For Valour (18 page)

The only good news was that the position of Leatherman Two’s knees seemed to be stopping him pinging me. Or maybe he knew exactly where I was and had decided to prolong the agony. Either way, I’d have to move as soon as the water reached me. I couldn’t stay there and let it freeze my bollocks off. I couldn’t reach his boots and pull him in without climbing the rope, and that was looped around the top of the pillar right next to him. But if I left my current hiding place I’d present him with a clear and very slow-moving target – and that always gave me a really bad feeling between the shoulder-blades.

The water had reached bollock height when I heard an indignant shout followed by a muffled grunt. Seconds later a body flew over the parapet and disappeared head first into the creek about three metres away from me.

The mooring line twitched alongside me, like a dancing snake. ‘Wake up, wanker. You can’t stay there all night.’

I looked up. I couldn’t see the zits under the shadow of the hoodie, but I recognized the voice. Two or three more figures appeared alongside him as I gripped my end of the rope. They all seized their end, like they were finalists in a tug of war, until Zitface raised his hand and the thing went slack again.

‘Just one more thing, before we pull you out of that shit. It’s gonna cost you another fifty.’

I nodded like a mad person. As Leatherman Two fought his way upright and finally broke the surface with a look of undiluted hatred on his face, fifty quid sounded like the deal of the century.

13

The Arnold Estate dudes heaved me out of St Saviour’s Dock, then cut the rope so Leatherman Two couldn’t join us in too much of a hurry. The last I saw of him he was still flailing about in the water and yelling very unfriendly things in my direction. I hadn’t picked up much of the ragtag collection of Balkan languages during my trips to Bosnia, but I knew what
kurvin sine
meant. It was Serbian for ‘son of a whore’.

Another fifty quid changed hands and I was enjoying a shower in Zitface’s mum’s flat. I managed to hose off the Timberlands, but even in a world heaving with dry cleaners, I decided it was easier to bin the jeans. As luck would have it, his stepdad had a spare pair pretty much my size. Zitface held them up for me to admire like I’d just dropped into a Giorgio Armani store for a browse. ‘Yours for a bargain price …’

Maybe that was because the not completely genuine eagle logo had been riveted onto the arse pocket upside down.

‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. Fifty quid?’

‘Sixty.’

‘Won’t your stepdad miss them?’

His normally impassive face broke into a smile. ‘Who gives a shit? He fucked off six months ago.’

I guessed he hadn’t left a forwarding address.

I handed over another bunch of notes and we shook. At that point it struck me that I didn’t even know his name.

‘Before I give you every penny I’ve got, maybe we should introduce ourselves? I’m Nick.’

‘Dave.’ He hesitated. ‘But it wasn’t always Dave.’

‘Don’t tell me … When you arrived from the Planet Krypton, it used to be Clark Kent.’

He frowned and shook his head. He didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.

‘Nah. I never met my dad, but they say he came from the Yemen. He called me Osama. But my mum changed it about ten years ago. Fuck knows why. I was just a kid.’

My dad hadn’t come from the Yemen, but we clearly had a lot in common. I told him a few stupid stories about me and Gaz and growing up on the Tabard while he rooted around in the fridge and conjured up a five-star full English, eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, the lot.

I watched in admiration. ‘Mate, you should be on
Master Chef
…’

He started to waffle a bit more freely as we ate. He told me a bit about his crew, and the day to day shit they got up to. As I wiped the fried bread around my nearly empty plate I felt a big stupid grin take over my face. Some things never changed.

As I turned to go he asked me if I needed him to look after the weapon. I told him I was happy doing that myself, but he should keep an eye out for angry Serbs in leather jackets.

He nodded. ‘Specially if they’ve been down the ink slinger.’ He rubbed his neck. ‘What’s that fucking thing all about?’

‘I’ll get back to you on that.’

He whistled up the lads who’d hauled me out of the creek for one final mission – escorting me to the Butler’s Wharf car park. As they drifted away I realized I’d had more fun with Dave and his mates in the last few hours than I’d had pretty much since I’d binned the military. I was going to miss them.

