by Tom Wood
Victor sighed. He wasn’t in a position to walk away from his CIA employer, but it was time to start thinking about the steps he would need to implement if he was to do so and remain breathing. A new identity was the first and most important thing. A clean identity, one he hadn’t used before. He didn’t know how many of his old aliases had been compromised. He couldn’t procure that now, however. But he would as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
He sat forward and typed another address into the browser window, bringing up a different email account he kept active as part of plying his trade. Among the hundreds of emails offering him cheap erectile dysfunction medication, the chance to make a fortune by simply handing over all his personal information to a friendly gentleman from Nigeria, and pills to increase the size of his penis, there was one of interest. He opened it up. It was a short message addressed to my friend, from a man named Alonso saying what a great time he’d had in Hong Kong but that he’d spent a lot of money there. He was on his way to Europe, only wasn’t staying long. The email ended with, how are you?
Victor considered. The Hong Kong contract with its high purse and the European one that needed to be done fast would have come to him for first refusal, but if he didn’t respond they would go to someone else. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of men around the world just like him. Victor had encountered enough of them to know he was far from unique, but that he had survived those encounters told him he was towards the top of the bell curve in his rarefied profession.
A month ago, he would have deleted the message without responding as per the terms of his employment. In light of the latest conversation with his control, things had changed. He needed to keep his options open. Victor composed a reply to Alonso, writing that it was good to have heard from him and that he would like to know more about his travels. He sent the message.
He logged off the terminal and sat for a moment, feeling calm but not wholly relaxed. If his employers wanted to play games, so be it. He could play games of his own.
Only Victor wouldn’t be playing fair.
CHAPTER 16
Sixty miles south-west of Minsk, Belarus
It was cold in the back of the car. Xavier Callo sat with his shoulders hunched up and his arms tightly folded across his chest, hands buried beneath his armpits. It was Blout’s fault; he smoked roll-ups as he drove, keeping his window down so the smoke drifted outside. The incoming draught flowed straight over Callo. His captors had supplied him with a coat, which he wore now, but it only did so much. Abbot and Blout were both built like they could play pro football and seemed content enough with the window open and the cold air blowing in.
A flat green land rushed by Callo’s window. It was all empty fields, barely any signs of habitation, somehow dead. For a long time he didn’t even know which country he was in, only realising he was heading towards Minsk when he started to see signs for the city. They were in both Belarusian and Russian, and Callo knew a little Russian thanks to his business. He was hungry but didn’t say anything for fear of going back in the trunk.
When they had first started their journey Callo had spent a few hours in the back seat before Abbot had ordered him inside the trunk. Blout then held him down while Abbot taped his hands, feet and finally his mouth. He didn’t say why, but stressed if Callo didn’t keep quiet Abbot would rig up his own bollock-fryer and leave Callo to cook. He choked on gasoline fumes for about twenty minutes before he was let out, freed from his bonds and allowed on the back seat. No explanation was given, but Callo didn’t need one.
It was clear he had been stuck in the trunk while they crossed a border. After being kidnapped in Athens, Callo didn’t know where he had been taken. He had been on at least two planes and spent countless hours in car trunks. Based on the weather, he guessed he had been interrogated somewhere in Eastern Europe. Since he was now heading to Minsk, he must have been in one of Belarus’s neighbouring countries, most likely Poland.
His body clock was completely skewed and he had no idea how long it had been since he had been kidnapped. He managed to get a look at the clock on the car’s console, so he knew the time at least.
‘Why are we going to Minsk?’ he asked Abbot when he could no longer bear the silence or the not knowing.
Abbot had his arm resting on the window sill while he stared at the Belarus countryside. ‘Yamout texted your mobile. He wants you to meet him there.’
‘But I don’t have the money.’
‘You won’t need it, mate,’ Abbot assured him.
