Detonator

‘One more thing. Ask Pasha if they’ve got any recent thefts of uranium from the Soviet navy on record. From a decommissioned sub, maybe. Murmansk is full of that kind of shit. Over to you, mate.’

22

I left him to it and fired up the Alfa. I turned right off the roundabout, paralleling the beach in the opposite direction to the graveyard. I doubted that Dijani had a big enough team to have eyes on the cargo quay, but it wouldn’t do any harm to make it look like I was heading for Bari before doubling back.

I parked in one of the residential streets between the hospital and the cypress avenue, skirted the roundabout and followed the path up the edge of the cemetery that I’d taken earlier.

The mobile crane was in position at the rear, engine ru

I went back to the most easily climbable of the trees and swung myself inside, on to the roof of the nearest building. They weren’t short of cypresses in here too. In the thin moonlight they cast long shadows across the shiny white graves and crosses, and the maze of stone and marble buildings that housed the dead. As my breathing got heavier my split nostril started to make a rasping noise. The skin flapped and kicked off the pain once more. Fuck it, I’d get it sorted later.

It really was like a separate city, with its own paved streets, squares, monuments and glass-fronted chapels of all shapes and sizes.

I spotted more movement fifty to my half-right. I didn’t have time to fuck about. I grabbed the edge of the parapet and lowered myself to the ground.

Like almost everywhere else I’d seen in Italy, this place was a mixture of shiny new, classic old, under construction and falling apart. Keeping in the shadows, I made the most of the cover provided by rows of headstones. A light flickered somewhere to my left. It wasn’t a torch beam, though. It was one of those little electric candles that someone had left ru

Something else glinted by a mound of freshly dug earth. When I got closer, I found a shovel that hadn’t been gathered at the end of the day and returned to the storeroom.

I picked it up and looped round towards what turned out to be a not-quite-derelict family mausoleum.

The stone facing had flaked away and the roof was crumbling. The door must have fallen off a while back. It had been replaced by a random selection of boards nailed to a rickety frame. That too had been moved aside to allow access. I couldn’t see much of the interior except for a bunch of memorial plaques and a big hole in the ground.

I heard voices coming from inside – not very happy ones – and saw the silhouette of a body climbing out of it. When he reached the threshold, the figure turned and issued a string of instructions to whoever was still in the pit. It sounded like they were doing the heavy lifting. The boss man had swapped his sharp grey suit for jeans and a fleece, but he still didn’t want to get his hands dirty. A couple of thick undertakers’ straps lay coiled at his feet.

I sca

I was no more than five paces from him now. I gripped the shaft of the shovel with both hands, raised it across my right shoulder like an axe, and swung the edge of the blade as hard as I could at the side of his neck. It wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, so I didn’t take his head clean off. It stayed attached to his body long enough to tumble forwards into the pit with him.

I followed him in. Dijani landed on top of the one on the left. The one on the right was tangled up in the tarp they’d used to cover the coffin. I rotated the shaft so the shovel blade pointed downwards and chopped it deep into the place where his neck joined his torso. I felt his collarbone shatter and saw blood spurt from the wound. He still managed to hook my ankles with his good arm and sweep my feet from under me.

As my arse hit the ground he raised the same hand – not to hit me, but to try and stem the flow from his shoulder.

It wasn’t going to happen.

I kicked him backwards and focused on his mate.

The guy was lying alongside the coffin, still trying to shift the weight of the boss man off his chest. His eyes widened as I turned and raised the shovel once more, like I was about to dig myself a hole.

He raised both hands in surrender.

Fuck that.

I brought the blade down on his bulging Adam’s apple.

I glanced across at the other guy. He’d failed to locate and seal the soggy end of his carotid artery between his thumb and forefinger, and was bleeding out. Even if he’d succeeded, there wouldn’t have been enough oxygen feeding his brain.

I frisked them both for weapons. No joy there. And even in the darkness, I could see that neither of them was Rexho Uran.

I grabbed Dijani by the ear. That was all it took to remove his head from his shoulders. I held it up for a moment, thinking I might feel some satisfaction. But I felt nothing. Nothing at all.

Then I chucked it into the pit and climbed out of the ruins of the suddenly rather overcrowded mausoleum.

23

I heard two or three sets of footsteps approaching and saw some more of those red dots dancing among the headstones. I hung a rapid left and legged it back to what I could now see was a small family memorial chapel. I heaved myself on to the roof and out.

As I swung down from the tree branch, I heard more footsteps at the back, and another engine sparking up.

I hit the keypad of Luca’s spare mobile as soon as I’d crossed the main and was fifty from the Alfa. ‘Mate, get the GIS to the cemetery now. Dijani is dead. There are still at least four of the fuckers, in a blue Fiat three-to

‘You still think uranium?’

‘Tell GIS to get a fucking move on and we’ll find out.’

I’d just pressed the fob and seen the Alfa’s lights flash when I heard the shriek of tyres behind me. I jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the ignition button as the rear-view filled with light.

I swung the wheel hard left, flicked the Alfa’s headlamps on to main beam and did a screaming U-turn. Tyres smoking, I throttled up, straight into the path of the oncoming wagon.

He lost his nerve first. He hadn’t taken his helmet off and got ready to fight.

He swerved right and bounced off a line of parked cars. I glanced left as I sped past. A BMW SUV. Rexho wrestling with the wheel.

The darkness ahead of me was filled with blues and twos. I glanced behind to see the SUV doing half a doughnut, steadying itself then coming after me.

A spider’s web of cracks appeared in the top corner of the Alfa’s rear screen as I went left, and the round exited through the window just behind the passenger headrest.

Another shrieked through, punching a hole the size of a fist in the centre of the glass and burying itself in the dash.

I floored the accelerator pedal on the approach to the level crossing. The lights flashed and the barrier started to lower when I was ten away. I kept going.

The paintwork on Luca’s roof took some punishment, and his suspension didn’t take bumping over the railway track at speed too well, but the SUV came off worse. It managed to get under the first barrier without losing everything above the bo