I told him about the handful of locations I’d passed in the wagon, and my circuit of the fortress that morning.
‘Then you may have seen the covered area beside the St Petka Chapel, on the far side of the battlements that surround what they call the Upper Town.’ He looked at his watch. ‘My new friend is waiting for you there.’ He raised his right hand. ‘Go in peace, Nick. And may Allah deliver a pleasing resolution to your mission.’
8
I waited for the imam to disappear beneath the trees that lined the first part of his route back to the mosque, then got up and headed around the statue of the lad grappling with the snake.
I glanced down to my right as I crossed the pedestrian bridge for the first archway. Floodlights glared across the clay court at the corner of the moat. A couple of lads were whacking tennis balls across the net at each other. Every time their racquets connected, the impact echoed off the walls like gunshots.
I veered left through the fortified gate beneath the clock tower, leaving the First and Second World War armaments display stretching down the trench on either side of me. This way I’d cut the corner I’d wandered around this morning.
The covered courtyard outside St Petka’s was at the bottom of a small flight of stone steps that led from the Rose Church. I stayed in the shadows of the arch beneath the twin towers, opened my mouth and listened. The murmur of conversation floated towards me from the direction I’d just come, but I couldn’t pick up any sound of movement or voices ahead or below.
As I was about to move on, I heard a muttered oath and footsteps moving away from me. Maybe my mates with the headphones were still up and running. Maybe someone was having a late-night argument with God.
Then again, maybe not.
I had a bad feeling about this.
I emerged from the shadows into empty space. A couple of candles flickered in the rack outside the Rose Church, but whoever had sparked them up was long gone.
I stopped and listened again at the top of the steps.
A dog barked further down the slope, somewhere in the dead ground between the trees and the river. I might have heard a groan or a sigh closer in, but I wasn’t sure. It could have been the rustle of leaves and creak of branches in the night breeze.
Treading carefully on the tips of my Timberlands, I made my way to the walled courtyard below. The chapel door to my half-right was shut, but there was a glimmer of light from the wall lamp beside the arch framing the startlingly blue portrait of St Petka. There was a gated exit to a paved pathway ahead, and benches to my left under a tiled shelter.
I could see no sign of the imam’s most recent convert, yet I sensed that something had recently disturbed the quiet serenity of the place. I swung open the gate and looked up and down the pathway that ran along the side of the chapel. There was no hint of activity, innocent or hostile.
I moved back into the centre of the yard. To the right of the lamp, in deep shadow, was the mouth of an alley that led to yet another set of steps, at the top of which I could just make out the silhouette of yet another corner tower. Halfway up them, hugging the chapel wall, was some kind of obstacle.
As I moved towards it, and my eyes adjusted to the layers of darkness, I could see that it was a body.
9
The lad sprawled beside the chapel wall wore a white
kufi
prayer cap, like the imam’s, and a tufty beard. His body was still warm but he had no pulse.
I couldn’t see his neck clearly enough to tell whether he had a rose-coloured tattoo, and I didn’t want to move him, but his eyes were wide and his tongue protruded from his mouth, like an eel, so I suspected that he’d been garrotted. Unless he’d just bumped into a particularly brutal mugger, Wenceslas had paid the price for turning his back on the Crvena Davo.
Which meant that I needed to get the fuck out of there.
Since the footsteps I’d heard were going downhill, I figured that heading back up would be my best call. I’d had a good day out: I didn’t want to spoil it by being jumped on and given the piano-wire treatment somewhere in the trees.
I retraced my route up the steps to the Rose Church, only pausing long enough to notice that the candles had gone out. I stayed close to the wall as I looped back to the arch beneath the twin towers. I moved through it and left up the path that would take me across the walkway and into the old citadel.
I was halfway there when two lads in beanie hats and matching black Adidas tracksuits with white diagonal go-faster stripes below the knee emerged from the fortifications ahead of me. They weren’t there to take the air. I pivoted round and aimed myself back downhill. As I reached the bottom another two in matching kit appeared in the archway I’d just come through from the church.
