'Y: 007 Raw' by Rio Moss
Prologue
Saint-Septime
en Provence France
The man who exited the renovated
sandstone farmhouse at the bottom of the valley had no eyes and no ears for the
sight of the hills sizzling in the heat or for the birds proclaiming their joy
to the world.
. He was carrying a metal briefcase in
one hand, a bunch of keys in the other. He gazed down the gravel path that led
to the main road with a look of distrust, as if he was expecting something
unpleasant to happen.
Locking the door took him longer than
usual because he did it twice, each time pushing his weight against the door to
feel whether it was really closed.
The man looked out of place outside of a
holiday home in the Provence Netherlands United States
The most out-of-sync element of his
looks was his dress style. What would you wear on a sunny day in the French
countryside? Definitely not a suit, and certainly not a Brooks Brothers outfit
with a silk tie and leather shoes from Tod’s.
With a final push against the door, the
man looked up at the upper floor before making his way over to the car port
next to the house. A white Mercedes S400 was waiting for him. A hybrid car,
because he loved impressing people with how forward-looking and environmentally
conscious he was.
He hesitated between putting the metal
case in the boot or inside with him. In the end, he pulled open the right front
door first, put the case on the passenger seat, and then went round the front
to drive away.
Arriving at the main road, he looked
left and right. There was no sign of traffic, but then this was a two-lane road
between two villages with barely a thousand inhabitants between them.
He put on his right-turn indicators, the
law-abiding citizen that he was. He drove another half a mile before a man
crouching by the side of a pine tree on the side of the hill punched a number
into his mobile phone and hit the send button. The explosion tore the fancy car
to shreds. Coryn Maas had just been wiped out.
Chapter One
I never bothered about offending people.
I didn’t go out of my way to antagonize them, but I wouldn’t ponder whether
anything I was about to do was going to offend anybody, whether innocent
bystanders, or the other side, or my own colleagues or bosses. You do what you
have to do to solve a problem.
Sometimes it’s hard to gauge what is
going to offend people the most. Uttering a profanity, nudity, or killing
someone, often for no apparent reason.
This morning I felt like combining all
three of them. A good, short kick with a four-letter word might give me some
extra courage to face down the rest of the day, particularly the first hour
ahead. I could swear as much as I wanted, there was nobody within earshot. Only
God, if He was present in this white chapel at the top of the cliff dedicated
to one of His saints and if you believed in Him.
Killing people was something for later.
Even though contrary to what you might think, I didn’t enjoy the deed, but it
might be necessary if I wanted to take my mission to a satisfactory ending.
As to nudity, again, God would be the
only one offended for the time being, because there was nobody else around the
chapel. It was a bright sunny day, like any spring or summer day in this
country. It might be going bankrupt, it would always stay beautiful.
I decided not to swear, at least not
outside my thoughts, but I did go for nudity. Inside the dark chapel, I bundled
my clothes into a small heap and stuffed them on top of my sandals in a corner
between a pew and the wall. I just hoped they didn’t have a procession or some
other religious festival lined up for today.
Outside, it felt good to let the rays of
the sun shine on my body, but I wasn’t a tourist, I wasn’t here for the sunshine
or the culture.
I gauged the distance to the edge of the
cliff and I stepped back. I counted to three and just let it fly. I ran
forward, ever faster, not acknowledging the fact that an empty space would
appear under my feet within five seconds. Four. Three, two, one.
I jumped into the void. The void was
actually a vast expanse of the most beautiful blue water you’ve ever seen. As I
said, I wasn’t a tourist, so my eyes and mind were not focusing on how poetic
all of this was, but on the ever-shortening distance between my body and the
body of water. Call it a clash of titans.
I won. It didn’t feel like that at
first. I crashed through the surface like a seal dropping through a plate-glass
window. It felt hard and uncomfortable. I gagged like a toddler during his
first attempt at swimming.
That wasn’t like me. I wasn’t an Olympic
champion, fair enough, but I did put in weeks of extra swimming practice before
even agreeing to undertake this mission. If you came out to the Greek islands,
you should expect to get wet.
As soon as the shock of the contact with
the Aegean Sea wore out, I gathered my wits
about me and hurried to the surface. After having washed the confusion out of
my eyes, I glimpsed around, in particular at the cliff I had just descended by behaving
like a Greek god. There was no movement anywhere, no evidence that anyone had
witnessed my foolish behaviour.
If anybody had seen me, it was a Greek
god, or our God, or the people sitting behind their monitors watching the
satellite footage. I could see their grins before my eyes.
After bobbing up and down for a second
to relax, I refocused my energy and began swimming. Straight ahead, in the
direction of the yellow line on the horizon. Aghia Lefkameni was an island that
barely featured on any maps. Add to that an almost unpronounceable name and you
knew nobody would be interested. There must be a church or at least a chapel on
that island, a tiny village full of ageing fishermen and their wives clad in
black, and one tourist resort, on the beach facing Aegina .
Binoculars were not strong enough for
anybody on Aghia Lefkameni to have covered the distance and watched me jumping
off the cliff. That also meant that I couldn’t overextend myself swimming.
Every 50 feet, I would stop and relax, move the muscles a bit in another
direction.
I watched out for nasty animals in the
water and for ships on a reckless course, the two most dangerous things that
would pale in comparison to what I’d find at the end of my aquatic journey.
Despite not wearing any clothes, I was
feeling wet and soggy by the time I reached the beach. As I could discern
people on the sand, I also became more self-aware. I could see them, they could
see me. What if any of them knew me and recognized me? They could just pull a
gun from under a towel and start firing away.
I felt more naked walking on to that
beach than I had ever before. It wasn’t that I wasn’t wearing any clothes.
Let’s face it, nobody on that beach was either. There were young couples with
children, elderly men and women, all barenaked. My feeling of nakedness was
related to my good friend Walther. I couldn’t bring my Walther PPK on this
mission because, well, I had no place to hide him. Improvisation was the name
of this dangerous game.
In contrast to what I had expected,
nobody gave me any looks. I would have attracted more attention had I been
wearing even a tiny pair of swimming trunks, but here, nudity was the new
normal.
I just walked past the sunbathers and
amateur volleyball players into the resort. There was a towel drying on a wire
strung between two young olive trees. I looked around and ripped it off. At
least, I had something to cover up if it became necessary. I marched on between
the low one-storey bungalows that were spread around like a kid had dropped a
box full of Lego blocks and failed to pick them up again.
My aim was not the resort itself, but
the high-end villa complex built behind it. I had studied the satellite
pictures to memorize the layout, but it would still depend on luck for me to
find the guests at the right place at the right time, and especially, in the
right numbers.
Too much of a crowd and I might have to
abort my mission, though on the other hand, if the crowd was unarmed, they
might stir up enough confusion to be helpful.
I didn’t have any choice. I walked
around the white reception building where a bunch of tanned tourists wearing
straw hats, plastic sandals and not much else stood shooting the breeze. This
was the Aegean , so the daytime heat was
tempered by a strong wind.
The reception marked not only the
separation between the bungalows and the upscale part of the resort, but also
between the flat beach area and the hilly terrain closer to the centre of the
island.
I disappeared behind a rickety shed that
must have been a leftover from before the tourist invasion and started
climbing. The towel came in handy to wipe the sweat off my face.
I took care not to hurt my bare feet on
the sharp edges of the rocks strewn around the area. At certain points, I would
bend and look around to see if I had been noticed. A naked man walking out of
the water was one thing, the same naked man climbing up the rocks behind the
reception area was a lot more cause for suspicion.
There was no time for behavioural
analysis, so I just made my way up until I reached a relatively flat area
covered in cypresses and other typical Mediterranean vegetation. I didn’t know
much about birds and trees beyond what I had once studied to pose as an
ornithologist visiting Cuba
Snatches of shouts and music wafted
through the trees in my direction. The party was on the way and I was about to
crash it.
I paused behind a tree to evaluate the
possibilities. Up ahead was a low wall, barely three feet high, acting more as
a form of decoration than as a barrier to keep people outside. The architects
had not imagined that anybody would come in by climbing the rocks from the beach
area to reach this place. Moving closer, I could count the guests.
Behind the wall was a tiled area with a
circular pool. Useless for swimming competitions, but practical for a party. I
counted six women in and around the water, three men between the pool and the
low salmon-pink villa with the bottom-to-ceiling glass windows. As befitted the
nature of this resort, most of them were not wearing anything, apart from a few
bikini bottoms and a fluorescent orange pair of Bermuda shorts on one of the
men.
If you wanted to leave the pool area, you
either had to walk into the villa or move to the right, where a silver version
of the latest Mercedes S-class stood in the shade of vines stretched out over a
trellis. I couldn’t see the license plates, but I guessed that was Retep Vane’s
car. The guests would have walked up from the parking lot at the entrance to
the resort.
My choice was stark: either I bluffed my
way into the party and went in full-frontal, or I crouched behind a tree and
hoped the number of people would diminish within a few minutes. The latter was
purely wishful thinking on my part. People coming to Greece
The man who would set the tone for the
group was Retep Vane. I knew from the surveillance footage I had watched last
week in London
As was usually the case, he looked
slightly older in real life than on the pictures taken by the service. There
were subtle patches of grey in the curly mass of hair dangling to his
shoulders. He looked unshaven, but that was more a question of projecting a
masculine image rather than being too lazy to shave, like I was on my days off.
I wasn’t here to kill him. I might have
to, but that was one of the uncertainties of my profession. You went in to
perform one particular task, but along the way, things could and did go wrong,
and you had to adapt to circumstances. That meant doing things that might
offend people, doing things that later on you might tell your boss but nobody
outside, not even your friendliest neighbour or most sensitive niece.
Round to the right I went, because I
reasoned that coming in the normal way, on the path that led up to that side of
the villa where Vane had parked his car, was the least suspicious manner of
approaching him.
When I was far enough to the right to be
out of the party’s sight, I left the cover of the trees and stepped on to the
path. Ouch. Gravel and bare feet don’t mix.
I felt lucky to see the car was
unguarded and had its nose pointing outside, ready to roll. The chauffeur must
be one of the men by the pool. I went round the driver’s side and peered
inside. Nothing, certainly not a key, and nothing else. I had spotted the laptop
lying on the floor under the table by the pool to protect it from the sun.
I draped the towel around my neck and
forgot about my painful feet. I walked from the car in the direction of the
pool, conscious that within seconds all eyes would be on me, the naked
intruder.
The only thing I could adjust before my
appearance was my hair. The wind had already blown it dry since my emergence
from the sea.
One, two, three. I rounded the bend and
stepped into the pool area. At first, nobody paid me any notice. The men and
women frolicking naked in and around the water were too busy with themselves to
notice another man walking around.
Instead of going for Vane, I headed for
the pool, pretending I was going to take a dip. I stopped when one of the men
called out.
‘You must be lost,’ the tough guy who I
assumed to be Vane’s driver said in a hoarse voice. The people in the water
didn’t pay attention, but the boss did. He put his mojito down on the floor and
shot a sour look at me.
I counted on him not remembering me from
the night before, at the restaurant, when I sat observing him and his entourage
while pretending to enjoy a moussaka and a glass of retsina. I wasn’t, but that
was the cover I needed.
‘This is a public pool, right?’ I
launched into a broad American accent, going on the presumption that if they
thought I was some stupid arrogant American, they would be more forgiving of my
trespassing trick.
‘We’re hiring this villa, so you’d
better go looking for another pool,’ Vane said. ‘What’s your name?’
I wasn’t going to answer that one, so I
crashed into the table, lifting it up my right shoulder and propelling it into
Vane and the two women sitting on his lounge chair. Almost at the same time, I
lifted the laptop off the floor and pulled a towel from the nearest chair. The
car keys and a mobile phone were lying underneath. I grabbed the keys and went
running.
‘Don’t hit the car,’ I heard Vane scream
at his chauffeur.
The man was armed and let it be known. The
first bullet just missed hitting my backside. I raced round the car and leaped
into the driver’s seat. By the time I started the engine, the chauffeur was
coming around the car as well to point his Beretta at the left front tyre.
I hit the accelerator and nearly scooped
him up. His gun flew down to the gravel and passed under my car, leaving him
struggling to keep his equilibrium. He had a good look at me, which meant I’d
better not bump into him again. No more Greek holidays for a considerable time.
I raced down the gravel path, enjoying
the drive but conscious of the dangers. I couldn’t see much in the rear-view
mirror because of all the dust the car was kicking up, but I knew I couldn’t
rest. A couple of olive trees got sideswiped but I continued on my way downward
which I knew from the satellite footage would take me out of the resort and closer
to the coastline.
I wasn’t going to have myself arrested
for driving a stolen car and for driving naked outside a naturist resort, so
just before I was to hit the guarded barrier coming up in front of me, I turned
a sharp right and dived into the bush. A couple of men came screaming out of
the guard post but they were not armed, I was happy to notice. Their work was
keeping peeping Toms out, not keeping car thieves in.
The airbags did not deploy because I
braked hard before hitting the first tree. I jumped out of the car, keeping a
tight hold on the laptop with the towel still around my neck. The water of the Aegean was glistening down below the incline, behind the
trees.
I ran as fast as my bare feet allowed,
missing sharp branches and needles only to stub my toe against a rock. A
painful grimace was all I had time for. By the time I reached the water, I heard
more voices up behind me. Maybe the chauffeur had run down the hill in hot
pursuit and would now soon start shooting in my direction.
I put the laptop on my head and
tightened it fast with the towel. I must have looked like one of those African
women returning home with a bucket full of fresh water balancing on her head.
According to my briefing, the laptop or
notebook or whatever you called it, was waterproof. I didn’t want to take the
risk that the lads back home found out tomorrow that it hadn’t been after all.
So there I went, heading back to Aegina the same way I had come, in the water. By the time
I reached the open sea, I was out of reach of the chauffeur’s gun. I never
looked back to see if he was watching me, I didn’t care. Vane did not have a
yacht down here, I knew that much. He was a man like me. He loved speed, and
yachts were just not fast enough to move in or out of one place at short
notice.
Today I had won a battle. The war would
go on.
Chapter Two
The man staring at me in the mirror had
changed. He no longer cared about the best brands of clothing and wines. At the
age I had arrived at, I still wanted a nice car and I still enjoyed the company
of the ladies, but I had outgrown the snobbishness of the bespoke tailor and
the venerable vintage.
I just made sure that the Tom Ford suit I
bought last Christmas didn’t show any rumples. That was enough for me. The
mirror in my office was pure vanity, but at least I hardly spent any time here,
so any rumours about me being a dandy were totally spurious.
I took the black folder from the desk
and heading out into the corridor. I scanned my card inside the lift and it
agreed to take me to level 7. Chief of staff Bill Tanner’s office was another
scan away at the end of the hall, to the right.
I announced my presence the
old-fashioned way, by knocking on the hardwood door with my right fist. Twice
in quick succession.
The light to the right of the door
jumped from red to green and I entered.
A young woman of Indian origin sat
behind a bullet-proof glass pane working on her desktop. She whispered my name
in a microphone to announce my arrival to Bill, who was working behind the second
hardwood door in the room.
The secretary raised her hand as the
light on that door also went green. I stepped into Tanner’s office to find an
uncharacteristic absence of a smile on his face. He pointed at the soft leather
chair in front of his desk. Despite the office’s location on the seventh floor,
there was no view at all. There was not even a window, only pictures of
nautical scenes from the Thames to the Falklands . Yes, there was a thing like reflecting glass,
but even that was not thought to be foolproof, so the service had decided that
the top people should not have windows to enjoy the views of London
Tanner held his balding head between his
hands as he looked at me. Did I notice the tracks left behind by tears?
‘The place has been a mess since M …,’
he sighed instead of finishing his sentence.
‘I know,’ I said. I didn’t but I could
guess. Tanner now had to take all the fire coming at him from all directions,
from the Cabinet Office, from the House, from the field. He was a moving
target.
‘Let’s turn to that island of yours with
the unpronounceable name,’ he said.
‘Aghia Lefkameni.’
‘Right. Q studied the laptop.’
‘Vane’s laptop.’
Tanner looked annoyed at my useless
remarks. ‘We didn’t find what we needed but we found something else.’
I hoped it was good enough to avoid days
if not weeks of sniggering remarks about my going all out in the buff. I put an
expectant look in my eyes.
‘Do you remember Coryn Maas?’
I leaned back to reflect. I knew that
name, but not in connection to Retep Vane and his ilk. Suddenly, I knew.
‘The Coryn Maas who was killed in the Provence
Bill nodded. ‘The Coryn Maas who spent
most of his life behaving like a prominent businessman and charitable gentleman,
but in the end proved to be a trustworthy tool of Langley
‘What’s the connection with Vane? What
was Maas doing on the laptop? Did Vane have
him killed?’ The theories flew through my mind and out of my mouth like
collapsing dominoes.
‘It’s not that simple, James. Maas was spending a holiday at his modest cottage in the Provence
‘How did the bomb work?’
‘The usual. Remote control by mobile
phone. He kept his car in a carport next to the cottage, so it wasn’t difficult
for anyone to tamper with it. Someone must have waited until after he left the
holiday home and sent a message to blow him up.’
‘Was there somebody else with Maas at the cottage? Wife, lover, secretary?’ I asked.
‘This was his private place. A spot he
kept to ‘chill out,’ if that’s the proper term.’
I knew what he meant. My home was my
chill-out space. A space where you could block out the rest of the world, at
least for a short time. Shut off the TV, the Internet, the radio. Lie down in
bath with a book or a bottle of wine for two hours and don’t care about what’s
happening outside.
‘James, are you still with me?’ Bill
asked, rupturing my temporary mental absence.
‘I must be getting old. Who did Maas need to keep his distance from?’
‘He had loads of enemies, as a man in
his position would.’
‘I didn’t mean his enemies, I meant the
people closest to him. Wife, lover, secretary.’
‘Maas
was married, lived with his wife in a home in the countryside on the border
between Belgium Netherlands
‘Bill, it seems to me I need to go down
and visit both the French cottage and that home, wife included.’
‘What we need to establish is the
connection between Vane and Maas . If the
latter is on the former’s laptop, did that mean they were enemies or friends?’
‘You’ve got a devious mind, Bill.’ I
liked the chief of staff. His mind went where mine wanted to go, as if he were
my GPS.
‘You’ve got points for not killing
anybody on that Greek island. Keep it like that. We won’t be telling the French
you’re operating in their zone, but don’t go and mess things up by killing some
people there.’
‘I might have another go at Vane if I
happen to find him strolling around the hills.’
Bill threw a flash drive through the air
and I caught it. The basic information about Maas
and the upgraded details about my Vane mission would be listed in full. I
needed to read it and then destroy it, like in a cheap action movie.
As I left his office, his secretary
smiled at me.
‘Goodbye, barenaked Bond.’
‘Did you watch the satellite footage?’ I asked
her. She must have.
‘That was way above my intelligence clearance.’
For a moment, I wished she’d been a lesbian.
Chapter
Three
Saint-Septime
en Provence France
A falcon circled high above the valley. If
I had been a gullible tourist, I might have believed it was a vulture looking
for corpses to feast on. I certainly was dressed to fit the part. Tough
athletics shoes, shorts with lots of pockets to stuff things in like knives, a
mobile phone, a miniature camera. Anyone going through them right now would
only find handkerchiefs with my sweat marks though. I was wearing a white
T-shirt, not just because that colour was supposed to keep you cool, but
especially because it was so neutral it might make you less conspicuous than
say, a red or black T-shirt.
I was going against my second nature of
not wearing anything on my head this time. A baseball cap of all things crowned
my short blond head. Just an unmarked white one. I didn’t care for baseball, so
I never wanted the name of a team I didn’t feel anything for to adorn my head. White
again was the most neutral colour I could have, even though a true baseball fan
would find it odd.
