Quiller Barracuda

Chapter 11: NICKO

'Get your fuckin' ass outa here right now or you'll get your fuckin' brains blown all over the place, you know what I mean?'

Black, heavy-barrelled Suzuki, an inch from my face.

He smelled of chewing-gum.

'Which way?' I asked him.

The quay was narrow here; this was more than a mile from the boat marina; there were three other cars standing further along towards the warehouses, figures near them, the glow of a cigarette in the shadows thrown by the cranes.

'Turn around. Make a U-turn. C'mon now!'

A jerk of the big gun. Lights came behind me and I stopped halfway through the turn. An engine idling.

'Who's he?'

'Just a guy.'

'What's he doing here?'

'Gettin' his ass out.'

Slam of a car door, footsteps. I left both hands on the wheel in plain sight. One of the men standing by the cars further along the quay broke away and started walking towards us, dropping his cigarette, head up, alerted.

Blinding light in my eyes – 'Turn this way – this way!'

Couldn't see a thing, just the dazzling white fire of the light.

'Who are you?'

'Charlie Smith.'

'What're you doing here?'

'I'm looking for the marina.'

'There's ten thousand marinas in this place. Listen, I've seen you before somewhere.'

I shut my eyes against the glare.

'How long's he been here?' To the other man, the black.

'Listen, I'm doin' my job, man, I told him to get his ass -'

'Jesus, I think I know.'

The glare blacked out, leaving an after-light under my lids. I'd taken this route because there weren't so many overhead lamps; the streets up there were day-bright and my face was known to a few people, among them the man who'd had me in his sights yesterday.

'Is this you?'

Holding a black-and-white photograph, shining the torch on it.

'No.'

'I think it's you.' The light dazzling again as he moved it.

'I know my own face.'

'Goddamn,' he said 'this is you.'

Said nothing. These weren't intelligence people; I'd simply walked into some kind of drug-trade situation. But they had my photograph.

'Hold him there, Roget.'

'Okay,' The Suzuki swung up again. 'Cut them lights, an' the motor. C'mon.'

It was the other man I watched, the white man. He was walking down to the group of cars, his gait busy, energised. He'd sounded pleased when he'd looked at the photograph, as if it were something to eat: he was a fat man, with small delicate hands for picking currants out of cake.

I started thinking about egress, about, yes, getting my ass out of here, but the front of the Trans Am was pointing straight at the water between the rusting mass of a dredger and a timber jetty and even if they let me go it would take a couple of bites with the wheel to get me facing the other way and if they'd wanted me in a rat trap they couldn't have done a better job.

Tomorrow,' I told Ferris on the phone, and he'd agreed: I hadn't got anything urgent to debrief tonight and I wanted some sleep. 'But you've lost one of your people.'

'Lost?'

The connection wasn't too good; the phone box had taken a battering and the armoured cord was frayed. I spelled it out for him and his voice was icy when he spoke again.

'I didn't realise we'd invited that much attention.'

There was the long shot,' I said.

'But that had a specific target. Tonight it was over-reaction.''

I knew what he meant. In the course of intelligence operations we don't kill off the infantry just for being there; a beating-up as a warning would have been the normal response. But these people weren't in government-style intelligence, and that made it even more dangerous because they behaved unpredictably and there weren't any rules.

'You'll need to be very careful,' I told Ferris, 'if you're going to replace that man.'

Telling him his job I suppose because he just said, 'What about Erica Cambridge?'

'I'll give you a replay tomorrow, but you should know that she went aboard a motor-boat tonight in the company of a Japanese from 1330 Riverside. And Senator Judd.'

Silence, then: 'Name of the boat?'

'Contessa.'

'That's a cutter. The Contessa is a 2,000 ton yacht anchored in the Bay.' I think he was going to say more about it but changed his mind. 'We're getting a lot of information in with a direct bearing on Barracuda. I'll brief you tomorrow.'

Over and out. He wouldn't sleep well for the rest of the night, with a death on his hands. He'd feel responsible, but more than that, it would change his whole approach to the running of the mission: he couldn't afford to deploy support for the executive or even passive surveillance people in these streets without risking their lives, and he wouldn't be prepared to do that.

It's an ill wind. I didn't want support.

He was coming back, the white man, someone with him, a woman. He shone the torch on me again and I contracted the facial muscles to bring the ears back and pushed some air into my mouth to fatten the cheeks, all I could do.

'Is this the guy?'

I couldn't see her face because of the glare.

In a moment: 'No.'

'Don't give me that shit!'

He shook the photograph.

'I haven't seen him before.'

