The Hunter

by WOOD TOM

  ‘You were saying?’

  CHAPTER 14

  Munich, Germany

  Tuesday

  01:12 CET

  It was raining when Victor left the train with fourteen other passengers. The station was mostly empty at that time of night and the amount of open space around Victor gave him some cause for concern. He did his best to exit quickly but without looking like he was he trying to do so. Outside the station there were no taxis waiting so he set off on foot. After sitting down on the train for several hours he was glad of the chance to stretch his legs.

  He found a fast-food place that was still open and took a seat by the window to eat his meal. Substandard even for junk food, but he needed the calories and there was no quicker way to get refuelled. At least the milkshake wasn’t too bad. Vanilla.

  He hailed a taxi, telling the driver the name of Svyatoslav’s street, acting as if he didn’t speak German so he wouldn’t have to talk inanities during the journey. The building was a four-storey apartment block in the east of Munich. The area was affluent, a nineties development of expensive river-view apartments and spacious housing.

  The building’s main door was dead bolted, and a security camera and light made it too risky to pick, so he spent the night sampling Munich’s all-night bars, allowing himself no more than one drink an hour. He used his time eyeing members of the opposite sex like the other single men. He stayed a maximum of two hours per bar to avoid people remembering him too easily. At six he took breakfast in a small café before heading back to the building, a takeout black coffee in hand, steam clouding in the frigid air.

  He stood on the opposite side of the road to the building, shielded from the drizzle by a bus shelter. The shelter also gave him a reason for waiting on the street should anyone notice him. Svyatoslav lived in apartment 318 according to the hotel records, but there was always the chance he wasn’t really Mikhail Svyatoslav. Victor was pretty confident this wasn’t the case. Svyatoslav’s passport was too well used to be a random identity and so was either genuine or his only cover. It contained numerous stamps for trips to countries outside the European Union, mostly old Soviet states – Estonia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, among others. He either travelled frequently for work or had been a keen tourist with an unimaginative taste in destinations. In any case, the address the identity corresponded to would be worth investigating.

  Victor took a sip of the coffee. It was typical German fare. Awful. They made world-class firearms but seemingly couldn’t brew a good cup of coffee if the survival of their nation depended on it. Assuming they’d run out of guns.

  Victor watched four people leave the building but no one enter. They were all dressed in suits, long coats, carrying briefcases. City drones on their way to service the hive. Between sips of coffee he watched people walking in the direction of the building, trying to gauge who intended to enter.

  The morning was cold, damp, the sky above invisible beyond slate grey clouds. In summer Germany could be beautiful, but more so than any other European country Victor found it oppressive in winter. The Viking hell was a cold realm called Niflheim, and Victor imagined the Northmen had feared something not dissimilar to Germany in November.

  He took another sip of coffee and saw a man with a woollen coat hurrying into the street, a metallic briefcase in hand. He had a long, pale face, dark hair. Victor recognized him, had seen the man leave the building ten minutes before. Better than perfect.

  Victor waited until the time was right, threw the coffee cup into a trash can, and headed across the street. He controlled his pace to reach the steps at the same time as the man. He glanced Victor’s way, but Victor’s gaze was averted, his hands fumbling in his pockets for keys that weren’t there.

  Victor allowed the man to reach the door first, who opened it with his key.

  ‘Danke,’ Victor said, taking the door before the man had a chance to question whether Victor lived in the building or not.

  ‘Kein problem.’

  The hallway was brightly lit, clean, and spacious. Victor took the stairs, noting from the unblemished banister and spotless steps that the elevator was hardly ever out of use. The resident hurried to his apartment on the ground floor, disappeared inside. Victor hoped he got back to work in time.

  Reaching the third floor, Victor opened the stairwell door and stepped out into the corridor. There were three locks on 318. Definitely an assassin’s place.

  It took two minutes to pick the locks, and he went inside. It looked as if Svyatoslav had just moved in, not lived there for any length of time. There were just the bare essentials of furniture, a couple of photos, no real personal possessions to articulate his personality. It reminded Victor of his own residence. It was not a reassuring comparison.

