The Widow's Son

by Daniel Kemp

  Two figures appeared on one of the many balconies of the house below and she could vaguely hear them shouting and pointing in her direction. Smack, like an angry hand slapping flesh, the trunk of the tree above her head absorbed a shot. It was followed quickly by a series of smacks as bullets from an automatic weapon found nearby trees. The ground near her feet sounded as though waves were crashing onto a rocky shore as bullets tore at them.

  Nothing like this had ever happened to her. She was a close-in killer, not a commando in a raiding party. In a window above the balcony where the accusing fingers were pointed at her, stood a shortish, bald-headed man with a grey beard dressed in a white shirt wearing black-rimmed glasses. White was the target's favourite colour and the rest of him fitted his description. She took aim with the Glock pistol she carried, gently squeezed the trigger twice and a head shot killed the Israeli.

  A smack didn't hit a tree. It went through her boot and into her leg just above the ankle bone. Hobbling and reaching out to trees for balance she made it to her boat without the next bullet. With immense strength she dragged the dingy into the water, fired the motor and steered for the lights on Swan's Island. The boat took a line of shells luckily all above the waterline but unluckily three hit Suzanna. The first two in her arm, upper and lower but the third broke a rib on entry and passed through a lung on exiting. The next one to hit was of a heavier calibre. It lodged in her liver causing massive internal and external loss of blood. Nearing her base camp she managed to zig-zag the boat away from the searching lights of the pursuers. With every pain-driving lurch over the choppy waters of the bay her hopes of survival increased. That wasn't the case for long. Breathing hard as she climbing out over the one remaining inflated tube, two stray rounds from a light automatic weapon hit her body. One in the femoral artery and the other in the widow maker artery on the left side of her heart. She was aware of Christopher Irons kneeling over her but not the first stab of morphine nor the next. By the time Irons had shot his whole pack of pain-relieving morphine into her bloodstream she had died, but it was from her wounds, not his overmedication as was his unenviable intention.

  * * *

  Searches began in earnest the following morning, beginning at the Israeli Embassy in Washington D. C. Later that day Michael Simmons passed on the GCHQ notification to Group and AIS of 'unusual activities' attributed to agents of Mossad in and around Mount Desert Island, Maine. The FBI were contacted by the Maine State police department and started inquiries of their own. Early on Thursday morning Al Jazeera announced that Tamimi-Dayut, the chief financial fund raiser of the Palestine Liberation Organisation had been found murdered in his hotel room in Paris, France. He had been dead for at least thirty-six hours. About an hour later Eastern Standard Time, the FBI found a rented open-backed Chevrolet abandoned in the trailer park north of Rockland, in Maine. Against the car registration number in the rental book was the name of Tamimi-Dayut, along with the requisite details from his passport. The agent of the rental company was asked to give a description of the man who had rented the Chevrolet; it matched Tamimi-Dayut to a tee. The black magic art of disguise Christopher Irons learned at Beaulieu was never a waste of time.

  * * *

  My guest at breakfast that morning in Claridge's Hotel was less despondent than when I'd left him.

  “Not all was in vain, it seems,” Fraser announced. “Moshe Gabbai and Tamimi-Dayut both dead should make the world a safer place in the long run. Overall Christopher made a good job of it. Inside I'm devastated about Suzanna, but what can I do. There was always an out for her but it was the life she chose. We both knew she wouldn't never make old bones,” he announced solemnly, then added,

  “It's always sad when one of ours cops it. How goes the Venery Munitions Ltd file, Patrick? Any luck on your UAV?”

  Fraser and Molly were staying in the hotel in the room kept by the Acquisition and Disposals on a renewable annual retainer. He had suggested they stay in the second apartment at his ex-office that was now mine in Whitehall; however, it was easier to explain that Hannah had moved in there whereas the truth was that she shared my rooms now.

