They Arab immediately checked the mirror, the others all turned to look through the back window.
The Cajun was already up on his feet, fists clenched. He spat venom in the direction of the receding car.
‘Ah, new problem,’ the Arab said, looking ahead.
All the others turned to face forward and saw that the traffic in front of them had come to a complete standstill. The Arab braked as he ran out of road.
The Cajun saw this too, and the occupants of the car turned around again to see him break into a loping run towards them. Unless they moved very soon, he would be with them again.
‘Open the glove compartment,’ Avi said to Julie. ‘Pass me what’s in there.’
Julie hurriedly clicked open the glove compartment and gasped at what she saw, but quickly recovered and handed over to Avi a revolver and a hand grenade.
‘Get ready,’ Avi said to the Arab as he pulled the pin on the grenade and heaved himself back out of the rear window.
Once outside, Avi took his time to line up the incoming Cajun with his throwing arm. Once satisfied with his targeting, he lobbed the grenade and pulled himself back inside the car. The Arab immediately twisted the steering wheel and gunned the engine so that the car took off like an electrified beast. The Mercedes mounted the pavement and went headlong through the tables of an outside café yet to open. Beyond the scattered tables people scrambled for safety as the Arab ploughed the car down the walkway, bypassing the queued traffic with his hand on the horn to give pedestrians half a chance to save themselves.
An explosion was heard behind them as they reached the corner of the block. The Arab turned right and re-joined a road with flowing traffic.
‘Will that stop him?’ Jonathan asked.
‘Can’t say – we didn’t see the result. It’ll slow him down, at least. He won’t catch us now, not running. Now we really have to get out of Spain – quickly.’
‘Julie,’ Jonathan said, ‘this whole thing has become much too dangerous. That’s four times in almost as many days that I’ve nearly got you killed. Now I’ve got extra help, professional help from our friends here, I want you to go somewhere safe and stay there till all this is over.’
Julie looked suitably shocked and outraged.
‘No! I won’t – we’re in this together,’ she said indignantly.
‘I know. But I can’t stop thinking about two things here. One is that I’m not sure how much more help you can give now we’ve got assistance – you’ll only be endangering yourself. And I really couldn’t bear it if something happened to you.’ Jonathan was trying to get her to safety by a two-tactic method – appealing to her on the rational and the emotional level.
‘Your boyfriend is right,’ Avi said unexpectedly. ‘I don’t think you can help us anymore in the place we’re going. It would be best for your safety if you left and went into hiding. I won’t let you on the plane.’
Julie’s eyes moistened.
‘I don’t want anything to happen to you either,’ she said to Jonathan.
He smiled, and their hands reached for each other across the car. ‘Hopefully we can resolve this in a couple of days. Then I can join you somewhere for an impromptu holiday. Can you think of anywhere you can go? Where you haven’t been before, and nobody knows you?’
Julie nodded as she wiped her eye. She leant into him and whispered something in his ear, then kissed him on the cheek. He smiled, and for a moment they seemed totally alone.
She whispered into his ear again.
‘Uh, good point,’ he said, as the reverie was broken. Jonathan looked at Avi. ‘She needs cash.’
‘Okay,’ Avi said. ‘We’ll go to our bank, then the main train station to put Julie on a train. Then the private airfield. I want us out of this country in one hour.’
The Arab hit the accelerator again and the car took off in the traffic.
37
Moscow
Derek Munro strolled into the arrivals hall of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport carrying only a small overnight bag.
Munro was in Moscow to meet the vice president of Russia. He was pretending to be an envoy from Warrant Tarrant, who would be granted an audience with the VP.
They were then to have a private talk over issues that concerned the two partners.
Munro was then to report back directly to Tarrant. The brief was that if the VP was acting strangely in any way, or Munro picked up any bad karma from him towards Tarrant, then Munro was to disappear off the grid and stay in Russia until the VP had been assassinated.
The Russian driver who picked him up barely spoke any English, or pretended not to. Munro gave up after a while and instead looked at the kitsch hoardings and cheap advertisements that lined the road all the way into the city.
Eventually the car pulled up in the city centre outside the Metropole hotel.
‘Right opposite the Bolshoi,’ Munro said to the window, taking in the famous ballet theatre across the road as the car slid to a halt.
His father had told him about the Metropole. Scrolling through the celebrity guest book while checking in, he saw the names of venerated celebrities who had all stayed at the place and marvelled at its Art Nouveau style.
His father had also told that in the ‘old days’, which is how Russians now referred to the communist period, every room in the place was bugged with surveillance equipment.
The old head office for the KGB was just up the road in Lubyanka Square. The Kremlin itself was less than a mile down the road in the other direction.
Once he had his room key, he took a second to appreciate the quality décor that surrounded him.
Clearly built with extreme opulence in mind, the building obviously still had scars from falling into the hands of the soviets before being refurbished for the purpose of parting foreigners from their foreign exchange.
