by Tom Wood
Going back to Switzerland had been a risk, but if he was going to continue living he would need the money. He had then flown back to Budapest and from there taken the train out to Debrecen as an extra precaution. It was important to keep moving, to avoid staying in one place for too long. The CIA was after him, and he had to do everything possible to hinder its efforts to track him down.
The CIA was extremely well funded and far-reaching, but it was not all-powerful. If he stayed mobile and did nothing to attract its attention, he was confident he could keep out of its crosshairs for now. How long that would remain true, though, he didn’t know.
The temperature was in the low thirties. Victor spent an hour at a coffee shop until he was sure he wasn’t being watched. He then moved on to another similar establishment, where he spent a second hour making doubly sure. A week ago he would have been satisfied that he wasn’t under surveillance, but now he didn’t fully trust his own abilities, especially when they were going up against an organization with twenty thousand full-time employees and many tens of thousands more foreign agents and assets.
Victor took a taxi into Debrecen’s city centre, passing through the clean streets with his eyes constantly watching the mirrors for potential tails. He knew his fixation with the mirrors unnerved the taxi driver, and Victor helped relax him by keeping the driver in conversation. They talked about soccer, women, politics, work.
‘What do you do for a living?’ the driver asked Victor.
They were driving past the grand building of an insurance firm, so Victor said, ‘I sell life insurance.’
The driver smirked. ‘Everybody dies, right?’
Victor kept his gaze on the wing mirror. ‘I seem to have that effect on people.’
Out of the taxi he spent some time walking with the crowds, stopping occasionally, doubling back often. He browsed through a number of stores, not buying anything but watching who came in after him and who was standing outside with a view of the door. When he was satisfied he wasn’t being shadowed he caught another taxi and sat in the back.
Victor climbed out fifteen minutes later in downtown Debrecen. Here the streets were quieter, and although it would be easier for a team to shadow him, it would also be easier for him to spot them. No one set off his threat radar. Another taxi took him back into the city centre and to his true destination.
The Internet cafe was of a fair size and pleasingly full of customers, some of whom smoked. Victor didn’t, but only because he was passively smoking more than enough nicotine to satisfy his craving. He was sure there would be a reply to his email from the broker; he just wasn’t sure what the reply would contain.
Victor sat down at the most sheltered terminal in front of an old PC. The flickering screen immediately made his eyes start to water. He could hear its noisy hard drive, half-humming, half-gurgling. Victor logged on to the message board. He noticed his heart rate was slightly up.
There was a message waiting for him.
He almost expected the computer to explode into pieces when he clicked to open it, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. A part of him almost wished it had.
You won’t want to call, but we need to speak. I can help you.
He hadn’t known what to expect, but it certainly hadn’t been that. He stared at the screen for a long time. It didn’t sound like the broker. There was no subtlety in the message. It was blunt, to the point, appealing for further communication. There was a phone number.
Had someone other than the broker sent the message? If the CIA had found him, maybe it had found the broker too and the message was a lure to trap him. Or if he’d been set up from the start, was this just another set-up in the making? Perhaps the change in tone was genuinely because of the unusual situation. He noticed he was getting a headache.
Victor had no true friends, no real allies, barely a handful of acquaintances. It had been one of the things that had kept him alive so long. The less contact he had with the world around him, the fewer potential points of compromise. Now that kind of protection had left him isolated, vulnerable. He was alone, on the run, with no clear idea why his hunters were after him. Regardless of the whys, he knew his chances of survival were diminishing with each passing hour.
Something had to change.
Victor was in no doubt about his own skill, but, though he hated to admit it, he was out of his depth. If things stayed the same he just wasn’t going to make it. He had been discovered twice, despite all his precautions, and he would be again. It might take weeks, even years. But how many times could he escape his enemies? Sooner or later he wouldn’t be fast enough.
His only lead had taken him nowhere. On his own he had no option other than waiting for the next attempt on his life. He needed help. And the only person offering it was the first person he’d thought had set him up. So far there was no proof to the contrary.
But he was out of options.
He memorized the number and left the cafe. He found a secluded payphone, dialled. The twenty seconds it took for someone to answer the phone seemed like the longest moment of his life.
‘Hello?’
The voice was female and that threw him for a second. He hadn’t considered who might have answered, but he wouldn’t have expected a woman. An American woman.
Eventually he found his voice. ‘It’s me.’
The response was instantaneous, the surprise obvious, seemingly genuine. ‘My God, it is, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wasn’t sure you’d call.’
Victor kept his gaze on the street, checking people, cars. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Not over the phone.’
Ten seconds.
Victor said, ‘I haven’t broken protocol in half a decade, so we’re going to do this my way or not at all. Understood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then tell me what you know.’
‘Not yet.’
‘Good-bye.’
It wasn’t a bluff.
‘No, wait.’
Twenty seconds.
The broker spoke quickly. ‘I know who they are, who’s been trying to kill you. I can help.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’ll tell you when we meet. Not before.’
