by Tom Wood
Victor put the phone away without responding. Our objective. It was interesting phraseology. Victor had no objective beyond staying alive and seeing out his commitment to the CIA. But to do that meant following orders.
The information on Basayev told him nothing that confirmed the identity of the man with green eyes. The email suggested Victor was right to have his suspicions, but he preferred to deal with facts over speculation. Fortunately there was a way to help him decide, one way or the other.
In the corner the man with green eyes sipped his Coke. The glass had about a quarter of liquid left. Victor gestured to Anika.
‘Another iced water?’ she asked.
‘Think I’ll go for an orange juice this time, thanks.’
She gave him a look. ‘Moving onto the heavy stuff?’
‘I’m letting my hair down.’
She returned a minute later with a highball glass filled with fresh orange juice.
‘Don’t go too wild,’ she said and took his money to the register.
Victor sipped his drink and waited.
CHAPTER 8
It took another fifteen minutes before the man who could be Basayev had finished his drink. It was a further four minutes before he came to the bar for a replacement. He moved slowly, but deliberately so, as though the world rushed for him, not the other way around.
‘A Coke,’ he said to Anika.
She nodded and took a glass from a shelf.
The man with green eyes asked, ‘Resisting the call of the table?’
As before, he spoke to Victor without looking at him. The Turk’s distorted reflection remained stationary on the bottles behind the bar.
Victor said, ‘I don’t like to push my luck.’
The man faced him and Victor thought he saw the first trace of a smile. ‘Or perhaps you are trying your luck elsewhere in succumbing to another type of call?’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
A full smile. ‘From the looks of things I think you would find more success at blackjack.’
‘I’ll bear your advice in mind.’
‘Consider it a gift.’
They held eye contact for a moment before Anika brought the man his drink. He turned to pay and waited for his change. His gaze remained fixed on a point behind the bar. Anika returned with a small stainless steel plate on which rested a few coins. She placed it before the man. His head angled downward. His gaze rested on the coins. His right hand reached towards them.
Victor’s glass shattered on the polished flooring that framed the bar.
Orange juice splashed outwards. Shards of glass and cubes of ice skidded across the flooring.
Victor paid no attention, neither when he knocked the glass with his elbow nor when it smashed near his feet. His attention was fixed on the man with green eyes and his reaction to the sudden noise. That reaction wasn’t to start in the instinctual response to potential danger, or to turn around in surprised curiosity, but was to thrust his right hand under his left lapel as he stepped away from the noise and twisted ninety degrees in its direction, left hand coming up to create distance and defence, feet a little more than shoulder width apart to provide balance and stability.
The reaction was fast. The movements were practised and smooth. The response was measured and confident. There was surprise but there was no hesitation and no fear.
‘Damn,’ Victor hissed through clenched teeth as he pretended not to notice.
He looked down to the floor and the mess he had created and then to Anika, an embarrassed and apologetic expression on his face. He expected her to roll her eyes or to laugh or smile at his clumsiness. Instead her chest heaved with panicked breaths. Her already large eyes were larger. White showed around the irises.
The man withdrew his hand from under the navy blazer and picked up his drink. He was relaxed and calm, his face neutral and unreadable.
‘Unlucky,’ he said to Victor without looking at him and took the Coke back to the table in the corner.
Anika was slower to control herself, and turned away in search for utensils to clear up the mess, her movements tense and hurried.
‘Sorry about that,’ Victor said, because most people would and because he was genuinely sorry about making a mess, and more so for scaring her.
He got up from his stool and squatted down to collect up the largest shards of glass in a napkin. Anika rounded the bar with a dustpan and brush in one hand and a towel in the other. She squatted down too, close enough for him to smell her perfume.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said, a little tersely – not angry at Victor but embarrassed by her earlier shock or not yet fully recovered from it.
‘I knew moving to neat orange juice was a bad idea.’
She managed a forced smile but didn’t make eye contact. She pointed at him picking up shards of glass. ‘You probably shouldn’t be doing that.’
‘I’m being careful.’
‘No, I mean you probably aren’t allowed, as a customer. It’s bound to be against twenty different European health and safety regulations.’
He didn’t stop. ‘How did we survive before the EU was there to look after us?’
She shrugged and looked at him, relaxing.
He said, ‘Death by broken glass must have been endemic.’
Anika smiled, briefly but genuinely, and some of the tension seemed to fade. She was fast and efficient in sweeping up the broken glass and then using the towel to soak up the puddle of orange juice. She took away the debris and towel and returned with another towel, a damp one, to wipe down the area of the spill so the soles of shoes didn’t end up sticking to the flooring.
She grunted as she went to stand and Victor surprised himself by offering her his hand and was surprised to find Anika took it. Her hand felt tiny in his own. The skin was warm and smooth. He helped her up. He held on to her hand longer than he needed to, but she didn’t pull away.
‘Sorry,’ Victor found himself saying again as they released hands.
