Silencer (26 page)

‘It sounds as if you’ve already made up your mind, so what’s the point of talking?’

‘Don’t be like that …’

‘Now isn’t the time, Anna. Now I just need to sort this shit out. For all of us.’

She sighed again.

‘I’ll call you later.’

I put down the phone and headed for my Timberlands.

Ten minutes later, I stopped at the desk with the ever-smiling receptionist and asked if the package had been picked up by the three girls. It hadn’t.

The sun was dipping behind the high-rises. That was good, as far as I was concerned, because it was hot as fuck. I turned right and headed for Starbucks, making a mental note to buy another pair of sun-gigs.

I was halfway down the queue when I saw a cab pull up and the three girls climb out of the back. They were still wearing the clothes they’d left Moldova in, and each clutched a small overnight bag. Kitty got out from beside the driver and waved them towards the lobby. They obeyed like sheep as she jumped back into the cab. Seconds later, she was gone.

I picked up a sticky bun to go with my brew. When the barista asked me my name, I said the first thing that came to mind.

The girl’s brow furrowed and started scribbling.

I had a munch as I waited for my cappuccino. By the time it
arrived, the Moldovan crew still hadn’t come out of the hotel. I went outside, in case there was a problem. As I got to the entrance, I realized what it was. They didn’t speak English, so had to rely on scribbled instructions. The package was handed over, and one of the guys on the door guided them outside.

‘You need a taxi?’ he asked. ‘Taxi to the airport?’

They nodded excitedly. ‘Taxi, taxi!’

He summoned one from the rank about twenty metres away, and leaned down to the driver as the girls piled inside.

‘To the airport. They’ve got a Lufthansa flight. You know the terminal?’

The driver nodded, pissed off that his knowledge was being questioned.

When the cab disappeared, I decided to bin the cappuccino and take off down the hill towards Admiralty. The girls would probably never know how lucky they were, and that was a pity. This time next year they might be on another flight to another place with another chance to be a dancer or a waitress, or, a year poorer, something much more desperate. But I still felt quite good about giving them a second chance. Where they came from, second chances weren’t too thick on the ground.

My Aussie mates would fade from view as soon as Bruce could walk without leaking. They were either going to be multimillionaires or convicts, but wherever they ended up, it wouldn’t be Hong Kong – or anywhere else with their old identities.

I felt a little jealous of them. They had each other, they had a plan, and they knew that no one else gave a fuck about them, so why worry?

I chucked a right towards Admiralty and got another coffee. This time it had
Dino
Sharpied all over the cup.

Wan Chai was as hot, sticky and congested as ever. The air was heavy with carbon monoxide trapped between the high-rises. I’d only walked a few hundred metres and my shirt already had big wet patches that clung to my sides. I’d bought myself a twenty-dollar pair of gigs, not that I needed them at ground level, with hundreds of feet of vertical concrete cutting out the low sun.

I checked out the bamboo scaffold as I entered the Internet café but there were no couples scrambling across it. I bought a can of Fanta that was as ice-cold as the shop, paid cash for a chunk of airtime and settled down to Google Dino Zavagno.

I picked up two guys straight away in two different countries, both in financial services, both at the geek end of the spectrum. Neither wore his cock on his head or had been anywhere near a peroxide bottle. I also picked up a mass of LinkedIn invitations to names that were close but no cigar.

I had a go at Bernardino, his full name, on Facebook and all the social networks, but nothing was an exact match. That surprised me. He was such a fuckwit I’d thought he’d be all over the place for the ladies. On the off-chance, I searched his name on the DEA site but, of course, there was nothing.

All the same, I pinged off an email to their El Paso office, which covered New Mexico and a slice of Texas.

My name is Nick Stone. Could you please forward this message to Bernardino Zavagno?

Dino – well, it’s been a few years since Costa Rica, hasn’t it? Could you contact me – there’s something important I’d like to talk to you about? Nick.

