I kept up a gentle monologue as I steered Harry back to the LUP (lying-up position). ‘Deep breaths, mate. We’re nearly there. Tea, sticky buns, evening paper …’ I thought it might help remove some of the tension from his shoulder muscles, maybe even bring a smile to his face. But he hardly reacted, just stared back in the direction we’d come, jaw clenched, the veins on his neck standing out like whipcord.
Koureh’s Stockholm practice obviously wasn’t short of business if his weekend place was anything to go by: steeply raked, slate-tiled roof; traditional dove-grey clapboard walls; bleached blue shutters standing to attention each side of massive picture windows that overlooked the water. His sundeck was the size of a tennis court, which left plenty of room to stretch out on the stainless-steel and cream canvas steamer chairs once you’d dragged yourself out of the hot tub. The nickel-plated hurricane lantern on the glass-topped dining table looked like the nose cone of a small space rocket.
I knew that all this five-star luxury was making things even worse for Harry. What kind of God let Koureh bring his designer family, and the occasional upwardly mobile receptionist, to this slice of Scandinavian Paradise when a lot of good lads still hadn’t recovered from his wartime dental treatment – and at least one we knew never would?
He blinked a couple of times and finally managed to tear his gaze away from the window where we’d been admiring Koureh’s happy snaps. The sweat was still pouring off him big-time, but his skin was looking better. He wiped a sleeve across his forehead. ‘Nick, I’m sorry. I lost it for a minute back there. I keep seeing Snakebite’s body lying in the corner of that interrogation room …’
‘I know. Not good.’ It was the smell that had got to me. They’d only taken him out and buried him a day or two before the maggots saved them the trouble. ‘But you’ve really got to try and cut away …’
It was easier said than done, of course.
Harry had taken his mate’s death hard. They’d been inseparable since Northern Ireland. They’d even been alongside each other when a toadhead pitviper had bitten Johnny on the knob in Colombia. We took the piss out of them both severely about that, of course. It was what friends were for.
4
We weren’t expecting our target to make an appearance for twenty-four hours or so. I hoped that would give Harry enough time to calm himself down and start thinking beautiful thoughts again.
Using the cover docs supplied by Chastain, Trev and I had flown in to Stockholm separately and spent the last eight days putting surveillance on the target until we reckoned we knew pretty much every detail of his routine. Apart from the practice, he basically had five regular stopping-off points: their apartment, St Erik’s Hospital, the kids’ school, Mrs K’s office and the local communal pool.
Harry had arrived via Copenhagen. He’d paid cash for a six-year-old Merc estate with Danish plates and brought it over on the Helsingør–Helsingborg ferry. I’d RVed with him at Tranås yesterday morning.
Trev was fluent enough in Swedish to be kept warm on long winter nights, so it made sense for him to stay with the target. His job was to keep the trigger on Koureh until he slid behind the wheel of his steel-grey Saab 900 convertible tomorrow night, then give us the standby as it headed south for the weekend. The wife and kids always came down in the Volvo estate after the Saturday-morning swimming lessons.
My only real worry – aside from Harry going into meltdown – was that our man in the white tunic might take advantage of the opportunity to show his latest receptionist the view from his super-king-size duvet before his nearest and dearest joined him. We weren’t in the business of killing real people.
Fuck it, we’d have to cross that bridge when we came to it.
Right now I wanted to get some calories down our necks, and visualize what we’d do when Koureh showed.
I dug into my daysack for water and scoff. Neither of us had fancied the idea of fermented herring, so our choice was a fairly simple one – Swedish meatballs or Swedish sausages. We didn’t bother heating them, just necked them straight out of the can. I left his pack of Camel Lights where they were. It was a disgusting habit, and we needed to keep the place sterile.
I glanced at Harry from time to time as we ate and drank. He’d got some colour back in his cheeks and was having a go at normal. And normal for Harry wasn’t all bad. Some of the girls around Hereford thought he was a dead ringer for the blond guy in
Thelma & Louise
– Brad somebody. I could never remember his name.
