by Gareth Flood
‘Icchchcssss!’ Hissed the Arab.
All the others looked up and swivelled their line of sight to see what he was looking at.
‘What the hell is that?’ Jonathan asked worriedly.
A sea of red had filled the road and was advancing down toward Ploschad Revolyutsii.
‘It’s a Communist march.’ Zlatan exclaimed.
As the red wave approached, Jonathan could begin to distinguish that the constant waving of huge USSR flags caused the incoming red wave effect. Beneath the flags he could start to make out people. Many of them were old and dressed in the old communist uniform of grey anorak and some variation of flat cap.
‘It is okay, it is okay.’ Zlatan said. ‘It is mostly old people wishing they could turn back time to when they had some security and a pension. They often get these marches.’
‘It is even better for us,’ Avi said, ‘it is heading for our square. A demonstration provides lots of cover and confusion should anything go wrong.’
They all watched as the red wave surged and broke into the square in front of them. It spread out in a fan movement and eventually coalesced into a rough square shape of waving and milling people. A group of about five men were trying to construct a makeshift stage near the plinth of the statue of Zhukov. The party broadcasts began through hand held megaphones from people near the front. Somewhere near the back a brass band struck up with stirring communist themes.
‘Great.’ Jonathan said, ‘We have music and everything.’
‘It is five minutes to twelve.’ Avi said. ‘Everyone look to the public phone. Jonathan, have the satellite phone ready.’
Jonathan felt in his jacket pocket for the tenth time to check that the new phone Avi had given him was there and switched on.
It was turning into quite a scene in the square below. Many of the marchers were now dancing as they were caught between political broadcasts and music. Tourists and shoppers had started to mingle among the crowd, some snapping away on cameras at the amazement that they were caught up in a in an event and ideology many of them had thought was consigned to the history books. It was turning into a carnival atmosphere.
‘There’ Avi said suddenly, ‘Grey trench coat, black hair. Approaching the phone from the North.’
All the eyes zoomed in on the man, who was walking near the edge of the crowd but seemed to have a purpose in his stride. It was two minutes to midday and he was heading straight for the phone booth.
‘That’s him alright.’ Zlatan said, as the man stepped up to the phone in the booth.
They watched him begin rummaging through the directory that was fixed by a chain to the base of the receiver, as per the instructions passed via Starbucks Man. He eventually pulled out Jonathan’s cellular phone and battery that had been buried in a cut out recess within the large phone directory that Zlatan had placed there fifteen minutes before.
The man could be seen putting the battery into the phone and looking to see how to turn it on. Jonathan immediately pulled the small, untraceable satellite phone out of his pocket and started dialling his own cellular phone number into it. He fought hard to stop his hands from shaking.
This was the most critical part of the plan.
His focus was on putting in one number at a time to get it exactly right. Once the full number was displayed on the screen as ready to call, his index finger hovered over the ‘Dial’ button. A bead of sweat slid down his forehead but he dared not look up or even move until given the signal.
‘Now.’Avi said with urgency, ‘He has turned the phone on. Do it!’
The instructions given to the man at the public phone were to unearth the cellular phone within the directory and simply turn it on. As soon as he did so, the phone began to ring with an unlisted number flashing on the call identification screen.
The man in the grey coat looked around the square and surrounding protesters, before pressing the ‘receive’ button on the phone to take the call.
‘Yes.’ The man said in English.
Jonathan immediately said the name of the organisation he worked for, followed by ‘Putting you through’, before placing the phone on two way mute to simulate the man being put on hold.
All the watching eyes atop the shopping mall noted that the man did not flinch at the mention of the name of the oil company. Once Jonathan had picked up the man again through his own set of binoculars, he took the phone off mute.
‘Hello.’ he said in a deeper and more authoritative voice than his first. Luckily the noise from the square would help drown out any inconsistencies in his voice. The man at the public phone would have to shout to be heard.
‘This is how you contact us?’ the man in the phone booth yelled over the noise of the marcher’s music and megaphones. ‘My boss is extremely upset about the man you sent. This is not the behaviour of international businessman, especially head of major oil company!’ Jonathan covered the mouthpiece and said ‘BINGO’ silently to the men around him. ‘You musht draw out zshe shpider!’ The strangely accented words of Mr.3.64 Percent echoed in his mind.
The spider had been drawn. He now knew exactly who was behind it all from within the oil company.
None of the men understood his reference to the peculiar English game of Bingo - he could tell by the quizzical looks on their faces. So he went for something more international and gave the thumbs up sign with his free hand. Two of them smiled but the Gypsy was deeply offended. The English had just insinuated something entirely disparaging about the origins of his mother. He let it slide this one time only as everyone else seemed so happy.
‘We send you a message when we kill Munro.’ The man at the public phone continued yelling, not giving the person he thought was on the other end of the line the chance to speak. ‘We kill everyone associated with this deal and make the pipeline never happen. You think I am afraid out here? We have men everywhere. You cannot touch us!’
