by A P Bateman
“Hey!” the man shouted after him, but it fell upon deaf ears.
Caroline pulled a face of apology then followed. They marched through the foyer, past the main dining room and the brasserie restaurant, and past the reception desk. The duty manager looked up then turned back to his computer screen. Just another domestic, the woman chasing after the man after a few cross words. He’d seen it all.
King stopped at the front entrance, bumping into Neil Ramsay, who was brandishing an expensive looking camera in one hand and dusting snow off his suit with the other. Red and black, issued by the sympathetic manager.
Ramsay ignored them both, turned to the man next to him and said, “The wind’s getting up, I couldn’t work out if it was snowing or just the ice dusting off the trees in the wind.”
The man next to him was finishing a cigarette. He had a hooked nose and was particularly thin. “Yes,” he said, his accent thick and distinctive. King had heard the accent many times. Russian, or at least Slavic. “Plenty of snow is on the way, by all accounts.” He casually flicked his cigarette butt out into the wind and unzipped his identical red and black suit. “Well, goodnight.”
King ignored them both and pushed past. He rounded the front left façade and past rows of people cradling steaming mugs of cocoa or mulled wine as they watched the Northern
Lights, which were now starting to fade having put on another spectacular show for the evening.
Caroline stopped and called out. King turned around, but he shared her expression. There were too many people. Too many tracks to hide the ones they were after and too many people for the watcher to hide amongst. Resigned to failure, King walked back with her to the entrance.
Peter Stewart was climbing the last of the steps as they reached the entrance. He was holding a mug of mulled wine and the heady scented aroma of cinnamon, nutmeg and red wine hit them. He eyed King warily but chose to remain silent as he studied Caroline. He looked at King approvingly, then ambled into the foyer, loosening the top proportion of his hotel-issue red and black snow suit as he headed to the bar. He drained his glass, obviously getting a top-up.
“Bugger,” said King. “Safety in numbers.” He stripped off, overheating from the thick suit, and yet his hands and cheeks were painfully tingling. He looked at Caroline and assumed his face was as red as hers. He wore his suit at his waist, the arms tied together. “Come on, let’s put these back, and get our shoes. And then we can get a drink. I don’t know whether I need to cool down or warm up.”
“You can apologise to that couple first,” she said indifferently.
“Right.”
“I mean it,” she said. “Crikey, Alex, what were you going to do if we’d caught up with whoever was spying on us? It could have just been innocent.”
“Innocent people don’t run.”
“Well, they do if someone built like you looks at them like you did, then shouted and charged out of the room,” she retorted, only half serious, downplaying the incident considering there was no positive conclusion. “Let’s forget it and move forward.”
King shrugged. “Nothing else we can do.” He kicked off his boots and tore the snow suit off and hung it back on the peg. His trousers were damp from the exertion, but his cheeks and hands were numb. “Somebody tried to kill me,” he said calmly.
“What?”
“Twice,” he said. “And they killed somebody else, before they got the chance to talk. Or before I got the chance to interrogate them.”
“What?” she looked at him incredulously. “Who? How? When?” She shook her head, realising just how stupid she had sounded. “What are you talking about?”
“A GRU agent held a gun on me,” he said. “It escalated, and I killed her.”
“Her?”
King nodded, an image of the woman going for her reload. He was still angry she had pushed him to it. “Yes. But somebody else tried to kill me, too.”
“Did you kill them?” she asked, tearing at her own suit. “That’s how it usually ends when somebody comes after you.”
“Not this time.”
“But they’re dead?”
“Yes.”
“Then who killed them?”
King shook his head. “That man with the mulled wine,” he said. “I know him. And I need to tell you about him. So, let’s get that drink, because it won’t be quick.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
From their own private alcove, affording the generous and comforting heat of the log-burning stove, King settled into the comfortable wing-backed chair and clearly observed the reception desk through the open concertinaed doorway. He had been about to ask the manager to look at any CCTV the hotel may have had of the grounds but had been put off by the in-depth conversation he had been having with both the Russian waiter and barman. There had been the air of conspiracy about it, although Caroline had been quick to remind him that he had effectively passed on their lack of hospitality skills with the waitress. What looked like conspiracy could well have been a stern word about standards and expectations.
King hadn’t noticed any cameras on his ride up in the snowmobile. He had surveyed the hotel for a while, much to Stewart’s consternation, but he wasn’t going to change the way he operated for him. The man should have known the importance of a recce, even if it was just a casual observation. The two men had checked in separately, thanks to King parking the snowmobile down the side of the hotel, out of the way of the main entrance. The winding road up the mountain, or what King decided was merely a huge mound – an almighty engineering feat, but no less a mound all the same – had been easy enough and King saw by the tracks that a caterpillar style machine had taken regular trips, compacting the snow as hard as concrete. It would have made sense to bring up the hotel’s supplies from the carpark this way. The snowmobile coped with the corners and gradient effortlessly, but he could see why the funicular had been constructed. Cars would not cope at all, and the prepared carpark below had been full of all sorts of vehicles. He had counted a dozen. He assumed some would belong to staff, but otherwise it had meant the hotel would be barely half-full. He thought of the impending storm and considered it was just as well.
