‘He’s right,’ cut in Avi. ‘This is quite normal. But what will happen tomorrow will not be a normal meeting and exchange of mutually beneficial information.’
Jonathan reminded himself to just give in again and go with the flow. Zlatan was right. He had no real understanding of how the industry worked behind the curtain, while his comrades seemed quite relaxed with the way things were going.
He decided that he should react as he would to situations on a plane – only panic when the cabin staff is seen to be panicking.
‘How long before we get to the hotel?’ Avi asked.
‘About forty minutes,’ Zlatan replied.
‘Good,’ Avi said. ‘I have formed the basis of a plan. That will give us enough time to discuss and agree arrangements during the journey. Here is what I propose … ’
Exactly forty minutes later, as they pulled up outside the Hotel Karnegie, they had their plan. Each one of them left the car with a smile on their face.
49
Moscow
Thirty minutes later the entire detail of men were back in the car and on their way to another hotel.
The first part of their newly formulated plan was complete.
Zlatan had pre-booked a room in the Hotel Karnegie under a valid but untraceable name. After checking in, they all went for a drink at the sumptuous marble bar. Once everyone had finished their drink, Jonathan paid for the drinks on his personal credit card and then reassembled his global roaming cellular phone, before turning it on. It beeped and flashed up on the screen that he had forty new messages.
He switched it off and disassembled it once more.
‘Now,’ Avi said as he took the phone off Jonathan. ‘We shall see how many people are interested in you, and what they are willing to do. This gives them all a day to get to Moscow and set up.’
En route to their true hotel, they stopped the car and parked illegally at the edge of Ploschad Revolyutsii square.
Avi repeated the process of turning Jonathan’s cellular phone on and off once more.
This would ensure that whoever was interested in Jonathan would also converge on the square. They would watch known areas he had been to – hoping he would go there again.
‘There,’ Avi said. ‘The scene is set. All that remains is for us to get a good night’s sleep. We have to get up early tomorrow. A lot is going to happen.’
50
Moscow
From atop the Okhotnyj Ryad shopping centre, hidden by a dormant neon sign, Jonathan and his entourage, apart from Zlatan who was not with them, focused their binoculars on the people coming and going through Ploschad Revolyutsii Square.
It was ten minutes to midday, and everything seemed normal. The square was bustling with tourists partaking in the usual tourist activities in the area: taking snaps of the National Historical Museum and the statue of World War Two Red Army commander Georgi K. Zhukov, looking around for how to get into Red Square, and joining the queue to see the embalmed body of Lenin.
Shoppers went into and out of the entrance to the shopping mall that Jonathan and his companions stood on top of. Everything appeared as it would do on a normal day.
Zlatan emerged from a stairwell behind them and jogged to join the group at the edge of the square. Once crouched down with the others, he picked up a set of binoculars to survey the scene.
Avi leant over to Zlatan. ‘How did it go planting the final piece?’ he asked.
‘No problem,’ Zlatan replied. ‘It’s in the phone box at the far end of the square.’
‘Good.’ Avi pulled back and relayed the message to the others around him.
From the sky above came two short, sharp shrieks as the desert falcon made a low pass near them. The Arab quickly shifted his binoculars left and away from the square to the large road of Teartal’nyj Proezd that led down the hill and into the square from nearby Lubyanka Square, where the former offices of the KGB were.
‘Icchchcssss!’ hissed the Arab.
All the others looked up and swivelled their line of sight to see what he was looking at.
‘What the hell is that?’ Jonathan asked worriedly.
A sea of red had filled the road and was advancing down towards Ploschad Revolyutsii.
‘It’s a communist march!’ Zlatan exclaimed.
As the red wave approached, Jonathan began to discern that the constant waving of huge USSR flags caused the incoming red wave effect. Beneath the flags he could start to make out people. Many of them were old and dressed in the old communist uniform of grey anorak and some variation of flat cap.
‘It is okay, it is okay,’ Zlatan said. ‘It is mostly old people wishing they could turn back time to when they had some security and a pension. They often get these marches.’
‘It’s even better for us,’ Avi said. ‘It’s heading for our square. A demonstration provides lots of cover and confusion should anything go wrong.’
They all watched as the red wave surged and broke into the square in front of them. It spread out in a fan movement and eventually coalesced into a rough square shape of waving and milling people. A group of about five men were trying to construct a makeshift stage near the plinth of the statue of Zhukov. The party broadcasts began through hand-held megaphones from people near the front. Somewhere near the back a brass band struck up with stirring communist themes.
‘Great,’ Jonathan said. ‘We have music and everything.’
‘It’s five minutes to twelve,’ Avi said, ‘everyone look to the public phone. Jonathan, have the satellite phone ready.’
Jonathan felt in his jacket pocket for the tenth time to check that the new phone Avi had given him was there and switched on.
It was turning into quite a scene in the square below. Many of the marchers were now dancing as they were caught between political broadcasts and music. Tourists and shoppers had started to mingle among the crowd, some snapping away on cameras in amazement that they were caught up in an event and ideology many of them had thought was consigned to the history books. A carnival atmosphere was apparent.
