I headed for the washrooms which lay at the far end of the hall. I kept my head down, walking nice and easy, not looking back and using other passengers as cover. It should have worked but didn’t. As I passed a tinted window in the side of a store I caught the men’s reflection.
They’d spotted me and were heading my way.
TWENTY-TWO
The entrance corridor to the nearest washrooms in the terminal where I was sitting was blocked by a no-entry sign and a large janitor’s trolley, with two mops propped against the walls further along to reinforce the message. There was a powerful smell of bleach in the air and something else not quite nice. Vomit. The floor to one side was covered with a clutch of sodden paper towels and cleaning rags, and the air-con here didn’t seem to be working, which meant the smell had got trapped in the corridor with nowhere to go.
Unfortunately the plan I had in mind to deal with this latest problem didn’t allow me to go looking for another washroom. And the fact that this one was out of use served my purposes very well. I checked out the trolley. It held an array of tissues, paper towels and cleaning products, along with pale, two-litre plastic containers of what I guessed was liquid soap. Hooking my backpack over my shoulder I grabbed one of the containers and one of the mops as I passed by. I unscrewed the top of the container as I pushed through the door, hoping the cleaner was on a break.
The interior of the washroom was panelled, tiled and bright as day under the ceiling lights. It was also empty. The combined smell of vomit and bleach in here was even stronger, enough to close the throat and water the eyes. Whoever had been ill out in the corridor had continued being ill in here. I upended the container, pouring the gloop out onto the floor across the doorway a couple of paces inside, then stamped on the mop’s wooden handle and broke off the head.
I’d never practiced kendo or stick-fighting but it looked as if I was about to find out if I could.
I heard the men’s footsteps as they came hurrying down the corridor. They were probably intent on a quick take-down to complete their assignment and get out of here.
The door was kicked open, slamming it back on its hinges, revealing one man. He was big across the shoulders, confident and steaming for a fight. He saw me standing halfway across the room and walked quickly forward, eyes locked on mine, an attack-dog on two feet.
He was holding something slim and dark grey in colour down by his leg, and I recognized the outline of a knife. This guy had decided not to bring a gun into a security-washed area like Frankfurt Airport and I was betting he’d settled for a ceramic blade instead. Although not guaranteed there was less chance of being pinged by metal detectors and it would be extremely sharp for maximum effect.
I glanced at his feet. He was a half-step away from the first pool of liquid soap and I wanted him to keep coming with his eyes fixed on me. I waved the mop handle in the air, swishing it around to catch and retain his attention.
Then I fumbled and dropped it. Deliberately.
His expression showed he couldn’t believe his luck. As I scrabbled to pick it up again, muttering to myself, he gave a grunt of triumph and increased his pace, his knife blade now out in front, the way he’d been trained.
The second his feet hit the soap the game changed dramatically. He yelped in surprise as his boots took off and dumped him on his back with a crack. Surprisingly he didn’t drop the blade and scrabbled to get to his feet. But the floor was too slick and whatever he did he couldn’t get a purchase.
I swung the mop handle hard across his head, stunning him, then followed up with another strike, this time on the side of his neck. He dropped the knife and lay still. I leaned forward and grabbed his foot, dragging him clear of the soap, then frisked him for ID. Nothing doing. Some money in his pants pocket and a cellphone. But no photo. I hit the ON button and found myself looking at the same former CIA photo. He’d loaded it as his screen saver so he could check the face easily without having to find the photo gallery.
I pocketed the phone and skirted the soap. His colleague would be waiting outside. I hoped he wasn’t armed with anything that went bang. But this was my only way out and I didn’t have time to wait for him to come in to see where his friend had got to.
I stepped through the door. The second man was standing near the far end of the corridor, his cellphone in his hand. He looked stunned to see me and I could read the message writ clear on his face. This wasn’t how it was supposed to play out.
I had one chance and one chance only. There was nobody else in sight and we were both partially hidden by the janitor’s trolley. I took three long strides and swung the mop handle at his head. He raised a hand to block it and took the full force on his forearm. It should have put him out of the fight but he appeared not to be affected by it.
Instead he dropped his phone and reached inside his jacket. If he was crazy enough to have brought a gun inside the terminal I was in trouble.
I began to swing again but changed tack and jabbed him hard in the face with the broken end of the stick. It made a nasty liquid noise at it entered one eye and he opened his mouth to scream, so I used a round-house swing across the side of his head to knock him out.
I didn’t bother searching him but scooped up his cellphone and walked away. Leaving my picture lying around would be stupid. I scrubbed at my face to give the impression of wiping away tiredness and to conceal my features from the cameras, and headed for the main exit.
As I cleared the building my phone buzzed. It was a text message from Callahan.
Stay and read it or get out of here? There was no option. If what had happened inside got classified as a terrorist incident, they’d shut the airport down tight and I’d be caught inside the cordon.
I opted to get out. Callahan’s message would have to wait.
The queue for cabs outside was low and I got a ride within a couple of minutes and told him to take me to the central station. He nodded without looking at me and we were off. One hurdle cleared.
