The Untouchable (58 page)

'Regattas in Norway, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, France, all those clubs going over to compete. Can you sail, Atkins? Can't? Try learning. I'm going to have a pee. Fifteen minutes must be nearly up. You want a pee, Eagle? I'll call you when I need you, Atkins.'

It was masterful of Mister. Atkins had heard the bark and knew it was that of a guard or attack dog. It was the bark of the sort of dog used by the Royal Military Police for perimeter protection or for hunting a man down. He heard the door close behind them.

Alongside that sort of dog would be a handler and guns and - his mind raced - a listening probe. The dog had barked beyond the fall of the lights around the door. Mister's mastery had been in finishing his sentence, about a regatta route, then suggesting a pee, like he was too dumb to have been alerted, if they were listened to. He shivered. He heard the door behind him open again.

A light was switched on behind him, from the hall.

Its beam, maybe two hundred times candlepower, was thrown past him, over the green, well-cut and watered lawns, over the shrub bushes, and the man-height fence that was topped with a barbed-wire strand, into the scrub, on to a grey-white flat stone fifty yards from him. Atkins saw the man he had tried to kill, to run down. The light caught the big spectacles, too large for the face, and the thin shoulders, and the jutting knees as he sal cross-legged, unmoving. A woman with a dish was beside him, and an older man in uniform. Thenthe flashlight caught two men in dark overalls and their rifle barrels blinked back at the beam. Another man with another rifle, an image-intensifier sight on it, scrambled to join them. He couldn't see the dog but the barking was frantic and the noise billowed over him.

The light went out. There was pandemonium in the doorway of the house . . . He thought that all the bloody security had been in the house, complacent and sitting in the bloody kitchen - none of the idle bastards had been out on the property's fence.

Atkins started to walk. He had come to the end.

There was a shake in his stride, his knees were weak and he wanted to piss, but he went briskly on to the lawns and through the shrubs. He heard his name called, but he didn't turn. The engines were starting behind him, and there was the flash of headlights, the slamming of doors, and tyres grinding the gravel. The cry of his name felt like a knife into his back, then,

'Leave the bastard, fucking yellow bastard!' He heard the bark of the dog and the engines' scream.

He raised the flag - white flag, abject, surrender.

Atkins shouted, ' I'm coming over. Please, don't shoot.

Please, don't.'

He jumped at the high fence. It bucked, rocked, held under his weight. He did not feel the pain as the wire slashed his hands. He rolled over it, as he had been trained to do. He blundered through the thorn bushes towards the dog. He was thrown down.

Hands forced their way over his body, prised between his legs and into his armpits. He was rolled over and his arms were forced into his back, and the handcuffs clicked, tight, on his wrists. He was dragged.

Rocks caught his shins. He thought of the steely loyalty of his mother if she came to visit him, and the way the boy had struggled as he'd been lifted on to the bridge rail, and the contempt that would be on the face of his father. They were into a wood of thick-growing trees. Twice he hit the tree trunks and he felt the blood dribble from his nose. They didn't allow him to slow them. He was thrown onto the back of a pick-up. A cage door grated shut. The vehicle jerked forward. Beside him, kept from him by the cage mesh, was the hot breath of the snarling dog.

He thought he was free. He was no longer Atkins.

'Which one are we following?' Frank asked.

'Mister, Target One.'

'What about the others?'

'Irrelevant to me,' Joey said.

'And the guy in the back?'

'He's yours, not mine.'

' I can call up help, cavalry.'

' I don't want help, not from anyone.'

'Where do you think, Joey Cann, we are going?'

'Wherever he leads us to.'

'He'll turn Queen's, won't he? He'll sing, testify.'

' I'll fix him. Eagle, you worry too much.'

'Right now, I'm worrying overtime.'

'Just drive.'

'You're the better driver, Mister.'

' If I'm driving I can't shoot. Think, Eagle, switch on.'

The Eagle knew Mister when in structured situations. He knew him in conference and in meetings, and when there was an agenda on the table in front of him in the office over the launderette. This, though, was new. He did not know Mister in crisis. He was not a part of the other meetings where the maps were studied and the guns loaded; he had been safe from them. The two guns were now out of the glove box.

