Keys to the Kingdom (7 page)

CHAPTER 10

Riyadh

Abbas bin Naseem looked out the window of the Jordan Air Boeing 737 as it banked sharply and lined up on its final approach to Riyadh Airport. Away to his right he saw the skyscrapers of Riyadh dominating the skyline. It looked so unlike his own poor country that had suffered for all their Arab brothers through more than fifty years of war with the hated Israelis. The spirit of his people was almost broken and they had been scattered by the Israelis to the four winds. Two seats behind him sat Nasrullah. They had left Karachi two days previously and were now about to arrive at their destination. Naseem felt his nerves tingle. He was approaching his destiny. The training in the Swat would soon come to fruition. He had learned the techniques of bomb making and detonation. From his earliest days in the camp, he had worn the shroud of the martyr. He had entered his coffin gratefully and had spent two days buried in the wooden box in the earth. He had never flinched from his path no matter what he had had to endure. Nasrullah had lectured him and his colleagues on the role of the Saudis in the subjugation of his country. The fabulous oil wealth should belong to all the Arabs and could have transformed his country. Instead it had been used to buy Western whores and to enrich the casino owners of Europe. He wanted desperately to avenge himself on those who had betrayed his brothers. The Saudis were the tools of the Americans who in turn were controlled by the Zionists. Naseem had initially been reticent to launch a strike against his Arab brothers. He would have preferred to die in the midst of the enemy. But Nasrullah had convinced him that destroying the House of Saud would be of greater benefit to his people. His body shuddered as the aircraft hit the runway. Spontaneous applause broke out as the aircraft steadied and the brakes were applied. Naseem bent in prayer and thanked Allah that he had been brought safely to the place of his destiny.  

Antwerp

In the old days when you were looking for Semtex, you went to the man who had the largest store of the Czech explosive in the world and who had no compunction in handing it out to any terrorist who asked. But Muammar Gaddafi had met his end in a sewer pipe in Sirte and God only knew what had happened to all the beautiful Semtex he had stored. Consequently, the Libyan Revolution had closed off the first place that Gallagher would have gone in his search for his favourite explosive and he was obliged to go to his second choice. He stood in a doorway across the road from the entrance of the Rode Lieuw on the Falconplein in the Belgian port city of Antwerp.  It had been many years since Gallagher had been in Antwerp and the Docks section of town hadn’t improved over time. He could smell the fetid waters of the Schelde a mere two hundred yards away. He heard that the Falcon Plein had been taken over by the Russian Mafia but he knew the man he was looking for was still in operation. Antwerp typified the schizophrenia of Belgium. To its Flemish residents it was Antwerpen the capital of Flanders while to the Walloon population of Belgium it was Anvers. It was previously one of the principal ports of Europe and remained one of the centres of the European diamond trade. But there was nothing the Belgians liked more than making money, so Antwerp had its darker side. The big money spinners were drugs and armaments and both were to be found easily if you had the right connections. Gallagher’s connections went way back and he had checked that they were still in operation before he had put his foot on mainland Europe. Several countries still had live warrants in his name. Het Roode Leeuw with its peeling red facade was as dirty and decrepit an establishment as he had remembered it. The French phrase ‘
plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme
’ came to his mind. During the past hour he had seen several prostitutes usher their clients through the front door of the bar. Het Roode Leeuw had always had a dual function. On the ground floor you could obtain anything that was marketable, for a price. While you haggled about drugs, arms, money or lives in the bar the only commodities for sale upstairs were drugs and sex. The man Gallagher had come to Antwerp to see had not yet arrived so he maintained his vigil from the doorway across the road. He had landed that morning in Amsterdam still using the Daniel Ryan identity. The immigration officer hadn’t even given him a second look. For some reason the Irish had some kind of cachet of harmlessness with their continental neighbours. They hadn’t even bothered to log his passport in the immigration computer. He’d taken the train from the Central Station in Amsterdam and arrived in Antwerp in time for lunch. After checking into the Hilton in Franklin Rosevelt Plaats he went walkabout to revisit some of his old haunts. He strolled down De Keyser Lei and turned right into Pelikanstraat where gold and precious stone shops ran side by side along the street. The bright light of the 100 watt bulbs in the windows reflected from the brilliant metal and gave the street a faint golden glow. During his walkabout he had bought a second hand leather jacket and a pair of Levis. He wore both his purchases as he stood in the doorway. A glance at his watch told him that it was almost ten thirty. Although he had been assured that Rolf de Wolfe still ran his office from a corner of the Roode Leeuw, he was beginning to feel that he was going to miss out tonight. While he watched the front of the bar, his thoughts strayed to the two brown boys and their mother living in the villa in Belize. Carmelita had accepted the fact that he would never love her the way she loved him and that there was some dark secret in his past that was responsible. She was happy just to be with him and to have the opportunity to raise her family in luxury. Although the weather in Antwerp was warm, a chill passed along his spine. Somebody’s walked over my grave, his old dead Ma would have said. Sometimes he wished he wasn’t so bloody Irish and Celtic. The bad vibes had been growing over the past few weeks but Gallagher put it down to old age. This was the big one. He had promised himself this one for a long time and now it really was going down. When he had put an end to the House of Saud, he would be able to spend the rest of his days taking the sun in Belize. Maybe he would even be able to give Carmelita the kind of love she deserved. His reverie was broken by the arrival of a Mercedes 360. Gallagher had never seen the man who climbed out of the driver’s side of the car but he recognised the type. He was heavily built and tall. Gallagher reckoned him at least six feet three. He wore a black cotton jacket over a white tee shirt and his whole comportment screamed ‘minder’. Three heavy gold chains hung from his neck. The driver moved smoothly to the rear of the car and opened the back door. Gallagher immediately recognised the portly figure that stepped from the Mercedes. The only change in Rolf de Wolfe over the past fifteen years was that he had become even fatter than Gallagher remembered. Gallagher watched as de Wolfe waddled quickly through the front door of the bar while the minder looked carefully about before following in his master’s footsteps. At least his information regarding de Wolfe had been accurate. As long as de Wolfe hadn’t got religion it could safely be assumed that he was still in the business of providing the very best of arms for the very highest prices.

