Dead Centre (12 page)

I felt like throwing up now.

I grabbed my passport and threw a few things into a day sack. It felt good to be back in that routine, getting on with a job – even though it wasn’t a job until I knew they were alive.

I looked up Frank Timis online. Nothing. I even tried Wikipedia and Wikileaks. I couldn’t find a thing.

I sat on the sofa and looked out over the river and the downtown lights. Steam billowed out of every building. I speed-dialled Anna. I usually called her every other day after the three p.m. broadcast. She always wanted to know what footage they’d used, and if there was anything she’d done wrong.

There seldom was. She was an old hand at reporting foreign conflicts. A lot of journos turned up in war zones without a clue. A picture of one unwittingly wearing Gaddafi green, for instance, could be valuable propaganda. It could also get you killed.

The only thing I’d commented on so far this trip was the state of her hair. Apart from that, she looked perfect. I couldn’t wait to see her again. It was turning ugly out there. She’d been in Tunisia and Egypt earlier in the 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

Eastcheap, London

Friday, 18 March

07.20 hrs

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 work. The warlords, the clan leaders, bunged them in a couple of boats and sent them out to mug whatever they found coming from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden. As one of the choke-points for world shipping, it offered easy pickings.

Piracy grew into an industry. As Rudy had discovered, gangs now roved across thousands of square miles, as far east as the Seychelles, south to Tanzania, and north to the Arabian Sea and Oman. The turf was divided up. The waters of the Gulf of Aden might as well be the streets of Mogadishu.

A typical cell of a dozen or so men goes out into the open sea in two or three skiffs, small, cockroach-infested wood or fibreglass fishing boats, for three or four weeks at a time, taking only a couple of outboards. All other available space is filled with grappling irons, ladders, knives, assault rifles, RPGs and
khat
leaves, the local narcotic.

There’s nothing to cook with. They catch fish, which they eat raw. The plan is always to find and take over a larger vessel, then live on it and use it as a mother-ship. Which was what must have happened with the skiffs that captured the
Maria Feodorovna
. They’d have binned the fishing boat and would now be using the yacht as a control base, having taken the hostages back to shore because they were European and would be worth a few bob.

Why hadn’t they taken the crew as well? They were white, but maybe they were seen as fellow workers of the sea. Somali pirates had some rules. They didn’t attack all shipping. They left the Indian vessels that brought expensive goodies and food from the east, mainly because the clan warlords liked to buy the stuff with the proceeds of their crimes. If the supply dried up, the warlords wouldn’t be best pleased.

But the fact was, these pirates attacked anything of value that floated: oil tankers, freighters, cruise ships, private yachts, they’d have a go at anything. I found it quite funny that a dozen Somali fishermen could fuck global shipping magnates about, holding them, their crews and world trade hostage. I’d have laughed into my brew if it hadn’t been for Tracy and the boy.

Back on dry land, Somalia was still in shit state. The Americans had tried to intervene in 1993 when the warlords were hijacking food aid. They’d got hammered. Nobody had tried since. The clans were now at war with each other, and Islamic militants had gatecrashed the party for a slice of the action. There was no functioning government, or even a judicial system, just chaos and disorder. Small wonder a job as a pirate seemed such a fantastic opportunity to the average Somali. I’d have been having a go at it if I was up Shit Creek.

The economic impact of piracy was actually quite small as things stood, compared with the volume of international trade. Less than one per cent of the vessels in the Gulf of Aden had been approached by pirates, let alone attacked, and most of those were only shipping garden gnomes from China. But the statistics didn’t tell the full horror of what awaited victims like Tracy and Stefan.

And in the bigger picture, the nightmare scenario for Britain was that if one of the two liquid-gas ships we needed to dock here every day got lifted, we’d lose a major part of the energy supply that kept our power stations humming. If baby incubators couldn’t function and the lights went out, the government might find that uprisings weren’t confined to the Middle East.

Even the front-line pirates got fucked over. They received less than 30 per cent of the take. The bulk of the proceeds had to be handed over to the clan warlords, and those who had to be paid for the hostages’ food and board. There were also investors. Some were Somalis. Buying shares in piracy was better than going to sea. Easier money and conditions. But some were from international criminal syndicates based in the Gulf States, with links into Europe and London.

In fact, the whole thing was a fuck-up, with everyone taking a cut some way or another. There were a lot of noses in the piracy trough.

3

I’D JUST STARTED on my third Danish when Julian arrived, immaculate as ever. Today he was in a black Crombie coat over a white shirt and tie. I pointed down at the extra mug to tell him that he didn’t have to go and line up, and the Danishes that were left were his. Not that he was going to eat any. They were far too unhealthy.

Jules had done really well for himself since resigning from MI5 last year. He’d gone through his moral car-wash, resigned, and come out the other side without turning his back on the good guys. He was now in the K&R business, negotiating ransoms for insurance syndicates, and trying to make sure that no one got kidnapped in the first place.

I stood up and received a soft palm and a warm smile.

‘Nick …’ He still sounded guarded. ‘How are you?’

‘Not bad, mate. Not bad.’

He took off his coat to reveal a black suit and double-cuffed shirt with simple silver stud cufflinks. He sorted his Crombie out over the back of his chair, making sure it wasn’t dangling in the crumbs on the floor.

‘What’s been happening, Nick?’

The frothing machines hissed behind us as people ordered their double skinny this, that and the other.

‘Same old, same old. But I might be doing a K&R job. I need you to see if they’ve been pinged or not.’

‘How many?’

‘Only three.’

I explained the who, what and where.

‘So the attack was five days ago?’

‘I don’t even know if they’re still alive.’

He fished into a big pocket that looked like it had been specially sewn into his coat, pulled out an iPad and sparked it up.

‘How are things in the K&R world?’

His fingers played about on the screen. ‘Business is good. I’ve stopped working for a percentage of the premium saved. I can normally get them out in about three months, so it’s better just to take a set three grand a day.’

‘In that case, you can pay for these.’ I offered him the plate of Danishes but he shook his head. I dunked one in my coffee.

‘Still busy in South America, Central America, Mexico. Africa is still good, and of course Somalia’s top trumps.’ He finished tapping away. ‘Not a thing, Nick. They don’t show up anywhere.’ He looked up. ‘Do you know who’s holding them? If they’re with a clan? Has anyone been approached about a deal?’