‘If you won’t tell me now, I’m gone.’
‘You won’t make it on your own.’
‘I beg to differ.’
‘If you really believed that,’ the voice said quietly, ‘you wouldn’t have called.’
Thirty seconds.
Victor stared at his reflection in the glass of the phone booth. It was hard to look himself in the eye. He took a breath. ‘If we meet, where?’
‘Paris.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight.’
‘Why so soon?’
‘Because I might not be alive tomorrow.’
Forty seconds.
‘Give me the details.’
‘Call this number when you arrive. I have to go now.’
The phone went dead.
She’d ended the conversation first. It was a good sign, despite the anger it caused him. He’d been trying to drag it out to a minute to test her. If she’d have let it go over sixty seconds he would have known he couldn’t trust her. Still, ending it early could just as easily have been a trick to convince him she was genuine. If it was, she was in for a big surprise. He didn’t trust anybody.
But there had been a desperation in her voice that made him think she was the real thing, that she wasn’t trying to set him up, that she was in as much danger as he. Though he rationalized a good actress or a gun in the face would add that sense of desperation particularly well.
This whole thing had started in Paris, and now he was being asked to return. His enemies had tried to kill him there already, and going back seemed like a great idea if he fancied suicide. If his enemy knew he was arriving today, the airport and train stations could be put under surveillance. Kill teams could be set in place. He’d be easy to spot. If he made it
out onto the streets he could get himself a weapon from his safety-deposit box, but that too might be compromised. He couldn’t risk it so that meant no gun. He would be going straight to his foe’s doorstep, unarmed, making their job easier. It was the last thing he should be doing.
But if there was even the slightest chance the broker knew something useful, then he needed to hear it, whatever the risks. It was either that or start running and never stop. In his gut it felt like a set-up, and no matter how much he thought about it he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was walking into a trap. And walking into it of his own free will.
By going back to Paris he would find out one way or another what was going on. If she was telling the truth, so be it; he could use whatever information she had to work out what to do next. If it was a trap, then at least he’d know for sure he was on his own. That or he’d be dead and it wouldn’t matter.
Two choices.
Go to Paris or disappear for good.
Neither prospect was enticing, but spending the rest of his life as a target of the CIA held the least appeal.
CHAPTER 30
Paris, France
Saturday
00:09 CET
Named after someone whose life had been filled with such complexity, Charles de Gaulle Airport’s stark simplicity always seemed to Victor like a deliberate irony. Even in the best of moods, passing through it could feel like a long walk to nowhere. The terminal was especially uncrowded, even for midnight, with only a few people anxiously checking the departure boards for news of their delayed flights. There had been particularly bad weather over much of western Europe. Either that, Victor thought, or the French air-traffic controllers were on strike again.
He’d seen no one at the airport whom he thought was a shadow, but he couldn’t be sure. At the airport he was safe from being killed if not arrested. There were armed and wary guards who would shoot anyone without a second’s hesitation who even looked as if they might pull a gun. Without a weapon he was safe from them, at least. As soon as he was in the city, everything would change, if he hadn’t been taken into police custody by then. In a city where murders occur daily, his own would barely warrant attention. He wouldn’t die easily though. If he was walking into a trap, then, for his enemies’ sakes, there had better be nothing short of a platoon waiting for him.
Making it through passport control had given him the confidence that the French authorities weren’t expecting him. It was one less thing to worry about. He would still be careful of the police and security services, but it was the CIA that was currently sitting at the top of his threat radar. He made straight for the exit, not bothering to do any countersurveillance. If there were people watching him, he wasn’t going to shake them all, and the more time he spent confined, the easier he was making their job. His best chance was to get into Paris as quickly as possible. In the city he could blend into the scenery, disappear.
He reached the exit without incident and went through the automated doors fully expecting to be gunned down the second he stepped foot outside. The sky above was black, the clouds angry, roiling. The bitter wind bit at his flesh, an almost visceral assault. The rain came down straight and hard. Victor saw the raindrops pelting the ground as a hail of bullets.
There were fewer than a dozen people outside, but any number of them could be a killer just like him. He’d come too far to turn back now. He’d made his choice, good or bad, and he was going to see it through. But no one shot at him, no one so much as made eye contact. If he was to die, it wasn’t going to be here in the rain.
It had been five days since the attack in Paris, and he would never have believed then that he would be back before the week was out. But a lot had happened in that time. The scratches on his cheek were as good as gone, but his chest still ached, and there were scabs on his hands and wrists. Victor wasn’t sure how many lives he had left. He climbed into a taxi and told the driver to take him to Paris and the closest pawnshop.
‘None will be open.’
Victor reached for the seat belt. ‘Just find one.’
They drove into the city, Victor silent despite the driver’s attempts to draw him into conversation.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ Victor asked.
The driver shook his head.
It seemed a long time until the car pulled up alongside a kerb. The shop had a barred and meshed window, a reinforced door. Two of the letters in its yellow neon sign were black.
