Tarantula (9 page)

He looked up at Antonietta and raised a finger to his lips.

She stared back at him in terror.

Milton holstered the pistol, walked quickly to the bike and swung his leg over it. The woman from the post office backed away from him. He saw other pedestrians, some pushed against the wall as if praying to be absorbed by the bricks, others turning tail and fleeing. He gunned the engine, released the brakes and bounded forwards and away into the traffic.

THE LADY VICTORINE was a large thirty-four metre catamaran. It had four decks and offered six well appointed staterooms, a separate dining room and lounge with a cocktail bar. It had cost Ernesto Gorgi Di Mauro twenty million Euros, but it had been worth every cent.

Ernesto was on deck, dressed in a pristine Egyptian cotton robe, staring at the shore with an abstracted expression on his face. He was troubled. Antonietta had just called to report what had happened in Naples that morning. The Englishman, Smith, had executed Tarantula just after he had eliminated Curtis and Leon Patterson and the men that they had brought with them from England. He had been waiting for him to arrive, had watched him go about his work, shot him and then disappeared on a motorbike.

There was plenty that he did not understand about what had happened, and Ernesto had not risen to his position in the organisation by being ignorant about such things.

How had Smith known that the hit was going to take place when it did?

And why had he done what he had done?

He could speculate about that second question. Revenge. Smith must have discovered that Tarantula had killed his colleague and he was evening out the scores. He hoped that he was right. Vengeance was a motive with which he was intimately familiar and one that he could live with, especially if the money was right.

But
how
had he known about Tarantula?

Only a handful of people knew who he was.

And what if he was wrong?

What if it wasn’t just revenge?

What if it was something else?

He felt uneasy.

His cellphone was on the table next to him, next to a croissant and a glass of orange juice. He reached down and took a bite from the pastry, chewing it absent mindedly as he looked over to the shore, the sleeve of rock fringed by verdant trees and scrub. The road wound its way along the cliff face and Ernesto watched as a lorry loaded with lemons negotiated it, the bright yellow of its freight a vivid splash against the grey of the rock.

He didn’t know what to do. He needed to see Smith. He needed answers.

He picked up his cellphone. He scrolled through his contacts, wondering who best to call.

It was so peaceful and calm on the ocean that morning that the explosion, when it came, was so unexpected that it took him a moment to realise what it was. There was a loud, rolling boom, the deck shook for a moment and then a plume of inky black smoke unfurled into the perfect blue sky. Ernesto reached for the rail to steady himself as the yacht lurched again, rolling from port to starboard as if buffeted by a sudden gale.

There was a second explosion, bigger than the first, and the deck rolled again.

He fell to his knees.

He looked up to see flames rising from the stern, a conflagration that took hold with frightening speed as he watched. The yellows and oranges crept up to the wheelhouse, releasing a great cloud of smoke. The fire roared as it devoured the wooden deck, a hungry thunder from which he heard another sound: the chattering of an automatic weapon.

He scrambled to his feet.

Another explosion and then another.

Smaller and more contained.

Grenades?

His pistol was in the stateroom, in its holster, slung over the back of a chair.

He felt naked in his robe.

He had to get off the boat.

He crept forwards, the soles of his feet sweating in his slippers, one step and then another as he edged towards the motorboat that was tethered to the railings on the port side of the yacht.

One of his men, a sturdy killer called Paolo, staggered into view, hauling himself towards him, both hands on the railing. Two big blooms of blood were on his white shirt, slowly expanding, meeting in the middle. He groaned with the effort, slowed and then tripped, falling face down onto the boards. He pushed onwards, slithering on his belly and leaving a smear of blood behind him.

Whatever it was that was happening at the back of the boat, Paolo was desperate to get away from it.

Ernesto reached the ladder that dropped down to the launch.

Another booming detonation, the biggest so far, and the deck tipped crazily.

He was thrown against the railing and then fell backwards onto his ample behind.

