Stephen Leather - False Friends

‘I’ll take a cigar, yeah,’ said Shepherd.

‘Come on, then. Let’s give dessert a swerve and we’ll have a chat outside.’ He stood up and gestured with his chin at Thompson. Shepherd caught Sharpe’s eye and nodded at the door and the four men threaded their way through the tables to the doorway. They headed along the corridor and over to the pub. ‘Hey, Paul, get us some brandies,’ said Kettering. ‘The good stuff.’

Thompson went inside the pub while Kettering handed cigars to Shepherd and Sharpe and then lit them with matches. The three men blew smoke up at the stars.

‘So, Ian says you’re the go-to guys,’ said Kettering.

Shepherd leaned towards Kettering and lowered his voice. ‘What is it you want?’

Kettering looked around, then bent his head towards Shepherd. ‘AK-47s. Can you get them?’

‘I can get you anything, mate. The question is, have you got the money?’

‘We’ve got money,’ said Kettering. ‘Money isn’t a problem. So what would an AK-47 cost?’

‘Depends on how many you want,’ said Shepherd.

Kettering shrugged. ‘Forty?’

Shepherd laughed. ‘Forty AK-47s? What are you planning, a war?’ He continued to laugh but his mind was racing because Kettering had caught him by surprise. He had been expecting the man to want to buy two or three, or maybe half a dozen. But forty was a totally different ball game. As he laughed he looked over at Sharpe and could see that his partner’s eyes had also hardened with the realisation that their investigation had moved up to a whole new level.

‘Can you get us forty or not?’ asked Kettering.

Shepherd forced himself to appear relaxed. ‘I can get you four hundred. Give me a month and I could probably get you four thousand.’ He took a pull on his cigar and held the smoke in his mouth rather than inhaling before blowing it out. ‘A grand each. So forty grand.’

‘Pounds?’

Shepherd frowned. ‘Of course, pounds. What do you think I meant? Roubles? Rupees?’

‘A grand each, though,’ said Kettering. ‘That’s more than we thought.’

Thompson returned with four brandy glasses and he handed them out.

‘Garry here says a grand each,’ Kettering said to Thompson.

‘Fuck me,’ said Thompson. ‘That’s about three times what we thought we’d have to pay.’

‘What, Googled it, did you?’ Shepherd chuckled. ‘It’s like buying bubbly, mate. You get what you pay for. If you want Bolly or Cristal you pay top price. If you want a bottle of fizzy white wine then you piss off down to Tesco with a tenner in your hot little hand.’

‘You can get a second-hand Romanian knock-off for a couple of hundred quid,’ said Sharpe. ‘But it won’t be new and you won’t know whether or not it’s going to blow up in your hands. We’ve got the real thing, brand new and still in their boxes, never been fired.’

Shepherd nodded in agreement. ‘We only sell good gear,’ he said. ‘No one has ever complained about our product.’ He sipped his brandy.

‘But a grand,’ said Kettering. ‘That’s steep.’

‘Plus the ammunition,’ said Shepherd.

‘How much?’

‘Again, depends on how much you want. We can do you a good deal if you want to bulk buy.’

‘We do,’ said Thompson. ‘The more the merrier.’

‘And these guns, where do you get them from?’

‘Not thinking about trying to cut out the middleman, are you?’ asked Shepherd. ‘Because that’s a dangerous game to be playing in this business.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Kettering. ‘Jeez, you’re a suspicious bugger. I just meant where do they come from? Russia? China?’ He flicked ash into the street.

‘I wouldn’t sell you a Chinese gun,’ said Shepherd. ‘Pile of crap, they are. As bad as the Romanians. No, mate, we’ve got the Rolls-Royce of the AK. Made in the former Yugoslavia. Serbia. Google the Yugo and you’ll see what I mean. Everybody loves them.’

‘The Yugo’s a car, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, but I’m sure you’ll be able to tell the difference,’ said Shepherd. ‘Our Yugos are the ones that go bang.’

‘I thought the best AK-47s were the originals, the Russian ones,’ said Thompson.

‘Nah, the Yugo’s better, no question,’ said Shepherd.

‘And you can get us forty?’ asked Kettering.

‘Like I said, forty or four thousand.’

‘What, you get them from the factory?’

‘Where I get them from isn’t the issue, mate,’ said Shepherd. ‘The issue is you paying for them.’

‘Cash?’

Shepherd laughed. ‘No, mate, Amex will do nicely.’ His face went hard. ‘Of course, cash. But if you’ve got krugerrands I’ll take them.’

‘Krugerrands?’

‘Gold,’ said Shepherd.

‘We can get the cash,’ said Thompson.

‘Glad to hear it,’ said Shepherd. ‘So we’re agreed on forty? For forty grand?’

Kettering nodded. ‘And the ammo.’

‘I can let you have the ammo for?50 a box.’

‘And how many bullets in a box?’ asked Thompson.

‘We call them rounds,’ said Shepherd. ‘Or cartridges. And there’s a hundred in a box.’

‘So a bullet — I mean a round — costs fifty pence?’

‘I guess you were good at maths at school,’ said Sharpe. He grinned over at Shepherd and they both laughed.

‘Yeah, fifty pence each,’ said Shepherd.

‘That’s bloody expensive,’ said Kettering.

A couple went by, a man in a cashmere coat walking arm in arm with his fur-coat-wearing wife, and the men stopped speaking until the couple were out of earshot.

‘Yeah, well, it’s not as if you can drop into B amp;Q and buy a few boxes, is it?’ said Shepherd. ‘It all has to be brought in from the Continent and there are risks and costs. Plus, you need special rounds, 7.62 by 39 millimetre. They’re not easy to come by in this country. Most of the ammo you’ll be offered is nine mill or.22 so it’s pretty much a seller’s market for the AK-47 ammo.’ He shrugged. ‘You’re welcome to see if anyone else can get you the rounds cheaper but I can tell you now you’ll be wasting your time.’

‘Plus, there are quality-control issues,’ said Sharpe. ‘We’ve got a saying. Guns don’t jam; ammunition jams. It doesn’t matter how good the gun is, if you start using it to fire crap ammo then your weapon is going to jam. And that can ruin your whole day.’

Kettering nodded thoughtfully. ‘We’ll need about twenty thousand rounds,’ he said. ‘So two hundred boxes.’

Shepherd’s jaw dropped. ‘Two hundred boxes? That’s five hundred rounds per gun, right?’

‘Is that a problem?’

Shepherd looked across at Sharpe. The same thought was obviously going through his partner’s mind. Why would anyone want to buy twenty thousand rounds?

‘If you’ve got the ten grand it’s no problem at all.’ Shepherd took a long pull on his cigar.

‘What about a discount?’ asked Thompson.

‘As you’re such a good customer, you can have the ammo for eight grand,’ said Shepherd. ‘We’re looking at a total of forty-eight grand.’

‘How about we split the difference and call it forty-five?’ said Kettering. ‘Seeing as how I’m buying the Bolly?’

‘Forty-five it is,’ said Shepherd. ‘But, mate, what are you going to be doing with twenty thousand rounds?’

‘Self-protection,’ said Kettering.

‘From what? The bloody army?’

‘Look, you said the ammunition was hard to get hold of. I don’t want to be coming back to you for more.’

‘You know the magazine only holds thirty rounds?’ said Sharpe.

‘So?’ said Kettering.

‘Just thought I’d mention it. I mean, twenty thousand rounds is a lot of ammo. Are you planning to fire them at the same time?’