Oakes checked his watch. Another thirty minutes, then he’d be off duty. A few hours’ sleep and he’d be heading for a day’s hiking along the Windrush. He hadn’t done the walk through the Cotswolds yet and it was time to get his boots out and exercise his leg muscles before he was posted somewhere else less inspiring.
He stretched and heard the crackle of the envelope in his top pocket. He’d picked it up earlier when he’d clocked on. He hadn’t opened it yet because he was sure he knew what it was; a bollocking for getting heavy-handed with a couple of local men who’d strayed on to the base two days ago in search of whatever wasn’t tied down. His method of dealing with trouble had cost him dear in promotion over the years, and his current tenure of the rank of corporal looked like being shorter than ever. One of the men had thrown a punch and made a run for it, but Oakes had brought him down within thirty paces, managing to roll on the intruder’s throat in the process. The youth had ended up in hospital, bitching about being beaten up.
He stood for a moment, breathing in the clean air. It made a change from some bases, where the taste of aircraft fuel lay on your tongue all day long.
A brief flare of light came from No. 2 hangar, which housed three Lynx helicopters undergoing maintenance. Oakes froze, looking off to one side of the hangar. It came again . . . definitely a light.
He edged closer, his approach silent on the thick grass, glancing towards the garage in case Killick was watching. He reached for his radio, then decided to leave it; he was already too close and the noise would carry.
He wanted this one to be a real surprise.
A small side door was open. As Oakes stepped inside he heard a scrape of noise echo through the hangar. He hefted his heavy rubber flashlight and moved towards the bank of switches that would illuminate the overhead lights.
He felt rather than heard the door swing to behind him, and a swish of disturbed air ran across the back of his neck.
‘Hey – come out—!’
His words were choked off as he was slammed back against the wall. His head connected sickeningly with a heating pipe, and a spray of lights burst in front of his eyes.
Oakes possessed some expertise in martial arts, and had represented his squadron in inter-service bouts, holding his own against younger men. Dazed as he was, he instinctively moved sideways and lashed out with a boot, a move designed to drop his attacker where he stood. But the man was no longer there.
He flicked on his torch, and instantly felt a sharp pain in his hand, as if he’d been electrocuted. The torch fell from nerveless fingers and hit the floor of the hangar, the bulb popping with the impact. He heard a sharp intake of breath barely four feet away, then a vice-like hand gripped his throat.
In the darkness, Oakes realized with awful certainty that whoever this man was, he was no local thief looking for what he could steal. Even as he thought it, he experienced a sharp pain in his gut, like the very worst kind of belly cramp, and his bladder gave way, flooding his pants with a hot gush of urine. Through the pain, he wondered how he was going to explain this to Killick and the others, being taken down like a novice.
Then he was sliding down the wall, the hand gone from his throat and his legs no longer holding him upright. He hit the floor in a sitting position, head lolling, his breath sliding out of him in a rush. God, he felt tired.
A beam of light stabbed through the darkness, and he saw a vague face in the background staring down at him.
‘What the fu—?’ he tried to ask, then gave up, the effort too much.
The last thing he felt as he rolled on his side was his head hitting the oil-scented concrete floor of the hangar. The last image he saw, looming overhead in the reflected torchlight, was the familiar blade of a Lynx helicopter.
Kassim slipped out of the giant hangar through a rear door and walked towards the fence where he had prepared an escape route. He slid through the gap and jogged across the fields, sticking close to a stone wall until he reached a narrow lane. He thought he heard a faint shout behind him, but it might have been his imagination.
Dealing with Oakes had been easy. But it had brought no satisfaction. The man was just a name, a person on the list. He hadn’t even been at the compound. But his instructors had been adamant: not every death would have a connection, but each was about laying a confusing trail.
He was feeling nauseous again, with frequent attacks of bile rising in his throat. He had put it down to the rigours of his travels and the intense stress he was under, but a small part of him was beginning to wonder.
Parked up against the wall near a clutch of trees was a battered Ford Fiesta collected from a dealer at a used car lot in an area called West Drayton near Heathrow airport. The man had barely spoken, merely handing him the keys and wishing him God’s protection. The car was old and tired, but it had served well enough to get him here, allowing him to stay off public transport and dictate his own pace. He jumped over the wall and climbed into the car, and drove away back towards the M4 motorway.
THIRTY-SEVEN
‘Jesus, this guy’s a fucking killing machine,’ Ken Deane muttered helplessly on the other end of the telephone. ‘Who the hell’s next?’
Harry stared out at a bus full of airport workers going off duty, and wished he had an answer. He was back at El Segundo military base for a flight to Pristina in Kosovo. He knew that the only way to move this business along was to go to the source of the problem: the compound near Mitrovica. Deane had nobody on the ground sufficiently skilled in investigative work, and Harry was the only person he could call on. It meant a long flight with no guaranteed outcome, but they had no choice. Harry wasn’t prepared to sit around waiting for the next grisly development.
‘I’ve got you on a military jet to the Slatina air base complex at Pristina International,’ Deane had explained, after Harry told him what he wanted to do. ‘It should take about ten hours.’