It was at this point the man had been speaking for exactly forty-five seconds, which was the exact time it took triangulation software to track the signal of a cellular phone number to the exact spot it was being used.
Thus it was at this moment that all hell broke loose from every direction. The man in the grey coat jerked to his right and then his left as he was hit by sniper fire from two different angles. He pirouetted like an epileptic marionette but still somehow managed to stay on his feet.
Assassins and guns started randomly appearing from all over the square. Two protesters in flat caps emerged from the crowd of marchers pulling shotguns from under their coats.
A homeless man on the far wall closest to the phone booth rose to reveal an Uzi.
Two black Mercedes trucks ploughed into square from the main road, sending communist marchers bouncing off their hoods.
Men in black balaclavas began to be disgorged from the trucks, all armed with automatic weapons.
The homeless man and the pair with shotguns opened up at each other with the man in the grey trench coat caught in a triangle of fire in the middle. The men in balaclavas opened up from afar.
The entire crowd on the square looked like it had had ten thousand volts put through it as the combined gunfire drowned out and the stopped the music and broadcasts.
People scattered everywhere, hitting the floor, climbing over each other.
Within seconds it was a scene of complete and utter pandemonium. The man in the grey coat jerked again from another bullet impact and hit the floor - dead.
It was now a battle among various assassins and government agents to get to the body that they thought was Jonathan Marshall and pick up identification to claim their prize.
The man dressed in homeless rags went down, not before taking out one of the men with a shotgun.
The other man with a shotgun turned to the approaching gang dressed in black but was hopelessly outgunned and was also cut down.
Some of the men in black were also going down due to sniper fire still coming from somewhere from at least two different l
ocations.
The square was becoming a little bit clearer as the marchers had a bit more time to spill out of it into the surrounding streets.
From the east of the square, an unmarked transit van pulled and the side door slid open. A tall man in an ankle length black leather coat emerged from the dark square of the door. One half of his head was covered in long slicked back hair and the other half by what appeared to be a shiny curved metal plate, riveted into his skull.
The Arab on the roof suddenly became very agitated and his eyes went wide behind the lenses of his binoculars. He said something quickly in Arabic.
Avi shifted his binoculars, ‘Unbelievable.’ he said as he looked at the man in the trench coat.
‘What is it?’ Jonathan asked worriedly, as he too followed their line of sight with his own lenses.
‘That assassin from Madrid. The Arab saw him before he shot him on the roof. Looks like he survived a bullet to the skull.’
‘Holy Crap.’ Jonathan uttered in disbelief.
Zlatan had also by now focused in on the new entrant to the scene. ‘The Tatar!’ he said breathlessly. ‘It must be! Hardly anyone who sees him lives. We need to get going soon.’
‘You don’t have to tell me twice.’ Jonathan said, ‘I’m ready now!’
At that moment, the sound of gunfire was temporarily drowned out by the noise of a horrendously loud motorbike that came flying over some low steps from the north road and into the square. A huge bear of a man with a full length alligator coat flying off his broad shoulders leapt off the bike. The bike’s trajectory continued forward but at an increasingly lower angle, until it went straight into the back of one of gunmen dressed in black, taking him down. The huge man rolled and surfaced with two large automatic pistols in his meat hook hands.
‘It can’t be.’ Zlatan said in disbelief, ‘The Cajun! It must be.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Avi confirmed, our second friend from Madrid – who cannot be killed by hand grenade.’
The Cajun was cutting a swathe into the square through the gunmen in black and anyone else who was around. The Tatar was doing the same thing from a different angle. Both were also taking bullets but seemed not to notice.
‘These guys must be wearing some serious body armour.’ Zlatan said, before looking down and packing their things on the roof into a duffel bag. The others could not seem to tear their sight away from the incredible scene of carnage being played out before them.
In no time at all, every gunman wearing black was dead, along with the last few people who had been unable to get out of the square.
Only The Cajun and The Tatar were left.
They squared off against each other from a distance of ten feet - the inert body of the man in the grey coat between them.
Sirens could be heard very close now. The Cajun threw his guns to the side and pulled out a huge Bowie knife from somewhere deep within the folds of his coat. The Tatar also threw his guns down and pulled out a curved knife that was six inches long.
‘Knives. Now these guys are talking my language. They know how to settle a fight.’ Zlatan whispered.
Silence echoed around the area for a few seconds as the two faced each other. This was broken by the screeching of tyres on the main road and popping noises as the police and security forces arrived to immediately fire tear gas into what they had been told was an armed riot. Gas just began to obscure the view of the two lethal and legendary assassins as they lunged at each other.
‘We are out of here.’ Avi said urgently, ‘Go, go, go!’ he started pulling and pushing the others in a hurry and soon they were moving quickly back down the fire escape and into their waiting car at the back of the building.
