two addresses inside the cover. The first belonged to the offices of a newspaper in New Jersey. The second was residential.
He swung the bag over his shoulder and headed for the boarding gate. He didn’t look back. Whatever was going on in the terminal building wasn’t his concern. His mission lay elsewhere.
III
Chapter 50
Liv stared at the blank, soundproofed walls and the small mirror she knew from experience concealed an observation room. She wondered if anyone was in there now — watching her. She studied her reflection in the toughened glass, her clothes grimy, her hair plastered to her skull. She raised her hand to smooth down her fringe then gave it up as a waste of time.
To begin with she thought they’d brought her here because interview rooms were the one place in any police station you were still allowed to smoke, but looking at herself now, she wasn’t so sure. Maybe they were just keeping her out of the way because she looked like a crazy woman. She’d felt a little mad as she’d given her statement, describing the sequence of events from her arrival in the terminal building to the moment she’d staggered back after the attempted kidnapping.
It was as if it had all happened to someone else. Her sense of disconnection had increased when the officer taking her statement had gone outside to fetch her another smoke and returned with a subtly different attitude. His quiet sympathy had been replaced by a cool distance. He’d completed the ritual in near silence, got her to read and sign the document then disappeared without a word, the blinds on the outside of the window preventing her from seeing where.
There was no handle on the inside of the door. His change of tack and the silent wait in this stark room, with its table and chairs bolted to the floor, conspired to make Liv feel like she had been arrested.
She picked up the cigarette burning slowly away to nothing in the ashtray and breathed it in. It tasted foreign and unpleasant, but she persevered. Her own crumpled Luckies were still in her holdall in the back of Gabriel’s car, along with her passport, her credit cards, everything except her cell phone. Arkadian was on his way in, apparently. Hopefully he’d be more sympathetic than his colleague. She thought back to her own journey, driving up through the winding road between the dark shapes of mountains, then along bright streets through a city that managed to appear both incredibly old and very modern. She remembered the sights sliding past her exhausted eyes as she stared out of the back of the police car: the familiar logo of Starbucks, and the chrome and glass storefronts of modern banks standing right next to open-fronted shops, carved out of stone, that sold copper goods, and carpets, and souvenirs, as they had done since biblical times.
She took another drag on the foul-tasting cigarette, screwed up her nose and crushed it out in the ashtray with a picture of the Citadel printed on the bottom. She pushed it to one side and laid her head on her arms. The sound of the air-con hummed at the periphery of her senses. She closed her tired eyes against the glare of the strip lights and, despite everything she had just been through, was asleep within seconds.
Chapter 51
The Cat, Pet and Canine Clinic sat on the corner of Grace and Absolution in the heart of the Lost Quarter. A vet’s presence in such a sleazy and down-at-heel section of the city was surprising enough, but the fact that a light now burned behind its frosted-glass frontage was even stranger.
In the circles in which Kutlar moved it was generally referred to as the Bitch Clinic — testimony to the work that went on here during the hours of darkness. Most of these procedures, where medical records weren’t required and the bills were paid in cash, were performed on women. There wasn’t a pimp in the city who hadn’t used the clinic at one time or another for anything from a hastily arranged backstreet abortion, to a cut-price sterilization job done under the guise of fitting a contraceptive device. IUDs and slow-release hormone pills were relatively expensive, so it was more economical to sterilize them. Most of the girls didn’t even know about it until years later.
The clinic also offered other, more specialist services; ones that commanded a much higher premium due to the steeper prison sentences that resulted from discovery.
Kutlar had never used the place before. He owned no pets and until recently had been fortunate enough, considering his line of work, not to require any of its under-the-counter arrangements either. This had all changed on the rain-lashed airport service road when the nine millimetre round had flattened on its way through the van door and split in two as it entered his right leg. Part of the slug now lay in a stainless-steel tray. Kutlar looked at it now, felt his stomach lurch and turned away. He caught his reflection in the door of a medicine cabinet. His close- shaved head was varnished with sweat and shone in the overhead lights that made hollow shadows of his deep-set eyes. He realized he looked like a death’s-head, shuddered, and looked away.
He lay on his left side, propped against a raised part of the examination table while a fat man with a white coat and grey skin continued his delicate search for the second half of the round. Occasionally he felt a tugging sensation or heard a wet, tearing sound that made his stomach roll, but he fought back the nausea, forcing himself to breathe steadily — in through the nose, and out through the mouth — while focusing on a picture of a black Labrador slobbering happily from a large poster pinned to the opposite wall.
Kutlar had heard about the clinic from an acquaintance who specialized in the import and export of various items not generally advertised in the classifieds. He’d told him the doctor was generous with the painkillers, provided he hadn’t fallen off the wagon and snarfed them all himself. The clink of metal on metal announced the reunion of the second piece of the slug with its twin.
‘That appears to be most of the hardware accounted for,’ the fat man said in a voice that would not have sounded out of place coming from the mouth of a consultant. ‘I need to irrigate the wound now, flush out any smaller fragments that may still be there. Then I can seal the veins and start closing you up.’
Kutlar nodded and gritted his teeth. The doc picked up a clear plastic bottle with a thin spout and squeezed it with a doughy hand, carefully directing a stream of cold saline into the red chasm of his upper thigh. Kutlar shivered. He was still wet from the rain. His damp clothes, coupled with the blood loss, had started to shake him up a bit, probably with a little post-traumatic stress thrown in as a chaser. He looked back at the poster of the happy dog, realized it was recommending some kind of worm treatment, and felt the nausea rise again.
He thought about the ambush on the road, trying to work out where it had gone wrong. He’d dropped the first two guys at the car-hire place outside the main airport, then headed off to the other airport with his cousin Serko to drop off the skinny Hispanic so he could catch his red-eye to the States.
They’d spotted the dark-haired player in the trench coat just after they’d dropped him off — by the arrivals gate, holding up a sign with the girl’s name on it. He looked like police, but was alone. They’d held back, watching until the girl suddenly appeared on some half-full flight out of London. Kutlar had weighed it up and figured there’d be a nice bonus if he and Serko could jump the guy and come back from the drop-off with the girl in tow, so they’d followed them outside. They almost had a chance to grab her straight off when the chaperone headed for the car while she’d held back for a smoke. Only there’d been some security guys across the road, rousting vagrants from the bus stop. So they’d waited. Followed them in the van. And decided to spring the ambush on the service road.
The plan had been simple. He was to take care of the babysitter while Serko transferred the girl to the van. Nice and easy. Except the driver had come flying out so fast he’d been knocked backwards and dropped his gun. By the time he’d recovered, a shot had been fired. He’d thrown himself at the man, kicked his gun from his hand, then scrambled back to the van and taken off. Except the girl hadn’t been there. Neither had Serko. As he sped away he’d looked in the rear-view mirror and seen something lying in the road. He’d nearly spun round and gone back until bullets started chewing up his side panels and punched out his window. He only realized he’d been hit when he tried to apply the brakes and his leg wouldn’t move. Going back would have been suicide. He’d had no choice. Dead
