Christopher Brookmyre (42 page)

'Did you come to his rescue, too?'

'Only in as much as I saved him from himself.'

'How?'

'I'm not sure he'd want me to tell you. They're all a little skittish when it comes to . . . certain matters. I'm never quite sure who knows what or how much about whom, and it's kind of an unwritten rule not to ask.'

'Okay, that covers why he might be reluctant to tell me. It doesn't stop
you
telling me.'

'No, it doesn't,' he agreed. 'But it's also my choice not to.'

'Hmm,' Jane said, sensing a weakness. 'You know, in the UK these days, your decision to remain silent can be used against you in court. Thanks to those crazy liberals in New Labour.'

'What are you getting at?' Bett asked, slightly suspicious.

'It means you're giving up your right to prevent me drawing my own conclusions.'

'And why should I care what those conclusions might be when I know the truth?'

'Because you do care. You care about them. You're not as impervious as you like to make out. I've seen you. You're protective of them, you're
proud
of them, and you care what I think of them. You chewed my arse off the other day for selling them short.'

He smiled rather shyly. Found out.

'Can I trust you?' he asked. 'Can they?'

'Other than that you're teaching me to be devious and deceptive, I think you can.'

'I think I can too.' He took a swallow of wine and washed down a last forkful of couscous.

'Somboon is an orphan,' he said. 'But don't tune up the violin just yet. He's from a moderately wealthy background and the sob part of his story only began four years back. His parents were murdered in a bomb attack while on business in Indonesia. Islamic fundamentalists.'

'They were targeted specifically, or just . . . '

'As much as those fascist psychopaths specifically target anyone. They were part of a trade delegation at a tourism conference. It was attacked because of pandering to the West, encouraging immorality, something vague and illdefined like that. You know how well thought-out their ideological motives tend to be: pick an insane bigotry and run with it.'

'And Somboon?'

'Somboon was home in Bangkok. A bright kid, as you know. Resourceful, inventive, intelligent, and now very lost and very, very angry. To cut an extremely long story short, he began dedicating himself to vengeance. He was planning to become a one-man, or one-boy, counter-terrorism assassination unit. I couldn't tell you exactly what he was planning, but the least worst scenario would have been him ending up only killing himself.'

'So how did he come to your attention?'

'Another very long story. But the punchline is I was in Bangkok and caught him trying to steal a potentially catastrophic quantity of plastic explosive. I offered him an alternative path, a way of channelling his anger.'

'Alternative just to vengeance, or would I be right in guessing an alternative to jail?'

Bett gave a thin and knowing smile.

'It's good intelligence practice to recognise the recurrence of a pattern,' he conceded.

'You offered alternative paths to Nuno, Rebekah and Armand too, then?'

'Not Armand. He's an old friend, we go back a long time. When I planned to set up this enterprise, he was the first person I called.'

'Nuno?'

'A promising, ambitious and idealistic young police officer. Too promising, too idealistic and way too ambitious for his own good, as it turned out. He made enemies of some powerful senior officers, went sniffing around too close to their slush funds. They were setting him up to take the fall for a police corruption scandal. He'd have ended up in jail and then been looking at an exciting career as a security guard if he hadn't been brought to my attention.'

'By whom?'

'Contacts.'

'Okay. What about Rebekah? My instincts suggest a military background, and, given her particular talents, I'd guess the US Air Force. How the hell did
she
come to your attention?'

'That's a little more sensitive,' he said, his voice lowering though only they and Marie-Patrice were left in the building, and even she had to be at least fifty yards away. 'Rebekah was actually in the US Navy.'

Jane smiled sadly to herself at the mention of it, as it made her think of Ross, who could not hear the US Navy discussed without pointing out that it was founded by a Scot.

'It's little-reported enough in the US,' Bett went on, 'and therefore barely at all overseas, but the US Air Force has had some serious problems with regard to the training of its female recruits. Still too much of a macho culture among the fly boys who reckon just because women have been allowed in doesn't mean they have to make it easy for them. This has taken all the petty forms you might imagine, but also far less petty forms too.'

