Hunting for Caracas

by Anthony Fox

  Nina was starting to get anxious. She couldn’t lose her grip on the situation.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I’m here to help you escape.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ she said, obviously sceptical.

  ‘Yes. I’m not here on official duty, and luckily for you I have a personal interest in this case, so if you want to get out of here you’re actually going to need my help.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a car outside. In less than an hour I’ll have you on a private jet heading to America. All I want is to hear what you have to say.’

  ‘Wait. Really?’

  ‘YES! REALLY!’

  ‘How do I know you aren’t with Luque? Or the White Wolf? Or anyone else?’

  ‘Because, instead of bringing a gun, I brought balloons,’ said Clayton.

  Nina couldn’t help but laugh then. Laugh at this whole twisted situation. She thought about her options, which were extremely limited. Her alternatives equalled one. She could break free and escape this hospital, using this man as her hostage. But she considered her chances of remaining free afterwards.

  Which were very slim.

  ‘OK.’

  It was easy enough to grab a hospital wheelchair. Nina held the big bunch of balloons, which gave the impression she was being released, and also helped to conceal her. Clayton pushed. They reached the lift. Got out on the ground floor. Exited the hospital without being stopped. They left the wheelchair outside as they climbed into the private Mercedes.

  69

  Verona, Italy.

  Assia didn’t know how long she slept, but it felt like a long time. It was the sort of sleep where you feel like you’ve missed days rather than hours. Apart from the faint aftertaste of beer in her mouth she felt better. Then she remembered telling the tale of her arrest and jailing in Thailand, and she fluttered with embarrassment.

  After getting up and taking a long shower, Assia dressed in the same clothes she had worn the day before. They were all she had but the hotel provided an express laundry service, so at least the items were clean and freshly ironed. They smelled of bitter lemon.

  After dressing, Assia grabbed a bag of nuts from the minibar and left the room. Next door Matthews answered quickly enough for her to know he was awake and alert. He opened the door just enough for her to squeeze in, and then closed and bolted it behind them. Assia came in and sat.

  ‘I don’t want to be alone. I keep getting flashes from the underground car park.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘And the meat cleaver sinking into the coffee table.’

  ‘That’s normal.’

  Assia noted that Matthews’ voice had returned to its customary flat tone. Any possible softening in his manner the previous night had vanished, as if their conversation had never happened. He stood with his back to her, facing the wall.

  Assia looked at the wall in front of them. It was covered with pieces of paper of different sizes and shapes, and contained various items of information. It was the same information that had covered the wall of the apartment before.

  ‘You brought all that stuff from the other apartment?’

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  Oops. She’d forgotten Matthews hadn’t seen her spying that night, but was surprised to learn Grandad obviously didn’t say anything to Matthews after seeing her in the corridor. She’s just an innocent girl, Grandad had said.

  ‘I saw you and Grandad looking at it,’ she said honestly.

  Matthews gave no reaction; he just continued to face the wall.

  ‘That’s what was in the bag you brought?’

  ‘Amongst other things.’

  ‘It’s the stuff from Luque’s barn, right?’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘The stuff you took before Luque shot you?’

  Again, he didn’t respond.

  ‘So it’s important information, I guess, to get shot for?’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on getting shot.’

  ‘Is it like pieces of evidence, like clues? On the recording Rudy said Luque would lead you to Caracas. Is this stuff supposed to help?’

  ‘Look, Assia, you just need to–’

  ‘To what? Forget we were just attacked by a group of psychos, the leader of which is still out there looking for me? Or that you’re hunting a terrifying giant and an unstoppable assassin called Caracas?’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said.

  They were both silent a long time.

  ‘So what are you looking for?’ Assia asked.

  ‘Let me ask you a question. Since you’ve been with us, you haven’t asked to call your parents. Only your brother.’

  ‘I don’t often speak to my parents,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  Assia spoke as if practiced at explaining this part of her life. ‘My parents never wanted children. So they raised us, gave us everything we needed, in a material sense at least, and sent us to good schools, but there was no singing hymns round the camp fire together. They don’t have any siblings, so not much in the way of family gatherings either. When we hit sixteen my dad was sixty-five and my mum sixty-one, both retired and reclusive, and my brother and me sort of just looked after ourselves from then on.’

  ‘Did they care when you were arrested?’

  ‘Of course they did. Like I said, they’re not bad people. My father flew straight out with my brother and hired a good lawyer. If it weren’t for him I’d still be in there. According to Dad, Mum was racked with guilt the whole time for letting me go over there at such a young age.’

  Matthews left the questioning and went back to his wall.

  ‘So what does it all mean?’

  No response.

  ‘It must mean something?’

  ‘It hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not something I’ll discuss with anyone.’

  ‘Well, you obviously need some help. Just try talking about it out loud, otherwise you’re going be staring at that wall forever, and I’m bored.’

  Matthews massaged his temples.