‘There,’ Avi said suddenly. ‘Grey trench coat, black hair. Approaching the phone from the north.’
All eyes zoomed in on the man, who was walking near the edge of the crowd but seemed to have a purpose in his stride. It was two minutes to midday and he was heading straight for the phone booth.
‘That’s him all right,’ Zlatan said as the man stepped up to the phone in the booth.
They watched him begin rummaging through the directory chained to the base of the receiver, as per the instructions passed via Starbucks Man. He eventually pulled out Jonathan’s cellular phone and battery, which had been buried in a recess within the large phone directory that Zlatan had placed there fifteen minutes before.
The man could be seen putting the battery into the phone and looking to see how to turn it on. Jonathan immediately pulled the small, untraceable satellite phone out of his pocket and started dialling his own cell number into it. He fought hard to stop his hands shaking.
This was the most critical part of the plan.
His focus was on inputting one number at a time to get it exactly right. Once the full number was displayed on the screen as ready to call, his index finger hovered over the ‘dial’ button. A bead of sweat slid down his forehead, but he dared not look up or even move until given the signal.
‘Now,’ Avi said with urgency. ‘He’s turned the phone on. Do it!’
The instructions given to the man at the public phone were to unearth the cellular phone within the directory and simply turn it on. As soon as he did so, the phone began to ring with an unlisted number flashing on the call identification screen.
The man in the grey coat looked around the square and surrounding protesters, before pressing the ‘receive’ button on the phone to take the call.
‘Yes,’ the man said in English.
Jonathan immediately said the name of the organisation he worked for, followed by ‘Putting you through’, before placing the phone o
n two-way mute to simulate the man being put on hold.
All the watching eyes atop the shopping mall noted that the man did not flinch at the mention of the name of the oil company. Once Jonathan had picked up the man again through his own set of binoculars, he took the phone off mute.
‘Hello,’ he said in a deeper and more authoritative voice than his first. Luckily the noise from the square would help drown out any inconsistencies in his voice. The man at the public phone would have to shout to be heard.
‘This is how you contact us?’ the man in the phone booth yelled over the noise of the music and megaphones. ‘My boss is extremely upset about the man you sent. This is not the behaviour of an international businessman, especially the head of major oil company!’ Jonathan covered the mouthpiece and mouthed ‘Bingo’ silently to the men around him. The strangely accented words of 3.64 Percent echoed in his mind: ‘You musht draw out zshe shpider!’
The spider had been drawn. He now knew exactly who was behind it all from within the oil company.
None of the men understood his reference to the peculiar English game of Bingo – he could tell by the quizzical looks on their faces. So he went for something more international and gave the thumbs-up sign with his free hand. They smiled.
‘We send you a message when we kill Munro,’ the man at the public phone continued yelling, not giving the person he thought was on the other end of the line the chance to speak. ‘We kill everyone associated with this deal and make the pipeline never happen. You think I am afraid out here? We have men everywhere. You cannot touch us!’
At this point the man had been speaking for exactly forty-five seconds, which was the exact time it took triangulation software to track the signal of a cellular phone number to the exact spot where it was being used.
Thus it was at this moment that all hell broke loose from every direction. The man in the grey coat jerked to his right and then his left as he was hit by sniper fire from two different angles. He pirouetted like an epileptic marionette, but still somehow managed to stay on his feet.
Assassins and guns started appearing randomly from all over the square. Two protesters in flat caps emerged from the crowd of marchers, pulling shotguns from under their coats.
A homeless man at the far wall closest to the phone booth rose to reveal an Uzi.
Two black Mercedes trucks ploughed into the square from the main road, sending communist marchers bouncing off the front of the vehicles.
Men in black balaclavas began to be disgorged from the trucks, all armed with automatic weapons.
The homeless man and the pair with shotguns opened up at each other, with the man in the grey trench coat caught in a triangle of fire in the middle. The men in balaclavas opened up from afar.
The entire crowd on the square looked as though it had had ten thousand volts put through it as the combined gunfire drowned out, and then stopped, the music and broadcasts.
People scattered everywhere, hitting the floor, climbing over each other.
Within seconds it was a scene of complete pandemonium. The man in the grey coat jerked again from another bullet impact and hit the ground – dead.
It was now a battle among various assassins and government agents to get to the body that they thought was Jonathan Marshall’s, and pick up identification to claim their prize.
The man dressed in homeless rags went down, not before taking out one of the men with a shotgun.
The other man with a shotgun turned to the approaching gang dressed in black, but was hopelessly outgunned and was also cut down.
Some of the men in black also went down due to sniper fire still coming from at least two different locations.
The square was becoming a little bit clearer, as the marchers had a bit more time to spill out of it into the surrounding streets.
From the east of the square, an unmarked Transit van pulled up and the side door slid open. A tall man in an ankle-length black leather coat emerged from the dark rectangle of the door. One half of his head was covered in long slicked-back hair, and the other half by what appeared to be a shiny, curved metal plate, riveted into his skull.
