Victor got himself a glass of water from the kitchen. He felt tired, drained. He turned on the TV, eager for some light distraction. Nothing happened when he pressed the on button. He noticed the TV was an old boxy set, out of place among the other modern goods. He pushed the on button again. Still nothing. The standby light glowed red.
Three TVs for one person in a small apartment was excessive, and an aging set in the kitchen when everything else was new just didn’t feel right. Victor ran his fingers along the TV’s case, finding the screws in the plastic depressions. The screw heads felt sharp on his fingertips. Recently used.
Victor searched the drawers until he found a screwdriver. He unplugged the portable TV and turned it around so he could see the screws. They were marked and grooved. It took him a minute to unscrew them all and take the back off the TV. Inside he found why it wouldn’t switch on. Apart from the standby light it was hollow. A hide. Inside was a 9 mm Browning handgun, a. 22 Luger, a separate suppressor for the Luger, a couple of spare magazines for each, a variety of knives, and two boxes of shells for the handguns. Just a weapon’s stash. Nothing else.
He’d been hoping to find a lot more, some small clue to help him find out who hired the kill team. He’d wasted his time, likely compromised himself in the process, and was no closer to his enemies. Victor resisted hurling the TV off its perch and took a breath to compose himself. He reattached the case to the fake set and placed it back exactly as he’d found it. He then washed the glass, dried it, and returned it to where it had been on a shelf. He performed another sweep of the apartment to make sure he hadn’t missed anything and he hadn’t.
Outside he headed back to the city centre. There was nothing else he could do in Munich with what little information he had. But he had the flash drive. Whoever wanted it was still out there, unseen to his eyes. How long could he stay unseen to theirs? He needed to formulate a new course of action. But for the time being he had to lie low, gather his thoughts while he considered his next move, rest where he knew it was completely safe. There was only one such place where he could do that. Near the village of Saint Maurice, north of Geneva, Switzerland.
The closest thing he had to home.
Before he left there was one other place that he needed to visit. It was that time of the year again, though because of the circumstances he had been putting it off, but he could do so no longer. He changed direction.
It was a run-down building, a spectre of the old in the modern area where he found it. The bricks were faded, grimy, dark in the rain. Orange streaks of rust stained the walls beneath windows protected by iron grilles. The door was unlocked, and he pushed it open. Inside it was dim, the high ceiling lost in the shadows above.
Victor’s shoes clicked on the tiled floor, the only other sound his breathing. He could feel his pulse rising steadily with each step that brought his ultimate destination closer at a frightening pace. It took a lot of will-power, as it always did, not to turn around and walk straight back out.
He pulled the curtain back and stepped inside the box he likened to an upturned coffin. He pulled the curtain shut behind him and fell to his knees, head bowed, palms together.
In a quiet voice Victor spoke to the faceless silhouette on the other side of the mesh panel.
‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’
CHAPTER 15
Central Intelligence Agency, Virginia, USA
Tuesday
06:07 EST
Procter noted the mandarins were all absent at this early hour, so it was just Chambers, Ferguson, and Sykes around the table with him. Chambers looked as presentable as ever, but both Ferguson and Sykes were looking a little rough around the edges, Ferguson especially. He was too old to still be doing six AM starts and only had about a year left before retiring.
Alvarez’s voice came through the speakerphone. ‘I’ve spent all night liaising with the French police and their intelligence services, who have thankfully cut us some slack. I’ve got a copy of their crime-scene and lab work, but unfortunately it doesn’t help us a whole lot. As I expected there’s nothing useful from the scene where Ozols was killed. The way the cops have it the killer was waiting in the alley for Ozols and shot him from close range. He took his empty shell cases with him, not that it would have mattered as you’ll understand in a minute.
‘Now, at the hotel we got a second chance at getting something from this guy, but it doesn’t get any better. No unidentified hairs or traceable fibres. The only fingerprints found in the killer’s room belong to the maid who cleaned it. This time he didn’t take his empty shells with him, but no fingerprints on them either.’
‘He wore gloves the whole time?’ Procter asked.
‘Negative,’ Alvarez replied. ‘Surveillance footage shows the killer didn’t wear any. If he had wiped down everything he’d touched there wouldn’t have been the maid’s fingerprints left behind in the kinds of places you would expect to find them. What the lab people did find were traces of silicone. So far I haven’t been able-’
‘Washing your hands with silicone solution prevents fingerprints,’ Ferguson interrupted.
Procter looked Ferguson’s way.
‘It creates a waterproof barrier over the skin,’ Sykes continued for his boss. ‘The oil from your fingers can’t get through it, so you don’t leave prints behind on anything you touch. You can’t tell if someone is wearing it either as it’s completely clear. It was developed to help prevent industrial dermatitis in factory workers.’
Procter nodded. You learn something every day, he thought.
‘Okay,’ Alvarez continued. ‘That solves that little mystery, so thanks. We haven’t got a shot of his face from the surveillance tapes as he kept it angled away from the cameras at all times. He’s white though, tall, wearing a suit, he’s got dark hair and blue eyes, wearing glasses. Had a beard too. If he takes the glasses off and has a shave no one’s going to pick him out of a crowd though. Ballistics is a dead end like everything else. The ammunition was made in Belgium but, although not something you see every day, is too common to trace further.
‘He was checked in to the hotel under the name Richard Bishop, a British citizen. No one by that name has left the country since yesterday and from what I’m hearing no British citizen by the name Richard Bishop even entered France in the last month. It’ll be bogus, I’m sure, but it would be worth just doublechecking with the Brits.’
‘I’ll get someone on it,’ Chambers said and scribbled herself a note. ‘I’ve personally contacted the heads of station in London, Moscow, Berlin, Riyadh, Delhi, Islamabad, and Seoul. So far no one’s hearing anything suspicious about Ozols. I’m expecting callbacks throughout the day, but I’m not hopeful. Whoever organized this assassination has done a good job keeping themselves hidden.’
Procter hadn’t made up his mind about Chambers yet. He considered her to be just a stopgap, someone to keep the chair warm until a long-term candidate could be found. How she performed on this would answer his doubts one way or the other. On the one hand the brain on her practically poked through her skull, but on the other Procter just wasn’t sure she had the balls for the role. Literally more than figuratively.
He leaned forward. ‘And we’ve had no intercepts relating to Ozols, Paris, or the missiles. No known assassins have been spotted in the region recently and we haven’t got a hope of ID’ing him based on the few details we have. I’ve been on the phone to my equivalents in allied countries to see if anyone recognizes the MO but it’s too non- specific to produce any leads.’
It was Sykes’s turn to speak. ‘We’ve been checking the Russian angle, and no matter who we speak to it’s the same. Moscow believes everything on board the sunken frigate is unrecoverable. Obviously we can’t ask too many questions unless we tip them off to what we’ve been doing.’
Alvarez continued, ‘Interpol likewise can’t do a lot with what we have so far but we might have caught a break with this hotel incident. What the CCTV footage showed us, with the way I’ve pieced it together, is as follows. The killer murders Ozols and returns to his hotel approximately two hours later. When he gets there he spots two men and he either recognizes them or something makes him suspicious. He tries to avoid them but is ultimately seen.
‘A few minutes later he kills them in the corridor outside his room, shooting through a door opposite. A couple of minutes later two more men enter. He waits for them, follows one, and ends up killing them both. Disabled or tortured one with an exploding aerosol if you can believe it. All these people are armed by the way and aren’t carrying ID. Next, he kills a woman in the hotel kitchen, a guy in the apartment building opposite, and from
