Nugget Two
: that Dima has decided to go out with a bang. For his
great occasion he sports a custom-built blue pinstripe double-breasted suit; and for his delicate feet a pair of black calf Italian slip-ons with tassels – not ideal, in Luke’s teeming mind, for making a dash for it, but this isn’t going to be a dash, it’s going to be an orderly withdrawal. Dima’s manner, for a fellow who reckons he’s just signed his own death warrant, struck Luke as improbably carefree. Perhaps it was the foretaste of vengeance he was enjoying: of an old
vor
’s pride soon to be restored, and a murdered disciple atoned for. Perhaps, amid all his anxieties, he was glad to be done with the lying, ducking and pretending, and was already thinking of the green-and-pleasant England that awaited him and his family. Luke knew that feeling well.
The
apéro
is getting under way. A low baritone burble issues from the Salon d’Honneur, starts to grow, and drops again. Some honourable Salon guest is making a speech, first in Russian blur, now in English blur. Peter? The Wolf? De Salis? No. It’s the honourable Emilio dell Oro; Luke recognizes his voice from the tennis club. Handclapping. Church silence while an honourable toast is drunk. To Dima? No, to honourable Bunny Popham, who is responding; Luke knows that voice too, and the laughter confirms it. He looks at his watch, takes out his mobile, presses the button for Ollie:
‘Twenty minutes if he’s on time,’ he says, and once more settles to his silver laptop.
Oh, Hector. Oh, Billy Boy. Wait till you hear who I bumped into today.
*
Mind a bit of off-the-cuff pontification before I go, Luke?
Hector is asking, draining his malt at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Luke doesn’t mind a bit. The topics of Adrian, Eloise and Ben are behind them. Hector has just passed judgement on Billy Boy Matlock. His flight is being called.
In operational planning, there are two opportunities
only
for flexibility – with me, Lukie?
With you, Hector.
One, when you draw up your plan. We’ve done that. Two, when the plan goes belly up. Until it does, stick like glue to what we’ve decided to do, or you’re fucked. Now shake my hand.
*
So here was the question in Luke’s mind as he sat staring at a lot of gobbledegook on the screen of his silver laptop and, with zero minutes to go, waited for Dima to emerge alone from the Salon d’Honneur: did the memory of Hector’s parting homily come to him
before
he saw the baby-faced Niki and the cadaverous philosopher taking up their positions in the two tall-backed chairs either side of the glass doors? Or was it instigated by the shock of seeing them there?
And who first called him the
cadaverous philosopher
anyway? Was it Perry or Hector? No, it was Gail. Trust Gail. Gail has all the best lines.
And why was it that,
precisely
at the moment when he spotted them, the burble in the Salon d’Honneur swelled into a babble, and the great doors opened – actually only one of them, he now saw – to disgorge Dima alone?
Luke’s confusion was not only one of time, but of place. While Dima was approaching from behind him, Niki and the cadaverous philosopher were rising to their feet in front of him, leaving Luke hunched at mid-point between them, not knowing which way to look.
A furious bark of Russian obscenities from over his right shoulder informed him that Dima had drawn to a halt beside him:
‘What the fuck d’you want with me, you shit-ants? You want to know what I’m doing, Niki? I’m taking a piss. You want to watch me piss? Get out of here. Go piss on your bitch Prince.’
Behind his desk, the concierge’s head discreetly lifted. The impossibly chic German receptionist, showing no such discretion, swung round to take a look. Determinedly deaf to all of it, Luke tapped meaninglessly at his silver laptop. Niki and the cadaverous philosopher remained standing. Neither had stirred. Perhaps they suspected Dima was about to make a straight dash for the glass doors and the street. Instead, with a subdued ‘
fuck your mothers
,’ he resumed his walk across the lobby and into the short corridor leading to the
bar. He passed the lift and drew up at the top of the stone staircase that led to the basement lavatories. By then he was no longer alone. Niki and the philosopher were standing behind him, and a few feet behind Niki and the philosopher stood meek, unnoticed little Luke with his laptop under his arm and his blue raincoat over it, needing to go to the loo.
