The Lucifer Network

by Geoffrey Archer

  Sam took himself off to the servery and helped himself to a plate of fruit and some scrambled eggs and bacon.

  De Vere Collins was an untidy-looking man with a reddish, pock-marked complexion and straggly hair. He’d finished eating, leaving the tablecloth in front of him covered in crumbs. Their table was in a corner, out of earshot of the others. Collins poured himself another cup from a cafetière, then glanced round to check nobody was standing near them. He leaned forward.

  ‘There’s been a pretty startling development in the Jackman case,’ he murmured. ‘That theory the Yanks had about him shipping atomic demolition munitions to Osama bin Laden – it doesn’t stand up any more.’

  Sam blinked. ‘Why not, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘The ADMs have been found, that’s why.’

  ‘Good Lord! Where?’

  ‘Still in Moscow. An undercover police squad raided a Chechen mafiya hideout yesterday looking for drugs, and there they were. Still in component form. The nasties hadn’t found anybody to reassemble them, it seems. And there were a few key bits missing.’

  Sam let out a gust of air. Their house of cards had collapsed. Back to square one. Then he frowned. ‘But I’ve just spoken to Duncan Waddell. He didn’t mention any of this.’

  ‘He may not know it yet. I got it from a friend at the US Embassy.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Sam gulped, thrown into confusion. ‘Where the hell do we go from here?’

  ‘Makes it more important than ever that we find Vladimir Kovalenko and persuade him to tell us what Jackman shipped for him,’ Collins reminded him. ‘Trouble is it’s only been rumours so far that he’s back in Vienna.’

  Sam had little faith in Kovalenko ever being found, which made it vital to know whether Julie’s friend Max Schenk had been a business contact of Harry Jackman’s.

  ‘There is one other avenue I’m pursuing,’ he ventured cautiously. ‘It may not take us anywhere, but it’d be mad not to explore it now we don’t have any other leads.’ He explained about stumbling across Julie Jackman last night, and his suspicion that her boyfriend could have been a contact of her father’s. When he’d finished, Collins wrote Max Schenk’s name in a notebook.

  ‘I’ll see what Austrian security have on him. Sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they aren’t.’ He puffed out his cheeks and gave Sam a sideways look. ‘How come the little bitch talked to you? I thought she considered you the devil incarnate.’

  ‘Believe it or not she’s apologised for what she did. Claims she got it all wrong.’

  ‘Wonders’ll never cease!’

  Sam finished eating and glanced around. The coffee shop was built like a conservatory. Sleek men in suits were scattered amongst the potted plants. He tried to picture it a year ago, full of woolly-haired scientists discussing the idiosyncrasies of HIV.

  Collins’s mobile phone bleeped. He dabbed the button. ‘Yes?’

  Suddenly his eyes bored into Sam’s. ‘Bloody hell!’ He jotted something on a paper napkin, grunted a couple of acknowledgements and ended the call.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Sam demanded.

  ‘Vladimir Kovalenko.’

  ‘He’s been found?’

  ‘He certainly has. The Kriminalpolizei were called to an apartment in the second district first thing. The bugger’s been murdered.’

  Collins’s embassy car was waiting outside the hotel. The driver refused to break the law and took them through the traffic at regulation speed. Collins tapped his knees impatiently.

  ‘First Harry Jackman gets it and now Kovalenko,’ Sam murmured, in a voice low enough for the driver not to hear. ‘Somebody’s making damn sure we don’t find out what was in that shipment out of Moscow.’

  ‘There may be no connection, of course,’ Collins warned. ‘There’s a whole string of people who wanted Kovalenko dead.’

  They crossed the brown streak of the Danube Canal and turned right by the Prater amusement park with the giant Ferris wheel towering above them. Then they hit a traffic jam. A tram had had a minor altercation with a car. The police were sorting things out.

  ‘Shouldn’t be long,’ their driver commented. ‘Doesn’t seem to be much damage.’

  Sam noticed a copy of the International Herald Tribune on the seat next to the driver. Anxious to know whether the allegations against his father had reached the international press, he picked it up.

