John Milton: The Jungle Part 8

It was a short five-minute walk along Calvert Avenue to get to Sh.o.r.editch High Street. The area had long since graduated from edgy to hip and was now so part of the establishment that the bars and eateries looked like they were trying too hard. Men and women were gathering, and the sound of music drifted out onto the street.

There was a twenty-four-hour convenience store on Old Street, and Milton went inside and bought the things that he thought they might need: shower gel, more coffee, a loaf of bread, croissants and jam for breakfast. He found the aisle with the alcohol and paused there uneasily. The hard stuff was with the cigarettes behind the Plexiglas screen that protected the owner, but Milton ran his finger across the bottle tops that stuck out of the cardboard packaging for a six-pack of Corona and knew that he could do plenty of damage to himself without needing gin or vodka. Just one beer would set back all of the progress he had made, all the days of sobriety that he had chalked up. He would be careful. He picked up the six-pack, put it into the basket and took it to the counter. He asked for a packet of Marlboro Lights and requested two fifty-pence pieces in the change.

He checked his watch. He had been out for ten minutes. He had just one more thing to do.

There was an old-fashioned telephone box on the corner of Hackney Road, outside Browns strip club and the Turkish kebab house. Milton went inside. The window had been smothered with calling cards for the prost.i.tutes that worked the area, a panoply of naked flesh and the promised satisfaction of practically any fetish. The booth was foul smelling and had, Milton guessed, most likely been used both as a toilet and a shooting gallery.

He picked up the handset and rested it between his shoulder and ear. He took out his own phone, navigated to the entry in his contacts book that he wanted, and dialled.

ALEX HICKS WAS SITTING with his wife, watching television. They were on the sofa, and Rachel was leaning against him. He had his arm around her and, as he squeezed her a little tighter, it seemed again as if she was more substantial than she had been even last week.

"You're putting on weight."

"Thank you, darling," she said, pretending to take offence and jabbing her elbow into his ribs. "Feel free to go and get me another tub of Ben & Jerry's."

"Don't you think so?"

She turned her head so that he could see her smile. "Maybe."

"How much?"

"Four pounds since last week."

He squeezed her. "That's great."

"I haven't been sick for three days."

"I know."

"And I'm sleeping better."

He squeezed her again. He knew how close he had been to losing her. The cancer had been aggressive and virulent, and her doctors had all but given up hope of stopping it. It had started with a melanoma on her back. They had gone to the doctor and she had ordered a biopsy; they had both known, when she was called and asked to make a quick appointment at the surgery, that the news would not be good. It was cancerous, the doctor said. They had to get rid of it. It was removed within a week, but the disease had already spread. The MRI revealed a five-centimetre growth under her left breast that had wormed its way into the wall of her chest. They took that out, too, and the growth on her right lung. They scanned again and found more. It was growing more quickly than they could take it out. The doctors were talking about more surgery and then a course of brutal chemotherapy, but Hicks and his wife had both realised that they were not hopeful of being able to do very much at all.

The news seemed to suck all the fight out of Rachel, but Hicks was determined that they would not give up. He had researched available treatments and had discovered one that seemed to offer the best chance. It was available at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. They were offering a targeted treatment involving two experimental drugs-Opdivo and Yervoy-that had demonstrated encouraging results in precisely the same kind of cancer that Rachel had developed. They had visited the clinic and started the program. That had been two months ago. The last MRI found no cancer anywhere in her body.

The drugs, while scouring it away, had inflicted the usual panoply of side effects. The Opdivo and Yervoy had caused colitis and pneumonitis. The additional chemotherapy she had undergone had meant that she had lost her hair, and, over the course of the program, a quarter of her body weight. But there was no doubt about it: her hair was regrowing and she was putting weight on again.

His phone was on the arm of the sofa. It started to vibrate.

Rachel looked over at it. "Who's that?"

"I don't know." He picked it up and looked at the screen. "It's a London number."

"You don't recognise it?"

"No."

"Leave it."

"No," he said. "I'd better answer it."

He pressed to accept the call and put the phone to his ear.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Hicks?"

"Yes. Who is this?"

"It's Milton."

His wife looked over at him. "Who?"

"Business," he said, a little fl.u.s.tered.

"It's eight o'clock, Alex."

"I know." He disengaged himself from her and stood. "I'll take it in the study."

She nodded, unconcerned, collected the remote control and flicked between the channels. Hicks left the lounge and went into the room that they used as a study. He shut the door behind him and put the phone back against his ear.

"Milton?"

"h.e.l.lo, Hicks."

"Is everything okay?"

"Everything's fine. How are you?"

"We're good."

"Your wife?"

"She's better, thanks to you. What's going on? I didn't expect to hear from you."

"I need a favour."

Hicks felt a twist of anxiety. Milton was not the sort of man to ask for favours, and Hicks knew that he was in his debt. "What do you need?"

"Don't worry. It's nothing. A surveillance job."

"What? A person? A place?"

