* * *
Marc was reaching for the door to his room when some unnamed instinct stilled him in his tracks. Outwardly, nothing was amiss, but after a night of seeing every part of his plans come apart, he was suddenly seized by the certainty that something wasn’t right. Holding his breath, Marc pressed against the wall and leaned as close to the door as he dared, straining to hear.
For long minutes, nothing. He started to wonder what he would do if one of the hotel staff appeared.
Then, very distinctly, he heard the sound of movement on the other side of the door. The creak of the wicker chair out by the balcony, shifting under someone’s weight.
The blood drained from his face. All the while he had been burning off time taking the long way back to the hotel, thinking he was being clever, but these people had found him anyway. Was there someone like the German assassin waiting in there for him, a silenced gun aimed at the door? The chair creaked again and he knew for certain.
Silently, Marc drew back from the door, retreating away. Strangely, he felt partly vindicated for his own paranoia. Before setting off to the Jade, his last act had been to secret his daypack in a hide outside his hotel room. Instead of stowing it in the room safe—which was hardly secure in itself—he’d opted for a more basic option.
There was a maintenance closet off the corridor, with a hung ceiling. Marc stood on tiptoe to dislodge a tile with his fingers, and found the daypack’s strap hanging behind it, exactly where he had left it. He grabbed it and fled.
* * *
Instead of going up the rise toward the town, he retreated back down the small slip road that served the hotel, following the curve around the hillside toward the beaches. With his hood up and a shemagh taken from Sam’s go-bag around his face, Marc avoided the gaze of the Monte Tauro’s security cameras and scrambled over a wall a few meters further on, climbing around a dusty fiberboard sign on scaffold poles, dragging the backpack behind him.
The sign sported a sun-bleached picture of idyllic three-story beachside apartments and text promising the completion of construction the previous year. On the other side of the wall was the debris of a forsaken construction site, overgrown by the march of the local greenery. The plot sported the frames of the promised apartment but little else. The unfinished holiday homes resembled something a patient but unimaginative child might have made out of building bricks, breeze-block cubes open to the air in many places where walls had not been added. The air was musty with the smell of animal urine and neglect, the ground littered with windblown trash and dead leaves. Marc slipped into the nearest of the skeletal buildings and worked his way to the uppermost floor, through the gaps where staircases would have eventually been installed. The boom and bust in the European construction industry over the last decade had left dozens of sites like this scattered around the holiday resorts of the Mediterranean, snapped up by speculators unable to complete contracts, or sell in a hostile marketplace. The apartments were out of the way here, out of sight from Taormina, forgotten and isolated. A good bolthole, and well placed to watch the hotel.
It was what Marc needed, a place where he could rest and think on his next move. Too much of what was happening to him was reactive, forced on to him by the actions of people who wanted him dead. If he was going to get ahead of the curve, that had to change.
He found a corner of the unfinished building, a space that probably would have been a well-appointed bathroom had the Euro crash never happened. He put on his last change of clean clothes and, making certain that there was no way any light would be seen from the streets above, he booted up his laptop.
The hard drive sat on the floor. It was an ugly object, all sharp edges and steel plates. Numerous ports and jack sockets dotted the flanks of it, many of them non-standard sizes deliberately chosen by the Soviet military to make it difficult for anyone without the correct gear to access the contents.
Difficult, Marc reflected, but not impossible. He set a suite of high-level intrusion programs to work on the device, letting them probe its firewalls for weaknesses. It would take hours for the software to map the whole scope of the drive’s memory, like a scout circling an ancient fortress in search of loose stones in the walls. Marc could only sit back and watch the slow, inexorable motion of a progress bar across the screen.
One at a time, feeling the tightness in his muscles, he marched bullets into the magazine of the Glock and waited for the dawn.
THIRTEEN
The port of Mersin appeared to Khadir as little more than a drab collection of gray boxes, stacked alongside quays extending into the gunmetal sea. The Turkish docks were alive with activity and the noises of commerce, as containers were loaded and unloaded on to the slow hulks of cargo ships resting at anchor.
The driver threaded his car between the forklifts and trucks until they emerged in the shadow of a black-hulled freighter flying a Bolivian flag. Khadir gathered up his bag and walked away without looking back. The Santa Cruz rose high over his head, the ship’s curved stern like the battlement of an iron castle. He immediately spotted a man in a heavy weather coat at the rail, the distinctive silhouette of an AK-47 resting low over his belly, not quite concealed from sight.
Others were waiting at the foot of the gangway, and as Khadir approached, a parked van was disgorging his soldiers on to the quayside. The youths saw him and they kept their manner circumspect, even though he knew that many of them had never glimpsed the sea before. Jadeed descended from the ship, barking out an order, and they fell into a loose rank and marched up the walkway.
Khadir’s subordinate had traveled ahead of the group, arriving a day earlier to meet the arrival of the Santa Cruz. The rest of them had made the trip from the orphanage by various means, moving separately. Khadir favored the train; it gave him time to reflect and take a rare moment of respite.
Jadeed intercepted him before he reached the foot of the gangway and the expression on the other man’s face spoke volumes.