  ‘Mind if I have a look?’

  ‘Help yourself,’ the driver told him.

  He checked through the pages but found nothing. Then Collins pointed to an article headed MYSTERY VIRUS STRIKES EU OFFICIAL.

  ‘That one’s getting interesting,’ Collins told him. ‘The bloke had some sort of brain meltdown and they think he was infected deliberately.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Bio-terrorism with a racist motive. The victim was the head of the EU’s anti-racism centre here in Vienna. Infected with a virus no one’s ever seen before. Through a cut with a chip of glass, they think.’

  Sam turned to him. ‘Any connection with the Southall bomb and the other racist incidents in Europe?’

  ‘Nobody knows. But that’s what they’re working on.’

  Sam stared fixedly through the windscreen. Max Schenk was a virologist . . .

  He shook his head. No good getting ahead of himself.

  The traffic began to move again and soon they were passing the Messegelände, Vienna’s huge International Trade Fair site. Beyond it, monolithic apartment blocks lined the road. The driver turned left then pulled up outside a drab-fronted building where four police vehicles already stood. The street was curiously empty of onlookers.

  ‘If this were London, there’d be rubbernecks everywhere,’ Sam murmured.

  ‘The Viennese tend to keep themselves to themselves,’ Collins explained.

  They got out of the car and Collins gave his name to the uniformed officer guarding the door to the apartment house. After a few words into his walkie-talkie he saluted and told them the Herr Inspektor was on his way down.

  When the plainclothes officer appeared, Collins greeted him as an old friend, then introduced him to Sam as Inspektor Pfeiffer. The security policeman led them up a stone staircase that smelled of some undefined unpleasantness. He had the ruddy complexion of a Tyrolean mountain guide and spoke reasonable English.

  ‘The police were called by a neighbour at five of this morning,’ he told them. ‘She heard much noise from the apartment next door. Like a fight.’

  They reached the floor where the incident teams were at work. The apartment was small and in severe need of refurbishment.

  ‘Our high-living friend had come down in the world,’ Sam murmured. There were three doors off the narrow hall, all open. From one of the rooms came flashes of light as a police photographer captured the scene.

  ‘At first the officers thought it must be a robbery. That the thieves were discovered by the victim and killed him. But one look at the body and it was clear this was a planned murder.’

  ‘Because of the way he was killed?’ Collins asked.

  ‘Yes. They used a garrotte.’ Pfeiffer raised his eyebrows. ‘Quite special, I think. Come. I show you.’

  The bedroom he led them into looked as if a hurricane had passed through. The cheap bedside table and lamp were overturned and a wardrobe door had been wrenched off its hinges. Books and clothes were strewn round the floor. In amongst them lay the prostrate figure of a man sprawled on his side on the brown carpet, the blue of his distended face almost matching the indigo of his silk pyjamas. Round his neck was a thick metal strap with a thumbscrew at the back.

  ‘Jesus. That’s medieval,’ Collins gasped. He turned to Sam. ‘Recognise him?’

  ‘It was years ago,’ Sam whispered. ‘And I only saw him from a distance.’

  ‘How did you identify him, Herr Inspektor?’ Collins asked.

  ‘The crime officers found six passports in a suitcase, including his original Russian one with a photograph taken before h
e had the cosmetic surgery to change the way he looked. That’s when I was called in.’

  ‘Any idea how long he’d been living here?’

  ‘Four weeks only. The woman in the next apartment, she saw him arrive with two bags.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes. And she say he never have visitors.’

  ‘Because he knew that if he did, they’d probably kill him,’ Collins commented.

  ‘So it looks. But this garrotte, I have never heard it to be used by criminals in Vienna. The people who do this are not from here, I think.’

  Sam stared miserably at the remains of the witness they’d placed so much store in finding. ‘Have you found any other papers in the apartment?’ he asked forlornly. ‘Diaries, business contracts, notebooks?’

  The Inspektor shook his florid head. ‘Only the passports and some plastic cards. We already make investigation about the bank accounts he have.’

