The Hunter

by WOOD TOM

  ‘Then the Cold War ends, and guess what happens? Hey, you’ve done it, you’ve won battle. It’s over. Your hand gets shook and your back gets patted and the thanks last as long as they take to give. And before long you’re forgotten, obsolete, a relic. You keep your job, but no one really wants you to do it any more. Your expertise is worthless now because you actually won your fight. And what are you left with? No money. You got paid peanuts and didn’t care. You took the job because you loved your country. But what happens when you find your country doesn’t love you back? What do you have left?’ He took a deep breath.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ Ferguson said. ‘Nothing. That’s what. You’re surplus, a has-been. Old. You don’t speak Arabic; you speak Russian. What good are you now?’

  Sykes’s shocked expression told Ferguson what he already knew, that he should have kept quiet. Ferguson grabbed his glass of Burgundy and took a big swallow.

  ‘This isn’t about the money,’ Sykes said eventually. ‘You were never going to sell those missiles to our military, were you? You want to get revenge. You want to get back at Uncle Sam for forgetting about you.’

  Ferguson put his glass down. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t care enough about my country any more to want revenge. This is about the money. I want to be reimbursed for all my years of loyal service when I did care.’

  ‘Well, I’m not helping you do it if it means selling those missiles to fucking North Korea or worse.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong again, Mr Sykes. You’re going to do exactly as you’re ordered to the absolute best of your abilities. Do you know why? Because you’ve been party to multiple murders. American citizens are dead thanks to you, or had you forgotten? The only way out of this is through lethal injection.’

  Sykes glared hard at Ferguson.

  Ferguson drained the last of the wine. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Mr Sykes. Once you’ve sold your soul to the devil you can’t then ask for it back.’

  CHAPTER 67

  Nicosia, Cyprus

  Saturday

  02:59 CET

  Exercise always cleared his head and focused his mind. The simple pleasure of physical exertion was one that most people did everything in their power to avoid. Reed could not understand that, but he could not understand most people anyway. He grunted. He had his toes resting on his room’s high bed to increase the resistance of his one-arm push ups. He breathed hard. Sweat dripped from his nose.

  His smartphone flashed, breaking his concentration and interrupting his rhythm. He squeezed his eyes shut to regain his focus, determined only to stop for death itself. Training was about beating his body with his mind, and with a body so perfectly honed it was never easy.

  He fought on – breathe out, push, breathe in, lower, repeat, repeat, repeat. Finally he collapsed, no longer able to continue. He lay with his face on the carpet for a minute while he regained his breath.

  All the lights were off in his hotel room, and he operated only from his natural night vision. The phone felt heavy when he lifted it, but he knew the fatigue would pass shortly. Reed was at the peak of physical fitness. The new message was from his most recent client. He sat down on the end of the bed to read it.

  Another contract. Reed absorbed the details and considered for a minute. The stipulations of the job required him to go to Africa immediately, but the target could only be dispatched once Reed had been given the green light from the client, who noted the target to be an easy feat for Reed’s skills. The Englishman shook his head. The appeal to his vanity was particularly transparent, even from a client he guessed to be American.

  The idea of taking another contract so soon after killing five others was not something Reed would normally do. He needed to return to the Firm’s employment as soon as possible. He could only take so long an absence at one time without it creating problems. Plus, he did not particularly like the sound of flying to Tanzania and then waiting until the client gave him the go-ahead. The prospect of another sizeable donation to his bank account overruled any reservations.

  Reed composed a reply and sent it to the client. He checked his watch. It was too late to travel, so he decided to sleep for a few hours first. He took a pillow from the bed and placed it on the floor. He lay on his back, palms flat by his hips, knife within easy reach.

  He woke precisely three hours later and phoned the front desk, asking for travel arrangements to be made on his behalf. He then showered, dressed, and packed his things. He checked out and collected the flight details from the concierge.

  He climbed into a taxi in front of the hotel and told the driver to take him to the airport. Reed had never been to Tanzania before. If nothing else, the trip would broaden his horizons.

  *

  As Reed’s taxi pulled away from the kerb, a man on the opposite side of the street lowered his newspaper. He was dressed like a tourist: shorts, T-shirt, sunglasses, and ball cap. He waited until the taxi crossed an intersection and headed into the distance before dropping the newspaper into a trash can and crossing the road. It was a warm morning.

  The man took the cap from his head as he entered the hotel. He walked through the spacious lobby and took the elevator as though he were a guest returning to his room. He used the key card he had stolen from a maid the day before to open a hotelroom door. Inside, he closed the door behind him and reached underneath the bed frame. After a moment his hand gripped the device and pulled it free from the tape that held it in place.

  The device consisted of two components: a small radio receiver and an attached audio recorder. Sitting down on the bed, Victor scrolled through the noise-activated recordings, ignoring the sounds of a maid’s vacuuming, a door being slammed, and several TV news broadcasts. It was the last recording that he listened to twice, making notes on a small pad of paper.

