Jonathan was stunned. Though he knew he shouldn’t be – damn Falcus!
‘And you have nothing else to tell me?’ Jonathan asked.
‘I think you should come back and talk this through with ...’
Jonathan hung up. The Mentalist was frustrating him and clearly had nothing else to offer.
He’s still living in his happy little Dutch land where everything is in pure two-tone black and white, thought Jonathan. That doesn’t help me when I’m wading knee-deep in brown. I’ve got Julie to think about as well now. I need to find out what’s going on and get us out of this goddamn mess, pronto!
He began feeding more coins into the phone.
It was time to call Conor.
The phone rang.
‘Wassup?’ came the deep American voice.
‘It’s me,’ said Jonathan. ‘Have you heard or seen anything?’
‘Well, I tell you buddy, I don’t know what you stirred up, but it ain’t good. I asked a few questions to some senior clients of mine and only got dumb stares or concerned glares. Think I may be putting myself on some secret blacklist here. Not that I care, I’m getting sick of whining Limeys anyway. But most of the day I was in meetings, so I’ll ask around some more tomorrow.’
‘Well, be careful,’ Jonathan said. ‘Someone tried to kill me again today. People have been killed. The hit list may be real. If it’s getting too hot, take care of yourself first – and keep your head down.’
‘Will do.’
‘Okay. I have to go,’ Jonathan said, checking his watch to make sure he did not go over his thirty-second time limit. ‘Take care, and I’ll call again soon.’ He hung up.
He fed the last of the coins in. This was the final call for the day.
‘Hello?’ answered a tentative voice.
‘Harry, it’s me. What’ve you found out?’
‘Jonathan. So glad you called, are you okay?’ Harry Shaftesbury asked.
‘So glad you called’? thought Jonathan.
‘Harry … are there other people listening to this call?’ Jonathan asked.
‘Uh … no, no, not all,’ Harry said.
In a semi-lit room in MI6, five agents with earpieces were gesticulating wildly at Harry to keep the conversation going.
‘Look, Jonathan,’ Harry said, ‘I’ve informed my superiors of your situation, and yes – your situation is grave. They think it would be best if we can arrange some meeting point and a time when you could “come in”, as it were. We can protect you.’
‘Have you found anything else out?’ Jonathan asked impatiently.
‘Um. Well, yes, it appears the incidents were connected.’
‘No shit.’
‘We have some strong leads. We need proof by way of some company files, or something of that ilk. Do you have anything?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Am I worth any less to my government if not?’ Jonathan asked.
‘No, no, no, of course not,’ said Harry, clearly flustered. ‘We want you to come in, all the same.’
‘Well, nothing personal, old roomie, but I’m not going to trust people who can’t even be honest enough to tell me they’re obviously listening in on the call. I will call back, so give me some indication you know who’s trying to kill me and that none of them are related to your organisation, and I’ll think about it.’
Jonathan hung up.
In a semi-lit room in MI6, five agents raised their arms and dropped their jaws in disbelief. Harry felt his heart sink.
As Jonathan trudged back to the car, he kicked out in frustration at the loose gravel under his feet, sending up a small cloud of dust.
He decided the best option now would be to drive for a while longer until they found a random bed-and-breakfast or cheap motel for the night. Tomorrow would be another day of them hopefully being alive, and someone finding something out.
The calls would be made again tomorrow: it was the deadline for finding anything out.
His mood lifted as he approached the car and saw Julie smiling at him through the windscreen.
He had to get the answers tomorrow, for Julie’s sake above everything else – he wanted to stay alive, but felt he had got her into this mess as well. He had to get her out of it and towards the happy life she deserved, even if it cost him his life.
20
Houston
Roscoe Ickes leant back in his cream leather chair and put his boots on his huge desk in Houston to read the main pages of USA Today. He was confronted by the headline: NO SUSPECTS IN OIL CEO AND RUSSIAN VICE PRESIDENT ASSASSINATIONS.
Ickes slowly started turning a light shade of red, which intensified in colour until he stood up and tore the newspaper in half.
‘Kazanzski!’ Ickes barked at the door.
Kazanski came scurrying in from an adjoining room.
‘Yes sir!’ Kazanski, an ex-marine, barked back.
Ickes threw his power tie over his shoulder and stared Kazanski down.
‘I put resources on to find out who killed Calvin Mitchell over there in Europe. And I know from friends in intelligence and the State Department that things are going down.’ He pointed his fat Mont Blanc power pen accusingly at Kazanski. ‘Did you send some wet-behind-the-ears MBA to do this, to save cost?’ Ickes continued. ‘Cause either way I ain’t heard nuthin’ and I ain’t happy!’ He banged his fat hand on the table for effect.
‘Sir, no Sir,’ replied Kazanzski. ‘My man is very capable, but leads are proving a bit thin on the ground at this stage, sir. The only thing we know for sure is that everyone is trying to track down an employee from Calvin Mitchell’s organisation. Seems he has the answers.’
