Less than thirty seconds later, two other mobile telephones, neither of them registered in Spain, began to ring elsewhere in Cambrils. They were answered almost immediately, in two different hotels, and in two different languages.
Richter had almost reached the main doors of the Tryp Port hotel when another phone rang in the lobby. He glanced to his right and saw a group of four men, all wearing dark suits, standing by the reception desk, one of them taking his mobile from his jacket pocket and lifting it to his ear.
None of that was in the slightest bit unusual or remarkable in any way. But it was what the man said when he answered the call that caused Richter to hesitate momentarily. He slowed down, pulled out his own phone from his pocket and stared at the screen as if he had just been sent a text message.’
‘What is it?’ Masters asked. ‘Some other piece of fucking disastrous news?’
Richter turned his back to the reception desk and spoke quietly to the two Americans.
‘I don’t think we’re the only ones in town looking for Vernon,’ he said. ‘When that guy behind me answered his phone, the first thing he said was “Da” and you don’t need to be much of a linguist to know that that’s the Russian for “Yes”. I didn’t catch the rest of what he said.’
‘He might just be a Russian businessman here in Spain to do some kind of a real estate deal,’ Moore suggested.
‘He might be, yes,’ Richter said, stepping outside the hotel and leading the way over to the parked Peugeot a few yards down the road, ‘but for there to be four of them and for them to get a phone call at pretty much the same time we did seems to me to be more than a coincidence.’
‘So, what do we do about it?’ Masters asked.
‘We wait here for a couple of minutes while Baker is sorting out the IP audit to tell us where Vernon is right now. If that guy is just a property developer, he’ll carry on with his registration and then take his bags up to his room and then hit the dining room. If he isn’t, my guess is that the four of them will come out here in a real hurry, get into their car and drive off to wherever their IT expert at Yazenevo or Khodinka tells them to go.’
‘And then?’
‘We have to get to Vernon before anybody else does,’ Richter said. ‘That’s the priority, so we stop them right here.’
‘What? Shoot them down in the street?’
Richter pressed the button on the remote control to unlock the Peugeot and shook his head.
‘I hadn’t planned on anything quite that drastic, because if we do that we’re going to be kneedeep in Spanish plods with a whole bunch of awkward questions to answer. I was thinking more along the lines of immobilising whatever car they arrived in. With a couple of blown tyres, they won’t be going anywhere.’
‘Here you go then,’ Moore said. ‘They just walked out of the hotel, all four of them together.’
‘You two get going,’ Masters said. ‘I’ve got this.’
Richter nodded, dropped down into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Moore sat down beside him.
‘When you’ve done it, TJ,’ Richter said, ‘we’re probably going to need to move quickly, so once the dust has settled could you grab the case from my room and do the same for Rich here, and we’ll meet you somewhere on the seafront.’
Masters took the two electronic room keys, tucked them into his pocket, nodded and walked in the opposite direction, heading towards the group of four men who were striding quickly across the road towards a Renault saloon car on French plates.
Richter switched on the Peugeot’s lights and pulled away from the kerb, pressing the button to lower his window as he did so. As the car rounded the first corner and began tracking west along the Carrer de Mossèn Jacint Verdaguer, he and Moore clearly heard two shots, close together.
Moore immediately started counting, ticking off the seconds on his fingers as his mouth worked silently. About ten seconds later, they heard two more shots, the sound moderated by the distance they’d travelled.
‘So now we know that was the opposition,’ Moore said, ‘not some bunch of innocent tourists or whatever, because they wouldn’t be carrying. And I guess the Ruskies weren’t expecting what happened. Sounds like TJ blew the tyres and then ran, and it took one of them eleven seconds by my estimation to pull out a weapon and try and shoot him down. Pretty sloppy reactions.’
‘You know him better than I do,’ Richter said. ‘You reckon he got away?’
Moore nodded.
