by Mark Burnell
It was too painful to see his tears and to recall how terribly they had fought, how impossible it had been for the two of them to find comfort in each other after the others had died. This was a moment where she might have cried, but Alexander’s presence guaranteed her stoicism. Looking at Christopher, she tried to persuade herself that she was following this path for both of them but she knew that was a lie. Whatever the differences between them, she saw now that her presence in the world had, after all, mattered dreadfully to him. To see his grief—to be the cause of it—was too painful to witness. Had he not suffered enough without this?
Momentarily, she thought she could repair the damage, that she could run down the hill and tell them all that she was alive and that everything was all right. Then reality infected the illusion and she realized that she could not. Not today, not ever. To do that would be to place them all at risk. Alexander didn’t even need to say it.
She turned away and handed the binoculars back to the Cherokee driver as four large files were transferred from the back of the Jeep to the Rover. Alexander and Stephanie got back inside the car. The driver pulled off the windswept verge and executed a U-turn.
For a while, they drove in silence. Then Alexander patted the four bulging files between them and said, ‘This is all for you.’
‘What is it?’
‘Information. Every detail must be memorized. Absorbed.’
‘What kind of information?’
‘It concerns a German terrorist, who started out as an anarchist but who has renounced her ideals in favour of commercial considerations. She is, you could say, a professional terrorist. Her name is Reuter. Petra Reuter.’
Stephanie picked up the file nearest her and began to flick through it, scanning fragments of information. Petra Reuter was born in Hamburg in 1968. During the Second World War, her father, Karl Reuter, had been a teenager in the 371st Infantry Division under Lieutenant-General Stempel at Stalingrad, part of Paulus’ doomed Sixth Army. After the war, he’d become a policeman, moving to Stuttgart in 1959. In 1965, at the age of forty-two, he’d married Rosa Holl, twenty years his junior. Petra was their only child. Rosa had died in a car crash in 1985. At the time, she’d been an archivist at the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart. A life-long smoker, Karl Reuter had succumbed to lung cancer in 1987.
Stephanie skipped the bulk of the file and flicked through a section near the back, which contained education details, a photo-copied set of fingerprints, details of Reuter’s sexual history, photographs of a dark-haired woman whose features were blurred to the point of anonymity. With each photograph there was a tag containing a date and a place.
‘I’ve never heard of her,’ Stephanie said, setting the file back on the seat between them.
‘You wouldn’t have. But over the past two years and, in particular, over the last year there are plenty of people who have.’
‘Does she have links with Khalil? Or Reza Mohammed?’
‘No.’
‘Then what’s she got to do with me?’
‘Everything. Stephanie Patrick is dead. You are Petra Reuter.’
3
Petra’s World
14
The air-conditioning unit was broken so it was baking inside the hotel room on the fifth floor. The window was wide open but it made no difference. It was another sweltering, airless day. At the centre of the floor, a naked woman was stretching, her skin slick with sweat, her mind focused on her breathing. By a glass of water on the bedside table, there was a watch. She glanced at it.
She completed the routine and closed her eyes for a minute, more aware of the heat within her than of that which surrounded her. Her short, thick hair, which was so dark it was almost black, was soaked with perspiration. Through the open window, she heard the ceaseless riot of the traffic—sirens, engines and horns in competition—and could smell the choking exhaust fumes that contributed to the permanent mustard haze that hung over the city. She rose from the floor and caught her reflection in the mirror. She saw her muscles and sinews—the human cables—moving beneath the skin, she saw her lack of body-fat. She saw her animal power.
At nine-thirty in the morning the temperature passed 35°C, on its way towards the previous day’s high of 40°C, the humidity as close to one hundred percent as made any difference. In Brazil—in Rio de Janeiro—winter had arrived as a heat-wave.