Callo tried to continue the conversation but Abbot didn’t speak back. Blout had said nothing at all to Callo. The silence was distinctly unpleasant and left Callo’s imagination too much time to work. He was scared of going to somewhere even more terrifying than where he had spent two hours hooked by the balls to a generator. Though, in truth, Callo couldn’t imagine anything worse than having his testicles electrocuted. Maybe this time he wouldn’t know the answers they wanted and they would actually flick the switch. He shivered and pushed his thighs together. He knew he was in over his head, but he also knew if these guys were going to kill him they could have easily done it already. There was no need to take him all the way to Minsk to do so.
He hadn’t seen the suited guy since the interrogation. After Callo revealed everything he knew about Ariff and Yamout, he had been taken back to his cell and left there for maybe twenty-four hours. Then Abbot had awoken him, and he’d been allowed to take a hot shower, with no one watching him while he scrubbed and cleaned. New clothes were waiting for him and he received some decent food, as much as he wanted.
Callo had dared to hope his release had been pending, but instead they were going to Minsk. He hoped they weren’t planning on using him as bait to kidnap Yamout. It wouldn’t work. Callo didn’t have the nerves to bluff his way through that kind of encounter. Plus, Abbot and Blout were sure to be outnumbered by Yamout’s bodyguards. But they must have worked that out for themselves. So what did they have planned?
No one had shown him any credentials or said who they worked for, but the bastard who’d interrogated Callo stank of CIA. The Brits were either in on the kidnapping or just mercenaries doing the heavy lifting. Bizarrely, no one seemed to care that the majority of Callo’s business was highly illegal, and in talking about Yamout and Ariff he had admitted his part in many crimes. He had fully expected to be charged with some smuggling beef at the least, but so far nothing. Maybe after he had done whatever it was that Abbot wanted doing in Minsk they would actually let him go. It wasn’t as if Callo was going to go to Amnesty International and complain about being frightened by a pair of glowing oranges.
‘Maybe another hour until we’re in Minsk,’ Blout said to Abbot.
‘Hear that, mate?’ Abbot cocked his head in Callo’s direction. ‘Not long now and this will all be over.’
Callo was happy to hear that.
CHAPTER 17
Minsk, Belarus
Victor had arrived in the city the night before after a relaxing flight from Austria to Minsk International Airport. He had no luggage with him except a carry-on bag holding a few effects that weren’t essential, but he preferred to fly with at least some luggage. Airport security tended to watch out for people with none. A thankfully silent taxi ride from the airport had taken him into central Minsk, where he’d performed counter surveillance before arriving at his hotel, the Best Eastern.
As Yamout was expected to meet with Petrenko around or after nine p.m. at the Hotel Europe the next day, and because of the potentially short duration of his stay, Victor would need to kill him at some point shortly after this time.
He’d taken the Minsk metro across the city and hailed a taxi to take him back into the centre. A second cab immediately after the first took him around the city centre for half an hour. Victor then re-joined the metro for another thirty minutes, changing trains twice before exiting and performing counter surveillance on foot. Finally, a third taxi had taken him to Passazhyrski train station.
H
e bought himself a large cappuccino with caramel syrup from a stunning Belarusian brunette at a kiosk and drank his coffee leisurely while he circled the concourse. He saw no sign of any shadows. May in Minsk tended to stay in the low seventies so Victor was without an overcoat but kept the jacket of his charcoal suit buttoned up. The cappuccino was especially good, or maybe it was just the memory of the brunette that enhanced the flavour.
In the basement level of the train station he found the left-luggage facility and gave the false name provided by his employer.
An old guy then dragged two heavy Samsonite suitcases to where Victor waited and dabbed the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘What have you got in here, rocks?’
‘Guns,’ Victor replied.
The old guy laughed.
The tags on the suitcases showed they had travelled overnight from Moscow, but there was a good chance the contents had been switched somewhere along the way. By the weight of the suitcase in each hand, Victor knew exactly what they contained.
He took a cab back to the Best Eastern and entered his room. Victor wasn’t sure how the hotel came by its name, as there was nothing best about it. His room was bland and uninviting, the bed soft and lumpy. He closed the drapes and laid the suitcases on top of the bed so he could check the contents. The interiors had been stripped out and replaced with thick foam rubber sheets, cut to fit several items.