  A forensic specialist had begun dusting the furniture for the attacker’s prints. Sam guessed there wouldn’t be any.

  Collins turned from the room and pulled Sam with him. ‘That garrotte’s the sort of toy the KGB used to play with,’ he whispered. ‘My guess is the Kremlin’s behind this. Kovalenko knew too much about the people at the top.’

  Inspektor Pfeiffer had followed them out into the hallway and overheard. ‘I think you can be right. The FSB have wanted to find Herr Kovalenko very bad since six months. Every week we speak about him with Moscow. We had new information that he had been seen back in Vienna, but in the west of the city, not here.’ There was a bullishness about his manner which Sam interpreted as contentment. One more undesirable foreigner out of the way.

  ‘How fat is your dossier on Kovalenko’s activities?’ he asked.

  ‘Fat I would not say. Such people are not easy to check. There are so many like him in Vienna. And they all have some legal business to hide their activities. Many are in joint venture with Austrian citizens. We don’t have enough officers to watch them as close as we would like.’

  ‘What about in the last twelve months?’ Sam checked.

  ‘For most of this year he has not been in Vienna. And before that we had nothing for many months. What I want to know most importantly is how the killers found him here.’

  ‘A man like Kovalenko would never function totally alone,’ Collins stated. ‘He’d have used someone local to find him the apartment and watch his back. But such a person normally works for money, not loyalty. So if a better payer comes along . . .’ He shrugged.

  The explanation was tidy, but it was the timing of the murder that disturbed Sam, as much as the killing itself. Kovalenko had been eliminated just a few hours after he’d told Günther Hoffmann why they were looking for him. He shook his head. It had to be coincidence. It couldn’t be anything else.

  He looked at Collins and they nodded at one another. There was nothing to be gained from hanging around this morgue.

  They thanked the Inspektor and left.

  Out in the street they paused by the car without attempting to get into it.

  ‘I’m going back to the Embassy,’ Collins told him. ‘Drop you somewhere?’

  Sam thought for a moment. He’d arranged to meet Julie Jackman at lunchtime to hear what she’d arranged with Schenk, but he had a couple of hours to kill. Time enough for another word with Hoffmann.

  ‘I saw a metro station close to that Ferris wheel. If you can drop me there it’ll do me fine.’

  ‘No problem.’

  They got back into the car. Sam drummed his fingers on his thigh, thinking hard.

  Harry Jackman ships a mysterious cargo out of Russia after setting up the deal with Kovalenko in a hotel full of virologists, one of whom was Dr Max Schenk. A year later a virus is being used as a weapon . . .

  ‘I’ve been having some more thoughts about the rendezvous Miss Jackman’s trying to arrange with her former lover,’ Sam announced.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I want her to wear a wire.’

  ‘That’s a little OTT, isn’t it?’

  ‘She’ll be under a lot of stress. Can’t expect her to remember everything that’s said. She might forget something important. And I’d like to hear his voice.’

  ‘I take your point.’ Collins chewed it over for a moment. ‘Well, fine. There’s a bloke I use occasionally who could help with that. Give me a ring this afternoon when you know when and where it’s to happen.’

  ‘Thanks. I will.’

  Ten minutes later Sam was on a train heading for Heiligenstadt again. When he reached the third-floor apartment in the Karl-Marx Hof, he found the door to the neighbouring flat open and the beak-nosed woman cleaning the threshold. A couple of her cats were curled up on the rug behind her. He gave her a courteous smile.

  ‘You again!’ she remarked in German. ‘You always come when he’s out.’

  He pretended not to understand and knocked at Hoffmann’s door anyway.

  ‘There’s no point,’ she commented. ‘He’s in the hospital.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Last night. An ambulance came.’

  Sam gaped. He had visions of another murder. Hoffmann’s neck with a strap round it this time.

  ‘Heart attack,’ the crone went on, gleeful at the drama that had come into her tedious life. ‘That’s what they said. Like his wife. Unheimlich, nicht?’

  Uncanny indeed. Sam asked when it had happened and she told him it was around midnight. Which would have been shortly after the man had got home.