* * *
The blue-and-yellow taxi was weaving across the road, cutting in and out of all the other cars; it seemed every male driver fancied himself as Ayrton Senna while driving like a drunk. Sitting on the slashed back seat, Petra Reuter stared out of the window at Guanabara Bay and tried to ignore the motorized mayhem around her. They passed Santos Dumont, the city’s mid-town airport. Yesterday, when she had been on top of the Sugar Loaf, she had watched the planes taking off from the airport. She had watched the sun set behind the mountains, seen the beach lights flicker to life in the dusk, seen Christ silhouetted against a sky of blood on top of the Corcovado. Yesterday, she had been an American tourist.
At the end of Flamengo Beach, the taxi headed for Centro, Rio’s financial and commercial district. She got the driver to stop on Avenida Presidente Antonio Carlos. From there, it was only a short walk to Rua Araujo de Porto Alegre. The pavements were as congested as the roads: sweating businessmen in lightweight suits; food-vendors working at stands on street corners; shoe-shine boys touting for business; perspiring policemen with guts over their belts and guns on their hips; young girls selling individual cigarettes or sticks of chewing gum. The roasting air smelt of diesel.
The office block was home to fifteen different companies. Petra took a slow lift to the sixth floor. The reception area for the suite of offices belonging to Boa Vista Internacional was freezing; machismo in machines—only in Brazil, perhaps, could an air-conditioning system feel the need to prove its virility. Petra asked for Eduardo Monteiro and was shown into a large office with tinted glass forming the rear wall. She could see into the ageing office blocks on the other side of the street. The man who entered the room a minute later was small and desiccated; his skin looked like brown wrapping paper. His nose was hooked like an eagle’s beak, the bridge forming a perfect perch for small, wire-framed glasses. His beige suit was as creased as his forehead. Petra asked if he was Senhor Monteiro.
He smiled and shook his head. ‘No. Senhor Monteiro is not available. He asked me to speak to you on his behalf.’
‘What about Marin?’
‘He’s not in the city. He’s at his house in Búzios with his family and friends.’
‘I came here on the understanding we would meet.’
‘If everything is satisfactory, you will. He has a helicopter that can bring him into the city. But only if it is necessary. That is why he and Senhor Monteiro want me to speak to you.’
‘And who are you?’
‘My name is Ferreira.’ He sat behind the desk and in front of the window. ‘Would you like a cafézinho?’ Petra shook her head. ‘Coke? Mineral water?’
‘Nothing.’
She sat down opposite Ferreira, who said, ‘I’m sure you appreciate Senhor Marin’s caution. He was unaware that he was in business with you. And he has no desire to end up like Lehmans.’
‘Lionel Lehmans died from a cardiac arrest.’
‘We heard that, too. But in this world, you can never be sure.’
‘You should check with his doctor. For a man with a weak heart, he took very poor care of himself. Too much rich food, too many young boys—sooner or later, one or the other was bound to get him. In the end, it was a fifteen-year-old Greek—and not the foie gras—that killed him.’
Ferreira shrugged. ‘Why have you insisted on coming here? You could have waited until Senhor Marin returned to Europe.’
‘I’m on a schedule. I thought Lehmans explained this to you.’
‘No. It was never mentioned.’
Petra knew that was a lie. ‘So I’m mentioning it now.’
‘He talked about de
livery in two to three months. That’s not a rush job. Not for us.’
‘But I need guarantees. And I need them now. So that if there’s a problem I still have time to look elsewhere.’
‘And for this, you come out into the light?’
Petra’s expression darkened. ‘It would be better for you if you didn’t try to second-guess me.’
Ferreira smiled feebly. ‘Of course.’
‘I understood that I would be able to inspect everything in the order. Just as Lehmans would have, if he’d been here.’
‘That is true.’
‘Good. So let’s do it.’
‘Today?’
‘Now.’
‘Right now?’
* * *
The unique opportunity that Alexander could not overlook was created by two separate occurrences, one deliberately planned, the other a stroke of luck. What actually produced the chance was timing; the second incident took place within sixty hours of the first.