“What is wrong?” said Khadir, meeting the issue directly.
As usual, Jadeed wasted no time with preamble. “The equipment is in place, the doctor is here as well, but the material is not on board.”
Khadir covered his annoyance with a slow nod. “Reason?”
Jadeed shook his head. “He refused to account for it.”
“He?”
“The Britisher is on the ship.” Jadeed inclined his head toward the vessel. “His paymasters sent him. He will only speak with you.” There was something else left unsaid and Khadir gave his man a level look, waiting for him to reveal it. At length, Jadeed scowled. “He insults me. My temper is tested.”
Khadir snorted quietly. “I would expect no less.” He advanced up the walkway, striding on to the ship as if he owned the vessel and everything aboard it.
The one with the rifle was waiting for him, along with a second man. The rifleman was of Eastern European stock, Khadir guessed, perhaps a Serb, but the other could only have been the Britisher. He didn’t need to confirm that it had been this man’s voice on the other end of the satellite phone, days earlier. The cold twist of his lip confirmed it.
“Well now. The famous Omar Khadir. Here you are,” he began, the rough edges of his words broken and crude. The man had dark hair cut close to the scalp and the unkempt new growth of a beard. His eyes were of note, though. They were the only thing that gave Khadir pause. He knew immediately that this was not a man to underestimate. “You brought a school outing with you.” The Britisher surveyed the group of the youths as they milled in the middle of the deck, eyes darting around as they took in the scope of the ship. “This a joke, is it?” Khadir said nothing as the man came close to him. “You bring a couple of men and what, a pack of kids?” He grunted. “Be lucky if you could find one of ’em whose balls have dropped.”
The youths were all watching now, and even if they didn’t understand the words, they could guess what was being said. “They are soldiers,” Khadir replied. “They are loyal. That is all that m
atters.”
The Serb made a negative noise and spat on the deck in open contempt, and the Britisher walked toward the group, glaring at the youths. “Can they even hold a rifle?” He shot a look back at Khadir. “You really think this shower of little shits is up to it?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “What kind of amateurs are you people?”
“They understand this war,” Khadir told him. At his side, he could sense Jadeed seething at the Britisher’s tone. “They are old enough to fight. You should understand that.”
“You what?”
“Your nation practically invented the idea of child soldiers, after all.” Khadir went on. “The young ones who signed away their lives to fight in your First World War? Britain’s boys, old enough to carry a gun, old enough to die for King and Country.” He allowed a shade of mockery to enter his tone. “What is it they called those infantrymen? Tommy Atkins.” Khadir sounded out the name. “Like you. You were once a soldier of the crown, yes? It’s a good name.”
The twist in the Britisher’s expression showed that Khadir had touched a raw nerve. His guess had been accurate. He knew this kind of man well, the thuggish and cunning sort that swelled the ranks of armies the world over. Men who fought for the sake of it, not for ideals.
“You wanna call me Tommy…” said the Britisher. “I don’t give a toss if you call me Mary bloody Queen of Scots…” Without taking his eyes off Khadir, his hand came up and pointed toward Jadeed. “I’ll tell you this, Saladin. Your dog there keeps on eyeballing me and I’ll fucking gut him. We clear?”
“We are.” Khadir glanced at his second-in-command and Jadeed scowled and walked away. Behind him, the gangway was retracting and the Santa Cruz’s horn sounded as the ship’s crew began to cast off.
Tommy—that was now the name Khadir had fixed the man with—came back toward him, dismissing the Serb with a jut of his chin. “You keep your little boy band off the deck and out of trouble, right?”
“Explain something to me,” he replied, ignoring the demand. “What makes you think you are in charge here?”
That earned him a rough burst of laughter. “Did you miss a memo, pal? Did you forget who’s bankrolling your little junior jihad?”
Khadir felt his tolerance waning. “Al Sayf does not answer to you, mercenary, or your Combine. We have paid our way in blood.”
“Whatever you say.” The other man shrugged. “But the fact is, the gents I work for can cut you out of it and you’ll be shit out of luck. So you’d best not piss me off.”
“They sent you to watch us. Who is the dog now?” Before Tommy could reply, Khadir advanced on him. “That was not part of the agreement. Where is the hardware we were promised?”
“Down below.” The Britisher looked away as the dock began to slip back from the ship, the engines giving off a low, muttering growl. “Set up just like you wanted.”
“You know what I mean!” Khadir snapped. “We were promised the Thunderbolts in return for the strike in Barcelona. Where are they?”
Tommy folded his arms. “Not here. Not yet.”
“That was not—”
“The deal, yeah, heard you the first time. But things change. Circumstances beyond our control and all that. There are some loose ends that need to be cleared up.”
Khadir was silent for a moment, recalling the sudden and unexplained removal of his previous contact with the Combine. The Britisher must have guessed his line of thinking.
“No room for mistakes, you know that as well as I do. So we’ve got people cutting off any chances for blowback. Thing is, one particular little fucker is taking more effort than expected.” He said the last with some venom.
“That is the Combine’s problem, not ours.”
Tommy shook his head. “Wrong answer, Saladin. It’s everyone’s problem. And my new bosses? They don’t like that. So we’re dialing it back until things are sorted.”