  There were two bedrooms, one of which was fitted out as a gym with a selection of free weights and an exercise bike. There was a large TV in the gym, positioned so it could be watched while the exercise bike was being used.

  The master bedroom was as empty as the rest of the apartment, with just a bed, neatly made; dresser; wardrobe; and another TV fitted so the assassin could watch it in bed. There was a stack of films against one wall, console games against another. The ingredients of a sad and lonely life. The kitchen was modern, clean, almost straight out of a brochure. An old television set stood on one counter.

  Victor searched every room, every drawer, every cupboard. He found nothing. No evidence of who Svyatoslav had been. Nothing that even hinted at the fact that he had murdered people for money.

  Victor got himself a glass of water from the kitchen. He felt tired, drained. He turned on the TV, eager for some light distraction. Nothing happened when he pressed the on button. He noticed the TV was an old boxy set, out of place among the other modern goods. He pushed the on button again. Still nothing. The standby light glowed red.

  Three TVs for one person in a small apartment was excessive, and an aging set in the kitchen when everything else was new just didn’t feel right. Victor ran his fingers along the TV’s case, finding the screws in the plastic depressions. The screw heads felt sharp on his fingertips. Recently used.

  Victor searched the drawers until he found a screwdriver. He unplugged the portable TV and turned it around so he could see the screws. They were marked and grooved. It took him a minute to unscrew them all and take the back off the TV. Inside he found why it wouldn’t switch on. Apart from the standby light it was hollow. A hide. Inside was a 9 mm Browning handgun, a .22 Luger, a separate suppressor for the Luger, a couple of spare magazines for each, a variety of knives, and two boxes of shells for the handguns. Just a weapon’s stash. Nothing else.

  He’d been hoping to find a lot more, some small clue to help him find out who hired the kill team. He’d wasted his time, likely compromised himself in the process, and was no closer to his enemies. Victor resisted hurling the TV off its perch and took a breath to compose himself. He reattached the case to the fake set and placed it back exactly as he’d found it. He then washed the glass, dried it, and returned it to where it had been on a shelf. He performed another sweep of the apartment to make sure he hadn’t missed anything and he hadn’t.

  Outside he headed back to the city centre. There was nothing else he could do in Munich with what little information he had. But he had the flash drive. Whoever wanted it was still out there, unseen to his eyes. How long could he stay unseen to theirs? He needed to formulate a new course of action. But for the time being he had to lie low, gather his thoughts while he considered his next move, rest where he knew it was completely safe. There was only one such place where he could do that. Near the village of Saint Maurice, north of Geneva, Switzerland.

  The closest thing he had to home.

  Before he left there was one other place that he needed to visit. It was that time of the year again, though because of the circumstances he had been putting it off, but he could do so no longer. He changed direction.

  It was a run-down building, a spectre of the old in the moder
n area where he found it. The bricks were faded, grimy, dark in the rain. Orange streaks of rust stained the walls beneath windows protected by iron grilles. The door was unlocked, and he pushed it open. Inside it was dim, the high ceiling lost in the shadows above.

  Victor’s shoes clicked on the tiled floor, the only other sound his breathing. He could feel his pulse rising steadily with each step that brought his ultimate destination closer at a frightening pace. It took a lot of will-power, as it always did, not to turn around and walk straight back out.

  He pulled the curtain back and stepped inside the box he likened to an upturned coffin. He pulled the curtain shut behind him and fell to his knees, head bowed, palms together.

  In a quiet voice Victor spoke to the faceless silhouette on the other side of the mesh panel.

  ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’

  CHAPTER 15

  Central Intelligence Agency, Virginia, USA

  Tuesday

  06:07 EST

  Procter noted the mandarins were all absent at this early hour, so it was just Chambers, Ferguson, and Sykes around the table with him. Chambers looked as presentable as ever, but both Ferguson and Sykes were looking a little rough around the edges, Ferguson especially. He was too old to still be doing six AM starts and only had about a year left before retiring.

