by Tom Wood
Al-Waleed bin Saud toured the world on a permanent holiday, moving from city to city with his humble retinue of sixteen individuals. That retinue included two personal assistants, an accountant, a chef, a security detail of nine and three young women who were listed as interns but did nothing except shop and spend time alone with the prince. He stayed in the most expensive hotels, and only ones that could accommodate his particular requirements. Though he lived an extravagant, hedonistic lifestyle he tried to maintain the image of a respectable, devout, and proud Saudi. To maintain the illusion and to ensure no word of his habits reached his homeland, he shied away from hotels that were too large or too rigid in rules and regulations. He elected to stay where he could bribe staff and hire out a whole floor at a time, whether he needed the rooms or not, for the sole use of his retinue. And he preferred to stay at hotels that could provide suitable extras for the discerning guest, such as prostitutes and narcotics.
Though he embraced every Western decadence imaginable, Al-Waleed helped fund the activities of extremists and fundamentalists from Mali to Malaysia. Though pocket-change to the prince, these donations provided a significant percentage of the funding for several groups known to have committed atrocities and determined to commit more.
The prince was far from the only rich Saudi to support terrorism, but he was one of the most prolific. His donations were often paid in cash or jewellery, making them difficult to trace and even more difficult to intercept. Thus the decision had been taken to terminate his financial support once and for all.
The problem, as was the case for the wider issue of Saudi support for terrorism, was Western reliance on the kingdom’s oil. The symbiosis could not be jeopardised. The House of Sa’ad would not tolerate the murder of one of their own any more than they would tolerate one of their princes risking the Western support the royal family needed to stay in power.
So, a compromise had been reached.
The prince was to die, but his death could not lead back to the CIA who orchestrated it nor to the House of Sa’ad who had no choice but to condone it.
Which was the reason Victor had been hired.
THREE
The psychological evaluation included within the dossier theorised that Al-Waleed’s support for terrorism was a way of balancing out his excesses with his religious conscience. Victor cared little for such insight. He dealt in usable and exploitable facts. He cared about verified wheres and whens, not speculative hows and whys. The only judgement he trusted was his own.
The two guys to his right stood up and left, leaving much of their breakfast behind and unfinished, only to stop and stand a metre from their vacated table to continue their discussion. One slipped on sunglasses. The other squinted and held up a hand to shield his eyes from the direct sunlight. They interrupted Victor’s line of sight to the hotel entrance.
He did not require a perfect view to know when the prince would show because no Rolls-Royce had pulled up outside to provide him with transportation. Hotel records supplied by Victor’s employer showed the prince was planning on staying at least another three days. This was typical. His itineraries over the last twelve months showed a mean duration of four nights for visits to European cities outside summer months. Last night, on arriving, Al-Waleed had partied hard into the early hours, drawing complaints from guests on the floor below. Victor did not expect to see him anytime soon. But he had to wait, just in case. Secondary data was no match for that collected himself.
Which was fine by him. The coffee was good, even if the china too delicate, and the sunshine was pleasant enough on his face to counteract the cold elsewhere. He had a newspaper before him, which he browsed but did not read, to help his cover. He was used to drawing little to no attention, and aside from the blonde woman’s casual interest, this morning was no different. Hiding in plain sight was as necessary a skill as any he had acquired. The fewer people who noticed him the freer he was to act and the better his chances of a clean getaway in the aftermath.
He had performed a reconnoitre of the hotel prior to the prince’s arrival. He had stayed for two nights in a suite on the same floor as the prince was now staying, and had used his time there to explore its halls and corridors, adding three-dimensional intelligence to the two-dimensional plans he had studied. He had memorised the faces and names and routines of staff members, the position of CCTV cameras, how long it took room service to deliver, how many times the employee would knock and how long they would leave a tray outside before removing the untouched food.
It was simple enough to act the part of a regular guest because, like Al-Waleed, he spent much of his life living in hotels. But whereas the prince moved from city to city out of boredom and a desire for new and ever more exciting experiences, Victor did so out of simple necessity. A moving target was a hard target.
The hotel had a lobby fitted with comfortable armchairs and sofas, but his prior presence there ruled out the lobby as a place to wait. At best, he would be recorded on CCTV cameras, and at worst a keen-eyed member of staff would note him. His study of the hotel had also eliminated it as a strike point, so although the danger of being noted was minimal, he would not go there. He took no risks he did not have to.
The two grey-haired men finished their conversation, shook hands and departed in opposite directions. A waiter collected the cash they had left to cover the bill and began gathering up plates.
Both blonde women had also departed by the time a silver Rolls-Royce pulled up outside the hotel. It was earlier than the CIA-supplied itinerary stated. No problem in itself, but it reinforced Victor’s protocol of relying only on his own intelligence.
Three of the prince’s security detail stepped out of the hotel entrance a moment later and approached the vehicle. They were all Saudis, dressed in a uniform of smart suits and sunglasses. They looked the part, but knew little about personal protection work beyond what could be squeezed into a two-week course. Still, they were a problem because they operated in groups of three, rotating every eight hours to provide Al-Waleed with continuous twenty-four-hour protection. They were armed too. The prince had diplomatic status and could bring whatever he wanted across borders, including guns.