I should have chucked the Nokia I’d used to call Blackwood’s chambers and the Astra HQ in the river before taking off on my Bermondsey sightseeing trip. Instead I put it in a Jiffy-bag in a Hounslow all-night store, covered it with stamps and mailed it to an estate agent’s address in Newcastle that I’d plucked off a random website. Better late than never – and if it was being tracked, maybe it would be a waste of someone else’s time, not just mine.

I stuffed my bomber jacket into the daysack with my Russian tank commander’s hat and pulled on the Gore-Tex. I left the Skoda in the long-term car park at Heathrow with Sam’s Browning and second mag tucked into the spare tyre, then tubed it to West Brompton and caught the train to East Croydon. After doing some of the kind of anti-surveillance shit that I’d done on Bankside the previous evening, I headed for Gatwick and took the first flight I could get to Vienna.

If the Leathermen were going to make a habit of chasing me around, I needed to find out who the fuck they were, and who was pulling their strings.

1
Rasskazovska, Moscow

Wednesday, 1 February

I’d lost count of the number of movies I’d seen that featured a lone figure standing on the wrong side of a railing, gazing at the life he could no longer share, but I’d never thought I’d be in that man’s shoes.

Now here I was in Anna’s gated enclave, watching her hold our son in the saddle of a little wooden dinosaur on a spring while the older kids ran around, leaping on and off the roundabouts and swings. It was six degrees below outside, but some genius had erected one of those inflatable plastic domes over the playground for the winter months and pumped it full of warm air.

She seemed happier than I’d seen her in a while, and even more beautiful. And our boy was loving every minute of it. His chuckle was completely infectious, and bounced across the play area. I couldn’t wait to show him what fun you could have with a condom full of ketchup.

The midnight Aeroflot connection to Domodedovo had been full of men in leather jackets, but none of them seemed particularly interested in me, or not enough to join me for my second breakfast of the day. I’d called in at Shokoladnitsa after we landed and got a ham and cheese pancake and a mug of their world-famous hot chocolate down my neck while I checked out the surrounding area. Then I’d mooched out to the yellow cab rank and, after a short negotiation involving both dollars and roubles, took one to Moscow’s eastern margins.

2

The truth is I wasn’t sure what kind of welcome I was going to get from Anna. I hadn’t called ahead, in case she was having a bad-hair day and wanted me to keep my distance.

When she finally caught sight of me, she screwed up her face like I was someone she’d bumped into in another life, and she could no longer remember my name. But then she swept our little soldier off the dinosaur, both of them giggling like lunatics, and brought him over to the gate.

She held him up to me. ‘Darling Nicholayevich, this is your papa. You have his eyes. Hopefully you won’t decide to follow his choice of career …’

Her expression was still guarded. No surprises there: she’d thought she’d cleared me out of her life a week ago. But he wriggled with delight.

I reached out and took him, as carefully as I possibly could.

She finally gave me a smile. ‘He’s a little boy, Nicholas. He’s not made of glass!’

As I drew him to me, he clutched my nose between his thumb and forefinger, gave it an experimental twist, then settled his head on my chest, under my chin. He smelt of warm milk and fruit purée and everything good. For about the first time in my life, I wished I’d bothered to shave.

I held him close and shut my eyes. Which was a mistake. A big mistake. I suddenly pictured myself at the edge of the Grwyne Fawr Dam, my little boy in my arms. Heard the crack of a high-powered rifle. Watched helplessly as the 7.62mm round lifted off the top of his head, just above the eyeballs, like a soft-boiled egg …

‘Nicholas … What’s the matter?’ I felt Anna’s hand on my arm.

I blinked, momentarily disoriented. ‘Nothing.’ I held our son more tightly. ‘All good.’

Our place – Anna’s place – was a two-storey, three-bedroom villa with all the trimmings in a brand new community not far from the Borovskoe Highway. It had cost two million plus of the dollars I’d lifted from a Narcopulco-based drug baron, who’d threatened my family last year, and it had been money well spent.

The developers had taken some stick from the tree-huggers for bulldozing this stretch of woodland, but they’d left enough silver birches to shelter each property from the next when the leaves were out, while not giving the inhabitants a sense of total isolation. Knight Frankski had really come up with the goods. It was just what she’d wanted: an even better place to bring up your kid than the Tabard Gardens Estate.

