I let go of his throat and threw my hands round the back of his head, pulling it towards me so I could get a better purchase with my teeth. Then I bit as hard as I could, working my head from side to side as I did so.

My jaws closed and the bone collapsed like a peanut sh.e.l.l. His sinuses exploded.

Blood and snot spurted from the hole in his face and he let out a scream of rage and pain.

I pulled away from him, kicking and punching, trying to get him off me. But he still held on.

I managed to turn us onto our sides, and force my hand down between us until it could close around the cold metal of the pistol grip. I brought the muzzle up beneath his armpit, released the safety, and squeezed.

He took the round full in the chest.

I squeezed again.

Nothing.

There hadn't been room between us to allow the top slide to move backwards and forwards fully enough to reload.

I pushed myself away from him, scrabbling at the top slide with my fingers until I got enough grip to rack it and release it.

I lay on my back for a moment as he writhed beside me. Then I rammed the muzzle into his chest and squeezed the trigger twice.

I crawled away and sat against Tengiz's stone. The only sound louder than my choking attempts to regain my breath was another car pa.s.sing along the road. This one seemed to have parted company with its exhaust entirely.

My tongue had swollen to the roof of my mouth. My Adam's apple felt like it had been kicked right against the back of my throat. I sat there, gobbing out blood between my jumper and my sweatshirt, trying to leave as little DNA as possible on the ground.

I fished out the mobile, gulping oxygen to slow down for Charlie to understand me. It rang just once before he answered.

'Back the car up to the gate. Get the boot open. We've got a drama.'

He didn't answer; he just closed down. He knew what was going into the back.

I rolled over and scrabbled about, trying to locate whatever the Hulk had been aiming to cut me into little pieces with. My fingers touched the cold steel of a gollock. No half-measures for this boy; he might have called it a machete, tree-beater, it didn't matter. What did was that the thing wasn't buried in my head.

f.u.c.k that. I'd been lucky this time.

I crawled over to the bench, still trying to gulp in air, my mouth still filling with blood. I spat it into my jumper, and managed to heave the slab far enough to get my hand through the gap. I fished about until my fingers brushed against the plastic bag. The papers went back in my jacket pocket. Until the Hulk had turned up, I'd given Whitewall and whoever pulled his strings the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn't any longer. Charlie and I were being well and truly f.u.c.ked over. No-one was getting this now. It was ours.

I groped around with the torch and found the pistol. I pushed it back into my jeans, and shoved the machete down the front of its previous owner's trousers.

I grabbed his hands, and started to drag him down the pathway. We couldn't just leave him here. The elderly are early risers, and for all we knew there could be a steady stream of widows from first light.

I could see Charlie b.u.mping the Audi across the road, then turning and backing it up.

I reached the tap and started to wash myself down.

Charlie walked through the gate and saw the body on the pathway. 'f.u.c.king h.e.l.l, lad.'

'You've been st.i.tched up, mate. f.u.c.king Whitewall had this knucklehead waiting for you with a gollock.' I pointed down at the handle sticking out of his waistband. 'I've got to clean up, then I'll give you a hand.'

I washed as best I could and pushed back my wet hair, trying to look a bit respectable for the hotel. I filled a couple of plastic drinks bottles that someone had left by the taps, and went back to the plot to rinse away the most obvious splashes of blood. I didn't want the Sunday morning knitting circle to miss a st.i.tch and call in the blue-and-whites.

Charlie and I somehow managed to heave the Hulk into the boot, torso first. For a moment the rest of him was hanging down across the Audi's rear b.u.mper, as if he was bent over, being sick.

There was rustling, and the crunch of gravel behind us. Bodies on the pathway.

No time for talk: I grabbed the gollock and ran back into the gloom. My eyes out on their stalks, I checked each side of the path as I ran to where I thought the noise had come from.

I stopped just past Tengiz, took cover behind a tomb, and listened.

More rustling, left of the path.

I ran for it between two plots. They heard me and took off. I headed for the shouts of scared Paperclip.

Jumping a low wall, I crunched over the gravel of a plot. I could make out two shapes, maybe two plots ahead, stumbling over fences and walls, trying to get away. I jumped again and fell onto plastic sheeting. A body was under it, moaning, not moving.

Gollock up, I kicked myself free and pulled the plastic away.

One of the sh.e.l.l-suit crew stared up at me, tourniquet still in place around his arm, not moving a muscle. The plastic was pulled between two plots to make a shelter. I shone the torch beam in his eyes, and his pupils remained fully dilated. If he was looking into the future, he didn't have to look far.

The others were well gone now. There was nothing I could do but head back for Charlie and hope they'd been too f.u.c.ked up to see anything. But I knew, deep down, that if they were, they wouldn't have been jumping around as they had.

We each grabbed a leg and swung him in. I closed the lid and Charlie took off his jacket and jumper and started to wipe blood off the back of the car.

'He was waiting for me,' I said. 'He knew you'd be here. Which means I wouldn't mind betting those two at the house weren't there by accident either.'

Charlie carried on with his cleaning while I checked the area for stray sh.e.l.l suits and any other machete-waving psychopaths.

