Old Enemies (39 page)

They had decided that Sean would go into the bar first, order a beer, find a corner into which he could fade. Some minutes later Harry would appear, order his own drink, making sure the barman saw the crisp £200 note in his wallet – only one, he didn’t want there to be so much on show it would encourage a mass mugging – and when the time was right he would quietly press for news. So they began. At the first bar they got nothing but a scowl of suspicion from the bartender, which grew even deeper when Harry promised to return the following evening. It was much the same story at the second, and barely different at the third, where the bartender tried to spin a story that he reckoned was worth the money but was nothing more than froth on the bar-room floor. The patter was established; Harry would leave, followed a little later by Sean, and they would head on a short walk through the crumpled streets of the Little Balkans to their next encounter.

They stopped for a slice of pizza after the fifth, at an Anatolian takeaway that stank of old fat, but the Little Balkans wasn’t a place to be fussy. Harry wasn’t sure he’d seen a true Italian during the past hour; many of the faces were considerably darker, some distinctly Asian or African, their expressions strained, their skin sallow, telling unfinished tales of hardship.

It happened in the sixth. Sean had tucked himself into the corner of a bar barely wider than a railway carriage, hiding beside a cooler cabinet with a cracked door that had been clumsily repaired with gaffer tape. The place wasn’t busy but was filling as the evening drew on, its three tables occupied, while the other drinkers stood and leaned, and already some were leaning farther than others. The barman had a distinctive mouth beneath his moustache, with a chipped front tooth and a gold molar, and neither his clothes nor his hair had received much attention for a couple of days. When Harry walked in he went directly to the same spot he’d occupied on his previous visit and ordered a beer; the barman poured it carefully, wiping the spillage from the bottom of the glass with a towel, his eyes alert as he pushed it across the bar. Harry paid, once again taking care to display the note in his wallet.

‘Is good,’ the barman muttered. ‘You wait.’

Harry took the top off his beer then left the rest untouched. A puddle of dampness from his glass began to spread across the varnished wood in front of him, while in the reflection of the smudgy mirror he examined the other punters. He learned nothing except that a good number of them were excessive and even desperate drinkers, if their dull eyes and unsteady hands were to be believed, but did desperation make them more or less likely candidates as kidnappers? He couldn’t tell. And perhaps the barman wasn’t to be trusted, anyway. After a while Harry arched his eyebrows in impatience. ‘Is good,’ the reply came back once more.

Then two men who were sitting at the back of the bar got up to leave, emptying their glasses and pulling on their jackets, but as they passed behind Harry they stopped, and stood either side of him at the bar. The barman exposed his chipped tooth. ‘My money,’ he demanded. Harry knew it could be a set-up, a mugging in the making, the easiest way in the world to deprive him of his money, but he had no choice. He opened his wallet, so wide that they could all see he had only a single large note in it, and slid it across the bar. The barman grabbed it in the same moment that one of the men touched Harry’s sleeve and turned towards the door.

The newcomers were younger than Harry, dark, very Latin, as Harry knew most Romanians were, unkempt, and seemingly fit. His excitement mounted, along with his caution. He would have to be careful with these two, no matter what they intended. One led him to the door while the other followed close behind. Parked directly outside was an old white Transit van with battered bodywork, and faded lettering on its side suggesting it had once been used by a food-delivery company in Germany. The engine was already running, pouring out a stream of oily smoke as the two men opened the rear door and pushed Harry inside. They followed him, closed the door, and said not a word as they were driven off into the night.

It was only after they had turned the first corner that one of the men drew a gun on him.

Sean hobbled out into the street as the Transit van drove off leaving an acrid cloud of badly burned diesel. The street lighting in these parts was poor, and his eyesight old, and he couldn’t get the registration details, but that wasn’t so important. He fished out his new phone and switched to the tracking app that Harry had installed that afternoon, the software that linked his phone with Harry’s and recorded each other’s location by using updates from GPS and WiFi access points. A street map of Trieste flashed up on the screen; Sean was relieved to see a small avatar moving away from the point at which he was standing. It was heading south, towards the seafront. He studied it carefully as the avatar moved slowly through the grid of streets. There was no rush. If Harry’s plan worked, his phone would lead Sean straight to him.

They searched Harry thoroughly, took away all the contents of his pockets, including his phone and wallet, then threw a blanket over him so that he could see nothing, but they didn’t harm or threaten him, apart from waving a gun in his face. And although he was travelling blind, the sounds he could hear told their own story. The traffic remained heavy, slow-moving, suggesting they were still in the city centre, and he could hear voices aplenty from the pavement. The van creaked and complained at every opportunity, its best years far behind it, and as they drove on Harry grew relieved, for clearly this was no simple mugging, they could have done that inside the van then dumped him on any backstreet. It seemed these men were interested in more than a few hundred euros. Harry estimated they hadn’t been driving more than ten minutes when the van began to slow, whining down through the gears, pulling off the main road and onto streets where the traffic was lighter. Then they were reversing along what was a narrow alleyway, judging from the sound. They stopped, someone was banging on the door, Harry was dragged out, not violently but still swathed in his blanket, across a small rubble-strewn yard then through a creaking door before being hustled up two flights of stairs. He knew from the hollow echo that the property they were in was empty, and from the glimpses of builders’ rubbish at his feet that it was under reconstruction. He wasn’t surprised to discover, when at last the blanket was pulled from his head, that he was in a room of raw plaster walls and naked pipework, strewn with builders’ gear and with nothing but a single bare bulb for light. In addition to the two who had brought him here there were two others; they were all armed, and all those arms were pointing directly at him.