An icy rage manifested itself in the slow tightening of Khadir’s fists. “Al Sayf have burned many bridges to reach this point. I will not allow the fears of old men to stop our call to vengeance.” His eyes glittered with cold fire. “You are like them, a man without conscience and faith, so I do not expect you to appreciate such ideals. But understand this.” He leaned closer, his voice falling into a leopard snarl. “Tell the ones who hold the leash around your neck that if they betray us, there is nowhere under heaven where they can hide.”
* * *
When Marc awoke the first thing he did was tap the laptop’s keyboard, ignoring the aches across his back from having slept sitting up. He scowled at the progress bar on the monitor, still incomplete, the endless train of data calls on an inset panel showing the unrelenting, inexorable advance of his scan programs as they mapped the stolen hard drive. He ate a crumbling energy bar as a makeshift breakfast, and hazarded a look out of the empty window frame, down toward the hotel.
A patrol car was parked outside the lobby entrance, and he could see a Polizia Municipale officer talking animatedly with the one of the desk staff.
Marc shrank back, scanning in every direction for any signs that he had been discovered. He drew the pistol and then slipped back to his hiding place.
His eyes fell to Novakovitch’s iPhone, still lying where he had left it, half-stripped on the dusty floor. He wondered if it might hold some clue that could help him with the hard drive. Carefully, Marc reassembled the device, but not before using the thin blade of a screwdriver to tease out and disconnect the handset’s GPS chip.
The phone came on and emitted a soft, melodic chime. The tiny tape-spool icon indicating a waiting voice-mail blinked in the corner of the screen. The message was just over three hours old, and the phone displayed Tanya Kirin’s picture as the sender’s ID.
Unless the dead girl was calling from her watery grave, someone else was reaching out to him. Marc tapped the playback key and gingerly raised the phone to his ear.
“I assume you have Dima’s phone, Mister Dane,” began a smooth, metered voice, in an accent that could have been Swiss or Austrian. “My name is Grunewald. We should have a conversation.”
Marc’s heart thudded in his ears and a wash of fear rose and fell in him. He held the phone away, as if it had suddenly become poisonous. A hundred questions churned in his thoughts, but he swallowed and took a deep, long breath. It took an effort to step back from the moment, to look at this new development from outside himself.
They know my name. But that wasn’t a surprise, the leak inside MI6 could have made sure of that. They know I’m here on the island. Had someone on the yacht got a look at his face? That had to be it.
Abruptly, another thought occurred to him. But they don’t know where I am. If this Grunewald guy had that information, Marc would already be dead.
Looking again, he saw that the voice mail message had an attached link with it, a web address for an online map site. Marc opened the laptop’s browser and copied the code in by hand, revealing a street-level view of a sleepy residential district. An avenue in the Hammersmith district of London.
Marc’s gut filled with ice. He knew the street and the house with the yellow door framed in the middle of the screen, knew it well even though he hadn’t been there for years.
Kate’s house. His sister’s house. He had a flash of memory—a dinner party, feeling awkward and out of place, a few months after Kate and Stephen had married. Back when Mum was still alive.
He put down the phone and for long moments, Marc lingered on the thought of smashing the handset into pieces under his heel and making a run for it. But that was never going to be an option, not for him. Maybe Sam could have done it, just walked away and not looked back, but Marc was not that person. He had made a promise.
He drank the last of the water he had in his pack and gathered his thoughts. He tapped the key to return the call and on the third ring the line connected.
“I see I was right.” The same voice, calm and unhurried. “Do I have your attention?”
Marc resolved to give th
em nothing more than they already had. “Say your piece.”
“Straight to business. Good. I’m glad we didn’t have to go through any needless chest-beating.” There was a brief pause, and Marc strained to listen for any background noise, anything to give him a clue as to who he was talking to or where they were. “Mister Dane, you’ve made yourself an irritant. You’re getting in our way. Now you’ve taken something that my employers would very much like to have in their possession, yes?”
Marc glanced at Novakovich’s hard drive, but said nothing.
“I think you can see where this conversation is leading,” Grunewald continued. “Give me the storage device, or there will be consequences.”
“Come and get it.” His throat was dry and his reply came out gruff and terse.
“You’re quite clever for a technician, Mister Dane, but you’re out of your depth. Let us be clear about this, so you understand.” The man on the other end of the line read off the street address of the Parker household. “It only requires me to make one call and my men will enter that house and kill everyone they find there.” The bloodless, matter-of-fact delivery of the threat made it all the more chilling. “Don’t do anything so foolish as to try to warn them. That would be a grave mistake.”
Having seen the work of the hit team on Novakovich’s yacht, Marc had no doubt that he was dealing with people who were more than capable of such an act. “You kill them and I’ll upload the contents of that hard drive to every news agency on the planet.”
He heard the brief sneer in the reply. “That’s a poor bluff. The device is encrypted.”
“Maybe so,” he retorted, “but I am quite clever, remember?” Marc shot a look down at the laptop. In truth, he doubted his software was going to be able to harvest much of use from Novakovich’s files, but if he could make Grunewald think otherwise …
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