‘No doubt in my mind. That man can move a long way in ten seconds. I’ve seen him do it. So those four guys are out of the running for a while, even if they’re not out of the race.’
Richter’s phone rang, and he immediately passed it to Moore, who held a largely monosyllabic conversation with whoever was at the other end of the line.
Then he ended the call and looked at the satnav. With no destination entered, the device was simply indicating where they were in the streets of Cambrils.
‘That was your man Baker,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t have an exact location but he said the IP address decodes as being near a place called the Parc del Pescador, and that’s somewhere to the south-west of us right now.’
Moore increased the scale on the satnav’s screen to show more of the town, then stabbed his finger at a green triangular shape, the broad base backing onto the seafront and the apex of the triangle pointing north.
‘That’s it right there,’ he said.
Richter glanced at the screen and nodded, increasing speed as much as he dared.
Seconds later, he swung the car left to head towards the seafront. That looked like the fastest way to get to their destination because there was no road that took them in exactly the direction they wanted to go. And there was another problem as well.
‘Goddamn place is like a nightmare of one-way streets,’ Moore complained, hitting the nail on the head. ‘Didn’t any of the guys who planned this place know anything about automobiles?’
‘I don’t think anyone actually planned Cambrils,’ Richter said, hitting the brakes hard and changing down twice before spinning the wheel to the right and heading west again. ‘I think it probably just grew up the way it is at a time when the biggest vehicle around was a horse and cart.’
What looked like a young man on a moped, but could have been a girl, shot out of a junction on the right-hand side of the road, barely fifty yards ahead of them, and careered into their path. Richter twitched the wheel slightly to the right and powered past him, the angry pathetic bleat of the moped’s horn fading into silence behind them.
‘This is the Carrer de València,’ Moore said, studying the satnav. ‘Don’t go to the end, because according to this it’s a mandatory right turn and we need to go the other way.’
‘So pick me a route,’ Richter said.
‘I am. The next road on the left is one way the wrong way. There,’ he said, pointing through the windscreen. ‘Take the next on the left. One hundred yards.’
Richter kept the speed up, then hit the brakes and spun the wheel, the tyres squealing and scrabbling for grip as he turned the vehicle through ninety degrees. The diesel engine howled as he floored the accelerator pedal, the turbo kicking in.
‘Now second on the right and then go straight.’
Richter made the turn, scattering a group of middle-aged men who were about to cross the road. The road bent slightly to the right and then straightened up.
‘This is the Rambla de Jaume I,’ Moore said, comprehensively mangling the Spanish name. ‘At the end of this there’s a kind of roundabout thing, and that’s right at the top of this triangular park effort. So you need to hang a left when you get there.’
Then he reached under his lightweight jacket – they were all wearing jackets because of their weapons and shoulder holsters – and took out his Glock. He released the magazine, pressed down on the round at the top to make sure the spring depressed – a very basic check – then slammed in back into the butt of the pistol and pulled back the slide to chamber the f
irst round. There was no safety catch to set, because the multiple safeties on Glocks are built into the firing mechanism. Then he held it lightly in his right hand, ready for immediate use, obviously not intending to make the same mistake as the Russian team back at the hotel.
Richter powered the Peugeot around the biggish roundabout at the end of the road and then swung left to follow the road that ran alongside the Parc del Pescador, the open area of trees and shrubs on their right-hand side.
It’s a very Spanish habit to promenade. In towns all over the country, it’s common to see individuals, couples and family groups dressed in their finest clothes as if they were heading off to attend an important matinee at an exclusive theatre parading along roads lined with cafes and bars, or up and down the Rambla or its local equivalent in cities like Barcelona. They walk so that other people can admire their grace and dress sense, and then they take a seat outside a cafe and enjoy a drink or two while they watch other Spaniards doing exactly the same thing. It’s not organised, of course: it’s just something the Spanish as a nation tend to do.