  “There's nothing showing on the Venery books that Ratcliffe keeps, and there's nobody at the Pentagon who will comment on UAVs. However, I did manage to get some information. In February this year two US army Oshkosh tractor and trailers were purchased by a Syrian registered company from an American approved supplier. In the same month two USAF C-17 took off from Kabul landing at Antakya with unspecified cargo. Simmons at Group did a normal sweep. The company doesn't exist. The address is a shop front in Damascus.”

  “When you told me the name of one of Paul Gardener's victims it rang bells in my head, Patrick. Is Henry Mayler's November visit to New York what you wanted to discuss this morning?”

  “Yes, Fraser, it is. There was a meeting of International Master Freemasons at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York on the Saturday following Razin and Mayler's exchange of words in Kabul. That's where I believe Henry met Arnold. The FBI were out in numbers that weekend along with ex-President's protection details, and special forces were on high alert. The FBI had several specific targets to watch. One of them was the next presidential candidate from the Democratic Party, Tucker Stoneman, another was the Russian oligarch Bohdan Dimitriyevich Valescov. I used a contact in the CIA to profile all they had listed on Valescov. I tried to get them to give me all they had on Stoneman, but they wouldn't budge on that one. Did you know Valescov is of the same Rosicrucian order as Henry?” Fraser shook his head.

  “I traced their affiliations to a founding lodge in Zaragoza in Spain. Do you know of that lodge, Fraser?”

  “I've heard of it, laddie, yes. And I did the same research as you but I hadn't had all the information on Gardener that you had. Be that as it may, laddie, William Guerny II said the man he spoke to had an American accent, not Russian.”

  “I know that, Fraser, but I doubt Arnold uses the phone to speak to the likes of William Guerny II. I played around with the theory that Valescov may have mentioned his son to Mayler at some time and Henry may well have told Valescov of Razin. Now where Gardener comes into it I'm not sure, but if his name was mentioned, then Mayler could have twisted Razin's arm for a location and Valescov could have killed him.”

  “Then why the—Antelope is at the harbour awaiting tanker?”

  “That's what's confusing me, Fraser, and what I want to work on. Hannah is tracing the original message and will have it worked back to cover all transmitting possibilities. I've put AIS under Simmons' direct control and he's weighing in with them as well. I want to keep Sir John Scarlett out of the mix at the moment. Too many eyes at Vauxhall. When the signal about Gardener's execution pinged up it went to Geoffrey Harwood with the Antelope in the harbour bit redacted, but it did show Arif's name and—identified target of asset code Antelope. Would Geoffrey have known Liam's code as Antelope, Fraser?” He turned his head away from the table and fixed his gaze to floor. After several seconds he said three simple words that contained a complexity of meanings. “Yes, he did!”

  * * *

  The Arif Belmokhtar flashed signal, at 04:14 on Tuesday, had originated from the same NSA relay station in Erbil, Iraq, only this time there was no NSA footprint.

  “It can't have come from Razin as he's dead. So someone else is using his 'Help Me' card in the harbour thing. Maybe Geoffrey knew Razin's code and told Henry Mayler just as small talk or worse. He could even had told Henry Liam Catlin's code name. But neither of them would be aware of Catlin's preference of not using it,” Hannah emphatically declared.

  “It also means one of them knew how to lock into the NSA signal networking system. I would put my money on Geoffrey knowing about that sort of thing after all the hardware inserted at his Greenwich AIS. I want you to call Spencer Morrell, Hannah. He might have gone home for the Christmas holidays, but if he's still in his offices he'll meet you, whereas if it's me calling I won't get past his PA. Ask him if he has any ideas. We're looking
for any kind of fingerprint that could have been left. I'm scratching away in the dark on this. I need to fix a name to whoever dispatched it and then match that sender to Bohdan Dimitriyevich Valescov.”

  Spencer was still at work and, so he told Hannah, could be there until the New Year. His department had been tasked to find the same target as us, but he was hampered by not knowing that Razin was dead and our project was on the loose looking to meet up with Arnold. All he had was an IT location address in Wiltshire, England. After a shared coffee in a reception room with Spencer, Hannah decided he was of no further use to us and returned empty-handed.