One rested between Mister's thighs, the other was in his right hand, both were cocked. From what he could see of Mister's face, and from his voice, there was no panic. It was as if he had found a welcome fulfilment.

The window was down, the cold air of the evening whipping their faces. Mister checked often in the mirror, but the lights stayed behind them. In the chaos of the departure they had, both of them, tried to get into the Russian's car, and been bounced out. A pistol had pointed at their stomachs. The Turk's car had already pulled away. The Eagle had never driven a getaway vehicle. The lights behind were constant, but the lights he followed diminished,

The Eagle followed the tail-lights as best he could, but the Mitsubishi did not have the acceleration power of the Mercedes fleet ahead. Always the lights were strong behind him. He wanted to piss, and wouldn't have cared if he had messed his trousers. It was all right for Mister, he'd find another bloody lawyer. Suddenly, the lights ahead disappeared.

They're trying to lose us, bastards.'

' Keep looking.'

'You reckon, Mister, there are road-blocks up front?'

' I don't know - just look for their lights.'

'They'll know the way out, Serif'll know the bloody way what's that?'

The Eagle would have sworn, far up the road, just past the first sign into Godbina village, there was a flash of a brakelight, and no headlights in front of it.

He thought the Mercedes column had killed their lights so that the Mitsubishi would not be able to follow. Of course there would be road-blocks, and bloody machine-guns. His skill was in the reading of the pages of Archbold, not in evading road-blocks and bloody machine-guns. And if they evaded the road-blocks, what then? Where to then? He was slowing.

He'd have sworn - on his Bible, on Archbold, put his hand on the smooth leather of the volume and given his oath - that the brakelights had flashed again off the road to Mostar, climbing and going right. He took the decision. He saw the turn-off. There was a high moon rising. He swung the wheel and snapped off the headlights.

'What are you doing?'

'You said to follow them.'

'You sure it was them?'

'Sure, Mister.'

'Positive sure?'

'They turned off because there'll be road-blocks.

They know the form.'

The track they were on was good for the first half-mile. The Eagle started to relax. He had made the decision, and stood his corner, and his decision was accepted . . . His decision, not Mister's. He was starting to lose the sweat in the pit of his back. He had to go slower, change down through the gears, as the track surface deteriorated. Every minute or so he saw the wink of the brakelights in front of him, higher and climbing. His eyes were now accustomed to driving by moonlight. He leaned forward over the wheel, and by concentrating to his limits he could see most of the ruts, enough to avoid most of them . . . Then came the sinking despair. It came in his gut, his heart and in his mind. At first he did not dare to look up to the mirror. It had been his decision. Mister was quiet beside him, as if he'd parcelled off responsibility.

The low chassis of the Mercedes saloons would have snagged on the rutted track.

He looked up into the mirror and the twin headlights, merging there, dazzled him. The brakelights shone brightly, then were extinguished. As they drew level, the Eagle saw a tractor and two men unloading bales.

As they lurched on the rutted track past the tractor, in the moon's grey glow, the Eagle saw that its front lights were smashed. He had made a decision and it had been wrong. The humiliation and the fear settled on him. He turned to Mister. 'What are we going to do?'

An icy calm in the reply. 'Go overland, walk out of here . . . What are you, Eagle? What the fuck are you?'

'Not very clever, Mister.'

'I'll get you out - what'll you be then?'

'Grateful, Mister.'

The lights behind, in the mirror, glowed more fiercely, and the distance narrowed as they came ever closer. There was, the Eagle thought, an inevitability to this conflict. He'd known it since he'd seen the guns and heard the dog, and when the flashlight had found the young man sitting cross-legged on the flat stone peering at them through heavy spectacles. Mister had said the young man had been 'dealt with'. He recalled what he had said, in the road outside Mister's home, a month before, a bleat in his voice: You know what I worry about? I mean it, lose sleep about? One day you overreach - know what I mean - take a step too far. i worry . . .

And he could remember Mister's punch just below his heart, and the pain. He pulled over and the Mitsubishi lurched into a shallow ditch.

'You won't leave me, Mister?'

'Did I ever?'

They were at the crest of a hill. The track, ever rougher, fell away from them. Down to the left were lights and the outlines of close-set buildings. There were more lights in the far distance, and a murmur of water. Between the two groupings of lights was a black hole into which the Eagle gazed and saw nothing. He scrambled out. He subsided into the ditch, water covered his shoes and the cold gripped his feet. He came round the front of the Mitsubishi.

