A little wizened man in an office, who had survived the carnage on the beaches, being offered a job … the smell of mule shit at the edge of a bazaar and sweet tea in thimble cups, perched on the crates that contained the Blowpipes. Standing in a north London crematorium while a poor soundtrack played the
Exodus
theme and an unbeliever’s coffin slid jerkily from view … Sitting on a hard chair in a register office beside Josie, holding her hand and feeling blessed … In the rain, on a dock, watching a freighter nudge towards the quayside and hearing the booming voice … dumping a bag of baubles … hustling, going for deals, a man alone … the interview room in a police station … and couldn’t remember when love had last figured in his life. Remembered them all – and then Roscoe went.
Went like a bloody cat. Pushed off one leg, might have had half a dozen paces to close. All bluff and all bollocks, as if Roscoe had never believed the crap talk he’d given with authority. Went fast, with athleticism. Harvey Gillot had felt the hand wrench off his arm and the detective was launched.
The hired man reacted.
Roscoe was struck, mid-air and without balance, by the swinging weight of the pistol – the Desert Eagle or the Jericho 941 – and caught the blow across the side of the face, cheek and chin. Gillot recognised then that Cairns –
Mr
Cairns – was not crude, ineffective, without talent at the job he did. The response had been so fast, like a cobra’s strike, like he had seen up on the North West Frontier in a village market. Roscoe fell. The arm swung back. Two hands locked.
So, Harvey Gillot, what the fuck to do?
Heard sounds now. Heard the moan, semi-conscious, of the detective. Heard oaths and shouts from the men behind and reckoned one voice was that of his ‘chauffeur’ on the morning ride, as dawn came, through the town and to the start point of the Cornfield Road. Heard a gasp from the girl who was Revenue and Customs, and a squeal from little Megs Behan, whom he hadn’t touched, who had slept on his bed and who had blasted him with a bullhorn. He hadn’t heard an oath, grunt, gasp or squeal from Benjie Arbuthnot. He faced the pistol. Roscoe was down, not prone but on hands and knees. He wouldn’t beat any count and wouldn’t stay on any field.
What the fuck to do? He kept the smile in place.
He did the smile that might have sold ice to an Inuk in Greenland, or sand to a Bedouin in the Sinai. The bastard was not Inuit or Bedu, and stared through him. Harvey Gillot could see the narrow little eyes over the two sights, the V and the needle. Die well or badly – did it matter?
One more step. He took it. Quite a good step, and again the silence drenched him. He heard the slither of his own foot, then the heave of the bastard’s breath, as if he would draw it in deep, fill the lungs, then let it out. When he let it out, he would fire … Guys he knew, guys he had a laugh with, guys who bought his stuff, told him that a marksman took in breath, held it, let it seep and fired.
Silence gone. An explosion in his ears and his head. He saw, a sharp moment, that the gun kicked hard, went up – was coming down fast. A delayed spasm, then the impact against his chest. No pain, but the shock of the impact. His knees buckled. He didn’t want them to fold and was confused, didn’t understand where the strength had gone. One good step, assured and strong, not another, and the ground – a dirt path and squashed corn – rushed to meet him. His eyes never left the gun and the face behind it.
No reaction from the face.
The gun had kicked up but now was down, aimed.
He knew they called it ‘double tap’. Many thoughts, the great
irrelevancies of the last macro-seconds of a life. ‘Double tap’ was from British policemen in Shanghai in the 1930s. The aim was on him and the finger whitened as pressure pushed away the blood. He couldn’t have moved or shouted. Harvey Gillot didn’t think it was his choice whether he died well or died badly, couldn’t shift from the aim and had no voice. The breath bubbled in his throat.
The miserable beggars had allowed him one shot only.
Small miracle that one had been allowed, packaged in a matchbox. He could get the pen through the metal detectors but not the bullet for it. He had needed it to be given him at Osijek airport.
He had emerged from the corn as the shot was fired, had seen Gillot go down and the detective pistol-whipped so that his mouth bled. His face was discoloured and he was dazed, his orientation gone. He had seen also that the members of his Vulture Club were either hunched at the side of the path or flat on their faces.