She nodded to say no problem, and moved to serve a waiting customer. Glad to have repaired the damage he’d caused, Victor settled back on his stool and glanced to the bottles behind the bar to check on the Turk’s reflection, but the glass surfaces were empty of distorted shapes. Victor turned his head to see the watcher was no longer sitting at his table, and the booth where Deák and the blonde had been lounging a moment ago was now empty.
CHAPTER 9
‘How about another orange juice?’ Anika asked Victor.
He shook his head, said, ‘Not now,’ and stood.
She asked another question but he was already walking away. Letting Deák exit the bar without his knowledge was the kind of amateur level mistake Victor thought he’d left behind years before. Ascertaining the threat posed by the man he now believed to be Basayev had been a necessary precaution, but he shouldn’t have let Anika distract him. It hadn’t even been a purely physical distraction. He had been surprised by her reaction to the broken glass and felt bad for scaring her.
The whole sequence of events with the glass of orange juice had lasted no more than ninety seconds, beginning to end. Deák could have left at any point during that period. It would have taken five seconds for him and the hooker to slide off their seats and get out of the booth. Then four seconds to exit the bar. Up to eighty-one seconds left with which to disappear with.
Victor exited the bar in two seconds, reducing Deák’s head start to seventy-nine seconds. The Turk and his boss with the grey hair and beard were nowhere to be seen. Wherever Deák was, they would be just behind him.
The casino floor had five exits excluding the bar – a doorless entranceway that opened up to the restaurant, the corridor leading to the main exit, two unmarked doors for casino staff, and one for the restrooms. The two service doors were not options. That left three. Deák and the blonde wouldn’t be using the toilets, either out of necessity or squashed together in a cubicle. They could have more efficiently done either in the bar’s own. T
wo exits left.
He walked quickly, but not too quickly, towards the corridor leading to the main exit. He typed out a text message on his phone as he did – a man in a hurry replying to something important, searching for better reception. The restaurant was on the far side of the casino floor and a minute’s casual walk through the crowd and around the tables. Deák would have had plenty of time to reach the maître d’ stand and could be now waiting to be seated or on his way with the blonde to a table. It would take Victor forty seconds to get to the restaurant to confirm they were there. If they weren’t, Victor would have to recross the casino floor, losing another forty seconds and putting him 159 seconds behind Deák. Plenty of time to have reached outside and got into a cab and taken a turning off the street and be lost in the city by the time Victor got onto the sidewalk. And if Deák and the blonde were in the restaurant they would still be there after Victor had checked they hadn’t left the casino.
Deák was seventy-nine seconds ahead when Victor entered the casino floor. It took him nineteen seconds to reach the corridor leading to the main exit, and would take another eleven to get outside. Deák would have covered the distance no more than a third slower. Sixty-nine seconds ahead. If he was on foot he would still be visible. If not, it would take seven seconds to get into the first of the taxis lined up outside. Eight seconds to tell the driver where they were going. Two seconds for the driver to start the engine. Three to take off the handbrake and put the car in gear. One second to check his mirrors. Four seconds to pull out. Fifty-two seconds left. At only ten miles per hour that was 763 feet. Enough to reach an intersection and disappear around a turning or so that Victor would only see the tail lights glinting in the distance by the time he pushed through the revolving doors.
An amateur mistake.
But Deák wasn’t in a cab. He wasn’t on the street outside either. Victor checked with first taxi driver waiting outside the casino. He’d been there twenty minutes without a fare. Deák was in the casino restaurant, ordering a late supper for himself and the blonde. The grey-haired man with the meticulously trimmed beard was sitting at a nearby table. The Turk wasn’t in sight. There didn’t need to be both of them in the restaurant to confirm Deák was there and having been close to him in the bar, even a clueless crew didn’t want to risk avoidable exposure.
Victor saw the Turk when he returned to the bar. He was perched on a barstool waiting for another beer, looking somewhere between annoyed and exasperated. Too many false starts in one night. Victor sympathised.
Basayev was still at his little table. His neutral expression was just the same as when Victor had last seen it, except that now he nodded a single time at Victor. An almost friendly gesture.
Victor took a stool at the bar. When the Turk checked his phone and left, so would he. It wouldn’t be a long wait, maybe half an hour. Someone of Deák’s thin frame wouldn’t eat a huge meal at this time of night and the blonde would be keen to move things along as the sooner Deák was out of breath with a grin on his face, the sooner she could help someone else celebrate. It would have been more discreet for Victor to wait outside the casino, but he had returned to the bar to see whether Basayev was still present. While Anika fixed Victor another orange juice he considered that fact.
