He didn’t look soft, that’s for sure. The guy is fifty plus but physically he still looks harder than me. That day he was wearing shorts, a sleeveless linen shirt and thong-style sandals; his skin was brown and shining and his muscles were sharply defined. There was sand in his hair and clinging to his clothing; it made me think of Afghanistan, and of him as a marine from Hell.
And yet he was different; there was an edginess that wasn’t part of my vision of the man. Maybe it was there before and I’d been too young to recognise it, but I didn’t think so. The thirty-something Skinner had been encased in an aura of absolute certainty. The older version seemed to have lost that; I looked at him and I saw a man with problems that he wasn’t sure he could solve.
I’d come expecting to be asked for my life story, and I was happy to lay it out for him. I owed that to him, that and more. The deputy director had told me his security clearance was higher than mine, so I had no problem telling him about my present employment, or about her view of our colleagues in Strathclyde. She had told me I should never be less than frank with him.
He didn’t bat an eyelid through any of it, not even when I described my SBS missions in Afghanistan. He asked me very few questions and none of them were personal. He didn’t want to know about the family I’d left behind, not that there was much of it left, only my mother. I didn’t think of her at all when I was in the Marines, and I listed no next of kin. I’d said no goodbyes when I left. When I joined Five I waited a few months then ran a check on her, with my line manager’s tacit approval. She’s still in Edinburgh, still drawing benefit, still pulling down convictions for nicking from supermarkets. It seems that she only ever steals food and drink, never clothes. My father never made it out of Peterhead; a friend of the taxi driver he murdered was sent up there and took full revenge by caving his head in with a dumbbell one day in the prison gym. Nobody saw a thing apart from one warder, and it takes two witnesses to convict.
Once my personal history was behind us we got down to business.
‘So, Clyde,’ he asked, when the time came, ‘why are you so keen to talk to me today, other than to give me back that card?’
I tried not to sound too eager, or too pleased with myself. ‘The image you sent to Amanda last night,’ I replied, ‘the body that was buried for you to find, we know who he was.’
He smiled. ‘I thought you might,’ he murmured. ‘What was he? Mossad?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, he was a paratrooper first, then Israeli secret service. Not any more, though. He was kicked out.’
‘That must be damn near a first for Mossad. What was he caught doing that was bad enough to get him the sack?’
I smiled at his sharpness. ‘Using a fake German passport on the assassination of a Hamas official. The German government kicked up such a fuss that he had to be cut loose. His name is Beram Cohen, but he’s used a few others.’
‘Let me guess,’ Skinner said. ‘He went freelance.’
‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘His name’s come up in connection with a couple of operations. It didn’t make the press, but last year around two dozen Somali pirates were taken out, in groups of two and three. It put quite a dent in their activities and made those waters a lot safer for a while. The operation was funded by the American State Department and Beram Cohen planned it. That’s what he did; he was a facilitator. He used mercenaries, mainly Russians, but a couple of South Africans as well, all of then skilled, all ex-regulars, like him.’
‘The sort of people who wouldn’t leave a fallen comrade behind?’
‘Exactly,’ I agreed. ‘Like the two men you told the DD about, his companions in the restaurant.’
‘The guys he ate with just before he died.’
‘Yes. The prints you sent to us meant nothing, but I’m interested in what the restaurant owner said about them speaking in a language he couldn’t identify. My guess is that if it had been a European language, Russian for example, he’d have been able to take a guess at that.’
‘In Glasgow he might have assumed it was Polish.’
‘True. The fact that he hadn’t a clue makes me wonder if it those men might have been the South Africans he used on the Somali job.’
‘Do you have names for them?’ Skinner asked.
‘Francois Smit and Gerry Botha,’ I told him. ‘Smit’s a sniper, Botha just a general killer. They’re old school. They go back to the apartheid days, but there are no files on them, because they made sure that they were destroyed before the regime changed. We only know about them because the Americans wanted a list of the people Cohen was using on the op, to make sure they were all acceptable, and so that anyone who talked could be silenced.’
‘I see,’ the chief constable murmured. ‘So what we have here is a planner and two hit men. Suddenly, out of the blue, Cohen, the planner, ups and dies from entirely natural causes. Smit and Botha have a problem. They could have stripped the body and chucked it in your namesake river, but their military ethics wouldn’t let them do that.’
‘Yes,’ I chipped in, ‘or they could have taken him out on to the Fenwick moors, buried him there and sent us rough co-ordinates, but I guess they didn’t know the terrain.’
‘So they brought him through to Edinburgh, dug a shallow grave in a city location and told us where to find him. But why Edinburgh?’
‘So that you’d be searching for them through here,’ I suggested, ‘while all the time they were back in Glasgow.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but not necessarily.’ His eyes were gleaming. There was something going on behind them. ‘But doing what in Glasgow, Clyde? That’s the question. You’ve got. . or you had. . the planner, you’ve got a sniper, and you’ve got his minder. Who’s the target?’
I frowned. ‘We don’t know for sure,’ I confessed, ‘but there is one possibility, and that’s why the DD has hit the red button. There is a man called Theo Fabrizzi. .’
‘A classical pianist,’ Skinner said. ‘I know. He’s playing in Glasgow tonight at a charity event in the Royal Concert Hall.’
‘You know about that?’
‘I was invited; turned it down. My wife’s going though. Never pass up a photo op, that’s her motto.’ I couldn’t miss the bitterness in his voice, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. ‘What’s with Fabrizzi?’ he asked. ‘An Italian musician? Is he Mafia?’
‘He isn’t Italian. Despite the name, he’s Lebanese, and covertly he is a significant financial backer of Hezbollah. He’s a sworn enemy of Israel. If they still had a death list, which they say they don’t, you’d be liable to find his name on there somewhere.’
‘Hold on,’ the chief interrupted. ‘You told me that Beram Cohen was kicked out of Mossad.’
‘I said they cut him loose, that’s all. As a freelance, it might actually have been more convenient for the government in Tel Aviv. Fact is, with him involved, it makes Fabrizzi the likely target. With Smit here, the hit could be anywhere. All he needs is a vantage point, and the right weapon. The record distance for a kill shot in Afghanistan is almost two and a half kilometres; Smit’s in that class. ’
He leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head, fingers intertwined, and he yawned. ‘Sorry, Clyde,’ he chuckled. ‘Late night, early morning, and I’ve been warned off stimulants. If the threat is a sniper,’ he continued, ‘what’s the problem? Take the target out of the firing line.’
‘This is where it gets difficult, sir,’ I said. ‘We can’t, because he won’t let us. I saw him early this morning and suggested that he pulls out of tonight’s concert and lets us get him out of the country. He told me no way, that he’d rather be a martyr than back down to an Israeli threat. But there’s this too; the Home Secretary’s been briefed. She’s ordered that these people, regardless of who might have commissioned them, are to be treated as terrorists. They are to be caught, not frightened off, so that, if the Israelis have commissioned this we can hand them their heads on a plate. Her words, according to the DD.’
He leaned forward again, took two more drinks from his small office fridge, and gave me my second Irn Bru of the day. ‘You have told Strathclyde, I assume, regardless of what Amanda thinks of their security.’
‘No, sir,’ I told him.
‘But you must!’
‘We’ve been ordered not to, by the Home Secretary herself. This is a secret operation, she says, and that means no police, apart from you, since you brought us Beram Cohen in the first place. Terrorism isn’t a devolved