The Game

by Tom Wood

  No exterior sounds were audible to dilute the glorious music that emanated from the Rolls-Royce’s top of the range sound system. The London Philharmonic Orchestra Choir were performing a stirring rendition of Thomas Tallis’s Gaude gloriosa Dei Mater. Leeson sipped twenty-four-year-old single malt and sang along in Latin.

  As the anthem finished he dabbed his watery eyes with an Egyptian cotton handkerchief and thumbed a button on the console to mute the speakers before he was enraptured by more beauteous sound. Tallis made Mozart and Beethoven seem like amateurs.

  From one of the console’s compartments he took out a satellite phone and powered it on. He entered a phone number known only to himself and to the person who answered when the line connected. The satellite phone sent out a signal scrambled by a custom encryption algorithm created by a code-writing genius currently rotting in a Siberian jail because he refused to use his skills for the Russian intelligence services. He would change his mind eventually, Leeson knew, when youth faded into maturity and blind idealism became secondary to the pursuit of life’s little luxuries. Leeson knew this because he had once been an idealist. But he had grown up, albeit younger than most did.

  ‘How did it go?’

  The voice that sounded through the phone’s speaker was clear but did not belong to the person on the other end of the line. It had been manipulated by a scrambler that altered the tone, tune, volume and pitch of the speaker’s voice. The result was a perfect disguise only identifiable by the slight electronic quality that occasionally affected words in a similar way to that of the tuneless studio-enhanced singing star. Leeson’s own voice was similarly scrambled.

  ‘Kooi was a most interesting individual,’ Leeson answered.

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘He wasn’t quite what I was expecting from the information I had.’

  ‘In what sense?’

  Leeson considered for a moment, before answering: ‘He was well mannered and patient and clearly of more experience than I had believed. He had no complaints about how we met. He seemed in complete control at all times, yet had to understand he was at my mercy.’

  ‘A front?’

  ‘I can tell the difference,’ Leeson said.

  ‘Calm?’

  ‘Supremely.’

  ‘He seems very promising thus far. But, of course, everything hinges on how he reacted to the proposal.’

  Leeson topped up his Scotch from the crystal decanter. ‘He said no.’

  ‘Was there hesitation?’

  ‘Not a second’s deliberation. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t think about it. He looked at my watch as if it was a piece of junk.’

  ‘Did you increase the offer?’

  ‘Of course. I offered to double the money. It didn’t even tempt him.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ the voice said.

  ‘He was a fascinating individual.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll be suitable?’

  ‘That would first depend on how the insurance policy is coming together.’

  ‘Perfectly,’ the voice said.

  ‘Excellent to know.’

  The voice said, ‘So is he suitable for the position?’

  Leeson considered again. ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘Yes and no?’ the voice echoed.

  ‘Yes for the reasons already discussed. He can do what we need him to.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But there is something about him that is dangerous.’

  ‘As he is a professional killer, I would have been most surprised had he exuded no danger.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ Leeson said. ‘There was something in his manner I have not encountered before. Something I cannot articulate.’

  ‘It’s not like you to be lost for words.’

  He swallowed some Scotch. ‘I am equally aware of the anomaly.’

  The voice said, ‘I’m not sure how much consideration we can give to a feeling that you can’t even describe.’

  ‘I’m not saying we should. But it is necessary to be frank and honest in my assessment. We need to hire the right man for a very specific kind of job. Neither of us can afford to make a hasty decision.’

  ‘And it would be, had your discussion with Mr Kooi not been the last step of a journey begun long ago, and your assessment of him need only include your conclusion of his suitability. So, my advice would be to discount any inexpressible feelings you might have about the man, and tell me whether we can proceed with him. Yes or no?’

  Leeson drained his glass and delivered his answer.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Iceland

  The pickup was a rugged Toyota Land Cruiser modified to cope with the unpredictable and sometimes extreme weather and diverse geophysical conditions of Iceland. The tyres were extra large and could handle snow, rock and sand and provided the height necessary to cross the many glacial waterways. The fuel tank had one hundred and fifty per cent of the standard capacity for the long distances it would need to cover. The vehicle was also equipped with GPS and VHF radios, additional lights, high-powered winch and air compressor.

  Wipers swung back and forth to fight the relentless sleet from sticking to the windscreen glass. Fog lights bounced off the waterfall of partially frozen raindrops and the world beyond was an impenetrable mass of grey. The cab’s temperature was pleasant thanks to the Land Cruiser’s heating. The FM radio managed to pick up a single station that ran a talk show Victor didn’t understand more than a few words of.

