twenty metres? A dark night on the airport road, manning a roadblock, with most of the grunts gone home, any Iraqi policeman would be glad of half a box. They had talked round it and haggled – as friends did – and Harvey would go back to his people in Baghdad and the friend would talk to the contact in Tirana. Then there had been chat about the problems that summer in Marbella – algae in the swimming-pools. Time had slipped, and he had almost forgotten that his first call of the day had been to order, special next-day delivery, a bulletproof vest.
Harvey crossed the hall and went into the kitchen. The dog was by the door, panting, tail wagging, and she was lifting down the lead from the hook by the coat pegs. He still had on his flipflops and his rough trainers were in the cupboard. He did the dog walk. Didn’t hang on to much, but the fucking dog walk was his.
He snatched the lead, beat her to it. She had binoculars round her neck, walking boots on her feet and a light sweater hooked over her shoulders. The shades were on her hair and would cut out the glare off the sea. He had nothing suitable for walking the coast path and going out towards the lighthouse and the great Pulpit Rock.
No explanations. Nothing about a late call coming through and putting him off his schedule. He might as well have struck her. She, his Josie, recoiled from him, almost flinched. He didn’t know what to say, how to say anything. Had yesterday’s shirt on and no hat to keep the sun off his forehead, no glasses to keep the brilliance out of his eyes, creased trousers and the flipflops that flapped on the kitchen floor as he went to the door, opened it, let the dog bound ahead of him and closed it. He didn’t turn to see her face, had no interest in her expression.
He walked towards the gates. They were closed.
The zapper that opened them was on his key-ring, which was beside the phone in his office.
He stared at the closed gates. Yes, he could have climbed them, but would not have been able to lift the dog over – too heavy and too big a drop. He was about to go back.
They opened. Well-oiled, they eased away from the post and stopped when there was enough space for him and the dog to go through. He looked behind, couldn’t help himself, and she was on the step with a zapper in her hand. He thought she mouthed one word, pathetic – he lip-read it.
He went out through the gate and the pick-up was coming down the lane. He saw the face and acknowledged a curt hand gesture – Nigel might have had some pillow talk about the unreasonableness of a husband – and Harvey swung on to the path and walked away from his gardener, Josie’s comforter… Yes, he believed it.
The dog went ahead.
Jumbled thoughts, incoherently put together… his wife, pathetic… the gardener… a contract from a village… the dog peering into bushes at the side of the track, hackles rising… the need for grenades in Baghdad… the requirement for police, Shia or Sunni, to have mortar bombs… a BPV coming in the morning with a spray… the sun’s strength in his eyes, brightness off the water… the ferry late… the growl of the dog… the fucking gardener… His thoughts were a mess and then there was a stone, sharp, under his foot. The flipflop was bloody useless.
He went on past the dog, his fingers touched the ruff of its neck, and he was too distracted by the pain in his foot, the light on his face and every other thing on his mind to stop and check the dog’s aggravation… Pathetic. No one had ever called Harvey Gillot pathetic – not in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Syria, the ministry buildings in Jakarta, Beijing, Seoul or Dubai, or in an odd little backwater of the Pentagon or in a garret on the top floor of Whitehall’s defence building, off Horse Guards Avenue. No one who worked from Vauxhall Bridge Cross on the Albert Embankment had ever called him pathetic.
A cloud lifted. To hell with confusion. His mind hooked on to the grenades and mortars, the signal he would send to Baghdad, to the interior ministry, and the calls he would make to Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the pen-pushers who issued the export-clearance forms and- Where was the dog? He whistled. The path ahead was empty and he could see down the side of Rufus Castle to the rocks and the beach. He turned.
The man wore overalls.
His hands pulled the balaclava down over his upper face, then came together and the scrape of metal on metal, the arming, carried to him. One hand, right side, was raised.
