by Dan Latus
‘He said to keep watching. So I did for a time, and then I didn’t bother any more. I just said I would stay in Portugal for a while. Pavel didn’t care by then. We had grown apart, and he had plenty of other girls, younger girls.’
That sounded honest, too. Whether it really was, or not, he couldn’t tell yet.
‘Then what?’
‘Jake, you know the rest!’ she said with exasperation, her stone-face disappearing for the first time. ‘We met properly, and then we began living together. We were happy, and we cared for each other. We had a good life.’
‘We did, didn’t we?’ he said with a bitter chuckle.
Was that a tear she had just shed? He rather thought it was, but he wasn’t going to let that fool him.
‘And we can again,’ she said.
‘Is that what you think? Well, perhaps. So what about that cosy little scene this afternoon in Vysoká Lípa? How did that come about?’
‘Pavel was aware that Fogarty was out of prison, and searching for the missing money. So he got his own people to join in. I think he wanted to satisfy himself that I was telling the truth about you.’
‘How did he know we were here, in this country?’
Magda shrugged, leaving him to figure it out for himself. It wasn’t difficult.
‘And what about your meeting with him? How did that happen?’
‘He phoned me to arrange it.’
Grim-faced, Jake said, ‘He phoned you?’
She nodded.
‘On the phone you no longer have?’
She buried her face in her hands.
‘Where is it?’
Magda reached into a pocket and brought out a small, slim phone. She laid it on the coffee table.
Jake stared at it wearily. Now he knew how it had been possible for Fogarty to track them. For all he knew, Fogarty could even be right here in the Czech Republic.
Probably not, though, he decided on second thoughts. Kunda wouldn’t accept that. This was his territory. Fogarty would probably just have handed over responsibility for this leg of the hunt.
Magda picked up the phone and removed the sim card. She ground it beneath her heel and dropped the phone in the waste bin.
‘A bit late,’ Jake said heavily, ‘but it’s a start, I suppose.’
‘What will we do now?’
It was a good question. What would they do now?
‘Let’s go and get something to eat.’
Chapter 32
They were quiet over their meal in the restaurant adjacent to the hotel. Jake had a lot to think about and Magda was subdued. He suspected she was emotionally exhausted, which he wasn’t far from being himself. It had turned into one hell of a day.
At least some things made more sense now, though, Jake thought ruefully. That people had been able to track their movements in the Algarve, and then find them here, had been baffling and very worrying. Now he knew how it had been done. That felt like progress.
Another thing that made sense at last was how and why Magda could cope admirably in situations that might have been expected to completely unhinge a normal young woman with no experience of the rougher side of life. She had been astonishingly calm and clear-headed when faced with some pretty damned appalling events. Now he could explain it. She was a seasoned warrior.
What he was struggling with now was if, when and where he should dump her. He knew he couldn’t afford to be sentimental. She had let him down, betrayed him even. She had shared his bed on a false promise, and she had misled him big-time for far too long. Somehow he had survived – so far. But he couldn’t trust her any more. Realistically, they had reached the end of the road.
Before he told her so, though, he wanted to get from her whatever he could in the way of information that might help him survive a bit longer. Then it would be Arrivederci, baby!
Hell. For all he knew, she might even be pleased when he told her. She could go back to fucking Pavel then – in more ways than one!
‘So what now, Jake?’ Magda asked as she sipped her coffee at the end of the meal.
He took his time answering. ‘I’m not sure. What about Kunda? What will he do now?’
‘It is very simple.’ She gave another of her exquisite shrugs. ‘He will try to kill you, and me. And he will continue looking for the missing money.’
Put like that, it was simple. Once again, but reluctantly now, he had to admire Magda’s capacity for clear-headed thinking. No nonsense, or obfuscation, at all. She just said it how it was.
‘Me, I can understand,’ Jake said, ‘after what I did to him back there. But you, too?’
