As he stepped around the food cart and then settled into a seat between an elderly man and a middle-aged woman, he remembered Madame Desmarais’s reading last night—she’d insisted on carefully removing her Tarot deck from its velvet bag.
As he stared through the young couple settling into the opposite seats, he once again heard Madame Desmarais suck in a little puff of air, her signal of a confounding card—the Moon. “Deception, fear and conflict, and clouded vision,” she’d said, waving her hands.
But next, the Chariot—victory and hard control and bravery, and Madame Desmarais relaxed a bit as she told him the card also signaled a journey.
Appropriate, Pauk thought, as the Eurostar began to roll out of the terminal.
It was the final card—Death—that troubled and disturbed him: the skeletal, armored specter of Death riding a white horse surrounded by the dead and the dying. Madame Desmarais clucked but reassured Pauk that this merely meant transformation of the psyche. Regeneration, she told him. Beneficial.
But Pauk couldn’t stop staring at the maiden on the Death card, who, according to Madame Desmarais, represented grief and mourning because the King had fallen in some great catastrophe. Just superstition, he chided himself sharply. There was no way the King represented his mentor fallen in defeat. His mentor stood at the height of his power. His empire grew stronger by the day.
Just a little more than two hours later, Pauk exited the train at Saint Pancras International station in London. His leg ached intensely again by now, and he moved with an even more noticeable hitch. His eyes burned slightly from the dark brown contact lenses. He kept his blue trilby pulled low, aware of the UK’s predilection for CCTV. He still had to pass through passport control before he entered the UK.
• • •
Minutes later at passport control, a watchful agent observed a tall, fashionably dressed man—the trendy type, with styled facial hair and a shaved head and a fancy cane, because he had some kind of deformity—pass through and continue toward the escalators that led up to the streets of London. Although the agent doubted he had a match, his attention kept returning to one face on the Interpol watch list, the most recent additions posted on the wall of the closet-size office used by passport control officers. Could it be the same man? The photo was poor quality, obviously taken off CCTV, and the man wore a hat and overcoat and appeared much stockier and younger than the French film scout who had passed through his station minutes ago. The descriptors mentioned a partial tattoo and possible nationality, Chechen. He hadn’t noticed any tattoo, and the man’s pronunciation and mannerisms were definitely Parisian.
Beneath the photo of the Chechen ran a warning: Under no circumstances arouse this person’s suspicion. Do not engage. Suspected of multiple murders. Considered extremely dangerous. Notify Interpol immediately.
Vanessa studied the now mostly decomposed features of the dead man on the stainless-steel tray. The point at the base of her throat constricted. She asked the morgue attendant to pull the sheet down so she could see more of the body. The attendant complied, but it was a slow process, because he was careful, especially of the decomposition. Jost Penders, a fit man in his early forties, had been proud to show off a small heart tattooed on his chest just above his own heart. She thought she saw the vague outlines now, but she couldn’t be certain—minutes earlier, the attendant had quietly warned her that the body had been exposed to the elements and to scavenging animals before it was covered over with dirt and debris at a construction site where work had shut down last spring.
She heard a too-discreet cough—from the inside officer from the Prague Station, posing as her friend and keeping his distance from all of them, living and dead. Because Vanessa had not been “declared” to Czech liaison, she had entered the country as a civilian. As far as the attendant knew, Vanessa was here to discover if the body had been her cousin.
She gestured to be able to see the dead man’s wrists. When the attendant complied, she leaned closer to examine the right wrist. She could see a white ropey mark—the scar on Pender’s wrist where he’d ruefully confessed to attempting suicide at the age of twelve when he realized he was gay.
Her breath caught at a sharp stab of sadness. She squeezed her eyes shut and trapped the inside of her lip with her teeth. After several seconds she nodded to the attendant. “Ano je to on.” Yes, it’s him.
Jost Penders had been executed: two close-range rounds to the head—just like the biker in Vienna.
