Текст книги "Detonator"

Автор книги: Andy McNab

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

5

The next morning I flicked on the news as Stefan took a piss.

The latest report about the missing child began with film footage of the border guards in action at the Geneva airport crossing. Every car and every coach was being given a proper seeing-to, passengers and contents on the pavement, sniffer dogs, the lot.

I was glad I’d had second thoughts about going that route. Especially when I spotted the lads in black combat gear wielding Heckler & Koch MP5s in the background. The Einsatzgruppe TIGRIS were an elite paramilitary force. They operated in tandem with the canton police, but only on high-risk special ops, so covert that the federal authorities had only admitted to their existence nearly a decade after they’d been formed. Their PR claimed they hadn’t fired a shot in more than a hundred and twenty ops. They probably thought we believed in Santa too.

First the GIGN. Now TIGRIS. What the fuck were they up to?

We hit the road before first light. I wanted to be in position before too many people – dog walkers, personal trainers, hikers, sightseers, whatever – were up and about. Even the sausage stands weren’t open for business. I told Stefan we’d have breakfast later. Right now we were going to have to make do with an energy bar or two and one of my remaining bottles of water.

‘Hard routine, Nick?’

‘Yup, hard routine.’ I aimed for the chateau, but this time followed the route alongside the water. ‘How do you know about hard routine?’ I didn’t want to prolong the conversation, but I had to ask.

‘It’s what soldiers do, isn’t it? When they’re on ops, and don’t want to light a fire or do cooking and stuff. In case they give themselves away. I read about it.’

‘In Dostoevsky?’

‘No!’ He was wearing his serious face. ‘I don’t only read Dostoevsky, you know. I read all sorts. My dad said I must. He said knowledge is power. He said that I have to know my enemy.’

‘I told you he was smart.’ I figured Frank had been quoting from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, not the Manic Street Preachers album or the song by Green Day. Either way, it was good advice. It was why I planned to spend however long it took scoping Lyubova’s place instead of steaming straight in there.

He spent the next five Ks listening to Pitbull and grappling with the disciplines of hard routine. I left him to it. Then he turned the volume down on the CD player and sparked up again.

‘You have to go to the toilet in a plastic bag, don’t you, Nick? When you’re on hard routine?’

‘Yup. Wherever you lie up has to be left sterile.’

‘Does that mean no toilet paper?’

‘It means no anything. No trace of you ever being there.’

‘Wow …’ He whistled softly. ‘That’s great …’

This wasn’t helping me get in the zone. I didn’t shut him up, though; at least it was keeping his mind off the wicked stepmother.

‘Nick?’

‘Yup?’

‘I think maybe I’d like to be a soldier …’

‘Not a footballer?’

‘I’m not joking, Nick.’

Fair one. I hadn’t meant to sound like I was talking down to him. When I was a kid, I’d hated it when people did that to me. It had made me want to hit them. And sometimes I did.

‘Mate, you’d make a brilliant soldier. A brilliant officer, probably. There’s a whole world out there for people like you. You’re clever. You’re already more educated than I’ll ever be. You’re rich. You can be anything you want. But right now there’s a job to be done. We’re closing on our target now. And I need to focus on it.’

I saw him nod at the periphery of my vision. Then he started murmuring the hard-routine mantra to himself. ‘No fires, no toilet paper. And no talking …’

I hung a left a hundred short of where I thought the avenue of lindens began and scanned the area ahead of us for a secure place to leave the wagon. The houses along there were few and far between, and had no shortage of land around them. I turned into a designated parking area at the edge of the patch of woodland, which seemed to cater mostly for walkers and anyone who didn’t want to pay the outrageous charges for a space by the lake.

There were only three other vehicles there so I pulled up between two of them, got out and had a good look around. When I was sure there was no one else around, I tucked Stefan into the boot with my day sack and gave him the torch. We were close enough to the wicked stepmother for him to be safer out of sight. And I was planning to stay in cover while I did a more detailed recce of her HQ.

We didn’t bother with the Dostoevsky jokes. I fished out my binoculars, closed the hatch and headed into the trees.

