Tracers

by Adrian Magson

  Harry thanked the young woman and rang off. Pity Rik wasn’t here, after all. He could have sent him round in person. She’d have probably salivated all over him and given him whatever information he asked for.

  He wondered what kind of person needed an isolated farm as a temporary base. Presumably somebody who needed space around them, and where they were not troubled by neighbours. But for what?

  A few vehicles swept by, fanning the surrounding foliage. If anyone noticed the car among the trees, they clearly considered it none of their business. Harry settled back to wait for daylight to fade.

  When the light had dropped sufficiently, he got out of the car and closed the door. He checked the gun in his pocket but left it where it was. He didn’t know anything about this place yet, and could be on a wild goose chase. Wandering around the woods at dusk with a handgun could expose him unnecessarily if he chanced on someone innocently walking their dog.

  He zigzagged through the trees, following a line roughly parallel to the road. The undergrowth was rampant, with tangles of briar and nettles underfoot, and lots of deadwood slowly rotting into the soil, making progress slow. An occasional curtain of hanging branches stung his cheeks, but although he wasn’t ideally dressed for tramping through the woods, he didn’t need to detour too far off his intended route. Other than the background hum of vehicles along the road, the atmosphere among the trees was quiet and sombre, the air heavy with the aroma of sap, rotten wood and damp earth. He stopped every few yards to listen and check his surroundings.

  Eventually he reached the edge of the tree line and saw the field containing the abandoned jump fences. Turning away from the road, he followed a rusted barbed wire fence until he reached another stretch of twisted wire. On the other side of this was a twin set of ruts, a continuation of the track from the road.

  Beyond the track was another belt of trees, dark and silent save for the faint rustle of leaves. The undergrowth looked as wild and desolate as the area he had just crossed, with fallen tree trunks and branches littering the ground.

  He looked right. The track ran for a few yards before curving sharply left and out of sight. It was tempting, and would allow him to move faster. But following it would leave him out in the open if anyone came along. He decided on the trees opposite, which looked like ideal cover.

  Crossing the track into a denser thicket, he eventually reached a high stone wall. The top layer showed signs of crumbling, with broken fragments lying in a jumble at the base. Moss covered the stones, filling the gaps with fuzzy bundles like small, hairy bugs, and the air reeked of damp and the permanent absence of sunlight. The structure was too high to see over, but Harry spotted a point where a stone had fallen out. He stepped across and peered through the gap.

  What had once been an elegant, two-storey farmhouse stood a few yards away, with the track running across between it and the wall. Beyond the house stood a collection of ancient barns and outbuildings, the latter with moss-covered walls and iron stains from large reinforcing cross-bolts in the stonework. A rusted iron fence ran along the front of the house, and inside it, the remains of a flowerbed now peppered with weeds and tufts of rampant, coarse grass.

  Rust seemed to be the predominant colour among all the outbuildings, from the corrugated metal sheets of the roofs, which had sagged away, exposing their metal trusses to the elements, to an ancient tractor standing against the barn wall. Its rubber tyres were gone, perished to husks, the engine block a solid, rusted lump beneath a dull, red bonnet. The smokestack was skewed drunkenly to one side, as rotten as soft bark.

  Behind the tractor Harry could just make out the front wing of a car.

  A yellow Suzuki four-wheel drive.

  The farmhouse was dark save for a single, naked bulb burning in one of the upstairs rooms. Harry froze at a flash of movement. A man was standing in the lit room, his back to the window. He was gesturing at someone out of sight. He wore a plain white shirt with the sleeves buttoned to the wrists. He shook his head and turned to stare out of the window, eyes on the trees right where Harry had been walking moments before. A dark patch was just visible on his face.

  Silverman.

  Harry stayed absolutely still. If he moved now, Silverman couldn’t fail to spot him. Then he realized the man’s attention was caught by something down at the front of the house. Silverman said something, and seconds later he was joined by another figure who looked down and smiled briefly before turning away and pulling Silverman after him.

  It was the young man from the airport.

  Harry lifted himself on his toes and peered in the direction the two men had been looking. As he did so, he heard a crunch from the other side of the wall, followed by a cough and the throaty sound of somebody spitting. He waited, not daring to move and feeling the strain up the back of his legs.

  A man walked by not ten feet away. He was moving slowly along the gravel drive, head swinging to check the scenery. Even in the poor light, Harry saw he was dressed in a bomber jacket and jeans, was heavily built and swarthy, in need of a shave.

  He waited for the man to turn away, then dropped slowly to a crouch, his breathing light but his heart pounding.

  The man on the other side of the wall was clearly a guard. While the shotgun he carried across his chest might have been for shooting vermin or rabbits, the semi-automatic tucked prominently into the side of his belt was anything but.

  TWENTY

  Harry thought about his next move, waiting for the man to walk away. Treading on a branch now would be a dead giveaway, and a shotgun blast among these trees could still be lethal. Gut instinct told him he should drop this assignment and get out fast. There were departments that dealt with this kind of stuff; he’d worked in one himself and knew the score. A phone call to the right number would initiate a scramble of men and transport, and in no time at all this place would be surrounded and contained.

