by Tom Wood
Victor didn’t panic. Victor never panicked. He had been expecting this. He had wanted it, to an extent. He had wanted to get closer to Phoenix, whatever the danger, because he was in danger regardless. He was calm because he was always calm. Unlike Wilders, Victor was used to such situations. Making enemies was an inevitable side effect of being paid to kill people. He couldn’t hope to neutralise all threats. He couldn’t hope to know of all threats.
‘I’ll make a deal with you, Mr Wilders. It’s a one-time, yes or no offer, and it’s the best offer you’ve ever had. There’s no time to negotiate. Help me get to Phoenix and I’ll help you live through this.’
‘How?’
‘Leave the details to me. Yes or no?’
‘I’d love to say yes but I’m afraid I don’t know how to get to Phoenix.’
‘You do,’ Victor said. ‘You just don’t realise it. You know something after working for him all this time. No one is perfect. No one is invisible. Everyone makes mistakes. He slipped up. He gave something away or you worked something out. Think. Think hard and think fast because I’m the only hope you have and I’d as soon gut you as help you for nothing in return.’
Wilders put his hands to his pinched face. His brain had never worked this hard in his life. Victor watched. Waiting. Counting down the seconds Wilders had left alive.
‘If you knew it was a trap, why did you come here?’
‘I knew Phoenix wouldn’t show in person, but I knew he would send someone in his place. Someone who could be useful. If you’re useful, then you get to live.’
The broker said, ‘We need to get out of here.’
‘Answers first. Who is he?’
‘I don’t know his name.’
‘You’ve met him, though? You know his face?’
Wilders shook his head.
‘You’re running out of time. Talk to me.’
‘But I have information. I have lists. I have data. Calls. Numbers. Contacts. Times. Places. Email addresses. Bank accounts. Companies.’
‘I see,’ Victor said. ‘In case he ever turned on you. Which is almost certainly why he now wants you dead. He found out you’ve been gathering intel on him. I hope you can see the funny side.’
Wilders could not. ‘I’ve been collecting it for years, but I don’t have the resources to make use of it. I’ve never been able to put the pieces together myself.’
‘Where do you have it stored? Can he access it?’
‘No,’ Wilders said. ‘He can’t know where I have it. I have a safe, in an apartment I own, but not in my name. I owned it long before I ever came to work for him. Everything’s in the safe.’
‘Where’s the apartment?’
‘Get me out of here and I’ll tell you.’
‘Tell me and I’ll get you out of here.’
Wilders didn’t hesitate because he didn’t have time and he didn’t have any bargaining power. He may not have been as good at this as he thought, but he knew when he was out of his depth. He said, ‘Zurich.’
‘The address,’ Victor demanded.
Wilders supplied details for an apartment in the Enge quarter, near to the Arboretum Park.
‘Okay,’ Victor said. ‘Give me your gun.’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘Now’s not the time to start being coy. You need to give me your weapon if you want to survive who’s coming. Unless you think you’re a better shot.’ Victor gestured. ‘In which case, by all means, after you.’
‘I’m telling you, I don’t have a gun. That was our agreement.’
‘Then I’ll need your bodyguard’s instead. You’ll need to order him to hand it over, unless you don’t like him very much.’
‘He… doesn’t have one either.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Those were the conditions of the meeting. No guns.’
Victor sighed. ‘Typical. For the first time in my life someone actually played by the rules when they shouldn’t have.’
‘Phoenix insisted we follow the terms.’
‘Then let me take a guess: the bodyguard is freelance, paid in cash, and more used to keeping the paparazzi away from pop stars than he is fighting off killers.’
‘He wasn’t my first choice for that very reason.’
‘But Phoenix insisted.’
Wilders could only nod.
‘Then he wants you dead as badly as me,’ Victor said. ‘You’re not very good at this, are you?’
‘I thought I was, until now.’
‘Be glad I’m here to show you the error of your ways. Who’s coming?’
‘I told you, I don’t know that.’
‘Again, you do, you just don’t realise it. You’ve hired them for something recently. Like I said before: not an individual, but a team. You hired them for a job that’s coming up soon, either in this country or a neighbouring one. Only thing is, Phoenix switched the targets without your knowledge. He likes to keep things clean. There’ll be no traces back to him because you’ve hired your own killers.’
If Wilders was pale before, now he was white. Everything Victor said made sense. Cold, hard, lethal sense.
He struggled to speak now his sympathetic nervous system went into overdrive. ‘They’re… Greeks. Well, Macedonians. A five-man team.’
‘I don’t care where they’re from. What’s their background? Are they sitting out there with sniper rifles and thermal imaging or will they assault with SMGs?’
‘I don’t know any of that.’
‘Why would you?’ Victor said. ‘Can you at least tell me if they’re any good?’
The broker said, ‘They were expensive.’
‘That’s not the same thing.’
‘I…’
He heard a noise. A crunch of gravel. Outside.
‘Forget it,’ Victor said. ‘We’re about to find out.’