Very clear to Harvey Gillot. The hand held a pistol that looked to him like a Makharov. He knew the Makharov, had handled the sale of Makharov pistols pretty much since the first day he’d been with Solly Lieberman. It might not have been a Makharov that was coming up to aim at his chest, might have been the Baikal lookalike. Came from the same factory and- The aim was on him. He tried to turn, and the twist of his foot seemed to gouge the stone, between the flipflop and his sole, deeper into the skin and the pain of it came on. He bent, reflex, and the shot was fired. He was half down, on his knee, and his ears rang with the crack of the bullet going high and wide. A hanging in the morning concentrated the mind – as did a raised handgun when aimed, ten-foot range, at a guy who had dropped to one knee. Harvey Gillot saw everything with such clarity. And the wasps.
He had never missed before. Robbie Cairns had never failed to drop his target with the first shot. He had seen the strike against the old stone of the castle ruin.
He steadied.
The target was down, on one knee, and the dog cringed at the side of the path. Fucking wasps. He had to aim again because the impact of the first shot had lifted his firing arm and destroyed the zero he’d taken. The fucking wasps were in his face. One at the balaclava slash for his nose, another at the slit for his left eye, one hovering and one crawling on him. He had the aim. Steadied. Now the man stared at him. Should have been fear, wasn’t. Should have been like the dog, but wasn’t belly down and didn’t cower. Started to squeeze and – fucking wasp in his fucking nose, and the other was half an inch from his eyeball. It had never been like this before.
He saw the two wasps. One was halfway up a nostril and the other was now on the material beside an eye. He had the flipflop, right foot, in his hand. A Makharov or a Baikal lookalike was aimed at him, and in retaliation Harvey Gillot readied to throw a flipflop. The pistol’s aim was gone, and the man’s arms flailed and brushed the balaclava. He hurled the flipflop – ten feet, could have been less. It hit the upper body. Not enough, of course, to hurt or injure, but more than enough, with two wasps in harness, to confuse.
He ran.
They said, military guys he met, that the big decision was between ‘flight and fight’. It was a response to acute stress. A bullet had gone over his head, fired from ten feet or less, and a goddamn insect had given him the chance of a double play. Now he did flight – but he’d done fight with the flipflop.
He ran and shrieked out loud for the dog, didn’t realise it was at his knee and belting with him. Another crack. A whiplash in the air and a splatter of bark on a tree ahead, and then he was round the bend in the path and cut away into scrub. He went down on his elbows and knees and burrowed through thorn and gorse. His shirt was snagged and torn but he kept going and the dog came with him.
Couldn’t go further – was at a drop. He had reached a place where level ground ended and he was trapped between rock that went up sheer, and rock that went down vertical. He lay still, hoped he was hidden, and held the dog. After the exhaustion, the heart’s pumping and the adrenalin, there was a god-awful pain in his foot.
Maybe it wasn’t clever.
Two minutes or three, he waited and listened. He thought the dog had the best hearing and would respond, but nobody came down the track. People came up, though, a boy and a girl, dressed to walk the coastal path. They might be going the whole way round the Bill. He used them as a human shield. If they reached the top of the track where it joined the lane, he reckoned he’d be fine. He came out of his lair and stumbled after them. His second flipflop fell off and he didn’t stop for it, but he pocketed the cartridge of the second round fired. The boy and girl were laughing, stepping out well and sharing a water bottle. They didn’t look back at Harvey, trailing them, and went right past where the first spent cartridge case had been ejected. Didn’t see it. Harvey picked it up. They didn’t have reason to look at the gap in the foliage where bloody Devonish dumped his grass and prunings, but Harvey saw the wasps there, angry and swarming. He reached the gates.
He beat on the button with his fist.
He held it down.
He yelled at the skies over the gates. ‘If you two haven’t started shagging yet, let me in.’
No one answered him and no one came.
He scraped up a handful of dirt and stones and threw it high over the gate towards the house, but knew it would fall short.
Vern had been waiting, seemed an age, at the car. He’d endured boredom and anxiety alternately but had known the confidence that came from belonging to a top-rated team, and his brother was pick-of-the-bunch. At his feet there was a small mess of ground-out cigarettes, self-rolled ones, and he prided himself that he had learned in gaol how to make them narrow and firm so that the tobacco lasted longest. He had been halfway through smoking the fourth or fifth when they had come out of the lane, crossed the road, then come up the slope, away from the