Anyway, I wasn’t likely to encounter
many baseball fans in the French countryside, was I? I had a small backpack
dangling from, you guessed it, my back. A casual search would turn up a bottle
of water, a small towel, the ID of a Swiss sales manager for a trade firm in Bern
The roof of the Maas
cottage first appeared in the corner of my right eye. I never looked at it
directly, in order not to betray to any observer that my coming to this place
was not coincidental.
I pretended to be looking for some point
straight ahead, a clutch of trees half way up a mostly bare and dry cliff. I
moved my head slightly to the left. I just saw a short stretch of tarmac in a
patch uncovered by trees. That was the road where Maas
had met his death. I stepped forward and moved my head around, sometimes
scanning the path that slung left and right between the rocks, trees and dead
branches, sometimes looking to the right in the direction of the cottage, which
was now all but invisible.
An approach from the rear would be the
most innocent tactic. Claim you’re lost if anybody asks what you’re doing so
close to a strange house. The information I received from Bill didn’t tell me
whether somebody else had bought the cottage and moved in. If there was, it
would make my task more difficult. How would I get in without a sound excuse,
and what inside the house was there still left from the previous occupant?
Before I reached the cottage, I first had
to cross the road. It was one of those narrow two-lane roads that swept up and
down, left and right, the kind of place you see on the Tour de France
broadcasts each summer.
I did some cycling of my own but I never
watched it unless I couldn’t avoid it. Like last summer when I went undercover
at a café in Belgium
It was unconscious, but I looked left
and right before crossing the road, half expecting a batch of cyclotourists to
emerge in front of my face.
The vegetation across the road was
dense. I not only had to watch my step, I also needed to keep my arms and legs
away from scratchy nettles and sharp dead branches and needles. The trek was
getting tiring quite soon, so I had a credible excuse for veering to the right
in the general direction of the cottage.
There it was. Two storeys, heavy stones,
narrow high windows, one back door. The curtains were drawn, but on the whole
the property still looked clean and well kept. Was there a real estate firm
looking after it?
I emerged from the bush and walked
around.
‘Anybody home?’ I said, but not loud
enough to be heard on the other side of the building.
A door slammed. I froze and reached into
my backpack for the satchel. I pulled out my Walther but kept it hidden inside
the backpack while hurrying forward. Another door slammed before I saw what was
happening.
A man had run from the house’s front
door to a Citroen C4 parked on the paved plaza in front. He started the engine
and drove off.
‘Stop!’ I called out while pointing the
gun at his car, but he was gone. If he were an innocent citizen, he would call
the police and say he had been attacked by an armed man. If not, he might return
with reinforcements.
I needed to work fast. I rushed for the
door and put my shoulders against it. It was locked.
Instead of wasting a bullet, I ran to
the edge of the trees where I picked up a chunk of wood big enough to hurt
someone with it. I slammed it into one of the windows.
Effective but noisy. As soon as the rain
of shards had stopped falling, an upstairs window swung open and a gun
appeared.
‘Les mains en l’air,’ a woman’s voice
ordered.
Surrender was not in my vocabulary. I ran
like hell toward the carport on the other side of the house, out of the gun’s
range. Two shots crackled, the bullets hit the spot I had just left.
The man who ran away had left an ally
inside to mop up. I needed to smoke her out without destroying information or before
she did. To my surprise, there was another car next to the house. A brand new
white Porsche 911 with the top down. Whoever the woman was, she wasn’t worried
about being noted. The other guy must have been local because he drove a French
car. I suddenly saw this one had Dutch license plates.
There was no time for reflection, I
needed to keep moving if I wanted to flush out the enemy. I ran for the back of
the house, my gun ready to fire if the woman had rushed to the back of the
house on the inside. I kept close to the wall, bending down to pass the
windows. I felt the back door, but it was locked as well.
Time was running out. Either I could try
to break in and expose myself to attack, or I could draw her out.
I went all the way through to the other
side of the house and ran off into the bush. As soon as I was certain she could
not see me, I crouched and looked back. I couldn’t see the windows, but I
spotted the front of the Porsche and the space at the rear of the house. It
wasn’t worth calling it a garden, since nothing had been planted there by man. All
the vegetation had just occurred naturally, thrown there by the wind.
The sound of an engine. Hell. How stupid
had I been. She was going to drive away just like her accomplice. I jumped up
and ran to the other side of the house to intercept her as she would be driving
to the front plaza from the carport. I was just six feet away when it happened.
The house shook like there was an
earthquake, only I was pretty sure that France
I ran harder just to see all the glass
windows fly out in bits and pieces amid a roar of fire. The blast threw me
aside between the trees. I covered my face while holding on to my Walther. It
must have been a sturdy oak tree. I collided with it and fell into a dark void.
‘Who are you?’
The faintest of voices. It almost
sounded like an angel, so maybe I was in heaven. Too bad I didn’t really
believe in heaven or hell. I tried to lift my eyelids. A searing white light
pierced into my eyes. Was this heaven after all?
‘Who are you?’
The voice sounded a lot clearer and a
whole lot less angelic. I opened my eyes again. White light. Fire? I blinked. The
light was still there, but less intense. I kept my eyes open and things came
into focus. The light came from up there, from the sky. Sunlight in a sky that
was gradually turning blue.
I managed to open my eyes wider. Instead
of the all-encompassing light, I now saw a woman sitting in front of me.
Crouching, black cotton trousers, black T-shirt with some inane slogan on it,
short dark wet hair. A Beretta in her right hand pointing straight at my chest.
In her left hand, I recognized the Walther. My Walther, but she was keeping it
down, pointing at the ground.
Behind her, I saw the destruction. Rocks,
stones, splinters of wood that had once been furniture. The wreckage of the
white Porsche.
‘You’re American, aren’t you?’ My voice
sounded like I had just digested a plate full of gravel.
‘I’ve got the gun, I’m asking the
questions. Who are you?’
‘I’m a hiker. I was just walking past
your house and I thought of asking for some water.’
‘A hiker with this?’ She waved the
Walther at me.
‘The guidebooks say there are still
bears in the Provence
‘You were snooping around the house with
a gun. You’ll have to come up with a better story before I shoot you in the leg
and make you spit out the truth.’
For some reason, I saw something in her
eyes that made me believe she could do just that.
‘I’m a British investigator. There was a
murder here some months ago and I’m here to look into it.’
‘You’re late.’
‘I didn’t miss you, or your friend.’
‘You mean your friend,’ she said.
‘I arrived here, he ran out of the
house, into his car, he drove off and the house blew up. Does that sound like
he was my friend?’
‘How is your investigation going?’
‘Now it’s your turn to tell me who you
are. Looks to me like you are a murder suspect. Waving guns at people like me, exploding
things, and you need a ride.’ I shook my head at what had been the Porsche. ‘I
have a brand new Renault Clio two miles from here.’
‘You drive in style.’
‘A rental. I wanted to keep a low
profile. Tell me what is going on here.’
‘Show me your ID and I’ll tell you
everything I know.’
I didn’t have anything on me that
revealed my true identity, but I did have a passport jammed into the back
pocket of my shorts. I showed her the Swiss passport in the name of Juergen
Moscher.
‘You’re not Swiss. You just told me you
were British.’
‘You don’t have to know my real name. I
work for British intelligence.’
‘Six?’
‘You’re familiar with British
intelligence?’
At last, she drew back, though she still
kept the Beretta trained in my general direction. I scrambled to sit myself
upright. There was some dried blood on my forehead, my T-shirt was ripped, but
otherwise I was still in relatively good shape.
‘My name is Tess Rivera. If you’re
investigating the murder, you should know who I am.’
The wife of the late Coryn Maas. The
widow. The woman who was supposed to live in a villa somewhere on the border
between Belgium Netherlands
‘What are you doing down here?’
‘The same as you. Investigating Coryn’s
death.’
Tess stood up and I tried to follow her,
but my joints were all stiff. I fell back once before it worked. ‘You’ve been
here before?’
She looked back at the wreckage. ‘I’m
going to take up your offer about your car.’
‘Let’s walk. You can tell me about your
husband while we get the car.’
She picked up a backpack from behind a
tree and put both guns in there.
‘Can I have mine back?’
‘At the end of the ride.’
‘Where is that?’
‘Depends on what your plans are. You’re
the driver.’
‘It doesn’t look like I will have a lot
of choice. You’ve got two guns, I’m impotent.’
‘A man and his guns. I’d like to get
back home.’
‘Is your investigation complete?’ I
asked her. She would be sticking around if she hadn’t found anything.
She walked away from the house and
crossed the main road before letting me go ahead in the direction of where I
had hidden the car. We would need hours to reach it.
‘I was inside the house upstairs when I
heard that man entering. I was waiting for him to go up when I heard you
coming.’
‘You heard me? I was as silent as Tinker
Bell.’
‘There are tripwires behind the house
that ring alarms inside. That’s how I knew somebody was coming from behind, but
the sound of the alarms scared off the intruder. You know the rest.’
‘Did he plant the bomb?’
‘It certainly wasn’t me.’
‘You’ve been in that house before?’
Tess slowed down because I was still not
in the right shape for a long walk. ‘That was Coryn’s private retreat. I knew
he owned it, but he never took me here. It wasn’t our lovers’ nest, if that’s
what you’re thinking.’
I remembered the briefing. Coryn Maas
used the cottage as a place to chill out, away from his job, and presumably
away from his wife as well.
‘What did you find there?’ I asked.
Tess Rivera didn’t reply. I stopped. She
walked right past me as if she knew where my car was.
‘Tess. You need to stop playing those
games. You pointed a gun at me, yet I never asked for your ID. I trust you. You
need to trust me.’
She slapped me. It hurt.
‘All I need to do is find the people who
killed Coryn. Convince me you’re not one of them, and I’ll trust you.’
‘Why would MI6 kill your husband? If we
wanted to, we’d have more subtle ways of bringing that about.’
We had reached the point where I first
noticed the cottage. My head was burning. I stopped to drink some water and
offered her a gulp.
‘Don’t you think it’s crazy how we all
had the same idea at the same time? My husband has been dead for months, yet
here we all arrive on the same day, the bomber, me, you.’
‘They might have been observing you. The
bomber found out you were headed here so he came back to tie up some loose
ends. Destroy the property before you found any clues.’
‘Why is MI6 so interested in Coryn? We’re
Americans.’
‘We’ve got our own angle on his case.
How far did the CIA research your husband?’
‘I was debriefed by people in Brussels
‘Which means you also work for the
agency. They wouldn’t bother you unless you were an active agent with access to
confidential information too. Which explains your way with the gun. Shooting at
me from the cottage.’
‘Are you still sore about that, Mister
Swiss man? I just happen to believe in self-defence. Yes, Coryn was working for
the CIA, but not with guns and speedboats and fast cars. He was a document man,
an analytic type, and a gladhander. He got on well with people, so that made
him a good source for information.’
‘No fast cars, but that was quite a nice
one you had back there.’ Shame about the explosion.
‘The other car was blown up.’
Her tone was so matter of fact, I didn’t
get her. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It wasn’t added to my file yet? They
blew up my other car when I left home last week. I drove off in Coryn’s Porsche
for once, and they blew up the other one.’
‘They planted a bomb in a car meant for
you?’
‘Who else? They must have been worried I
was going to find out too much.’
‘Which means you have information that
they want. We need to share.’
‘First walk me to your car and convince
me you actually work for MI6 and they have my interests at heart.’
I couldn’t just drive her back to the
office and have her meet with Tanner, but there was a positive alternative at
hand. I searched my backpack for my cell phone, but there was none.
‘I’ve got it,’ she said without looking
at me. ‘You’ll get it when we drive off.’
‘I can’t phone and drive,’ I tried.
‘Then you should let me drive.’
The rest of the trek developed in
silence. I thought I was the toughest bloke in the world, but having yourself
thwacked by an exploding cottage was not something to be taken lightly. I felt
relief when I saw the dark red French car still sitting in the place I had put
it, a rocky path behind the ruins of a sheep farm.
Tess looked askance when instead of
heading for the vehicle, I clambered into the farm building. I had hidden the
car keys on the floor under the rusting remains of a bicycle frame. They were
still there.
I dangled the keys in front of her face.
She wanted to snatch them but I pulled them back.
‘You drive or I drive?’ I said, as if it
mattered to her.
‘Where are you supposed to take it back?’
‘Any large town will do.’ No, it wouldn’t.
I had driven down from London Clermont-Ferrand
She looked at me from across the car. ‘Go
ahead, let’s hear it.’
‘Do you have a laptop in that bag of
yours?’
‘I do.’
‘We find a place for dinner, a hotel for
the night, and then we set up a talk on your laptop. I’ll introduce you to my
boss and he’ll explain everything.’
‘Sounds reasonable. Who says you’re not
going to kill me once we’re in a hotel room together?’
‘If I had wanted to kill you, you would
have been dead by now.’
‘Right. I’ve got both the guns, and you
were knocked out, remember?’
‘I don’t need a gun to kill.’
Tess grinned. The first laugh I had seen
today. She tapped the roof of the car with her hand and took place in the
passenger’s seat. I was the designated driver.
‘Where are we going, Miss Rivera?’
‘Anywhere out of here.’
The route zigzagged up and down and
around rocky hills. The only villages they crossed had a church, a café which
doubled as the restaurant for lost tourists, a bakery and a butcher’s shop. I
kept looking for the Citroen with the man who had bombed the cottage. There
were Citroens everywhere, but none fitted the bill.
‘I’ll find a hotel, we’ll have dinner,
and I’ll introduce you to my boss. Tomorrow morning, we’ll return the rental
and travel in class.’
‘Who is your boss?’
‘I told you, I’m with MI6.’
‘Then your boss is M?’
I braked, causing a driver behind us to
honk his horn and put up his finger in a nasty but deserved sign of discontent.
I put the car by the side of the road and stared at Tess.
‘You know far too much for just being
the bereaved widow of a CIA operative.’
‘Coryn was not an operative. He
collected some information for agents, but he never took any action that might
have been called spectacular.’
‘Yet, he was blown up, somebody tried to
kill you by blowing up your car and the holiday home in Southern
France , and you know about M. You’re not the housewife you pretend
to be.’
‘Are we going to talk to M tonight?’
‘No, we’re not. If you really want to know,
the person on the other side of the line will be my chief of staff, Bill
Tanner. M is no longer with us.’
‘That’s news.’
‘Tell me about yourself.’
‘First drive us to the hotel instead of
letting us sit here like targets,’ she said.
I drove off again. ‘It was a mistake not
to have researched your past when we first heard of Coryn.’
‘How do you know I met Coryn? I was an
operative who asked him to collect some information for us. He did, and I
thought he did his job well.’
‘So you two grew familiar and fell in
love. The operative and the informant.’
‘Do you understand now why I can fight
you under the table?’
‘We’ll see about that, but I hope it
doesn’t come that far. You and I should cooperate to find what really happened
to your husband.’
She went quiet, so I looked over and
expected to find her crying about her late husband’s fate. Her eyes were dry.
An hour later, I drove the Clio into a
gravel alley that ended in front of a wide low building painted white. Au
Cheval Blanc. The name of the restaurant betrayed its origins as stables for
the local landowner. In addition to serving excellent ‘gibier’ and local wines,
the restaurant also featured a hotel under its roof.
We checked in, one room each, adjacent
to each other. I convinced her to share a drink before going up, and while she
was obviously puzzled at my generosity, she didn’t seem to suspect anything.
I told her about my childhood trauma and
she expressed sympathy. What was more important, I ordered drinks for both of
us. This being a rather modest establishment, we just had simple martinis.
‘Are you going to tie me to the bed with
your handcuffs?’ she asked before we separated ways in the upstairs hall.
‘I don’t have to. I’m a light sleeper,
so I’ll hear it if you’re trying to slide out the window with all your sheets
tied up.’
She smiled, since she hardly realized I
had another method of keeping track of her.
First, I needed to reach Bill Tanner on
my encrypted phone. He was tied up with a hearing at Whitehall
I half thought about calling Felix
Leiter in Langley
So I called him again half an hour
later, while I heard Tess take a shower next door. Bill must have had a bad
day, because he first turned down my request for a three-way chat with Coryn’s
widow.
‘What did she know about Retep Vane’s
list?’ he asked.
‘I thought you should ask her that.’
‘For Jove’s sake, James, you’re spending
the day with her and I’m supposed to do your work? Get some answers from her
before we talk.’
‘It’ll move better when we’re two
against one,’ I suggested.
Bill seemed to believe that one so he
agreed on a conference call. I was to set things up with my laptop half an hour
later. I waited until I heard Tess turn the water off, gave her five minutes to
get dry and get dressed, and went over to the door of her room to knock.
‘It’s your neighbour, Juergen Moscher.’
I kept up that fiction, hoping she had memorized my fake identity.
‘Room service?’ she mocked me when
opening the door. She was wearing a white bath robe and slippers, but not much
else.
‘We need to talk to my boss, with the
laptop in my room.’
‘You’re telling me to get dressed after I
showered and prepared to have a rest?’
‘Sorry, but I’m working on MI6 time. I’m
sure even Bill Tanner has seen women in bath robes before.’ I signalled her to
come along with me, into my room.
After I set up the connection, Bill and
Tess made the necessary introductions. I felt like the translator at a
conference of highly educated translators. Useless, in other words.
My chief came to the sensitive questions
pretty rapidly, as I had expected. He didn’t want to be here ‘doing my job,’ as
he put it, he wanted to go home where his wife would have prepared a nice
casserole with some tasty puddings.
‘What is the connection between your
husband, Mrs. Maas, and a man named Retep Vane?’
‘Is that Retep Vane, the drugs and
weapons dealer?’
‘You seem to know him. What were the
links between your husband and him, did Coryn ever mention that?’
‘I don’t think there were any links.’
She watched as Bill and I exchanged
looks.
‘You cannot think my husband was in
league with such a scumbag like Vane, can you?’
I reached out and touched her hand. I
don’t know whether Bill could see that on his screen. ‘We found your husband’s
name on a list owned by Vane. That’s why I was here today. I was checking for
further evidence of a connection.’
‘You could have told me earlier. I would
have put that theory out of your head,’ she said.
‘Apart from your home in the Netherlands France
‘We still have relatives managing a
house we had in Florida Europe .
Coryn was thinking of buying a place in Croatia
‘In Croatia
‘The sunshine, the Mediterranean ,
the warm atmosphere, the beaches.’
‘You already have this cottage in France
‘There is no beach here, as your agent
here found out today. There is no law against CIA staff owning more than one
vacation home.’
‘I’m sure there isn’t, but we still need
to know everything about your husband. Are you certain he never met Retep Vane?’
‘I can’t be absolutely sure, because
there is a lot he didn’t tell me. Meeting somebody is one thing, working for
him is another. My husband held high moral principles.’
‘How did he afford a Porsche 911?’ Bill
continued.
‘You’re forgetting the Range Rover
Evoque,’ Tess said. ‘We both had money before we started our recent
occupations. Our parents were relatively wealthy, and they died rather early.’
I felt for her, having gone through the
same ordeal myself.
‘I want to talk to you.’ Bill pointed at
me, but didn’t want to use my name because I had told him I was still using a
cover with Tess.
‘That’s all for tonight then. Good night.’
Tess walked off without a further word.
‘She’s quite a piece, isn’t she?’
Bill wasn’t in the mood for light
banter. ‘I want you at that holiday home in Croatia
‘She said Coryn was dreaming of buying
such a place.’
‘We checked his accounts and found
evidence he already has one.’
‘He went behind his wife’s back and
bought a house in Croatia
‘Precisely. But you come back to London Croatia
‘Can’t we do the briefing right here,
right now?’ I didn’t feel like making the detour to London France
‘There are things not fit for discussion
on a web link with strangers listening in outside.’
