Final Target

by E. V. Seymour

  She got up suddenly. ‘I am going to take a bath.’

  ‘You can’t. You should report it.’ I didn’t actually mean this. It would draw all sorts of unwelcome attention, but I knew it was something that had to be said.

  ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘The police are not interested in a woman who runs sex parties for a living and it’s hardly a threat to national security,’ she added, the pained look in her expression spearing my conscience. ‘I would make juicy headlines in the newspapers, nothing more.’

  She was right. A defence team would rip her to pieces. In any case, my form of justice entailed more than a long prison sentence.

  She disappeared into the bathroom, locking the door in defiance, the sound of rushing water loud and clear.

  I took a long deep swallow of booze. I don’t like surprises and surprises were coming thick and fast. China a rapist, China a mental torturer, China who consorted with neo-Nazis and crossed up intelligence services, China who’d used the name Billy Squeeze to incite terror and fear, and for what? To punish me for an unknown transgression?

  No, none of this tallied with the man I knew.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  I slept what was left of the night on the sofa, Simone taking the bed and falling into a deep state of unconsciousness. The next morning I woke, used the bathroom, and called Dan at the student let. The fact he answered so swiftly, with a grunt, indicated that he had just got in, not that he was up early.

  ‘I want the place tidied up, the spare bedroom sorted, the bathroom and kitchen cleaned.’

  ‘Aw, today’s not good, Joe.’

  ‘Not my problem.’

  ‘We’ve all got essays to write.’

  A popular excuse for inactivity, I was not persuaded and said so.

  ‘As our landlord, you’re supposed to give us notice of a visit.’

  Smart-mouth. ‘This is not a visit. This is you preparing for a guest.’

  ‘What guest?’

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘There’s no room.’

  ‘Yes, there is, and she’s picky.’

  ‘She?’ I could practically hear Dan put his brakes on and screech to a halt.

  ‘Don’t get any ideas. I need it ready in two hours.’

  ‘What?’ You’d think I’d asked him to run for the US presidency.

  ‘She’s not been well and needs a place to stay undisturbed. You’ll hardly know she’s there.’

  The mutinous tone returned. ‘I’d like to help – honest, Joe – but no can do.’

  ‘This is not a request. This is an order. Under the terms of the tenancy agreement, you’re due for a rent increase. I might play nice. I might be a total bastard. Maybe you’d like to think about that while you get the place cleaned up.’ I cut the call. Dan was the easy part. Persuading Simone posed the real problem.

  I let her sleep on, made myself coffee from the tray and, as she was stirring, ordered room service for both of us. I sat on the bed at a respectable distance and watched as she became properly awake. She peered at me for a moment like she didn’t recognise me.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  ‘Hey,’ she said on autopilot, cool and distant.

  ‘I’ve found you somewhere to stay, somewhere safe.’

  She stirred, rearranged the bedding, punching the pillows hard. I think she imagined they were me.

  She sat up straight, her expression impenetrable. I told myself her irrational behaviour was symptomatic of what had happened to her. Wild at heart, she would have put up a fight, a fight she’d ultimately lost.

  ‘Where?’ she said. ‘A safe house?’

  ‘Sort of.’ I badly regretted my snap intelligence officer cover. I hoped the attack on Simone had dulled her sharp thinking. ‘I have a student let. There are three young guys there.’

  Her face fell. Couldn’t say I blamed her.

  ‘Nobody will think of looking for you there. It’s only for a short time.’

  ‘How short?’

  ‘A couple of days, tops.’

  She thought about it. I could see she was looking for reasons to decline. ‘And this house,’ she said, ‘is there somewhere I can park my car?’

  It was an odd question. Understandably, she was in a strange mood. ‘One space and it’s yours.’

  I’d clearly supplied the right answer because she softened.

  ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘Near the university, St Pauls.’

  She glanced away, let out a sigh. I could see she was wavering. This was not the time to weigh up personal comfort against security but if I said another word I’d blow it.

