The Hunter

by WOOD TOM

  They took a more or less straight line, veering off only for trees in the way. After ten minutes Victor stood at the base of a rocky outcrop. There were no more footprints, but he could see the fallen snow at the bottom of the steep slope, disturbed rocks, exposed earth. Victor made his way upward, using the trees for support. He noticed he was wheezing, the coarse sound of his breathing getting louder as he climbed. He’d already pushed himself more than he should. He was injured; he needed to rest, for a few days at least, to give his body time to heal. Soon, he told himself.

  Just before the top of the hillock, Victor found the assassin’s hide. It looked like he had been there overnight. There was a discarded winter coat, a backpack, a two-litre bottle half-filled with urine, and a plastic bag full of excrement. The jacket was empty. Victor took the backpack, and slung it over one shoulder, his own bag over the other. He began following a second set of tracks, ones that came from the west, deeper into the forest. It had snowed in the last twelve hours, but no more than an inch. There still remained shallow depressions in the snow, more than deep enough for Victor to follow with ease.

  He came upon the assassin’s vehicle after forty minutes. A Toyota SUV, parked off-road. Victor searched through the side pockets of the backpack, found the keys, and unlocked it.

  He stopped suddenly, hand clutching his chest. He retched, tasting iron, coughing up blood. He stayed leaned over for a minute until the pain had subsided. He used a handful of snow to wash the blood from his mouth and used some more snow to hide the blood on the ground.

  There was nothing in the vehicle to identify the man who’d tried to kill him. The Toyota had a rental sticker fixed to both front and rear windows and rental documents in the glove box. It would have been rented in a false name, Victor was sure. He threw the two bags onto the back seat and started the engine. He gave the vehicle a few minutes to warm up before he carefully reversed out onto the road.

  He sighed heavily. Whoever wanted him dead had found out where he’d lived. An impossibility had it not just been dramatically proved. In the rear-view mirror Victor saw smoke from his burning chalet rising above the tree line. If whoever wanted him dead had found him here, they could find him anywhere.

  Whatever semblance of a life he’d made for himself was over.

  CHAPTER 22

  Paris, France

  Thursday

  15:16 CET

  Alvarez took a big slurp of his three-sugar black coffee and typed clumsily on the keyboard resting on his thighs. He sat with his feet up on the desk, shoes on the floor. A mostly empty plastic ballpoint was wedged between his teeth, slowly being chewed. He was in his temporary office of the CIA’s Paris station on the second floor of the US Embassy.

  The office was barely big enough for him and his desk and was so small he liked to refer to it as his shoe box. It was quiet, though, and Alvarez could do without distractions. Near to his feet sat a photograph of Christopher from the school nativity play. He’d been a shepherd. The little trouper had nailed it perfectly, even if the kids playing sheep couldn’t baa worth a damn.

  Tracking down Ozols’s killer was going nowhere fast. If he was travelling under Alan Flynn’s passport, then, according to the Czechs, he hadn’t left the country, but Alvarez thought it more likely he’d just switched passports and gone who knows where? Alvarez didn’t have the time or the manpower for a Europe-wide manhunt, so he had focused his efforts on investigating the seven dead shooters. If he could find out who hired them, maybe that would reveal enough about Ozols’s killer to lead to who hired him. Then maybe there would be a shot at getting the missiles or at least stopping the technology from ending up in the hands of America’s enemies.

  He’d discovered a lot over a couple of days. Mikhail Svyatoslav, who the killer had impersonated, had been a former member of the Spetsnaz. He served in Afghanistan during the eighties before doing a brief stint with the KGB. He got shown the door when the Cold War ended, and went freelance, mainly working the Eastern bloc, taking out the trash for crime lords and other scum.

  With him had been a few Hungarians, ex-mob by the looks of it, and some Serb irregulars, including a woman. Alvarez had to shake his head at that. In short, he had compiled a list of the world’s worst assholes from every cesspit from the Balkans to the Urals. Hired guns, ex-soldiers, mercenaries, killers. Two of the bastards were wanted for war crimes in Kosovo. It’s good that they’re dead, Alvarez thought. Only dead they couldn’t be questioned. They were a bunch of typical Eurotrash hitmen. Alvarez had expected nothing less.