‘I’ll drive back tomorrow. What should I
do with her?’
‘Don’t tell her more than you have to. And
don’t bring her to London Langley
I didn’t tell Bill I thought she was
extremely able to protect herself if she had to.
Chapter
Four
The Trellice was one of those
new-fangled places offering modern fusion cuisine mixed in with everything that
didn’t seem British. Despite that image, a friend had once recommended it to
me, so I booked a table for two. Bill had told me to go out eating with a
mystery emissary of his.
I had returned the rental Renault to its
place of origin in Clermont-Ferrand England Paris Netherlands
She was impressed with my Bentley Continental
GT.
‘Your Tanner shouldn’t be worried about
CIA operatives buying Porsches if this is what you can afford,’ she said.
Bill’s briefing had included handing me
the ticket to Dubrovnik
He had also ordered me to have the
dinner with this mystery guest.
The waiter brought a bottle of Italian
sparkling water to my table just as a dj started spinning what I believe was
known as soulful house.
I was sitting with my back to a wall and
my face directed at the main entrance, as I always do in restaurants if I can. A
middle-aged gent with a rapidly disappearing tuft of reddish hair on top of his
head approached my table. He was carrying a laptop case.
My muscles tensed. The Walther was
sitting in its usual place under my suit jacket.
‘Dance,’ he said.
‘Not tonight, thanks.’
‘Oliver Dance, that’s my name.’
I mumbled something in way of an apology
and gave him my name. ‘My name is Bond, James Bond.’
‘I know, otherwise I wouldn’t be here
shaking your hand. By the way, do you know shaking people’s hands amounts to a
massive exchange of bacteria and genetic information?’
Please. Who was this Oliver Dance? My
shrink?
‘How did the liquid work?’ he continued.
I must have looked flabbergasted, because
he pointed at his glass.
‘You want a drink, is that it?’ I waved
at the waiter.
‘I’ll do with a Cabernet Sauvignon,
unless you have something else in mind for tonight,’ he said.
That’s what I ordered from the waiter. Dance
looked at me with a grin.
‘What is it?’ He was beginning to annoy
me.
‘I meant the liquid you provided that
young American lady with.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Bill briefs me on everything.’
‘Does he?’ For a while, I had thought I
was the only one to share in Tanner’s confidence and absolute trust, but if
even this blowhard could hold the chief of staff’s ear, I began to wonder. ‘What
is it you want to tell me?’
‘The liquid you poured into that young
lady’s drink at the French auberge? Did it work?’
When Tess took a toilet break during
dinner, I emptied a capsule from my pocket into her glass. It contained a
tasteless and colourless liquid which set off a reaction that could be picked
up electronically long after its digestion. In other words, even now, I could
watch my cell phone and see where she was. In the northern part of Belgium
‘She was married, so she’s not a young
lady anymore’ I said.
‘She’s single again, so that should be
enough for you, from what I heard around the office.’
‘If you listen to office gossip, that
means you’ve got too much time on your hands.’
The waiter came with the bottle of wine,
and Dance did the obligatory swishing wine around the glass and tasting a
microscopic nip before saying it was excellent, which I strongly doubted it
was.
‘On the contrary, my dear 007, I have
been hard at work on your behalf.’ He reached into the laptop case and produced
a hard silver case, which he put on the space between our plates.
He must have noted the suspicion on my
face.
‘You still don’t know who I am, do you?’
‘You’re Oliver Dance and you’re one of
Bill Tanner’s friends,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘You really don’t know, do
you?’
I was tiring of his games. I thought
about taking out my Walther and shoving it in his face. Get on with whatever
you have to say, I thought.
‘I am the new quartermaster,’ he said.
‘What happened to …?’ He raised his hand
to stop me. I didn’t even know there was a new quartermaster. Why didn’t Bill
tell me?
‘This is on a need-to-know basis. He
took leave because he received an offer from a major corporate group based in California Silicon Valley , if they still use that term.’
‘So now I have to call you Q,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to do anything, but I
would appreciate it. Before you question my abilities, let me tell you that I
worked with Tim Berners-Lee.’
The inventor of the Internet, for those
who didn’t believe Al Gore. Dance had my attention, though I still wondered
what he had helped the wise man on. Probably something far less prestigious
than the Internet, but nevertheless.
‘I hacked into the FSB sites before they
found ours,’ he added. The FSB was the successor to the KGB, its post-Cold War
equivalent, less fear-inducing but still a potent rival, especially with the
growing Russian communities in Western Europe .
‘Good for you. What’s in that case?’
Since the waiter was arriving with the
veal and orange dishes I had ordered, Dance – I still found it hard to call him
Q – kept the case on his lap until he found a new place to put it.
He opened it and handed it to me.
I saw a row of transparent tubes with
coloured plastic caps and a square plastic object, white and flat.
‘Is this my iPod?’ I asked.
Dance smirked. ‘Please, 007, don’t laugh
at me. Let me first introduce you to one of the basic laws of chemistry.’
The last thing I was in the mood for was
chemistry, especially with a man like this.
‘Each colour on those tubes represents a
different function. Blue is sleep.’
There were three tubes with blue caps,
two with red ones, two with yellow ones.
‘The red ones are poison. You mix them
in with anything and they have a mortal effect. Even a small drip on, let’s
say, this piece of veal on my plate, will be enough to send me into the
afterlife. The yellow ones have a double function. They act as a serum
neutralizing the effects of the red ones, though you have to apply them within
ten seconds to be effective. They also act as a truth serum. Whoever swallows
this, will be unable to hide lies from you.’
‘Are you going to tell me about the
iPod?’ I asked, pointing at the small plastic square.
‘You’re not going to tell me you’ve
never seen one of those before?’ Dance asked.
I certainly wasn’t planning to flatter
him with my supposed stupidity.
‘It’s a transmitter-receiver. Made
entirely of substances which don’t set off alarms at airports or under the roving
eye of handheld metal detectors.’
I picked it up and noticed a blue and a
red button. ‘What are these for and how do I explain this to someone who finds
it?’
‘The blue button is on, the red is off. Don’t
explain anything. Just say it’s a toy you bought for your son.’
‘What kind of toy is this?’
‘Just something any child will be happy
to fiddle with.’
I couldn’t think up any reason why a child
would want to fiddle with a white piece of plastic, unless it was a toddler who
would put it into his mouth, bite it, and throw it away if it bored him. Which
it would within a minute. I didn’t need to have children to know that.
‘Do you have children?’ I asked Dance.
‘A son who just moved to Boston
‘Congratulations. You tested all of
this?’
He nodded. We got to work on the veal
with orange sauce. The conversation was dominated by Dance describing his
children’s career planning with me. I could never talk like that, not just
because my job didn’t leave me any room for children or any semblance of a
normal family life, but also because I could never reveal such intimate details
about myself to anyone. The number of people I could allow to know details of
my private life had to be held down to fewer than five.
Dance saw me glance at my watch after we
finished the tiramisu with cranberry sauce.
‘One more thing, before I forget.’
He pulled a watch from the inside pocket
of his suit. Diners around us probably thought he was trying to sell me a
counterfeit.
‘That’s the same watch I already have.’ I
showed him mine.
‘No, it’s not.’ Again that annoying
smirk on his face, like the teacher telling off a naughty little boy. ‘The one
I’m giving to you has a built-in GPS and messaging device.’
‘So you don’t have a tube with fluid
that you inject in my veins to know my whereabouts?’
‘You can do that with your American
lady, but it wears off after a week. This one never does because it recharges
itself with solar energy.’
‘What if I put this watch where the sun
don’t shine?’
Dance did not see the joke.
‘What about the message device?’
‘You work it with the numbers.’ He
explained the whole works to me, press the button on the right that many times,
and a list of letters would appear, than with each letter marked, the watch
would give you a list of words to choose from. I felt it was more complicated
than texting on a mobile phone, but I didn’t want to offend our Internet genius
so I listened to all of his gibberish and pretended to admire his ingenuity.
‘You invented this all by yourself?’
‘007, you know Q is a team, not just one
person. I’m only the human face of Q, the voice who translates the
technological mumbo-jumbo into language understandable to field agents.’
Why did it sound like field agents were
a subhuman species?
We left the restaurant as new
acquaintances, uneasy about each other and wondering if our next meeting would
confirm a positive relationship or show us we should keep apart.
He took a taxi to wherever he lived, I
took the underground to Chelsea
Chapter
Five
The glare forced me to put on my
sunglasses straight away as I walked down the movable staircase on to the
tarmac. The weather in Croatia London
I was prepared. I was wearing a white
pair of trousers and a pinkish short-sleeved dress shirt from a London
The arrival hall was not exactly
crowded. That’s why I immediately noted the person in the grey chauffeur
uniform holding up the sign with the name Loiseau. The French word for ‘the
bird.’ Nice touch, I thought. I wondered if Dance was responsible for choosing
the name on my new fake French passport. If questioned about my French, I could
pretend my mother was English-speaking and I had grown up in some non-French
speaking country like the US Ireland
The person in the grey uniform was a
woman.
‘Triss Marron,’ she said after she had
helped me put my backpack in the boot of the Audi A8 and we had taken place in
the car.
‘Therese?’
‘Triss, like in Beatrice, but with
double s.’
I might not understand her name, but she
had my attention. She looked athletic with a strong push in the feminine
direction. The colour of her hair was like her name, marron or chestnut brown,
cut off in two straight lines on the side. Sharp nose, sharp eyes. I could tell
she was an MI6 agent.
‘You came down from Zagreb
‘I arrived here two days ago to look for
the property.’
‘And?’
‘It looks empty, but we can’t afford to
drive by in a car like this. They’ll remember.’
‘Where am I staying?’
‘Within walking distance of both the old
town and the Maas place.’
‘What else can you tell me about the
house?’
‘Coryn Maas bought it four years ago
through a shell corporation registered in Hong Kong ,
Phoenix Meuse Development and Investment. He’s spent very little time here,
since the neighbours only remember a caretaker passing by occasionally.’
‘Do we have a grip on the caretaker?’
As we rounded another bend, Dubrovnik
‘He’s not been seen for a while,
according to the neighbours.’
‘You posed as a real estate agent, I
imagine.’
‘Absolutely right. Do you want to get
inside tonight?’
‘I’d love to get inside straight away. What’s
the passage like?’ If it was in a desolate part of town, I would want to
inspect the house right now. Keep things short and simple.
‘We’ll check in at your hotel first,
then I’ll pretend to take you on a tour of the city.’
‘That’s nice of you, Miss Marron.’
‘Triss.’
‘Triss it is.’ The name reminded me of
Tess, same consonants, short and tough. I spent the rest of the ride admiring
the scenery. The road had winded down almost to sea level and passed the outer
walls of the old city on the land side. Even MI6 agents read guidebooks, so I
knew you could walk up the walls and go all the way around the city if you had
enough time. I wasn’t here for the sightseeing, but I might come back here on
holiday if I didn’t leave behind too much broken crockery, damaged egos or
worse this time.
Triss Marron would be a nice type of
person to keep me company on a holiday, though I didn’t know if she would find
enough time to come down from Zagreb
‘Do you often come here?’
‘Most of my business is inland. There is
some smuggling along the coast, since it’s the main route between Albania Bosnia Zagreb
I knew what she meant. Drugs from Turkey Bosnia
‘There is your hotel.’
A rectangular building in neoclassical
style, but obviously not older than a decade.
‘I’ll park the car outside, pretending
to be your driver. We’ll meet down there, at the bus stop.’ She waved at a
crowded street where buses, taxis and other vehicles fought for every space.
I checked in. My room was a suite on the
fourth floor with a brilliant view of the northwest side of town. The hotel was
outside of the old city, but I could see the main entrance, the heavy-set Pile
gate, where all the tourists passed through to head into town. I scrubbed my
face, packed my essential gear into a small backpack, and set out.
I didn’t know how Triss had done it, but
she had made the car disappear and she was now waiting for me to cross the
street and head into the old town. She was still wearing her uniform, but
without the cap that would have drawn too much attention.
She looked a lot better without it. I
could visualize her without the uniform and in more feminine attire. She had an
athletic figure, with the only awkward element the slight bump caused by the
gun inside her jacket.
‘Pay attention to your surroundings. It’s
crowded everywhere, and we don’t want anybody sticking needles into you,’ she
said.
‘How romantic.’ She was referring to
Bulgarian agents who once stabbed a dissident working for the BBC in London
We passed through the Pile gate without
saying a word, just moving our way through the throngs of tourists in light
togs and with cameras and mobile phones at the ready. I looked out for people
snapping us instead of the monuments. The crowds provided us with a perfect
cover, but they also would protect anybody following and observing us.
The other side might have a few
inconspicuous elements posing as tourists here and there, relaxing while taking
pictures of us. As soon as we entered the old town, there was a round low
covered structure to our right.
‘The old town’s water supply,’ Triss
commented.
In front of us was the Placa, pronounced
Pla-tsah, a long straight boulevard which once was a canal dividing the
mainland from an island on the right. Now it was the place to be seen, the
car-free street where everybody walked from morning until late evening to see
and to be seen.
A couple of actors dressed up as animals
from a popular cartoon blockbuster jumped past us into the crowds. Both Triss
and I were on edge, but just for a second.
‘I’m still missing one piece of my
equipment,’ I whispered to her, covering my mouth just in case a lip reader was
observing us.
‘Just a bit of patience, we’re almost
there.’
‘Do you mean it’s at the house?’
She laughed at me like a tour guide who
had just told a joke. My sense of humour wasn’t exactly going viral. I felt
naked again without my Walther, but that was the problem with air travel these
days. Even if you put a weapon in your check-in luggage, it would provoke a
row.
That’s why Bill had said he would
entrust the local agent with the armaments part of the trip. I wasn’t confident
Triss was quite up to speed with my requirements.
‘Where’s the house?’
‘You see the building at the end of the
street which looks like the Doges’ Palace in Venice
I nodded.
‘The fourth street on the right before
we get there.’
The side streets were not really
streets, they were alleys. On the left, I could see narrow staircases going up
between the houses, up toward the mountainous land side. Side streets on the
right were slightly wider and flat. Despite the ban on cars, there was still a
kind of motorized tricycles moving through. They were used to deliver goods to
restaurants and shops and to take away the garbage.
‘Follow me.’
Triss suddenly veered right, and before
I could object and say this was not the alley where Coryn’s house was supposed
to be, she had put at least fifteen feet between us. I nearly bumped into a
little old lady in black who was sitting on a chair in front of her house. I
mumbled an apology in French, true to my role.
Triss accelerated, as if she was trying
to lose me. I pretended to be looking left and right, admiring the old houses
which had survived earthquakes and battles from Napoleon until a siege by the
Serbs in the 1990s war of independence.
She fled into a portal on the right. Without
missing a beat, I stormed inside, hoping there was no trick. I didn’t want to
bump into a metal door or fall into a well. Triss was waiting for me by a heavy
oak door. As soon as I was inside, she closed it behind me. We were facing a
patio, an inside court where a collection of cacti received light from above.
Without a word, Triss went up a spiral
staircase with fine bronze and stone carvings worked into the side. I wasn’t
here to admire the sculptures, I wanted to know what she was up to. It wasn’t
until we had reached the roof that she spoke again.
The view took my breath away. As far as
you could see, orange tiles, some of them brighter than others.
‘The new ones were placed to repair
damage from the war,’ she said, falling back into her part as a guide.
On the left was the mountain side,
leading up to a centuries-old fortress where the Serbs had set up their
artillery to shell the historic town. On the right I could see the Adriatic
shine in the sun, with a forested island in the background.
‘Are we really here just to enjoy the
view?’
Triss didn’t look at me but paced toward
a collection of flower pots filled with earth and not-so-healthy looking
plants. She grabbed a hoe and started digging up one of the pots. She pulled
out a yellow plastic bag and swung it at me. I caught it. Its contents were
unmistakeable. I peered inside to look at the Glock.
‘Put it in your backpack,’ she said.
‘What if someone had decided to throw
out these dying plants?’
‘What if?’ she asked back.
‘Can we see the house from up here?’
Instead of pointing into the distance,
Triss took her mobile and put it into camera mode. She zoomed in on one
particular roof somewhere to the right of the chunk of city we were facing.
‘Is there a way to cross over from here?’
‘Are you mad? We’ll cause more damage
than is good for us. We need to go there the old-fashioned way, on the surface.’
She ticked me on the shoulder and turned
back toward the staircase. A minute later, we were strolling on the Placa with
thousands of real tourists again.
When we emerged on the main street, I
saw a man in a light cream suit standing on the opposite side, apparently
paying attention to postcards and video recordings of the war. As soon as we
turned right in the direction of what Triss had described as the Doges’ Palace
look-alike, he left the souvenir shop and paced in the same direction. He went
slower than us, so I couldn’t look back without making myself conspicuous. I
kept four feet behind Triss, looking into shop windows when I had the
opportunity, not to inspect the goods on offer, but to see whether Mister Cream
Suit was still tailing us. He was falling back.
We were just one street away from the
one where Coryn Maas had his holiday home when I decided to tell Triss about
the man.
‘The local intelligence service knows
me. They might have decided to put a man on me as they saw me take the flight
here,’ she said.
‘Isn’t that a threat to our operation?’
‘What can he do? He’ll see us enter a
house and leave again. There’s no crime in that.’
‘There is if he sees we’re breaking in
and he knows the house doesn’t belong to us.’
‘He could be thinking you’re renting and
you’re taking me inside for an afternoon tryst.’
‘That’s what I call positive thinking,
Triss.’
A tryst with Triss.
She abruptly turned into the alley, not
the one where Coryn Maas was supposed to have a house, but one earlier. I
followed her for ten paces until she turned right into an even narrower alley
and I hit a left to hide at the entrance to a patio. We waited for the man in
the cream suit to show up, but he didn’t.
I counted to ten and shook my shoulders.
We moved further into a warren of passageways where no two people could walk
abreast.
‘How are we going to enter?’
She lifted an object in the air which
looked like a metal thong. I smiled my approval. I couldn’t see that work in a
modern home in London
‘Are you sure he doesn’t have a
sophisticated alarm system in place?’
‘If he has, why does he need a
caretaker?’
Point taken. We took a sharp left and a
left again until we reached an alley that was four slabs wide. There was
laundry hanging from the upstairs windows, and the sun just found a
three-foot-wide gap to shine on the floor.
‘That’s the one,’ she whispered. Three
houses ahead on our right, an empty-looking three-floor house painted light
blue. Rather charming, I thought, though I would have preferred it to be
situated closer to a beach.
I didn’t like the fact that there was an
eighty-something lady sitting on a chair in her doorway three houses further
across the street, and she was talking to somebody who liked a postman. As
Triss was working to open the door, the uniformed man walked over to our side. I
smiled at him, which kept his eyes away from my partner’s efforts on the door. He
handed me an envelope addressed to Mr. Maas at this address. It bore a Belgian
stamp.
‘Are you done yet?’ I asked Triss as the
postman walked away and I ripped open the envelope.
She mumbled something which sounded
angry and pushed the door open. We went inside and found a dark and musty
hallway with two doorways on either side. These were comfortable rooms, but at
first sight there was nothing we were interested in. No computers, no file
cabinets, just sofas, chairs and tables, paintings of the Croatian coast.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ I said, still
holding the envelope in my hands. I was going to wait until we found some light
before looking at its contents. ‘Shouldn’t we pay the caretaker a visit?’
The fewer people knew about our visit,
the better, but the caretaker might inform us about Coryn’s comings and goings,
and especially about visitors he might have received here. Looking at the
property, I somehow didn’t think Vane might have showed up here in person. Too
dark, too confined, too cramped for his style.