It was immediately clear that the path alongside the Parc del Pescador, the Park of the Fisherman, was one of the spots in the town popular for this activity. While most of the streets Richter and Moore had driven down were virtually deserted, here there were probably fifty or sixty people strolling slowly along the pavements on both sides of the road.
‘Shit,’ Richter muttered. ‘That’s not what I expected.’
Moore nodded.
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘but, if what you said is correct, this guy Vernon will be by himself, and most of these people aren’t. They’re couples or they’re in groups.’
Richter brought the speed of the Peugeot right down until they were driving along at little more than walking pace as he and Moore stared out of the vehicle at the people they were passing on both sides of the road. Neither of them saw anyone who bought the slightest resemblance to the photograph of Charles Vernon.
‘Shit,’ Richter said again. ‘We’ll have to try the other side of the park.’
He reached the seafront, swung the car to the right, then right again and drove up the one-way street that lay to the west of the Parc del Pescador. There were fewer pedestrians on that road, and again they checked them out and again they saw nobody that looked anything like Vernon.
‘Where’s the cybercafe?’ Richter asked. ‘Maybe he’s still in the building.’
Moore directed him down one of the side streets.
Richter stopped the car on the side of the road where Moore told him to pull in, and they both got out and walked over to the other side of the street where the illuminated windows of the cafe beckoned. Richter opened the door and checked inside, but there was nobody sitting at the keyboards who could possibly have been Charles Vernon.
‘He’s gone,’ Richter said unnecessarily, jogging back across the street to the car.
‘Now what?’ Moore asked.
Richter started the car and pulled away from the kerb, keeping the speed down and looking carefully down every side street that they passed. Then he had a thought.
‘Have you got that list of hotels you printed?’
Moore nodded.
‘Yup, right here,’ he replied. ‘You got an idea?’
‘Just a passing straw that I’m clutching at,’ Richter said. ‘My guess is that Vernon wouldn’t want to be on the streets any longer than he had to every time he visited a cybercafe, so what’s the nearest cheap hotel to where we are now? According to Baker back in London, he’s used a different cybercafe every time he’s visited the Dark Web since this situation blew up, so maybe he’s been moving around the town frequently, not staying in one place for more than a day or so, and just picking out hotels close to cybercafes.’
‘Or maybe he just found one hotel that’s pretty much in the centre. Take the next on the left and go straight,’ Moore added. ‘There’s a hotel on the right about a hundred yards along that road. That’s the closest.’
Richter made the turn as instructed. It was a two-way street, and as he turned into it he saw a Vauxhall saloon, three up, heading towards him fairly slowly. The three men inside it seemed to be paying more attention to their surroundings, to the few people on the pavements, than they were to the road conditions.
‘I think we may have company,’ Richter said. ‘The Vauxhall on English plates.’
‘That’s what it looks like,’ Moore agreed. ‘They look more Middle Eastern than English,’ he added, ‘though these days you can’t tell.’
‘If they’re here for the same reason as us, they may be planning on Vernon having a really serious accident, if what Simpson told us is correct. Wilmot claimed he’d been working with the Syrians, and the man he was in contact with was really unhappy that Vernon had skipped the country, apparently because he knew about TRAIT. He’s probably just a loose end that they want to snip off.’
‘So you reckon it’s a hit team in that car?’
‘I don’t know, but possibly,’ Richter agreed. ‘If it is, at least they haven’t found him yet, so we still have time to grab him. And Simpson was very clear about that too. Whatever we do, and however we do it, we have to haul Vernon back to the UK, sitting in the back seat looking at the view, kicking and screaming or bound and gagged, whichever works. But we are definitely going to take him back.’
Without appearing to do so, he checked out the occupants of the Vauxhall as it drove past in the opposite direction. They could have been three entirely innocent British visitors to Spain, but to him they looked all of a type, and that type did not fit the description of ‘tourist.’ And as the car passed him, a sudden glint of steel through the rear passenger window seemed to confirm his suspicions. It was only the briefest of glimpses, but what it looked like more than anything else was the barrel of a compact automatic weapon.
