Safe from Harm

by RJ Bailey

  ‘That’s why I like it. That’s why you resent it when everyday life comes calling. Although sometimes I’m glad it does.’ He indicated his wound and smiled. The Tower of Terror did its stuff in my stomach again. ‘Thanks for stopping. Another coffee?’

  ‘No, I’d best be going.’

  ‘OK. See you around?’ Somehow it sounded different than when he said it to Liz. More like a question.

  My phone beeped and I ignored it. ‘Sure.’

  I didn’t know then it would be a good few weeks before I saw him again, and when I did, it would be with news of Paul. Bad news.

  Right then, though, I climbed off the barge and began a slow jog. The steps felt awkward, because I could feel those steel-grey eyes drilling into my back. Except when I glanced over my shoulder, he’d disappeared. The phone made an impatient buzz again and I looked at the message. It was from Jess. ‘COME BACK AT ONCE. URGENT. THERE’S A STRANGE MAN.’

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘Can we keep it?’

  I ignored Jess and stared at the open case for a good two minutes before I spoke. I had spent a quarter of an hour checking it before I had lifted the lid. The contents struck both of us dumb. Until Jess asked that inevitable question.

  ‘Who was it delivered this?’ I asked Jess.

  ‘I told you, a man with a motorcycle helmet on. He said he couldn’t wait for you and handed it over. How much is it?’

  ‘Never you mind.’ But I’d been wondering that myself. Sitting on the countertop were piles of banknotes, a mixture of print-fresh twenties and fifties, all neatly packed in an aluminium flight case. I watched the gleam in Jess’s eyes and she reached over to grab a bundle of the notes. I gently slapped her hand away as her fingers brushed the top note. ‘Don’t touch it. And wash your hands.’

  I pulled the small envelope that was nestling between two of the bundles and opened it. Inside was a larger version of a business card, bearing a single letter in a fancy gold font. ‘A’. Well, that suggested one person. Asparov. But wasn’t he out of the country?

  I picked up the phone and dialled.

  ‘Can we keep it?’ repeated Jess.

  I shook my head. ‘Ben? It’s me.’

  Before I could say anything else he told me about his computer system being hacked. He was beside himself with rage, as he should be. His type of clients don’t like their private details being stolen.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ he said, ‘I’ve got the cyber-security guys here installing some new and very expensive defences. I reckon this is down to you upsetting those fucking Russians.’

  I’d given him the full story of Bojan’s little games when I had got home the previous day. He wasn’t quite as outraged as I had hoped. He was now, though.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve had a little present today from them. The Russians.’ I fingered the card once more, running a thumb over the raised letter. ‘Well, Asparov, anyway.’

  ‘What kind of present? Ah, they didn’t shit on your carpet, did they?’

  ‘I don’t have any carpets. No, someone delivered around eight thousand pounds. Maybe more.’

  There was a silence on the line.

  ‘Ben?’

  ‘That’s weird. You sure it was Asparov?’

  ‘Pretty much. Listen, I need new security too. Can you ping me across the number of someone who can fit an Alpha-spec door and locks?’ An ‘Alpha’ spec is based on an MI6 protocol for safe houses. Basically you need a battering ram to get in. Or the right keys.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Too many people know where I live.’ Too many Russians for one.

  ‘OK. I’ll send a list across. Let me know how you get on with the Sharifs. Hopefully you won’t have to go six rounds with them.’

  ‘That a joke?’

  ‘Best I can manage right now.’

  I hung up and redialled the number I had been given for the Asparovs. The clipped tones told me it was the butler who had picked up.

  ‘Can I speak to Mr Asparov?’

  ‘I am afraid Mr Asparov is in Moscow.’

  ‘Odd, because I just got a delivery from him.’

  ‘Ah. I see. I think it was by way of recompense.’

  ‘Recompense?’ I asked. ‘Look, can you send someone back to pick it up?’

  I felt him shudder at the other end of the line at the suggestion. ‘I couldn’t possibly do that. It would be against Mr Asparov’s express wishes.’

  ‘And what if I were to dump it in the canal?’

