Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (12 page)

Last time he’d flown into Glasgow, he’d seen Lucy Klesk, a student‐
era conquest of his in the ‘ten pints down and no‐
one else in sight’ weight‐
class. She was sitting in one of the departure‐
lounge cafes, captivated by Hello! magazine and a king‐
size Mars bar. The years and the calories had not been kind, and it took him a moment to recognise her under that full‐
thickness extra layer of pale flesh. She’d been too engrossed in fending off the imminent threat of malnutrition to notice his scrutiny, but even if she had looked up, eye contact was a luxury he knew he could afford, as long as it was kept brief.

It took some getting used to, took some believing. Like putting on Gollum’s ring that supposedly made you invisible, you wouldn’t go straight down the female changing‐
room at the local pool without making sure that it was working, and Simon’s problem was that there was no‐
one he could ask for independent confirmation. The first time he returned, he must have looked like such a tit, walking around with sunglasses on indoors, wearing hats and hoods: all to obscure a face that was already hidden behind the world’s greatest disguise.

When the true proof of this came, it was back on foreign soil, where he took no such absurd precautions. He was walking through Schipol, connecting to his flight home to Nice, when he passed Rob Hossman on the opposite travelator. Rob had sat two desks away from him at Sintek Energy for four years; he’d even been to an abysmal dinner party at the guy’s house, one of those desperate suburban purgatory‐
with‐
salad affairs, where all the men pretended they were listening to each other’s conversations while they fantasised about fucking each other’s wives. They had traded greetings in corridors a thousand times, observing that etiquette whereby you clocked who was coming but pretended not to notice them until you had reached the crucial ten‐
foot passing zone. At Schipol they glanced across the concourse simultaneously, and Rob was half a second from performing that twitchy nod of his when the magic ring did its stuff.

The look on Hossman’s face was one that Simon would see repeated many times down the years, up to and including Larry the little drummer boy that very evening. It began with a narrowing of the eyes, the spark‐
of‐
recognition stage. Next the forehead made like an accordion as they ransacked their memory banks and tried to work out why his mug was familiar. Then, at what would normally be the Eureka moment, they hit the buffers with a thud. After that there was blank incomprehension – the Photo‐
Me‐
booth first‐
flash look – followed usually by a slight shake of the head or some more accordion action, by which time he was gone.

If their brains were computers, they’d need a manual reboot. One simple line of data unfailingly crashed the programme. How did Sherlock Holmes put it? Once you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever you’re left with, no matter how implausible, must be the truth. Their problem was that the impossible was the truth, so once they’d ruled that out, all they were left with was confusion.

Holmes was still right, though. They just weren’t possessed of all the relevant information. What they believed to be impossible, wasn’t. What they believed to be the truth wasn’t either. It wasn’t public knowledge, but was nonetheless a fact, that Simon Darcourt’s body had never been recovered. According to the inquest, it was officially ‘impossible’ that he could have survived the explosion, given where he’d been sitting, never mind the ensuing crash into the fjord’s icy waters. Officially impossible because the officials weren’t possessed of all the relevant information either.

Hard to blame them, really. The Stavanger disaster must have been a bitch to investigate, what with the debris being scattered and submerged in a stretch of deep water that was only accessible by boat or seaplane. It took the diving teams and salvage crews almost a month to conclude their efforts, and though they eventually raised all sections of the plane, they worked in the soul‐
destroying knowledge that the currents and shifting sands were every day claiming a further share of the evidence. His wasn’t the only body never to be recovered, the passenger manifest providing the only means of calculating the death toll. The bomber’s tracks weren’t merely covered, they were all but washed away. Whoever had blown up ScanAir flight 941, the investigators concluded, really knew what they were doing.

Well, yeah, sort of. But as even the most gin‐
addled, volunteer‐
fondling stage magician could tell you, the secret of a good disappearing trick is to keep the audience distracted: give them a loud bang and a bright flash so that they don’t notice your discreet exit, making sure you also whip the props away before they start trying to suss how it was done.