'Are we talking about . . . '

Bett nodded solemnly. 'At times, near systematic sexual abuse, using seniority and the chain of command to keep the victims silent. But the real scandal of it has been that the ones who spoke up and said
J'accuse
have ended up being punished or even discharged. It's been covered up on a disgusting scale, but there's been a snowball effect among victims in recent years: the more who speak out, the more who come forward.

'The same problems were believed to be less manifest among the navy pilots, but Rebekah's experience suggests it's merely that the story has yet to be told. It also illustrates how far they're prepared to go to ensure that it won't be.'

'What happened? I mean, spare me the details for the sake of the girl's dignity. Just the end result.'

'Rebekah was being "groomed" by a senior officer. He had got her to do certain things, sexually, but not . . . Anyway, he demanded she meet him after curfew one night, at a location on the base where she had no authorisation to be. She knew the setup, guessed what was coming. This was how the bastards shielded themselves: the victim can't say where she was because she wasn't supposed to be there. Either she's lying or she's in serious breach of base discipline. The location was high-security, a maintenance hangar. He had clearance, she didn't.'

Bett took a long, slow sip of wine and sighed.

'He had a side arm in case the weight of all his other means of coercion wasn't enough. He underestimated Rebekah, though. She's a strong girl, in lots of ways. There was a struggle. He lost.

'So there she is, standing over a dead senior officer in a hangar in the middle of a US Atlantic Naval base, thinking what the hell do I do now? Nobody's going to believe her about what happened; too many senior figures can't afford her to be believed. Her career is over and she could be looking at decades in jail. There is, however, a fully-fuelled Harrier jump jet sitting about twenty feet away.'

'She stole it?'

'Flew right out of there and headed east. Those things have a flight range of about twenty-five hundred nautical miles. She came coasting in on fumes and landed in Brittany.'

'Where you became aware of her through "contacts".'

'Quite.'

'What did the US Navy do about it?'

'Their principal concern was keeping the whole thing under wraps, but they were also understandably put out at misplacing several million dollars' worth of aeroplane.'

'What happened to it?'

'I brokered a deal, through diplomatic backchannels, to return it to them. So you can officially call me an arms dealer, to add to my other crimes and shames.'

'How much?'

'Money did change hands, but the greater part of my price was an assurance that they forget about Rebekah. I sold myself short - I should have anticipated they'd be only too happy to. Got themselves a bargain. She disappears and so does their embarrassing tale. So their nasty little secret can stay under wraps a little longer.'

'But you used their plane as a bargaining chip to save her. That was . . . pretty selfless.'

'Don't let's colour me too altruistic. I cleared a few euros from it, more than enough to buy that helicopter.'

'Complete with fully trained pilot.'

'Yes, and a good deal more besides. I didn't take her on because I reckoned I could use a flyer. I took her on because she had what it takes, what I need. When it came down to the moment, face to face with the enemy, when she was looking him in the eye, she pulled the trigger, and that's a lot harder than you might think.'

'No, I think it would be extremely hard. But not as hard as facing up to what would follow.'

'Sometimes you can't afford to think about that. Especially when you know your enemy won't.'

'True, but that still doesn't make it easier to live with yourself afterwards.'

'It makes it easier to live than if you're the one getting shot,' he retorted impatiently.

'But it's not always you or them, kill or die, is it?' she asked. Bett narrowed his eyes, his posture stiffening.

'You and Alexis really have been talking, haven't you?' he said tersely.

'She's just a kid,' Jane protested. 'Not everybody's cut out for this stuff. Not everybody's
got what it takes
to kill people.'

'Some have it, some learn it,' he said. Jane thought she detected a hint of sorrow in his tone, but maybe she was giving him too much credit for anything north of glib.

'Don't you think nineteen's a bit young to learn? And don't you think it should be a choice?'

