The Outsiders (10 page)

Jonno’s new friend smiled and was gone, and they were in a bus station. In twenty minutes they’d be in Marbella. He asked Posie if she was fine.

‘Never been better.’

‘I fancy some serious drinking tonight, after a bath with my toes wrapped round the gold taps. Going to join me?’

He was rewarded – first a wan smile, then a giggle. He squeezed her hand tight.

He had a fair complexion, and in thirteen years on the Costa del Sol had never succeeded in tanning. It was beneath his dignity to go out with sun screen on his cheeks and ears. Below his shades there was a mosquito bite – the sun had burrowed at the wound and had made a bad place, messy, to the left side of his nose. He scratched because it itched and because of the tension, which mounted with every passing minute.

Tommy King had a good view of the man who sat at a table outside the bar under an awning. He had good reason to watch him because the killing of that man would set him back two thousand pounds – a thousand already paid and a thousand in used notes to come. For that sort of expense it was predictable that TK – as he liked to be called – would want to see that it went well. It was about territory. What else? Above his glasses he wore a baseball cap that shielded some of his face. He sipped a soft drink, using a tissue to mask his prints and the possibility of a DNA trace. He wiped hard at the hole where his lips touched. The man had his back to him and was on a mobile. He must have thought he was safe there. Likely the man – from the Liberties of Dublin – thought he had protection, and was too big for the likes of Tommy King to take offence. Two thousand pounds had bought a death ticket for the fat bastard from Ireland. It was a cheap contract but as much as Tommy King could afford. A top man – what Tommy King hoped he would be, one day – would have flown in a guy from Manchester or Liverpool, then shipped him out when it was done, but Tommy King’s resources meant that the killer had come down the coast from Benidorm on his motorcycle. He’d made the check call and the biker was on his way.

The bar where the Irishman was and the one where Tommy King waited weren’t frequented by tourists. They were inland at least a kilometre and used only by expatriates. The Irishman had treated him like dog-shit. Tommy King could only afford three night-time dealers on the beat just west of Marbella and short of Puerto Banus; they’d been roughed up, their pockets emptied. The little they carried had been stamped on, and their cash from early sales kicked into the gutter. That had been a week ago, three days before Tommy King had met the Irishman and tried to talk like an equal, give the man an opt-out by suggesting there’d been a ‘misunderstanding’.

‘No misunderstanding, kid. Feck off. The next time I see you you’ll be feekin’ uglier than you are now.’

Tommy King had shuffled away. Smart, that – he’d gone like a beaten kid and had made the call to the guy in Benidorm.

He listened for the motorbike.

Nothing for him to be despondent about. He wasn’t a moaner – and he had a pretty girlfriend who lived in, seventeen. She didn’t talk much because she only had a smattering of English – the rest was Bulgarian – but she was fond of him. He had an apartment that taxed him at the moment, but wouldn’t once the future had tied up in Cádiz. The future was the MV
Santa Maria
. He had no idea of her main cargo, or where she was registered, or what nationality her crew or captain were. What he did know was that there were two containers on board, with a waybill for hardwood furniture. There was a guy down the road in Marbella, a lawyer, who had seen the main chance and raised the finance that was the future for Tommy King. It had come from people to whom it was chicken-feed, small change: his uncle had made the first contact. Tommy King’s uncle was Mikey and . . . Fuck Mikey and fuck the backer. When the boat came, the cargo was offloaded and the cash from the onward sale rolled in, TK would no longer be relying on three dealers to shift amphetamines on a plaza, and there’d be no fat Irish bastard pissing in his face.

He heard the bike.

What he always reckoned . . . In the dear old world of the Costa del Sol, where Mikey had been for thirty-five years and TK had lived for the last thirteen, and in Bermondsey, south-east London, which had been the family tribe’s home,
you got what you paid for
. If you paid twenty thousand, you’d get a limousine job, and if you paid two thousand, you’d get a guy from Benidorm whose bike needed a decoke. Even the Irishman heard the bike coming. He turned with a look of annoyance – maybe the sound of the thing, getting closer, made it harder for him to listen to his mobile.

