by Karen Guyler
“It’s Rubin’s weapon, I’d bet anything. Sadie, you’ve read our report?” Sadie nodded. “I’ve got the bullets he fired at us for you.”
“Anything like this weapon recovered from the house in Norway?”
Eva shrugged. “No drones, no weird bullets that I noticed. But when he targeted us, we didn’t see the actual weapon, only what it fires. The drone didn’t look anything special.” But they were learning much about Carl Rubin wasn’t what it seemed. “He mentioned other tests, a group of people could be next. Do you know where he is?”
“We’ll get someone tracking him down.” Gordon said.
“Does he have any other homes, assets where he could be? I don’t see an arms dealer operating out of rural Norway, no matter how much he loves the landscape, it’s too far from the world stage to make him viable.”
“How much do you know about arms dealers?” Sadie asked.
Eva shrugged away that it was precisely nothing. “I know about people.”
“We’ll be in touch.” Gordon disconnected.
She felt the jet banking even as Gordon called her back.
“Rubin’s in the area. His jet flew into Tallinn airport in Estonia early this morning and his yacht’s moored there currently.”
“Short hop from there to St Petersburg.” Eva said.
“Exactly. How do you feel about seeing if you can bug his comms? We need to get more evidence and you’re the closest assets we have.”
Eva had done the training on that plug and play. She could do that. “Sure.”
“We don’t believe he’s on board but he’s flying a Panamanian flag, so be careful.”
“What difference does the flag make?”
“If Rubin commits a crime while based on his yacht, he can invoke the laws of the country where it’s registered. Panama gives him the ambiguity he needs. It’s not just him, lots of boat owners use it, more favourable tax laws, just for starters, more flexible about everything else.”
“Okay, understood.”
“You need to be as discreet as you can be, we’re straying a little here but it’s within parameters.”
“Straying? What does that mean?”
“We’re out of The Society territory, more into MI6’s.”
“Aren’t we on the same side?”
“We are, but we’re accountable in a different way. And because we’re not in the general MI6 briefing cascade, we have to be careful we’re not compromising any of their operations we don’t know about. You’ll get a packet.”
Luke slept through the rest of the flight while Eva focused on the encrypted brief from Gordon: a schematic of the yacht, berthing plan for Tallinn harbour.
Could she do this by herself? Luke was exhausted, in pain, in a drugged sleep. She had to.
Her phone rang, Lily surprising her.
“Hey, sweetheart, is everything all right?”
“Yeah, I just wanted to say hello. Tricia said you might not get back tonight.”
Eva sighed. “I’m sorry about that, delays in the flights. Are you okay staying with Anya again?”
“Course, I, you,” Lily huffed out a breath. “You’re being careful, aren’t you?”
Eva forced a laugh. “Not much danger being in a meeting room, other than being bored to death.”
“Okay, I just wanted to say that.”
Lily’s careful tone took Eva back to when she’d been a teenager, lying in bed, unable to sleep beneath the worry of what would happen to her if something happened to her mum now that her father was gone.
She blew out a breath, pressed her fingertips to her eyelids, rubbing away the prickling of tears. She didn’t want that for Lily.
“Mum, you still there?”
“Yes, sweetheart. You mustn’t worry about me, I’m fine. Enjoy your sleepover. I’ll see you tomorrow. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Eva placed her phone on the table. That was how they’d always been. Had Lily ceased hostilities over Eva’s hedging explanation as to why she couldn’t visit Charles in prison?
All while the plane landed, taxi-ed to the private area at the rear of the airport where a car waited for her, Luke slept.
Using the code S texted her, she opened the padlocked comms cupboard and took a lapel camera and earpiece.
“Yo, Eva, I’m your eye in the sky.” Iago answered her call.
“Thanks for waiting.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I know, big doughnut run when I get back.”
He laughed. “I knew I liked you.”
She spun the laptop round, showed him Luke. “He took the strong painkillers before we got tasked, so I’m leaving him here. I did this training, I can do this.”
“Right, let me set up your comms.” Iago tapped furiously on his keyboard in London while she put in the earpiece and twisted the lapel camera into the top buttonhole of the coat she’d picked up on the way to the airport.
“Acquired.” Iago’s voice came in her ear, the inside of the plane appeared on her laptop screen. “Voice and visual. You’re good to go.”
She placed the bugs in their tiny travel boxes into her inside coat pockets, checked her Glock, and knocked at the cockpit door.
A man opened it. A woman was still in the chair, checking gauges, noting readings.
“Hi, I need something from the hold.” Eva said.
He grabbed a hi-vis vest from a hook at the back of the cockpit and followed her down the cabin. Stepping off the plane, the wind tore her breath away.
The hold lit up when he opened the door. Two coffins stark in the space jolted her. She gulped in the frozen air, rubbed at her eyes as if by taking away the image, she could undo the reality.
The first officer handed her what she’d asked for, no explanation needed. She closed her hand around it.
Yes, she could do this. She was only planting bugs.
31
Eva pulled the hi-vis vest borrowed from the plane’s first officer around her coat. But it wouldn’t stop her shivering when the cold wasn’t the problem.
