The Game (6 page)

The French bistro was small and cramped, with tightly packed tables beneath a low ceiling. Black and white photographs of famous French nationals covered the walls. Framed and signed football shirts had pride of place behind the bar. The lunchtime rush was over and there were plenty of empty tables, but the close proximity of neighbouring diners meant there was little chance of privacy, especially with the affable – and slightly drunk – owner making the effort to chat with all of his customers.

Victor selected a table outside on the pavement where there were no other patrons. He chose the table furthest from the entrance and took the chair against the wall so Muir sat opposite him, her back to the road. Pedestrians passed in sparse enough numbers to ensure they were not overheard.

Sunglasses shielded Victor’s eyes from the glare of a sun unobstructed by clouds. The photosensitive lenses of Muir’s own glasses had darkened automatically to compensate for the brightness.

A waiter was quick to arrive with menus but Victor motioned for him to keep hold of them.

‘Just coffee, please,’ he said. He looked at Muir. ‘Espresso?’

‘Sure. Whatever.’

‘Two espressos.’

The waiter nodded and smiled.

After he was back inside the bistro, Muir placed her phone on the table between them and slid it over to Victor. He didn’t reach for it. He didn’t look at it.

‘Procter being out of action changes nothing about the way I conduct business. I’m not assessing a target in person and especially not in a public space. Put your phone away. I’m here only to listen to what you have to say. So say it. The ten minutes begin now.’

Muir shuffled her chair closer to the table and leaned across. She tapped the phone. ‘Do me a favour and look at it, okay? It’s just a photograph. Just a guy’s face. That’s all. Just take a look.’

‘No,’ Victor said. ‘If you don’t want me to stand up and walk away right now, you do things my way. I’m here to listen. That’s all. Ten minutes isn’t a long time. I suggest you use it economically.’

‘You don’t have to touch the phone if you don’t want to.’ She manipulated it briefly and the screen lit up in Victor’s peripheral vision. ‘Just look at his face. It’ll make all this a lot simpler. And quicker. Please, it’s someone you know.’

‘I’m not sure why I’m failing to make myself understood. I’m not looking at the photograph. I don’t care who it is. I’m not killing him.’

Muir smiled a little. ‘You can’t kill him. He’s already dead.’

That got Victor’s attention, but Muir waited a minute until a couple of teenage girls had passed on the pavement. He overheard something about a double date gone spectacularly wrong.

Muir slid her phone back and slipped it away into a pocket. ‘And the reason why this guy is currently horizontal is because you made it happen.’

She sat back in her chair and watched him process the information.

He said, ‘My previous contract.’

She nodded. ‘Felix Kooi. Dutch national. Citizen of Amsterdam. Professional contract killer. Killed almost a month ago. Stabbed in a back alley in Algiers. A mugging gone wrong, according to the authorities.’

‘You told me you didn’t know the details of the work I’ve done for Procter.’

Muir showed her palms. Her hands were small and glowed white in the sun. ‘I only know because it’s relevant. And it’s all I know. I promise.’

‘I’m not sure how much your word counts for at this particular moment.’

‘Hey, I don’t lie. All right?’

‘I imagine that stance poses significant problems for your chosen profession. Deception is inherent to spying, is it not?’

‘I’m not sure if we really have spies any more, at least in the traditional sense.’ She glanced around. ‘I’m an intelligence officer for the CIA. I gather information on the bad guys and sometimes I act on it, or on information supplied to me.’

‘All without a single untruth.’

‘Okay,’ she conceded, exhaling heavily, ‘sometimes I might take a liberal attitude with the truth. But only for the greater good.’

‘How commendable of you.’

‘I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve with this.’

‘We’re having a discussion about how much your word is worth. Or not. I’m sure you can appreciate how that is pertinent to this conversation.’

‘Listen. I’m playing straight with you. I am. I wouldn’t go through all this to try and BS you.’

‘Very wise.’

Muir glanced at her watch. ‘I’m going to continue, if that’s okay with you?’ She didn’t wait for a response. ‘You were supplied with a significant amount of intel on Kooi, of course, so I won’t waste what little time you’ve granted me regurgitating what you already know. The salient part of his bio is that he was responsible for the assassination of an American diplomat in Yemen two months ago, which is why Procter sent you to deal with him. He—’

The waiter appeared outside with their coffees. He smiled as he placed them down on the table. The tiny white espresso cups were ringed with lines of red glaze.

