Another day, another start. Dawn broke over a sleeping hotel where a boy lay in a young woman’s arms and the first light reflected off the river and fell on them.
The same sunlight spread easily over fields of corn, and a farmer was already up, checking his crop and the sunflowers. He decided that within the next week he would begin the harvest. He saw a fox edge past him and stay close to the riverbank, but he didn’t know if it was the vixen still hunting her buried cubs or if a new life had reached that territory on the Vuka river.
The same light came into the rooms where a former electrician stirred and where a man who might have fired an anti-armour wire-guided missile slept alone because his wife had gone nineteen years before. It lay on a man who had been a brilliant sniper and now had only one leg, and on the man who was divorced from the inner clan because he had run from his home as the war had come closer.
The day would start when the storks screamed on their nests, flapped and took off to forage, but until then there was quiet.
And the same sunlight pierced a dull window and fell on the whitened face of a woman lying on a bed… and light, also, was reflected up from the metal roofing of a fifteen-carriage sleeper train that was south of Ulm, north of Augsburg, and heading, slow and noisy, towards Munich.
He finished his coffee and there was a knock on his door. He was fully dressed or he would not have called for the attendant to enter. He was given back his passport and slipped a tip to the man. Gratitude was expressed and it was hoped he would have a pleasant day. He was told the train would reach its destination in seven minutes.
15
Robbie Cairns was on the bench in the station and had been there through the night. The concourse had crawled with police and railway-security people. After midnight there had been light music over the loudspeakers and no train movements between one and four. He didn’t know what the great London stations – Waterloo, Victoria, King’s Cross, St Pancras or Euston – were like through the night, had never experienced them. One coffee outlet had remained open, and the toilets, but the place had been quiet.
After six, it had woken.
After seven, the pace of a new day was around him. The first commuters – suits, briefcases, severe skirts, laptop bags – powered past him. The food stalls were opening. Other than to go to the toilets, and take a fast shower, he had been on the bench. The loudspeakers bayed cheerful instructions – on train arrivals, he assumed, and departures: the big boards flickered new information. If Vern had been collecting him from the address in the short cul-de-sac street below the Albion Estate and they had been going to work, to a hit, then he would not have eaten or drunk anything. He thought food and drink before a hit would dull his sharpness.
Most of the night he’d had only his own company. Worse, then, because her face lived with him. Better later: a vagrant had sat near to him and indicated he wanted money. Robbie had gazed into the man’s unshaven, scarred face, and he had taken flight. After him, a stream of people had used the bench, sometimes crowded close to him and sometimes giving him space. He had learned, as the pace of the station quickened, that the trains came on time, to the minute. Nothing chaotic about the movements at Munich station. He saw which platform would be used by the train bringing in the sleeper traffic from Paris and knew where he would stand, and for how long he would wait after leaving the bench.
While he had had the bench to himself, when the area around him was deserted and there were gaps in the patrols, he’d kept the sports bag, Charlton Athletic, on his knee. He did it by touch, hands inside the bag. Robbie Cairns had screwed the silencer to the barrel, emptied one of the magazines into the bottom of the bag and refilled it. He had been told by the armourer that jams came from dirt and from bullets left too long in a magazine. Always, he had been drilled, he should empty a magazine, then reload it. He inserted it back into the Walther’s stock, looked again at the board, saw how long till the train came in and, finally, stood.
His legs were stiff so he stretched. His muscles cracked and his joints loosened.
He couldn’t avoid the cameras. A railway station would be covered by camera angles and lenses would have picked him up, discarded him, found him again, handed him on like postal baggage to the view of an adjacent lens. He was used to cameras, expected them. He walked to the news stand and bought a paper, the Suddeutsche Zeitung. He didn’t understand any of the words printed on the front page, or recognise any of the men photographed. He dropped it into the top of his bag. He was poorly equipped, and accepted it. He didn’t have overalls, gloves, lighter fuel and subsequent access to a wash-house. He didn’t have Leanne spotting for him or Vern to drive him away. He walked out of the station. Disjointed feelings of self-preservation were alive in him, and the whipcrack voice – hoarse, sneering and angry – of his grandfather shared space in his mind with the sight of her, the whiteness and the cold.
The instinct for self-preservation led him outside the station and he pressed himself into the angle of a great supporting buttress of stone. He shed his coat, stuffed it into the bag and took out the wide-brimmed baseball cap and dark glasses. He put them on, placed the Walther inside the folded newspaper and draped a shirt – seemingly carelessly – over the bag to hide its colour and logo. He was ready.
The crowds welled past him and he slipped among them and was almost propelled by the weight of movement into the station, on to the concourse. He checked again – last time – saw that the train was not delayed and noted again – last time – the platform it would come into. He sidled towards a doorway set back in a wall that would be level with the back of the engine. From the sign above it, he thought it was the entrance to the station’s chapel. From there, he could see up the tracks that merged, separated and came into the platforms.
He had the pistol gripped in his hand and hidden in the newspaper. He could find the safety and eased it off.
The big clock on the platform, digital figures, told him how long he must wait.
He had on a jacket, lightweight, from Bond Street, because it was easier to wear than to hold, and his shirt was outside his trousers and bulged. The train had slowed, now crawled.
He didn’t know exactly what he would do at his journey’s end but had an idea – couldn’t be certain because he had no comprehension of what he would find, except that a path had led through cornfields. Couldn’t say whether there was still a path and cornfields. Better to let his mind rest on other matters – the armoured cars for the great, the good and those who feared shadows. He had decided, after the train had pulled noisily clear of the siding and hammered through Augsburg, that Baghdad and Kabul would be awash with armoured-car salesmen and had determined that the better market was where careful men and women took precautions, what they called in the trade ‘event insurance’: a businessman in Ireland, an actress in Italy, a politician in Greece, anyone who could fork out the money in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala. No shortage of clients, and the prospects put jauntiness into his step. He could see the outskirts of the station, the marshalling yards, and did a final check around the cabin to make sure he had left nothing.
A shudder, a lurch. The train stopped.
He unlocked and opened his door. The corridor was filled with the Americans, the floor space wedged high with their luggage. He had more than ninety minutes until his connection and would get some coffee to pass the time. Harvey Gillot had been here once, flying into the old airport, had carried bags for Solly Lieberman. The old American had met up with Germans of his own age and they had talked in that language, which cut out the young guy, and later – past four in the morning when the veterans were showing no sign of exhaustion and Harvey’s head was lolling – he had been given numbers to note on the pad, and hands had been shaken. He had hoped for bed, but it was denied. A car had taken them to a shapeless modern block of flats and the sign had said Connollystrasse. The Germans and his mentor had lectured him on the attack by Palestinians in 1972 at the Olympic-fest, and had pointed out the Israeli house. They had walked past it, and he had ceased to understand the significance. They had been brought to the airport – no sleep – for the day’s first flight, and Solly Lieberman had chirped: They allowed others to take responsibility for their security: mistake. A lesson in life, young man, is that you look after yourself: no one else will. The Israelis died because of that mistake and faith had been put in the Germans who fucked up, fucked up big. In your own hands, remember it. He’d slept all the way back on the flight to Heathrow but reckoned Solly Lieberman had done checks on balance sheets.
The train was halted and the excitement of the young people round him was infectious. None of them had time, or inclination, to look at the sturdy man among them and wonder what was his business and why he
