Scorpion Trail

by Archer, Jeffrey

  Left and right past squares and fountains, then the target vehicle pulled up at the Martinova Hotel.

  Sanders stopped at the kerb. Parking no problem at this time of night.

  Lights out and onto his feet running, keeping in the shadows. He punched the buttons of the phone. A different number this time.

  'Ya?' A German voice answered, the man Sanders knew simply as Dunkel.

  'Hotel Martinova. Zehn Minuten.'

  'Jawohk'

  Voices on the phone, that's all they were. They'd never met. Never would.

  Dunkel hadn't even been told who he was working for.

  Sanders pushed through the swing doors into the hotel. The man he'd followed from the airport stood at the reception desk holding one of those large black leather bags used by pilots.

  Sanders' heart missed a beat, terrified he'd followed the wrong man.

  Iranian? Certainly looked it -- dark hair, dark-framed spectacles, small moustache, and wearing one of those collarless shirts under a suit that was almost black.

  But was it Akhavi?

  Sanders walked up behind him as casually as he could. He hovered half a pace from the desk. There was just a night clerk on duty.

  Hearing him, the Iranian snapped his head round. Fear in his eyes - a good sign. Sanders smiled.

  'Good evening,' he purred.

  The Iranian nodded and turned back to the desk. Sanders moved a little closer. The clerk had the reservation details already printed and pushed forward a form for the Iranian to sign.

  'You pay by credit card?' the clerk asked in heavily accented English.

  'Mmm.,

  'I make print?'

  He made a wiping gesture with his hand. The Iranian understood and pulled an American Express card from his pocket-book.

  Sanders lurched forward, making a grab for a brochure from the display on the counter.

  'Sorry,' he murmured, brushing against the Iranian.

  Just a quick glance. Enough to see the name Akhavi on the card.

  He backed off a pace and pretended to read the brochure.

  'Room 610. Sixth floor,' the clerk said. 'Is a letter for you. Have you baggage?'

  'I don't need help,' Akhavi answered, reaching out his hand for the key and the envelope.

  'Elevator is over there,' the clerk added, pointing to the left.

  Sanders rested his hand on the counter and watched Akhavi walk away.

  The clerk coughed. 'Can I help you, sir?'

  'Yes. I want to know if a friend of mine has checked in already. A Herr Dunkel? From Germany.'

  The clerk shook his head.

  'Could you look again, just to be sure?'

  The clerk wheezed with annoyance, but glanced down at the register. Sanders peered past him at the room keys hanging on their hooks. 612 was missing, but 614 was there. Close enough.

  'There is no reservation for that name,' the clerk grunted.

  'Oh dear, oh dear. Must be the traffic. I'm sure he'll turn up. Are you sure he hasn't reserved room six one four? Always goes for that number if he can. Some stupid superstition.'

  'Is no reservation!'

  'Okay, okay. I'll leave a note anyway.'He snapped his fingers, irritably.

  'You have some paper?'

  The clerk gave him a sheet and an envelope.

  'Plenty room, if your friend he come. Neina probLema.'

  Sanders sealed his note, scribbled Dunkel's name on the outside and pushed it across the counter.

  'Where's the toilet?'

  'Sir?'

  'The toilet. The washroom,' Sanders repeated, rubbing his hands together.

  'Round the corner. Next the bar.'

  The clerk pointed.

  'Thanks.'

  Sanders followed the directions but ignored the Gospoda sign.

  He was in luck. Stairs next to the toilets led up to a mezzanine floor.

  He climbed them, pushed on a door marked 1-Jaz and found the emergency stairs.

  He climbed two more floors, then listened. Silence. He took the phone from his pocket and called Vaillon again.

  'It's our man. Definite,' he said. 'Hotel Martinova, room six-ten. Our boys are on the way. They'll be in six fourteen.'

  Then he rang off.

  Sanders continued up to the sixth floor. Easing open the door to the corridor, he slipped past Akhavi's room. No sound from inside. He turned back and hid behind the exit door, waiting and watching through a crack.

  Down at the reception desk, Konrad signed the name Dunkel, giving an address in Munich. He paid cash in advance for the room and left his false passport so the clerk could complete the documentation.

