The Final Hour (Victor The Assassin 7)

by Tom Wood

  Muir sucked in air between her teeth. ‘Don’t do that. Don’t talk down to me. Don’t treat me as though I’m overreacting. I’m not, and I’m not naïve. I’m speaking plainly, that’s all. I’m saying it like it is. We’re not going to get through this by hoping for the best and we’re not going to get through it by being anything less than straight with one another.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Procter said. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  They were silent for a time.

  Muir said, ‘If we do nothing, Alvarez is going to find a link to Tesseract eventually, isn’t he?’

  ‘Careful as we were, we’ve left enough of a scent that he’s never going to stop until he can put one of us behind bars.’

  ‘And if we inform Tesseract, we expose ourselves to the possibility he’ll kill us to protect himself.’

  Procter nodded.

  ‘Jesus, Roland, how did it come to this?’

  ‘It’s my fault. I reined Alvarez in when I should have let him loose. He’s never forgotten that and he’s never forgiven me for it.’

  ‘You’re saying he’s doing all this to get back at you for giving him a hard time?’

  ‘I’m saying that he’s blinded by personal anger. That makes him relentless. He might have let this go otherwise. He might have left it to someone else. Someone we could handle.’

  ‘Does anything involving men come down to anything else but ego?’

  ‘Ego’s all we have, ultimately. All we are is ego. If we don’t protect that, what do we protect?’

  ‘So that’s a yes, then.’

  Procter said, ‘We need to find a way of contacting Tesseract that Alvarez can’t intercept, and can’t discover after the fact. Any electronic communication we send, no matter how careful, is bound to trip us up. I’m sure that’s what he’s waiting for. When I thought it was just me he was looking into I figured you would be safe to make contact. Now, after your conversation with him, I think it’s too much of a risk.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘So we need to sift through everything we know about Tesseract. Every associate he has. Every place we know he’s been. We need to find him first. It’s going to be a nightmare, but we don’t have a choice.’

  Muir buzzed down the door window to get some air and said, ‘I already know how to do this.’

  Procter said, ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Alvarez slipped up when he threatened me. He told me that Tesseract has worked with MI6. He didn’t say how he knew, and I didn’t ask, because he wrongly assumed I had made the introduction. He revealed that I’ve been at a social event with Tesseract’s former handler and I will be at one coming up with his current handler.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘I deliberately pissed him off and he tried to knock me down a peg, and in doing so he told me something I didn’t already know because he figured I had been part of it.’

  ‘So you’ve never had personal contact with Tesseract’s MI6 contact?’

  ‘No, never. Had it not been for Alvarez, I wouldn’t have even known he worked for them. And similarly he wouldn’t share that information with me even if we’d had contact since I got him in trouble. And we haven’t.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But Alvarez seems to think so.’

  ‘He’s wrong.’

  ‘Then this is the first thing he’s got wrong so far. I would dearly like to know how he’s come to this conclusion. But besides handing us a minor victory, how does it help us make contact with Tesseract if we don’t know who his handler is?’

  ‘Alvarez said nothing about the former handler being at the next gathering. Which seems telling, don’t you think?’

  ‘I follow you. So you’re going to check the guest lists for the events in question and find out who was at the previous one but not the one coming up?’

  Muir nodded.

  ‘But it’s unlikely to leave us with just two people.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We’re probably going to get several for each.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But two of those people are going to have a connection – they’ll share a reason as to why Tesseract moved handlers.’

  Muir said, ‘Now you’re in danger of making the same sorts of assumptions as Alvarez.’

  ‘My only assumption is if there is a connection, you’ll find it.’

  ‘Create a difficult objective, but show faith in the other person’s ability to complete the task… You taught me all these tricks, remember?’

  ‘Sometimes they’re not tricks, Janice. Sometimes I’m just telling the truth.’

  ‘But isn’t that the problem for people like us? We spend so much of our time telling lies we can’t see the truth when it’s staring us in the face.’