The sky was blindingly blue. There was still a chill in the air, but it would be stiflingly hot later.

The whole area, as far as I could see, was deserted, apart from one dog walker to my half-right. And it didn’t look like a real dog: it was one of those small, smooth-haired things that yapped a lot and belonged on the end of a cocktail stick. By the time I reached the edge of the avenue, he and his owner had found their way back to the parking area.

Staying inside the treeline, I walked up the slope towards the chateau until I found a linden whose lower branches were within reach of the ground and whose higher ones promised a combination of good cover and a wide enough field of vision.

I swung myself up into the foliage. My eyes started to leak almost immediately, and I had to stifle a sneeze. It was definitely a linden. The spores from those things could give you hay fever even if you didn’t suffer from it. Its bark was smooth, but sticky with sap. As the temperature increased, that would only get worse.

I gripped my nose between my thumb and forefinger and managed to strangle another sneeze at birth. I kept the trunk between me and the target until I was about fifteen metres from the ground. Then I worked my way round and climbed high enough to see over the wall and into the chateau grounds.

I raised the binos and scanned as much of the front of the building and its surroundings as I could through the leaves. We weren’t talking Buckingham Palace here, but all told, it wasn’t much smaller than the south London council block I’d grown up in.

The main part of the house had four storeys. The shutters on the upstairs windows were all open but the curtains behind them were mostly closed. As the Google Earth imagery had shown me, it was flanked on each side by a two-storey wing. The one on the right was encased in a scaffolding frame, covered with blue tarpaulin. A yellow plastic telescopic chute ran from the top floor to a skip on the ground.

The Dobermanns were still mooching around outside, hoping for somebody to sink their teeth into. The two beasts that had bounced against the railings last night had been joined by a couple of mates, and they were a mean-looking gang. I couldn’t see any sign of a handler.

As seven thirty approached, a guy in black combats and polo shirt appeared from the back of the house with a pile of metal bowls and a bucket. I had a really close look at his face, but it didn’t trigger a memory.

The guard dogs bounded towards him and I soon saw why. He put the bowls on the ground and filled them with enough raw meat to feed a battalion. Maybe it was to stop them eating the tradesmen who appeared at the entrance during the next half-hour.

Lyubova was clearly in makeover mode. Plumbers, decorators, electricians, roofers and chippies in shiny white vans with corporate logos were waved through the electronically operated gates by another couple of uniforms.

The security people had a good poke around inside the first vehicle to come out, so it looked like they were more concerned about the contractors helping themselves to Lyubova’s jewellery collection than someone or something being smuggled inside.

I swept the binos from window to window as a squad of identical blonde women in cream shirts drew back the curtains and raised the sashes to let in the morning air. It was like Downton Abbey on fast-forward. Lyubova hadn’t made an appearance yet, but I didn’t expect her to be doing much of her own housework.

Men in white overalls, hi-vis waistcoats and hard hats swarmed around the scaffolding, either looking busy but doing fuck-all or waffling into their mobile phones. I couldn’t be sure at this distance, but I’d bet they had a smile on their faces. They’d know an earner when they saw one.

I was about to clamber back down and go in search of a vantage-point at the rear when the phones suddenly disappeared in unison. It was like watching a well-rehearsed troop respond to a barked instruction on a parade ground. When I lowered the binos, I saw why.

A very smartly dressed woman – cream blouse, leopard-print pencil skirt – had just emerged from the front door. She flicked her shiny black hair over her shoulder and made her way across to inspect their work. Lyubova had broken cover. It was obviously still too early for her to be flashing the diamonds and rubies, but no one was in any doubt about who was calling the shots.

She waved her arms around and gave them shit until they started doing whatever they should be doing at warp speed. Then she turned on her no doubt very expensive designer heel and went back inside.

I stayed where I was, half hoping she’d decide to take a trip into town. She wasn’t about to wander into the local Spar, even if there was one, and I doubted that she’d wander about on her own, but I reckoned it might be easier to lift her outside the estate rather than in it.

