Death in the Kingdom (25 page)

‘Bad?' Don Don had reappeared in the doorway.

‘Sami, my friend. His place was hit. A lot of dead!' I said scrubbing my fingers over my stubble. I felt like shit in every sense of the term.

‘I didn't think,' said Don Don, vanishing back into the outer office. He returned with a newspaper and held it out with both hands. There it was on the front page. W
AREHOUSE
F
IRE IN
B
ANGLAMPHU KILLS TWELVE
screamed the headline. There was a photograph of a gutted blackened building.

‘Oh Christ!' I muttered. Seeing pictures always drove the point home, and now I had to face another fact. A man I had killed, or thought I had killed years ago, was alive and hunting me. I took the paper from Don Don and laid it on the desk. There was a photograph of a gutted, blackened building. Firemen were carrying out a body bag. For a second the image of beautiful Mary astride the Suzuki came to me. She would have gone back to Sami's after dropping me off and ridden straight into the ambush. She and a whole bunch of innocents had died because of me and that damned box.

‘Bernard,' I spat. That was why the fake CIA men had vanished from outside the embassy minutes after I had spoken to him. He thought he'd convinced me to do the run at night. He'd passed the information on to Chekhov and Chekhov had pulled his troops off the embassy and moved on Sami's in the afternoon.

‘More bad news,' Don Don said softly. ‘Kit just phoned. The Patong police went to the address you gave them. They found two bodies, a woman and the remains of your friend, Geezer.' Don Don suddenly looked like a man of fifty on a bad, bad day. I think he was one breath away from changing his career path. I probably would have too if I'd been in his position. I, however, didn't have a choice in what I did. Not at that moment in time anyway.

‘The woman had been subjected to some terrible abuse.' The embassy security man paused. ‘After she was tortured she'd had her head cut off and then some sick bastard sat it in your friend's crotch. He'd been tied to a chair and probably, according to Kit's people, made to watch what they did to her before he got it.'

Poor bloody Geezer. His death had nothing to do with the fucking box. It was purely personal. It was all about me—me and Dimitri Chekhov. I reached for the phone. I needed to speak to the sheriff. The conversation with Karl was short. When I hung up I told Don Don what I needed and he headed out the door.

It was 15:00. I had time to get ready for what would come next and time to think about Bernard and what I was going to do to him when we finally met face to face. Was I surprised that Sir Bernard Sinclair might be a traitor? No! I hadn't had time to analyse it all, but it made sense. Bernard was the ringmaster in all of it. He'd created the dance routine and I was just a fucking dancer. Coincidence only went so far and the clincher, as far as I was concerned, was the old queen's insistence that I keep that damn mobile phone powered up. With that he had been more than obsessive.

I glanced at the mobile sitting on the side table by a wall socket. The green light told me it was fully charged. If it had a tracer in it that was only active when it was powered, that would explain a lot. It would explain how he'd been able to pinpoint Geezer's place. Geezer had been my friend, not a player, and not known to Bernard. As for Sami's, that was obvious—I'd used the phone there. Down south I'd run out of battery and they had lost me. ‘Dumb shit!' I reprimanded myself. But on reflection I wasn't really to blame for not suspecting the mobile. Hey, I knew Bernard was as queer as a two-bob watch but I hadn't known he was a traitor, and I hadn't known I was being targeted and trailed by anyone until I had boarded the train down at Lang Suan what now seemed like years ago. As for Chekhov, the mad Russian was a whole different story.

Dimitri Chekhov had been an ex-KGB colonel. After the break-up of the Soviet Union he had turned his attention to getting rich. The euphemistically named Russian Mafia were, for the most part, former military and they were absolute cut-throats. The original Sicilian mafioso couldn't hold a candle to this new breed when it came to pure viciousness. My lot had been alerted to the Russian mob's presence in our area of operation in about 1996. Operating out of northern Cambodia, Chekhov had become a huge pain in the collective arse of our American allies and us. As a result, he'd been sanctioned and I had been given the task of taking him out on the orders of Sir Bernard Sinclair.