‘Would it make you more comfortable if I explain how I found you?’ Muir asked once the waiter had left them. She tentatively sipped the steaming espresso. ‘Procter figured you’d want to know.’

‘I already know.’

‘How?’

Victor remained silent and drank some coffee. He’d picked up the injury to the top of his left ear in the aftermath of his contract prior to Kooi. Procter, with his considerable power, and insight into events and those responsible for the injury, could have easily found out the specifics. He knew enough about Victor to know he wouldn’t be satisfied with a noticeable scar. Given the uncommon nature of the injury it would have been a relatively simple task for supercomputers and analysts to sift through the patient records of cosmetic surgeons for a man fitting his description.

Muir said, ‘Procter just told me to say “your ear”. He wouldn’t tell me anything else.’

Victor nodded.

‘You’re our third of four ear guys,’ Muir continued. ‘Today marks my third straight week of tracking down men with cosmetic ear surgery within the past twelve months.’

‘Procter’s a good boss.’

Muir nodded. ‘Of course. He’s the best.’

‘Even though I imagine he hasn’t told you he’s doing it, he’s looking after you. There’s a good reason he’s supplied you the absolute minimum of information about me. Do you know why that is?’

She nodded again. ‘So you wouldn’t consider me a liability.’

‘Most people wouldn’t be so careful. They wouldn’t even think about that.’ Victor sipped from his little cup. ‘You should send him a card if you haven’t already.’

‘I sent flowers.’

‘The last victim of Felix Kooi,’ Victor began after a nod. ‘When you say he was a diplomat in Yemen, what you really mean is he was a CIA non-official cover operative, correct?’

She hesitated a moment, then said, ‘That’s classified.’

‘Of course it is, Miss Muir.’ Victor swallowed the rest of his espresso and placed his cup back on its little saucer. ‘And hence I’m afraid to say that you’ve wasted the past three weeks. Because one thing about me that Procter should have made unequivocally clear is my intolerance for the withholding of relevant information. Perhaps, if you would like to know more about why I am so inflexible on this particular issue, you can ask your boss. He knows.’ Victor stood. ‘Thank you for the coffee. It was delicious.’

The man with sandy blond hair watched. He’d been watching all day. He would be watching into the night. He would watch the next day. Maybe even the day after that. Nothing but watching.

Some people didn’t like to watch. They got bored with the monotony of it. They grew complacent. They became irritated. They missed details. They didn’t do the job they were supposed to. They were lazy.

Not the man with blond hair. He didn’t get bored. He wouldn’t become irritated. He was never lazy. He maintained focus whatever the hour. However long he’d been watching for. No matter what the circumstances. It was the way it should be, even if it hadn’t always been so. As a young man he had lacked patience. He had hungered for excitement. Such was the folly of youth. Now, he could appreciate the quieter moments of life. He appreciated them because they were so very rare and therefore so very precious. Yes, he liked to watch.

It was such a simple thing, to watch, but no small skill was required for that simplicity. Anyone with sight could watch. Yet to watch successfully meant to remain unseen in return. The man with sandy blond hair knew himself to be not unmemorable. He had enough height and breadth to make him stand out. His face had sharp features. His eyes imprinted themselves for ever on anyone who looked into their depths. Yet, despite his conspicuous appearance, he shrouded himself in a cloak of the mundane that few could hope to peer behind.

The scenic locale and the sunshine made watching a more outwardly agreeable experience than perhaps it could have been, but a pleasant temperature and environment were quite unimportant to him. It would have made no difference had he been lying on frozen ground with an inch of snow across his entire body. He took his pleasure in the watching, not in the circumstances of the watch.

A riotous mob of pigeons flapped and crowded before his feet, eager enough for the bread he threw to them that they passed underneath his legs and between his feet. Across his lap lay a baguette that had been baked that morning and gave off the most wondrous of homely fragrances.

He was seated on an ornate iron bench set in Parc Central in the heart of the town that served as the capital of Andorra. It was a tiny settlement of less than twenty-five thousand people, and where often he discovered the charm of a town was in direct disproportion to its size, Andorra la Vella broke the rule he had witnessed the world over. He found it a horrid, soulless place, its buildings concrete monstrosities. Even the surrounding mountains failed to make a favourable impression. They were lumps of ugly rock fit only for the most ironic of picturesque postcards. He would not be sad to see his excursion here come to an end.

The man with blond hair carefully pulled chunks from the baguette’s soft innards. While he rolled them into little balls between finger and thumb he tore off pieces of crust and fed them between his lips.

