Vagabond (6 page)

His daughter was coming out of the house, a semi that was one of twelve, a successful speculation, and dated from 1937. It had three bedrooms and was called The Cottage when the others in the row had numbers. She might have been attractive, if she hadn’t been frowning. Her skirt was ridiculous and her eye makeup was carpet thick. If he’d asked her where she was going on a Sunday afternoon she would have said, ‘Out.’ She paused at the gate, a snapshot moment. The picture had come through the post six weeks earlier. It was in a brown-paper envelope, printed on cheap paper, and showed her in the same skirt, with the same amount of eye makeup and the same scowl. It was, of course, from the Irish – and there was no need to embellish the threat. They knew his home and his family. As did Five and the Russian.

Ralph Exton lived the lie. So, in their ignorance, did his family.

‘Hi.’

A grunt.

‘Where’s Mum? At home or . . . ?’

A shrug.

He thought it indicated that his wife, Fliss Exton, married to him for sixteen years, was likely to be with her dentist. She had many appointments with him and a Sunday afternoon was as appropriate as any other.

‘Have a nice time.’

He went past his daughter and walked up the gravel path, reached the front door and fished for his key. He lived the lie. He remembered, as he often did, a monochrome photograph of a man with a long pole doing the tightrope walk over Niagara. Ralph Exton thought, as he always did, Hey, man, you know nothing. I do it for real, no safety harness, each and every day. Wish me luck.

It would be good if there was some lunch for him in the fridge, but he wouldn’t hold his breath.

He slammed the door, leaned against it and the shivering was back. He could barely stand. ‘Fuck me,’ he wheezed. ‘Just another day at the office. Fuck me.’

Ralph Exton lived with the fear and the lie. Over his head he saw a cobweb that neither Fliss nor Toria had bothered to clear. A spider was lurking in the corner and a fly was wriggling, trapped. ‘Know how you feel. Life’s shit, isn’t it?’ He went into the kitchen in the hope that some instant coffee would kill the shivering.

Malachy Riordan did haulage work, cattle and sheep. The route would take him that afternoon through Dungannon, and he was hired to get over towards the Moy where a dozen bullocks awaited collection; the farm was a second cousin’s. He had come down through Donaghmore and gone past the big stone Celtic cross, sculpted a thousand years before, and now he drove into the town through the modern housing estates.

Normally he would have regarded himself as safe at the wheel of a tractor or the heavy lorry and as good as any when bringing a getaway car clear of an ambush site: speed, distance – catastrophe if he spun off a road and ended up in a ditch, half concussed. Today, though, he had been within less than an inch of taking the side panels off a post-office van, and had missed the temporary traffic lights that the council had put up for roadworks on the Pomeroy road – he had gone through on red, and two cars had had to back up to clear a way for him.

The Englishman had confused him.

The man had said,
I’ve a family to keep. You pay me. Good enough? I need the money
. Where Malachy Riordan came from, men talked about the Cause, loyalty and martyrs. Their blood, they said, was in the soil. They knew each corner of their territory and could recite the atrocities that had been done to their people at which crossroads and whether it had happened a decade or a century before. The man had said he would do the deal for a slice of their cash. He seemed to think that money explained his actions. He was a funny little man. ‘Funny’ because he had been told of the smell of burned flesh, had heard the noise of the drill, and should have been wetting his trousers or blabbering. He hadn’t pleaded for their trust, had seemed to suggest that Malachy and Brennie Murphy could take it or leave it: they could employ him as a source of weapons or walk away from him. A guy had gone to Lithuania four years before, had been stung and was banged up in a gaol in Vilnius. They needed the firepower.

Without trust there was a canker among them.

If the fight was to continue, they must have new weapons.

He had a good knowledge of target surveillance, had known since childhood of the techniques used by police, military and intelligence for bugs and cameras, but he was troubled because he couldn’t judge that man. He knew his name, Ralph Exton, his home address, where his wife went most days and where his daughter went to school. He knew the man had organised cigarette shipments from southern Spain to Ireland and that their sale kept the Organisation financially afloat. If it was a sting, a cell door would close behind Malachy Riordan and he’d be off the mountain for ten or fifteen years, or he’d be shot and a weapon planted. Suspicion flooded him. Yet he couldn’t say where the man had tripped. Brennie thought him clean.

