Winner Kills All Read online

  Saban guffawed and banged the bar top. ‘I know how you can cause trouble for Leka Zogolli.’

  ‘We’re all ears,’ said Freddie.

  Saban spoke quickly and softly, so softly that Adam couldn’t hear all the details. He caught a few stray words. Paris. Family. Children. Bastard.

  When he had finished, Sam shook his hand like she meant it.

  Then she said: ‘I need to ask another favour.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you sell us some cement?’

  ‘Why?’ Saban asked.

  Sam shot a glance at Adam. ‘Because we’re going down the mountain.’

  SIX

  Adam had emailed Kath but received no reply. He thought about sending a message to Rory, but decided to wait. Editors didn’t like being told a story had gone tits up, and he wasn’t sure how this was going to pan out. It all depended on two mysterious women.

  He had been sent to sit at a table out of earshot, with a beer and an order to take shallow breaths to give his ribs a rest. As he did so, he watched the two women talk in hushed tones to the barman. At one point, a grin flashed across Sam’s face, softening her features. They were both attractive women, though the kind he would be wary of complimenting for fear they might take it the wrong way and crush his windpipe.

  He had met women like that in Helmand: tough, capable, confident. But that was in an army situation. Off duty, they reverted to something softer, more – although he wouldn’t say it to their faces – feminine. But this pair . . . it was like they were ‘on’ all the time. Whenever one spoke to Saban, the other kept an eye on the door, and then they switched roles, instinctively, it seemed. And knowing there was a hit coming? They had to be some kind of Special Forces. But thank God for that.

  When Adam reached for his beer he noticed his hand was shaking. He held it out and watched his trembling fingers.

  ‘Just a little shock.’ It was Freddie, standing over him. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  From the corner of his eye, Adam saw Sam slide a stack of money over to Saban and they shook hands once more. Then she went outside.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘She’s bought the cement from next door. And a bit of sand. Now she’s buying a gun.’

  ‘Look, I don’t understand—’

  ‘No, I know. But based on what Saban told us, we no longer have a need to go up to Golan. We have our story. You’ll get yours.’

  Adam looked doubtful. ‘That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to answer to editors who have forked out cash for this trip. What are you two going to do, then?’

  ‘Sam and I need to go to Paris – that’s where our leverage over Leka is – which means flying out of Tirana. So we can drop you at the airport. Now, take your beer, go and talk to Saban and ask him about what’s going on in those villages. Do not identify him as your source when you write it up. Understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She grabbed his bicep as he got to his feet. ‘Or mention us by name or description. Clear?’

  He laughed and winced as his ribs protested. ‘I never argue with a woman who owns a shotgun.’

  ‘Especially one who knows where you live.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘We know where you work. Which newspaper. The next step is simple.’

  ‘I’ll keep it vague,’ Adam said.

  ‘Vague is good. We’ll be outside.’

  When he had finished with Saban – the man really did have all the information he needed to write his piece – Adam went outside. The women had backed their Dacia up to the breeze-block shell and were busy loading hefty sacks of cement and sand into the back of it. With the rear seats down, they had created a walled area in the back.

  ‘What’s going in there?’ he asked.

  ‘You are,’ said Freddie.

  ‘They won’t stop an AK round,’ said Sam, pointing at the bags, ‘but pretty much anything else. Just as long as you keep your head down.’

  Adam bristled. ‘No way. I’m not cowering in the back while you two play Calamity Jane.’

  The women exchanged glances. ‘Well, yes you are. Either conscious . . .’

  ‘Or unconscious,’ completed Sam with a shrug. ‘Which might be better for us. Get your gear from your car. Don’t forget your passport.’

  Adam’s phone beeped. It was a message from Kath: What kind of bother?

  I’ll tell you when I get home.

  If I get home, he thought. I’m trusting my life to two women who, despite their grim expressions, seem to be enjoying this. What if this was all a scam? He only had their word for the attempted hit.

