Age of Voodoo (10 page)

“And you, Mr Buckler,” Lex replied, not the least bit cowed, “can get your face out of mine, or I will gladly rearrange your features, starting with that gleaming American dentistry of yours. Capiche?”

Buckler didn’t blink. There was calculation in those snowy-grey eyes, a steady reassessment of the Englishman in front of him. Everyone else was looking on with curiosity and concern. The tension between Lex and Buckler crackled outwards, filling the space around them with an uneasy charge.

“Let’s us take this outside,” Buckler said. “Discuss it where there’s no audience.”

“Fine by me.”

“You two.” This to Wilberforce and Albertine. “Mind waiting here a while?” Buckler thrust a fistful of Manzanillan dollars at them. “Have lunch on me. Mr Dove and I are heading out for a nice friendly stroll.”

NINE

A REASONED, GENTLEMANLY

EXCHANGE OF VIEWS

L
EX WAS SIZING
Buckler up physically as they exited the lobby, debating how easy—or not—it would be to take the American down. A Navy SEAL was the hardest of the hard in the US military, the soldier’s soldier. The training programme was second to none in its brutality and attrition rate. On average, four fifths of candidates flunked the initial eight gruelling weeks of instruction and exercise, which was designed to break a man down to the core and show him the true measure of himself. The rest were left with the belief that they were nigh on indestructible. Further training turned these graduates into killing machines with exceptional tactical and strategic sensibilities and an uncompromising, never-say-die ethic. Buckler would be a fearsome opponent in any form of combat, armed or hand-to-hand.

That was all right, though. Lex was no slouch in the fighting department either.

They passed sunbathers who were lounging beside a crisp blue swimming pool, sipping drinks, fiddling with their smartphones, scrolling through books on their e-readers, plugged into music on their MP3 players, yelling at their children—all blissfully oblivious to the hostility simmering between Lex and Buckler, the potential for bone-crunching violence.

Then the two men were on the beach, striding across sand like muscovado sugar, fine-grained and fawn. They walked until they reached the beach’s end, where coconut palms grew thick and tourists were few and far between. They were well out of earshot of the hotel, distant specks to the unaided eye.

“I’d prefer this not to come down to a smackdown between us,” Buckler said. “We’re meant to be co-operating. Special relationship and such.”

“I’m happy to co-operate,” said Lex. “What I will not accept is some bloke who thinks he’s hot shit waltzing in and taking advantage. Whatever your mission is, Wilberforce Allen and Albertine Montase have no part in it. I draw the line there, and you do not cross it.”

“You, Mr Dove, if I may say, are arguing from a position of total ignorance. You wouldn’t be so quick to make blanket statements like that if you had the first clue what we’re up against and how urgent it is that we see the matter resolved.”

“Ignorant I may be, but some things are non-negotiable, and this is one of them.”

“Has it occurred to you that your friends might volunteer their services, willingly, if asked?”

“Whether that’s the case or not, I’m not prepared to let you ask them or put undue pressure on them in any way. Because you will, and they’re good people—innocents—and I won’t have them placed in harm’s way, even if it is with their consent.”

Wearily Buckler shook his head. “You know, it’s a shame. I was hoping you and I would be able to settle this with a reasoned, gentlemanly exchange of views.”

“Then, lieutenant, back down. Simple as that.”

“No can do, ace. Let me just say that in eight seconds I could have you on the ground, in a chokehold, unconscious. And all’s I’d have to do is maintain the pressure for a few seconds more, starve your brain of blood and oxygen, and that’d be that. Lights out. Permanently.”

“Of course you could,” said Lex. “And by the same token, I could grab you, spin your round, take hold of you from behind by the jaw with both hands, and kick your legs out from under you. You’d fall, and your own bodyweight would separate your skull from your spinal column at the Atlas bone.”

“It could happen,” said Buckler nonchalantly. “Or I could slam your head backwards against that there palm tree trunk—shatter the back of your skull. What’d kill you, though, is your brain getting hurled forward, tearing against the inside of its case.”

“Funny you should mention palm trees,” Lex replied. “My speciality is making it look as though someone has died through mishap rather than design. I use what’s around me. I often improvise. See these coconuts lying around?” There were several on the beach, smooth green seed pods the size of rugby balls. “People get killed by those all the time. They can fall from the tree right down onto your cranium, from a height of thirty feet or more, and each is a solid thing weighing up to five pounds when fresh. Wham! Instant fatality. A body gets discovered here, at this very spot, with a bloodstained coconut nearby, and the coroner will draw only one conclusion. It won’t occur to him that someone might have slammed the coconut down on the deceased’s head.”

“Cute. How about this? I pull you forwards and down into a headlock. I grab your pants belt, haul you up upside-down, and fall backwards, landing on your head. Our combined weight crushes it like an egg.”

“It would work better on firmer ground than this. Tarmac or concrete, or a tiled floor. But I take your point.”

“It’s called the Brain Buster,” said Buckler. “There’s also the Russian Omelette.”

“That’s the one where you cross the fellow’s legs, fold him over with his shoulders to the ground, pull his legs up on top, sit on them, and snap his spine at the base.”

