Chapter 2 #2
‘They’ve been approached by a young man named Emir Yilmaz.
Emir’s father, Tahir Yilmaz, is the head of the Turkish mafia, and according to Emir, the N’Drangheta have organised a three-way meeting on a Greek island to discuss a proposed joint venture between themselves, the Turks, and the Albanians.
Tahir, the father, very much wants this three-way alliance to go ahead.
He sees it as a chance for his organisation to expend.
Emir, on the other hand, emphatically doesn’t. ’
Eve frowns. ‘Does Emir have any say in the matter?’
‘Officially no. But he’s his father’s son, and although he’s still only nineteen, he’s extremely smart, and quite possibly has a better grasp of the realpolitik of the situation than Tahir.’
Eve nods slowly. ‘So Emir knows that his father’s a mafia boss?’
‘Yes. He’s a student at an elite management school at Fontainebleau in Paris, and when he approached the Twelve he made it clear that he’s being groomed to take over from Tahir, and that he knows his father’s business inside out.
’ Johnny sips his drink carefully. ‘The fact is that both the Twelve and the Turkish mafia stand to lose from the proposed alliance. The Twelve because the alliance would be so powerful, and the Turks because they’d quickly be forced into the position of junior partner. ’
‘And Tahir doesn’t realise this?’ Oxana asks.
‘Tahir, according to Emir, considers himself a man of honour, and assumes that the Albanian and N’Drangheta bosses are the same. He thinks that if he enters into an agreement with them, they will stand by their word.’
Oxana smiles faintly. ‘But Emir is under no such illusion?’
‘Absolutely not. He sees this meeting as an opportunity. Not to join hands with his father’s rivals, but to send them a deadly message.’
Eve narrows her eyes. ‘How, exactly?’
‘By killing the other bosses at the meeting and destroying any chance of an alliance.’
‘So Emir wants to force his father’s hand?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Is that a good idea? Wouldn’t killing the other bosses start a gang war?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Johnny says. ‘Not if it was known that the Turks had the Twelve in their corner.’
‘But just to be clear,’ Eve says. ‘Tahir has no idea that his son has been in contact with them. The Twelve, I mean.’
‘No idea whatever. He’d almost certainly view it as a very serious betrayal.’
‘So.’ Eve feels an icy hand close around her heart. ‘Where do we come in?’
‘Tahir Yilmaz, as I told you, will be attending the meeting with the Albanian and N’Drangheta bosses.
It’ll be just the three of them on a private Greek island, although the time and place of the meet isn’t yet known, or not to us, anyway.
Now Tahir may be a bit old-fashioned in his thinking, but he’s clever.
He knows that he’s under constant surveillance by police and intelligence agencies, so he’s not going to try to disguise his presence in the Aegean.
He is going to be cruising the Greek islands on his yacht, and he’s taking a party of family and friends with him, including his son Emir and his daughter…
’ Johnny takes a folded sheet of paper from a jacket pocket and consults it.
‘His daughter Defne, and Defne’s friend Buse.
And this provides us with a unique opportunity.
Defne and Buse are both seventeen, and because there will be unmarried men on board the yacht, protocol demands that the girls are accompanied by a responsible female adult.
In this case, Tahir has specified a British-trained nanny. ’
Oxana frowns. ‘Surely nannies look after small children?’
Johnny opens his hands. ‘I’m not an expert. But I understand that they’re sometimes employed by traditionally minded European families to act as chaperones for teenage girls.’
‘Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?’ Oxana asks.
‘It’s just possible that I am.’ Johnny smiles faintly. ‘The word is that Tahir Yilmaz is extremely protective of his daughter. He wants her in good hands on this holiday. He’s been told that British-trained nannies are the crème de la crème, and he’s set his heart on one.’
‘You want Oxana to pretend to be a nanny?’ Eve bursts out, unable to contain herself.
‘That’s the general idea.’
‘A nanny for a mafia boss.’
Johnny nods.
‘With a view to killing two other mafia bosses?’
He shrugs. ‘That’s pretty much the long and the short of it, yes.’