SIXTEEN
The bodyguard was waiting outside of the car, as he was instructed. He was supposed to keep his distance, but to stay close enough to offer aid should it be required. He couldn’t imagine the guy in the suit being much trouble to anyone. The bodyguard could snap him like a twig if it came to it. He played with his phone to pass the time, swiping young chicks he liked the look of and playing the slots with a casino app. He was supposed to be working. He was supposed to be on guard, but what was the point? He was hired for show, to intimidate, to scare. He hadn’t so much as punched anyone in months, and then it had been some smug little photographer who sneaked too close to his camera-shy client. It was the most boring job in the world, hence his increasing dependency on dating and gambling apps. Had to pass the time somehow.
He didn’t see the shadow approach. He didn’t hear the footsteps. He didn’t feel the knife. He was dead before the pain could register.
Victor thought about the lodge. It was a great place for an ambush if only because of its remoteness. Even if things got messy and loud, there was no one nearby to see, no one to hear. Plus, the size of the building and the grounds meant a team could approach without being detected, and enter unnoticed. There was no way to watch every door, every window. Phoenix had chosen well. This was no surprise to Victor. He knew next-to-nothing about the broker, but as Wilders had said of Victor, anonymity only enhanced Phoenix’s reputation.
He didn’t know the building’s layout, but he didn’t need to see blueprints or perform a walk around to know there would be multiple entrances and exits. The Macedonians would have done their homework. They had chosen the best approaches, the best points of entry. They knew their target and wouldn’t all come in the same way. They couldn’t risk Victor slipping away out of the front while they crept in through the back. That cut off any chance of escape, but it split them up. It made them vulnerable. He couldn’t fight off a whole team by himself, but one-by-one he had a chance, especially considering he had a single, significant advantage: he knew they were coming.
The problem with the room was it was too big and too open. There were no real blind spots to hi
de out of line of sight. He could duck behind the U-shaped worktops in the kitchen, or use the blocky island for cover, but he couldn’t hope to take an enemy by surprise from there if they entered from the far side of the room.
Phoenix was smart, so he would have briefed the team on Victor’s capabilities and his history, but they were expecting to catch him by surprise. They were expecting to ambush him.
That the lights were on cemented this fact. If they cut the power, he would know they were coming. So, lights on. Which meant they didn’t have night vision.
Wilders stood still and silent as Victor approached the touch screen by the front door. It was a master control panel for the whole building. Every electronic device – sound system, television, climate control – could be operated from here. A few taps and swipes and he had access to the lights. He could select by room and by individual fixture. He could also select them all.
The whole building went dark.
The screen glowed; more taps and swipes and he had access to the sound system. There were genres and playlists and albums and artists and individual songs. He selected genre, chose metal, then tapped the first band listed. He pressed the volume control until it maxed out.
The five Macedonians were already spread out inside the building when the lights went out. If this was unexpected, the blaring music that followed a few seconds later was a shock. There were speakers throughout the building and no escape from thumping drums and wailing guitars. A singer screeched and screamed.
They had no thermal nor starlight scopes or goggles, so the darkness was a problem. They did, however, have tactical lights fixed to their weapons, just in case. That foresight paid off now. They paused a second to switch these on, giving them concentrated beams of light to illuminate their path.
There were two targets: an assassin and a broker named Wilders. The latter was to be killed only once the first was dead.
The darkness and the screaming music told them that they were expected, but it didn’t matter. The Macedonians still had a significant numerical advantage, and they had been assured both targets would be unarmed. The assassin was making things difficult for them, but this was going to end only one way.
The first gunman to reach the main room picked out Wilders with the tactical light. The broker was terrified, his hands held high and obvious.
The gunman had to yell to be heard, ‘Where is he?’
Wilders yelled back and pointed. ‘Above you.’
The Macedonian’s head snapped up, and he saw Victor – hanging upside down – but in doing so exposing his neck for Victor to reach down and loop his right forearm under the man’s jaw, wrapping around his throat in a choke hold. Victor locked off on his own left wrist, left hand braced against the back of the man’s head, squeezed and lifted him off the floor.
Extreme pain, panic and airlessness made the Macedonian drop his gun to free up his hands in a desperate attempt to save himself.
Victor hung upside down, the backs of his knees against the horizontal support timbers while his feet were crossed around one of the verticals. Not an ideal position to be in for lots of reasons, least of all because supporting his own weight and that of his enemy meant considerable pressure and pain in his legs where they met the beams, but his options for surprising an armed enemy were limited.
The choke shut off the Macedonian’s carotid arteries. The toes of his shoes scrambled for purchase. After three seconds his legs jerked and thrashed. Six seconds later they swung back and forth.
Victor lowered the unconscious man a little to ease the strain, and to make it easier to adjust his hold to break the man’s neck. He released the corpse and contracted his core to raise his torso back up so he could grab the timber and lower himself down again. The resulting drop wasn’t far.
