Samson thought for a few seconds. ‘Can you call Saaf and tell him you’ve got a good fare to Düsseldorf airport and we’re late for a plane? Say it in German so his passenger understands. Make it all sound normal.’ That made sense – he had originally been on the Düsseldorf train.
They weaved through the traffic. ‘Where do you really want to go?’ asked Mohammed.
‘Frankfurt Airport.’
They took Autobahn 3 north from Cologne. Mohammed’s cousin shared his taste for speed, but at junction 22 – the Leverkusen-Opladen intersection – Mohammed left it until the very last moment before shooting down the slip road off the autobahn. Saaf was going too fast to follow and missed the turning. Mohammed gleefully hooked the air in front of him with a punch. Saaf would now have to travel all the way to junction 21 – the Dreieck-Lagendfeld intersection – before he could turn round and, besides, 21 was more complicated than 22 and they’d be forced to make a detour of a couple of kilometres before they could drive south. Saaf came on the phone and demanded to know what Mohammed was doing. ‘Gentleman left his wallet at the station,’ Mohammed replied, without skipping a beat.
It would be a two-hour journey to Frankfurt. Samson sent another text to Anastasia. Using the occasional nickname of their times together, he wrote, ‘Nas. I am going to be out of range. I really mean it about Firefly. Can you try to get hold of him? I believe he’s in great danger.’ On his phone, Samson bought a ticket on the only flight to Tallinn from Frankfurt that week, which left at 9.50 a.m.– tight, but it should work. Occasionally, things fall the right way, he reflected, before placing all his phones in the metalised Faraday envelope and stretching out on the back seat of the cab.
Chapter 19
Firefly
Anastasia couldn’t fathom how to work the remote for the air conditioning and, on this hot spring night in Athens, found sleep impossible. She got up and sat by the open window and looked through her messages and emails, then texted Naji. ‘I’m sorry, but we really need to speak again. Things are becoming dangerous. XXA.’
It was 5 a.m., but the reply came immediately: ‘See you at the funeral.’
‘Before then! I am going to call you now.’
No response came. She rang his number, but the calls were declined. She cursed and paced around the room, picking at a tub of cheese biscuits from the mini-bar. She dialled Samson. No answer. She left a message for Tulliver asking about Denis and lay down on the bed. It was then that the front desk phoned.
Kyros was the night porter, whom she’d known from a previous post in a larger hotel. There had been some connection with her roguish father, but she wasn’t sure what. He asked how she was and said what a pleasure it was to see her name on the hotel registry, then eventually got round to the three men who had asked about her at the front desk. He thought they were police, but two looked like foreigners and didn’t say anything. They would neither confirm nor deny that they were police officers. And they had specifically told him not to inform her of their visit. He didn’t like the smell of them one bit. He hesitated to say this, but possibly they were from the Greek National Intelligence Service.
‘Can you take my payment on the phone now?’ she asked.
‘That will not be a problem,’ he said. ‘We have all your details and we can deal with the mini-bar later.’
‘And Kyros, could you charge me for two nights, so my room seems occupied tomorrow and I remain on the registry?’
‘Naturally, I will take the payment now and forget to mention that you are checking out to the day shift.’
She booked the first flight to Skopje, the capital of what is now known as northern Macedonia, a little over an hour away – and raised the head of Mediterranean operations for the foundation, George Ciccone, to explain that she must depart sooner than she’d expected. She asked him to find a driver to meet her at Skopje Airport.
She arrived at Skopje mid-morning, but the driver was nowhere to be found. She sat simmering at a café in Arrivals, wondering if she had made the right decision. Making decisions in the early morning was never a good course for her; she tended to get things out of proportion. Now she wondered if Naji was really in as much danger as Samson had suggested. But, naturally, she got no response from him or Samson.
Just as a large man in his forties presented himself, holding a sign for the Aysel Hisami Foundation and introducing himself as Luka, her phone vibrated on the table. There was an American number on the screen. She snatched it up, thinking it would be the hospital, but heard the voice of Special Agent Reiner. ‘Where are you, Mrs Hisami? We’re wondering why you went to such lengths to deceive us about leaving the US and then ended up in the Balkans.’
‘I had meetings. I have a job, responsibilities, and since when did I have to tell the FBI my plans?’
‘I asked you to keep us informed of your movements, and now I find you in the Balkans, a hundred kilometres south of the Serbian border. I have one question for you; why are you going north towards Serbia, the country where those two buddies, Vladan Drasko and Miroslav Rajavic, came from?’
‘I’m on the way to see old friends – people I’ve worked with. Macedonia! Different country! You’re tracking my phone, right?’
He didn’t respond to this. ‘Seems like a really strange thing to be doing with your husband in the ICU in Washington. Couldn’t your friends wait? Why did you leave the hotel in Athens so early? I was hoping to catch you.’
‘That was
