Cold (31 page)

‘We’re in Malin!’ roared Joe.

‘What?’

‘Malin!’

After Irish Sea, Shannon and Rockall, it was their turn. The beautifully modulated tones of the shipping forecast had always cast a spell for Joe, from the very first day he had listened to it.

‘
Gale warning: Malin. West or north-west, gale eight to storm ten, occasionally violent storm eleven at first, backing south, five to seven. High or very high, becoming rough or very rough. Squally showers, occasionally wintry. Rain later good.
’

‘Rain later good. What?’ yelled Katya.

‘Hush your mithering!’ replied Joe. ‘Welcome to Ireland!’

An hour before, the sea had been choppy, exacting but manageable. But as the light of the afternoon began to dim, storm clouds reared up from the west and the mood of the sea became angrier and angrier. Now, as they rocked through the furious gap between the north-east tip of Ireland and the southern leg of Rathlin Island, the sea had become a demon: wild, savage, mad.

The North Atlantic poured through the narrow passageway, smashing into the Irish Sea as it stormed out. This was a terrible place to be, and it was just about to get far worse. Joe had been in the North Atlantic in a force 11 once before, but in a trawler the size of a block of flats. And, even then, three sailors had been injured, one poor fellow suffering a broken leg. He cursed himself silently. The logic driving them to run – run without leaving any evidence of their passage – had forced them into this storm. And in this they could very easily die.

A great monster of a wave that had been powering up from Newfoundland three thousand miles to the west hoisted the yacht the height of a house and then dropped it like a toy. The bow was underwater, invisible – the midriff of the boat, too. Through their feet they could feel the fibreglass hull shudder, and then the yacht crashed upwards, like a submarine breaking surface, and started the long slow rise up the next cliff of water. Katya glanced to where the sparrow had been seeking shelter. It had vanished.

SleepEasy
, thought Joe – never had a ship been so poorly named. He hadn’t slept since they left Liverpool. He smiled his broadest smile at Katya, exuding a self-confidence he didn’t feel. She reached for his free hand and squeezed it and yelled, ‘I trust you, silly Irishman!’

On Rathlin Island, a lone fisherman got out of his car by Rue Point, hoping to try his luck in a small sea cove, sheltered from the elements. But the wind was so strong it almost blew his car door off its hinges, and he got back in and slammed it shut. No fishing for him, not tonight. Out to sea, he could just make out through the sea spray the lights of a tiny yacht bouncing around in the ocean.

‘Damn fools,’ he muttered to himself. ‘They’re taking a great risk in this.’ And then the yacht disappeared in a squall of sleet. He sat in the car for another half an hour. The squall cleared, but he never saw the yacht again.

MANAUS, BRAZIL

T
he lobby of the Hotel Piranha had become an abattoir. The night porter, shredded with bullets, so much human Gruyère cheese; a hotel maid who had strayed into the firing line because she was looking for more toilet rolls got wasted with a single bullet; three kids from Alabama, touring the world, their brains splattered against a wall; a local cop, bent but not a killer, shot too; dead also was a taxi driver, enquiring about a fare; but the real kisser was the guy in the fancy purple robes.

‘Mãe de Deus,’ cursed Rubem Ribeiro, and – godless sinner though he might be – crossed himself. They’d shot dead the Cardinal Archbishop of the Higher Amazon on his way to bed his seventeen-year-old mistress on the sixth floor.

All of this killing might just have been manageable, in a kind of way, because the world had become bored with stories of mega-death from Latin America, had it not been that a number of stray bullets had clipped the hotel’s signature fish tank above reception, holding fifty piranha. Thrashing violently on the stone floor, they had spent their last moments of life eating the dead and dying: the staff, the guests, the cop, the taxi driver, and His Excellency too.

A large and fleshy piranha had its teeth clamped to the cardinal’s nose. Out of respect for the Church, Ribeiro shoved the fish with the toe of his shoe. The piranha was clamped on like a barnacle. All that happened was the fish, the nose and the dead meat rolled en masse an inch or two away from his shoe and then rolled back. From out of the cardinal’s oesophagus came a noxious burp and the stink of dead fish and dead meat. It was enough to cause Ribeiro to jump out of his skin.

