Grady looked like shit but it hadn’t affected his skills.
‘What the fuck,’ grunted Kevin. A hand slid sluggishly from the bunk as he opened his eyes and then rolled noisily onto his side.
I didn’t reply. I was focussing on the finger now resting on the trigger of the Glock that was pointing at my face. The hand that held it was steady, calm. No fear or sign of adrenalin, a man in control.
I’d woken first and, as the other two slept, I’d nipped out into the adjacent woodland to answer a call of nature that had been nagging at me since I had first started to stir. I scraped a shallow pit, did what I needed to do and then covered it over with the pine needles that littered the ground. I wasn’t too thorough and, as I fastened my trousers I thought back to times when operational necessity had meant that even using a scrape in the dirt was banned in case it might reveal your presence to a potential enemy. Taking a dump in a plastic bag, learning how to mask the scent of Western-European urine, all were things you needed to learn to do if you were to survive. But those were days long since passed. I now preferred my creature comforts.
Grady had been awake and was at the door to the bothy as I returned. He held a black bin liner in his hand and seemed to be in the process of clearing away the empty cans of beer.
‘You going to get back to London?’ he’d asked, quietly, as I followed him inside.
I’d then checked my watch. A quarter to eight. We’d slept late. ‘I think so,’ I’d replied. ‘Soon as Kevin wakes up I’ll put on a brew and then be away.’
It was as Grady had reached for the two whisky bottles that things suddenly went awry. I wasn’t really paying attention as the first one went into the bag, but as he picked up the second I saw the label, and I recognised it. Penderyn, the rare Welsh make I’d only ever seen drunk by two men. One, a fellow detective. The other, a recently deceased weapons inspector. And just two days earlier, I’d seen three men, who I’d deduced were from the Security Services, searching the home of that weapons inspector and I’d seen one of those men take a bottle of that same rare whisky from the house.
In that instant I thought back to where I had lain hidden in the gorse, watching the men searching Armstrong’s cottage, not close enough to see their faces or hear them speak, but near enough to recognise the practised skill with which they worked and the athletic way they moved on their feet.
And in that same moment in time, Grady must have seen the change in my demeanour and realised he was rumbled. And then he moved very, very fast.
‘My thoughts exactly, Kev,’ I said, focussing on Grady’s trigger finger. ‘I think our friend here isn’t quite who we thought.’
‘Keep still, both of you,’ Grady barked. ‘Finlay, get on all fours, you know the drill. Any funny business and I’ll put a round in your foot.’
‘I need a piss,’ said Kevin, from his bunk.
‘Hold onto it.’
I did as ordered, sensing that I needed to discover exactly what was going on before thinking how we were going to get out of it. Old lessons came back to me on how to handle being captured. Grady was as professional as it was possible to be, so we weren’t likely to be shot by accident or out of temper. But he might be prepared to wound us if that was needed to maintain control. And he hadn’t killed us, which meant he had a reason for keeping us alive. A fact that, at least in the short term, could work in our favour.
Kevin eased himself from the cot and onto the floor of the bothy. I looked up to where Grady had stepped back towards the doorway. He was pulling a phone from his pocket.
I looked across towards my friend. Two of us, both on the floor, both suffering the effects of a night on the grog. There was no chance of jumping our captor, not yet.
‘Where are you?’ Grady said into the phone. A voice responded. ‘OK … as quick as you can. Things haven’t quite gone to plan but I’ve got them both covered.’
…Them both covered. Someone at the other end of that call knew that Kevin and I were both here and were now secured. Someone who didn’t need to be told who we were and who was now on his or her way to see us.
‘Who was that on the phone, Chris?’ I asked.
‘Shut the fuck up. Now, both of you – crawl out front onto the grass.’
Kevin made hard work of it. Several times he lay flat on his face. I wondered if he was genuinely ill or trying to get Grady close enough to give us a chance. If so, it was a wasted effort. We were dealing with someone who’d been taught the same tricks as us.
It didn’t take long before we were where Grady wanted us, both on the grass, on all fours and facing up the track towards the cars.
‘Now, we wait,’ he said.
‘I need to take a leak,’ Kevin repeated, this time with some urgency.
‘I’m not stopping you,’ came the reply.
Kevin turned his face toward me. ‘Sorry, boss.’ With that, he unzipped his fly and began to empty his bladder where he was. A smell of strong, early-morning urine hit my nostrils, and then he farted. And it was no ordinary fart. This one roared into the world with a force I suspected was helped by some considerable internal effort. He laughed. And that was the trick to get me to look across at him. As I turned, in mind to somehow register my frustration at his failure to recognise our predicament, I glanced to his groin, and I saw the grip of a 9mm pistol that was hidden down the front of his trousers. And I knew what I had to do. One chance, and don’t waste it.
As our eyes met, I nodded. Then, dropping my right arm, I rolled fast to my right and away from him and kept rolling. Keep moving, I thought. Don’t think, just move.
Behind me I knew Kevin would have stayed still, allowing Grady to be distracted by and focussed on me. Grady wouldn’t want to kill us, so he’d be looking to secure a safe shot that disabled. We had one chance.
A shot discharged. Just one, and behind me I heard a thud as the round hit the earth.
‘Forget it, Taff. You wankers must think I was born yesterday.’
Grady had been one step ahead of us. Far from being in the same position we thought, covering us from in front of the bothy, he had moved. Kevin now lay on his back, a Browning pointed at where I would have also expected our captor to be standing. I couldn’t see him, and I guessed neither could Kevin. And it’s pretty hard to shoot at what you can’t see.
‘Throw it towards the hut or the next one takes your leg.’
Our chance was gone. And in more ways than one, for I now heard the sound of an approaching car. As Kevin threw the weapon, Grady appeared from behind a log pile. I lay on my back, craning my neck to see who was about to join us. I didn’t have to wait long. A black Range Rover pulled up. Inside, I thought I could see four occupants.
As the driver’s door opened and a figure appeared, I rolled onto my chest to get a better look. What I saw horrified me, and at the same time answered the question as to why Grady had lured me to this spot.
Then, if it were possible to make a bad situation worse, the front-seat passenger also came into view.
‘What the fuck,’ I heard Kevin utter the same words he had spoken on wakening to the sight of Grady’s pistol aimed at my head.
In front of us stood Howard Green, and beside him someone I had never in my wildest dreams expected to ever see again.
And some words came back to me; words I had heard a government Minister say not so very long ago – words of warning: ‘He asked me to arrange the deaths of two people, Mr Finlay.’
And I knew – knew the warning wasn’t history, as Toni had assured me. It was current, and the means of its delivery was now staring silently at me.
Petre Gavrić.