by Chris Ryan
‘There’s a number stored in the address book,’ said Bald. ‘This bird I know back in Hereford. Sally Higgins. I wore a wire to the meeting back at the Wainwright and gave Sally the tapes. She’s got the original as well as a bunch of copies.’
Suddenly Porter understood everything. That’s who the blonde was at the Piano Bar. That’s who I saw Bald giving the package to outside the safe house on Featherstone Street. She must have slipped him the wire before the meeting. Then Bald handed it back to her afterwards. Porter was starting to see his mucker in a different light. Christ, he thought. Bald’s even craftier than I’d given him credit for.
Bald said, ‘If either Lakes or that tosser Hawkridge tries to pull a fast one I’ll get straight on the blower to Sally. The tapes are in pre-paid envelopes addressed to every newspaper editor in London. They’ll prove that the Firm was in on this thing from the beginning.’
‘That’s your arse covered,’ said Porter, a rage building inside his chest. ‘Where does that leave me?’
Bald shook his head. ‘This is insurance for both of us. We’re on the same side. The job’s exactly the same as when it started. No one will fuck with us as long as we’ve got hold of them tapes.’ He tapped the burner, grinning. ‘Bloody hell, mate. You didn’t think I’d hang a fucking Blade out to dry, did you?’
Porter frowned. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
‘I had to be sure you weren’t on their side. With these guys, you never know what they’re thinking. It pays to keep an ace up your sleeve in case they try and shaft you.’
Porter nodded slowly, letting the words sink in. He’d been wrong to doubt Bald. He saw that now. But part of him also started to wonder what other surprises his mucker might have up his sleeve. He shrugged off the thought and turned his mind back to the mission. Back to Radoslav Brozovic.
Back to the warlord they were going to capture.
THIRTY-SIX
Geneva, Switzerland.
Two days later. 0715 hours.
Radoslav Brozovic, the Tiger of the Balkans, marched angrily into the conference room and nodded at the three men seated around the table. The room was situated on the first floor of the sprawling four-storey mansion on the banks of Lake Geneva, and like every other room, no expense had been spared. The table was solid oak with a cherry veneer and the chairs were white leather and handmade in a shop in Milan. Religious art paintings hung from the walls, along with a display cabinet of antique bullets from the First World War. A tall window at the back commanded an impressive view of Brozovic’s private dock and ornamental pagoda. Through the window he could see the winter sun reflecting brilliantly off the calm waters like a million gold coins, crisp and clear and cold. This view had cost him the best part of twenty million dollars, and he fucking hated it.
It had been Tatyana’s idea to move to Geneva. She was a pop star back in Serbia, with pop-star tastes and pop-star needs. So when they’d been forced to leave Serbia for good, Tatyana had argued that it was better to go into hiding somewhere with good schools and high-end shopping. Plus, Tatyana sucked dick real good. Better than any whore he’d ever had. Way better. It was all in the lips, Brozovic decided. The bigger the lips, the better the blowjob. And Tatyana had huge red lips. Things were the size of inflatable dinghies. What Tatyana wanted, she got. So, Geneva it was.
But the city left Brozovic feeling cold. There were too many Muslims, for a start. Wherever you went there were fat Saudis with their vast entourages, being driven around in their designer Italian cars. The creeping rise of Islam was everywhere he looked, and Brozovic often yearned to be back in his native Serbia. And if that wasn’t bad enough, now he was being made to feel like a prisoner in his own home.
He’d first learned of the Brit’s death in the papers. One of his contacts in London had alerted him to the article in the Daily Mail. It was only a few cursory lines, mentioning that the body of a former paratrooper had been discovered in a storm drain in Fuengirola. No suspects had been arrested but there was speculation that it was part of a recent spate of gangland slayings. Then Kavlak and Petrovich had disappeared from the safe house in Valletta. And two nights ago the Tiger had received a phone call from one of the cops on the organisation’s payroll in Zlatibor. Ninkovic had been found drowned in Lake Ribnica, not far from his usual fishing spot. A weight belt had been tied around his waist and there were bruises on his face and neck consistent with a struggle.