The Arab on the roof suddenly became very agitated and his eyes went wide behind the lenses of his binoculars. He said something quickly in Arabic.
Avi shifted his binoculars. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said as he looked at the man in the trench coat.
‘What is it?’ Jonathan asked worriedly, as he too followed their line of sight with his own lenses.
‘That assassin from Madrid. The Arab saw him before he shot him on the roof. Looks like he survived a bullet to the skull.’
‘Holy crap!’ Jonathan exclaimed in disbelief.
Zlatan had also by now focused on the new entrant to the scene. ‘The Tatar!’ he said breathlessly. ‘It must be! Hardly anyone who sees him lives. We need to get going soon.’
‘You don’t have to tell me twice,’ Jonathan replied. ‘I’m ready now!’
At that moment, the sound of gunfire was temporarily drowned out by the noise of a horrendously loud motorbike that came flying over some low steps from the road and into the square. A huge bear of a man with a tan trench coat flying off his broad shoulders leapt off the bike.
The bike’s trajectory continued forward but at an increasingly lower angle, until it went straight into the back of one the gunmen dressed in black, taking him down. The huge man rolled and surfaced with two large automatic pistols in his meat-hook hands.
‘It can’t be,’ Zlatan said in disbelief. ‘The Cajun! It must be.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Avi confirmed. ‘Our second friend from Madrid – who it seems cannot be killed by hand grenade.’
The Cajun was cutting a swathe into the square through the gunmen in black and anyone else who was around. The Tatar was doing the same thing from a different angle. Both were also taking bullets, both seemed not to notice.
‘These guys must be wearing some serious body armour,’ Zlatan said, before looking down and packing their things on the roof into a duffel bag. The others could not seem to tear their eyes away from the incredible scene of carnage being played out before them.
In no time at all, every gunman wearing black was dead, along with the last few people who had been unable to get out of the square.
Only the Cajun and the Tatar were left.
They squared off against each other from a distance of ten feet – the inert body of the man in the grey coat between them.
Sirens could be heard very close now. The Cajun threw his guns to the side and pulled out a huge Bowie knife from somewhere deep within the folds of his coat. The Tatar also threw his guns down and pulled out a curved knife with a six-inch blade.
‘Knives. Now these guys are talking my language. They know how to settle a fight,’ Zlatan whispered.
Silence echoed around the area for a few seconds as the two faced each other. This was broken by the screeching of tyres on the main road and popping noises as the police and security forces arrived to immediately fire tear gas into what they had been told was an armed riot. Gas began to obscure the view of the two lethal and legendary assassins as they lunged at each other.
‘We’re out of here,’ Avi said urgently. ‘Go, go, go!’ He started pulling and pushing the others in a hurry. Soon they were moving quickly down the fire escape and into their waiting car at the back of the building.
Once the door of the car was slammed shut and they were off and away from the scene, Jonathan let out a slow whistle. ‘The bloody CEO himself eh?’ he snarled, his face discoloured with rage. ‘That bastard! I slogged my guts out for him all these years, and this is my repayment – it’s all going down now. Get me to an internet café!’
51
Moscow
The tiny, dingy, dirty backstreet internet café had never seen anything like it. The greasy Russian proprietor hunched behind the till picked the eczema on his forearms nervously, as a collection of huge threatening men swept through the small room that was his ramshack
le business, consisting of five computers with internet connections.
A huge Arab with some kind of large bird on his arm threw a regular customer out of his chair to make way for the only normal-sized person in the group, who sounded English.
The small business owner watched with unease as three large men, one of whom looked suspiciously like a gypsy, covered the small man as he tapped away on the computer. The Russian did not like this and reached for the phone. As he picked up the receiver there was a ‘thud’ sound and the wire to the receiver dangled in the air from where it had been cut by a knife thrown clean through the cord and into the table in front of him. The gypsy was already spinning another knife in his palm.
‘Nobody move for the next five minutes,’ Zlatan said coolly in English, and then in Russian. Everybody hunched further down in their chairs. The proprietor showed a gap-toothed smile and shrugged as if he had been told that his team had failed to qualify for the European football championship yet again this year.
‘Right,’ Jonathan said, as he took control of the situation and brought up a myriad of screens to begin logging in. ‘First things first. You must all contact your employers and tell them to short-sell every share in the company they can get their hands on. That is very important for The Dichotomy. Not so much for you, Zlatan, just tell your boss to make a bowl of popcorn and start watching the news.’
As different satellite phones were pulled out of pockets and communications begun in a variety of languages, Jonathan’s first action was log into his anonymous web-based email account to check he still had the written hypothesis for the pipeline, as well as supporting documents. He always sent this type of document to himself on big projects he had worked on. The thinking was that they could always come in handy in future employment, as well as for general ass-covering during current employment.
That practice was never going to pay off more than today.
Once inside the email account, he could see that all the documents were still there.
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