I swerved immediately left towards the armaments display. That part of the trench wasn’t floodlit, but the sky was clear and the moon was strong enough to cast its own pattern of shadows. I stayed close to the brick wall on my left flank, to try to avoid presenting a silhouette to my pursuers. I reckoned that if I could get back to the floodlit archway that linked the clock tower to the tennis club, the Adidas team would have to think twice about initiating a contact.
I glanced over my shoulder. Two of them were following me along the trench; the other two had stayed on the walkway. When I turned my head back another two figures had materialized at the corner that led to the rusting patrol boat. I couldn’t tell whether they were in matching tracksuits, or carrying weapons, but I was pretty sure they weren’t just here for the beer.
None of the judo routines I’d shown the kids that afternoon would keep four switched-on attackers at bay, and there was no way I could climb either of the walls – I’d checked them out during my morning circuit – so I knew I was in the shit. I needed to keep them guessing for as long as possible, so I kept on walking and scanned the ground in front of me for anything I could use as a weapon. If I was going the same route as Wenceslas, I’d do my best to take one or two of them with me.
I passed two of the gateways in the brickwork on my left, both chained and padlocked. The lads coming towards me were now no more than fifty feet away. The ones behind were closing fast.
As I passed the third arch the gate swung open and two big boys in parkas and combats grabbed me and pulled me inside. One of them had Boris Johnson hair. He pointed a rock-steady Glock 16, complete with suppressor, at my forehead and raised an index finger to his lips. His mate held me from behind, the palm of his left hand pressed against my mouth. I didn’t know what they were up to, but I got the message.
Our hidey-hole smelt dank and mouldy, not the nice aroma of freshly dug earth, but of somewhere sad and unloved. It was the kind of place only the fungi came to party when the lights were low. The scent of my captor’s freshly soaped hand was almost a relief. He kept it firmly in place beneath my nostrils as four sets of footsteps converged on the path immediately outside. I didn’t know why. I wasn’t about to cry for help.
There was a muttered exchange among the Adidas team. Then I saw a shadow fall across the gate and a bunch of fingers the size of Serbian homemade sausages grip the centre bar. I was tempted to give them a good kick, just for the hell of it. It could hardly make things any worse.
Boris’s blond hair flicked back as he swivelled and aimed the muzzle of the Glock’s suppressor at them instead of me. He pushed back the gate and moved out into the trench. There was no arguing about the size of this boy’s bollocks.
His mate strengthened his grip. I guessed he wanted me to know that our job right now was to stay exactly where we were.
10
The silence was electric. The bad guys were obviously as impressed with Boris’s bollocks as I was. For a moment, you could have heard a pin drop. Then I heard more approaching footsteps. I couldn’t see who they belonged to, but the Adidas team’s body language told me the new arrivals weren’t fully paid-up members of the Davo fan club.
Boris let them have it with a barrelful of high-voltage Serbian. I could only make out about one word in ten, but it was impossible not to catch his drift. The Davo raised their hands and backed off. By the time my captor indicated that the two of us should step outside to join his mate, everyone else had melted away. The entire stretch between the twin towers and the corner by the armaments display was deserted.
My guy released me, but let me have a good look at the blade he had strapped to his left wrist. Boris waved me on with his Glock, then tucked it under his parka and down the front of his combats. I was surprised there was room in there. They escorted me up the trench, one of them at each shoulder. I wasn’t sure whether they were making sure I didn’t do a runner, or on BG duty.
We tabbed along the row of weaponry and through the archway beside the basketball court. I got a closer look at my new best mates now that we were surrounded by floodlights. I didn’t know where Boris had sprung from, but if he wasn’t the guy I’d spotted in the Mondeo near Barford and then again in the layby above the Morava River, he had an identical twin. His sidekick remained invisible, even when you could see him.
They frogmarched me past the Monument of Gratitude to France and the bronze lad throttling the snake in the middle of the fountain. I found myself thinking about the imam and his determination to stay off the vengeance trail. I wondered if he’d feel the same way when he buried Wenceslas tomorrow.