  What he didn’t expect was to find out that one of the hitters was an American, James Stevenson, and a former US Army Ranger. Stevenson had even tried out for Delta but hadn’t made the grade – not only that, but he applied to get into the CIA after he dropped out of his unit, but once again didn’t make the cut. He had an aptitude for fieldwork, but he was a discipline problem waiting to happen, too much of a risk to go on the agency payroll. He got into the private sector through an old army buddy and was based out of Belgium. Stevenson did a lot of protection work and other unspecified jobs for a security firm in Brussels.

  On the computer screen Alvarez had bank records, phone records, e-mails, memos, even utility bills. They belonged to the recently-shot-twice-in-the-face James Stevenson, former soldier, former mercenary, former scumbag. The guy had deposited a huge amount of euros in cash into an account at a not-proneto-asking-difficult-questions type of bank. This had happened two weeks before he’d become closely acquainted with a pair of 5.7s.

  A quarter of that money had then been wired to seven separate bank accounts belonging to the other members of the team. Alvarez assumed they would each have received the same amount again after the job, with Stevenson pocketing half the total for himself. Now the money was sitting gathering interest in the name of dead guys.

  Who the hell had given Stevenson the cash in the first place? was what Alvarez wanted to know. Stevenson hadn’t been the shrewdest operator in the history of contract killings and had left several clues on the hard drive of his personal computer, a portable copy of which was now plugged into Alvarez’s laptop.

  Stevenson liked to keep things organized, and he had details of each of the other members of the team in a spreadsheet, complete with email addresses and phone numbers where appropriate. This information helped identify a couple of the more elusive corpses but didn’t help track down who had hired Stevenson.

  He referred to the job itself as ParisJob, a rather unimaginative title in Alvarez’s opinion, but Alvarez supposed it hardly mattered what it was called. The private security firm in Brussels, through which Stevenson had done several protection jobs, had already been grilled and claimed they had nothing to do with Paris. Alvarez believed them. They made too much money hiring out mercenaries legitimately to have had a hand in a risky contract killing.

  It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, though, to think that whoever had hired Stevenson had been a previous client for the security firm. The list of potential suspects was huge and spread worldwide: private businessmen, multinational corporations, Saudi oil barons, African governments. Stevenson himself had worked with all sorts of clients, any one of whom could be the person Alvarez was after, or maybe the individual had nothing to do with the firm. If so, the list of suspects had risen exponentially.

  Alvarez’s gut told him that whoever had hired Ozols’s killer had also hired Stevenson and his crew to kill him after the job’s completion. Maybe he’d screwed up, maybe it was to tie off loose ends – it hardly mattered. But if Alvarez was right, and the killer had figured out that it was his own employer who’d tried to have him killed, there was a chance he still had the information. That meant the missiles were still out there and still attainable.

  The phone rang and he answered with a blunt, ‘Yeah.’

  It was Noakes, one of the CIA officers who worked out of the embassy. Noakes worked in the basement along with all the other technophiles. He was an okay guy, if a little to
o hyperactive on caffeine and sugar for Alvarez to have much patience for.

  ‘I’ve got something you might be interested in,’ Noakes said with his usual hundred-mile-per-hour speak. ‘Stevenson tried to be sneaky with his hard drive and used a piece of software for deleting files securely. It’s the kind of thing my dad would use. I mean, for Christ—’

  Alvarez jumped in. ‘Let me guess, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.’

  ‘Not quite,’ Noakes said. ‘Or at least it doesn’t do it as well as it’s supposed to. I’ve managed to extract some of the more recently deleted files, but the older ones are going to take longer, if they’re still there somewhere, which I don’t know. They could be. Or they might truly be gone for good.’