‘Will he survive our visit?’ Triss asked
as we moved up the stairs. She was now brandishing her weapon. I took the
precaution of doing the same, though I felt this house was empty, as dead as
its occupant was.
‘What do you think I am? A ruthless
killing machine?’
‘That’s what I’ve been told.’
‘By whom? Not Bill Tanner, I expect.’
She shook her head and put her finger in
front of her lips as we arrived on the upper floor. She went down the hallway
and into the rooms in Hollywood cop movie
style. Gun in both hands first, pointing it left and right in quick succession.
If anybody had been inside with anything heavier than a miniature toy gun, she
would have paid a heavy price.
The rooms were as dull and dead as those
on the ground floor. It didn’t look like Coryn Maas had visited lately.
‘What was that letter the postman gave
you?’ Triss asked as we were preparing to move to even higher ground.
‘Postmark Belgium
‘That’s where he lived with his wife,
isn’t it?’
‘In Holland Belgium Brussels Europe , the European
Union, NATO, all of that. A great place to spy.’
‘So what’s in the letter?’
I used my mobile phone as a flashlight. It
had an app I had downloaded just last year, when I needed to find my way on an
unlighted path for a morning excursion in Cambodia
Just as I was looking at the first
paragraph, we heard a bump upstairs. I immediately closed my cell phone, put
the letter in my back pocket and took the Glock out of my backpack.
I moved up the stairs first, letting
Triss cover my back.
At the top of the staircase, the space
was only four feet high. On the right, a few old suitcases were stacked in a
corner. I pushed open the door on the left, which revealed a child’s bed
covered in cobwebs. There was nobody there.
Something was scraping its way on top of
the roof. I looked up and saw a square pane of wood. The access to the roof. I
pointed at it to make clear to Triss that this was our next destination.
I don’t know what I was expecting. The
caretaker? The man in the cream suit? Instead, after I pulled down the pane and
stuck my head through the hole, I saw a Chinese man in a polo shirt and slacks
pulling away a heavily bleeding old man.
‘Stop,’ I said, pointing the gun at him.
Before I could pull the trigger, he dropped the old man and leaped off the roof
to the top of a neighbouring house.
‘Save this guy,’ I told Triss and off I
went, never looking back.
By the time I left the roof of Coryn’s
house flying, the Chinese guy was two buildings further. After heading inland,
he suddenly moved to the right. It was impossible for me to get a clean shot. First
of all, I would have had to stop to focus my aim, and that would have given him
the opportunity to increase the distance.
I didn’t give him that chance. I jumped
from roof to roof, brushing laundry out of the way, leaping over treacherous
edges and kicking buckets to the side. When I arrived at an alley, I pulled
back and jumped. I landed on both my feet before rolling over.
Two roofs away from me, the Chinese man kicked
open a door and vanished inside. He was running down to street level. I needed
to catch up with him or I would lose him in the crowds of tourists.
Instead of following him, I took a short
cut.
I stuffed the Glock back in my backpack,
not expecting my target to take the time to turn around and threaten me, and I
took hold of a metal bar hanging over the edge of a house. I swung my legs,
looked down which I know you’re not supposed to do but you have to if you want
to know where you are going to land. I let go and landed on the balcony of a
room below. A red, black and white cat hissed at me from behind the window. I
jumped over the balcony and did the same thing again, measure the distance to
the lower floor, let go and catch the metal railing of the balcony below. This
time, it wasn’t a cat staring at me, it was a butch guy in his underwear. He
was reaching for something, but by the time he had grabbed it, I was already
down on the street, picking myself back up again.
I ran in the direction where I expected the
Chinese man to emerge. I counted to three. Nothing happened. I suddenly
understood. The house was standing against the outer wall of the city. It must
have a rear exit.
I pushed my way past a throng of
stunning Israeli women who only captured my attention for five seconds. I went
round the corner faster than a skater on steroids. There he was. My target. Halfway
up a staircase on the side of the city wall.
I could have taken a shot there if it
hadn’t been for those tourists going up and down the same staircase, slowing
the Chinese man down but reducing his vulnerability as a target. There was also
the fact that I had put my gun in my backpack.
I raced up the stairs as well. The view
at the top was absolutely brilliant, if you were there as a sightseer. The old
city with its orange roofs, the palace and the basilica were on the left, with
those stark mountains in the background. On the right, there was a view down
the steep walls to the Adriatic .
The only view that interested me was the
one showing my target running up and down the walls away from me. I followed
suit, pushing and shoving tourists out of the way. The only consolation I had,
was that he faced the same problem. Overcrowding, the perils of mass tourism,
hot weather that sent sweat streaming down my back. Blame it on climate change.
I needed to stop this chap and ask him
what he was doing in the Coryn Maas holiday home besides trying to kill the
caretaker. I never considered the possibility of failure, because to do so
would lead to the acceptance of failure. I could consider that if he ran off, I
would still have the letter someone sent from Belgium Maas
at this address, but I couldn’t guarantee the message would include anything
useful.
So I repressed the option of failure and
I ran on, brushing aside the angry looks of the bystanders and focusing my
attention on the man in the polo shirt, still running away from me at a
frenzied pace that meant he was far younger and fitter than me.
There was a sharp descent where he just
took three steps in one go, but the downhill stretch was followed by a steep
climb back up. I tried to outdo him by taking four steps in one go, but that
resulted in me smashing against the wall and nearly losing my balance.
He was on the way back up. I leaped like
a mad leprechaun. The way up was far harder and he increased his advantage
again. By the time I was at the top, he had opened the distance between the two
of us. I paused for a nanosecond to wipe the sweat off my forehead before
surging forward.
The stretch up ahead was straight and
relatively flat, which allowed me to make up some lost ground and to look
around. Down on the left below the wall was a busy street, where tourists were
milling in the shade to look at souvenirs. Down on the right was the Adriatic , lapping at the foot of the wall. A cruise ship
was coming up in the distance, manoeuvring its way between the old city and an
island.
I looked ahead and I saw a woman coming
from the other direction. A woman in an athlete’s track suit and with a black
baseball cap tight on her head. That wasn’t enough of a disguise to prevent me
from recognizing her though.
Chapter Six
Tess Rivera brushed a hawker aside who
was trying to sell her computer mousepads with black-and-white pictures of the Dubrovnik
I saw the bulge in her pocket. I was
sure it wasn’t a rabbit’s foot, but I couldn’t tell whether it was a gun. Even
the Chinese man, who had probably never seen Tess before, sensed danger.
He slowed down as he saw himself locked
between Tess and me. She spread her arms to block his passage. He looked down
at the crowd on the left but chose against going that way. The landing would
not be soft.
My target wasn’t surrendering. He looked
back, saw me and spat on the ground. Then he slung his right leg over the
railing on the sea side, his left leg followed, and he leaped into the void.
Not again, I thought. I still remembered
my jump into the Aegean from the chapel. This
time, I was wearing all my clothes. Tess shot me a surprised look when I swung
over the railing myself and landed in the Adriatic just five feet from my
target.
‘Stop it or you’re going to drown,’ I
shouted at the Chinese man. I didn’t even know whether he spoke English, but
his swimming ability certainly wasn’t much to crow about. He splashed and
splattered about like a goldfish thrown out of its bowl by a cat.
I bumped my fist into his head as a show
of force. He dived or should I say, he sank? When he didn’t come back up again,
I followed him down.
He had created some more distance
between us, so his swimming skills were not as bad as I had assumed. Never
underestimate an enemy. If I have tricks up my sleeve, so will he.
I moved forward under water before
getting to the surface just before he did. I love swimming for recreation, but
moving around with your clothes on and a backpack restricting your movements is
a drag.
Just as I threw myself at him, the
cruise ship came into view. It was boring right at us. I pulled at his hair
with my left hand and slung my right around his neck. He thought I wanted to
drown him, but I needed him alive.
I could hear the shouts from the cruise passengers.
Dozens, maybe hundreds were crowding on this side of the ship to get a good
view of the city walls, but as an extra they got an aquatic fight between me
and my target. I wondered if they thought this was a show put on for their
benefit, because I seemed to hear cheers when I pulled the Chinese man under
water.
When we surfaced again, we got the waves
from the ship right in our faces. I finally managed to free a hand to take the
Glock I had received from Triss and put it against the man’s head.
‘Stop it now, or you’re dead.’
‘You don’t want to kill me, bro,’ he
said in a fluent American accent that upset me.
‘I’m not your bro. Who are you working
for?’
He grinned but remained speechless, even
when I threatened to pull him under water again.
He took advantage of the scrap to pull
out a knife from inside his trouser leg. He stabbed at me but his movements
were slowed down by the water. For the next minute, which felt like half an
hour, we were fighting a ballet. He knew I wouldn’t kill him with my gun, but
he had no such compunctions.
I bashed a fist into his temple, but
that didn’t seem to slow him down. He kept wielding his knife, ripping holes in
my shirt. I struck him with the butt of my Glock and slammed my left into his
right ear.
He sagged and I took the opportunity to
pressure his hand into releasing the knife. It sank out of view but still he
wasn’t giving up. He opened his eyes, spat water in my face and kicked me in
the shins.
A motorized sloop approached.
‘Do you work for Retep Vane?’ I managed
to ask before he slipped out of my grip and swam off.
I hurried to chase him but he reached
the sloop before I could touch him.
‘Police, stop him,’ I shouted, but my
words made no impression on the Croatian fisherman. He helped the Chinese man
on board and turned away just before I reached the boat.
I fired two shots at the vessel which
was now heading for the old harbour at high speed. I looked up to find Tess
Rivera on the wall. She was gone. Instead, there were crowds of tourists looking,
some of them waving at me. I waved back.
‘Who was he?’ I asked Triss. I was
putting on fresh, dry clothes in my hotel bathroom while she was enjoying a
glass of Pinot Noir on the balcony. The sun was going down after a tough day.
‘The caretaker. Before he died, he said
he hadn’t seen Coryn Maas at the property since last year.’
‘That’s useful. A dead caretaker and a
murderer on the loose.’
I hadn’t told Triss about Tess Rivera’s
presence in Dubrovnik
‘What did he have to say about the
Chinese man?’
‘He showed up at the door just ten
minutes before we arrived.’
‘Did he take anything?’ I could hit
myself for failing to have searched his pockets, but the Adriatic
was not the perfect place to do so.
I appeared in the room wearing a white
pair of trousers and a turquoise polo shirt. Triss whistled.
‘He said he was an emissary from Maas himself and needed to pick up a file.’
‘What kind of file?’
‘The caretaker said he didn’t know where
it was, and he got suspicious when his visitor got pushy and wanted to search
Coryn’s room.’
‘What’s the end of the story?’ I was
growing impatient, and hungry.
‘Just when the caretaker was about to
ask him to leave, the man found what he was looking for. A small plastic box. Then
he turned to face the caretaker and stabbed him with a knife.’
‘When we found him, he was moving the
man about on the roof. What was the point of that?’
‘The box was hidden on the roof, inside
a fake chimney,’ Triss said.
I pulled Triss down to the restaurant
for a dish of local mutton and meatballs, flushed down with imported wines. I
couldn’t care less about the vintage, I just wanted to eat, drink and sleep.
We were about to order desserts when my mobiledf
rang.
‘Bill,’ I said. The weariness was
dripping from my mouth.
‘You had a rough day but maybe tomorrow
will be better,’ the chief of staff said.
‘I take it you have good news for me.’
‘It depends on how you take it. Our old
friend Retep Vane and his entourage have landed in your part of the world. A
flight from the Turkish part of Cyprus Pula
Vane spent most of his time in Northern Cyprus because it had no diplomatic relations
and therefore no extradition agreements with most of the rest of the world
apart from Turkey
Bill turned out to know as much as I did
about Croatian geography. ‘You need to be on a domestic flight out there first
thing tomorrow morning.’
I briefed him about the Chinese man and
the plastic box from the Maas house. I didn’t
give him the details about how he gave me the slip. That would be something for
the report I would eventually dictate to one of the pool secretaries at MI6.
She would type it up and e-mail it to Bill, who I hoped would be far too busy
to read it in detail.
I was an action man, not a bureaucrat. Even
action men needed a break, and this evening was as much as I could enjoy.
‘We’re off to Pula
‘I also have good news for you,’ she
told me after looking at the screen of her phone.
‘The Croatian police are not going to
interrogate me about my little splash off the walls of Dubrovnik
‘James, let’s not get ahead of
ourselves. My office in Zagreb
‘You are getting ahead of me.’ I admired
her initiative, but then I could hardly expect her to be just my sidekick. I
watched her push hair off her forehead to one side.
‘A Japanese-looking man – those are the
words of my informant – was signalled arriving dripping wet at an address on
the other side of town. He walked out half an hour later and drove a BMW 3 up
north.’
‘Any words on his destination?’
‘We didn’t question him, we only saw him
leave.’
‘What about the man in the cream suit?’
‘You’re still thinking about that guy,
James? He must have made quite an impression on you. I suspect he was just one
of the local guys keeping a look out for British agents causing mischief.’
I wondered if he was working together
with Tess. I had expected that man to enter Coryn’s holiday home, but instead
there was the Chinese man. There seemed to be no link between the two.
We ordered tea rather than coffee
because we wanted to be rested and fit to catch the early-morning flight from Dubrovnik Pula
I saw the number and opened the message.
‘Look at this,’ I told Triss. I showed her the picture of the Chinese man,
looking scared as he prepared to jump into the Adriatic .
‘Is that her?’
I had told Triss about my brief
encounter with Tess Rivera, how she forced our target to head for the water.
‘Shouldn’t we be looking for her?’ Triss
asked.
‘Our priority right now is to find Vane
and catch this man if we can. I just hope Tess won’t find him before we do. I’ll
send the picture to Q for analysis.’
‘The quartermaster. How is he?’
She had never met Oliver Dance. Not
surprisingly, since she had been staying in Zagreb London
‘He doesn’t sound like someone I’d like
to meet.’
‘You’re lucky they sent me instead.’
‘I’d like to know about the types of
weapons he supplied you with on this mission.’
‘The usual stuff. A transmitter, some
juice to pour in people’s drinks and make them talk or not.’
‘Do you have anything for me, James?’
‘I could mix you a Martini if you’re up
to it.’
Her smile as she leaned in closer told
me she was. I was about to whisper sweet somethings in her ear when my mobile
phone interrupted me again.
‘That was fast. Who is it this time?’
Triss asked.
‘Q or one of the minions in his empire
put the Chinese man’s picture into the database and found a positive match.’
I showed her the file picture.
Underneath were all the details. Bokey Tan, aged 35, born in Taiwan California Europe , so his presence in Croatia US
‘What do we do if we meet him again?’
‘That depends on how he reacts. He
shoots, we shoot, he loses. If we catch him alive, we ask him what we want to know,
and then we deliver him to wherever he’s a wanted man.’
‘He sounds like a common criminal more
than an intelligence operator.’
‘That’s why we can afford to send him
away, unless he has confidential information he can use as an asset to win a
more favourable deal.’
Bokey Tan was driving north. I wondered
whether we would meet him again and find the plastic box he had taken from
Coryn’s holiday home.
With the tea almost gone, I asked
whether Triss wanted a tiramisu. She didn’t. We went upstairs, locking arms in
the lift.
As I closed the curtains in my room, I
pretended not to be surprised at the man standing across the street below. He
was still wearing the cream suit.
I kissed Triss but I knew I would have
another task tonight. I asked her to stay put and to act as if the room was
occupied. Keep all the lights on, move about. I checked the Glock and went
downstairs.
Instead of moving through the lobby
where I would be seen from the street level, I passed through the kitchens and
went out the rear where the delivery trucks came to supply the hotel. The smell
of rotting food was pungent.
The man in the cream suit had moved. He
must have realized that I had seen him and that I would be coming after him.
I crossed the street in front of the
hotel and slipped into an alley. He might have withdrawn here to wait, or he
might have decided to move as far away as possible and resume his job tomorrow
morning.
I ran around the alleys near the hotel. Since
we were outside the old town, the houses were newer and the streets wider. I
found my target heading for the Pile gate to enter the old city. I tailed him
but stayed at a reasonable distance. Even at this hour, there were still
sufficient numbers of tourists going for an evening stroll that I could hide
behind them if he happened to look back. He didn’t.
As soon as he’d vanished into town out
of my view, I raced forward. Too late. He was nowhere to be seen. There was a
narrow passageway to the left on the inside of the city wall. Unless he had
entered a nearby house, that was the ideal way to hide. I rushed in with one
hand on the Glock in my pocket.
I was moving past the first side street
when he hit me. The metal tube he was brandishing hit me on the arm like a
train. I loosened my grip on the gun and stumbled against a wall. He lifted the
tube again and would have smashed it into my head if I hadn’t stepped back. Instead,
it hit the wall of the house with a loud metallic clang.
I evaluated the possibility of screaming
my lungs out, but I wondered whether that would scare tourists away from the
alley rather than draw them in to help me.
I decided against noise and grabbed the
man’s leg instead, pulling it toward me so he lost his balance and fell to the
stone floor. I jumped on top of him, slammed my left against his chin and
reached inside my pocket for the Glock. The tube was useless now. He dropped it
and let it roll across the floor.
Once disarmed, he seemed to become
clueless. He wriggled under me but I kept him pinned to the floor. I pressed
the gun into his loins.
‘Whom are you working for?’ I hissed
into his face, adding spit to the threat.
‘Don’t kill me,’ he begged like only a
coward would. Fighting off people like me was obviously not on his programme
unless he had the upper hand from the start.
‘Come with me to the hotel and tell me
everything,’ I said. I preferred to have everything done with here, but I
needed something to make him feel more comfortable. He knew I wouldn’t kill him
inside the hotel.
Before waiting for his reaction, I
searched him. He wasn’t carrying any guns, which meant he was more of an
observer than an active fighter. I filched his mobile phone and looked down the
numbers of incoming and outgoing calls, but nothing struck me as familiar.
‘I’m not going to ask it again. Whom are
you working for?’
‘I don’t know.’
Wrong answer. I picked him up and
smashed him into the wall, away from the lone street light in the alley. The
gun was pointing at his stomach.
‘That’s not the kind of answer that will
win you points with me. Your name, nationality, or else.’ I pressed the gun in
so hard I feared his dinner might fly out his mouth.
‘Milan
‘Who’s in Milan
‘No, Milan
Fair enough. Milan Yugoslavia
‘Croat of course, I’m from Zadar.’
A city up the coast.
‘Why are you following me?’
I had to relax the pressure because an
elderly couple had entered the alley, no doubt on their way home. I tried to
smile at them, hoping they would not call the police about the presence of two
shady men in their street.
Once they had disappeared out of my
sight, I put the gun against Milan
‘They sent me an e-mail and some money,
so I started working for them.’
I got the picture. He claimed he never
met the people he was working for. ‘What did they want you to do?’
‘To follow the woman and report any
contacts or activities.’
‘So you were following my partner, not
me?’
‘When you joined up together, you also
became a person of interest.’
‘A person of interest? So that’s what I
am to you? What else did you tell them?’
‘Everything. About your visit to the
house, your run on the walls and the fight with the Asian.’
‘Do you know the Asian, Milan
‘Never seen him before.’
I pressed his mobile to his face. ‘You
are going to call them now and tell them I am leaving town to head back to Britain
‘I can’t do that. I never call them, I
only send them text messages.’
Another job for Q. I would ask to check
all the numbers on Milan
‘What did you say your last name was?’
‘Tobak. My name is Milan Tobak.’
I send the messages to Q hoping he was
still up and about. There was a 24-hour service, but I didn’t know how high my
priority was in the grand scheme of things. My inquiries were not related to
any imminent threat.
‘What are you going to do with me?’
‘Put you on the next plane to Zadar and
make sure I never see you again.’
‘My mission is to stay on your tail
until you leave the country.’