The flames reached up twenty feet now, a furnace of heat that shimmered the air, bubbled the paint and blackened the deck. Ernesto looked into the maelstrom as a silhouetted figure emerged from the middle of it. It was a man, dressed all in back. He was wearing a wetsuit, a sheen of water on the neoprene as it evaporated in the heat. The man had an MP5 held in both hands, the stock pressed into his shoulder as he stalked forwards. He had a spare magazine held between his left hand and the forestock. It was obvious, abundantly so, that the man was very familiar with the weapon.

It was obvious that the man was a killer.

One of Ernesto’s men burst out from below decks and the silhouette turned, lightning quick, and fired a rapid three shots into his guts, blasting him back inside again.

Ernesto pushed backwards. One of his slippers fell off his foot. He slipped and scrambled on the smooth deck.

The man followed, turning the MP5 and aiming down at him.

The smoke and flames roiled around him.

“No,” Ernesto pleaded. “Stop.”

Ernesto saw that it was Smith.

He stalked him, ejecting the dry magazine and slamming in the fresh one.

Ernesto crabbed away from him until his back ran up against the rails at the prow of the yacht. He reached up, pulled himself to his feet, and raised his hands, fingers extended, palms out, in entreaty.

“Please, signor,” he begged.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

“What do you want? Money? I have money. Inside. Take it all.”

Smith aimed the MP5.

“Please!”

Smith fired, just once. The bullet found Ernesto in the forehead, the impact jerking his head and shoulders backwards and overbalancing him. The lifeless body pivoted across the rail, tumbled overboard and plummeted to the crystal waters below.

MILTON RECLINED the chair as the Fasten Seatbelts light flicked off and the climb out of Naples levelled off. He looked out of the window and down at the dusky coastline below. They were twenty thousand feet up. The beaches that stretched away from the city were just narrow, flaxen ribbons against the deep blue of the ocean and the dark green of the interior. The city looked like a model in miniature, the tiny specks of the cars and lorries passing into and out of its curtilage, yachts and motorboats leaving scuds of white foam in their wake. Milton saw a big freighter slide with elaborate care into the harbour, the brown tinge from the pollution visible even from this height. Tugs nudged it towards its jetty and the big cranes hovered, ready to unload its cargo. What was it carrying, Milton wondered? How much of its freight would end up on the black market? How much of it was owned by the Camorra?

He knew that Ernesto would already have been replaced. His line of work bore unavoidable risks and demanded a succession plan. Would it have been a smooth and seamless transition? Would there have been a conflict, more bloodshed?

It didn’t matter. It wasn’t Milton’s concern. He had accounted for his target and met the goals of his assignment. He had done everything that Control had asked him to do.

Milton straightened his legs. The steward had unlatched the drinks trolley from the bulkhead and was wheeling it towards him.

Milton looked at his watch: seven in the evening.

“Sir?”

“Gin and tonic, please.”

“Single or double?”

Milton held up two fingers.

He had already enjoyed three doubles in the airport. Losing himself in a bottle was his preferred way to decompress. He needed the alcohol to help him to unwind, to melt the tension that coalesced in his shoulders and metastasised in his gut.

Milton put the glass to his lips, closed his eyes and took a mouthful.

He thought about the men he had killed. Four of them. Tarantula. Ernesto and the men he had found on the yacht. He knew that they deserved it, that they had as much as invited his attentions. Four men, each of them eliminated with studied dispassion.

It was more blood. His ledger was already dripping with it. The pages were drenched.

He thought of the tattoo on his back. It had been done in Guatemala. He only remembered fragments of that night: the woozy heat, the humidity, palm trees, dive bars and strip joints. He remembered the squalid tattoo parlour he had found. He had been drunk, out of his mind on Quetzalteca Especial and mescaline. He had slept through most of it.

He had tried to fool himself when he awoke the next day. He saw the tattoo in the bathroom mirror, remembered the night before, and pretended that it was of Michael, the Angel of Mercy.

