SAVING HARRY a gripping crime thriller you won’t want to put down

by Dan Latus

He walked on steadily, calculating the odds and taking stock, until he was way past his hotel. What had he lost, and what did he still have? How long had he got? And could he survive after a day like this?

  Not here he couldn’t. He was in no doubt about that. He had to get out fast, and he would have to do it alone and unaided. Asking for help could put him in even greater jeopardy.

  Chapter Four

  On foot, Harry Stone made it out of Starý Smokovec. By the time he reached Poprad, a dozen miles away as the crow flies but several further the way he went, it was late in the evening. Keeping off the main road had made the journey even longer than it needed to have been. He had walked for hours and he wasn’t in great shape. He was bruised and physically and mentally exhausted. Every part of his body hurt, and his head hurt even more. But he had made it.

  Poprad was a substantial Slovak town in farm country, a regional capital with a population of 50,000. Notwithstanding local pride and best efforts, it wasn’t a picturesque place, or one of much historical interest either. But it had been part of the EU for many years now, so it should have all the facilities to be expected of a modern rural service centre. Harry was counting on that.

  He entered the town cautiously, on full alert but doing his best to be inconspicuous. Not like the old days, he thought, with a wry smile. Thank God! In the old days, in a town like this, as soon as a stranger set foot over the threshold, somebody would have reported them to the authorities. Now he could mingle invisibly with the sprinkling of tourists wandering around the place as they broke their journey on their way to somewhere more appealing.

  There was no other big town in the region, and all roads passed through Poprad. It was the obvious place for someone in his position to go. So he kept well away from the centre and its shops, restaurants and cafes. He also gave the 24/7 Tesco on the edge of town a miss, even though it was one of the few retail outlets still open at that time of day. They would be looking for him somewhere like that.

  He didn’t feel hungry, but it was a long time since he had eaten or drunk anything, and he knew he ought to do something about it. He bought bread buns, cheese and a bottle of water from a small convenience store that was busy with local people. Night workers, they looked like, cleaners and maintenance crews. Some of them were perhaps staff from the nearby hospital on a break. He sat amongst them, on one of several benches arranged around an ornate fountain and pool, and ate his makeshift supper.

  His spirits reviving, it was time to think about what to do next. If he could only get out, his escape route was clear. It had long been planned. He had always been realistic enough to know this day would come, one day. Now here it was. Time to go.

  First, though, he had to get out of this town. His escape route didn’t begin in Poprad.

  The town was a regional transport hub. As well as being the start of a tourist railway into the Tatras, it had the main railway line from Bratislava to Kosice passing through it. But he couldn’t risk going anywhere near the railway station. Or the bus station either. They were bound to be watched. For the same reason, he had to avoid car hire agencies. His need for transport would have to be met some other way.

  Having finished eating, he went back into the convenience store and bought a small backpack, some toiletries, a shirt and a few other little things to put in it. He knew from experience that you couldn’t afford to neglect your appearance if you were on the run. You had to keep yourself reasonably clean and tidy if you wanted to avoid attracting unwanted attention.

  Then he went looking for a truck park. He found a small one in a quiet vicinity on the edge of town, little more than a patch of gravelled wasteland accommodating half a dozen wagons. What he was looking for was a truck with a home address in Bratislava, the national capital. He found three. The first driver he approached shook his head and indicated that he was settling down in his cab for the night. He had used up his EU-imposed quota of hours for the day.

  The second truck had its engine running and the driver seemed to be sorting out some paperwork before setting off. He nodded and welcomed Harry on board, even before he had been shown any money.

  Harry hesitated, his antennae bristling. It seemed too easy. No explanation had been needed. No payment demanded. When the driver picked up his phone to make a call, Harry signalled he needed five minutes. The driver nodded. No problem. Harry walked away briskly. Something hadn’t felt right.

  He didn’t go far.

  A couple of minutes later a black BMW turned off the road and stopped at the edge of the patch of gravel where the trucks were parked. Harry’s pulse quickened. It could be the car he’d seen at the hotel in Starý Smokovec. It was certainly the same model.

  When two men got out and went to see the truck driver, he knew it was the same one. He’d been right to be suspicious. His instincts hadn’t let him down. He wondered how much the truck driver had been paid.

  Two doors had been left open when the men got out of the car. In the glow from the interior lighting, the driver could be seen sitting behind the wheel, watching his colleagues. Harry made his mind up fast. It was now or never. No time to consider the pros and cons.

  He picked up a rock as big as a honeydew melon. The BMW, its engine purring nicely in the evening cool, the driver’s eyes on his colleagues standing next to the truck, was a mere ten yards away. Harry reached it in a couple of seconds.

  He jerked the driver’s door open wide. Before the man could react or even turn around in his seat, Harry smashed the rock into the side of his head. Then he grabbed him by the shirt collar, dragged him out of the car and flung him to the ground.

  The car was an automatic, and it wasn’t in Park. It was already starting to edge forwards now the driver’s foot had left the brake pedal. Harry swung himself inside and took command of the steering wheel. A quick glance in the mirror showed the men who had gone to see the truck driver racing back. He jammed his foot down on the accelerator and the car took off, the open doors swinging wildly until the force of the violent turn onto the road slammed them shut.