  He unscrewed the caps at either end of the room’s telephone receiver and opened up the case. Inside, the ends of two new wires were tightly wrapped around exposed sections of copper wire running the length of the receiver. Those wires formed a circuit that transmitted the sound waves of a voice as fluctuating electrical currents between the phone’s speaker and microphone.

  The new wires were in turn attached to a small transmitter the size of a bottle top fixed to the telephone casing with superglue. The transmitter worked by emitting the electrical signal running through the wires as radio waves. Because the transmitter was so small, the signal sent was weak and could only be picked up from short distances. To be sure of an excellent recording, Victor had placed the receiver only a few feet away beneath the bed.

  He removed the transmitter and wires from the phone before fixing the receiver back together. Victor left the hotel room and made his way back to the lobby. Outside, the keycard, radio receiver, and transmitter joined the newspaper.

  The night of the explosion Victor had recognized the assassin straight away. There could have been be no mistaking him. No one who witnessed a bomb blast behaved like that. Not unless they also happened to be the bomber. He had walked away casually, seemingly without a care in the world. He was dressed in khaki pants and a white long-sleeved shirt. He looked like a tourist, not a killer. That was the point.

  Victor saw the telltale signs of countersurveillance in the assassin’s manner, even though he believed his job to be complete. He never walked at the same pace for long, sometimes crossing the road for no apparent reason, sometimes crossing back suddenly. He frequently paused to look in shop windows, to check in the reflection for anyone who might be following him. He was good, very good.

  Victor had kept pace with him, mirroring his movements, staying out of sight. He stayed close but not too close, his face lost in the crowds that lay between them. Despite his precautions, the killer wasn’t as thorough as he could have been. But letting your guard down when the job was done and the danger past was a mistake everyone made at some point.

  Victor corrected himself. Nearly everyone.

  Once he had discovered where the assas
sin was staying, Victor had bribed an unhappy-looking concierge to find out which room was his. After stealing the key card, Victor had bugged the room when its occupant was eating dinner in the hotel restaurant. Now he knew that his mark was leaving Cyprus and where he was heading, even which flight he would be taking.

  That he was leaving proved Victor’s enemies believed he’d died in the bomb blast. He was no longer a target. With such extensive fire damage, the authorities might never be able to conclude that only one out of the two guests were present in the room at the time of the blaze. All Victor had to do was get off the island and disappear. Even if his enemies eventually realized he was still alive, he would be ten thousand miles away with a new face and a new life. They would never find him.

  The plan had been to kill whoever wanted him dead, to erase the threat, to stay alive. Now he didn’t need to do that. He could live his life without expecting an assassin’s bullet.

  He’d won.

  Victor hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. He sat in the back, silently staring out the window. He thought about where he might go, thinking of those countries where he had never set foot, where he had always wanted to go. For prudence it would be best to go to somewhere in South America first. His Spanish was good, and he would quickly become fluent. He could pay for a new identity there, a genuine identity, become a citizen of Argentina maybe. Then from there, Who knew where he would go?

  But he wasn’t going to South America, sensible as that idea would be. Because there was something he needed first. Something he couldn’t live the rest of his life without. Something he’d never wanted before.

  Revenge.

  CHAPTER 68

  Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA

  Saturday

  08:12 EST

  ‘I always wanted to ride when I was younger,’ Procter said. His arms were folded and resting on top of a sturdy wooden fence. In the field on the other side grazed two bay quarter horses. ‘Never got the chance though. Now I’m too old and too fat to start.’ He didn’t look unhappy about this declaration. ‘They’re amazing creatures, full of character and grace.’

  Alvarez stood to the side of Procter. ‘All I see is two big dumb animals eating grass.’

  Procter laughed and looked at him. ‘Never wanted to be a cowboy, then?’

  ‘I hear horse meat tastes pretty good.’

  They were in the heart of rural Virginia, farm country. Their cars were parked on a narrow road flanked by fields. No other vehicles had driven by so far. The sun was shining, but the air was crisp. Procter was dressed in jeans and a casual shirt underneath his coat. Alvarez wore a suit and overcoat. He’d barely worn anything else for weeks.

  Procter turned around. ‘How was the flight?’

  ‘Long.’

  ‘I can tell. You look worn out.’

  ‘I’m tired as dead dog.’

  Procter rubbed his hands together. ‘You should try going to bed. I hear it’s the recommended cure for tiredness.’

  ‘I’ll sleep later.’

  ‘I’ve got a thermos in the car. You want a cup of coffee?’

  Alvarez shook his head. ‘I’m trying to reduce my caffeine intake.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s not good for the body.’

  ‘And how’s that working out for you?’

  ‘Not so good.’

  Procter turned around again and leaned his considerable weight against the fence. The wood made a loud, threatening creak.

  ‘You didn’t hear that,’ he said.

  ‘Hear what?’

  The associate deputy director had always been a chunky 3XL kind of guy, but without a suit to thin him out a bit he looked like he was carrying more weight than was good for two people, let alone one. Alvarez, who measured his own body fat in the single percentiles, saw a heart attack waiting to happen.

  ‘It’s Saturday,’ Procter stated, ‘the weekend.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know what a weekend is?’

