O’Hagan slouched sideways in the back seat, looking out of the rear window of the taxi to check for any following vehicles. ‘I think we’re clean,’ he said, after a few minutes.
‘I ran checks before I got to the Square. And even if we are being followed, you’re just two American tourists out seeing the sights. This afternoon we’re going to the Qal’at Al-Bahrain, the Bahrain Fort.’
‘And are we?’ Petrucci asked.
‘No, but we’re certainly heading that way.’
After passing the Pearl Monument, the King Faisal Highway turns south, and Ahmed continued along it, swinging right at the next junction on to the west-bound highway that runs to Al-Budayyi, over on the west coast of the island.
Just short of Jidd Hafa, he swung the taxi off the highway and down an unmarked and almost invisible unmade road towards a cluster of whitewashed buildings. Although he slowed down, the car bounced and rattled, suspension creaking, as it lurched along the track, a plume of dust billowing out behind it.
He stopped the car outside a tiny stone building, its façade pierced by just two small and glass-less windows and a single door. Beside it was a ramshackle wooden framework roofed with sheets of corrugated iron acting as a rudimentary sunshade, and under that was a ten-year-old American Chevrolet. The car wasn’t covered in dust, which O’Hagan assumed meant it had arrived there only recently.
The mid-afternoon heat was brutal after the air-conditioned cool of the taxi, a blanket of air so hot it almost hurt to breathe. Ahmed walked across to the door, rapped twice and stepped back.
The man inside had obviously heard them arrive, for the door opened almost immediately, and a shrivelled, burnt-brown face peered out at them. Ahmed dispensed with the customary Arab greetings and stepped inside.
If it had seemed hot outside, the interior of the house was almost literally baking, despite the gentle breeze blowing through the four small windows, the two at the front mirrored by a pair in the rear wall. The occupant gestured to cushions piled on the floor — they were the only things resembling furniture in the room — then walked across to a small refrigerator standing in one corner.
Petrucci puzzled at that for an instant, noticing that there were no electric lights or sockets visible, then he identified the faint hum of a generator running somewhere nearby. The man returned with four ice-cold Cokes — they’d been hoping for beer, but that would have been too much to expect. The Americans opened their cans and drank.
The room was small and white-painted, and somehow conveyed an indefinable impression of transience, as if the current occupant had arrived there for the first time that morning — which, O’Hagan reflected, he quite possibly had — scattering the cushions on the floor and starting up the generator to power the fridge. He’d probably brought a couple of six-packs of Coke with him as well.
Ahmed sat down gracefully on a cushion, took a long swallow of his soft drink, then put down the can and looked across at the Americans. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is Omar, and he’s obtained the equipment you need.’
‘The Chevrolet outside?’ O’Hagan asked.
‘Yes. Everything’s already inside it.’
The two Americans remained seated. They knew Arabs, and they knew it would be some time before they would get to drive the car away. First, they would have to talk about the Chevrolet itself, and what was locked inside it, and then the route they were going to take back to Manama, and how difficult it had been to obtain all the equipment, and where they were going to park the car, and how they would set the timer, and anything else that either Ahmed or Omar decided was relevant. Only then would they be able to hand over the money — the bulky bundle of American dollars locked in Petrucci’s briefcase — and finally get the hell out of there.
It was going to be a long, hot afternoon.
It was one of those stupid, mundane annoyances that drivers face daily in every country in the world. The truck driver should have had somebody standing in the road behind his vehicle, stopping the oncoming traffic as he backed out. But he hadn’t bothered because the road had seemed fairly quiet. All he’d done was wait until everything looked clear, then switch on his hazard warning lights, and begun to ease out slowly.
Three southbound cars approaching the entrance to the industrial area braked in time, but the driver of the fourth vehicle apparently didn’t notice the looming obstruction until too late. He swerved out of his lane, moving around the rapidly slowing third car directly in front of him.
As he drove back towards Zarechnyy, Yuri Borisov was unaware of anything untoward until the overtaking vehicle suddenly lurched across the road in front of him. In an instant it filled his windscreen, and less than a second later slammed almost head-on into his car.
It wasn’t the first time the Russian administrator had been involved in an accident. His elderly saloon car bore permanent and rusting testimony to a number of minor collisions, and the dents and scars resulting from bouts of acoustic parking.
But this collision was far from minor. The oncoming vehicle was braking hard, but Borisov — who for perhaps the first time in his driving career was entirely blameless — was travelling at around thirty miles per hour, giving a combined impact speed of almost fifty.
The sound of the crash was sudden and shocking, the bang echoing loudly off the walls of adjacent buildings. Both cars lifted and spun in opposite directions, their momentum dissipating rapidly as wings and bonnets crumpled under the impact. Tyres screamed as the cars lurched sideways, black rubber streaking the worn tarmac surface of the road, while a glittering cascade of safety glass tumbled from shattered door windows.
Both drivers were bounced violently from side to side as their cars gyrated and lurched. Borisov was arguably the lucky one because he was wearing his seat belt. The other driver wasn’t, and at the first impact was thrown forward, crashing through the windscreen to end up lying unconscious, bleeding profusely from deep cuts in his head and neck, across what was left of his car’s bonnet.
Borisov habitually drove with both hands holding the steering-wheel — which was good — but with his thumbs hooked around the wheel’s rim — which was bad. When the two cars hit, the steering wheel spun hard to the left, instantly dislocating both his thumbs. The seat belt stopped his body hitting the wheel, but he smashed into the driver’s door with such force that his left arm broke just above the elbow, and his head crashed through the side window, giving him a mild concussion. When the noise and the motion finally stopped he was both alive and conscious, but at that moment it’s doubtful if he would have agreed that he’d been ‘lucky’.
A police car, which had been less than two miles away when the accident happened, arrived on the scene within minutes, a fire appliance and ambulance arriving shortly afterwards. The unconscious driver was lifted as gently as possible from the remains of his car and driven straight to hospital. Borisov’s vehicle needed more work because the doors had jammed, and there was less urgency because the Russian was visibly conscious and responsive.
In fact, as the police report stated later, he was highly responsive, trying as best he could with his mangled and useless hands to extract something from his jacket pocket. When the police officers realized that what he was trying to pull out was a pistol, their attitude changed immediately, and Borisov became less of a victim than a suspect. They promptly disarmed him and searched him thoroughly.
The Swiss bank passbook immediately attracted and held their attention. Once Borisov’s arm was set and his injured hands treated at the hospital, he was given a pain-killing injection and taken straight to the police station in Kondal for questioning about the weapon and the huge quantity of American dollars lodged in a Swiss bank account in his name.