The news of Ninkovic’s death had struck Brozovic hard. The other guys were mere gunmen. Disposable. But Ninkovic had been a constant through the years, his right-hand man. Together they’d grown the Red Eagles from a small band of warriors into a powerful organisation with thousands of foot soldiers. And now he was gone.
Brozovic glanced around the three men at the table and noted the unease stencilled across the faces of each man. They could sense his anxiety. They could smell it. That wasn’t good, Brozovic knew. An organisation like this depended on fear and loyalty. The moment you showed the first sign of weakness, you were finished.
Brozovic sat down at the head of the conference table and glanced at his Blancpain Fifty Fathoms watch. It had cost the thick end of fifteen thousand dollars. His wife had bought it for him as a present on his fortieth birthday, along with a set of gold-plated golf clubs monogrammed with his initials. In addition to sucking dick, Tatyana was also good at spending his money.
‘Let’s make it quick,’ Brozovic said. ‘I’ve got fifteen minutes until I have to take my kids to school.’
The guy on the left cleared his throat and spoke first. Koroman, the Tiger’s chief of security. A former cop with eyes like black studs pressed deep into his flabby face and the doughy build of a guy who had let himself go over the years. Koroman was the most nervous of the three men sitting at the table. That was not surprising. After all, he had the most to lose from this latest fuck-up. The last guy in Koroman’s boots had been severely punished for failing to do his job. He’d had a bomb shoved up his arse, and his mutilated remains had been stuffed in an ice chest.
‘Boss,’ Koroman said. ‘As you requested, we’ve increased your total bodyguard detail to eighteen men. Ten in the house at all times, plus eight more patrolling the grounds in two four-man teams.’
‘What about the dock?’ Brozovic asked. ‘Is that covered too?’
‘Yes, boss.’ Koroman coughed. ‘I’ve briefed our guys to keep an eye out for any intruders on the lake, after what happened to Ninkovic. We’ve also installed six more security cameras to cover any black spots, and upgraded the alarm system. We have the perimeter covered. No one can get within a hundred metres of the property without us knowing about it.’
‘And our loose end?’
‘Taken care of.’
Brozovic nodded. Killing Stankovic had been an unpleasant task, but a necessary one. Brozovic had ordered the execution as soon as he’d read about the Brit in the newspapers. He had to assume that the gunmen were spilling their guts to their captors before they died. He assumed that, because he knew more than almost anyone about the limits of human pain. If the killers were as good at torture as they were at murdering people, then it was only a matter of time before they learned about Brozovic’s involvement. At least with Stankovic out of the way, it might buy him some more time before the killers tracked him down.
He smiled coldly at his chief of security. ‘Let us hope your precautions are good enough, Milan.’
Silence. The Tiger turned his attention to the next man. A young guy in a tailored black suit with a dark turtleneck sweater underneath and gold rings on every finger. A big gold crucifix hung round his fat neck. Basta was his new 2i/c. Ninkovic’s replacement. Brozovic could have gone for the easy option and appointed one of the older guys as a safe pair of hands, but he needed new blood in the upper ranks of the organisation. He wanted to shake things up a little. Basta was hungry and fearless, and he was desperate to prove his worth.
The Tiger routinely assessed those who worked for him by how
well they would stand up to torture. He reckoned Basta could hold out for a good twelve hours. He had that hard-edged look about him. That complete lack of fear. Koroman, on the other hand, was weak. The guy wouldn’t last five minutes in an interrogation. He’d start spilling his guts even before the crocodile clips were attached to his balls. The Tiger decided there and then. He would get rid of Koroman once this mess had blown over. He visualised the ways in which he could have the guy killed. Buried alive, maybe. Or perhaps beaten to death with the golden golf clubs.
‘Any word on who the fuck is behind this?’
‘Not yet, boss.’ Basta fiddled with his gold rings. ‘I’ve got all my guys on it, just like you asked. They’re putting the word out. Nothing’s come back so far. Whoever did this, they’ve covered their tracks. But we’ll find them.’
