by Chris Ryan
Not when I’m so close to landing the big prize.
Cooper said, ‘Do you have a car?’
Street said, ‘A rental.’
‘Then listen carefully. There’s a car park due east of the shopping district, off the Rock Creek Parkway. It’s across the bridge from Pete’s Boat Hire shop. You can’t miss it.’
‘I know the place.’
‘Drop your car off there and proceed on foot to the Starbucks. If anyone’s tailing you, abort the meeting. If you don’t show up, I’ll assume the meeting has been blown and notify Prosser.’
‘Understood.’
‘Good man. I’ll see you at the meeting point tomorrow night, then. And Charles?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t be late. Prosser doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’
The temperature was borderline crematorium when Street emerged from the hotel the following evening. He had showered and shaved, and he was wearing a brand-new suit for the meeting with Prosser. An off-the-rack item he’d bought at the Macy’s off New York Avenue. Not as expensive as the suits he used to wear on the job, but it was an upgrade on the tired old threads he’d arrived in DC wearing. The suit had nearly maxed out his credit card, but Street felt it was worth it. He didn’t want to look shabby next to the super-elite crowd at the College Club. The shoes were the same scuffed brogues he’d worn to the British embassy. Couldn’t do much about those. His budget didn’t extend to forking out for some new footwear. He just hoped no one would notice them.
Street subtly checked the area as he exited the lobby and paced towards his Corolla, thirty metres due east. The hotel was situated in the middle of a wide and sparsely-populated car park. Like a brick island surrounded by an ocean of blacktop. There was an IHOP to the south and a cluster of single-storey buildings to the north: a thrift store, a car wash and an attorney’s office, plus a Cambodian supermarket. He made a note of all these things without being aware of it. Twenty years of taking in every detail had ingrained the habit in his daily life.
But Street noticed nothing unusual. Just a handful of pickup trucks and people carriers parked up in front of the IHOP, a couple of U-Haul vans occupying the spots further to the north. He unlocked the Corolla, slid behind the wheel.
Gave himself a final check in the sun-visor mirror.
He still didn’t look good. But he looked a lot less shit than he had done yesterday.
I’m ready.
Forty metres to the west, Omar Ketsbaia sat behind the wheel of the Chevrolet Impala, watching the target head towards his car.
Two vehicles were needed for the mission. Ketsbaia was in the secondary motor. Both had been paid for using fake credit cards and documents at separate rental desks, one from Washington Dulles airport and the other from Ronald Reagan National. Both were fitted with stolen plates they had lifted from similar-looking cars across the city. Even the athletic gear Ketsbaia was wearing had been paid for in cash at an outlet where he was careful to wear a baseball cap to avoid showing his face on camera. Nothing could be traced back to the guys on the team. Or more importantly, their employers.
The people Ketsbaia worked for were not the kind you wanted to piss off.
The target gunned the engine, steered out of the parking lot and merged with the traffic shuttling south on New Hampshire Avenue.
Ketsbaia finished the dregs of his weak black coffee and tapped open the app on his phone. A loading graphic briefly filled the screen before it was replaced by a detailed map of the general area. In the middle of the screen a flashing blue dot suddenly appeared. Ketsbaia stared at the dot as it inched along New Hampshire.
He smiled to himself.
The target would be wary about being followed. But he wouldn’t expect his car to be transmitting a GPS signal.
Fitting the transmitter had been easy enough. There were dozens of security stores where you could buy a tracking device the size of a box of matches, no questions asked. Ketsbaia had planted the lump under the Corolla’s wheel arch in the dead hours before sunrise, when he could be sure no one was watching him. The lump emitted a constant signal that Ketsbaia could access by entering the SIM card details into the app, allowing Ketsbaia to track it from his phone. He could follow the target at a safe distance, and the guy wouldn’t suspect a damn thing.
Not until it was too late.
He fixed the phone to the bracket mounted on the dash. Watched the blinking dot for a beat as it continued south. Then Ketsbaia pulled out of the car park onto the main road.
Ninety metres to the east, Denis Krashov sat up in the Dodge Grand Caravan and nodded at the woman sitting next to him.
‘That’s the signal,’ he said, pointing towards the Impala as it turned left onto New Hampshire. ‘Omar’s on the move.’
There were four of them inside the Caravan. Krashov, the woman and the Vasin twins. Five if you counted the dog, Krashov reminded himself.
They were parked in front of the IHOP, along with half a dozen other sedans, people carriers and pickup trucks. They had been stationed there for the past several hours, observing the hotel entrance from a distance while they waited for their target to appear. There had been a lot of sitting around. A lot of drinking cheap coffee and listening to the Vasin twins talk shit. But now Krashov could feel a hot thrill of anticipation sweeping through his veins. The waiting was over.
They had not had much time to prepare for the op. Their employers had only learned of the target’s existence a little over forty-eight hours ago and there had been no time to bring in one of their own assets. So they decided to contract it out to one of their trusted sources instead. Which is where Krashov came in.