‘I think I just saw the rear seat passenger in that car holding a Uzi or maybe a MAC-10,’ he said, and Moore snapped his head around to look.
‘I don’t see anything,’ the American said, ‘but that doesn’t mean you didn’t see it.’
Richter was watching the rear-view mirrors very carefully as the distance between the two vehicles increased, and he gave a sudden exclamation as something unexpected happened.
The driver of the Vauxhall suddenly accelerated hard and steered the car down one of the side streets on the right-hand side of the road.
Richter reacted instantly, spinning the steering of the Peugeot anticlockwise to the limit of its travel and feeding in power to the front wheels as he did so. The car performed a screeching U-turn and then Richter accelerated hard. Almost immediately, he braked and swung the car down the same side street he’d just seen the Vauxhall drive into.
The British-plated vehicle had come to a stop about seventy yards in front of him on the right-hand side of the road, the passenger’s door standing wide open. There was no immediate sign of the occupants.
‘They must’ve seen something,’ he said, braking the Peugeot to a stop about twenty feet behind the other car.
Immediately, he and Moore climbed out, weapons in their hands.
‘Which way?’ Moore asked.
‘I don’t know.’
There appeared to be nobody else in the street, but there were three or four narrow alleyways between the buildings on the right, possibly leading to side doors or hidden entrances, or perhaps acting as links to adjoining streets. The only thing that made sense was that the three men from the Vauxhall must have seen Vernon – or somebody they assumed was Vernon – and had pursued him down one of these alleyways.
The trouble was, Richter had no idea which one.
Then a shot rang out from somewhere close by.
‘The middle one,’ Richter said, pointing to where he thought the sound of the shot had come from, and running straight across to the entrance to the alleyway. He didn’t go down it, because that would probably have been a very efficient way of getting himself killed, but instead slamme
d to a halt by the stone wall on one side of it and then peered cautiously into the darkness, his Glock pointed at the ground but ready for immediate use.
Then both he and Moore heard pounding footsteps overlaid with panting as somebody tried to catch their breath and run at the same time.
Seconds later, a figure burst out of the alleyway next to the one where Richter was standing.
He moved, but Moore was quicker. He grabbed the running man with his left hand and swung him in a short vicious parabola against the stone wall, and at the same time lifted his Glock to point at the figure’s head. The man grunted with the pain of the impact, then tried to get away, despite the silent but very visible threat of the pistol.
‘Let me go,’ the man gasped, in English. ‘They’re trying to kill me.’
‘Vernon?’ Richter said.
‘What? Yes. I’m Vernon.’
‘Good. Get him in the car.’
Moore half-dragged the stooped figure down the street towards the Peugeot.
As he did so, Richter heard more pounding feet and eased the side of his head around the corner, just enough to see down the alleyway. One man was heading his way, arms pistoning and a pistol clutched in his right hand.
It would have been an easy shot for Richter, but he already knew there’d been three people in the Vauxhall, and if he fired the other two would probably be on him in seconds. They’d be bound to follow the sound of the shot. So he decided a silent option made more sense.
He transferred his Glock to his left hand, waited until the footsteps were almost on him, then locked his right arm rigid and swung it sideways at what he reckoned was neck height. In the vernacular of martial arts, the move is sometimes called a clothesline, because the effect is exactly that: like running into a clothesline.
Keeping the Glock in his right hand would have increased the momentum of the blow, but he didn’t want to risk dropping the pistol. And a professional never drops his weapon.
The sideways swing of Richter’s arm coincided almost precisely with the running figure’s emergence from the alley, and the result was sudden and catastrophic. The unyielding bone of the outside of his forearm caught the running man just below the chin, crushing his larynx and windpipe. His legs carried the lower part of his body forward a couple of steps, then he crashed backwards, the pistol falling from his hand and the back of his skull smashing into the ground with what sounded to Richter like terminal force. Dead or unconscious, either worked for him.
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