by Rob Aspinall
I had to decide.
And fast.
27
Baggage
Bang!
As Philippe turned his back, I was up out of my seat. I hauled my case from the overhead locker, left the Duty Free behind and ran awkwardly to the front of the plane, case in arms, bashing prone knees and elbows as I went, slipping sideways past a couple of standing passengers. A blonde cabin crew lady already had a hand on the door. She heaved it halfway closed but stopped when she saw me coming.
“Out of the way!” I shouted.
The blonde lady yelled back for me to stop and grabbed at me on my way out. The corridor that connected to the door of the plane was being detached. I leapt over the foot-wide gap and into the tunnel. A sharp right took me back up the ramp in the direction of the boarding gate, feet pounding over the thin grey carpet, traveller case wheels rumbling loud behind me. As I approached the gate, I noticed they’d shut the door. A pair of airline reps peered through the glass. One on a radio. Damn! They must have called it in. Security would be on their way. I slammed on the brakes as something to my right caught my eye. I back-pedalled and saw the corridor branching off into an emergency exit door. I ran straight for it, pushing down on the release bar and setting off a whooping alarm.
As I broke through the door, I was expecting something on the other side. A set of makeshift steps. A ladder. Anything. All I got was fresh air and tarmac. I swung outwards over a fifteen-foot drop to the ground, clinging on to the door with my free hand. I just about hauled my own weight back in, heels teetering on the lip of the doorway.
I heard feet and voices converging both ways behind me. I was trapped. Idiot! What have you done, Lorn?
Airline reps, cabin crew and security appeared in the tunnel behind me. They shouted over the alarm to close the door and step inside. I leaned back out again, wondering if I could make the jump down. Oh, onto the tarmac? Come on. Then I got lucky. A white buggy towing a chain of full luggage cages was headed my way. As the airline personnel surged towards me, I picked up my case and held it close to my chest, then jumped.
I hoped I’d timed it right.
For one, perilous moment, I thought I’d got it wrong.
I began to fall. The tarmac rushing towards me.
But the buggy zipped by beneath me, an electric whirr-blur of multicoloured baggage. I bounced off my own case and almost off the edge, but clung on, seizing hold of a leather suitcase handle sticking out of the pile. I rolled back upright, a few luggage carriages from the front of the train, squatting down and looking over my shoulder, watching the airline staff watching me, open mouthed. The luggage train sped away from the plane, fast enough for the wind to ruffle a strand of hair loose above my ear. The smell of jet fuel was sweet, the whoosh of a rising jumbo exhilarating.
The buggy driver didn’t stop, blissfully unaware. People waiting for their departures, on the other hand, gathered and pointed at me from inside the window. As I zoomed by below, I looked up and saw a little girl’s face pressed to the glass, nose flattened like a pig. The buggy arced around the end of the departures terminal and stopped.
I laid low. As the baggage handlers began unloading from the front, I slipped off quietly onto the tarmac, yanking my case off with me. I moved around to the other side of the luggage train and hid. The men were tossing the bags fast onto a conveyor belt, like there was a medal and a cash prize for the winner. The conveyor belt rose upwards and through a hatch covered by black rubber flaps.
I picked my moment and went for it, running into the open as fast as the case would wheel behind me. The baggage handlers were totally clueless, moving onto the next cage along the train. I lifted my case onto the conveyor belt and jumped on with it. I clambered up the rise, stepping over and around luggage. Pink. Blue. Brown. Green. Patterned. You name it, people had it. As I got to the hatch, I crouched into a ball, behind my case. I heard one of the men shouting at me to get off, but I ignored him and rode the belt through the hatch. A face full of smelly rubber flaps later, I came out the other side in arrivals, the belt weaving its way round a packed baggage-claim area, noise rippling through the crowds as they wondered how the hell this lunatic in the black dress had found her way onto the carousel. A loud buzzer went off and the conveyor belt stopped, but I was already hopping off onto the hard, shiny floor of the terminal, dragging my case with me. A middle-aged guy offered a hand to help me off.