Oxana frowns. ‘So no one on the yacht would know that I wasn’t a real nanny?’
‘No.’
‘Not even Emir, the son?’
‘No. We’d tell Emir that the Twelve will take charge of eliminating the other two bosses, but not who this would be done by, or how. There’s no reason he’d suspect you. From what I understand the Yilmaz clan are decidedly old-school. They’re not likely to see a female assassin coming.’
‘And how exactly is Oxana supposed to accomplish all of this?’ Eve asks. ‘Dive off the yacht in her nanny’s uniform with a knife between her teeth? How does she get anywhere near this mafia meeting?’
‘That would be up to Oxana. The Twelve have a very high regard for her resourcefulness.’
Eve glances sideways. Oxana’s lips have formed a faint smile, and there’s a dangerous glitter in her eyes.
‘And me?’ Eve asks. ‘What would my role be in all of this?’
Johnny regards her thoughtfully. ‘Why don’t we go through to the dining room?’
I bite down on my anger. The whole project seems reckless and poorly thought through.
When all’s said and done, there’s no actual plan.
Just the hope that Oxana can somehow improvise the death of two of the most ruthless and closely protected organised crime bosses in the world.
The Twelve are playing her, that much is clear.
Flattering her into agreeing to a mission that will probably see her killed.
And I’m not agreeing to that. No fucking way.
I’ll fight them to my last breath. I will not see Oxana’s life thrown away.
‘There’s something I want to say,’ Eve says when the waiter has filled their water glasses, taken their order, and departed.
‘The three of us agreed, when we first discussed going freelance, that any one of us could veto a project, for whatever reason. Well, I want to veto this one. Partly because Oxana and I work together, and there’s clearly no place for me on this one, but mostly because it’s simply too dangerous.
Oxana alone, without backup, without any chance of rescue if things go wrong…
’ Eve’s face is pale. Her hands are clutching her knees beneath the table.
In her peripheral vision she sees Oxana opening and closing her mouth.
‘I’m sorry,’ Eve says. ‘But no. No way. To any of it.’
Johnny nods, his lips compressed. ‘I hear you, Eve. And I know that the whole thing sounds very thrown together at this stage. But I promise you it will be extremely carefully planned, including Oxana’s exfiltration. You have my word on that.’
‘I’m sorry, Johnny, but no. That’s my last word.’
He nods again. ‘Well, I’m sorry, Eve, but it appears that you don’t actually have the last word.
And nor, for that matter, do I. Because I’ve been informed by Captain Gladstone that, in return for five million pounds that was deposited to the account that the two of you share, and which paid for your new flat, Oxana agreed to place her services exclusively at the disposal of the Twelve. ’
Eve stares at him, incredulous. ‘But… I thought that money was our severance payment. In return for our silence about… about the Twelve and everything we know about them.’
Johnny looks down at his knife and fork. He takes his linen table napkin and lays it carefully across his knees.
Eve turns to Oxana. ‘Angel, tell me this isn’t true.’ Her voice is shaking and unrecognisable, even to herself.
Oxana lifts her hands from the tablecloth and lets them fall. Her grey eyes meet Eve’s. ‘It is true. I’m sorry.’
Eve stares at her, speechless. ‘Why?’ she whispers eventually. ‘Why did you agree to it? Not for the money, surely. We—’
Oxana’s gaze is steady. ‘It’s who I am,’ she says quietly. ‘It’s what I do.’
For a long moment, time stands still. Something inside Eve is in freefall, plummeting into a void, into darkness.
She feels herself reach for the bag beside her chair.
She feels her hand close around the rolled leather handles.
She feels the pressure on her heels as she stands.
It’s as if her body is acting independently of her.
She looks from Johnny to Oxana, but whatever she’s looking for, she doesn’t find it in their faces.
She turns her back on them, and somehow her legs carry her from the dining room, through the tall double doors, and down the front stairs of the club.
As she passes the desk, she gives the reception staff a frozen smile, then proceeds to the street.
A taxi is dropping passengers off nearby, and she raises her hand.