  Konrad and Pravic waited for the lift. The clerk glanced at them knowingly. The one who'd registered looked to be nearly sixty, but his blonde, blue-eyed companion was younger. Picked him up in a bar shouldn't wonder.

  Konrad led the way along the silent sixth floor corridor. He stopped at 614, his key slipping into the lock. Pravic crept forward to check the other numbers. 6 10 was two doors further on.

  Inside their room, Konrad unzipped his bag and carefully removed the equipment. Pravic watched uneasily. Konrad had told him only the bare essentials of what this job was about. just enough to know why his particular skills were needed.

  Poisoning was not the way Pravic liked to kill. Too remote, too uncertain.

  When he'd murdered a man for Konrad in Berlin six years before, it had been with a knife.

  He saw the strain on Konrad's face. He'd refused to say who they were working for, but he guessed it was somebody in Zagreb. There'd been two phone calls with instructions.

  Pravic placed a chair in the entrance lobby, beside the bathroom. Above his head was a wire grill and a humming fan. He found the control for the airconditioning and turned it off. Then he climbed on the chair and lifted the grill which was nearly a metre square, turning it diagonally to lower it through the aperture.

  'What do you think?' Konrad asked under his breath.

  'Maybe okay,' Pravic, whispered, stepping to the floor again. 'Old hotel.

  Plenty space.'

  His German was halting, but adequate.

  From Konrad's tool kit, Pravic took a torch, a screwdriver and a drill.

  'Help me,' he said, locking his hands together in a stirrup to show what he meant.

  Konrad stood beside the chair, and gave him a leg up into the ceiling space.

  For years Pravic had worked with ventilation systems, but fear of these cramped spaces never left him. The gap concealed by the false ceiling was just half a metre high, its metal frame and crawling boards built for access.

  Pravic shone his torch upwards. An aluminium duct extended in from the corridor. From its open end he felt the cool draught of fresh air.

  The fan, when switched on, sucked air from the room, mixed in the fresh supply, then blew it back into the bedroom through a vent.

  Every room the same - including 610.

  Pravic wriggled into the roof space. Separating him from the void above the corridor was a square access panel, held in place by four screws. He removed them and the panel came away easily. Then suddenly it slipped from his grip, thudding onto the ceiling below him.

  He froze. Beneath him Konrad swore, then switched on the television to drown his noise.

  Two doors down, Dr Harnid Akhavi dialled the room number written on the note he'd been given at reception.

  'Pavel?' he asked timidly.

  'Da.'

  'Hamid. In room six hundred ten,' he said in heavily accented Russian.

  'I'll come up.'

  Three minutes later they were shaking hands and embracing.

  'I'm very pleased to see you, my friend,' Akhavi said.

  'I too.'

  They embraced again, their first meeting for four years.

  'How much time do you have here?' Kulikov asked.

  Akhavi looked at his watch. Ten minutes past one in the morning.

  'The car comes at four.'

  T
hey sat and Akhavi offered an orange juice from the minibar. The Russian would have preferred something stronger.

  'You weren't followed?' Kulikov asked.

  'I don't think so. An Englishman downstairs - I believe he was drunk.' His lips pouted with distaste.

  He asked about Kulikov's family. Time was short, but the social courtesies his culture had taught him could not be bypassed. Eventually he was ready to grasp the nettle.

  'So, you have brought me something?' he asked.

  Sanders had seen the Russian arrive, carrying a large Samsonite briefcase.

  He descended two floors on the emergency stairs, then dialled Dunkel's number.

  'Sie sind zusammen,' he announced softly when Dunkel answered.

  Konrad put the phone down. Same mystery voice that had summoned him to this hotel. English accent.

  NATO? Was that who his employer was?

  We are together. The code they'd agreed. The clock was now ticking.

  Konrad grabbed a mask, hooked the strap over his head and settled the soft rubber over his nose and mouth. Then he breathed in sharply to test the seal.

  He laid out the artists' airbrush, the propellant canister and its connecting tube. Beside it, the screw-top jar containing the lethal, light-brown fluid.