All was good – well, getting better – and soon we’d put our feet up, to lie back and enjoy the sunset. The mosquitoes weren’t due for another month in this part of the planet, so there was nothing to spoil our day.
That was when the radio sparked up and Trev came on the net.
5
Trev was one of the world’s great improvisers, but he really hated being taken by surprise. So I could always tell when he was feeling the pain, even over the net. And right now he was feeling it big-time.
‘Mate, I’ve fucked up. I do not have Bravo One …’
Our comms operated on a frequency-hopping system, so they were pretty secure unless you used the handset to call your mum and she kept you on the line, but it still made sense not to ID names.
‘The appointment diary was full to bursting until around now, and all day tomorrow, so I went for a brew. When I got back, the wagon wasn’t there.’
I didn’t ask him whether he’d zipped through a couple of crossword puzzles while he was waiting, but I would later.
Trev brought us up to speed. He’d rung the receptionist and asked for an emergency appointment; apparently he even knew the Swedish for ‘root canal’. She’d told him Mr K had left for the day, and wouldn’t be back until after the weekend. That was bad news for us, but probably good news for her. As the shadows lengthened, Stockholm was going to be a lot more comfortable than this bit of Östergötland.
Trev had checked out Koureh’s city apartment and the four other known locations, but he wasn’t at any of them. So we had to assume the target was heading in our direction. His drive was about three and a half hours from the capital, which meant we had to get our finger out.
I put the empty bottle and sausage cans back into my daysack and took out the alarm clock we’d bought at a Clas Ohlson hardware store in Tranås. Next out of the sack were the Swan Vestas. You could spark these things up on the zip of your Levi’s, but the coarse sandpaper striker that ran along the side of the box was what I needed. I cut the strikers off two boxes and tucked them into the left-hand pocket of my bomber jacket. The clock and a bunch of loose matches went into the right.
I told Harry to take up position behind the treeline. Good-looking or not, I still reckoned it would be a whole lot safer for both of us if he stayed out of sight while I went back inside and messed around with Koureh’s pipework. And if anyone came along the track that led to the house, I wanted to hear about it from Harry first.
I told him to do his owl call if he spotted any incoming threat. It was one of his favourite party tricks.
I could see he was chuffed, but a bit worried too. ‘What if you confuse it with a real owl?’
I gave him a big grin and clapped him on the cheek. ‘No chance of that, mate. It sounds more like the siren on a New York fire truck. That’s why I suggested it.’
I got to my feet and moved a few metres back for a piss before doglegging towards the lake to check for movement on the water. I didn’t want a summer cruise party or even a lone kayaker as an audience when I slipped into that basement. A pair of osprey circled lazily above the trees on one of the nearby islands, but nothing and no one else was invading their space.
I picked up a forked stick a couple of feet long on my way back through the trees and slipped on my gloves as I walked out onto the immaculately trimmed lawn.
Five minutes later I ducked beneath the slatted platform at the top of the steps up to the kitchen doorway. Dew had started to form, making the gravel pathway surrounding the house cold and slightly slippery to the touch. I could feel my shirt and jeans dampen as I got down onto my belt buckle.
The window I’d unclipped earlier was hinged at the top and wider than it was high – so big enough to allow a lad in Timberland boots and a bomber jacket to gain entry if he didn’t want to keep using the front door. The frame stood proud of the casing by about a centimetre where it met the sill. I gripped both sides of it with the tips of my polythene-covered fingers, prised it open and wedged the forked stick in one corner to keep it in place.
Then I turned and slid inside, feet first.
6
Harry and I were travelling light on this job. We always did. The Swedish police might routinely carry pistols and keep Heckler & Kochs locked down in their wagons, but they didn’t like anyone else doing it, especially if they were in-country without a formal invitation. The same went for slabs of high explosive and rolls of det cord. So when you were aiming to bring the rafters down on a guy who didn’t deserve to keep enjoying his Jacuzzi, you had to make do with whatever came to hand.
It was still light enough outside for me to see clearly without having to risk a torch beam blitzing a darkened window. First up, I pulled the toolbox out of its cupboard. Judging by its contents, none of the family wasted much of their time on DIY. Every gadget was in mint condition, even the pliers. Maybe Koureh was saving them for someone special.