‘Make it two seats,’ said Harry. ‘I’m taking backup.’
‘Ferris?’
‘Yes. Is that a problem?’
‘No. I figured you had him around somewhere. Just keep him out of the limelight.’
After finishing with Bikovsky, he and Rik had been forced to spend the night in a hotel. While waiting for the flight, Harry had called Deane to see if there were any updates. It couldn’t have been much worse: the reports of yet another KFOR-associated murder, this time in England.
With regular flights between Moscow and London Heathrow, Kassim had probably walked on to a plane after his attempt on Koslov and straight off the other end, with no reason for anyone in UK immigration to detain him. The following evening a security alert at a small helicopter base in Gloucestershire had revealed a dead RAF corporal, Malcolm Oakes, also with the UN sign carved into his chest.
‘Oakes was due for a tour of the Falklands,’ said Deane. ‘He’d just finished a training course in the north of England and was on a temporary posting at the base in Gloucestershire to beef up security while they had people coming back from overseas.’
‘Didn’t he get the warning?’ Harry asked.
‘He did. Your Ministry of Defence sent out a written letter telling him to remain on the base pending developments.’ He sighed. ‘They found the envelope in his pocket. He hadn’t opened it.’
So Oakes had received the same treatment as the others. But with no close witnesses, there was little to go on and nothing significant from anywhere else, either. A woman cleaner at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport had seen a thin-faced man ‘vigorously’ washing his hands and forearms, then being sick in the toilets. It had been odd behaviour but hardly pointed towards a serial killer; go almost anywhere in Moscow and you could see people being ill following a heavy session on bootleg vodka.
The man’s description could have fitted any number of people in transit through the airport, and so far there was no camera footage available to back up the cleaner’s claims. At the helicopter base where Oakes had been murdered, a fellow guard named Killick had seen a fi
gure hurrying from the hangar towards the perimeter fence, but had been too far away to make pursuit possible. He’d taken it to be another opportunist intruder . . . until he’d discovered his colleague’s body.
‘You realize there are only four of you left, don’t you?’ Deane asked. ‘Bikovsky, Koslov, Pendry and you.’
There was silence as they contemplated what had happened, and what would happen again if Kassim wasn’t stopped. If the newspapers got a sniff, they would have a field day about the UN’s inability to protect its own against a knife-wielding maniac bent on revenge.
‘Have the Aeroflot passenger lists thrown up anything?’
‘We’re narrowing it down – or at least the FBI is. There are three possibles at the moment, all unaccompanied male passengers who flew from the US to Moscow on Middle East or European passports. They’re running a check of late flights from Moscow to London as we speak. Once they’ve got the right one, they’ll have a name and passport details, and where he got his tickets. I’m willing to bet it’ll be right here in New York.’
‘Nothing on the woman, Demescu?’
‘Not a whisper. She’s either gone to ground in the local community or she’s back in central Europe.’ Deane sighed, his frustration at being so in the dark and helpless clearly showing. ‘I just wish we knew where this Kassim was going to pop up next. It’s like he’s got a fucking crystal ball.’
Harry rang off and looked for Rik, who was chatting to a young woman in a USAF uniform. They had another hour before boarding their flight. He couldn’t help wondering if they were wasting their time going to Kosovo when Kassim might even now be heading back to the States, and any information he picked up in the Balkans could prove futile. On the other hand, if he kept on the move, at least Kassim wouldn’t know where he was, which was good.
He stopped in mid-stride, his brain spinning. Something Deane had said . . .
He rang Deane again, who said, ‘What’s up – miss your flight?’
‘You said Oakes was on a temporary posting to the base in Gloucestershire.’
‘That’s right. He’d been there three days.’
‘With Demescu in the wind, how would Kassim have known that?’
The silence on the other end was palpable, then Deane said, ‘I’ll call you back. When’s your flight?’
‘Just under an hour.’
Thirty minutes later, Deane called.
‘Remember Demescu’s supervisor – a techy nerd named Ehrlich?’
‘Yes. A nervous type.’
‘And with good reason. They shared drinkies, he admitted that at the outset. It looks like she’s been playing him. Security checked his workstation and found a memory stick concealed in the handle of his rucksack. It was full of data from the personnel records. Ehrlich’s been carrying information out of the building to Demescu, and from her to Kassim. The last data he downloaded was about Oakes, lifted from British MoD personnel movement records.’
‘So he took over from her.’
‘Yeah. He had a programme running that updated any new information on each of the names. We should have spotted it.’
‘Does Ehrlich know you’re on to him?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Good. Let him run. Demescu must still be out there somewhere. She probably knows who some of Kassim’s other helpers are – like the source of the tickets he’s using.’
‘Hell of a way to operate; they must have known we’d make the connection sooner or later.’
‘Maybe. But it was never meant to be a long-term arrangement. They probably figured on being long gone before then. And Kassim wouldn’t care.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everything he’s done indicates he’s on a one-way trip. He’s not using multiple documents to travel and he’s taking bigger risks. It’s as if he knows when this is over, he’ll be burned, and the others will fade into the background. Let Ehrlich run but monitor his movements.’