I gave half a thought to the kid in the boot of my wagon, then dismissed it. The breeze off the water was still cool enough to give me goosebumps so he wouldn’t be baking yet. Besides, hard routine was hard routine. He knew that. And I wasn’t his nanny.

An hour later a couple more visitors arrived.

The first wagon through the gates was an Audi Q5. The second was a Maserati. They’d obviously travelled in convoy. I didn’t need to check their registration numbers against the ones I had in my Moleskine. Hesco and Dijani were paying the ex-Mrs Timis a visit. And, judging by their extremely cheery greeting, they hadn’t come simply to offer a grieving widow their condolences.

Mr Lover Man’s message had just become very clear indeed.

After she’d ushered them inside, I focused the binos on the white vans. This time, I did bring out the Moleskine and the UZI, and scrawled the name, contact details and website address of every contractor within reach.

More minutes ticked by. When Hesco and Dijani showed no sign of leaving, I climbed down and went back to the wagon. Whatever they were discussing over coffee and biscuits, I was now absolutely certain that there was a whole lot more to Frank’s death than revenge for his infidelity.

6

For the first time since we’d started doing this shit, Stefan didn’t seem too happy about his morning in the boot of the wagon. I rewarded him with an extra-large takeaway sausage, a roll and a bottle of Coke, but it didn’t seem to make much difference to his mood.

We sat in the parking area alongside a greasy spoon on the main back to St Gallen while I got a big frothy coffee down my neck and he ate. When one mouthful started to feel like it was going to last for ever, I gripped him. ‘OK, what’s the problem?’

He concentrated very hard on the next bit of sausage. ‘You’re hoping to leave me with her, aren’t you?’

Fuck. I’d been focusing so much on keeping him in the dark that I’d let his imagination run wild. ‘Mate, I told you I won’t lie to you.’ I put down my coffee and gently lifted his chin. It wasn’t easy, but I finally got him to look me in the eye. ‘There was a moment when I thought a nice Swiss chateau might be what you needed. But after you told me what you told me, and now I know more about the woman, I’d rather sell you to the circus.’

What happened next was an amazing thing to watch. It was like I’d lifted the world’s heaviest Bergen off his shoulders and he’d become two feet taller. He gave me a mega candle-power smile and demolished the rest of the wurst in no time.

We didn’t hang around long after that. I was about to go into the decorating business, and time was money in that game.

The second cyber café on my list wasn’t that far from the first, but it always paid to ring the changes. Stefan cheered up a bit more when I steered him into an artists’ store a few doors down and said I needed his help on a new mission. When he asked me what sort of help, I told him to wait and see.

He wrinkled his brow when I bought a plain A4 pad, two soft pencils and a rubber. Then his eyes lit up as we stopped by a display case of folding Laguiole knives with bone handles and good-sized blades. The assistant spotted us and went into overdrive. Yes, they were expensive, but the quality … Every man should have one … You never knew when they would come in useful … You could take them on picnics … You could sharpen pencils with them … How could I resist?

I couldn’t. But not for the reasons he had in mind.

He beamed as I looped the leather sheath for mine on to my belt, and Stefan put his in his pocket.

The café was a bit more like a café this time around, so I ordered a coffee and a milkshake as well as Internet time. Me and Stefan pulled up our chairs in front of the monitor furthest from the till and I kicked off by googling the contractors’ names I’d taken down at my linden lookout point.

Only two of the outfits weren’t owned by Adler, and boasted about their independence. One of them went on for ever but seemed to be mostly about konstruktion. I chose the other. They called themselves Hochfliegend, and had the simplest logo – three thought bubbles: small, medium and large – and the simplest lettering.

‘Mate, what does that mean?’

‘Hochfliegend? Great Ideas.’

That explained the logo. I hoped what I’d planned turned out to be one of mine.

I pointed at the decal on the side panel of one of their Peugeot vans and handed Stefan the A4 pad and pencils. ‘Draw that, will you, mate? The company name, the address, everything except the contact numbers.’ I didn’t need some nosy fucker ringing Head Office to complain about my driving.

