The second time he had touched her was when she had paused to look at the horizon and they had been level with the end of the sunflower strip where a monster bloom sagged over the path. She had taken its weight and marvelled at the detail of the pointed orange petals, the core of ochre where bees fed. A spider – tiny, delicate – had come on to the back of her hand and scuttled towards her wrist. She would, at any other time and in any other place, have flicked it away, and would have done so there if he had not taken her hand and guided the spider to his palm, then freed the spider on the upper petals.
He had talked of the death of his mother, and her reburial in the new cemetery, had described to Penny where defence positions had been dug and she had seen what were now shallow trenches, little more than ditches. He had called the
Kukuruzni Put
the lifeblood route of the village, and had spoken of Marinci, Bogdanovci, and of the town behind them where the water tower was.
He had dropped his voice when they came to a newly ploughed strip that was above a gully in which a river flowed. There were many tyre marks, a flattened area that might have been under a tent and a pit some four feet deep, seven feet long and four feet across. He had told her of the death of four men, three of his age and the schoolteacher who had taught his father, then of a great betrayal. She had said Harvey Gillot’s name.
He looked hard into her eyes. Her older colleagues and line manager said she had doggedness, commitment and focus. Before they had reached the cemetery she’d shown her ID and put a card into his hand, which he’d pocketed without a glance.
He asked, simply, ‘Have you come to preserve the life of Harvey Gillot?’
‘No.’
‘You deny that you have come here to save the life of Harvey Gillot?’
‘I deny it,’ she said boldly. Penny Laing had made a remark that would have been greeted in the Alpha office with disbelief and astonishment. Bleaker: ‘I’m part of a team that regards him as a target for a criminal investigation.’
‘Did you hear of a contract?’
‘I did.’
‘Is the contract investigated?’
‘Not by me.’
Silence hung. He told her she stood where the men from the village had waited in the dark hours for the shipment to come through. Here they would have taken delivery. He told the story simply and well. She could almost feel the blast of the artillery shells and mortars, almost see the flash of the knives taken from sheaths, and experience the fear of those waiting for death, the pain before it. She almost understood the weight of the betrayal. She must have turned, as if she was preparing to sit down on the path, perhaps better to share what had happened at this place. He stripped off his T-shirt and laid it on the ground. She blushed scarlet and thought that to refuse was to offend. She sat on it and got out the sunscreen. He took it.
The third time the boy touched her was when he rubbed the white cream on her hands and lower arms, on her cheeks, chin, nose and forehead, and she allowed it.
To learn more, he said, she must talk to his father.
He had his hand on the butt, inlaid plastic, of the Baikal pistol. Not tight or frantic, just resting there. To keep his hand on it seemed to drain the tension and help him to relax. Always important to be calm, have the breathing steady. He waited and watched the gates. He could picture how it would be. He had seen it enough times. Late, very late, the target was aware that someone was close to him and had entered the protective circle that men imagined was around them. Might be defiance or fear, or just a stunned moment of shock that stopped the function of legs and arms – because the target had seen the pistol. Sometimes, if the target froze, Robbie would do the double tap of two head
shots. If the man had fight in him – could be a rolled newspaper, a plastic bag of shopping or a coat on his arm as he came out of a club or a pub, or a glass in his hand if he was still inside, then Robbie did a chest shot to drop him and a head shot to finish him.
The wasps were worse than they had been earlier and he was surprised that the gates hadn’t yet opened, that the target hadn’t come out with the dog. More walkers had used the path but he was still and wasn’t seen. Once he’d had to allow two wasps to crawl on his face because he couldn’t swat the little bastards while people went by …
Never anything to show from a chest shot other than the hole in the clothing that a schoolkid’s pencil would slip into. It might have a trace of burn round it, a scorch, but that was hard to see. The head shot also made a hole where a pencil could slot. The blood didn’t come out of the chest or the head until the target was down and dead – not that Robbie had seen the bleeding: he was gone by the time the dribble started. Didn’t run – important to walk.
His dad, Jerry, had done a stretch when Robbie was a youngster: his mum had said that after a snatch at a jeweller’s had gone wrong – a shop assistant ignored the raised cosh and slung an adding machine, then her shoe at the lead guy in through the door – his dad had run till his lungs half burst. Everyone on the street had noticed him and yelled to the police which way he’d gone. The old fool had still had a balaclava tight in his hand when they found him sagged against a lamppost.
