With the driving music, the towers of lights and lasers, the gyrating silhouettes on the dance floor, the smoke casting a pallor on the ruins and the Door to Nowhere suspended, ethereal and mysterious, above the water, it made it easy to believe that, if the dead were going to rise from the grave, it would be on a night like that.
Well, one of the walking dead did show up – though he didn’t realize it yet. He arrived on one of the scores of huge cruisers, nosing its way through the fog and mooring just outside the arc of barges.
As it bobbed among other mega-yachts, The Division's shooters, spotters and safety men were all at their posts. After alighting from their boat they had sent the decent little cruiser to wait in the darkness offshore, adjusted their earbud headphones and lapel mics and watched the crowd grow in size and confusion. Satisfied nobody had marked them, they melted into the masses, split apart and made their way to their predetermined positions.
The key man was a thirty-four-year-old black guy, one of the funniest and smartest people you could ever hope to meet. Like all of us when we joined the outfit, he had taken another name – in his case he had called himself McKinley Waters, in tribute to ‘Muddy’ Waters, the great Delta bluesman. Anyone who ever saw Mack, as we knew him, play slide guitar and sing ‘Midnight Special’ had to wonder why he was wasting his time in the intelligence business.
Mack was the primary shooter, stationed in a little hollow near the lip of the cliff, his rifle already assembled and hidden in the darkness next to him, swigging from a bottle of Jack that contained iced tea, looking for all the world like some dude getting loaded and waiting for the crowd to clear before he made his way down.
Further along the clifftop, in the shadows under a cluster of stunted trees, was the back-up shooter – a prick by the name of Greenburg, the sort of guy who made no secret he was gonna marry rich. He was hanging out with two others, looking like a group of white buddies trying to decide whether to pay the money and take the drop over the cliff or not. In reality, the other guys were spotters: apart from locating Finlay, their job was to warn the men, whose entire attention would be focused on shooting, if danger approached from somewhere outside their field of vision.
I was on the bluff next to the rented van. By accident, I had the best view and could see all the team at their stations. Hence, I saw the excitement ripple through them when Finlay turned up on time: in another few minutes he would be well and truly going through the Door to Nowhere.
His security team, all ex-KGB guys, emerged on to the recreation deck at the back of the boat and, binoculars raised, scanned the cliff side, the small beach and the dance platform.
Only when they gave the all-clear did anyone appear from inside: it was a group of young women, dressed to kill in Chanel and Gucci. They waited on deck while a speedboat was launched to deposit them directly on the dance floor.
I saw Mack put his bottle of Jack down and slide his hand into the darkness. I knew that he was expecting Finlay to emerge to kiss his four companions goodbye and he was going to be ready. The two spotters, worried about an advancing cloud of smoke, wandered away from Greenburg to make sure that they had a clear view. A safety guy came through the car park and headed towards the fence, ready to take everybody’s back. I heard, through my earpiece, our three guys partying down by the water – a third shooter, another safety guy and a guy riding shotgun in case it got into a firefight with Finlay’s goons – talking to Control. He was out on the boat that had delivered the team, getting an update from everybody except me. We all sensed that we were on the launch pad, ready to shoot.
The thing that none of us knew was that a group of men on another boat, its running lights out, were also taking a keen interest in everything that was happening on shore. Masked by the eddies of smoke and the looming bulk of the big cruisers, their modest boat was, to all practical purposes, invisible. And yet the men on board had a stunningly good view: they were all equipped with military-grade night-vision goggles.
The glasses had been supplied by Finlay’s head of security, who didn’t think the Bodrum trip was any way to run a railroad. To improve protection he had enlisted a group of hard men – freelancers, but among the best in the business – to travel independently to Bodrum. They were briefed by phone, a container of equipment was waiting for them when they arrived and they cooled their heels for two days before being told to get on board a boat he had organized. It was that boat which was anchored just offshore.
In the darkness, the freelancers saw Finlay emerge from the bulletproof glass of the sitting room and approach the young women. We saw him from the cliff side too. Mack let the target take two steps – just to make sure the goons next to him couldn’t haul him back inside in time if a second bullet was needed. He had his finger on the trigger when the spotter nearest to him called a warning.