Authors: Kevin Wignall
Chapter Thirty-four
They rode the bike to Auxerre and left it on a side street before walking towards the station. Once they got there and checked on the trains, Dan put in a call to Patrick White.
When Patrick answered, something about the quality of his voice made Dan say, “It’s Dan. Where are you?”
“I’m in DC.”
“Did I wake you?”
Patrick sounded bemused as he said, “I wish it were so. I’m in the back of a car on the way to a breakfast meeting. If I sound groggy, blame the report I’m reading. But anyway, good to hear your voice, Dan.”
“Yeah, well, there are seven dead guys and counting who tried to stop me making this call, but here we are, and we need you in Paris.”
“Bill’s guys, or freelancers?”
“Freelancers. Eastern European, I think.”
He didn’t respond, but Dan knew he’d be relieved to hear that.
He was more businesslike as he said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t get out of this trip home, but I’ll be there day after tomorrow at the latest, sooner if I can.” He paused before he said, “How much have you managed to find out?”
“A lot, enough for you to do what you need to do, and hopefully enough for you to keep your side of the bargain, get them to leave me and Charlie alone. I mean, Jesus, they’re squeamish about the things we did for them, but they’ve been using some low-life gangsters this week.”
There was another pause, a second or two only, but in some way, Dan knew it was ominous, an emptiness creeping into his stomach.
He was expecting bad news, but still wasn’t sure he quite heard right when Patrick said, “Dan, Charlie’s dead. His body was found yesterday. He was in Croatia. I don’t know how they tracked him down.”
Dan immediately thought of Tito, the doctor in Innsbruck. Dan had never trusted him and he was pretty certain now that Tito must have played some part in selling Charlie down the river.
But he felt sick at the thought that Charlie had gone to Croatia, no doubt looking for Darija and the memory of another summer. He’d been overtaken by dreams of settling down and this was the price he’d paid.
Dan felt hollowed out by the news. He’d lost other friends in the last few weeks, but in Charlie’s death he’d lost one of the great certainties in his life. He’d always been there when he’d needed him, right up until the end, taking a bullet that had been meant for Dan. They’d all been there for each other at different times, but now Charlie was gone too, and Dan was on his own.
“Was it Brabham?”
“His people, yes. Maybe freelancers, although I know a lot of those resources were tied up with you.”
“How was he killed?”
He needed to know. He wasn’t sure why, but it mattered.
“Shot.”
“But how? Execution style, in a gun battle, sniper? How?”
“Dan, does it really matter? Charlie was a good guy, he got shot.”
Patrick was keeping something back, Dan knew it, and now he said, “Patrick, tell me how it happened. You know I’ll find out and I won’t be pleased if you’re holding back on me.”
There was another silence, but Dan didn’t fill it, and a little while later, Patrick sighed and said, “He had multiple gunshot and knife wounds. It looks like they tortured him.”
“To get information on me?”
“Maybe. Or if it was Brabham’s own team it might have been . . .
retaliation, for Jack Carlton and Rob Foster.”
And at last, something filled the hollowness. Dan had liked Jack Carlton, just as Jack had liked Benoit Claudel, and maybe none of them had been possessed of enough humanity, but they’d lived by the same informal rules, had respected each other in some way. The anger he felt now wasn’t just for the death of Charlie Hamsun, for the loss of him, but for the manner of it.
For the first time in the last two weeks, Dan could see the way forward with total clarity. He knew exactly what he had to do now. He’d been thinking about his own future, and that was tied up in this, but he had to act now for Charlie and Benoit, for Mike Naismith and Karl Wittmann and the others.
Yes, they’d all done bad things, but they’d been good men, and they’d acted for the agency and the government that had killed them. Jack Redford, too, had been targeted by the people he’d served. And Dan didn’t feel he was in much of a position to take a moral stand, but he was the only one left, so he knew it was up to him, and that he
would
take this back to them.
“Dan . . .?”
“Patrick, when you get to Paris, get in touch with the Swedish Embassy—that’s where Inger will be, and she’ll give you the proof of what I’m about to tell you. Fourteen years ago, Harry Brabham—that’s Congressman Harry Brabham—murdered Sabine Merel in Paris. His father oversaw a crime against the French Government, including the murder of Jean Sainval of the DGSE, and has done everything in his power ever since to keep this hidden. But that’s what happened. Jack Redford knew about it, which is why Brabham knew exactly who Jacques Fillon was.”