  Alvarez’s voice came through the speakerphone. ‘I’ve spent all night liaising with the French police and their intelligence services, who have thankfully cut us some slack. I’ve got a copy of their crime-scene and lab work, but unfortunately it doesn’t help us a whole lot. As I expected there’s nothing useful from the scene where Ozols was killed. The way the cops have it the killer was waiting in the alley for Ozols and shot him from close range. He took his empty shell cases with him, not that it would have mattered as you’ll understand in a minute.

  ‘Now, at the hotel we got a second chance at getting something from this guy, but it doesn’t get any better. No unidentified hairs or traceable fibres. The only fingerprints found in the killer’s room belong to the maid who cleaned it. This time he didn’t take his empty shells with him, but no fingerprints on them either.’

  ‘He wore gloves the whole time?’ Procter asked.

  ‘Negative,’ Alvarez replied. ‘Surveillance footage shows the killer didn’t wear any. If he had wiped down everything he’d touched there wouldn’t have been the maid’s fingerprints left behind in the kinds of places you would expect to find them. What the lab people did find were traces of silicone. So far I haven’t been able—’

  ‘Washing your hands with silicone solution prevents fingerprints,’ Ferguson interrupted.

  Procter looked Ferguson’s way.

  ‘It creates a waterproof barrier over the skin,’ Sykes continued for his boss. ‘The oil from your fingers can’t get through it, so you don’t leave prints behind on anything you touch. You can’t tell if someone is wearing it either as it’s completely clear. It was developed to help prevent industrial dermatitis in factory workers.’

  Procter nodded. You learn something every day, he thought.

  ‘Okay,’ Alvarez continued. ‘That solves that little mystery, so thanks. We haven’t got a shot of his face from the surveillance tapes as he kept it angled away from the cameras at all times. He’s white though, tall, wearing a suit, he’s got dark hair and blue eyes, wearing glasses. Had a beard too. If he takes the glasses off and has a shave no one’s going to pick him out of a crowd though. Ballistics is a dead end like everything else. The ammunition was made in Belgium but, although not something you see every day, is too common to trace further.

  ‘He was checked in to the hotel under the name Richard Bishop, a British citizen. No one by that name has left the country since yesterday and from what I’m hearing no British citizen by the name Richard Bishop even entered France in the last month. It’ll be bogus, I’m sure, but it would be worth just doublechecking with the Brits.’

  ‘I’ll get someone on it,’ Chambers said and scribbled herself a note. ‘I’ve personally contacted the heads of station in London, Moscow, Berlin, Riyadh, Delhi, Islamabad, and Seoul. So far no one’s hearing anything suspicious about Ozols. I’m expecting callbacks throughout the day, but I’m not hopeful. Whoever organized this assassination has done a good job keeping themselves hidden.’

  Procter hadn’t made up his mind about Chambers yet. He considered her to be just a stopgap, someone to keep the chair warm until a long-term candidate could be found. How she performed on this would answer his doubts one way or the other. On the one hand the brain on her practically poked through her skull, but on the other Procter just wasn’t sure she had the balls for the role. Literally more than figuratively.

  He leaned forward. ‘And we’ve had no intercepts relating to Ozols, Paris, or the missiles. No known assassins have been spotted in the region recently and we haven’t got a hope of ID’ing him based on the few details we have. I’ve been on the phone to my equivalents in allied countries to see if anyone recognizes the MO but it’s too non-specific to produce any leads.’

  It was Sykes’s turn to speak. ‘We’ve been checking the Russian angle, and no matter who we speak to it’s the same. Moscow believes everything on board the sunken frigate is unrecoverable. Obviously we can’t ask too many questions unless we tip them off to what we’ve been doing.’