The pen was in his hand. He had twisted it, aimed it along his forefinger and the next finger was against the pocket clip. No one saw him, a damn great wraith that had risen from beneath the corn and his hat was awry and … He remembered everything he had been told. As the contract killer took his final steadying aim, he must have been some four or five feet to the side and out of peripheral vision. He aimed the finger at the little space behind Robbie Cairns’s left ear, which had been identified to him as the ‘mastoid process’. He pressed the trigger down violently, crushed the pen’s clip into the recess. The recoil blistered back down his arm, into his elbow and up to his shoulder. He had been shown what to do, where to aim, on a courtesy tour of the police special-operations training centre outside Jerusalem. The timing of his visit, as a friend and therefore confided in, had seen the early development of tactics to be used against suicide bombers wishing to gain a leg-up to Paradise by detonating themselves inside Israel. There was a ‘critical shot’ opportunity when the
bomber approached his target but the policeman, soldier or armed citizen who confronted him, or her, had to consider the nightmare scenario of the explosive belt being controlled by a ‘dead man’s handle’ and that the death spasm would – as a reflex, the principle of the running but decapitated chicken – indent a pressure switch. He could have fired into the lump, the ‘mastoid process’ behind either ear or down the bridge of the nose.
There was no second shot. The one bullet available, of .22 calibre, dropped Robbie Cairns. As well it did. No chance was open for another firing.
Cairns fell, subsided fast. No shock on his face, nothing that betrayed a moment of anxiety. Only the concentration of aiming and focusing on the fallen target, Harvey Gillot, lived with the hired man.
The path the bullet would take had been amply explained to Benjie Arbuthnot by a dedicated instructor. When might he have needed such expertise? He couldn’t have said, but he had never willingly passed over an opportunity to learn the black-art skills of his chosen profession – how to kill and leave not a single muscle flapping. The bullet would have gone through the ‘mastoid process’ and on into the ‘medulla oblongata’, the brain’s stem, and on impacting into it would have created an ‘instant flaccid paralysis’ – and the instructor had grinned grimly. ‘But I have to hit it, and how big is it? How much would I need Lady Luck?’ It was about the size of half a sausage, and it had been reached through the ear canal and the bullet would have driven along a mass of splintered bone ahead … and it worked. He knew the tactic as explained was successful because no muscular flap –
post mortem –
tightened on the trigger bar of Cairns’s pistol.
He slipped the pen back into his pocket.
Blood oozed from Cairns’s ear, spilled out and ran on to his neck.
He went forward. At that moment, the only man standing on the Cornfield Road was Benjie Arbuthnot. He towered above the men and women who crouched low.
Was he in time? He didn’t know. Had his intervention, breaching
the rules he had preached, been too late? They were matters beyond his experience. Quite hard, he kicked Roscoe’s ribs. ‘A smack in the face, nothing more. I gave you kit. Can he be saved?’
‘Or can he not be saved?’
He heard Arbuthnot’s voice. Gillot did not know where he lay or why he couldn’t see anything more than distant shadow shapes above him. There was a bark in the voice that demanded attention.
‘Come on. Don’t just bloody look at him – do something for him. You had the kit, on your belt, Sergeant, so use it. Steyn, off your knees. So that you all understand, there will be no more shooting. Robbie Cairns is as dead as yesterday’s mutton. God knows who did it, but he’s down and dead. We have to be grateful to someone but I don’t know who. No more shooting, so can we,
please,
see if Gillot can be saved? Doesn’t look too bright, does he? Worth saving? I think so. He’s been quite useful to the mother country over the years, not exceptional but useful – probably was more sinned against than sinning in the matter of the missile delivery. He’s owed the effort, my opinion. Not that it’s an important opinion, these days.’
The pain was bad in the ribcage and in his chest, not unbearable but bad. The voice clearest to him in the babble was that of his driver, who had called himself Daniel. The accent was mid-Atlantic and mid-European, unique to the group who had followed him through the corn.