  Take great care, Kemmer had said. One tiny splash of the liquid could mean himself being victim to the same delayed-action death he'd chosen for the men in room 610.

  Konrad pulled on surgical gloves and unscrewed the lid of the jar.

  Blood pounded in Pravic's ears as he squeezed between the ducts in the dark void above the sixth-floor corridor.

  With hardly room to move, hardly space to breathe, panic came in waves, drenching him in sweat. He cursed Dunkel for making him do this.

  Above his head ran the big square duct feeding air to the rooms. First spur to the left for 612, the next for 610. just a few metres more ...

  Yet ... the deeper he crawled, the further he got from his escape hatch, the more Pravic feared that the demons in his soul would emerge from their caves and cripple him.

  He rested for a second, trying to shut out memories of the voices and smells, which had always been precursors to the childhood abuse that had warped his mind.

  Sometimes darkness triggered these flashbacks - at night he tried to keep a light on when he slept. Sometimes confinement did it, like in this tunnel where cobwebbed pipe work scraped his back as he inched along the boards.

  The fear was so strong now he wanted to retch. Fear of being trapped, of his child body being pinned down by a weight so much heavier than its own. It was all coming back - the smell of his father's spirit-laden breath on the back of his neck, the hoarse panting in his car, the pain as his feeble attempts to resist were overpowered, and the humiliation as the drunkard's fat prick spurted stickily between his thighs.

  Then they were gone, the images swirling back into their Hadean mists.

  This time the waking nightmare had been over quickly. Sometimes the revulsion lingered, destroying his control.

  He waited for his heartbeat to settle, then wiped the sweat from his eyes with a shirt sleeve. He had to press on.

  At the next joint in the ducts he followed the pipe to the panel for room 6 10. Muffled voices growled beyond the plasterboard. He heard the whirr of the fan.

  He pushed the twist-drill against the panel and turned the handle. Slowly. Quietly. The material was soft. Didn't take much to make a neat round hole.

  Then he backed away with his tools, feet first towards room 614.

  Konrad dripped the brown liquid into the reservoir of the paint sprayer.

  A quarter of a litre was all it held. As he stopped the flow, a couple of drops spilled onto the tissue he'd laid out to catch them.

  He held his breath. Then, steadying his hands, he screwed the cap back on the jar, which was still half full. He wiped the rim with the soiled tissue and placed the refuse in a polythene bag. Finally he screwed the reservoir onto the stern of the air brush.

  'Psst!'

  Pravic's head hung down from the vent in the lobby. Konrad passed him the second face mask and a pair of rubber gloves.

  'Make sure it fits,' he warned. 'Mask must be tight. Understand?'

  Pravic grunted. Then Konrad handed him the air brush and the propellant canister in a bag.

  'Don't connect the air until you are ready,' he reminded him.

  Pravic looked irritated. He knew exactly what to do and didn't like old fools like Dunkel telling him.

  Two doors down, Dr Hamid Akhavi had also donned rubber gloves. Plutonium's toxicity made it foolish to touch it with bare hands.

  The sample was smaller than he'd expected, like a segment of an orange.

  But from its colour and its weight he knew it was the real thing. Twenty pieces like this and he could make an atomic bomb.

  'We still must analyze it,' he said, trying not to show his excitement.

  He packed the plutonium back in its container then went to the bathroom to wash his gloved hands. As he dried them on a towel, he looked up sharply, hearing a creaking from the ceiling.

  He listened again, but there was nothing more. Must be the ancient plumbing, he decided.

  'There is still a problem, Pavel,' he said, returning to the table and pulling off his gloves. 'Your price is ... unjust.'

  Kulikov bristled. He hated the bazaar mentality of the Islamic world.

  'Twenty kilos is a lot of plutonium, my friend. It would take you decades to produce in your own reactors.'

  Akhavi held up his hands in acknowledgement.

  'Of course. But my country simply cannot pay one hundred million dollars.

  Already the nuclear programme starves our economy. The reactor contracts with your government and with the Chinese, they are not cheap. And the machinery. . .'

