Jig (43 page)

‘Who are you?' the man asked. He had a foreign accent, European of some kind.

Cairney still held the girl tightly. ‘Linney?' he asked.

The plump man shook his head and looked angry. The girl who'd been shoved so rudely aside gazed at Cairney as if she didn't know quite what to make of him. There was a dull defensive quality in her face.

‘Who are you?' the plump man asked again and then started to rise from the bed, his expression now one of alarm. He began to make for the door, the bedsheet hanging loosely from his body. Cairney hesitated only a moment over his options. He could let this man leave the bedroom – but then what? The look on the man's face suggested that of some outraged burgher searching for the nearest telephone to call the police. And that was a complication Patrick Cairney didn't need.

‘Don't go any further,' Cairney said. ‘Stop right where you are.'

The plump man paid no attention. He was about six feet from the door and still hurrying when Cairney said, ‘Don't take another step.'

The man ignored him.

Cairney clenched his fist and struck the man on the side of the head. It wasn't the fiercest of blows but it had an immediate effect. The plump man's eyes rolled and he gasped and then appeared to implode as he staggered back across the floor onto the bed. The bedsheet, like some outsized shroud, collapsed around him. It was crude and Cairney regretted having to do it, but there was no way he could have let the man stroll out of here. He looked down at the unconscious figure, feeling curiously depressed by the sight of the open mouth and the broken skin on the side of the scalp. It shouldn't have been necessary, it should have been simple and smooth and uneventful. Instead, he'd been drawn into an act of violence that seemed all the more upsetting to him because of its very intimacy, the connection of his flesh with that of another, the moment of harsh contact, bone on bone. It wasn't violence from a distance, the kind he was accustomed to. It was close up and personal, and it made him unhappy. He was still holding the girl, still staring at the inert figure on the bed, when he heard a man's voice from beyond the bedroom door.

Rasch? Are you finished in there?

And then the door opened and the man from the terrace stood on the threshhold. He appeared only slightly surprised by Cairney's presence. There was a momentary widening in the eyes, and then he was smiling, as if the unexpected appearance of a total stranger were an everyday event.

‘You can let the girl go,' he said. ‘I don't like having my property mistreated.'

Cairney didn't release the girl. He ran his eye over the man, but he didn't notice the presence of any weapon. Besides, since the man was dressed only in shorts and sweatshirt, there were no obvious hiding-places for a gun.

‘Linney,' Cairney said.

Nicholas Linney nodded. He gazed a moment at Gustav Rasch on the bed. Then he turned his face back to Cairney.

‘You're the one they sent from Ireland,' Linney said.
This was the one everybody was so worried about. This was the man Harry Cairney had said was going to be so fucking good at his business
. Nicholas Linney felt a rush of pleasure to his head, a keen anticipation, an awareness of combat. He'd find out how good this guy was supposed to be. This guy was about to discover that Nick Linney wasn't some overweight German clerk. All at once Linney's chest was tight and his heartbeat had the persistence of a funeral drum.

Cairney let the girl go. She sat on the edge of the bed, pushing her glossy black hair out of her eyes. The other girl reached for her friend's hand and held it.

‘I'm the one,' Cairney said.

Nicholas Linney took a step back out of the bedroom. Cairney moved after him. Linney glanced at the man's overcoat, seeing how one hand was thrust inside a pocket now.
He has a gun in there
. And he wouldn't carry one unless he intended to use it somewhere down the line. Linney thought of all the weapons he had inside his office. He'd play along, he'd wait for the moment, the opening. It was bound to come. There was a wonderful irony in the idea of killing this hot-shot with one of the M-16A2s that had been intended for Ireland. Linney was enormously pleased by it.

Both men stood inside a large living-room. There was a massive fishtank where small electric colours darted back and forth.

Cairney said, ‘We need to talk. You know what I've come for.'

Linney smiled. His goddam heart wouldn't stop hammering. Here was a situation he'd wanted all along, his own private little war. Right here in his own living-room. He could already feel the stark warmth of the automatic rifle between his hands.

