transport, but with the surveillance equipment to move, a car had been necessary. Plus maybe they’d intended to follow Yamout or Petrenko after the deal was completed and they went their separate ways.
Victor circled the Saab, examining the bodywork. It was mostly clean — recently waxed by the rental company — but on the windshield, outside the swathe of clear glass from the wipers, was a thin layer of pale grime. Victor ran a finger over it. The substance on his fingertip was slightly moist. He rubbed it dry with his thumb until he was left with a fine grey powder the consistency of talc. He re-examined the bodywork, finding no evidence of the powder except for a few thin pale streaks on the front bumper and residue in the grooves on the bonnet and grille.
Victor took the bag of surveillance equipment, but left the car. If the police weren’t looking for it yet, they would be soon. At an internet cafe he compiled a list of hotels in central Minsk within a 2.5 kilometre radius of October Square, then used a payphone to dial each one, asking for the names he had from the Belarusian driver’s licences he’d procured from the team, but no hotel he called had any guests matching those names. He checked hotels further out but with no result.
If they hadn’t stayed at a hotel they must have used some other kind of establishment. That wouldn’t be a hostel, as they would have required more privacy, but it could be a private residence.
He thought about the grey powder. Had time allowed, Victor would have set off on foot, but with an 18- square kilometre area to cover he couldn’t hope to complete the task before he needed to leave. He had to find the location before the cops did, if they hadn’t yet. He hailed a taxi.
The driver was a plump Belarusian woman with glasses and the biggest smile he’d seen in a long time.
In Russian, pretending not to speak the language well, he asked her, ‘Do you know where the, uh… build site is near here, on…’ He trailed off, as though he couldn’t remember or pronounce the name of the street.
‘Kirova… Nemiga?’ she offered slowly, helpful and smiling.
‘Kirova,’ he said, with a smile of his own.
She dropped him off at the east end of the street and he walked west, quickly realising that she’d misunderstood him, or he hadn’t made himself clear. Roadworks were taking place. It looked like they were fixing a water main. He hailed another taxi.
‘Nemiga,’ he said to the driver.
As they turned into the street, Victor saw scaffolding framing a building halfway down the block. He had the driver pull over. Nemiga was in a rundown neighbourhood approximately half a mile from October Square. The street was lined with narrow-fronted townhouses painted in pastel shades. Victor approached the building with the scaffolding. He heard the sounds of busy work emanating from the property — shouting, banging, and the rumble and whine of power tools. A cement mixer was set on the sidewalk outside.
The Saab didn’t have to be parked near the mixer to get cement dust on its windshield, depending on the wind that day. Not that where the car was parked helped him much. The team would have taken a spot wherever it was available, if the space outside whatever building they’d used wasn’t free. There were maybe twenty houses on each side of the street, forty in total, thirty-nine potentials after discounting the house being worked on. He could knock on every door, and further reduce the potentials by crossing off any house where someone answered, but even then he could be left with twenty-five or more properties to break into. But there was a simpler way of narrowing down his selection.
He looked at the sky. The clouds were dark and had been all morning. The ambient light was limited. Victor walked along the sidewalk until he found the only house with all of its drapes closed.
It had a good deadbolt, but Victor had been picking locks for fifteen years. He closed the front door behind him and dropped the lock picks back into a pocket. He stood in the hallway and listened. There was no alarm, but Victor hadn’t expected to find one. If someone broke in the team hadn’t wanted the police to show up and start asking questions they didn’t want to answer. In the days when Victor had his own house he’d gone with the same philosophy.
He didn’t know if this was a safe house owned by whoever they worked for or somewhere that had been rented just for this job. It was dark. The hallway was narrow with a threadbare carpet and flaking paint on the walls. The ceiling light had no shade. A set of stairs led up. A door stood in the wall to his right. The hallway opened up into a kitchen ahead of him. He opened the door first, finding himself in a small lounge with a two-seater sofa, armchair, TV and little else to suggest it was anyone’s home. A camp bed was set up in one corner with a small suitcase opened out next to it. The bed hadn’t been made. The suitcase contained clothes and toiletries and nothing else. A side pocket was open, but empty.
Victor tried the kitchen next. The fridge was a quarter full with milk, cheese, sliced meats, some vegetables and orange juice. The cupboards were mostly empty, except one contained bread and canned goods. Plastic knives, forks and spoons were mixed together loose in a drawer. The kitchen led to a bathroom. Several damp towels competed for space on the rail.
Upstairs there were two bedrooms. The first was small, with a single bed against one wall and another camp bed against the other. Each had been recently slept in. That made three. The suite back at the Europe must have been used purely for surveillance then, with the team commuting from here, probably operating in some kind of shift arrangement, travelling back and forth to rack up the trip meter. Victor searched through the suitcase he found next to each bed. Like the one downstairs they had clothes and toiletries and nothing to tell him who these guys were. As with the one downstairs, they had open but empty pockets, one on the front of the case, the other on the inside lid.
The last bedroom was larger than the first, with a slept-in double bed where the fourth team member had rested, most likely the leader. When Victor stepped inside the room his heart rate increased by several beats per minute. Not because there was an open suitcase sat on the bed, with clothes scattered around it on the bedclothes. Not because there was nothing else inside it of use to him. His heart rate quickened because on the opposite wall to the double bed was a fifth recently used camp bed.
But no suitcase.
CHAPTER 29
Zurich, Switzerland
In a dark room two men who were not Swiss stood before an antique wooden desk. The first man was in his early thirties and wore jeans and a windcheater. The second was old, very short, wearing a suit. He stood slightly hunched over. Before them a laptop computer sat on the desk. Video footage filled the laptop’s screen. The footage had been recorded with state-of-the-art infrared cameras, of a hotel suite. The recording showed three men, acting shocked and confused. The laptop’s speakers played strange sounds.
‘He’s shooting through the door,’ the man in the windcheater explained.
The older man nodded and watched as one of the three men jumped down behind a sofa a second before the suite door burst open and a man with a sub-machine gun and night-vision goggles charged in and opened fire, mercilessly gunning down the two standing men, and then the third through the sofa. There was no sound of gunfire, only the results of it.
The man in the windcheater said, ‘Silenced FN P90. He’s using subsonic ammo. That’s why we can’t hear it.’
The video footage cut to another camera as the man with the P90 continued his assault, shooting through a bedroom door and lying down next to it, before opening the door and killing those in the room beyond.
The man in the windcheater rubbed his tired face and said, ‘My team is next.’
The gunman was then shot by two men arriving behind him, and played dead until they had passed him, then killed them also. He exchanged fire with a final man, before shooting him and leaving. The video jumped forward in time, and the man had returned to squat down next to the last man he’d shot, who wasn’t dead. He stayed squatted down for almost half a minute.
‘Is he questioning him?’ the old man in the suit asked.
‘I expect so. The microphones didn’t pick it up. He wouldn’t have told him anything.’
‘How else are we exposed?’
The man in the windcheater answered. ‘The authorities will have found the surveillance equipment, of course,
