Hit For Hire

by David Archer

  Sam had noticed that she waited behind. “Something wrong, Catherine?” he asked her.

  “Not a bit of it,” she replied. “Didn’t you know I’ve got a bit of a fancy for gingers? Just wanted to do a wee bit of flirting, nothing wrong with that now, is there?”

  Sam looked at her for a moment, then smiled and shook his head. “I’m sure I want to know what’s really going on,” he said, “but I’m equally sure you’re not going to tell me just yet. Just reassure me that it’s nothing I need to know at this moment.”

  Catherine tried to look innocent. “Wot? Can’t a girl fancy a sexy man like that? I work long hours, Sam, if I can get me a bit of something looks that good, I’m bloody well going to take it.”

  Sam shook his head again, turned to the officers and assured them that Noah wasn’t the man they were looking for. All four of them looked over at Noah, smiled and waved. He waved back with an equal smile and then gave them a thumbs up.

  “Good to see the London police are doing their job,” he called loudly. “Makes us all feel safer while we’re visiting.”

  When Sam and his crew were gone, Sarah looked at Noah. “What on earth do you think that was all about?” she whispered.

  “I’m afraid it means there’s a complication,” he whispered back. “The only possible reason for them to be looking for someone with this face would be if Adrian is no longer in their custody. He’s escaped.”

  Moose stared at him, but Neil muttered, “Shit!”

  “Keep it together,” Noah said. “It doesn’t change anything as far as our orders go, but it means I need to make things happen quickly, before the real Adrian can make contact with the Council.”

  “Do you think he will?” Sarah asked.

  “Almost certainly. If he’s escaped, he’s probably in disguise and trying to figure out a way to get back on his game. He would know they were trying to reach him before, and probably knows how to make contact. If he gets in touch with them, they’re likely to vanish and we’ll be back to square one.”

  “Maybe you should get hold of them first,” Moose said. “Tell them somebody is running around pretending to be you.”

  Noah shook his head. “That would be too far-fetched,” he said. “They would almost certainly decide they couldn’t trust me, even if I convinced them not to trust him. They’d vanish into the woodwork like cockroaches when the light comes on.”

  They were eating as they talked, but the situation caused them to rush. Noah was glad Moose had complained about being hungry, because the four policemen seemed to be amused at how quickly they were shoving the food down. As soon as they were finished, they rose and headed back to the room. Noah made a point of stopping at the officers’ table and shaking hands with all of them.

  * * * * *

  “It isn’t two o’clock yet,” the voice said when Adrian identified himself.

  “Yes, but something has come up. I have an opportunity to complete your contract in conjunction with a new one.”

  The Assistant to the Home Secretary hesitated for only a couple of seconds. “You can finish the job? You’re certain?”

  “All I need is your approval,” Adrian said. “The PM will be in a location soon with another target I’ve been employed to eliminate. Taking both at once would be very simple.”

  “Well, then,” the Assistant said. “I only had a brief moment to speak with Her Ladyship, but she told me to use my own judgment. Very well, let’s proceed, then. I trust there will be no change in the fee?”

  Adrian smiled into the phone. “None at all,” he said, and then the line went dead.

  NINETEEN

  As soon as they got back to the room, Noah looked at Neil. “Is there any way you can determine whether the Council left on schedule?”

  Neil thought for a moment, then nodded. “I should be able to find out,” he said. “We know what time their plane arrived last night, so I should be able to get their tail number. Then I can check flight plans to see if it’s departed yet.”

  “Get on it. And if you can think of a way to delay them leaving, do it.” He turned to Sarah. “I can’t do anything about the nose, that has to wear off on its own,” he said, “but I need you to go out and get me some other hair dye. I don’t know if my own natural blonde will cover this red, so let’s go with black.”

  Sarah grinned. “Sounds good,” she said. “Anything but that god-awful red. I’ll be back in an hour.” She picked up her purse again from where she had just set it down and started out the door, but Noah told her to wait.