He came up the hill that was Irish Street, skirted the town’s sloping square and was below the ruins of the castle of the patriot O’Neill. He took the turning that would lead him to the Ranfurly road and towards the Moy. He saw Mikey Devine. He was difficult to miss: he wore a high-visibility orange jacket and held a lollipop sign warning of a school children’s crossing point. He was smoking as he waited for them to come out of their afternoon classes. Mikey Devine was eleven years older than himself and had followed him like a dog. He was a good ‘dicker’ – message-carrier – and could play stupid well enough to linger outside a barracks and get the policemen’s private car numbers when they came off shift. He and his ma, widowed, still lived on the mountain. He had been a volunteer, had moved weapons, tracked targets, had been a pall-bearer for one of those commemorated in the village of Cappagh where the names were done in gold on the stone . . . He had gone the other way. Most had. They had bought into the ‘peace’, and the reward for turning a back on the armed struggle was to wear the uniform needed to see kids across a street. ‘Fuck you, Mikey Devine. You were bought cheap.’ Everyone knew Malachy Riordan’s stock lorry, as would Mikey Devine, but the bastard ducked his head and didn’t peer up at the cab. There was enough puddle water close to the gutter from the morning’s rain so Malachy edged the wheel over and let his near-side tyres splash through it as he accelerated, wetting the other man’s legs. It was a brief moment of satisfaction.

The Sinn Féin people in the town paid small sums for a week of crap jobs and the money kept a sort of discipline among those who had copped out of the fight. Better weapons and better supplies of military explosive would draw back a few of the waverers and lessen the organisation’s reliance on brave but untrained kids: like Pearse and Kevin.

He had been told by Brennie Murphy that he should take the Englishman on trust. That was why Malachy was driving badly. The Englishman claimed a Russian contact, a safe one.

The young man, mid-twenties, had dealt in heroin for four years. He prospered. Now he employed half a dozen enforcers and four sales people; he had targeted for his commercial expansion a district on the west side of the Iset river dividing the city of Yekaterinburg, and south of
ulitsa
Kuibysheva. The young man believed this city in the Sverdlovsk
oblast
, the capital of the Urals, offered a major business opportunity. Near to the wide river he had met with competition from men who used two kiosks, which had been torched; the people operating from them had been beaten. The young man had drunk local ‘champagne’ that evening in a nightclub on
ulitsa
Vosmogo Marta and had thought himself king of all he surveyed. A couple of months had passed since then and the young man was ignorant of certain factors that would affect what remained of his life.

The areas of ignorance stacked up. He did not know of a former captain in the old GRU named Timofey Simonov. He was unaware that, twenty-five years after leaving Military Intelligence, Timofey Simonov had made his first ventures in the new capitalism in Yekaterinburg, and provided a protective ‘roof’ for a network of kiosks. His limited contacts could not tell him that Timofey Simonov performed functions for several of the fringe élite, the
siloviki
, in Moscow and St Petersburg. The young man’s knowledge of geography was limited to the supply routes running north from Afghanistan and through the Tajikistan city of Dushanbe into Russia, not of European maps and specifically not of the town of Karlovy Vary set in the hills of the western Czech Republic. There was no possibility he could have been warned that he was showing grave ‘disrespect’, or of the dangers in causing offence to an individual living a quiet life 3,800 kilometres away. Neither did he know that two sacks of cement dust and half of an oil drum had been delivered that afternoon to a lock-up garage on the east side of the Iset river, close to the weir where young lovers liked to leave padlocks on the railings. Men had followed him and learned his movement patterns, but he hadn’t seen them. The young man’s ignorance was perhaps a blessing because his awakening from it would be violent and cruel. He had lunch and drove now, in an Italian sports car, around his kingdom, checking his profit margins.