  ‘I fear it is yours to do with as you will.’ He couldn’t have sounded stiffer if he’d been doused with spray starch.

  ‘Can you stop talking like that?’

  ‘Like what?’

  Like you have Sir John Gielgud up your back passage I wanted to say, but let it pass. ‘When will Mr Asparov be back in the country?’

  ‘Not for some time.’

  ‘Then I’ll wait and return it personally.’

  ‘He will not be pleased.’

  ‘I’m not exactly thrilled myself, friend.’

  I broke the connection and fetched a carrier bag from the drawer and the latex-free gloves from my RTG holdall.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Jess.

  ‘Putting this somewhere safe. Where we can’t touch it.’

  She stuck out her lower lip. ‘But why?’

  I put on the gloves and shovelled the stacks into the brown bag. The flight case was too bulky to fit in my safe, but I reckoned I could squash the notes in. ‘Look, Jess, you’ve heard that expression: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a free stack of cash either.’

  ‘But it’d pay for—’

  ‘Stop it, now.’ I knew what she was thinking. Indonesia.

  ‘Trust me, this has more strings attached than Kermit the Frog.’

  There was a beat. ‘Isn’t he a glove puppet?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  The doorbell rang. Laura. ‘Get that, will you, Jess. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  The safe was in the wardrobe in my bedroom, not much more useful that the average hotel safe, but better than nothing. I’d move the money to somewhere more secure as soon as I could. Not a bank, though. They’d have questions. Although not as many as I had.

  I opened the safe. The only thing in there, apart from the client files Ben had given me, was a knife. Not an ordinary blade, but an Eickhorn Advanced Combat Knife, which had once belonged to Paul. It was a nasty piece of work, with a curved tip, a razor-sharp edge and a really cruel serrated section. It was perfect. I took it out, replacing it with the money. Then I slid the knife under my pillow.

  Just in case.

  PART TWO

  NINETEEN

  There are enough people in this world concerned about being shot at for BMW to make a high security version of its 7 series. The 7Li is armoured and compliant with the requirements of the class VR7 ballistic protection standard. Which means you can fire 400 7.62mm rounds at it from every angle with zero penetration. It is also blast-proofed against fragmentation and armour-piercing hand grenades. Each of the corners is reinforced for those times when you have to punch through parked vehicles or reverse your way out of trouble. Most of us PPOs have been trained to do those high-speed reverses and spins so beloved of the movies.

  It’s all, for the most part, a waste of time.

  You’d have to go some way to find any PPO who’d ever had to ram his or her way out of trouble. If it did happen to me, I’d see it as a sign of failure – you shouldn’t get yourself boxed in in the first place. And, some hostile countries excepted, you rarely get grenades tossed at you. Plus, thankfully, AK-47s are pretty rare on the streets of Knightsbridge.

  Still, it’s what people expect of PPOs and their vehicles, the so-called Hard Skills – fast driving, martial arts, gunplay. The Soft Skills – planning, negotiation, conflict resolution – are generally underappreciated. But that’s what the job
is 99.9 per cent of the time.

  Three days into the PPO role for the Sharifs and I managed to get them to garage the Roller – it would be reserved for special occasions – and to use the 7Li they had gathering dust as the everyday car. It was still conspicuous to those who know what to look for, but it pulled a lot fewer stares than the Ghost. They also gave me permission to have it given the once-over by One-Eyed Jack.

  Despite the name, One-Eyed Jack had perfectly good vision. Rumour had it he got the nickname from his early days doing MOTs in south-east London. If he liked you and found a minor fault, he’d say: ‘I’ll turn a blind eye to that for the moment, but get it fixed.’

  But Jack, disproving the adage about old dogs and new tricks, had moved on from MOTs. These days he worked out of a former airfield near Leighton Buzzard. He had three big hangars, all used to customise cars. Those hideous stretch limos that were once so fashionable? Jack’s work. Blinged-up Range Rovers with illegally dark windows? Same. But they were just the public face of his business. Hangar 3 was where he did the real graft, plating up cars to B6/7 blast-proof standard, increasing engine power to cope with the extra weight of the armour. He did Beemers, Audis, Mercs, Toyota Landcruisers . . .

