by Gareth Flood
‘Erm. Well, yes, it appears the incidents were connected.’
‘No shit, Captain Obvious.’
‘We have some strong leads. We need proof by way of some company files or something of that ilk. Do you have anything?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Am I worth any less to my Government if not?’ asked Jonathan.
‘No, no, no, of course not.’ flustered Harry. ‘We want you to come in all the same.’
‘Well, nothing personal old roomie, but I’m not going to trust people who can’t even be honest enough to tell me when they are obviously listening in on the call. I will call back, so give me some indication you know who is trying to kill me and that none of them are related to your organisation and I’ll think about it.’
Jonathan hung up the phone.
In a semi-lit room in MI6, five agents raised their arms dropped their jaws in disbelief. Harry felt a ripple in his bowels.
As Jonathan trudged back to the car, he kicked out in frustration at the loose gravel under his feet, sending up a small cloud of dust.
He decided the best option now would be to drive for a while longer until they found a random bed and breakfast or cheap motel for the night. Tomorrow would be another day of them hopefully being alive and hopefully someone finding something out.
The calls would be made again tomorrow, it was the deadline to find anything out.
His mood lifted as he approached the car and saw Julie smiling at him through the windscreen.
He had to get the answers tomorrow for Julie’s sake above everything else – he wanted to stay alive but felt he had got her into this mess as well – he had to get her out of it and towards the happy life she deserved, even if it cost him his own life.
20
Houston
Roscoe Y. Ickes leant back in his cream leather chair and put his patterned cowboy boots on his half acre sized power desk in Houston to read the main pages of USA Today. He was confronted by the headline: No suspects in Oil CEO and Russian Vice President assassinations.
Ickes slowly started turning a light shade of beetroot, which intensified in colour until he stood up and tore the newspaper in half.
‘Kazanzski!’ Ickes barked at the door.
Kazanski came scurrying in from an adjoining room.
‘Yes Sir!’ Kazanski, an ex-marine, barked back.
Ickes threw his power tie over his shoulder and stared Kazanski down.
‘I put resources on to find out who killed Hoot and I ain’t heard diddly squat over this Mitchell affair and the big bag o’ crapola happening over there in Europe. And I know from friends in Intelligence and the State Department that things are going down.’ Ickes said, pointing his fat Mont Blanc power pen at Kazanski accusingly.
‘Did you send some wet behind the ears MBA dipstick to do this, or some kinda wetback to save cost?’ Ickes asked, ‘Cause either way I ain’t heard nuthin’ and I ain’t happy!’ Ickes banged his fat hand on the black granite power table for effect.
‘Sir, no Sir.’ replied Kazanzski. ‘My man is very capable but leads are proving a bit thin on the ground at this stage, Sir. The only thing we know for sure is that everyone is trying to track down an employee from Hoot Mitchell’s organisation. Seems he has the answers.’
‘Pah!’ Ickes spat into his wastebasket in disgust. ‘Not good enough. Don’t forget my next Rank and Yank session on employees is coming up. You know this guy’s name that they are all looking for?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Good. Pull your college boy back, fire him and then release The Cajun on this guy’s ass!’
‘Sir!’
‘I want that mean son of a bitch in Europe by company jet by tomorrow! Or you’ll get ranked and yanked now.’ The fat hand hit the table again. ‘Show me some damn SemperFi boy!’
‘Sir, yes Sir!’ Kazanzski barked.
‘Oo-rah! Now get out and make it happen!’ Ickes said, pointing at the door.
‘Sir, yes Sir!’
*
Forty minutes later an express motorcycle courier kicked up a cloud of dust as he hit the brakes on his motorbike. The bike skidded to a halt outside a wire mesh fence on the edge of the deepest and darkest swamp that Alabama could offer.
Without turning the engine off or removing his helmet, the courier unclipped a tube from the rack on the back of the bike and heaved it over the mesh fence as hard and far as he could.
His left foot stomped the bike into gear and another cloud of dust sprayed up as he gunned the engine and the bike hurtled back towards the main road at speed.
The courier was a man local to these parts and was not going to hang around at this location for a second longer than he needed to.
The plastic tube bounced and rolled a few times before coming to rest near the edge of the water of the swamp.
Two beady eyes in the water started moving towards the land and a huge alligator surfaced to begin heaving its scaly body out of the murk. The beast’s large jaws opened and it delicately picked up the tube to hold it between its front fangs before it slipped back into the water. Once immersed, the giant beast began swimming with purpose.
Ten minutes later, the tube was picked up by a massive, gnarled, leathery hand with sharpened nails. Two giant, scaly hands popped the tube open and a voice recording started playing with instructions that had been translated into South Mississippi dialect. The voice was saying that a company plane was waiting at the airport with further instructions on the target that was to be tracked down.
The Cajun heaved his large frame fully upright, donned his alligator coat and cowboy hat, and scraped some of the greasy hair from his leathery, wizened face. His reptilian eyes sparkled with the scent of fresh prey as he started wading into the swamp.
