Final Target

by E. V. Seymour

  She smiled without warmth. ‘How else do you explain his death?’

  ‘He got unlucky. The banker was the prime target, I understand.’

  She cast me a look that was cool and bitter. ‘Did you know that Lars was afraid for his life?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ach, of course, you were away.’

  In spite of her German intonation, I detected sarcasm. ‘He spoke to you about it?’

  She nodded. ‘None of it made sense. He claimed that someone had stolen stuff from his studio in Berlin and that he was being followed.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘In London.’

  ‘Did he say who by?’

  ‘It was more a feeling he had.’ She pushed her plate away. She’d hardly touched the food. ‘One night he phoned and told me that someone had tried to kill him on the Underground. I wondered if he’d been smoking too much weed.’

  So Lars wasn’t lying. I floated my next question as though it was an interesting hypothesis. ‘Do you think Benz is connected to his death?’

  Shock flashed across her face. ‘Why must you persist with this …’ She broke off, searching for the word, ‘… this absurdity? You have an English saying, “thinking outside the box”. Lars was a man who thought creatively. Lars had no interest in politics. He found it a distraction. Art was everything to him. At least, it used to be,’ she said, with a sigh of unhappiness.

  I finished my plate of food, drained my drink. ‘Do you know where I can find Dieter Benz?’

  She flicked the fingers in a gesture of frustration

  ‘Please, Mathilde, I’d like to help you.’

  ‘Help me do what?’

  ‘Find Lars’s killer.’

  She leant across the table. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Call it justice, a British sense of fair play. The police are looking in the wrong direction.’

  ‘I agree.’ She eyed me carefully for a moment then picked up the fork and idly pushed the congealed remains around the plate.

  ‘You can meet Dieter in person,’ she said with an empty smile. ‘He is holding a rally tomorrow morning in Alexanderplatz.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Benz had dreads and looked older in the flesh than his thirty-four years, even from a distance.

  Bone-cold, I’d followed a procession of around four hundred people – young, middle-aged and old – from Alexanderplatz to the Brandenburg Gate. You didn’t have to speak German to understand what they were chanting. Many held ‘Pro-Deutschland’ banners, and anti-Muslim slogans with ‘Stop Islamiserung!’ One guy brandished what looked like a red traffic sign with a symbol of a mosque on it, crossed out in black. He had a big belly, white hair and venom in his eyes. I didn’t like these people. It seemed I was in good company. Most passers-by spurned offers of leaflets by screwing them up and dumping them on the road.

  I clapped my gloved hands together and narrowed my gaze against a fine film of sleet. Up ahead a small platform had been erected and Benz, with a group of shaven-headed heavies in front of him, blasted away through a megaphone. To my British ears, he sounded unhinged, but the assembled seemed to like him – lots of grunts of approval, knowing nods and the odd cheer. This was no French affair, with water cannon and riot police and flying fists. Despite the verbal trash and racist views on offer, everyone was polite and well behaved, maybe because of the chill wind factor and a sky sheeting snow, or because cops in khaki lined the route. Having a deep-seated aversion to the law, I burrowed deeper into the crowd. I wasn’t happy. If anything kicked off, I’d be caught in the crush.

  I was just mapping how I could creep closer to the action when I became acutely aware that the mood music had suddenly changed. Familiar with trouble, I knew how to read the signs. Benz’s diatribe had increased in volume. The cops, with their watchful eyes and neutral expressions, stirred as one. Mounted police and guys in black with white helmets and visors – the riot police – emerged out of nowhere. Police dogs, not in evidence before, barked with the type of intensity that says I am going to rip your head off. The crowd, which had been largely dormant, collectively woke up. It was positively tribal. I craned my neck. Other voices, other faces and bodies flooded in from Strasse des 17 Juni, ironically named after a bloody uprising, as a counter-demonstration of Turks and others took to the street. Fuck.

