Detonator (16 page)

‘Nah.’ I tried to make light of it. I suddenly had a fairly good idea of where this was leading. ‘She clipped me across the ear. She and Gaz’s mum went ballistic because they didn’t know we climbed up on the roof and they thought we might fall off and kill ourselves. It was a fair way down to the pavement.’

He went quiet again. He seemed to be watching the very well-behaved Swiss houses and countryside sweeping past his window, but I knew he wasn’t taking much in.

‘Remember all that shit, eh? It’ll help the cover story. You remembering some stupid stuff your dad did back in the day.’

‘My stepmother beat me.’

It was my turn to shut up. I didn’t have much choice. I spent a minute or two wishing I hadn’t sparked this up in the first place. I pictured him flinching when I’d raised my hand outside the chalet. I should have read the signs.

Then I told myself, Fuck it, why worry about what you can’t change? ‘What did she beat you for?’

He took a long, halting breath. ‘I think maybe because I am not her son.’

He probably wasn’t wrong about that. There was a fair chance that Stefan jumping ahead of her in the inheritance queue and being groomed to take over the business empire had also had something to do with it.

Another of my chats with Frank rose to the surface and swam towards me. On a landing strip in Malindi. We had just snatched Stefan back, first from his al-Shabaab kidnappers, then from the Georgians who were trying to use the kid as a lever against him.

I remembered Mr T leaning in towards me, eyes fixed on mine. ‘
My wife’s name is Lyubova. It means “love”. She has much of it
.’

I’d admired his optimism. Lyubova knew Frank was a world-class shagger without a doubt, but at that point he hadn’t told her Stefan even existed.

‘I believe she will embrace my son as her own. I hope she will forgive me. I hope that I may become the husband she deserves.’

His words still echoed in my head, even when the image of his precise, sharply chiselled features faded, and was replaced with hers. The portrait on the bedroom wall. The photographs in the green room. Those eyes. That calculating face. They now told me that forgiveness wasn’t high on her list of favourite things.

I took Stefan’s distress about his stepmother seriously. It sounded like Frank’s embracing scenario hadn’t happened. I had no idea whether he had even got close to becoming the husband she deserved. Whatever, the magic hadn’t worked. Had he binned her, or had she binned him? Had he become the ex-husband she wanted to kill?

Ly … u … bo … va …

Had
she
told Mr Lover Man to pull the trigger? Had she paid him to? Was Hesco
her
fixer?

I’d already asked myself why the chateau wasn’t Frank’s number-one choice of bolthole as soon as he had perceived a threat. As the tarmac unrolled in front of us, all sorts of possible answers were bouncing around inside my head. They all pointed to the fact that I needed to go and grip the ex-Mrs Timis. And that she would not be laying out the welcome mat.

Stefan reached out and patted my wrist, and I suddenly became aware that I’d been holding the steering-wheel tightly enough to throttle it. I tried to give him an encouraging smile. ‘Mate, I need to pay her a visit. But don’t worry, I won’t leave you without an ERV.’

It sounded pretty weak, even to me.

The atmosphere inside the wagon was suddenly heavy with the things that we weren’t saying to each other. He was the one to cut through it.

‘Nick?’

‘Steve?’

‘How do you know who you can trust?’

Given what had happened to his mum and his dad, he’d already had enough first-hand experience of betrayal in his life for there to be only one answer to that question:
You don’t. Ever. So trust no one.
But I couldn’t bring myself to say that. It wasn’t my job to tell him the world was a heap of shit.

He was too switched on for me to fudge it. On the other hand, I did want him to know that there was the occasional light at the end of the tunnel. A small handful of individuals had shown me that, over the years. They hadn’t helped me find God or inspired me to rush out and hug some trees, but they had probably kept me out of prison.

‘It’s not easy. I don’t have to tell you that. There are going to be people who … let you down. And people who don’t, however bad things get. The trouble is, you can’t always tell the difference between them – because maybe there’s some shit happening in their world that we don’t know about …’

‘So?’ He wasn’t about to let me off the hook.

‘So … we have to understand that we don’t hand out trust like chocolate bars. People have to earn it. But it’s brilliant when they do.’