  ‘OK. Fine. Just please stop talking.’ He turned back to the wall. ‘What we know is, Luque’s planned a job and hired Jenkins to do this job for him. Simple, right? But there’s a few things that don’t sit right. First, Luque only deals at the highest end of the market. He’s what you might call a big fish. Jenkins isn’t a big fish. If they’re planning the job I think they are, then Jenkins isn’t capable of pulling it off. Second, Caracas, who Luque works for, operates in the same field as Jenkins and is a thousand times more capable of doing it. So why hire Jenkins in the first place?’

  ‘Maybe Caracas is busy doing something else?’

  Matthews was already shaking his head. ‘A job this important, you need your best guy doing it. Like I said, Jenkins just isn’t capable. I’m not even sure Caracas could pull this job off.’

  ‘Well, maybe if it’s so difficult they need two people to do it. Maybe Jenkins and Caracas are going to work together.’

  Again the head shake. ‘No way. These guys don’t share jobs and they don’t share credit. Planning is different, but when it comes to the serious stuff, these people always work alone.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Ego. Trust issues. Too many reasons to mention. But if you hire someone like Jenkins to do a job, you set him up and then you send him out to do that job alone, with no exceptions.’

  ‘So then it doesn’t make sense.’

  Matthews took a few steps back and lowered himself into a chair. He rubbed the scar on his neck. ‘It doesn’t, does it?’ he said, more to himself.

  Assia looked from Matthews back to the wall of evidence. ‘What’s this about?’ she asked, pointing to a large piece of paper with images and diagrams.

  ‘The first part is about a place in the USA, the second links to Cannes on the French Riviera.’

  ‘And what are those four sheets in the middle? Why’ve they been enlarged?’

  ‘Because those pieces d
on’t seem to fit anything Luque has planned. So far I can’t work out what they’ve got to do with anything. Maybe nothing.’

  Assia looked over them. She recognised the piece with the letters D, I, A, N followed by the numbers 9 and 6 that’d caught her eye the first time she saw all the papers on the wall back in Matthews’ room at the safe house. ‘The numbers seem important somehow.’

  ‘Hm? Maybe. They’re the only numbers that show up.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a Bible quote. It’s always a Bible quote.’

  ‘Always? You do this sort of thing often, do you?’

  ‘No, I mean in films. In the films they always find something like Job 2:13, or Genesis 9:21, and no one can figure it out, then it always turns out to be a Bible quote.’

  ‘It’s not a Bible quote.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Assia! Because DIAN 9:6 is not a Bible quote!’

  ‘OK. OK.’

  ‘The piece of paper I found it on was burnt away. This is the end of it. All that was left. So DIAN must be the end of a word or sentence.’

  Assia looked at the piece of paper for a long time. ‘Maybe it’s a date.’

  Matthews barely seemed to be awake any more. ‘What?’

  ‘Nine and six. As in ninety-six. As in the year nineteen-ninety-six. I was born in ninety-eight, so to me it looks like a date.’

  ‘Maybe. Don’t see what that would have to do with something about to happen soon.’

  ‘But maybe it’s important.’

  ‘Yes, maybe, Assia,’ said Matthews, clearly tired and frustrated. ‘But 1996 was a big year, about as big as every other year, and I’m sure a lot happened. I don’t have the time or the resources to go randomly through records for a whole year.’

  ‘But maybe it’s linked to Luque?’

  ‘Luque’s file doesn’t mention anything important that year.’

  ‘What was he doing then?’

  ‘Working for someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A man called Jean-Papin Blanc. But I know Luque’s file inside out and there’s nothing useful in 1996.’

  Assia thought things through. ‘OK, but in the recording Rudy told you to find Luque and he’ll lead you to Caracas. He doesn’t say you have to literally follow him. Only that finding Luque will lead you to where you want to go.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Matthews. Maybe it was the mention of Rudy, but he seemed to have been given a tiny spark of life.

  ‘Well, Luque could possibly be leading you to something that happened in 1996. And back then you’re saying Luque leads to this man Jean-Papin Blanc. So maybe it’s something to do with Blanc in ’96.’

  Assia watched Matthews. She could see him thinking. ‘Do you know Jean-Papin Blanc’s file inside out?’ she asked.

  Matthews leaned to one side so he could reach the phone in his pocket. He dialled Grandad and when the young boy answered Matthews told him to look up the movements of an old weapons dealer named Jean-Papin Blanc. He told him to check the records for the year of 1996.

  70

  Vienna, Austria.

  When the wall and the ceiling fell in on Nina after the bomb went off, she’d been completely covered in rubble. By sheer luck, this actually saved her life rather than ending it. Firstly the damage to her body had been minimal, all things considered, mainly because the pile of brick and concrete formed a protective shell that shielded her from far more serious injuries. Secondly, whilst she lay unconscious on the floor, the rubble and debris kept her hidden from the man with the pistol who had searched the apartment for survivors.

  When Assia ran to the ledge, chased by the gunman, the floor had fallen away beneath Nina’s body and she’d slid from the fiery enclosure down to the floor below. As flames engulfed everything and everyone above, and the heat and smoke rose to begin its attack on the third floor, Nina lay unconscious and in relative safety below.