  Riots have a peculiar kinetic energy all their own. Scuffles will often break out on the fringes of a big crowd and large groups will sheer off and clash head-on with others. But at its core, a big bunch of people throbs with accumulated heat and violence. In that dark second, I felt as if my life was in imminent danger.

  In mindless confusion, we moved as one. The lucky ones got knocked and jostled; those who weren’t were done for. Staying upright was my main preoccupation as the baying crowd surged forward, funnelling in one ugly direction amid screams and shouts and the clatter of horses’ hooves, policeman shouting, helicopters circling.

  Something hit me hard on the back of my head. My teeth rattled. Warm blood trickled down into my collar. A huge man with wide, terrified eyes gripped my elbow for balance, almost knocking me to the ground. Trapped, I needed to escape and escape quickly, but I could hardly breathe for people, moving human flesh and the collective body odour of fear. Any attempt to push my way through, to catch the slipstream, seemed doomed. Instead, I bowled along, letting the flow take me, like an uprooted tree caught in a river torrent.

  People went down. Other people trampled them, their handbags and footwear scattered like unspent grenades. I grabbed a young guy who’d lost his footing, set him straight and kept him moving, one fluid motion. The noise was deafening. Terror stalked the streets, ugly and loud.

  I estimated that at any moment now CS gas would make an entrance. Bang on cue, my eyes burned with stinging heat. I was breathing in tight bursts, wheezing and coughing as an acrid cloud of tear gas burst above our heads. By some miracle, I kept in motion, with no idea where I was heading. It was like being trapped in a smoke-filled room with all your bearings gone.

  Snow fell in big heavy flakes. It was treacherous under foot. The looks on people’s faces reminded me of one of those weird paintings of chaos by Bosch or Blake. I couldn’t work out how this would end, only that there would be a heavy price to pay in blood and injury. I didn’t know whether German police had adopted the very British habit of ‘kettling’. I didn’t know if there was method in the madness. All I knew was that I was not in control, and for a man accustomed to calling the shots – no pun intended – this was bad news.

  Looking up, I caught sight of the pentagonal-shaped exterior of the Philharmonic and Chamber Music Hall. We were moving west, towards Potsdamer Platz. Then, without warning, the depth of people abruptly thinned, and I and another guy made a break for it, popping to the surface after being caught in the deep. It felt good. I felt loose and free. As I looked about me, a thin malicious whistle of cold air passed by my left ear, followed by a dull thud.

  I glanced down. Red so bright that it hurt my eyes stained the fallen snow. The guy next to me was on the ground, sprawled in a way I instantly recognised. Eyes open. Body twisted. Blood spreading out and pooled around his head from where a bullet had passed through the base of his skull.

  A bullet meant for me.

  Fear briefly stammered in my chest. Fear is good. It proves you’re not stupid. Screams and shouts sliced through the cold. The cute move would mean another gunman up ahead, the same way a bomber sets off a secondary device to catch those fleeing the first blast. I didn’t waste time searching for the shooter. I didn’t wait for the cops. I didn’t even pause to breathe.

  I ran.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I didn’t return to the hotel. It took me two hours to fight my way through a lockdown of the city centre and bribe a taxi driver to drive with all speed to the airport. He could run as many red lights as he wished.

  Lady Luck on my side, I caught the next flight to Bristol. I’d have gladly flown to anywhere in the Br
itish Isles. As certain of the intentions of my fellow passengers as I could be, I settled back in my seat, a large gin and tonic to hand, my brain hissing with numerous possibilities.

  These were: McCallen had tipped off Mossad; McCallen, through her connections, had unwittingly turned the spotlight on me; McCallen, for reasons best known to her, had me targeted deliberately; Mathilde had been got at, either by Benz or persons unknown, or someone from my past had taken an opportunistic pot shot.

