Richter paused for a moment, as if another thought had just struck him.
‘But maybe you couldn’t just change the SIM card,’ he suggested. ‘After all, if you did that, how would your team of three Syrian hitmen be able to contact you and confirm that Professor Charles Vernon had ceased to exist down in Cambrils? We recovered the mobiles from what was left of them, and oddly enough your mobile number—’ he pointed at the smartphone lying on the table in front of Michael ‘—was in the call record of one of the phones and listed in the contacts section of all three of them. Bit of a giveaway, that, don’t you think?’
Michael shook his head.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he repeated, ‘and I don’t know you, so I’m leaving.’
Like most booths in most pubs, the table was fixed and so were the seats, so to stand up Michael had to lean forward slightly over the table so that he could manoeuvre his way out. Which was exactly what Richter had been expecting.
As he did so, Richter pulled out the cosh that he had concealed in his right-hand jacket pocket and swung it in a short vicious arc towards the left-hand side of Michael’s head. The blow connected with a solid thud and the effect was immediate. Michael simply collapsed onto the table, knocking his half empty glass onto the floor where it rolled around but didn’t shatter, the spilled liquid from the drink spreading across the table.
Richter glanced round, but nobody seemed to be paying him any particular attention, and very possibly the sight of someone collapsing in a pub was not sufficiently unusual for most people to notice. Although to be in that state of inebriation before lunch was perhaps not so common.
He stepped out of the booth and walked around to the seat opposite, pocketed Michael’s phone then dragged him out and wrapped his left arm over his shoulder so that he could grasp the unconscious man’s left wrist. Then he pulled him upright and walked him slowly and clumsily across the bar towards the main door, mouthing apologies and muttered explanations as he did so. What he hoped it looked like was a man helping his drunken friend out of the door and into the street outside where he could sober up. In fact, of course, Richter’s purpose was rather less altruistic.
As well as tracking Michael’s mobile phone, Baker had also been tracking Richter’s Blackview, and the call he had made before confronting Michael had been to Hammersmith, which meant that Baker had been able to both listen to and record the entire conversation Richter had had with Michael. And on a different line, Baker had been talking to Steve Carpenter, an elegant and lethally efficient black man who was both another of Simpson’s operatives and one of the men Richter had always found he could rely on. Carpenter had himself been shadowing the three men, but from a motor vehicle.
And that was why, less than thirty seconds after Richter had stepped out of the main door of the pub, still holding up the unconscious Michael, an anonymous white Ford Transit van stopped right outside the building. The side sliding door opened, Moore and Masters stepped out, grabbed Michael and hauled him into the back of the vehicle while Richter climbed into the passenger seat beside Carpenter. The two doors slammed almost simultaneously, Carpenter lifted his foot off the clutch pedal and the van shot away down the road.
‘Just one question, my man,’ Carpenter asked in his fake Jamaican accent. ‘Where to?’
Richter paused for a few seconds, considering. Then he smiled bleakly.
‘Epping Forest should do the trick,’ he said. ‘Bit of poetic justice, perhaps, returning to the scene of the crime. Or in this case the scene of a completely different crime, but who’s counting?’
He turned to look back into the rear of the vehicle where Masters had already snapped a pair of handcuffs around the unconscious Michael’s wrists.
‘Any problems with the bodyguards?’ Richter asked.
Moore shook his head.
‘They were both carrying,’ he said, ‘but we had the drop on them and they’d seen the suppressors so they knew we could finish them quietly enough so nobody would ever notice. Or almost nobody. And people in this fine capital city of yours don’t seem to take too much notice of what’s going on around them anyway. So we walked them off the main drag, found a convenient set of railings and used the other sets of handcuffs to hitch them up to it. We took their pistols and spare mags and about two minutes later your friend Steve Carpenter here pitched up in this white truck. Then we just waited for the go from Hammersmith. Job done, pretty much.’
It was more or less the middle of the day and the traffic was moving fairly freely, at least by London standards. Carpenter headed north until he could pick up the M25, then turned east towards the Dartford Crossing, but pulled off at Junction 26, drove under the motorway and then took to the country roads and headed up towards Epping Green, looking for a secluded spot where Richter could spend a little quality time with Michael.
* * *
A little under three hours after they had finally stopped, the four men got back into the Transit van and Carpenter began steering them back more or less the way they’d come.
Michael had ceased providing useful information to them at about the same time as he’d stopped breathing, and they’d taken some time to sanitise the scene before leaving, to muddy the waters. And what the Iranian had told Richter had served to confirm what they’d already deduced about what was going on, as well as putting a lot more flesh on the bones, including what he had known about the timescale. His name of course was not Michael, but they had discovered that he was the senior Iranian illegal in Britain. Or, to be ruthlessly accurate, he had been the senior Iranian illegal in Britain, a position that would now have to be filled by a new incumbent in due course.