I carried Nicholai inside and strapped him into his very shiny baby bouncer. I put it on the table where he could have a good look around while I reached for my daysack.

I peeled back my cuffs to show I had nothing hidden up my sleeves, then, as if by magic, I whipped out a couple of parcels I’d had gift-wrapped at Gatwick: a teddy bear in a Tower of London Beefeater uniform for him, and perfume for her.

The girl at the duty free didn’t need me to tell her I was out of my depth. She’d guided me gently to the Chanel counter when I’d explained what I was looking for and plucked a bottle of Coco Mademoiselle from the display. Apparently it had top notes of Tunisian Curaçao and was just the thing for pretty girls on motorbikes.

Anna gave me that look again – like I was someone she didn’t completely recognize – but this time it was immediately filled with warmth. ‘Nicholas … You’ve never done that before …’

I shrugged. I might even have blushed. I didn’t think I’d ever done that before either.

Whatever, they both seemed to work OK. Nicholai started chewing the teddy bear’s ear, and Anna gave me the biggest smile I’d seen from her for as long as I could remember.

When she’d fixed us a couple of George Clooney specials from the coffee machine, she finally asked the question that had been on her mind since the moment I appeared. ‘So, Nicholas … Are you planning weekly visits?’

I told her not to panic. ‘Only when I really need your help.’

I gave her the watered-down version of my recent Serbian experience, and made a rather bad attempt at drawing Sniper One’s tattoo on her notepad. ‘I thought it was a birthmark at first, but close up, it’s quite intricate. It reminded me of those mortar scars in the pavement that the Sarajevo locals used to fill with resin during the siege.’

‘The Roses?’

I nodded. ‘But maybe it’s just a coincidence.’

She gave me her version of the eyebrow treatment. ‘You don’t believe in coincidences, remember?’

‘When I was in Bosnia with the Firm in ’ninety-four, there was a rumour about a Serbian brotherhood, a kind of secret society, forged among the killers on the hills surrounding Sarajevo, or maybe even before that. They don’t seem to advertise themselves on the net. I couldn’t find a single thing about them when I pressed the Google button in the Gatwick departure lounge.’

‘Most secret societies try to stay away from Facebook.’ I could see that her mind was whirring. I always loved it when that happened. Except when I was at the sharp end of any conclusions she came to. ‘I need to talk to Pasha …’

I liked the sound of that. Pavel Korovin was a good guy. He had been Anna’s editor at
Russia Today
, and they’d spent quite a bit of time saving the world together when we’d first met.

‘My guess is you needed to know this yesterday?’

I grinned. ‘Early last week would have been even better.’

She gathered her coat – the one that looked like a giant duvet – fur hat and gloves, kissed Nicholai on the top of his still not very hairy head, and made for the door. ‘Look after him, will you? I’ll try not to be too long. There’s plenty of stuff in the fridge …’

3

Not too long ended up being about two hours. When she whizzed back through the door the newshound in her couldn’t conceal its excitement, and the mother couldn’t hide her concern.

‘Where’s Nicholai?’

‘In his cot.’

‘You managed to make him go to sleep?’

I shrugged. ‘He was a bit knackered after we finished the obstacle course and the judo session.’

She gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘Judo?’

‘Yup. Karate too.’ I threw some exaggerated martial-arts shapes. ‘The whole black belt, Seventh Dan thing.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Actually, we just had a man-to-man in the hot tub. Then he asked if he could have a bite to eat and get his head down. All that dinosaur riding takes it out of a guy.’

She gave me a glimmer of a smile, but I could see she’d switched into business mode.

She threw her coat, hat and gloves onto the settee and sparked up the Clooney machine again. With a couple of frothy cappuccinos on the go, we sat at the table and she took a dozen printed sheets of A4 out of her satchel. She shook her head when I reached for them. ‘Unless your Russian is a lot more fluent than it was a week ago, you’ll have to settle for the pictures.’

She fished a page full of images out of the pack and handed it across to me. They were an odd bunch, ranging from pre-revolutionary political cartoons of dastardly men with Rasputin hair, fizzing bombs and Cyrillic captions to more contemporary photographs of the kinds of guys you didn’t want pointing guns at you in the Black Mountains. And among them were two close-ups of someone’s neck freshly inked with the rose-coloured tattoo.