The bureaucrat once occupying a back office at the Finance Ministry in Moscow had slipped out on a spring afternoon five months before and none of those with whom he worked had noticed that his briefcase was in his hand. Why take a briefcase if the destination was a park, and the purpose to eat a sandwich? Memory sticks did not weigh heavily or bulge. It had not been noticed by those colleagues that this official had spent all of his previous lunch breaks in the last fortnight with sticks in the computers and passwords tapped into the machines. His absence had not been noticed on a warm, sunny afternoon. It was not until the next morning and his failure to arrive at his desk that security personnel were sent to his bachelor apartment. It had been wiped clean, the owner’s personality deleted. He was gone – well gone. An evening flight had taken him from Domodedovo airport to Vienna. He had been airlifted on to Zürich and taken to a safe-house by Swiss financial authorities. Now he had moved on. The investigators had shifted him to a small gated estate just inside the M25 and to the south-west of London. At first, after arriving in the United Kingdom, he had been too scared to cough and had stayed inside the four-bedroom house with the handyman/housekeeper couple – both formerly with the anti-terrorist command – who were responsible for his safety. He had begun to relax. The secrecy around him had slackened. In the small hours of a morning in August, at first light, he had tiptoed downstairs and telephoned his mother’s home, near to the aluminium smelter in Krasnoyarsk at the heart of Siberia. Where was he? his mother had demanded from her apartment in the Sovetsky district of the city. He had not answered her. He had repeated that he was well and would urge the authorities handling him to attempt to bring her out of Russia to him.

The conversation had been a disaster. Part of the disaster he had known of: she had refused to leave her motherland. The other part was the capability of Russian electronic intelligence to pick up the call to the Krasnoyarsk number, locate the caller and set a watch on the streets, lanes and bridle paths on that side of Weybridge. When he was found, Timofey Simonov was given a contract and turned to his considerable diary of contacts. A weapon had been made available to a Bosnian Serb marksman who had perfected the skill of using a precision rifle at long range while working from high ground, above the Jewish cemetery, during the siege of Sarajevo. It would be a deniable killing, and no trace could be laid at the feet of important men in the commercial banking world of the Russian state. The killing would send a message and whistle-blowers poring over files and computer screens in Moscow would hear of it.

The target, of course, knew nothing of plans being made to abbreviate his life. Now that the security regime had relaxed, he walked more often in the garden, seeing only a distant wall of trees on the south side of the property. It was another afternoon of rain so he did not go for his run, three circuits of the grounds. He had never heard of Timofey Simonov, and boredom had supplanted fear. That afternoon he played chess against himself on a laptop computer.

He woke with a start. The shadow moved in the room. He had been among the trees, the vandalised ruins and wilderness of the abandoned aircraft hangars. It was said to be the safest town in the Czech Republic and the police took great care of the residents of the street that ran up the hill. The evening had begun. Timofey Simonov had been asleep on the sofa in the first-floor room with the big windows that overlooked the town. The curtains had not been drawn and the dusk had crept up on him. The figure flitted across his eyeline.

The ghosts had been with him as he dozed. He had not been to Milovice for three weeks. It was almost home to him. He had nothing to fear, yet the breath had caught in his throat. He coughed. A light was switched on.

The brigadier came into the room most days at this time with a pot of coffee. It surprised Timofey Simonov that he had felt a frisson of apprehension when he had become aware of his man’s presence. What had he to fear? Nothing that he knew of. And to look forward to? A concert that evening, and next week he had tickets for a Glenn Miller orchestra playing in the town. In his sleep he often walked on the old runways and aprons of Milovice, among the weapons arsenals and the side roads that went to the firing ranges where the battle tanks had performed. And, so many times in his sleep, he cringed at the engines of the Mig-29s of the 114th Regiment of Interceptors. They had been, to the NATO people in Germany, the fulcrum designation of Soviet air power . . . All gone, and weeds grew at Milovice. It was a scandal, a disgrace, an insult to the country of his birth and— The tray of tea was put down beside him.