by Chris Ryan
The guy was standing at the toilet, primed to take a leak. He’d heard the whirring and was turning around to see what the fuck was going on behind him. Gardner raised his right leg at the knee and put his foot level with the lower part of the guy’s back.
Knocked forward by the blow, the guy seized hold of the cistern just as the door closed. There was piss all over the floor. Gardner grabbed him by his hair. The guy yelped. Then Gardner smashed his face into the mirror above the basin, and the yelp fizzled out to a low wheeze. But Gardner didn’t stop. He drove the guy’s head repeatedly into the mirror. Spiderweb cracks formed with every impact. Blood spots painted the glass.
Now he smashed the guy’s head against the porcelain edge of the basin. Gooey blood and snot streamed out of his nose. Now he wasn’t making any sound at all. His arms hung limply by his side.
Gardner spun him around and shoved him onto the toilet seat. The toilet stank of piss and sweat. The guy’s dick dangled out of his zip. The ash grey of his trousers was a much darker colour on the inside thigh of both legs. The guy cupped his nose between his hands. Tiny shards of glass were embedded in his forehead. Before he had a chance to react, Gardner whipped out the Glock and nestled the cold muzzle between his balls.
‘Tell me where Aimée is.’
‘Please—’ the guy said.
Gardner swiped the guy’s hands away from his face. His nose was purple and swollen. His lips were purple and swollen. His whole face was a mass of purple putty.
‘Please, don’t—’
The voice hit Gardner like a piece of two by four.
‘What did you just say?’
The guy stammered, ‘Please, please, don’t kill me.’
Each syllable throbbed inside Gardner’s skull. Not because Gardner recognized the voice. He didn’t. But the accent was unmistakable. The guy spoke with a London accent. He swallowed his Ts and made his double Ls a W.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘We’re on your side,’ the man said.
‘Your fucking name,’ Gardner shoving the Glock harder into his groin. The man squirmed.
‘Peter Stokes.’
‘You were on your way to kill Aimée.’
‘No, I swear.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I don’t know anyone called that!’
‘Then who the fuck are you?’
The guy’s face twisted with pain. Snot dribbled down his nose and formed a slithery tache around his mouth. He stared at the broken mirror for the longest while, then directed his gaze at Gardner.
‘I’m with MI6,’ he said.
10
0721 hours.
Gardner kept the Glock pressed against Stokes’s balls. His first reaction was that the guy was full of shit. But then he considered the accent. It was as English as beating the shit out of someone in the town centre on a Friday night. And undercover spies, even ones who practised the accent for years with such discipline that they avoided ever talking in their native tones, still betrayed occasional traces of an accent. Especially when someone had a Glock in their face.
And then he thought about Stokes’s appearance. The guy looked more like an accountant than a crazed killer. He had a doughy jawline and the slack body shape of someone who spent their nine-to-five hunched in front of a computer. He probably moisturized first thing in the morning and ironed his shirts last thing at night.
But part of Gardner didn’t want to believe Stokes.
Because if he really was MI6, then he had no lead on Aimée.
The silence lasted for several seconds. Then Stokes broke it.
‘I’m telling you the truth. My colleague’s name is Rachel Salvago. We’re agents with the counterintelligence division at the Ministry.’ He frowned at the Glock. ‘Look, why don’t you put the gun away and we can talk about this?’
‘The gun stays where it is,’ Gardner said. ‘Who’s your boss?’
‘Leo Land.’
‘Land sent me to kill you.’
‘How well do you know Land? And who the hell are you anyway?’ said Stokes, eyeing Gardner’s frame.
‘Don’t worry about me, mate,’ Gardner said. ‘Tell me your story.’
‘All this is about Istanbul.’
Gardner loosened the grip on the pistol. ‘I’m listening.’
‘Land knows,’ Stokes said.
‘Knows what?’
Stokes shook his head at the piss-streaked floor. He took a deep breath. ‘Like I said, me and Salvago work for Land. We just get on with our jobs and look the other way. But—’
Gardner was staring hard at Stokes. What the fuck he was talking about? Every minute without a lead made it less and less likely he’d find Aimée.