'But he was there, for Christ's sake. At the apartment.'

'This is someone else.'

A hint of patchouli on the air.

'How long were you with him?' Anger in his voice, frustration, wanted his currant cake.

'Long enough to remember what he looked like. This isn't the man.'

'Well Jesus Christ this is the face of the guy in the photograph!'

'You'd better take care, Nicko. Don't kill too many, for your own sake.'

'Get back to the car.'

Walking away – 'I'm warning you, Nicko.'

The scent of patchouli… a link with Proctor, subtle and tenuous but a link. And a question: why had she lied? She'd said nothing more than good evening that night in the apartment but I recognised her voice, just as she'd recognised me. A black girl, petite, slender, more than attractive, vibrant, her arm hanging like a model's in the light of the brass lamps, the hand turned outwards a little for effect, her dark eyes taking me in. So why had she lied? I haven't seen him before.

'Out!' He jerked the door open. 'Out of the car!' He turned to the other man, the minion. 'Frisk him.' Then he squeezed himself into the car and rummaged around for guns, taking the keys from the ignition and opening the trunk and throwing things around, the jack and the breakdown kit and the fire extinguisher, half pleased with himself, I thought at this stage, and half worried that he'd got it wrong and I wasn't the guy, the guy in the photograph.

Don't kill too many, she'd said.

Had Nicko killed the man on surveillance in Riverside an hour ago? He couldn't have done it himself; he wasn't quick enough on his feet, with his hands. But I didn't think he'd even ordered it. The setup with 1330 Riverside and Erica Cambridge and Mathieson Judd and the cutter for the Contessa was strictly political. The setup here was cocaine.

'He's naked, Nicko.'

But there was the link with Proctor. Was Proctor on cocaine?

'Okay, take him down there and put him in the car. In the Line, not the Chewy. Keep the gun on him. You let him go, Roget, you're dead.'

That would explain Proctor's changed personality, if he'd got himself into cocaine.

We started walking and the black boy hit the muzzle into my spine two or three times because he'd seen it done in the movies I suppose but it was annoying because he could chip a vertebra and I was tempted to spin on him with the right forearm doing the work. There wouldn't be any risk because when a gun gives a man the type of cocky confidence this one was showing then you know he's not paying enough attention and you can take it away from him like a toy from a boy. But he wasn't alone here and it wouldn't do any good: I needed to get clear as soon as I could and I mustn't rush anything.

'Keep movin'!'

Another prod, though I hadn't slowed. He was young and fresh out here from Jamaica or Haiti, recruited from some cardboard city on a mudbank by an entrepreneur with a gold watch and a diamond pin and stories of fortunes to be made, hey big daddy here I come, and I didn't want to spoil everything for him but it would have to come to that.

Behind me I heard Nicko swinging the Trans Am straight and rolling it down the quay on the wall side, parking it and cutting the engine, slam of a door. Catching up with us, 'She's parked okay for you, limey, we don't want anything illegal going on around here,' a thin wheeze, something like laughter, pleased with himself. He was the pseudo manic-depressive type and I would have to watch him because they're the most dangerous, they'll kill out of caprice.

I said it was decent of him because I didn't like tickets and we reached the Lincoln and the black boy pulled the rear door open and pushed me inside and slammed it and stood away and his voice came through the glass – 'Stay in the car, mister, you wanna live, you know?'

He had a point because that Suzuki was big enough to blow the whole of the Lincoln through the wall without even being selective.

There wasn't anything I could do for the moment. There were three other man standing near the cars, all in dark clothing – a navy sweater, a jump suit, no shirts, nothing white. Two of them were smoking; they didn't talk; sometimes they turned slowly to look at Nicko and then they looked away again. It was important for me to get the hang of their relationships so that I could work with it; at this stage my thinking was that they were all traders except for the boy Roget, that Nicko was in charge but they didn't like him, were even afraid of him, perhaps because he'd killed people – don't kill too many, Nicko – and would be ready to kill more.

I couldn't see Monique; she must be in the Chevrolet parked in front of the Lincoln.

2:14 on the facia clock.

It looked as if they were waiting for a boat because they stood watching the sea, the strip of water between the dredger and the jetty. It wasn't dark out there; the moon was throwing a milky light across the swell left by the hurricane, and ships lay silhouetted at anchor. A helicopter was working a course from north to south across the Port to Virginia Key, presumably a US Coast Guard patrol. If these people were Lights and the squeal of tyres under the brakes and the three men stood back, nearer the wall, one of them bending to look through the windshield; then Nicko came past the Lincoln from behind and was there beside the grey Pontiac when it stopped rolling and a door came open and two men got out, one of them holding the other in a police grip with an arm twisted behind him, both Latins.