Victor told the driver to wait and went inside. He came out five minutes later, a few hundred euros lighter, but heavy one Benchmade Nimravus knife with a four-and-a-half-inch black tanto blade, two unlocked prepaid cell phones, and a car charger. He’d examined the knife in the store, checking its sharpness and balance before the scrawny owner’s staring eyes. Victor climbed into the back of the taxi and had the driver plug in the first phone.
‘Are we close to a bar?’
The driver smiled into the rear-view mirror. ‘Like that, is it?’
‘Yes,’ Victor replied. ‘It is.’
The driver took him to a nearby bar. It sat near an intersection. The road outside was busy with people and cars.
‘Take me to another one.’
The driver gave him a look, but Victor said nothing. The next two bars he likewise dismissed. The fourth was on a quiet street, no nearby intersections.
‘Better?’ the driver asked.
Victor reached for his wallet.
In the bar he bought a vodka and told a confused bartender he needed to borrow some tape. In a toilet stall he taped the knife, point up, onto the skin of his lower back. He tucked only the front of his shirt back in. It felt better to be armed. Now, at the very least, he could take some of them down with him.
He used the bar’s payphone. The line connected after just a few rings.
‘Are you at De Gaulle?’ were the broker’s first words.
‘I’m in the city.’
‘Write this down,’ the broker said. ‘I’ll meet you there.’
‘No, you come and meet me.’ Victor told her the bar’s address. ‘If you’re not here in thirty minutes all you’ll find is an empty glass.’
‘Hold on a second; this isn’t how this works. You come to me.’
‘We play by my rules or I’m on the next plane out. Decide.’
A pause. Then, ‘Okay.’
‘Wear something red.’
He hung up.
The bar was half-empty, just the serious drinkers who looked like they spent a lot of time there. He knew he’d been noted as an outsider, but it wasn’t important, no one here was going to go out of their way to volunteer information to the authorities. Most were too busy pickling their brains to even remember him.
Victor paid for his drink and stepped out into the cold. He looked both ways down the street. To the left, the road led into an industrial neighbourhood; to the right, it headed toward the freeway intersection. He couldn’t see a sign for the metro and didn’t think she would come on foot. There were sirens in the distance, but the rain seemed louder.
He crossed the road and found an alley where he could watch the entrance to the bar. At a time like this he would normally have taken out his gun, chambered a round, and flicked off the safety before putting it in the front of his waistband, to the left of his belt buckle, where he could get to the gun quickly. But he had no gun, only a knife. It wouldn’t be enough if they sent a kill team, but it was better than nothing.
He had some shelter from the wind and the incessant downpour, but the rain still found him, and the chill still pricked his skin. Victor didn’t care. It felt great.
Cold, wet, but still alive.
He had been standing for exactly twenty minutes and smoked one delicious cigarette by the time a white taxi pulled up outside the bar and left a tall woman standing on the kerb, a cloud of exhaust fumes disappearing into the air around her. She was dressed in an ankle-length grey coat. Dark hair tied back in a ponytail protruded from underneath a woollen hat.
A burgundy scarf was wrapped around her neck.
The broker.
She took a moment to compose herself and went inside the bar. He was surprised the taxi had dropped her off right at her destination, even more surprised that she went in without even checking her surroundings. Either she had no idea what she was doing or was playing the part of someone who didn’t.
There was no evidence of a kill team on the street, the road clear, sounds of cars only in the distance. A man was walking down the street with a dog, but Victor discounted him. Too much insulation around the midriff. The dog was a Doberman, and the man strained to keep it in check. A kill team wouldn’t use a dog, even as a distraction.
Victor exited the alleyway quickly, head down, collar up, just a man who’d taken a short cut and was eager to be on his way. He stroked the Doberman before crossing the road. On the other side, he stood to the right of the bar’s entrance, his back against the wall. He kept his hands in front of him, outside of his jacket despite the cold. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly. He watched the roads.
The door opened five minutes later. She stepped out into the night. Before she knew what was happening he took hold of her arm.
‘This way.’
He heard the breath catch in her throat, but she didn’t resist. Victor took her west, further along the street, and turned into the first alley they came across. He pushed her against the wall and searched her. She took in big gulps of air.
‘I don’t have a gun.’
It only took a few seconds for him to know she was unarmed. He’d wanted to find a gun so he could use it himself. He led her out of the alleyway.
‘Where are we going?’
He didn’t answer her, just kept walking, his fingers tight on her arm, her legs working fast to keep up with him. He could see her looking at him out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t look back. He kept his own gaze on his surroundings.
Victor led her to the end of the street and into the industrial area. The roads were wide, clear. Fences lined the sidewalks, beyond which factories stood. Some with lights on, others without. A car appeared, heading towards them. Victor’s hand moved to his back. At ten yards, if it looked as if it was going to stop, he’d slit the broker’s throat and throw her into the road in front of the car before he started running. Down an alley, he’d find a hiding place, ambush the last man, drive the knife through his spine, take his gun, kill the others or die shooting.