Stokes went on: ‘About a month ago Salvago picked up a string of mobile calls made between Moscow and the Firm. They were made late at night, and always to the same number in Russia. We did some digging, and found out that the Russian number belonged to a guy in the mafya. His name was Aleksandr Sotov.’
Gardner felt invisible hands Chinese-burn his neck. He knew what was coming next, but he had to ask the question. ‘Who was he talking to at the Firm?’
Stokes’s face hardened. ‘Take a wild guess.’
‘Shit!’ Gardner said.
The train slowed once more. The doped-up female voice informed them they were pulling into the next stop: Kantza.
‘What were they talking about?’ Gardner asked.
Someone rapped their knuckles on the toilet door and shouted angrily in Greek. Once, twice, three times.
‘Be out in a minute,’ Gardner called out. He looked back to Stokes and gestured for him to answer.
‘Land knew that the Russians intended to sell a nuke to somebody and blow it up in Turkey. And not only that, he played his part too.’
‘How so?’
‘Land recruited an ex-SAS soldier to take delivery of the bomb.’
Gardner felt his guts stretch, like someone was pulling him in either direction. ‘Land made me track Bald.’
Stokes just looked blank. He clearly had no idea who the fuck Bald was.
‘Did you try and confront Land?’ Gardner asked.
‘You’re kidding? Land is one of the most powerful mandarins in Whitehall.’
Stokes touched his jaw and winced. ‘We didn’t say anything, but somehow Land must have cottoned on that we knew.’
‘How?’
The train was now gathering speed again.
‘Because the day before the bomb exploded, he suddenly dispatched both me and Salvago to Athens. I mean, like that,’ he said, snapping his fingers. ‘Told us to head to an address and await further instructions.’
‘Number ten Kapsis Square.’
‘Then we heard about the bomb.’
‘And then you saw me coming.’
‘And we knew he wanted us out of the way for good. So we ran.’
Gardner tore a fistful of paper towels out of the dispenser and chucked them at Stokes.
‘Clean yourself up. Then you’re going to introduce me to Salvago.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I want to see if her story matches yours. If it does, maybe I’ll start believing what you’re saying.’
‘There’s something you should know,’ said Stokes, dabbing at his bleeding nose. He pulled the towel away and examined the red splodges. ‘A friend inside the building sent me a message last night. Our offices were ransacked. Computers taken away. Mobiles too.’
Gardner thought back to Aimée. She was carrying the MacBook and the flash drives. ‘All right, let’s meet Salvago,’ he said.
One hand holding a tissue under his nose, Stokes unlocked the toilet door and walked down the aisle. The carriage was mostly empty now. The ginger girl was at a table seat. Steam wafted from a cup of coffee in front of her. She took one look at Stokes’s face and made to stand up, but he put her at her ease. She slid back down into her seat. Gardner thought he saw something in her eyes when she looked at Stokes. So
mething that said they were maybe more than just colleagues.
There were two seats either side of the table. Stokes sat next to Salvago, Gardner opposite them.
‘Who are you?’ Salvago said in a warm and husky voice. Gardner didn’t much rate redheads but a bit more time spent around her might make him change his mind. She had eyes the colour of summer grass, high cheekbones and a ten-out-of-ten rack. She had left two buttons undone on her white blouse, revealing cleavage that would make a grown man punch a hole in a wall. If Salvago and Stokes were getting it on, fair play to the lad.
Gardner looked at her and told her, ‘Land sent me to kill you.’
‘It’s true,’ Stokes said. The bruises on his face said the rest.
The woman leaned as far back from Gardner as the seat allowed and exchanged a look with Stokes.
‘It’s OK,’ Stokes said.
‘Land told me you were a couple of Russian torturers,’ Gardner went on. ‘He said you were holding a friend of mine hostage.’
Salvago arched an eyebrow. ‘What friend?’
‘Her name’s Aimée. We worked together in Serbia. She was freelancing for the Firm.’