He thought the dog must have crossed legs and almost chuckled, but the bastard wasps hadn’t left him. He watched the gates and waited.
The phone call ended. It had been a long one – and no coffee to go with it because
she
was in the kitchen: he wasn’t going to carry his notepad, pen and the phone in there and keep talking while the kettle boiled. His friend from Marbella had rung back to say that 82mm mortar shells and RG-42 hand grenades could
be included in the package. Did they not have enough of that gear already in Baghdad? No, because the Yanks had blown up arms stores the length and breadth of the country. Did the Iraqi police need mortar shells designed for use at battalion level and in an infantry assault? They could be persuaded. Did they need hand grenades with burst-radius of up to twenty metres? A dark night on the airport road, manning a roadblock, with most of the grunts gone home, any Iraqi policeman would be glad of half a box. They had talked round it and haggled – as friends did – and Harvey would go back to his people in Baghdad and the friend would talk to the contact in Tirana. Then there had been chat about the problems that summer in Marbella – algae in the swimming-pools. Time had slipped, and he had almost forgotten that his first call of the day had been to order, special next-day delivery, a bulletproof vest.
Harvey crossed the hall and went into the kitchen. The dog was by the door, panting, tail wagging, and
she
was lifting down the lead from the hook by the coat pegs. He still had on his flipflops and his rough trainers were in the cupboard. He did the dog walk. Didn’t hang on to much, but the fucking dog walk was his.
He snatched the lead, beat her to it. She had binoculars round her neck, walking boots on her feet and a light sweater hooked over her shoulders. The shades were on her hair and would cut out the glare off the sea. He had nothing suitable for walking the coast path and going out towards the lighthouse and the great Pulpit Rock.
No explanations. Nothing about a late call coming through and putting him off his schedule. He might as well have struck her. She, his Josie, recoiled from him, almost flinched. He didn’t know what to say, how to say anything. Had yesterday’s shirt on and no hat to keep the sun off his forehead, no glasses to keep the brilliance out of his eyes, creased trousers and the flipflops that flapped on the kitchen floor as he went to the door, opened it, let the dog bound ahead of him and closed it. He didn’t turn to see her face, had no interest in her expression.
He walked towards the gates. They were closed.
The zapper that opened them was on his key-ring, which was beside the phone in his office.
He stared at the closed gates. Yes, he could have climbed them, but would not have been able to lift the dog over – too heavy and too big a drop. He was about to go back.
They opened. Well-oiled, they eased away from the post and stopped when there was enough space for him and the dog to go through. He looked behind, couldn’t help himself, and she was on the step with a zapper in her hand. He thought she mouthed one word,
pathetic –
he lip-read it.
He went out through the gate and the pick-up was coming down the lane. He saw the face and acknowledged a curt hand gesture – Nigel might have had some pillow talk about the unreasonableness of a husband – and Harvey swung on to the path and walked away from his gardener, Josie’s comforter … Yes, he believed it.
The dog went ahead.
Jumbled thoughts, incoherently put together … his wife,
pathetic …
the gardener … a contract from a village … the dog peering into bushes at the side of the track, hackles rising … the need for grenades in Baghdad … the requirement for police, Shia or Sunni, to have mortar bombs … a BPV coming in the morning with a spray … the sun’s strength in his eyes, brightness off the water … the ferry late … the growl of the dog … the fucking gardener … His thoughts were a mess and then there was a stone, sharp, under his foot. The flipflop was bloody useless.
He went on past the dog, his fingers touched the ruff of its neck, and he was too distracted by the pain in his foot, the light on his face and every other thing on his mind to stop and check the dog’s aggravation …
Pathetic.
No one had ever called Harvey Gillot pathetic – not in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Syria, the ministry buildings in Jakarta, Beijing, Seoul or Dubai, or in an odd little backwater of the Pentagon or in a garret on the top floor of Whitehall’s defence building, off Horse Guards Avenue. No one
who worked from Vauxhall Bridge Cross on the Albert Embankment had ever called him pathetic.