  Then he remembered what Saban had told him about the people further up the mountain and their disdain for human lives, which made him feel sick inside.

  Another message from Kath: Are you OK?

  Yes. Are you? Is Conor OK?

  I’ll tell you when you get home.

  Touché.

  After he had fetched his bag and given the keys of his hire car to Saban, he threw his belongings into the Dacia.

  ‘You get in, we’ll put a layer between you and the rear door,’ said Sam.

  He was about to climb in when he hesitated. ‘What is the Sayonara Syndrome?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sam.

  ‘It clearly does,’ he replied.

  It was Freddie who told him. ‘We had a captain in Iraq who used to make sure that every risky patrol was led by the same young lieutenant. To the point where it became a joke. We couldn’t understand it. He even made the guy use the Vallon – which is the metal detector for IEDs. I mean, a decent lieutenant will always take his turn. Just to show he won’t ask someone to do something he wouldn’t do. But it’s not his primary role. And every time the lieutenant went out, Dawson always said the same thing: “Sayonara”. Which doesn’t just mean goodbye, it has a we-won’t-meet-again finality about it. Sure enough, the lieutenant stood on an IED one day and boom. Dead. The following year, the captain married his widow.’

  ‘Nice. So he’d been . . .?’

  ‘Well, according to Freddie here, deliberately putting the lieutenant in harm’s way,’ said Sam. ‘He and the wife had been having an affair long before deployment. But that was war, not journalism. Get in.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Just a thought,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Although not a good one,’ added Sam. ‘Freddie has a vivid imagination.’

  ‘I do when it comes to sex.’

  Adam decided to change the subject. ‘Why are you helping me?’ he asked.

  Freddie shrugged. ‘We’re PPOs. Bodyguards, to you. It’s what we do.’

  That begged a whole fresh set of questions. But Adam kept his mouth shut and climbed into the rear of the car as they put an extra two layers of bags in position, so that he was barricaded in on all sides. He felt like a pig in a very dusty pen. As he tried to make himself comfortable he thought about the Sayonara Syndrome and laughed to himself. Not because of the captain’s shenanigans – that was monstrous – but the thought that Rory might have sent him to Albania to get to Kath. As if.

  The Dacia rocked as the women climbed in the front and he heard them checking their weapons. Sam had gained an automatic pistol from the Albanian customers, who had now departed in a black Mercedes. Were they friend or foe? Who knew? Maybe it would be those guys waiting for them down the hill. He felt the fingers of paranoia squeezing his heart.

  ‘Who were the men with guns?’ he asked. ‘Cops?’

  ‘Not regular cops,’ said Sam. ‘Maybe Sigurimi or whatever the equivalent is now.’

  Adam knew that the Sigurimi was the Albanian equivalent of the Stasi. And equally feared.

  ‘You trust them?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Freddie. ‘Hard to tell white hats from black hats over here.’

  ‘What about all this extra weight?’ Adam asked, trying to get his mind off useless speculation about the loyalties of the men who had sold Sam a pistol. ‘
Will this thing even move?’

  ‘We’ll mainly be going downhill,’ said Sam. ‘We’ll dump the cement when we’re in the clear.’

  In the clear. She made it sound so simple. Like driving through a rainstorm. Except it looked like they were heading for a shitstorm. Christ, I’m really frightened, he thought.

  He heard Freddie snap the barrels shut once more. ‘You ever see that film The Magnificent Seven? The original?’ Of course he had, but he didn’t answer. She was speaking to Sam.

  ‘It was hard to get away from it. Paul loved it. That and the bloody Great Escape.’

  ‘This reminds me of that movie. Steve McQueen says to Yul Brynner: “Never ridden shotgun on a hearse before”.’

  ‘Doesn’t that make me bald?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Doesn’t that make me dead?’ Adam shouted from the back, a slight tremor to the words undercutting his attempt at levity.

  They both answered at once: ‘Not yet.’