  Alvarez held the phone a fraction farther away from his ear. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Noakes laughed. ‘Almost forgot to tell you. I’ve dug up some deleted e-mails between Stevenson and an unidentified person. We’ve only got the last few in what appears to be an ongoing conversation. They’re discussing payment for something called ParisJob.’

  ‘Good,’ Alvarez said. ‘Get those e-mails to me as soon as possible.’

  ‘On it now.’

  Alvarez put the phone down, pleased to be making some progress but aware of how little he really knew. He stood and walked to the window. Alvarez stared out through the glass, through Paris, to the person out there who’d started this whole mess.

  ‘Where are you?’ he whispered.

  CHAPTER 23

  Central Intelligence Agency, Virginia, USA

  Wednesday

  16:56 EST

  He looked like a kindly old gentlemen, face craggy but tanned, thin but still strong, hair grey but thick. Kevin Sykes watched Ferguson pour himself a cup of coffee from the brushed steel pot and take a sip. It was bitter, tasteless crap, but the caffeine content should at least meet with Ferguson’s approval.

  ‘Has the room been swept?’ Ferguson asked. He looked at Sykes through the reflection in the office window.

  Sykes nodded. ‘Just before you got here.’

  Ferguson turned around and said, ‘Then please explain to me what the fucking hell has just happened.’

  Sykes tensed visibly. ‘Tesseract showed up in Switzerland.’

  ‘And?’

  Sykes shook his head. ‘Swiss police found a body in the woods north of the village of Saint Maurice. My man.’

  Ferguson sighed heavily and sat down. ‘What about Tesseract?’

  ‘We don’t know for sure. The house was burned to the ground. I guess there’s a chance he was in it.’

  ‘That sounds to me like a fool’s hope, Mr Sykes. If he killed your man I doubt he would have managed to get himself cooked afterward.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m inclined to agree with you, sir.’

  ‘So he’s gone then, with the flash drive?’

  Sykes nodded.

  ‘Unless it was lost in the explosion. Which would take this from disastrous to catastrophic,’ Ferguson added. ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘A few hours ago,’ Sykes replied, half to himself. ‘Look, this isn’t over yet. We have leads. We—’

  ‘So why did you not inform me of this earlier?’

  ‘This is my show, and I’ve been handling it. Telling you before I knew the facts would have achieved nothing except to inflame the situation. There isn’t anything you could have put in motion that I have not already done.’

  Ferguson frowned. ‘And whom did you use this time?’

  ‘Carl McClury. He was ex-Special Activities Division with a solid record in wet work, before that Special Forces. He wasn’t prone to asking questions either. He was freelance, did contract work for the company. His cover was as a security guard at the Zürich embassy, so he was the perfect choice for a clean-up op.’

  ‘You have got to be joking.’ Ferguson stepped forward angrily. ‘You used a CIA employee? Are you out of your fucking mind?’

  ‘A former employee. He’s not on the books.’

  ‘Don’t get cute with me, Mr Sykes. It amounts to the same thing. What do you think will happen when they find that out?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Sykes answered confidently. ‘McClury was an agency contract shooter, and everyone knows it’s not unheard of for our contractors to do work for other people. Who knows who McClury may also have been doing jobs for? Europe’s a hell of a big place. Lots of potential clients. His death will go down as an occupational hazard. Plus,’ Sykes added, ‘there is nothing that connects McClury to Tesseract. There’ll be no evidence that the man who killed him was the same guy who shot up Paris. And let’s not forget that nothing connects us to McClury or Stevenson and his crew. We’re so clean we’re practically virgins.’

  Ferguson ran slim fingers through his hair. ‘I’m afraid I don’t share your confidence.’

  ‘There are at least two people between us and McClury, and neither know where their orders came from. McClury was payment on delivery, and he didn’t deliver. Before him, Stevenson was paid in advance in cash. Alvarez won’t be able to identify the man who paid him. And that money was shipped through the usual methods – intermediaries, offshore accounts, et cetera. No trail. We let Stevenson gather his own team, remember? We’ve got nothing to worry about.’

