Recoil - Andy McNab [30]
I closed the door behind me. ‘All right, mate? Want a brew?’ I kept my tone light and happy, but he knew as well as I did that I wasn’t here for tea and a KitKat.
The little table with the brew kit was still against the opposite wall. I even recognized the Smarties and Thunderbirds mugs that would have come with an Easter egg.
He shook his head while I went to test the weight of the kettle.
‘OK, Dave, let’s crack on.’ I flicked the switch and stopped playing Mr Nice. ‘By the time I get to Heathrow this evening I want a ticket to DRC and a contact in-country who’ll get me to Ituri province and a fucked-up village called Nuka.’
Crazy Dave’s face didn’t even twitch. He just stared. If he’d been able to move his legs I was sure he’d have put them up on his desk, sat back and chuckled.
‘Write the name down, Dave. N-U-K-A. I need to be there as of yesterday.’
He still didn’t move.
‘There are two reasons why you need to pull your finger out and get on with it. One, it’ll stop me putting the word around about how you tear the arse out of the commission so much you make more money on every job than the fuckers in the field. They wouldn’t be impressed with you, would they? They’d probably take you out of here and give that chair of yours a bit of a roll down the hill, know what I mean?
‘Two. What are the companies going to say when they discover you don’t even check that guys like Charlie have all their pistons working? Sending out cripples isn’t the finest quality control, is it? I mean, if word got out, you wouldn’t be left with much to broker, would you? And these are good times, aren’t they?’
I leaned against the wall. ‘By the way, is that your grandkid on the wall in the hallway there?’
‘A boy.’
‘Congratulations.’
The kettle clicked and I threw a teabag into the Smarties mug. ‘But that’s not to say I ain’t going to bubble you anyway, one day. Charlie shouldn’t have been on that job in the first place. He wasn’t physically capable, and you ripped him off. How much was it?’ I put the kettle down and picked up a Tetrapak of UHT milk. ‘Oh, yeah, I remember. You gave Charlie two hundred grand and kept three hundred yourself. Wasn’t that how it went?’
I looked at Dave. He wasn’t embarrassed, he was angry. He was fuming. His hands gripped the sides of his wheelchair so tightly his knuckles were white.
I squeezed the teabag with a spoon. ‘Just think, Dave, if you’d got all that money you ripped off instead of kindly donating it to Charlie’s widow you wouldn’t be living here now, eh? I bet that grandkid would be all squared away with an education trust and that girl of yours could have had a nose job. But let’s not worry about that for the moment. I’ve come all the way from sunny Switzerland to hear how you’re going to get me to Nuka.’
‘I know where Nuka is. I’m a broker, remember?’ He pushed himself away from the desk and manoeuvred his high-tech chair round it to face me. ‘You finished?’
‘Nope.’ I thought I might as well push my luck. I picked up pen and paper from the desk and started to jot down the details of my Citibank account in Virginia. ‘Let’s say twenty grand in cash on top and we’ll call it quits – for now.’
‘You know, Nick, if I could stand I would. Then I’d fucking chin you.’
He raised himself an inch or two off his seat but only to relieve the pressure on his arse or something. He held himself like that for a few seconds. Maybe he needed a fart.
‘Here’s how it is, Nick. The Gospel according to St Real.’ He sat himself down again. ‘I fucked up, got greedy and regret it. Charlie was a good guy, but I’ve paid my debt to him. Now, I’ll go this extra mile for you, but then that’s it. We’re all square. I want you out of my way. You’ll always be trouble.’
‘I like being around you, Dave.’ I tested the brew: it was good. I had a bit of a weakness for UHT. ‘I like to remind you now and again of what you did to Charlie. Remind you that I could fuck up business and at the same time fuck up that head of yours. Know what I mean?’
‘You can try and fuck up whatever you want. In the short term, yes, you could do business