Fire Hawk (28 page)

‘Your colleague, this
guy
you're going to sort out. Why did he come to Cyprus?'

Rybkin's cheek twitched. ‘He has investments here,' he said quickly, waving a hand around to indicate that the villa was one of them. ‘They need attention from time to time – like indoor plants. That's all. Nothing else.'

‘And he paid you to come to Cyprus with him? So you could help him water his plants?'

Rybkin's face pulled into a guilty smile. ‘Well, it's kind of a free vacation for me. That's all.'

‘Always take a gun on your hols, do you?' Sam goaded.

‘When you are a KGB man for many years, you collect a lot of enemies,' Rybkin sighed.

That at least would be true, thought Sam.

‘And these days they are all allowed passports,' Rybkin added ruefully.

‘Where is he now, your
colleague
?'

‘He had to return to Ukraine yesterday. Urgent business.'

‘The business of avoiding a police inquiry into how the woman he went to bed with on Tuesday night ended up dead, yes?' He'd intended the words to come out cold, but they were tinged with bitterness.

‘As I explained to you before, my friend,' Rybkin repeated, ‘I don't know.'

‘And I don't believe you, Viktor,' Sam snapped, his
eyes like knives. ‘You knew about her lethal allergy.
You
decided how she should die. You were
there
.'

‘Look, my friend,' Rybkin retorted, ‘you may have a clever brain, but your heart is weak. How many years was it you let this woman play games with you?'

‘Fuck off.' The man was side-tracking.

‘No. Not fuck off. You have a weak heart with women and that means bad judgement all round. Believe me. And Chrissie too, she had bad judgement.'

‘What d'you mean?'

For just a moment Rybkin seemed poised to tell him something, then decided against it.

‘Bad judgement about how far it was safe to go,' he explained cryptically. ‘I warned her about him – I told you that. And she ignored my warning, that's all.' He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘And my friend, let me give
you
some advice. Because I like you, understand? I like you just as I liked Chrissie. And the advice is this. Don't try to find the man who killed her. His affairs do not concern you. Not you or your SIS. Just to ask questions about him will be dangerous for you.'

He swung his arm across his body as if drawing a line under the whole affair.

Questions. Had Chrissie died because she'd asked too many?

A hint of a breeze from the terrace set the candle flickering. In the guttering light Rybkin had the look of an evil god. He stood up and closed the doors, shooting the bolts at top and bottom.

‘You talked with Chrissie,' Sam stated.

‘Of course.'

‘What about?'

The Ukrainian eyed him with an expression that contained a hint of pity.

‘Look. On Tuesday she was drinking more than she should. I ask her why she drinks so much. She told me
she was sad because a love affair had just ended. I ask if the lover had been you and she is surprised. Because I guessed it in Kiev last year, you see. Not great detective work. You were both pretending too hard.'

‘Really,' he remarked flatly.

‘She told me she thought you still loved her. Is it true?'

‘It's irrelevant.'

‘No. Not irrelevant. Look. Here's some more advice. It's better for you that you forget her. The more questions you ask about her, the more you will hear things you don't like.'

Sam blinked. ‘What d'you mean?'

Rybkin's shoulders heaved again. ‘I mean like how one moment she tells me she is sad about breaking up with you, and then the next she throws herself at my colleague. What sort of woman is that?'

Rybkin was deliberately stirring it now, Sam realised. He decided to throw a pebble into the water.

‘Did she mention Iraq to you?'

The Ukrainian looked startled, but recovered quickly.

‘No. Why? What about Iraq?'

An impenetrable mask clicked into place, one perfected through decades of Cold War deception.

‘Never mind,' Sam answered. Rybkin's sensitivity to the question was enough.

The two men stared at each other across the flimsy table, each trying to read the other's mind. Suddenly Rybkin stood up and pulled the gun from his belt.

‘And now my friend, we are going to say goodbye,' he announced abruptly.

Sam's stomach balled. The gun was being pointed at his chest.