‘I’m flying out tomorrow morning so you
can sleep for an hour of eight. Make sure I don’t see you again.’
I watched him walk back to the main
street. I kicked the metal tube into a drain and set off to the hotel. I still
had my gun and his mobile. Would he carry more efficient arms the next time? I
sincerely hoped I would never see him again, because I didn’t like being
watched by anonymous people.
‘Does the name Milan Tobak mean anything
to you?’ I asked Triss when I arrived back in my room.
‘He gave you his name?’ She walked up to
me and held me before giving me a kiss full on the lips.
‘He received messages telling him to
follow you around. Then he saw you joining up with me, and decided I was the
one to tail.’
‘Sounds like a low-level operator. Did
you hurt him?’
‘No, but I told me I didn’t want to see
him again, and we were leaving the country tomorrow morning.’
‘Do you think he’s outside now?’
She almost made me loose my balance the
way she swung around and hung from my neck.
‘The curtains are closed. This is our
world, whoever’s outside.’
We forgot about the man in the cream
suit, the Chinese man. I didn’t forget Tess Rivera.
Chapter
Seven
Sleeping on the road had never been my
forte. Whether on a train, bus, plane or in someone else’s car, I was never
able to fall asleep because I wanted to stay aware of my ever-changing
surroundings. I preferred not to have anyone else drive, because I wanted to
keep control over my direction. If anything came up, I wanted to react the way I
wanted.
That’s why I didn’t sleep on the flight
from Dubrovnik Pula Croatia
After we arrived, Triss had arranged a
car at the airport, an Audi A4 with its handbrake the size of a Rubik’s cube, and
a pair of Berettas hidden under the passenger seat. She had left our previous
guns at a safe in the hotel, where someone she trusted would pick them up and
send them back to Zagreb
‘It’s a difficult country to move about
in,’ Triss said, launching into a description of the geography. An extremely
long coast, hundreds of inhabited and uninhabited islands, a large hinterland
and a narrow area between the two parts of the country, with Bosnia
As promised, MI6 texted me the full
details of Retep Vane’s whereabouts by the time we reached a safe house near
the centre of Pula noon ,
we went for a stroll through the town, behaving like the young foreign couple
we were supposed to be.
We saw a bronze model of the city in a
park, walked past the well-preserved Roman amphitheatre which looked even
better than its bigger brother the Coliseum, and strolled through a Roman gate,
reminding me of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris
We picked a restaurant along a
pedestrian street, reducing the risk of a drive-by shooting. I still insisted
we sit inside, out of the view of casual passersby, some of who might not be as
casual as they looked.
Retep Vane never travelled alone. He
would have a retinue of thugs with him, and after what I did on Aghia
Lefkameni, they would be armed. Instead of sticking to my mission and steal the
laptop, I should have incapacitated him, but I wasn’t like him. I had to follow
orders, some of them mean and nasty, some of them too soft. Even now, I didn’t
have the green light for a kill, a red light turning to flickering yellow at
best.
The tiramisu was on the table when I
finally thought it opportune to discuss our next move with Triss.
‘We’ll be posing as a couple on holiday
at a beach resort in Croatia
‘Not a tough job. We already look the
part,’ she smiled.
‘London
‘Is he renting a villa or does he stay
on a yacht?’
‘He hates boats because it makes him
feel vulnerable. Something to do with getting caught in a storm on the Black Sea when he was six. His father almost didn’t make
it.’
‘So he’s renting a villa.’
‘He’s a cheap bastard, so like the last
time I met him, he prefers to rent only a suite inside a resort populated by
tourists.’
‘Which should make our job considerably
easier.’
‘Considerably. Were it not for one
detail. He’s allergic to anyone approaching him with a surprise. Say, a gun, a
grenade, or even a knife hidden inside a shoe or under one’s trousers.’
‘He’ll have anybody searched who comes
close to him. That won’t look good at a holiday resort full of tourists,’ Triss
said.
‘He found a solution to that problem.’ I
hadn’t told her all the details of my operation on Aghia Lefkameni.
‘A metal detector app for mobile phones?’
‘You sound like Q now.’ I hesitated
before I threw the bomb. ‘He’s staying at a naturist resort.’
‘What?’ she giggled.
‘A nudist camp.’ I didn’t think I needed
to clarify what a naturist resort was, but there I went.
Triss kept giggling while pointing at me
and at herself. I nodded.
‘That’s right. In order to get close to
him, we’ll be staying at the same resort, but don’t worry. I checked it out. At
the restaurant and inside the supermarket, people are expected to wear clothes.’
‘That’s a relief. But if we’re not
wearing any clothes, where do we hide our weapons?’
‘That’s exactly Vane’s point. Everybody’s
naked, so almost no threat, but we’ll think of something.’
‘Like what?’
‘People heading for the beach still
carry bags with food and suntan lotion, or towels slung over their shoulder.’
‘That’s how you plan to hide the guns?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.’
‘How soon are we supposed to show up
there?’
‘I was thinking of driving up there
immediately after lunch. The place is in Rovinj.’
‘That’s maybe an hour’s drive up the
west coast.’
I knew my geography. Pula Istria . Rovinj was halfway up the
west coast, between Pula Slovenia Italy Trieste
As we walked back to the safe house, I
kept looking for men in cream suits, Asians and women like Tess. There were
several in that last category, but none acted suspiciously.
‘Are we booking a room there?’ Triss
asked as we entered the safe house.
‘London
‘So they know we’re going commando?’
‘Don’t worry about your reputation. It’s
all for Queen and Kingdom.’
‘I’m sure the Queen doesn’t want to
know.’
‘Half her relatives like to prance about
in the nude so I think she will forgive you.’
‘Stop joking. Do you know how vulnerable
we will be? If Vane sends one of his henchmen after us with a semi-automatic or
even with just a metal tube like that man in Dubrovnik
‘I’ll find something.’
‘Like what? An invisible missile shield?’
I touched her hair to calm her down. I
don’t know whether it was fear, or embarrassment at having to walk around
naked.
The journey up to Rovinj developed in
silence until we were about one mile from our destination.
‘He knows what you look like.’
‘He does, but unless one of the people
we bumped into told him about me, he will have forgotten most of it. There’s
also the naked element. People walking around without clothes all look alike.’
‘How do you know?’
I looked at her. A smile broke out. I
liked that.
‘Was that how you got close to him on
that Greek island?’
‘He was staying at a nude resort there
as well, but his guards were rather weak.’
‘He won’t make that mistake twice.’
I drove into a sandy path up to a
barrier. ‘We’re new guests,’ I told the man in the white uniform. This looked
like a heavily guarded border between enemy states.
‘Checkpoint Charlie,’ Triss said,
guessing my thoughts.
The barrier went up and barely a bend in
the road further, we understood where we were. A couple was strolling by,
wearing sandals and straw hats but nothing inbetween. Their child had more
clothes on than they had, mainly as a protection against the sun.
Luckily, there were trees everywhere,
providing cover if needed, I noted. I put the car into a parking lot amid a
crowd of vehicles. I looked at the license plates. Germany Austria Switzerland France Pula
I told Triss but she said there had been
no time to order false British or other plates. I left her with the car to pick
up the room keys at the reception. The staff was wearing the same white
uniforms as the gatekeeper, and the few guests inside the small building were
all dressed up, either just arriving like me or preparing to leave for the
outside world.
I showed my French passport, filled in
the details and took the key. It was an old-fashioned metal key, but I noted
the suites had already been upgraded to more contemporary electronic cards.
‘I have a friend over from Turkey
‘We don’t have guests from Turkey
I didn’t insist, because doing so might
well throw suspicion on me. It wouldn’t take much for Vane to find out someone
had been asking for him. There couldn’t be too many guests from Muslim
countries like Turkey
I walked back to the car and we set out
to find the room.
‘Let’s get into our room as quickly as
possible.’
I noted the obvious about a nudist
resort. When you’re the only person wearing clothes, people will stare at you. It’s
like the world upside down. Imagine walking naked down the promenade at any
European beach town or on London Oxford Street
Here it was our clothes that made us
stick out like a sore thumb.
Triss sighed as soon as we closed the
door of our room behind us. We were situated in a small one-storey bungalow with
a view on the beach, that is if you could imagine all the young olive trees
away.
The furnishings were modest. Rattan
chairs, two beds, a low table, a desk, a TV set, and a balcony area. Hardly any
privacy, I thought. My first reaction was to plant a chair against the inside
of the front door and jam it against the door handle.
‘You think that’s going to stop anyone?’
‘For a second.’ I understood her
concern.
‘What now?’
‘We get ready for a walk along the
beach. We’re newly arrived guests making a reconnaissance walk around the
resort, so we don’t need to lie down anywhere.’
‘Bokey could be on his way here.’
‘What?’
‘The Chinese lad you chased into the
water. My sources caught him between Split
‘He drove all night just to take that
plastic box to Vane, is that the theory you’re thinking of?’
‘Why don’t you do some reconnaissance of
your own while I relax here?’
I understood her fears but there were
more pressing concerns.
‘We’re a couple. If one of us goes out
on his own, that won’t look good. Especially a man on his own. People will
think I’m off to the beach to ogle the local talent.’
‘Instead, you want to ogle me as well as
the local talent, is that it?’
I went up to her and kissed her in the
neck. ‘You know that’s not true. I touch, but I don’t have to look.’ I closed
my eyes and found her mouth.
‘Stop it, you naughty boy. Go and play with
your guns.’
I turned my back to her and began stripping.
I put on the blue sandals that came with the room, and a pair of sunglasses. We
each carried a straw bag which contained sun lotion, towels, mobile phones and thermos
bottles. Perfect for a day on the beach.
‘Let’s put the suntan lotion on first,
otherwise we’ll stick out like a pair of lobsters at a seafood buffet,’ she
said.
Good point. I tanned quite well,
actually, it’s just that I never had the time to spend on a beach. I might go
for a swim if I had an hour off, but you wouldn’t catch me dead lying on a
towel. Part of it was that I considered just lying there a waste of time, part
was that lying flat on your back in public was a position of weakness. The only
advantage it had ever brought me was when I was lying by a pool in Las Vegas
I wished this mission were equally
simple, but here I needed not to kill someone, but to find information.
‘Let’s walk around the carpark,’ I told
Triss when we were out in the open.
‘On the parking lot, in this getup?’
Just as I turned left back to where we
had arrived from, a flabby elderly couple greeted us in German. ‘Guten Tag,’ I
said back, and behind me, Triss mumbled something similar, though it sounded
like it had trouble coming out through her gritted teeth.
‘This is the job, for Queen and Country,
no place to be angry, Triss.’
‘I’m not angry, only disappointed I hadn’t
thought of this before.’
Walking round the cars gave me five
Croatian license plates in addition to ours. Since Vane had come in from Turkey Pula
‘Let’s go for a beach stroll,’ I told
Triss after I had photographed the plates with my mobile and sent the pictures
to Q.
‘Shouldn’t we just wait for them to have
dinner at the resort’s restaurant? It would save us lots of effort and we
wouldn’t have to parade around butt-naked.’
‘That would be too easy. They could be
ordering room service, or they could recognize us and we’d be sitting ducks. Let’s
walk around and find them.’
The beach was of soft sand obviously
carted in from elsewhere, because the Croatian coast was famous for its rocky
bays, promontories and inlets. The resort beach, only accessible to diehard
naturists, had been laid out in the shape of a crescent, with a stone pier
sticking out to form a barrier against waves that might threaten to eat away
the sand.
There were various groups of people on
the beach, some of them just suntanning, others trying to keep their kids busy
with ball games, still others heading out for a swim in the quiet artificial
bay. We just walked without staring at the guests. Triss was also trying hard
not to attract any attention, but she looked a lot more beautiful naked than
she had done in the driver’s livery I first saw her in at Dubrovnik
She stared right in front of her, away
from the nude bodies on the beach and away from any guests giving her the
once-over. At the end of the stretch of sand, I steered her to the right past a
beach bar where a bunch of wrinkled men sat enjoying German brews and a couple
of volleyball courts lied deserted in the afternoon sun.
‘What if they see us before we see them?
We’ll be dead meat,’ she hissed at me when we passed the sports area.
‘They won’t recognize us, not in this
get-up. Would you recognize any of them if they walked around here naked?’
‘The Chinese man, I would. You, if I
knew you like you say Vane does, yes, definitely. We’re naked, not invisible,
Bond.’
That was the first time she used my
surname. I imagined it indicated her level of frustration with my tactics.
And yet I knew they would pay off. Melting
into your environment is one of the basic elements of the spy craft. Don’t wear
a Hawaiian shirt if everybody around you looks like an accountant. Don’t drive
a brand new sports car if all the other motorists move around in Ladas. I must
admit that on that count I had made many mistakes, but then I was a real car
lover, and would always prefer a Bentley or Aston Martin to a Lada or a Dacia
At a nudist resort, do like nudists do. If
we were wearing clothes, not only would everybody be looking at us, we would
present an immediate target for watchers looking out for something out of the
ordinary. By walking around in the nude, Triss and I had reduced our
visibility, how strange that might sound to anybody living in what naturists
called the ‘textile’ world.
As I had guessed, the area beyond the
volleyball courts was different. Instead of the bungalows like the one we had
checked into, there were modest villas with their own pools behind low
ornamental metal railings.
The resort was split into several
sections, from the campsite with tents and trailers all the way to luxury
units. Our trajectory now brought us closer to the latter, where a wealthy
individual like Vane would stay.
We moved on, my eyes darting about
behind the sunglasses to try and locate the right place. I counted about ten
villas, and not all of them had a view of the sea, which made it harder for us
to get close. We couldn’t afford to be seen walking around each of the
buildings, because that’s not what tourists do in the middle of a sunny day on
the Mediterranean .
‘How much further do we have to go?’
Triss asked.
I took her hand in a grip hard enough
she couldn’t pull him out and let onlookers know we were not a couple after
all.
‘I wish I was wearing shoes with laces
so I could pretend to bend down and tie them up,’ I told her with a smile.
‘I wish I was wearing lots of things I
could pretend to be fixing up,’ she replied.
I stopped and crouched, pretending to
massage a hurtful foot. After three seconds of touches and subtle looks around
me, I straightened up and continued to the back of the villa area, where the
terrain went uphill and became more densely grown with low Mediterranean
vegetation.
‘We need to come back here tonight for a
walk in the dark. We’ll see more when we’re in the dark and they’re in the
light,’ Triss said.
Only then it would be too late, I
thought.
Just before we reached the villa built
all the way at the back, I again performed my foot massaging play. I could look
across the pool to a building that was set further back from the path. A man
was seated on a lawn chair with his back toward us, apparently reading a book. He
had a tiny coffee cup and a glass of water on a low table next to him. A
Turkish coffee, I noted.
I got up, took Triss by the hand again
and took her up into the bush. ‘Got them,’ I whispered in her ear.
We climbed up the hill until we reached
a wooden observation tower. Unfortunately, it had been designed to watch the
sea, not the villas we had just passed.
‘Shall we get back and get dressed?’ she
asked, barely a minute after we had climbed the tower.
‘I’m beginning to like it here,’ I told
her and I wasn’t joking. I could imagine myself renting one of those villas for
a week and relaxing by the pool, if only I had something livelier to do than
cultivating a suntan.
Triss took my hand and pulled me down
the stairs.
‘Let’s hide in the bushes and watch that
villa.’
Whatever it was, I hadn’t expected this.
Agent Triss Marron performing more duties in the altogether than I had ordered
her to. Nudity beyond the call of duty.
‘You’re going to earn yourself an OBE,’
I said with a smile.
She slapped me in the face. ‘You’re
going to earn yourself a sexual harassment suit if you’re not careful, James.’
Back from Bond to James. She knew I
would notice.
‘What’s your ideal job, Triss?’ I just
had to ask her.
‘Visiting nudist camps with our most
masculine agents,’ she said, pulling a sour face that I knew was a joke.
‘I’m serious, Agent Marron.’
‘Do the same things you do, James.
Eliminate bad people and save the world, or at least our country.’
‘Do you want to do that in Croatia London
‘Anywhere where I can be useful without
having to suffer ignominy and poor hygienic conditions.’
‘That rules out most of the world, then.
What about the Ziggurat?’
The MI6 headquarters in London
‘Sounds fine for a few years, until
boredom sets in and I want to move out into the field again.’
‘Like you are today.’
‘More like I was yesterday, down in Dubrovnik
‘We should be catching more bad people
tonight than we did yesterday. He escaped.’
‘But we got the man in the cream suit.’
‘Fair enough. Silence now.’
We had approached the villas from behind,
through the bush, where nobody was supposed to wander, not even in the daytime.
We crouched and looked at the land side of the building. There was a measly
garden which obviously had not received enough water lately, behind a low
railing anyone could jump over. The windows were wide and narrow, and placed
about four feet from the ground. The villa was shaped like a crescent, with the
pool where I had seen the man with the Turkish coffee on the other side, turned
toward the sea.
‘Everything’s quiet,’ Triss said.
‘Apart from us.’
I took a picture of the front entrance
with my phone camera for later reference.
‘Do we need satellite surveillance?’
‘Our operation is not big enough for
Bill to put in a request. I’d rather have a few extra hands.’
‘So would I,’ Triss said, with an
unsettling look into my eyes.
‘Let’s return to our room and prepare
for action.’
We first went back up the hill to the
tower in order to descend the same way we had come up, a matter of not arousing
any suspicion.
As soon as we entered our room, Triss
let out an enormous sigh of relief and headed for the closet where she had put
her clothes. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a red T-shirt.
For some reason, I didn’t feel like
wearing anything. I stepped into the shower to scrape the suntan lotion off,
threw a towel on a chair and pulled it up to look through the window.
Our mobile phones went off
simultaneously.
‘Bokey Tan just had lunch in Pula
‘My message is telling us how to proceed
tonight. Since Vane will be holing up here, we need to watch him make contact
and intervene at the appropriate time. Under no reason should he be killed.’
‘Is M saying we should abduct him from
the middle of a dozen armed thugs?’
‘M is no longer at play here. Bill is
running the show, and he’s got a lot more on his mind than our escapade this
evening.’
‘At least he won’t see our nude
pictures. That’s a relief.’
I felt like slapping her, gently. She
was a riot.
‘There’s just two of us. There’s not
much we can do, just wait and see what develops before intervening. I’m
supposed to have everything go out over the radio.’
‘What radio?’
I hadn’t told her about the gear from Q,
most of which would be totally useless tonight, but for the small piece of
plastic that had the capacity of letting the lads at MI6 listen in to whatever
we were hearing.
‘We’ll also need dinner,’ Triss reminded
me.
The sun looked like it was about to set.
It would soon be dark, far earlier than we were used to even during a weak
summer in Britain
‘We need to take shifts,’ I said. We
couldn’t afford to be both away from our lookout simultaneously.
‘I’ll go first and confirm that diners
actually wear clothes.’
‘You’ll be happy to know that we might
go for an early checkout before the night is over.’
‘Back to the real world.’
‘The real world of shootings and
violence,’ I said. I didn’t think there was anything wrong about the unreal
world.
‘What are you looking out for?’ She
pulled up a chair to sit down next to me, also facing the outside.
‘This is the main route between the
parking lot and the villa area. Anybody arriving or leaving will pass right by
our window.’
‘What if they take an alternative mode
of transport?’
‘Like what? A helicopter? We’ll hear it.’
‘A yacht of some kind.’
I suppressed a four-letter word. Triss
was bringing me down to earth with her realism.
‘Vane doesn’t like boats, I think I
already told you.’
‘Others might arrive or leave by ship
and we would never see them.’
I stood up and pressed my face against
the window. In the right-hand corner, I could see the beach with the bay and
the pier. If that’s where they arrived, no problem. I hadn’t seen anything
about a yacht harbour nearby, so I assumed the resort didn’t cater to that kind
of visitor.
