in the back seat had about thirty shells in his jacket pocket, and two spare magazines, both fully charged. From the looks of him, he wouldn’t be needing them any more, so Richter took them as well. He checked his pockets, but there was no indication of who he was. No wallet, no credit cards, no nothing. Just around fifty pounds in cash. A pro, but then Richter had guessed that already. The Colt is a weapon for a pro.
The driver was carrying a Mauser HSc in a shoulder holster, which Richter got off him with some difficulty. He had a full spare magazine in a natty pouch on the holster strap, and a dozen or so loose rounds in his jacket pocket, all of which went into Richter’s pocket. He, too, was carrying no ID. They were Russian agents, of that Richter was sure, not least because they weren’t carrying Stechkins or Makarovs or any other eastern-bloc weapons. The Russians almost never use homegrown weapons in foreign operations. This is because, with the exception of the Kalashnikov assault rifle and its variants, Russian small arms are not sufficiently good to be a weapon of choice for any assassin, so anyone found carrying one is virtually certain to be identified as a CIS agent, even if he’s not.
Richter checked the rear of the car. He found three .45 shell cases on the floor, which was probably all there were to find. Richter knew they’d fired at least five shots at him, one which broke the front and rear screens of the Granada, three when he’d reversed direction at the end of the dual carriageway and one when he’d opened the Jaguar’s rear door. The Colt was no help – the magazine in the pistol was full, apart from the single shot just fired – another indication that its former owner was a pro. Only amateurs run out of ammunition, and he’d obviously reloaded as they chased the Ford. The fourth and fifth shell cases were somewhere on the road, maybe miles back, and there was no way he was going to start looking for them.
A squawk from the front seat made Richter jump, and he saw a radio transceiver screwed to the dashboard. That suggested he’d been right about the second car, which was probably on its way towards him right then. It was time he was somewhere else. Quite apart from another carload of opposition, Richter didn’t want some officious citizen – or, even worse, a brace of woodentops in a Panda car – spotting him there and asking all sorts of questions that he really hadn’t got any answers for, so he climbed back into the Ford, put it into gear and took off.
Richter took the first side road he came to and followed it until he found a river. He stopped next to the bridge, checked that he was unobserved and then heaved the rock into the water. Richter knew that forensic experts could pull fingerprints off almost anything, and he wasn’t taking any chances. Then he got back in the Granada and drove on. Five minutes and three miles later he pulled the Ford off the road and into a wood. He sat for a few minutes in the car, breathing deeply. From the start of the chase adrenalin had kept him going, kept him concentrating on what he was doing. Now reaction was setting in. His hands were shaking slightly, and a check showed Richter that his pulse rate was significantly higher than normal.
Richter was no stranger to violence. Within days of his first meeting with Simpson, and even before he had been recruited into FOE, he had been sent deep into France with a cover story so thin that it was virtually transparent, and he had been forced to kill just to stay alive. But never before had Richter killed with his bare hands, one-to-one.
The men in the Jaguar were dead, of that he was certain. He had heard, and felt, their skulls shatter under the blows of the rock, and this time there had been no termination order, no official approval. He didn’t even know who they were. They had died because they had tried to kill him, nothing more – not much of an epitaph and possibly, Richter realized, not even much of a justification. He knew he was going to have to be careful.
Richter put the guns on the seat beside him, then had a look at the car. It was a mess, at best. The windscreen was laminated, so there was little he could do about the bullet hole, but he knocked out the shattered rear screen, keeping the glass in the car, as he didn’t want to advertise that he’d stopped there, for any reason. The driver’s door window had shattered as well, and the bits were all over the floor, which was the best place for them.
He looked at the offside of the car and found a bullet hole just below the top of the front wing, and the exit hole near the centre of the bonnet. Richter smeared some mud over the holes – a barely adequate disguise – then threw more at the side of the car. The bullet which had taken out the side window had left the car through the roof, just above the passenger door, and Richter guessed that the third shot had gone above, or perhaps in front of, the windscreen. Under the circumstances, he thought, it had been bloody good shooting.
The left side of the car was very badly bent and twisted, front and rear wings buckled beyond repair. All the lights that side had gone; headlight, sidelights and indicators. The bonnet was jammed shut, so Richter couldn’t tell whether the bullet had done any damage in the engine compartment, but as everything seemed to be working he wasn’t bothered.
After about twenty minutes Richter was satisfied that he had done all he could to hide the fact that he’d been involved in a running battle. He studied the map for a few minutes, and worked out a route that would get him back to Hammersmith without going anywhere near any major built-up areas until he reached the outskirts of London.
Before he set off, Richter put on the shoulder holster with the Mauser, and put the Colt into the side pocket of his jacket. The magazines and loose rounds went into his pockets. Wearing his gloves again, Richter took the three spent shell cases and dropped them down a rabbit hole near the car. He set fire to the blood-smeared road map and then trod the ashes into the ground. He tossed his gloves out of the window at fifteen-minute intervals as he drove.
An hour and twenty minutes later Richter double-parked the Granada outside his flat, went up and wrapped the pistols, holster and ammunition in a couple of old towels, and put them in a small suitcase. Then he drove to Euston Station and checked the suitcase into the left-luggage office. A man, in Richter’s opinion, couldn’t have too many guns, especially ones that couldn’t be traced to him.
The duty Pool Controller was almost incoherent when Richter delivered the remains of the Granada. He didn’t believe it. The duty driver he summoned as a witness didn’t believe it either. ‘What the bloody hell did you do to it? Look at the state it’s in.’
‘There was,’ said Richter, ‘a certain amount of unpleasantness.’
‘What am I going to tell the Transport Officer?’
Richter was getting tired and irritable. ‘I don’t give a toss what you tell him. If he’s not happy, tell him to see me.’
Richter went into his office, picked up the direct line to Simpson and waited. After ten seconds he put it down again and looked at his watch. It was after eight, and it was being unduly optimistic to suppose Simpson would still be around at that time in the evening.
Richter shrugged, locked his office door and walked back down the stairs. He called in at the Duty Room and told the Duty Operations Officer what had happened. Or rather, what Richter thought he ought to know about it. The Ops Officer said he would tell Simpson when he got there in the morning.
Chapter Ten
Wednesday
Simpson looked very unhappy when Richter appeared in his office at nine the following morning, for two reasons. First, Richter was late and hadn’t answered his flat phone, and second, the Transport Officer had been draining all over him since just after eight. ‘Sorry,’ Richter said.
‘Stow it, Richter. Sarcasm I can do without. What happened?’
Richter told him, omitting the fact that he had removed the weapons and ammunition from the car and that he had contributed to the driver’s headache and caused the passenger’s.
‘Who were they?’ Simpson asked.
‘Pros,’ Richter replied. ‘Neither had any ID, and it looked like a very tight set-up. The reason I didn’t hang around was that I was worried about a second team in another motor.’
‘Did you see a second car?’
‘Not that I could positively identify, no, but they had a radio in the Jaguar that definitely wasn’t there to pick up the racing results on Radio Four. I took off from the crash when I heard a car coming, so that could have been