  The engine caught first time and grumbled a little as Sam gave it enough gas to compensate for the extra load, and they bumped out of the rough car park and onto the road down the mountain.

  PART TWO

  ‘Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be fish’

  SEVEN

  How did I know it was a hit?

  As I eased the Dacia out of the car park, trying to get used to the new distribution of weight, I knew I would be asking myself that question for a long time to come.

  ‘How is she?’ Freddie asked, tapping the dash with the barrel of the shotgun.

  Skittish? I thought. Was that the right word? Though that suggested a prancing colt; something delicate and dainty. The Dacia was only a few steps up from a tractor. I settled on: ‘A very pregnant sow on four wheels.’

  We’d been in FWD vehicles before, driving towards men who wanted to harm us. Iraq. Afghanistan. Normally, though, we had a bunch of hard-nosed squaddies with us, not a civilian hiding behind bags of cement. Although, to be fair, we hadn’t given him much choice.

  We began our descent, with my foot hovering over the brake. The rear end felt twitchy due to the extra baggage. I reckoned the Dacia would prefer to come down arse-first. I had placed the automatic pistol in the centre console. It was a Beretta, with the older fifteen-round magazine. Worn, but OK from what I could tell from a quick once-over. In an ideal world I’d strip down and reassemble an unfamiliar weapon half-a-dozen times, putting a round through it at each rebuild. Just as Pavol, my Slovakian weapons tutor, had taught me. But this was a far from ideal world: I wouldn’t know if I had been sold a pup until I pulled the trigger. And that might be too late.

  So, how had I known it was a hit? Not some sixth sense; not the hairs on the back of my neck or a gut feeling. I think it was the choreography. That’s what PPOs like me do. We visualise – or some sketch out on paper, napkins, fag packets, whatever is at hand – the possible lines of attack and escape; the threats and responses. You need to know how to extract the client – the Principal, in PPO speak – safely if shit goes down. So you sit and try to calculate what might be coming and from which direction. Those instincts tick over, even while you are not in paid employment, idling at a White/Yellow status. It is what makes PPOs such crap dining companions. They never just sit, relax and look at the menu. There is always at least one meerkat moment when they look around, calculating the odds.

  So, while I was sitting at the café, I had already assessed we were vulnerable to a drive-by. I also knew the trick of identifying a target by phoning the venue. These days it was usually the intended victim’s mobile that rang, but maybe those lads on the bike didn’t have Adam’s number.

  ‘Here?’ Freddie asked, as I slowed for a bend. To my left there was a cliff edge with a fifty-metre drop to some scrubby trees and not much in the way of crash barriers, and to my right, a rock face. It was constricted. But it would be for any opposition as well.

  If they tried to block us with a car, someone might go over the edge. And that someone might be them.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. I became aware that my heart was pounding in my chest. I wasn’t breathing properly. Too shallow and the heart has to up its game to try to replace lost oxygen. I gulped in some air and then regulated my breathing to deep and slow. ‘Soon enough though, don’t worry about that.’

  ‘Who the hell are you two again?’ Adam queried from the rear.

  ‘You already asked that,’ I reminded him. ‘And we told you.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t what you might call full disclosure, was it?’

  Freddie gave him a fuller answer. She gave a quick outline of two ex-military medics who had ended up on the Circuit, the international brotherhood – and, increasingly, sisterhood – of those in the security industry.

  ‘You haven’t really explained who this Leka bloke is you are so concerned with.’

  I could, of course, have explained about my ‘boyfriend’ Tom, who, as a British soldier, was part of the Kosovo Force (KFOR), four international brigades of peacekeeping troops. It also included my late husband Paul, who, alongside Tom, had been involved in a rather one-sided fight with some Albanian would-be rapists. I remembered the words, the anguish in them, as Tom described the scene, the memory still raw as they stood and watched a group of men surround a young goatherd, just thirteen or fourteen years old.