The harbour master unlocked the tall metal gates that led to the VIP members’ area of the marina, the jetties where the wealth of a small country would be moored during the summer. “Last berth, biggest yacht, you can’t miss it. I’ll be in my office, if you need me.” His English was flawless.
“Is it too windy for helicopters to fly right now?” Eva asked.
He shrugged. “Air is not my area, water and boats are.”
She walked down the sloped gangplank to the hub of jetties that spoked off the central platform.
“What the hell are you doing?” Luke’s voice, groggy in her ear.
“How are you feeling?”
“Where are you?”
“At the marina.”
“Send the car back for me. You can’t do this on your own.”
“I can, it’s planting a few bugs. I did the training.”
Eva stepped to the side of the platform to let a couple pass her. They barely acknowledged her, the hi-vis working.
“There’s a lot of value in the target thinking we’re out of the picture.” Luke said. “Showing our hand so quickly’s not good, we could get better mileage another way. And he might just shoot you for real this time.”
“He’s not here. I’ll be in and out before he gets back.”
The water hit the hulls of the boats she passed, tiny flickers of light split into shimmering drops as the small waves dispersed the reflections.
“Are you onboard?” Luke asked.
“Not quite.”
“Then you don’t know that.”
She’d reached the spoke at the end of the spread, there were a dozen boats moored nearest the central platform and one right at the end, lit up like a buy me sales shot.
“Wow.”
It was ridiculous to call it a yacht, even a super yacht wasn’t anywhere close. It was something the Royal family would be at home on. She couldn’t guess at its
price tag, it was so alien a thing to her normal life in a rented flat in London, the kind of things she saw in movies.
She was under-dressed, under-armed, under—
“You need to wait for me to get there.” Luke sounded more awake now.
“I’ll be done by then.” Her slow footsteps were taking her down the jetty far too quickly.
“Eva, he knows who you are, you can’t bluff your way out if he sees you.”
“He saw you, too. Have some faith in me.”
The locked gate in the middle of the span opened easily to the key the harbour master had given her. She just had to persuade her heart rate to calm down. And her mind to stop rerunning the conversation she’d had with Gordon last October when he asked her if she was prepared to pass her father’s legacy on to Lily. Her father had tried to ease her mind by telling her that the bullets he ran towards were words and recorded conversations, but they’d killed him anyway. And here she was, walking voluntarily towards where the man who had actually tried to shoot her had last been seen. It was one thing wanting him to pay, but another to risk making her daughter pay the price, gambling her life on an assumption when he might be nothing like Charles.
She pulled her hood up.
“Going quiet on your end.” She followed the protocol her training had taught her.
She heard Luke not appreciating it, if the language in her earpiece was anything to go by.
A strain of music reached across the black water. As the distance shrank to the yacht, Eva realised she was tensing, hunching in on herself, nothing to do with the dropping night temperature. She had to seem confident. She pulled her shoulders back, marched faster. Security lights blazed at her, turning the peaceful darkness to a dazzling fury.
The yacht towered four decks above her, an enormous span of height. She’d have trouble looking off the top deck for sure, the draw that drop would wield over her would be strong. If that was the only way out, there was no way she’d be able to dive off it. She shuddered. She’d try and stay on the entry deck.
“Identify yourself.” The demand through the tannoy split the silence.
“Harbour master’s office, requesting boarding clearance, compliance check with new regulations.” Eva shouted.
Her camera feed gave Luke and Iago eyes on. She wasn’t alone. She unzipped her coat and undid her holster, pressed her fingertips against the handle of her weapon. She wasn’t helpless.
“Who wishes to board?”
“Harbourmaster’s deputy.”
“Come back in the morning.”
“Non-compliance means you forfeit your mooring. You have ten minutes to leave.”
The lights blazed on her, the tannoy stayed silent. Were they really going to risk it? If Rubin was on board, it could be they were leaving anyway, and she might have forced their hand.
Should she give it more than ten minutes? She had to act as though their decision just meant paperwork to her.
“Hey,” she shouted, moving closer. “I’m not standing here freezing my arse off while you decide. I’m writing it up that you’re in breach of compliance. You need to be gone in eight minutes.” She threw a couple of Russian swear words at the implacable shiny blackness of the super yacht and walked away.
“That went well.” Iago said.
“Give it a minute.” Luke was suddenly on her side?
“You may board.” The tannoy overrode them both. A gangplank slid out from the black hull and whispered to a stop on the jetty.
Eva breathed, reminded herself as the harbour master’s deputy she was overworked, underpaid and now pissed that she had to do this with all the boats when she just wanted to sit in the office and drink hot chocolate.
A slim woman in black trousers and a red fine knit jumper, whose long hair fell perfectly back into place when the wind ruffled it, was waiting for her at the top of the gangplank.
“I’m Mr Rubin’s assistant. Welcome aboard the Overwatch.” She said it as though Eva had been expected.
“Curious name.”
“The Overwatch is a one-of-a-kind. What do you need to see?”
“If I tell you, it would ruin the point of a spot check, wouldn’t it? I need to inspect the whole vessel, I’ll be taking notes as I go.”