His heart is no longer beating vigorously, his feet and knees feel good and springy. He is hearing and thinking clearly. He is reminding himself that he knows the terrain and the bodyguards don’t, and that Dima knows it too, which gives extra incentive to the bodyguards, if they ever needed it, to be behind Dima rather than in front of him.
Luke is as astonished by their unscripted appearance as Dima patently is. It defeats him, as it does Dima, that they should be harassing a man who is of no further use to them, and will by his own reckoning and probably theirs shortly be dead. Just not here and now. Just not in broad daylight with the entire hotel looking on, and the Seven Clean Envoys, a distinguished British Member of Parliament, and other dignitaries, putting back the champagne and canapés twenty metres away. Besides which, as is well attested, the Prince is fastidious in his killing. He likes accidents, or random acts of terror by marauding Chechen bandits.
But that discussion is for another time. If the plan has
gone belly up
, in Hector’s words, then it is a time for Luke to exercise flexibility, a time
not to finger it but to
do
it
, to quote Hector again, a time to remember the stuff that has been dinned into him on successive unarmed combat courses over the years, but he has never been obliged to put into effect except the once in Bogotá, when his performance had been fair to middling at best: a few wild blows, then darkness.
But on that occasion it had been the drug baron’s henchmen who’d had the advantage of surprise, and now Luke had it. He didn’t have the odd pair of paper scissors handy, or the pocketful of small change, or the knotted bootlaces, or any other of the fairly ridiculous bits of household killing equipment that the instructors were so enthusiastic about, but he did have a state-of-the-art silver-cased laptop and, thanks not least to Aubrey Longrigg, huge anger. It had come over
him like a friend in need, and at that moment it was a better friend to him than courage.
*
Dima is reaching out to shove the door in the middle of the stone staircase.
Niki and the cadaverous philosopher stand close behind him, and Luke stands behind them, but not as close as they are to Dima.
Luke is shy. Descending to a lavatory is a man’s private business, and Luke is a private person. Nevertheless, he is having a life-moment of spiritual clarity. For once, the initiative is his, and no one else’s. For once, he is the rightful aggressor.
The door they are standing in front of is occasionally locked for security reasons, as Dima rightly pointed out in Paris, but today it isn’t. It’s guaranteed to open, and that’s because Luke has the key in his pocket.
Therefore the door opens, revealing the rather poorly lit staircase beneath. Dima is still leading the way but that situation changes abruptly when a truly massive blow from Luke with the laptop sends the cadaverous philosopher clattering without complaint past Dima down the staircase, unbalancing Niki and providing Dima with a chance to seize his hated blond turncoat of a bodyguard by the throat in the manner that, according to Perry, he had fantasized about when describing how he proposed to murder the husband of Natasha’s late mother.
With one hand still round his throat, Dima drives Niki’s astonished head left and right against the nearside wall until his useless, worked-out body collapses under him, and he lands speechless at Dima’s feet, prompting Dima to kick him repeatedly and very hard, first in the groin and then on the side of the head, with the toe of his inappropriate Italian right shoe.
All of this happening quite slowly and naturally for Luke, though somewhat out of sequence, but with a cathartic and mysteriously triumphant effect. To take a laptop in both hands, raise it above his head at full stretch, and bring it down like an executioner’s axe on
the cadaverous bodyguard’s neck conveniently placed a couple of steps beneath him was to repay every slight that had been done to him over the last forty years, from his childhood in the shadow of a tyrannical soldier-father, through the catalogue of English private and public schools that he had detested, and the scores of women he had slept with and wished he hadn’t, to the Colombian forest that had imprisoned him, and the diplomatic ghetto in Bogotá where he had performed the most idiotic and compulsive of his life-sins.
But in the end, it was undoubtedly the thought of rewarding Aubrey Longrigg for betraying the Service’s trust that, irrational though it might be, delivered the greatest impetus because Luke, like Hector, loved the Service. The Service was his mother and father and his bit of God as well, even if its ways were sometimes imponderable.
Which, come to think of it, was probably how Dima felt about his precious
vory
.
