Aggressor

PART FIVE


1
I came out of the hotel and turned right along the main drag, checking the town map I’d got from the front desk. Everyone else on the street was either a local draped in black or a Westerner in regulation Gore-Tex jacket, polo shirt and Rohan trousers. It had certainly been dress of the day in the Marriott. The reception was full of them emerging for breakfast; the café was a sea of Outward Bound.
I followed the main drag, paralleling the river somewhere to my right. It was 11.26 and a lot busier now as I passed the spruced-up opera house, theatres, museums and parliament. They were beautiful buildings, hailing from an era before Joe Stalin turned up with a few million truckloads of ready-mix. I couldn’t understand it: from what I’d read there were still a few statues to him left standing, and plenty of old Soviets who rated him their greatest ever leader – pretty scary considering he’d massacred a million or so of his devoted comrades.
Above me, just before the cloud cut off the sky, was a telecoms mast the size of the Eiffel Tower, beaming out pictures of US flags and smiling Russian housewives 24/7.
There were quite a few locals out and about at this time of the day, and I definitely wasn’t the grey man. I didn’t have the sort of skin that tanned in five seconds like theirs did, my hair wasn’t black and my eyes were blue. I was blending in like Santa in the Congo. People were looking at me as if they all had come to the conclusion that I must be a spy, or there to do any number of bad things to them.
A police blue and white Passat cruised past. The two guys inside had AKs on the back seat. They both looked me up and down before the driver gobbed off to his mate about the weirdo. F*ck ’em, I’d be out of here soon enough. Besides, they were probably just jealous of my jumper.
All the same, I was beginning to feel more worried about this job – or, more truthfully, about Charlie. Which probably meant I was a little worried about me, for being stupid enough to go along with him. I couldn’t quite work out how he could rattle off the kit list, yet forget about the DLB . . .
Then I thought, f*ck it, so what? I’d see this through. Charlie needed me. He was all that mattered. He might have disco hands and have difficulty remembering what the f*ck he was up to, but at least he was still here. Every other friend I’d ever had, whether we’d still been at the embryonic stage or reached the point where we were wearing each other’s clothes, was dead.
I was doing this for Charlie; he was doing it for Hazel. I couldn’t let him down. He was in the hotel at the moment, probably flapping a bit about whether or not I’d noticed that there were times when he couldn’t even pick his own nose. Maybe he was flapping big time, not knowing if he was going to be able to keep his shit together long enough to see the job through. The thing he most needed right now was to know that he could depend on me, and that made me feel good.
Maybe I’d also be doing my bit to save a young squaddie or two on the pipeline. I’d seen what happened to a family when their much-loved son was zapped, and I realized I didn’t like it one bit.
I had a shrewd suspicion that I was really trying to concentrate hard enough on Steven and Hazel to allow me to avoid thinking about Kelly and me, but I just didn’t have the bollocks to admit it to myself. So I thought of Silky instead and that felt much better. I knew I’d rather be on a beach with her than f*cking about in a Georgian politician’s backyard.
I crossed the road and passed an English bookshop/café/internet joint. A high-pitched American female voice screeched through the open door: ‘Oh-my-God . . . that-is-sooo-cool.’ I made a note to give the place a miss.
I felt myself smiling. The fact was: I missed Silky. Months of sitting on a psychiatrist’s couch hadn’t cleared my head anywhere near as effectively as bumming around for a few months with a freewheeling, freethinking box-head.
Maybe I’d just get back to her and crisscross the continent in that van for years to come. Maybe this job would be my swansong as well.
I passed the city’s newest landmark. No doubt about it, the new McDonald’s was the glossiest, brightest building on the main drag. Its brown marble walls were extra shiny this morning after their coating of rain. New converts lined up with their kids for a Georgian McBrunch.
There weren’t too many Ladas parked up outside. Being the new thing in town, it was the domain of dark-windowed Mercs, and even a Porsche 4x4. You didn’t get cars like that by working for a living in this part of the world. Their drivers-cum-bodyguards were gathered under a nearby tree, dragging on Marlboros and pausing occasionally to flick ash off their obligatory black leather sleeves.
An old man in an even older black suit jacket pointed at parking spaces with a small wooden truncheon, as more shiny cars full of rich kids came to stuff their faces with American imperialistic calories. I was even thinking about getting supersized myself.
It wouldn’t be long now before I turned off the main; it was easy to tell because McD’s was featured big-time on the map. Just as well, because I couldn’t read the street names in Russian and Paperclip.
My plan was simple. If possible, I would do a full 360 of the target house, until I’d seen as much of it as I possibly could. My priorities were defences and escape routes. That was if I didn’t get picked up by one of the VW blue-and-whites. They buzzed around the city like flies, or just sat there, lurking in lines of parked cars while their passengers watched and smoked.
I turned left on the second junction and walked uphill into a swathe of narrow roads and cramped houses that hadn’t had their wash and brush-up. Suddenly I was in the real Tbilisi, the part that was poor and decaying, and I realized that I felt at home in it, away from the land of fresh paint and shiny new tarmac.
Small bakers sold bread and cakes from a hole in the wall. Cars swerved round potholes and pedestrians who’d stepped into the road to avoid craters in the pavement. Abandoned vehicles and bulging bin bags littered the kerbs. Maybe it was garbage day. Or maybe it was just a hangover from the communist era: the belief that anything inside your four walls was your responsibility while anything outside was the state’s had come hand in hand with the hammer and sickle.
It was easy enough finding the house numbers; they were stuck to the wall on two-foot-square plastic panels that also carried the street name in Paperclip and Russian. It felt like another depressingly uniform throwback to the old days, but I guessed at least it meant the postman wasn’t going to make a mistake with the Christmas cards – unless you lived in one of the fancier places. They seemed not to have to advertise themselves.
Electric cables ran in every conceivable direction above my head, emerging from what looked like home-made junction boxes stuck on trees. Maybe they were; when the electricity supply is as erratic as it was here, people will always come up with ways of making sure they get their share. Rainwater dripped from gutter pipes that disgorged their contents straight into the street. I was starting to get an uncomfortable film of sweat down my back as I climbed.
I carried on uphill, the sweat now flowing freely. After navigating three crossroad junctions I got to what I hoped was Barnov Street. The target house was along here, on the left somewhere.
Old, once-elegant buildings stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the odd modern lump of glass and steel. Without exception, they were protected by high walls, some plastered and painted, some just rough concrete blocks.
I passed the French and Chinese embassies. A small hut stood outside each of them, complete with bored-looking security guard reading the morning paper. Despite appearances, and the holes in the road, this was obviously the upscale end of town.
Ladas weren’t the limo of choice up here, either. The only badges I’d seen blocking the narrow pavement in the last few minutes were VW and Mercedes. But strangely, not many of the drivers were wearing black. A lurid Hawaiian number went past in a Saab, smoking a cigar and shouting into his mobile, but still finding the time to check his slicked-back hair in the rearview. He didn’t look like he was en route to an ambassadorial reception.
This had to be mafia land. Good for them, but not good for Charlie and me. There was going to be an unhealthy amount of protection around this neighbourhood.