I checked we weren’t being followed, aware that the two men might have had a stand-by driver in case things got messy and they had to move out fast. But traffic was heavy and I couldn’t tell if any one vehicle was getting too close. In the end I gave up before the driver began to take too much interest. With the current state of fear over terrorist attacks a call from him to the cops was the last thing I needed.
I got the driver to drop me short of the station and took a fast stroll around the block, ducking into a store and allowing a few pedestrians to go by before I exited and walked back the way I’d come.
As far as I could see I was clean.
Back at the station I bought a bus ticket for Paris. It was something like a twelve-hour trip but it meant I’d be unobserved and able to catch up on some sleep. If I was being tagged I was figuring on a team expecting me to take the quickest route possible out of here. But that meant flight schedules, passenger lists and cameras and the possibility that they would be waiting for me at the other end.
Before taking the SIM card out of my phone and going dark, I checked Callahan’s latest message. It was interesting.
One Ur Lebanon attackers Ukrainian national, former Spetsnaz. No known affils but thought contractor for Moscow. Akrotiri attackers no ID but poss same. Where you?
I debated not telling him but thought better of it. It was obvious by now that my every move was being monitored. I had no idea how but my suspicions centred on the impossible: someone had gained access to my locator messages. Nothing else made sense. The only question was, at what point were they picking up on them? The only person who had known where I was at any one time up until we got to Cyprus was Isobel Hunt. Yet she had been in as much danger from an attack as me, so why would she risk it?
Furthermore, although she’d known I was coming to Frankfurt she wouldn’t have known precisely where I would be at any one time.
That left me with the uncomfortable notion that it could only have been someone able to access my text messages to Callahan
. But that was a wide field and included an outside intercept or someone on the inside close to Callahan himself. But why?
I decided to push the envelope. If I didn’t take some control over events I might have to spend days, maybe weeks looking over my shoulder, all the time wondering when the next strike would take place.
I told Callahan I was taking a flight to Paris and would send a locator on arrival in the capital. Then I switched off my phone and removed the SIM. Right now I couldn’t trust anyone, but maybe I could force whoever was pinpointing me to make a mistake. I focussed instead on the two cellphones I’d acquired from my attackers at the airport and opened them up.
Neither device had a security code, which told me a lot about what I could expect to find inside: no code meant nothing worth hiding. They were burners, acquired for this operation only and to be disposed of afterwards. In the event of anything going wrong and falling into the wrong hands, there would be nothing to show who the men were or what they were doing.
I deleted the photos of me and took out the Sim cards and batteries, and dropped them down a storm drain.
Then I got on board the bus and headed for the rear where I put my head down.
TWENTY-THREE
Moscow
A monitor mounted on a side table in the ‘dead room’ was flickering, but lacked sound and image. A new meeting had been convened, but the chairman, Konstantin Basalayev, was not yet there. It was a common enough tactic used by senior officials to unsettle those beneath them, to promote anxiety and compliance. Most feigned indifference to it, even if inwardly they were not.
As the minutes ticked away, each individual battled with wondering why the meeting had been called and why the chair previously used by Anatoly Dolmatov, remained empty. All they knew was that Basalayev must have received reports from the field, which he had so far kept to himself, and Dolmatov was no longer in play.
The clues were self-evident to those who knew what to look for.
‘Shot for being ugly or shot for fucking up?’ murmured Sergey Grishin, the former general, eyeing the empty chair in a false attempt at bravado. ‘He should have remained a chopper of wood.’
Nobody else spoke, too anxious to distance themselves from the same fate, whatever that was. Instead their attention was glued to the active monitor in the corner, itself a worrying departure from the norm in this room.
When Basalayev appeared, he did so in a rush and without a greeting, leaving one of the guards outside to pull the door firmly closed behind him. He picked up a television remote from the table and pressed a button.
The screen blossomed into life, showing a slightly grainy image but clear enough for everyone to see. It showed what appeared to be a long-range image of an airfield, with several buildings in the background bathed in sunlight. A number of emergency vehicles were moving at speed across the grass and tarmac towards a small, single-storey structure off to one side. Other transport, including an armoured vehicle, were disgorging troops around it and taking up positions.
Basalayev froze the picture and said, ‘That was an attempt by Dolmatov’s new team to complete the mission against Portman. They failed. I have relieved him of his duties with immediate effect.’
Nobody spoke, nobody exchanged glances, their suspicions unnervingly correct.
Basalayev pressed the remote again and the images fast-forwarded to another scene. This one had been taken inside what was clearly a busy airport terminal building. It showed two men threading their way through a crowd and approaching a corridor with signs displaying washroom facilities. A cleaner’s trolley was parked across the corridor. One of the men stayed at the front of the corridor behind the trolley while the other skirted it and disappeared inside. There was no soundtrack, which lent the scene an extra sense of impending drama.
A flurry of movement came from the man near the trolley. He stepped away from it and raised one arm in a defensive stance as another figure raced towards him. It was difficult to see the detail but it was clear that he’d been attacked. He fell, clutching his face. Then the other figure stepped past him and walked away, rubbing his eyes with his hand and effectively blanketing his features from the watchful eye of the camera.