By the time I noticed on my watch it was
half past six, nothing had happened yet.
‘Do you think Bokey Tan will come here?’
Triss asked.
‘We have no idea whom he’s working for,
but it sounded from your sources’ intel that he should be close by now.’
‘Do you want me to ask around?’
‘No need to reveal your interest. You
know what? You can go to dinner now. Just let me know where the restaurant is
and what’s on the menu. If you see any suspicious activity, let me know, but
don’t intervene.’
Triss left our room in her less than suitable-for-dinner
attire, but who cared in an environment where not wearing anything was the
norm.
I made sure all lights inside our
bungalow were out. From the outside it would look as if we were all off to
dinner. If they had anybody watching the place, maybe they would think there
was only a single woman staying here, but I couldn’t rely on them being that
dumb.
A professional would have paid off the
staff to look at the guest list, or sat outside and watched us walk around. Before
we left on our exploratory tour, I had placed bits and pieces in strategic
locations that told me nobody had entered the room during our absence, not even
a professional. If anybody was watching us, he certainly had not made a move
that could betray him.
I regretted not having neutralized the
man in the cream suit back in Dubrovnik
Maybe was not a word that should be in
an MI6 agent’s lexicon. Approaching middle age had not only made me lose my
interest in fancy brands of clothing or top-level libations, but it also had
damaged my certainties. Doubts were making themselves felt within the confines
of my neat world.
I was woken up to reality when I saw a
familiar figure walk up the path from the parking lot. He was wearing a black
suit, so he didn’t want to partake in the naturist lifestyle. Bokey Tan. He wasn’t
carrying the plastic box the dying caretaker had talked about, but I could tell
from the bulge in the suit jacket that he was packing firepower. From the shape
I guessed the weapon was equipped with a suppressor, which was practical at a
populous resort.
I slid off my chair as if this made me
less visible if he looked my way. He never did. He looked right in front of him
as he pursued his journey through the resort. Somebody must have provided him
with the precise information about where Vane could be found. Since he didn’t
carry the box with him, he probably would be negotiating a deal.
As soon as I felt he wouldn’t see me if
he looked behind him, I slipped out of the bungalow and headed for the parking.
I looked for a new BMW 3-series. It was harder than I thought it would be. There
were several such cars with plates from various countries, Germany Austria Italy Switzerland Estonia
It took me a while to find one with
Croatian plates that began with DU, the abbreviation for Dubrovnik
As soon as the couples were gone, I
slipped underneath the car and disabled the alarm system. The next phase,
opening the door, was kids’ play. While I was at it, I also had a look at the
trunk. Unfortunately, there was nothing that told me anything and certainly no
plastic box.
Bokey Tan had come to Vane with empty
hands. Didn’t he mean to hand him the box in the first place and was it
something he wanted to hold on for himself or for another client, or was this
part of a ransom deal, where he picked up the money first and put the box out
for a pick-up by the other side later?
When I heard voices in a foreign
language, I closed the car and put the alarm system back on before slipping
away behind other cars. I assumed the language was Turkish. I had received
training in a wide variety of European tongues, but I also had the ability to
recognize many others. Anyone with a grain of linguistic talent can recognize
Arabic, Chinese or Japanese, especially when you have the faces of the speakers
to look at.
I didn’t want to see any faces, but I
interpreted the sounds at Turkish. So Vane was sending over his henchmen to
check out Tan’s car. I wished I were up at the villa right now, with Triss and
I preparing ourselves to tackle Vane and Tan.
I thought about messaging Triss to leave
her dinner and join me up there, but I wanted to give her some more time. There
might be a tough few hours ahead.
I moved back to observe Vane’s men
looking at Tan’s BMW and following precisely the same routine I had. I was
interested to see whether their search would turn up anything I had missed. When
it didn’t, I moved back and hurried up the path, back to our bungalow. I didn’t
need to leave Triss a written message, a mobile text would do when the need
arose. All I did, was to pick up one of the bags with my gear inside. I even
left the suntan lotion in, despite how ridiculous that might seem if anybody
searched me.
Behind the volleyball courts, I turned
right into the villa area, but keeping at least one building between myself and
the place I suspected Vane rented. I made sure they wouldn’t be able to see me
spooking around in their neighbourhood.
At the villa that was just southeast
from Vane’s, I swung my legs over the low railing after I had made sure the
occupants were out to dinner or the building was unoccupied in the first place.
Moving to the side to get my first night
view of the other villa, I regretted not having asked for night-vision goggles
from Q. It was always hard to tell ahead what I would need on a particular
mission.
I slid along the side of the villa,
keeping my head low. A number of young olive trees and lantana bushes provided
limited cover between the garden and the pool at the rear of Vane’s villa where
I had seen the guard earlier in the day. Apparently, excessive privacy had not
played a part in the design of the area, since maybe the resort owners didn’t
feel like people walking around nude all day long would crave to hide
themselves from other residents.
I crouched in the bushes and took my
time observing the scenery. There were lights on inside Vane’s villa, but they
were not the full-on lights I had expected. He was smart and had only turned on
night-table lights, I suspected.
That made my job a whole lot more
difficult. I had a rough guess where Vane and I suppose, Tan, were huddling,
but I didn’t know how many other people were inside. There had been three Turks
in the parking lot, but I don’t know how large Vane’s entourage really was on
this occasion. Obviously larger than it had been at Aghia Lefkameni.
Now was the time to message Triss. I
told her to bring the gun, though I knew she had taken it with her to dinner,
so there was no need for her to return to our bungalow.
Before I had time to message her more
details, there was a stir at Vane’s place. Between the chirps of the crickets
performing their evening concert, I thought I heard a couple of snaps I was all
too familiar with in my trade.
The worst thing I could do now, was to
leave my hideout and join in the fracas. I readied my Beretta and strained like
a leashed dog looking forward to a steak being thrown into its pen.
I felt a presence in my back. I swung
around, ducked and pointed my gun at the person creeping up on me.
‘Triss,’ she said in a low voice.
I nearly killed my own partner. Friendly
fire, just there’s nothing friendly about it, just sheer stupidity.
There was no time for apologies. I signalled
her to come closer and I updated her on the situation, including the Turks on
the parking lot.
‘I’ve got this for you,’ she said,
handing me a thermos bottle in the dark. I stuffed it in my bag.
‘You stay here and cover me. I’m going
inside to have a look at what’s going on.’
Just as I prepared to move over the
railing and cross into Vane’s pool area, there was movement at his villa.
The lights inside went out, and three
men in suits left through the back door, past the pool and over the back
railing. They almost decided to come our way but then suddenly veered in the
direction of the main path to the volleyball courts, the way we had come during
the daytime.
I hesitated what to do with them. I
could shout at them to stand still. If they did, they would mean a heavy burden
on us, since it would be hard to control them. If they offered resistance, the
shootout would alert Vane and his goons inside that something was up, and we
would be outnumbered.
‘We have to let them go,’ I whispered to
Triss, who I could see was itching to have a go at the trio.
‘What if they have the plastic box?’
‘That‘s a risk we have to take. I want
to get inside.’
We waited until the three had
disappeared out of sight. I jumped in the direction of Vane’s pool area. Triss
stayed in his bushes while I entered through the glass door that the three
departures had failed to close on their way out.
There were conflicting smells emanating
from the suite. A strange mix of Mediterranean vegetation, put there to relax
the guests, with sweat and exotic foods.
I kept going close to the ground, my
head and back arching to stay behind the cover of a long dinner table. When I
reached the end of the table, I saw the bulky shape on the floor.
This was Retep Vane, I knew immediately.
I kneeled by his side and felt his pulse. There wasn’t anything left to feel. I
wanted him alive, they killed him.
The same sense that Triss was crawling
up behind me again overpowered me, but this time I knew it was not a friendly
force.
I jumped backward against the table
right on time to see the fire sending off the bullet from the muzzle of the
gun. A man was standing behind a curtain firing at me. I shot back, shattering
the window looking on to the pool.
The next few minutes were like hell. We
fired at each other never knowing we would hit anything. I dived behind the
table for cover, he moved into the kitchen. I hit a few pans which fell on the
floor with loud bangs.
Shards of glass flew all around. I wasn’t
going to pick up the bill for Vane’s villa, and the Turks weren’t likely to do
either.
It was dark inside but there was enough
ambient light for me to recognize Bokey Tan. Why did he kill Vane and who were
the three men who left early? Innocent bystanders or Tan’s accomplices?
When the shots stopped, I counted to
three, fired one shot above the table in the general direction I supposed Tan
to be in. There was no reaction, so I took my chances and ran across the room,
past Vane’s body, closer to the kitchen. I heard a door in the distance.
Tan was leaving the villa to run back to
the parking lot. I ran behind him and nearly stumbled over two bodies lying in
the hallway. They must have been Vane’s bodyguards, the ones who stayed with
him while the others walked off to check Tan’s car.
Outside, I fired one shot at the
disappearing figure of Bokey Tan. I could see Triss running toward me. ‘Search
the house and follow me to the parking lot,’ I shouted at her, as if she had
the time to do both.
This was the second time in two days
that I was running after Tan. I was wondering how he would get away this time,
though I hoped he wouldn’t choose the sea again. I had had it with wet clothes
for a while.
Suddenly, there was a cry of pain ahead
of me. Another sound, like a man surprised in a very bad sense. I passed by our
bungalow when I saw what had happened. Tan had kicked out two of the Turks
returning from the parking lot.
As I approached the scene, he was
killing the third one with a shot and swinging the gun at me.
I jumped into the dry mix of sand and
gravel as the bullet flew above my head. I looked up, wiped the pebbles off my
face and saw him head for the cars.
He had to veer left to come out behind
the cars. I took the opportunity to take out the thermos bottle Triss had given
me. I threw it with a wide arc in the direction of where I knew Tan had parked
his BMW.
The explosion shattered the evening
quiet of the resort. First there was the thermos turning into a ball of fire,
then Tan’s car which was literally lifted off the ground.
Immediately, a concerto of car alarms
ruptured the night. In the light of the fire, I could see Tan run. He had
survived the explosion and was heading for another vehicle. A Porsche Cayenne.
He jumped in and drove off with
shrieking tires. He must have filched the keys from Vane, I realized. I ran for
our Audi and looked behind me to see Triss catching up.
I dived into the car, threw the bag on
the back seat, and started the engine. Just before I pulled out, Triss took the
passenger seat.
‘Buckle up. He’s not getting away this
time.’
I backed out and drove like mad in the
direction of the resort’s main entrance and exit. I saw the Cayenne
The path out of the resort was dusty so
Tan succeeded in sending clouds of dust our way. I turned on the fog lights and
tried to remember every twist and turn in the road we had arrived on earlier in
the day.
Triss fastened her seat belt and gripped
a handle above the windshield.
We left the dusty road and switched on
to the main road without a scram. I could see Tan’s taillights going left,
toward the town of Rovinj
‘Hold on for the city tour,’ I told
Triss. We hadn’t had the time to see the town, which according to my
information was picturesque and medieval, but then most towns along the Adriatic were.
Tan was obviously in a hurry to get away
from us. Twice on the two-lane road, he overtook vans, narrowly missing
oncoming traffic. Twice, I waited for the other cars to pass and did the same.
With Triss in the car, I felt a heavy
responsibility. Too many of my missions had ended with the deaths of local
assets, from Italy Bolivia
I wished I had one of my home cars at my
disposal. The Bentley Continental GT Speed I had bought with my own money as my
home car, or one of the Aston Martins the old Q had provided me with. You
couldn’t wish for a better company car than that.
‘James, are you going to catch him or
are you just tailing him?’ Triss asked when it became clear we were not going
to overtake Tan.
Thank God this was night and we were
wearing clothes, otherwise it might have gotten quite hilarious. A nude man and
a nude woman in a car chasing a Chinese hitman across Croatia
‘He’s too far to take a shot, but he’ll
have to stop at some point. We’ll corner him and take him, preferably alive.’
‘He’s not the type,’ she said.
‘Your type?’
‘The type who lets himself be taken
alive.’
‘He wants to stay alive to pick up the
plastic box. He must have stashed it inside a hotel room in Rovinj.’
‘If he killed Vane, whom is he working
for?’
‘What did you find at the villa?’ I
asked her while taking a sharp turn to the right. The road was leading toward
the city centre of Rovinj, another three kilometres away.
‘You’re not going to believe what I
found.’
Chapter
Eight
Despite my efforts to keep pace with Tan
up ahead, Triss now had the larger portion of my attention. ‘Stop playing with
me, spit it out. What did you find?’
‘I moved Vane’s body.’
‘What did you do that for? The Croatian
police might not be happy about that.’
‘You think they will be happy if they
ever find out MI6 turned a resort into a full-scale war zone?’
‘We’ll be gone by the time they figure
that one out.’
‘I won’t. My job is to work with those
people. How will I explain when they find out?’
‘All they need to know is that a Chinese
hitman murdered a visitor with a shady background.’
‘There is still the matter of the
vanished couple, the blown-up cars and another half dozen of dead Turks.’
‘The vanished couple are French so that
shouldn’t be too much of a concern for your public relations image.’
‘You’re in and you’re out, and you leave
others to clean up your mess.’
‘That’s exactly what London
‘As I said, I moved Vane’s body and
found something interesting underneath.’
There must have been lots of blood.
‘This must have dropped out of his back
pocket during the struggle.’
She held up a tiny bloody stub.
‘A flash drive.’
‘We might need Q to break the codes.’
‘Don’t worry, as soon as we get access
to a computer, we can get a look at it.’
I didn’t know whether I had to be happy
or frustrated. Any flash drive from Vane might give us at least a look at his
operations, but it was too soon to tell whether it was relevant to this case. I
wanted that plastic box Tan had taken from Coryn’s holiday home.
Right now, I needed to keep my eyes on
the road. The city of Rovinj
Where food and souvenir stalls were set
up in the middle of the street, he moved to the side and mounted the sidewalk
on the right. The crowds dispersed to the left, fear or anger on their faces
depending on their reaction to seeing an SUV disrupt the market atmosphere.
I followed Tan everywhere he went. I had
it easy, he smashed his way through the souvenir market, I only had to follow
his trail of destruction.
‘Should I try and shoot him?’ Triss
asked. She was wielding her Beretta and preparing to lower the passenger
window.
‘In this crowd? Are you mad? We need him
alive. We need to find out who’s behind him.’
‘Right now, we are.’
‘That’s very funny.’ I was concentrating
all my energy on following him and avoiding creating as much damage as he was
doing. ‘No shooting until I say so.’
‘Fine, boss.’ Triss put the gun away.
The streets got narrower as we neared
the historic centre. The old town was built on a circular hill surrounded by
water on all but one short side. It was like a ship linked to land by one
narrow passageway.
Tan rammed a stand loaded with cheeses
and bottles of honey before veering to the right across the crowded plaza
separating the old city from the new one and heading straight for the yacht
harbour.
Almost as suddenly as he had made a
turn, he stopped without killing the engine and ran out, away through the
ancient city gate into the narrow paved streets of the old town.
‘Stay here, he’s coming back for the
car,’ I shouted at Triss as I tailed him, even though it dawned on me he might
just as well be boarding a yacht. I hoped she would switch off the engine of
his SUV.
I pushed myself through the throngs of
panicky tourists jamming the city gate. The stone face of what looked like a
pirate looked out over the plaza from the front of the gate. I saw Tan far
ahead, at the top of the street, which was paved with large flat squares, each of
them a bit higher than the previous one, allowing people a comfortable climb up
to the top of the city, where the tower of the Saint Euphemia church reached to
the sky.
By the time I was halfway up the street,
Tan had vanished. There was a slight bend to the right where he could have
slipped away into a side alley.
I stopped for one second to pick up some
fresh air before storming into the alley. I thought I caught his shape moving
into another alley on the left. For the following minutes, I just stormed from
one poorly lit passageway into the other, always trying to find Tan while aware
he could just stop somewhere behind a corner or in a doorway and shoot me in
the face.
That’s why I kept holding my Beretta
ready to shoot. I might fall into a stupid trap, but I wouldn’t go down like a
lame duck.
I saw the sea at the end of an alley on
my right. We were already far away from the yacht harbour, so I wasn’t worried
about him escaping by water again. There was a strong wind which caused lines
of foam to appear on the waves.
After I lost sight of Tan, I just raced
straight ahead to erupt onto a wider cobbled street. A one-story house
separated the street from the sea. It had a sundial made of blue mosaics next
to its front door. Beautiful if you had time to admire this kind of thing,
completely useless because it was night.
I looked around for any signs of life, I
stopped to listen out for Tan’s footsteps on the stone somewhere around here. There
was nothing. Just the sound of the waves slamming into Rovinj.
Next was the clock at the top of the
church’s campanile tower telling me the time. Eleven o’clock . I wondered whether Tan might have headed
for the church, the main landmark in this town.
I raced up the next street, looking into
each alley I passed, but there were only tourists. Couples looking for romance
in a medieval town. I entered the church but not to admire its mosaics and
effigies of a Byzantine-style God. I wasn’t looking for God, I was looking for
the devil.
Out on the plaza in front of the church,
I phoned Triss to let her know my failure. I also warned her that Tan might
soon go looking for his SUV. That was all the hope we had left, that he would
turn back to pick up the car and continue his journey.
‘He stashed the box somewhere in a house
in here,’ I told her when we were standing by our car.
Police were arriving on the scene to
find out what those damaged cars were doing in the middle of a pedestrian area,
so to avoid any problems, we made ourselves scarce. We went to sit outside a café
and ordered drinks. I could have used something strong, but the local beer was
the only alcoholic beverage on offer.
We watched as the police surveyed the
scene. Triss went over and talked to them. They left immediately.
‘What was that about?’
‘They wanted to tow away the cars.’
Which would have kept Tan away.
‘So what did you tell them?’
‘That we need them to transport our
bottles of honey out of town.’
After an hour, there was still no sign
of Tan showing up.
‘Should we spend all night here, like a
couple of homeless drifters?’ Triss asked.
‘Like a romantic couple,’ I countered.
‘We lost him, and he’s not coming back.’
‘If we leave, the first thing that
happens is that he’ll be back here, step into his car and leave.’
‘He’s not that dumb.’
A short evaluation led me to agree with
Triss. I phoned London London
‘I’m on the next flight to London
‘Which is next morning.’
‘Which means we can spend the night
together.’
‘Right here on these chairs,’ Triss
said. The waiter was moving around, wiping down a chair here and there to let
us know we were already overstaying our welcome.
We paid and went over to the cars. I let
the air out of the Porsche’s tires. ‘We don’t want to make it too easy for him.’
We never headed back to the resort,
which would be under police siege right now with investigators trying to find
out what had happened. They had several dead guests, a villa full of bullet
casings and bodies, and the wreckage of an exploded car on the parking lot. Now
was not the time for us to make an appearance.
Triss helped me book a flight which
would make sure I would arrive at MI6 just before noon . Lunch with Bill Tanner. I wasn’t looking forward to
it, but despite my failure, I had one minor achievement I could pride myself
on. I would leave Croatia
She would have to deal with the fallout
from Vane’s death and from the chase if local police ever managed to tie the
ruckus to her.
We booked a room at a modest hotel on
the outskirts of Pula
‘A Canadian citizen with a passport
naming him as Michael Tu just crossed into the European Union from Croatia
‘Which car did he use and where?’
‘He arrived by speedboat in Trieste , Italy
I told Henry to follow up and to pin
down Tan’s movements and most likely destination.
Barely one hour later, when Triss and I
were cuddling and trying to take each other’s clothes off, the next call came.
‘A US Trieste Brussels
‘Are we sure it’s him? He’s not playing
games with us, is he?’