  He gathered that the host was discussing global finance with a banking expert, but between the weak signal and Victor’s limited understanding of Icelandic, they could have been discussing pretty much anything. Still, it was something to pass the time.

  It had been two days since he’d left Muir and he was about fifteen kilometres south of the small town of Húsavík, heading south along the main road that looped around the coast, linking Húsavík with Akureyri. Each town had fewer than five thousand inhabitants, and they were as remote as human civilisation was ever likely to, or would want to, get.

  Another kilometre and Victor slowed. Visibility was poor through the sleet and in the featureless terrain, the turning would be easy to miss. Satellite navigation would have informed him when he was approaching it, but it would also inform anyone else with the resources to hijack a GPS signal. Victor had plenty of enemies capable of doing just that. He kept it disabled.

  He didn’t see the turning until he’d reached it, whereupon he headed off the highway onto a track, heading east, slowing down further because the track was un-surfaced and uneven. He flicked off the wipers now he wasn’t driving into the sleet and he could see the landscape extending away into the distance. The terrain was flat with no elevation or depression for at least ten kilometres in every direction.

  Victor liked what he saw.

  He applied the handbrake and turned off the engine some thirty kilometres from the coastal road that linked the two towns. He pulled up the hood of his coat, opened the driver’s door and stepped outside. The sleet had eased but had been replaced by raindrops that didn’t fall down but were pushed horizontally by the wind and peppered his face. The ambient temperature was somewhere around minus two, but the wind chill pushed it down much further.

  A building lay approximately three hundred metres to the north. It was a two-storey cabin with a triangular red-tiled roof that extended down almost to the ground. Little but Icelandic moss grew tundra extended to the horizon to its south, east and west. To the north were mountains, but no area of high ground within anything close to a rifle’s effective range.

  Victor drew an FN Five-seveN handgun from a pocket of his coat and racked the slide to put a high-velocity 5.7 mm round in the chamber. He approached the cabin, seeing no signs of recent vehicles or people but the sodden ground made any such signs difficult to spot.

  When he was two hundred metres away he circled the cabin, keeping low and moving quickly because there was no cover, only the downpour to help make a shot fro
m the cabin more difficult. Seeing no evidence of visitors, but aware the snow made his tracking attempts unreliable, he sprinted towards the building, moving in a line that offered the best protection from gunmen at the windows.

  Victor reached it with no shots fired and proceeded to examine the exterior. The two doors were locked and the windows closed. He checked along the door and window frames and examined the ground before them. Nothing out of the ordinary. He double-checked everything.

  He returned to the Toyota, and by the time he’d driven it three hundred metres and parked it close to the cabin the rain had stopped completely. Victor saw the sun shining and areas of pale blue sky appeared through openings in the clouds. He used his set of keys and unlocked the cabin’s front door.

  He checked every room of the cabin, first the lounge, kitchen and bathroom on the ground floor and then the two bedrooms on the first floor. Each room was compact and had a minimum of furnishings. A diesel generator in a small shed outside the kitchen supplied electricity to the building and Victor spent an hour cleaning it and performing some basic maintenance before he could get it working. The kitchen contained a boiler supplied by water heated deep below the surface, and Victor started it up now the electricity was running.

  He pulled back the weatherproof sheeting from the Land Cruiser’s trailer and heaved off a sack of smokeless coal, carrying it over his shoulder to the kitchen. He fed the stove with fuel and poured the rest into a coal cupboard. He made himself a cup of black tea and ferried in supplies from the pickup until one half of the lounge was full of boxes and bags and he was sweating beneath his coat.

  The windows were the first areas that required modification. He would have liked to replace them with armoured glass, but it had proved impractical to have such specialist materials shipped to Iceland without attracting attention. Instead he drilled holes in the brickwork on the inside of the windows and screwed in metal frames, across which he stretched high-tensile steel mesh. The mesh wouldn’t stop a rifle bullet, but he had learned his lesson the hard way never to dawdle in front of a window, no matter how well protected he believed himself to be. He bolted steel sheeting to the insides of the shutters. He calculated that when the shutters were closed, the sheeting and mesh would stop all but the highest velocity rifle rounds.

  It took him two days to finish the windows and another day to replace the door frames and doors with ram-proof steel. He fixed the original wood over the steel to disguise the reinforcements from outside.

  The next morning he drove to Husavik to buy supplies and materials with which to continue his planned renovation of the cabin into a safe house fit for purpose. It would take some weeks until it was finished but with each day’s work it took on additional layers of protection. As soon as the modifications were complete he would leave it, returning only when he needed to lay low. He’d learned the hard way never to stay in one place too long.

