been covering the back door. He found brass shell casings in the snow.
The footprints then split off, towards his former residence and also farther north. Victor followed them away from the chalet. The footprints were sharper, deeper, the sniper having moved swiftly through the snow. Before he had removed his boots.
They took a more or less straight line, veering off only for trees in the way. After ten minutes Victor stood at the base of a rocky outcrop. There were no more footprints, but he could see the fallen snow at the bottom of the steep slope, disturbed rocks, exposed earth. Victor made his way upward, using the trees for support. He noticed he was wheezing, the coarse sound of his breathing getting louder as he climbed. He’d already pushed himself more than he should. He was injured; he needed to rest, for a few days at least, to give his body time to heal. Soon, he told himself.
Just before the top of the hillock, Victor found the assassin’s hide. It looked like he had been there overnight. There was a discarded winter coat, a backpack, a two-litre bottle half-filled with urine, and a plastic bag full of excrement. The jacket was empty. Victor took the backpack, and slung it over one shoulder, his own bag over the other. He began following a second set of tracks, ones that came from the west, deeper into the forest. It had snowed in the last twelve hours, but no more than an inch. There still remained shallow depressions in the snow, more than deep enough for Victor to follow with ease.
He came upon the assassin’s vehicle after forty minutes. A Toyota SUV, parked off-road. Victor searched through the side pockets of the backpack, found the keys, and unlocked it.
He stopped suddenly, hand clutching his chest. He retched, tasting iron, coughing up blood. He stayed leaned over for a minute until the pain had subsided. He used a handful of snow to wash the blood from his mouth and used some more snow to hide the blood on the ground.
There was nothing in the vehicle to identify the man who’d tried to kill him. The Toyota had a rental sticker fixed to both front and rear windows and rental documents in the glove box. It would have been rented in a false name, Victor was sure. He threw the two bags onto the back seat and started the engine. He gave the vehicle a few minutes to warm up before he carefully reversed out onto the road.
He sighed heavily. Whoever wanted him dead had found out where he’d lived. An impossibility had it not just been dramatically proved. In the rear-view mirror Victor saw smoke from his burning chalet rising above the tree line. If whoever wanted him dead had found him here, they could find him anywhere.
Whatever semblance of a life he’d made for himself was over.
CHAPTER 22
Paris, France
Thursday
15:16 CET
Alvarez took a big slurp of his three-sugar black coffee and typed clumsily on the keyboard resting on his thighs. He sat with his feet up on the desk, shoes on the floor. A mostly empty plastic ballpoint was wedged between his teeth, slowly being chewed. He was in his temporary office of the CIA’s Paris station on the second floor of the US Embassy.
The office was barely big enough for him and his desk and was so small he liked to refer to it as his shoe box. It was quiet, though, and Alvarez could do without distractions. Near to his feet sat a photograph of Christopher from the school nativity play. He’d been a shepherd. The little trouper had nailed it perfectly, even if the kids playing sheep couldn’t baa worth a damn.
Tracking down Ozols’s killer was going nowhere fast. If he was travelling under Alan Flynn’s passport, then, according to the Czechs, he hadn’t left the country, but Alvarez thought it more likely he’d just switched passports and gone who knows where? Alvarez didn’t have the time or the manpower for a Europe-wide manhunt, so he had focused his efforts on investigating the seven dead shooters. If he could find out who hired them, maybe that would reveal enough about Ozols’s killer to lead to who hired him. Then maybe there would be a shot at getting the missiles or at least stopping the technology from ending up in the hands of America’s enemies.
He’d discovered a lot over a couple of days. Mikhail Svyatoslav, who the killer had impersonated, had been a former member of the Spetsnaz. He served in Afghanistan during the eighties before doing a brief stint with the KGB. He got shown the door when the Cold War ended, and went freelance, mainly working the Eastern bloc, taking out the trash for crime lords and other scum.
With him had been a few Hungarians, ex-mob by the looks of it, and some Serb irregulars, including a woman. Alvarez had to shake his head at that. In short, he had compiled a list of the world’s worst assholes from every cesspit from the Balkans to the Urals. Hired guns, ex-soldiers, mercenaries, killers. Two of the bastards were wanted for war crimes in Kosovo. It’s good that they’re dead, Alvarez thought. Only dead they couldn’t be questioned. They were a bunch of typical Eurotrash hitmen. Alvarez had expected nothing less.
What he didn’t expect was to find out that one of the hitters was an American, James Stevenson, and a former US Army Ranger. Stevenson had even tried out for Delta but hadn’t made the grade — not only that, but he applied to get into the CIA after he dropped out of his unit, but once again didn’t make the cut. He had an aptitude for fieldwork, but he was a discipline problem waiting to happen, too much of a risk to go on the agency payroll. He got into the private sector through an old army buddy and was based out of Belgium. Stevenson did a lot of protection work and other unspecified jobs for a security firm in Brussels.
On the computer screen Alvarez had bank records, phone records, e-mails, memos, even utility bills. They belonged to the recently-shot-twice-in-the-face James Stevenson, former soldier, former mercenary, former scumbag. The guy had deposited a huge amount of euros in cash into an account at a not-proneto-asking-difficult- questions type of bank. This had happened two weeks before he’d become closely acquainted with a pair of 5.7s.
A quarter of that money had then been wired to seven separate bank accounts belonging to the other members of the team. Alvarez assumed they would each have received the same amount again after the job, with Stevenson pocketing half the total for himself. Now the money was sitting gathering interest in the name of dead guys.
Who the hell had given Stevenson the cash in the first place? was what Alvarez wanted to know. Stevenson hadn’t been the shrewdest operator in the history of contract killings and had left several clues on the hard drive of his personal computer, a portable copy of which was now plugged into Alvarez’s laptop.
Stevenson liked to keep things organized, and he had details of each of the other members of the team in a spreadsheet, complete with email addresses and phone numbers where appropriate. This information helped identify a couple of the more elusive corpses but didn’t help track down who had hired Stevenson.
He referred to the job itself as ParisJob, a rather unimaginative title in Alvarez’s opinion, but Alvarez supposed it hardly mattered what it was called. The private security firm in Brussels, through which Stevenson had done several protection jobs, had already been grilled and claimed they had nothing to do with Paris. Alvarez believed them. They made too much money hiring out mercenaries legitimately to have had a hand in a risky contract killing.
It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, though, to think that whoever had hired Stevenson had been a previous client for the security firm. The list of potential suspects was huge and spread worldwide: private businessmen, multinational corporations, Saudi oil barons, African governments. Stevenson himself had worked with all sorts of clients, any one of whom could be the person Alvarez was after, or maybe the individual had nothing to do with the firm. If so, the list of suspects had risen exponentially.
Alvarez’s gut told him that whoever had hired Ozols’s killer had also hired Stevenson and his crew to kill him after the job’s completion. Maybe he’d screwed up, maybe it was to tie off loose ends — it hardly mattered. But if Alvarez was right, and the killer had figured out that it was his own employer who’d tried to have him killed, there was a chance he still had the information. That meant the missiles were still out there and still attainable.
The phone rang and he answered with a blunt, ‘Yeah.’
It was Noakes, one of the CIA officers who worked out of the embassy. Noakes worked in the basement along with all the other technophiles. He was an okay guy, if a little too hyperactive on caffeine and sugar for Alvarez to have much patience for.