The pigeons waited impatiently for the bread, but he only flicked it among them when he was happy the ball was perfectly spherical. Such attention to detail greatly mattered to him.

When the ball of bread sailed through the air the resulting melee caused him to suppress a smile. Many times he’d watched the stronger pigeons shunt the smaller birds aside as they chased after the bread, else the fastest or most cunning pigeons would get to the food first and flap away before they were relieved of their prize. The weak and the slow were left hungry. It was life’s eternal struggle played out in miniature at his feet. He silently applauded the actors who performed with such passion. So savage and yet so very beautiful.
Bravo
.

A middle-aged woman strolled by, draped in finery, dragging along a dog with bulging eyeballs and so small even the pigeons showed no fear of it.

‘You shouldn’t feed them,’ the woman called to him. ‘They’re a nuisance. Pure vermin.’

‘As are we all, madam,’ the man with blond hair said back. ‘But at least the pigeons have no pretence of grandeur.’

She frowned and quickened her pace.

‘Everyone’s a critic,’ he whispered to his actors.

He flicked another sphere of bread. It landed near the woman’s feet and the pigeons whooshed in her direction. She yelped and fled, jerking the tiny dog with her. It yapped.

This time he didn’t suppress his smile.

Parc Central was one of the few green areas inside the town, but the surrounding valley was green under the summer sun. The pretty young mother and her son came here so often because it was so close to the boy’s school. The child still enjoyed playing on the swings and roundabout and climbing on the frame. They came most days after school and sometimes at the weekends too. The man with blond hair knew because they never went anywhere without his knowledge – without his presence.

They lived in an apartment nearby. Although only a small dwelling it was located in one of the town’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. The mother worked part time as a sous chef in a fine restaurant and earned each month less than half the sum of the apartment’s rent. He had eaten at the restaurant and found the food to be quite excellent, if a little heavy on the saturated fats.

The mother saw him on occasions, of course, like she saw other people on the street or in the park, but she strolled through a simple existence unaware of just how dangerous life could be. She failed to see through the mundane cloak that encased him. She dismissed him as just another man. A local, perhaps. Uninteresting and harmless. She didn’t see the monster. But she would when the time was right.

That time was coming.

Victor’s hotel had a fitness suite located on the ground floor. It was open twenty-four hours a day, which meant Victor could use it in the middle of the night when there were no other guests around. Beneath a high ceiling the room was fitted with rows of exercise bikes, cross trainers, treadmills, step machines and rowing machines that occupied about three-quarters of the space. The rest was filled with resistance machines. No free weights.

It was quiet. His footsteps echoed. There were speakers positioned throughout the room linked to a music system that could be operated by the guests, if they so chose. Victor left it alone. The only other sound was the thrum of air conditioning that kept the temperature low.

Including the main entrance, there were four ways in and out. The other three consisted of two short corridors leading to the male and female locker rooms and a door that would open into a room containing maintenance, cleaning and first aid equipment. He tried his hotel key card on the lock for the other door but was greeted with a red light.

The female locker room was small, with no more than twenty lockers lining two of the four walls. Benches stood before them. A small toilet and a smaller shower room led off from the main area. Victor found no one. All the lockers were unlocked and he checked inside each one to make sure they were empty of anything forgotten by a guest who might come to collect it at this time of night. Nothing.

He exited it, walking fast, shaking his head and looking embarrassed for the benefit of any security guard who happened to be watching the fitness suite via one of the two cameras. The men’s locker room had a similar layout and was similarly empty of people and belongings.

The suite’s only entrance was set in one corner and even with mirrors on most of the walls, it was impossible to watch from the majority of the cardiovascular and resistance equipment thanks to several pillars and the machines blocking line of sight. But the door pushed inwards. Victor took a two-euro coin – the only money on him – from a pocket of his shorts and balanced it on the top of the inside handle.

He began his workout by doing a circuit of the resistance machines. He kept the breaks between sets short and used light weights and high repetitions to maintain his strength without adding excess bulk to his lean muscle mass. It took him an hour to do the circuit and he paused to refuel on protein and carbohydrates from a supplement shake before beginning the second part of his workout with cardiovascular exercises.

He rowed for thirty minutes, creating intense fatigue in his upper body already weakened from the circuit training. His workout gear now soaked in sweat, he moved to a cycling machine. He kept his heart rate at ninety per cent of maximum for half an hour and moved to the treadmill as the first light of dawn began to brighten the city outside.