‘You got it. This guy’s gonna be more carefully watched from now on than the Secretary-General himself. What are you going to do?’
‘I’m staying put in LA. Kosovo can wait. You’ll have to pass my apologies to the military. I want to draw Kassim in.’
‘How?’
‘By laying some bait.’
‘What are you suggesting?’
Harry had already had an idea which might draw Kassim out of the woodwork. ‘We can start by updating the UN computer records on Bikovsky. Put him back in his apartment in Venice Beach, say, nursing a broken leg.’
Deane gave a grim laugh. ‘Christ, a British hunting trick from the days of the Raj. Put out a wounded goat and wait for the tiger.’
‘More or less,’ Harry agreed. He didn’t care for Bikovsky, but he drew the line at coldly using the man as such obvious bait. But he could use the address and Kassim’s knowledge of its location at no risk to anyone else. ‘You’ll have to spice it up a bit,’ he added. ‘Make it really worth his while coming.’
‘How do we do that?’
‘Put in something that Ehrlich will be bound to pass on.’
‘Like what?’
‘Let him know I’ll be there as well.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
In the cramped toilets of the flight from Heathrow to Los Angeles, Kassim’s urine looked luridly purple under the bulkhead light. He stared at his reflection in the mirror with dismay; the last few days had done more to wear him down physically and mentally than the years in the inhospitable hills of Afghanistan. Then, he’d been in constant danger of being caught by the Americans or the Afghan army, or being vaporized by one of their drones. Yet nothing had wreaked more visible damage on him than the days since leaving the hills on this mission.
He’d developed dark shadows beneath his eyes, making his cheekbones more prominent, and his shaven jaw was like that of a man only days away from death, with a sallow greyness to his skin. Assaulted by rushed convenience meals snatched between flights, and rare stretches of sleep which were becoming increasingly restless and disturbed, his body was beginning to rebel. His digestive system, schooled after years of deprivation in the hills to exist on a meagre diet of dried meat, coarse bread and little water, was now collapsing, causing him acute stomach pains and loose bowels.
He filled a plastic beaker with water and swallowed three of the pills he’d got from the man who had supplied the car in West Drayton. He had explained that he needed something to help him make the long drive without stopping, and to overcome a pain in his gut. The man had told Kassim that his sister was a pharmacist and knew about such things. He’d made a brief phone call and within minutes a small bottle with a dozen pills was Kassim’s, in exchange for fifty English pounds.
As he emptied the cup he recognized that it wasn’t merely his physical self he needed to preserve; his mental shell, armoured over the years to shut out the disabling emotions of fear and doubt, was showing signs of severe strain. He wondered what kind of pills he could take to rectify that particular problem.
Someone rattled the folding door and a warning tone sounded, followed by an announcement that they were shortly coming in to land. Kassim put the remaining pills in his pocket. He would keep them for later, for as much as he had so far accomplished, there was still a lot to do. And though the binder in his jacket was now thinner than it had been, his task was still far from over. Apart from the Americans, Bikovsky and Pendry, who still lived, there was their leader whom he had come so tantalizingly close to.
He took out the binder. He now knew a little more about the Englishman, Tate, than he had before. He was a member of the British Security Service known as MI5. Kassim knew about such operatives; they were trained in covert work and were skilled investigators as well as experts in counter-offensive methods. It could not be long before their paths crossed and, God willing, if he was strong enough and watchful, Kassim was sure he could take this man, too.
He returned to his seat and fastened his seatbelt. The overhead television screen was showing
CNN highlights. He slipped on his earphones and watched a smiling group of politicians, hair gently ruffled by a breeze gusting off a river behind them. Kassim recognized the building the English called Big Ben, on the River Thames.
In the foreground, his arm around the shoulders of another man, stood the figure of Anton Kleeman.
Evening was approaching in Venice Beach, as a young woman skater glided gracefully along the bike path, virtually silent on rubber wheels. A group of three old women, skin etched deeply by years in the sun, talked and watched their dogs perform. Elsewhere the sound of homeward-bound traffic drifted across the rooftops, signalling the close of another Californian day.
Harry adjusted his position and sipped from a bottle of spring water. From his position on the sand by a trailer used for carrying jet skis, he was able to see the spread of the sidewalk, giving him ample time to study the faces going by. Behind him the Pacific was whispering on the shore two hundred yards out, and a few lone walkers stood outlined against the gleam of the water.
He’d spotted the position earlier, while he and Rik were trawling for observation points. The pool of shadow thrown by the trailer was ideal, and as a vantage point it was as good as he was going to get. Satisfied that it covered all angles, he had made his way back between the bungalows and low-rise apartment blocks, to a narrow back street of art galleries, cafés and souvenir shops. At the end was an army-surplus store selling bleached chinos, jeans and swimwear. Rik was already dressed to blend in, in T-shirt and jeans, but Harry needed something similar. He selected bleached khaki shorts, a baseball cap and a dark, baggy sweatshirt. After changing in the store’s fitting room, he went to another store and bought some deck shoes, then left his normal clothes in the rental car and made his way back down to the beach.
Retribution Page 20