There were about a dozen people in the bar of the Rode Leeuw when Gallagher pushed in the front door and entered the small room. It took his eyes a few moments to become used to the dark interior and he used the time to walk across the room to the bar. Four skinheads sat at a table directly inside the door. A second set of skinheads were playing backgammon. A heavily painted woman who might, or might not, have been a prostitute sat on a barstool beside a man who could either have been a client or a pimp. Gallagher heard them conversing in Russian. De Wolfe and his minder sat at the back of the room. The conversation had been lively when Gallagher entered but died immediately. Every eye in the bar was concentrated on him. The dice from the backgammon game remained in the closed fist of one of the skinheads.  Total strangers were not appreciated in the Roode Leeuw. The room pulsed with loud heavy metal music that blared from a loudspeaker above the bar.

Gallagher cast a glance across at de Wolfe. The fat man was assiduously ignoring him. It looked like de Wolfe’s memory didn’t span the years.

‘Een bier, alsublieft,’ Gallagher said returning his gaze to the barman. He had in one phrase exhausting his knowledge of Flemish.

‘What you say, mate?’ the barman’s put-on English accent cut the silence. He stopped moving to the music and stared at Gallagher. He was short and stocky and his hair was hennaed a deep red.  The tattoo on his forearm marked him as a former ‘Legionnaire’. Directly behind the barman was a large Belgian flag with the words ‘Flamseblok’ stencilled in black across the centre.

‘Is it too much to ask for a fucking beer?’ Gallagher said in his heaviest Belfast accent. Something told him that things were going to end badly but he was willing to bet it wouldn’t be the first time blood had been spilt on the stained wooden floor of Het Roode Leeuw. He could probably handle the barman but if the rest of the shitheads joined in, he might be in for a trip to the hospital.

De Wolfe looked up slowly from the table and viewed the new arrival. There was no hint of recognition in his eyes.

‘Irish?’ the barman asked.

Gallagher nodded.

‘One beer comin’ up, mate,’ the barman smiled exposing a row of crooked teeth.