‘Yes. I know him. I betrayed him when I came with you.’
Ah! I was forgetting that, Jake thought. That’s a complication. Maybe I need to think again.
He changed the subject. ‘Is Kunda tied in with Fogarty?’
Head on one side, she considered for a moment. ‘I think not. Not in the sense I believe you mean. They are occasional collaborators, with certain shared interests, but they are certainly not partners. They are both looking for the missing money, but independently of each other.
‘One other thing. Because Fogarty has been in prison, and now is on the run, he is… How do you say? Dead in the water?’
Jake nodded.
‘Dead in the water,’ she said with satisfaction at having got it right. ‘Fogarty cannot manoeuvre now like he did before. He has influence still, and he has resources. But so has Pavel, and Pavel is legally a free man. He can go anywhere openly. So he will proceed alone, I believe, and follow his own best interests.’
‘So,’ Jake mused, ‘we and the others – and the money – now have two independent organizations hunting us? Is that how you see it?’
Magda nodded. ‘But it is too late for two of your former colleagues. One man in Yorkshire and another in Scotland have been killed already.’
‘Kunda told you?’
‘Yes. They knew nothing about the money,’ she said with a shrug, ‘and eventually they died. Pavel told me. I believe him.’
Jake grimaced and looked away. So that was Penrose and Gregory he no longer had to worry about. Christ, there aren’t many left on that damned list!
And no wonder, he reflected, that Magda was in a bad place when he found her in the beer garden. She had had even more to worry about than he knew. It wasn’t at all surprising that she had seemed so hesitant and confused.
She knew a lot, too. He couldn’t ignore or deny that.
‘OK,’ he said briskly, knowing now what he needed to do. ‘Here’s the plan. That is, if you are still with me?’
‘Yes, I am, Jake. You should know that.’
Well, maybe. He would have to think more about that, and wait to see what happened. But things were different now. Total trust was out the window. He could no more trust Magda absolutely than believe in fairies after today’s revelations.
‘The plan then,’ he said with more confidence than he really felt, ‘is we simply carry on. We do what we had intended to do. We can’t ignore today – at least, I can’t – but maybe we can put it behind us. So we will go to Petrovice tomorrow, and pick up our passports and a couple of new phones. Then we’ll go to England. Is that OK with you?’
‘It is.’
He could hear the relief in her voice. He placed his hand on top of hers. ‘You and me,’ he said softly. ‘Together.’
Looking directly at him, she gave a little smile and said, ‘Thank you, Jake.’
Chapter 33
London was cool, damp and overcast. Inevitably, they shivered when they left the plane, and shivered even more when they left the Heathrow terminal. Magda gave him a brave smile. He thought he knew how she felt. It wasn’t like the Algarve, or Northern Bohemia, either.
‘Welcome to England, Mrs Robinson,’ he said confidently. ‘You’ll soon get used to the weather.’
‘Thank you, Mr Robinson. Always have I wanted to come to England. I will not even notice the weather.’
‘That’s the spirit!’
They were the Robinsons now, supposedly from somewhere he’d never heard of in the West Midlands, according to their rather scuffed new passports. Phan had done a good job. The passports had got them through the lines at both Prague and Heathrow airports. Money well spent, even if it had been hard not to wince at the price.
As the Robinsons, they took a cab into Bayswater, where they checked into a small hotel that had what they needed: bed, food and quiet. Phan had also provided them with several throw-away phones, and Jake soon began working one of them. His first call went to Bob. It was time to start work.
‘You’re back, bonnie lad! So where’ve you been?’
‘Taking a break, Bob. There were some difficulties we had to overcome.’
‘We? Who’s we?’
Jake winced.
‘Just a figure of speech. Me, I and all those who provided help along the way.’
‘Oh, aye?’
He grimaced. Bob was suspicious. But he was damned if he was going to pander to his suspicions. It was better that he knew nothing about Magda. Better, actually, that nobody knew about her.
