This time when they came for him it was different.
They weren’t alone.
There were six other men with them. Konstantin watched them file into the cell. It was like the tiled wall had been replaced with muscle. The muscle didn’t talk. They didn’t acknowledge his nod. I was as if he didn’t exist to them. That suited Konstantin.
“Get up,” the man said.
He didn’t move.
“I said get up.”
Konstantin placed his hands flat on the table and pushed the chair back, dragging the metal legs across the floor so they grated. He stood up slowly.
“What’s going on?” he asked the woman.
She didn’t answer him. She looked at the man.
“You’re being moved.”
He looked at the woman. “How many days has it been?”
This time she answered him. “Eight.”
He had been out of touch with reality for eight days. Eight days. Anything could have happened in that time. Akim Caspi could be dead. Mabus could be dead. A third of the world’s population could be dead. He wouldn’t have known. All he did know was that tomorrow the novemdiales would be over.
If the Sicarii were going to strike tomorrow, it would be the perfect moment. For nine days the world would have mourned Peter II, and the victims of Rome and Berlin along with him, and each new dawn would be a day further away from the tragedies. Nine days was enough for the numbness to have receded. Nine days was enough for the world to think that final attack wasn’t coming. Nine days was enough to make a fool out of everyone.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Russia, Italy, London? Does it matter? One cell looks pretty much the same as another wherever it is,” the man said.
“I’d like to know.”
“Berlin,” the m “The fun stuff’s over. You’re going to be held accountable for what you’ve done, and then we’re going to bury you way down deep. And when the world has forgotten about you we’ll whisper in the right ear and someone will find you in the showers or shiv you in the yard. It won’t matter to us. But I am sure we’ll find someone who really wants to hurt you; maybe an ex-countryman of yours? Or maybe someone who isn’t enlightened enough to turn the other cheek. It doesn’t matter one way or the other to me. Justice will have had its way, and the world will have its blood, so everyone is happy.”
“Except for me,” Konstantin said, as they came around the table and grabbed his arms. Two men forced them behind his back and cuffed him. They cuffed his ankles and ran a chain from one cuff to the other, meaning he could barely shuffle more than a foot at a time.
“And who the hell cares if you’re happy?” the man asked.
The muscle bundled him into the back of an SUV and drove.
They left the man and the woman outside the BKA offices in Wiesbaden. They didn’t talk until they were more than thirty minutes outside of the city, then the driver switched on his blinkers and followed the traffic off the next exit ramp, leaving the Autobahn. This wasn’t the way to Berlin.
For a moment Konstantin thought that perhaps they had decided to do it the Russian way, drive him somewhere remote then finish him, cleaning up the problem he posed. He licked his lips.
The driver pulled over to the side of the road.
It was a remote spot, far enough away for his body not to be found quickly. Remote enough the local wildlife might take care of that problem altogether.
There was little in the way of passing traffic. No one would accidentally see anything from the side of the road.
It was a good place to kill a man.
The driver leaned forward, opening the glove box.
Konstantin was suddenly aware of his breathing. It was hard. A regular push in, out, in, out. He looked at his options. There wasn’t a lot he could do. He couldn’t very well fight from the back seat of an SUV with six other slabs of solid muscle surrounding him. Well, he could, but he wouldn’t win. He wasn’t Superman. He couldn’t run. The back doors would be child-locked to prevent him from opening them from the inside. So, he did the only thing he could do: nothing.
The driver pulled a padded envelope from the glove box. It didn’t look bulky enough, or heavy enough in his hand, to contain a service revolver, and they wouldn’t have risked a close-combat weapon like a Korshun knife or a SARO machete. He turned in his seat and looked straight at Konstantin. “We’ve got a message for the old man from Control,” the driver said in a coarse Manchester accent. “This is it, all debts paid in full. He’s kept up his end of the bargain, but this is the end of the road. You’re cut off, as of now. You understand?”
He handed Konstantin the envelope.
It contained a passport with his picture on it in the name of John Smith, just about as English as names came, and a plane ticket from Frankfurt Main back to Heathrow, leaving in six hours. There was also a billfold with about 300 Euros in it.
“You get yourself caught, you’re on your own.”
“How are you going to explain this?” Konstantin said, meaning the plane ticket. “They’re expecting me in Berlin.”
“Yours is not to reason why, soldier. Yours is to get your ass home. End of story.”
He nodded. He knew enough not to ask operational details. No doubt the real wall of muscle was arriving right about now at the BKA building and the man and woman were scratching their heads, wondering who the hell they’d just turned him over to if it wasn’t the good guys. Or maybe only one of them was scratching his head. The woman had said she wanted to believe him. Maybe that had been enough to convince her to make the call? Had the simple act of telling the truth set this entire chain of events into action like the first domino going over?
