Fair Game (16 page)

Roobie opened his mouth to argue but his father put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘We have business to discuss and you are becoming annoying.’

Roobie twisted out of his father’s grasp and glared at him. He pointed a finger at his face but stopped when he heard the click of a gun being cocked. Crazy Boy was holding a revolver and pointing it at Roobie’s head. ‘Blood or no blood, I won’t take disrespect from anybody,’ he said.

Roobie immediately backed away from his father, putting up his hands and smiling his ingratiating smile. ‘Cousin, I apologise,’ he said. ‘I have been at sea for days, the sun, the waves, I am not myself.’ He took another step backwards, towards the door. ‘I meant no offence, cousin.’ He bowed his head.

Crazy Boy pulled the trigger and both Roobie and Blue flinched as the bullet thwacked into the wall just to the left of Roobie’s head. Roobie howled and fell to his knees. He dropped and put his forehead against the floor and began to pray. Crazy Boy walked forward, his ears ringing from the explosion, and prodded Roobie’s ribs with his foot. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘If I’d wanted to shoot you, you’d be dead.’

Roobie stayed where he was and continued to pray, rubbing his forehead against the concrete floor as he rocked back and forth.

Crazy Boy prodded him again, harder this time. ‘Get up or I will put a bullet in your head,’ he said.

Roobie pushed himself up into a kneeling position and looked fearfully at Crazy Boy. ‘I’m sorry, cousin, I didn’t mean to disrespect you,’ he said.

‘You forgot who I was,’ said Crazy Boy. He waved the gun around. ‘This is all mine. There are fifty people working for me here, every one of them owes their livelihood to me. I didn’t get here by letting people disrespect me, blood or not.’ He pointed the gun at Roobie’s face. ‘Do you understand, cousin?’

Roobie nodded.

Crazy Boy gestured at the door. ‘Then get the fuck out, I need to talk to your father.’ Roobie scrambled to his feet and rushed out of the door.

‘I apologise for my son,’ said Blue.

Crazy Boy waved away the man’s apology and put the gun back on the table. ‘I understand what he wants, it’s what I wanted ten years ago. But he has to prove himself first.’

‘I shall talk to him,’ said Blue. ‘What just happened will never happen again.’

Crazy Boy sat down and picked up the bag of khat leaves. ‘Now let me tell you what we’re going to do,’ he said. ‘I will need you to follow my instructions to the letter.’

Katie Cranham stretched out her legs and giggled as the bubbles from the Jacuzzi tingled against her thighs. Eric Clavier, the young Frenchman who was sharing the whirlpool bath with her, raised his glass of champagne. ‘Is this the life, hey?’ he asked.

‘It doesn’t get any better,’ she said. The first time that Katie had laid eyes on Eric she’d thought that he was good looking in a male-underwear sort of way, but after four days together on the yacht she’d happily have pushed him overboard if she thought she’d get away with it. ‘Are you sure you should be drinking that?’

‘Champagne?’ he said. ‘Nectar of the gods.’

‘It’s the owner’s champagne,’ she said.

‘And this is his Jacuzzi,’ he said. ‘What’s the difference?’

Katie didn’t answer. She’d already had one argument with the man since leaving Dubai and it was a long way to Sydney, Australia. She’d only been crewing for six months but one of the many things she’d learned was that boats were no place for animosity, even a yacht as big as the
Natalya
. She was a 185-foot three-masted schooner, and Katie had been told that she was worth more than twenty million dollars. It seemed a fair price for a vessel that was more luxurious than any hotel she had ever stayed in.

‘You must drink a lot of champagne, surely,’ said the Frenchman. ‘The prime minister is your father, right? You must be as rich as God.’

‘Who told you that?’ said Katie.

Clavier shrugged. ‘Someone.’

‘Well, it’s bollocks,’ she said. ‘He’s my godfather, not my father. He went to school with my dad, that’s all. They’re friends.’

A figure in white appeared at the end of the Jacuzzi and Katie shaded her hand and squinted up at him. It was the captain, an Australian by the name of Graham Hooper. He was in his late twenties, and when there were no clients on board he was happy enough to be called Hoop. ‘Can you take a spell on the bridge in an hour?’ he asked Katie.

‘No problem, Hoop.’

The captain flashed her a thumbs-up. ‘It’ll give me the chance to go over the charts with you. Eric, I’ll need you on watch at six tomorrow morning.’

Eric saluted him lazily. ‘Aye, aye, Captain.’

Hoop pointed at the bottle of champagne in the ice bucket behind Clavier. ‘Is that from the owner’s cabin?’