There were many rumours about where The Cajun came from: some said he was the product of ten generations of Alabama inbreeding that began when a family of trackers mysteriously decided to live in the swamp, others said he was a human-alligator cross breed.
They say he worked entirely by sense of smell and could track and kill anything for the promise of a year’s supply of red belly moonshine. Some said he wasn’t human at all but a swamp wraith that could make small animals explode - purely with the power of his mind.
The one certainty was that he was the greatest tracker alive.
And he was being dispatched to Europe to find Jonathan Marshall.
21
Paris
In a dank, dimly lit basement in Paris, a burly Russian in a black leather jacket sat hunched over a laptop. Three other men faced him across a wide table. They also had their heads buried in computer screens.
From this tiny room, the laptops and a series of radiophones, the Russian in the leather jacket was running the entire hit operation in Paris.
The man was aware that he was behind the game, now that the prey had clearly fled the city.
The man still hoped something would turn up very soon as he knew his employers back in Moscow would be less than pleased about the events of the last few days.
There was clunk as a metal door was unlocked and creaked inward from the entrance to the room. The man in the leather jacket looked up.
‘What is it?’ he yelled at the door. The instructions had been specific – no disturbances. Another man in a leather jacket appeared at the door as it opened.
‘We are being relieved.’ the man at the door said.
The look of surprise was clear on the faces from all the men in the room.
‘Oh really?’ said the man in the centre. ‘And who the hell would be replacing us?’ he asked, while putting his hands on his hips.
‘The man from the South.’ the man at the door replied.
‘You are joking me!’ the first man spat on the floor and cocked his head up. ‘That guy doesn’t exist.’ he retorted.
The man at the door was suddenly jerked backwards into the darkness with a yelp. A crunching sound was heard, followed by a thud.
The Tatar entered
the room.
They could not see his face properly - it was as though a cloud of darkness surrounded his features.
‘I bring a message from our employer-’ emanated a deep and gravelly voice from the darkness, ‘- failure is unacceptable’.
The Tatar reached out with his right hand and grabbed the top of the head of the man in the centre of the room. The head was jerked left and right and a loud crack was heard as the neck snapped.
Before they could even reach for nearby guns, a swirl of movement exploded from the doorway that was impossible to focus the eye on. Each man was hit in various soft spots of the body so that they all hit the floor – one after the other – dead.
The Tatar moved around the space quickly, grabbing all the maps, laptops and documents used in the operation that he needed - before disappearing out of the door again in a cloud of black.
22
Brittany
As the rocky coastline of North Brittany slowly migrated across his car window, Jonathan was thinking of how great he felt.
This was due to the fact that the previous night was the first since his personal nightmare had begun, that he had slept well.
The only thing to destabilise the evening had been the initial trepidation of wondering if something would happen with Julie. They had ordered a twin room but he had decided not to make a move, on the basis that: they had both been through a lot in a short space of time, he would not try anything on the first night with someone he liked this much, he was sure that Julie was far too classy to come on to him in a two star motel or do anything on their first night together – she was the kind of girl you took home to meet Mom, not sleep with on the first night because you knew they were not marriage material.
Once it was clear nothing would happen that night, utter exhaustion had ensured his best night of sleep in years.
He had woken thinking of the dead men.
The body count is three so far, that I knew of. he thought, as the French countryside raced past.
Hoot Mitchell, apparently a complete prick in person; The Russian Vice President and Falcus. How much had they known about the risks of what they were getting involved in? They probably all knew, in some form of another that their lives were at risk.
The thing that really annoyed him about the whole situation was that he was unaware of the risk.
He knew he was working in an industry dominated by politics and subterfuge. But there was no disclaimer or waiver he had to sign on the first day, stating that he might be hunted down like a dog if a powerful “stakeholder” did not agree with the work he produced.
I’m but a lowly pawn in the game, but now everyone is trying to take me out as though I’m some kind of kingmaker. he thought.
Given the second attempt on his life yesterday, he decided his focus now was on staying alive. Though he had started to wonder if he could turn this around and use what he knew to gain some kind of amnesty from the monsters chasing him.
The problem was he still did not have it all clear in his own mind at the moment.
His plan for today was to leave the Hotel really early, which they had done by checking out at five in the morning, then drive to the next significant thing he saw on the map. That was the ancient medieval city of Mont-St.-Michel. Once there, he would call Pink and Harry again and hoped they would have some news or insight he could use to get him and Julie out of this alive.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ asked Julie, shattering his sober thoughts.
‘Uh, what’s that?’ he asked, becoming aware that he had been absently staring at the dashboard while getting lost in his thoughts.
‘The texture of the faux leather dashboard, of course.’
Jonathan turned to look at her, ‘Really?’ he asked, confused.
‘Of course not silly. Look out of the window.’ Julie pointed past his face and he followed the direction of her hand. He had to do a double take to believe what he was seeing.
Out of the hazy morning air, it looked like a stone fortress with an abbey suspended at the top of it was floating on the ocean.
