Oh do they? I thought. ‘Who is this bastard?’ I said.
His face was a stone. ‘We had a deal.’
‘We did, but the deal is off and the rules just changed. You can have the money back.’ Which was a fair offer and, in any case, I didn’t want it any more.
‘No way, man. I’m risking my skin already.’
I am an infinitely patient individual, but Wes was pissing me off and I was getting nowhere. I struck hard and fast, grabbed his throat with one hand and dragged him half way across the table.
‘I’m going to run through possible candidates and you’re going to agree or disagree.’
This was bluff on my part. I wasn’t going to disclose my personal list of clients to some creep like Wes.
‘Break my neck, if you like,’ he managed to croak.
I increased the pressure. Wes’s spaniel eyes popped. His lips clamped shut. ‘I suspect our dead scientist was engaged in a little more than finding the cure for the common cold. Right?’ I didn’t get a nod. I got a double-blink. Good enough. ‘She was working in strategic defence against bio-weapons.’ I didn’t know this, but it would do. I said nothing about my source, nothing about secret departments. Wes tried to swallow, difficult under the circumstances. ‘In an enterprise like this I’m guessing we’re talking dirty bombs, chemical warfare, terrorism. Nod if I’m on the right trail.’ He didn’t nod. I released my grasp. Wes coughed, cleared his throat, and shook himself like a wet dog after a walk in the rain.
‘I have to go to the men’s room,’ he rasped, standing up.
I stood up opposite him. ‘I’m coming with you.’ It would be easier to work him over in the tiled confines of a public lavatory.
He gazed up at me with defeated eyes, saw I wasn’t screwing with him and, with the same raised hands that had undressed dozens of women, showed me his palms in surrender. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, slumping into the leather, ‘but you didn’t hear it from me.’
I sat back down. Right, now we were getting somewhere.
‘Wilding was working on a blueprint.’
‘A blueprint for what?’
Wes looked round, furtive. ‘Some new kind of drug, works in a different way. I don’t know. I’m not a chemist.’
I stared at him and read deceit in his eyes. Again I cursed my own stupidity, lack of professionalism and downright criminality for embroiling me in something unspeakable. Without doubt, I was treading on unhallowed ground.
‘Honest, that’s all I know,’ he burbled, distracted. He ran a hand through his hair again. It stuck up in dark tufts. Pale, his face a mass of lines and edges, he looked genuinely stricken. I hadn’t just opened a can of worms. I’d eaten them.
‘I don’t believe you.’
He squirmed in his seat, desperate to escape. There was no escape. He seemed to come to the same conclusion because the fight went out of his body and he leant in close and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Drugs that kill certain types of people.’
My face stiffened. ‘This is a bit of a departure from your usual line of business, isn’t it? I thought the object was to get addicts hooked, not kill them. Who exactly?’
Wes shook his head, his expression contorted. ‘I don’t know,’ he said shooting me another beseeching look. ‘On my mother’s life.’
I looked him hard in the eye. ‘Fuck’s sake, Wes, don’t you care?’
He shook his head sadly. ‘Man, it’s business. It’s money. Just money.’
I swallowed hard. No point in getting into a fight with Wes, snake that he was, about moral distinctions. I had no stomach for it and it would have been supremely hypocritical. ‘So the data for the blueprint was what I was ordered to steal, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Who wants it?’ I’d tried before and got nowhere, but I was all for catching Wes unawares.
He recoiled as if I’d thrown boiling oil in his face. ‘I can’t, man. He’ll kill me.’
‘I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me.’
‘You have no idea what this guy does. His victims suffer agonies.’
‘Then tell me and I’ll kill him before he gets the chance.’
A flame of indecision flickered in his eyes, guttered and blew out. There weren’t many men who could inspire that level of fear. Impressive, I thought.
‘Okay,’ I said, resigned. Something I’ve learned in life: don’t expend energy on people or things you can’t control.
Wes’s relief was plain to see. ‘Can you do it?’ he said. ‘Can you find it?’ His eyes glistened with hope and fear.
‘I don’t know.’ I wasn’t telling the truth. I had to find it but when I did I wasn’t going to hand it over to Wes, or anyone else. ‘Let me get this straight, Wilding wanted to trade but welshed on the deal?’
Wes swallowed. ‘Yeah, I think.’
‘Think?’ I snarled. ‘How much was she paid?’
‘I don’t ask questions, man. I follow orders.’ He swallowed again, looked at me pleading.
‘There’s something not…’
‘Three days,’ Wes said, scrabbling to his feet. ‘Meet me in the usual place, usual time.’
‘Are you insane?’ Our usual hook-up was the Placa de Catalunya, a square in Barcelona.
‘Thursday morning. Be there. Make sure you have the hard drive with you.’
Even if I found the goods, no way was I travelling on a scheduled flight. My description would already be circulated to every customs officer in Europe. I still intended to show up at the appointed hour on the appointed day because my gut told me that if I were smart I’d find the man who’d employed me for the job. If I could pump him for information, it could give me the vital lead I needed to find who was also in the market for the stolen hard drive. It was a risk. Wes might turn up in Barcelona with backup in place.
I decided to call in a favour. A fan of the two birds with one stone scenario, I also wanted to chase down the Russian lead.
One of my main clients, Mikhail Yakovlevich, was currently in London. He had houses in Russia, France and Britain. His British home, in Kensington, was worth a cool ten million. Having made his fortune in the steel trade, he’d specialised in supplying raw materials to factories in short supply. This was the shorthand version. In reality he had clawed his way to the top of his particular grubby pile through the cultivation and maintenance of friendships within the FSB (formerly KGB) and the relentless elimination of his enemies. I knew this because I’d carried out most of the eliminating. His FSB connection was what interested me.
I arrived outside the white stucco porch, gazed up at the four-storey dwelling, and hoped he was in. Eight marble steps to the lacquered front door, and before my foot touched the first, one of the most sophisticated security systems in the world clicked into action. Yakovlevich took his own safety seriously; evidenced by the entourage of former convicts he hired to protect him. Most of them looked as though they’d been conceived in Frankenstein’s laboratory.
I rang the bell, one of those old-fashioned hand-pull affairs. The door swung open. There is a saying that behind each powerful man is a good