‘Suppose I tell you what I know. What guarantees can you give me you won't shoot me when you've heard everything I have to say?'

‘I don't give guarantees,' Cairney said. He wondered why Linney had talked about shooting, and then it dawned on him that the man imagined there was a gun in his pocket. Fine. Let him think so.

‘You pump me dry of information, what fucking good am I to you after that?' Linney asked. ‘I need something. I gotta have a guarantee. Something.'

Cairney, who saw on Linney's face a desperation that lay beneath the intensity, felt suddenly relaxed. With barely any effort he'd established control here. He'd taken command. The game was his and he could play it however he liked. Whatever uncertainty he'd felt before fell away from him. He felt the way he had when he'd assassinated Lord Drumcannon, that elation when the man had appeared in the sight of his rifle, that moment when you knew the game was over and the result already sealed beyond doubt and all that was left was the mere bloody formality of the victim falling.
You've got this one
, he told himself.
You've cornered this one. And all because he thinks you've got a gun concealed in your pocket
.

‘Somebody broke a contract,' he said. ‘Somebody screwed the Cause. It's not the kind of situation where I can offer you immunity, Linney. For all I know, you might be the man I'm looking for.'

Linney shook his head. It was just as he'd expected. This fucker suspected
him
. ‘Not me, friend.'

Cairney moved forward. He was very close to Linney now.

‘Who gave you my name anyway?' Linney asked. He glanced a second at the half-open door of his office. He could turn quickly, he could make it inside, slam the door hard behind him. He could do it. He could get to a weapon. It all depended on letting this fucker think everything was going his way. ‘It was that scumbag priest, wasn't it? He sent you here.'

Cairney said nothing. He had a tremor, a fleeting doubt, that Nicholas Linney was preoccupied with something, that his mind was feverishly working in some other direction. Cairney bunched his hand in his coat pocket and moved it very slightly to emphasise the phantom gun.

Linney saw the gesture. He'd never been faced with a gunman before, and he felt the vibrancy of the challenge. His mind was astonishingly clear and sharp. He had a sense of a steel spring coiled deep inside him. Play along with the guy, he thought. Lull him. Then
move
.

‘What is it you want? Names? Addresses?'

‘I want everything you can give me, Linney.'

Nicholas Linney had his back flush to the wall now. He looked at the man a moment, then said, ‘In my office. I got all the information there.' Linney indicated a door to his right.

‘After you,' Cairney said.

Linney took a step towards his office. He sucked air deeply into his lungs and felt that spring inside him suddenly unwind.

Now!

He shoved the door open and slammed it hard behind him and before Cairney could get a foot in he heard Nicholas Linney bolting the door. And then there was another sound from within the locked room, one that Cairney recognised only too well. It was the click of a magazine being shoved hurriedly into a rifle. And then Nicholas Linney roared aloud, the strange cry of a man exalted by the prospect of battle.

Cairney reacted immediately.

He threw himself to one side, rolling over and over in the direction of the sliding glass-doors, so that he was out of the line of fire. When the sound of automatic gunfire started, he heard it split the silence of the house like a hammer smashing glass, and then the two girls were screaming and grabbing one another for protection against the random, blind assault of bullets that traversed the living-room and buried themselves in plaster.

Cairney blinked involuntarily. Linney was shooting wildly through the door of his office, his bullets tearing huge holes in the wood and spraying the air with splinters. It was desperate stuff and Cairney, cursing himself for having been misled by his own sense of supremacy, closed his eyes and pressed his face down into the floor. Linney kept firing madly, the door shook and vibrated, the splinters flew, the girls screamed. It was insane, a world that had only a moment ago been regulated and under control turned totally upside-down and gone berserk.

One of the oriental girls was struck by the spray inside the bedroom and was screaming because there was an enormous hole in her stomach. The other girl, covered by her blood, lay flat on the floor and cried for a time until she became quiet. The gunfire pierced woodwork and mirrors and windows, creating chaos and debris. A stereo blew up in a violent plume of smoke and sparks, and the chandelier threw out tiny shards of crystal that created a glassy rain. The fishtank exploded like a dynamited kaleidoscope, showering the room with yellow and blue and red fish.