One thing Six could do was paperwork. This crew would have presented every necessary piece of paper, with every i dotted and every t crossed. In and out, no one any the wiser until the real prisoner transport team arrived, hence the thirty minutes of driving rather than taking him straight to Frankfurt Main or the military airport at Wiesbaden. Six didn’t want the Germans knowing it was Her Majesty who’d sprung their suspected papal assassin. It wasn’t exactly good form for a monarch to be getting her royal hands dirty like that, even if she didn’t know what was actually being done in her name.
Konstantin pocketed the passport and the ticket.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me, mate. I’m only doing what I’m told. Thank the old man for calling in every favor he had with every man, woman and child from here to Timbuktu. Without him you’d be rotting away in Berlin for the rest of your natural, pal.”
He broke one of the smaller Euro notes at a kiosk, buying a phone card.
It took him the best part of an hour to find a working pay phone.
He called in to Nonesuch.
Lethe answered on the first ring. It took a moment for the line to connect and then both of them were talking without the other hearing. Then the line opened. Konstantin started again, “I am on the evening flight from Frankfurt Main to Heathrow. When I land I am going to call again. By then I want you to have found Miles Devere for me.”
He hung up before Lethe could get a word in.
It was an uneventful flight, both on the ground and in the air. A lot could happen in nine days it seemed, including people forgetting a face, or half-recognizing it and not being sure where from, even when it was a face they had seen day after day on the news reels and in the press. He wasn’t a film star and he wasn’t a pro ball player. What that meant was when they looked at him a few people did a weird sort of double-take, then shook their heads as though dismissing him. They had recognized him on some subliminal level, just like any other famous person, but they had filed him as just that, a famous person. Logic told them he had to be one, and who was he to argue with logic?
The fact of the matter was that the BKA were hardly about to announce to the world that they’d lost him. Airports, train stations and bus terminals would be swarming with agents on the ground
looking for him-but they weren’t looking for John Smith.
As it was, he landed in London refreshed from the flight and disembarked the plane. On the way along the metal passage back toward the gate, he asked one of the ground crew where the nearest pay phone was and made the call to Lethe.
“Welcome home, Koni,” Lethe said, even before the phone had started to ring in his ear. “We were worried about you.”
“Touching, I am sure. You have the address for me?”
“The old man told me to tell you he wants you here for a debriefing first thing.”
“Second thing. First thing I have a promise to keep.”
“Whatever you say, man, I’m just passing on the message. Second thing it is.”
“The address?”
“He’s in England. He entered the country the day after the assassination.”
“England isn’t small. Where in England?”
“I just want you to appreciate my brilliance for a moment, Koni. I found him for you, just like you asked. But think about it, if I say he’s in London, that means he’s one of seven and a half million people spread over thirty-two different boroughs. That’s a lot of people and a hell of a lot of streets. That’s your needle in a haystack right there.”
“Where is he?”
“Well, out of all those millions of buildings, I found the one he’s in. That’s how good I am at what I do, Koni. He has a place in the heart of London, Clippers Quay, off Taeping Street. You can take the DLR to Mudchute and walk from there in a couple of minutes. Most of the houses are built around the old Graving Dock. There are four apartments in the block. The penthouse is his. You can’t miss it.”
“A graving dock? Isn’t that appropriate,” Konstantin said.
“It doesn’t mean they used to bury people there, Koni,” Lethe said in his ear. The phone line started to beep, but he talked over them.
“Well it does now.”
Konstantin hung up and went to keep a promise.
He left the train and walked quickly down the stairs that ran between the up and down escalator. He was the only person left on the train by the time it reached the Isle of Dogs. This part of the city was called Little Manhattan because of the mini-skyscrapers that had been built all along the riverside development of Canary Wharf. The Devere Holdings building was in there amid all of the merchant banks and import/export offices. Mudchute rather matched its name. Despite its nearness to the skyscrapers, it was like something out of the ’50s and owed its curious name to the fact that when it was being built the country was suffering from football factories, and its hooligans were the fear of Europe; otherwise, it would have been called Millwall Park, after the football team.
He followed the road around. Twenty years ago this part of London would have been full of kids kicking tin cans and pretending to be Teddy Sheringham and Tony Cascarino. Tonight it was quiet.
There was more building going on on the other side of the tracks. The metal skeleton of the building was slowly being wrapped in bricks and mortar.
He didn’t have a weapon. No doubt he could have climbed over the wall and dropped down onto the building site and found a decent sized rock. Or maybe a piece of steel pipe or rebar, a chisel, hammer or other tool. He decided against it, not for any ethical reasons-he had no problem with stealing from a construction site. No, he wanted to do this with his bare hands. He didn’t want anything between him and Devere as he beat the life out of him.
Konstantin found the building. Lethe was right, he couldn’t miss it. It was one of those carbuncles on the face of the city Prince Charles had been railing about for years while no one paid the slightest bit of notice to his royal raving.
He had lost his bump key when the BKA took him into custody, so getting past the security was going to be a little more complicated. He stepped back, standing just out of the puddle of light from the streetlight, and looked up at the facade. There was a fairly substantial drainage system on the outside of the house, with pipes running all the way down from the roof. He’d never understood why the British put their water pipes on the outside of their houses, when the cold came they were always going to crack, maybe not for ten years, but eventually they would. Freeze, thaw, and all of that. Pipes on the outside was asking for problems. Good metal pipes properly set into the mortar were asking for an entirely different set of problems.