  I took a deep drink, savoured the bite of gin at the back of my throat and swallowed. Mossad didn’t stack up for one blindingly good reason. They don’t miss. Added to this, the technique was crass. They’d never take such a risk in a public place, with the possibility of innocent casualties. If they wanted me removed, it would be my body lying in the dirt, thanks to a poisoned hypodermic, or another less high-vis method.

  This did not let McCallen off the hook. She’d got me into this imbroglio in the same way she’d entangled Lars Pallenberg. Whether or not she’d deliberately set me up I didn’t know. Trust was in short supply where I came from. My pathological distrust of others had saved my life on more than one occasion. I wanted to believe McCallen for all the obvious reasons, but I couldn’t swear on my heart that she was worthy of it, and I was still angry with her for deceiving me about her relationship with Pallenberg. A guy doesn’t propose to a woman with whom he hasn’t had a close and intimate relationship, especially when he’s ditching the girl he was supposed to marry. Neither does he set her up to be killed, I had to concede.

  Unless it was part of a double-cross.

  I took another huge gulp of gin. Someone could have seen me with Mathilde, perhaps at the restaurant, and made the connection. The thought of her being threatened clawed at my gut. I supposed it was possible she could have stage-managed my removal, but she’d had little time to make the necessary arrangements and her exact motivation eluded me.

  I stared out of the window at the grey light, its impenetrability mirroring the opaque nature of McCallen’s agenda. Unable to break through, I set it aside and, out of professional interest, concentrated on the method of the most recent attempted hit on me.

  On the surface, it appeared opportunistic – reckless even – but it could have also been a carefully planned operation, the chaos of the demonstration a cover for cold-blooded murder. Clearly, the killer had estimated his chances and thought he could pull it off. Killing in a crowd wasn’t a method I favoured, the one exception a nightclub hit, but the weapon for me was always a ring-gun. It meant you had to get up close and personal, preferably with your ring finger placed hard against the base of the skull of the intended target. It meant there was no room for error. It meant you did not jeopardise the lives of others. A shot from a gun would never figure as an option, the possibility of hitting the wrong individual – as had happened in Berlin – too great.

  Or, at least, that’s what I believed had happened.

  In a more relaxed frame of mind, I had to admit that the guy standing next to me could have been the intended victim. Maybe he had a dirty past, links to a criminal network, had failed to pay a debt, crossed someone up … the list was endless.

  Who was I kidding?

  All roads led back to McCallen. She featured in three of my five possibilities, however outlandish those possibilities were. Whether she was guilty or not, she knew an awful lot more than she had been willing to tell me. As soon as I got back to safety, I intended to find out precisely what that was.

  * * *

  Customs waved me through without a hitch and I picked up the car and travelled back to the place I now called home. It was dark and I was tired, the perfect set of circumstances to get you slotted. To be on the safe side, I checked before entry and on entry. I double-checked the downstairs basement room that doubled as an office and spare room for stores and laundry, the mid-floor sitting room cum dining room and the kitchen and the upper storey bedrooms, two mid-size, one large enough to imprison an unwelcome guest. Next, I showered, fixed myself something to eat and caught News 24. It emerged that the German national killed in Berlin was a train driver. The Germans were keeping schtum, but the investigation, for obvious reasons, was heading in a political, right wing, nationalist direction. Which suited me. It also suited the killer.

  Within minutes, my mobile phone rang. It was McCallen.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Never better.’

  ‘The guy shot in Berlin –’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘Shootings in broad daylight on a Berlin street are rare.’

  ‘You think I’m responsible?’

  ‘No,’ she said, steely. ‘I simply thought you might be following up the Benz connection.’

  McCallen never ‘simply’ thought anything. ‘Did you now?’

  ‘Why are you so pissed off?’

  ‘I was an inch from having a hole blasted through my brain, and it’s your fault that I came here in the first place.’ I wasn’t going to tell her that I was sitting at home on my comfortable leather sofa, feet up, with a beer. If she were as good at her job as I knew her to be, she’d already have checked the airport manifests.