  If that makes me sound like a Jeremy Clarkson-style petrolhead, the truth was that I knew about Beemers, Audis, Jags, Range Rovers and so on because they were tools of my trade. They were what I had to drive on The Circuit. The other cars that wheel-spun around the PPO world were the clients’ toys – Maseratis, Lamborghinis, Ferraris. I can’t tell a Ferrari F70 from a 458 – well, maybe with a gun to my head – and, even though I have a soft spot for Porsches, the variations of 911 produced over the years baffle me.

  Jack came out when I pulled up on the concrete apron outside Hangar 3, wearing the Duckhams overalls that were already faded when I first met him. He was close to sixty, completely bald, his skin lined and the creases in his fingers so ingrained with oil that it would take a sea of Swarfega to clean them. Still, he had a good go with the rag he was holding and held out his hand.

  ‘The call surprised me. I didn’t know you was back in the game,’ he said, showing me teeth that appeared to have shuffled apart from each other in mutual distaste. His voice was gruff, the edges rough from his old cigarillo habit.

  I shook his hand. ‘Just a few weeks now.’

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘Family in north London.’

  ‘OK, are they?’

  ‘Fine.’ Jack wouldn’t expect much more. But the Sharifs really were fine, or at least the members of the family I had seen so far. I had turned up for the interview with a headscarf on, just in case, but Mrs Sharif had told me they were none too strict about such things when in London. Mrs Sharif was, without exaggeration, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Relaxed, friendly, she had made it clear she considered the whole PPO thing nonsense, at least when outside Pakistan. But Mr Sharif – who was away on business – was worried about Nuzha, the daughter. She turned out to be the kind of twelve-year-old you only read about – polite, diligent, hard-working, maybe a little too serious. Whereas Jess had had a poster of One Direction in her bedroom at that age, Nuzha had a picture of Malala Yousafzai. The young lady wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t doubt she’d make it.

  So, unusually, Mrs Sharif, with a little help from Ali, her residential security advisor, and a consultation with Nuzha, had hired me, without waiting for Mr Sharif’s say-so. I liked that.

  ‘What can I do you for?’ Jack asked, looking over the BMW. He tapped one of the doors with a knuckle, then repeated the process on the windscreen glass. ‘Is that all factory-fitted?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, they make a pretty good fist of it. Unless you think your bloke’s going to be attacked with an RPG, it’ll do the job.’

  ‘I don’t need plate. I want you to do a number on the reversing camera.’

  ‘Ah. OK, that’s easy enough. With the hard drive, it’ll be three hundred, though. Plus the VAT.’

  ‘That’s fine.’ It wasn’t my money. ‘Just give me a receipt.’

  ‘Take me about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. I can lend you a Range Rover if you need to leave it.’

  I looked at my phone and checked the time. I had to pick Nuzha up from school in Hampstead Garden Suburb in three hours. ‘I should be good. Oh, and could you check whether the driver’s air bags have been done. If not, disable them and tweak the diagnostics to hide it.’

  ‘Steering wheel and side?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The thinking behind taking out the driver’s air bags was simple. If you get rammed by hostiles, a face full of giant gas envelope tends to impair your response, not to mention blocking your vision. Everyone else in the vehicle can get a free bouncy castle, but you, the driver, want to be able to see and steer out of trouble.

  ‘That’s another hundred.’

  I remembered there was something I meant to ask him. ‘Jack, by the way, what’s RSCA? I’m a little rusty.’

  He nodded at the BMW. ‘This fitted with that?’ There was no hiding the contempt in his voice.

  ‘No, I heard about it on another job. Russians. Asked if I knew what it was.’ Before they tried to beat the crap out of me, that is.

  ‘It’s a pile of shit, that’s what it is. It controls the car.’

  ‘Controls how?’

  ‘Whatever you want. It’s a phone app, sort of. Remote Security and Control App. You key in a code, then you can lock the car, open it, immobilise it, start it up, put the bleedin’ radio on, some of them even have a “Come to Daddy” feature. Or Mummy in your case.’

  ‘What’s that do?’