Danger over, Gallagher thought as he fished a ten Euro note out of the pocket of his recently purchased leather jacket.

‘I hate the fucking Irish even more than I hate the English,’ a skinhead stood up from the table and moved to the bar.

Gallagher stared at the skinhead. Well built, haircut to the butt, potato face that would run to flesh after a decade or so of lowering Stella Artois, an A-one ace bully. He looked so like his Billy Boy counterpart in West Belfast that Gallagher smiled. He was going to enjoy this. He was prepared for the skinhead’s rush. He moved aside and punched the youth in the throat. The skinhead stopped dead and grasped his neck. Before he could catch his breath. Gallagher kicked him very hard in the groin. The skinhead collapsed on the floor holding his gonads and screaming silently.

‘Anybody else not like the Irish?’ Gallagher said to the three skinheads who remained sitting at the table. Nobody moved. He heard a sound behind the bar and he whirled in time to see the barman come around the side of the bar with a baseball bat in his hand. He immediately put up his hand palms forward. ‘No trouble. I only wanted a beer.’

‘I give you something more than a beer,
klootzak
,’ the barman moved forward cautiously and competently. He wasn’t going to follow in the footsteps of the skinhead who had now found his voice and was screaming for all he was worth. ‘And when I finish I let the boys have fun with you.’

‘Henri,’ a deep voice cut through the screaming and the high-octane music.

Gallagher and the barman both turned in the direction of the voice.

‘I think Meneer has come to see me’ De Wolfe said. ‘If you don’t want him to seriously hurt you I suggest you put the bat away and bring his beer over to my table. And get that screaming piece of shit out of here. He’s bad for business.’

The woman at the bar laughed.

Gallagher walked over and sat at de Wolfe’s table. ‘Thanks,’ he said as he sat down across from the two men. De Wolfe had aged. He weighed more than three hundred pounds and his skin had the texture of thousand-year-old papyrus. His tiny black eyes stared out from behind glasses as thick as bottle-tops.

‘I got the feeling that Henri should be the one thanking me,’ de Wolfe said in heavily accented English as the barman deposited Gallagher’s beer on the table. ‘Do I know you?’

‘No,’ Gallagher said laying on his Belfast accent with a trowel. He sipped his beer and looked at de Wolfe and his minder. ‘Who I am is unimportant. Let’s just say that I have money and I need some material that is difficult to buy on the open market. I’ve heard that Rolf de Wolfe is the man to see when you want something that’s in short supply. But that was a few years ago.’

De Wolfe smiled. ‘It is still the case, Mr Noname.’ He stared at the man across the table and wished that his eyes hadn’t disintegrated to the point where he would have difficulty recognising his brother at two metres. ‘This is Michel,’ he flicked a fat thumb in the direction of his minder. ‘I am an old man in a business of a young one. Michel is my arms and legs. ‘

Gallagher turned his gaze to Michel. De Wolf’s minder was somewhere in his mid thirties but already his fair hair had receded to the crown of his large head. Lank strands of hair were pulled into a ponytail that flicked at the top of his broad shoulders. Gallagher called on his knack of judging people and reckoned Michel to be either ex-military or an ex-policeman. ‘We need some ordinance, Mr de Wolfe,’ he said slowly.

‘It never changes.’ The two black eyes examined Gallagher carefully from behind the thick glasses. De Wolfe couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew this one somewhere in the past but he couldn’t remember who or where. There had been so many men and so many deals in de Wolfe’s long life of crime. But something told him that this was one he should remember. ‘But I read in the newspaper that you people were no longer in business. I cried when I heard the news. I haven’t done business with any of my Irish friends for well over ten years now. These ceasefires all over the place play havoc with my cash flow.’ De Wolfe didn’t care which side of the sectarian divide his clients came from. It didn’t pay to have political preferences in his business.

Michel cracked an obligatory smile.

‘So what can I do for you, ‘ de Wolfe opened his fat hands in front of him. ‘Some small arms perhaps. I have a large consignment of Kalashnikovs that might interest you. The changes in the East have opened a lot of warehouse doors.’