The Outsiders by Gerald Seymour

sunshine, Winnie.’
    ‘They used Damian Fenby’s head for a kick-about.’
    ‘You’ll want a team of committed people. Your old colleagues?’
    ‘I’d like to rake them up.’
    ‘And the name?’
    ‘The boy called him “the Major”. He identified him as Petar Alexander Borsonov but we don’t have traces yet. We will. Interestingly, there was a small telephone book of Russians we tried to check out over the years but he wasn’t on any list we made. So, he’s careful, discreet and clever. My girl, God willing, will bring more back.’
    It was about the time that Caro Watson would be touching down in Bucharest and there was a good connection for Constanta. Winnie tried to picture the boy and open his mind, take him beyond the banality of the photo image and give him flesh and colour, build a portrait, but it was beyond her.
    ‘And I have your authorisation to bring my old people together again for this?’ she said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I’d have expected nothing less. Fenby was ours.’
    ‘ Was ours . . . By the rules, Winnie.’
    ‘What else?’
     
    The car with the Major was held at traffic-lights momentarily, the driver manoeuvring for a gap in the vehicles ahead, but it gave the escort car the opportunity.
    The girl had the door opened for her, and the eldest policeman leered. He gave her a card, and she slipped it into her bag – she didn’t examine it for his rank. In mangled Russian, Natan was told that he was being dropped here, too, and the time he should be back there in the afternoon. He was pushed out and the car sped after the Mercedes. She walked off, hips swinging. She was a free bird, as though a cage door had opened. She didn’t look at him. He was dirt, beneath her. She crossed the road, tripping through traffic, and men braked to let her pass.
    He bit his lip.
    He could turn round, of course. He had been in Constanta twice before, when the first loose discussions had been under way – before the detail the Major now demanded. He had wandered through department stores, into computer businesses, and had ended in a side-street at a working man’s café-bar, and eaten meat with fried potatoes and drunk Coke. He had had the brochures from Dell spread across the table. In the car they had given him a pocket map of the city and had pointed out to him where the store was. He would remember the rest. He could have turned round, gone to look at another store with the same level of merchandise.
    He was a fighter. Always had been. He’d been beaten by kids on the farms round his home, gone home bloodied and been told by his brothers and his father to ‘stand up for himself’. He’d been jeered at by kids at school and had ridden it. He’d been ostracised in Kaliningrad, expelled for ‘academic non-conformity’, and had sworn at his tormentors. He had gone on to the streets, found work and seen off the cold and hunger. In the hotel suite, when they had slapped him, humiliated and not trusted him, he could have lashed out at them, but they’d have beaten him to a pulp and heaved him on to the street. He had fought them by walking into the embassy’s lobby in Baku. He would fight them again in a café in a back-street of Constanta. He liked to fight, on ground of his own choosing.
    That ground would be a café used by labourers and peasants behind the St Peter and Paul Orthodox Cathedral. It was ground where he could hurt.
     
    Winnie had begun calling them back.
    There was Dottie in A Branch. She handled the allocation of the surveillance teams used for tracking targets, on foot and in vehicles. Dottie, plain as the proverbial pikestaff, had been the Boss’s apparatchik , the most loyal of the loyal. She managed detail supremely well, and had been devastated by the break-up of the unit.
    There was Kenny, taciturn and awkward, with few words to contribute. He sifted expenses dockets on the third floor, and would nod to her in the canteen but would not come to sit with her. He would, likely, have