“Yep. Those psychos in the Spetsnaz love that one.”

“Hmm. It’s always struck me as a bit elaborate. Besides, the subject has to be out cold at first, or at least stunned.”

“Easily arranged. A jab to the summit of the nose or the upper lip—that’ll have the guy reeling, not knowing what the hell’s going on. You can do pretty much what you want with him after that.”

“I agree that everything goes much more smoothly if your opponent is too dazed to resist or put up a fight,” said Lex. “So imagine that that’s happened here. My next move—this is me taking the ‘accident’ route again—would be to drag the person out into the shallows. This lovely flat beach sand extends only so far. There are rocks and reefs out there below the surface. Just last year a youngish man, only in his late twenties, was larking about with his wife in the surf not a hundred yards from where we’re standing. They were newlyweds. Honeymooners. He plunged under, whacked his forehead on a hidden rock, end of story. A terrible tragedy. So it’s not unprecedented that someone could die in that way just here.”

“It would surely be a pity if history repeated itself.”

“It would, Lieutenant Buckler.”

Lex and Buckler continued to face each other, gazes locked. A breeze stirred the tips of Buckler’s silver-flecked moustache. Waves crested and plunged, blazing in the sun.

“I believe we have arrived at a stalemate,” Buckler said.

Lex nodded. Stalemate was a good word for it. They had just played a game of verbal chess, each of them gauging the measure not only of the other’s abilities but also of his willingness to follow through on his threats. Each now knew that he was facing a serious proposition. It wasn’t only in what they said, it was in the calm conviction with which they said it. Each was left in no doubt that the other was prepared to do whatever it took to get his own way.

“Compromise,” suggested Lex.

“I’m all ears.”

“Let
me
talk to Wilberforce and Albertine, not you.”

“Sounds doable.”

“That way they’ll be getting it from somebody familiar, somebody they trust, rather than some random American they don’t know from a hole in the ground. And I’ll phrase the request however I see fit. No arm-twisting, no guilt-tripping.”

“I can probably go along with that.”

“But,” Lex added, “first, before anything else, I’ll need a full mission briefing.”

“Fair enough.”

“And if I don’t like the sound of it...”

“Mr Dove,” said Buckler with something like a sigh, “let me be frank about this. A Team Thirteen op is never going to be tea and crumpets on the lawn, or whatever it is you Brits like to do of an afternoon. I can guarantee you it’s going to be grim and insane and nightmarish. A total bitch. I wish it weren’t, but it always is. That said, my unit are the best there is at this job. They do what no one else could or would dare to, and they do it with the utmost courage and professionalism. You
won’t
like the sound of it, I can assure you of that, but if anyone’s got a chance of pulling this thing off successfully, meeting the mission aims, surviving—then it’s me and my shooters.”

“Am I supposed to feel all fired up and happy now?” Lex said.

Buckler very nearly cracked a smile. “That was my best pre-game pep talk. Sure you are.”

TEN

JANITORS OF THE UNCANNY

B
UCKLER TURNED THE
air con in his suite up to full. The vent rumbled into life, scaring a tiny brown lizard clinging to the wall nearby. The reptile scurried for safety into a crack in the skirting board.

Coolness sifted slowly into the sweltering room.

The American removed a ruggedized laptop from his carry-on bag and set it on a small round table by the window. While the computer booted up, he pulled a couple of beers from the mini-bar fridge and passed one to Lex.

“Hotel’ll charge you an arm and a leg for those,” Lex warned.

“Uncle Sam’s picking up the tab. He can definitely afford a couple of beers.”

Lex twisted off the bottle cap. “So tell me. A grey op. What is that? You said ‘freaky shit.’ How freaky? Freaky in what way?”

Buckler pondered how to put it. “Okay. Take our most recent assignment. Day and a half ago we were in Siberia, can you believe it. Roughly six hundred klicks north of Krasnoyarsk, wading through swampland and taiga west of the Yenisey river. Worst fucking terrain imaginable.”

“I know. I’ve been.”

“Swarms of horseflies and deerflies so thick you can scarcely see through them, biting worse than any mosquitoes. Nothing but pine forest and sodden ground for mile upon shitty mile. Guess what we were hunting there?”

“I’m going to hazard it wasn’t pheasant. Men?”

“A man,” said Buckler. “One lone man. But like no man you’ve ever known. A man who was also an animal.”

“I’ve met a few of those in my time.”

“No, you don’t understand. Literally an animal. A bear.”

“A man who was also a bear?”

“A werebear. As they call it in Russia,
medvyedchik
.”

Lex laugh-snorted. “You’re kidding me.”

“I look like a kidder to you?” said Buckler. “This guy was a shape-shifter. An indigene from one of the Samoyed tribes. Some of the locals thought he might be a shaman—medicine men round those parts are supposed to be able to transform themselves into animals—but a couple of the shamans we spoke to denied it. Said no true shaman would be so destructive. He’d been roaming the area for a while, this werebear, preying on reindeer herds, scaring the hell out of villagers. Then, come winter, when the reindeer were moved south to warmer pastures, he started snatching children. The smallest of kids, sometimes even babies. Got a taste for them. He’d take them from their cribs in the middle of the night.”