Vagabond (57 page)

They came into a clearing and the headlights caught a closed truck. A man stood close to it, dragged on a cigarette and swore at them because the light was in his eyes. Timofey Simonov was out first.

He was told, ‘Over there, Ralph. That building – you see it? There is an iron door in the end of the wall. I used to go through it to work each morning. It was the command bunker. Thirty-six steps down and proof against even tactical nuclear strikes. My desk was there. And Brigadier Denisov was my senior officer. It is our place, our territory, and a disgrace that it is treated as a rubbish dump. It is where we have the weapons and where your business associate can shoot. It is good, Ralph?’

Good or bad, it was where they were. He climbed out. The wind whipped him, ruffling his hair and bugging at his coat. An owl hooted in the darkness. He stayed back, looking longingly for shadows and cover.

‘It is a pity your friend did not come.’

Malachy Riordan said nothing. He allowed himself to have his arm held, as if he was from Spain or Italy where men touched, and was taken to the back of the truck. A finger was flicked: an impatient instruction.

The cigarette was thrown down, the butt stamped on, and the flap lowered. It clattered, metal on metal, and he flinched at the noise. There was laughter at his reaction. He was told by Timofey Simonov that there would be no ears, eyes or mouth to report anything within five kilometres of where they stood. The boxes were lifted out. The man who had brought them helped the brigadier. The headlights of the truck and the Mercedes lit the open space and the track up which they had come, probing further back into the darkness and making more shadows. He heard an owl. Malachy Riordan knew about owls. He was a night creature, seldom out on the business of war in daylight. He knew owls because they valued the quiet of the mountain.

The boxes were piled up, light chains and padlocks round each. Malachy was invited forward. He felt in his hands the hardness of her throat. First she had taunted him, then he had hit her and gone for her neck. The moment before she had realised he would end her life she had started to struggle. She had split his lip, bitten him and scratched his face.

He was given a small hand torch and a sheet of paper on which were written the items purchased, the quantities and the prices.

Businesslike but not taken from a computer, where it would have left a trace. He shut her from his mind.

He was shown on the list what he had purchased, and the items were checked against the paper. There were rifles, assault and the Dragunov sniper version. He saw rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and the larger boxes that would contain the broken-down pieces of the DSkH heavy machine-gun and the lighter PK7.62mm. There were grenades, and some boxes contained ammunition. The torch was aimed towards a last box and he was told that it held the new Semtex stocks. It was what men in the armed struggle dreamed of: not the quantities that had come from Libya thirty-five years back – so great an amount that it could not be hidden satisfactorily or used because too few men were trained for it – but sufficient to set alight East Tyrone and the Mid-Ulster area. Enough to bring off their arses the men who had said they would fight ‘one day but not today’. The boxes were laid out in a line, like coffins when the aftermath of an atrocity was on the television and the dead were waiting to be buried: Syria or Lebanon.

The little man in the uniform said in his ear, ‘My friend, for goodwill may I add to this collection a present from myself. Would a tank suit? A T-62, combat weight thirty-six tonnes, maximum speed fifty kilometres per hour, main armament range of four thousand eight hundred metres with fragmentation-high explosive shells. Would you take it?’

‘No, sir. We have no ability to use a battle tank. I applaud your generosity but—’

The little man in the uniform was doubled up in laughter. A joke. Only for a moment did he imagine coming down the Pomeroy road, lurching into Irish Street and heading for the police barracks in a tank. He laughed too, but feebly. There were sufficient weapons here to make a difference in the war, and volunteers would flood to him. He would choose only the best, and a new world beckoned. He had woken and she had been cold beside him. The fly had flown from his face to her chin, then had skipped across the bruised line, where his fingers and thumbs had pressed, to her chest. He retched and was sick.

They stood back, gave him space. He had eaten nothing through the night, and just a small cake in the café before his pick-up. The laughter was stifled. Was he all right? Yes. He was regarded curiously. The money, he realised, was trivial to them but not to his own people. The funds paid to the families of prisoners had been slashed because of the sum allocated to him. That would change when the firepower was back on the mountain, the old songs were sung again in bars and buckets rattled. A key opened a padlock at the end of the line.

‘I say again, it is a pity your friend did not come.’

She had brought his car. As Karol had told her to, Jana parked in the station forecourt. She had done exactly as directed, and had cleared out the boot – it had contained a mess of supermarket bags, old newspapers and the bag in which he kept a change of clothing. There was a blanket on the seat behind her. As she had been told to, she had filled the tank to the screw cap. She loved Karol, loved the honesty that ran in him, which, she thought, was bred from naïveté, was sometimes stupid and at others heroic. He had promised her a future. She locked the car, put the keys into her bag, went to the machine and bought a ticket for the next train from Milovice to Prague. She would go home and cook herself something, then make another cake for her mother.

The boxes were open. The headlights from the Mercedes and the Azerbaijani’s van lit them and reflected off the weapons and ammunition.

He had the pages he had torn out of her notebook and had to crouch near the bonnets of the vehicles to read her writing – which was educated. Malachy Riordan shivered and the owl was still shouting, like it knew. His clothing was still damp. He had her list of the weaponry.

There were priorities: they’d have recognised them. At the top was the deal that had been agreed: money transferred, the purchased items in the boxes with the protection of greaseproof paper and masking tape. At the bottom was what he had done. They knew – they weren’t idiots. He would have whacked the face of a slapper in any Russian city or kicked the arse of a whore. But she had been neither a slapper nor a whore. She had had education and style. She had been sent to hold his hand because the leaders of the Organisation would have thought him too crude to negotiate his way round a foreign city. These men knew, and it didn’t matter to them. They stood back and watched him, showing no impatience.