  Procter regarded her for a moment, then said, ‘You’ve already done all this, haven’t you? You’ve already worked it out.’

  Muir nodded. ‘I wanted to see if Alvarez was bluffing, so I went over the guest lists of both social events. Earlier this year I was at a reception of some 209 other people. I was there with thirty-three representatives of US intelligence or our affiliates. Cross them off and we’re left with the Brits and other foreign nationals. Strike off the latter, obviously. Now, another ninety-seven were British intelligence but not MI6: they worked for MI5, the Ministry of Defence or GCHQ. That leaves us with those that were certifiably MI6. Of those, nearly half are not on the guest list for the next event. If we discount junior roles and the most senior positions, we have just four individuals: two men and two women, nice and egalitarian. I’ve neither the time nor the resources to pick their lives apart, but one name stands out of those four. His reason for not coming to the next event is just about as good as it gets.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  She nodded. ‘Shot dead outside his home, in fact.’

  ‘Not by Tesseract, we can assume, else they wouldn’t still be using him.’

  ‘Unless it was an internal job. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. But if we go with this guy as Tesseract’s former handler, that allows us to jump through the entire guest list for the next event and zero in on a single name: Monique Leyland. Oh, I forgot to say they have their own codename for him: Cleric.’

  ‘How did you work out she’s Tesseract’s – or Cleric’s – new handler?’

  ‘Because she now has the dead guy’s old job. Which is far too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. I don’t know how long he’s been working for them, or even if they’re still in contact, but if anyone can get hold of Tesseract without Alvarez knowing about it, it’s going to be her.’

  ‘When is this event? Tell me it’s soon.’

  ‘Next week.’

  Procter exhaled. Relief. Hope. ‘It could be a trap. You warned Alvarez against jumping to conclusions and you’re doing it yourself.’

  ‘Everything could be a trap, Roland. We’ll be as careful as we can be.’

  ‘Then you are going to help? Help us both?’

  Muir said, ‘I’ve never shied away from a fight. I’m not going to start now.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Victor had the taxi driver drop him off outside the hotel. It was not the usual way he did things – he preferred to take routes less obvious and not share his destination with anyone – but the hotel was set on a hill unnegotiable in a suit and shoes, and the winding driveway was long and steep. Any potential advantage to be gained by hiding his intentions from the taxi driver would be more than offset by arriving at the hotel in a wet and soiled suit, or taking a long walk up the driveway, giving any waiting threats plenty of time to line up a shot.

  He gave the man a modest and forgettable tip and bade him good day. As Victor was in the UK, in the historic city of Bath, he adopted an appropriate English accent – something as common and forgettable as the tip he had given.

  It was an old hotel that had lost a little grandeur over the years, but there was a stubbornness in its weather-beaten façade that Victor liked. He liked bu
ildings that had endured. It gave them personality. He didn’t like modern hotels built for functionality, especially with windows that didn’t open, wardrobes that couldn’t be moved to barricade the door, and cameras in every hallway. Maybe that was why Leyland had chosen it. She couldn’t know how he used wardrobes, but maybe she had deduced his shyness for CCTV. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like anyone understanding him.

  He kept this from his expression as he entered the hotel lounge, which joined the lobby via an open double-doorway. The lounge was a pleasant space to relax and read the papers, else drink coffee or take tea, as he saw Leyland was doing.

  She stood to greet him as he neared. Victor shook her hand because that’s how normal people behaved and his goal was always to seem just like them. She smiled at him with a certain warmth, as though they were close, as though she was happy to see him. She wasn’t playing the same game as Victor, but hers was still a game.

  Neither behaved in a way to suggest they knew the other person was acting, nor that they knew the other person knew.

  She had a model’s height and a gymnast’s figure. She wore a knee-length tweed skirt, white cashmere sweater and suede boots. Her black hair was straightened as it had been the last time he had seen her, but it was longer now. The length suited her.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ she said.