  ‘All right.’ She stretched out, feline, and covered my hand with hers. I looked into her eyes, read the smile inside. Truce, I thought.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  She smiled properly. In spite of the bruising to her face, she looked ravishing to me. I leant towards her and this time she didn’t recoil as I kissed her cheek. As she drew away a little, a serious note entered her voice.

  ‘What are you going to do, Joe?’

  ‘Sort things out once and for all.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I know the man who attacked you.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘China Hayes, the guy I told you about.’

  Her laugh was thin. ‘Absurd, ridiculous, incroyable. I am no threat –’

  ‘I already told you. It isn’t about you.’

  Her brow creased. ‘I do not understand. You told me about him. You told me …’ Her voice became small then disappeared over the horizon.

  ‘He attacked you to get to me. It’s my fault, Simone. I should have protected you.’

  She looked down. I was millimetres away. It might as well have been a mile. She looked up at me with sad eyes. When she spoke her voice was soft. ‘You cannot be in all places at all times.’

  ‘No, and I’m sorry.’

  * * *

  Simone didn’t rush. We ate breakfast together. She bathed, dressed, packed her minimalist gear into her minimalist luggage, settled her bill, including a hefty payment for the damage to the room, and we drove in convoy to the other side of town. I let Simone park her car, told her to stay where she was while I left mine close to a skip three streets away.

  Sprinting back to join her, we went inside the house together. No bicycle in the hallway, no skateboard, the familiar odour of late teenage unwashed males replaced by an altogether cleaner smell of fresh air and cleaning fluid. I was impressed. It was nowhere near hotel standard, but it was a hell of an improvement on the usual ‘sweep the floor with a glance’ school of housekeeping.

  Dan popped out first, duster in hand, the others sidling next to him like Fagin’s pickpockets. Simone was obviously the draw in spite of her wounded looks. I ran through the introductions and said that I’d show Simone to her room.

  ‘Would you like coffee, Simone?’ Dan said. I did a double take. Nobody had ever offered me so much as a glass of water.

  ‘Thank you, that would be lovely,’ Simone said graciously.

  Maybe this was going to go a whole lot better than I thought possible. Almost immediately, the memory of McCallen’s tortured scream ripped through my mind, blackening my thoughts, dragging me kicking and screaming back to reality.

  Simone followed me upstairs and across the narrow landing to a back bedroom. ‘A single bed,’ she said, arching an eyebrow. ‘I haven’t slept in one of those for years.’

  I put her bags down and showed her the bathroom next door. The boys had done a good job, and there were clean towels and the sanitary ware was clean. The floor left a little to be desired, but I’d seen worse.

  We went back to her room. She swung the strap of her bag off her shoulder and placed it carefully on the bed and sat down. Something dinged in my mental database.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Don’t be arch with me.’

  A tap at the door signalled the en
d of our spat and the arrival of coffee, which came on a tray with a plate of ginger biscuits.

  ‘There’s sugar in the bowl,’ Dan said – obsequiously, I thought.

  ‘Don’t I get a drink?’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t ask,’ he replied, shooting out of the room.

  Amused, Simone lifted the cup to her lips and looked over the rim through dark eyelashes.

  ‘I’m coming back as a girl,’ I said, raising a smile. She opened her mouth to respond when my phone beat her to it. It was Jat.

  ‘I’ll call you back later, yeah?’

  ‘I thought it was urgent. I’ve bust my balls on this.’

  ‘It will keep.’ I switched off my phone.

  ‘Problem?’

  ‘No.’ I smiled. She smiled back.

  ‘Want a biscuit?’

  ‘I’m good.’ Glad that the cloud between us had passed, I said, ‘Seriously, will you be all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I held her gaze. ‘Are you all right?’

  She swallowed, looked away. It seemed to take an eternity for her to wrench out an answer. ‘I will be,’ she said eventually.