“Grazie,” I said, flattening my dress.
I hurried across the terminal to the main exit, breezed on through NOTHING TO DECLARE and out to a long line of taxis, all cream Mercedes-Benz saloons. I headed to the one at the front of the queue and gave my case to the driver, a balding, Turkish-looking man in a pink polo shirt, who’d clearly had one too many strudels. He stubbed out the end of his cigarette and put the case in the boot while I got in the back.
“Berlin, bitte,” I said, as he climbed in behind the wheel.
“Ein Hotel?”
“Nein. Berlin bitte. Danke.”
I didn’t know any hotel names and wasn’t about to ask for a recommendation. JPAC had spies everywhere. Either that or they could check the CCTV and see me get in the guy’s cab. Next minute, he’s being tortured and the door to my hotel room is being kicked in by a grab team. Or, even worse, a Type A.
No, my instincts told me it was better to get dropped off somewhere generic and densely populated.
As I caught my breath in the back of the taxi, I realised it wasn’t like me to think so clearly. Philippe’s super-spy know-how must have been embedding itself deeper into mine. Re-wiring my brain, as Dr Tariq had put it.
“Okay, Berlin it is,” the cab driver said, picking up on the fact that I wasn’t German and switching to fluent English.
A pair of blue-and-white Polizei cars came flashing past us as we pulled out of the bay. I turned to watch them through the rear windscreen of the cab. They stopped outside the terminal building.
“There’s been an incident here,” the taxi driver said.
“Really?” I asked, playing dumb in my mock Italian accent.
“Yes, they’re saying a young woman ran off her flight and jumped off one of the tunnels. You know? That connect to the planes.”
“She must really have wanted to get off that flight.”
“Crazy British,” he said, looking in his rear-view mirror with smiling eyes. “Probably drunk. Not civilised like us, eh? Where is your accent from?”
“Italy,” I said. “Milan.”
“Ah, fashion capital,” he said, as the taxi pulled out of the airport entrance and into a heavy flow of traffic on a busy expressway. “Are you here in Berlin on business or vacation?”
“Strictly business,” I said, relaxing into the soft, off-white leather seat, a little terrified, a little elated. Finally, I wasn’t just surviving. I was living. And I’d rather die on my own terms than live on someone else’s.
28
A Different Girl
I asked the cab driver to drop me off somewhere central.
“Don’t you know where your business meeting is?” he asked.
“I’ve got a while,” I said. “I want to look around first.”
“Then I’ll take you to Alexanderplatz,” he said. “You can start with the World Time Clock, seeing as you’re on international business.”
As the taxi driver swung his cab around and headed back to the airport, I looked out over Alexanderplatz. It was a huge square, packed with Christmas market-style stalls, beer tents and rows and rows of long wooden tables and benches. There was even a carousel fairground ride with fake horses and a windmill helter-skelter. Traditional Bavarian folk music played in the background. I think it was something they called Oktoberfest. It would provide some much-needed cover while I got my bearings.
I passed by the World Time Clock the cab driver had mentioned. It was a silver-grey drum-shaped sculpture with numbers circling around the middle and a wire sphere on top representing the solar system. It stood on top
of a pole around nine feet high and told you the time in cities around the world. I stopped beneath it, opened my case and pulled out a new coat. My new thigh-length cream mackintosh. It was still pretty mild in Berlin, but I thought it was a good idea to keep adjusting my clothing. I changed my hair slightly too, removing the silver clips and tying it up in a ponytail.
I wheeled my case through the busy stalls, looking for something to eat and drink. It had been a long time since Magda’s chicken stew. I didn’t go for strudel as the sight of it brought flashbacks to the night before. The betrayal. The torture. It left a bad taste in my mouth and a knot in the pit of my stomach. After weaving in and out of stall after stall, tent after tent, I plumped for a pretzel the size of my head. It was piping hot and nom. I took a seat on the empty end of a bench where two German couples in their forties were chugging on big jugs of beer, frothier than rabid Dobermans. I munched through the pretzel and scanned my surroundings.