  If he did that, however, he would never know what lay behind the events of the past couple of days. A puzzle like that could gnaw away at you, driving a person mad with speculation.

  He could do both, he reasoned. Call it in to Jennings and wait around to see what happened. See what the lawyer had in the way of clout.

  He made his way back to the car and dialled the number. If things went disastrously wrong, at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing he had fulfilled his part of the contract. If it all turned out to be a fuss over nothing, well, he’d have to live with it. Former MI5 man cries wolf. He’d had worse things said about him.

  A motorbike with a loud exhaust clattered by on the road. It was loud enough to shock a number of birds out of the trees, forcing Harry to abandon the call and redial. He noted with relief that there seemed to be less traffic going by now. If he had to get away from here in a hurry, he didn’t fancy waiting for someone to let him out into a long line of commuter traffic. Not with a man waving a shotgun behind him.

  Jennings’ number was engaged. He counted to ten and tried again. It was time for the lawyer to tell him what the hell was going on. If he turned round and said he didn’t know, Harry might as well pack up and go home. First, though, he’d drop a call to the anti-terrorist squad.

  At least the boys in black might get a night training exercise out of it.

  The motorbike engine was still surprisingly loud, but muffled now by the trees. It took a few seconds for the alarm bell in Harry’s brain to ring. Something about the proximity of the noise wasn’t right. He switched off the phone for a second, listening to the sound of the engine.

  Why still so close? It should be a mile away by now.

  Another clatter of exhaust, this time from deep in the woods, scared up a handful of birds. They streaked by overhead, wheeling away to the south before peeling off in different directions, pigeons, mostly, identifiable by their heavy wing beats, dragging in their wake a flock of smaller birds swooping and darting haphazardly across the sky.

  The engine gave a final cackle, followed by a series of flat pops. The s
udden quiet afterwards was almost numbing, with only the beat of wings fading into the distance as a few more birds joined in the exodus.

  Then the blast of a shotgun tore through the gloom.

  It was followed by a deathly silence. Then two flat pops, this time muffled.

  Harry felt his blood go cold. There was no mistaking the sound.

  Someone was using a handgun.

  Moments later a car engine roared and lights swept through the trees from the direction of the house. The motor revved and whined furiously, the glow flaring through the foliage as the vehicle tore along the track towards the road.

  Harry switched off his mobile and grabbed a torch from the boot of the Saab, then took off through the trees, crashing through the brushwood and hanging branches. He reached the fence bordering the track and scrambled over. This time, instead of heading through the trees towards the high wall, he turned and ran along the track and through an open gateway with a security light burning high on a stone pillar to one side.

  The light was enough to show a huddled shape on the ground in front of the house. His instincts had been right – he was being followed!

  He dodged off the track and crouched behind the pillar, his heart thumping. He peered out but saw no sign of movement. A metronomic ticking was coming from somewhere nearby, and he saw a trial bike lying at the side of the track, the ribbed front wheel turning slowly. Its rear tyre had been ripped away from the wheel rim, no doubt shredded by the shotgun blast.

  Harry stepped out and knelt by the body. Flicked his torch on the man’s face.

  It was the guard he’d seen earlier. He was dead. The shotgun lay close by, the stock shattered, and the man’s lower face was a mess of blood, the torn flesh sprouting splinters of wood.

  Harry moved on, ghostly fingers crawling up his back. He stepped round the side of the house, but there was no sign of the Suzuki. So who had got away – good guys or bad?

  The side door of the house was open, the interior thrown into dull relief by a single light. It gave him a narrow view of a large, rustic kitchen with yellowing, bubbled wallpaper and ill-matching chairs set around a heavy table. The floor was bare, laid with heavy flagstones worn to a shine by decades of use.

  Harry stepped inside, feet crunching on grit. A smell of stale food and damp hung in the air. A battered cooker and fridge were the only light dash of colour, but like the decor, they were ancient and long past their prime. The kitchen table and worktops were a mess of dirty plates, opened tins and empty food wrappers. A bolt-hole, not a home.

  A half-open doorway leading to the front half of the house lay to his right. A doorway to the left showed a narrow flight of stairs disappearing up into darkness.

  Neither option looked very welcoming.

  Upstairs was the logical place to go; it was where he had seen Silverman. First, though, he had to check that the ground floor was clear. The torchlight pushed back the dark, revealing a narrow view of two large reception rooms and a utility room, and a hallway running across the front of the building. More damp, more musty air and heavy furniture, but no signs of life. He returned to the kitchen and moved across to the stairs.

  Holding the torch against the barrel of his semi-automatic, Harry switched it on and poked it round the doorway and up the stairs. There was no sound of movement, no blast of gunfire. He steadied himself, remembering the countless times he’d gone through the training shell they called the Clearing House. Dodging from room to room and hoping for a clean run, all the trainees had to do was face a barrage of deafening flash-bangs, pop-up targets and screaming sound effects operated by the merciless technicians on the other side of the blast-proof walls.

  The difference between then and now was this was for real, with real bullets.

  He bent and picked up a muddy shoe lying near the door. Stepping forward, he lobbed it underarm into the gloom, where it bounced and rumbled along the floor. No reaction.