'Where's Martinez?' This was Nicko.

The driving window of the Lincoln was down and I caught most of what they were saying, patching a word in here and there to construct the sense.

'He's on his way. Toufexis had some business.'

'We're running late, for Christ's sake. Put him in the big one.'

'What's Roget doing there like that?'

With the gun.

'We've got someone else in the car, same kind of thing.'

For the first time I began to worry. It's easy to think, when there are guns around and the talk is tough and they're confident to the point of inattention, that you won't find it very difficult to get clear. I've got clear in situations totally controlled by field intelligence people, sometimes KGB, people trained and drilled and capable, so that in this kind of lax crime-world setup the danger was in under-estimating the odds. These men were shipping coke and they were doing it in competition with twenty or thirty major narcotic gangs and that meant they had to carry firearms, but they hadn't been trained to use them and they hadn't been through unarmed combat instruction and they wouldn't have fast reactions, but to underestimate them could be fatal because it only needed one stray shot and finis.

And there was the fat man, Nicko.

I knew his kind. He'd been spoiled by his mother and he'd grown up to take what he wanted and hurt if he had to hurt when they wouldn't give it up and later kill if he had to kill, and it had begun with cake and now it was wealth and power and women and sometimes death if someone's death would give him one of those things or all of those things. But the thing about him that warned me, frightened me, was that he'd started to enjoy killing and had probably begun to want only those things that would give him the excuse for doing it. This was my impression.

He wasn't uncommon in the terrorist world or the narcotics world but that was no comfort to me: he was here now, tonight, and the cake he wanted was another death. My own.

'Not there! Put him in the front!'

Roget moved away from the rear door, backing off and keeping the gun levelled and ready to swing: he at least knew the rudiments. The Latin -1 would have said Cuban – moved in front of him with loose jerky steps and his hands crossed over his head as if he knew exactly what had to be done, tugging open the front passenger door and climbing in, slamming it shut, putting his hands on the ledge below the windshield now and leaning his head forward. I could hear that he was praying.

'No talkin' between you two bastards!'

Roget's face at the window. But it was the other face that worried me, the fat man's. He was standing a few feet from the car with his hands hanging by his sides, the little pink fingers bunched like the legs of hermit crabs. He looked at the Cuban, taking his time, and then looked at me, taking his time, his fleshy red mouth in the faintest of smiles, his small eyes shining.

We've got someone else in the car, same kind of thing.

Chill rising up the spine, reaching the nape of the neck. The fat man turned away, and I seemed to hear the echo of shots.

'What's your name?' I asked the Cuban softly.

He didn't answer, went on leaning his dark head on his arms, the tremor in his shoulders never stopping, as if he were in fact bending forward under the lashes of a whip. I could hear his prayers now, tumbling in Spanish from his lips, his prayers and his plea to madre mia, a plea for help, madre mia, the sibilants throwing echoes back from the facia panel, soft as the rustling of dead leaves.

I left him to it and watched the quay, the men standing there. Nicko had his eyes on the water now, like the others, and sometimes looked at his watch. The others weren't talking together, nor to Nicko. The black had his back to them, his gun still levelled at the Lincoln, his jaws working on the chewing-gum.

When the Cuban took his hands off the ledge I asked him again, 'What's your name?'

'It's too late,' he said. I think he was at the stage where he realised he wasn't alone in the car, and wanted to voice his thoughts, and that was more important than my question.

'Too late for what?'

'For anything.'

The quiet despair of the damned in his voice. He didn't turn in the seat to look at me; he looked at my reflection in the windshield. Roget had said no talking.

'Is your name Juan?'

'No. My name is Fidel.'

'You mean it's too late at night?'

'Too late for anything. He will kill me.'

'Nicko?'

'Yes. It is why I am here. Is it the same with you?'

'Yes.'

Same kind of thing.

'Maybe he'll change his mind,' I said.

'How long have you known Nicko?' His tone calling me a fool.

He was perhaps forty, this man, short but I would have said muscular under the dark seaman's jacket, his face weathered, less by the sun and the wind than by the demons in his head. He looked as if he'd come a long way through the years, missing the right turning and having to go back. He was shaking a little as if cold, on this warm tropical night; I don't think he was on cocaine, on a downswing.

'What happened to your hand, Fidel?'

He didn't answer.

'What are they waiting for, out there?'

His eyes, reflected, widened a little, perhaps surprised by how little I knew of things.

'The boat,' he said.

'Where is it coming from?'