A part of me wondered what the hell I was doing here. Was it just another Lorna Walker goose chase? I had a habit of getting in situations and then wondering what in J-Lo’s butt-cheeks I was doing. Like the time I was fourteen and I tried to dye my hair dark like Becki’s. I spent three weeks with bright-orange hair and got called Sunny D for an entire year.
Philippe was right. I didn’t even know what the hell I was here to stop, let alone whether I was up to the task.
I’d err on the side of fuck no, my inner devil said.
Maybe she was right, but all I could do was try.
Don’t limit yourself, inner devil said. You can fail spectacularly too.
I licked the sugar dusting off my lips and checked my watch. Pill-pop time. I lined up the packets and sunk my late lunch quota with a Coke from the pretzel stall. Then I took my iPad from my case and connected to a free Wi-Fi hotspot. The first protocol on JPAC’s list was scheduled for the following day, at the Reichstag. So it made sense to stay nearby. The Reichstag building was just under four kilometres across the city. I planned out my route across Berlin on Google Maps, dumped my rubbish in a bin and headed off across Alexanderplatz. It wasn’t long before I found a store selling souvenirs, including luggage and baseball caps. I picked up a cute pink rucksack and cap in the same colour that said I (HEART) BERLIN.
I walked over to the McDonald’s across the street and straight into the ladies toilets. I locked a cubicle door behind me, put my case on top of the toilet seat and zipped it open. I sifted through my clothes, messed up in a pile from the frantic airport escape. The skimpy stuff bought for Venezuela was out of the equation, but fortunately I’d been greedy enough to splash out more of Philippe’s money on an unnecessary outfit of Levi skinnies, some new white Converse and a blue-and-white striped jumper.
I quick-changed into the new clothes and transferred drugs, iPad, spare underwear and other essentials into my rucksack. I left the beachwear, dress and mackintosh piled on top of the zipped-up suitcase next to the sinks, with a toilet paper note scrawled in lipstick: Please take me home :)
Some lucky fräulein would hopefully bag the stuff in the case and wheel it away. I hauled the rucksack over both shoulders, tugged the new baseball cap low over my face, slipped out of the bathroom door and melted back into the crowded Alexanderplatz, a different girl.
Rather than get the bus, I decided to walk the forty or so minutes across the city. I had time to kill and it would help me get a feel for the place. I mean, apart from the London trip with Becki, this was just about the only sightseeing I’d ever done. I started beneath Alexanderplatz’s huge TV tower, a soaring column with a shiny silver ball two-thirds of the way up and a cloud-piercing spike on top. It stood out a mile over the skyline of the city. It was impossible to get a full snap of it on my phone, but if I needed to find my way back to Alexanderplatz again, it was one hell of a good pointer.
I made my way through the Berlin streets, keeping my head down under the cap and using my phone to navigate. I was heading for something called the Brandenburg Gate. I’d always thought cities must be pretty similar to one another. Once you’d seen one street full of shops and bars and honking traffic, you’d pretty much seen them all. But Stockholm had taught me otherwise. And Berlin even more so. While my hometown of Manchester was a bunched-up mess of buildings and alleyways with any free space gobbled up by stores, cafes and offices, here there were roads as wide as football fields and lots of open space, like they hadn’t realised there was some spare real estate going.
The city was pretty weird, actually. It was like someone had taken two different places from two different times and smashed them together. One, the modern, shiny Germany. The other, a grim-fest of old brown buildings from East Berlin. The GPS on my phone took me through the Mitte district, where swanky stores and restaurants rubbed shoulders with quirky cafes and shops, cool graffiti art on the walls and lots of outdoor seating where Berliners hung out, sipping coffee. The streets were buzzing with life, with big yellow street trams like the ones we had in Manchester. Good for me, because it meant more people and more cover.