The prince emerged after the bodyguards had performed a perfunctory check of the locale and climbed into the waiting Rolls. Al-Waleed was dressed in the traditional flowing robes favoured by Saudi men. He was average height and wide in the midriff. One of Al-Waleed’s assistants followed. The bodyguards climbed in after him. The last man replaced the valet driver who had fetched the car.
The Rolls-Royce pulled away from the kerb and left the street.
Victor continued to wait. He stood only when the prince’s accountant left the hotel about five minutes after Al-Waleed had gone. He was a tall, thin man in his fifties, with a shiny bald head and goatee beard trimmed to razor-straight edges. Like the rest of Al-Waleed’s retinue the accountant was a Saudi. He was a friend of the prince’s father, sent along to accompany the wayward son on his adventures and to make sure he did not overspend his allowance nor run up debts the father did not want to pay.
Al-Waleed held positions in several Saudi firms owned by the House of Sa’ad, but worked in title only. His lengthy holidays were described as business trips, yet he saw no clients and attended no meetings. Even if he wanted to play businessman, his father would never allow his unreliable son to damage the family’s corporate interests. The accountant handled everything. The prince had no personal business ventures, finding such matters tedious; he preferred to occupy his time spending his huge allowance on whatever fun money could buy, and the support of terrorism.
Al-Waleed hated the accountant and what he represented and treated him with appalling disdain. Any task Al-Waleed felt was beneath him would be delegated to the accountant, often purely for the sport of humiliating the man. Thus it fell to him to buy drugs and hire call girls and arrange meetings with terrorist middlemen.
Such middlemen were a necessity, for known members of terrorist gr
oups had good reason to be cautious about venturing out of cover in search of funds. Given the difficulty of hunting down the diverse and disparate terrorist groups, with new ones forever springing up from the ashes of those destroyed in an endless cycle, the war against terror had instead begun targeting their sources of income. Without money, bombs could not be made nor bullets purchased. It was prevention over cure. A philosophy Victor tried to live by himself.
One such middleman was due to arrive in Prague later that day. He was a Turkish banker named Ersin Caglayan who handled the bank accounts of several charities that siphoned funds to jihadi groups all over the Middle East. The prince had met with him a number of times in the past and would again while both were in the country.
Victor watched the accountant while he thought about the problem of killing the prince without the CIA being blamed in the process. Setting up his death to look like natural causes – a freak accident or a heart attack – was out because of the complexity both required on such a hard target. Al-Waleed moved around too much and had too many guards in the way for Victor to plan and exact such a death.
A simple solution, however, was to have Caglayan take the blame.
FOUR
The woman advertised her age as twenty-five, but was at least ten years older. The soft glow provided by the low-wattage lighting helped the lie by smoothing out the fine lines in her face, and generous make-up covered the dark bags beneath her eyes. Victor went along with the deception. Neither did he comment on the fact the photographs on her website must have undergone extensive retouching. There was no need to be impolite.
Still, she was an attractive woman with long dark hair and blue eyes full of life and ambition. She opened the front door to her second-floor apartment on Pařížská Street, off Wenceslas Square, wearing a silk robe and an enormous smile. Her teeth were bleached white and too straight and perfect to be her own.
She advertised herself as an escort. It was a soft, almost harmless-sounding word. Victor understood the need for it in the same way he understood why people like him called themselves mercenaries or shooters or hitmen. He only thought of himself as a professional killer. He had no need to soften his means of employment any more than he had his use of prostitutes.
She took his hand and led him inside without a word, gesturing him to go on into the lounge area while she closed the door behind him. Victor didn’t like to give anyone his back, but he was playing the part of a typical client and did as she asked to preserve the illusion of normalcy. A significant part of his life was spent acting; even so, pretending he was just another regular guy while maintaining a permanent guard was a difficult balance to achieve. He never liked to increase his vulnerability if it could be avoided, but sometimes it was better to be a little more vulnerable in the moment to ensure continued survival outside of it. Now was one of those times.
He rubbed his hands together in a sign of nervousness and because they were cold from an afternoon spent following the prince’s accountant around the city.
The woman’s apartment was small but furnished with expensive pieces in a clean, modern style. It was so spartan he wondered if it served only as a place of business and she lived elsewhere, but bookshelves filled to capacity contradicted that assessment. Maybe she just liked the minimalist approach.
‘You know my rate for the hour, yes?’ the woman asked as she followed him into the lounge.
She spoke in English, but with a strong Czech accent. Her high heels clicked and clattered on the bare flooring. In them, she was as tall as he.
He had already turned to face her, positioning himself so he was near to the same wall as the west-facing windows, at an acute angle so as not to be in the line of fire for a marksman across the street.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘Then I’d like to see my gift now,’ she said with a smile that made it seem as innocent a request as the way she phrased it.
‘Of course.’
He withdrew his wallet and counted out crisp banknotes.
