could score some crack. It was no way for an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency to die. Far better to have been have been killed on duty than while going for a piss.
The way the cops had it and the way it looked in Alvarez’s head too was that the perp had surprised Kennard with a knife and demanded his things. Kennard had tried to draw his gun and had been stabbed repeatedly. Kennard was full of himself enough to have tried something stupid like that. He should have handed over the wallet and waited for the guy to go and then put three in his spinal column.
Alvarez thought for a moment. Kennard, though hardly a lethal weapon, was a fully trained operative. It was hard to see how some lowlife could’ve gotten the drop on him. Alvarez scratched the back of his thick neck. He sighed and shook his head. He was reading far too much into it. The guy had been killed. It happened, even to the best. And Kennard certainly wasn’t the best.
Alvarez was going to have a shitload of extra work to do now that Kennard was out of the picture. The guy gets himself killed when they’re up to the eyeballs on the hunt for a professional contract killer. Perfect timing.
Alvarez put the file down and turned on his phone. He had three missed calls and a voice mail. He listened to the message. It was Noakes telling him about the photographs on Stevenson’s hard drive. He called him back.
‘What have you got?’
‘I’ve found something in a couple of the photos from Stevenson’s meeting.’
‘Such as?’
‘In the ones showing the mystery man leaving, we’ve got some shots of his car-’
‘But none of the licence plate, I know.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s right, but on two we get a look at a windshield sticker, once I’d enhanced the image. It’s from the rental-car company.’
‘Who are they?’
‘They’re based out of Brussels. We didn’t have a clear shot of the sticker, just the first half of the name and phone number, but that was enough to narrow down the list of suspects until I found out who it was. There aren’t that many rental-car companies in Brussels with similar names. I’ve emailed you the pertinent details.’
Alvarez hung up a minute later and opened up Noakes’s email expectantly. He pushed the police report to one side. It was a damn shame about Kennard, but he would deal with the bureaucracy of his death later on.
Right now he had more pressing matters.
CHAPTER 29
Debrecen, Hungary
Friday
20:12 CET
Victor had spent the morning in Zurich emptying his primary bank account before burying the money minus twenty thousand euros. The cash would be his only source of funds for some time. He couldn’t carry any more across borders without attracting suspicion and putting the rest in another bank was not an option.
Going back to Switzerland had been a risk, but if he was going to continue living he would need the money. He had then flown back to Budapest and from there taken the train out to Debrecen as an extra precaution. It was important to keep moving, to avoid staying in one place for too long. The CIA was after him, and he had to do everything possible to hinder its efforts to track him down.
The CIA was extremely well funded and far-reaching, but it was not all-powerful. If he stayed mobile and did nothing to attract its attention, he was confident he could keep out of its crosshairs for now. How long that would remain true, though, he didn’t know.
The temperature was in the low thirties. Victor spent an hour at a coffee shop until he was sure he wasn’t being watched. He then moved on to another similar establishment, where he spent a second hour making doubly sure. A week ago he would have been satisfied that he wasn’t under surveillance, but now he didn’t fully trust his own abilities, especially when they were going up against an organization with twenty thousand full-time employees and many tens of thousands more foreign agents and assets.
Victor took a taxi into Debrecen’s city centre, passing through the clean streets with his eyes constantly watching the mirrors for potential tails. He knew his fixation with the mirrors unnerved the taxi driver, and Victor helped relax him by keeping the driver in conversation. They talked about soccer, women, politics, work.
‘What do you do for a living?’ the driver asked Victor.
They were driving past the grand building of an insurance firm, so Victor said, ‘I sell life insurance.’
The driver smirked. ‘Everybody dies, right?’
Victor kept his gaze on the wing mirror. ‘I seem to have that effect on people.’
Out of the taxi he spent some time walking with the crowds, stopping occasionally, doubling back often. He browsed through a number of stores, not buying anything but watching who came in after him and who was standing outside with a view of the door. When he was satisfied he wasn’t being shadowed he caught another taxi and sat in the back.
Victor climbed out fifteen minutes later in downtown Debrecen. Here the streets were quieter, and although it would be easier for a team to shadow him, it would also be easier for him to spot them. No one set off his threat radar. Another taxi took him back into the city centre and to his true destination.
The Internet cafe was of a fair size and pleasingly full of customers, some of whom smoked. Victor didn’t, but only because he was passively smoking more than enough nicotine to satisfy his craving. He was sure there would be a reply to his email from the broker; he just wasn’t sure what the reply would contain.
Victor sat down at the most sheltered terminal in front of an old PC. The flickering screen immediately made his eyes start to water. He could hear its noisy hard drive, half-humming, half-gurgling. Victor logged on to the message board. He noticed his heart rate was slightly up.
There was a message waiting for him.
He almost expected the computer to explode into pieces when he clicked to open it, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. A part of him almost wished it had.
You won’t want to call, but we need to speak. I can help you.
He hadn’t known what to expect, but it certainly hadn’t been that. He stared at the screen for a long time. It didn’t sound like the broker. There was no subtlety in the message. It was blunt, to the point, appealing for further communication. There was a phone number.
Had someone other than the broker sent the message? If the CIA had found him, maybe it had found the broker too and the message was a lure to trap him. Or if he’d been set up from the start, was this just another set-up in the making? Perhaps the change in tone was genuinely because of the unusual situation. He noticed he was getting a headache.
Victor had no true friends, no real allies, barely a handful of acquaintances. It had been one of the things that had kept him alive so long. The less contact he had with the world around him, the fewer potential points of compromise. Now that kind of protection had left him isolated, vulnerable. He was alone, on the run, with no clear idea why his hunters were after him. Regardless of the whys, he knew his chances of survival were diminishing with each passing hour.
Something had to change.
Victor was in no doubt about his own skill, but, though he hated to admit it, he was out of his depth. If things stayed the same he just wasn’t going to make it. He had been discovered twice, despite all his precautions, and he would be again. It might take weeks, even years. But how many times could he escape his enemies? Sooner or later he wouldn’t be fast enough.
His only lead had taken him nowhere. On his own he had no option other than waiting for the next attempt on his life. He needed help. And the only person offering it was the first person he’d thought had set him up. So far there was no proof to the contrary.
But he was out of options.
He memorized the number and left the cafe. He found a secluded payphone, dialled. The twenty seconds it took for someone to answer the phone seemed like the longest moment of his life.
‘Hello?’
