Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Prayed again – ‘Don’t let the bastards shoot.’ Realised it: ‘the bastards’ were the marksmen. A fucking jumble in his mind and the marksmen were the risk to his life, not the man hugging him close and holding the pistol to his neck.

The voice boomed in his ear, had stayed with English, and Eddie didn’t know why: ‘I walk out. I walk past you. I walk from the Sail. When I walk I have the guarantee that the whore, Immacolata Borelli, the voltagabbana – the turncoat – retracts evidence. You have a half-hour. Look for the time on your arm. Half an hour. In half an hour, no promise of retracting evidence, he is dead. Believe me, dead. You have a half-hour. You decide.’

Eddie shivered. The cold was on his skin, but the warmth of the night made him sweat. It was a new cold, and it came from fear. The rifles, he saw, never wavered in their aim and were on his head and his chest, and he was perhaps forty paces from them, and they would have a killing range of a quarter of a mile.

He sucked in great gasps of air, would have collapsed if the arm and the belt had not held him.

A man among them pushed himself up. He had been flat on his stomach, went to his knees, then used his hands for leverage. It was the man who was slight and inconsequential, who wore a creased, dusty shirt and crumpled trousers, and who was unshaven and had the short pepper-coloured hair. His face was weathered and worn and had the texture of hardship. He stood at his full height, then arched his spine as if to get stiffness from it… Salvatore breathed hard on Eddie’s neck, beside the pistol barrel. The marksmen had not shifted, nor a big-bodied man who wore a suit and held a pistol loosely, uselessly, in his hand.

Eddie watched the man who stood, saw him cup his hands across his mouth, as if that was the way to be heard.

‘Do they believe me?’ a shrill whisper in Eddie’s ear. Then the firearm’s blast near his ear, and the hair above it was scorched, the stink of firing on his skin. Concrete dust came down and settled on his face. Eddie blinked, squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again, and the rifles were still aimed at his head and chest. ‘I think, now, they believe me.’

The man had paused, as if at an interruption. Now he stood his ground and called to them.

‘My name is Lukas. I’m a friend of Eddie’s parents, not a policeman. I’d like to help.’

He twisted a little, lowered his head and murmured to Castrolami below him, ‘This is advice. If you ever incline to hostage-taking and a jerk says, “I’d like to help”, my advice is to shoot him, and fast.’

Lukas had that mischief in his face, but then his head rose and it was gone. He was sober, sombre. ‘I’m here to see if I can help,’ he shouted, throwing his voice down the walkway.

The mischief was off his face but it stayed inside him. First time the mischief had taken root since he had been at the forward airstrip in the mountains beyond Bogota and the captain, Pablo, had asked for advice and it had been suggested that the assault team go in: there was not much else in Lukas’s life that pumped excitement.

The tip of a directional microphone lay in front of his trainers, and by his ankle the comms kid took off his headphones and gave them to Castrolami.

He yelled again: ‘Would be good if I could help to sort this out, and that’s what I want to do – if you’ll allow me.’

Because he now stood square in the centre of the walkway he could see far down it. There had been an accident in the hanging of the washing so there was an avenue of vision for him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where he had a good eyeball on the boy and on the hood who held him.

‘My name, I’m saying it again, is Lukas. What I’m looking to avoid is anyone getting hurt, and any way I can, I’ll try to help prevent that.’

What Lukas saw: every few seconds, the hood’s head moved and took the boy’s with it, and he rated it as a hell of a hard call for Franco, the sniper, to have a zero on the small piece of skull that was visible as a target. And the bodies were locked together, like they were in stand-up sex out in the yard at a kids’ party. He didn’t rate the chances of the sniper getting a clean shot. And the pistol was against the back of the boy’s head, and Lukas could see in the available light that the finger was inside the loop and against the trigger bar. Most likely a shot to the head – a killing shot – would induce a muscle spasm through the body. Most certainly, a chest shot – whether fatal and into an organ or a wounding shot – would set off a decisive twitch through tissue and ligament and it would go to that finger. A spasm, a twitch, would be sufficient to depress the trigger bar… wasted exercise. They had taught the siege-busters at the Quantico training unit to do a double tap in the head, close range, pistol if possible. Two shots to the brain might suppress a spasm.

‘I told you what I want. I want it. Now you have twenty-five minutes. You use time.’ The voice came back, reedy.

Lukas thought the hood was exhausted. God alone knew how long it had been since he’d slept in a bed. Maybe not for two nights or three. Exhausted and hungry – wouldn’t have eaten proper cooked food. Exhaustion and hunger, to Lukas, balanced out. The hood would be irrational and unpredictable. He would make mistakes and be subject, big-time, to judgement errors. They were the equations Lukas worked on, were what he knew.

Castrolami, below him, beside him, murmured, ‘We have a feed through, the psychologist hears this. He says that Salvatore would dream of a legend – was never taken, killed with honour, will already know that nothing can be negotiated and that he is boxed. Salvatore knows it. He is a killer, he expects to kill. More important than anything to Salvatore is the belief that woven into the legend will be respect. The psychologist says-’

Lukas said, ‘I have his drift. Thank him.’

‘What do you do?’

‘What I try to do is get up close, talk a bit, get the pistol off the boy’s neck, take it from there. Do you want to indulge the hood, give him police-assisted suicide – his legend – or do you want to fuck him?’

‘Charge him, convict him, hear the key turn and lose it, smell the decay as he rots and the years go by. That is a better message than giving him respect.’

‘Harder to achieve, but a goal… Just watch me, just be ready… as they say, on a wing and a prayer.’

He moved forward but slowly. Like he was the tide coming in. Short, crabbed steps and he was gone from Castrolami and the comms kid and was, in a few steps, separated from the Tractor, the Engineer and the Bomber.

Lukas could see the boy’s face, part of it. There was bruising in rings, multicoloured, round the eyes, the cheeks were scarred, the lips grotesque, and there were blood smears from a wound on the forehead and from the nose, and more blood was caked where it had dribbled from the mouth. The boy wouldn’t be standing if he hadn’t been held by the belt and the arm. There had been just blind fear on the face when he had first seen it, but there had been a change, subtle. Like hope was born.

There were many burdens on Lukas’s back and shoulders. The one he liked least was that he gave little packages of fragile hope to hostages when he approached them.

He saw the increasing agitation on the hood’s face, and went slower. He did short steps that were barely the length of his shoe… If the mother-fucker moved the pistol from the boy’s neck, if the mother-fucker moved his own head clear of the boy’s, then he made an opportunity for Franco, the sniper, to shoot with the Beretta M501 rifle. Lukas reckoned, through a 1.5-6 x 42mm Zeiss scope, that the sniper would have a good view, wounds and warts, of the two faces… It would be Castrolami’s call before the sniper fired, and that was not the goal set.