Inside one half of the first Samsonite was a dismantled Heckler amp; Koch PSG1A1 semi-automatic rifle and long sound suppressor. It was a very good weapon, perfect for urban use and easily one of the most precise semi-automatic rifles in the world, with an expected accuracy of sub-one minute of angle. Victor wasn’t keen on one characteristic, however. The rifle ejected its spent cartridge casings a long way, which, at best, made sterilising the environment more difficult after shooting the weapon. At worst, it could give away his position. Victor assembled the gun and inserted one of the three detachable box magazines that were set into the foam rubber beneath it. Each magazine contained twenty match-grade 7.62? 52 mm cartridges. Loaded, the rifle weighed almost eighteen pounds and was over forty-seven inches in length.
He set out the Garbini tripod on the bed and familiarised himself with its operation, adjusting elevation and rotating the PSG laterally. He set the fully adjustable butt stock and pistol grip to his requirements and peered down the Schmidt amp; Bender 3-12? 50 scope. With a clear line of sight, he could kill Yamout from a thousand yards away.
Victor disassembled the rifle and placed each part back inside the case. In the lower half of the suitcase were a set of thermal-imaging goggles, a master keycard for the Hotel Europe where Yamout’s meeting was taking place, a block of C-4 plastic explosives and accompanying remote and timed detonators. Victor took out each item and checked it.
Inside the second suitcase, not set into the protective sheeting, was a concealable Class IIIA armoured vest comprised of non-interwoven, thermally bonded Kevlar fibre. Victor tore away its plastic wrap and tried it on for size. It was a medium, which fit him snugly as he wanted, but did not reach down his abdomen as far as he would have liked. A large size would have, but would have been too bulky on his frame to allow him unhindered movement. Better to be fast and vunerable than protected and slow.
Set into the foam rubber of one half of the second suitcase were two suppressed handguns — a. 45 calibre Heckler amp; Koch USP Compact Tactical and a. 22 calibre Walther P22. Each gun had three fully loaded magazines packed with it. One by one, Victor took the guns out, checked and dry fired them a few times, then put them back in the case. He’d requested the handguns because both used ammunition that was naturally subsonic and therefore extremely quiet when used in conjunction with a suppressor. Both guns were also small and concealable, the USP 6.8 inches in length and the Walther just 6.3 inches. They had small capacities to go along with their small sizes, eight rounds for the HK and ten for the P22, but they were purely for backup.
If he couldn’t use the PSG to snipe Yamout from a distance, Victor would be relying on the weapon in the second half of the suitcase to help him successfully fulfil the contract. The FN P90 was a strange-looking weapon even to Victor’s eye. Made by Fabrique National of Herstal, Belgium, the P90 was a selective fire sub-machine gun constructed with a bull pup configuration enabling a long ten-inch barrel that didn’t increase the weapon’s overall length. This gave it quicker target acquisition as well as more accuracy than typical sub-machine guns.
Victor took the compact weapon out of the casing. Primarily composed of high-density impact-resistant polymer and lightweight alloys, when empty it weighed just shy of six pounds and was only 19.7 inches long. He wrapped his right hand around the pistol grip and thumb-hole and in his left hand took the enlarged trigger guard that doubled as the forward grip. Victor found the hand arrangement comfortable. It also helped control recoil, especially on automatic fire.
The selector switch was beneath the trigger guard and Victor thumbed it from safe to semi-automatic to automatic. He squeezed the trigger gently, feeling the weight necessary to fire a single round, and then depressed the trigger fully for automatic fire. It was a useful feature, giving him the option of firing either one shot or several without having to use the selector to change between fire modes. With a cyclic rate of nine hundred rounds per minute, the P90 could unload its fifty-round magazine in 3.3 seconds. The weapon fired a 5.7? 28 mm cartridge extremely accurately, even on fully automatic. Dispersion was minimal, thanks to the round’s low recoil impulse and the weapon’s twin-operating recoil springs and guide rods.