  Two sofas faced each other across a glass-topped coffee table. She swept her skirt as she sat down. He took the sofa opposite. She had already taken the sofa facing the door, so Victor had to break protocol to face her, but he sat in such a way that he could keep watch of his back in the reflection of a nearby window pane. Not ideal, but it would do. There was little chance of an assassination attempt in a busy hotel lounge at eleven a.m.

  Leyland asked, ‘Can I have anything brought over? Tea? Coffee? Something to eat? The avocado sandwiches are little triangles of pure heaven.’

  He was hungry, but he said, ‘I’m fine.’

  He didn’t want to be here any longer than he had to be.

  She had chosen to sit as far from the door as possible, in a corner to further isolate them. There were other people in the lounge, but none in earshot.

  He had been in her company only three times before today. He had only known her as Monique in their first encounters, but he had since learned her full name to be Monique Cynthia Leyland. She was thirty-two and single, and held two degrees. She spoke French, German, Italian and Latin. Her role as Victor’s handler for British intelligence had been inherited from the man who had recruited his services, and Victor didn’t trust her any more than he had trusted him. Like her predecessor, though, she had gone out of her way to encourage trust and cooperation.

  He had once avoided any personal contact with those with whom he did business, but with his more recent employers he was forced to break that rule. He kept face-to-face meetings rare, and held them only when necessary. All other communication was done via electronic means.

  Leyland poured tea from the china pot. It had a swirling glaze of flowers and birds. The cup and saucer were decorated in the same pattern. She used little tongs to select a sugar cube from a bowl and dropped it into the tea. She stirred with a spoon until the sugar had dissolved, then added a splash of milk and stirred again. She put everything back in its proper place.

  ‘I’m not really a fan of tea, truth be told. But I’m a stickler for tradition.’

  Victor couldn’t remember the last time he had drunk tea. He quite liked it, but he liked coffee more. The last time he had ordered tea it had been to use as a weapon.

  She said, ‘How did it go in Bavaria?’

  Victor said, ‘It worked out as planned, to an extent. Things were a little messy, but Wilders is – was – a subordinate of Phoenix as we suspected. He handled personal interactions. Also as expected the meeting was an ambush, but Wilders wasn’t in on it. The kill team were there to assassinate him too. He’d been collecting intel on Phoenix for years as an insurance policy, which I suspect was the ultimate reason Phoenix wanted to get rid of him.’

  ‘Ironic.’

  ‘Isn’t it just? Wilders had the information stored in a safe in Zurich.’ He removed a thumb drive from a pocket and presented it to Leyland. ‘Everything’s on there. It was all hard copies so I took pictures.’

  ‘You left the originals?’

  He nodded. ‘Wilders told me Phoenix didn’t know about the apartment, but I’m sure he’s looking for it. Wilders wasn’t anyone special. He’ll have left a trail, and I can’t see Phoenix targeting him unless he felt confident he didn’t need to extract anything from him personally. So, it’s only a matter of time before Phoenix finds the apartment. If he finds an empty safe he’s going to think someone – no doubt me – got to the information before him. If Wilders really did collect enough to track him down, then I don’t want Phoenix to know I have it. At best, he’ll disappear and reinvent himself and I’ll never get this close to him again.’

  ‘At worst?’

  ‘He’ll double his efforts to protect himself.’

  Leyland thought about this as she took possession of the memory stick. ‘Yes, then that’s especially wise. I’ll get cracking on this and see what correlates to our own intel.’

  Victor said, ‘Do you know the gentleman by the window? The one with the grey jacket.’

  She shook her head. She didn’t look. ‘No, why?’

  ‘He’s been glancing at you the entire time I’ve been here.’

  Her expression didn’t change. ‘You get used to it.’

