year, then moved to Libya. With the whole Middle East jumping up and down, she’d probably want to cover the fuck-up that was unfolding in Bahrain. Protesters had been shot and Saudi troops had moved into the country to back the government. Big drama ahead for all. Especially me, as she’d want to be in the thick of it.
The phone buzzed and crackled in my ear as it tried to get cell contact. Eventually it opened up. She sounded concerned. ‘Nicholas — is everything all right?’
There were screams and chants in the background as the rebels gave Gaddafi’s name a hard time.
‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that?’
She laughed. ‘I got held up, that’s all.’
She must have found a quieter spot because the noise went down a couple of decibels.
‘Anna, I need a favour. Can you find out about a guy called Francis Timis? I think he’s Ukrainian. He says he changed his name to Francis so it sounds more Western. He’s loaded, but I can’t find anything about him on the Net. There’s a Romanian mining guy, but that’s definitely not him.’
‘Maybe he’s rich enough to buy anonymity. Spell it for me?’
I heard gunfire and some scuffling as she took cover.
‘How old is he?’
‘Mid-forties, maybe. No older than fifty. Anything you can get.’
There was more rustling. She had to shout to make herself heard. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’ll tell you another time. You sound a bit busy. Have you got your date yet?’
She was due to be replaced by a colleague. At first she’d been looking forward to some leave. But this past week she’d started to sound less keen. It didn’t make me worried, exactly, but I was concerned.
‘I’m going to have to go.’
‘I’ll call you tomorrow, usual time.’
‘Nicholas?’
‘Anna?’
‘Look after yourself.’
I started to laugh as the phone went dead.
My next call was to a London number. This time the line was a lot clearer.
23
I left the flat and crossed the street to the Metro. One change would get me to Paveletskaya, and from there the Aeroexpress to Domodedovo took just under an hour. That was the quick bit. Security at the airport had been a nightmare since the suicide bombing in January. The queues could snake around for miles inside the building. Passengers were missing their flights. It was going to mean I couldn’t just try and grab a seat on the next Heathrow plane. I’d have to factor in at least a couple of hours of downtime before I could get airside.
As I neared the entrance, something registered in my peripheral vision. I didn’t turn my head. I carried on until I was nearly inside, then stopped, checked my watch and looked around like I was weighing up my options.
About fifty metres down the road was a vehicle. I couldn’t see the driver, but it was either Ant and Dec’s Audi from outside the hotel or one that looked exactly like it, right down to the half-moons carved out of the grime on the windscreen and the two shapes filling the front seats inside.
PART FOUR
1
Coffee shops are like London buses. You don’t see one for ages, then three come along at once. I sat with my frothy cappuccino and stack of Danishes as more and more people lined up like lemmings for their pre-work caffeine fix. Nearly all of them had headphones or mobiles stuck to their ears.
This branch of Starbucks was on the north side of London Bridge, by Monument tube. Jules had decided he didn’t want me to come to the office. His syndicate dealt with kidnap and ransom. K&R was a private, secretive world. His bosses wouldn’t want him bringing somebody in to tread across their turf — especially when Jules knew that that somebody wouldn’t be wearing a suit.
I sipped at the froth. I’d gone to my flat in Docklands straight from Heathrow and got my head down for a couple of hours. I’d had a lukewarm shower when I got up because I’d forgotten to spark up the immersion heater when I came in. I gave it a twenty-minute burst and jumped in.
The place was covered with dust. Dust sheets were for the movies, or so I thought. I hadn’t sold the 911 or the flat, or even rented it out when I went to Moscow. I didn’t need to. Prices had taken a hit in the recession, but they’d pick up again. As Mark Twain kept yelling from the Moscow billboards: ‘Buy land: I hear they aren’t making it any more!’
Besides, I didn’t know what I was doing with Anna, and neither, I guessed, did Anna know what she was doing with me. We were sort of experimenting with the idea of living together.
The newspapers were still dominated this morning by the Japanese tsunami and Gaddafi’s war.
Japan had raised its nuclear-contamination alert level as core damage to Reactors 2 and 3 was worse than expected after the ’quake. Panic had spread overseas. Shops in parts of the US had been stripped of iodine pills.
Libya’s government was declaring an immediate ceasefire after a UN Security Council resolution backed ‘all necessary measures’ short of occupation to protect civilians in the country. But no one seriously thought Gaddafi would stop bombing his own people just because he said he would.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, yet another country was going tits up. At least thirty-three anti-government protesters had been shot dead in Yemen and another 145 wounded when government forces opened fire on a group of them. The Arab freedom wave kept on rolling, but at a cost.
It was hard to cut away from it and keep my head full of Somalis and piracy. Until I’d joined the Regiment and had to deal with that shit head-on, I’d thought pirates belonged to a far-off world where the Jolly Roger flew on a Caribbean masthead while all the lads swigged rum and gave it the old yo-ho-ho on the quarterdeck. But these fuckers didn’t sport eye patches and head-scarves. There wasn’t a Captain Sparrow in sight. They ran round in flip- flops, shorts and tank-tops. They carried grappling hooks, RPGs and AK47s. And now they killed people.
2
Somalia is a failed state. Its landmass, which makes up the Horn of Africa, is stuck between Ethiopia and Kenya to the west, and the Indian Ocean to the east. Its northern coastline is on the Gulf of Aden, the other side of which lies Yemen, whose government had just taken to killing protesters. Talk about keeping bad company.
The piracy committed offshore is a direct result of the anarchy that rages on land. The same thing happens in other weakly governed states, like Indonesia and Nigeria, but it’s particularly bad in Somalia. The country has been caught up in civil war since the 1990s. Come to think of it, it can’t really be called a country any more.
In the early 1980s, Somali pirates were mostly unemployed youths who hung round the docks looking for