  One of the men – an older one – started to jeer at us. They made all sorts of obscene gestures.

  Goading us.

  They knew we couldn’t touch them.

  Some of the younger ones had begun to paw and prod at the girl. She was lashing out at them, which only made them laugh more. It was like a vile game of ’It’.

  Then another guy – I’d say about thirty, the one with the AK –walked ten, fifteen metres down the hill, so he was closer to us. He unbuttoned his pants and flipped out one of the biggest cocks I’ve ever seen. I mean, there’s always one in a group like that, isn’t there? Always one hung like a donkey who takes every opportunity to whip it out. His looked like he should have a licence to take it for a walk.

  The others cheered. He waved it about at us, pointed at it, then at the girl. Just in case we were particularly slow.

  So he started working at it while we watched, running his hand up and down the shaft, pulling back the foreskin, until he had this great stonker on. Two of the men had the girl by her wrists at this point, so she couldn’t go anywhere. The rest were clapping, this sort of rhythmic, almost flamenco-like dance clapping. As if it were some kind of cabaret . . .

  And then one of the Brits opened fire, hitting the guy with the hard-on. At which point they realised that, by interfering, they had broken the KFOR non-intervention mandate.

  So they killed them all.

  It was the logic of madness, but, as he said, the whole world seemed turned on its head in Kosovo at that time.

  Paul, my future husband, had tried to stop the slaughter. And Tom had let one of the potential rapists – a young kid – live, pretending to shoot him in the head, but deliberately missing. Now Leka, that boy, was an all-grown-up warlord intent on getting revenge on the British squad.

  They may have let him live, but the Brits had killed the others; his family and friends. Maybe Leka reasoned he had been spared to avenge them.

  It was certainly possible he had already managed to kill Paul, who was shot coming off a shift for a British Nuclear Police/MI5 operation.

  And Leka knew he could get to Tom through me. I couldn’t just let that go.

  I couldn’t go on thinking Tom might get hurt or I might be followed and kidnapped to use as bait for him, as they had once tried in Zurich.

  But I didn’t tell that story to Adam. I also didn’t tell him the bigger reason I had for wanting to resolve the situation with Leka, and fast.

  The truth was, I was needed over the other side of the world, where my daughter Jess was with her father. Her father who had taken her without my permission; had snatched her from under my no
se. They were last seen in Bali. But I knew Jess was no longer there.

  When the photographs that my old mentor, the Colonel, had extracted from the internet had showed she was in Bali, I contacted the UK police, who asked the Balinese cops to investigate. However, with there being no current extradition treaty between Indonesia and the UK, all they could do was check ‘on a friendly basis’.

  A frustratingly vague report had come back: Our enquiries show that, while the suspect had been in the country, sources indicate he has now left the island of Bali with the girl.

  I had always known that the chances of Jess still being there were slim – Matt, my ex, knew enough to keep moving, especially if he ever caught wind of the fact I was coming for them – but Bali was where I could pick up the trail. And I would.

  If you live that long.

  Not helpful.

  I made an effort to stop thinking about Matt and Jess, and Laura, the treacherous au pair who had helped him take my daughter. I really didn’t want that anger out there yet, clouding my vision, not given our current situation.

  What had Adam asked?

  Oh, yes. About Leka. I just said: ‘It’s complicated. I needed to get something to use against him.’

  ‘For what?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘Yes.’ I didn’t expand. My leverage came from Saban, the barman, who had been at school with Leka. Though I suspected his association went beyond that. Saban was coy about how he knew so much about Leka’s operations in Europe, but it was clear he hated him. My guess was this: Saban had been part of Leka’s organisation in France. They had fallen out. Saban had come back home to open his café, but he still despised Leka enough to dish the dirt on him when asked, even by a couple of strangers in town. I suspected Saban had some skeletons of his own in some worm-riddled cupboard, but that wasn’t my concern. Neutralising Leka was.

  ‘That’s good,’ Adam said.