Salvago bit her lower lip. ‘This Aimée, does she know stuff?’
‘She knows all right. Transcripts of conversations between Sotov and a guy by the name of Maxim Ledinsky, a director in the FSB.’ Salvago nodded on hearing the guy’s name. ‘Other files were encrypted. We didn’t have time to crack them.’
Salvago said, ‘I’ll bet my mortgage those files name and shame Leo bloody Land. Where’d you find them?’
‘Pulled them from a factory the other side of the city. Sotov had some kind of a storage facility there.’
‘What happened to the rest?’
‘Up in smoke.’
‘Damn,’ Salvago muttered. She struck Gardner as the sort of girl whose swear-scale stopped at ‘bloody hell’. ‘Then we can’t prove the link between Land and the Russians.’
‘Aimée had some of the files with her.’
‘Where is she?’ Stokes asked.
‘I don’t know. Land arranged a flight home for us. It was an ambush. They took her,’ said Gardner, then fished out his mobile and played them the clip. Salvago and Stokes squinted at the grainy images.
‘Jesus,’ said Stokes. Salvago was quiet. Gardner was left alone with his thoughts. If Land was involved with the nuke, that would explain why Land had asked him to kill Bald only after the exchange had been made.
‘Give me your phone,’ Salvago said. Gardner pressed it into her palm. She dug out an outdated Nokia notebook from the front pocket of her jeans and tapped away on a few keys. ‘My expertise is e-crime and communications,’ she said. ‘The Nokia is a specially modified handset. It bypasses the security encryptions and protocols on networks and gives me the raw data direct from the satellite. Basically I can track the GPS details of any mobile, anywhere in the world, just by plugging this into it. Like so.’
‘Fucking hell.’ Despite himself, Gardner was impressed.
Salvago tapped some more. Then she unplugged the Nokia from Gardner’s mobile and took a sip of her coffee.
‘I know where your friend is,’ she said.
Gardner and Stokes flashed quizzical looks.
‘Rotterdam.’
11
Rotterdam, Holland. 0930 hours.
It was exactly nine-thirty in the morning in Hamburg, an hour behind Athens, and Kruger debarked from a VLM plane splayed on the gun-metal runway at Rotterdam Airport. Kruger hated flying but his employers insisted he come to Holland immediately. They explained that the Brit and his two friends would be in-country soon. Kruger had checked out the train route, his preferred mode of transport. It would have taken him something like twelve hours and five stopovers: Hamburg to Bremen, Bremen to Leer on the Dutch border, Leer to Groningen, yada fucking yada. The journey was just over an hour by plane, so he bit the bullet and flew.
Kruger had no baggage. In his opinion a man needed only three things in the world: protein, water and the ability to hunt and kill.
She’ll be at the premises in three hours, the Russian had said. That was at five o’clock. The woman would be there already. Knowing the Russians, she probably wouldn’t be in mint condition. No big deal. She was fucking dead either way.
The Chevrolet Avalanche was nestled among the people carriers and the Golfs in the long-stay car park. Kruger hit the A13 south towards Rotterdam and curled his lip at the flat skyline. He hated Holland. Despised the fucking place. Dirty, grey, flat as day-old Cola.
Fuck it, he told himself as he neared the premises.
The targets will be here in a couple of hours. Deal with them, you could be out of the country by nightfall. He lit a cigarillo and tightened his grip on the wheel.
12
1029 hours.
Fifty-nine minutes after Kruger’s VLM touched down, a Boeing 737-700 landed at Rotterdam and taxied into the same parking spot the VLM craft had occupied. Gardner, Stokes and Salvago briskly moved through passport control and made their way through arrivals. The airport was a ghost town. Ditto the flight. The nuke seemed to have put a lot of people off flying.
Salvago checked something on the Nokia.
‘How accurate is that thing?’ Gardner asked her.
‘It picks up on the broadcast signals from satellites, the same ones that phones link with to get a reading on their longitude, latitude and altitude. Normally a phone receives radio signals from at least three satellites. This thing,’ Salvago said, ‘receives its signals from twenty-four. So yeah, pretty damn accurate.’