The cardio machines all faced windows that ran along one wall beneath rows of TV screens. Normally, Victor would not have remained exposed before an unarmoured window for any length of time, but to protect the privacy of the hotel’s guests, the fitness suite’s windows were one way. In addition, he used machines adjacent to or behind pillars to provide cover and limit line of sight for any marksman across the street.

Midway through his run on the treadmill he heard the echoing clink of metal striking a hard surface. The sound was quiet compared to the whine of the treadmill’s machinery and the thump of his feet on the belt, but Victor had chosen a machine close to the door to make sure he heard it.

He glanced over his shoulder to see a woman enter. She was in her mid twenties, dressed in workout gear, with blonde hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. She was slim and toned and he didn’t have to look at her longer than a half a second to know for certain there could be no hidden weapon on her person. Victor dismissed her as a threat and continued his run.

Her fragrance would have informed him of her approach even if the mirrors had not let him keep track of her movements. He was on the end of the row of treadmills. There were another five to his right. She chose the one next to him.

He glanced again in case he had missed something the first time, but there wasn’t room to hide a pencil in her clothes, let alone a gun. She was looking his way and saw his eyes flick in her direction.

‘Hey,’ she said.

He nodded to acknowledge the greeting, but didn’t say anything in return.

In his peripheral vision he saw the young woman tap the screen of her machine to set up her workout and began at a quick walk. She looked across at his readout.

‘Wow,’ she said, ‘that’s an impressive time.’

He nodded again, and smiled briefly – polite but distracted. ‘Thanks.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Sorry,’ he said, speaking between inhales, ‘I’m in training for a race. I need to concentrate.’

‘Sure, no problem,’ she said. ‘Oh, by the way, did you drop this coin?’

Victor found Muir waiting outside his room. She didn’t see him straightaway, because she was looking left in the direction of the elevators as Victor rounded the corner from the stairwell. She didn’t hear him approach because his footsteps were quiet even without athletic shoes and carpet to further muffle the sound, only facing him as he entered her peripheral vision. Her shoulder blades came away from the wall next to his door, her legs straightened and she arched her back. She’d been waiting there a long time. She had a key card between her fingers.

‘I took a wild guess that you wouldn’t like it if you found me inside your hotel room,’ she said, waving the card for emphasis.

‘Not as much as you wouldn’t.’

She wore grey trousers and a blue blouse underneath a smart leather jacket that was tapered at the waist and flared out around her hips. It made her look less thin than she had the day before but could do nothing for the sunken cheekbones. Her boots had a two-inch heel. Her dark hair was loose and wavy. Behind her glasses her eyes looked tired, but she had applied extra makeup to try and hide the dark circles and bags.

‘My body clock is still all over the place,’ she explained, ‘and I figured you would be an early riser.’

He ignored her and moved to insert his own key card in the slot.

Muir took a rapid step back. ‘Why don’t I wait for you downstairs while you take a shower?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘You really hum.’

He looked at her.

She said, ‘Shall we say I’ll see you in the lobby in about twenty minutes?’

‘We have nothing further to discuss. If you had managed to get clearance to answer my question you would have said so by now.’

‘You’re right. I don’t have clearance. I spent half the night trying to get it.’

Victor pushed open his door. ‘Have a good flight back to Washington, Miss Muir. I trust you understand it’s in your best interest to forget you ever met me.’

‘Wait,’ she said, and went to grab his arm.

Her fingers didn’t find their target. Instead they were twisted back on themselves, and her wrist joint hyper-extended. She gasped and sank downwards as he applied pressure. He released her before any serious damage was caused, but only just.

‘Go back to Washington, Miss Muir.’

‘Wait,’ she said again, grimacing as she rubbed her wrist. ‘I haven’t got clearance, but I’m going to answer your question anyway. I’m going to break the rules because I need your help and I don’t have time to waste waiting for a guy in an office to grant clearance on facts you’ve already worked out for yourself.’

‘That’s a sensible attitude to take.’

‘I thought you’d agree. I’ll tell you everything you want to know downstairs, okay?’ She sucked in air between her teeth and tried to rub the pain from her wrist.

‘Not in the lobby,’ Victor said. ‘But I’m going to get some dinner when I’ve cleaned up. You can join me if you wish.’

She glanced at her watch. ‘Don’t you mean breakfast?’

‘I’m unlikely to get the two confused.’

‘Sure, okay. Let’s go get some dinner. At six a.m.’