Brozovic nodded. It was almost certainly the British, he told himself. It had to be. Revenge for the attack on the SAS. Why else had the killers targeted the Selection gunmen? But that still left the question of who exactly was carrying out the murders. Was it an MI5 operation? MI6? SAS? Or maybe a few private individuals who’d taken the law into their own hands? Brozovic needed to know. He needed something concrete. He needed a target. He had all this muscle and firepower, and nothing to train it on. Right now he felt like a hunter without a lion.
‘There are rumours it’s ex-SAS men,’ Koroman said.
‘There are always rumours.’ Brozovic, dismissed the guy with a wave of his tattooed hand. ‘But you know what the problem with rumours is?’
Koroman stared blankly at the Tiger. Blanked. ‘No, boss.’
‘I can’t fight rumours. I can’t go to war with them. I can’t grab rumours and put guns to their heads and blow their fucking brains out. Can I?’
‘No, boss,’ Koroman replied. He lowered his head in shame.
Brozovic suddenly exploded, hammering a fist down on the conference table so hard that Koroman jumped up in shock. The Tiger stared down the barrel of his thick nose at his chief of security, pulsating with rage.
‘Don’t give me fucking rumours! I want the sons of bitches who killed Ninkovic brought to me. I want to hear their screams as they’re fed into the meat grinder. I want their faces cut off and hanging from these fucking walls.’ His voice echoed like thunder through the room. Spittle flecked the table in front of him. ‘I want names, I want faces. I want that information, and I want it five fucking minutes ago. Got it?’
He sat back and took a breath. No one said a word. The three guys had been stunned into silence. Basta fiddled with his tacky gold rings. Koroman stared at the floor. They were afraid now, Brozovic thought. That was good. Men worked best when they were scared, in his experience. Maybe now they would actually get some results.
‘Boss. It’s time,’ the thickset guy on the right said.
Brozovic turned to the man. His personal bodyguard, Nastasic. The Tiger grunted and rose from his chair. He nodded at Basta and blanked Koroman.
‘We’ll meet again at the end of the week. I want results by then. If you still don’t have anything for me, then maybe it’s time we reconsidered your positions in the organisation. Understood?’
Koroman nodded meekly but said nothing. He’d been around long enough. He knew what Brozovic meant.
‘We’ll take care of it, boss,’ Basta replied. ‘Whoever did this, we’ll find them.’
Brozovic turned and strode out of the room, Nastasic following close behind. He paced across the mezzanine, passing the glass elevator leading down to his garage filled with classic motors and his two prized Harleys. He walked down the spiral staircase leading to the huge living room with its high ceiling and Steinway & Sons piano, and the drinks cabinet filled with bottles of Lagavulin twenty-five-year-old whisky, and the sofa made of crocodile leather. He could hear Filip and Danica, his kids, shouting at one another across the living room. They were watched over by the other five bodyguards who would be accompanying them on the drive up to Rolle. Tatyana resented having the guards around the house twenty-four-seven, but Brozovic had put his foot down. The security was a necessity. At least for the time being.
He was the Tiger of the Balkans, decorated by the Serb government and proclaimed the saviour of the motherland by the priests of the Orthodox Church. He had built a criminal empire that had bases of operation in every major city in Europe. He had millions in the bank and millions more invested in casinos in Monte Carlo and property developments in Madrid. He even owned a football club that he’d dragged out of the Serbian fourth division and guided to the national championship and cup, which had beaten the mighty AC Milan in the Champions League. And yet Brozovic felt utterly powerless. He was gripped by the irrepressible sense that the walls were closing in around him.
Well, fuck them. The killers wouldn’t get to him that easily. Not like the others. His house was impregnable, and Brozovic reassured himself with the thought that he had taken every available precaution. Nothing had been left to chance. He wasn’t going down without a fight.
He took a deep breath and strode across the living room towards his children, ready for the morning school run.
0726 hours.
Two miles away, Bald and Porter sat inside the cabin of an eighteen-ton Mercedes-Benz Actros dump truck and waited.