Richter spent about twenty minutes on his mobile, bringing Simpson and the Intelligence Director up to speed, and Masters had been similarly employed briefing the senior spook at the American Embassy.
What they then had to do was decide how to respond.
If they could.
And if there was time.
‘And don’t forget the one thing we really can’t do about this,’ Richter emphasised to Simpson, ‘is tell the bloody Israelis. Or not yet, anyway.’
Chapter 47
Moscow, Russia
Thursday
Two separate telephone calls had been made to two different numbers, each with a Moscow dialling code, within about an hour of the events that had taken place in Cambrils. The responses from the recipients, one based at the new GU headquarters at Khodinka airfield, and the other some distance further out from the centre of Moscow at the SVR building at Yazenevo, were identical in substance and remarkably similar in tone. Both superior officers were incredulous that their team of four highly-trained operatives, sent out, respectively, one to snatch and the other to kill, an elderly English scientist, had failed to achieve their objective.
The SVR senior officer had been particularly scathing when he learned that not only had his men been outwitted and outgunned by a combined team of at least twelve American and British agents – the SVR operatives would obviously never admit that they actually only faced two armed men on the streets of the Spanish city, but claiming to be outnumbered three-to-one at least made their abject failure explicable in terms any military officer could understand – but they had also been forced to surrender both their pistols and their passports. Losing their weapons was one thing but being deprived of their passports generated a veritable mountain of paperwork that greatly increased the irritation factor at Yazenevo and served to significantly deepen the depth of the ocean of shit in which they were going to find themselves.
The upshot of it all was that coincidentally both the four-man GU team and the four-man SVR team discovered they were occupying neighbouring seats in the economy class section of the same aircraft as it headed for Moscow. On arrival, each group was collected by a uniformed driver and guard in a small van and driven away for separate protracted, pointed and painful debriefing sessions.
In the end, all eight men walked a
way, which was a rather better result than any of them had realistically been expecting, but they all knew that their chances of advancement or promotion in their chosen organisations had catastrophically slipped from ‘good’ to somewhere between ‘nil’ and ‘extremely unlikely’.
* * *
Nobody was going to be able to debrief the surviving Syrian hitman, Marfan, for some considerable time. He was in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Tarragona having so far endured two emergency operations to repair the damage that the nine-millimetre bullet, fired at almost point-blank range, had caused to his stomach and other internal organs. His prognosis was good, but even when he was released from the ICU he would still be in hospital for some weeks.
When he could talk, no doubt the Spanish police would wish to interview him about what had happened on the streets of Cambrils. They would also be interested in learning his name and nationality, because the only thing the hospital staff had found in his pockets when he was pulled out of the back of the emergency ambulance was a billfold containing a couple of hundred euros. No passport or driving licence or any other sort of identification, and no indication of how he might have arrived in Spain, unless he had been either the driver or a passenger in the abandoned Vauxhall on English plates that had been right next to him on the street when the medics had arrived. There had been no identification on either of the dead bodies that had been recovered from the scene.
Even that looked like it wasn’t going anywhere. The Spanish had obviously checked with the British authorities to identify the owner of the Vauxhall, but that hadn’t helped. Their records stated that the vehicle had been the subject of a private sale for cash about a month earlier, according to the previous keeper, but the new owner hadn’t bothered registering it and the name and address he’d given the seller – who had been questioned by the British police about the vehicle – both appeared to be false.
They hadn’t got any idea of his nationality because when Marfan did finally regain consciousness he had refused to say a word to anyone. The doctors tried talking to him in Spanish, obviously, as well as Catalan, French, German and English, which exhausted their combined linguistic repertoire, but the man didn’t respond to any of them. None of them spoke Arabic, but even if a speaker of that language had been available, Marfan would not have responded, because although he had been badly injured he certainly wasn’t stupid. The only option he had, one he knew almost from the first moment when he woke in the unfamiliar surroundings of the hospital’s ICU, was to say nothing to anybody.
In fact, and as anybody familiar with the murky workings of the world of intelligence and the even murkier world of contract killing would know perfectly well, the Syrian could not and would not say anything useful to anybody, simply because he daren’t. If he did let slip anything relating to what he was actually doing in the Spanish seaside town, or who had employed him, or almost anything about his mission, then not only would the Spanish have probable cause to prosecute him for something, but his employer would almost certainly take steps to ensure that he said nothing else. To anyone. Ever.
Lying in a hospital bed would make Marfan a static and helpless target, and if by chance he was prosecuted and ended up in prison, he would still be a static target but this time behind bars, and the kind of people who employed contract killers to do their work for them tended to have a vindictive nature, long memories and an extremely long reach.
