Free Silencer by Andy McNab Page B

that filled his screen. The same went for whoever was behind the camera: the hum of voices sounded as if they were discussing what to have for dinner.
    ‘How did you find him?’
    Frank brushed another imaginary speck off his trousers. ‘When you look for garbage, you go to the garbage dump.’
    His lads kept chatting in the background, apparently oblivious to the loud rasps of their captive fighting to get oxygen into his lungs through swollen, lacerated lips. Frank was more concerned about his thumbnail – a fleck of varnish was starting to chip away from the immaculately buffed tip.
    I leaned forward so that I could study the boy on the chair more closely. Just like his dead mate, the runner was covered with ink. A blurred crucifix tattoo took pride of place across his torso; Christ’s feet were nailed to his belly button and his face was covered with a tuft of blood-soaked chest hair. The only other patch of blue I could make out beneath the red was a drawing of an iron cuff around his right ankle with a padlock resting on the top of his foot. The prison ink of choice was usually a mixture of soot and piss, injected into the skin with a sharpened guitar string attached to an electric shaver.
    The runner was so ravaged and swollen I couldn’t tell if his eyes were closed against the pain or so puffed up he couldn’thave opened them even if he’d wanted to. His whole body was covered with bruises that were almost the same colour as his body ink. Blood dribbled from his nose, ears and mouth, and streamed down his legs from a knife cut across the top of each thigh. The damage I’d done him with the remote control paled into insignificance alongside the workout his new best friends had given him.
    Frank gathered his empty mug and wandered over to the nuclear reactor. He didn’t offer me a refill. He’d have figured if I wanted another brew, I’d ask him for one – or get off my arse and fetch it for myself. He might have every material thing he’d ever dreamed of, and be rocking himself to sleep every night in the cradle of Russian culture, but some things never changed. Frank was Frank. I liked that. At least you knew where you stood.
    He waved his spare hand nonchalantly over his shoulder, in the direction of the screen. ‘Do I recognize this vermin? Of course I don’t.’
    ‘Does he know where Katya is?’
    Frank piled sugar into his mug as the nuclear reactor kicked off. ‘Yes.’
    ‘Where?’
    He turned and headed back to the table with a look I’d come to know well – as if he had another place to be. He sat down and reengaged with the screen as he stirred his coffee. ‘The two of them are peasants. They were only there to collect your … your Cuban woman.’
    He took a sip of his brew. It looked like molten tarmac, but he seemed to like it.
    ‘Collect for who? For what?’
    ‘He says he doesn’t know why. They were each paid five hundred dollars US by a Vasil Diminetz to make sure she went to Moldova. Half now, half on delivery.’
    ‘Moldova? Why Moldova?’
    He shrugged.
    ‘That’s it? That’s all he knows?’
    ‘Of course not. They always know more. They just don’t realize it. Until they are … enlightened.’
    ‘She involved with the Moldovans?’
    He pursed his lips. ‘We do not know yet. These things can take some time.’ He tilted his head towards the wreck filling the screen. His hand went up to silence me as he listened to the slow, strange sounds emerging from a mouthful of broken teeth as the invisible interrogators fired another question at him.
    I waited as Frank listened, his hand still in the shut-the-fuck-up position.
    ‘They could not find her brother – he has become a ghost. So it seems yours is the only Moscow address in the doctor’s file. They saw you in her building … They had already seen the photograph, so …’
    Frank lowered his hand as the body slumped, chin resting on the top of Christ’s head.
    The fucking photograph. ‘So, Frank? So what ?’
    He