by Andrew Grant
‘Remember the name?’
I wound back the photographic cells in my brain. ‘Carl with a C, Leathem. New York driver’s licence, Queens address, early forties, six foot one, weighing over 200 pounds, I guess, silver hair, number-two haircut, moustache, chubby face. State Department standard ID number ZD 437627002,’ I recited.
‘Damn, I wish I could do that damned memory trick,’ the CIA man muttered as he reached for his mobile phone. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells.’ He pressed a directory number. ‘Isbaider,’ he said. ‘Run this ID number for me. ZD 437627002, name of Leathem. I’ll hold.’
I poured another coffee and pushed the plate bearing my virtually untouched breakfast to one side. I wasn’t hungry. Gallons of blood, severed heads and a missing friend could do that to you. I hadn’t known who from the Sheriff’s office was still in town, but it had been a lucky break that Karl had been on watch when I’d called. Karl had been a field operative like me way back when. We’d worked together occasionally in those days. Now I was calling on our past to try and figure out the present.
While Karl hung on the end of his phone I tried to stay in focus. Not knowing what the hell was happening with Sami was eating me. As soon as we finished, I would head down to Banglamphu to find out for myself. After a minute or so the CIA agent nodded, grunted and grunted some more before thanking whoever was on the other end of the line and flicking his phone off. ‘No State ID has ever been issued with that number. We only have one Leathem on our books and he’s an accountant at Langley.’ Karl took a final puff of his almost extinct cigarette and ground it out on his saucer. ‘Look, Dan, one pro to another and on my mother’s grave, we didn’t go out chasing whatever it was you were after out there. It was some other outfit. Also, old buddy, we would have got you,’ he added.
‘But the colours, Karl! Mr Green, Mr Blue, Mr Beige. They had all the hallmarks of you lot,’ I said.
‘We’re not so big on the colour thing these days, Dan, we’ve become a bit more subtle than that. Believe me when I say you’ve been suckered on this one. Someone wanted you to think CIA, but we were not involved.’ Karl looked absolutely convincing in his denial. Then he paused for a long time, giving me a calculated stare. ‘However, old buddy, if you tell me what it was that you found out there we might get very involved.’ I believed him. I stubbed out my own cigarette and fought back the impulse to light another or scream with frustration. Karl could see it plainly. He just shook his head.
‘Fake IDs are a dime a bushel. The people in this mystery outfit might have been equipped with them to throw everyone off the scent if the shit went down wrong, which obviously it did.’ Karl stood. ‘I’ve got a meeting down the street in fifteen so I’ve got to roll. But believe me when I say it wasn’t us. If it had been, I think the only get-together you and I would be having about now would be over a gun. We’re forgiving but not that forgiving, especially if you’d taken out a big chunk of our assets. If you figure it out, call me. I think we need to get close on this if some other player in our ballpark is impersonating us. I’ll put the word out through our people and see what we dredge up.’
Karl and I shook hands and I watched him leave the restaurant. I was none the wiser.
If it wasn’t the CIA or Tuk Tuk, then who the hell was it and where the fuck was Sami? The only good thing for the moment was the fact it wasn’t the CIA on my tail. I paid the bill and headed back to the embassy. I needed to speak to Carter if he was still there. The SAS intelligence network was good, damned good. They might have a hint who the third player might be. Once I’d spoken to him I was going to go down into the Old Town to find my old friend, The Onion Man.
24
The retrieval team was due to fly out on a military flight at 22:00. I didn’t see Sylvia or the little Welsh beauty in the basement. Carter’s people didn’t have any intelligence on new local players beyond what we already knew, so it was up to Karl’s crew. I was caught in a hellish limbo. My mobile was charging so I found a scrambled land line and called home.
I told Bernard what had gone down in the last few hours. He seemed surprised, but it was hard to tell. No, he didn’t have anything else to add. When I hung up I was left with the impression that there was a hell of a lot that he could have added. I didn’t dwell on it. I had things to do, including finding a fucking head-hunting killer. In hindsight, maybe I should have realised it then, but I was still rocking from everything that had taken place in the last few hours.
So there I was. My prime mission had been accomplished, but now I was obligated to find the bastards who had killed Geezer and poor innocent Babs. Lone Ranger be damned. I needed to get them before they got me. It was plain that they would come after me in their own time. These guys were pros who knew only too well that when the spring was wound to breaking point, it was so easy to make a fatal mistake.