“So, you and he go back to MI6?”
King took his eyes off the reception desk and looked back at Caroline. “All the way. Another life,” he paused. “It’s not pretty, but I want you to know.”
“You’re scaring me, Alex,” she said quietly. “Who is he?”
“He recruited me,” he said. He stared into the fire now, the flames hypnotic. The drinks came, but he barely noticed. He was in another world.
Caroline edged his beer across the glass table closer to him. “Go on,” she prompted.
“I haven’t told you this, but I went to prison.”
“I know,” she said. “I guessed.”
“You guessed?” King asked. “What does that say about me?”
She shrugged. “I can read you, Alex. Just snippets you say, or how you react to conversations, or dramas and films on the television. Little tells.”
He shrugged. “I was in and out for all sorts. Fights and thefts mainly. I had nothing, and it’s not an excuse, but I had to feed my brothers and sister from before I was ten. If I didn’t, well she certainly wouldn’t have.” He had told Caroline about his mother before, but only skirted the issues. She had been a crack whore and the family had disintegrated into care after she had arranged a punter to be with her own twelve-year-old daughter. King had been unruly and far enough into his teens to be considered an adult and he had never seen his siblings again. He had found them though, many years later and had seen them right financially. Although, it had been an anonymous endeavour. “I started with the biblical loaf of bread to feed my family.” He smiled. “And then the odd television or stereo…”
Caroline had been privately educated, went to a good university and entered the army as an officer. She attended Sandhurst and had childhood memories of her pony and skiing trips in the Christmas holidays. She b
ristled and felt entirely guilty when she heard snippets from King’s childhood. “It must have been tough,” she said, aware of the emptiness in her words.
King looked away from the fire and took a sip of his beer. He nursed the glass, but the flames were a welcome distraction from making eye contact with her. He loved to look into her eyes, but not for this. “I killed two soldiers in a bar fight,” he said. “I was an arrogant shit, and I boxed semi-professionally. They were back from a tour in the sandbox, pretty drunk and hitting it big with the women. They had their pay and were throwing it around. I was a tosser. There were words, insults and punches thrown. I was faster. But it didn’t stop there. When they were down, I went back for more…”
Caroline saw that his eyes were glistening. Usually so cold and hard, they looked vulnerable for the first time. She sipped her gin and tonic, unsure what she should do. The distraction was welcome.
“I went to prison,” he said. “For manslaughter. I had served a year, then one day I got a visitor.”
“That man?”
He nodded. “Peter Stewart. Former Parachute Regiment, then SAS before he turned MI6 special operations officer. He trained his men, even worked with them on assignments. He told me what he could do for me, what my life could be like and I went with it. I’d made some enemies when I lived in London, and again in Portsmouth. I did some unofficial boxing matches, won when I should have lost, threw a fight when I should have won. I made a lot of money on the side bets, but the wrong people lost a fortune. I was a marked man. And there’s no place worse than prison for a marked man. They always get someone to you and you can’t get away. My time was running out, so I leapt at the chance. I was busted out of Dartmoor Prison, the body of a homeless man who died on the streets of hyperthermia was dressed in my clothes and dropped in a bog on Dartmoor and the autopsy of that poor fellow was passed off as one Mark Thomas Jeffries…”
Caroline reached out and touched his hand. “But you’re a different man now, Alex. And you’ll always be Alex to me.”
“Am I different though?” King didn’t take his eyes away from the fire. “I’ve killed people, done terrible things.”
“For your country, though. A soldier in secret wars. Wars which could cost our country everything,” she paused. “Look at your first mission for MI5, with Charles Forrester. There wouldn’t be a country now, had Zukovsky got his way.”
King sighed. “I can’t leave Mark Jeffries behind. He’s always there.”
“No,” she said. “Alex King is always here.” She squeezed his hand. He was on his
way to maudlin, and she wasn’t having him do that. “Tell me about that man, Stewart.”
King nodded. “He was my recruiter, my mentor. I spent so long thinking I owed him my life, that he betrayed me, and I just couldn’t see it.”
“Betrayed you, how?”
“It was before I worked for Five. Some people furthering their private business interests using government funds and assets thought I knew too much. They persuaded Stewart to come down on one side of the fence or the other. He was nearing retirement, needed the security, and sold me down the river.” He shrugged. “We’re all collateral in the end, I should have been ready for it.”
“But you trusted him. In your mindset, he rescued you and changed you. He undoubtedly had a part in creating the man in front of me today, the man I fell in love with. A man with a sense of justice and duty, of doing the right thing, no matter what path must be taken to get there. So, his betrayal was everything to you. You wouldn’t have seen it coming, and it wouldn’t have been easy to get over,” she paused thoughtfully. “So why the hell is he here now?”
King took a drink, draining a third of the glass. He placed it back on the glass table and shifted in his chair. The alcohol and the fire were making him tired. He decided he’d had enough to drink for tonight. He looked back at Caroline and said, “Last year was madness, it created a large footprint.”
“Footprint?”
