by Tom Wood
‘But not as many as the two that came before him.’
‘Maybe that just means he’s good at staying hidden. As expected.’
She sighed and rubbed her eyes. ‘Tell me what your gut says.’
‘That the target has to be one of the four possibles and he wasn’t the previous two and he’s unlikely to be the fourth. Therefore, on the numbers, this guy has to be the one.’
‘I’m coming to the same conclusion.’
‘Shall I deploy a team?’
‘Unless you want to take him on with just the two of us.’
A smirk. ‘I don’t think that would be a particularly sane move given the target’s skill set.’
‘Scared?’ Muir asked.
‘I didn’t get this old by being brave.’
‘You’re not old, Francis.’
‘Saying that just means you’re getting old too. How do you want to do it?’
‘We’re running out of time so I want as many boots on the ground as we can get. But I don’t want any deadweight. They all have to be good. And each and every one needs to know exactly the kind of target they’re dealing with.’
‘Then you need to be prepared to bump up the fee.’
She shrugged. ‘Better than the alternative. I don’t want any amateurs with a guy this dangerous. We can expect he’s armed. Who knows what he’s capable of?’
He matched her shrug. ‘Put half a dozen guys on him and it doesn’t matter what he can do. It doesn’t matter if he has a gun. We’ll have more. Numbers always win in the end. What about at his hotel? He may have an idea who is staying there but we can trap him in the building. It’s public. We can—’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Not his hotel. Trust me when I say that would be an extremely bad idea.’
‘Okay. You know more about him than I do. So where?’
She tapped the screen. ‘We know where he’s going to be so let’s wait for him to leave. We’ll stay close – but not too close – behind and in front. When the opportunity presents itself – and it will – we move in and surround him. He can’t watch every direction at the same time. Speed and surprise before he can process what’s happening.’
‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘It will be,’ Muir said confidently. ‘He won’t know what hit him.’
FIVE
Vienna, Austria
The patient wore a charcoal suit. It was a smart business garment of obvious quality and cut in a classic style. The jacket was open and a steel-grey tie rested over a white shirt. He was tall and lean but unmistakably strong, and sat with a relaxed yet rigid posture, his hands resting upon the arms of the visitor’s chair. He looked a little younger than the age listed in his medical records. His dark hair was cut short and neat but was notably free of product or fashionable style. Eyes darker still than his hair betrayed nothing of his personality save for a calm watchfulness and keen intellect. Dr Margaret Schule, who prided herself on her people-reading skills, found him quite fascinating.
She examined the site of the surgery and asked, ‘Are you experiencing any pain?’
The patient shook his head.
‘What about when I do this?’
The patient shook his head again.
‘Okay, that’s tremendous. I’m so pleased.’
Schule tugged the latex gloves from her hands, bunched them up, and used the toes of a shoe to push down a pedal and open the clinical waste bin. She dropped the gloves inside. The bin was the only object in the room that marked it as the office of a medical professional, and its presence was as unavoidable as its appearance was unpleasant. She kept it in a corner, where it was less likely to draw the eye and disrupt the room’s carefully composed ambience.
Her office was on the third floor of a late eighteenth-century Viennese townhouse that had once belonged to a conductor in the Royal Orchestra in the time of Mozart. Schule loved to tell her patients of this fact. Brightly patterned Turkish rugs covered much of the dark-stained flooring. She refused to have carpets for hygiene reasons. Classically painted landscapes hung from the walls. The furniture was comprised almost exclusively of antiques from the Baroque period, save for the ergonomic mesh chair where Schule spent a large portion of her time.
‘Can I get you a glass of water, perhaps?’ she offered her patient.
‘No, thank you.’
Schule returned to the chair and rested her forearms on her large desk as she examined the man before her. He looked back at her with the same pleasant yet neutral expression he always wore. He made no small talk. He didn’t fidget. He wasn’t bored. He wasn’t nervous. He offered nothing about himself and sat on the other side of the desk as though there was nothing interesting enough to know. Schule wasn’t convinced.
The visitor’s chair in which he sat was not where it had been positioned when the patient entered her office. She noted the change immediately because she had noted it each and every time the man had visited her and because she lived her life by a rigid desire to see each and every thing in its rightful place. When he left she would reposition the chair so that it sat square to the desk. Then she could look a patient directly in the eye from her own chair, which was also squared to the desk, without having to swivel the seat as she now did and destroy the careful equilibrium of the room. She liked to have her own chair and the visitor’s chair aligned with the office door on the far wall. She liked order. She liked straight lines.
