out under a strip of canvas that now covered the body. The police protected the immediate scene but the road was opening and the first cars were coming through slowly. She knew her motorcycles, they’d been her former husband’s delight and fantasy, and when she had tried to please – not often – she had brought home a magazine for fanatics. The rumble of sound was from a Ducati Monster with a helmeted rider who had his visor down.
‘What are you thinking?’ Gough asked her.
‘That I’d expected this would be all marinas and five-star dossers, a place for tacky celebs . . . and maybe we’ve had a better view of where we are.’
‘I think so.’
The Major walked towards them.
The body was carried past. Cigarettes were lit. They seemed to him to be as cold and as hungry and as out of place as refugees.
The Major said, ‘It was interesting, no more. A criminal steals from a criminal. The profits from narcotics trafficking are being taken to a bank – I do not know which one – or where. Another group from another area, had lost the money it needed to pay for a shipment already received, they have to steal, find a ready source of cash. I thought it would be interesting for you to see the city into which you plan to plant your Undercover . . . not always a pretty place.’
It was late and he wanted to be home; Simone would have a meal for him to be heated in a microwave, and the children would be asleep, but he would not be returning to the apartment on the Rue d’Orient tonight because the paperwork would not wait until the morning.
‘You believe that a new route for the movement of firearms is planned by a terror group in your country. Very possible. So, firearms come into Marseille; they are not brought here by UK nationals, but by local entrepreneurs, gangsters, those beyond the law. They are not legitimate business people involved in simple import/export, they are not spinster aunts who dabble in something of this and something of that, they are not bankers who see an investment turning out a satisfactory profit . . . They are thugs. They know the market-place and where we are vulnerable, how to move around us. Criminal thugs have risen to eminence through violence. No other way to measure them. The higher they have risen, the greater their realisation that violence, its certainty, should determine their actions.’
Within his first six months in Marseille, men had sidled up to him: lawyers, accountants, guys from the Chamber of Commerce, local government officials, had talked in soft voices of the advantageous of mutual cooperation. Coldly, sternly, politely, he had declined the ‘advantages’ they offered.
‘This is a dangerous city. If you manoeuvre an agent that you employ on to these streets, close to the sources of violence, you take a great chance. A chance with your agent’s wellbeing . . . but, that will have been evaluated. Of course.’
Most weeks he did the equivalent job of sweeping up the detritus left on the north of the city: bodies carbonised in cars, corpses slumped in cafés with multiple Kalashnikov bullet wounds, cadavers abandoned in the hills above the projects. Few palliatives to the frustration, and few arrests.
‘We are stretched very thin. We are under-resourced. You breeze into our city and require a team from the “intervention force” and want them to sit on their backsides and wait around, and be ready to help your agent, and then another team, then another. Three shifts . . . I regret that it cannot be done. You have the right to go to my superiors and request that I am bypassed, and the likelihood is that you would be escorted to the airport. You could contact the Ministry in Paris and they would request a written communication as to your aims, and perhaps you will receive a suggestion that you come back in a couple of months or three.’
He had one weakness, and knew it. His wife would be in bed having prepared his dinner and would have made sure there was a beer in the fridge, and his children would have wanted to talk to him about football or dancing or . . . No other officer from L’Évêché had been invited to his home, had met his family. It was a small measure of security, about all he could do. It was his heel, where he was vulnerable, and he knew it.
‘You were fortu
nate to have contacted me. This is a dangerous city, it is also a corrupt city. There are officers, investigators, who have sold out, and it would be advantageous for any of them to pass your names, your hotels, your mission – what you call Rag and Bone – to interested parties. Myself, I trust very few – Samson, yes, I trust him, would give him my life for safe keeping. Not others.’
He hoped they would appreciate his frankness. Their bags were still in the wagon they had travelled in. He would have the couple dropped at their hotel, then return to work.
‘I give you my mobile. You ring that number. Wherever I am, it is with me. We will come. We will be there as quickly as is possible . . . I do not know what you expected, but you should not have travelled here and should not have permitted your man to journey, naked, to Marseille. For one rifle, for a handful of rifles, a trifle. You should withdraw him . . . My phone is the best I can do.’
‘You all right?’
Battle Sight Zero Page 25
