by Blake Banner
“You’re preaching to the choir, Lacklan. I know they exist.”
“All I am doing, like that RAF pilot, is fighting them in the only way I know how. You and Gibbons said my way was wrong. I should talk and reason and negotiate; but while you tried to do that, they grew in power until they were ready to plant a nuclear device at the United Nations, wipe out half of New York and slaughter a quarter of a million people. But now, because of those methods you disapproved of so much, New York is whole, those people did not die and Omega is almost finished. They are broken.” I sighed and shook my head. “You label me a killer, Marni, but maybe you should think also about all the lives I’ve saved by killing these bastards and destroying their organization.”
I put my bottle down on the lamp table. “I’m sorry, Marni, I am wasting your time. This was a mistake. I’ll see you around.”
I had gotten to the door when she said, “Lacklan, wait.” I turned with my hand on the handle. “Please come back and finish your beer. Don’t overreact. You want us to trust each other, so you should allow me to express my feelings, not just my opinions. They are not always the same, you know.”
I walked back and sat on the arm of the sofa, looking at her. She met my gaze and went on.
“I know you hate what you do. I know it troubles you and it haunts you, and I know you left the SAS because you were tired of killing. So if you are conflicted about what you do, can’t I be? For me, it isn’t just the killing. If it were some anonymous entity killing these people, maybe I’d feel better about it. But it isn’t. It’s the man I love. We both knew it, Lacklan, from the time we were twelve, fourteen: it was us, contra mundum, you and me. And to think of you doing this stuff…” She shook her head. “It breaks my heart.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“Maybe we should talk more.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Well, that was kind of what I was suggesting, if you recall.”
She gave a snort that might have been a snigger. “Yeah, I guess it was, huh?”
I became serious. “When they are gone, then people like you and Cyndi McFarlane can talk your asses off, negotiate till you’re blue in the face and find the way to make the world a better place. But before that, Omega has to be destroyed completely.”
She wouldn’t look at me. She just gazed out the window, with the sunlight on her face. “I know,” she said at last. “I just wish it didn’t have to be you.”
“Yeah, well, on that at least, we can agree.”
Now she looked at me. “I know. I know you feel the same.”
She rose from her chair and came and sat on the sofa. I slid off the arm and dropped beside her, then put my arm across her shoulders and pulled her to me. “Do you ever think about going back to Weston?”
She slipped her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. “Sometimes I miss it. I remember playing in the woods with you, and our holidays in Colorado. Lately, I have found it hard to imagine going back, but I do miss it.” She looked up at me. “And I love it here too.”
“My mother lives near here.”
“I know. I’ve visited her a few times.”
My eyebrows told her I was surprised. “You have?”
“She asks after you. She says she gave up writing to you.”
I stroked her cheek with the backs of my fingers. “Yeah. It’s a long way back.”
“What do you mean?”
“From where I am, to normality, to writing to your mom and visiting her, to visiting a country to see the architecture and the museums, or as she would say, the musea, and try the local cuisine, rather than toppling a regime or assassinating a drug lord. It’s a long way back.”
“Is it a journey you want to make, Lacklan?”
“You know it is, but I want to make it for a reason. Kenny and Rosalia are my family and I love them. But that house is so big and empty, and it still reeks of his pipe and his cigars, and the rooms still echo with his humiliating put-downs and insults. I need somebody to make the journey for. Otherwise…”
I left the words hanging and gazed out at the beautiful façade opposite.
“Otherwise what?”
“Otherwise I will probably follow Jim Redbeard and Njal, and my greatest ambition will be to fall in battle and get taken up to Valhalla by a Valkyrie, to spend the rest of eternity wenching, boozing and brawling.”
“Wow, can I come?”
“No. You’d probably fall for one-eyed Odin and bear his children, and then I’d have to fight him too.”
“Silly Lacklan.”
“Will you be there, to help me come back?”
She nodded.
“Even though you know I must finish the job I started?”
She nodded again.
We stayed like that, talking quietly together, remembering the past and wondering about the future, watching the light turn to burnished copper on the ancient walls across the road, as the sky moved from blue to pink. Then the air seemed somehow to shift and turn grainy, and the sound of the traffic took on a nocturnal quality as the room slipped into darkness, and neither of us rose to switch on the light. Shortly after that, I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the bedroom.
In the morning, I rose at six and went for a run. When I got back at seven, she was up, making coffee in the kitchen. I showered and dressed and joined her at the table. She looked a little shy and that made me smile.
“We talked a lot last night,” she said. “but it was all about feelings in the abstract. What did we actually conclude?”
I grunted a laugh. “Scientists! Always chasing facts…” I hesitated for a second, suddenly conflicted at having lied to her. “Let me do this job…” I held her eye a moment. “Marni, I…”
She shook her head. “Don’t tell me anything about it, Lacklan. I don’t want to know. Just come back alive and whole. And promise me this will be the last. And after that, you will leave this life behind.”
I thought about it for a long moment, then nodded. “All right. I promise you that. I’ll be away for a couple of weeks. When I get back, I’ll come and see you, and then we’ll talk in more concrete detail.”