  ‘The car will drive to you. Within reason. You know, if you or your clients don’t want to step out into the rain, you can pull it along the driveway. They have some sort of sensors in the bumper so you don’t accidentally get run over. Still gives me the willies, though.’ He sniffed his disapproval. ‘And there’s a “Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here” button.’

  ‘That the technical term?’

  ‘E-Evac. Emergency evacuation. The car comes to you a little quicker, shall we say.’

  ‘And you don’t like it because . . .?’ I knew the answer.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of motors that drive themselves. Technology gone fuckin’ mad. And RSCA is hackable. Very hackable. My boy Jordan reckons he can do it in under a minute. So you can be drivin’ along and suddenly, it ain’t you at the wheel. It’s some geezer with an iPhone in the car next to you. And even if you don’t have the hacking gizmo, in most cases the standard pin code is—’

  ‘One, two, three, four?’

  ‘No, the client’s name or initials. Most people are too vain to change that to something with hashtags and exclamation marks. You don’t want that on this, do you?’ He indicated the BMW once again, his face aghast.

  ‘Not after that sales pitch. One more thing – a “Disabled” sticker. A kosher one if you can.’

  ‘Yup, no sweat. That’s on the house.’

  I handed him the keys to the 7Li.

  ‘Ta.’ Jack wrapped his fist round them and fixed me with his two good eyes. ‘Is this just a precaution or . . .?’

  ‘No, not just a precaution,’ I said. ‘I think I’m being followed.’

  I didn’t think anything of the kind. I knew I was being followed. Not all the time. Perhaps once or twice in the past week. Not always in the same car, either, but I had clocked the same driver in two different vehicles and I’d seen a classic switch manoeuvre, where one tail drops back to allow the other to move forward, thus mixing up the action so the object of attention doesn’t notice. But I had noticed. Which is why Jack was working on the reversing camera. It was a device to make the camera ‘live’, so that you can film the cars behind you and save that to a hard drive. It could then be loaded to a USB stick and viewed at home.

  It was possible that I was being paranoid, of course, and that what I thought I knew was just bullshit. Take that clocking
of the driver, the one with stubble and the sort of shaved-at-the-sides haircut that made it look as if a turd had been laid on his head. I’d seen him in a Fiat 500 and an Audi A5. So what? Lots of people had two cars. Jesus, my Principal had a dozen. But I drove a different route to and from Nuzha’s school and to and from home every day. I probably shouldn’t be seeing the same driver twice.

  The PPO mantra applied here: once is possible, two is probable, three is definite.

  And I had something to be paranoid about, of course. I was the proud owner of ten grand I didn’t deserve. It was tucked away in Ben Harris’s rather more substantial safe. I’d had the stash checked for markers or substance imprints. It was clean, but part of me thought that the moment I spent a single note, it would blow up in my face. Maybe someone else fancied spending it, though.

  But I was still hovering at ‘probable’ on the tail. It was why I hadn’t yet raised it with Mr or Mrs Sharif. You need to be sure before you create a sense of tension or fear in the household. Besides, even if it was a follower, there was another question. Who was being tailed? Them or me?

  While Jack worked on the car, I took a walk around the airfield. It had shrunk over the years, as parcels of land around the perimeter had been sold off for housing. Jack had offered high-speed driving courses here, until the new neighbours complained about tyre-squeal and smoke.

  Now he said they were complaining about the ‘eyesore’ of the motley collection of ruined and scavenged planes at the end of the weed-choked runway.

  I walked across towards them, batting off the clouds of small flies that rose in my path. I am no expert on planes, but they were all of a vintage – an early passenger jet that had been used for fire evacuation drills, a sad, twin-engined number whose wings looked as if they had been attacked by voracious moths and a once perky little Cessna, now down on its knees – well, its collapsed undercarriage. Most of the aircraft had missing panels, wires and tubes hanging from them, as if they had been subject to sustained torture and evisceration. I could smell the pungent mix of their lifebloods – the spilled oil, grease and the kerosene – and I thought that maybe I was on the side of the neighbours. There was something very melancholy about these unloved and abandoned orphans.