  I contacted Peter, back at the Hub, and he was more useful. I sent him the signal with all mention of Antelope removed and he promised to do his best with it. Around 2pm that Thursday he had news.

  “I had to get through a variety of firewalls on the NSA sites and interestingly some highly sophisticated Russian data filters as well. They really were top-notch, but not as good as ours at plugging leakage. You see, sir, a mobile phone will always give you a location, but as the signal was sent some days ago the likelihood of the dispatcher still being there is very low so I looked further. The other thing one can get from a phone signal, if one knows how to look, is its number. That's the tricky part where filters play their role. I got through them all, sir. I have the number.” I could visualise him jumping up and down as he told me. It was not Razin's phone. It was the one given to Mayler by Geoffrey Harwood.

  “You have done it. You've just confirmed a conclusive connection between Arnold and Henry's phone. Do you think it's possible that Geoffrey Harwood had that phone tweaked in some way, Patrick?”

  “I thought you disapproved of me getting my hands dirty with that side of things?”

  “I've come around to your way of doing things a lot. Haven't you noticed?” she answered, seductively sweeping her long black her away from her sculptured face.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Christmas Eve

  The first gathering of solid intelligence that had any connection to Henry Mayler and Razin to land in my hands came from an ExxonMobil employee via Christopher Irons on the Friday of Christmas Eve. I had declined to spend the holiday period with the Ugherts, citing the operational state as the cause, but it wasn't only that. One part of me wanted the semi-permanence of company, the warmth that a close friendship of others would give, but the stronger part wanted the same isolated life I had some two weeks or so before when in my old flat at Canary Wharf doing whatever I wanted, because with that separation or self-inflicted quarantine came the excitement of no responsibility, nobody to consider before jumping into an adventure that could end badly. Hannah had become a slight impediment to that, all the same, provided I never allowed the comfort of sex and a warm firm body to lie against to amplify into anything else, then there would be no sense of duty to obstruct my inclinations. Despite all those considerations the furtive business I was in was paramount.

  Allowing for a few who had nobody to share Christmas with, everyone who was anyone in my line of work was packed up and headed for home or places to stay for the holidays by Friday lunchtime at the latest. Certainly at the time of night I had arranged for our meeting there would be no one of significance left in town.

  Jimmy and Frank had three days' leave and although the two special protection officers assigned to me were as amiable as one could hope, the conversation we had on the walk through St James's Park that night under a cloudless sky and full moon lacked the synthesis that people who know details of each other have. I left them both waiting in the hotel foyer looking as unobtrusive as possible, whilst I went searching for illumination on a member of the Rosicrucian order whose ideology could fill a room with toxic garbage.

  My educator was waiting in the Martini Bar of Duke's Hotel. It was busy. Josh Polish, Christopher Irons' man within ExxonMobil, was a tall, confident man of medium build and on whom the expensive clothes he wore hung well and naturally. He spoke in a cultured English accent that had been nurtured at an early age on his family's estate in Gloucestershire before he had settled in America and made his fortune. His bearing and pose belied his age of seventy-one. He wasn't doing any of this for money, he had plenty of that, I'd seen his bank accounts, neither was he doing this as a penance to offset the damage his company may have caused throughout his forty-plus years as company treasurer and chief negotiator. His reason was one of plain and simple revenge for being passed over in the upper echelon of business life.

  “If you carry a stone in your shoe for any distance, Mr West, it either becomes part of your foot or part of your shoe. I can afford as many pairs of shoes as I want, but I only have one pair of feet to carry me until I've left this life. Now's the time to care for my feet and ditch the stone in the shoe. In these documents you have all you need to blow Tucker Stoneman's presidential candidacy as high as the moon. It will make a gigantic splash across America that will drown many like him. He is an evil man who stupid-minded people admire and look up to. The kind of paganism this man privately preaches becomes dangerous when they are more disciples in his tent than critics. I do realise the people you represent will use the information contained in here to your country's advantage, better that than no action at all, which would happen in the States. I'm on a private jet out of here in three hours' time. I have a heart condition which the doctors say will allow me to live for at least eighteen months. For the remaining time I have, I want a peaceful life alone with my wife. We never had children, neither of us wanted them. We have no living relatives either. No ties, Mr West. Just plain, ordinary creatures that fell in love with each other and are now joined at the waist.”