‘It’s like being a soldier, then.’

I didn’t answer immediately. I’d known a good few soldiers who hadn’t earned my trust. Ruperts, mostly. And a handful who had, big-time. ‘When you’re in the fight, you do find out pretty quickly who you can trust.’

He nodded slowly. I’d never been around a kid who took the job of decoding life’s mysteries so seriously. I’d been through some gangfucks when I was his age, but I couldn’t remember trying to learn from them until much later.

‘We’re in the fight, aren’t we?’

‘We are, mate.’

‘And I trust you, Nick.’

I hesitated, but only for a nanosecond. ‘Same.’

I sensed him giving the faintest of smiles.

He let another few Ks speed past his window. ‘Nick?’

‘Yup.’

‘Er … maybe
you
could be my
actual
dad.’ He paused. ‘Would that work for you?’

He had tried to keep the question matter-of-fact, but failed. Even I could hear the tremble in his voice.

Since we’d exited the chalet, he’d done a really good job of convincing me, most of the time, that he was a tough little fucker. He’d grown up fast – because he’d had to. This was a wake-up call – to remind me that there was still a lonely seven-year-old kid hiding behind the armour plating.

But I couldn’t piss about. I had to leave him in no doubt that extracting him from the gangfuck in Somalia and then the one on the mountain wasn’t the same as doing the whole dad thing. I didn’t know how to look after my own son. Some days, I didn’t know how to look after myself.

‘No, mate. It wouldn’t work for me. And, believe me, it wouldn’t work for you either.’

I gripped the wheel again, concentrating hard on the brake-lights of the wagons in front of me. I was pretty sure he was doing the same. I knew I had to choose my next words with a fuck of a lot more care than usual.

I hoped they’d come out right.

‘The thing is, Stefan, I can do my best to protect you against the bad guys. It’s my job. And us pretending to be father and son is part of that. But it’s an act. It’s a performance. In real life, I’m not your dad. In real life, your dad is dead. Me, I’m a gun for hire. And that works, when it works,
because
I can’t do all that stuff dads are supposed to do. The stuff your dad did. I can only do what
I
do. I can’t do the mathematical challenges. I don’t have any of the things a bright guy like you needs. I don’t have the skills.’

I listened to the hum of the engine. The rasp of the tyres on the tarmac. The silence inside the wagon was like the silence that fills the gap between the whoosh of an RPG launcher and the missile sending a jet of molten copper through the side of a fighting vehicle. I felt a sudden need to fill it.

‘Also, I don’t have a home. I have some mates, I have some contacts. I don’t really have friends. A lot of the people I called my friends are dead now, so maybe it’s better that way. Maybe it’s …’

I was blabbering now.

I shut the fuck up.

When I did glance at him, I saw that he was still staring straight ahead, chewing his bottom lip between his teeth and nodding to himself. He was processing what I’d said to him, like he always did.

Eventually, he turned and looked me straight in the eye. ‘So I guess that means we’re both in the shit, eh, Nick?’

‘Nothing new there, mate.’

St Gallen was a sizeable place, east of Zürich, close up against the German border. We arrived there shortly before dark o’clock. It was less than forty-five minutes, by my reckoning, from Lyubova’s country pile.

Stefan’s mouth fell open as I headed towards the centre. He pointed at a square in the business district where everything seemed to have been covered with red carpet, including a couple of wagons. A group of teenagers huddled together on big red banquettes, too busy texting to talk. Lights flickered on above them, suspended on wires, like baby barrage balloons.

I remembered reading something about a couple of designers winning a competition to create a public living space that looked and felt like a room where you could hang out with your mates. Fuck knew where their inspiration came from. The only rooms I’d ever seen like that had been in Iraq and Afghan, when the grenades had detonated and we’d had to scrape what was left of the inhabitants off the walls.

I drove past a big fuck-off cathedral and found a very shiny shopping mall a few blocks from the train station that advertised a cyber café and a McDonald’s. I parked up on the street a couple of hundred beyond the entrance, opposite a tram stop the size of a suspension bridge.