  ‘He didn’t seem too bad,’ the woman concluded. ‘He could still talk. Told me not to worry.’

  Sam asked which hospital he’d been taken to but she didn’t know.

  He thanked her and made his way downstairs again, making a mental note to try to trace the clinic later and check on his condition.

  One thing was clear. If the old spy had been hospitalised last night, he could hardly have been connected with the death of Vladimir Kovalenko.

  Brussels

  On the tenth floor of the University Clinic of St Luc, two of the four twenty-five-bed units had been turned into isolation wards. In the past twelve hours the Brussels police had traced and brought to the hospital every person known to have been in contact with Anders Klason since his arrival in the Belgian capital the previous day. Thirty of those who were now sitting on beds or standing around chatting had been involved in the conference where Klason had collapsed. Sitting alone at the far end of the second unit was a scared, uncomprehending Turkish taxi driver, the man who’d brought the Swede from the airport to the city centre.

  In a room on her own lay a terrified Commissioner Blanche Duvalier. When she’d heard about Klason’s incident with the broken glass at the Austrian lakeside, she’d told Dr Gouari about her own confrontation with a sharp object outside the Commission building three days earlier. Within minutes she’d been isolated. Since then she’d been questioned thoroughly by the police and subjected to hourly blood tests administered by a masked nurse with coldly observant eyes. Klason, she’d learned, was still alive but little more than a vegetable. She knew too that her description of the woman she’d collided with bore similarities to the one provided by Nina Klason. Something evil was under way in Europe and the two of them were its first victims. She’d sent word to Paris where her daughter worked for UNESCO. Annette was on her way. She’d been praying to God that she would arrive in time.

  In the last hour she’d begun to feel confused, as if parts of her memory were being unplugged and then reconnected. She remembered Anders Klason disintegrating before her eyes in the Salle Bertrand. Remembered his fear. She was experiencing panic interspersed by patches of incomprehensible calm. One such more restful moment was engulfing her now. Her lips widened in a smile at the irony of it all. All along she’d been hoping for a closer relationship with the tall blond Swede, but not in separate beds.

  The door to her small room opened. She didn’t recognise the three who came in because their faces were mask
ed. They were carrying equipment which they began to set up. A roll of transparent plastic. Stainless steel frames. Drips, tubes. To her it looked like the paraphernalia of death.

  One of the masked faces came closer. A black face that she was quite certain she had never seen before. And it spoke.

  ‘Je suis desolé, madame.’

  Nina Klason was also occupying a single room. No masks for the medical staff here though, because her blood tests had shown none of the viral antibodies now surging through the veins of the Commissioner for Racial Equality. The African doctor’s initial assessment was proving the most likely one. That the virus was like rabies and needed broken skin to enter the body and attack the brain.

  A small table had been brought to her room for the plain-suited, Neanderthal-faced Belgian police officer to set up his laptop. He liaised with Interpol, he’d said, and had been showing her disks full of photographs. Men mostly, hard faces with shaven heads. A few sour women too. A cast of hundreds from a half-dozen nations, all with a record for racially motivated crime.

  Nina Klason shook her head for the hundredth time. None of the faces was familiar. None matched the couple who’d crouched next to Anders’s beach towel less than a week ago. By now she was numb with exhaustion. No sleep last night and a day of talking today.

  She’d spoken on the phone to her mother in Vienna, who was at the end of her tether coping with the Klason’s two attention-seeking children. The woman had agreed to hold the fort for one more day on the understanding that Nina made alternative arrangements after that. Nina was torn about what to do. The Congolese doctor had told her that if her blood tests were still negative the next morning, she would be free to go home. The children needed her, but so did Anders. The doctors had warned her he could die, and deep down she’d already accepted it. She wanted to be there when it happened, whether or not he was aware of her presence. But someone had to look after the children. She’d tried three of her Viennese neighbours. All had expressed concern that whatever infection Anders had been hit by, the Klason infants might be carrying it.

  ‘Es tut mir leid,’ she whispered, apologising to the policeman for not recognising the last of the faces presented to her. The Flemish officer had been conversing with her in German.