  ‘That remains to be seen.’

  ‘Yes, McClury’s death makes things awkward, but he was a shrewd operator. Meticulous. He won’t have left any tracks to follow like Stevenson. Besides, he was totally deniable alive, and he’s even more deniable dead.’

  ‘You forgot to add incompetent to his list of qualities.’

  ‘He had an impressive track record.’

  ‘Right up until the point he got himself killed.’

  ‘Be that as it may, he was the only choice for the op given its unique criteria. We needed someone fast, and disposable hitmen aren’t exactly easy to find.’

  It was a good retort but Ferguson waved a hand to dismiss the point, and Sykes swallowed down the anger that flared up inside him. He reminded himself who he was speaking to and didn’t press the issue further. Ferguson wasn’t just his boss, he was the architect of their scheme, and he demanded obedience at all times, even when he was blatantly wrong.

  ‘What are you going to do about McClury?’

  Sykes already had everything planned out in his mind. ‘It’ll be a day before he’s identified by the Swiss police, another day at the very least before anyone that matters realizes he’s former agency. That’s more than enough time for me to sour McClury’s reputation. I’ll make it seem as if he’d been taking contracts for some very objectionable people. The kind of people who don’t mind killing the hired help when they’re no longer useful. That’ll be sufficient to muddy any trail. No one will think to connect his death with what’s been happening elsewhere.’

  Ferguson seemed to take a long time placing his cup back down. He carefully wiped the corners of his mouth with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Somehow Sykes managed to stop himself from smiling. He knew he’d won the old bastard over. Ferguson just didn’t want to give Sykes any praise.

  ‘Things have gone bad so far, I accept that.’ A little humility would go down nicely, Sykes thought. ‘But this thing isn’t over yet. Tesseract is still out there, still with the flash drive I’m sure, so we have options. People are looking for him now, the French, Germans, Swiss, the agency. That’ll help us close in on him. And when we do, I’ve got some more contractors on standby. I know it’s risky, but we can make it look like someone else got to him first. Sure, things won’t have been as clean as we would have liked, but the end result will still be the same.’

  ‘There won’t be a next time.’

  ‘You don’t know that. It’s too early to give up.’

  Ferguson paused for a moment. ‘This is what we’re going to do instead.’

  ‘The plan is still good; we can make it work.’

  Ferguson continued. ‘I’m afraid I don’t share your optimi
stic evaluation of the circumstances. Your incompetence thus far has made it even more difficult to salvage this operation. Have you forgotten what’s at stake here? Because I haven’t.’

  ‘Of course I know what’s at stake. You’re the one who’s losing sight of the objective, not me.’

  ‘You arrogant little shit,’ Ferguson said with a smile. ‘I’ve spent my entire career moving from one mission to the next without letting anyone get in my way. I’ve never lost sight of an objective. You can count on that. But I’m not going to put my freedom in jeopardy because you seem incapable of killing one man.’

  ‘I think you overestimate Tesseract’s chances.’

  ‘I think you overestimate your own.’

  ‘Nothing has happened so far that cannot be fixed.’

  Ferguson shook his head. ‘Stand the contractors down immediately.’

  ‘What? No, we have to keep them ready.’

  ‘Tell me why exactly? May I remind you of the considerable efforts it took to track Tesseract down in the first place when he didn’t know we were trying? Now that he knows people are after him, do you think that’s going to make him easier to spot? Frankly, I’m amazed you think that’s a workable course of action at this time, and I’m even more amazed that you’re willing to put more people at risk after what just happened to McClury.’

  ‘What else are we going to do? Hope Tesseract dies of natural causes and leaves us the location of the missiles in his will?’

  ‘Comments like that do nothing to reassure me, Mr Sykes. You don’t leave me any choice. I’m taking it out of your hands.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean? What are you going to do?’

  ‘Something I should have done from the very beginning. Had I known this killer would be quite so adept at staying alive I never would have waited. I’m making a call.’