The Old Enemy

by Henry Porter

The Ghost is German (?)

  2. Harland collaborates with Denis Hisami. That means the Ghost must have relevance, or live in the US.

  3. Hisami pays for team of young investigators. They are hacking GreenState. Is Ghost part of GreenState? Maybe owner? Who is Jonathan Mobius? Originally German?

  4. Five colour code names. Are the colours targets, or operatives?

  5. Hisami to reveal in Congress part or all of what they have found out to show who is behind attacks on him in the US.

  6. The Ghost gets wind of this and orders pre-emptive hits on Harland, Hisami and me.

  7. A Serb named Oret who may have hired three killers is murdered.

  8. Anatoly Stepurin, Russian operative ultimate boss and behind Oret’s murder? Kremlin?

  His leg began to feel better. He sat back and watched little towns flash by in the vast black night of northern Europe. Toombs was right: there was only one question – who? And plainly that was no mystery, because Naji and Zoe Freemantle knew whom they were investigating. And almost certainly Ulrike knew, because it was inconceivable that Harland had not told her about the individual he’d seen in Berlin.

  So, he needn’t concern himself with the details of the killers, who paid for them, who snuffed out the man called Oret, or where the chemical warfare agent came from. These things were not his business. But they were the CIA’s, and there was no point in keeping what knowledge he had to himself. He did two things. He texted Anastasia to underline how important it was to find Naji. Not only was he in danger, but he was currently the only person who could help them. ‘As your humble employee, can I ask you to make this a priority and get hold of him as soon as possible? XX,’ he wrote. Then he withdrew Toombs’s card from his wallet and called him. Toombs answered immediately.

  ‘I may lose you,’ said Samson.

  ‘You already did! Why the hell did you get off that train?’

  ‘Those two men were yours?’

  ‘There were no two men.’

  ‘The only women I saw were in hijab.’

  ‘Right. They were there to protect you. Look, Mr Samson, if we can find you, so can the people who want to kill you before you get to Estonia – that’s where you’re headed, right?’

  ‘I have information for you.’

  ‘Save it,’ Toombs snapped. ‘I’ll send you instructions for the Company encryption, then sit on your goddamn phone and stop the signal.’ He was told to download an app from a website and enter a series of passcodes into the app, which he did. The app promptly vanished from his screen.

  ‘The five words,’ began Samson. ‘Berlin, pitch, pearl, etcetera – are all colours, but of course you knew that. I can’t help you with the numbers, but I guess you’ve figured that out, unless the NSA computers are finding it hard to crack encryption that they haven’t seen before.’ He let that hang in the air, but Toombs didn’t bite. ‘Then there was a man named Oret, who seems likely to have hired at least three of the killers, but he was murdered.’

  ‘We know about Oret.’

  ‘And you know who killed him and his wife?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Try a man called Anatoly Stepurin. Russian. Cyprus-based. Profile looks right: semi-official hood, career killer, and deniable. Résumé includes Special Forces, activity in Ukraine and connections to GRU military intelligence. He’s now into illegal big-game hunting. Pay this arsehole £200,000 and you can shoot a lion. Pay him a fraction of that and he will kill a man for you. Most of this is on an investigative French website called Rochet. Looks like the reporters have good contacts with French and German intelligence.’

  Toombs exhaled heavily.

  ‘Was that a thank you?’

  ‘Yeah, sure – thanks.’

  ‘Stepurin could be the supplier of the nerve agent.’

  ‘I realise that.’

  ‘Have you got to Nikolai Horobets, the Ukrainian national who killed Harland?’

  Toombs didn’t reply.

  ‘So, you haven’t. Maybe I can do something about that. I have contacts there.’

  ‘That might be useful. Yes, let us know.’

  ‘What are you going to do for me?’

  ‘Aside from trying to keep you alive, although that’s going to be really hard, seeing as you are on a different train to the people who were sent to protect you. What more do you need?’

  The morphine induced a kind of sweet, lackadaisical wooziness, but also made things clearer. ‘Who are Nyman and SIS trying to protect?’