She grinned. It was a happy sight, and nice to see. “OK,” she said. “I’ll be waiting.”
Twenty minutes later, I left and drove back south and east along the M40, toward London. There was somebody in East Acton I needed to see. It was a forty-five minute drive to his house on East Acton Lane, opposite the Alfayed Muslim School.
It was a classic, 1930s English semi-detached, with a front lawn and a big bow window. I parked my rental car in his driveway, blocking the exit for his TVR Cerbera, and rang on the bell. I hadn’t phoned ahead, but I’d sent him a message saying I’d be shipping out in a couple of days, and he knew that meant I’d be showing up sometime soon.
He opened the door and looked at me without expression. He hadn’t changed. He was short and wiry, his hair was grizzled and he had a mustache that would have looked more at home on the face of a Mongolian barbarian of the fourteenth century. When he spoke, the accent was Edinburgh: Scottish, but intelligible to the rest of the English speaking world.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” he said. “By the looks of ye, you’ll be needing a cup of tea.”
“Hello, Ian. It’s good to see you too.”
“I never said it was good to see you. What have they been doing to you over in Wyoming? You look a mess. Come on in.”
I stepped in and he closed the door, then slapped my shoulder with a hand like a girder. “How’ve you been, Lacklan? I heard you were fixin’ fuckin’ cars or some shit like that.”
He led me past a living room and a dining room to a kitchen at the back of the house with a view of a large backyard with a lawn and a couple of vegetable patches.
“Tea or coffee?”
“Coffee. You settled down, huh?”
He grinned. “In a manner of speaking.”
“You left the Regiment…”
&nb
sp; He made a noise like sandpaper on petrified nicotine, which was his way of laughing. “In a manner of speaking. I keep my hand in, unofficially. Know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean.”
We were quiet while he spooned coffee into a percolator. “You see any of the lads?”
“Bat’s over in the States.”
“I heard. So what do you need?”
“I’m going to South Africa.”
He put the percolator on the heat and pointed to a pine chair at a pine table. “Sit doon. You’re not a fuckin’ tree.” I sat and he sat opposite. “You fixed for hardware?”
I nodded. “But I’m not sure about the route back.”
He frowned at me like I’d spoken to him in classical Greek. “You’re goin’ in with no extraction plan? Tha’s nuts.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.”
“I’m not followin’ you, pal. How can I fix you up with an extraction?”
“You can’t. And we’re not without an extraction plan, I just don’t much like the plan we have, so I’d like a plan B. Have we got any friends in Central Africa?”
“Guys?” He thought a moment, then nodded. “Aye, Billy. You remember Billy Beauchamp? Posh lad, Eton, dropped oot of Oxford, joined the Regiment. Nice lad, real gent.”
“I remember him. He’s in Africa now?”
“Aye, he got a job with the government, if you know what I mean. He’s lookin’ after some of Her Majesty’s interests in Cameroon. You want me to get a message to him?”
I nodded. “We may have to pay him a visit on the way home.”
“Who’s we?”
“A pal. A good man.”
“One of the guys?”
I shook my head. “No, but close enough.”
“Can he be trusted, Lacklan?”
“I owe him my life several times over.”
He made a face. “Good enough for me.”
The coffee pot started to gurgle. He stood and made for the door, pointing at the pot. “Help yerself. There’s some real whiskey in the cupboard, not that Irish muck you drink, real Scotch. I’ll be back in a mo’.”
I poured the coffee and laced it with Scotch, then stood at the back door, looking out at the lawn and the sycamore tree that shielded the backyard from the road at the back.
He returned five minutes later, as I was placing the empty cup in the sink. He picked up the pot and poured himself a cup.
“That’s OK,” he said. “He’s given me a number for you to call if you’re in trouble. He’ll see you OK. But there’s a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I talked to Fido…”
“Major Crawley?”
Major Reginal ‘Mad Dog’ Crawley was affectionately known to the men as Fido. Ian nodded. “Aye.”
“Why?”
“Because even though you’re a Yankee bastard, you’re a pal and I’d rather you didn’t get killed. Your name has popped up on the bush telegraph a few times lately, and I thought I’d ask the major if he had any intel that might be useful to you. Seems Sgt. Bradley has been trying to get a hold of you in Wyoming, but nobody’s had sight nor sound of you in a couple of years back there. What have you been up to?”
“Why was he looking for me?”
“Word is, there’s a contract out on you. There’s a price on your head, me old mucker.”
FOUR
I sighed and rubbed my face.
“I knew that.”
“I thought you might. The contract originates in South Africa. I figured that’s why you were going.”
I nodded. “Did he know anything else?”
“Nothing solid, but word is the contract was awarded to a couple of independent operatives. It’s not an in-house job, so no clue as to who issued it…”
“I know who issued it. Who are the operatives?”
“Two South African guys, late of the Recces. One of them is in London at the moment, name of Bandile Bhebhe. No idea where his partner is…”
“His partner was Captain Mark Philips, and he is now feeding the pines in a New England forest.”
He grinned and chuckled. “You always were a fuckin’ psycho. I have no idea where this feller is right now. Chances are he’s parked outside in an unremarkable car, watching you. My guess is that his job is to stop you from getting to South Africa, so if you’re going to do anything about it, you’d best act fast.”