  The sofas were comfortable and low. The padding was soft, made softer as the sofa was old and the material covering the padding had stretched over time. It was a sofa to lounge on, to sink into, to fall asleep on. That made it awkward for Victor to perch on, ready to spring to his feet should it be required. It made him look awkward and uncomfortable, but he would rather that than sit back and be vulnerable. Monique sat back. She was comfortable.

  One long leg was crossed over the other and she held the saucer in her left hand while two fingers and the thumb of her right hand gripped the cup of tea. She looked at him through the steam. It was no hardship to look at her in return.

  She glanced at a flag flying outside the window. ‘They always look so dirty, don’t they? Like the flags are ashamed. Like a metaphor for the grubbier side of patriotism, or maybe here we don’t have anything to be patriotic about?’

  Victor didn’t answer. There were many things he didn’t understand because he was beyond them or had never experienced them. He would first need to belong somewhere to feel patriotism. Besides, Leyland wasn’t looking for a discussion. She was just voicing her thoughts, as people were apt to do. Victor tended to keep his own thoughts to himself. Even those that could do him no harm he was reluctant to share. Sharing was for civilians.

  ‘I hope you’re reassured that I’m delivering on my promises,’ she said.

  ‘Promises you wouldn’t have had to make had one of your organisation not sold intel on me to Phoenix in the first place.’

  Leyland sipped tea. ‘You’re not going to let that go, are you?’

  ‘I want you to maintain focus, yes.’

  It was only half the truth. He didn’t hold Leyland responsible for another’s corruption, but he wanted her to think he did. He wanted her to think so because he didn’t want her to know he felt indebted to her, because she had done him a favour when she hadn’t needed to do so. He couldn’t tell her that without revealing more of himself than he was willing for anyone to know. It was another game of sorts, only this one had far higher stakes.

  She said, ‘I can promise you this has my every focus. I’m a laser beam of focus, in fact. I want to put you back to work. The world, in case you hadn’t noticed, is fuller than it has ever been with tyrants and villainy. Every day you’re out there looking for Phoenix, they’re out there multiplying like bacteria.’

  Victor said, ‘I thought you were too clever to be an idealist.’

  ‘A clever ide
alist is but an optimist. Once we’ve put this Phoenix business to rest then I can put you back in the field. The sooner the better.’

  In a way, she was like Wilders. The only difference being she worked for an intelligence agency and therefore had some legitimacy behind her. Victor had never fooled himself into believing the actions of governments were any more just than those of private individuals, even when he had worn a uniform. Killing was killing, however it was marketed. Defence, regime change, intervention were all terms used to make the unpalatable less so for general consumption. The only real difference between Wilders and Leyland was Leyland made maybe five per cent of what Wilders had earned.

  ‘I trust that eagerness will not result in rushed work.’

  ‘Tut, tut,’ she said with a smile. ‘You really need to have a little more faith in your friends. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to catch the train back to London. I have a party to attend in a few hours.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Muir had never been a party girl. She had studied and exercised through her youth and figured fun would come once she had put her career in order. It had, but only through a series of bad choices and regrets. Maybe she should have gone to more parties along the way. Maybe she would feel more comfortable in a sleeveless dress and modest heels and some colour on her lips. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so out of place now.

  The British intelligence community liked their gatherings, or soirées, as they were fond of calling them. At first, Muir had thought they were a waste of time and had gone along to them only when she had been compelled to by a higher power. She had been naïve then. The Brits just did things their way, in the way they had always done. The gatherings were social occasions – no secret work could be done between quaffing champagne and nibbling smoked salmon canapés – but it was all a distraction. Smoke and mirrors, as they also liked to say.

  They held the parties to sniff out the weak links in their allies. They wanted to see who drank a little too much, whose eyes were a little too roving, whose lips were a little too loose. It worked, because the junior analysts and assistant cultural attachés and first-time-in-the-field operatives loved an embassy party. It was the reason they wanted to work in intelligence. They wanted their slice of the juicy glamour pie and it took enormous resolve not to gorge upon it and choke.