‘Give me the analgesic. Morphine, OK. How? I don’t need a vein, just in through the trouser leg. There, that one … Ease it in. Takes a bit but it’ll keep the pain within limits. I appreciate you guys have put time and cash into this joy-ride, coming here to stand on the pavement and watch, but I don’t think we’re into happy endings. Looks grim to me. There’s no exit wound, so a slug’s lodged in there, probably wedged against the backbone, and it’ll have taken rib with it, fragments like shrapnel. About all that’s good is that the bullet entered right side of the chest – left would have been the heart. But I have a collapsed lung, and he’s breathing and there’s air in the cavity that the lung should be
filling. Do we have a field dressing? What do we have that’ll block that hole? Get too much air in and its pressure will screw up the veins going into the heart so they twist and get a blockage. Guess you don’t need to know that. Do we not have a field dressing? Yes, Ma’am, the blouse will do – just get it off. Seemed quite a decent sort of guy, but arms brokers can put on a deal of shit when they want to. I suppose he knew what he was doing. Take a look, Bill. I’m not feeling good about it.’
The pressure built on his chest. The pain was ebbing but he could feel a great weight there and thought hands pressed down on him. There was drowsiness and – just maybe – the need to sleep. The voice was American.
‘I reckon you’re right not to feel good about it. Looks to me like you could be losing him. Not my expertise, though. Put him under the earth for a couple of years, then call me. Shit, girls, if I want to make a joke, I make a joke, but don’t damn well pout at me. He’s – almost said “was” – an arms dealer. They come in busloads. They summon up excuses for what they do, sometimes even plausible ones, but society’s better off without them. I won’t be shedding tears, except … except it was gutsy to come here and look them in the face. Just didn’t work out the way he must have hoped it would. Do the form thing and swab him with the potassium permanganate – get some steriliser round it. But, my bet, you’re losing him.’
A woman’s voice rose above the others, must have been the Customs woman’s, but the need to sleep grew and the pain had drifted. So damn tired.
‘He’s sinking, isn’t he? Isn’t that what you say? But he fucked us all up, didn’t he? I’m wrecked, so’s Megs and so’s Mark Roscoe. I wish he’d never come into my life, and the sooner he’s out of it the better I’ll be pleased. How does it end and where? In this damn place that nobody wants to know about. Everything about this thing, and the people involved – me, everyone – is so bloody ordinary. God, look at the colour of him. Megs, giving up your blouse was, big-time, a wasted mercy mission. He wasn’t worth it.’
He drifted further, warm from the sun, and knew that sleep was near.
Megs spoke and her voice was clearest. ‘Is that what you all do? Wring your hands, weep to start with and then slag him? Then mutter about “sinking” and bloody “losing” and him “going”? Don’t you do anything? Or should it be “slipped” and “lost” and “gone”? Is he actually breathing now?’
Very faint, and hardly heard but identified as Roscoe: ‘I failed him. Wasn’t paid to stand in front of him but was obligated to … After all that I failed him
and
I’ve lost about half of my front teeth. Did no one see who zapped the hire bastard? Well, Gillot was a nothing man and this is a nothing place, so I suppose it’s fair to say that nothing fucking happened. No bright lights, no cameras, no bands and no grandstands. It hurts to have failed.’
He felt himself lifted, and it was the last Harvey Gillot felt.
Steyn drove and Gillot was across the back seat, his head in Roscoe’s lap.
Benjie Arbuthnot bumped off the track, drove past the cemetery gate and headed into the village. In front of the church, he braked, leaned forward and lifted the plastic bag that had been at his feet. He passed it to Megs Behan and suggested where she should leave it. She crossed the road but didn’t turn to face the men and women gathered on the café’s veranda. They gazed at her as if she’d come from a different world and was alien to them – as she was, and as Harvey Gillot had been. Her blouse had gone with Gillot, so her shoulders and chest were covered by a skimpy T-shirt. She wouldn’t have cared if she’d been naked. She hooked the handles of the bag – as Arbuthnot had said she should – over the pointed top of a post in front of the half-completed building. Still they stared at her. None waved or wished her a good journey home. Arbuthnot had said, before they were off the Cornfield Road, that the bag contained some ‘trinkets and baubles’ and some ‘legal documents’, and she imagined he had cleared out his wife’s jewellery boxes – maybe fifty thousand’s
worth or even a hundred – and also included the deeds of the house that overlooked the sea with views to die for. She climbed back into the car and seemed to hear each shout of abuse that had been thrown at him and to suffer the blow of each rock, stone or fist. She turned her back on them and asked Arbuthnot where they were heading for. She was told that a brisk drive would bring them to Osijek in time for the flight and the connection to London.
Roscoe called in from the airport – he’d found a quiet corner of the car park.