"A place. There's a block of flats in Wanstead. East London."

"Okay," he said. "Anything else?"

"It's a brothel. I just want to know if anyone goes in and out."

"That's easy enough."

"And I want to know who runs it."

"That might be more difficult. How will I tell the proprietors and the punters apart?"

"It's run by the Albanian mob. There's a certain look."

"Big? Nasty-looking?"

"Exactly. If you see anyone you think might be involved, I want you to follow them. Find out where they're based."

"I can do that. How long do you want me to watch it?"

"A day should be enough."

"Starting when?"

"Tonight. Can you do it?"

"I'll have to check." He paused, remembering what Milton had done for him and Rachel, and, correcting himself, said, "No, forget it. It's fine. I'll drive down now. Where?"

"You got a pen and paper?"

Hicks reached over for the newspaper he had been reading earlier and took a pen from the table. "Fire away."

Milton gave him an address in East London and Hicks noted it down.

"Anything else I need to know?"

"Yes," he said after a pause. "Be careful. I broke into the flat yesterday. There was a man there. He tried to kill me."

"And?"

"He's not with us anymore."

"Jesus, Milton. Police?"

"I doubt it."

"But they might be looking for you."

"I'm sure they are. I don't know whether they'll have a description of me. But they don't know you."

"Is there anywhere I can lay up and watch?"

"Not really. You might have to be creative."

"Is it too late for me to say no?"

"Too late."

"All right," he said. "It's against my better judgment, but I'm in. Anything else I need to know?"

"Not really." Milton paused, and Hicks could hear the buzz of traffic and voices on the line. "Actually, there is one thing. Your P226?"

The gun was in the garage with the rest of his equipment, hidden in a void beneath the floor. "What about it?"

"Bring it."

Chapter Fourteen.

KOSTANTIN PASKO stepped out of his car. It was ten in the evening and raining, the kind of persistent drizzle that was one of the things that he disliked most about London. It wasn't proper rain, the sort that would roll in off the ar Mountains and soak Ljuboten and Brezovica for days. It was a fine mist that wasn't heavy enough to require an umbrella, but still soaked into clothes and chilled the bones. It was an apologetic kind of rain, and Pasko thought that it suited the country very well. It was a small annoyance, balanced by the opportunities that had been afforded to him since he had arrived in London fifteen years earlier.

Pasko had arrived here after the Yugoslav wars, hidden amongst the tens of thousands of Kosovar and Albanian refugees who had come to London to escape the endless violence back home. He was a veteran of the Kosovo Liberation Army, battle hardened from guerrilla warfare in the mountains and ready to use his experience to make a better life for himself and his family. The Eastern Europeans had flooded London since the nineties, but, of all of them, it was the Albanians who were the most feared. There were hard men among the Poles, for example, but there were stories of Polish builders who had worked for Albanian foremen only to have been beaten to a pulp when they had the temerity to ask for their wages at the end of the week. Pasko's people were strong and proud and fearless.

Pasko had built that kind of reputation for himself. He had been drawn to the underworld like so many of his fellow soldiers. He had initially served under a man named Adem and, when he had been killed in a shoot-out with the Turkish gangsters who controlled the heroin trade, Pasko's reputation made him the obvious replacement. He had not retaliated against the Turks for weeks, waiting until they must have a.s.sumed that the threat had pa.s.sed. But Pasko did not forget. He found the man responsible and shot him to death as he had his beard trimmed in a barber shop on Green Lanes.

But Pasko did not want the drug trade. His genius had been to leave the heroin to the Turks and to take Albanian business in another direction. He had long looked at Soho with hungry eyes. The s.e.x trade appealed to him. It had been the province of the Maltese for decades, but Pasko looked at them and saw them for what they were: soft and arrogant, made fat and lazy by their relationships with the corrupt police officers who ran vice from West End Central. He watched them for months, identifying the leaders and those who would need to be removed so that he could usurp their positions. And then, when the time was right and the pieces were all in play on the board, he had made his move. There were four murders in one night, coordinated and executed with precision, and the Maltese mafia had been decapitated. The Albanians swept in and took the vice trade for themselves.

That had been ten years ago. They had consolidated since then, and, once Soho was secure, Pasko had instigated an aggressive program of expansion. He had properties everywhere now.

Hundreds of girls.

Thousands of customers.

His business made millions.

There were challenges, obstacles that needed to be overcome, but the phone call he had received from Llazar tonight was more worrying than most. He had been in the pub he owned in Maida Vale and had come straight away, driving as quickly as he dared as he made the journey from west to east.

He went to the door of the block of flats. Llazar had texted him the code to unlock it, and he entered it and went inside. He went through the lobby to the hallway. There was a cage blocking the door to his property. He reached through the bars and knocked on the wood.

Llazar opened the door.

"What happened here?"

"Drago," his lieutenant said, swallowing hard and looking away.

"Where is he?"

He swallowed again. "He is dead, boss."