“
Harry
Brabham?” The surprise was evident in his voice, backing up what Dan had suspected before, that Patrick had expected the evidence to point to the father. “You said you have proof?”
“We do, and if anyone happens to be listening to this and thinking of intercepting Inger Bengtsson, don’t bother because we’ve got more than one copy. We have the security tape, Patrick, the tape that Brabham ordered Jack Redford to steal from the DGSE.”
There was another brief silence, and then Patrick said, “I’ll be there tomorrow night, I’ll contact you and Inger as soon as I arrive.”
“Contact Inger at the Swedish Embassy. I won’t be in Paris—I have something else to do.”
“Yes, I can contact Inger,” he said, failing to mask his unease. “But, Dan, I hope your other plans have nothing to do with what I’ve just told you.”
“I have some personal business to deal with, that’s all. But let’s catch up soon, Patrick—I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about.”
He ended the call, offering Patrick no more time to argue against things that were already decided.
And when Dan turned to Inger, she looked full of the same misgivings and said, “Why would I be at the Swedish Embassy? And you’re not going to be there, why?”
“The Swedish Embassy is safe, safer than anywhere else you could arrange to meet him. And no, I won’t be there. Like I said, I have some stuff to do.”
“But . . .”
“They killed my friend Charlie. Not just killed, they tortured him.”
“Oh my God.” She put a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry, Dan.”
He nodded, but pointed then and said, “Here’s the train.”
She tried to say something, but stopped herself. He could appreciate that too, because what was there to say? So they waited as the train glided along the platform and they boarded in silence.
It wasn’t until they were on their way that she said, “When will you leave? We can stay together tonight?”
He thought of how easy it would be to say yes, how much he wanted to be with her tonight. But for the time being, at least, he knew his own internal momentum was too strong, that he had to move, had to see this through to what he saw as its logical conclusion.
“I won’t be staying in Paris tonight. I’ll be moving on right away.”
“Then I’ll come.” When he only smiled, she said, “We made a pretty good team, didn’t we?”
He nodded.
“I don’t want you with me.” She looked stung and he said, “Not like that. The opposite. I don’t want you involved in the things I have to do now.”
“So maybe you don’t have to do them. You could . . .”
“Go and live in the forest?” She smiled in response, but there was a sadness about her that was unbearable. “It’s not just about me, it’s about everything, Charlie and the others, the stuff we did, it’s about Sabine Merel . . .”
“But we have the tape.”
He didn’t need to spell it out, though, that having the tape and seeing it broadcast were two different things. Certainly, Patrick would use it as leverage, to ensure the withdrawal of funding, the reassignment of key personnel, any number of things that would fall short of what Dan and Inger wanted, what the Merels and Bergeron wanted, what Jack Redford had wanted.
Inger seemed to acknowledge that fact, and in the end, said only, “I’m just afraid you don’t know what you’re walking into, even with your background.”
“I have a pretty good idea.” He nearly added that it was nothing he couldn’t handle, but Inger didn’t look as though she’d be reassured so easily, and in the present circumstances, he felt it might be tempting fate anyway.
Chapter Thirty-five
He traveled in the cab with Inger, leaving her at the Swedish Embassy.
One last time, she said, “I can’t change your mind?”
“I promise this is the last time ever, but no, you can’t.”
“So when will I see you?”
“In Stockholm. I’ll be there. Soon.”
She shook her head, as if in response to a lame joke, but sounded desperately concerned as she said, “Please be careful.”
“I’ll be in Stockholm. You haven’t seen the last of me.”
She leaned across and kissed him, and he held her until the obvious impatience of the cab driver parted them. He watched as she walked into the embassy, and turned only when the driver asked where he wanted to go. Dan gave him the address of his apartment in the 17th and sat back in the seat.
He was fired up enough now that he was almost hoping to encounter more of Brabham’s guys in the area around the apartment, but there was no one that he could see, and he wondered if that was because they’d all been called away. A handful had followed them down to Auxerre, all dead, another he’d killed at the Vergoncey. Another team had gone to Croatia to take care of Charlie.
His thoughts snagged once again on Charlie’s death, and he forced his mind in a different direction, trying to work out what those various logistics told him about Brabham’s team, the numbers and resources at his disposal. He was guessing from past experience that he probably had a dozen working for him directly, most of them in the field.
