He was too old for them to do anything else to him but rant and rave. He had avoided making serious errors, the organisation took care of him, and there were only a few years left before he reached the two fives, fifty-five, and would be retired whatever happened. Tord Schultz sighed. A few years to fix things, to avert ending up as the world’s most economically fucked-up pilot.

He signed the log, got up and left the cockpit to flash his row of pearly-white pilot teeth set in his tanned pilot face to the passengers. The smile that would tell them that he was Mr Confidence in person. Pilot. The professional title that had once made him something in other people’s eyes. He had seen it, how people, men and women, young and old, once the magic word ‘pilot’ had been enunciated, had looked at him and discovered not only the charisma, the nonchalance, the boyish charm, but also the captain’s dynamism and cold precision, the superior intellect and the courage of a man who defied physical laws and the innate fears of mere mortals. But that was a long time ago. Now they regarded him as the bus driver he was and asked him what the cheapest tickets to Las Palmas were, and why there was more leg room on Lufthansa.

To hell with them. To hell with them all.

Tord Schultz stood at the exit next to the flight attendants, straightened up and smiled, said ‘Welcome back, Miss’ in broad Texan, the way they had learned at flying school in Sheppard. Received a smile of acknowledgement. There had been a time when he could have arranged a meeting in the arrivals hall with such a smile. And indeed had done. From Cape Town to Alta. Women. Many women. That had been the problem. And the solution. Women. Many women. New women. And now? His hairline was receding beneath the pilot’s cap, but the tailor-made uniform emphasised his tall, broad-shouldered physique. That was what he had blamed for not getting into fighter jets at flying school, and ending up as a cargo pilot on the Hercules, the workhorse of the sky. He had told them at home he had been a couple of centimetres too long in the spine, that the cockpits of Starfighters, F-5s and F-16s, disqualified all but dwarfs. The truth was he hadn’t measured up to the competition. His body was all he had managed to maintain from those times, the only thing which hadn’t fallen apart, which hadn’t crumbled. Like his marriages. His family. Friends. How had it happened? Where had he been when it happened? Presumably in a hotel room in Cape Town or Alta, with cocaine up his nose to compensate for the potency-killing drinks at the bar, and his dick in not such a Welcome-Back-Miss to compensate for everything he was not and never would be.

Tord Schultz’s gaze fell on a man coming towards him down the aisle. He walked with his head bent, yet still he towered over the other passengers. He was slim and broad-shouldered like himself. Younger though. Cropped blond hair stood up like a brush. Looked Norwegian, but was hardly a tourist on his way home, more likely to be an expat with the subdued, almost grey tan typical of whites who had spent a long time in South-East Asia. The indisputably tailor-made brown linen suit gave an impression of quality, seriousness. Maybe a businessman. Thanks to a not altogether thriving concern, he travelled economy class. But it was neither the suit nor his height that had caused Tord Schultz’s gaze to fix on this person. It was the scar. It went from the left corner of his mouth and almost reached his ear, like a smile-shaped sickle. Grotesque and wonderfully dramatic.

‘See you.’

Tord Schultz was startled, but did not manage to respond before the man had passed and was out of the plane. The voice had been rough and hoarse, which together with the bloodshot eyes suggested he had just woken up.

The plane was empty. The minibus with the cleaning staff stood parked on the runway as the crew left in a herd. Tord Schultz noticed that the small, thickset Russian was the first off the bus, watched him dash up the steps in his yellow high-visibility vest with the company logo, Solox.

See you.

Tord Schultz’s brain repeated the words as he strode down the corridor to the flight crew centre.

‘Didn’t you have a boarding bag on top?’ asked one of the flight attendants, pointing to Tord’s Samsonite trolley. He couldn’t remember what her name was. Mia? Maja? At any rate he had fucked her during a stopover once last century. Or had he?

‘No,’ Tord Schultz said.

See you. As in ‘see you again’? Or as in ‘I can see you’re looking at me’?

They walked past the partition by the entrance to the flight crew centre, where in theory there was room for a jack-in-the-box customs officer. Ninety-nine per cent of the time the seat behind the partition was empty, and he had never — not once in the thirty years he had worked for the airline — been stopped and searched.

See you.

As in ‘I can see you, alright’. And ‘I can see who you are’.

Tord Schultz hurried through the door to the centre.

Sergey Ivanov ensured, as usual, he was the first off the minibus when it stopped on the tarmac beside the Airbus, and sprinted up the steps to the empty plane. He took the vacuum cleaner into the cockpit and locked the door behind him. He slipped on latex gloves and pulled them up to where the tattoos started, flipped the front lid off the vac and opened the captain’s locker. Lifted out the small Samsonite boarding bag, unzipped it, removed the metal plate at the bottom and checked the four brick-like one-kilo packages. Then he put them into the vac, pressed them into position between the tube and the large dust bag he had made sure to empty beforehand. Clicked the front lid back, unlocked the cockpit door and activated the vacuum cleaner. It was all done in seconds.

After tidying and cleaning the cabin they ambled off the plane, stowed the light blue bin bags in the back of the Daihatsu and went back to the lounge. There was only a handful of planes landing and taking off before the airport closed for the night. Ivanov glanced over his shoulder at Jenny, the shift manager. He gazed at the computer screen showing arrival and departure times. No delays.

‘I’ll take Bergen,’ Sergey said in his harsh accent. At least he spoke the language; he knew Russians who had lived in Norway for ten years and were still forced to resort to English. But when Sergey had been brought in, almost two years ago, his uncle had made it clear he was to learn Norwegian, and had consoled him by saying that he might have some of his own talent for picking up languages.

‘I’ve got Bergen covered,’ Jenny said. ‘You can wait for Trondheim.’

‘I’ll do Bergen,’ Sergey said. ‘Nick can do Trondheim.’

Jenny looked at him. ‘As you like. Don’t work yourself to death, Sergey.’

Sergey went to a chair by the wall and sat down. Leaned back carefully. The skin round his shoulders was still sore from where the Norwegian tattooist had been plying his trade. He was working from drawings Sergey had been sent by Imre, the tattooist in Nizhny Tagil prison, and there was still quite a bit left to do. Sergey thought of the tattoos his uncle’s lieutenants, Andrey and Peter, had. The pale blue strokes on the skin of the two Cossacks from Altai told of their dramatic lives and great deeds. But Sergey had a feat to his name as well. A murder. It was a little murder, but it had already been tattooed in the form of an angel. And perhaps there would be another murder. A big one. If the necessary became necessary, his uncle had said, and warned him to be ready, mentally prepared, and to keep up his knife practice. A man was coming, he had said. It wasn’t absolutely certain, but it was probable.

Probable.

Sergey Ivanov regarded his hands. He had kept the latex gloves on. Of course it was a coincidence that their standard work gear also ensured that he would not leave any fingerprints on the packages if things should go wrong one day. There wasn’t a hint of a tremble. His hands had been doing this for so long that he had to remind himself of the risk now and then to stay alert. He hoped they would be as calm when the necessary — chto nuzhno — had to be performed. When he had to earn the tattoo for which he had already ordered the design. He conjured up the image again: him unbuttoning his shirt in the sitting room at home in Tagil, with all his urka brothers present, and showing them his new tattoos. Which would need no comment, no words. So he wouldn’t say anything. Just see it in their eyes: he was no longer Little Sergey. For weeks he had been praying at night that the man would come. And that the necessary would become necessary.