Rybkin laughed. ‘You think I'm going to shoot you?' He laughed again. ‘You're wrong my friend. This time I just want to be sure you don't follow me. Understand? So, wait here five minutes after I've gone, please. But if I see you
coming after me I
will
shoot, and this time I'll shoot to kill.' He started backing towards the open doorway. ‘The front door – please close it when you leave. Because of the thieves I told you about. Just pull it shut. And I repeat, don't move from here until I am long gone.'

‘What's going on?' Sam protested, his voice heavy with irony. ‘A minute ago we were friends drinking vodka and now you're running out on me again.'

‘Well, I apologise for leaving so suddenly but I have another appointment.' He paused. ‘Look, I told you I like you Sam, yes? But I think it best that we don't meet again, if that's okay by you.'

He was in the hallway now.

‘Suits me, Viktor,' Sam grunted. ‘But do one thing for me will you? Take a message from me to whoever killed Chrissie. Tell him he's going to pay, okay? Just that. That he's going to pay.'

Rybkin's shoulders sagged. ‘No Sam. I will not pass such a message. Because you are still a friend. And too many of my friends have been killed already.'

The front door clicked shut. Rybkin's feet crunched up the cinders to the Lexus. Sam leapt for the hall. When he heard the engine roar into life, he inched the door open. As the tail lights sped down the road, he sprinted after them, ducking for cover behind the construction plant. The limousine turned left towards the valley, its lights disappearing behind the bank of earth where the Toyota was parked.

‘Fuck!'

The lights hadn't emerged from the other side. He heard a dull phut phut, followed by a hiss.

‘Bastard!'

Rybkin had blown his tyres. A few seconds later the Lexus reappeared and accelerated down the hill.

Sam cursed again. He'd lost this round. But there would be another, he decided, and very soon.

He sprinted behind the mound to check the damage to his car. Both front tyres totally flat. It would take an hour to walk back to Limassol.

He returned to the villa to fortify himself with another shot of vodka and to satisfy his curiosity about the place. He downed a slug, then unstuck the candle from the wooden table. Across the hall from the main room was a smaller one – bare concrete floor and unplastered breeze-block walls. Behind that, a kitchen and a third room. All bare, all empty. He wanted to check upstairs but discovered that the staircase had yet to be installed in the house.

He returned to the main room and refixed the candle to the table. Then he unbolted the doors to the terrace and opened them, stepping onto a balcony three metres deep with a wrought-iron railing protecting its edge. Beyond it the ground sloped steeply downwards, the full moon casting silver reflections on the distant sea.

Why had Rybkin come up here this evening? Not for the view, that was for sure. To hide. Seeing Sam in the Paradiso had put the fear of God into him. And now? He'd be on his way out of Cyprus if he had any sense.

Sam stepped backwards to re-enter the house. Something crunched under his foot. He bent down and found that whatever it was had become pinned to the sole of his shoe. He felt underneath the rubber and pulled it away.

‘My God,' he croaked when he saw what it was.

He strode back inside to check it in the light of the candle. In the palm of his hand lay a gold ear stud with a pearl centre.

‘Shit.'

He remembered all those hours he'd spent choosing them.

One of a pair he'd given to Chrissie two years ago.

BY THE TIME
the taxi deposited Sam at the entrance to the silently sleeping Mondiale Hotel nearly two hours later, he'd concluded that Chrissie's last terrified moments must have been spent in the concrete ghost town he'd just come from. A perfect location for a murder – no one around to hear her screams as they forced down her throat something that was a snack to most people, but which she knew would kill her.

And Rybkin
had
been there, he felt sure of it. The man had lied to him from start to finish. He hadn't been in Cyprus to monitor the progress of transnational crime, but to play a part in it.

Sam had walked for twenty minutes along the road to Limassol before a car had stopped to give him a lift. A couple of elderly British ex-pats heading for an early check-in at the cruise terminal and a five-day jolly to Egypt had dropped him outside a cab office on their way through the almost deserted town centre.

‘Here, sir.' The cab driver gave Sam the receipt he would need to keep the SIS expenses department off his back. ‘My number's on the card. Any time.' The man drove off.