  He turned to Moose. “Go with her,” he said. “I don’t want any of you going out alone until this mission is either over or aborted.”

  Moose nodded and slipped on his jacket, tucking his pistol and its holster down his pants as he did so. He and Sarah walked out the door together and Noah went into the bathroom. “Give me a second, Neil, I want to get rid of these contacts now.” Neil heard the water running, and then a blue-eyed, red-haired Noah came back and sat down in a chair near where Neil was working on his computer.

  “Boss man,” Neil said, “Moose said they were talking about leaving by noon, but there isn’t even a flight plan filed for that plane. As far as I can tell, it’s still sitting on the tarmac.”

  Noah narrowed his eyes, deep in thought. He wasn’t paying any attention to the computer monitor, but suddenly looked at Neil as he mumbled, “Yes!”

  “What?” Noah asked.

  “Well, you know we found out that Florentine outfit owns that building, right? I did a search and located the security company they use. Like a lot of security companies, their video security is tied into a cloud server, and I managed to hack into it. Just for safety’s sake, I went back to last night and found the bit where Moose was skulking about in their hallways and erased it, but now I’m looking at the live feed. Take a look, there goes Ms. Deanna what’s-her-name back into her room right now. I think they’re all still there.”

  Noah watched, and saw that Neil was correct. A moment later, François and James came into view and entered their own rooms. “The camera seems to be right near the elevator, am I right?”

  Yeah, looks that way,” Neil said. “They’re not real serious about building security, though, cause there’s only one camera on each floor, in the same position.”

  Two other men came out of a room, and Noah pointed at them on the monitor. “Those guys are bodyguards, I think. They were in the room when I met with the Council, but they kept their backs to us.”

  Neil nodded. “Yeah, I saw them with the drone. They were just standing there staring out into the darkness, like they were almost afraid to turn around.”

  Noah picked at his upper teeth with a thumbnail for a moment. “You’ve got Deanna’s sat phone number, right? Can you tell if it’s the same one she’s got with her now?”

  Neil blinked at him, then minimized the web browser he was using and called up another program, before reaching down into his computer bag to retrieve the Sat Phone Tracker he’d purchased the day before. He plugged it into the USB port on his laptop and then tapped some keys. “The tracker keeps a log of all the calls and phones it detects,” he said a moment later. “I can get the Electronic Serial Number of her phone from the log, then run a GPS trace on it and see where it’s located.” The computer made a couple of soft sounds and the display changed. Neil copied a line of data and then entered it into another program, which brought up a map of London and put a Google-style marker on a point.

  Neil turned and grinned at Noah. “Bingo!” he said. “That’s the building we were looking at just a minute ago, so she’s got it with her.”

  “What about getting into her call history? Can you do that?”

  Neil shook his head. “Not without access to the phone itself. While they’re fairly simple radio devices, that works against us when it comes to hacking them. A regular cell phone has encryption that regulates how you access different files inside, but a sat phone doesn’t. I can monitor the calls it makes,
but I can’t get into any of its background logs.”

  Noah nodded, chewing gently on his bottom lip. “What about the others? Do they have their phones with them, as well?”

  Neal went back to the computer for a couple of minutes and then turned to Noah. “Only one of them is at the same location, the one that apparently belongs to James. The other two are still in Rome.”

  “Okay. Now check on Broussard. I want to know where he is.”

  Another moment passed and Neil grinned again. “At the moment, he’s at home.”

  Noah leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment. “If Adrian contacts them, they’re not going to trust me at all. What I need to do is get busy leaving the trail I want them to follow. That will at least give me some bargaining power, a way to convince them that I’m actually working on the assignment they gave me.”

  Neil leaned his chin on his fist and looked at Noah. “If Adrian wanted to contact them, wouldn’t he have to do it the same way you did?” He turned back to the computer and called up a program, then began entering search parameters. Lines of data streamed across the screen for a couple of moments, and then there was a beep. “Well, there it is. He placed an ad in the London Telegraph this morning, and it’s on their website now. Same code you used and everything.”