The patient’s medical records listed him as a resident of Brussels, but those records began only from the day when the patient had first walked into her practice some months before. He had not supplied his medical history prior to that point. She found this somewhat curious, but it was not uncommon. Schule knew herself to be among the uppermost echelon of the planet’s cosmetic surgeons. Her clients ranged from Hollywood’s brightest and most beautiful to members of several European royal families and the wives of Russia’s super rich. Discretion was not only expected by her clients, but demanded. No one at Schule’s practice asked any questions that their clients did not want to answer. The man sitting opposite her didn’t look like a movie star or a prince, but he had to be as wealthy as one to afford her fees, or else vain enough to justify such extravagance.
As well as offering a complete range of the most common procedures, such as rhinoplasty, facelifts and liposuction, Schule was at the forefront of scar reduction. She had studied and taught across the world and her expertise was always in demand. The majority of her work in this area was in smoothing the results of her less skilled fellow surgeons.
She said, ‘I think we can say that the procedure has been nothing short of a spectacular success. I’m delighted with the results and I hope you are too. Of course the original surgeon did a perfectly adequate job of putting the ear back together, but alas he didn’t do you any favours when it came to minimising scarring. Fortunately, with the injury being comparatively recent, combined with your relative youth and exceptional level of health and well-being, the techniques I employed could not have worked any better. I’m sure you’ve seen for yourself in the mirror, but the actual scar tissue, which you know cannot be avoided and will always be present, is limited to a fine line that is only visible at especially close range. Over time its visibility will further be reduced and I would speculate that within a year even you will have a hard time identifying it.’
The patient nodded. ‘Thank you.’
Schule wasn’t used to such reserved appreciation. She was used to huge smiles and endless streams of tearful expressions of gratitude. She had never known someone so emotionless. When she had first discussed the procedure with him he had listened intently, made a series of surprisingly astute queries, and showed neither uncertainty nor concern. On the day of the surgery he had been relaxed and without fear. His heart rate had been almost unnervingly low and regular.
He was at least twenty years her junior and it went against her professional ethics, but she found herself wanting to get to know him better. There w
as something about him she couldn’t articulate that went beyond an obvious attraction.
She cleared her throat. ‘If there is no pain or discomfort then I don’t believe you’ll need another check-up, but please do book an appointment if you feel the need to see me at some point in the future.’
The patient nodded.
‘If I may,’ Schule began, ‘I would love to use your case for a paper I’m writing for a surgical journal.’
‘I’d prefer to be left out of any literature, thank you.’
‘I can assure you that your anonymity will be protected. Only the injury, procedure and results will be included.’
‘The answer is no.’
Schule sighed. ‘Well, that is a shame. But it’s your choice. Do let me know if you change your mind.’
‘I shall.’
‘Then I think we’re all done.’
He said, ‘There is one thing that I wonder if you could help me with.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’d like to take any physical records of my procedure with me, and I would appreciate it if any and all electronic records could be deleted too.’
Schule smiled, friendly and reassuring. ‘I can promise you that your privacy is of the utmost importance to us here and no one but my staff and I will ever see those records. I’m sorry if I’ve made you nervous because of the journal. I respect your wishes not to be included.’
He nodded. ‘I appreciate that, but regardless of your paper, when I leave here I’d prefer that no record of my presence was left behind.’
‘I’m afraid we must retain your medical records, both for legal considerations and for any future procedures you might have with us. There really is nothing to be concerned about. I’ve been protecting the privacy of my patients since the very beginnings of this practice.’
‘Please, I’d like my records.’ His tone was calm but insistent.
‘I’m sorry,’ Schule said, ‘but I just can’t do that. It comes down to a matter of legality and I’m not prepared to break the law, even if I was comfortable with what you’re asking of me.’
‘Your name is Margaret Schule,’ he said. ‘You are forty-nine years old. You grew up in Gräfelfing, twenty kilometres west of Munich. Your father was a baker by trade. He joined the Nazi party in the summer of 1939. By the time the Second World War ended he had risen to the rank of lieutenant in the Waffen SS. He changed his name after the war, taking the identity of one of his childhood friends, and took his young wife to Austria. They lived there for over ten years before returning to Germany, where you were born. You studied medicine at the Berlin College of Medicine and spent six years practising in Germany before working in London and then the United States, where you specialised in cosmetic surgery and taught for a time at Princeton Plainsborough. You came to Austria fifteen years ago for your father’s funeral and eventually established this practice six years later with an investment from your husband, Alfred, who you first met while you were in London. He owns a fifty-five per cent stake in your practice and has absolutely no idea that you’ve been having an affair with his younger brother for the past eighteen months. You meet every Friday afternoon. He tells his secretary he’s playing badminton.’
There was no change in the patient’s expression. There was no malice. He sat still and relaxed, handsome yet cold, but everything about him demanded obedience.