I selected a small hand drill, a clear plastic packet of bits, a roll of double-sided tape and a very shiny adjustable spanner, then took a cloth from a neatly folded pile.
The boiler gave a sudden rumble as I placed the spanner and the cloth on the floor in front of it, then resumed its soft murmur. I put the roll of tape and the hand drill on the top step beneath the entrance from the house, and extracted the Swans, their ignition strips and the alarm clock from my bomber jacket. I lined them all up and screwed a drill bit the same diameter as a matchstick into the chuck.
I slowed my breathing and opened my mouth to quieten the roar of the blood-flow in my ears, then turned the door handle and pulled it back far enough to be able to listen for movement above me.
Nothing.
I wasn’t expecting any, but these routines always made me feel a bit more secure. Now I could just get on with the job.
The tape rasped as I peeled two or three inches off the roll and fastened both the ignition strips alongside each other on the bottom of the door. Leaving it ajar, I drilled five neat holes in the sill, as tight as possible to the point at which the leading edge of the strips would cross the threshold. I pushed it closed and tapped a Swan into each hole until only its little red head was visible, then checked that we’d be guaranteed a strike.
I blew the coil of wood off the bit, slid it into its packet, and put it and the roll of tape back in the toolbox before returning to the boiler.
Like pretty much everything else in the place, this bit of kit belonged on Planet Zanussi. Its gleaming aluminium casing was a world away from the rusty enamel monster I’d grown up with on our estate in Bermondsey, but it needed to be fed in much the same way. I spent a minute or two following the pattern of the pipework leading in and out of it, then took a couple of paces back, slowed my breathing, opened my mouth and listened some more.
Still no noise from the rooms overhead.
I moved back to my entry window and went through the same routine.
Again, nothing. No owl. No New York fire truck siren.
Then, in the distance, a sound like a squeaky wheel.
I slowed my breathing further. After a moment, I heard a soft, sad echo. So, not a wheel. The osprey was calling to its mate.
I went back to the boiler and wrapped the cloth around a pressure joint by a right-angle bend. If anybody was in the mood to examine it closely enough, I wanted this thing to look like it had sprung a slow leak, and that meant leaving no scratch marks on the brass. I tightened the jaws of the spanner over the freshly wrapped nut, gripped the moulded, rubber-sheathed handle and applied some gentle pressure. It was rock solid.
I tried again, with a bit more muscle. Same result.
The third time, it gave.
I loosened the spanner, removed the cloth, crouched down and leaned my ear right up close to the joint. There was a whisper of gas, like air leaving a radiator valve if you could be bothered to do the rounds with your little brass key when the cold weather arrived.
The digital time display read 19.57. There was probably a scientific formula for this, but I had no idea what it was. I just wanted Koureh’s basement to fill with enough gas to make a nice big bang the moment he opened that door.
Natural gas was lighter than air, and dissipated relatively easily. The house had been built in the thirties, so it wouldn’t take long for it to find its way up between the floorboards. The trick was to make sure the mixture was right – more than five per cent by volume but less than fifteen, or it wouldn’t ignite. I gave the nut an extra twist for luck, replaced the spanner and the cloth where I’d found them and shut the cupboard.
I wound the alarm clock, primed it to go off in a couple of hours, and left it on the slab of highly polished granite nearest to the doorway. It didn’t exactly go with the Georg Jensen gear in the rest of the house, but if Koureh hadn’t already lit himself a cigar upstairs or come down here to pop his boxers into the washing-machine or do a session on the treadmill, it would ring loudly enough for him to throw open the door to see what was going on.
At that point the strikers would brush the match heads and we’d have ourselves a serious bonfire. If all else failed I’d creep back onto the sundeck, light his Gucci hurricane lantern, lob it through the glass into his living room, then do a runner.
As I hauled myself out of the basement window and lowered it back into place, the silence of the pine forest was suddenly broken, and the cries I heard now had nothing to do with the ospreys.
7