The Outsiders by Gerald Seymour Page B

from the table and the jeans were ripped at the knee. She managed a smile and sat down.
    She did not apologise for being eleven minutes late, or reach out a hand to him. He was not her friend. She did not introduce herself but was brusque.
    ‘You’re Natan?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You were in our embassy in Baku?’ She focused hard, caught his eyes. ‘You told them who you worked for, what you’d heard, and you demanded to speak to an intelligence officer. You offered, as a reason why we might travel across Europe to meet you, details of the death of a colleague in Budapest. Well, I’m here.’
    She put her handbag between them and the woman with the big hips came forward. Caro Watson waved her away. She slid the bar on the pocket recorder in the bag. The light winked and a spool turned.
    She took a deep breath. The boy seemed to shiver. Most did when the reality of a meeting confronted them. Then it gushed.
    ‘It was a great joke for them. It was a dummy and we were in the lay-by near to where the Major lives – his family is there – close to Pskov. There were the three of them. Him and his best guards. The dummy had been dumped and they found it and they kicked it. They did it until they lost interest but by then the dummy was broken, in pieces. The head could no longer be recognised as one from a dummy that you see in a clothes store. The Major is Petar Borsonov and . . .’
    She could see the face of Damian Fenby as it had been when she identified him.
     
    The taxi dropped them at the back of the derelict hotel where the road veered to the left, but the driver pointed to a gravel track.
    ‘I don’t think it’s very far,’ Jonno said.
    They climbed the track, which was too rough for the wheels on the cases so he carried them. When they came to one of the zigzag bends, they saw the towering bluff of a small mountain with a sheer cliff and, below it, on a lower plateau, the façades of two villas. The tiled roofs peeped above the trees and undergrowth that covered the slopes. One was white and the other ochre, the colour merging with the ground. He pointed, and she paused to take in what he showed her. Sweat stained the armpits of her blouse. She carried the two plastic bags they’d filled in a mini-mart by the bus station – milk and bread, some pork fillet, potatoes, salad – a back-stop against the fridge being empty – four beers, a bottle of wine, and some sparkling water. He thought Posie didn’t often carry shopping bags. She was wearing little more than a pair of slippers on her feet, and would have been fine on a pavement but –
    Posie trod on a sharp stone and started to limp. Jonno did the decent thing and took the shopping bags with the cases.
    They went on up. Below them there were interminable holiday homes and apartment blocks, finished and unfinished, then Marbella’s parks and trees, which went down to the shore. He saw ships out to sea, and a distant landmass. They’d be isolated up here. No bar, no bistro, no dancing, and no late bus back.
    At the next corner he saw high retaining walls, with wire on them, and wooden gates. A surveillance camera had picked them up and moved as it followed them. Brilliant: they were on TV. He wondered who was watching them.
    There was a pad with keys on it and grille for speaking into. The sign identified it as the Villa del Aguila. He looked up the track to where it ended: another set of gates, more cameras, wire and retaining walls. He noted the gap in the two walls. He and Posie trudged forward and he muttered to her that they were nearly there. Between the walls there was an opening that was little more than the width needed for a car to get through. The gates had been painted once but the deep green colour had faded. There was a chipped, peeling sign and Jonno bent close to it: Villa Paraiso. He said they had reached Paradise.
    He pushed open the gates and they went through. He heard her struggle to close them. There was a path with steps that went