The irrationality behind killing the cardinal troubled him the most. Of course, everyone who was anyone in Manaus knew that the cardinal was a swordsman, that he screwed any woman he could – the younger the better. But in this raw, Amazonian frontier town, the regional base for the mining and logging companies to rape the last true wilderness on earth, it was not a good idea to anger the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Eight people murdered in Amazonas – not a story. A randy cardinal shot, then bitten to death by piranha, was. Ribeiro was used to buying silence for the CIA. But there were not enough hundred-dollar bills in circulation for him to kill this story.

Ribeiro racked his mind, going through all the local psychos, drug cartels, bandits and rip-off merchants in town. None of them would have slotted the cardinal – or, if they had, not like this. This wasn’t local. It had to be outsiders.

Ribeiro had been CIA station chief in Manaus for longer than he could remember, sniffing out the Escobars and Co., profiling the major Colombian drug lords, the Mexican psychos, the drippy European and American money-launderers and the Swiss, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein bankers who popped up on his very local radar in the city. This was the first time he’d come across a mass killing without the smell of narco-dollars attached; and the first when, thanks to the piranhas, there weren’t many leftovers.

Tipped off by Langley, Ribeiro had arrived ahead of the finest detectives in the whole of Manaus. They were all on his payroll and he would, in the ordinary way, have feared nothing from them, but killing a cardinal was out of the ordinary; the piranha angle boosted it out of his control. So he examined and photographed evidence, but removed and destroyed nothing. Other than the dead and the piranha, the only items of interest, the only thing remotely unusual about the hotel and its guests, were two passports – one Irish, one Russian – in a drawer in reception.

Ribeiro pinged a short message:
Eight dead, Hotel Piranha, including Cardinal of Amazonas. These passports may be of interest.
He attached photographs of both passports in his message to Langley. Then he walked out of the building as he heard the police sirens draw nearer, crossing the busy road to stand on the embankment overlooking the Rio Negro.

A black vulture flopped lazily down through the morbid, sticky heat to land on the great river’s muddy beach closest to the city. In a rainbow-coloured puddle, slicked with oil, a dying piranha flapped its gills. The vulture pecked out its eyes first, and was filleting its throat when Ribeiro’s mobile phone rang. It was Langley.

‘Ribeiro?’ An American voice.

‘
Sim
.’ He deliberately didn’t translate the Portuguese into English.

Langley had a habit of demanding instant answers, as if Manaus was like the South Bronx – rough, but not that far from Manhattan. Ribeiro’s city was a deep-sea port, true, but one thousand miles from the ocean. The more Portuguese he spoke, the better Langley might understand that it was in another country.

‘
Sim
,’ he repeated, then reluctantly, in English: ‘Yeah, this is Ribeiro.’

‘This is Jed Crone, Deputy Director.’

In thirty-something years of working for the CIA, Ribeiro had never been honoured by a direct call from such a senior executive.

‘How can I help, Mr Crone?’

‘I want you to close this down. The eight dead, they’re not dead. The killings did not happen. I want that, and I want you to hunt down all possible leads to the Russian national Koremedova and the Irishman, Tiplady. Confirm that is your mission. Confirm now.’

On the other side of the street, three separate TV trucks had arrived, their satellite dishes already poking skywards. Ribeiro used his phone to take a photograph, pinged it to Langley, and then put his phone back to his ear. Crone was barking into it, barking that he should confirm receipt of his instruction.

‘No.’

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘The killers slotted seven people plus a cardinal, then everybody got chewed up by a fish tank full of piranha. No way I can close this down. I’ll keep a lookout for the Russian lady and the Irishman. All I saw were the passports, not the people. And, Mr Crone, I don’t know what the CIA’s priorities are these days, but whoever killed eight innocent people, that’s not good. Was this an Agency operation?’

Ribeiro could feel the frost down the phone.