Once the door of the car slammed shut and they were off and away from the scene, Jonathan let out a slow whistle, ‘The bloody CEO himself eh?’ he said as his face discoloured with rage. ‘That bastard! I slogged my guts out for him all these years and this is my repayment – it’s all going down now.’ he snarled. ‘Get me to an internet café!’
51
Moscow
The tiny, dingy, mucky backstreet Internet café had never seen anything like it. The greasy Russian hunched behind the till picked the eczema on his forearms nervously, as a collection of huge and threatening men swept through the small room that was his ramshackle business consisting of five computers with internet connections.
A huge Arab with some kind of large bird on his arm threw a regular out of his chair to make way for the only normal sized person in the group, who sounded English.
The man behind the till watched with unease as three large men, one of whom looked suspiciously like a gypsy, covered the small man as he tapped away on the computer. The Russian did not like this and reached for the phone. As he picked up the receiver there was a “thud” sound and the wire to the receiver dangled in the air from where it had been cut by a knife thrown clean through the chord and into the table in front of him. The gypsy was already spinning another knife in his palm.
‘Nobody move for the next five minutes.’ Zlatan said coolly in English and then in Russian. Everybody hunched further down in their chairs. The proprietor showed a gap toothed smile and shrugged as if he had been told that his team had failed to qualify for European football yet again this year.
‘Right.’ Jonathan said, as he took control of the situation and brought up a load of screens to begin logging in. ‘First things first. You must all contact your employers and tell them to short sell every share in the company they can get their hands on. That is very important for your boss Avi and er, Arab guy. Not so much for you Zlatan, just tell your boss to make a bowl of popcorn and start watching the news.’
As different satellite phones were pulled out of pockets and communications begun in a myriad of languages, the first thing Jonathan did was log into his anonymous web based email account to check he still had the hypothesis of the pipeline, as well as supporting documents. He always sent these types of documents to himself on big projects he had worked on. The thinking was that they could always come in handy in future employment as well as general ass-covering during current employment.
That practice was never going to pay off more than today.
Once inside the email account, he could see that all the documents were still there.
So far, so good. he thought.
The next thing he did was log into the share trading account he held with an online brokerage house in the UK. For years he had been picking up bonus share awards for high performance at the company. It was a feature of the organisation that they preferred to reward people with shares rather than cash. It was part of the “Golden Handcuffs” policy to tie employees to the organisation and its performance. Jonathan did not own huge amounts of shares, but sold under the right circumstances, they would make a tidy profit. He put two orders into the trading system. The first order was to sell all of his existing shares at the current market price. The second was to place an order to sell short all company stock that was available for short selling.
‘It is done.’ Zlatan said from over Jonathan’s shoulder, while looking at his computer screen. ‘The boss is having an eighty nine inch Plasma screen wheeled onto the veranda to watch the cable news channels.’
‘Eighty nine inches?’ Jonathan asked absently while still tapping away at the keyboard. ‘Didn’t know they made them that big.’
‘They do for him. He will only watch a television the size of his lucky number.’
Jonathan stopped tapping away at the keyboard only for a second. He shrugged his shoulders then continued banging away at the keys.
‘What is this short selling?’ Zlatan asked, reading the screen. ‘I am interested.’
‘It’s something you can do as an investor to make profit when you are sure that the stock of a company is going fall. I’m putting in a request to my broker to borrow shares in the company from other clients in his company. The broker promises those investors they will be returned at the same price. He will i
mmediately sell all those shares on my behalf at the current market price. Then, if the shares dive downwards I am “short” in the position against what the broker sold them for - I cover this by buying them back at the lower price once the stock has dived. So basically I buy the stock back and the broker returns them to the original owners, who were just holding the shares anyway whether they went up or down – so it makes no difference to them. I make a profit from the difference between the price at which the stock was sold and the cost to buy it back, minus commissions and expenses for borrowing the stock, which is the stockbrokers profit. Understand?’
‘No. I think I’ll just stick to killing people for money.’
‘Whatever works for you.’ Jonathan said, as he kept hitting the set of black keys at a now near blinding speed. His middle finger slammed on the enter key to send through an order to short sell every share the broker could lay their scaly little claws on.
The third and final thing Jonathan did was to send his original hypothesis to the major news networks in the US, across Europe. Once one of the major western media organisations picked it up and ran with it, every major foreign network would feed off them like a cloud of remora fish following the big sharks. He copied his bumbling roommate, Harry Shaftsbury in on the email. That would put it into the intelligence networks while the media agencies where trying to verify it.
Contacts within the intelligence services could verify to the media that elements of the hypothesis were real and that would give enough credence to start running the story. With a gleeful smile, Jonathan watched the little electronic envelopes being sealed and posted off into cyberspace.
‘Why you look so happy?’ Zlatan asked, still looking over his shoulder but seeing the smiling reflection in the computer screen.
‘Because,’ Jonathan replied, ‘By this time tomorrow, a plethora of oil company executives will either jump or be thrown from the top of global headquarters – and every one of those sons of bitches who are involved will deserve every bit of airtime they get before they hit the pavement.’