‘Pah!’ Ickes spat. ‘Not good enough. You know this guy’s name that they’re all looking for?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Pull your college boy back, fire him and then release The Cajun on this guy.’
‘Sir!’
‘I want that mean son of a bitch in Europe by company jet by tomorrow! Or it’s your ass out the door.’ The fat hand hit the table again.
‘Sir, yes sir!’ Kazanzski barked, already heading for the door.
Forty minutes later an express motorcycle courier kicked up a cloud of dust as he hit the brakes on his motorbike. The bike skidded to a halt outside a large wooden colonial property on the outskirts of New Orleans.
Without turning the engine off or removing his helmet, the courier got off his bike, walked up to the front door slipped a manila envelope through the letter box.
He pressed the doorbell button, then ran back to jump on the bike. His left foot stomped the bike into gear, and another cloud of dust sprayed up as he gunned the engine and the bike hurtled back towards the main road at speed.
The courier was a man local to these parts who was not going to hang around at this location for a second longer than he needed to.
Inside, a giant of a man in a tan trench coat opened the envelope to pull out a list of addresses and a picture of Jonathan Marshall.
No-one knew where The Cajun had come from. There were many stories and few certainties.
The one certainty was that he was the greatest tracker alive.
And he was being dispatched to Europe to find Jonathan Marshall.
21
Paris
In a dank, dimly-lit basement in Paris, a burly Russian in a black leather jacket sat hunched over a laptop. Three other men faced him across a wide table. They also had their heads locked on to computer screens.
From this tiny room, with the laptops and a series of radiophones, the Russian in the leather jacket was running the entire hit operation in Paris.
The man was aware that he was behind the game, now that the prey had clearly fled the city.
The man still hoped something would turn up very soon, as he knew his employers back in Moscow would be less than pleased about the events of the last few days.
There was a clunk as a metal door was unlocked and creaked inward. The man in the leather jacket looked up
.
‘What is it?’ he yelled at the door. The instructions had been specific – no disturbances. Another man in a leather jacket appeared at the door as it opened.
‘We are being relieved,’ the man at the door said.
The surprise was clear on the faces of all the men in the room.
‘Oh, really?’ said the man in the centre. ‘And who the hell would be replacing us?’ he added, putting his hands on his hips.
‘The man from the south,’ the man at the door replied.
‘You are joking me!’ The first man spat on the floor and cocked his head up. ‘That guy doesn’t exist.’
With a yelp, the man at the door was suddenly jerked backwards into the darkness. A crunching sound was heard, followed by a thud.
The Tatar entered the room.
They could not see his face properly – it was as though a cloud of darkness surrounded his features.
‘I bring a message from our employer.’ A deep and gravelly voice emanated from the darkness. ‘Failure is unacceptable.’
The Tatar reached out with his right hand and grabbed the top of the head of the man in the centre of the room. The head was jerked left and right, and a loud crack was heard as the neck snapped.
Before they could even reach for nearby guns, a swirl of movement exploded from the doorway that was impossible to focus the eye on. Each man was hit in various soft spots of the body so that they all fell to the floor – one after the other – dead.
The Tatar moved around the room swiftly, grabbing all the maps, laptops and documents used in the operation ... before disappearing out of the door again like a wraith.
22
Brittany
As the rocky coastline of north Brittany slowly migrated across his car window, Jonathan was thinking of how great he felt.
This was because he had slept well the previous night for the first time since his personal nightmare had begun.
The only thing to destabilize the evening had been his initial trepidation in wondering if something would happen with Julie. They had ordered a twin room but he had decided not to make a move, since they had both been through a lot in a short space of time, he would not try anything on the first night with someone he liked this much, and he was sure Julie was far too classy to come on to him in a two-star motel.
Once it was clear nothing would happen that night, utter exhaustion had ensured his best night of sleep in years.
He had woken thinking of the dead men.
The body count is three so far, that I knew of, he thought, as the French countryside raced past.
Calvin Mitchell, apparently a complete prick in person, the Russian vice president and Falcus. How much had they known about the risks of what they were getting involved in? They probably all knew that their lives were at risk in some way or other.
The thing that really annoyed him about all this was that he was unaware of the risk.
He knew he was working in an industry dominated by politics and subterfuge. But there was no disclaimer or waiver he had to sign on the first day, stating that he might be hunted down like a dog if a powerful ‘stakeholder’ did not agree with the work he did.
I’m just a lowly pawn in the game, he thought, but now everyone is trying to take me out as though I’m some kind of kingmaker.
Given the second attempt on his life yesterday, he had decided that his focus now would be on staying alive. Though he had started to wonder if he could turn this around and use what he knew to gain some kind of amnesty from the monsters chasing him.
The problem was that he still did not have it all clear in his own mind at the moment.
His plan for today was to leave the hotel really early, which they had done by checking out at five in the morning, then drive to the next significant thing he saw on the map. That was the ancient medieval city of Mont Saint Michel. Once there, he would call Conor and Harry again, hoping they would have some news or insight he could use to get him and Julie out of this alive.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ asked Julie, shattering his sober thoughts.
