A Time to Die

by Tom Wood

  Which left just two men.

  The first was tall and broad while the second was shorter and slim. The height and build of the first was not ideal for a professional who needed to remain unnoticed by targets and enemies alike, but the strength that size resulted would prove a useful attribute for a man who worked with aggression before stealth. The second man was less noticeable. He could hide in a crowd better or in shadows or anywhere else the taller man’s size would make problematic. But it was harder to shadow a target from a low vantage point. Size alone would not reveal the identity of an enemy.

  They both wore the right clothes – dull, muted colours; loose but not baggy; unrestrictive but plenty of material for an assailant to grab and manipulate, or to snag and catch and otherwise get in the way.

  Not killers then, Victor deduced with a little surprise. These men weren’t connected to Phoenix and looking for the bounty on his head, or sent by one of his many enemies for revenge or to send a message or for self-preservation.

  Three shadows.

  The Armenian woman had warned him Rados was having him followed, but these men weren’t Rados’ Varangians. He didn’t think they were SIS watchers keeping an eye on him either. He had believed what Monique had told him, so it didn’t make sense she would have him followed. But, he reminded himself, he had believed Banik too. Even if they weren’t killers, they were also too sloppy for the kind of professional that would come after Victor.

  So, who were they?

  FIFTY-FOUR

  He had to find out. It wasn’t in his nature to ignore threats, and even if these three weren’t shooters they could be a local crew in the employ of one. Which made a lot of sense if Victor had already encountered that killer and knew his face. Hiring a local crew to keep tabs on him was less risky than doing it personally.

  Traffic was slow-moving. Even Victor’s casual gait was faster. He kept going, as yet unsure of his course of action. He stepped aside to allow a short woman carrying brown paper bags of groceries to pass by. She smiled in appreciation.

  He reached the end of the block. Traffic was at a standstill at the four-way intersection. Drivers were getting restless because one of the lights was faulty and no one wanted to be the good guy and let the others through first.

  Victor crossed, turned side on to pass between two stationary taxis. He glimpsed the man in glasses again, hanging back while the two on the other side of the road had closed the distance, now walking side by side.

  The tall man wore a hip-length brown leather jacket. He had a bald head and grey stubble. The second man had a blue sports coat, open over a chequered shirt. They walked side by side without talking or gesturing to one another, which was rare for two men, especially when they walked at the same slow pace as Victor, despite the cold and drizzle.

  Either it was a prearranged exchange in lead position, or they feared he had become suspicious of the man behind him.

  Half a block later, he saw that it was the latter, because the tall man in the leather jacket had broken off from the man in the blue sports coat and was now lead. The man in glasses had fallen way back out of line of sight. If Victor turned, he was sure he would see him, but for now casual glances and reflections were not revealing him.

  The light was fading and headlights glowed from roads slick with rainwater. An old man in a stinking trench coat asked Victor if he had some spare change. Victor kept on walking. He turned a corner and crossed the street, earning a blast of horns from drivers who had to slow down even more to accommodate him.

  In the windscreen of a parked removal van he saw the man in the blue sports coat pick up his pace. They were willing to take risks in order to maintain contact with him.

  He saw a row of payphones, all of which were unused. Victor liked payphones, and lamented the days when they could be found almost everywhere. Cell phones were more use to the wider public, but almost useless to him. He approached the row of phones, picked the cleanest-looking one, inserted coins into the slot, and punched random buttons with a knuckle.

  With the receiver to his ear, he recited the Lord’s Prayer to give his lips something natural to say as he turned and rotated and peered around as people did when talking on the phone. He saw the tall man in the leather jacket loitering at a bus stop. The man in the blue sports coat had stopped to tie a shoelace. The man in glasses with the tan scarf was still walking because he had a lot of distance to cover.

  They were operating on a classic, if poorly executed, switch routine; alternating who kept close to Victor to prevent him from spotting them. They had no idea he had made them a long time ago. That was his advantage and he planned to exploit it in full.

  He left the payphone and went for a walk, keeping his movements slow and predictable while he waited for the right moment. He wanted them in a bored rhythm. There had been no indication that they possessed superb powers of alertness. The easier he made it for them, the quicker their focus would slide.

  He headed to Knez Mihajlova, a long pedestrian street in the centre of the city. It ran from the main square, Trg Republike, to Belgrade’s imposing fortress and Kalemegdan Park. It was busy, even in the rain, and he passed along until he saw a dense crowd watching a street magician perform tricks. Victor kept his pace slow as he headed towards the crowd, as if he had no interest in seeing the magician and he was merely taking a route that would pass through the crowd. He didn’t want his shadows to shift a gear.

  A crowd meant numbers. Numbers meant anonymity. Victor became a singular fragment of a much larger whole. Outside observers saw the crowd, not its composite parts. Those parts were hard to identify as individuals, made harder by limitations in line of sight and the ever-shifting nature of the mass. He liked crowds for this reason. He dressed to blend in – muted colours; common garments. In a crowd of any decent number he was almost invisible. He acted to appear unremarkable, to disappear against the background. Longer and longer strides reduced his height little by little. He waited until he was as deep into the crowd as he could be, and stopped walking.