  Alvarez continued, ‘Interpol likewise can’t do a lot with what we have so far but we might have caught a break with this hotel incident. What the CCTV footage showed us, with the way I’ve pieced it together, is as follows. The killer murders Ozols and returns to his hotel approximately two hours later. When he gets there he spots two men and he either recognizes them or something makes him suspicious. He tries to avoid them but is ultimately seen.

  ‘A few minutes later he kills them in the corridor outside his room, shooting through a door opposite. A couple of minutes later two more men enter. He waits for them, follows one, and ends up killing them both. Disabled or tortured one with an exploding aerosol if you can believe it. All these people are armed by the way and aren’t carrying ID. Next, he kills a woman in the hotel kitchen, a guy in the apartment building opposite, and from the same building shoots another outside with a rifle. An old lady gets murdered along the way, but the bullets that shot her match the gun of the sixth guy killed, so she probably just got caught in the crossfire.

  ‘Information on the seven others our guy killed is coming through all the time. They look like hired shooters. The way they acted tells me they were in Paris to take out Ozols’s killer. Obviously he took them out instead.’

  Ferguson’s brow furrowed. ‘So you’re telling us that one assassin kills Ozols, and a couple of hours later seven other assassins try and kill him, but he shoots them all dead?’

  ‘That’s exactly how it appears.’

  Ferguson raised his palms. ‘Someone please explain to me how this makes any sense?’

  Chambers took off her glasses. ‘Is there any indication who sent the team?’

  ‘At this stage no,’ Alvarez answered regretfully. ‘But I don’t think it will be too long before we have them all identified. That gives us seven chances to find out who sent them. And whoever did send them obviously knows a hell of a lot about Ozols’s killer. So if we can find out who hired these guys, we’ll have a good shot of getting the killer, and maybe we can still get those missiles too.’

  Chambers and Ferguson were nodding, but Procter noticed Sykes wasn’t looking so relaxed. Procter understood why. The kid was out of the loop, had nothing to say, no opinion to offer, and he didn’t like it. He was still comparatively young, and Ferguson obviously thought highly of him, so he shouldn’t be worried by his lack of contribution. There was no point speaking just for the sake of it. Ferguson should have taught his apprentice that much at least. If Sykes was really smart he should be satisfied at this stage of his career just to watch and learn from the playmakers.

  ‘The final and maybe most important thing I’ve fo
und out,’ Alvarez announced, ‘is that the killer didn’t leave Paris straight away after being attacked. Seems he hung around to investigate the guys who tried to whack him.’

  Ferguson spoke. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because one of the gunmen, found riddled with .45-calibre slugs in the building opposite the killer’s hotel, checked out of his own hotel about an hour after he was killed.’

  There was a momentary silence in the room. Procter could hear the creak of leather.

  ‘That’s a clever trick for a dead man,’ Sykes offered with a smirk that showed his bright teeth. Everyone ignored him, and Procter shook his head imperceptibly.

  ‘The clerk at the hotel described the man as quite tall, lean, with dark hair, glasses, and a beard,’ Alvarez explained. ‘The real man, Svyatoslav, doesn’t match that description. He’s shorter, stockier. We got lucky with facial recognition and ID’d him from airport CCTV.’

  Procter leaned forward. ‘Let me guess, the assassin acquired Svyatoslav’s things?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alvarez agreed. ‘He pretended to be him and signed out. The clerk gave him Svyatoslav’s passport, plane tickets, et cetera that were stored in the hotel safe. They haven’t popped up on the grid, so he didn’t use the passport to leave the country.’

  Chambers asked, ‘What do you think the killer would want with Svyatoslav’s things?’

  ‘I think he must be trying to learn about him,’ Alvarez said. ‘That’s why he went to the hotel. He didn’t flee the country; he went to where one of the guys who tried to kill him was staying.’

  ‘And if he is trying to identify his attackers, and who they were working for, what’s his next logical step?’ queried Procter.

  ‘To check out Svyatoslav’s address,’ Alvarez answered.

  ‘Please tell me we know where that is,’ Chambers said.

  ‘Munich.’