‘There is no other Asian travelling
anywhere at this moment. If we’ve pinned the wrong man, that means Tan is
taking another route, maybe with a car someone provided him.’
‘Let’s go with Wayne Wang. Tell Bill I
won’t be seeing him at the office tomorrow. I’m off to Brussels
‘He won’t like that.’
‘Tell him a lost cause just turned into
a winning cause. He’ll understand.’
‘You’re off to Brussels
‘You’ll have to book me a flight.’
‘Am I your secretary now, James?’
The flight to Brussels London Belgium
The city also had its fair share of
murky international lobbyists, arms and diamond traders, and extremists from a
range of countries. Our local section had its hands full, but Bill had made a
special call to arrange for a watcher at the airport.
By the time I emerged from the flight, I
was told that Tan had booked himself into a downtown hotel under the name of
Toby Tu from California
A young man in a shiny Italian suit was
holding up a sign reading ‘Mr. Delacroix - Universal Trading’ at the exit. He
shook my hand and introduced himself as Beau ‘B-e-a-u, like the French’
Bradwick.
I didn’t believe for a moment that was
his real name, but it worked for him. A young whipper snapper, fresh off the boat.
‘What can you tell me about Tan’s
movements?’ I asked him as he guided me through the bleak multi-storey parking
tower.
‘He picked up a car that was waiting for
him somewhere here and then drove it to the hotel. He hasn’t been seen out
since.’
We took the lift to another level and
walked out amid the vehicles, first left, then right.
‘Here’s your ride,’ Bradwick said.
‘Wow!’ Even I was impressed. A fine car was
one of the few things in life that still had the power to surprise me. The
Aston Martin One-77. In silver. Named like that because only 77 of them were
ever made. ‘Did you drive this here?’ I asked Beau.
‘I came by train.’
He threw the keys across the roof and I
caught them just before they were going to scratch the surface.
‘Chelsea
I turned around, surprised there was
somebody here who knew where I lived. I saw a young guy with a fuzzy beard in a
blue T-shirt. I smiled.
‘Lokomotiv Krasnoyarsk,’ I said.
He mumbled something and walked away
backward, his eyes on the car.
‘How long have you been here?’ I asked
Beau when we were pulling out of the complex and heading for the Brussels
‘Two months.’
‘You already know the lay of the land?’
‘It’s a small land. Brussels Antwerp
‘Sounds about like Belgium
‘Right in front of the Central Station. In
the heart of town.’
I knew the place. It was within walking
distance of the tourist area, with its marketplace, narrow streets filled with
restaurants for tourists, and shops selling beer and metal effigies of that
little boy doing his thing.
‘Does this car have any special
features?’ I asked while trying to keep my speed under the legal 120-kilometre
limit.
‘No word from Q. Just all the usual stuff,
I suppose.’
‘You suppose.’ I checked the glove
compartment and the central console. Defibrillator, check. Gun, check. Oliver
Dance obviously did not know about my predilection for the Walther PPK, so he
had put in a Glock instead. Nice touch, it would have to do. I turned a knob
next to the handbrake, not knowing quite what to expect. I got Brahms at full
blast.
‘Any special requirements?’ Beau asked.
‘Each morning at 7 past 6, I want a
glass of orange juice to be put beside my bed, squeezed from oranges grown on
the south flank of Mount Etna in Sicily.’
Silence from Beau.
I looked at him. He was staring in the
distance.
‘You must be used to working with
primadonnas. I was joking.’
I was beginning to like the kid. A bit
dour, shy, introspective, not my type of person, but I could understand he
would make a fine agent one day. More of a desk analyst at MI6 than a field
warrior like me. Or was I overestimating myself?
We drove into Brussels
‘Do we know which room he’s in?’
‘415, under the name of Toby Tu.’
‘The same guy from the flight.’
‘For once, he didn’t change his ID. He
must have run out of passports to use.’
‘Any sighting of a plastic box?’
‘None so far, but he could have ditched
the box and kept its contents.’
My room at the Brussels
The extras were provided by MI6, Beau
Bradwick told me. They included four suits not exactly to my taste, with a
range of ties and shoes. There was also a dark blue track suit. Someone in London Brussels
Beau pulled a hard black case from under
the bed.
‘How original.’
He threw the case on the bed and opened
it with an electronic card he then handed to me. The suitcase was surprisingly
empty. It contained only a mobile phone and a couple of small boxes with wires
attached.
‘What am I supposed to do with that?’
Beau didn’t say a word but switched on
the mobile phone. It showed the name of a local service provider, as any other
mobile would.
‘It’s a mobile phone,’ I said, feigning
surprise at the wonders of technology.
‘Don’t look at me like that, I’m not Q.’
The logo was replaced by a blank space.
‘This is where you bring in your
personal code, like this.’ He tapped in a row of numbers and letters, eight in
all. A new number appeared, followed by a question mark. ‘This is Tan’s
identification code, so you hit y for yes.’ He did, and the screen showed a map
of central Brussels
‘So this shows us where Tan is at all
times?’
‘It’s more than that. If you go to another
screen, like this, you can listen in to his phone conversations, but only on
the hotel phone.’
‘Which is completely useless, because he
will use his mobile for important conversations.’
And I just thought of something else.
‘And he is likely to speak Chinese,
which I don’t understand.’
‘There is a new feature on this, Bond. Listen. Yo soy un viajero bonito.’
‘I am a happy traveller,’ a metallic female
voice said, like the worst railway station announcement you ever heard.
‘Does she also attempt Chinese?’
‘Mandarin, Cantonese, Fukien
and Shanghai
‘He’s still going to use his mobile
phone.’
I took delivery of the phone and the
wires, which turned out to be part of the batteries, just like with a normal
mobile.
‘You leave this on at all times, and you’re
going to know where Tan is, unless he runs more than one mile away from you.’
‘How did you plant a device on him?’
‘It’s too complicated for you and me to
understand. Q told me over the phone but I’ve already forgotten most of it.’
‘A charmer, isn’t he?’
I looked out of the window to see a busy
triangular plaza. Stalls were selling the usual souvenirs mixed in with beers
and home-made candles. At the outer edge of the space, tourists were basking in
the sun eating anything from American fastfood to mussels and tuna sandwiches.
Just when I thought Beau should be going
and I should be getting on with my job, music erupted all around us.
‘It’s the mobile phones,’ he said.
I went for mine, he grabbed his. A
priority message from London noon ,
less than an hour from now.
‘We’re going to have to give this one a
miss,’ I said.
‘No, we won’t. We have a media centre in
Brussels
‘You said I couldn’t afford to get more
than a mile away from Tan.’
‘You won’t have to.’
Chapter
Nine
Angels in long white dresses were
staring down at me from the azure blue sky. It looked like I was in heaven,
only the colours were not quite how I imagined heaven. Not that I frequently
racked my brains about what heaven would look like, if indeed it existed and I
would even ever get near it with my kind of record. I had killed dozens of
people, but I didn’t know whether the fact that most of those were villains
would help me one bit with the powers upstairs.
Anyway, I wasn’t in heaven yet, I was in
a crumbling empty old house in the centre of Brussels
Apparently, Beau had spent his first two
months in Brussels
Water leaked in through a hole in the
roof when it rained but MI6 was not ordering any repairs because the present
situation looked more authentic, he said. I wondered what would happen if we
had to hold a conference here in the pouring rain.
We went down an impressive spiral
staircase where the walls showed the same scenes of angels radiating joy. I was
wondering whether that was the message we would be getting from MI6.
I checked my special mobile to find Tan
still in his room. According to Beau, no GPS device had really been planted on
the hitman. He had been ‘painted’ by laser when walking through Brussels
At the bottom of the stairs, Beau
brought in a code in an incongruous-looking electronic pad on the wall. He
pushed open the oak door to reveal a soundproof conference room that could be
found in any intelligence or security agency in the world.
Three people were already sitting in the
room. Beau introduced his colleagues and boss, MI6 Brussels station chief
Dominic Ronson, whom I had met once before on a mission in Switzerland
The sturdy man with the short curls
stood up and shook my hand. We sat down and watched the huge flat screen on the
wall at one end of the room. One of Beau’s colleagues, a young woman with a
dark Mediterranean complexion, hit a computer keyboard and a stylized picture
of the Ziggurat appeared on screen.
The next moment, we saw Bill Tanner
appear, a serious expression on his face. From the background, I could tell he
was seated inside the main conference room, which could seat up to 400 people,
though a skeleton staff would still be at work in their offices for the most
vital tasks.
He made the throat noises required of
somebody about to make an important announcement and asking everyone to keep
quiet. Even in Brussels
‘You all know the sad events that hit us
over the past year,’ he said, without referring literally to M’s fate and to
our temporary move to new headquarters, almost ten months ago.
I was hoping he wouldn’t delve too far
into the past. I didn’t want to see those events again before my eyes, and I
feared Tan might abscond before the speech was over.
‘Now the time has come to move on, how
harsh it may seem to some. The powers that be have decided on a successor for
M.’
The people around the table in Brussels
‘Out of respect for M, he wants to be
known as Y,’ Tanner said.
Now we really were taken aback. I could
see eyebrows being raised from Los
Angeles Hong Kong
and back. Y?
‘He will be talking to most of you
individually within the next few weeks. Let me introduce to you: Y.’
Bill stood up and temporarily disappeared
from view.
When he reappeared, he was shaking hands
with a tall athletically built man with a tan and a mop of black hair on top of
his head. My first thoughts were of a university professor, maybe in archaeology,
who despite a sedentary job, had managed to keep fit.
I leaned forward to check whether the
line I saw was on the screen or on his face. It was the latter. A horizontal
line above the left eye. A mark that showed he had seen field action.
As Y took Bill’s place in front of the
cameras, I leaned over to whisper in Dominic’s ear. ‘Do you know him?’
For a moment, it looked like Y had
overheard me. He shot a stern look at the camera, or was it at me? He was like
a headmaster preparing to pounce on a snotty boy.
‘Benedict Yarborough,’ Dominic whispered
back. ‘He’s seen action in Pakistan Bosnia
‘Why don’t I know him?’
The Brussels London
‘Colleagues and friends, I know I am not
arriving here under the best of circumstances. Let me tell you this. I will be available
to all of you all of the time. No matter what your problems are, if you think
you need to take them to me, just do so. I will be here for you.’
I was impressed, even though the
statement sounded too much like a politician, like a presidential candidate
canvassing for votes.
‘We face an ever more complicated world,
from the Arab Spring to Chinese militarism to the depletion of natural
resources. It is your task and mine to make more sense of this world, and to insure
that the people of the United Kingdom can survive whatever problems show up in
that kind of uncertain world.’
He should have been addressing the
United Nations, I thought, not without a splinter of admiration.
‘I trust you to continue with the good
work you were doing before I came here, under my illustrious predecessor.’
Did I detect sarcasm about M, or was it
really deference and a realization of what he was up against? My impression was
that Y wasn’t the kind of man to be intimidated by other people’s records,
least of all people who were no longer around to compare himself with.
I missed his final words because of my
daydreaming. Dominic snapped his fingers and the screen went blank.
‘What can you tell me about him?’ I
asked the station chief after the other MI6 members had left the room.
‘He’s sharp and obviously talented
enough to mind the shop.’
‘Mind the shop? That doesn’t sound like
a ringing endorsement of our new leader.’
‘You’ll have a chance to meet him sooner
than later, since you work out of London
‘I never met him and I barely know his
name,’ I told him, acknowledging I was out of the loop.
‘That’s because he was permanently
abroad, jetsetting even more than you were.’
A ring disrupted our conversation. We
both searched for its origin. It turned out to be my new mobile phone, courtesy
of Q. The sound indicated that Tan was doing something. I looked at the screen
to see what it was. He was moving, though he was still inside the hotel.
‘I need to go,’ I told Dominic.
He accompanied me upstairs, past the
pure white angels and the blue skies, up the classic staircase. If I had been
an architect or a collector of antiques, I might have wanted to purchase this
house for myself.
‘Will Beau still be working with me?’ I
asked Dominic.
‘He’s got a European Union conference on
monetary regulation coming up.’
‘That sounds exciting.’
Dominic gave a short bark that served as
a laugh. He stayed inside, out of view from the street, while letting me out
with the push on a button that was camouflaged in the foot of a marble fruit
basket. Nice touch.
I didn’t know where Tan was headed, but I
wished I had the Aston Martin at my fingertips.
According to my wonder of technology, he
was reaching the hotel lobby. So was I. Emerging on the triangular plaza, I
kept myself covered by the stalls selling souvenirs and beers, making sure that
anyone leaving the hotel would not run into me.
As the red dot on my phone screen left
the confines of the building, I saw Tan appear. Without as much as a movement
of his head, he looked left and right for trouble. Whoever had supplied him
with a car at Brussels
Tan was not carrying a plastic box or
anything else apart from the thing that caused a bulge in his back.
He turned left, away from me. Before
reaching the first intersection, he veered sharply right, crossed a street just
in front of a black cab whose driver shot him an angry look. I waited for the
car to pass before I followed Tan.
The Taiwanese-American who called
himself Toby Tu followed the crowds, which was a smart thing to do. He could
hide among the tourists, but so could I. It looked
like Tan wanted to be swallowed up. He walked through a pedestrian gallery
covered with a glass roof. I fell back, because if he looked back, he might see
me. I was also aware of my reflection in the windows of the chocolate and watch
shops as I strolled along trying to look like a tourist myself.
Halfway the gallery, Tan followed the
stream to the left, into the maze of narrow pedestrian alleys known as the Butchers Street
Tan seemed to be taking in all the
sights, but his speed told me he had a target. He was moving too fast for a
tourist.
He turned left, crossed a wider street,
went right, veered left again into an alley until he reached the Belgian
capital’s main market square. The view was brilliant, with the gothic city hall
sending its sharp tower into the heavens, and the cleaned baroque buildings
with their roof statuettes and gilded elements attracting the camera-toting
tourists.
Again, Tan took the tourist itinerary,
but without stopping for pictures or souvenirs. He passed by Manneken Pis
without more than a passing glance at the figure of the little kid doing his
thing.
There were tourists standing in the way,
eating waffles laden with cream and chocolate and fruit. Tan nearly bumped into
one, obviously a Japanese woman. He didn’t apologize but stepped up his pace.
I was losing him and I saw what he was
up to.
The lights flashed on a red Range Rover
Evoque parked on the corner of a side street. I needed my car. Which was
precisely what I said when I phoned Beau Bradwick.
‘I have a conference in ten minutes.’
‘Never mind the conference. Get Dominic
to send somebody else and get me the car first.’ I gave him my estimated
location.
Fortunately for me, Tan spent several
minutes inside his car without leaving. I saw he was calling somebody on his
mobile. Making a rendez-vous or telling him about me?
I dived into another side street, but
pretended to be admiring the chocolate pixies and elves in the shop window. The
chunks of marzipan shaped and coloured like fruit were not too bad either.
If Tan drove off and I wasn’t able to
stay close, he would vanish off my mobile phone screen, and my mission would
end in complete failure. Again.
The Range Rover pulled out, nearly
hitting a taxi. A serenade of horns followed. I looked left and right for signs
of the Aston.
Instead, an Evoque just like Tan’s, but
silver, braked hard just behind me. I swung around to see the window on the
driver’s side go down and Tess Rivera waving at me.
‘Jump in, or I’m going alone,’ she shouted.
I went round the front of the car and
took place next to her. ‘What are you doing here?’
I didn’t have to ask, I knew. She had
followed Tan in Dubrovnik Brussels
As she sped away to follow Tan, I called
Beau to let him head for his conference and leave the Aston under the hotel. The
car was too visible anyway.
‘Is he the man who killed your husband?’
‘I don’t know, but I sure would like to
find out. And make him pay if he is.’
‘Are you going to kill him?’
‘If I have to.’
‘Is this sanctioned by your employers?’
Tess didn’t answer that one. Tan was
speeding through the maze of narrow streets, away from the pedestrians-only
centre. There was definitely no more sightseeing on his agenda.
‘What was in the plastic box?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’
Tess said.
I didn’t believe her. ‘The box Tan took
from Coryn’s holiday home in Dubrovnik
‘I have no idea, but it must be
important,’ she said in a voice so flat it sounded like she didn’t mean what
she was saying.
‘He doesn’t have the box with him, but
maybe whatever was inside is so small he’s carrying it somewhere on him.’
‘Let’s hope so. I’m not interested in
that box, I just want to know whether he killed Coryn and why.’
‘The answer might be inside that box.’
We were leaving the city centre. The
main city was separated from the newer areas by a complicated ring road which
went up and down through tunnels just like the ones I had used when arriving
from the airport.
Tan was playing a dangerous game. He
started out in the slow lane to the right, then veered into traffic that went
down into a tunnel. We followed, but it was a hairy ride with narrow misses as
we switched lanes to keep up with him.
There were horns, angry faces and
obscene finger gestures that met us each time we followed the trail Tan set out
for us.
‘We can pull back a bit, I’ve got him on
my screen,’ I told Tess.
‘Are you worried we will crash?’
‘It’s not my car, so I won’t have to
file the expenses.’
‘Thanks for the empathy.’
‘Did you ever follow us to Rovinj?’
‘Why should I have? Did you find
anything there?’
I hesitated about revealing the events
at the nudist resort, but maybe she already knew about them.
‘Tan killed Retep Vane.’
‘Who?’
I took my eyes off Tan’s car to look at
Tess. She wasn’t lying, or was she? ‘You really don’t know Vane?’
She shook her head. Swerved to the left,
narrowly missing a Mercedes limousine before passing another car and veering
right again, out of the tunnel and up, three cars behind Tan.
‘He was a thug. A major arms, drugs,
people smuggler based in the Turkish part of Cyprus Greece Croatia
‘How does he tie in with Tan?’
‘We never got the occasion to find out. My
mission in Croatia
‘So your mission failed.’
That was blunt. ‘We did manage to track
Tan to Brussels
‘If we do, you can blame it on me, is
that it? There’s always a convenient excuse.’
‘There are no excuses, only missions
accomplished and not accomplished. Why didn’t you tackle Tan in Dubrovnik
‘I was keeping an eye on Coryn’s house. He
walked in, then later you and that woman did.’
‘She was a colleague from MI6.’
No response.
‘So you waited until we were running
around on the walls before showing up.’
‘Remember, I wanted to stay out of it,
but then I thought, why don’t I intercept the guy from the other side. We had
him in a pincer, but I didn’t expect him to leap into the sea. Neither did you,’
she said.
‘You’re right about that.’
A sharp horn sound from the left as we
passed a delivery truck from the right. Tan was diving into a tunnel again, but
by now there was no doubt that he had seen us.
‘He’s going to play us.’ I wished I was
in control of the car. Or even better, I could make use of this brilliant car
Beau had shown me. It was now sitting idle under the hotel. I grinned,
wondering if Q had not equipped it with a remote control that could guide it on
its own to the place I was in now. Keep dreaming.
Tess hit the floor to wedge the car in
between another SUV and a bus. The result was an annoying scratching noise and
superficial damage on all three vehicles, but she forged ahead. Surely, the Brussels
‘What did you find out about your
husband?’
‘He had lots of contacts.’
‘You and I both know that’s the polite
way of saying he played all sides.’
‘Coryn a double agent? I don’t believe
that. Whom else would he have been working for? Do you have proof?’
‘Just think about this, Tess. I don’t
want to spoil the memories you have of a man you loved, but he did get involved
with some nasty people.’
‘Aren’t you?’
I was worried she was going to brake in
the middle of the tunnel to continue our conversation.
‘Nasty people usually end up dead either
before or after I meet them. Vane is a case in point. Now you need to talk to
me about Coryn.’
‘Or what? You’re going to kill me too?’