‘Another failure,’ Basalayev emphasized. He switched off the monitor and dropped the remote on the table with a clatter. He looked around at the faces, all of whom looked stunned by what they’d seen. He took a few more seconds to study each person, his cold gaze making them shift uncomfortably in their seats before he finally took his own seat.
‘As of now,’ he said, his voice barely above a whisper, ‘Voronin will be running the operation.’ He glanced at the former Spetsgruppa special forces officer. ‘Our latest information is that Portman is flying to Paris, his location to be confirmed later. We already have a team there in readiness, do we not?’
Voronin nodded. That he didn’t look too happy at being singled out for this dubious assignment was no surprise, given Dolmatov’s abrupt fall from grace. But that was the risk you took when you rose to a position where risk ran alongside honour, the former always shuffling just ahead until you took the prize … or did not. ‘Correct. They are ready to move at a moment’s notice.’ He spoke with a clear voice, confidence in every word.
‘Good. This time, finish it. Finish him. Do it now.’
Voronin nodded and rose from his chair.
When the door closed behind Voronin, Irina Kolodka rested both hands on the table’s surface, the move capturing everyone’s attention.
She said, ‘You know, don’t you, that another failure will end this assignment for everyone?’
‘Everyone?’ Basalayev stared at her. His face gave no clue to his thinking, but it was clear what he meant: everyone including who? That she spoke for someone far above them was now clear, if it hadn’t been before. She who had the ear of the president now also had his voice. And the message was no less chilling.
‘All of you.’
So it had finally come to this.
Basalayev’s face was a mask. If the remaining members of the committee had looked more closely they might have noticed a slight tic at the corner of one eye. Had they known him better they would have recognized a burgeoning anger, even a resentful fury at the hand he’d managed so adeptly to deal himself.
As the old saying went, to run the wolf-pack you have to run with them … or face the risk of getting bitten.
‘There will be no failures,’ said Basalayev. But this time his voice sounded a little less certain.
TWENTY-FOUR
My bolt-hole apartment in Paris was in a quiet cut-through off the Rue des Pyrenees in the 20th arrondissement to the east of the city centre. I hadn’t used it as much as I’d have liked, as Paris was among my favourite cities for chilling out. It was located in a small block of apartments in a quiet quarter and, like many Paris streets, had plenty of local facilities which meant nobody had to go far to eat, drink or entertain. In a sense, it had a village feel about it which I’d enjoyed.
Now, however, it looked as if I was going to have to move on.
The address titles of all three of my apartments, in Paris, London and New York, were held and dealt with by Belnex, an offshore administration company based in Gibraltar. I’d acquired each property at various times, putting everything I earned into them as a hedge against the day when I might have to think about a change of profession. They were all small but in good locations, which suited me fine. If my neighbours looked on me as an absent professional I didn’t mind. The cities were big enough for it to be very common and it saved having to answer awkward questions.
Disposing of the properties would be a simple matter of a written instruction to Belnex. They would deal with the paperwork and the real estate agencies and I could stay out of it. I was reluctant to sell but now wasn’t the time to take risks by hanging onto them.
Life was a lot more important than property and no security could ever be absolute, especially in the financial sector where data could be hacked
and sold. Whoever was after me had already demonstrated that they had the reach in spades to do that. It reminded me that I would also have to dispose of my current credit cards and open new bank accounts.
I arrived at the apartment building and took a stroll around the block. It was late enough for the main flush of office workers to have gone but too early for the tourists to have got their plans going for the day. I stopped for coffee at a café on the corner of the street from where I could watch the front entrance of the building and picked up a copy of the sports daily L’Équipe. I had no particular interest in rugby or football, but it gave me useful cover for scanning the street.
There wasn’t much to see. An elderly woman pulling a shopping basket walked out, followed by two young girls, probably college students looking way too sophisticated for their years. A workman picked up a pile of scaffolding clips left on the side of the street and dumped them in the back of a pickup, and two boys who looked as if they were goofing off from school went by laughing.
After thirty minutes of watching and reading stuff I didn’t care about, I paid up and left the café and did another tour, stopping to buy some fruit on the way. A plastic bag of shopping to go with my backpack and a shuffled gait was all it needed to give the impression of being a nobody going about their nobody daily business. It’s certainly enough to make the eyes pass over a potential target and move on. By the time the eyes come back it’s time to be gone and forgotten.
The building had no concierge and relied on a keypad entry system for residents to come and go. I walked along the street on the same side as the building and waited for a cab to come along and used it as cover to dodge inside the doorway. Only the workman saw me enter and he looked about as interested in me as I was in him, but we both nodded and muttered ‘bonjour’ as was the custom.
I tapped in the entry code and slipped inside the building. The foyer smelled of polish and flowers, a pleasant mix as familiar as the last time I’d been here which was about a month ago. I liked Paris and this place had been a haven in between jobs; always hard to tear myself away from when the next one came along.
A Hostile State Page 14