When the sound of the engine had gone, Sam still hadn't moved. From behind the hotel he could hear the
hiss of surf on shingle. He felt a light breeze blowing off the water, a mild wind from Africa. He filled his nostrils with smells of the sea and of the damp greenery of the beds lining the driveway to the hotel.

He'd phoned Mowbray from a call box in town, telling him what he'd learned about Chrissie's death. They'd agreed Rybkin was probably on his way out of the country by now, the ‘other appointment' he'd talked of being with a check-in counter at Larnaca airport. Mowbray was alerting the Cyprus police to try to get him stopped.

Sam's limbs felt leaden, his heart encased in stone. Drawn so much closer now to Chrissie's death, the reality of it was biting hard. Since leaving that villa on the hillside he'd gone over in his mind the conversation with Rybkin. The fact that it had ended the moment he'd mentioned Iraq could not have been coincidental. He believed now that his original speculation had been right, that Chrissie had died because she'd uncovered a link between the Ukrainians and the Iraqis. A link they couldn't afford to let her report. He had no proof of this, as Mowbray had yet again reminded him, and no evidence of what the deal might have been.

For the umpteenth time he took from his pocket the photo snapped in the hotel bar. Some deep gut instinct told him there was another clue in it that he hadn't yet found. Holding it towards the light coming from the hotel entrance he looked at it again, searching for this thing that he might have missed. He shook his head. Only faces. Those that could be seen and those that couldn't.

He moved inside the entrance lobby where the light was brighter to study it more closely. Three figures only at the table in the picture: Chrissie, Rybkin and the other Ukrainian. A little way behind the table, beyond the range of the flash, figures stood at the bar, none of them
more than a shadow. A couple of faces were turned towards the camera, one a man who appeared to be staring at Chrissie. Nothing unusual in that. Men had often stared at her. But if no stone was to be left unturned in trying to prove his suspicions, then these shadowy, indistinct faces should also be scrutinised more closely. A job for the forensic specialists, not for him, the photo analysts back in London, who with their computers could extract detail from the direst of murk. He would call Waddell and alert them to be ready for the picture when he got back to England later in the day.

He knew he should try to get some sleep now, but knew too he wouldn't be able to. The hotel felt claustrophobic. If he went to his room he would only brood. He needed air. He pushed back outside through the swing doors and turned left onto a winding path that ran through gardens to the back of the hotel and to a set of stone steps leading to the beach. The whispering of the surf grew stronger as he walked and he knew it was at the water's edge that he wanted to be. It was always at the bad times in his life that the soothing power of the sea drew him most strongly.

At the bottom of the steps the beach was soft sand, but as he approached the water it became stonier. The surf had pushed the shingle into a long, low ridge. He stood on it watching the sea's phosphorescent sparkle. With the sky now overcast the only light on the beach was what spilled from security lights in the hotel's garden. He took a few deep breaths to oxygenate his blood, then slid towards the gentle breakers, stones skittering beneath his feet.

He stared at the ripples as they sparkled forward, stopping just short of his feet. But instead of the sea comforting him, this time it seemed to heighten his sense of loss. He fished in his jacket pocket for the ear stud he'd found at the villa, and as he turned it over in his fingers
Chrissie's face filled his mind. He began to feel what she must have felt: excitement at uncovering, as he believed she had, the Iraqis' connection with the Ukrainians; the thin-ice thrill of danger as she used her old friendship with Viktor Rybkin to try to unmask the deal; then the cold, panicky fear as the ice gave way beneath her. And Sam knew what happened with Chrissie when a situation slipped from her control. He remembered her terror in Baghdad when they'd first met in 1990, remembered watching her disintegrate when she believed they were all about to die.

Then he thought of how she'd been in Amman, her hunger for pleasure and her need to have him wanting her still. He shook his head like a dog. Being out here in the dark with his memories was not such a good idea. He turned back towards the hotel.

Suddenly he saw that he was not alone. A solitary figure sat on the top of the shingle bank a little further along, silhouetted against the light from the hotel. Sam dropped to a crouch, fearing irrationally that it was Rybkin. But the figure sat motionless and benign; a woman, he thought, hugging her knees like a child. He began to move up the bank, his feet scrabbling against the slipping shingle.