He’d spent fifteen years of his life inside the worst prison in the world. There were no guards inside that festering pit. No rules. No order. Just a brutal daily struggle for survival, locked up with several hundred dangerous criminals and psychopaths. Either you stood up for yourself, or you took shit and ended up a bloodied corpse. Krashov was determined not to be one of the victims. In the first week of his incarceration, one of the older prisoners had dissed him behind his back. The next day at the workshop, Krashov pinned the guy to the floor, shoved a metal spike into his mouth and hammered him to the floor.
After that, no one had dared to mess with him.
Once he had been released, Krashov found himself unexpectedly on the right side of history. The world had been turned upside down while he’d been locked away. The old order had crumbled, and his particular skills were suddenly in demand. He acted as an enforcer, making sure parties honoured their side of a deal. Anyone who refused to pay their debts was dealt with, severely.
Soon his activities caught the attention of figures high up in the security services. He had expected trouble from them. Threats. Instead they’d made him an offer. There were certain jobs that the agency could not risk carrying out, the official had said. Mostly overseas work, much of it dangerous. Work they couldn’t risk leaving fingerprints on.
Krashov would take on the occasional contract, as and when the official saw fit. They would supply him with documents, training and weapons for each mission. In return, the official would ensure the authorities turned a blind eye to his business dealings.
Krashov had readily agreed. He was a patriot, after all, and he was happy to serve his country’s interests. As a sign of his loyalty, he hadn’t even demanded a payment.
Which is why he now found himself in a parking lot in DC.
On the right side of history once again.
This op was going to be fast and smooth. A real in-and-out job. Once the target had been acquired they would take him out of the district to a rented property in Bethesda. A private jet belonging to a friend of the intelligence services would land at a nearby airfield the following morning, ready to ferry them out of the country and back to the motherland.
Twenty-four hours from now, Krashov could be back home, drinking champagne in an exclusive bar and celebrating another successful operation.
He turned to the woman. ‘Get us moving. Don’t lose Omar, okay?’
‘Got it,’ the woman said.
They pulled out of the car park. Following the Impala.
Closing in on their prey.
FOUR
The drive to the meeting point took Street thirty-two minutes.
He took a circuitous route to the park, doubling back on himself several times and taking a couple of deliberate wrong turns to throw anyone who might be tailing him. After five miles he turned onto K Street and passed through downtown DC, with its wide sidewalks lined with bland office buildings and high-rise apartment blocks. Street continued west past Washington Circle, heading towards the cobblestoned streets and elegant brick rowhouses of Georgetown. Every so often he glanced up at the rear-view mirror. But he couldn’t see anyone following him.
After a quarter of a mile he turned left off K Street and motored south towards the river. Two minutes later he was pulling into the Rock Creek car park.
The car park was a rectangle of blacktop, with four bays arranged either side of a strip of grass running down the middle. Across the creek, a hundred metres away from the car park, stood the Swedish embassy and the waterfront lined with a cluster of high-end restaurants and bars. Further to the west was the waterfront park. In Street’s day the waterfront had been an industrial dumping ground along the edge of the Potomac River. Then the money had poured in. Now it was an oasis of green space and art installations, moments from the bustle of the city.
Progress, right there.
The Starbucks was just north of the waterfront, Street knew.
Not long now, he reminded himself. Not long at all.
He eased off the gas pedal and slow-crawled towards a cluster of empty spaces at the far end of the car park. At gone seven o’clock on a Wednesday night, the place was more empty than full. Street counted maybe a dozen cars in total. A few SUVs, plus a bunch of dated compacts and saloons decorated with political slogans and the names of college football teams.
Nothing that immediately struck him as suspicious.
He steered into a space at the end of the leftmost bay and killed the engine. Then he checked his crappy old plastic watch. 7.20pm. Street had mapped out the walk earlier and he knew it would take him six minutes to get from the parking lot to the waterfront shopping district. Which gave him a four-minute window to sit behind the wheel and wait to see if anyone had tailed him. Anyone further than a few minutes back would be too far behind to keep up their surveillance.
Standard operating procedure for agents in the field, Street knew. Always assume you’re being watched.
That was why Cooper had insisted on him making the final part of his journey to the RV on foot. If someone was following him further behind, they would have to abandon their wheels in order to continue their pursuit. Which meant anyone entering the car park faced an immediate problem. Do we stay in the car and draw attention to ourselves? Or do we get out and risk getting spotted? All Street had to do was stay put and look out for anyone pulling into the lot and acting shifty. Or anyone who didn’t get out of their car at all. Either way, they’d flag themselves up as a surveillance detail.
He watched and waited.
He saw a dark blue Chevrolet Impala steer into a space in the bay due east of Street, twelve metres behind him. A guy in full jogging gear got out and started going through a complicated routine of stretches before his evening run.
He saw a small crowd of tourists enter the park on foot, seventy metres away, taking snaps on their selfie-sticks, while their bored-looking guide lectured them on the area’s history.
As Street looked around, he understood why Cooper had chosen the park as their meeting point. There were people coming and going in every direction, a transient population, lots of entrances and exits. In the unlikely event that someone did follow them into the park, Street and Cooper could easily lose them. No surveillance team could realistically cover all the entry points in and out of the park.
Two minutes passed.