She approached and took them from his hand, still smiling, but the smile slipped away as she turned to count the money and put it out of sight on a bookcase between two hardback novels. Historical fiction, he noted.
‘I take it you read all the rules,’ she said without turning around. ‘What’s allowed and what’s not.’
‘I did.’
‘That’s good to know. I don’t like having to repeat myself. It wastes our time.’
‘I’m not here to waste time,’ he said.
She turned around and regarded him in a different way, as if assessing his desires and perversions from the way he stood and the cut of his suit. Maybe it was a game she played with each client, having long grown used to what makes a man tick.
‘What shall I call you?’ she asked as she toyed with her hair.
Victor remained silent.
The woman said, ‘You can tell me your name, honey. I won’t tell anyone, I swear. Discretion is all part of the service, I assure you.’
Victor said, ‘Honey will be fine.’
She tilted her head to one side. ‘Is that what you want me to cry out in bed?’
‘There’s no need for you to pretend.’
She smiled. ‘I don’t think I’ll need to with you, will I?’
He’d heard it all before, of course. It wasn’t his first time paying for sex. It was sometimes necessary in a life where he could allow himself no real connection with anyone, but could not afford to be distracted by desire for too long. It was one impulse he could do little to control with will alone.
He smiled with her because that’s what she expected him to do and he was playing the part of a regular client – a businessman cheating on his wife, maybe, or a politician living out a sordid cliché of a personal life – not a professional killer who used hookers because he couldn’t risk a relationship, or even a friendship. Any personal connection created a gap in his defences and at the same time put that person at risk from those who meant Victor harm. The last time someone had wanted to get close to him he had convinced them the feeling was not mutual.
‘Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?’
He gestured to a small table where a lead crystal decanter sat on a solid silver tray; Scotch, judging by the pale yellow colour of the liquid.
‘No,’ she said in return. ‘I’m afraid that whisky was a present from a dear client. It would be rude to share it with another. I’m sure you can understand that.’
He nodded.
‘What do you like?’ she asked, and he could feel the expectation of her words. She wanted to see if she was right in her previous assessment of him.
‘I prefer to show, rather than tell.’
This seemed to catch her by surprise. ‘That sounds… promising.’ She tapped her bottom lip with a long red nail. ‘And there was I thinking you were going to be boring.’
‘I can assure you I’m a painfully dull person.’
‘I think I’ll be the judge of that,’ she said.
They stood in silence for a moment.
She gestured with her eyebrows, which had been plucked and drawn back on. ‘Bathroom’s that way.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Victor said. ‘Clients need to shower first.’
‘That’s what my listing clearly states.’
‘What if I told you I don’t like showers?’
‘Then I’d politely bid you farewell.’
‘No refund?’
She smiled and said nothing.
‘Do any clients refuse?’ he asked.
‘It happens on rare occasions. Most men accept my rules. Most behave as a gentleman should.’
‘And what happens on these rare occasions?’
‘I show them the door.’
Victor said, ‘Even very dear clients?’
She carried on smiling, but did not answer. ‘Help yourself to a robe.’
He nodded and circled through the lounge so he did not have to pass in a straight line across the w
indow. His route brought him close to the woman. She brushed his arm as he walked by.
The bathroom was off the hallway. He stepped inside and shut the door. He slid the little brass bar across to lock it. Not that such a mechanism had any strength to resist a forced entry, but he did not want the woman entering and interrupting what he had planned.
FIVE
Victor pulled the hanging string by the door to turn on the light. An extractor fan whirred into life as the fans got to speed and emitted a quiet hum. He reached behind the shower curtain to turn on the shower. Then he lowered the toilet lid and stood on it so he could reach the extractor fan high on the same wall as the bathroom’s small window.
He took a cent coin from a trouser pocket and used it to unscrew the plastic protector from the face of the extractor fan. He felt the change in air pressure as the whirling blades sucked air from the bathroom and forced it outside. The blades were made of plastic and weak, but were spinning fast enough to split skin and maybe damage tendons. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a ballpoint pen. Its shell was made from aluminium.
He held it in a tight grip and pushed it between the blades. They came to an abrupt stop.
He heard clicks and creaks and a mechanical whine before the sound stopped and resistance died with it. He removed the pen and the blades sat unmoving while he replaced the fan’s face-plate and screws.
He gave it a couple of minutes for the room to steam up, then began undressing. He did so in a particular way, in a particular order to limit his vulnerability doing so. His balance and flexibility were both excellent, but bending or squatting and standing on one leg all put him at greater risk than sitting down. He first sat on the toilet lid to untie his shoes, perched on the edge, head over hips, ready to spring to his feet if necessary. He untied both shoes before removing them, to spend the least possible time wearing only one shoe. Running or fighting wearing one shoe would be a considerable hindrance, even without the fact Victor had no intention of dying in such an undignified manner. His socks followed because bare feet gripped surfaces far better than soft wool. The jacket and tie were next, which he stood up to remove, followed by his shirt, trousers and then underwear. He placed all the items in an easy-to-carry pile and left them on the toilet seat while he ran the taps to wash himself as requested.