I nodded. “Thanks, Ian. I owe you.”
“Nay worries, lad. I’ll just add it to your tab.”
Fifteen minutes later, I stepped out into his front yard and made my way to my car. I spotted my tail parked on the other side of the road, fifty yards down the hill. I was mad at myself for not having spotted him earlier, but I figured that, like his pal, Captain Philips, he might have been tracking my GPS.
I got into the car and drove up the hill to the roundabout and there took the first exit into Bromyard Avenue. I knew that further down, close to the Acton Vale, there was a Virgin gym on the right with a parking lot. The parking lot was flanked by evergreen hedges that largely concealed it from the road, and at that time of the morning, just after ten, I figured the place would be largely empty.
When I got there, I pulled into the lot and found a spot tight by the hedge, killed the engine and waited. He followed about two minutes later and parked a few spaces away from me. I kept my head down, like I was reading something, opened my Swiss Army knife and waited for him to kill his engine. Then I got out and made like I was walking toward the doors of the gym, but at the last moment I stopped, turned and made for his car, smiling at him through the windshield. I knocked on his window and it slid down.
He was big, with a neck like a tree trunk and a skull like a boulder. His eyes were small and unfriendly. I leaned down, smiling, like I was going to ask him a favor as a fellow gym-user, and smashed my fist into the side of his chin. I heard his jaw crack under his ear and saw his small eyes glaze with pain.
I didn’t pause. He had his right shoulder to me, so I leaned in, pushed his forehead back with my left hand and, with my right, slipped the blade of the army knife down behind his left collar bone. He gave a small gasp and went into spasm, making a ‘dzzz’ sound, kicking his feet and drooling through his teeth. I yanked the blade left to right a couple of times, gave him a second for the spasm to pass and removed the blade. I had severed his carotid artery and his jugular and he had bled out in a couple of seconds, but all the bleeding was internal. There was no mess.
I wiped the blade on his pants, returned to my car and left the lot. I drove back up Bromyard Avenue and joined the A40 at East Acton, headed for Gatwick via the M40 and the M23, to catch my flight to Malaga.
Pretty soon, I had left London behind and I was among green hills and abundant hedgerows that threaded through the fields in a lush patchwork of oak, holly and ash. As I drove, I felt ill at ease in my own skin. Thinking back to Marni in Oxford, I didn’t like what I had done. I hadn’t liked lying to her the first time, back when we’d made the hit on Timmerman[1], but this time had been uglier. Any fool could have seen that she was sincere and she believed in me. But the lie had been necessary, necessary to ensure that Njal and I were safe. I didn’t know how close she still was with Gibbons, or how many mutual friends they had who might be in bed with Omega. A small slip of the tongue could cost me or Njal our lives. My gut told me to trust her—my brain told me to keep that base covered, just in case.
But I was also aware I’d had another, deeper motive. I wasn’t only covering my back and Njal’s, I was testing her. What I wasn’t sure about was why. Was it because deep down I suspected her? Or was it that I wanted to prove to myself conclusively, for once and for all, that my faith in her, back in the day, had been well founded?
I asked myself the questions, but I didn’t know what the answers were.
I dropped off my rental car in the parking garage and made my way through the teeming masses at the airport, through passport control and along endles
s clinical passages of tiles and glass, to gate C sixty-three, where they were preparing to board. As I arrived, my cell phone rang. The screen told me it was Bat Hays.
“Bat, everything OK?”
His rich, cockney baritone came back at me: “Yeah, yes, sir. You all right?”
“I’m good.”
“Look, um, this a bad time?”
“I’m about to board a plane. We have a couple of minutes. What’s the problem?”
“Did you get the papers? We got them this morning.”
“What papers, Bat?” But even as I was asking the question, I knew what the answer was.
“The divorce, sir. The decree, it’s final.”
“Oh.” Me and Abi, we were divorced now. Our marriage was over. I said, “OK, I…” I foundered for a moment. “I haven’t been at home…”
“Thing is, sir…”
“Don’t call me sir, Bat. We’re not in the Regiment anymore. We’re friends.”
The silence was a little too long. “Yeah, that’s the thing. Me and Abi, we’ve got pretty close. She’s a wonderful woman.”
“No argument from me.”
“Thing is, sir… Lacklan… we’re thinkin’ of gettin’ married.”
The line was beginning to move through the gate. I went to speak, but nothing came out of my mouth. He went on.
“I was wonderin’, I know it’s a lot to ask, would you give us your blessin’ sir, and maybe be my best man?”
I found my voice, taking a breath to steady it. “I can’t think of a better woman for you, Bat, or a better man for her. I’d be honored. I’ll call you when I get back.”
“That means a lot to me, sir.”
I hung up and headed for the desk.
* * *
The only convertible I could rent at Malaga airport was a Mini. To my mind, a Mini is a girl’s car, but the drive from Malaga to Cadiz was two and a half hours, and I figured if I was driving for two and a half hours along the Mediterranean coast, at 120F, it might as well be in a convertible, even if it was a Mini.
