The Outsiders Read Online Free PDF

day after, more likely the day after.’
    The taxi driver had come to the gate to help her with the cases. Geoff Walsh was looking back towards the bungalow, the Villa Paraiso. The moon was nearly full. It bathed the roof and the white stucco of their front walls. Its light caught the big trees that hid the other properties and reflected off the high stone wall, the razor wire that topped it, the cameras that moved and tracked them . . .
    He said, distant and preoccupied, ‘Good. I didn’t want to leave the place empty. I’d prefer a stranger here than it being deserted and—’
    She interrupted, often did, ‘He’s called Jonno – silly name – and his mother says he’s hoping to bring his girlfriend.’
    ‘Not, I hope, to hump in my bed.’
    The cases were stowed, and she was in. She said, ‘You’re a miserable old cuss, Geoff Walsh, and it’s a long time since your bed’s seen any romance. Come on. You’ll be back here in two weeks and nothing will have changed.’
    He looked back a last time for his cat, Thomas, then closed the door and did up the belt. The cameras on the walls of the Villa del Aguila tracked them as they drove down the road. They turned the hairpin and headed for the airport at Málaga.
     
    Winnie had said, ‘He was one of us. He was with us in good times and bad. Three years gone and we still look out for him, still want his input. We could never hold up our heads if we put him on the back burner. I hate those who did it today as much as when I saw Damian in the mortuary. Listen – it will happen. God knows how, but we’ll have a name. He won’t know, right now, who I am but he will. He should know that the day will come when we’ll bring him to some sort of justice.’
     
    ‘Of course I haven’t lost them – they’ve been stolen.’
    She stood in the doorway of the suite’s living area and the bedroom they shared was behind her. He gazed at her, undecided as to whether the blaze in her eyes and the curl of her lips made her even better-looking than she was when she walked with him into the best restaurant in the town or crouched over him on the big bed and nibbled his earlobes . . .
    He was the Major. His name was Petar Alexander Borsonov, but he had been known as the Major – by friends, a few, and enemies, many – for nearly three decades. The Major had bought her the missing earrings at the two-day stop-over in Ashgabat, capital city of Turkmenistan, astride the Silk Road; among the population of that dump-town there was a jeweller of true quality. The Silk Road interested the Major. Today it carried the unrefined opium paste from the poppy fields of Afghanistan, and the chemicals from China that were needed to make the tablets the kids craved. He had come to do deals and had brought with him the Romanian girl: Grigoriy, the one time praporshchik or warrant officer, called her his ‘arm candy’, while Ruslan, long ago a starshina or master sergeant, referred to her gruffly as the ‘bike’. The earrings were diamond and sapphire and he had paid cash for them. The craftsman’s grandson had interpreted and negotiated . . . He had brought them to her in the crap hotel where they had stayed the two nights and muttered something awkwardly about the stones mirroring her eyes. On the flight across the Caspian Sea and towards Trabzon he had seen the way the light caught them. She had been beautiful, haughty and his – as if he had bought her.
    ‘The maid did the room early. It’s not her. They were stolen, but not by the maid.’
    He had paid from a wad in the hip pocket of his jeans. He had not talked it through with the warrant officer or the master sergeant because he was the Major, with control and authority. That morning they had been to meet a haulier who worked the Silk Road and had access to the boats needed to cross the Caspian with cargo. He had relationships with police and Customs in Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, and could handle border posts into Turkey. She