When the MV
Santa Maria
came in, Tommy King’s cargo was sold on and the backer’s debt repaid, there would be big money, clean money, for him. He would no longer be fucking about protecting the territory where his dealers sold pills outside the two nightclubs. He would be a man of means, more of a made man than his uncle, Mikey Fanning, had ever been.

The guy should have done something about that bike, the noise it made. It came round the corner, leaving a thick trail of exhaust fumes.

The guy wore a helmet with a tinted visor. He came up behind the Irishman and stopped. The Irishman was starting to wave his arms and could hear fuck-all on his mobile. The guy showed him the gun. He’d pulled it out of his leather jacket.

The guy aimed.

A bit more than four years back Tommy King had seen a man stabbed to death. Of course he’d seen men who’d had a beating, and he’d seen others dead – shot and knifed – but the man who had died from stab wounds had reacted as soon as the light had flashed on the blade. He had lunged forward to grapple. ‘Flight or fight’, they said, in the books about special-forces people. Either run like fuck or stand and see it out. The Irishman did neither.

He looked stupid, Tommy King thought. He looked like he didn’t understand why a guy stood three or four feet from him and had a handgun in his fist. Others, at different tables, screamed and some went down on the paving. There were no heroes and no have-a-go tossers. Two shots, like they did in the movies. Two in the head. The arms didn’t go up. The Irishman didn’t look as though a sledgehammer had hit him. He crumpled. He hit the table he’d been sitting at, and tipped it.

The gun was gone, and the bike. A bit of screaming started, not much. The seats in front of that bar were deserted, then the tables at the bar where he was. He made sure he had the tissue in his pocket, the one he’d used on the can, and sauntered away. Bloody brilliant what two grand could buy. And when the MV
Santa Maria
came in, the money with it, he’d be a big man and have respect and . . . He might even buy the guy from Benidorm a new bike.

He walked away, and thought himself a coming man – something his uncle Mikey had never been.

There was much about the Mad Monk, as the chief called her, that appealed to him, and a little about her that rather frightened him. The word
maverick
rolled silently on his tongue. He knew its origin: a cattle farmer of the old Wild West had declined to brand his steers and those that had wandered from the herds were called after him – he was Maverick. She was in that tradition, a loner, independent. There was one in pretty much every organisation. He would have said that any corporate building was the poorer if a maverick didn’t walk the corridors. She was indulged and had the protection of seniors, as her rare species always did. Her professionalism was valued and her commitment total. It was the unpredictability that frightened him.

The knock came at his door. It opened before he could respond. Crumpled clothes. No cosmetics. A brush cursorily run across her hair, or maybe only fingers to smooth it. He thought she looked rather wonderful. She dumped two coffees on the desk.

Her chief said, ‘I don’t think, Winnie, you can do any more, except wait. Always the hardest, the waiting.’

‘I won’t argue with that.’

‘We start at the centre of the matter and the world revolves around us. Then it runs away from us. Go down the line, either to success or failure, and control is diminished. It’s as if when the big moves are made it’s in the hands of people we don’t know – people we didn’t realise existed.’

‘Very philosophical, Chief.’

‘If this moves to any sort of conclusion it will have drifted away from you.’

‘Tell me something fucking new.’

‘Mind your tongue, Winnie.’

As a ten-year-old her language had been as choice as that of the deep-shaft miners who brought their kids to her father’s classroom when off-shift. As a fifteen-year-old it had been enough to warrant a visit to a child psychiatrist in Merthyr. At university it was regarded as an affectation. In childhood she had been smacked, had suffered withdrawal of favourite toys, being shut in the shed where the family’s collie slept, and she’d had soap forced into her mouth. There had been an internal disciplinary meeting at Thames House just before her first posting to Belfast: stern faces had gazed down on her as if she’d nicked the Crown Jewels; the charge had been the use of abusive language to seniors and subordinates.