When the Syrian was sufficiently compos mentis to work all this out for himself, he made sure that his silence appeared to be because he spoke none of the languages the doctors had used. And if and when the Spanish police did turn up at his bedside with an Arabic-speaker, he would simply claim to have been an innocent bystander – despite the arguable circumstantial evidence against this suggestion – or to have suffered traumatic amnesia and to have no recollection whatsoever of what happened in the hours, or probably days, leading up to him being shot. That way, once he was released from the tender care of the Spanish medical system, he might be able to walk out of the hospital and just keep going because ultimately he genuinely was a victim: he had been shot rather than having shot anyone himself. And after that, he would say nothing voluntarily, and make sure that certain people he knew were aware that he was keeping silent. If that worked, he might just manage to stay alive.
Whichever way you looked at it the Syrian at was a dead end.
Chapter 48
Chiswick, London
Thursday
Mayfair is embassy-land in London, and people involved in the intelligence services of almost any nation – what might be called the international brotherhood of spooks, although brotherly affection is rarely exhibited between those belonging to different nations – are very well aware of the number of fixed and mobile cameras that are in use in this particular chunk of Britain’s capital city. Almost every embassy and consulate there is covered by at least one and usually several watch teams from a selection of entirely different embassies and consulates whose sole purpose in life, at least during working hours, is to photograph and later try to identify everybody who enters or leaves the building they are charged with watching. The result of that, predictably enough, is the absolute refusal by virtually every intelligence officer in the capital to meet with an intelligence officer of any other nation anywhere in this area, because nothing would blow, say, an American CIA senior officer’s cover as a lowly third secretary faster than him getting himself photographed at a meeting with a known SIS officer. People tend to be known by the company they keep.
And that was why some ninety minutes after Carpenter had switched off the engine of the white Transit van in the underground parking area at Hammersmith, he and Richter, along with Moore and Masters as the two transatlantic representatives, were sitting at a table against the back wall of a branch of Carluccios on Chiswick High Road – Chiswick being a long way from embassy territory – looking at the fifth member of the group. He was one of those tall and fair-haired Americans with shoulders that are far too broad and far too many teeth that are far too white, and who always look as if they should be wearing the armour-plated uniform of an American footballer or the checked shirts and Stetson hat of a modern-day cowboy. He also didn’t look happy with either where he was or what he was doing.
He’d introduced himself as ‘Jack Jones’ which nobody believed for a moment, but he had given the correct response once Richter had walked up to him and hit him with the challenge code five minutes earlier. The challenge and response had been agreed by the American Embassy in some haste on a scrambled telephone line when Simpson had explained the situation to the senior Company man there, even before Richter had got back to Hammersmith.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ the man calling himself Jones said for the third time. ‘Or not right here, anyway. How do you know this place is secure?’
‘You’re beginning to sound like a cracked record,’ Richter said, exasperation in his voice. ‘Look around you. You know and we know that it’s not secure because it’s a fucking coffee shop, but we don’t have time to fanny about. If you see anybody you don’t like the look of in here, or anyone you think might be listening in to our conversation, I’ll get Steve here to walk across to their table and shoot them. He’s good at that. But if you don’t start telling us what we need to know pretty soon I’ll ask him to shoot you instead and get the embassy to open another box of spooks and send one out here who will talk to us.’
Jones stared at him as if he wasn’t quite sure whether or not he was joking. Whatever he saw in Richter’s eyes seem to help him make up his mind.
‘Okay,’ he said reluctantly, taking another look around the inside of the coffee shop. ‘You asked for satellite imagery of this here hick town in Iran.’
He pronounced the name of the country as ‘Eye-Ran’ which was what Richter had expected, then keyed in two different combinations and snapped open the catches on a reinforced leather-bound steel briefcase attached to his left wrist by a chain and handcuff
.
‘These ain’t been properly analysed by the photo int guys back home, so it’s pretty much raw data,’ he said, unlocking the handcuff as well.
He took out a buff folder and slid about a dozen black and white pictures onto the table between them.
‘You weren’t real clear ’bout what you’re looking for, so this is the take from one of the Keyhole birds for the last three months, and we just picked the best image we had at about the same time each week. There’s a whole raft more of these pictures we can get if you need them, but until you tell us what the hell’s going on we’re pretty much in the dark.’
The images were all superficially identical, which was entirely predictable. They all showed a built-up area, some of the structures already annotated on each picture, and others were identifiable even by someone like Richter who had almost no photographic interpretation experience.
‘Over here on the east,’ Jones said, pointing, ‘that’s the local airfield. Real obvious. This oval thing is a sports stadium and down here near the southern end of the town this building is the Zahedan Medical University. Most of the rest of it looks like housing plus a few industrial sites. So do you guys know what you’re looking for?’
‘Not really, no,’ Richter admitted. ‘It was more a case of letting the fox see the rabbit.’
The expression on Jones’s face clearly showed he had no clue what Richter meant by that remark.
Masters took three of the images, placed them side-by-side on the table in front of him and silently studied them in turn, presumably looking for some kind of difference between them.
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