Читать книгу A Foreign Country - Charles Cumming - Страница 11

Taking someone in the street is as easy as lighting a cigarette, they had told him, and as Akim Errachidi waited in the van, he knew that he had the balls to pull it off.

It was a Monday night in late July. The target had been given a nickname – HOLST – and its movements monitored for fourteen days. Phone, email, bedroom, car: the team had everything covered. Akim had to hand it to the guys in charge – they were thorough and determined; they had thought through every detail. He was dealing with pros now and, yes, you really could tell the difference.

Beside him, in the driver’s seat of the van, Slimane Nassah was tapping his fingers in time to some R&B on RFM and talking, in vivid detail, about what he wanted to do to Beyoncé Knowles.

‘What an ass, man. Just give me five minutes with that sweet ass.’ He made the shape of it with his hands, brought it down towards his circling groin. Akim laughed.

‘Turn that shit off,’ said the boss, crouched by the side door and ready to spring. Slimane switched off the radio. ‘HOLST in sight. Thirty seconds.’

It was just as they had said it would be. The dark street, a well-known short-cut, most of Paris in bed. Akim saw the target on the opposite side of the street, about to cross at the postbox.

‘Ten seconds.’ The boss at his very best. ‘Remember, nobody is going to hurt anybody.’

The trick, Akim knew, was to move as quickly as possible, making the minimum amount of noise. In the movies, it was always the opposite way: the smash-and-grab of a screaming, adrenalized SWAT team crashing through walls, lobbing stun grenades, shouldering jet-black assault rifles. Not us, said the boss. We do it quiet and we do it slick. We open the door, we get behind HOLST, we make sure nobody sees.

‘Five seconds.’

On the radio, Akim heard the woman saying ‘Clear’ which meant that there were no civilians within sighting distance of the van.

‘OK. We go.’

There was a kind of choreographed beauty to it. As HOLST strolled past Akim’s door, three things happened simultaneously: Slimane started the engine; Akim stepped out into the street; and the boss slid open the side panel of the van. If the target knew what was happening, there was no indication of it. Akim wrapped his left arm around HOLST’s neck, smothered the gaping mouth with his hand and, with his right arm, lifted the body up into the van. The boss did the rest, grabbing at the legs and pulling them inside. Akim then came in behind them, sliding the door shut, just as he had rehearsed a dozen times. They pushed the prisoner to the floor. He heard the boss say: ‘Go’, as calm and controlled as a man buying a ticket for a train, and Slimane pulled the van out into the street.

The whole thing had taken less than twenty seconds.