Of course, he hadn’t blown up a passenger airliner merely for the purpose of faking his own death; that would constitute a profligate waste of human life. There’d be no pay‐
out, for a start, and in any case, he wouldn’t have been able to lay hands on the hardware. It hadn’t even been his idea. Okay, the not‐
dying part had been his idea – what he regarded as a sensible modification of the suicide bomber’s traditional remit – but the attack itself was at someone else’s instigation.

Finland had extradited the fugitive Urkobaijani guerrilla leader, ‘Artro’, to Moscow, where he was wanted for organising a bombing campaign in support of the region’s (yawn) struggle for independence. Artro’s speciality had been marketplaces: security low, surveillance non‐
existent, very busy, very public. Having now seen a couple of Russian markets, the only downside Simon could envisage was that it would be difficult to tell the difference between the state of the place before and after the bomb went off. It certainly couldn’t smell any worse.

Artro’s geopolitical knowledge didn’t extend very far beyond Russia being the Great Satan and the US being the Great Satan as well, and it was widely rumoured that he’d gone on the lam to Finland in the disastrously mistaken belief that Scandinavia was an entirely autonomous continent, politically separate from Europe. That said, misapprehension wouldn’t necessarily have led to apprehension if he’d followed the first rule of lying low, which is to lie low; or in his case, to not get puggled on three bottles of Finlandia then start glassing Russian sailors in the centre of Helsinki.

Artro’s militia vowed revenge on the Finns, their feelings towards the Russians already having been made fairly clear. Their problem was that Artro had been very much the balls and the brains of the outfit – the latter admittedly wasn’t saying much – and the credibility meter was starting a rapid countdown on their vow. In fact, with their leader behind bars, the potency of their entire organisation was under serious scrutiny; in the world of terrorism, perception is everything, so if nobody is scared of you, you might as well not exist. They needed to do something high profile and they needed to do it soon.

Naturally, they went to Shub. Sooner or later, everyone does.

And if you’ve been very, very good (or, depending on your moral standpoint, very, very bad), Shub sometimes comes to you.

Shaloub ‘Shub’ N’gurath. Probably the most dangerous man in the world, if only the world knew he existed. That wasn’t his real name, of course, only what he’d told Simon for communication purposes, and it was rumoured he never gave the same name to two people. ‘I don’t like being talked about,’ he said, and by Christ he meant it.

How to describe him? The Bill Gates of international terrorism? The anti‐
Kofi Annan?

The Bill Gates comparison was probably better, in that no matter what you were up to, your cause, your enemy or your methods, you could be sure he was seeing a slice of the action, financially speaking. Another valid comparison would be with the Great Oz, as it was difficult to equate this bald, bespectacled and pot‐
bellied little man with the power he wielded and the reputation that preceded him. The aura of mystery and secrecy surrounding him functioned as part of his security and defence.

Though rumours proliferated, they tended to be rendered even more shadowy and confused by the difficulty in two conversants establishing for certain who they were talking about, not to mention their mutual reluctance to confirm that he was who they meant, lest it ever get back to him.

Despite this, Simon had still heard plenty of stories. Some sounded like campfire tales, others Bogeyman myths likely to have been started or at least encouraged by the man himself, but one he had little difficulty believing was that Shub was represented on the boards of several of the world’s leading arms manufacturers. Certainly if he hadn’t existed, they’d have done very well to invent him (even though all of them – and their shareholders – deep down sincerely wished their products weren’t necessary and that the world could be a happier, more peaceful place). His far‐
reaching efforts kept the fires of armed conflict well stoked around the globe, and those conflicts had made him an extremely wealthy man. In explaining his business to Simon, Shub had concentrated on the area of terrorism because that was to be his field of activity, but it was obviously only one slice of a very large and very bloody pie.

‘Terrorism is merely an agent, an irritant,’ Shub said. ‘It causes the rash, the irritation, and governments are forced to scratch. Then, as every child is told, scratching makes it worse. More soldiers, more guns, more training, more unrest, more repression, more revolt, more terrorism, more irritation, and for me, for my friends, for you, for us all: ka‐
ching, ka‐
ching, ka‐
ching.’ He had smiled, rubbing his thumb against his fingers in the internationally recognised gesture.