My team and I set up an ambush outside Chekhov's fortified compound in the bush, up by the border just beyond Anlong Veng. Chekhov made regular visits to the town and we simply waited for him to emerge. As his Range Rover started to ford the stream that ran past the compound, I made multiple 300-yard hits with a .50 calibre Barrett, using a mixture of explosives and armour-piercing rounds. The Rover bogged in the stream and turned into a flaming colander. We didn't see anyone escape. We hadn't been in a position to go and investigate up close but we'd chalked up a positive and, to my knowledge, Chekhov hadn't appeared on any intelligence since that day. But he had!

I should have made the connection, but how do you make a connection to a dead man? It was the heads, the damned heads. That was what had been bugging my subconscious. That had been Chekhov's party trick. He had been known as a head-hunter. Legend had it that when he had been seconded to the Spetsnaz and stationed in Afghanistan, on a wall in his unit's camp he had lined up the severed heads of the more than a dozen rebels he had personally killed. Headless bodies had a habit of turning up wherever the maniac was stationed, from Asia to Europe.

I remembered the torso of Ivan Scranner, an undercover operative working in East Berlin. Just prior to the Wall coming down he'd come across the border for a meet. I'd been detailed to provide him with close cover. Point was, when I went to his hotel to do just that he was already dead. I'd found Scranner's naked and tortured remains in the ornate bath of his suite. His head wasn't there. As far as I knew it had never been found. We thought Chekhov had probably taken it back east with him. We knew it was Chekhov because the hotel's security cameras showed him enter and leave Scranner's room. He entered carrying what looked like a bowling bag and left an hour and a half later with the same bag appearing a good deal heavier going out than when he'd taken it in. As he'd walked towards the camera turret in the foyer by the lift, he had looked up at the camera and saluted. He'd had a broad smile on his wide face the whole time.

I'd never forgotten that smile. It was the broad beam of a jovial grandfather. Picture a bulky bear of a man, a sort of grey-suited Santa with a broad-brimmed hat and a thick, yellow walrus moustache. That was the Dimitri Chekhov I saw on the security video. Thing was, the eyes hadn't been smiling. They had been as cold as fucking ice. They had taunted the camera. He had made no attempt to disguise himself, such was the arrogance of the man.

The next and only other time I laid eyes on him was years later. I was staring through the cross hairs of the twenty-power sniper scope on the Barrett as he sat in the passenger seat of his Range Rover. I'd lost sight of him as I had started pounding the vehicle to bits. Bye bye, Dimitri, I'd thought at the time. Not so, it seemed.

The only way, all these years later, that Chekhov would have know who had pulled the trigger that day was if someone had told him. At the kill zone there had been Sami, Sami's number-one man, Jo, and yours truly. The only other people in the know were Bernard, who had ordered the hit after consulting with CIA brass, and the late Neville Trevaine, my Bangkok controller. My money was on Bernard. But why had Chekhov waited so long to come after me? Unless, of course, Bernard had decided to withhold that little gem until the black box had been discovered. Box or not, I suspected that revenge on me, the triggerman, would be more of a motivator for Chekhov than anything else.

‘The chemical team are packing to go. The good doctor was asking where you were. She's outside.' Don Don broke through my meditation. He laid the articles I'd requested on the back of one of the office's guest chairs.

‘Thanks for those,' I replied as I stood. I unplugged my mobile phone and ensured the power was off before slipping it into my pocket. This was going to be the key to undoing Sir Bernard. I wasn't sure how yet, but I was going to find a way to use it to turn the tables on the traitorous old prick.

25

Ex-wives and ex-husbands occupy a strange space somewhere between familiarity and distance, attraction and revulsion. Memories of love, smells, taste and touch are things that are never forgotten. Everything is poured into a big blender along with equal parts of anger, hurt and the numbing pain of failure. Then the switch is flicked on to stir it all up. It's a heady mix and it's damned hard to take on an empty stomach.

Sylvia knew that something had changed. Her antennae had always been sharply tuned. Maybe if it hadn't been we might have made it. Who knows? There was no banter this time. She had come to say goodbye. They were flying out that evening. It was 16:20. I'd be at Sami's at 18:00 and Sylvia would be flying out of my life again shortly after that.

‘I was going to suggest a late, late lunch or dinner,' she said when I joined her. ‘Now I don't think it would be a box of laughs, even if they let us out of here.' Much as I wanted to, I knew she was absolutely right. As before she could still read me like a bloody book.

‘Got a really bad thing going down,' I said, attempting a wry grin. ‘I'd really like that, but let's take a rain check on dinner until I'm back in the UK.'