‘Uh, what’s that?’ he asked, realizing that he had been absently staring at the dashboard while getting lost in his thoughts.
‘The texture of the faux-leather dashboard, of course.’
Jonathan turned to look at her. ‘Really?’ he asked, confused.
‘Of course not, silly. Look out of the window.’ Julie pointed past his face, and he followed the direction of her hand. He had to do a double-take to believe what he was seeing.
Out of the hazy morning air, it looked as though a stone fortress with an abbey suspended above it was floating on the ocean.
He had heard about this place but never seen it. While the tide was in, it played tricks with your mind. As his eyes adjusted he could see it was a walled village, with the abbey as centrepiece, clinging precariously to a clump of rock roughly one kilometre across which jutted out of the sea. The rock was connected to the mainland by a permanent causeway, and everything else around it seemed to have been smoothed away through the ages by the ceaseless movement of water and wind.
‘Yes, beautiful,’ was all Jonathan could say.
He was truly amazed at the sight.
‘It was a single block of granite in the bay. During the ice age, it resisted erosion from the glaciers better than the surrounding rocks. An abbey was established on it, and grew from there.’ Julie smiled when she saw his quizzical face.
‘School trip, remember? That’s how I know a fair amount about it. It’s always packed with tourists and there are lots of security guards about, because it’s a world heritage site. So it should be safe for us to get lost in the crowd – and you to make your calls for a while.’
‘Sounds good.’ Jonathan smiled back. ‘And we get to see some real history at the same time, almost like being on holiday.’
Forty minutes later they had parked up in the visitor car park and were crossing the causeway on foot. The spires rose majestically above them and the sea surrounded them on nearly all sides.
‘It’s quite remarkable,’ replied Jonathan, looking up at the scale of the surrounding wall. ‘It’s too bad we don’t build things like this today. Glass and metal towers hardly compete.’
As they went through the massive wooden doors to the entrance, Jonathan noted how right Julie had been about the tourists. The place was packed. As soon as they were through the doors, it was like being at an outdoor music concert or sporting event.
Julie turned and grabbed his hand, which was a pleasant surprise. It was their first physical contact, and despite their predicament, Jonathan was thrilled at the touch. Her skin was warm and incredibly smooth. It was all he could do to stop himself from stroking the softness on the back of her hand with his thumb.
‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘All the roads in the lower village wind upward and around the mount, heading for the abbey. There are more tourist shops higher up. One of them will have a payphone.’
She started pulling him through the throng. One of them had to take the lead to cut through the crowd. This may have been the only reason she had taken his hand. He hoped not, but for now he didn’t care.
It was progress, and he would take it in no matter what the circumstances. He couldn’t take his eyes off her as they began the uphill struggle to find a payphone.
Outside the walls of the stone citadel, the tyres of an unmarked black Audi crunched the gravel as it came to a stop in the car park. The car’s white reversing lights flicked on and the car moved backwards to pull up next to an old two-door Peugeot 106.
The door of the black Audi clicked open and a dark boot emerged to be placed on the gravel. The full shadowy force of the Tatar emerged into the hazy light.
As the sun reflected off the nearby water his features were more discernible. It was not a handsome face. It was the face of a seasoned killer, scarred by battle.
His hair was shoulder-length, dirty brown-black, and tucked behind his ears. He wore a lon
g leather trench coat, which he quickly checked with his hands to ensure that multiple hidden weapons were properly adjusted.
The large man stepped forward to look into the windows of the Peugeot in front of him.
They had left nothing in the car.
He reached out with a huge hand and felt the bonnet of the car for heat. It had stopped about half an hour ago.
The Tatar was not underestimating his prey; he was checking every detail he could. For him to be here, these people were not stupid: they had survived two assassination attempts already. He would soon change that.
The large frame straightened up and he looked over the car roof at Mont Saint Michel, glittering on the water in front of him. He cared not for beauty or history. He cared about killing. It’s what he was paid for, and business was good.
He had driven all night from Paris and had just missed them by an hour at their hotel this morning.
It doesn’t matter, he thought, as he started to walk towards the causeway. They will still die the same day.
They were in the circular monument right in front of him. Only one way out.
They will not escape this time.
The phone made a clunking noise as the coins dropped through to the collection box and the call connected. While Jonathan waited for Conor Wright to pick up, he looked over his shoulder to see the re-assuring figure of Julie sitting on a medieval wall, licking an ice cream and looking out over the sea.
He turned back as Conor answered with a hushed, ‘Yeah?’
‘It’s me,’ said Jonathan. ‘Any news?’
‘Well, old buddy,’ – Conor was still speaking in hushed tones, probably so that no one else in the office could hear the conversation – ‘there are all sorts of feelers out, looking and asking questions about you from a lot of different areas. Guys in the office I’ve never seen before; black suits from upstairs. I asked one question about your project, which brought a barrage of questions from what were described as ‘auditors’. The Dutch Mentalist was called up and came back downstairs looking pale. No one has ever seen that before. Suggest you don’t contact him again.’ Conor’s voice was quiet.
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