PART SEVEN
1
Sunday, 1 May
The terminal was heaving with passengers waiting for international flights, and every single one of them had been delayed.
It was 10.09 on a Sunday; only a matter of time before the Audi would be discovered. Even in Georgia, bloodstained seats and a shot-out window must be a curiosity.
Our flight to Vienna should have taken off at 10.30, but we weren’t even being allowed to check in. There was only one departure gate, and only enough room airside for one planeload of passengers.
We’d covered our tracks as effectively as we could, but that didn’t stop me feeling uncomfortable. Red Eyes and his mate hadn’t done us any favours when they’d ripped our masks off, and it wouldn’t take Inspector Morse to link us to Baz’s Audi and the bodies in his driveway. I just wanted to get the f*ck out of here. Freedom felt so close I could spit at it, but we were still the wrong side of the glass partition.
I sat by the garden sheds across the road from the terminal. At least the benches were dry; the sun had done its stuff, and now peeped intermittently through the banks of slow-moving cloud.
A lot of us had moved out here to escape the crush, and the taxi drivers were really pissed off about it. They didn’t want to share their world with a load of foreigners. The shed owners weren’t too happy about it, either. Each of them sat behind their identical chocolate- and gum-laden counters, making it very clear that the portable black-and-white TV on the shelf behind them was a great deal more appealing than the potential customers in front.
A bored-looking anchorwoman with big black hair was presenting a news programme on all three screens. It was obviously another slow day at the network. We were treated to endless vistas of grand buildings, or lingering shots of Georgian soldiers in US BDUs, with Richard the Lionheart insignia stuck all over them, sitting purposefully in the back of trucks, or running courageously up and down hills.
We’d made it to the hotel just before four. The kit had stayed with the body in the boot. We had to walk back into the city clean, just in case a curious blue-and-white wanted to know what we were lugging about this time of the morning. Charlie’s jumper and the weapon went down an open manhole that no man or beast in their right mind would consider even going near, then we’d played a couple of drunken arseholes back from a night on the piss, jackets inside out and tied round our waists to cover the worst of the blood and mud. As it turned out, nobody raised an eyebrow. It was just another Saturday night in downtown Tbilisi.
I’d retrieved my card from behind the cistern, had a shit, shave and shower, then headed for Charlie’s room with my old clothes under my arm to spend a little quality time covering our tracks. I pulled the CTR tape from its casing and burned it, with the help of the hotel’s complimentary matches, and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Even our cell phones got the good news from my boot heel after a wipe-down to dispose of prints. We’d come into this country sterile, and we had to leave the same way.
The Marriott tape stayed with us; it was just too valuable to lose control of. There was a world of potential shit between us and Brisbane, and we needed to keep as much bargaining power to hand as we could.
After enough room-service breakfast to feed a couple of Charlie’s horses, we binned our clothes in the kitchen skips behind the hotel, along with the remains of the camcorder. The tape was in my new, oil-worker chic, dark blue Rohan trousers, and I had slipped the first ten pages of the document in Baz’s safe inside a magazine, in the pocket of my new khaki jacket. Charlie, waiting in the terminal, had the other half. He was going to come out and buy something from the shop when it was time to leave. That would be my signal to follow him back in.
I felt sorry for the old f*cker. Once such a strong, solid, dependable performer, and now so screwed around by disease that he was finding it hard to grip anything firmly for more than five minutes. I could only begin to imagine his frustration. Just like Ali – king of the world one minute, a wreck the next. But unlike Ali, Charlie had a half-empty wallet into the bargain.
I had been thinking about that wallet a lot since this morning. Instead of keeping the papers as insurance, maybe we should cut a deal.
I felt a call to Crazy Dave from Vienna coming on. I’d persuade him to put us in touch with whoever the f*ck had dreamed up this job, and give them the chance to buy the papers for the rest of Charlie’s two hundred grand.
As a bonus, I’d try and resist the temptation to rip their heads off for forgetting to mention that we’d be sharing house-room with a couple of maniac jewel thieves, and a graveyard with a machete-wielding cousin of the Incredible Hulk. We’d keep the two tapes of Whitewall and a copy of the papers as a little memento of our Georgian adventure, in case they changed their minds later, or suddenly found themselves in the mood to give us 200K’s worth of pain.
I didn’t have too many illusions about Whitewall. He was probably just as expendable as we were, and they’d bin him as easily as they’d planned to bin Charlie. But at least we had something up our sleeves that he wouldn’t want to become regular Sunday afternoon family viewing.
I suddenly realized that, for the first time in my life, I didn’t give a f*ck about the actual money. I wanted it for Charlie and Hazel’s sake, of course, and because I never liked the idea of being turned over, but that was it. The thing I was really looking forward to was calling Silky. I needed to hear her voice again.
But I didn’t fancy explaining to either of the girls that we’d be coming back via Hereford – that we had to see an old mate, and would therefore be a day or two later than we’d promised – so I decided to leave that bit of the conversation to Charlie.