‘No,’ said Crone. ‘But the tone and content of that observation has been noted – and, Mr Ribeiro, you should note that your contract extension is currently under active review.’

‘What’s that mean in English?’ asked Ribeiro.

‘In English, that means you’re fired.’ And the call was cut.

The worst professional day of Ribeiro’s life as a spy ended in a bar by the docks. He’d had one last piece of information to sell, something that he hadn’t got round to mentioning to Crone. The buyer was an absurdly young Englishman called Baker, a butterfly expert from the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. Or so he said.

‘What might you have for us?’ asked Baker.

‘Why is MI6 pretending to be interested in butterflies?’

Baker repeated his question.

‘A cleaning lady at the Hotel Piranha, the supervisor . . .’

‘And?’

‘In the reception bin, one of her cleaners found an airmail envelope with a big stamp with the Queen’s head on it. It had been sent, according to the postmark, from Windsor.’

‘So the passports end up in Manaus, but not the people,’ said Baker.

‘Uh-huh. Who do you think did the Hotel Piranha?’ asked Ribeiro. ‘It wasn’t the Agency, was it?’

Baker shook his head. ‘No. Not the Agency. But something odd is going on inside Langley. We’re not a hundred per cent certain, but we suspect the people who did this have snow on their boots.’

‘What?’ said Ribeiro, not up to speed with 1940s English slang.

‘The Russians. They’ve lost something – lost something very precious to them – and they want it back. And they will kill anybody and anything that might be stopping them from getting their lost property back.’

‘What is it?’

‘That’s the problem. We don’t know.’

EASTERN UKRAINE

T
win lines of steel railway track, still cross-hatched by its wooden sleepers, floated above the early morning mist. A railway bridge over a motorway had been blown up, the concrete bridge a mess of rubble below, but somehow the railway track, as skewed and twisted and wrong looking as a Möbius strip, hung in the sky. Nearby, a line of electricity pylons had been brought down and the great steel structures lay higgledy-piggledy on the ground, locked in a cat’s cradle of wires as if an invisible giant had been caught in their web of steel.

The convoy trundled past a petrol station; its roof had taken a direct hit from artillery, the shell smashing through the white plastic and steel structure as if it were something he’d made out of cardboard and glue when a boy at primary school.

The closer they got to the war zone, the more uncivilised everything became: the roads dirtier and grittier; the houses in the roadside villages empty, some half destroyed by stray shells. No children; cars drove maddeningly and madly fast; every now and then the air bristled with a far-off
crump, crump
of artillery.

On the edge of the small town, east of Donetsk, a play fort blocking half the road had been created by stacking ammunition boxes, breeze blocks and spare tractor tyres on top of each other. Daubed with a big fat skull and crossbones, and topped off with two flags – one the black, blue and red of the Donetsk People’s Republic, or DPR, and the other that of the American Confederacy – the fort was patrolled by seven men holding Kalashnikovs upright by their stocks and waggling them in the air unconvincingly, as if they had been invited to bring penis extensions to a swingers’ party but weren’t quite sure they’d come to the right address. The rebels were dressed in a drunk’s idea of what a Hollywood wardrobe mistress might come up with if asked to dress a rebel army in Eastern Ukraine: black bandanas; a mishmash of military fatigues; hunting caps.

The aid convoy of white trucks was guarded front and back by a brace of DPR police cars and was waved through the checkpoint without ceremony, at speed. That left the rebel guards with nothing much to do apart from fret about their loss of power and reflect upon their essential insignificance.

As Gennady’s load of grenades and Grad launcher missiles slowed through the chicane, a muscle-bound rebel with a forehead as narrow as a pencil case brought down his Kalashnikov, held its sight to his eye and fired. A stray dog yelped and flopped over onto its side, dead. Through his rear-view mirror, Gennady saw a pool of blood grow by the dog’s head. His right foot hovered over the brake pedal. In the old days, when he’d had command, he would have thrown such a man in the slammer for a month for such cruelty. But then he remembered the role he was playing – a driver-cum-mercenary – and his truck rolled on.