Mister was silhouetted against the moon. He heard the drone of the vehicles down the track behind them, and in moments their lights would trap him.

'Are you coming or not?'

'Coming, Mister.'

Ante had the rifle to his shoulder. His body-weight was against the bonnet of the blue van. He aimed. He had the whole of the upper chest of Target One in his

'scope. He dragged back the cocking lever, scraped it till it locked home. He settled. Frank swung his arm up. His wrist would have hit the underside of the barrel immediately below the end of the sight's lens, and the aim darted towards the moon. Frank lectured Ante. Joey realized the anger of Salko and Fahro.

Muhsin had the dog down from the cage and it peed against the wheel of the van.

'You did right,' Joey said.

'Thank you - but it's not for you. He was going to blow him away. I am an authorized firearms officer, sometimes I'm a team leader. That man is under my control. I am responsible for his actions, and his target is a British citizen. I'd have been before Disciplinary, a full inquiry. I know the regulations no one's life was in danger. It would have been murder, and if 1 hadn't intervened I would have been an accessory.'

' I support what you did.'

' I'm grateful for that, Joey.'

' I support what you did because Mister is mine.'

Joey marshalled them. Muhsin would lead with the dog, and Ante would be alongside them. Joey would be a dozen paces behind, with Salko and Fahro.

Joey said to Frank, 'You should watch the prisoner.

Please feel free to read him his rights, and you can offer him a solicitor. You can assure him he'll have legal-aid funding for an appeal to the European court should that be necessary, and make sure he's warm, fed and comfortable and—'

But Joey didn't finish. He hurried away into the dark, and there was the thud of the boots around him, and the baying of the dog.

Mister ran.

The Eagle shambled after him.

Every thorn hush seemed to catch at the Eagle's suit jacket and trousers, and he seemed to stumble on every stone Sometimes they would blunder onto a path and then they could go faster, but each path petered away into denser thorn thickets. On a drop, deeper than half the height of his body, he was thrown forward, winded, and he cried out for Mister's help, but help didn't come and he pushed himself up and followed the crashing, ripping sounds of Mister's flight. Driving him on was the noise of the dog's pursuit. He didn't know how they would lose the dog.

There were people in the village, his friends and Mo's friends, who paid seven hundred and fifty pounds for a dog that was little more than a pup, and they talked about their dogs talked about damn all else but their dogs - spoke about ground scent and air scent. The ground scent was from his shoes, and the air scent was from the sweat as he panted to follow Mister.

They said, his friends and Mo's, that 'The hardest thing in this good life is to evade a well-trained dog.'

The heel of his right shoe had come off.

'Are you there, Mister?'

'You're doing well, Eagle, keep at it.'

He saw the shadow of Mister and then it was gone.

There were thicker trees. Mister had gone into them.

Then a path. He was on the path and off it when he heard Mister's feet break dry wood. Mister hadn't told him of the path, hadn't warned him of it, hadn't guided him down it. He tried to run but was capable only of a slow, waddling trot. His breath came in great heaves and his stomach bulk bounced on his belt. He tripped. Moonlight didn't penetrate the canopy of the trees above him. He fell flat. The fall burst the air from his lungs. His fingers scrabbled for a grip, to push himself up. The dog was closer, and the staccato voices urging it on. His fingers found the smooth shapes. Long thin shapes, then wider but still smooth, then the shapes of locking joints, then narrower cross-shapes, then the teeth, and his fingers slipped into the eye sockets and on to the rounded plate of the skull. The Eagle whimpered. The skeleton was across the track. He could not see it, but could feel it and touch it and understand it as clearly as a Braille reader would have. He pushed himself up. The dog's barking drove him on. He had gone twenty more short strides when he realized that his left shoe was off. Thorns, small stones, bramble stems, broken branch wood slashed his foot. He hobbled after Mister and sobbed from the pain. Mister was at the edge of the wood. There was thin grey-white light from the moon and an emptiness in front of them that was cut by a dark line where water ran loud, then more emptiness, then the lights. The lights were a grail. Mister had his foot down on a tape of dull yellow.