‘It was in the galley, in the fridge,’ said Clavier. ‘You said we could eat what we wanted from the galley.’

‘Eat, not drink,’ said Hoop. ‘That’s going to come out of your wages, so enjoy it.’

Eric threw him another mock salute. ‘No problem, Captain.’

Hoop shook his head as he walked away. ‘You shouldn’t take the piss, Eric,’ said Katie. ‘He’s a good guy. I’ve been on vessels where it really is “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir” and where we’d both be thrown off for taking a bath in the owner’s Jacuzzi.’

‘Hoop doesn’t care, it’s not his yacht. He’s a hired hand, the same as us.’ Clavier shifted in the water and farted. A large bubble burst to the surface. He laughed at the look of disgust on Katie’s face.

‘You’re a pig,’ said Katie, rushing out of the Jacuzzi and padding along the teak deck to a row of wooden sunloungers. A brunette in a yellow bikini was sprawled on a blue and white striped towel, her eyes hidden behind huge sunglasses that made her look like a basking insect. She was Joy Ashmore, a professional sailor and former model, and married to Andrew, another member of the crew.

‘Eric’s a pig, isn’t he?’ said Katie, as she dropped down on to the sunlounger next to Joy.

‘Have you only just found that out?’ Joy laughed, pushing her sunglasses up on top of her head. Her blue eyes sparkled with amusement.

‘He farted in the Jacuzzi.’

‘He probably had a pee, too,’ said Joy. She took a tube of sunscreen and began rubbing it on her shapely legs.

Katie stretched and sighed. ‘This is such a beautiful boat,’ she said. ‘I can imagine living on it all year round.’

‘We’re spoiled because the owner’s not on board,’ said Joy. ‘We get the run of the vessel and can really enjoy ourselves. It’s a different matter when we’re crewing for clients. Best behaviour all the time, catering to their every whim. I tell you, sometimes my face aches from all the smiling.’

Joy and her husband Andrew had been crewing full-time for almost ten years, and between them had accrued more than half a million miles at sea, most of them under sail. They were true nomads, rarely working for the same client for more than six months, criss-crossing the world as and when the urge took them. It wasn’t the life that Katie wanted for herself. She enjoyed sailing and she enjoyed travelling, but crewing was just something to do for a year before she rejoined the real world. And the real world meant a mews house in Mayfair and a job in the City and maybe, down the line, a political career. That was all ahead of her, though, and just then she was perfectly happy kicking back on a twenty-million-dollar yacht.

‘You know what I hate?’ asked Joy.

‘Fat men in high heels?’

Joy laughed. ‘Close,’ she said. ‘I hate men with no taste who spend millions on beautiful boats like this just so they can sail them for a couple of weeks a year. It’s such a bloody waste. They don’t appreciate them, they don’t buy them to sail, they buy them to park in a marina somewhere so that everyone can look at them.’ She squirted sunscreen on to her hand and rubbed it into her neck and shoulders.

‘It is a shame,’ agreed Katie.

‘A damn shame,’ said Joy. ‘Boats like this are meant to be sailed. Their form and function are perfectly aligned when they’re under full sail. Like now.’ She handed the tube of sunscreen to Katie.

Katie looked up at the massive sails above them. In all there were eight hundred square metres of white canvas billowing out from the three masts, boosted by two lightweight fisherman sails adding a further two hundred and fifty square metres. ‘Why do you think he won’t sail it?’

‘Because he’s a multi-millionaire businessman, that’s why. And businessmen aren’t sailors. They think that yachts are like houses, they have them dotted around the world to show how rich and important they are.’ She raised her glass. ‘But then if it wasn’t for the likes of them, I wouldn’t have the life I have, so God bless ’em, every one.’ She nodded at the tube of sunscreen in Katie’s hand. ‘I gave you that to rub on my back,’ she said.

Katie laughed. ‘Sorry,’ she said. She squirted more on her hands as Joy sat up and turned around.

‘So how are you enjoying life on the ocean waves?’ asked Joy as Katie massaged the sunscreen over her back.

‘It’s OK,’ said Katie.

‘Just OK? Most kids your age would give their eye teeth to be on a yacht like this.’

‘Yeah, I know. Don’t get me wrong, it’s just that I tend to have more fun on dry land than I do at sea.’

Joy laughed. ‘I hear that,’ she said. ‘But then I’ve got my hubby on tap whenever I need a bit of TLC. You get to choose between Hoop and Eric.’

‘Oh God, no,’ said Katie. She pretended to make herself sick.