  While they drove to the airfield, she thought of her old crew, the trio Nina had been with before Operation Matterhorn. The people she wouldn’t tell this Roger Clayton about. Clayton needed the information she had, but Nina couldn’t deny she needed Clayton’s help too for any chance of getting out of this intact.

  They negotiated, and eventually started trading questions.

  Clayton gave Nina a pair of loose trousers and a shapeless long-sleeved top to put on over her hospital gown. Although she wasn’t comfortable putting them on in front of him in the back seat of the car, she immediately felt better to be back in clothes. A pair of slip-on deck shoes a size too big completed the look.

  She started talking. She had received an envelope with a letter inside asking her to join a private operation called Matterhorn. An operation set up by a mysterious benefactor who was only known as the White Wolf. Nina went through a list of the people involved in the operation. Clayton calmly noted down the names of Phil Connelly and Robert Paxman next to those of Kemisola Zango and Matthews.

  ‘Just Matthews? That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it,’ replied Nina.

  ‘Know if that’s a first or last name?’

  ‘He never said. But it sounds like a family name, if you’re asking my opinion.’

  Clayton wasn’t.

  He underlined the name.

  Nina asked what news there was from the aftermath of the explosion. No one at the hospital had revealed anything. Clayton told her about Connelly, Paxman and Kemi, all dead. There was also the body of a boy under a bed: Nina insisted she didn’t know his name. She was genuinely saddened by the news. Then she wondered aloud how the girl with the boy could’ve escaped.

  Clayton asked her about the early days of the operation. Nina began with their initial gathering at a ski chalet in Switzerland. She reluctantly gave Clayton a detailed description of the location. There was a roof terrace with views of one of Switzerland’s highest mountains in the background. She guessed this was why the operation was given its name.

  Then a brief overview of the events after Switzerland as the team covered Europe looking for signs of Luque’s existence, slowly narrowing it down to central Europe before arriving in Spain and then eventually, after three months, Austria.

  Nina left out the part about her crew knowing that Phil Connelly would be part of Operation Matterhorn, and that they’d been tracking him before the beginning of the operation in Switzerland. She left out that Connelly was rumoured to be a traitor who’d sold out his country, and if Nina had been able to return with proof that Connelly lied to his superiors in the military, then she and her crew could have sold that information to the right people for a hell of a lot of money.

  ‘Two of the men involved, Connelly and Matthews, left the apartment and weren’t in the house when the bomb went off,’ said Nina.

  ‘Do you think Matthews could potentially be Connelly’s killer?’

  ‘I don’t think Matthews would, or could, do that. A contest between Connelly and Matthews could only have one result. Connelly was a dangerous guy, you could tell. And Matthews barely seemed capable of fighting me.’

  ‘Then who got Phil Connelly?’

  ‘It must have involved Luque when he uncovered our operation somehow.’

  Then the topic came up of the man now fitting Nina’s description of Matthews as he was picked up on street cameras returning to the apartment shortly after the explosion and carrying a girl off down the street to a parked car. As Clayton suggested this Matthews could have been involved in the explosion, Nina found herself again thinking back to what she’d heard on his iPod that evening in the apartment when she’d caught Matthews asleep at the kitchen table.

  ‘He was definitely hiding something. I just need time to think it through,’ was all Nina was willing to say.

  ‘Is it possible he and this girl are working together?’

  Nina replied with a shrug.

  ‘Anything’s possible.’

  71

  Zevio, Italy.
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  They relocated to a self-catering apartment twenty kilometres outside Verona.

  Assia was still shaken after the car chase and being kidnapped. Not wanting to be alone, she sat with Grandad in the kitchen whilst Matthews read some file in another room that Grandad had brought for him. She wondered if it was a file on Luque’s old boss. From 1996. Maybe she was right about the piece of information…

  By the way Grandad behaved with Matthews, Assia guessed there was more potential danger ahead. A strange feeling moved through her stomach as she thought she would likely be left behind this time.

  If only you left us behind on the train, Charlie and me. We’d be free and ignorant of all this. Charlie would surely be alive and I’d be unafraid. And you Matthews, you wouldn’t have to explain what is going on to some stupid girl who can’t deal with the way her life is unfolding.

  Assia wondered what would happen when Matthews had finished in the other room. She found herself thinking about the way he moved, and how he carried himself and maintained his composure.

  I could learn to fight like that. Then everyone would be afraid of me.

  Assia stabbed her salad with a fork as Grandad passed her a paper bag from the fridge containing a cheese sandwich, taking one for himself.

  ‘Hope the food’s OK. I don’t cook,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, it’s fine,’ Assia replied.

  They sat and ate.

  ‘So you were in prison?’ Grandad said through a mouthful of sandwich. It seemed he always ate as if fearful at any moment someone might take his plate away and he’d never eat again. ‘That how you were able to spot those men in the building when we tried to leave? Did someone in prison teach you?’

  ‘No one taught me. It all came from not being able to communicate with anyone. With the men back at the safe house, I didn’t see them as much as I sensed something from them. When I was in prison I was one of a handful of women who didn’t speak a word of the language. On my first night in there I was certain I wouldn’t survive the week. I cried like a baby.