me, that she knew things about my past.
My concern must have been plain to see. She smiled again and shook her head very slightly. 'Naturally Valentin has gone to the trouble of learning a lot about you these last few days. Do you think he would employ someone for such a task otherwise?'
'What does he know?'
'Enough, I'm sure. Also enough about Tom. Valentin is sure you are both the right people for this. Now, Nick, as you will appreciate, there is little time. You need to be in Helsinki by Sunday. All I will require are your travel details. Everything else will be looked after.'
She gave me the contact details. They were very basic, if not a bit over the top, but easy to understand, which was good, because my head was spinning around with 1.7 million other things at the time.
She stood up. Our meeting was obviously over. 'Thank you for coming, Nick.'
I shook her hand, which felt warm and firm. I looked her in the eye, probably for a fraction of a second too long, then bent to pick up my helmet.
She followed me to the front door. As I reached for the handle she said, 'One last thing, Nick.'
I turned to face her; she was so close I could smell her perfume.
'Please do not turn your cell phone on until you are far away from here. Goodbye, Nick.'
I nodded and the door closed. I heard the locks and chain being put back into position.
Going down in the elevator I resisted the urge to dance a jig or jump up and click my heels. I had never been one to embrace good fortune blindly I'd never had that much of it to embrace, really but Valentin's proposition sounded rather good, and what few doubts I had were dispelled by the envelope inside my jacket as long as it didn't go bang on the way home.
The elevator slowed and the doors opened on the ground floor. The doorman was frowning at me as he tried to work out why I'd been up there so long. I pulled the ski mask from under my helmet and nodded to him. 'She was wonderful,' I said. By the time the sliding doors opened and I was facing the security cameras, the mask was over my head again.
Walking up the driveway I started to pull out the chin strap on both sides of the helmet with my thumbs and forefingers. I'd just got past the gate and onto the sidewalk when I heard the noise of an approaching car. As I played with the straps I looked up and to the left to check it was okay to cross.
A Peugeot 206 was screaming toward me at the speed of sound. It was dark maroon and dirty from the last couple of weeks of slush and road salt. Behind the wheel was a white-knuckled woman in her early thirties with a chin-length bob. I waited for her to pass, but as soon as she was about thirty feet away she slowed to a more controlled pace.
I checked to my right. The Israeli security guy about two hundred feet away wasn't fussed about it, nor the uniformed officer, who was looking very bored and cold on the opposite side of road.
I watched her get down to the barrier, indicating left, then join the stream of traffic. I spotted the license plate. It was a '96 registration, but there was something else that was much more interesting no sticker on the back window telling me how wonderful the dealership was. I suddenly felt I knew what she was about. Just as quickly, I threw the idea aside. Shit, I was getting as paranoid about surveillance as Val and Liv were about cell phones.
Pulling my helmet on, I put the key into Ducati's ignition and was just starting to put my gloves on when I spotted another vehicle about forty or fifty yards further up the road a midnight-blue Golf GTi in a line of vehicles, two up, both sitting back in their seats with no conversation or movement. The side windows were steamed up but the windshield had a direct view of the gates to the apartment building. I took a mental note of their registration. Not that it mattered. Well, that was what I tried to tell myself, anyway. PI 16 something, that was all I needed to know.
I decided that if I didn't stop being paranoid I'd end up in the clinic with Kelly and began to give myself a mental slapping. Then I remembered: Paranoia keeps people like me alive.
I had one more look around, my helmet down as if I was checking over the machine. I couldn't see anything else that made me feel uneasy, so I straddled the bike and pushed it off its stand.
Turning the engine over, I pushed down the gear selector with my left foot, got into first, revved it up a little, turned left and made my way down toward the main gates. If the Golf was a trigger, the team that was about to follow me would have just received a point by-point, stage-by-stage description of exactly what I was doing over the net.
They needed a visual picture of what I looked like, what the bike looked like, its registration, and what I was doing. 'That's helmet on, that's gloves on? not aware? now complete (on the bike).
Keys turned, engine on, stand by, stand by. Mobile toward Kensington exit? approaching. No intention (no indicators on to show which way the vehicle is going)?'
Everybody had to know exactly what I was doing and where I was to the nearest thirty feet so they could put good covert surveillance on me.
It's not like Miami Vice, where the good guys are sitting there with hand mikes at their mouths and a big antenna stuck on the roof. All the antennas on E4 vehicles are internal, and you never see any mikes.
All you've got to do is hit a press el a little switch placed wherever you want. My preference had always been to have it fixed internally in the gear shift. That way you can just talk, making it look as if you're having fun, or having an argument. It doesn't really matter as long as you're giving the details. Which, if I was getting triggered away from here, these two would now be doing.
What made me still feel edgy was that the two cars were ideal for city surveillance. Both were very common models in dark, nondescript colors and they were compact, so they could zip in and out of traffic and were easy to park, or even abandon, if the target went foxtrot (on foot).
Not all cars have the retailer's sticker in the back window; it's just that surveillance cars would tend not to have them because they could become a VDM (visual distinguishing mark).
If they were a surveillance team they would have to be E4, the government's surveillance group that keeps tabs on everybody in the U.K. from terrorists to shady politicians. No one else would be able to stake out anything along this road. There was more security here than at Alcatraz. But why me? It didn't make sense. All I'd done was go into an apartment building.
I got to the barrier and the guard looked out of his shed and into the cold, trying to work out if I was that guy who said he was the messenger half an hour ago.
I turned right and merged with the traffic, which was still a nightmare. I headed the opposite way from the Peugeot, and tried to be as casual as possible. I wasn't going to scoot away like a scalded cat and show that I was aware, but I'd check to see if I was a target.
It was starting to get dark now as I checked my mirror, expecting a surveillance bike to be up my ass in no time at all.
Either the Peugeot driver was a loony and couldn't drive the thing, or she was a new or very useless member of E4. Val would have fitted very nicely into their portfolio, as would quite a few of the residents in this area. I could just be a new face that needed a picture for the surveillance log and general buildup of intelligence on the building.
If I was right, she was trying to make a photo- or video-run on me and had fucked up the timing. It's very hard to make these runs as you only have one chance and the pressure is always on, but this one was especially incompetent.
The car could be rigged with both video and stills cameras, hidden behind the radiator grill or part of the headlight setup, or little bits of the body work cut out in the rear so there was just enough light for the lens. The cameras are activated electronically by the driver as they pass the target. The camera takes the whole reel of film at a very fast shutter speed. That's why the timing's so important: hit the button too soon and the film could be finished by the time you're on top of the target, or the target might have walked behind a parked car as you begin your run, producing nothing more for your efforts than a nice picture of a Ford Fiesta, and a hard time from your bosses at the debriefing.
The video camera is a much safer option, but all it takes on the move is a few bumpy seconds of the target walking. This time around, all they would have was a visual of a biker with a ski mask on. That made me feel a lot better. I had no idea where those pictures would turn up, but I knew Lynn wouldn't be in the best of moods if they found their way to him.