Konstantin picked a path up to the first balcony. It was a long affair that actually ran around half of the frontage, then turned right to catch some of the lowering evening sun. The second story balcony repeated the pattern. It was the same for each of the four stories. The water pipes threaded through the narrowest of places, where the balconies didn’t over lap. Once he got to the first one it would be relatively easy to climb to the next. Of course there was no guarantee that when he got there the balcony doors would be open-and if they weren’t, hell would freeze over before Devere stopped playing Little Pig and let him in.
He could always try the buzzer trick again, but there were only three buzzers and no lights in any of the lower apartments. He didn’t waste any more time. He shimmied up the drainpipe, scuffing his feet off the wall, and hooked his hand onto the first balcony so that he could pull himself up. Second to third was almost as easy. He stood on the balcony rail and reached up. The next level was six inches out of reach, so leaning out over the drop, he jumped.
Konstantin caught the concrete base of the balcony and hauled himself up as though he was doing chin-ups, then swung, hooking his leg up onto the balcony railing and climbed onto the third story balcony. He repeated the maneuver for the fourth story and stood there for a moment, looking in through the huge plate glass doors and dusting his hands off.
The television was on, casting shadow shapes across the contours of the lounge.
Miles Devere was slumped in a leather armchair. He had his eyes closed and rested in the posture of someone who’d slipped into sleep.
Konstantin wanted him awake for the fun.
He checked his watch. It wasn’t quite midnight. There were chairs on the balcony, good cushioned chairs with high backs. Konstantin settled down into one of them. He was going to do this the Russian way. That meant coming late, four o’clock, coming in fast and hard and scaring the living crap out of Devere before he made him beg and plead and offer to pay anything, to give up his fortune, anything, and everything. Konstantin wasn’t about to be bought. When Devere was through begging he would beat the man to death and leave him in his fancy skyscraper city apartment surrounded by all the fine things money could buy.
He had the patience of a saint when it came to keeping a promise.
He looked out over the river, watching the city at night. It was a curious beast. It never quietly slept. He couldn’t understand the appeal of it. It was dirty, smelly, over-crowded, just like any other city in the world. He scanned the rooftops from The Tower to St. Paul’s distinctive dome and over the rooftops to The London Eye and, almost on the edge of what could be seen, Big Ben. The night lights made it seem like a different place. Like a fairy tale city. They might soften the sharp edges of the architecture, but they couldn’t hide the fact that right now murder was the only tale of the city worth telling.
He checked his watch again.
Two a.m.
Soon, he promised himself. The ambient light from the television went out.
Two hours passed slowly. Konstantin didn’t mind. Some moments were worth savoring. This was one of them. The moon was full and bright.
He stood up and walked the length of the balcony, looking for a makeshift tool that would help him break the lock open if he needed it. Three out of ten burglaries in the city required no force at all because the occupants were too dumb to lock their own doors and windows, but Konstantin was working under the impression that Devere was security conscious. Rich men usually were-to the point of paranoia. Whatever he was, Devere wasn’t a keen gardener. There was no ready supply of tools for turning the soil and planting bulbs in the window b
oxes.
He walked back slowly to the balcony doors. The basic locks that come with balcony doors are usually brittle and quite soft, meaning they will break under pressure. It didn’t matter how tough the glass was if the lock was going to shatter under a decent amount of leverage. A broom handle was enough to break most of them, but thankfully, most of the people sleeping soundly out there under the soft lights in fairy tale city didn’t know that. If they did, they wouldn’t have been sleeping at all, never mind soundly.
The door was locked, but he couldn’t see any additional locks or security-meaning Devere thought living four flights up made him safe. He wouldn’t live to regret that mistake.
Konstantin found what he was looking for: a metal rod from the clothes hanger Devere used to dry his designer shirts.
He slipped it through the lock handle and applied a little pressure, testing it out. He felt the resistance, then pressed again, a little harder this time, working the lock. It split on the third try, with a crack like a gunshot.
He tossed the metal rod aside and slid the door open on its runner.
He went inside.
The apartment had that eerie four o’clock silence. He moved quickly through the place, walking from room to room. The decor was spartan, Scandinavian minimalist. It had absolutely no stamp of personality on it, and that wasn’t just because of the dark. It wasn’t actually that dark inside; the full moon painted everything silver.
Each white wall had a single piece of art on it. Konstantin couldn’t tell if they were cheap prints or expensive originals. He wasn’t much of an art lover. He recognized some pieces, especially by the old masters, but the new stuff, not so much. He liked his artists like he liked his enemies, dead.
Devere didn’t look like a paranoid man. There were motion detectors in each room at strategic points, and the little red light blinked every time Konstantin moved, but no alarm sounded. Like most people, he obviously didn’t set the alarm when he was in the apartment.
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