In 1967, at the age of just twenty-one, Lionel Lehmans deserted the Belgian army and became a mercenary, seeking the Siamese twins of money and conflict in Zaire, Angola, Ethiopia, Somalia and Chad. By 1987, however, he’d grown weary of spilling blood and of having his own blood spilled. His list of injuries was lengthening, his stamina was waning and his appetite for warfare was rapidly being usurped by an appetite for indulgence. No longer content to limit himself to the whores and bars of the lost communities of Africa, Lehmans decided to relinquish the sharp end of the business for the softer, financial end. Trading on the surviving contacts made over two decades, he went into the arms business. Unlike Gustavo Marin, the Brazilian whom he met in 1994, Lehmans had no direct contact with manufacturers. His sources were all buyers. Marin, on the other hand, knew everybody and, for the right price, would play any role; supplier, recipient for and deliverer to the end-user, middle-man, guarantor. Even manufacturer, it was rumoured.
Lehmans returned to Brussels, his home town, and began to engineer deals, casting himself as a middle-man and taking a cut of everything that passed through his hands. As his reputation spread, his work took him further afield but it was in Brussels that he first encountered Grigory Ismailov. Ismailov was a Georgian who had served in the Red Army for the duration of the doomed Afghanistan campaign. After the retreat from Kabul, Ismailov was discharged from the army and took to crime, killing being the only profession for which his Afghan experience had fully trained him. He worked for criminal organizations in Sverdlovsk and Perm, in the Urals, before moving back to his native Georgia in 1994. In Tbilisi, he made a name for himself as a man for whom no job was too distasteful providing the pay was right. In 1996, he began sporadic work for Chechen gangs operating in Moscow who wished to take anonymous retribution for Russian atrocities inflicted upon Grozny. With no family to bind him, with no conscience to undermine him, Ismailov was the perfect choice. Most of these jobs simply involved killing—policemen, politicians, journalists, the usual targets—but somewhere along the line, Ismailov was entrusted with a greater programme of terror. That was what brought him to Brussels and, ultimately, to the attention of Alexander in London.
Lehmans was under Magenta House observation on account of his business links with Gustavo Marin. Marin was under observation because he was known to have links with Marc Serra, a Frenchman suspected of conducting business on behalf of Khalil. When Grigory Ismailov came to Lionel Lehmans with a list of ‘special requests’, Lehmans approached Marin because he was known to cater for customized weaponry. The line of communication thus established, Alexander had the order traced back to its source. At that time, Ismailov was planning a domestic—‘domestic’ meaning purely Russian—bombing campaign against Aeroflot offices. Besides, as the local joke ran, with a safety record as poor as theirs, what would be the point of bombing their aircraft?
What concerned Alexander was not the proposed assault on Aeroflot but the new assassination programme that Ismailov was also planning. Three of the names on the hit-list drawn up by the Chechens were based in London, including the Russian ambassador himself. It was this consideration which prompted Alexander to sanction Ismailov’s execution, which was carried out by a Magenta House operative who travelled to Grozny, coinciding with a visit by Ismailov to the Chechen capital for a meeting with his employers. The operative used a car-bomb activated by a mercury tilt-switch. The device killed Ismailov and his Chechen driver instantly. As anticipated and desired, the blame for the killings was placed upon a rival Chechen gang and bloody retribution followed almost instantly, the resulting confusion covering any lingering trace of the real perpetrator.
This was the first occurrence. The second was the heart-attack that killed Lionel Lehmans.
Lehmans learned of Ismailov’s death within six hours of it occurring. Keen to stop the deal that Ismailov had initiated, Lehmans tried to reach Marin but failed because the Brazilian was on his yacht and had deliberately severed all communication with the outside world. Unfailingly sentimental when it came to family matters, Marin would tolerate no interference when he was with them. Frustrated, Lehmans consoled himself with the fact that the deal could still be halted and that the weekend would not be without its Greek pleasures. On Sunday evening, however, Lehmans was dead on his bedroom floor, his heart’s failure being the only true indication that he had ever had one.