  It was an easy car to drive. You just put your foot down and it went — fast. A couple of hundred yards down the road, he turned onto the E50 and headed westwards towards Zilina. Once past there, he would turn south for Bratislava. He knew the road well.

  Done it! He laughed wildly and pounded the steering wheel with both hands. He was out of there, free — and still alive!

  Chapter Five

  As he calmed down and settled into the drive, he began to think. He had plenty to reflect on.

  For a start, he was still perplexed, as well as shocked, about the situation he had found in Starý Smokovec. So much violence. It didn’t make sense.

  Well, that was wrong. It made perfect sense from the point of view of someone not wanting the gathering to happen or the information he was bringing to be discussed and disseminated. He could make a pretty good guess as to who that someone might have been.

  What he didn’t know, but could also make a good guess at, was how exactly the meeting had been compromised. Top secret, and in an out-of-the-way location, yet someone had found out about it in advance — and acted. There had to have been a leak. Either an inadvertent mistake, or information had been passed on deliberately. There was no other explanation.

  That was as far as he could get for now. He would just have to put it all on hold and focus on activating the long-dormant escape plan. His intention was to slip off the game board. For that to happen, he needed to focus and concentrate.

  One thing had to change, unfortunately. He could no longer head for Bratislava. The truck driver would have passed on the information that that was where he was going. Now he would have to go further, to Vienna probably.

  Mind you, that would be no problem at all in this beautiful and expensive new car he had just acquired. He chuckled.

  And Vienna International, or Flughafen Wien, was a better airport anyway from which to start his journey.

  First, though, he wanted to let Johann
e know what was happening.

  He drove fast for a couple of hours before stopping to phone her. By then he was pretty well exhausted, but he was past Bratislava and feeling a lot safer. If they’d picked up another car to give chase, it hadn’t out-sped the BMW, and all they could know was that Bratislava had been his destination. That was where they would look for him.

  There was no answer to his call. Disappointed, he sent her a brief text, saying he needed her to contact him. He hoped that would do it. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she would realise the need was urgent.

  He was off the road, parked in a well-lit service area on the autobahn. It was tempting to get his head down, close his eyes and get some sleep. Very tempting. He really needed it.

  No, it was too risky. He started the engine and made his way back onto the autobahn. The people chasing him wouldn’t be put off by the car being parked in a well-lit, public place. If the car was spotted, wherever it was, he would be done for. No one and nothing would stop them finishing the job they had set out to do. Not in the minute or so a hit would take. They would take the risk and gamble on getting away afterwards.

  The international airport in Schwechat, ten miles from downtown Vienna, wasn’t far away now. He would keep going until he reached it, then he could park in a long-stay car park and get his head down for an hour or two. He badly needed to do that if he was to keep firing on all cylinders.

  It worked out fine. He slept for two hours and woke up at 6 a.m. a different man. A bit stiff, admittedly, but clear-headed.

  There was no answering text on his phone. He frowned and called Johanne again. Same thing. No answer.

  Where the hell was she?

  Logically, he knew she could be anywhere, just like him, but he had expected her to be in Kiev still. Perhaps some emergency had come up? It was possible. But she should still respond to his calls and texts. It was unlike her to be out of reach.

  However, they had allowed for this sort of situation. He knew what he had to do. Johanne knew too.

  He spent a little time on his phone looking for flights. Not surprisingly, he couldn’t find any that went direct. It looked as though his best bet would be to fly to Frankfurt, and then go with Lufthansa as far as he could. He would have options after that. Plenty of short flights on small planes to choose from, as well as ferries.

  He made the bookings. Then he sat back to do some more thinking. Henderson would be waiting to hear from him, but Henderson could wait. There was a leak, and he couldn’t rule out the possibility that it was somebody close to Henderson.

  Alternatively, of course, it could be someone in the US camp, or one of the other allies. He sighed and shook his head. He had no idea who it had been, not that it really mattered at this stage.

  He had two overriding priorities. One was looking after himself and surviving to fight another day. The other was making contact with Johanne. He had no space in his head for anything else right now, and no time either.

  At last, while he was waiting in Frankfurt Airport, he made contact. No names. And minimal exchanges.

  ‘Been busy,’ she said crisply. ‘Like you.’

  ‘You heard?’

  ‘Yes. Are you hurt?’

  ‘No. I just wanted to let you know the time has come. I’m bailing out.’

  ‘Understood. See you soon.’

  ‘Take care.’

  He sighed with relief and finished his coffee at a gentle pace. Then he got up and headed for the departure gate. She was all right, and she knew what was happening. He could carry on as planned, without further worry.

  Chapter Six

  London, June 2018.

  Giles Henderson was a worried man. Things had clearly gone very badly in Slovakia and it was down to him. He had set the meeting up, so it was up to him to organise the recovery. He was responsible, and he didn’t like being responsible for things that had gone wrong.