Salvago turned her attention back to the Nokia. Stokes and Gardner had ditched their phones in Athens in case Land tried to trace their signals. Once word reached Land that Salvago and Stokes were still alive, he’d do everything in his power to track them down and slot them. Gardner was sure of it. He’d also had to dump his gun. Somehow he figured airport security wouldn’t approve.
‘Stop,’ Salvago said as Gardner reached the main doors. ‘Step outside those doors and Land will see you.’
Gardner frowned. ‘How come?’
‘Latest satellite tracking technology.’
‘Spies in the sky?’
‘Years ago satellites were pretty poor at tracking human beings. All you could see from space was a head of hair. Not exactly a lot to go on when you’re looking for one person among six billion. But there’s new software that maps out someone’s gait. See, everybody has their own way of walking. The software matches your shadow, gets an instant lock on you wherever you are.’
‘So how do we get out of here?’
‘We wait for a black spot.’
‘Like when the satellite’s not over us?’
‘Exactly. You see, there’s only a few satellites that have this software installed. So there are periods when the sky is clear. Twenty minutes at a time. And the next one is in’ – she consulted the Nokia – ‘fifteen minutes.’
To pass the time they sat at a café in the arrivals area. Stokes took a coffee, black. Salvago ordered a decaf. Gardner went with a Diet Coke, sipping at it as he watched Sky News on a big plasma TV hooked to the wall. The he-and-she presenter team looked stern-faced. The camera cut to a shot of a guy in a dark-grey suit. He was standing in front of a lectern, a bank of microphones in front of him.
‘This was the damning response to last night’s atrocity from the Israeli Prime Minister Lev Yalom,’ a reporter announced over the images. Yalom spoke aggressively, his right hand formed into a chubby fist. He thumped the lectern, disrupting his notes. ‘No more broken promises,’ Yalom said. The voice-over said, ‘Here in Jerusalem it’s become increasingly clear that Israel sees the Iranians’ attempt to smuggle nuclear arms into Tehran as a declaration of war.’
There was footage of an Israeli F-15l Ra’am fighter plane, followed by a shot of the Knesset. The chamber was packed.
‘This morning Prime Minister Yalom issued an ultimatum to Tehran: either Iran unconditi
onally agrees to dismantle its nuclear programme within the next twenty-four hours, or Israel will do it for them. Even as he spoke, the Israeli Air Force was making preparations for retaliatory attacks against key military and civilian targets in Iran, believed to include the civilian Bushehr nuclear facility.’
The report cut back to the news desk. Breaking news scrolled across the bottom of the screen. A defence expert was introduced. Gardner had seen dozens of these experts on TV and never rated their opinions. They were all retired ruperts or Whitehall pen-pushers. He looked away.
‘It’s starting,’ he said.
Stokes tore open a sachet and tipped sugar into his cup. ‘Israel’s bluffing. They won’t dare bomb Iran.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Joe’s right,’ Salvago said.
‘They want this to happen,’ said Gardner. ‘Blaming the Iranians for the nuke gives them licence to shoot up whoever they please for the sake of national security. They’ll bomb Iran back into the fucking stone age.’
Gardner finished his Coke and licked his lips. He felt the sugar and caffeine ease the pressure behind his temples. A bus pulled up outside the airport. Salvago took a last gulp of coffee.
‘It’s time,’ Gardner said. ‘We need to go.’
They shuffled through the exit and ran the twenty metres to the bus stop. Hopped on board the number 33 bus and purchased three one-way tickets to Rotterdam Centraal station.
‘Where exactly are we headed?’ asked Gardner, sitting opposite the other two.
‘An address on Van Brakelstraat,’ Salvago told him.
‘Any idea what kind of place?’
‘Nope.’
Great, Gardner thought. We’re going in half-cocked to face an enemy we know nothing about. He prayed that Aimée was there. He prayed she was OK. He hoped the guys who snatched her were saying their prayers too. Because when Gardner came face to face with them, they were going to the dark side.