The biker had been killed in an industrial section on the outskirts of Vienna. Jost Penders had turned up dead in a warehouse district outside Prague. The Chechen was a creature of habit, like most people. Penders had been missing for seven months. If his remains had not been accidentally covered with dirt and debris for those months, he would probably be decomposed beyond identification by now.
She followed the inside officer out of the morgue, a survivor of the catastrophic flood of 2002, when cemeteries were upended and bodies floated through the city streets. A cold, drizzling rain had begun to fall, and beneath her thick woolen coat, the chill reached all the way to Vanessa’s bones. But she refused a ride when the officer offered to share a Škoda and drop her at the hotel. She needed to walk, to absorb the shock of Jost Penders’s murder, and she turned to follow the short block to the Vltava River.
Dressed in a dapper charcoal wool tweed and a Christys’ black fur felt befitting the gray English afternoon, a middle-aged and slightly overweight man with a walking stick and a pronounced limp slowed as he passed an impressive estate set back from the road in Saint John’s Wood.
The gates began opening with a smooth mechanical hiss. A black limousine with MP plates headed out and away from the residence, its windows so darkly tinted there was only a shadowy sense of passenger and driver.
Time noted, the man, Pauk, strolled on in the direction of the park.
Pauk’s morning had proven productive. Although his hotel was a flea palace in Earls Court, it was centrally located, and his neighbors were not interested in anything except the overwhelming drama—or boredom—of their own lives.
Pauk’s longtime associate had chosen well. He’d also received four packages yesterday without incident. Expressed separately overnight, each contained a nest of metal and plastic parts, including the disassembled pieces of his Dragunov. Now, today, like Humpty Dumpty, it would all have to be put together again.
Sprawled on the soft, billowy duvet in her room in the Hilton Prague, Karlín District, Vanessa stared at the secure scan she’d just received on her laptop—the pages from Sergei’s intel that she’d asked Lee in forensic accounting to translate ASAP. They had arrived with a small jpeg of Lee’s avatar appearing in one corner—a massively muscled, dangerously spiked warrior zombie. In Vanessa’s opinion, the slight, geeky real-life Lee easily surpassed his alter ego.
Pushing back intrusive thoughts—fear for Khoury, and the sadness and a simmering fury at the revelation of Jost Penders’s murder—she studied Lee’s translated sections taken from the margins of the spreadsheets. The first notation had her completely stumped: a string of thirteen numbers. Not a standard-format eight- or eleven-character SWIFT code—the Bank Identifier Codes, or BIC, used by all banks for international wire transfers. She made a note to return to it later when she had more time, more access to resources.
She moved on. The next entries were familiar: the series of electronic money transfers through one particular account, and Sergei had identified the corporate account owner: Bashir Group General Import-Export, Dubai, UAE.
A front company—importing and exporting nothing legitimate—identified last year by CPD and directly linked to Bhoot’s associates.
Vanessa exhaled sharply. She stared at Lee’s translations of Sergei’s margin notes on this page. Lee had seen through Sergei’s string of alphanumerics and he had divided them into date and amount; date and amount; date and amount . . .
On March 31, 2011, a transfer into the account for forty thousand euros.
On April 3, 2011, a second transfer into the account for another forty thousand euros. And that same day, all eighty thousand euros transferred out to a separate offshore account.
Vanessa stared at the dates and numbers. She knew what Sergei hadn’t known: A Spanish prosecutor had been murdered on April 1, 2011.
Now she raced through the transactions. June 2, 2011, forty thousand euros deposited to the same account, followed by an additional forty thousand euros two days later.
The Russian’s Sverdlovsk-45 engineer; according to Sid he’d been executed by sniper on June 3, 2011.
On October 16, 2012, forty-five thousand euros deposited—followed by forty-five thousand more on the nineteenth.
Vanessa closed her eyes, recalling the date Sid had told her the Dutch MIVD officer was killed. October 18. Apparently, the Chechen’s rate had gone up.