The temperature on the Corolla dash read 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
He saw professional dog walkers. Young couples heading out for a romantic stroll along the waterfront. Old-timers decked out in sun visors and shades and carrying aluminium walking poles.
He saw no sign of a threat.
Just the usual comings and goings in a city park.
While Street kept his gaze fixed on the entrance, he thought about all the ways he’d spend his money. He decided he’d start by fixing himself up with a decent watch. Something respectable. A Breitling Navitimer, perhaps. He’d treat himself to a few Canali suits as well. Street figured he’d trudged around in cheap threads for long enough.
I spent ten years paying the price for shagging that Russian asset. Ten years feeding off scraps, while the rest of the world left me behind. A simple mistake had cost him his future at MI6.
But all that was about to change.
Soon he would be famous as the man whose dossier brought down the most powerful man in the world. His reputation would be restored. More than that, he’d become a celebrity in the intelligence field. Everybody would want a piece of him. The opportunities to make money would be limitless, he reasoned. He could start up his own firm. Rake in some serious cash.
He’d prove all those bastards at Vauxhall wrong yet.
After three minutes a grey wagon arrowed off Virginia Avenue and rumbled into the lot. A big old Dodge Grand Caravan with Virginia plates and tinted windows. Street observed the Caravan as it rolled past the nearest available spaces before it turned into the empty one immediately to the left of the Corolla. Which might have been due to a lazy or unconfident driver who didn’t want the hassle of trying to manoeuvre a vehicle the size of a tank into a tight space, Street thought.
Or because someone was planning to make a move on him.
He stayed perfectly still, kept his hand on the wheel and focused his attention on the Caravan at his nine o’clock. Street went through the getaway plan in his head once more.
Fire up the engine. Slam the Corolla into Reverse. Pull out of the gap, bolt out of the parking lot and rejoin the traffic on the main road. Then call Cooper and tell him he’d been compromised.
He’d studied the angles on Google Maps the previous day.
Figured he could be out of the parking lot and lost in traffic in under eight seconds, if he needed to be.
But then the driver’s side door popped open and he stopped panicking.
The woman who climbed out was forty or thereabouts, and she wore her age the way some people wore suits. Proud and well. She was dressed in dark tracksuit bottoms and a plain blue t-shirt underneath a zip-up hoodie with the words PENN STATE stencilled across the front in big white lettering. There was probably a photograph of her on Urban Dictionary, right next to the entry for Soccer Mom.
As Street looked on a boxer dog leapt up from the front passenger seat and jumped down onto the blacktop after her. Soccer Mom glanced over in Street’s direction, saw him staring at her and gave him an All-American smile. Street relaxed his features and waved back. Then she hooked the leash onto the boxer’s collar and set off in the direction of the bridge seventy metres to the south. The boxer leading the way, straining at the leash as its owner followed behind at a decent pace.
Soccer Mom disappeared out of sight behind the Caravan.
Street breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Calm down,’ he said to himself.
No one’s following you. You’re just being paranoid.
He made one last check of the parking lot. Looked towards the entrance. Clear. Checked his wing mirrors. Also clear. In the rear-view he noticed that Jogger Guy had stopped to answer his phone. At a distance of twelve metres it was hard to pick up the actual conversation but Street got the gist from Jogger Guy’s body language. He looked pissed off. He was waving his arm furiously and shouting at the person on the other end of the line. Street caught the words back and the office and right now?
>
As in, You want me back at the office right now?
He heard Jogger Guy shout, ‘This is bullshit!’ as he killed the call. Then the guy tossed his kit into the boot and climbed back behind the Impala’s wheel. The door slammed shut.
The engine roared into life.
Street scooped up the envelope containing the dossier from the passenger seat. He was about to debus from the Corolla when he caught sight of a rapid movement in the rear-view. He glanced up and saw the Impala’s rear lights glowing as the vehicle reversed at speed out of the space behind him. The wheels screeched, burning rubber as the rear of the Impala swung out in a wide arc, backing up until it filled the Corolla’s mirror.
Street could see what was going to happen a split-second before it did. Then there was a shuddering impact as the rear of the Impala reversed into the Corolla at an angle.
The Corolla jolted.
Glass tinkled. Metal screeched.
Nothing happened for a moment. Then Jogger Guy cut the engine and staggered out of his ride. He marched around to the back of the Impala, spotted the damage and screwed up his face in anger.
‘Motherfucker!’ he yelled. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding me!’
Street hit the steering wheel and gritted his teeth in frustration. This is the last thing I need, he thought. Some fitness freak pranging me five minutes before my meeting.
Prosser doesn’t like to be kept waiting, Cooper had said.
He was tempted to just walk away. But the car was a rental. The damage could cost him a lot of dollars. Dollars he didn’t have. Besides, who walked away from a prang? That would surely arouse suspicion. The smart play would be to get the guy’s details, then quietly move on.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ Street muttered to himself.
He left the dossier on the passenger seat and stepped out of the Corolla. The hot evening air smothered him immediately. It was like being wrapped in a stack of warm towels. Street could feel prickly beads of sweat slicking down his back, pasting his shirt to his skin as he paced around to the rear of the hire car.