  It was the most I could hope for. I glanced at my watch. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘You have plans to make?’ A rhetorical question, but I answered anyway. I wanted her to know.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘When will I see you?’

  I had no idea. If China contacted me when he said and everything went to plan, it could be as early as the following day. If things went badly, I’d never be coming back. I forced a smile, brushed her lips with mine and said, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  I had six hours to prepare mentally and get into the zone. I was taking no chances. Recent events had forced me to make a mental leap. I likened it to driving a fast car. Responsive, swift movers got you out of trouble better than slower models. A weapon would make me feel confident. I didn’t have to use it, but if I was in a hole it would probably save my life and McCallen’s. I still had my contacts, some abroad, some in London, but they were absolutely no use to me now. I’d used a guy once for a job in the south-west. He hung out in Bristol. As soon as I reached home, I planned to call him and make the necessary arrangements for drop-off and collection. This was not the type of conversation to have in a street.

  I was almost at the car when I remembered Jat’s call. As I was about to phone him back, a Volvo pulled up with two guys inside. The back of my brain processed ‘problem’. I quickened my stride when, without warning, another two men rushed out from behind the skip, aerosols in their hands. Instinctively, I took a step back, but the spray connected with my face. My vision blurred, my eyes poured tears, the skin around them on fire. Confused, disorientated, wheezing, I raised my hands. Someone slapped them away and threw a hood over my head. Three car doors opened and I was bundled, blind, inside. It was a classic out, grab, shove inside movement. If I’d been watching, I’d have said they’d got it down to a fine art. Nine seconds is enough to take a guy off the street in broad daylight. China’s men, if that’s who they were, were good, and I was now out of the loop; my skills and thinking were so rusty I’d drawn all the wrong calculations, made all the wrong calls. It spelt the end of the road for me, disaster for McCallen.

  Sandwiched between two bodies, I couldn’t breathe and sneezed ferociously. At any moment I expected either to pass out or die. Someone handcuffed my wrists.

  ‘Don’t touch the hood,’ one of them said. ‘It will only spread it around and cause further irritation.’

  English accent, I registered. Made no difference. Whoever had done this to me were bastards. The longer we drove, the tighter my chest became. Breath rattled painfully through the narrowed airways, the hood sodden as my eyes went into overdrive.

  ‘Jesus, how long?’ I moaned.

  Nobody answered. I must have blacked out because the next thing I remembered I was being bundled out and frogmarched across a short stretch of turf and into a building. The hood came off and I peered out through half-closed and swollen eyes. I was standing in a kitchen. Blinds drawn, light artificial. Someone gripped hold of my elbow and propelled me through a corridor and manhandled me up a flight of carpeted stairs and into a bathroom. I struggled but I was so out of it I made little impact. All at once, my body was pushed back over the bath and my face plunged into ice-cold water. I struggled and bucked, desperate for oxygen. Dragged up by my hair, cool water from a showerhead sprayed directly into my eyes. I gulped and swore. Paradoxically, the relief to my vision was instant and I stopped fighting.

  After a few minutes of the water treatment, a voice said: ‘Okay, he’s good to go.’

  I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes were like slits. At least I could see.

  Hauled back downstairs, I was pushed into a spartanly kitted out sitting room. Chairs, no sofa, no television, and books, mainly thrillers, on the shelves. Two mugs of hot drink, tea, at a guess, sat on a low table. It wasn’t what I expected. As in the kitchen, the blinds were drawn. The man who’d pushed me into the room I now recognised as the same man I’d hit in the gut when Titus had bagged me. It was not an encouraging start, but it was a whole lot better than a one on one with China’s crew. The fact was I’d half-expected a visit from MI5 and, in the absence of a formal call, I’d become complacent and assumed I was off the hook. My fault.

  My thought processes up to speed, I had a good idea what the security services were now thinking. With Titus dead, they had me pinned down as his murderer. The reality of my situation sucked every bit of air out of me. It wasn’t so much as out of the pan and into the fire as into another pan. Rescuing McCallen suddenly appeared a remote possibility.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  I sat, compliant.