Shit—how much money was the Chechen pulling in? And how many others had he so contemptuously murdered on orders from Bhoot? Because there were more dates, more deposits, dating back several years. But she didn’t have time right now to track down the assassinations that might surely be linked to other payouts.
Her pulse tripped over itself as she clicked her way through the virtual pages to find what she was looking for: a transaction for fifty thousand euros on February 1, 2013. She’d last seen Penders in Prague two days later, February 3, when she went to his apartment to look at photographs he’d secretly taken of his occasional lover, the German nuclear trigger expert known as Hans, a suspected player in Bhoot’s network. Another fifty thousand euros streamed in on February 4, 2013. All one hundred thousand euros transferred out one day later.
She searched for one more date. She found it on a separate page: one hundred ten thousand euros had flowed in two equal deposits through the same account less than two weeks ago. The entire balance was transferred out on September 18, two days after Arash was murdered.
Jesus—Sergei discovered the money trail from Bhoot to his personal assassin.
She needed to get this information to Chris, but she needed a little more time to decide on a strategy for delivery. She wanted back in on Operation Ghost Hunt.
She sent off a secure cable to Lee, thanking him and requesting the account be tagged with an immediate-priority alert the moment there was any new activity. She hoped it wouldn’t occur to Lee to ask if she still had access.
Forty-five minutes later, she heard the ding of her secure version of IM. Khoury? Rolling off the bed, she checked her screen.
Bear: hanging in?
Bear was Sid’s IM moniker. Vanessa typed a quick response.
V3: whassup?
Bear: chatter up on j-sites
Meaning the chatter had intensified on known terrorist websites and in jihadist chat rooms.
V3: ??
Bear: BOLO on yr guy got a ding
Zoe had sent out the Chechen’s picture to Interpol/Europol watch lists—and someone had spotted him.
V3: where?
Bear: london
Some time after Sid disconnected, Vanessa realized she’d been memorizing plaster patterns on the hotel ceiling. She looked over at the window to see that it was barely daylight outside. She glanced at the clock. She’d been somewhere else for twenty minutes.
Still unsure about her next move and isolated from CPD, she scrolled through secure communications on her laptop. After deleting several cables that qualified as bureaucratic sludge, she held her ready finger on the delete key and barely glanced at the next.
Shit. She jerked her finger off the keyboard as quickly as if she’d been scalded.
The bigot list for Operation Ghost Hunt—her demotion happened so quickly, she was still on the CPD distribution list for it.
She stared at a cable from MI5—sent from Thames House to London Station, where it had been cut and pasted into the cable to Headquarters.
In summary, a sharp-eyed passport officer at border security for the Chunnel terminus in Saint Pancras reported a highly probable match for an individual from terrorist watch list—and confirmation had come via facial recognition software. MI5 was requesting a meeting in London with CPD—“Given mutual concern over security threats to certain high-level targets and Iranian nuclear threat.”
Within thirty minutes Vanessa read the confirmation from CPD to London Station that would be forwarded to MI5—the meeting was on.
She sat down to compose her cable to Chris:
C/O GROVES PLANS TO MEET C/CPD/OPS AT REGULAR SCHEDULED MEETING SITE PRIOR TO MEETING WITH GATEKEEPER AT 1300 HRS ON 28 SEPTEMBER. LOOKING FORWARD TO DISCUSSING OPERATION GHOST HUNT AS C/O BELIEVES SHE HAS VITAL INFORMATION TO SHARE.
What did she have to lose? If she did nothing, she was fairly certain she was headed to the backwater posting of Montevideo via Nicosia and Headquarters. That would be failure, and she couldn’t afford to fail; her father had taught both his children at an early age that the strongest have a responsibility to care for those who can’t defend themselves.
And ultimately, the thing that drove her to keep pushing her way back in was her hatred of Bhoot and others like him—those who dealt death in exchange for money, power, and ideology. She had everything at stake when it came to stopping the ghost.
