The Outsiders Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been cut adrift to shop in the pedestrian street, and the Gecko had stayed in the hotel – he had had messages to send, codes to renew and firewalls to check. The Major knew the word ‘geek’, and understood it, but it was awkward on his tongue, so he used ‘gecko’. With the warrant officer and the master sergeant, the Major was working methodically through the finance offered at the meeting with the haulier. The girl stamped her foot. She almost made him feel his fifty-four years. The other two men, around the same age, scowled at her – she had broken their concentration.
    ‘You’ve looked?’
    ‘Of course I have looked. We were all out, except Gecko.’
    ‘You looked carefully?’
    ‘Everywhere. I didn’t wear them, of course, to go into the streets.’
    She had worn them last night. They had brushed over his cheeks and across his nose, where her lips had been. She was young enough to be his niece. Neither the warrant officer nor the master sergeant had offered an opinion when he had said she would travel with them in the executive aircraft now parked at Trabzon airport . . . Was it possible that the Gecko had gone into the main bedroom, off the suite, and pocketed a pair of earrings? She stood in the doorway with her feet a little apart and her skirt stretched tight across her hips. Her lips jutted and her eyes challenged. The other two men, as if they had given up on him, began to shuffle their papers and tidy them.
    ‘What are you going to do?’ She had been a waitress in Constanta, a Romanian port city, and when they returned there, on the last leg of their journey, she would be paid off and would walk away without a backward glance. ‘Are you going to do anything? They’re missing. He was here – the Gecko.’
    The Major jabbed with his finger towards the door of the bedroom they shared. It was a strange gesture because the index finger of his right hand had been amputated at the lower joint, and old skin made an ugly lump of the wound. The warrant officer was getting the last sheets of paper together and did it awkwardly because he had suffered a similar wound, same finger, same hand, same hasty surgery. The master sergeant scratched his cheek, not with his right index finger but with the middle one. He, too, had the old wound. Three men bound together by identical injuries from a war fought many years before.
    She went back to the bedroom and flicked the door with her heel, shutting it.
    To one of them: ‘Get the Gecko.’
    To the other: ‘Search his room.’
    The Major knew that a gecko was a lizard and protected itself by spreading shit on a predator. It could change colour for better concealment, and scurry upside-down on ceilings. In the last two years the kid, Gecko, had become almost a part of him, like an old sock or glove. The Major could not have handled the computerised encryptions; nor could either of the others he relied on.
    The master sergeant brought the Gecko in. The kid would have read the anger.
    ‘Have you anything to tell me?’
    A shake of the head.
    ‘You came in here?’
    A nod.
    ‘And into the bedroom?’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘Why?’
    A hesitation. Then: ‘I went into the bedroom to see if your number-three phone, the Nokia, was charged.’
    ‘The Nokia was with me.’
    ‘I couldn’t find it so I assumed it was.’
    Those years ago, in that war, the Major had been in charge of a small Field Security detachment of what was then the KGB, and had travelled among fighting units in the west of Afghanistan. Sometimes the troops brought back captured mujahideen and he would interrogate them.
    ‘You searched my room?’
    ‘For the Nokia, to charge it. I—’
    In Herat province, to speed up questioning, the Major might have used pliers on fingernails or teeth, a rifle butt across the face. He might have wired the bastard to the generator. He kicked. Quick, without warning, into the Gecko’s privates. The head went down as the torso doubled and he caught the cheek with a