Schule stared at the patient for a long time before regaining her composure. Her mouth opened to demand answers to questions that she couldn’t form the words for. Eventually, she reached across her desk and pushed a button on her intercom, then held the receiver to her ear.
When the line connected, Schule instructed her secretary to do as the patient wished, silencing the secretary’s protest’s with: ‘I don’t care. Just make sure they’re deleted and hand him all documentation.’
The patient stood without taking his gaze from her, repositioned the chair as it had originally been, and left the office without another word.
SIX
Victor withdrew a pair of sunglasses from his inside jacket pocket and slipped them on. He stood outside the grand townhouse that housed Schule’s practice. The early afternoon sun was bright and warm. The building was whitewashed, like every building on the wide boulevard. A wrought iron fence, painted black and topped with brass spikes, flanked a set of marble steps that led down to the pavement. A light wind blew against his face. He descended the steps as he instinctively swept his gaze across his immediate environment.
The building was located on Wiener Street in central Vienna, opposite the Stadtpark. The neighbourhood was one of almost identical streets, with identical rows of expensive townhouses, all gleaming white with red-tiled roofs and beautifully maintained. Few were residences. Most served as offices for accountants, lawyers and doctors. The park’s maple trees on the far side of the road cast dappled shadows across the pavement and offered shade for parked high-end sedans and hulking luxury SUVs. Victor couldn’t see a single piece of litter or trace of gum.
Every thirty metres or so a bench was positioned on the wide pavement opposite. Men and women in business attire made use of them to eat their lunches and drink coffee, or just to enjoy the sunshine while chatting on their phones.
A bus stop on the far side of the road was the only sign the neighbourhood did not exist in a world of pure affluence. Only two buses stopped there because those who lived and worked here shunned public transport, but the stop was useful for visitors to the park. Victor imagined he was one of the few people in the area, if not the entire city, who considered a bus the ideal method of urban transport. His life was one of assumed identities, but if he could avoid it he preferred not to compromise them with the trail of documentation required to buy or rent a car. Stealing one posed an unnecessary risk, significant enough that it was only to be undertaken when there was no other option. Cars also trapped him, both by confining him physically and by demanding the concentration necessary to drive them. Riding the subway meant he could maintain more vigilance, but at the price of being held captive at least thirty metres underground. A bus, however, was a mode of transport that let him preserve vigilance, yet one via which he could depart frequently and easily without leaving behind a paper trail.
He planned to take a bus out of the neighbourhood as the first step of his counter-surveillance routine, but not from the stop opposite his destination. A handful of people were waiting – three heavy-set men in business suits, an elderly couple holding hands, a young man in a cap, and a woman with two small children – and they stood up from their seats or shuffled forward into a rough line as both buses that stopped there neared, one after the other.
Except for the man in the cap.
Victor slowed his pace and dropped his gaze to the medical notes in his hand while the buses pulled up, the first in front of the stop, the other directly behind the first. A minute later they set off again, the second bus pulling out ahead of the first because they largely shared the same route and most of the waiting people had not wanted to walk the extra distance to the second bus.
The first bus joined the traffic after the second, leaving the bus stop empty.
Except for the man in the cap.
He wore walking boots, jeans and a sports jacket. Earbuds rested in his ears and the wires extended down and disappeared beneath the jacket. The brim of a cap hid his eyes. There was some logo on the cap Victor didn’t recognise. The cap was navy blue and the logo black. The sports jacket was grey. The jeans were faded but dark. The walking boots were brown.
He looked to be in his late twenties, but it was hard to be exact when his face was half hidden by the navy blue cap. He wasn’t tall or short. He wasn’t broad or thin. His clothes were ordinary. Most people wouldn’t have looked at him twice, if they had noticed him at all. But he’d let both of the only two buses that served the stop leave and there was a bench less than ten metres away that would have been far more comfortable to sit on than the small plastic stools of the bus
stop.
Victor crossed the street to the same side as the man in the cap and headed west. He didn’t look back: either the man was still sitting at the bus stop and therefore was of no concern, or he was now walking west as well, in which case Victor had nothing to gain by letting the man know he was on to him.
After one hundred metres the pavement turned ninety degrees to follow the border of the park. Victor waited in the small crowd that had gathered at the road’s edge, waiting for the crossing light to change. If the man in the cap was behind him he would have slowed down or even stopped to maintain a tactical shadowing distance. Again, there was no point looking to confirm if he was there, and equally no point if he was still sitting at the bus stop.
Victor saw the traffic slowing and crossed a few seconds before the lights changed. The crowd followed. He hurried across – just a man who didn’t like to wait. If the man in the cap was alone he would now be rushing to close the gap, because he wouldn’t want to get trapped on the far side of the road when the lights changed back again.