I was about to get myself organised to head down to Sami’s place and find out where he was when Don Don appeared in the doorway. ‘Urgent call for you,’ he said, indicating the phone I’d just used. It started to chime. Was it Sir Bloody Bernard?
‘Daniel, it’s Sami.’
‘Thank Christ,’ I said. ‘Did you know …?’
‘Just listen,’ he said urgently in a hoarse whisper. ‘It’s not the CIA, it’s Dimitri Chekhov. They hit my warehouse two hours after you left. Killed everyone, then torched the place. They were looking for you and the box so it has to be Bernard. You’re bugged, either your phone or your computer.’
‘Chekhov!’ I said, stunned.
‘Yeah. Explanations later,’ Sami whispered before I could dwell on the name or the man behind all this. He was obviously in a tight spot. ‘Be down at Banglamphu after dark. Chekhov’s got the place under surveillance. He’s waiting for you or me to show. Disguise. It’s a circus. Go stand by the old man with the drinks cart. Use your phone, fake a call to me but only when you’re in position. Watch your back. We need one of his people alive real bad. Later, Dan!’ With that the line went dead.
‘Bad?’ Don Don had reappeared in the doorway.
‘Sami, my friend. His place was hit. A lot of dead!’ I said scrubbing my fingers over my stubble. I felt like shit in every sense of the term.
‘I didn’t think,’ said Don Don, vanishing back into the outer office. He returned with a newspaper and held it out with both hands. There it was on the front page. WAREHOUSE FIRE IN BANGLAMPHU KILLS TWELVE screamed the headline. There was a photograph of a gutted blackened building.
‘Oh Christ!’ I muttered. Seeing pictures always drove the point home, and now I had to face another fact. A man I had killed, or thought I had killed years ago, was alive and hunting me. I took the paper from Don Don and laid it on the desk. There was a photograph of a gutted, blackened building. Firemen were carrying out a body bag. For a second the image of beautiful Mary astride the Suzuki came to me. She would have gone back to Sami’s after dropping me off and ridden straight into the ambush. She and a whole bunch of innocents had died because of me and that damned box.
‘Bernard,’ I spat. That was why the fake CIA men had vanished from outside the embassy minutes after I had spoken to him. He thought he’d convinced me to do the run at night. He’d passed the information on to Chekhov and Chekhov had pulled his troops off the embassy and moved on Sami’s in the afternoon.
‘More bad news,’ Don Don said softly. ‘Kit just phoned. The Patong police went to the address you gave them. They found two bodies, a woman and the remains of your friend, Geezer.’ Don Don suddenly looked like a man of fifty on a bad, bad day. I think he was one breath away from changing his career path. I probably would have too if I’d been in his position. I, however, didn’t have a choice in what I did. Not at that moment in time anyway.
‘The woman had been subjected to some terrible abuse.’ The embassy security man paused. ‘After she was tortured she’d had her head cut off and then some sick bastard sat it in your friend’s crotch. He’d been tied to a chair and probably, according to Kit’s people, m
ade to watch what they did to her before he got it.’
Poor bloody Geezer. His death had nothing to do with the fucking box. It was purely personal. It was all about me—me and Dimitri Chekhov. I reached for the phone. I needed to speak to the sheriff. The conversation with Karl was short. When I hung up I told Don Don what I needed and he headed out the door.
It was 15:00. I had time to get ready for what would come next and time to think about Bernard and what I was going to do to him when we finally met face to face. Was I surprised that Sir Bernard Sinclair might be a traitor? No! I hadn’t had time to analyse it all, but it made sense. Bernard was the ringmaster in all of it. He’d created the dance routine and I was just a fucking dancer. Coincidence only went so far and the clincher, as far as I was concerned, was the old queen’s insistence that I keep that damn mobile phone powered up. With that he had been more than obsessive.
