“But I’d been drinking myself and the two of us got into an argument. It was so bloody stupid. The next thing I knew, I’d knocked him to the ground. Even then, there were a dozen ways I could have hit him. But I’d let my training get the better of me. He didn’t get up and suddenly the police were there and I realized what I’d done.” He paused. “I’d killed him.”
He fell silent. All around us, the insects continued their chatter. There wasn’t a breath of wind.
“I was dismissed from the army and thrown into jail,” he went on. “As it happened, I wasn’t locked up for very long. My old regiment pulled a few strings and I had a good lawyer. He managed to put in a claim of self-defence and I was let out on appeal. But after that I was finished. No one was going to employ me and even if they did, d’you think I wanted to spend the rest of my life as a security guard or behind a desk? I didn’t know what to do. And then Scorpia came along and offered me this. And I said yes.”
“Are you married?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been married three years and there’s a kid on the way. At least I’m going to have enough money to be able to look after him.” He paused. “If it is a boy. You see what I mean? My choice.”
The whisky bottle passed between us one last time. It was almost empty.
“Maybe it’s not too late for you to change your mind,” he said.
I was startled. “What do you mean?”
“I’m thinking about New York. I’m thinking about the last few weeks… and today. You seem like a nice kid to me, Cossack. Not one of Scorpia’s usual recruits at all. I wonder if you’ve really got it in you to be like me. Marat and Sam… they don’t give a damn. They’ve got no imagination. But you…?”
“I can do this,” I said.
“But do you really want to? I’m not trying to dissuade you. That’s the last thing I want to do. I just want you to be aware that once you start, there’s no going back. After the first kill – that’s it.”
He hesitated. We both did. I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“If I backed out now, Scorpia would kill me.”
“I rather doubt it. They’d be annoyed, of course. But I think you’re exaggerating your own importance. They’d very quickly forget you. Anyway, you’ve learnt enough to keep away from them. You could change your identity, your appearance, start somewhere new. The world is a big place – and there are all sorts of different things you could be doing in it.”
“Is that what you’re advising me?” I asked.
“I’m not advising you anything. I’m just laying out the options.”
I’m not sure what I would have said if the conversation had continued but just then we heard something; the croaking of a frog at the edge of the clearing. At least, that was what it would have sounded like to anyone approaching, but it wasn’t a frog that was native to the Amazon rainforest. One of the wires that Hunter had set down had just been tripped and what we were hearing was a recording, a warning. Hunter was on his feet instantly, crouching down, signalling to me with an outstretched hand. I had a gun. It had been supplied to me when we were in Iquitos – a Browning 9mm semi-automatic, popular with the Peruvian Army and unusual in that it held thirteen rounds of ammunition. It was fully loaded.
I heard another sound. The single crack of a branch breaking, about twenty metres away. A beam of light flickered between the trees, thrown by a powerful torch. There was no time to gather up our things and no point in wondering who they were, how they had followed us here. We had already planned what to do if this happened. We got up and began to move.
They came in from all sides. Six of the Commander’s men had taken it upon themselves to follow us into the rainforest. Why? Their employer was dead and there was going to be no reward for bringing in his killers. Perhaps they were genuinely angry. We had, after all, removed the source of their livelihood. I saw all of them as they arrived. The moon was so bright that they barely had any need of their torches. They were high on drugs, dirty and dishevelled with hollow faces, bright eyes and straggly beards.
Two of them had cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They were wearing bits and pieces of military uniform with machine guns slung over their shoulders. One of them had a dog, a pit bull terrier, on a chain. The dog had brought them here. It began to bark, straining against the leash, knowing we were close.
But the men saw no one. They had arrived at an empty clearing with a tree lying on its side, nobody in front of it, nobody behind, termites crawling over the bark. Our empty hammocks were in front of them. Perhaps their torches picked up the empty whisky bottle on the ground.
“¡Vamos a hacerlo!” One of them gave the order in Spanish, his voice deep and guttural.
As one, the men opened fire, spraying the clearing with bullets, shooting into the surrounding jungle. After the peace of the night, the noise was deafening. For at least thirty seconds the clearing blazed white and the surrounding leaves and branches were chopped to smithereens. None of the men knew what they were doing. They didn’t care that they had no target.
We waited until their clips had run out and then we stood up, dead wood cascading off our shoulders. We had been right next to the soldiers, lying face down, inside the fallen tree. We were covered with termites, which were crawling over our backs and into our clothes. But termites do not bite you. They do not sting. We had disturbed their habitat and they were all over us but we didn’t care.
We opened fire. The soldiers saw us too late. I was not sure what happened next, whether I actually killed any of them. There was a blaze of gunfire, again incredibly loud, and I saw the ragged figures being blown off their feet. One of them managed to fire again but the bullets went nowhere, into the air. I was firing wildly but Hunter was utterly precise and mechanical, choosing his targets then squeezing the trigger again and again. It was all over very quickly. The six men were dead. There didn’t seem to be any more on the way.
I brushed termites off my shoulders and out of my hair. “Is that all of them?” I whispered.
“I don’t think so,” Hunter said. “But we’d better get moving.”
We collected our things.
“I shot them,” I said. “What you were saying to me… you were wrong. I was with you. I killed some of them.” I wasn’t even sure it was true. Hunter could have taken out all six himself. But we weren’t going to argue about it now.
He shook his head. “If you killed…” He put the emphasis on the first word. “You did it in the dark, in self-defence. That doesn’t make you a murderer. It’s not the same.”
“Why not?” I couldn’t understand him. What was he trying to achieve?
He turned and suddenly there was a real darkness in his eyes. “You want to know what the difference is, Yassen?” He had used my real name for the first time. “We have another job in Paris, very different to this one. You want to know what it’s really like to kill? You’re about to find out.”
ПАРИЖ – PARIS
Our target in Paris was a man called Christophe Vosque, a senior officer in the Police nationale. He was, as it happens, totally corrupt. He had received payments from Scorpia, and in return had turned a blind eye to many of their operations in France. But recently he had got greedy. He was demanding more payments and, worse still, he had been in secret talks with the DGSE, the French secret service. He was planning a double-cross and Scorpia had decided to make an example of him by taking him out. This was to be a punishment killing. It had to make headlines.