‘Hoop’s all right,’ said Joy.

‘He’s thirty-seven,’ said Katie. ‘Almost twice my age!’

‘Sometimes it can be fun to have an old hand on the tiller,’ said Joy. She grinned. ‘That’s a sailor’s saying. Like red sky at night.’

‘You’re terrible,’ said Katie. ‘But seriously, this long-distance stuff isn’t for me. I’m going to fly back to London as soon as we hit Sydney. A school friend can get me a chalet-maid job in Gstaad. Easy work and all the skiing I can handle.’

‘And maybe land yourself a rich husband?’

Katie shrieked. ‘You have to be joking!’ she said. ‘I’m not going to be doing the marriage-and-kids thing for years. I’m too busy having fun.’

As Crazy Boy came out of the front door, a camera clicked away in the attic of the house opposite. The clicking continued as he and Two Knives walked over to the car and climbed into the back. There were two men in the attic and they had been there for the best part of three days, eating only the food and water they had brought with them and urinating and defecating into Ziploc plastic bags which were sealed and neatly packed in a rucksack.

‘Wonder how much was in the case?’ asked the man who was taking the photographs. His name was Michael Franklin and before joining MI5 he had worked for an advertising agency. When the agency had run into financial problems and dispensed with his services he had applied for more than fifty jobs, and the only organisation which had asked him along for an interview was MI5. The interview had gone well, the two men and one woman who had grilled him had been interested more in his technical knowledge of photography than his portfolio, and a week later he had joined the Secret Service. It was a big change from photographing models or plates of food or electrical appliances, not least because he no longer worked in studios. Usually he was in an attic or in the back of a van and once in the steeple of a church overlooking a Turkish café where he had had to stay for more than a week. On that occasion Franklin didn’t know who he was photographing or why, which was more often than not the case with the Secret Service work, but the officer he was working with on the Crazy Boy case was chatty and more than happy to tell Franklin about the man he was following.

Franklin’s digital camera was linked to a MacBook laptop which his colleague was operating.

‘A million, could be more,’ said the man, studying the computer. ‘Depends on whether he was carrying fifty-pound notes or five-hundred-euros.’ His name was Robert Splaine, a twenty-year veteran of MI5.

‘And what happens to it?’ asked Franklin.

‘It stays in the house until someone else comes to get it.’

‘Like a bank?’

‘More like Western Union,’ said Splaine. ‘Al-Faiz will be giving that cash to someone in London totally unconnected to Crazy Boy. But someone in Somalia or maybe Yemen or Kenya will go in and pick up cash from another man and somewhere along the line the books will be balanced. Crazy Boy was in Nairobi a couple of days ago so it’ll be connected to that. Maybe funding a new wave of pirate attacks.’

‘How come he can just come and go like that? He’s a pirate warlord, right?’

‘He’s a British citizen now, with a British kid. That trumps anything else.’ He shook his head. ‘We’re in the wrong business. Do you ever think how long it would take you or me to save a million quid?’

Franklin laughed. ‘Two hundred years, maybe.’ He swung the long lens to the side so that he could capture the number plate of the Mercedes as it drove away, then turned to look at his colleague. ‘You don’t mean that, about being in the wrong business,’ he said. ‘You like being one of the good guys.’

‘Yeah? Well, you tell me why all the bad guys get to screw the best-looking girls and drive the best cars? Have you seen Crazy Boy’s house? It’s a bloody mansion. I couldn’t even get a mortgage to buy his garage.’ He screwed up his face as if he had a bitter taste in his mouth. ‘He’s got a Ferrari that’s worth more than my house.’

‘Now you’re sounding all bitter and twisted. The difference is that what he has is temporary. We’ll get him eventually and then he’ll lose everything and end up in a six-foot-by-ten-foot cell.’

‘Yeah, but here’s the thing,’ said Splaine as he looked at the images on the laptop. ‘If he does go down, the cell we’ll put him in will be a hundred times better than the shithole he came from.’

‘You ever been to Somalia?’ asked Franklin.

Splaine nodded. ‘Several times. It’s the shithole of all shitholes.’

‘I guess you can understand why they do what they do,’ said Franklin, detaching the long lens from the body of the camera. ‘You’d probably do anything to get out, if you were born in Somalia.’

‘No argument there,’ said Splaine. ‘And to be honest, if he stayed in Somalia I’d probably not give him another thought. But he’s come to my country, my city. That’s what pisses me off.’ He smiled. ‘But we’ll get him. We always do. Once MI5 gets you in their sights, it’s all over.’