When he had finished the cleaning – it took all of a quarter of an hour – he checked the laptop. There were copies of the fulsome praise from DC that had come into Ground Force Security, and gratitude for his report. The company didn’t give him saccharine accolades for what he had achieved in the last trip, knew that the sweet stuff was unwelcome. Lukas could have reeled off the story of disasters in the hostage-rescue trade. He didn’t do celebrity and didn’t want back-slapping. Truth was, the fear of failure gripped his gut more when he was in the field than the demands of success. Failure was a body-bag. There had been enough for them never to be forgotten.
He wound up the cord of the vacuum cleaner that did the living-room rugs and the bedrooms’ carpet. Ruby Ridge was in Lukas’s battle honours, and nobody was keen to shout that one up to the clouds. Lukas, if he had engaged in a discourse about his work – which he never did – would have said that Ruby Ridge, up in the forests of Idaho where it was wild enough for mountain lion, had been the first pinpoint lesson of where a screw-up had happened. An innocent woman shot dead by official marksmen, and a child, and in return fire a US marshal killed, then the circus of a full-blown FBI-controlled siege of ten days’ duration, with a cast of maybe five hundred agents, and millions paid by government in subsequent compensation. Lukas had not been senior, had been then a marksman with the Bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, and had seen a cock-up played out close enough to smell the shit that emanated. A good lesson for a rookie. He had been far back from the front line overlooking the cabin, and his Remington Model 700 had never been out of its bag, let alone loaded, but he had seen, played out before him, how bad it could get. He knew he walked a fine line between Ruby Ridge and the broken careers, and the hero-gram stuff on his laptop.
He watched the telephone and thought it might be an opportunity to go visit his friend who did the artwork down by the river, shit work and without talent, but by a good friend. The artist would never have heard of Ruby Ridge – or seen the face of a hostage when it was frozen in death, attached to or severed from the neck, or incoherent and trembling in the moment after liberation. Lukas played the strings, did God, and he went round a last time with a duster.
When he closed the door he stood in the lobby for a moment and listened. The bell did not ring. He went off down the flights of stairs.
Gerald Seymour
The Collaborator
8
Eddie came out of the main door on the ground floor. He had been told he would be met and taken to Immacolata. He saw a great deal in the moment he was on the outer step but he assimilated the importance of nothing.
The door swung shut behind him. He caught a glimpse of it and the grandfather’s old hand, pocked with cancer scars, that had heaved it: too fast, no chance to thank. A van was parked on the street as if about to unload, but nothing was taken from the tail doors and nothing was carried to them. A pavement opposite had bustled and was now still. The kids were not crowded in the street but further up the slope of via Forcella and further down, as if they formed a cordon and made a perimeter. A man came forward and did not play-act friendship, a frown puckering his forehead. A hand from the interior slid open a side door of the van. The guy on the fish stall caught Eddie’s eye, the swordfish in ice beside him, and held his gaze.
Eddie had his hand in his pocket, was reaching for a handkerchief – must have been dust, up his nose and in his throat. He was about to sneeze. A man closed on him, came from the van, and behind was a dark interior, and sacking, a rope trailing out of the opening. The man on the fish stall held Eddie’s eyes. So much, then, for Eddie Deacon to assimilate. Time slowing. The man coming slower. People in the cafe opposite pirouetting their chairs to face away from the street, but the pace of the movement slackening. Trying to understand… The fish-seller had that look, unmistakable, no argument with it. Like a warning shout, but nothing passed his lips. The quiet, like fog, settled on him but the sights were clearer.
He could not comprehend why the fish-seller should give the warning. He could only react to it.
The hands of the man reached towards him. Not open, not in greeting, clenched. The veins stood out in his muscled arms, like highways through the hairs. Eddie ripped his hand from his pocket and moved into that defensive stance, as a boxer does, trying to go forward on to the balls of his feet. He had never, since he was a child in a tantrum, hit anyone. He had never punched, kicked, gouged or bitten another adult. He had only once intervened in a fight and played a hero and- So fast. His hand was only halfway up to protect his chin and throat when the fist of the man came at him. He felt himself buffeted. Pain riddled his nostrils and there were tears in his eyes. A grip tightened on his shirt and he was dragged forward. He was pulled past the fish-seller and saw nothing but a face without expression. Should he have tried to run? No chance: blocked by the van and the fish stall on its heavy trestle legs. Could see only the backs of the heads in the cafe opposite.
He was dragged forward and when he was close enough the man’s knee exploded into Eddie’s groin.
About the end of it, his experience as a street-fighter. Real pain now. He tried to double up, which merely offered his jaw, the chin, to a short-arm hook punch. He went into the side hatch of the van.
Eddie was face down, his head buried in a heap of loose sacking, foul-smelling and tasting – hard for him to breathe, and he struggled, but one fist was clamped in his hair and the other whipped his face, used it as if it was a boxer’s training gear. He stopped the struggle. The door was slammed. Then all light went and a hood was over his head. His arms were snatched down into the small of his back, handcuffs snapped on. He heard the tearing of heavy-duty tape and his hood was lifted, the tape fastened over his mouth, and the van was moving.
The hands were at his legs and rope was wound round his ankles. He heard the oath when the van must have hit a hole, perhaps where a cobblestone was missing. Then the rope was lashed tight and tied.
He was helpless.
He wondered if he would hear sirens, immediate pursuit. There had been people in the cafe, people further up the street and down it. He imagined a phone call on a mobile, alerting police to what had happened. The hope died pretty bloody soon.
Eddie realised that the van was not speeding. There was no chase. The driver went at the normal speed for morning traffic, didn’t hoot, didn’t weave, didn’t chase back-doubles and rat-runs.
He thought the worst. He was gone, lost, and it was hard to drag air into his lungs, and could hear the breathing of the man sitting on the van floor close to him. He didn’t dare move because that would get him another thrashing. Truths came.
Eddie Deacon, bloody idiot, had blundered on to territory where he should not have been. Way back, he should have walked home from the Afghan place, should have reached up and taken down the blow-up of Immacolata, his Mac, folded it and put it deep in a drawer, maybe under his socks. He should not have gone with a street kid and burgled, should not have jacked in work and taken a budget flight, should not have walked down a street where no smile met his and no help requested was given. He should not have trusted the old couple, grandparents and providers of coffee, cake and betrayal. Pretty damn obvious: keep the idiot in place and send for the heavy squad.