  Noah was looking at the ad on the screen. “Remember how quickly they got back to me? It’s quite possible that they’ve already spoken to him. There’s a phone number in the ad, can you find out where it is?”

  Neil opened yet another program and entered the number. A moment later he shook his head. “That number isn’t showing up on the network,” he said. “Somebody has destroyed the SIM card. No way to find it now, but cell tower logs might tell us something of its call history.” He continued tapping the keys for a couple of moments more. “Okay, that phone was only activated less than twelve hours ago, so there isn’t a lot of activity. Its first call was to a number right here in London, at about 2:45 this morning. It only lasted a few minutes, but then he made another call to a number in Vienna, Austria. That will last a little longer. The next call was to the Telegraph at just after eight this morning. After that, it’s had only three other calls. The first was from a cell phone, only lasted a few minutes, and then the other two were both incoming calls from an encrypted number.”

  “Encrypted number?” Noah asked.

  “Yeah, like rerouting a call through a dummy line. I can see the number the call came in from, but there is a suffix on it that tells me it was only a relay. I can’t see the originating number.”

  Noah scowled and let out a sigh. “That would probably be from Pierre Broussard, then. I think we can safely say that Adrian has made contact with the Council. Now the question is how to convince them he’s the phony and I’m the real one.”

  Neil shrugged. “What if you called to warn them that you heard there’s someone out there trying to impersonate you?”

  Noah shook his head. “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what they would expect,” he said. “They probably think I’m an undercover agent trying to gather evidence against them. Trying to play myself off as the real guy being on their side would fit right into that sort of an undercover op.”

  Neil started to speak, but Noah’s phone rang at that moment. He pulled it out of his pocket a glass of the display, then answered. “Hello,” he said.

  “Now, then, Mr. Colson,” Catherine Potts’s voice said through the line, “perhaps you can enlighten me on why you are wearing the most-wanted face in all of Europe?”

  “I was actually hoping you might be able to clear that little mystery up for me,” Noah said. “I take it Adrian is no longer the guest of the British government?”

  “I’m afraid that’s true,” she said. “He escaped last night, and I’ve been called in to work the task force that’s trying to locate him. Your turn.”

  “I was sent over here to impersonate him,” Noah said. “My mission was to identify the top leadership of the IAR, and I was actually getting somewhere. Just last night, thinking that I was Adrian, they hired me for a spectacular assassination that I have no intention of going through with. Unfortunately, there is at least one man above the people I’m dealing with that I need to identify. If I can get to him and take him out along with the ones I’ve already met, IAR will probably be finished.”

  “Well, that would be a lovely boon to us all, wouldn’t it, now?”

  “I think it would have been, but this has thrown a problem into the situation. I’m about 99% certain that Adrian has already contacted IAR’s ruling council. That means they probably know I’m an imposter, and he’s aware that someone is impersonating him. It’ll be almost impossible for me to complete the mission if I don’t have their trust.”

  “Yes, I can see that would be a problem. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Well, if you can round him up in a hurry,” Noah said. “That might help a bit, but I’m not sure the damage isn’t already done. I’m trying to work out a plan of action right now.”

  “Hmm. What’s this spectacular assassination you spoke of? Anything I need to be aware of?”

  Noah thought for a second, then said, “Actually, you probably should. If the real Adrian has made contact with them and told them that I’m a fake, there’s the possibility he might try to pull it off himself. The contract was to assassinate Prince Charles, and my plan was to make preparations as if I were really going to do it, which of course I’m not. I just wanted them to see certain things happening that would fit into the basic plan I outlined with them.”

  Catherine was quiet for several seconds. “Don’t mistake my meaning, but there might be a lot of Brits who wouldn’t be too upset if it happened. Charles has actually alienated an awful lot of our citizens, and there is a move in Parliament to actually bring the monarchy to an end, rather than see Charles take the throne. They want to let Elizabeth complete her reign, but with the understanding that she will be the last monarch.” Noah heard her sigh. “But of course, we can’t let that happen. I believe the majority of the people still revere the crown, no matter who wears it. On the other hand, if Adrian is going to try to accomplish it, it seems to me he’s going to be even more interested in finding and putting a stop to you.”