They were parked on a potholed stretch of blacktop on the outskirts of Geneva, half a mile north of the airport and four miles from the city centre. Fifty metres ahead of them a single-lane road ran from east to west, flanked by belts of farmland and industrial warehouses. A hundred metres further to the east there was a bridge over the main road running north to south, with a dimly-lit tunnel underneath. The tunnel was fifty metres long and ten wide, and scrawled with graffiti. From where Bald and Porter were sitting they had an unobstructed view of the tunnel’s western exit. The morning was grey and wet and angry and the Alps loomed in the distance, black against the rising sun. Like lumps of coal being shovelled into a furnace.
Bald said, ‘How long?’
Porter checked his G-Shock and said, ‘Fourteen minutes, mucker.’
‘Let’s hope he’s not fucking late.’
‘He won’t be,’ said Porter. ‘He won’t.’
The dump truck was hot. They’d stolen it from a building site in Lancy, seven miles to the south of the ambush point, at 0400 hours. The Actros had been easy enough to wire and get started, and it blended in perfectly with their surroundings. Swiss roads were under constant threat of landslides. There were roadworks in every direction. No one would give a flying monkey’s about a dump truck parked up at the side of the road. By the time the construction crew turned up for work and reported the truck missing, the team would be racing towards the border.
Both operators were packing heat. Sig Sauer P226 semi-autos with thirteen-round clips of .357 SIG rounds, a necked-down version of the .40 Smith & Wesson. The Sigs were the stainless-steel variants with the heavy barrel and the polymer grip. They were instantly familiar to Bald and Porter from their days in the Regiment. Like greeting an old friend. Devereaux and Coles were also equipped with Sigs. Each man had two extra clips, giving them thirty-nine rounds of ammo per guy. Making a total of a hundred and fifty-six rounds. More than enough if things got noisy.
There was a gallon container under the seat filled with petrol, with a black pouring nozzle attached to the handle. Bald and Porter also had a steel link chain, ten metres long with grab hooks at either end, plus a Hilti cordless rotary hammer drill with a battery pack and a drill bit that was an inch in diameter. The Hilti drill was an industrial piece of kit, way more powerful than regular power tools and capable of boring through solid concrete or masonry. The hammer drill, petrol container and chain had been purchased from a hardware store in Thonex, east of Geneva and near to the French border at Ambilly. In addition Bald and Porter were wearing dark overalls with harnesses strapped around their waists, as well as knee pads and gloves and Pro-Tec crash helmets. All purchased from a shop that specialised in bikes and skateboarding
equipment. Bald and Porter also wore clear plastic face masks they’d bought from a joke shop in downtown Geneva for fifteen Swiss francs a pop. They were the kind of masks that distorted your features. The ones kids wore on Halloween or to fancy dress parties. They were less obvious than the traditional ski masks. Less noticeable at a distance.
They’d made all their preparations. Sorted out their kit.
Now we’ve just got to get through the mission without getting killed.
For the past two days the team had been keeping eyes on Brozovic’s mansion over in Genthod. Running a 360-degree probe in an exclusive neighbourhood was practically impossible without drawing serious attention to themselves. So they had created their own concealed OP instead, drilling a hole in the boot of a BMW 3 series just above the licence plate, then parking the vehicle opposite the mansion. It was an old trick they’d learned from their days running OPs in Belfast. It worked a treat. But the recce only told them what Porter had already suspected. Getting inside the mansion was a non-starter. There were bodyguards all over the place. Security cameras, regular patrols around the grounds. Even a moat. It was just like Ninkovic had said. The place was a fortress. Trying to blast their way inside would only get them killed.
Which is why they’d switched to the idea of a mobile hit. From observing the target’s routine the team knew that Brozovic took his kids to their private school in Rolle every morning at 0730 hours sharp. He insisted on going with them. Six bodyguards accompanied Brozovic and his kids. Two rode in the Lincoln Town Car with the principal, with the other four split in pairs between the front and rear Audi A6s. All three vehicles were armoured. Porter could tell because the blacked-out windows carried a telltale green tint. The heavy security presence would have looked conspicuous anywhere else, but not Geneva. Porter had heard of oligarchs landing their choppers on the school playing fields to pick up their children. No one would bat an eyelid at the two Serbian kids rocking up to the school gates in a three-car motorcade with half-a-dozen heavies in tow.