‘What a fucking waste of time’, she’d told them. ‘If you didn’t know it, I’ve work to do.’

Now no one seemed to take offence. She gave an impression of inner contentment, and was envied it. Well, they knew fuck-all.

‘If the sun were to shine on us, Winnie, what’s achievable?’

‘We get a name, we can build a profile. A big player travels. He’s on the move and one day – if we have a Trojan horse in his camp and are forewarned – he’s beyond the protection of Russian frontiers. We can have him arrested on third-party territory, staple an extradition warrant to his forehead and we’ve got him.’

‘That would take a great deal of sunshine, Winnie.’

‘They used Damian Fenby’s head for a kick-about.’

‘You’ll want a team of committed people. Your old colleagues?’

‘I’d like to rake them up.’

‘And the name?’

‘The boy called him “the Major”. He identified him as Petar Alexander Borsonov but we don’t have traces yet. We will. Interestingly, there was a small telephone book of Russians we tried to check out over the years but he wasn’t on any list we made. So, he’s careful, discreet and clever. My girl, God willing, will bring more back.’

It was about the time that Caro Watson would be touching down in Bucharest and there was a good connection for Constanta. Winnie tried to picture the boy and open his mind, take him beyond the banality of the photo image and give him flesh and colour, build a portrait, but it was beyond her.

‘And I have your authorisation to bring my old people together again for this?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I’d have expected nothing less. Fenby was ours.’

‘
Was
ours . . . By the rules, Winnie.’

‘What else?’

The car with the Major was held at traffic-lights momentarily, the driver manoeuvring for a gap in the vehicles ahead, but it gave the escort car the opportunity.

The girl had the door opened for her, and the eldest policeman leered. He gave her a card, and she slipped it into her bag – she didn’t examine it for his rank. In mangled Russian, Natan was told that he was being dropped here, too, and the time he should be back there in the afternoon. He was pushed out and the car sped after the Mercedes. She walked off, hips swinging. She was a free bird, as though a cage door had opened. She didn’t look at him. He was dirt, beneath her. She crossed the road, tripping through traffic, and men braked to let her pass.

He bit his lip.

He could turn round, of course. He had been in Constanta twice before, when the first loose discussions had been under way – before the detail the Major now demanded. He had wandered through department stores, into computer businesses, and had ended in a side-street at a working man’s café-bar, and eaten meat with fried potatoes and drunk Coke. He had had the brochures from Dell spread across the table. In the car they had given him a pocket map of the city and had pointed out to him where the store was. He would remember the rest. He could have turned round, gone to look at another store with the same level of merchandise.

He was a fighter. Always had been. He’d been beaten by kids on the farms round his home, gone home bloodied and been told by his brothers and his father to ‘stand up for himself’. He’d been jeered at by kids at school and had ridden it. He’d been ostracised in Kaliningrad, expelled for ‘academic non-conformity’, and had sworn at his tormentors. He had gone on to the streets, found work and seen off the cold and hunger. In the hotel suite, when they had slapped him, humiliated and not trusted him, he could have lashed out at them, but they’d have beaten him to a pulp and heaved him on to the street. He had fought them by walking into the embassy’s lobby in Baku. He would fight them again in a café in a back-street of Constanta. He liked to fight, on ground of his own choosing.

That ground would be a café used by labourers and peasants behind the St Peter and Paul Orthodox Cathedral. It was ground where he could hurt.

Winnie had begun calling them back.

There was Dottie in A Branch. She handled the allocation of the surveillance teams used for tracking targets, on foot and in vehicles. Dottie, plain as the proverbial pikestaff, had been the Boss’s
apparatchik
, the most loyal of the loyal. She managed detail supremely well, and had been devastated by the break-up of the unit.