  ‘You can’t think I set you up.’

  ‘I can think what I like.’

  ‘Hex, for God’s sake. Look, where are you exactly?’

  ‘You think I’m stupid as well as reckless?’

  She let her voice drop to a sexy growl. ‘I have never thought you stupid.’

  Wise woman. I remained impervious to her flattery.

  ‘Can we meet?’ she said.

  ‘I think we should.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning in Cheltenham.’

  She was silent a moment, obviously working out how I could so confidently announce that I’d be happy to see her so soon in the UK.

  ‘The Queen’s, for coffee?’ she said.

  One of the oldest and swankiest establishments in town, it overlooked Imperial Gardens and the Promenade and had recently undergone a makeover. Seemed an odd choice to me. She must have picked up on my reluctance. She attempted to persuade me.

  ‘All spies meet in hotels.’

  I visualised her arching a teasing eyebrow. ‘I’m not a spy.’ I didn’t care for the hotel idea. In the serene splendour of the Queen’s, it would be impossible to raise my voice, threaten, get down and dirty or extract the kind of answers I was looking for. I’d probably break fine china. ‘St Mary and Matthew’s church, town centre, ten o’clock.’ Before she could respond, I cut the call and switched off my phone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Winter fog like liquid nitrogen engulfed the streets. I offered a silent prayer to St Barbara, patron saint for ‘the protection against harm’ and glided across town, safe in the knowledge that if I couldn’t see more than a metre ahead, neither could I be seen.

  St Mary and Matthew’s can be approached from three separate directions. In the middle of a more downmarket side of town and a thoroughfare for occasional shoppers and those en route to work, its location always struck me as unusual. I liked it because of its stillness. I’d chosen it because it was a good place to have the type of conversation I had in mind.

  I arrived early. I did not do the obvious and wait in the porch. I did not skulk among the graves. I walked around to a set of steps that led down to the padlocked door of what I believed was a crypt. It was sheltered, out of the way and private. I waited, my back against wood, hands deep in my pockets. Mist embraced my cheeks. McCallen arrived a few minutes later and peered over the railings.

  ‘What are you doing down there?’

  ‘Care to join me?’

  She let out a big indulgent sigh and stomped down the stone steps and into the confined space. I moved aside so that she could stand underneath an arched entrance that provided her with about a half-brick’s worth of shelter. This being nothing more than a ruse to get her where I wa
nted her, I pounced, my gloved hands flat against the door on either side of her shoulders, my body pinning hers – no escape. She let out gasp of alarm when she saw the cold expression in my eyes.

  ‘Back off,’ she hissed.

  ‘Not until you tell me what the fuck is going on.’

  When McCallen is on the spot she makes a sound: tsk.

  ‘Did you tip off Mossad?’ Mossad was not involved, but I wanted to see how McCallen would react.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘How do you explain what happened in Berlin?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Someone tried to kill me and missed.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘Unless you can tell me that the guy who took a bullet had a criminal past, or was one of yours, I can.’

  She didn’t say a word, just stared at me.

  ‘He was clean, wasn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘It’s early days, but there’s nothing to suggest he had dodgy connections.’

  ‘So, again, why would someone take such a risk?’ From left field, it occurred to me, and not for the first time, that the hit man was a beginner, making mistakes while learning his craft. Good. Errors cost lives, starting with his.

  She raised her eyes heavenwards as if I were being particularly dim. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  ‘Not to me.’

  She stamped one foot. ‘There are any number of people who’d like to see you dead.’

  True. ‘Are you one of them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So who did you tip off?’

  She threw me an empty smile. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘To further your career.’

  Her eyes turned a deadly venomous green. ‘You think that of me?’

  ‘I do.’

  She emitted a breath of cold air. Colour spotted her cheeks. She was angry, all right.

  ‘I came to you with one purpose in mind, to find out who threatened and killed Lars.’