‘Fat Freddie,’ Jake said. ‘Tell me what you’ve got on him.’
‘So you’re in London?’
‘I don’t think I said that, did I?’ He sighed and added, ‘Oh, it’s not you, Bob. It’s just that the former colleagues seem to be dropping like flies, and the way I was traced in Portugal makes me suspicious of all phones, including yours.’
‘So you’ve heard about Penrose and Gregory, have you?’
‘Yeah. I’m not taking any chances.’
‘Fair enough. Look after yourself, bonnie lad. Be careful. Stay alive.’
‘I’ll do that. So what have you got for me?’
Pretty much all Bob had was an address where Fat Freddie had been living a year previously. Jake doubted if he would be there now, but it was somewhere to start.
The building was in Barnet. It was a block of flats that had seen good days since it was built in the 1960s, but probably not many. They called into a café across the road for a coffee. From the table where they sat, they had a good view of Acadia Towers.
Jake counted twelve floors above ground, and it looked as though there was parking and utilities below ground. The address for Freddie was flat 608, halfway up the building. That would be Witness Protection’s idea of a pragmatic compromise. Freddie had a choice if danger threatened of making for either the roof or the ground floor. Or, if Fogarty caught up with him, he would be going out the window, with no choice at all.
‘It is not a nice place, I think,’ Magda observed as she slowly stirred sugar into her black coffee.
‘Man on the run wouldn’t care about that.’
‘Will he recognize you?’
Jake shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. I only ever saw him a couple of times. But I’m sure he’ll listen to what I have to say. It’s in his interests.’
Magda nodded.
They finished their coffees. They wouldn’t learn anything else from sitting there sipping Americanos, Jake decided. Time to go see Fat Freddie.
Surprisingly, although there was free access to the building, the lift still worked. He pressed for the seventh floor, the one above Freddie’s. Magda saw him do it but didn’t say anything. She seemed to know what he was doing, which was no surprise to Jake. He knew now she was no amateur with a natural talent for this kind of thing. She was an experienced professional with a lot of miles on the clock. He was getting used to the idea.
The lift came to a stop. They got out. Jake turned to head for the emergency stairs. The staircase stank. It smelled, and looked, as if it was being used as both a bedroom and a toilet, even at that height above the street. He held his breath as they tiptoed through the bedding, accumulated rubbish and everything else. Magda said nothing but she wore that stony look he was used to seeing when something displeased her.
When they emerged onto the floor below, she broke her silence. ‘English people!’
He shrugged and said, ‘Not necessarily. Lots of foreigners here, these days.’
She humphed and said, ‘No Czech would live like that.’
Jake kept quiet.
‘Do you still want me with you?’
‘Yes, if you don’t mind. Seeing a woman at his door, instead of a man on his own, Freddie will feel less threatened – if he’s there, that is.’
The door of flat 608 opened promptly when he pressed the button for the doorbell. A young woman appeared. She looked surprised.
‘Oh, hello! Have you been standing there long? The bell doesn’t work, I’m afraid.’
Jake shook his head and smiled. ‘No. We’ve just arrived.’
‘To see me? Are you from the agency?’
Again he shook his head. ‘We’re here to see Mr Rogers. Is he in?’
‘There’s no-one here with that name. You’ve got the wrong flat. Oh, wait a minute!’
She turned and disappeared for a moment. When she returned, she had a bundle of envelopes in her hand that she was scanning.
‘Yes. I thought I recognized the name. Rogers was the previous tenant. These are for him. Bills, I think. He’s been gone nearly a year now, but he didn’t leave a forwarding address and he’s never made contact with me.’
She finished with a shrug. ‘I’ve just kept them on the table in the hall.’
‘Return to sender?’ Jake suggested with a smile.
Her face lit up. ‘Oh, are you an Elvis fan?’
He laughed and thanked her for her time. Then they left.