'I hope you got the full wad up front, mate. It's a total f.u.c.k-up, but we'll protect ourselves with the doc.u.ment. Whatever's in it must be pretty important; every f.u.c.ker seems to want to get their hands on it.'

The cleaning was taking too long. 'Let's just f.u.c.k off and sort everything out when we get back under cover.'

We got in the car, me behind the wheel.

'I've got a problem, lad.' Charlie looked like he'd just seen a ghost.

'What?'

'I've only got half.'

'You what? What the f.u.c.k were you thinking of?'

Charlie raised a hand. 'Hold on, everyone's in the driving seat except for me. I had two choices. Take the job as it was, or leave it.'

I headed for the nearest area of darkness, the high ground towards the TV tower. I couldn't believe he'd been so stupid. You always demand all the money up front. You never know who's f.u.c.king about with you. I started shouting at him as we bounced back into the shadow of the trees. 'Didn't you think you could be st.i.tched up? What the f.u.c.k was going through that wobbly old head of yours?'

He said nothing as we twisted and turned our way towards the darkness.

As I parked up, in what I supposed was a fire break in the pine trees that blanketed the mountain, he finally turned and faced me. It was his turn to shout, and I could feel the force of his soundwaves against my face as well as in my ear. 'I'm f.u.c.king dying, remember? I need the cash. What would you have done? a.s.sume Crazy Dave would come begging, and just walk away? Think about it.'

I'd known I was wrong as soon as I'd opened my mouth. 'I'm sorry, Charlie. f.u.c.k it, it doesn't matter. Let's get the kit in the boot, and then get the f.u.c.k out of here. As long as we've got that doc.u.ment, we're going to be OK, I'm sure of it.'

'Yeah,' Charlie quipped. 'If all else fails we can put it on eBay.'

PART SEVEN

1

Sunday, 1 May

The terminal was heaving with pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sengers.

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.u.c.k out of here. Freedom felt so close I could spit at it, but we were still the wrong side of the gla.s.s part.i.tion.

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 p.i.s.sed 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 a.r.s.eholes back from a night on the p.i.s.s, jackets inside out and tied round our waists to cover the worst of the blood and mud. As it turned out, n.o.body raised an eyebrow. It was just another Sat.u.r.day night in downtown Tbilisi.

I'd retrieved my card from behind the cistern, had a s.h.i.t, 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 s.h.i.t 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 doc.u.ment 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.u.c.ker. 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.u.c.k 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.u.c.k 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.

2

Next time I looked at my watch it was 11.05. I was slouched over an espresso thick enough to tar a road, watching a Georgian celebrity chef do something interesting with an onion and a couple of oxen.

The delay was beginning to worry me. Once Baz's Audi was found with a present in the boot, the police would be swarming all over the house, trying to work out how Father Christmas had dropped by there as well. Or it could be the other way round. Whatever, it didn't matter which way this nightmare unfolded. If there was any CCTV footage in the can, it wouldn't be long before they were huddled round a monitor, watching the f.u.c.k-about in the yard.

Had I left any DNA at the cemetery? It was too late to worry about it now. But I did, just a bit.

Adrenalin and caffeine were taking their toll. I could almost feel the tension pumping round my body. At least the pain in my Adam's apple was starting to ease.

I took another sip of my now-tepid brew and concentrated on looking as bored as everyone else, but the bites in my swollen tongue made that easier said than done. s.h.i.t, it hurt. I wouldn't be putting away any packets of salt and vinegar for a while.

Five flights had been delayed so far. I heard the occasional Brit and American voice, and now and then a s.n.a.t.c.h of French and German, but most of the chat seemed to be in Russian or Paperclip.

A hardtop 110 Land Rover was still parked outside the terminal, either waiting for a pick-up, or until the driver was sure his pa.s.senger's flight had actually taken off. For his sake, I hoped he'd brought his thermos and a paper.

Two men came out of the terminal, dragging their carry-ons behind them, and headed towards the sheds. They wore the international uniform of the travelling fifty-something American executive: blue blazer, b.u.t.ton-down shirt, chinos, very shiny loafers and a laptop bag for good measure. They were clearly in a good mood, and anxious to share it. Some guys who'd been chatting in French, and switched instantly to English as they approached, were today's lucky winners. 'Hey, good news, fellas. The Vienna flight's at 12.25. We gotta check in now.'

There were sighs of relief and jokes about Georgian inefficiency as the crowd gathered their bags and headed for the terminal.

I stood up just as Charlie emerged from the main entrance, laptop bag on his shoulder. He saw me, up and ready, and turned back.

I was about to follow when I caught a glimpse of the latest TV news bulletin. And what I saw made my body feel so heavy, all of a sudden, I had to sit down again.

Baz's Audi filled the screen.

Then the camera cut to a glistening pool of blood in the mud, directly under the boot. Some of the rubber stops must have been missing from the drainage holes.

The reporter gobbed off, then a policeman answered a series of questions. A string of Paperclip flashed along the bottom of the screen, with what I a.s.sumed was a summary of the morning's breaking story.

The camera homed in on the open boot, where the Hulk lay curled up like a baby, the satchel still shoved behind his back. He was big, and a lot darker-skinned than most locals.

It zoomed in even closer on the entry wounds. An ambulance crew stood by as forensics guys took swabs and checked for prints.