I made to go straight on to the souvenir stalls by the main, but Boris and the Invisible Man funnelled me left towards the zoo. I didn’t ask how they knew where I’d parked the Audi. Warp-speed Serbian was way beyond me and, anyway, they didn’t seem in the mood to chat.
A couple of deep, feral roars came through the railing that surrounded the big-cat enclosure about eighty metres ahead of us. Maybe I was wrong about the wagon. Maybe they were just going to feed me to the lions and be done with it.
The zoo closed at five during the winter, but they steered me straight towards the entrance. Then, sharing a grin, they grabbed me by the biceps and dragged me to my wagon. Grey forced me to spread my legs and put the palms of my hands flat on the roof, and Boris fished around in the pocket of my bomber jacket and extracted the fob.
He pulled open the driver’s door and they bundled me inside, doing that thing the police do with your head when they want you to look like a prick but not damage yourself on the frame.
I made myself comfortable, and gave a bit of thought to what might make a deadlier weapon than the satnav in the Audi’s glove box. Then I realized that neither of the boys was coming along for the ride, and Boris was holding out the fob, letting it dangle on its shiny ring in front of me.
I reached up to take it, but for a moment he held it firm, and leaned in towards me. His stubble had a hint of red and his eyes were killer blue. They didn’t blink even a little bit as, in clear Estuary English, he wished me a pleasant flight home. Just not in those words. What he actually said was ‘Now fuck off back to Heathrow. And save us all some grief.’
11
Under his close scrutiny I pressed the panel for Aerodrom Nikola Tesla on the satnav’s Recent Destinations screen.
I didn’t know how the two of them fitted into all this, but as I pulled away from the animal kingdom, neither seemed too sad to see me go. I kept eyes on them in my rear-view. They made no move to follow. Maybe they already had some of their mates primed and in place.
The Air Serbia flight I was aiming for checked in shortly after eight in the morning, so I wasn’t going to bother with a hotel. I’d pull in wherever the truck drivers hung out between here and the terminal, and get my head down in the wagon.
1
Allerdale, Cumbria
Saturday, 4 February
I’d been to the Chastain ancestral home only a couple of times, when the team had gathered to fine-tune the Swedish op. We never said the word ‘deniable’ out loud, but we all knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of it being officially sanctioned, so it made sense to hold the briefing sessions a comfortable distance from Stirling Lines. It didn’t necessarily mean I had a standing invitation to go back there, but I was pretty sure the colonel wouldn’t tell me to clear off if I dropped by on my way north.
Ravenhill had been in his family for ever, and not having Guy around to take over the place was going to add another fistful of salt to his father’s wound. Continuity and inheritance had never been big issues for the Stone clan, but every nook and cranny of this place felt differently. From the moment you pulled in through the main gates, and wove through landscaped woodland that must have been planted up six generations earlier, you knew that the Chastain roots ran deep.
The main house was a whole lot grander than anything I’d been used to. It was tucked into a crescent of oak, hornbeam and Scots pine, with a sweeping view across the greenest of rolling green fields to the eastern shore of Bassenthwaite Lake.
We weren’t talking Downton Abbey here, but we’d stayed over in the converted stable block during the planning phase, and could have had a couple of bedroom suites each.
Yet more stone outbuildings and what now looked like an oak-framed boathouse completed the fairy-tale set-up. Harry, Trev and I had run around the estate for an hour every morning before our full English, and never reached the boundary wall.
I parked the Skoda alongside a Range Rover and a very shiny Maserati, and told it not to be embarrassed. I probably needn’t have bothered. It had spent its whole life doing God’s work.
I didn’t expect an immediate answer when I lifted and dropped the gleaming brass knocker on the Chastains’ front door. It would take them a while to tab all the way to the hall. I gave them ten and was about to repeat the process when I heard footsteps on the gravel from the direction of the lake.
The colonel and his wife appeared in the kind of well-used country kit that had seen some proper action on the peaks and fells, not just in the Regent Street boutique window. Their immaculately sculpted hair was greyer than when I’d last seen them, and it was impossible to miss the sadness in their eyes, but they were still Mr and Mrs Charisma.