Of course, there was always an endless supply of freelancers, but the quality was variable, and that had already shown in the people Dan and Inger had come up against. Nor would Brabham want freelance people hanging around his office in Berlin. It left him confident that he could do this, that maybe he could even come out of it alive.
As he stepped inside and closed the door, he could tell the apartment was empty. Anybody would have known it was empty, and as he walked through the sparsely furnished rooms he thought of how another person might have filled this space with life.
He thought of Sylvie’s apartment nearby, stamped with her personality, and he wondered if he even had it within him to live like that, to live. Foolishly, his thoughts made a run for Stockholm, to some imagined domesticity with Inger, and he was embarrassed by how alluring he found it, a woman he hardly knew and who hardly knew him.
He also knew he couldn’t afford to be distracted. Whatever promise the future held, he had business to finish with his old life first, and he needed to focus on that above all else.
He threw some clothes into a bag, then went into the secure room and put together another bag. He checked the trains then, and headed back out, knowing he couldn’t rely on Patrick to get him through airport security this time.
He took a late-afternoon train to Cologne and picked up the night train there, grabbing a few hours’ sleep but arriving in Berlin just before five in the morning. There was a boutique hotel just along the street from the address he had for Brabham’s office so he’d arranged an early check-in.
It was still dark when he arrived, and bitterly cold, but he could tell why Brabham had chosen this location. It was a quiet, anonymous street in Charlottenburg, a mixture of offices and residential, the odd store or bar, a cobbled road surface. No one would ever suspect it.
In fact, the neighborhood was so ordinary that the hotel, small and incredibly stylish, looked as if it had been transplanted from somewhere else. The room he was given faced outwards, but the view was obscured by the trees that lined both sides of the street and had not yet shed all their leaves.
So he went back out and took a stroll until he was standing opposite the building. It was a nondescript-looking place, probably built in the 1950s, a pharmacy at street level and a door to the left for the lobby that served the two floors above.
There was no one about at this hour so he took a closer look, a keypad on the door, a plaque for name plates, but none on there—maybe Brabham had both floors. He turned and looked at the building facing. It was older, or looked older, an ornate
fin-de-siècle
quality with little balustrades outside each of the windows on the upper floors. He could also see that it was empty, with mail lying on the floor just inside the lobby door.
He went back to the hotel and picked up one of his bags. He worked the door of the empty building, then made his way to the top floor and set himself up in one of the rooms, clearly a former office, with phone and modem points dotting the floor. He lowered the blinds too, enough to give him cover should one of Brabham’s people choose to look out of the window.
And then he settled in for the wait. They were looking for him, had been searching for him for weeks, and he knew, because he knew the mindset of these people, that it would never occur to them that he was right here, right now.
They’d have increased their security levels, but they still wouldn’t expect him to actually show up here. And for all their knowledge of his history, they wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t in his character to play the part they imagined for him. Whether they knew it or not, whether they were ready for it or not, they were the targets now.
Chapter Thirty-six
The first to arrive came just before eight. It was light but the street still had a sickly pallor, as if a real sunrise wasn’t guaranteed for the day ahead. The guy looked in his late twenties, suit and overcoat, carrying a coffee and some sort of breakfast food in a bag. He moved the bag into the same hand as the coffee and nonchalantly hit the numbers on the keypad.
Dan was looking through his binoculars and scribbled the number down as it went in. He waited a few minutes then, and watched as the lights flickered into life behind the top floor windows, though the blinds prevented him seeing anything beyond.
The next two arrived about twenty minutes later, one in office clothes, the other dressed like someone who worked at some Internet start-up in Seattle. He couldn’t see the keypad clearly as the formally dressed one punched in, but the pattern looked the same for the numbers he’d written down.
Within minutes, a man and woman came along, both in office clothes, and he realized now that this whole office was on the young side. He guessed they were all in their late twenties or early thirties. The last to arrive was a guy in a heavy sweater and padded jacket, a scarf wrapped around his neck, a lanyard hanging outside the jacket—so they probably needed to swipe the card to get through the inner door.
Even from Dan’s position, he could see this guy was struggling with a heavy cold. He sneezed two or three times in quick succession before finally managing to key in the number. He was slow doing it and once again, Dan got a pretty good view and was certain he’d got it right now.
No one else arrived before nine o’clock and Dan relaxed a little, doubting there’d be much to see for the next few hours. He also knew this wasn’t the full outfit. These were backroom people, though he’d show them no more mercy for that.