He looked at me as if I’d had another blow to the head. ‘This is our mission?’

‘Trust me. It’s important. I can’t draw for shit, and I remember you being pretty good with crayons and a paintbrush. I need the thought bubbles and the lettering to be as accurate as possible.’

He shrugged and got on with it. Out came the tip of his tongue and he wedged it between his teeth. I remembered him doing that when he was younger, and Frank had sat him down in front of yet another mountain of homework.

He went wrong once or twice and had to get busy with the rubber, but came up with the goods in twenty minutes flat. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a fucking sight better than I was ever going to be able to manage.

I picked up the sheet of paper and smiled. ‘Brilliant, mate. I should put you on hard routine more often.’ I folded it carefully, twice, and put it in my pocket. Then I motioned him towards a sofa on the other side of the room and told him to catch up on his Dostoevsky.

Next up was the search for a second-hand auto dealer. I couldn’t just head for the Hochfliegend depot and borrow one of their vans. The word would go out at warp speed, and I’d be fucked as soon as I arrived at Lyubova’s front gate, if not before.

I toyed with the idea of cruising around until I found a Peugeot Expert, then nicking it. But I needed to be in control of this. I didn’t want to put the shits up Stefan any more than I already had done. I didn’t want to get caught doing it. Or to feature on the canton police computer when I had done. Or to go to all that trouble and then discover it didn’t have a plywood-lined load space.

And I didn’t have all the time in the world.

Most of the traders on the site looked like they welcomed more formal business arrangements than I had in mind. I needed the sort you could find underneath the railway arches in south London, run by lads who felt the same way about cash business as I did. I selected three possible contenders and wrote down their details. If they weren’t right, maybe they had a mate who was.

Finally I scanned the news.

The abductor still couldn’t be named, but they were looking for an Englishman who was rumoured to be connected to the murder victim, and had been seen in the proximity of the abandoned Range Rover. One theory was that a paedophile ring was involved.

My brain had been scrambled big-time up there, and I wasn’t getting everything right, but I didn’t think I’d been spotted – except by Claude the carrot-cruncher, and there was no way he’d ID me as a Brit. So someone on Hesco’s side of the fence had to be feeding the investigation to make my life more difficult and theirs easier.

Mr Lover Man must have been their original source from inside Frank’s camp. We’d spent quite a bit of time together, on and off, both in Moscow and Africa, so he knew I was a Brit. I wasn’t sure if he had ever been given my real name. I fucking hoped not. Not just because it would put us deeper in the shit right now, but because I liked it that way.

The paedophile thing was always a good line to throw to the media. They knew it grabbed the public’s attention like nothing else, and they wanted whoever had taken the kid to have nowhere to hide. But it still didn’t explain who was calling the shots here, and why TIGRIS and the GIGN were out in force.

7

I visited a bunch of holes in the wall over the course of the next half-hour. My magic black debit card did the business, now I remembered what it was for, and my fingertips knew the PIN without having to consult my head. The thing had no limit, but the individual machines did.

Next I checked out the used-car-dealer options. The second of the three was ten Ks from the centre of town, with a couple of rusting diesel pumps under a sheet-metal canopy that had also seen better days.

A row of previously enjoyed but freshly polished wagons stood to one side off the forecourt. The one I needed was a three-year-old Peugeot Expert refrigerator panel van with a fair amount of mileage on the clock, a current Autobahn vignette and a handwritten sign taped on to the windscreen asking for SFr 7,999.

The side door was open so a potential purchaser could share the salesman’s excitement about the business end of the vehicle. And I did. The interior had been fitted out with a plywood floor and walls. The insulation made these things the bike thief’s wagon of choice. You could lift a top-of-the-range Ducati off the street and nobody would hear the alarm going off as you drove it away. Even from the road, it looked perfect for what I had in mind.

I cruised on past, keeping an eye out for somewhere to park. Somewhere close enough to walk back from, but far enough away to avoid linking the Polo, Stefan and the van.

‘Can I come too?’

‘No, mate. Best to keep you out of sight right now.’