Suddenly, Alexander saw a remarkable opportunity. He knew that as far as Marin was concerned, the transaction was between him and Lehmans; where the order ended up was a matter for the Belgian, along with the size of his commission. Alexander also knew that Lehmans operated alone; the chance of anyone else knowing about his deal with Ismailov was negligible. When Marin learned of Lehmans’ death, he was going to be looking for someone to inherit the deal. Either that, or he was going to abandon it and take the loss.
By instinct, Alexander was a cautious man. The operation he ran was small and he had never harboured desires to expand it. He pressed his operatives into action as a last resort and disliked having to do so. As for Petra, she had been a matter of permanent reluctance for him. He had not wanted her in the first place. Having been forced to accept her, he had been unwilling to train her as an assassin and so had been compelled to treat her as a one-off, choosing to have her trained as an undercover operative instead. This fell outside the organization’s mandate which was another source of pain for him. Now, however, he was faced with his greatest dilemma yet. With the deaths of Ismailov and Lehmans, a space had been created that could be filled by Petra but the window of opportunity was bound to be limited. Marin would not wait long. If he could not find someone to carry the deal forward, he would walk away from it. On the other hand, Petra was not yet fully trained.
Under any normal set of circumstances, Alexander would have let the moment pass. Had he had his way, Petra would have spent another year—perhaps longer—moving from city to city, following the routines he devised, offering stage-managed glimpses of herself for hand-picked viewers. But here was a chance to penetrate Gustavo Marin’s inner circle and, potentially, to forge a direct line to Marc Serra. The two men trusted one another, just as Marin had trusted Lehmans. This was an opportunity to buy into that by proxy, something that could not be achieved from the outside. And it was this consideration, in the end, that outweighed the serious concerns over Petra’s readiness.
From London, via Brussels, Alexander orchestrated contact with Marin, masquerading as Petra, allowing her identity to be revealed—something that was guaranteed to grab the Brazilian’s attention—and informing him that she was on the other end of his deal with Lehmans. Petra, Marin would discover, was keen to finalize their business quickly and, on account of her own circumstances, would be prepared to meet him face to face in Brazil. Alexander reckoned this would be enough of an incentive—the name of Petra Reuter was known, the face was not—and was proved right. Marin agreed to see her and to conclude the half-negotiated deal in Rio de Janeiro.
Petra’s function was clear: fly to Bra
zil and negotiate a price with Marin. Then fly home and let Alexander take care of the rest. The important thing was to strike up a relationship with the Brazilian. From that, a creditable approach to Marc Serra could be engineered.
Physically, she was in superb condition, her strength and fitness complemented by a range of self-defence techniques taught to her by lain Boyd. Mentally, she seemed tougher than ever—certainly Alexander had seen no sign of weakness in her. But what was lacking was background; the legend she had assumed was still thin, her knowledge was still patchy. And what of her real nerve, the kind of nerve that was only tested in extremity? These were the things that had preoccupied Alexander as he’d prepared to allow the paper terrorist to become real.
* * *
They parked on the pier and stepped into a crucifying sun that was now directly overhead, apparently hot enough to burn their shadows from the ground. Petra peered into the water lapping the pier; it was filthy, pools of dark froth floating on the oil-slick that encircled the rusting hulls of docked ships. She glanced at the home ports painted across their sterns: Osaka, Vancouver, Rotterdam, Magadan. The cranes on the dock were idle. To her left, she watched a vast tanker pass beneath the raised section of the Niterói Bridge. On the far side of Guanabara Bay, Niterói itself was blurred by haze.
Ferreira led her into a cavernous warehouse with Boa Vista Internacional painted above the entrance in peeling yellow and green. The air inside was stifling. There were old rail-tracks set into the ground and creaking gantries overhead. Some men were stacking crates on the left, others were slouched around packing cases, smoking cigarettes, killing time. Petra felt their gazes and recognized the intent in each one.
In an office at the rear of the building, two men were waiting for them. They were clad in ill-fitting suits, perspiration stains beneath the armpits, stubble on their jaws, sunglasses masking their eyes. On the desk, there was a piece of tarpaulin. On it were different pieces of off-white plastic and a small, black metal box. One of the men handed Ferreira a thick file as he closed the office door.