He went on staring into the windshield for a time and then his eyes closed. 'Juanita,' he said, kept on saying, whispering, 'Juanita', and was weeping now, his head going down and the tears coming freely, 'Juanita, oh, Juanita...' in a tone of such desolation that I saw her in the distance, a red rose on her black dress and her face waxen white as she turned and waved, her hand no higher than her shoulder, and turned away, walked away, his woman I would suppose, Juanita.

My nerves jerked as he moved suddenly, hitting the door open and swinging it against the wall, his bunched body projecting itself out of the car as Roget swung the gun and shouted at him – 'Freeze! Freeze right there!' – and Nicko and the others turned to watch, one of them giving a short laugh, having seen this sort of thing before, perhaps, having expected it.

Nicko said nothing, didn't make any move towards the car. He was smiling.

'Back in the car! Back in the car, you wanna get fuckin' shot?'

Fidel the Cuban stood turning, writhing, his head in his hands, moving as if he were struggling to get out of some kind of restraint, a strait-jacket, struggling but not succeeding.

I knew what he felt. I had no Juanita, but I knew what he felt. I wasn't doing the same thing because I had done the same thing in my mind a long time ago when I was new to things, before I learned that a trap cannot be sprung by allowing the onset of panic, which sounds stuffy, perhaps, considering this man was approaching his death, but it doesn't mean that I had no feeling for him, do not ask for whom the bell, so forth.

'Back in the fuckin' car!'

And the man came, Fidel, back into the car, his crouched shadow leaving the wall as he dropped onto the seat and pulled the door shut, leaning his head back against the squab, his eyes closed.

I began waiting until I thought he might be ready to listen to whatever I had to say, and while I was waiting, lights came from the dark sea, lifting and falling to the swell.

'Fidel. Is this the boat?'

He turned his head a little. 'Yes.'

'What are they going to do with you?'

'They will kill me.'

'Listen, Fidel, I might be able to do something to stop them but I'll need your help, so brace up, get your head together, you know what I'm saying?'

'Do something? With him there?'

I think he meant Nicko but he could have meant the black, Roget. Roget would be easy to work on.

'Listen, there's no point in giving up, Fidel, it won't get us anywhere. You've got to -'

'Who are you?' interested for the first time.

'I can get you out of this but you've got to help, now understand that. We -'

'You know nothing,' he said, 'you think you can do anything against him, against Nicko, then you know nothing.'

Not a lot of use. I wanted information out of him so that I could get something together and set it in motion but there wasn't going to be time because the arrival of the boat would change things and I wasn't ready.

'Where will they take us, Fidel? Quick.'

'Across the sea.' His eyes watching me in the glass.

'Across the sea to where?'

'They will take us out to sea, and then shoot us, and throw us to the sharks. That is the way it is done.'

Jesus Christ it sounded like a regular programme, sweating a little, I was sweating a little now because the time frame was narrowing, closing on us, and once they'd got us on the boat there'd be nothing we could do, finito.

In my trade I've seen one or two deaths, caused one or two deaths, all right, killed if you want me to spell it out for you but listen, this is the point, I've never taken it lightly, a man's death lightly, even when he was at my throat before I managed to beat the odds, even when he'd been doing everything he could to blow me away, I've never thought of it as all in the day's work, although to many that's all it is, a trick of the trade, a necessary inconvenience. But I would have to get perspective: this was Miami Florida and the drug trade here was a multibillion-dollar industry and the stakes were high and life was cheap and that man over there, the fat man, Nicko, had probably made this trip a dozen times, fifty times, and thought of it as no big deal, and if I got the correct perspective on what was happening tonight, if I pulled back from the environment as you pull back with a zoom lens, all I would see would be a miniature black Lincoln down there with some tiny figures standing around it and two tiny figures inside it, and they would be the two tiny figures who would be dropped into the sea in a little while from now, to float for a time on the slow lifting and falling of the swell until the dark fins broke through, accelerating and closing in, and then there was just a lot of blood on the surface, a lot of threshing about and then the blood, Christ, it was a beautiful red, he was a beautiful man, he coloured the whole sea like a flag, like a banner, and that was all it was going to be about, given the correct perspective and the background of a multibillion-dollar industry with its primal laws and its murderous checks and balances, a whorl of crimson blossoming on the moonlit breast of the sea.

And this perspective, I knew, was necessary to me: it would give me a tool for getting inside Nicko's mind, so that I could see if there were anything I could do to it, if there were time.

They will take us out to sea, and then shoot us, and throw us to the sharks. That is the way it is done.