'Nobody has a choice about when they discover the world's harsher realities, Mrs Fleming,' he fired back with a barely suppressed anger. 'And Alexis discovered them a lot older than . . . ' he sighed, swallowing something, shaking his head, labouring to calm himself. 'A lot older than some,' he finished quietly, this time with real sorrow in his voice.

Jane looked at him, kept her eyes trained so that he knew he couldn't hide from her gaze no matter how long he stared at his empty plate.

'What happened to you?' she asked softly.

He said nothing, but regained that iron countenance. The shutters were up.

'We've talked all evening about where everyone else came from, but what about you? How did you get here?'

'Military Intelligence.'

'Which country's?'

'More than one.'

'Where are you from?'

'Lots of different places.'

Jane nodded. It was going to be like this, was it? Good practice, perhaps. Get anything out of him and tapping the weapons hawkers would be a doddle.

'Originally. Childhood.'

'A small town. Just an ordinary small town. The name is on the front gate.'

'Rla an Tir?' Jane asked. He smiled at her pronunciation. 'Where is it?'

'By a river.'

Jane sighed, loudly communicating her exasperation, though she knew it signalled acceptance of defeat.

'What is it you're afraid of?'

'In my experience, the more people know about you, the more ways they can find to hurt you. I've made a lot of enemies.'

'And so that means you can't afford to make any friends? Nobody gets in, do they? Into your sanctuary. I don't even know your first
name
.'

Neither she nor Bett spoke for a few moments, both of them simultaneously reaching for their glasses, as though otherwise occupying their mouths would excuse or disguise the absence of conversation. Jane's silence was a stubborn one as she was feeling there was nothing left she could say and that the ball was in his court anyway. Bett's seemed more reflective, as though she had at least given him something to think about.

Covering the gap, but accentuating the awkwardness, Marie-Patrice returned at this point to take away their plates. They thanked her heartily, but were once again left with their impasse after she had departed to fetch dessert. They sat for a few more wordless moments and then Bett finally spoke.

'It's Hilary,' he said.

'What?'

'My first name. It's Hilary. And if you tell anybody, I'll have no choice but to kill you.'

A tale of a tub

Another few days of this and Ross would have to start checking himself for barnacles. The longest he'd ever spent on a boat before had been about an hour on the pond at Rouken Glen with his mates, and the longest he'd spent on a boat with his dad had been half that, on a pedalo in Lanzarote when he was about eleven and their relationship was, to put it politely, less problematic. He wasn't sure how much more he could take. The only upside was that it made his need to escape all the more imperative, if that was at all possible. So far, escape itself most definitely wasn't.

It was what, six days now? Five? Seven? He was starting to lose track. Certainly enough time for his dad to have muttered, 'Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink,' at least a couple of thousand times. He probably wasn't even aware he was saying it, or at least not aware that he had said it again and again and again and again just about every time there was a lull in conversation long enough to have a look over the gunwales or through a window.

Not that Ross didn't have his own unconscious verbal tick, right enough. He couldn't remember when it had started, but he was aware that he was constantly singing snatches of
Friggin' in the Riggin'
, and this awareness was not proving the first stage towards cessation. All the bloody time, in his head, under his breath; whenever he wasn't talking or following a sufficiently engaging train of thought, there it was.

Give it some bollocks!
Indeed.

It was a big yacht, its size and opulence a constant reminder of the stakes being played for and the resources at the enemy's disposal. It had to be at least a hundred feet long, and maybe thirty tall from the flybridge to the waterline. Price, he knew too little to gauge; two million, five, ten? However, the longer Ross spent on it, the smaller it got. It may have dwarfed the vessel they were ferried to it aboard, but it was still a confined space, a limited environment hemmed in by - thank you, Dad - water, water everywhere. Ross walked the decks constantly, round in circles and figures of eight, each fixture, each polished rail, the tesselation of the wooden floor becoming more familiar, the spaces between them shorter. He climbed the stairs between decks to give 241