Aggressor

3
Charlie joined me on the bench about twenty minutes later. By then, I had worked out where the target was, and could just about make out the blue vehicle in the yard and most of the front of the house that faced the yard, and us. There was a front door with a window each side and another two directly above them on the first floor. But from this distance, we’d need binos to see any detail.
He had a carrier bag in his hand. ‘F*cking hell, I thought graveyards were supposed to be havens of tranquillity. It’s like a fairground here.’
‘What do you reckon on the DLB, old one?’
‘The four guys eyeballing God by the flower bin? It’s got to be the one. The bench support is a square of four sections. It’s got to be hollow inside. Anyway, I’ll find out tonight, won’t I?
‘I picked up a comic for you at the hotel. Something to keep you occupied while I do all the work.’ He fished a newspaper out of the bag, followed by a pair of green miniature binos, still in their packaging.
It was the Georgian Times, an English-language weekly that came out on Mondays. I studied the front page as he unpeeled the binos.
George Bush was to visit Tbilisi on 10 May, on his way back from the VE Day celebrations in Moscow. TBILISI IN ANTICIPATION OF GREAT VISIT, yelled the headline. Then: TBILISI LOOKS LIKE A PARROT.
It seemed the locals were honking about the yellows and pinks being splashed all over buildings to cover the grime.
‘It all makes sense now. Dubya on his way, new tarmac roads. I bet he’s like the Queen, thinks the whole world smells of fresh paint and floor polish.’
Charlie snorted with laughter. ‘Thought you’d like it. Maybe the rush on this job has something to do with his visit. You know, sort out any local difficulties before the main man shows up.’ He shifted the binos up to his face and got busy focusing them.
I flicked through the rest of the paper. It didn’t seem to go a bundle on world news. Most of the spreads were devoted to groups of smiling people shaking hands outside some local company’s HQ, with a caption saying wonderful things about partnership in enterprise, and the importance of spreading the message of Georgian business worldwide. One small article announced that the government had demanded yet again that the Russians pull back their forces. But yet again the Russian answer was yeah, yeah, like we said, wait until 2008 – or words to that effect.
I scanned the rest of the page. ‘Hot pipeline news,’ I said. ‘Says here it’s coming in on time. It’ll start pumping by the end of May.’
‘Not my cup of tea, lad.’ The binos were lined up on the target. ‘I went straight to page three. Check it out – lovely pair of peaks.’
I turned back. ‘Oh yeah, good one.’ I was looking at a picture of the hills of Borjomi National Park. ‘That’s where the water comes from.’ I read the piece more closely. ‘Oh dear, seems somebody’s f*cked up. The pipeline goes straight through here, and a f*ck sight too close to the natural springs. Georgia’s biggest export will be history if there’s a landslide and the pipeline fractures. There’s shit on in the government. “Pressure groups demanding an inquiry,” it says here. The World Wildlife Fund are leaping up and down. There’s all sorts going on. Did you find the horoscopes?’
Charlie was still studying the target. ‘F*ck, Nick.’ The binoculars trembled in his hands. ‘Looks like there’s proximity lighting – and a couple of cameras covering the inside of the courtyard. Here, what do you think?’
I swapped him the paper for the binos. A group of old women passed behind us, each with a burning candle in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. They were all dressed in black and bundled up in headscarves.
I looked down at the house.
‘That his Audi?’
‘Yep, blue and in shit state. I even have the plate for later on. If he’s on the take like Whitewall says, you’d think he could afford a decent motor.’
He was right about the lighting; the corner nearest us had CCTV and arc lights mounted on both front corners of the house. Under each arc light was a black plastic cylinder that we’d have to assume was a proximity detector. We hadn’t seen any of it during the walk-pasts because they were at first-floor level, hidden by the wall.
One camera on the right-hand corner was angled in the direction of the gate and another covered the side of the house, aiming towards the rear, just like the camera on the left-hand corner. There’d be another one at the back, no doubt. I studied the gates.