'Fidel,' I said, 'why will they shoot us first?'

'Because otherwise we might swim to shore. It will be only a few miles.' His eyes watching me in the glass, interested in me now, perhaps because I wanted to know all about this thing instead of wailing to my mother. 'It is their way because they do not have to get rid of our bodies. There will only be bits and pieces found, perhaps.' Impatiently – 'You are not afraid?'

'I don't intend to be thrown to any sharks; I wish you'd understand that.'

In a moment, 'You are not American, I think?'

'No.'

'You are English?'

'Yes.'

'It explains things, then. I have heard that the English cannot see the nose on their face.'

'We try to look beyond it, you see. Have they sent for this boat especially to take us out there?'

'Of course not. There will be a pickup.'

Some of the fear had gone out of his voice; he'd got over his madre mia bit and his prayers to the almighty God who had decided understandably to drop him in the shit, and now he was fatalistic, but that wasn't really any better, any more useful to me. I would need to get some feeling back in him. Anger, perhaps. Anger towards Nicko. That could be dangerous because this man was a Latin and liable to shoot the whole chamber dry before he took aim, but I'd have to make the best of the material. I would much rather have worked alone, but he might get in the way and it was probably safer to bring him into the act than risk his messing it up.

The boat was riding at the jetty, a line taut round a capstan with a man keeping it secure. Another man had come down to the quay to meet Nicko, and they were talking now. We've got a couple of guys to take care of, so forth.

There were questions, of course, that would have to wait, because I needed all the time I could get to structure some kind of survival; they would be asked later and perhaps answered, if ever at all – where had Nicko got that photograph? Why was he so ready to blow me away without checking my identity more than he had? Was it Proctor who had thrown this net out for me, with photographs all over the town? Questions like that.

But more immediately: 'A pickup of cocaine?'

'Of course.'

"This boat is carrying the cash?'

'The cash is in the other car.'

'How much?'

'I do not know. I am not on this run. When you say you might do something, what -'

'I'll tell you when the time is right. How many runs have you done, Fidel?'

'Many.'

'With Nicko?'

'Sometimes.'

'How much cash is usually taken on board?'

'It depends. Different sources, different deals. Maybe half a million, maybe a million.'

'American dollars.'

'Of course.'

Nicko was nodding to the other man; then he turned and began walking towards the Chevrolet. The two men on the quay started scanning the environment, each with one hand tucked inside his jacket. Nicko brought a black suitcase from the Chevrolet, ducking to talk to someone inside, Monique perhaps. Then he nodded and slammed the door and began walking with the suitcase towards the jetty. Almost as an afterthought he turned his head to look at Roget, the black, and jerked his free hand, gesturing towards the boat.

It was then that the reality of the thing hit me and I was made to know that I had been whistling in the dark in order to keep panic away because there was nothing I could do if I got inside that man's mind, no argument I could use to stop his hand. I was one of the two tiny people who would be dropped into the sea and that was it.

The only chance of getting clear would be in some kind of action between the Lincoln and the boat and Roget would have his big black Suzuki trained on us and even if I could get it away from him the other men were armed and would be too far away for me to work on them. If the -

'Outa the car!' Jerking the Suzuki. 'C'mon, outa the fuckin' car!'

I saw Fidel go into spasm as if a bullet had hit him; then he opened the door and its edge caught against the wall and he had to pull it away, walking round the front of the car with his eyes on the sky, praying again I suppose.

'You! Outa the fuckin' car!'

I opened the door and pushed it shut after me and noted everything I could as I walked to the jetty. Roget was of course at our backs; Nicko was halfway along the jetty with the suitcase, leaning a little backwards as fat men have to, leaning a little to the left to counter the weight of the suitcase in his right hand, not looking back, or towards us, towards Fidel and me, taking care as he got hold of the boat's rail and stepped aboard. Monique was still in the Chevrolet: I wouldn't expect her, or any woman, to be present at an execution.

'Keep walkin'!'

I think Fidel had slowed his step, understandably; when I glanced at him I saw that he had paled and was walking with that jerky motion, head down now, that I'd seen in him earlier, as if he knew exactly what had to be done. He'd been here before, not like this but behind a gun, herding some other man to the slaughter-house.

We were on the jetty now with the boat twenty, twenty-five feet away and black water immediately on my left. It was inviting, because once I was under the surface I could move a long way unseen; but there wouldn't be time to dive; Roget would pump the big Suzuki as a reflex action.

That was the last chance that offered; once on the boat there would be no more, and as I followed the Cuban onto the deck I caught some of the aura, and felt the fear wash into me, chilling me to the bone.