Cairney saw the plump man on the bed slither to the floor in a tangle of bedsheets and a snowstorm of feathers released from a punctured pillow. He lay beside the two girls, both of whom had been hit.

And then abruptly the firing stopped and the silence was the most profoundly unsettling Cairney had ever heard. He raised his face and looked at the door, which was buckled and split and hanging precariously from its hinges. What was Linney doing now? Reloading?

Listening, Cairney heard the sound of dying fish flapping desperately in puddles of shallow water. He crawled through the sliding glass-doors to the terrace where a rough wind rising up off the ocean scoured his face. The carnage, so sudden, so unexpected, had shaken him. It wasn't supposed to be like this, he thought. It wasn't supposed to get away from him like this. He had had
goddam
Linney right where he wanted him – and now, Christ, it had fallen apart.

He heard the noise of the broken door being kicked down, then the sound of Linney moving in the room, feet squelching through the water from the fishtank.

Cairney peered through the glass doors. Linney, his back to Cairney, was holding a pistol out in front of himself as he moved. He walked hesitantly towards the bedroom, trying to keep his balance on the slippery floor. Cairney watched. He knew Linney could turn around at any second and see him framed in the glass doors, a perfect target.

There were twenty feet, twenty-five at most, separating Cairney from Linney, who was standing now in the threshhold of the bedroom. It might be the only chance Cairney would ever have. He would have to move now or not at all.

He stepped through the glass doors back inside the room, moving with all the stealth he'd learned in the desert, moving as the Libyans always said ‘like a man whose feet are the wind', watching Linney who was regarding the girls inside the bedroom. Fifteen feet, ten. How far could he travel across this watery floor before Linney heard him and turned around and fired his pistol? Ten feet. Nine. Eight.

When Cairney was a mere six feet away, some instinct made Linney swing quickly round, firing one shot that was unfocused and wild and went flying past Cairney's cheek into the glass panel of the door. Cairney bent low, shoulders hunched, every muscle in his body relaxed and ready now for the move he'd have to make before Linney found his range and fired again. He threw himself across the room with neither grace nor elegance, an anxious linebacker, his shoulder crunching into the man's face. There was the sound of bone breaking as the man slithered on the watery floor and tumbled back against the wall. The blow confused and pained Linney but didn't render him unconscious. The pistol clattered across the ceramic tile of the floor and Cairney, turning away from the other man, picked it up.

Linney watched him grimly. Then, using the wall for support, he made it to his feet. ‘I gave it a good fucking shot, didn't I?' He seemed very pleased with himself. ‘You're not bad. You know that?'

Cairney shook his head. None of this should ever have happened.
This chaos and destruction. None of it
. He could think of nothing to say. He felt brutalised. This was so far removed from any sequence of events he could possibly have anticipated. He couldn't have dreamed this even if he'd dreamed a hundred years.
There's no thrill in killing
, Finn had said once. But there was, if you were a man like Nicholas Linney. What did Linney resemble anyhow but the kind of random killer that Finn had always loathed? A lover of easy death and casual destruction?

‘Mulhaney took the money,' Linney said. His jaw must have been broken because he spoke as if he had a mouth filled with old socks.

‘Mulhaney?' Cairney asked.

Linney grimaced in pain. He raised one hand to his lips and probed the inside of his mouth and removed a filling, a small gold nugget that lay in his palm. Cairney glanced a second inside the bedroom. The plump man, whose nakedness in death seemed oddly childlike, like that of an unnaturally huge baby, was surrounded by feathers from the wrecked pillow. The girls, who lay beneath him, looked only mildly surprised.

Nicholas Linney's face had already begun to swell. ‘Mulhaney runs the North-Eastern branch of the Teamsters. Big Bad Jock.'

Cairney knew the name now. It was one he always associated with questionable labour practices, slush funds, Las Vegas intrigues.

‘What makes you think Mulhaney has the money?'