Who was he kidding?

The tattoo was of Samael.

The Angel of Death.

He had been in Guatemala to put a bullet into the head of a businessman who had refused to cancel an oil exploration contract he was negotiating. He had received some very firm anonymous advice that he should withdraw. He had been told that the business was against British interests and that it wouldn’t be allowed to continue.

He had ignored it the advice.

Control passed Milton his file.

The man had been Milton’s fiftieth victim.

Milton felt the dry blast of recycled air on his face. He kept his eyes closed, put the glass to his lips again, and drank.

The flight would take three hours.

Milton was going to get good and drunk.

THE ROAD THROUGH THE FOREST was tranquil, the gentle quiet embroidered by the gurgling of a mountain rill and the chirruping of the birds in the canopy of trees overhead. The route forestière de la Combe d’Ire was pot-holed and narrow, often passable by just one car at a time. Evergreen pine forests clustered tightly on either side, pressing a damp gloom onto the road that was dispelled by warm sunlight wherever the trees had been chopped back. The misty slopes of the massif of the Montagne de Charbon stretched above the treeline, ribs of rock and stone running down through the vegetation. The road followed a careful route up the flank of the mountain, turning sharply to the left and right and sometimes switching back on itself as it traced the safest path upwards. The road crossed and recrossed the stream, and the humpback bridge here was constructed from ancient red bricks, held together as much by the damp lichen that clung to it as by its disintegrating putty. The bridge was next to a small enclosure signed as a car park, although that was putting it at its highest; it was little more than a lay-by hewn from the hillside, a clearing barely large enough to fit four cars side by side. Forestry reserve notices warned of “wild animals” and “hunters.”

It was a quiet and isolated spot, the outside world excluded almost as if by the closing of a door.

Milton had parked his Renault there, nudged against the shoulder of the mountain. It was a nondescript hire car; he had chosen it because it was unremarkable. He had reversed into the space, leaving the engine running as he stepped out and made his way around to the boot. He unlocked and opened it and looked down at the bundle nestled in the car’s small storage space. He unfolded the edges of the blanket to uncover the assault rifle that had been left at the dead drop the previous night. It was an HK53 carbine with integrated suppressor, the rifle that the SAS often used when stealth was as important as stopping power. Milton lifted the rifle from the boot and pressed a fresh twenty-five-round magazine into the breech. He opened the collapsible stock and took aim, pointing down the middle of the road. Satisfied that the weapon was functioning correctly, he made his way towards the bridge and rested it in the undergrowth, out of sight.

Milton had scouted the area and knew it well. To the north, the road eventually led to Saint Jorioz, a medium-sized tourist resort that gathered along the shore of Lake Annecy. The descent to the south led to the small village of Chevaline. The village made its living from farming, but that was supplemented by renting the picturesque chalet farmhouses to the tourists who came for cycling and hiking. Milton had stayed in just such a chalet for the past three days. He had spent his time scouting the area, departing on his bike early in the morning and returning late at night. He had kept a low profile, staying in the chalet apart from those trips out.

Milton heard the engine of the BMW long before he saw it. He collected the rifle and slipped behind the trunk of an oak, hiding himself from the road but still able to observe it. The wine-coloured estate car was in second gear, struggling a little with the steep camber of the road. It emerged from the sharp right-hand turn, its lights illuminating a path through the gloom.

The car slowed and turned in towards the Renault. Milton held his breath, his pulse ticking up, and slipped his index finger through the trigger guard of the rifle. The driver parked alongside and switched off the engine. Milton could hear music from the interior of the car. The passenger-side door opened, and the muffled music became clearer: French pop, disposable and inoffensive. The passenger bent down and spoke sharply into the car, and the music was silenced. For a moment all Milton could hear was the crunch of the man’s shoes on the gravel, the rushing of the water and the wind in the leaves. He tightened his grip on the rifle and concentrated on keeping his breathing even and regular.