He retrieved the dead man’s gun, which was a pistol, but it had a vertical fore grip and folding buttstock. It was a Beretta 93R. The R stood for raffica, or burst. Each squeeze of the trigger fired off three bullets, making it a deadly close-range weapon, but it needed the grip and buttstock to help control the recoil generated by that rate of fire. The tactical light was useful, but it was attached to the right-hand side of the gun because the folding vertical fore grip was in the way underneath. That meant the focus of the light beam wasn’t quite where the muzzle pointed. Insignificant at point-blank range, but that difference could put a shot wide at range if the shooter used the beam to aim.
It would never be Victor’s first choice of weapon, but he preferred his enemies armed that way. The weapon wasn’t suppressed, which was unusual when dealing with professionals. It probably wasn’t the team’s first choice either, but Victor knew as well as anyone that it was almost impossible to operate with the best gear. The most effective weapons were the ones hardest to obtain. More often than not he had to make do. The Beretta was what an associate of his had once referred to as a spit gun – because spitting distance was about as far as it could be shot with any accuracy.
He made sure it was loaded and a round was in the chamber, but didn’t frisk the body for more magazines or comms equipment. The others were close and he couldn’t afford to have his gaze anywhere but sweeping the entry points.
That diligence meant he was ready when the next guy entered. A single squeeze of the trigger put three subsonic nine mils through his cranium.
The next was harder to kill. He entered through the north doorway a second later than his team mate, catching Victor off guard while his gaze was elsewhere, but the man was as surprised seeing two corpses on the ground and both targets still alive. He didn’t hesitate, but the surprise threw off his aim. He shot too soon, before he had Victor in his sights, the torch beam working against him.
He had the same model Beretta and put a three-round burst wide of Victor, shattering a window. The recoil was fierce, even with the fore grip and buttstock, making the second burst slower; correcting his aim took longer.
It gave Victor enough time to twist and fire off a snapshot.
The burst hit centre mass and the Macedonian staggered and cried out, but didn’t go down. Victor saw no mist of blood or bloodied clothing, and was able to aim his second shot for the head before the gunman could recover. A red splash hit the wall behind him.
Three squeezes of the trigger. Nine rounds fired. The Beretta had eleven remaining.
Victor switched the selector to single shot. He preferred accuracy to firepower.
The music ceased.
One of the Macedonians had found another control panel and killed it. Victor had expected they would, sooner or later. The lights followed, bathing the room again in a warm glow. It didn’t matter. He had a weapon now. He was armed. He didn’t need to hide himself any longer. It was time to finish this on his own terms.
Wilders was cowering behind a sofa.
Victor said, ‘Where else in the lodge are there control panels that affect all rooms?’
Wilders was silent. He was terrified.
‘For the music,’ Victor prompted. ‘For the lights.’
Wilders snapped out of his panic. ‘Master bedroom. Mezzanine.’
Victor changed position, rushing to cover the staircase, reaching it in time to see a shadow on the landing above and squeezing the trigger when that shadow became a human form. A double-tap left nine bullets in the 93R’s magazine, and dropped the gunman, who slid on his back down the stairs, coming to rest at the foot of the staircase, at Victor’s feet.
He swapped out the half-empty mag for a full one from the dead guy’s gun.
Footsteps.
The last Macedonian tried stealth. He attempted to be quiet. He crept along a downstairs hallway with slow, careful footsteps, but like the rest of his team, like Victor, he wore boots. He couldn’t be silent on the hardwood floors. But he expected his enemy to be as noisy, to be as detectable.
Victor slid across the floor on his stomach, the highly polished floorboards letting him slither with a decent amount of speed, just using his left palm and right e
lbow to pull himself forward while he kept the weapon clear. He was down behind the kitchen worktops, hidden, when the gunman entered the room.
Victor popped up behind him and shot him in the back of the head.
Wilders was still behind the sofa after Victor had swept the lodge to make sure the five-man team really had consisted of five. He found their various points of entry, but no evidence there had been anyone else. Wilders had been right about something, at least.
He stood. He was sweating. He was out of breath. He was shaking. Victor could see it on his face – he’d never felt more invigorated, more alive.
‘I did okay, yes? I stood where you told me to,’ Wilders said. ‘I can’t believe I’m still alive.’
Victor said, ‘I can’t believe it either,’ and shot him twice in the face.
SEVENTEEN
There wasn’t an inch of CIA headquarters that Muir didn’t know. She had been in many briefing rooms, situation rooms and conference rooms. She had even spent time in the hallowed halls of the seventh floor, where the royalty of espionage held court. This particular conference room on the fourth floor could have been in any office in the country. It was nothing special. Just a room. Maybe that was why it had been chosen.
Alvarez said, ‘Would you like a glass of water?’
Muir nodded. ‘Please.’
He poured her some from a glass jug. He filled it halfway. She didn’t get the point of that. Fill it up or not at all. Waste of a glass otherwise.
‘Shall we get right to it?’ Alvarez said. ‘Skip the small talk?’