He lifted out each weapon and laid it on the grass. Their voices were low and they exchanged cigarettes. It made him feel a little better, that they put the business of the weapons ahead of the girl. He had the inventory she had written: he started to examine the firing mechanisms and to count.

Danny Curnow watched. They were approaching the moment of intervention, but it would not be his call. Beside him Karol Pilar had the camera.

The headlights threw a rectangle of light. It would have been forty-five to fifty metres long, less in width. It lay across open ground, then petered out in the mass of birches and pines. The Czech would decide. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, who carried the hitting power and were trained in close-quarters assault, belonged to him. Gaby Davies was crouched on the other side of him, and he doubted she had ever before been low to the ground, one knee in wet mud, watching targets who had with them enough weapons to start a small-scale war, low-intensity combat. Would she scream if the firing started and break cover? God alone knew.

He had never believed in taking passengers. A few times, more senior men – ranking officers in Intelligence – had wanted to accompany him and Dusty to meetings with touts but he’d refused them. He’d told it straight: ‘No, you will not be with us. You’re not trained for it, or privy to the location. You would be an impediment to my safety and to Corporal Miller’s. You’ll get a full brief when I return.’ They were to the side of the rectangle of light. Whether he wanted her there or not was of minimal importance. She was there because she now outranked him.

The Czech understood the change of leadership. Without reference to Danny, he had passed the night-sight monocular to her. She would be aiming through the gaps in the trees, and there was bracken, which was bloody noisy if it was disturbed. She had eyeball and had hooked a microphone into her watch-strap. A cable led up her sleeve to the recorder and she whispered her commentary. This was the evidence log. Karol Pilar had the camera to back it. Twice, Denisov walked in front of Malachy Riordan. Then the Czech eased away from Danny and looked for another gap. Pilar had his own machine pistol and microphone. Away in the blackness beyond the lights the three gunmen would move on the call.

A murmur from Danny Curnow: ‘What do you need?’

‘Russia and Ireland together in the lens and a weapon held up. I am instructed to gain evidence, not intelligence. It will happen. Patience.’

On the other side of him, warm breath close to his ear: ‘You all right?’

‘Fine – why should I not be?’

He watched. They would shoot. That would be the moment of opportunity for the camera. Straight after the image was taken the arrests would take place. Easy. A walk in the park. The cold caught him.

It might have been the cold that caused him to shiver. The weapons were being counted. He watched the tout. Ralph Exton played no part. He was like Danny Curnow. He thought it the last time he would be called back to arms.

Jocelyn knew where to look and she saw him.

It was a young people’s wine bar, which did good business on a Friday evening. The kids would have abandoned their desks and screens and emerged from the warrens of civil-service buildings. They were the public servants who believed themselves hard done by, underestimated, put upon, that they deserved a binge as the weekend loomed. Matthew Bentinick was the cuckoo among them. He was alone in a corner.

She grimaced when their eyes caught, then headed through the throng. The crowd was three deep at the bar and the staff looked harassed. She hadn’t the energy to fight her way through to demand a single clean glass. They’d share. A Sauvignon Blanc bottle stood in front of him. Knowing him, it would be the house brand. The cork was out and the glass in front of him was empty. She pushed, did a Red Sea parting of a group from the Home Office that had merged with another from Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and burst through.

Jocelyn did not think that she had ever seen the mercurial Matthew Bentinick so exhausted. A tired smile cracked his face as she squeezed close to him, hip to hip. He held a pipe in his hand, not lit but reeking of stale tobacco. The Friday-night talk battered them. Where would the crowds decamp to for a late meal? Who had tickets to which game the next afternoon? Whose line manager was a bastard? She filled the glass and tapped it, showing which side was his and which hers, then told him she wasn’t incubating any virus she knew of. He sipped, she swigged.

‘Always the worst?’

‘Always.’

‘Nowhere to go but sit and wait?’

‘Right.’

‘Because it’s personal?’

‘Personal and more.’

‘This shower round us, having their end-of-week moan, they have no idea what you carry, Matthew. I don’t mean at home. What you carry each day at work and what you take back on the train each evening. Our family used to talk about it at ghastly reunions, which suddenly turned wonderful when you took one of the ancients out into the garden. No one else they met gave a toss. Special Operations Executive, dark nights, agents swinging under parachutes, half of them compromised and going into the cage within an hour of landing. And next morning there would be another gang of recruits needing a transfusion of confidence. They were left behind and ducked into corners in pubs to hug beers and shots of gin, and felt true cowards. They’d seem bemused that I was interested and almost grateful that I’d hear them out.’

He gulped some wine and gripped the stem of his pipe. He pushed the glass to her. ‘Easy to imagine, Jocelyn, that we’re the ones with the short straws, eking out the waiting time and chorusing how much easier it is to be there, part of the fun and games, not side-lined. Sorry, my dear, but’s that’s crap.’

The glass went back towards him and she had the bottle by the neck. The fine wine slopped from her mouth as she drank. Then she topped up the glass.

‘‘‘Them’’, the ones who are there?’

‘Because we’re in their hands.’

‘We rise and fall on their successes and failures. I don’t know a better man than my Vagabond. He’s the best because you can aim him at a target and he’ll go through fire to get to it. He won’t call Health and Safety, or argue an overtime rate. He does the job. The job owns him and has his loyalty. He would have risen from his deathbed when I told him the
job
needed him. He would have left a bride at the altar if I’d stood in the church door and flicked my fingers. Did I have the right to call him back? That’s the burden.’