I glanced at the mobile sitting on the side table by a wall socket. The green light told me it was fully charged. If it had a tracer in it that was only active when it was powered, that would explain a lot. It would explain how he’d been able to pinpoint Geezer’s place. Geezer had been my friend, not a player, and not known to Bernard. As for Sami’s, that was obvious—I’d used the phone there. Down south I’d run out of battery and they had lost me. ‘Dumb shit!’ I reprimanded myself. But on reflection I wasn’t really to blame for not suspecting the mobile. Hey, I knew Bernard was as queer as a two-bob watch but I hadn’t known he was a traitor, and I hadn’t known I was being targeted and trailed by anyone until I had boarded the train down at Lang Suan what now seemed like years ago. As for Chekhov, the mad Russian was a whole different story.
Dimitri Chekhov had been an ex-KGB colonel. After the break-up of the Soviet Union he had turned his attention to getting rich. The euphemistically named Russian Mafia were, for the most part, former military and they were absolute cut-throats. The original Sicilian mafioso couldn’t hold a candle to this new breed when it came to pure viciousness. My lot had been alerted to the Russian mob’s presence in our area of operation in about 1996. Operating out of northern Cambodia, Chekhov had become a huge pain in the collective arse of our American allies and us. As a result, he’d been sanctioned and I had been given the task of taking him out on the orders of Sir Bernard Sinclair.
My team and I set up an ambush outside Chekhov’s fortified compound in the bush, up by the border just beyond Anlong Veng. Chekhov made regular visits to the town and we simply waited for him to emerge. As his Range Rover started to ford the stream that ran past the compound, I made multiple 300-yard hits with a .50 calibre Barrett, using a mixture of explosives and armour-piercing rounds. The Rover bogged in the stream and turned into a flaming colander. We didn’t see anyone escape. We hadn’t been in a position to go and investigate up close but we’d chalked up a positive and, to my knowledge, Chekhov hadn’t appeared on any intelligence since that day. But he had!
I should have made the connection, but how do you make a connection to a dead man? It was the heads, the damned heads. That was what had been bugging my subconscious. That had been Chekhov’s party trick. He had been known as a head-hunter. Legend had it that when he had been seconded to the Spetsnaz and stationed in Afghanistan, on a wall in his unit’s camp he had lined up the severed heads of the more than a dozen rebels he had personally killed. Headless bodies had a habit of turning up wherever the maniac was stationed, from Asia to Europe.
I remembered the torso of Ivan Scranner, an undercover operative working in East Berlin. Just prior to the Wall coming down he’d come across the border for a meet. I’d been detailed to provide him with close cover. Point was, when I went to his hotel to do just that he was already dead. I’d found Scranner’s naked and tortured remains in the ornate bath of his suite. His head wasn’t there. As far as I knew it had never been found. We thought Chekhov had probably taken it back east with him. We knew it was Chekhov because the hotel’s security cameras showed him enter and leave Scranner’s room. He entered carrying what looked like a bowling bag and left an hour and a half later with the same bag appearing a good deal heavier going out than when he’d taken it in. As he’d walked towards the camera turret in the foyer by the lift, he had looked up at the camera and saluted. He’d had a broad smile on his wide face the whole time.
I’d never forgotten that smile. It was the broad beam of a jovial grandfather. Picture a bulky bear of a man, a sort of grey-suited Santa with a broad-brimmed hat and a thick, yellow walrus moustache. That was the Dimitri Chekhov I saw on the security video. Thing was, the eyes hadn’t been smiling. They had been as cold as fucking ice. They had taunted the camera. He had made no attempt to disguise himself, such was the arrogance of the man.
The next and only other time I laid eyes on him was years later. I was staring through the cross hairs of the twenty-power sniper scope on the Barrett as he sat in the passenger seat of his Range Rover. I’d lost sight of him as I had started pounding the vehicle to bits. Bye bye, Dimitri, I’d thought at the time. Not so, it seemed.
The only way, all these years later, that Chekhov would have know who had pulled the trigger that day was if someone had told him. At the kill zone there had been Sami, Sami’s number-one man, Jo, and yours truly. The only other people in the know were Bernard, who had ordered the hit after consulting with CIA brass, and the late Neville Trevaine, my Bangkok controller. My money was on Bernard. But why had Chekhov waited so long to come after me? Unless, of course, Bernard had decided to withhold that little gem until the black box had been discovered. Box or not, I suspected that revenge on me, the triggerman, would be more of a motivator for Chekhov than anything else.
‘The chemical team are packing to go. The good doctor was asking where you were. She’s outside.’ Don Don broke through my meditation. He laid the articles I’d requested on the back of one of the office’s guest chairs.