She didn’t give herself time to back down. Instead, she quickly typed the closing to the cable.
C/O GROVES SCHEDULED TO FLY BACK TO RESIDENCE ON 28 SEPTEMBER. WILL DO SO AFTER REQUESTED MEETING AND PER HQS CONVERSATION WILL BEGIN SHUTTING DOWN COVER COMPANY AND WRAPPING UP BUSINESS IN ADVANCE OF NEW PCS ASSIGNMENT.
She sat back and gazed around at the hotel room, the stacks of hand-scrawled notes, and the room-service tray of still-uneaten food.
“Wrapping up” might be a stretch.
The Chechen might be in the UK, the man who had murdered three of her assets and possibly dozens of other targets.
With a click of a key she sent the cable, and then she booked a flight leaving for London in less than three hours. Chris’s reply came within minutes.
PERMISSION GRANTED FOR C/O GROVES FINAL MEETING ON OPERATION GHOST HUNT PRIOR TO PCS DEPARTURE AND TERMINATION OF ANY FURTHER INVOLVEMENT WHATSOEVER IN THE OP.
The bore of the Dragunov felt warm and true under Pauk’s careful touch. The black steel gleamed from careful tending. He’d always admired the efficient mechanics of the weapon’s short-stroke gas piston operation system. After a moment, he set it next to the scope and cartridge case laid out on the bed. Most of it was assembled and ready. He’d removed most of his maps from the walls, folding them into tight rectangles placed one on top of the other. He was quite familiar by now with the most likely locations where he would deal with his target. He was also prepared to encounter more intense security.
He turned, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the chipped and clouded mirror. He stepped closer, gazing dispassionately at his near-naked body, and the abstract pattern of scars that marked his back, ribs, and thighs. Some from the beatings after his mother died and he was taken away to the makeshift orphanage, some from the sicknesses because there was no medicine, others from fighting. But they were all from his childhood. Everything changed when he met his mentor. And when the last war ended, he left Chechnya for good and vowed he would never let anyone hurt him again. After that, the scars became remnants of a distant, ever-fading history.
He looked down at the fluid-soaked bandage on his upper thigh. He’d been taking antibiotics along with the codeine, but still the pain gnawed at him. If anything, it was getting worse day by day. But something else disturbed him more than the pain. Somehow, with this new wound, this new scar-to-be, he had become vulnerab
le again.
Voices drifted from the hallway, and he looked up, even though he had set the double chain locks and the dead bolt himself.
The room had only one small window, overlooking a trash-filled alley in Earls Court. Last night he stared, sleepless, out at the sickly strays—all the time missing Madame and her cats.
The voices passed, fading, and he breathed.
He wasn’t used to being on edge. Everything felt different. He reached for his book on English gardens. He touched the photograph he used as a bookmark and pulled it free.
He’d captured it from the YouTube video—the woman from Cyprus, Vienna, Prague. Somehow she had managed to trespass into his mind. Was it possible he had dreamed about her, he a man who did not dream? The tips of his fingers went to his bandaged thigh. He felt certain he would encounter her again—and then he would deal with her once and for all.
After some time, Pauk realized he had been sitting on the edge of the bed, jaw clenched, hands made into fists. He steeled himself, returning the photograph to its place between the pages of the book. He had a job to do.
Vanessa took the stairs quickly, descending from Westminster Bridge toward the large wharf complex and the entrance to the London Eye—the great iconic wheel turning slowly against steely river and leaden sky.
On time at 1300 hours, she strode into a brisk headwind that punched up the Thames and made her skin rise with goose bumps. She scanned the waterfront, dreading their initial interaction. What to say first? And where was Chris? Had his anger softened?
Thirty seconds later, she saw him near the ticket booth, waiting in the shadows.
And the answer was no—no softening; he stood so ramrod straight in his black overcoat he could have been a palace guard.
Shit. She needed to start strong. She saw him tracking her approach, and she could read the offense in his eyes.
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