  Toombs was walking and Samson assumed he was moving so he could talk more freely. ‘You’ve been straight with us, so I’ll help you with this. We don’t think they want to protect anyone. We believe they’re aware of penetration at the very highest level and want to deal with that in their own time. That’s just our theory, which gives your former bosses the benefit of the doubt, and that kind of sticks in my craw. But we think the theory works.’ He paused. ‘And they don’t want you screwing up their plan to deal with the situation quietly. That’s why they won’t give one airborne fuck if you’re killed.’

  ‘Who are we talking about? You got a name?’

  ‘Cabinet-level minister, or government official, but I don’t have a name to share with you.’

  ‘Penetration means Russia, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the same thing in the States? Is that what Denis Hisami was going to reveal?’

  ‘You’ll have to talk to Reiner, that’s his beat. Look, I should go. We’ll be in touch. Stay safe.’

  Samson fell asleep almost immediately and did not wake up until they pulled into Cologne station, where he had to change trains. He struggled up, feeling like death but noticing that the pain in his leg had disappeared, and walked the few metres to the Berlin train on the adjacent platform. It was early, but already crowds of passengers were waiting for the doors to open. Without knowing why, he moved to the trickle of people who had reached their destination and were making for the concourse. Something told him he had to leave the station as quickly as possible. As he walked, he noticed on the departure board that a train to Frankfurt Airport was due to depart at 6.55 a.m. This gave him an idea. He exited and found a cab. The driver unplugged his earphones and began to move off. Samson turned. A man dashed from the station, looked around and went to the line of waiting Mercedes cabs. He was big, wearing a suit and a short overcoat and was carrying no luggage.

  The cab driver’s ID was visible. His name was Mohammed. ‘Where are you from?’ Samson asked in Arabic as they moved off.

  The driver looked in the mirror. ‘Aleppo – you?’

  ‘Lebanon. A man got in the cab behind and he will attempt to follow us. I need to lose him.’ He leaned forward and placed two folded €20 notes on to the passenger seat. ‘Can you help me do that, Mohammed?’

  ‘Of course.’ He grinned in the mirror. ‘That driver is my cousin Saaf. We start work together because we talk on the cab line. He just flashed his lights. You may be right about his passenger.’

  Samson thought for a few seconds. ‘Can you call Saaf and tell him you’ve got a good fare to Düsseldorf airport and we’re late for a plane? Say it in German so his passenger understands. Make it all sound normal.’ That made sense – he had originally been on the Düsseldorf train.

  They weaved through the traffic. ‘Where do you really want to go?’ asked Mohammed.

  ‘Frankfurt Airport.’

  They took Autobahn 3 north from Cologne. Mohammed’s cousin shared his taste for speed, but at junction 22 – the Leverkusen-Opladen intersection – Mohammed left it until the very last moment before shooting down the slip road off the autobahn. Saaf was going too fast to follow and missed the turning. Mohammed gleefully hooked the air in front of him with a punch. Saaf would now have to travel all the way to junction 21 – the Dreieck-Lagendfeld intersection – before he could
turn round and, besides, 21 was more complicated than 22 and they’d be forced to make a detour of a couple of kilometres before they could drive south. Saaf came on the phone and demanded to know what Mohammed was doing. ‘Gentleman left his wallet at the station,’ Mohammed replied, without skipping a beat.

  It would be a two-hour journey to Frankfurt. Samson sent another text to Anastasia. Using the occasional nickname of their times together, he wrote, ‘Nas. I am going to be out of range. I really mean it about Firefly. Can you try to get hold of him? I believe he’s in great danger.’ On his phone, Samson bought a ticket on the only flight to Tallinn from Frankfurt that week, which left at 9.50 a.m.– tight, but it should work. Occasionally, things fall the right way, he reflected, before placing all his phones in the metalised Faraday envelope and stretching out on the back seat of the cab.