London passes in a blur. The walk from the road to the mansion block smells of green leaves and summer.
The lift sighs and wheezes as it always does, as if nothing has changed.
Inside the flat it’s cool and utterly silent.
There’s a breath of Oxana’s Annick Goutal scent in the air.
Eve makes coffee, her movements calm and methodical, and again there’s that sense of her body acting independently of her will.
It knows what to do, and it gets on with it.
Finally, when the coffee has been made and poured, Eve sits on the arm of a chair and stares out of the window, at the motionless trees and the distant people and the dogs winding their way through the grass. She sees everything but feels nothing.
Oxana left me with no choice. The lie, and the scale of the lie.
The fact that she made a deal with the Twelve and didn’t tell me about it?
What does that make me? Who am I, in her life?
The casual ease with which she was ready to launch herself, without me, into a suicidally dangerous mission.
Leaving me… what? Sitting around in the flat, agonising?
I can guarantee that she didn’t give me, or my feelings, a second thought.
For her, it would have been all about the challenge.
She’s always been up for anything, crazily so.
Her mind doesn’t process danger in the usual way.
It doesn’t convert it to fear. She doesn’t experience what I do: the dry mouth, the racing heart, the sick apprehension.
Everything’s reduced to calculation. This makes her supremely good at what she does but leads her to make terrible decisions.
Decisions that any normal person would instinctively reject.
That response. ‘It’s who I am… It’s what I do.
’ It’s her way of telling me that all the things we’ve shared – the wild days, the blissful nights – count for nothing.
I’ve reached for her, but I haven’t touched her, not deep inside, and I certainly haven’t changed her.
The way she cut me out and turned me into a side-player in my own life, was the ultimate fuck you.
Well, fuck you too, Oxana. I can’t do this any more.
For my own self-preservation I have to leave. It’ll kill me, but I have to go.
She’s businesslike now, unhurried and organised as she changes out of her suit into jeans and a track top, and packs a cabin bag. She’s not yet sure where she’s going, but she knows what she needs. Ordinary, unremarkable clothes and shoes. Washbag. Laptop. Phone.
Everything’s going fine until, on the bedside table, Eve finds a small tortoiseshell clip in which a single blonde hair has been trapped.
She sits down on the edge of the bed, slowly turning the clip in her hands, unable to stem thoughts of Oxana, and the bullet scar on her cheek, and her bravery, and her idiocy, and the things she doesn’t understand, and the multiple ways in which she can be hurt, and the way that she reaches for Eve like a blind kitten when she wakes.
It’s all so unbearable and heart-twisting that Eve lowers her head to her hands and weeps uncontrollably for several minutes before forcibly halting herself, wiping her eyes, and continuing to pack.
When she’s ready to leave, she rolls back the bedroom carpet, and opens the combination safe that has been sunk, near-invisibly, into the floor.
Ignoring the Glock and Sig Sauer handguns, the boxes of 9mm ammunition and the bundled passports, she reaches for the cash.
There’s ￡20,000 in new notes, and she takes exactly half of them, before locking and closing the safe and replacing the carpet.
She walks out of the building without looking back and drags the cabin case behind her to Hampstead underground station.
When she exits at Waterloo, her track top has been replaced by a raincoat, there’s a baseball cap on her head, and she’s wearing sunglasses.
After studying the rail map carefully, she queues in the ticket hall and buys a single ticket to Exeter for cash, ensuring as she does so that the peak of her cap is pulled down well over her eyes.
By 3.30 p.m. she’s sitting in a half-full second-class train compartment with the cabin case on the seat next to her, and a cup of takeaway coffee and two packets of Waitrose shortbread fingers on the table in front of her.
As the train pulls out of Waterloo Station into the sudden brightness of the afternoon, she leans back in her seat.
She closes her eyes, and the full import of what she’s done rushes over her like a cold Atlantic breaker.
She can’t breathe, she’s drowning, she’s made a horrible mistake, Oxana is Oxana and it can all be worked out.
But it can’t. Not any more.