*
Someone should be screaming, but no one is. At the foot of the stairs, the two men slump across one another in seeming defiance of
vory
homophobic code. Dima is still kicking Niki, who is underneath, and the cadaverous philosopher is opening and closing his mouth like a beached fish. Turning on his heel, Luke treads cautiously back up the steps and relocks the swing-door, returns the key to his pocket, then joins the tranquil scene downstairs.
Grabbing Dima by the arm – who must have just one last kick before he goes – Luke leads him past the lavatories, up some steps and across an unused reception area until they arrive at the iron-clad delivery door marked
EMERGENCY EXIT
. This door requires no key but has instead a tin green box mounted on the wall, with a glass front and a red panic button inside for emergencies such as fire, flood or an act of terrorism.
Over the last eighteen hours Luke has devoted serious study to this green box with its panic button, and has also taken the trouble to discuss with Ollie its most likely properties. At Ollie’s suggestion,
he has loosened in advance the brass screws attaching the glass panel to its metal surround, and snipped through a sinister-looking red-clad wire that leads back into the bowels of the hotel with the purpose of connecting the panic button with the hotel’s central alarm system. In Ollie’s speculative view, the effect of snipping the red wire should be to open the emergency exit without provoking an emergency exodus of staff and guests from the hotel.
Removing the loosened pane of glass with his left hand, Luke makes to push the red button with his right, only to discover that his right hand is temporarily out of service. So he again uses his left hand, whereupon with Swiss efficiency the doors fly open precisely as Ollie has speculated, and there is the street, and there is the sunny day, beckoning to them.
Luke hustles Dima ahead of him and – either out of courtesy to the hotel or a desire to look like a couple of honourable Bernese citizens in suits who happen to be stepping into the street – he pauses to close the door after him, and at the same time establish, with grateful acknowledgements to Ollie, that no siren call for a general evacuation of the hotel is resounding behind him.
Fifty metres across the road from them stands an underground car park called, rather oddly, Parking Casino. On the first level, directly facing the exit, stands the BMW car that Luke has rented for this moment, and in Luke’s numb right hand lies the electronic key that unlocks the car’s doors before you reach them.
‘Jesus God, Dick, I love you, hear me?’ Dima whispers through his panting.
With his numb right hand, Luke fishes in the hot lining of his jacket for his mobile, hauls it out, and with his left forefinger touches the button for Ollie.
‘The time to go in is
now
,’ he orders, in a voice of majestic calm.
*
The horsebox was backing down a hard incline and Ollie was warning Perry and Gail that they were going in. After the wait in the lay-by they had driven up a tortuous hill road, heard cowbells and smelled
hay. They had stopped, turned, and backed, and now they were waiting again, but only for Ollie to ratchet up the tailgate, which he did slowly in order to be quiet, revealing himself by stages up to his wide-brimmed black fedora hat.
Behind Ollie stood a stables, and behind it a paddock and a couple of good-looking young horses, chestnuts, which had trotted over to take a look at them, then bounced off again. Next to the stables loomed a large modern house in dark red timber with overhanging eaves. There was a front porch and a side porch, both closed. The front porch faced the road and the side porch didn’t, so Perry chose the side porch and said, ‘I’ll go first.’ It had been agreed that Ollie, as the stranger to the family, would stay with the van till summoned.
As Perry and Gail advanced, they noticed two closed-circuit television cameras looking down on them, one from the stables and one from the house. Igor’s responsibility, presumably, but Igor has been sent out shopping.
Perry pressed the bell and at first they heard nothing. The stillness struck Gail as unnatural so she pressed it herself. Perhaps it didn’t work. She gave one long ring then several short ones to hurry everyone up. And it worked after all, because impatient young feet were approaching, bolts were being shot and a lock was turned, and one of Dima’s flaxen-haired sons appeared: Viktor.
But instead of greeting them with a buckwheat grin all over his freckled face, which was what they would have expected, Viktor stared at them in nervous confusion.
‘Have you got her?’ he demanded, in his internat’s American English.
The question was directed at Perry not Gail because by now Katya and Irina had come through the doorway and Katya had grabbed one of Gail’s legs and was squeezing her head against it, and Irina was reaching up her arms to Gail for an embrace.