Winding through the heart of the city was a large, snaking river. The Spree. I came off the streets and followed it towards a large glass dome in the distance. I was deviating from the journey mapped out for me by my phone, but it re-routed and told me I was still on track. With an early-autumn sun breaking through the clouds, the deep-blue water glimmered on the surface. Locals and tourists soaked up the sunshine by the waterside. Couples strolled hand in hand. Boats glided back and forth as the Spree curved gently round between tall, pristine white buildings. The glass dome in the distance twinkled on top of an old stone building with German flags flying on all four corners. I wondered if it was the Reichstag and what exactly JPAC had planned. Philippe had made those Black Flag Protocols on the list sound big. And scary. Would Berlin be the same again? Would lovers stroll hand in hand, people sip their coffee as usual, tourist boats meander along the river, Berliners chink their jugs of frothy beer at Oktoberfest?
I guess we’d find out.
29
The Exchange
The turn of the plane woke me up. The wing to my right tipped upwards as we came in for landing. The jungle was long gone. Plants and trees here were rugged, the grass short and brown, and the land flat.
We rumbled along a rough landing strip – a deserted military base with a couple of old, arching hangars at the end of the runway with the rusty shell of a fighter jet parked outside. Weeds squeezed out through the concrete, with nothing much for miles around. The faint red and blue markings on the wings of the old bomber suggested we were in Russia. I unbuckled and climbed out of my seat. In the cargo bay, the van and Hummer had dried out. Both were caked in crusty red African mud. The cargo ramp opened and made contact with the floor.
“Welcome to Russia,” Nathan said, stomping out onto the runway and sucking in the air. Clarence pushed a cuffed Mobutu down the ramp while I opened up the boot on the Hummer.
“It’s a bit nippy, General,” Nathan said, rubbing his hands.
“It’s freezing!” Mobutu said, shuddering, bare-footed, only his red silk kimono and matching boxers for warmth.
“You’ll get used to it,” Nathan said, lighting up a fag.
I opened the boot of the Hummer and stood clear, out of the way. Inge climbed in the back of the van and ran her hands over both track balls. A split screen of images flickered into life. The dog on top suddenly stood up straight and leapt out the back of the Hummer. The dog on the bottom did the same. They trotted around and sprang up into the van, the images on Inge’s monitor corresponding to the viewpoint of the dogs. They squatted down tight to the floor, nose to tail and powered down. As Inge drew the camouflage net over the dogs, I strode down the ramp on to the cracked, weedy tarmac. It was fog-breath cold outside. A breeze that got under your bones. The engines were left ticking over. I got the impression we weren’t stopping for long. Good.
I joined Nathan, Clarence and Mobutu in front of the plane, waiting for whatev
er it was we were waiting for.
“This is an outrage. An international incident,” Mobutu said. “The other generals will not stand for this.”
“Who do you think let us in to your country?” Nathan asked, pinging his cigarette onto the floor and grinding it into the runway with one of those horrific brown trainers he wore. “I’m afraid, General, you’ve upset some powerful people. Here are some of them now.”
A pair of dark Mercedes SUVs rode into view at the far end of the airfield. They came at us in a hurry and parked side by side. A Russian military general and his driver climbed out of one SUV, dressed in green fatigues and armed with a pistol at his hip. Three men got out of the other, all big guys with thick necks, chunky gold rings around their fingers and faces beaten into clumsy shapes with an ugly stick.
The Russian general was a short, thin man with mousy hair and a face that bunched up in the middle like he was permanently pursing his lips. He wore a smart green uniform with medals under a long black coat. He took off his large green and red cap. He stepped forward to greet Nathan. Not so much a greeting as an eyeballing. The thick-neck brigade stood square on to us, in long, dark coats ideal for concealing automatic weapons. One of them joined the Russian general at the front of the posse. He had a face like a rhino missing a horn.
“Mr Moore,” he said, “we meet again.”
“Hello, Nikolai. How’s the oil business?”
“Things could be better, you know,” Nikolai said. “Economy’s gone to shit … This is General Yurkovich.”
“Hello, General,” Nathan said in Russian.
Yurkovich half-smiled but didn’t speak. He stared straight past Nathan at Mobutu.
“Shall we proceed with the exchange?” asked Nikolai.