It was a long shot: I hadn’t seen him for years. But if I did get to him, he might be able to help. If I didn’t, I’d just have to go to Mexico with a name, the same as I had coming here. But first I needed to see what was out there on El Peregrino, the Pilgrim.

I hit the keys and accessed all the normal places, but it looked like Katya, Dino and I were not the only people left on the planet without a digital presence. I hit the news channels and still nothing. There were no pictures and no articles that had anything remotely to do with the Pilgrim I was after.

PART SIX

4 September 2011

15.22 hrs

My two-man DEA reception committee sat granite-like in their very shiny black Ford Taurus a few metres beyond the exit from the Avis car park. Chinos and polo shirts, short-back-and-sides with expressions to match. You didn’t need an eagle eye to spot them. They’d FaceTimed me as I exited the luggage hall, a hand covering the screen that would have shown Dino checking me out. And now, as if to make doubly sure they couldn’t be missed, the sedan carried government plates.

I sat behind the wheel of my hired Chevy Cruze, checking the bars on my iPhone yet again in case it hadn’t rung because of a weak signal. I must have been there at least fifteen minutes because I’d had to spark up the engine to blow out the mist gathering on the windows. I had a new US Sprint SIM card in my mobile. Now I just had to wait – and hope – that Dino was going to call.

It was pointless heading out of the airport: I had nowhere to go. If Dino fucked me off, I’d dump the rental and make my way to Mexico. I had to crack on, with or without his help.

Ten minutes more of the heater doing its stuff and the mobile
kicked off. I grabbed the ignition key and closed down the engine. I didn’t want to miss a word. I checked the screen before hitting
answer
. The number was blocked.

‘Dino?’

I could hear breathing, not heavy and desperate, but like he was weighing stuff up.

‘Mate, where do you want me?’

Still nothing, but I knew he was there.

‘Dino, mate … Where do you want me?’

‘One last question.’ High-pitched – the same voice as twenty years ago, but sadder, more guarded.

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Tell me the range, man. What was the range I gave you?’

I’d made sure I remembered as much as I could about that job, but the distance between our firing position and the Wolf’s lair had been etched on my brain anyway. It was the only thing that bound us.

‘Four – four – seven. Metres. None of your yards shit.’

I kept it light. His emails had given me the sense that talking with him was going to be like drawing blood from a stone.

Silence again.

He had some more thinking to do, and this time I let him get on with it.

Finally: ‘Sixteen eighty-seven Veld Court. Fredericksburg.’

He gave me a second to write it down, which I didn’t.

‘You got it?’

‘I got it. On my way.’

He closed down before I could get a finger to my screen.

Maud had a very nice voice. She came on like a friendly shop assistant. She told me that I was seventy-three miles from my destination; my journey would take a shade over an hour and fifteen.

Maud needed to be more climate-aware. I’d heard sat-nav make plenty of promises it had failed to keep, especially when it was raining; that always slows the traffic. But for now I was following her instructions to the letter: heading east from the airport towards DC, aiming to hit the Beltway, then turn south to Fredericksburg.

I’d waved goodbye to my reception committee a few minutes ago, but they hadn’t paid much attention. I checked the rear-view. They were still a couple of cars back.

It had been ten years since I last drove this route, but the airport and its surroundings still looked much the same. That time it had been summer and the place had reminded me of a high-tech business park, with everything green and manicured. Now the leaves were starting to turn red. They’d soon drop onto the grass, but would be sucked up before they had time to flatten out and go soggy.

I remembered suburbia starting about fifteen miles from the airport, mainly ribbon development either side of the Beltway: vast estates of neat wooden and brick houses, many still under construction. Now, as I made my way east towards the I-495, it
began almost from the exit road and spread to the western and northern perimeters of Washington.

Swathes of exposed ground on either side of me were crisscrossed with track marks where the big plant had crawled through vast tracts of woodland, turning it into matchsticks and Dunkin’ Donuts packaging. Foundations were being laid for sprawling estates of houses that each had the same footprint. Giant billboards invited me to share the magic of living there in fall 2012.