The first movement came at lunchtime. The man and woman who’d arrived together went out, strolling along the street and coming back after half an hour with what looked like a lunch order.
He was average build and height, with the kind of boy-next-door
good looks that had almost run their distance—he was beginning to look doughy, his hair receding. She was attractive, dark hair pulled back, possibly Hispanic, and she was clearly the more observant of the two, glancing around, even taking in the building where Dan was hiding, though never reaching up to his floor.
Not long after lunch, he saw a black BMW pull into the street. It stopped outside the building as if the driver was searching for a place to park, then reversed, and turned into a narrow gateway that led behind the buildings on that side.
There obviously wasn’t a back entrance because, a few minutes later, the two guys strolled from the same turning and down to the building. Dan recognized them right away, the two guys who’d been parked outside the Vergoncey.
One was fair and, once again, late twenties. The other was a little darker, and closer to Dan’s age, though he didn’t know him. Both of them had a restrained swagger, a misplaced confidence that set them apart from all the other people who’d headed into that office.
Dan watched for a while, but after an hour he guessed they weren’t coming back out. Would they usually spend the day in the office, he wondered, or had they been sent there for additional protection? Brabham would know by now that there had been a death at the Vergoncey and a bloodbath in the countryside near Auxerre, and he’d possibly also heard that Dan was no longer in Paris, so perhaps this was just a precaution, and a half-hearted one at that.
Dan kept watching through the afternoon, and then with the street once again in darkness, he watched them leave one by one. For the most part, they left in the same order that they’d arrived, except that the two guys in the car left at the same time as the woman, doing their best to impress her as they walked the short distance along the street together.
Only one guy was left, and when Dan saw the lights go out, he made his way downstairs. The guy was sneezing even as he came out of the door, and if anything, looked worse than he had that morning. Briefly, he looked at the lit window of the pharmacy, but he checked his watch and changed his mind, heading off along the street.
Dan trailed after him, picking up his pace only when he saw that the guy was about to jump on a tram. Dan boarded further down, bought a ticket from the machine, watched casually. The guy was so out of it with his cold, though, that Dan probably could have been standing right next to him and he wouldn’t have noticed.
They didn’t stay on many more stops, and when they got off, the guy made a couple of turns, into quiet streets of apartment blocks. There was hardly anyone about. Dan checked his watch—just after six, but becoming fiercely cold. He followed him into a small apartment block, not old but already looking dated.
The guy looked at the stairs, and on a better day he’d have probably used them, but with a resigned look he headed to the elevator and pressed the button. Only as he stepped inside did he become aware that there was someone behind him.
He jumped a little, but didn’t suspect anything, and nodded, even looked ready to ask which floor Dan wanted. It only took him a second to work out that he didn’t recognize Dan from the building but from the office, and by that time Dan already had the gun on him.
Neither of them said anything. The elevator stopped, doors sliding open with a judder.
“I’m just a tech guy.”
Dan waved the gun a little and he stepped out and walked along the short corridor to a blank-looking door. He reached into his pocket for a key, and was shaking visibly as he opened the door. Dan stepped in behind him and closed the door.
They walked through into a small sitting room that looked as if a handful of students lived there, empty cartons all over the place, a games console, DVDs and magazines on every surface.
“Take off the lanyard and drop it on the table there.” The guy did as he was told. “You live here alone?”
The guy nodded vigorously and said, “I really am just a tech guy, it’s all I do, I mean . . . I’ll tell you anything, all you need to know.”
Dan could tell he was being straight with him—it was too bad.
“All I really need from you is twenty-four hours of silence.”
He shot him in the chest, the guy managing an unconvincing, “No, please,” before it hit him and his legs crumpled and he fell backwards into a chair. He moved convulsively for a few seconds, and then grew still, his eyes fixed on the TV as if he’d been paused in the moment of seeing something baffling.
Dan picked up the lanyard, looking at the card, which was blank except for its magnetic strip—deniability. He reached inside the guy’s jacket, then the pockets of his jeans where he found his phone and his wallet. His name was Adam and he was twenty-seven. He looked north of thirty, but that might just have been the cold.
Dan looked through his messages, then through his sent messages, finding one to someone called Josh which said, “Feeling really unwell, not sure if I’ll make it in today.”
It had been sent early that morning. And it really was too bad, thought Dan, because making it in had cost him his life.