Basayev hadn’t moved when Victor had left to find Deák. If either Deák or his boss Farkas was Basayev’s target then losing a visual was a significant risk and one that seemed out of place with so careful a professional. So either Basayev knew exactly where Deák was going to be at some later point and there was no need to survey him so closely, or he knew Deák would now be in the restaurant. If the first option was true then Basayev had no need to be in the casino bar at all and was risking exposure for no benefit. That didn’t make sense. And if Basayev knew Deák was now in the restaurant with the blonde without having to check himself, then the blonde had to be under Basayev’s employ. But the blonde had shared a look of friendly rivalry with the other hooker. They knew each other. They both regularly worked the casino, competing for the same business but each getting enough clients not to have any genuine dislike for the other. A prostitute who relied on casino patrons to pay her rent wouldn’t betray one to someone she didn’t know or trust.
Therefore Basayev didn’t know Deák’s current location. He could have left the casino in a taxi to the airport for all Basayev knew. No killer, least of all one so careful and aware, would allow that to happen. Which meant one thing.
Neither Deák nor Farkas could be Basayev’s target.
Victor wasn’t either. There were too many reasons against it. He hadn’t been in Berlin long enough for one of his many enemies to track him down and put someone on the ground ahead of him. He’d never stolen from a Chechen warlord and people trafficker either. The only person who knew he was in Berlin was his employer, and he would know better than to send a lone man after him. Victor had met the man who hired him just once but from that short meeting knew he was too smart for such an error. If his paymaster was going to set him up the attempt would be much harder to identify and much harder to escape from. He knew Victor’s recent history. He wouldn’t make the same mistakes others had.
So if Basayev’s target wasn’t Victor or Deák or Farkas, then who was?
Anika wiped down the bar in front of Victor and said, ‘I hope you’re going to be more careful with that orange juice than the last.’
Victor gripped the glass. ‘I’ve got it glued to my hand.’
She smiled easily, relaxed, her face nothing like it had been in her reaction to the broken glass. Yet someone who worked behind a bar would hear glasses smashing on a regular basis. And even if she was new and still unused to such surprises, she would have only been startled, not scared. There was a reason why sudden noises frightened her.
Victor asked, ‘How long have you worked here?’
‘Almost a year.’
‘Like it?’
She did a little dance with her shoulders as she decided how to answer. ‘It’s a job. Like any other.’
She didn’t know Victor. She wasn’t going to tell a stranger she hated what she did for a living. He gave an understanding nod.
‘What about you,’ she began, ‘some kind of construction work?’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Your hand was rough. I don’t mean that as an insult,’ she was quick to add. ‘It just felt as though you don’t sit in an office all day.’
‘I do work in an office,’ he said, ‘but I do a lot of climbing. Where are you from?’
She gestured around. ‘Here. Berlin.’
‘Your parents aren’t German though, right?’
She looked uncomfortable and answered without looking at him. ‘That’s right.’
‘Where are they from?’
He smiled as though they were just making small talk, like he was a regular patron and not a professional assassin and she was a regular bartender, not someone who lived with the kind of fear that made her panic at the sound of breaking glass. He saw her debating with herself whether to say more, but in the end she trusted him enough to say, ‘They’re Moldovan. Me too, but I’ve lived in Germany for three years now.’
‘How do you like Berlin?’ he asked.
‘I love it. Germans are so friendly.’
Victor asked himself what Anika could have stolen from a Chechen warlord and people trafficker that would justify sending a man like Basayev after her. It had to be something of considerable value to the warlord to warrant the time and expense and risk of setting a killer on her trail. It had to be something personal because Victor doubted Anika had the know-how to have smuggled large amounts of cash or jewellery into the EU and if it was money or jewels then she wouldn’t need to work in a job she didn’t like. It had to be something precious to Anika to warrant living with the kind of fear that made her panic at the sound of breaking glass after three years.
There was only one thing she could have stolen.
CHAPTER 10
She’
d stolen herself.
Moldova had a tiny land mass and a population of only a few million people, but it was one of the world leaders in people trafficking. Tens of thousands of its young women had been sold and held against their will to be used as prostitutes or sex slaves in Europe and the Middle East. Some managed to work their way out of captivity. Some were freed by the work of police forces and charities. Some escaped. Some never got away.
Anika must have been the personal property of the Chechen warlord, instead of a commodity, if three years later he still cared about her escape. Maybe she’d even been his wife, or one of many.
She asked, ‘Where are you from? You sound German, but I don’t think you are.’
‘Switzerland mostly,’ Victor answered. ‘But I travel around a lot. I’m kind of nomadic.’
‘So what brings you to Germany?’
‘The coffee.’
She smiled. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying but you don’t seem like a gambler.’
Victor didn’t know how she’d managed to escape, but she had, and he respected that kind of guile and resourcefulness. She was a survivor. Like him. Whatever she had endured in captivity, three years later she was now able to hold down a job, interact with people, handle the advances of male patrons. Maybe after three years, even though she hadn’t yet fully shaken off the fear, she dared to believe she was safe. But Basayev had tracked her down.
‘Why don’t I seem like a gambler?’
She said, ‘You don’t fit the type. The way I see it, people gamble for one of two reasons: because they need the money or because they like the excitement, the risk.’