I turned south on the 495, through what might have been a leafy Surrey suburb if it hadn’t been for the roar of eight lanes of traffic. Large detached houses lined the roads, each with a seven-seat people-carrier or a gleaming 4x4 in the drive and a basketball hoop on the car port.

After about fifteen minutes I saw the turn-off. Maud told me Dino’s place was now exactly forty-nine miles away, most of it on the freeway.

Within eighteen hours of pinging off the email I’d had a reply from the DEA’s El Paso office, which had nearly made me choke on my coffee. They wanted a photograph. I replied with a crisp ‘No’ and suggested they ask me a question that only Dino and I would know the answer to, a kind of proof-of-life statement.

I got one line back:
What color hair?

The grin on my face took me straight back to Costa Rica. How the fuck could I forget that ridiculous bleach job? After three further exchanges via the El Paso office I’d finally got the call I was hoping for. The way Dino sounded, the meet wasn’t going to be a social, so I wasn’t expecting balloons and party poppers after all these years.

I still didn’t know if he could or even would help me, and he still didn’t know why I wanted to see him, but I’d decided that, whatever happened now, I was heading to Mexico tomorrow. I wanted this shit over and done with so I could get back to Moscow.

I sat in the middle lane and went with the flow. The rain had pretty much stopped, but I had my wipers on full blast to get rid of the shit being kicked up off the tarmac by the trucks.

I checked the rear-view.

Sure enough, the Taurus was still two vehicles behind, but a whole lot dirtier now than it had been when it started the day.

I got caught behind two massive eighteen-wheelers racing each other along the nearside lanes. Some kind of projectile arced out of one of the cabs, hit the concrete ahead of me and exploded in a burst of yellow spray.

Trucker bombs had become a national epidemic. The long-haul lads were getting a hard time for it, but I had a certain sympathy for them. They could go for a hundred miles or more without finding anywhere to park their rigs safely or legally. The average Joe could take the next exit and hit a gas station or a McDonald’s whenever he felt like a piss, but the big dogs were tied up with weight and height restrictions, and the strong possibility of not being able to turn around again to get back on the freeway.

The only answer was to recycle. They’d finish off their carton of whatever kept them going, refill it and bin it out of the window. There were even piles of shit at the roadside; plastic bags full of what looked like four dog loads from the morning walk. How the fuck did they race each other and take a dump into a plastic bag at the same time?

I started to see signs for the massive US Marine Corps camp and training area at Quantico. After years of seeing it in TV crime shows, most people know Quantico as the place where impossibly good-looking baby FBI agents are trained, and all the special units are based. The DEA also had their equally massive training academy on the same patch, which was about the size of the Isle
of Wight. I’d spent quite a lot of time instructing at the FBI academy whenever we’d developed a new technique – for room-clearing, covert entry or whatever – and being on the receiving end of their instruction whenever they came up with something they were happy to share. The flow of information between us had always been good.

You couldn’t see it from the freeway, but Quantico looked more like a seventies university than the centre of anti-everything. Agents or students wore different colour polo shirts to ID who they were and what they were there for. Everything was squeaky clean, including the language. I swore in the dining-room once – well, I said ‘shit’ when I tipped over my Coke. The whole place went quiet. You’d have thought I’d slotted the cook, but maybe I’d interrupted one of the prayer gatherings they had over the lunch trays. The training area was just as bad. Bears might shit in the woods, but no one at Quantico was even allowed to piss in them. It was one hell of a training centre, but I hated the place.

I guessed the presence of the DEA academy explained why Dino was now in this part of the world. Or maybe he was big-timing it at their downtown HQ. The fact I’d been FaceTimed and treated to a Taurus escort had to mean he was something hardcore, or maybe operating super undercover.

I hadn’t had the slightest indication from him about what he was doing, just a collection of one-line emails and a call that added up to:
What the fuck do you want?

The Taurus cut past me on the inside. The two guys had their heads forward, not talking, and took the exit at speed. Surveillance over. It looked like all they wanted right now was to be first to the academy’s car wash.