  Noah nodded into the phone. “Yes, I’ve thought of that. The situation could conceivably pit the two of us against each other, and it’s possible it could end with only one of us surviving.” He paused for a second. “Catherine, tell me something. Are your people determined to get him back alive?”

  “I’m sure Sam would love to,” she said slowly, “but I think the best possible scenario would be the recovery of his dead body. Sam isn’t aware of my double position, so I can’t approach him about this. What I can do is go to Mrs. Wimbley—she’s in the top administrative offices, has the ear of the director and knows about my special affiliation with your group—and let her know that one of our people is on the job and has a need for a free hand in the matter. Considering the damage Adrian has done in the past, I’m certain Mr. Younger will approve it.”

  “Okay, that would probably help. Can you tell me anything about what went on while your people had Adrian?”

  “Days on bloody days of interrogation,” Catherine said. “About the only thing we really gained was confirmation that some older assassinations were his work, things over the last three or four years. He was setting up an assassination that he referred to as some sort of magnum opus, but we never did find out who the target was or who hired him for it. Speculation was that it might have been the PM, but nobody knows for sure.”

  “The Prime Minister? Who would want to kill her?”

  “Oh, it might be easier to ask who wouldn’t! While the citizens may love her dearly, the same cannot be said of the House of Lords. She’s thwarted a number of their attempts to circumvent her on different policies they want to implement. If they had their way, the people would have a much smaller voice in the goings-on of our country. Several of
them, including a few cabinet members, have been overheard wishing something might happen to her. No evidence, you understand, just a lot of speculation.”

  “I can understand,” Noah said. “I suspect the same thing goes on in our Senate and House sometimes, with respect to the president. Incidentally, the last I knew you were just a clerk in the British-American liaison office. I take it you got a promotion?”

  She laughed. “Actually, I got in a spot of trouble a bit back, and being transferred to Foreign Espionage Group was my punishment. It doesn’t affect the special affiliation, and frankly, it’s a lot less boring than the old job. The only problem is having to keep Sam in the dark, but I think he has a wee fancy on for me so he doesn’t get too upset when I have to make up a weak excuse for where I’ve been or what I’ve been up to.”

  “Whatever works,” Noah said. “Listen, Catherine, if this comes down to the wire, I may need you to get one of Charles’s appearances canceled. Hopefully I can track down Adrian and complete my own mission before that becomes necessary, but just be ready to call whoever you have to in a hurry if it comes down to it.”

  “I’ll be ready,” she said. “You just take care of yourself, Mr. Colson. I’d greatly prefer this not be the last time we work together.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Noah said. They added goodbyes and the call ended.

  Noah looked up at Neil. “She gave me an idea,” he said. “If Adrian has actually made contact with IAR, then he’s fully aware I’m out here. He’s going to want a confrontation, a chance to take me out. I think we should give it to him.”

  Neil’s eyebrows rose halfway up his forehead. “Boss, are you insane? Don’t get me wrong, I know how good you are, but this guy’s been at it a lot longer that you have. Sarah would go through the roof if you suggested this in front of her.”

  Noah was nodding. “Which is why I’m discussing it privately with you. What I need to do is create a situation where he can expect to find me at a certain place and time. He’ll want to set a trap for me, but I want to make sure it backfires on him.” He leaned back and thought for a couple of minutes, then looked at Neil again. “They’ll be expecting me to call and say I need to meet with them again. When I do, they’ll agree to a meeting and set a time and place for it, which I’ll be forced to agree to. They’ll give that information to Adrian as soon as I’m off the phone, so that he can start making preparations, or he may have even proposed a place and time to them. We need every possible advantage when it comes to that meeting, because the Council won’t be there; it will just be me and Adrian, and only one of us is likely to come out of it alive.”