The lobby was a riot of stained glass, mosaics and gold chandeliers. Lamps on gilded stalks were interspersed along the walls, which cast shadows on the marble floors from gorgeous women who entertained day or night for a fee, and passing surly staff trained in the Soviet service tradition of not smiling under any circumstances.
Having looked around the lobby, he went straight to his room.
The room was not on the same scale of décor as the public areas. It was small and decked out with thin linen and worn towels, signifying the typical Moscow three-star experience at five-star prices that Munro had heard about.
After dumping his bag, he stretched out on the bed to wait for the phone to ring.
He would not go out.
‘Not here to bloody sightsee,’ he said to the faded stucco ceiling.
38
London
Within the marbled foyer of the head office of the largest oil company in the world, a nondescript man in a black suit, carrying a briefcase, strode purposefully towards the large glass security doors.
The man looked like just another consultant as he held a contractor pass up to the infrared reader on the wall. He heard a beep and then watched the bullet-proof glass open with a hiss, allowing him to enter the interior of the offices.
The pass was a forgery.
It was a testament to the organisation he worked for that he could walk into any high-security office in the world, within twenty-four hours of deciding to do so.
It was just another weekday morning in these offices, and he seemed to be just another ordinary body in a river of bodies streaming into the building and heading for the lifts.
But there was nothing ordinary about this man.
Once encased in a silver elevator, he looked indistinguishable from the other employees around him – and that was the point. The best spies in the world were not those James Bond types who came flying out of the top floor with the treasure as the building and the bad guys exploded behind them. The best spies were grey people that no one remembered passing in the hallway. They were people who could go into the villain’s lair every week and gain access to the treasure without anyone noticing them.
The man was one of the best field operatives MI6 had, sent into the building by William Gladstone himself in an attempt to draw the events of the Dalton case out into the open.
The man got out on the seventh floor, where there was a thriving café full of people having impromptu meetings and breakfast briefings over coffee. He walked straight to a table where Jorge Armando was already waiting for him with two steaming coffees.
Hola! Good morning to you,’ Jorge said as he stood up and greeted the man with a smile and a handshake, as he would any other business colleague within the organisation.
Both men sat down and started pulling out files to pore over on the table.
It looked like one of any number of ordinary meetings taking place in the café, and to a certain extent it was: the only difference was that it was an ordinary meeting among two MI6 agents in the field.
They were meeting to kick off a new phase of operations in the case. They were going to try and flush out the nervous contact who had called the MI6 confidential information line and who Jorge had identified as working in the Portfolio department.
Their objective was twofold: firstly, to flush out the person into the open, and secondly, to have them in an interrogation room by the end of the night.
Jorge moved his coffee aside and laid out a list between the two men.
‘I have a list of six people I have limited it down to,’ Jorge enunciated with his thick Colombian accent. ‘Two of them are from internal consulting organisation, like a-me.’ He finished with a loud sniffing inwards through both nostrils, and flared his eyes.
‘The reason I have called you in today is because all six have come into the building for work,’ Jorge continued. ‘One of the internal consultant guys in my organisation has been working on a “Portfolio project” upstairs. Not has been seen much lately of this guy and when he has been seen, he acting very strangely, no? Everyone assume he is just suffering from the “two-year burnout”. He is the prime suspect, okay?’
‘Good,’ the other man replied as he took a sip of his coffee. ‘The objective for today is that we try to corner everyone on the list and ask them some strategic questions about this Portfolio project. Given this person sounded highly strung on the phone, we should be able to tell from the body language if we have hit anything close to a nerve with them. We will split the list into two and reconvene here at sixteen hundred hours with the results.’
‘Agreed.’ Jorge nodded.
The meeting was over.
Both men gathered up their files and shook hands before departing in different directions.
Just another business meeting.
The two men met again at sixteen hundred hours for coffee at a different table in the café to share their results.
Jorge went first.
‘I got one guy by the canteen, another by the coffee stall on the first floor, another in the gym. No joy on any of them being our boy.’
‘Fine,’ the other MI6 agent said. ‘I got one outside the main entrance on a cigarette break and the rest working on laptops in empty meetings rooms on the thirteenth floor. I think we found him in the second to last one I spoke to. I brought up the questions of him working in Portfolio and he vehemently denied it, but I could see he was about to crack up. The man was nervous as hell, and wouldn’t even admit to knowing his own name.’
Jorge’s eyes widened.
‘Is it the man I said it was?’ he asked.
‘Indeed it was,’ replied the other spy, with all the excitement his British reserve and training would allow. ‘Let’s put eyes on him for the rest of the day. I feel he will bolt tonight, and we will pick him up when he does. Gladstone wants him in the basement tonight – he’ll have him.’
For the second time that day, papers were shuffled to signal the end of the meeting.
39
Moscow
It was mid-morning in Moscow, and Derek Munro was lying fully clothed on his hotel bed. He had been ready to go since before dawn, and was still waiting for the call.