‘I still think the bolts are manual.’ I lowered the binos. ‘Did you see them on your walk-past?’
‘No. What do you reckon about the two outhouses?’
The binos went back up. The only windows that would get any light into the ground floor would be the ones by the front door. There was a gap of no more than two metres between the wall and the house at the sides and rear. Maybe the building had originally had a fence and no neighbours.
Two small brick outbuildings faced the house, about ten metres across the cracked concrete courtyard. If we came in through the gate, they’d be down to our right, the Audi dead ahead and the front door to our left. ‘Good place to hide while we sort our shit out? If he’s in, at least we’d have somewhere to sit and think.’
The front of the house was flat. Three steps led up to a recessed porch. The door was solid natural-coloured wood, with two lever locks on the right, one a third of the way up, the second a third of the way down, and a handle in the middle. From this distance I couldn’t tell if the handle also had a lock. The floor was lined with cracked, blood-red quarry tiles and a coir mat.
I felt a few specks of rain on my face. Mist was rolling in from the other side of the city. Three young guys walked past. They had their hoods up on their multicoloured nylon shell suits, and they were trying hard not to look furtive, but failing.
Charlie grinned. ‘Looking for somewhere to try out a bit of home-grown poppy from the north, I fancy.’ He wiped the moisture from his cheek. ‘So the house – piece of piss, or what?’
‘Don’t know yet. I need to give it some thought once we get back to the hotel. You?’
‘Easy. Chances are, any motion detectors down there are just for the lights, maybe they even kick off the CCTV as well. Why rig them up to the alarms? They’d go off every time a bat flew past. Poor Baz’d be up all night, wouldn’t he?’ He took the binos from me. ‘Know what, lad? I think we should just go for it. Street lighting is shite. Through the gates, do the old anti-detector crawl, up to the main door. I’ll get that open, do the business, and then we’ll get our arses up here and DLB the lot. Then it’s back to the hotel in time for breakfast. A nice early one, mind, because I’ve got a very important appointment with Air Georgia.’ He brought down the binos and grinned at me. ‘That sound like a plan?’
‘Sounds like a f*cking nightmare.’
He pulled open his jacket and shoved the binos inside. ‘Give me a few. I can walk past that nightclub for any escape routes round the side.’
I picked up the paper again. ‘OK, I’ll follow in fifteen.’
Charlie stood up and rested his hand on my shoulder. ‘Listen, lad, I want to say thank you . . .’ He paused, and seemed to have difficulty swallowing. ‘For a while there I thought you weren’t coming. That worried me. I really do need your help, so thanks.’
I didn’t know what to do. My head sort of froze. F*cking hell, what was he going to do next? Kiss me? ‘I hope you remember the way back, you silly old f*cker . . .’
Charlie smiled; he knew it was just a bit too much for me. Man to man, my comfort zone with emotions didn’t extend much further than the message on his glass tankard.
‘Maybe, maybe not. If I get lost, I’ll ask a nice policeman. F*cking enough of them about, aren’t there?’
He walked away and I instantly regretted not telling him how I felt. He was my friend, and of course I would never have left him. But that was another of my many problems. I only ever knew what to say after the event.
I looked at the paper for another ten minutes, my mind full of what-ifs. What if Baz was in the house? What if he met us as we were trying to go up the hallway? What if there wasn’t even a safe?
To me, three hours of planning for three minutes’ work was always time well spent. But maybe Charlie was right. What was I worried about? We would go through the plan, and all the what-ifs, at the hotel.
I found myself thinking of Silky again, and concentrated hard on all the positive stuff. It took about another five minutes to realize it wasn’t working. Try as I might, I couldn’t overcome my biggest concern: that Charlie might forget what the plan was once we were on target.
I got up from the bench and started walking down the slope, past row upon row of the young smiling faces of the 1956 dead. They all looked about the same age as Steven was, when he, too, became a good lad f*cked over.