  There was only one thing for it: he breathed deep and took the stairs in three strides, hurling himself to the floor as he reached the landing and curling round to see past the banister, the gun and torch thrust out before him.

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered, and swallowed hard.

  A man’s body was lying crumpled at the far end, legs drawn up to his belly. One arm was thrown across his face, and an almost delicate mist of blood had been sprayed across the faded wallpaper in the background. The man had been shot twice in the chest. Harry bent and eased his arm away.

  The greeter from the airport.

  Recovering quickly, he checked the bedrooms, then came back to the landing and switched on the light. The single bulb revealed a trail of blood on the wooden boards and a scarlet handprint smeared down one wall of the stairwell. It was easy to see the chain of events: the killer had charged up to the house on the motorbike, taking the outside guard by surprise in spite of – or perhaps because of – the noise. What Harry had taken to be the sound of the bike engine popping had been the first shots fired, which must have damaged the shotgun without killing the guard.

  The killer had then stormed the house and disposed of the second guard, during which the first man had fired his shotgun into the motorbike wheel to disable it and prevent the attacker’s escape. The gunman had simply adapted to the change in circumstances and got away in the Suzuki.

  The one thing he couldn’t tell was whose blood was on the wall down the stairwell. Unless the killer had taken a hit on the way in. The two guards had been prepared, but hadn’t reacted fast enough. The outside man got caught in the open and this one had been standing flat-footed at the top.

  Harry checked each room for papers, personal effects – anything that might tell him what had happened and why. What it revealed was an old house that had been largely uninhabited, with the majority of living space confined to the kitchen and two bedrooms. The main ground floor rooms were untouched, while the utility room showed signs of some use, with washing in the tumble dryer and dirty footwear on the floor.

  But there was nothing about the men who had been staying here.

  The bedrooms were the same. One room contained two sleeping bags on the bare boards and spare items of clothing heaped on two hard-backed chairs. Evidently the guards’ quarters. Rucksacks in one corner showed the men had not planned on a lengthy stay, and the wardrobe and a cupboard hadn’t been used. The labels on the bags and the few clothes inside were all high-street chains, readily available, cheap and disposable. A couple of DVD players lay on the floor, the accompanying discs bearing cheap, pirated labels.

  The other room held a single bed against one wall, with a sleeping bag in place of bedclothes. A dent in the mattress showed the bed had been used recently.

  Harry flicked open the sleeping bag. A faint smear of red showed against the fabric at the top, with a heavier patch on the inside. More blood. But this was dry. He guessed it had leaked from Silverman’s hand, and might account for the blood on the stairs. Down by the side of the bed he found a grubby wad of gauze with bloodstained cotton padding on one side. Silverman had changed his bandage but hadn’t had time to dispose of the old one. There was no sign of the dark coat or the sports bag they’d seen him carrying at the airport.

  It looked like Silverman had been given the prime spot – such as it was – while he was here. Yet he clearly hadn’t made himself so comfortable that he’d been unable to pick up at a moment’s notice when necessity demanded. Harry wondered what the man had been thinking of as he lay here, guarded by his two colleagues.

  Or had they been his captors?

  He checked the window. It looked out over the rear of the house on to a patch of garden and more trees. It was now too dark to see anything clearly, but the window showed a small gap at the bottom, as if it had been closed in a hurry. It slid up with only the faintest protest, and he noticed a shine in the sash runners. He rubbed his finger along the groove and sniffed.

  Soap. Someone had been prepared, then. But not the guards. Had Silverman escaped out the ba
ck or had he gone with the gunman?

  As he turned to go, he noticed some marks on the wallpaper alongside the bed. Somebody had written on the paper. But the marks were odd, almost Cyrillic. Or were they?

  He lay on the bed with his head on the pillow and looked up, studying the marks against the light. The scribbling was upside down. He was looking at a mobile phone number followed by the letters ‘J.A.’

  He felt a buzz of excitement. The same letters and numbers he’d seen on the scrap of paper in Silverman’s briefing file! Without some additional information to clarify them, he’d dismissed them as useless. Now here it was – the missing half of the number.

  He made a note of the number and initials and slid off the bed. On the way past, he checked the body on the landing. The man’s pockets produced a French passport in the name of Henri Taoub, a thin wad of Euros and Sterling and a mobile phone. Other than that, Mr Taoub had been travelling light.

  He left the money but took the passport and mobile for checking later. Back outside, he checked the body at the front of the house. This also revealed money and a French passport in the name of Marcel Yamouh, but no mobile. It pointed towards Taoub being the one in charge. He stood up, reflecting that since neither of the two dead men had the initials J.A., another person was involved – someone Silverman was intending to contact.

  He hurried back through the trees to the car. If the shots had been heard and recognized, it wouldn’t be long before the police were on their way here. He waited until he was well away from the immediate area before ringing Rik and gave him the passport details, the number he’d copied off the wall and the number from the guard’s mobile phone.

  ‘Can you crunch that lot? I’d especially like a name and address for the phone.’

  ‘Should be easy enough. How do you know J.A. isn’t the guy on the bike?’