  'You too must understand something, my friend. There are many people I must pay. A whole shift of the security personnel. Senior officers who will arrange transportation. Border officials ... the list is long. And the risk to me is great. If I'm found out it'll be the firing squad.'

  They looked at one another. They both knew there was truth in each other's position. They guessed too there was room for manoeuvre. What neither could be sure of was how much.

  'What is your offer, my friend?'

  'Twenty million.'

  The Russian exploded with derisive laughter.

  Pravic heard the outburst through the plasterboard, and froze, terrified he'd been discovered. An angry Slavic voice boomed through the ceding panels.

  A fresh tremor of panic rippled the length of his body. He dug his nails into his palms, puncturing the thin rubber gloves.

  Then he heard two voices. Anger directed at one another, not at him.

  He breathed again. Short quivering breaths.

  Do the job, he told himself Then the passport would be his. A passport to freedom.

  He pressed the nozzle of the airbrush into the hole he'd drilled. A tight fit. Then he connected the propellant can with the tube. He eased the mask over his nose and mouth, the rubber slippery on his sweaty skin.

  He held his breath, pressed the button on the spray and held it down. With the torch lighting up the reservoir he watched the brown liquid disappear into the conditioned air of Room 610.

  Outside in the street, Martin Sanders re-parked his car to overlook the hotel entrance. He wanted a photo of the Russian if he could get one. He guessed the silver-haired smuggler might be on the flight to Moscow at eight-fifteen in the morning.

  Vadlon also waited nearby, his task to follow the Iranian back to the airport.

  Akhavi and Kulikov shook hands, not because they'd agreed a price, but because they knew they'd have to eventually. Thirty million was as high as the Iranian had been prepared to go.

  They were ready for the next phase - the proving of the sample at the desert laboratories. Then they could plan for shipment and delivery.

  Kulikov eased open the door, looked both ways and
slipped back to his room. In his hand the Samsonite briefcase which had held the plutonium sample was now packed with $100,000 in used notes.

  Dieter Konrad cleaned the equipment with the bactericide Kernmer had given him. Every piece of tissue he'd used, every part of the spray, he placed in a plastic bag and sealed it.

  The half-full flask of brown liquid he encased in 'bubble-wrap' plastic to protect it, then stuffed it in his bag to be disposed of later.

  Pravic watched, emotionally drained. The precautions Dunkel was taking alarmed him. He didn't even know what it was, this lethal substance he'd administered, and he had a lurking fear it could have contaminated him too.

  'You go now, Milan,' Konrad announced. He sounded tired and flat. 'I'll stay until the morning. It will be less suspicious. Ring me at the Dubrovnik at ten. By then I will have decided when we go to Berlin. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day.'

  Pravic hesitated. He trusted no one.

  'You have the passport?' he demanded.

  Konrad frowned in irritation.

  'Yes, but not here. I'll give it to you tomorrow at the hotel.'

  He saw the suspicion in Pravic's ice-blue eyes.

  'Don't worry.'

  After Pravic was gone, Konrad lay on the bed and closed his lids. To rest and to think, but not to sleep. That was impossible. It always had been after sentencing someone to death.

  Twenty-One

  Friday 1st April. 4.35 p.m.

  Pthein-Main Air Base, Frankfurt

  Colonel Irwin Roche eased his Opel Vectra forward. He'd got used to a manual shift since being in Europe and liked it. He was even considering giving up on automatics when he returned to Milwaukee.

  The line of cars leaving the base seemed slow today, or maybe his wish to get home was stronger than usual. Not that he wasn't always happy to see Nancy and the twins, but tonight they were expecting a new arrival.

  The woman from CareNet had called that morning to say they'd be arriving late. Very late, probably. Lorna Sorensen, that was the name she'd given. Didn't know when they'd get here, but he'd looked up the map and Ancona was a hell of a long way south.

  The queue of automobiles surged a little. He waved to the duty man at the guard post, and then he was through to the public highway. He took the slip road down onto the Autobahn and eased into the slow-moving traffic. Always solid at this time of day, and in the mornings. Fortunately the next junction was his turn-off, so he never had more than a few minutes of it to put up with.