‘Blood money’ was the politicians’ poe‐
faced and overused phrase, more accurate than they probably knew. Terrorism pumped cash around the globe like a heart: weapon sales, weapon smuggling, training camps, professional hits, kidnapping, drug‐
running, fundraising, protection rackets, money‐
laundering, security systems, surveillance technology, defence contracts … ba‐
bump, ba‐
bump, bang‐
bang, bang‐
bang, ka‐
ching, ka‐
ching. And if terrorism was the heart, Shub was its pacemaker. World Peace would be a very bad day at his office, which was why strenuous efforts were being put in at all times to make sure such a cataclysm never came about.

Terrorism didn’t just move money, either: it generated the stuff. In the most impoverished areas of the world there might not be any cash for food, but if you threw in some ethnic tension or an independence struggle, the war chests just filled up as if by magic. Most people would only associate Urkobaijan with Channel Four news footage of tearful refugees wading through mud, pulling all their earthly possessions on wooden carts, but that didn’t mean Artro’s mob couldn’t spare a three hundred K advertising budget for letting the world know they still meant business.

The IRA had their deluded sugar daddies drinking Guinness in Bostonian Plastic‐
Paddy theme pubs, but they weren’t unique. Every festering little conflict on the planet had its overseas fanclub, ex‐
pats or second‐
generation romantics trying to buy a sense of their own fading ethnicity as the world threatened to homogenise around them. Plus they could usually rely on further generosity from foreign parties who shared their antipathy towards the target nation and/
or the target nation’s allies, which was one of the many areas in which Shub specialised.

Gadaffi had infamously made Libya an international centre for terrorism. He brought people together from many nations and conflicts, gave them funding, helped them share resources, contacts, networks; offered them training camps, accommodation, swimming pools, room service and conference facilities (well, just about). However, this hospitality was only extended to those who fitted the left‐
of‐
centre ideological bill. It was like terrorism as a nationalised industry. Shub N’gurath, on the other hand, represented the free market end of things, and would never let something as crass as politics get in the way of making a deal.

The ScanAir bombing was a great example of Shub’s ability to match people’s needs and resources. In Brazno, Urkobaijan, Artro’s shower had the money and the motive but not the means and definitely not the time. In Bridge of Don, Scotland, Simon had the nous but not the hardware. In Ghent, Belgium, a man named Michel Bruant had the hardware but no way of getting it out of the country. And in Le Havre, France, there was a freight firm running an unofficial sideline worth eight times its declared turnover. Shub put them all together, and took a minimum forty per cent at every step.

Serendipity doo‐
da.

Shub also had a talent for recognising not only the right man for a job, but in some cases the right job for the man. Bruant’s package was designed as a suicide bomb, and Artro’s brigade all liked the idea of Urkobaijani independence so much that they had every intention of still being there if and when it finally happened. Nonetheless, Shub would have had little difficulty finding them a volunteer if the price was right; he’d done it before.

There was nothing expressed the depth of your belief, courage, resolve and all‐
costs fanaticism quite like a suicide attack, but according to Shub, these rare qualities tended to be found only in ‘those who were closest to their god’. By this he didn’t mean the fundamentally religious, but the terminally ill, with little time left to do much but worry about their family’s future welfare. ‘Assisted euthanasia’ he called it, the assistance being primarily financial in nature – though strapping twenty pounds of C4 to your chest and detonating it in a public place obviously helped you on your way. Quick and painless, too.

Shub had brokered plenty such deals, and might have organised another but for two factors. Factor one was the Urkobaijanis’ stipulation that the target should be a civil aircraft, putting them into terrorism’s elite bracket: the mile‐
high club. In the past, all he’d needed was someone capable of staggering from their oncology ward to the local police station or government building, but negotiating European airport security would take a sharper mind and a fitter body.

A suitable candidate would still have been found but for factor two, which was that Shub had been alerted to the existence of someone who might have the brains to do it without staying ringside for the show; someone who was showing great potential and might be ready to take off the stabilisers; someone who might be swayed to view it not so much as a task as a once‐
in‐
a‐
lifetime opportunity.