‘In a way,’ he said to Magda, as they waited for the lift, ‘I’m glad we didn’t find Freddie there. If we had, he probably wouldn’t have been alive.’
Magda didn’t seem bothered by that possibility.
‘What did she mean about Elvis?’
‘It was just a joke.’
After a moment’s pause, Magda said, ‘I don’t understand English jokes. They are not funny, I think.’
Afterwards, he thought long and hard about how they might find Fat Freddie. There would be a trail. There always was. It was just a matter of finding the end of it, and then hanging on and following it.
Money could be the key. Money paid and money spent. Money owed, money recorded. Once there was money involved, somewhere there would be a record. How to find it?
‘Ask your friend, Bob?’ Magda suggested.
He shook his head. ‘No. I prefer to keep him out of it for the moment.’
‘You don’t trust him?’ she asked with a smile. ‘You don’t trust your friend?’
‘I don’t trust anyone,’ he said. ‘It’s better to minimize the number of people who know what we’re doing.’
‘Do you trust me?’ she asked softly.
He chuckled and said, ‘Implicitly!’
It was a blatant lie, and she probably knew it. He certainly didn’t trust Magda, not really. Not now. Even without the recent revelations he probably wouldn’t have trusted her fully. He’d known too little about her.
As it was now, he would keep her with him, so far as that turned out to be possible, mainly because she was useful to him. She knew things he didn’t. She knew more about the principal actors in this drama than he did. Some of them, she knew personally, and she knew a lot about how they operated. All that was worth a lot to him.
As for the rest of it, well, although he certainly didn’t want Kunda exacting revenge from her, he didn’t really know if she was with him or not. But that didn’t matter. She had fooled him once; it wouldn’t happen again.
‘We should sit down and talk more about ourselves,’ Magda said sadly. ‘Then perhaps we could trust each other more.’
So she didn’t trust him any more than he trusted her?
With a relaxed smile, he said, ‘That’s a very good idea, Magda. One of these days we should do just that.’
Chapter 34
It was strictly a business meeting. They sat in their hotel room, armed with mugs o
f strong coffee, and considered how best to find Fat Freddie. By then, Jake was not overly anxious about Freddie’s welfare. The man had slipped away from the flat where he had been living long ago, and it was hard to believe he would be unaware of the threat Fogarty posed now he’d escaped.
Besides, he couldn’t pretend to have liked the man. He had hardly known him. Just another professional criminal in the circles in which Bob moved. More on his mind was the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, Fat Freddie knew where the money was. That was a good enough reason to continue searching for him.
‘What have you got there?’ he asked as Magda pulled a sheaf of paper out of her bag.
‘I thought it might help,’ she said, handing over a small pile of envelopes, fliers and sundry bits of paper.
He read the address on the top envelope and then just stared at the pile with astonishment. ‘I didn’t see you take them.’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe they will reveal something.’
‘Good thinking,’ Jake said thoughtfully, riffling through the pile. ‘I did wonder about them. I even thought of going back to the flat for them, when the woman wasn’t there.’
‘She doesn’t know who we are,’ Magda said, anticipating his next point. ‘So what could she do anyway?’
‘Not much,’ he admitted. ‘You’re right. It wouldn’t really have mattered whether she was there or not.’
He wondered for a moment how on earth Magda had managed it without him or the woman noticing. Obviously, she had served a good apprenticeship.
He was grudgingly impressed, too, by how her mind worked. It wasn’t the first time she had displayed an uncanny knack of thinking useful thoughts.
In fact, Magda – or whatever the hell her name was! – was just full of surprises. And she was certainly earning her keep.
‘Well, let’s get started.’ Handing back half the pile of papers, he said, ‘See what you make of these. I’ll take this half. Then we can swap over. Two brains are better than one.’
They went through the two piles in silence, opening envelopes and studying the contents, unwrapping the fliers and notices. Then they sat back and considered. Magda made some more coffee before they started comparing notes.