  The shadows would be looking for a man on the move; a man maintaining the same route and pace he had been using. Their eyes would be programmed to spot such telltale signs. They would be looking for someone of his height. They would ignore those men standing still. There wasn’t time to evaluate them all.

  They ignored Victor.

  It was one of the reasons he preferred to go up against professionals. He knew how such opposition acted. He could predict a sensible response to most situations. With amateurs it was harder to anticipate their actions. They were prone to impetuousness, apt to impulsivity, happy to improvise. Professionals had training and experience; they had protocols and modus operandi.

  The tall man in the leather jacket and the shorter man in the blue sports coat walked on by.

  Victor gave it a moment and then moved in the opposite direction until he spotted the man in glasses and the tan scarf. Victor fell in behind him.

  They passed out of the crowd and continued on the route Victor had looked like he was taking. It led them down an alleyway.

  Not long now, Victor knew, because all three had lost sight of him. They would have to communicate.

  It took another fifteen seconds, which surprised Victor – the man seemed even less patient than he imagined – but the slip in discipline came anyway.

  The man sighed, shoved a hand into his trouser pocket and withdrew a mobile phone, the phone Victor had seen him playing with – pretending to play with – on the bus. He thumbed the screen to enter a code to unlock it.

  There was a brief conversation.

  … No, me neither… he can’t have… keeping looking…

  Victor was behind him when the call finished.

  He tapped the man on the left shoulder as he stepped to the right, so when the man turned Victor was out of his line of sight. Victor wrapped an arm around his neck, applying a choke hold, and dragged him backwards behind the cover of wheelie bins and a fire escape.

&n
bsp; The phone fell from the man’s hands as they snapped up to grab Victor’s to relieve the pressure, but Victor was strong and the man was too slow and too unskilled to have a hope of saving himself.

  He went slack as oxygen deprivation convinced the brain it was dying and to shut down non-essential functions like consciousness in an attempt to stay alive as long as possible.

  Victor released the man and let him drop on to the ground. He was no threat, and there was no need to kill him. At least yet.

  He took a step and retrieved the phone from the ground. It had survived the fall, but with cracks across the screen. It still functioned though. The inaction had caused the brightness to dim, but it would remain unlocked for another few seconds.

  He used a knuckle to operate the screen, finding the man had been using his personal phone. It was full of apps and notifications. He was not surprised by this. These guys were not good enough to be operating sterile.

  Victor navigated to the phone’s settings and then to the location settings and then to its location history.

  A calendar and a map filled the screen. On the map was a red line and a number of dots that marked everywhere the phone had been today. Victor used a thumb and finger to zoom into the map and saw where the man had walked from to the point where he had begun following Victor. He zoomed out of the map and saw where he had spent the rest of the day. Victor memorised the address.

  He checked the previous day’s entry. The man had travelled to, then from, the same location. Whatever was there was significant.

  Victor slipped the phone back inside the man’s jacket and searched for a wallet. There was one, worn from use, but it only contained cash. The slots for cards were empty. No receipts either. An attempt at operating sterile, but a half-hearted one, given the personal phone.

  He checked the man’s pulse to make sure he hadn’t killed him by mistake – it happened sometimes – but felt the thump of blood pressure through the carotid. He would wake up fine, without sign of injury. It was doubtful he would even remember being choked out.

  Victor glanced around in case his buddies had come to check on him, and walked away.

  The address corresponded to a beautiful old stone building designed by a true artist and built by artisans. It looked like a grand office building from the late nineteenth century, the kind of place that was commissioned by a rich merchant to show off his success and had been sold by squabbling heirs of heirs. The once lavish interior would have been gutted decades ago during the communist era. Where once had been solid oak tables, brass light fixtures and Persian rugs, now there was chipboard veneer, stained plastic and linoleum.

  The people coming and going through the entrance were blue-collar workers and the civilians they dealt with.

  Even without the sign, Victor knew a police station when he saw one.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Cops. He hadn’t been expecting law enforcement to be after him. He had kept a low profile in Belgrade despite the incident at the scrap yard and the hospitalised attempted muggers. He couldn’t imagine having left enough evidence of criminal activity to have put the police on his tail. Which meant Rados, with all his connections, had done so instead.

  Not a true surprise, but an unexpected development nonetheless. He knew Rados didn’t trust him as an outsider and a newcomer, even without the Armenian woman’s warning, but he hadn’t anticipated Rados would put police assets on his tail to find out more about him.

  Since when?

  It made no sense for him to have done so after the Slovakian deal. Rados believed Victor had saved him, and if he hadn’t, there was no need to go through the pretence. So the cops must have been following him earlier, before Victor had proven himself.