“This way.” The assistant gestured to the double doors leading to the inside space, one of which was open.
Eva could have done with sunglasses against the glare of gleaming brass and wood so highly polished she could practically see her face in it.
“This yacht is a test bed of green ingenuity,” she went on as though Eva was an investor she was hoping to impress. “We have a unit that desalinates seawat—”
“That’s all very laudable, but that’s not why I’m here.”
“Why are you here?”
“What’s your name?”
“Marai Bukowski.”
Eva tapped it into her phone but let Iago do the searching for the woman’s history. “Where’s the owner?” The million dollar question.
“He’ll be coming aboard shortly.”
Eva turned her panic into annoyance. Tapped harder on her phone. “As if it’s not bad enough I have to do this,” she launched into Russian, interrupted herself. “When is shortly?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Well, find out, I don’t want to be here all night. I have a hundred others to do. Night shift is supposed to be easy.” Eva stared at the woman. “Get to it, I don’t need a chaperone, I know my way round one of these.”
She walked around the perimeter of the room, some kind of reception area, comfortable easy chairs and a couple of sofas, low tables. The chess set ready to play in one corner tempted her but knocking the king over, her forecast of Rubin’s future, would just get her noticed. She scowled instead up at where the wall met the ceiling and down at where it met the carpeted floor. “Hmmm,” tapped some more at her phone.
She peered harder at the join between carpet and wall, then squatted, gazing sideways, looking for plugs, anything to suggest comms she could tap.
Nothing on that side.
“Are you still here?” She asked Marai as she crossed to the other side of the room.
The assistant hovered at the door to the interior of the yacht. Eva gave the ceiling more attention on that side, tutted. “I’ll need to speak to the owner about that.” She frowned. “This is going to take some time.”
“What’s wrong?” The assistant looked worried. “I’ll go and check his eta.”
Eva gave her a minute before placing two bugs in the room, then opening the interior door which led into a short corridor. Through the porthole in the first door, the room showed her it was a dining room, worth one bug at least.
The next was the one she’d most hoped to find. No porthole in the door signposted that it was where Rubin valued his privacy. Blond wood clad walls, such a reminder of his home, Eva could have been transported straight back to Norway.
“Office, I’d say.” she murmured to her audience.
“Any chance there’s a laptop or anything, I can echo it.” Iago sounded hopeful.
Eva’s look around the room let her camera pick up the easy chairs clustered together as though they were having a conversation, the drinks cabinet and the expected globe beside them. Around two TV screens one side wall was decorated like an art gallery in extraordinarily clear photos of nature: a fjord, a waterfall, forests from the air, the tops of the trees looking curiously different when viewed from high above them, a nicer use of one of his drones. And Rubin’s huge desk almost in the middle of the space, the night beyond the glass wall in front of her reflecting her tense face.
On the other side wall there were no photos, but many framed certificates, and a huge canvas, richly lettered, in the middle, proclaiming Rubin’s public persona upfront and central: ‘there is no planet B’.
But to the right of it all—what was that doing there? Out of kilter already, the memory drew her to framed print that reached into her childhood.
“How can that be writing?” She’d demanded when her father had shown her what he’d brought home. She’d run her finger over the curling swirling pattern of the calligraphy. “How do you read it?”
He’d laughed. “Shall I tell you a secret? I don’t know how but I know what it says. It’s pretty, isn’t it, so much more poetic than our letters.”
She hadn’t really understood what he was saying then, but now she could see it. Amongst the other utilitarian framed certificates of seamanship and black-and-white typeface, the Arabic was much more inviting.
“Eva, what’re you looking at? Bug the desk.” Luke’s urgent hiss was drowned by the sounds of a helicopter, deafening as it landed two decks above her.
32
“Helicopter’s landing.” Eva told Iago and Luke in case they hadn’t picked up the noise through her earpiece.
“You need to leave.” Luke replied.
Her brain was right with him, screaming at her to get out of there. “On it, I have to put at least one in here.”
She pressed a bug behind the Arabic calligraphed print. It was thin enough that it wouldn’t make the frame protrude so far from the wall he’d notice. Another behind the desk leg near the top where Rubin might not find it. No handy bookcases as per her training, but that was okay. She’d improvise. Come on, quick. The drawers of his desk were locked. No space between the back of the drawers and the desk front. The lights were recessed spots, the whole setup in place to not provide spaces for listening devices.
“If I put one too close to the TVs, won’t it interfere with its signal?”
“It’s a risk, don’t do that.” Iago confirmed.
No trunking hid the wires, they were buried in the wall.
The globe, on the underside of its support? Too obvious. Beneath one of the chair seats could be a last resort. She searched with her fingertips for anything not fabric. There, a wooden strut in the middle of the seat pan base. She pressed the tiny device onto it.
“Eva, get out of there.” Luke’s voice insistent in her ear.
The tremendous clatter above her was fading, the helicopter winding down. She should have enough time to get out the way she came in, providing the gangplank hadn’t been retracted. She got to her feet and pulled the gun out of her coat pocket.