He had heard about this place but never seen it. While the tide was in, it played tricks with your mind. As his eyes adjusted, he could see it was a walled village with the abbey as centrepiece clinging precariously to a clump of rock roughly one kilometre across which jutted out of the sea. The rock was connected to the mainland by a permanent causeway, everything else around it seemed to have been smoothed away through the ages by the ceaseless elements of water and wind.
‘Yes, beautiful.’ was all Jonathan could say.
He was truly amazed at the sight.
‘It was a single block of granite in the bay. During the ice ages, it resisted the erosion from the glaciers better than the surrounding rocks. An Abbey was established on it and grew from there.’ Julie smiled when she saw his quizzical face.
‘School trip remember? That’s how I know a fair amount about it. It is always packed with tourists and there are lots of security guards about as it’s a world heritage site. So it should be safe for us to get lost in the crowd and you to make your calls for a while.’
‘Sounds good.’ Jonathan said, smiling back. ‘And we get to see some real history at the same time, almost like a holiday’
Forty minutes later they had parked up in the visitors car park and were crossing the causeway by foot. The spires rose majestically above them and the sea surrounded them on nearly all sides.
‘It’s quite remarkable,’ replied Jonathan, looking up at the scale of the surrounding wall. ‘It’s too bad we don’t build things like this today. Glass and metal towers hardly compete.’
As they went through the massive wooden doors to the entrance, Jonathan noted how Julie had not been wrong about the tourists. The place was packed, as soon as they were through the doors, it was like being at an outdoor music concert or sporting event.
Julie turned and grabbed his hand, which was a pleasant surprise. It was their first physical contact and despite their predicament, Jonathan was thrilled at the touch. Her skin was warm and incredibly smooth. It was all he could do to stop himself from stroking the softness on the back of her hand with his thumb.
‘Follow me,’ she said, ‘all the roads in the lower village wind upward and around the mount, heading for the Abbey. There are more tourist shops higher up. One of them will have a payphone.’
She started pulling him through the throng. One of them had to take the lead to cut through the crowd. This may have been the only reason she had taken his hand. He hoped not, but for now he didn’t care.
It was progress and he would take it in no matter what the circumstances. He couldn’t take his eyes off her as they began the uphill struggle to find a payphone.
Outside the walls of the stone citadel, the tyres of an unmarked black Audi crunched the gravel as it came to a stop in the car park. The car’s white reverse lights flicked on and the car moved backwards to pull up next to an old two door Peugeot 106.
The door of the black Audi clicked open and a dark boot emerged to be placed on the gravel. The full shadowy force of the Tatar emerged into the hazy light.
As the sun reflected off the nearby water his features were more discernible. It was not a handsome face. It was at the face of a seasoned killer, possibly someone who had been mocked at school for his slightly bulbous nose. The large scar on one side of his face plus another on his forehead would have put an end to the mocking.
His hair was shoulder length long, dirty brown black and tucked behind his ears. He wore a long leather trench coat, which he quickly checked with his hands to ensure that multifarious weapons of nastiness were properly adjusted. The large man stepped forward to look into the windows of the Peugeot in front of him.
They had left nothing in the car.
He reached out with a huge hand and felt the bonnet of the car for heat. It had stopped about half an hour ago.
The Tatar was not underestimating his prey; he was checking every detail he
could. For him to be here, these people were not stupid, they had survived two assassination attempts already - he would soon change that.
The large frame straightened up and he looked over the car roof at Mont St. Michel, glittering on the water in front of him. He cared not for beauty or history. He cared about killing. It’s what he was paid for and business was good.
He had driven all night from Paris and had just missed them by an hour at their hotel this morning.
It does not matter, he thought, as he started to walk towards the causeway. They will still die the same day.
They were in the circular monument in right in front of him. Only one way out.
They will not escape this time.
The phone made a clunking noise as the coins dropped through to the collection box as the call connected. While Jonathan waited for Captain Pink to pick up, he looked over his shoulder to see the re-assuring figure of Julie sitting on a medieval wall licking an ice-cream and looking out over the sea.
He turned back as Pink answered with a hushed, ‘Yeah?’
‘It’s me.’ said Jonathan, ‘any news?’
‘Well old buddy,’ Pink was speaking in hushed tones, probably so no-one else in the office could hear the conversation. ‘there are all sorts of feelers out, looking and asking questions about you from a lot of different areas. Guys in the office I have never seen before; black suits from upstairs. I asked one question about your project, which brought a barrage of questions from what were described as “auditors”. The Dutch Mentalist was called up and came back downstairs looking pale. No-one has ever seen that before. Suggest you don’t contact him again.’ Pink said, his voice quiet.
‘Shit, you sound uncharacteristically serious.’ Jonathan said, trying to make light of the situation. If Pink was freaked out – things were really serious.
‘Hell, yeah.’ Pink continued. ‘I think anyone you ask to help you in here is putting themselves in jeopardy.’
‘Look,’ Jonathan said, I don’t know what is going on either and the last thing I want to do is drag more friends into danger. But I need answers, and if I can’t go internal within the company - then I’m fast running out of options.’