Victor checked the four fully loaded translucent polycarbonate magazines that mounted horizontally along the top of the weapon. He could see that the magazines contained white-tipped SB193 subsonic ammunition. Each bullet was boat-tailed with a lead core and had a projectile weight of 55.0 grains with 2.0 grains of powder, producing a muzzle velocity of just under one thousand feet per second with an effective range of fifty yards. A supersonic round was comparable to a 9 mm JHP in stopping power, but the subsonic SB193, though heavier than a supersonic 5.7 mm, had less than half the velocity. Stopping power therefore wasn’t going to be particularly high, but in Victor’s experience, whatever a bullet’s characteristics, two in the chest and one in the head stopped anyone.
He loaded a magazine and adopted a firing position. He looked down the P90’s unmagnified optical reflex sight. The reticule displayed a pattern of two concentric circles. The largest was approximately one hundred and eighty minutes of arc for fast target acquisition at long range and a smaller circle of twenty MOA surrounding a tiny dot at the centre of the field. Victor moved to the room’s wardrobe, opened it, and held the P90 in the shadows. The tritium cell low-light reticule appeared as two horizontal lines across the middle of the field with a single vertical line from the bottom of the field to the middle to create an open T-shape.
Victor removed the Gemtech SP-90 suppressor from the suitcase. He aligned it with the muzzle brake, pushed down and rotated ninety degrees clockwise to lock it in place. The unique mounting system enabled him to affix the attachment in less than two seconds, far faster than a traditional screw-on suppressor. The SP-90 added 7.25 inches in length and almost twenty ounces in weight to the P90. It also reduced the muzzle velocity of the SB193 round to 951 fps, but Victor found this had next to no negative impact on ballistics or accuracy in real-world situations. The plus side to the reduction in velocity was a suppressed P90 was even quieter than an MP5SD.
Victor put on the thermal imaging goggles, turned off the lights, and switched the goggles on. They detected the infared light omitted and the room became shades of black, grey and white. He released the P90’s magazine and checked the front of the weapon where the infrared wavelength laser aiming module was located beneath the barrel. The laser designator was integrated into the receiver and didn’t affect the P90’s performance in any way. Victor flicked the adjustment switch from off to high intensity. There was a low intensity setting to
o, but Victor didn’t plan on using the gun long enough for battery life to matter. He set the goggles so hot was displayed as black, cold as white.
A thin black beam, invisible to the naked eye, cut across the room and glowed where it struck the far wall. Victor swept the glow on to the television mounted on the wall. He squeezed the trigger, putting an imaginary burst into his reflection’s head.
Plastic explosives, a sniper rifle, two handguns, and a sub-machine gun.
Yes, Victor thought, probably enough weapons.
CHAPTER 18
Washington, DC, USA
Nelson’s Diner was a shiny sausage-shaped building a twenty-minute drive from Langley. Procter sat with a cup of coffee in a booth along the far wall from the entrance through which Clarke entered with his nose wrinkled at the smell of grease and frying meat. The place was almost full, lots of people like Procter who could do with losing a fair chunk of pounds. Clarke slid on to the vinyl-covered seat.
‘You might want to try acting more like you belong here,’ Procter said. ‘You’ll draw less attention that way.’
‘Well, I don’t belong, do I? Anyone can see that. Including you, I’m assuming. Which makes me ask, why here?’
Procter’s gaze strayed off Clarke. ‘Because this place makes the best steak sandwiches you’ve ever tasted. You should try one. It’s worth coming to work just to have one at lunchtime.’
Clarke glanced over to a table where a couple of guys in overalls were eating hamburgers with fries and a few token lettuce leaves on the side. The buns looked flat and soggy and the fries were anorexic sticks of potato in thick oil coatings. Behind the counter a wide, sweating Latino was flipping burgers. Grill fat sizzled.
Clarke grimaced. ‘I think I’d rather skip the stroke at seventy.’
‘Cut the bourgeois prejudice for once, Peter.’