He made to get out but I gripped him. ‘No, mate. You stay here …’

Then I thought, Fuck it. This might go on for ever. He can’t spend the rest of his life living on takeaways, staying off the radar. Even if his photograph was on the Net now, we had to get used to hiding in plain sight.

I threw on my baseball cap and jacket and guided him inside. Stefan still limped a bit, but I didn’t need to carry him.

We got some Big Macs, fries and Coke down our necks and practised our father-and-son act. That was the trick. We weren’t the only ones doing it. Some of the dads in the restaurant area were in jeans and T-shirts. A few others were in grey suits and looked less like they were in the mood for a Happy Meal than we did. It was after seven p.m., but they had probably only stepped away from their desks for a quick break between currency swaps.

Stefan told me that what we were eating had zero nutritional value and I told him not to talk with his mouth full. Whatever, I don’t think either of us gave a shit. It filled a space.

The cyber café was on the floor above, and felt like a designer schoolroom. I paid for an hour, chose a keyboard and monitor in one corner and began by checking out the location of its most obvious competitors. I might need them later, and I never liked going back to the same place twice. Three names and addresses went into the Moleskine.

Next I ran through the budget accommodation directory. The Swiss didn’t really understand the meaning of ‘cheap’, but there was quite a bit of choice. I got scribbling again.

On balance, I thought we’d avoid the B-and-Bs. I liked their anonymity, but preferred the idea of being able to disappear into a crowd. Top of my list was something that called itself a hostel, with four storeys and an external staircase leading to each one. It was in a stretch of open ground dotted with trees on the far side of what was apparently the oldest library in the world. I pointed at a picture of visitors in blue felt slippers admiring ancient illuminated manuscripts in display cabinets. ‘What do you think? We could pop in there if we get short of reading material.’

He was still stressing about our visit to Lyubova, but he managed a weak grin.

I googled Adler Gesellschaft. Laffont had been right. Their glass and steel executive HQ was on the northern edge of town. Their manufacturing bases – which seemed to turn out everything from aircraft fuselages and wing panels to fence posts and stripy poles – were mostly in Eastern Europe and their distribution depots were scattered across the continent, but their tax returns were definitely filed in the canton of Zürich.

They weren’t the kind of outfit to broadcast precise details of their ownership, but I found my way to the glossy PR section of the corporate website and discovered that the George Michael lookalike I’d spotted at the Albertville depot was IC logistics. His name was Adel Dijani, which sounded more Lebanese than Swiss to me.

I was about to leave the site when I pinged a shot of their head of security at a recent event – maybe the opening Frank had been invited to. The first thing I noticed was a flash of red and silver on his ring finger. I zoomed in on it.

A silver double-headed eagle on a red enamel background.

An Albanian eagle.

I’d definitely seen that ring before. When its owner’s hand was clapping Mr Lover Man on the back. Celebrating the fact that me and a Nissan X-Trail had fallen off a cliff.

As far as I knew, this was the first time I’d been able to have a good look at Hesco’s face. Sideburns that had been given a little too much love and attention. Dark, tightly curled hair. A neat white scar running down his nose that looked like someone had shoved a stiletto up his nostril and taken it out sideways.

I stared at the photograph.

He was definitely one of the two on the hill. He was definitely at the Aix marina. Had he been in the chalet? On the road before the crash? The harder I tried to remember, the less I could. That part of my recent past was still splintered and remote.

But now I had the fucker’s name.

Zac Uran.

Zac Ur-an.

You … ran
…

That settled it.

Mr Lover Man had known he was dying. He knew he’d been fucked over. He had nothing to hide. He
had
given me the name of the guy who had fixed for him to kill Frank.

But Zac wasn’t at the top of the food chain. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been bouncing about on the hill. He wasn’t simply chomping around in the pondweed though. It took more than that to drive a Maserati.

I surfed the news sites, starting with the sport and UK-based shit, as any Brit would. Then I got more local. The assassination victim in the French Alps had been formally identified as Ukrainian multi-millionaire Frank Timis. There were a number of theories about what lay behind his death. The police had released a photograph of the oligarch’s son, who, sources claimed, had been abducted – possibly by the killer.