  Chapter 19

  Firefly

  Anastasia couldn’t fathom how to work the remote for the air conditioning and, on this hot spring night in Athens, found sleep impossible. She got up and sat by the open window and looked through her messages and emails, then texted Naji. ‘I’m sorry, but we really need to speak again. Things are becoming dangerous. XXA.’

  It was 5 a.m., but the reply came immediately: ‘See you at the funeral.’

  ‘Before then! I am going to call you now.’

  No response came. She rang his number, but the calls were declined. She cursed and paced around the room, picking at a tub of cheese biscuits from the mini-bar. She dialled Samson. No answer. She left a message for Tulliver asking about Denis and lay down on the bed. It was then that the front desk phoned.

  Kyros was the night porter, whom she’d known from a previous post in a larger hotel. There had been some connection with her roguish father, but she wasn’t sure what. He asked how she was and said what a pleasure it was to see her name on the hotel registry, then eventually got round to the three men who had asked about her at the front desk. He thought they were police, but two looked like foreigners and didn’t say anything. They would neither confirm nor deny that they were police officers. And they had specifically told him not to inform her of their visit. He didn’t like the smell of them one bit. He hesitated to say this, but possibly they were from the Greek National Intelligence Service.

  ‘Can you take my payment on the phone now?’ she asked.

  ‘That will not be a problem,’ he said. ‘We have all your details and we can deal with the mini-bar later.’

  ‘And Kyros, could you charge me for two nights, so my room seems occupied tomorrow and I remain on the registry?’

  ‘Naturally, I will take the payment now and forget to mention that you are checking out to the day shift.’

  She booked the first flight to Skopje, the capital of what is now known as northern Macedonia, a little over an hour away – and raised the head of Mediterranean operations for the foundation, George Ciccone, to explain that she must depart sooner than she’d expected. She asked him to find a driver to meet her at Skopje Airport.

  She arrived at Skopje mid-morning, but the driver was nowhere to be found. She sat simmering at a café in Arrivals, wondering if she had made the right decision. Making decisions in the early morning was never a good course for her; she tended to get things out of proportion. Now she wondered if Naji was really in as much danger as Samson had suggested. But, naturally, she got no response from him or Samson.

  Just as a large man in his forties presented himself, holding a sign for the Aysel Hisami Foundation and introducing himself as Luka, her phone vibrated on the table. There was an American number on the screen. She snatched it up, thinking it would be the hospital, but heard the voice of Special Agent Reiner. ‘Where are you, Mrs Hisami? We’re wondering why you went to such lengths to deceive us about leaving the US and then ended up in the Balkans.’

  ‘I had meetings. I have a job, responsibilities, and since when did I have to tell the FBI my plans?’

  ‘I asked you to keep us informed of your movements, and now I find you in the Balkans, a hundred kilometres south of the Serbian border. I have one question for you; why are you going north towards Serbia, the country where those two buddies, Vladan Drasko and Miroslav Rajavic, came from?’

  ‘I’m on the way to see old friends – people I’ve worked with. Macedonia! Different country! You’re tracking my phone, right?’

  He didn’t respond to this. ‘Seems like a really strange thing to be doing with your husband in the ICU in Washington. Couldn’t your friends wait? Why did you leave the hotel in Athens so early? I was hoping to catch you.’

  ‘That was you? Why didn’t you call instead of arriving like secret police at the dead of night? What do you want to say to me?’

  ‘We’ve been in touch with Mr Samson, as I believe you have. I wanted to warn you that we’re certain he’s being followed by persons that wish to kill him. There may be others who have the same intention towards you. Samson knows how to look after himself, but you don’t. So it seems odd – not to say, extremely dangerous – for you to be headed towards the country that provided two of the four suspects in this affair, indeed the two men who tried to kill your husband and your former lover.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t think . . .’

  ‘I don’t think anything. I just want to know what you’re doing. We’re trying to keep you and Samson alive. I suggest you take the first flight back to the States.’

  ‘I’ll be returning as soon as I can.’

  ‘Make that tomorrow! Your husband needs you. I’ll remind you that this investigation is undoubtedly the most important thing going on in America right now. We need to be able to speak to you in person. Tomorrow, I want to hear you’re on your way back to DC. Tomorrow, Mrs Hisami!’ He rang off.