  “Could I ask you one question before you leave for that idyllic life Mr Polish? Have you ever heard this Tucker Stoneman use the word 'dingnation' at all? I believe it's used as an expression of surprise. I also believe it hails from Missouri. Would he have any connection to that state?”

  “He doesn't, no. Comes from sunny California, does Tucker. But I know a man in his inner circle who comes from Missouri and uses that word often. His name is Calvin Zunkel. He's one of Stoneman's heavies. If it ever leaks out that you got all this information from me it could be Zunkel who pulls the trigger and kills me.”

  I had briefly glanced at the written sheets of papers and pocketed the memory stick after Polish left, leaving me to finish my drink alone. From what I saw it was every bit as good as I'd hoped. I was certainly not about blow Tucker Stoneman's political career to the moon and back. That was never part of my agenda.

  * * *

  That night, as I lay beside Hannah, my mind was on what Josh Polish had said about no ties. He had a wife but he never thought of her as a burden. I lay there probing everything I had experienced to discover why that would be, but the truth he found in his marriage would not shine on me.

  * * *

  As far as I could see, Harwood giving Mayler a phone had greatly complicated the investigation and left himself wide open. Mayler had made his decision to escape from the farm when it was obvious to him we were not flying him straight to Canada. He had enough on Razin to be able to find him and rightly suspected he had followed him to London. Getting hold of a phone would have been no problem for Henry, and for all I knew he could have had one concealed on his body and bribed a guard to let him keep it. The important thing was Fyodor Nazarov Razin was destined to die as soon as Paul Gardener, as Arif Belmokhtar, murdered Bohdan Dimitriyevich Valescov's eldest son.

  From what I had deduced it was obvious that Tucker Stoneman was the mysterious Arnold taking advice from people such as Valescov and the like, but they were not my immediate worries. They could be left in the Pending file to use at a later date, or unveiled to either their own governments or the United Nations to regulate and oversee. My job was to safeguard the British population, including overseas military personnel, and then propel GB Ltd forward riding on the information I had.

  * * *

  Narak Vanlian met with the Sunni Kurdish followers of Alaz Kar
abakh in the mountains beyond Antakya over the weekend before the Christmas weekend. The UAV and hellfire missiles were transported through friendly territory under their supervision and launched, guided and fired by USAF personnel paid for by transferred funds from Panama. The payment to Sunni Kurds for the assassination of Arif Belmokhtar was not paid in money. It came in the back of the five trucks piled full with a variety of weapons that Narak and his team had brought from the Venery warehouses, further north in Turkey at Gaziantep. From the information I gathered that drone and remaining projectiles were returned to Kabul under political cover provided by the company who sold the transporters to the Kurds; Springfield Munitions, part owned by Calvin Zunkel. Was it not Springfield that Henry Mayler, posing as Razin, declared to be his destination?

  The fact that Christmas Day was celebrated in Britain and America at the same time helped Michael Simmons at Group to provide the invaluable intelligence he was doing partially through the state-of-the-art technology that Geoffrey Harwood had installed at AIS in Greenwich. GCHQ had worked wonders on intercepting CIA and NSA messaging, having electronically inserted listening devices on Zunkel's main fixed telephone line and fixed a signal from his mobile phone along with another electronic inserted bug installed in Stoneman's campaign headquarters. But that wasn't enough. Peter at Group had tracked the actual instructions from inside the Pentagon to Narak Vanlian regarding the coordinates for the UAV and its launch requirements. I was on my own in the silence of the Whitehall office, hearing the footfalls of the two protection officers patrolling the outside corridor, puzzling over Liam Catlin and had he played a role in all of this.