  ‘I used to.’

  ‘What’s on your mind that couldn’t wait until Monday?’

  ‘A woman.’

  Procter smiled. ‘My dad used to say behind the scowl of every man lurks a member of the fairer sex.’

  ‘That’s probably true,’ Alvarez said. ‘But this isn’t just any woman.’ He drew a notebook from inside his coat and opened it. ‘Her name’s Rebecca Sumner, aka Rachel Swanson, American citizen, used to be one of ours, formerly of the Directorate of Intelligence working the Europe office until around four months ago.’

  Procter’s face became serious. ‘The woman who met with Ozols’s killer?’

  Alvarez nodded. ‘She was a good analyst, a hard worker, on the rise, ambitious, all that shit. She resigned her post to work in the private sector. On the surface nothing more than a government employee off to land a bigger paycheck. Only she didn’t take a job with any of the usual suspects. In fact, she left the country under a false passport three weeks after leaving her desk with the company. She went to France and rented a small apartment in Marseilles, paid for six months’ rent in advance. In cash.’

  Procter looked sceptical. ‘On an analyst’s take home?’

  ‘If it was,’ Alvarez said, ‘then I’m in the wrong job and you can take my verbal resignation right now. But no, there were no withdrawals from her bank account to match the deposit. Someone else gave her the money. She had no means of employment in France, but monthly donations were made into her US bank account to the amount of her former salary.’

  ‘No kidding?’

  Alvarez flipped over a couple of pages. ‘On Wednesday, French police entered her apartment and discovered a few things of note, such as a sink full of burned documents and communications equipment. Half her clothes were gone. Drawers were left opened. The front door hadn’t been locked.’

  ‘What spooked her?’

  ‘A neighbour confirmed she left her apartment in the early hours of Friday morning. Before she left, Sumner made a couple of calls to John Kennard’s cell phone. He was already dead by then, of course, and Sumner didn’t leave a message. It was the first time she’d ever phoned him. They had never worked together at the agency or trained together at the Farm. They lived twenty miles apart, had different social circles, no family in common, no reason to explain why she had his phone number. Seems when he didn’t answer her call, she packed her bags and disappeared.’

  ‘To Paris.’

  Alvarez nodded. ‘Her cousin owns an apartment there that she was using. Anyway, she’s there less than a day when French authorities try to apprehend a suspect they believed to be the man responsible for the hotel massacre. He was seen entering the building with Sumner. Obviously we know what happened next.

  ‘The killer knows Sumner, who knows Kennard. For argument’s sake, let’s say they’ve been working together. Kennard was in Paris with me working on getting the location of those missiles from Ozols. He had access to all my notes. More important, he was there when Ozols gave me the time and location of the meet. Maybe he passed that on to Sumner, who did the same to the killer. A nice arrangement. Efficient. Fewer risks.

  ‘But something goes wrong because Kennard is killed, which spooks Sumner into leaving Marseilles. She thinks she’s next, so she’s meets with Ozols’s killer, who survived an assassination attempt. Hoyt drowns in the bath.’

  ‘A clean-up.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So who’s behind it?’

  ‘I don’t know for certain,’ Alvarez answered honestly. ‘I can’t see Sumner and Kennard, two young CIA employees, turning mercenary. Kennard maybe, but the fact that Sumner continued to receive a pay packet equalling her old salary tells me she could have been tricked into thinking she was part of a legit, albeit off the books, op.’

  ‘Only someone within the agency could pull that off,’ Procter stated. ‘You’ve got a suspect, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’ve no proof.’

  ‘Go on.’
>
  ‘Remember: Russian missiles, only six people knew about Hoyt. I’m one of them, a techie in Paris is another, and the rest are the four people in the briefing room when I gave my report.’

  ‘And I’m one of those,’ Procter said.

  Alvarez nodded.

  Procter blew out some air. He shook his head. ‘Old bastard’s retiring next year.’

  ‘Maybe he wants to add to his retirement fund.’

  Procter looked thoughtful. He didn’t speak for a long time.

  ‘You’ve done a good job, Antonio,’ he said eventually. ‘But given the sensitivity of what you’ve just told me, I don’t want you to speak of this to anyone again. That includes me.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m going to tell you this because I like you, not because you need to know,’ Procter explained. ‘I’ve known for some time that we had a problem in NCS, someone playing by their own rules. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I’ve had people looking into this whole thing for a while, from other angles.’ They watched a car drive past until it became small in the distance. ‘But I’ve never been able to get close before. And I never would have guessed Ferguson would be who I’m after, but now we might just have made that all-important break. You’ve helped immeasurably already, but you’re too close to this. You—’

  Alvarez scowled. He adjusted his footing. ‘Sir, don’t take me off this now when I’m this close to nailing this fucker. If Ferguson really is behind this and we get him, we’ll be able to catch Ozols’s killer next, then whoever murdered John. Everyone.’

  Procter put a hand on Alvarez’s shoulder. ‘I respect your dedication but you’ve done as much as you can. If it is Ferguson, then he knows you are on his trail. He’s probably got people watching everything you do.’