  Footsteps rattled down the hall. The door swished open and another man entered. Shorter than me, he wore tailored trousers, a casual, open-neck shirt and soft-soled shoes typical of men with indoor occupations.

  A silent exchange took place and the guy who’d brought me down removed my cuffs and left. His colleague drew up a chair and sat. Older than the others, he had dark wavy hair streaked with grey, wide features, the set of his mouth slightly curved up as though he’d been told a good joke and it still amused him. His brown eyes studied me as I studied him. They didn’t seem particularly penetrating. There was something almost lazy in his expression, as if he couldn’t give a damn whether I talked to him or not. He had a tremendous aura of stillness and calm. I do not take to people easily, yet I took to him. I also realised that his benign appearance was a front cultivated over many years with a view to interrogating people like me.

  He leant forward, pushed a mug of tea towards me and, picking up his own, held it to his full lips and took a sip.

  ‘Quite flavoursome,’ he said in the way someone might comment on a bottle of wine. ‘I’d drink yours while it’s still hot.’

  I wondered how many times beverages had been thrown in his face. Strange to say, I didn’t think that often. I took a drink, placed the mug back on the table. I wondered what he was called. He looked like a Casper or a Dominic. Actually, I thought Casper suited him better.

  ‘I apologise for dragging you here so unceremoniously. CS gas,’ he said with a sympathetic sigh, ‘nasty stuff.’

  I gave a silent nod of agreement.

  ‘Do you know why you are here?’

  My normal response would be to lie but, as one of Titus’s men had help spirit me away on the last occasion, I could hardly plead absolute ignorance. ‘No, not really.’

  Casper, as I thought of him, nodded as though he understood my position.

  ‘You see, we have a problem, Hex. May I call you Hex?’

  ‘Sure.’ My mind raced back to the last job a lifetime ago. Someone in MI5 had sanctioned the order for McCallen to bring me in back then. I wondered if it had been him.

  His smile was wide, yet there was a sudden hardness in his eyes.

&nb
sp; ‘Or would you prefer me to call you Stephen, Mr Porter?’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  My skin must have turned the colour of greaseproof paper. Either McCallen had briefed ‘Casper’ on my trip to Berlin, or more likely Mathilde Brommer, Lars Pallenberg’s ex-girl, had shopped me to the British security services. While my mind reeled, he fired his next salvo.

  ‘You had dealings with one of our colleagues last year, Inger McCallen.’

  So he had been involved. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You did good work and we were grateful.’

  That was something. I sensed a ‘but’ coming.

  ‘You have been in touch with McCallen more recently.’

  ‘She contacted me.’

  ‘About?’

  Either he didn’t know, or was testing the water. ‘A guy on your watch list.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘You’d have to ask her.’

  ‘I would if I could, but we both know that isn’t possible so I am reliant on you.’

  ‘I can’t help. Sorry.’

  ‘Really? How long do you wish to stay here?’

  Give him something useless, something he already knows, I thought. ‘She mentioned someone,’ I said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘A German woman, Mathilde Brommer.’

  He didn’t skip a beat. Physically, he didn’t give anything away. ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Dieter Benz.’

  ‘You know who he is?’

  ‘A radical with strong links to neo-Nazi groups in the UK.’

  ‘Which is why you flew to Berlin?’

  ‘Correct.’

  I watched his expression and saw the pieces dropping into place for him. I hoped I came out on the bright side of the picture.

  ‘What were you asked to do?’

  I shrugged. ‘Watch him.’

  ‘You didn’t think it an odd request?’

  I flashed an easy smile. ‘I’m accustomed to those.’

  This raised a brief laugh. ‘Yes, I see that.’ He waited several beats, continued the heavy eye contact. He had the sort of stare from which escape was impossible. ‘Your relationship with McCallen, how would you describe it?’