‘Not in the boot, Nick. Please. I hate it in the boot …’

I’d never heard him complain about anything before. I thought I might have to start gripping him again.

‘I try my hardest to think about hard routine, but I can’t help thinking about being trapped under my dad instead.’

The gripping idea went out the window.

I found a space outside a newsagent and gave Stefan two ten-franc notes in case he wanted to buy himself a fizzy drink and a sherbet fountain while I headed back to the used-car lot.

A blond lad who’d stood even further away from a razor than I had over the last few days emerged from the workshop, wiping the grease off his palms on the sides of his faded blue boiler suit. He had a wicked smile and spoke even better English than Stefan did. I knew within seconds that we could do business together.

I got him to fire up the Expert and drive me around the block. He told me the cooling mechanism needed some attention, which was why the price was rock bottom.

‘What kind of attention?’

He grinned sheepishly as he threw it around the first corner.

‘It’s totally fucked.’

I told him I’d sort it.

I was no vehicle geek, but the engine did what it was supposed to when you turned the key, and the gearbox didn’t seem to be about to fall apart all over the tarmac. When we made it back to the pumps he slid open the side door and invited me to take a closer look at the load space.

It was even more impressive close up. The ply on the floor was at least forty mil thick, and thirty on the walls. The previous owner had added shelves and a lockable tool chest on the passenger side, and also lined the partition, leaving a small window into the cab. I wondered whether he had lived in it.

Blondie liked the idea of SFr 7,750 cash and, yes, he did know someone who could fix me up with something very nice on the panels at short notice. ‘If you have some more of these …’ He eyed the roll of notes I’d just handed to him.

He tore a page out of a spiral-bound notepad and wrote down a name and address. ‘Klaus has a very big talent. An artist, really. But not mainstream, maybe. He is like your Banksy. An anarchist.’

Perfect. Klaus sounded like he was going to be even less likely to call in the law than this lad.

We shook on the deal and both scribbled something unreadable on the registration document, which I reckoned would go straight into the bin as soon as I’d left. He wouldn’t want to waste any of his valuable time with the tax people, and he knew I wouldn’t either.

Almost as an afterthought, I asked if he had any degreaser or solvent he could spare. I wasn’t going to use it for cleaning, but he didn’t need to know that. He took me into a mechanic’s Aladdin’s cave at the back of the workshop and gestured at a shelf lined with plastic containers of all shapes and sizes. I examined the labels and chose the 200ml bottle with the highest diethyl ether content. It cost me another fifty.

Klaus was only about a K away, in a wriggly-tin lock-up with huge skylights on the other side of the railway tracks. He wore a T-shirt that told me to feed the world over jeans that hung off his arse and were distressed in more ways than one. The whole fuck-you look was topped off nicely by moth-eaten dreadlocks and beard, and an anarchist’s attitude to physical hygiene.

He rested a roach the size of a prize-winning carrot on the edge of an ashtray that looked like a coiled dog turd. This lad was definitely not going to be in a hurry to call in the law. He slid off his stool to greet me. The air in his lock-up was sweet with cannabis fumes, but it didn’t hide the fact that he badly needed a shower.

The samples of his work on display told me that he was up for almost anything from anti-capitalist graffiti slogans and X-rated cartoons to apparently uncontroversial corporate stuff. I showed him Stefan’s drawing and asked if he could scale it up in blue for the side panels.

‘Hochfliegend … I like zis.’

Klaus liked the idea of cash too. For him it was clearly a political statement. So I offered him a bonus if I could pick up the van in an hour.

He pursed his lips, raised his arms and shrugged.

I tried to lure him back to the real world. ‘How long will it take?’

His eyebrows disappeared into his moth-eaten hair. ‘Zis is not rocket science.’ He poked a nicotine-stained finger at a battered laptop and a machine covered with multi-coloured Post-it notes in the corner. He was right. It looked like a Dalek with a letterbox in its chest.

‘I will design on screen, zen print on self-adhesive vinyl. You can come back in one hour for ze decals. You can apply zem yourself. Piece of piss.’