  The planned debriefing in Slovakia of his Donbass agent had been a total disaster. Mass murder had ensued. His American colleagues were understandably apoplectic about the loss of their man attending the supposedly secret meeting. Then there was his own man, who had been approaching the end of a fine career in the service of his country. Losing him like that was extremely painful.

  To be honest, he wasn’t too upset about the loss of the others, the representatives from Kiev and the Donbass region itself. They were not men with whom he had ever had any dealings, so there was no sense of personal loss in their case. All the same, they had been there, and they had gone down, at a meeting he had called.

  Then there was the information the meeting had been convened to discuss. What on earth had happened to the report that had been the only item on the agenda?

  From his point of view, the only good thing to have come out of the disaster was that somehow his Donbass agent, Harry Stone, seemed to have survived. At least, his corpse hadn’t been amongst the dead in that damned hotel.

  He wasn’t entirely sure how that had come about, because he had heard next to nothing from, or of, Stone. The Americans, of course, were complaining bitterly. They had concluded in their simplistic way that as Stone was the survivor, it must have been him who had leaked the details of the meeting. Henderson didn’t buy that. Not for one moment.

  Knowing Harry Stone as he did and had over a great many years, Giles Henderson believed something quite different. Stone was simply an extremely good field agent, and survivability was one of his greatest professional assets. Somehow, and not for the first time in a long career, Stone had apparently taken better care of himself than the others had managed to.

  Why aren’t I surprised? he thought with a wry smile. Harry Stone, eh? What’s he like?

  Even so, the slaughter of everyone else attending the meeting was a problem for him to ponder and in time, to explain to those colleagues on a higher pay grade than his own. The minister constitutionally responsible for the department’s activities would have to be told and placated as well. Not a pleasant prospect. But it would have to be done and would be.

  Something else bothering him was that he knew so little of the content of the material Stone had somehow acquired in the Donbass. Oh, he knew the subject matter. That had been the whole point of the meeting. But that was all he knew. He had no details. Nor did he know where the file was now, not even if Stone still had it.

  Come to that, where was Stone? Depending on how you looked at it, the man had resigned, retired or gone AWOL. Take your pick. Whichever the case, he simply didn’t know where Stone was, or what his real intentions were.

  All he had had was a rather cryptic text message purporting to come from Harry Stone, which said he had packed it all in. Like the Americans, Stone believed there had been a leak. Unlike them, however, Stone knew it wasn’t him who had done the leaking and he was furious about it. No more than me, Giles Henderson thought grimly.

  So, he concluded, there was a lot of work to do — and a lot of problems to sort out as a matter of urgency.

  In the weeks that followed, Henderson had no success in locating Harry Stone. The only communication he received from him remained the brief text message sent from somewhere near Bratislava. Thereafter, nothing. Not even a signal from his phone that would have given away his location. Not a thing. Stone had, to all intents and purposes, vanished. And deliberately so, it seemed.

  He considered putting a team together to try to find Stone but decided against it. The cost of that sort of investigation would be high, and there was no guarantee of success. It would be difficult to justify in today’s financial climate. Besides, he had plenty of other things to do.

  On balance, it was better to wait for Stone to contact him. Intuitively, he felt that would happen, whatever the man had said about quitting. He put that down to anger and exhaustion. Somehow, he just couldn’t bring himself to believe that Harry Stone was done with the department. There was too much unfinished business.

  Chapter Seven

  Harry Stone’s cabin, May 2018.r />
  For a time, Harry was happy. He caught up on some sleep, aired the cabin out and went grocery shopping to fill the freezer and larder. Then he settled down to wait. For Johanne.

  As well as the domestic business, he sent Giles Henderson a letter via his solicitor in London. He asked the solicitor to forward the enclosed letter unopened and without a covering letter. He also specified that it should be sent in a plain envelope, not in one of the firm’s luxuriant, crested ones.

  That was about as much as he could do to keep his whereabouts secret. He just hoped it would be enough.

  In the letter to Henderson, he repeated what he had said in the text: that the meeting in Starý Smokovec had obviously been compromised by a leak. He himself had been lucky to escape the fate that awaited everyone else attending the meeting.

  The letter should be taken as notice that he was retiring from the Service with immediate effect. Furthermore, he would look after his own personal security, thank you very much. He should be left strictly alone, he warned, or there would be consequences. He left what those might be unspecified.

  He sat back and continued to wait for Johanne.

  He hadn’t forgotten the package he had carried all the way from Slovakia, and before that from Donbass but so far as he was concerned, dealing with it could wait a little longer. Henderson would see it differently, of course, but that was his problem. Harry felt fully justified. He had done enough. More than enough.

  Johanne didn’t arrive. He had expected her, and soon, but it didn’t happen. Their understanding had long been that if and when one of them called to say they had pulled the plug, the other would follow. They were linked, professionally as well as personally. If one was in trouble, the other probably was too, regardless of whether or not he or she knew it. The call to run had to be heeded.

  Now he’d pulled the plug, but Johanne still hadn’t come.

  Days slipped by. No problem at first. He knew getting out might be difficult for her, depending on the circumstances. Something hot could be happening, or else she could be in an awkward location or operational phase. Whatever. Days lost were not necessarily a big problem. She could still be on her way.