Abbot re-entered suddenly and Callo leapt back to the middle of the sofa. If Abbot had seen him move, he didn’t show it. Abbot thrust a cell phone into Callo’s hands and then took a piece of paper from a pocket of his jeans. He held it in front of Callo.
‘This is what you’re going to do,’ Abbot said, expression intense, a hard edge to his British accent. ‘You’re going to phone Gabir Yamout. You’re going to tell whoever answers what’s on that piece of paper. You speak Arabic, right? You can paraphrase it, put it in your own words, but you’d better say it all.’
Callo took the paper and quickly read what was written. ‘Yes, I speak it. But I don’t understand. This doesn’t make any sense.’
‘You don’t have to understand it,’ Abbot said. ‘You just have to say it.’
‘But I-’
Before he could finish, Abbot slapped Callo hard across the face. The phone fell at Callo’s feet. His cheek stung badly. He looked up at Abbot, suddenly afraid. He noticed Blout was back in the room.
‘Phone Yamout,’ Abbot repeated coldly, ‘and say what’s on the facking piece of paper.’
Callo picked up the phone and dialled the number.
‘Please,’ Callo said. ‘But no one will answer. It’ll go to voicemail. Then I’ll get a call back.’
Abbot shrugged. ‘Just make sure you act scared.’
Callo didn’t get it, but he sat listening to the phone ring for about ten seconds it went to voicemail.
Callo repeated what he saw on the paper. It was just a few short sentences — an outright lie — and Callo didn’t have to act scared.
Before he’d finished the last line, Abbot snatched the phone from him and hung up. ‘That was good.’
He seemed genuinely happy and Callo managed a weak smile in return, despite his face still stinging. Blout went back into the other room.
Callo looked at the piece of paper again. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I missed out the part about the hotel. I’m sorry.’
Abbot gave a big shrug. ‘That don’t matter. The exact details aren’t the important bit, it’s the delivery that sells it. And yours was top notch. Very convincing.’
‘Really? Thank you.’
Blout returned with a rucksack that he set down on the dining table. He opened it and took out a wallet. He threw it to Abbot, who emptied the contents. Callo watched his credit cards, receipts, cash and other litter from his wallet rain down on to the carpet. Abbot then tossed the wallet away and used his foot to spread the pile around on the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ Callo asked. ‘That’s my stuff.’
Abbot didn’t answer. Callo looked to Blout, who was rooting around inside the bag.
‘Is that all you wanted me to do?’ Callo found the courage to ask.
Abbot rolled up his shirtsleeves. ‘That was half of it, and you did great. You did a good job. Like I said, very convincing. Which is what we needed you to be. But now we need you to be convincing for the second part.’
Callo nodded, eager to please. ‘I can do that.’
Abbot gave a strange smile. ‘I’m sure you’ll do fine.’
Blout put on a pair of latex gloves. He gave a second pair to Abbot.
‘When do I make the next phone call?’ Callo asked.
Abbot shook his head and stretched the gloves over his big hands. ‘No more phone calls. What we need you to do now is convince your A-rab friends that you were attacked like you told them.’
Callo’s gaze flicked back and forth between Abbot and Blout. ‘But I said I’d escaped my attackers.’
‘Ah,’ Abbot said with a nod, interlacing his fingers to push the latex into place, ‘but they found you again.’
Blout stepped menacingly closer. Callo stared up at Abbot, finally understanding, his eyes filling with water, head shaking weakly from side to side.
Abbot stood over Callo and pulled his right elbow back and made a fist.
‘Sorry, mate,’ Abbot began, ‘but you really should have seen this coming.’
CHAPTER 26
Victor arrived back at the Best Eastern half an hour after leaving the Europe, which was quicker than how he would prefer to do things, but proper counter surveillance wasn’t an option with an injured arm. Two hours making sure he wasn’t followed was fine in theory but not if the wound got infected as a result or was spotted by a vigilant police officer.
In his room, he stripped off his clothes and ran a bath. While the bath was running he examined his wound in the mirror. Blood stained his entire arm. The wound itself was about four inches in length, maybe an eighth of an inch in depth, and it was bleeding far worse than when he’d first been shot. He fitted the plug in the sink and turned on the hot water tap. The hotel room came with a kettle, mugs, teabags and sachets of instant coffee and sugar. Victor dropped two teabags into a mug and poured in just enough cold water to wet them. He took a clean T-shirt from his luggage and ripped it into strips. The resulting pain made him grimace.
He lowered his injured triceps into the sink and in seconds the water had turned a pale red. With gritted teeth, he washed the wound to get rid of any traces of clothing or other debris. He patted dry his arm with a towel, took the damp teabags from the mug and pressed them over the wound. He kept his elbow and shoulder horizontally aligned to balance the teabags while he wrapped a strip of T-shirt around his arm. He bound the wound firmly, but not too tight, to give the teabags the best chance at working. The haemostatic tannins found naturally in tea would help stop the bleeding, reduce the chance of infection, and aid the healing process. Victor checked the teabags after five minutes, finding them soaked with blood. He replaced them with two more and bound the wound with slightly more pressure. When he checked after another five minutes the bleeding had stopped.
Victor tore open a sachet of granulated sugar and carefully poured it into the wound channel. He didn’t know if the wound was infected, but the sugar’s antimicrobial action would ensure that it wouldn’t become so. And if it was infected the sugar would hopefully kill the bacteria, or at least slow its spread. He then rebound his arm with another strip of T-shirt, downed two miniature bottles of vodka from the mini bar and lowered himself into the bath, keeping his right arm clear of the water.
Now his wound was clean and had stopped bleeding it could begin healing properly. He was going to have another scar, but when he already had so many one more wouldn’t make too much difference. He wasn’t in the habit of taking off his shirt in public, but if the scar turned out to be too prominent yet more of his money would end up in the pocket of plastic surgeons. Aside from rich women, assassins were probably their best customers.
Good as teabags and sugar were at patching up injuries, it would have been better to use proper first-aid equipment. He hadn’t been able to risk trying to find an all-night pharmacy so soon after the attack as the police would be at their most watchful. Victor doubted they would know they were only looking for one man, at least so far, but if he was out on the streets he could be stopped at random. They would probably be smart enough to put hospitals and drug stores under surveillance.
The police presence would be huge all night, with the hope of catching the culprits as they fled. Running was the expected course of action. It was what criminals did in such situations. And Victor considered it a fine tactic in a crisis. If a location was compromised, withdraw. Once out of the initial danger area stop, regroup, formulate a plan. But a hasty withdrawal in this case was too risky with his wound. At night there were few people on the streets to disappear among and less means with which to escape with speed. While so fresh, the injury would be hard to disguise and would hinder him if he was spotted.
He felt tired. The adrenalin hangover was at its peak and he had to fight to keep his eyes open. Images of the attack flashed through his mind. It couldn’t have gone worse: Yamout had escaped, Victor had been forced to kill someone’s surveillance team, and he’d been wounded in the process.
He didn’t know much about the team, but he knew they had been there to record the meeting between Yamout and Petrenko, yet had no affiliation with either despite their intervention when Victor had started massacring everyone. If they had been associates of Yamout or Petrenko they would have responded to the cries for help. They weren’t Belarusian security services either. The watcher’s Russian hadn’t been good enough for a