“In South Africa. You confided in that man Ryan Beard, the MI6 contact who helped you out after you had your run in…”
“I was abducted and driven to somewhere they could kill me and get rid of my body. I killed two men!” she said harshly. “And then I was ambushed and only just made it out alive…”
“There’s no medals in this game,” he said sharply. He caught her expression, softened his tone somewhat. “Whatever happened, MI6 caught wind of my existence. When Forrester took me on, I wasn’t too bothered about using my name. Everybody involved in my last days in MI6 were either dead or retired. There were only a few people who even knew of my existence. I underestimated two things. The first was that a young man who literally drove me to an embassy on two occasions would be handed a picture of me and actually remember my face.”
“And the other?” Caroline was irked. She had known from King’s initial reaction when he found out what she had done, that she had made a mistake. She had just hoped it would be ok.
“And the other thing was I went too far off the reservation last summer. Searching for you, faced with the game Milankovitch forced me to play, I created a trail. That trail would have been fine, but for a loose end I failed to sever almost three years ago…”
“Peter Stewart,” she said quietly.
“I was intent on killing him for what he did to me,” King paused, casting his eyes to the
fire. “But when the crunch came, I couldn’t see what difference it would make. The man had become a father-figure to me over the years. I walked away. But I had no idea that he would come back out of retirement. He was desperate for recognition within the new MI6. He had no contacts worth a damn, but when MI6 found the link in South Africa, he must have stepped up and volunteered what he knew. Now MI6 have the Milankovitch affair hanging over Director Amherst, who in turn, has sent me up here on this fool’s errand to clear up things for MI6. Amherst has his balls in a vice, and the new director of MI6, Villiers, is slowly turning the key.”
“And Stewart killed the person who tried to kill you?”
King’s mind filled with the image of the man’s face blowing out, the sight of Stewart standing behind him, casually lowering his gun. No chance to overpower the man, get some answers out of him. King had the man, just needed another second to put pressure on the arm lock. Another second and the man would have dropped to his knees and started talking.
“He did.” King looked back at her. “The man shot at me when I visited the scene of Fitzpatrick’s death. I winged him, but he got away. There was another man, I shot out his engine, but he got away on his accomplice’s snowmobile.”
Caroline nodded. She had been brought up to speed in her briefing prior to leaving London. “Where is this man who Stewart killed?”
“About five miles away,” King paused. “I’ve made a note of the GPS coordinates on my phone, but we couldn’t bring him on the snowmobile.”
“So, where does this Peter Stewart character fit in? Does he know I’m with MI5?”
“Oh, I’m positive,” King mused. “He may not know the rest of the team are here, or who they are. But he’ll know you from your South African escapade. And he’ll know Neil Ramsay for sure. Simon Mereweather is deputy director. Ramsay is Mereweather’s righthand man. He’ll know him, will have looked at his file. Or whatever they have on him.”
“But he won’t know Rashid and Marnie,” Caroline nodded. “We should keep it that way. It won’t hurt to have two pairs of hands that only we know about. Not if you don’t trust MI6.”
King nodded. “I’m not happy about those two Russians either.”
“The barman and the waiter?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think it’s just a coincidence?”
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
Caroline took a sip of her drink, put it down and looked at him. “I’ll lay off those for a while, it’s easy to get caught up with thinking I’m actually on holiday, when really I need to keep a clear head…”
she paused. “I’ll get a coffee. Do you want a tea?”
King shook his head. “They don’t do tea well here… It tastes like wood and they keep putting lemon in it. The milk tastes sour, but the courtesy tray in the room has UHT, which is passable, and Lipton tea, which is drinkable.” He looked up as Caroline swung around in her seat as a commotion started at the front desk. King stood up and said, “Let’s take a look.”
It was a chaotic scene. The manager was calling somebody on the phone and holding up one hand to subdue the man thumping the desk with a fist. King couldn’t understand a word of the language, but he got the gist. The man wasn’t happy. He was clad in thick clothing made from animal skins, and had a rifle slung over his shoulder on a braided leather sling. King could see the rifle was a Mauser from World War Two. The scope on top looked from the same era. He suspected the man would be a superb shot. There was something about people who used a gun to feed their family. They learned not to waste a single bullet.
King turned his attention to the two women who stood quietly behind the man. They were rotund, red faced. He doubted he could guess their ages within twenty-years. To King and his limited knowledge, the three looked like Eskimos. Only he knew they were called Inuit now. And he doubted they still lived in igloos. He was aware that these people of Northern Scandinavia were the Sami, and he knew there were several types of Sami, like tribes. They were a semi-nomadic group and they travelled through Norway, Lapland, Finland and Russia. The Russians seemed to leave them alone. There wasn’t much in the way of a hard border this far north.
A tall, lithe man of about fifty, with cropped white silvery-white hair sidled up to the desk. He carried an aura of calm and confidence. King watched as the manager seemed to breathe a sigh of relief and the newcomer started to talk with the Sami at the counter. The manager seemed bolstered by the arrival of the other man, and an arrogant expression took over where indecision and uncertainty had been merely moments before.
King caught sight of the waitress walking through, and he walked over and said quietly, “Excuse me, what’s going on?”