  He hadn’t seen these three prior to the Slovakian deal, but there could have been different cops shadowing him. They might have seen him leave the country or witnessed his return and conversation with the British woman. Or his counter surveillance techniques could have kept them away until now. There was no way to know for sure.

  A long, circuitous route took Victor back to the apartment via cab, bus and foot. The neighbourhood was almost deserted at this time of night. Scant few lights were on in windows and whole minutes went by between passing cars. The lack of foot traffic meant it was easier to look out for enemies, but he stood out more as a result. A sniper on a rooftop or at one of the black windows would have a simple shot to make.

  No shot came and he detected no signs of cops or killers. It was impossible to be sure, of course, but that was why he didn’t rely only on his own perception for protection. The location, the legend, the counter surveillance techniques all combined to form a multi-faceted defence. He could be tracked down, as the German on the train and Abigail in the hotel and many others had shown, but both had had to reveal themselves to corner him.

  He checked his watch and waited in an alleyway at the back of his block until it was time to move. The wait was a long one, because of the hour, but he was used to waiting and he’d done his research. There was no need to pass the time because his mind was occupied each and every second – paying attention to every sight and sound and smell that might warn him of an approaching attacker.

  When the time was right he left the alleyway and circled the block until he was on the corner of his street with the apartment building’s entrance visible in the spill of sodium streetlight. The heavy door offered a great deal of safety, but it was also a chokepoint. If an enemy or enemies had tracked him down and knew of the apartment they could lie in wait for him to return.

  With as little exposure as was possible he scanned the building opposite – the windows and rooftop overlooking the apartment’s front door. He saw no open windows or out-of-place shape on the parapet above, but he carried on waiting regardless. He didn’t rely on his own perception.

  He didn’t check his watch again but he kept track of the time and was surprised when the bus was late. At this time of night there was almost no traffic on the roads to slow it down, so he imagined some other issue had delayed it – a drunk passenger without the right fare, arguing with the driver.

  He heard its approach before he turned to see how far away and work out its speed – thirty to thirty-five miles per hour. No traffic and no lights to interrupt. It had half a mile to travel, which it would cover in less than thirty seconds. But it would slow as it reached its destination, adding another ten seconds. Victor had fifty metres to cover, which he would traverse at four miles per hour – a quick walk, but not attention worthy. After the count in his head reached fifteen, he set off along the pavement.

  When he was five metres from the steps leading to the apartment, the bus slowed to a stop at the bus stop outside, shielding him from any marksman hidden out of sight on the rooftop of the building opposite. He unlocked the front door as the bus doors hissed open and a man stepped out.

  He was young, maybe twenty and maybe high. His hair was lank and his clothes shabby. He wore headphones and was lighting a roll-up cigarette before the bus doors shut behind him. No threat.

  Victor entered the building, spent the rest of the night awake and alert, and fell asleep at first light.

  The phone woke him up. He checked the message.

  The club. Now.

  The fights were well underway when Victor arrived. He detected nothing from Rados’ crew outside or on the way in to suggest anything was amiss. He didn’t believe they would be able to hide it from him if their opinion of him had changed.

  Rados was dressed in a fine suit, shirt and tie. He looked fresh and rested and without the sling supporting his left arm, he appeared in excellent health.

  ‘My hero,’ Rados said with a warm smile.

  Victor said, ‘How’s the arm?’

  ‘I’m going to have a nasty scar. But otherwise, I’m fine. It doesn’t even hurt that much. My doctor – you met him, right? – is a religious man, and said that angels had been watching out for me. Hilarious, isn’t it?’ Rados continued: ‘He is wrong, of
course. If I am protected, it is by the prince of darkness himself.’

  ‘I almost believe that,’ Victor admitted.

  Rados smiled. ‘I hear you have been spending a lot of time with the Armenian woman.’

  Victor nodded. ‘I’ve seen her a second time, yes.’

  ‘You like her?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘How interesting.’

  Victor said, ‘I like familiarity.’

  Rados said, ‘I’ll bear that in mind. It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Why do we like what we like?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We like sweet things. We like meat. We like fat. Why?’

  ‘Simple. Our bodies need carbohydrates and protein and fats. Our taste buds respond to the macronutrients to make sure we eat them, to make sure we stay alive.’

  Rados had expected such an answer. ‘Then why don’t we like water in the same way? We need it more than anything else but air. We can survive weeks without food, but a matter of days without water and we will never recover. Water should taste like pure joy. Why doesn’t it?’

  ‘Because it never had to compete. We had no choice. Water to quench our thirst or death.’

  ‘So, we don’t always like what we need. Sometimes we don’t know what is good for us. Sometimes, having no choice is actually the best thing for us.’

  Victor said, ‘Is that what you tell your men so they don’t question you?’

  ‘You see through my tricks with a rare gaze.’ Rados laughed. ‘How are you fixed for later?’

  ‘I don’t have any plans.’

  ‘Great,’ Rados said. ‘I would like to invite you to a special gathering tonight.’