  She accompanied Luka to the nearly empty car park but stopped short of his Toyota and asked for a cigarette from the packet she’d spotted in the top pocket of his bush jacket. She moved away to smoke and think about the call. Why would the FBI track her to Athens then Skopje and, when they found her, have almost nothing meaningful to say, except to warn her of the dangers she faced, which were, in any case, obvious, because they had tried to kill Samson twice and she’d been beside her husband in Congress? The FBI were keeping tabs on her and letting her know about it, and that, apparently, was an end in itself. It was bizarre. She took out her phone and left a message for Tulliver that she would be out of reach for a while, then turned it off. Samson would know what to do about a phone that was being tracked, but she hoped switching hers off and burying it in the bottom of her bag would be enough.

  The farm was exactly as she remembered, though a brand-new barn had replaced the one where Almunjil’s gang of IS killers had held her, Naji and Samson captive. The collection of stables, the broken stone courtyard, the bent rails and crooked fencing around the pens were all as they had been, but the old tractor and trailer had gone and new machinery glinted in the sunlight. As the car pulled up in the yard, Moon appeared, barking, and in her wake came three puppies, two white and one cappuccino-coloured. Anastasia got out and crouched down and was immediately surrounded by the puppies, while Moon stood back, not letting up with the barking. Above her, Naji appeared on the old wooden walkway and folded his arms with an exasperated look. She called out hello, and he shook his head then ran down the steps to shake her hand and, finally, let her embrace him and look him over. ‘I had no idea how tall you were,’ she said. ‘You’re a man now!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and a rueful look darted from beneath his brow, which she remembered from when she had first encountered him as a boy. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

  ‘I wanted to see that you were all right and to tell you that you should have the conversation with Samson. There’s a lot going on, and no one – not the intelligence agencies, the FBI, nor even Samson – can figure it out. He says you know everything?’

  He shrugged and looked up at
the hill. ‘Some things, not everything.’ At this, Ifkar came out with a sports bag hooked over his shoulder. He tore down the steps to join them and shake hands with Anastasia and Luka, then kissed her awkwardly on both cheeks. He was larger than she remembered, broad and as strong as a bull. When she saw him last, he had been recovering from an infected bullet wound and, before that, he’d been on the road for months, wandering the mountains alone with Moon until they teamed up with Naji.

  The old couple followed. Darko had aged and was now using a stick. He descended the steps arthritically and was shooed forward by Irina, who was impatient to greet Anastasia. She beat her husband to the clinch and gave Anastasia a floury hug, which left hand imprints on her jacket. The ritual was repeated with Darko, who then stepped back and kept slapping his thigh, looking round and laughing with tears in his eyes.

  ‘How long will you stay with us?’ asked Irina in the Macedonian language, which Anastasia just about understood. She replied in a combination of Macedonian and Greek that she wasn’t planning on staying. The couple weren’t having that. Why would she travel all this way just to say hello? She must stay. There was lamb stew and a pastry filled with summer cherries, preserved in the finest home-made brandy, all prepared in Naji’s honour. There would be plenty for Luka, too, though she wasn’t sure of a bed for him. It would be a feast, and they would drink a beautiful light red wine that came from her people’s vineyard in the south. There was no question of Anastasia returning to Skopje to stay in a hotel. She would sleep at the farm and Luka would go to Pudnik, where there was a decent little place run by a young woman, who had recently inherited it from her parents.

  Anastasia was moved. Things had worked out well at the farm, where there had been so much terror and slaughter. For the first time in his life, Ifkar knew what it was to have loving parents, while Darko and Irina had found a son to make up for the loss of their boy and only child in a motorbike accident. And fortune had smiled materially on the poor mountain farmers in the shape of a new barn, tractor and trailer. She wondered if Denis had had anything to do with that. Generous gifts indeed, but ones that also ensured their silence about his presence at the farm that night when he’d saved all their lives and killed three terrorists. That was the way Denis worked.