Conn Iggulden - Quantum of tweed

‘Oh, for God’s sake…’ Victor Stasiak said. ‘There’s no privacy here.’

In moments, the bridge filled with boys peering over the edge while their harassed scoutmaster warned them constantly that they would fall if they leant that far out. Victor tried not to listen, but he learned more about that bridge and waterfall in the next minute than he had ever wanted to know.

To his surprise, Nerius suddenly spoke, the words hoarse from a man who weighed them like gold and spent them only rarely.

‘I am… pleased to hear that. I can take over, Victor. We can work something out.’

Victor Stasiak blinked at him in surprise. He opened his mouth to reply, but the scoutmaster was already pointing further down the hill. The group began to move away. Swiftly, Victor checked both directions, seeing only the backs of young Scouts hurrying to catch up with the rest. He failed to see Albert Rossi brace himself against a tree some way off the path. Albert was muddy and exhausted from scrambling over rough ground, but at last he was close enough to bring his gun to bear on the two men.

‘I would have liked that, Nerius,’ Victor Stasiak went on. ‘Yes, I can say it to you now. I would have liked you to take over, after me. I have no sons, Nerius. You would have made me proud.’ He checked the paths again. Finally they were alone.

A hundred yards away, Albert Rossi wiped sweat from his eyes and rested the long silencer on a small branch, squinting along it.

‘There is only one small problem, old friend,’ Victor said.

Nerius raised his eyebrows in silent enquiry.

‘Small dogs should not show their teeth to big dogs, Nerius. When they do, they get hurt.’

‘What do you mean?’ Nerius asked in genuine confusion.

‘I mean you should have told me about the shipment from the Ukraine, old friend. It should have turned up on the books and it did not. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about you stealing from me?’

Nerius understood suddenly that he was very alone. He stepped away from Victor Stasiak and his muscles tensed to run. In doing so, he gave Albert Rossi a perfect, clear shot.

With a grim expression, Albert squeezed the trigger, then squeezed it again, much harder, so that his hand shook with the effort.

‘Safety catch!’ he whispered to himself, flicking it across with his finger and resuming his position, squinting along the barrel.

His mouth fell open in surprise. In that brief moment of inattention, the situation on the bridge had changed dramatically.

Victor Stasiak had Nerius by the throat. The smaller man was struggling violently, hammering at the hands that held him. They staggered left, then right as Albert Rossi looked on in astonishment. It seemed almost rude to interrupt his kill in such a way, as if they were not taking him seriously at all.

The wooden bridge across the waterfall was well built and solid. It was quite capable of preventing Boy Scouts from falling to their deaths, with a little care. It was not, however, capable of withstanding the sixteen stone of Victor Stasiak, combined with the twelve stone of Auguste Nerius, suddenly slamming against the railing. It gave way and both men flailed in horror as they plunged over the edge and tumbled to the rocks far below. For reasons Albert did not understand, Victor Stasiak’s spinning bowler hat landed on the wooden bridge and stuck there, quivering.

For the second time in his brief career as an assassin, Albert Rossi watched men fall to their deaths. He was obscurely disappointed. He’d been looking forward to using the gun and if it hadn’t been for the rotten safety catch, he’d… He caught himself, realising lots of different things at once. He would be paid a small fortune, for a start. Victor Stasiak was definitely dead and that meant he’d succeeded, at least as far as Stephen Hawking was concerned.

More pressing, though, was the sudden shouting of bodyguards nearby, combined with the barking of dogs. Albert Rossi was fairly certain they would see that a terrible accident had occurred. However, he suspected the sight of an armed man wrapped around a nearby tree might make even a simple-minded bodyguard a little suspicious. He could hear Alsatians barking furiously as the bodyguards came sprinting up to the bridge. Instinct alone made him toss the pistol into the river far below before standing up and trying very hard to look like any other hiker who happened to be wandering past.

Albert Rossi reached the bridge at the same time as the bodyguards. The Alsatian dogs growled and lunged on their short leashes, their black eyes frightening. One of the men was already gesturing wildly, speaking into a mobile phone in a language Albert couldn’t understand.

Albert felt it would be suspicious to ignore the scene, so he sidled close to the broken rail like any other interested passer-by. He was looking at the sprawled bodies far below when one of the guards grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

‘You… go! Go away now!’ the man said, gesturing down the path.

With a frown at the man’s bad manners, Albert did as he was told, trying not to let them see how his legs were shaking. That was it, he told himself. That was the last job he’d take. He could still recall the moment of puzzled terror as Victor Stasiak caught sight of him in mid-fall. The look in the man’s eyes had been an awful thing to witness and Albert shuddered as he reached the bottom of the track.

To his surprise, there was a policeman standing by the postman’s bicycle, but Albert had been dealing with worse things than that and he strolled on, passing the police car parked nearby. He was close enough to hear the radio splutter as the message came in about a Boy Scout troop who had been splashing around in the pools below only to have two men bounce off the rocks around them. That was a trip they wouldn’t forget, Albert Rossi thought with a smile. He wondered if there was a badge for that.

As he made it back to the road, he realised he didn’t regret the decision he had made. Albert Rossi was cut out for a lot of things, but the life of an assassin was too noisy, too fraught with danger and, frankly, too stressful. He almost looked forward to quiet days back in the shop, or he could even retire.

A thought struck him. He owed himself a visit to a casino first. He began to whistle, walking along a leafy lane towards Buttermere.

PC George Thompson almost choked on his lemonade when he saw Albert Rossi again. For a moment, he thought there would be a nasty repeat of their first meeting, but this time with Rossi thumping him on the back. He had been sitting at a table under a cafe awning, coincidentally close to the Nissan Micra he had followed north, when the man himself strolled by, whistling to himself as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

As a general rule, policemen don’t enjoy the sight of cheerful, carefree people and PC Thompson was no exception. He finished coughing out the last gulp of lemonade he’d inhaled and stood up suddenly to bar Albert Rossi’s path. They faced each other in mutual suspicion and surprise.

For the first few moments, Albert could not reconcile the face of the policeman with his recent experiences. In Albert’s mind, the policeman had a definite context and a cafe in Cumbria was not it. For his part, PC George Thompson could hardly believe how bedraggled and muddy Albert Rossi was. He looked as if he’d leapt through a hedge, hiked over a mountain and slid down a hill until a tree arrested his descent.

All of that was in fact true. It had been a busy morning for Albert Rossi. Mud-spattered and weary though he was, he was also feeling very pleased with himself. He recognised the moustache and smiled.

‘Afternoon, George,’ Albert said cheerily. ‘Or I suppose it’s evening by now. I didn’t expect to see the long arm of the law so far out of London.’