‘Thanks for those,’ I replied as I stood. I unplugged my mobile phone and ensured the power was off before slipping it into my pocket. This was going to be the key to undoing Sir Bernard. I wasn’t sure how yet, but I was going to find a way to use it to turn the tables on the traitorous old prick.
25
Ex-wives and ex-husbands occupy a strange space somewhere between familiarity and distance, attraction and revulsion. Memories of love, smells, taste and touch are things that are never forgotten. Everything is poured into a big blender along with equal parts of anger, hurt and the numbing pain of failure. Then the switch is flicked on to stir it all up. It’s a heady mix and it’s damned hard to take on an empty stomach.
Sylvia knew that something had changed. Her antennae had always been sharply tuned. Maybe if it hadn’t been we might have made it. Who knows? There was no banter this time. She had come to say goodbye. They were flying out that evening. It was 16:20. I’d be at Sami’s at 18:00 and Sylvia would be flying out of my life again shortly after that.
‘I was going to suggest a late, late lunch or dinner,’ she said when I joined her. ‘Now I don’t think it would be a box of laughs, even if they let us out of here.’ Much as I wanted to, I knew she was absolutely right. As before she could still read me like a bloody book.
‘Got a really bad thing going down,’ I said, attempting a wry grin. ‘I’d really like that, but let’s take a rain check on dinner until I’m back in the UK.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, standing and coming around the desk. She leaned down and pecked me on the forehead. ‘Maybe not. My boyfriend is the jealous type.’
Boyfriend! I hadn’t known. But then, what was there to know? We’d been divorced for five years and only seen each other three or four times during that period. We didn’t do birthday cards, Christmas cards or have weekly chat sessions like some exs.
‘Lucky guy,’ I said.
Sylvia’s eyes searched my face, then she smiled. ‘I do believe you mean that.’
‘I do. Given the chance to do things over, we wouldn’t be where we are,’ I said, suddenly feeling l
ike a cliché. ‘Truth!’
‘Well, well. Regrets, huh?’
‘Oh yes—about us, about a lot of things actually,’ I replied as the images of Babs and Geezer sprung to mind. ‘Oh yes!’ I needed coffee and I needed food but going outside the embassy compound with Sylvia was totally out of the question. ‘Cafeteria,’ I said, taking her arm and steering her in that direction.
‘Been there, done that,’ she replied dryly. ‘So upmarket, darling.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed as we descended the stairs arm in arm. It reminded me of the day we posed for our wedding photos. I stopped that line of thought immediately. ‘Have you tried their scones?’ I added as we entered the cafeteria.
‘Not likely,’ my ex replied as I eased her in front of me at the servery. We quit the banter while we got our coffees and a brace of sandwiches. The place was just about deserted but I led her to an alcove table. We seated ourselves, organised our refreshments and I got straight down to brass tacks. Time was the one thing we didn’t have.
‘Syl, I need to know the history of the damned strain of anthrax. Why it is so bloody unique? Apart from its size and all that stuff. But even more importantly I need to know how it got here and from where.’
Sylvia spooned two big shovels of sugar into her coffee and started stirring. She stirred slowly, her face thoughtful and young. She looked like a teenager, not a thirty-six-year-old doctor of microbiology. After some time she stopped playing with her spoon and her eyes met mine. ‘This is top secret, Dan. I’ve just had another briefing and it’s cut-your-heart-out time if this goes any further.’ She paused, her eyes searching mine like beautiful, twin blue–grey lasers. She took a sip of her coffee and grimaced. I tried my brew to keep her company. It wasn’t great but it was the only game in town, as the Yanks say, and I needed caffeine.
‘Basically,’ Sylvia continued, ‘this version resembles the normal base bacillus anthracis strain about as much as a biplane resembles a damned stealth bomber. Somehow those researchers fifty plus years ago managed to create something totally and scarily unique. Something no one else, to our knowledge, has even got close to. All of us researchers know about it. It’s our very own industry legend, if you like. We all know the details of the brew but not how to make it, and that’s why everyone wants it. It’s potentially the damned neutron bomb of bacterial warfare.’ As she was speaking Sylvia was taking the wrap off her sandwich. I glanced down at mine. I had to eat even if I didn’t want to.