  Each morning he examined the doors and windows for tampering, and powered on a rugged custom-made laptop computer based on the model used by military personnel in combat situations. He attached the computer to a satellite phone and unfurled the mini dish. The encrypted signal was bounced via satellite to wireless receivers in Europe.

  This time he hijacked the Wi-Fi transmission of a café in Bonn, Germany, and used it to access the email account he’d given to Muir so she could reach him.

  On the morning of his sixth day in Iceland, he found a single email in his inbox: We need to meet.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  London, United Kingdom

  Some actors Victor didn’t recognise were promoting the premiere of a film he hadn’t heard of. From the huge posters, it didn’t look as if he would enjoy it. The hordes of people crowding behind the barriers in Leicester Square to get a glimpse of their idols told him he was in the minority when it came to modern cinema. Or cinema in general. He used to enjoy watching Harold Lloyd, but far preferred books to films. The special effects were more realistic.

  It was Friday evening, 19:45 local time, and the sky was just beginning to darken. He’d flown in that morning, from Reykjavik to Helsinki, then to Amsterdam and finally to London. He had no concern that Muir would try to track him, for whatever motive, but he knew stringent adherence to protocol had saved his life several times. He couldn’t quantify how many times such precautions had saved his life without his knowledge. The longer he stayed alive the more enemies he created. The more enemies out there, the greater importance protocol took on, and the more disastrous the consequences of breaking it.

  A chorus of claps and cheers sounded from the crowd as the film’s star climbed from a limousine. Victor clapped too. He didn’t know the man’s name.

  ‘I think he’s a bit wooden, personally,’ a woman’s voice said from Victor’s flank.

  He turned to see Muir and acted as though he hadn’t tracked every inch of her circuitous route through the crowd towards him.

  ‘But,’ she added, ‘when he’s that handsome, who cares?’

  ‘It would appear no one does.’

  ‘Are you a movie fan?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Victor said. ‘Who isn’t?’

  She looked at him for a moment, debating whether to take him seriously or not. Instead, she asked, ‘Shall we take a walk?’

  ‘Your team having trouble keeping eyes on me in the crowd?’

  ‘I didn’t bring one.’

  ‘Sure you didn’t.’

  He knew she’d come alone. But he didn’t want her to know that, for the same reasons he didn’t want her to know he’d seen her approach. Regardless of how this job turned out, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t find himself on a different side from Muir at some point down the line. The less she knew about how he worked and what he was capable of, the better his odds in that hypothetical future. Not against Muir specifically – she wasn’t on his level – but against the organisation she worked for and those of its employees who were.

  ‘I didn’t bring a team,’ Muir said. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘Okay, I believe you,’ Victor said, sounding as if he didn’t. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

  He wasn’t sure when the decision had been made to use 1984 as a blueprint, but London was one of the most Orwellian cities on the planet. Closed circuit cameras were everywhere and the number of routes through the city Victor preferred to take got smaller with each visit as new cameras appeared. But even with the risk posed by the cameras, the huge city offered a great deal of anonymity.

  He led Muir down a series of cobbled side streets and alleys until they had left the West End and the crowds of partiers and tourists and miserable Londoners who hated anyone capable of a producing a genuine smile.

  He said, ‘I take it Leeson sent another message to Kooi’s email account.’

  Muir nodded. She walked next to him, alongside the kerb because that was the only room he’d left her. He wasn’t expecting an attack from a car or across the street, but some habits came too naturally to ever change.

  ‘The email is from the same address as the previous one,’ Muir explained. ‘This one’s subject is Second Date. You must have made quite the impression.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The message said at your earliest convenience.’

  ‘Where?’

  Muir shook her head. ‘No location this time around. But there’s a phone number to call.’

  Victor nodded. ‘Makes sense. He’s met me once. There’s no need to go through another face to face, especially as the first was set up purely to test Kooi’s reliability. I take it you’ve checked out the number.’ He gestured. ‘This way.’

  He turned onto another side street lined with independent coffee shops, record stores and fashion boutiques. He smelt marijuana on the breeze.

  ‘The number you’re supposed to call is a cell phone. It matches that of a prepaid handset and SIM card bought together last week in Romania.’

  ‘Before or after I met with Leeson?’

  ‘Before.’

  Vic
tor nodded again. ‘The meeting wasn’t simply a formality, if that’s what you’re deducing from that.’

  ‘I get that it’s just Leeson being cautious and prepared. If you didn’t pass the test he could just ditch the cell. A few bucks down the drain isn’t likely to make him lose any sleep. Purchasing the phone in the same city where you met is just a smokescreen. He doesn’t know how much you can know or find out. But you know he was in Budapest. If he bought the phone in some other city he’s just giving away needless information about his movements. Give me some credit, please.’