He reached for a bruised student portfolio and fished out a handful of graphic illustrations of a dominatrix not quite dressed in PVC. ‘Maybe you like vun viz a naked girl instead of sree sink bubbles? Very good for business …’

I massaged my chin with my hand for a moment. ‘Tempting … But no. It’s not really that kind of business.’

‘If you say so, my friend. Zo I never came across a business zat didn’t involve somebody getting focked.’

‘You’re not wrong.’ I tapped the dial of my Suunto. ‘And right now you’ve got fifty-four minutes before you have to add your name to that list.’

He gave me a snort of derision and reached for his keyboard.

I left him to it and walked back to Stefan.

The boy had his nose in a Spider-Man comic. He’d stocked up on fizzy apple juice and Kinder Eggs too. The foot well on his side of the wagon was filled with empty wrappers. He was really cutting loose from the curly kale. I leant in through the window. ‘You know that stuff has no nutritional value …’

He looked up. ‘Want one?’ He held out his hand. The wrapper was still in place, but it wasn’t egg-shaped any more.

‘Last one?’

He nodded.

‘Nah. You have it.’ I got in behind the wheel. ‘But you’d better get it down your neck before you have to drink it. We’re going to the beach. You like to swim, remember?’

I knew he thought I’d totally lost it now. And maybe I had. But I’d decided he was right: he couldn’t spend the rest of his life stuck in the boot of one wagon after another. It had taken a lot of courage to tell me he was having nightmares about Frank in there, and I didn’t want him freaking out. Besides, today had turned into a scorcher. I didn’t want him hallucinating or dying of heat exposure.

I followed the signs to Kreuzlingen until I came to a stretch of grass covered with parasols and half-naked bodies. A crescent of trees shielded it from the road on one side, and the lake on the other. An overpriced parking area and a cab rank sat close by.

The primary-school day had obviously come to an end, because the place was crawling with kids Stefan’s age, their mums or nannies, and even some dads. Not many of them were reading Dostoevsky.

I fed the meter, then handed him his rucksack, fifty francs and the keys to the Polo. After a moment I added another fifty. ‘This isn’t all for Kinder Eggs, mate. It’s for a taxi into town, to the ERV, if I’m not back before last light.’ I told him to ask the driver to take him to the cathedral. It was the safest place I could think of. And if I still wasn’t with him by ten tonight, he should go and ask a priest for help – because that would mean I needed one too.

He tried to keep his happy face on, but I could see he was rattled.

‘Nick …’ He did that chewing thing with his lower lip. ‘What are you going to do?’

That was a fuck of a good question, and I had no idea how to answer it. Stefan might have had the IQ of a university professor and the armour plating of a born survivor, but he was still a kid. I couldn’t tell him I thought his stepmother had had something to do with the murder of his dad, and had probably aimed to kill him too. I couldn’t tell him that I was going to persuade her to tell me why.

And I also couldn’t claim that I was about to wave a magic wand over the whole situation so we could all live happily ever after.

I gripped his shoulder. ‘Listen, it’s a nice sunny day. Enjoy it. Just don’t talk to any bad guys. And remember, I’m only telling you this stuff because it pays to have a plan. You know that. ERV, remember?’

I walked him across the grass and fixed him up with a couple of deckchairs and a parasol near a friendly-looking woman in a sundress, who’d just treated her twin girls to the Swiss version of a Mr Whippy. I went and got one for Stefan while he laid out his towel. It was already melting when I handed it to him.

He seemed to cheer up as he took his first lick.

‘Mate …’

He nodded, dribbling ice cream down his chin.

‘You know that has—’

‘Yup. Absolutely no nutritional value.’ His eyes narrowed in the sunlight. ‘But who gives a fuck?’

I looked for a hint of a grin on his face and couldn’t find one.

I left him surrounded by very healthy-looking families. As long as you didn’t spot the haunted look in his eyes, he blended in nicely. Maybe it would remind him of the things he didn’t have, but there was fuck-all I could do about that.

And he wouldn’t be the only kid in the world to feel like he was on the outside, looking in.

I’d been there too.