A cloud lifted. To hell with confusion. His mind hooked on to the grenades and mortars, the signal he would send to Baghdad, to the interior ministry, and the calls he would make to Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the pen-pushers who issued the export-clearance forms and— Where was the dog? He whistled. The path ahead was empty and he could see down the side of Rufus Castle to the rocks and the beach. He turned.
The man wore overalls.
His hands pulled the balaclava down over his upper face, then came together and the scrape of metal on metal, the arming, carried to him. One hand, right side, was raised.
Very clear to Harvey Gillot. The hand held a pistol that looked to him like a Makharov. He knew the Makharov, had handled the sale of Makharov pistols pretty much since the first day he’d been with Solly Lieberman. It might not have been a Makharov that was coming up to aim at his chest, might have been the Baikal lookalike. Came from the same factory and— The aim was on him. He tried to turn, and the twist of his foot seemed to gouge the stone, between the flipflop and his sole, deeper into the skin and the pain of it came on. He bent, reflex, and the shot was fired. He was half down, on his knee, and his ears rang with the crack of the bullet going high and wide. A hanging in the morning concentrated the mind – as did a raised handgun when aimed, ten-foot range, at a guy who had dropped to one knee. Harvey Gillot saw everything with such clarity. And the wasps.
He had never missed before. Robbie Cairns had never failed to drop his target with the first shot. He had seen the strike against the old stone of the castle ruin.
He steadied.
The target was down, on one knee, and the dog cringed at the side of the path. Fucking wasps. He had to aim again because the impact of the first shot had lifted his firing arm and destroyed the zero he’d taken. The fucking wasps were in his face. One at
the balaclava slash for his nose, another at the slit for his left eye, one hovering and one crawling on him. He had the aim. Steadied. Now the man stared at him. Should have been fear, wasn’t. Should have been like the dog, but wasn’t belly down and didn’t cower. Started to squeeze and – fucking wasp in his fucking nose, and the other was half an inch from his eyeball. It had never been like this before.
He saw the two wasps. One was halfway up a nostril and the other was now on the material beside an eye. He had the flipflop, right foot, in his hand. A Makharov or a Baikal lookalike was aimed at him, and in retaliation Harvey Gillot readied to throw a flipflop. The pistol’s aim was gone, and the man’s arms flailed and brushed the balaclava. He hurled the flipflop – ten feet, could have been less. It hit the upper body. Not enough, of course, to hurt or injure, but more than enough, with two wasps in harness, to confuse.
He ran.
They said, military guys he met, that the big decision was between ‘flight and fight’. It was a response to acute stress. A bullet had gone over his head, fired from ten feet or less, and a goddamn insect had given him the chance of a double play. Now he did flight – but he’d done fight with the flipflop.
He ran and shrieked out loud for the dog, didn’t realise it was at his knee and belting with him. Another crack. A whiplash in the air and a splatter of bark on a tree ahead, and then he was round the bend in the path and cut away into scrub. He went down on his elbows and knees and burrowed through thorn and gorse. His shirt was snagged and torn but he kept going and the dog came with him.
Couldn’t go further – was at a drop. He had reached a place where level ground ended and he was trapped between rock that went up sheer, and rock that went down vertical. He lay still, hoped he was hidden, and held the dog. After the exhaustion, the heart’s pumping and the adrenalin, there was a god-awful pain in his foot.
Maybe it wasn’t clever.
Two minutes or three, he waited and listened. He thought the dog had the best hearing and would respond, but nobody came down the track. People came up, though, a boy and a girl, dressed to walk the coastal path. They might be going the whole way round the Bill. He used them as a human shield. If they reached the top of the track where it joined the lane, he reckoned he’d be fine. He came out of his lair and stumbled after them. His second flipflop fell off and he didn’t stop for it, but he pocketed the cartridge of the second round fired. The boy and girl were laughing, stepping out well and sharing a water bottle. They didn’t look back at Harvey, trailing them, and went right past where the first spent cartridge case had been ejected. Didn’t see it. Harvey picked it up. They didn’t have reason to look at the gap in the foliage where bloody Devonish dumped his grass and prunings, but Harvey saw the wasps there, angry and swarming. He reached the gates.