They searched him once again, this time more thoroughly, took his belt and his footwear. They bound his hands in front of him with his belt, not tightly but sufficient to ensure he could pull no surprises, and the inspection was intimate enough to leave his trousers flopping around his ankles.

‘What did the bastard have on him?’ Cosmin demanded.

‘Only these,’ Sandu replied, holding out a wallet, pen, loose change, wristwatch and phone.

They spoke in rich Latin tones that Harry found easy on the ear, even if he understood no more than a few words of the language. Good morning, good evening, good night, please, thank you, more wine, cheers – a menu of words he’d picked up on a night out with a hard-drinking Romanian delegation during a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels. He couldn’t follow any of this conversation but he knew what Cosmin was about. The Romanian inspected his shoes carefully before tossing them to one side, took the pen apart and threw its pieces after the shoes, grabbed the wallet, emptied out the small amount of beer money it still contained, ripped open the lining to see if anything else was hidden inside. He did the same with Harry’s coat. Then he picked up the phone. Cosmin looked at it suspiciously, turning it over in his hands; he’d had enough trouble with phones. He didn’t want to mess around with it in case it sent some sort of signal, but he knew that many phones could be tracked even when they were supposedly switched off.

‘What do you think, Nelu?’ he demanded.

‘Get rid of it,’ Nelu replied.

Harry watched as they talked. He could tell that these were serious men, tough, not fools, and not amateurs. He sat propped against the wall, his hands tied, struggling to drag his trousers up his legs, surrounded by armed men, knowing they would be happy to kill him, and knowing in his own turn that he would have to kill every one of them.

Cosmin and Nelu finished their discussion about the phone. It had not been switched on. Cosmin placed it on a workbench and began walking around it, staring. Then he took a heavy hammer, raised it high above his head and beat the phone to fragments.

That was when Sean’s tracking signal went blank.

‘What the fuck you want?’ Cosmin demanded roughly, at last turning his attention to Harry.

‘The boy.’

‘Talk.’

‘Can I get out of this?’ Harry asked, holding up his bound wrists.

‘Fuck you.’

‘OK, I’m a friend of the boy’s family. They asked me to come here to do two things. To make sure the boy is still alive. And to make sure he is released safely when the ransom is paid.’

‘How you do that?’

‘The ransom will not be paid until I talk to them over your Skype link. I will make sure the money is paid in the way you want, and also that the boy is released at the same time. Everyone goes home happy.’

Cosmin started nodding thoughtfully. The mention of Skype was some sort of proof that this man had a connection with the family, which meant he might be useful. It also meant he could be seriously dangerous. He wandered across to inspect Harry more carefully, bent over him, examined the wound on his face. Harry’s nose filled with garlic and stale sweat.

Cosmin appeared satisfied. He straightened up. ‘What is your name?’

‘My name is Harry Jones.’

Harry didn’t even have time to scream as Cosmin’s boot hit him flush on the chin. His senses were swirling, tumbling over and over in a remorseless current, then they began closing down, drowning. Just before he passed out he realized that these people knew who he was. Then he gave up the struggle to stay afloat and his world went black.

Sean had decided that the tracker solution Harry had insisted on had severe limitations. The first problem was that, for some reason he didn’t understand, it had given up the ghost. The second was that although he had followed the marker until the moment it disappeared from the screen, its accuracy in the dense inner city left a lot to be desired. In fact, many of the smaller streets and alleyways weren’t even marked, and for a moment Sean panicked. He was no longer a young man, even at the best of times he had little faith in his abilities with things technical. Every muscle and joint in his body was screaming at him and he was entirely alone, without even a dog to lick his boots.

Yet the signal had given out somewhere in the Old City, that unmistakable maze of twists and turns, alleyways and side streets that was to be found only in this quarter, so it was here that Sean came. His hobbling was getting worse; his knee had taken a sharp knock when Harry had thrown him out of the path of the delivery van and it was making its misery felt. It was swelling, stiffening, so much so that he was forced to purchase a walking stick, a twisted hardwood cane with a gnarled, heavy head like a shillelagh. It made him more mobile but did nothing to lessen the pain, and he found the pavements of the Old City a challenge. This part of town was built against a hill, on top of which stood an ancient fort and the somewhat less ancient cathedral of San Giusto, and down from which tumbled a chaos of medieval passageways. Hard walking for any elderly man, let alone one with a dodgy knee. Every street tested his strength. He passed up and down, searching for what he wasn’t quite sure, hoping to discover a battered white van tucked away behind every corner even though many of the alleys and passageways were absurdly narrow, barely wide enough for two donkeys to pass, and some even smaller than that. But he could find no sign of Harry.