Eventually the phone rang, piercing the interminable silence and vast emptiness of the white ceiling he was staring at. He picked up the receiver and was told to get into a black GAZ Volga limousine waiting outside the entrance.
Two minutes later, Munro exited the hotel and started walking towards the car, which was parked illegally directly outside. As they approached the rear door with a view to getting in, the Volga unexpectedly pulled off in a hurry, and an unmarked black van immediately replaced it that had driven up from behind.
The side door of the van slid open and before he could move, Munro was wrestled from behind into its black interior. Even before the door was slid shut, a small black sack was put over his head and his hands were quickly bound.
Munro did not react or try to fight back.
He was not worried that they would do anything to him. It was probably just security goons trying to make a case for earning their keep. Either that, or they were sending an early message to his boss. It was too early, though, to worry about personal safety yet.
They left him to bounce on the corrugated metal floor of the van for about forty minutes. Even with his training, and despite being in peak physical condition, he struggled to endure the continual pain, until finally the van came to an abrupt halt.
Amidst the jabbering of Russian tongues, he was unceremoniously hoisted out of the van by what, he felt, must have been two huge men with meaty hands under his arms. After being carried a short distance so that his feet were just clearing the ground, he heard the clanging sound of metal on metal and then felt the sensation of going up in a lift. After he was dragged for another short distance, the bag was pulled off his head and the bonds cut off his hands at the same time.
He was outside, standing on a massive concrete floor with no walls round it. It was about ten floors up on what was obviously the top storey of a construction site. There were many other buildings being built all around, and cranes littered the skyline. It must be some new business park that was going up.
The vice president of the Russian Federation was standing before Munro in a blue suit with faint white stripes, his arms behind his back. Two huge men in black suits flanked him.
They sure go for effect in Russia, Munro thought.
He still believed he had no real reason to fear for his safety – yet.
His kidnap was just an opening round in the negotiation process, he thought.
‘Greetings. Welcome to Russia,’ said the vice president with a smile. He started to walk away from the two minders. He half-turned back to Munro and motioned for him to follow. ‘Walk with me, as the Americans say,’ he said, with another disarming politician’s smile.
Munro joined him and they started doing a slow tour of the perimeter of the building.
‘Do you like my suit?’ asked the vice president, fondling his lapels with obvious pride.
‘Yes, very nice,’ Munro replied.
‘It’s from Oswald Boateng, a famous tailor of Savile Row in London, don’t you know,’ the vice-President said in a mock posh English accent.
‘You stiff British people wear these to make money. These pinstriped suits, it is your uniform. Look beyond the horizon: what do you see?’ His arms took in the expanse of the building work around him.
‘A bunch of cranes?’ Munro said.
‘Exactly!’ the vice president replied with delight. ‘Exactly. Russia is rising again to reclaim her rightful place as a world power. The rebirth is everywhere.’
There was a pause that Munro guessed was, once more, a much-cherished effect.
‘Now,’ the vice president continued. ‘The deal with your employer is a large part of this. A very important opportunity for Russia to monetize her wealth of resources. Now is not the time to be questioning alliances. Let me ask you, my friend, what is the current state of mind of my business partner?’
‘He is wondering what yours is,’ Munro asked in return.
‘Ah,’ the vice pr
esident considered, as they reached the end of the floating platform of concrete and did a right turn to continue the circuit around the edge of the rooftop. ‘If he could not pick this up from the conversations on the phone, let me say my resolve is as firm as ever, my purpose … unwavering. Now is the time we look to our allies to stay strong at our side.’
‘Oh, he’s still in the deal ...’
‘Good,’ interrupted the vice-president.
‘He is just feeling there is some exposure of this trouble in France, and other potential leaks need to be cleaned up,’ Munro continued. ‘It could mean the end of his leadership of his organisation.’
‘Mm,’ considered the Russian, as they approached the centre of their rooftop walking track. ‘I understand. Such a large pension is obviously a consideration for any man.’
This isn’t going well, Munro thought. He thinks Tarrant is getting cold feet. Looks like I have to switch to brief number two.
‘That’s not quite what I meant ...’ he said, making one last attempt to get the conversation back on track.
‘My friend,’ the vice president interrupted, clapping a hand on Munro’s shoulder. ‘I’m glad you have come here with this message. I too have a message for Warren Tarrant.’
With that, he released his hand and scratched the top of his head.
Munro sensed movement behind him and spun his head around – too late. One of the men in black suits was already in the air, coming at him from behind with a flying sidekick, right leg outstretched and left leg tucked neatly underneath his body.
His attacker’s foot made contact just below Munro’s left shoulder blade and the transfer of force enabled the man in the black suit to land where Munro had been standing only a second before.
All his years of training were useless as Derek Munro went flying over the edge of the concrete into open air ... and then flailing ten storeys down to the car park below.
40
Madrid
Transition Page 17