‘Maybe,' she said, standing and coming around the desk. She leaned down and pecked me on the forehead. ‘Maybe not. My boyfriend is the jealous type.'

Boyfriend! I hadn't known. But then, what was there to know? We'd been divorced for five years and only seen each other three or four times during that period. We didn't do birthday cards, Christmas cards or have weekly chat sessions like some exs.

‘Lucky guy,' I said.

Sylvia's eyes searched my face, then she smiled. ‘I do believe you mean that.'

‘I do. Given the chance to do things over, we wouldn't be where we are,' I said, suddenly feeling like a cliché. ‘Truth!'

‘Well, well. Regrets, huh?'

‘Oh yes—about us, about a lot of things actually,' I replied as the images of Babs and Geezer sprung to mind. ‘Oh yes!' I needed coffee and I needed food but going outside the embassy compound with Sylvia was totally out of the question. ‘Cafeteria,' I said, taking her arm and steering her in that direction.

‘Been there, done that,' she replied dryly. ‘So upmarket, darling.'

‘Yeah,' I agreed as we descended the stairs arm in arm. It reminded me of the day we posed for our wedding photos. I stopped that line of thought immediately. ‘Have you tried their scones?' I added as we entered the cafeteria.

‘Not likely,' my ex replied as I eased her in front of me at the servery. We quit the banter while we got our coffees and a brace of sandwiches. The place was just about deserted but I led her to an alcove table. We seated ourselves, organised our refreshments and I got straight down to brass tacks. Time was the one thing we didn't have.

‘Syl, I need to know the history of the damned strain of anthrax. Why it is so bloody unique? Apart from its size and all that stuff. But even more importantly I need to know how it got here and from where.'

Sylvia spooned two big shovels of sugar into her coffee and started stirring. She stirred slowly, her face thoughtful and young. She looked like a teenager, not a thirty-six-year-old doctor of microbiology. After some time she stopped playing with her spoon and her eyes met mine. ‘This is top secret, Dan. I've just had another briefing and it's cut-your-heart-out time if this goes any further.' She paused, her eyes searching mine like beautiful, twin blue–grey lasers. She took a sip of her coffee and grimaced. I tried my brew to keep her company. It wasn't great but it was the only game in town, as the Yanks say, and I needed caffeine.

‘Basically,' Sylvia continued, ‘this version resembles the normal base bacillus anthracis strain about as much as a biplane resembles a damned stealth bomber. Somehow those researchers fifty plus years ago managed to create something totally and scarily unique. Something no one else, to our knowledge, has even got close to. All of us researchers know about it. It's our very own industry legend, if you like. We all know the details of the brew but not how to make it, and that's why everyone wants it. It's potentially the damned neutron bomb of bacterial warfare.' As she was speaking Sylvia was taking the wrap off her sandwich. I glanced down at mine. I had to eat even if I didn't want to.

‘Why not just make up a fresh batch to the original recipe?' I suggested as my ex took a tentative nibble on her tomato and cheese creation and hesitated before repeating the process.

‘That's the point and here's your history lesson,' Sylvia mumbled around a mouthful of food. ‘The original formula and the remaining samples of that particular strain, along with the team who created it, were destroyed when the laboratory burned down. A US tanker plane loaded with fuel crash-landed on takeoff. Direct hit on the lab at Orford. Killed just about everyone. Couldn't have done better if they'd planned it,' she added, picking up her coffee cup.

‘Anyway, the brew was so top secret and had evolved so quickly that nothing was replicated elsewhere. Not only that, there was a lot of politics involved apparently. Very few people even knew of its existence.' Sylvia swallowed another mouthful of coffee and shuddered.

‘As Murphy would have it, along with the flames from several tons of aviation gas, guess what?' Sylvia pushed the remains of her sandwich to one side.

‘What?'

‘It rained for a week. The rain helped to eventually put the fire out, and it killed whatever remained of the strain. That, of course, is how we knew how to neutralise it. The only material to survive was that which you miraculously produced in your little lead box. I honestly don't know where you got it, Danny, but there it was, just waiting for oxygen to bring it back to life.' Sylvia paused and again contemplated her coffee for a moment before pushing the cup towards the plate containing her discarded sandwich. Then those laser eyes met mine again. ‘So where did you get it, Dan?'