Was it my style that caused this
outburst? ‘We are allies. Even allies need to open up to one another. I told
you about Vane, you tell me about Coryn.’
Up ahead, Tan was keeping to the left,
apparently not planning to leave this road, which went up and down from surface
to tunnel and back.
‘His car was blown up in France Netherlands
‘You drive like a pro, and your
detection work is more than up to scratch. Don’t tell me you learned all this
by living with a CIA informer.’
‘Let’s focus on Coryn.’
‘I agree. What did you learn about him?’
‘He was involved in major transactions,
some of which happened at both holiday homes, in France Croatia
‘So he used those places not just to
chill out, but to meet people he couldn’t afford to meet at your place or in Belgium
‘Because the CIA and half a dozen other
intelligence services would spot him. Brussels
‘At last, something we agree on. Keep
your eyes on that viper,’ I said as I saw Tan slowing down.
We were driving on a lane to his right,
about four cars behind. He slowed down, forcing us to do the same, but that
wasn’t a problem, since there was a red light coming up.
‘He’s going to turn left,’ I said.
There were altogether about a dozen cars
waiting around us, both on the left, the right and ahead and behind us.
The light turned green. The car in front
of Tan’s Evoque, a Renault, turned left. At first, he didn’t, he moved ahead,
but then did a brisk left to end up on the right of the Renault.
Tess did flick on her lights and cut in
front of another car on her left to follow the flow. Tan was picking up the
pace again but we had left the ring road to head out into the outer parts of Brussels
‘We’re heading east,’ Tess said.
‘In the direction of the airport.’ I
knew this much about Brussels
‘In the direction of lots of other
places as well.’
It turned out Tan was not really going
east, but north. He turned and turned to throw us off his track, but my mobile
phone was doing its work and showing me his location each time we lost sight of
him.
This was the messy part of Brussels Brussels
‘Coryn sold information to all parties,’
Tess said.
Her statement caught me off guard.
‘I never found any evidence of this man
you called Vane, but if he visited Croatia
‘Did your husband ever visit nude
resorts?’
‘Are you joking?’
‘Those were Vane’s favourite hangouts. He
met contacts there, because they couldn’t hide any weapons. In the end, Tan
just walked in at night, with his clothes on and his gun ready.’
‘Coryn wasn’t afraid of nudity, but I
can’t see him walking around like that in broad daylight in the middle of
strangers. Could you?’
‘I didn’t know Coryn.’
‘I meant, could you walk naked in broad
daylight in the middle of strangers?’
I stared hard at her. A smile was hiding
there somewhere. ‘I don’t think that’s relevant to our job here, which is to
find what your husband, Vane and Tan were up to.’
‘It must be in that box.’
Something popped inside my head. ‘What
if he’s playing with us? While he’s driving around Brussels
I phoned Beau. He was still at his
conference minding the bureaucrats. Dominic was my next try.
‘Can you send someone over to check on
Tan’s hotel room?’ I told him about my fears, but I left out the bit about
teaming up with Tess.
He promised he would send another agent
who was currently drawing up a list of suspicious telephone numbers with Syrian
connections.
‘Do you have people at the CIA you can
trust?’
‘Coryn was the one with CIA connections,
not me. You’re stubborn, James.’
‘That’s why I’m a field agent. I work
until I get my man. Or woman.’
Tan’s Evoque was picking up speed again.
We stayed back because we didn’t want to alarm him, even though he must have
seen us for a long time.
Metal balls appeared in the sky beyond
him.
Chapter Ten
They weren’t UFOs and this wasn’t
science fiction. Tan was approaching a set of huge metal balls joined by tubes,
symbolizing the structure of an atom. The weird building bore the obvious name
of Atomium, and it had been erected here as part of a World Expo in 1958.
The structure was surrounded by parks
and streets full of cars, with an exhibition centre down the road. By the time
we reached the structure, Tan’s car had vanished. I looked at my mobile.
‘He stopped. He must have parked
somewhere and gotten out of his car.’
We looked around for the red Evoque but
it was nowhere to be seen.
‘Are you sure he didn’t see your device
and threw it away?’ Tess asked.
I explained how there was no device at
all. He had been painted with a laser and was being tracked by satellite. She
seemed to understand it, or maybe, she didn’t care.
We found a spot to park the car and
hurried in the direction of where Tan was supposed to be if my phone was right.
The red dot was moving toward the Atomium.
‘There you go.’ I saw the hitman enter
the building.
‘You must be kidding. He’ll get trapped
in there,’ Tess said.
‘Let’s not sell the skin of the bear
before we shoot him. Old Belgian proverb.’
‘Funny. Why don’t you go in and grab
your man, while I guard the exit.’
‘Do you have a gun?’
She showed me her handbag. I guess there
was space in there for some small calibre weapon that might stop Tan if he let
her get close enough.
‘Come with me.’
‘He’ll play us and run off again.’
‘I have the cell phone. We’ll never let him
get far enough from us.’
I asked staff where they had last seen a
Chinese man come through and they pointed at an elevator. We went up into one
of the tubes and ended up inside a ball. There was no time to admire the
scenery.
One of the balls had been refurbished as
a sushi bar. An Asian hostess asked if there were two of us and where we wanted
to sit. There was only one rectangular bar structured around the train with the
dishes, but there were also other tables which offered you a view of Brussels
We weren’t here for the food anyway.
The woman had barely assigned us two
seats or a snap sounded from the kitchen. The bulled went right past Tess’s
head and smashed a wooden board with the name of the restaurant in Japanese
characters to smithereens.
Tan had fixed a suppressor to his gun,
and now he came into view from the kitchen. Through the doorway, I saw the cook’s
body lie on the floor in a growing pool of blood.
The waitress disappeared behind the
counter as I fired back. I don’t know whether she was hit or just smart enough
to hide as the firestorm broke loose. I just fired at the kitchen opening,
hoping one of my bullets would find Tan or at least contain him in there.
I wasn’t using a suppressor, so each
time I fired, it sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a steel surface. There was
nothing I could do about it, my only aim was to hit Tan. I considered the
implications of killing him, which would mean our hopes of finding the links
between Vane and Maas would be severely
curtailed.
Tess and I lied low behind the heavy
wooden tables, the windows behind us splintered by Tan’s shots. The restaurant
went quiet but for the wind blowing in.
I looked at Tess. She made a move to get
up and look over the counter but I put my hand on her arm and shook my head. I
didn’t want to sacrifice her for my cause. After all, in this operation, she
was a civilian, a bystander, not an official agent.
I lifted my right arm and fired a shot
into the wall of the kitchen doorway. There was no reaction.
‘He’s jumping,’ the waitress said from
her hiding place.
I took her comment at face value and
signalled to Tess to cover me. I took the weapon in both my hands and forged
forward. The waitress sat behind the counter and pointed at the kitchen. I went
inside and saw the rope from the emergency escape system hang out the broken
window of the kitchen. Tan had nearly reached the ground level even though the
rope stopped short of touching the pavement.
‘Tess, run downstairs,’ I shouted while I
fired a shot at Tan and grabbed the rope to follow him. The waitress was on the
phone, probably to call the police to come and find the murdered chef.
I raced down the rope, keeping my gun
ready just in case Tan would turn around and see me as the vulnerable target
that I was.
Just while I was preparing to leap to
the ground, my mobile rang. I jumped first and ran after Tan, who I suspected
was looking for his car. I saw him turn back to shoot at me so I jumped behind
a car to take cover while listening to my call.
‘Bond, you have to help me,’ a barely
recognizable voice said. Dominic Ronson sounded like he was running out of
breath after a long and tiresome jog.
‘Where are you?’ I asked, though I
thought I knew the answer.
‘In Tan’s hotel room. They shot me,’ he
said before breaking out in a nasty cough.
‘We’re on our way,’ I told him. We weren’t.
I called Beau Bradwick while I was running and trying to locate Tan. Behind me,
I saw Tess run out of the Atomium with her gun at the ready.
I told Beau to drop the conference and
rush to save his boss at the hotel. As soon as I finished the call, I could
look up the screen to find Tan. There was no red dot.
I stopped and looked around. He could
not have vanished so rapidly. I told Tess when she caught up with me. We looked
around for a car speeding away, but there was just normal traffic.
‘Let’s head back to my car,’ Tess
proposed.
I shook the mobile as if that was going
to work.
‘Do we head to the hotel or can we drive
around here until we pick Tan up again?’ she said after I told her about
Dominic’s call.
‘Let’s drive.’ She pulled out in the
Evoque and drove back and forth around the expo area. I looked out for any sign
of Tan or of his car, but I couldn’t find anything. He had vanished, into thin
air, as the cliché said.
‘Let’s go and find Dominic,’ I ordered
her.
Q would be the target of some angry
questioning about why his equipment had failed me. I wondered if he would have
an explanation that satisfied me. I was angry for letting Tan escape again.
If Dominic had been attacked in Tan’s
hotel room, did that mean my feeling had been right that the hitman had only
wanted to draw us away while somebody came to pick up whatever had been inside
the plastic box from Dubrovnik
‘Tan’s whole trip was a decoy to get us
away from the hotel,’ I told Tess when she shot a glance of concern at me.
‘You think he was playing us?’
I explained my theory. She agreed it
could be possible, though she still believed Tan went out to the Atomium to
meet somebody.
‘We didn’t see anybody.’
‘The sushi chef?’ Tess asked.
‘He knew we were tracking him. He wouldn’t
risk talking to a contact in full view with us so closely behind.’
‘Maybe he only needed to pick something
up, and then he killed him to stop him from talking to us.’
‘The Belgians will have to find out if
the chef really has a dodgy background, but I wouldn’t hope for too much. All
Tan did was trapping us in a convenient location and making his getaway. We’ve
lost him. Again.’
‘Are you going to get a reprimand?’
‘Are you?’ I asked.
‘You’re still not satisfied I’m in this
to find who killed my husband?’
‘I never trust anybody for the full 100
percent.’
‘After all I did for you, you should at
least give me a 90 percent. I tried to trap Tan in Dubrovnik
‘Maybe that was part of the plan. Tan
drew me away from the hotel, and you just showed up and volunteered to drive me
all the way here.’
Tess slammed the brakes so hard my
forehead hit the ceiling of the SUV.
‘That is a totally callous accusation. If
you don’t apologize right now, I throw you out of my car.’
Two cars behind us used their horn to
tell us to hurry up. Neither of us bothered to look behind us and react.
‘I apologize, but you must admit it
could’ve been a plot.’
The other cars passed us, but I didn’t
take note of the drivers’ gestures.
‘You are outrageous, and no, that’s not
an apology, merely a lame excuse. You suck, Bond.’
‘I do admit that you helped me a lot. But
somebody, somewhere, is going to make the remarks I just have. It was
convenient for you to show up at the moment you did and take me to follow Tan.’
‘I had no idea where he was going,
remember. It was you with your stupid cell phone who tracked him down, I was
just doing the driving.’
She continued the drive into town, but
we didn’t exchange any more words until I told her how to find the hotel’s
underground parking lot. I noticed the Aston Martin was still in the place I
had left it after the drive from the airport.
By the time we arrived at Tan’s room on
the fourth floor, a hotel security member had cordoned off the hallway and
asked us if we were staying in one of the rooms adjacent to the hitman’s.
I explained we were colleagues of the
victim.
Before he had a chance to say anything
more, I saw Beau run out of the room. I waved at him. He shook his head and
tried to hide the wetness in his eyes.
‘James, he’s dead.’
I gave him a short hug, Tess embraced
him. The Brussels Brussels
The room had been declared a crime
scene, but we could still enter if I put on plastic bags around my shoes. Dominic
was lying on his back with his feet under the bed, as if he had tried to hide
there and someone had been pulling him out. He had been shot in several places
in the arms and shoulder. He must have bled to death, because the carpet was
soaked red.
‘What did he tell you?’ I asked Beau.
Beau shook his head and looked like
breaking into a fit. ‘This man gave me my big break, my first foreign
assignment.’
I removed my eyes from the corpse and
looked around the room. There was blood spatter on a wall, obviously Dominic’s
before he had collapsed onto the floor. Several items had been thrown off the
furniture, a mirror was shot to shards.
‘This is Tan’s room, not Dominic’s,’ I
said as I tried to focus on the essential. We had to look for traces of the
ever-elusive and over-elusive Taiwanese-American hitman.
I put plastic bags over my hands and
started making rounds of the room, pulling open drawers and doors. Tan had done
his best not to leave any traces of his presence. There were no shirts, no
underwear, no ties that betrayed a man had occupied this space.
I even looked under the bed, to see if
Dominic hadn’t managed to find something and tried to hide it there. If the
person who had killed him had had any time and any sense, he would have done
the same thing. I even opened the minibar, finding only an empty space where I
assumed the Scotch had been. I felt like gulping down some of the other stuff
myself to recover from the emotion, but what would Tess and Beau say? Drinking
on a friend’s grave.
The windows had escaped the carnage. There
was no broken glass, no blood spatter. ‘The killer must have had the key card
for the door,’ I told nobody in particular. ‘Tan must have left it behind
somewhere and told the killer where he could find it.’
‘We don’t have Tan’s cell so we can’t
find whom he talked to,’ Tess said. She was still standing with Beau by Dominic’s
body.
The only piece of territory I hadn’t
recced yet was the bathroom.
No signs of struggle here either. The
first item I wanted to search was the garbage can. The empty Scotch bottle was
there, so I had been right. There were no hairs from the man’s comb. He had
been afraid of leaving DNA for us to analyse. The other items inside the can
were crumpled paper napkins and a plastic wrapping.
‘Can you help me out with this?’ Tess
called out.
I walked out of the bathroom and found
her sticking her right arm inside a tall porcelain vase containing a thorny
type of dry plant.
‘Did you find anything or are just showing
off?’
Tess and Beau both shot me a look of
distaste like there was some chemistry working between them. A pang of jealousy
hit me.
As I walked over to the vase, my mobile
phone started acting up. I looked at the screen and swore. ‘Down! Now!’
I hadn’t finished shouting yet, or the
window behind Tess and Beau flew apart in thousands of pieces darting around
like shrapnel. The bullet whizzed right past the woman’s back and hit the vase,
sending shards of porcelain mixing with the glass around the room.
Tess and Beau were lying on the floor,
whether because of my shouts or because of the impact of the pandemonium, I
couldn’t tell. The door opened and a Belgian policeman ran inside.
‘Stay out,’ I shouted at him. He was
just one more moving target in my way. I wiped the glass from my face and
pointed the Glock at the window. I shot at an opening in the roof of a baroque
house across the street. I just hoped my instincts were not wrong and no
innocents were inside.
The next moment, I saw a figure move. It
was Tan, like the mobile phone had told me. He had re-emerged, only with more
firepower.
I shot off two more bullets, but I wasn’t
sure they would do any damage at this distance. Tan fired again, but I dropped
to the floor and rolled over behind a sofa. His bullet hit a mirror.
‘Let’s get out of here.’
Tess and Beau were a bit dazed and had
slight cuts from the bits of window, but they still responded to my calls.
We rolled around like a bunch of monkeys
at play until we had reached the door and got up to walk into the hall. The
mobile phone told me Tan was on the move.
‘Don’t go back in there unless you’re
certain it’s absolutely safe, but don’t let anybody in either. We need to
retrieve the stuff.’ And Dominic’s body.
‘I’m coming with you,’ Tess shouted. She
had traces of blood all over her face where the glass shards had cut her.
‘You need a doctor,’ I shouted as I ran
to the lift.
She followed me.
‘What was inside the vase? I didn’t see
anything when it flew apart,’ I asked her when we were heading down to the
ground level. I kept my eyes on my phone screen. Tan was about to leave the
house he had used as a shooting platform.
She held out her hand to reveal a black
tube in hard plastic.
‘Is that a flash drive?’
‘Show you later,’ she said.
‘Whatever it is, don’t lose it,’ I said.
I was tiring of mysteries, I just wanted straight answers.
As we ran out of the hotel’s front door,
Tess pulled my elbow and pointed across the plaza. Tan was carrying a sports
bag while running down into the tourist crowds. There was no way I could shoot
him now.
‘If he drives out of here, we’re done. Our
cars are under the hotel,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell me you’re a good driver but a
poor runner.’
At that point, Tess threw herself into a
higher gear and passed me by, all the while avoiding colliding with tourists
sampling ice creams, waffles, beers and coffees. I put away my gun because it
was useless here. I would hit more civilians than I ever had a chance of
injuring Tan.
When I saw him turn left into an alley, I
let Tess follow him while I jumped into one alley earlier. I had covered this
territory before, when I tailed him out of the hotel. As I had anticipated, I
gained a few seconds by taking this road, and I drew up level again with Tess. What
I hadn’t counted on, was that he had seen us and would take countermeasures.
He jumped to the right, swung around and
pointed a gun right at us. I felt wind through my hair, whether it was the
bulled grazing me or just the movement of my head when I let myself drop, I
didn’t know.
The bullet clattered into the brick
which had been behind my head just seconds earlier. Tess ran to the opposite
side of the street to take refuge in a marzipan shop. I was so exposed I could
do nothing but fire back and hope he wouldn’t shoot again.
Tess jumped back out of the shop and
finally started shooting to cover me. Tan disappeared. I counted to three and
went after him, Tess staying behind me. I looked into the alley from where he
had shot at us, but there was no Tan to be seen.
I recognized one of the houses.
‘Let’s get in there.’ I pulled Tess by
the arm and got my gun out again. It was like I expected. The door was not
locked. I pushed it gently open, careful not to make any creaking noises. I
went in with Tess so close behind me I could smell her lily perfume. When she
opened her mouth to ask me something, I put my finger to my lips. Any sound was
going to betray our location to Tan.
It was dark inside, but I could still
see the angels smile down at us from their blue skies. There was a staircase
leading up, but I imagined it would only take us to that hole in the roof, so I
took the way down, sticking close to the wall and letting my eyes get used to
the darkness first. Tess was still following me one pace behind.
If she wasn’t to be trusted, as I had
hinted at earlier, I would be trapped. Tan in front, Tess behind me. My life
was in their hands.
The flash looked like someone lighting
up a match to start smoking in a particularly drafty spot.
I shot back while pulling Tess down
behind me with my left hand. Tan had aimed too high in what seemed like his
handicap. The bullet planted itself in the wall behind us. There was no time
for thinking now. I raced forward down the stairs shooting like an amateur gone
crazy.
Even if one drip in that rain of bullets
hit Tan, it would have been worthwhile. He fired two shots back before silence
hit. Had I eliminated him?
I recognized the sound. He was placing
some fresh ammunition. I fired three shots while Tess rejoined me.
I heard metal clattering on the floor
somewhere to the right below me. There he was, raising the muzzle of the weapon
toward me. I jumped like a tiger and kicked his gun hand askew. Before he had
the time to redress the situation, I pinned him to the wall and forced my gun
into his stomach.
‘Drop the gun or you’re butter,’ I
hissed, spitting him in the face.
He grabbed my gun hand and tried to force
my other hand down so he could shoot me in the face, but I pressed harder. He
guessed I wanted him alive. I resisted the pressure and fired. The bullet tore
through the outside of his upper left leg.
Tan screamed and dropped the gun.
‘That’s what you get if you don’t play
along with us.’
Tess had joined us, her gun pointing
straight at Tan’s face. ‘Did you kill my husband?’
‘We don’t have time for this,’ I interjected,
trying to prevent the situation from derailing into a personal vendetta. ‘Help
me turn the light on.’
I kicked Tan’s gun away and forced him
down on the floor. He was sitting against the wall, holding his injuries with
both his hands to try and stop the blood.
I wasn’t really interested in helping
him, I wanted answers and I wanted them right now.
After Tess had switched on the light, I
stared right into his eyes and knew he was not the kind to give in. I pulled a
tube out of my pocket and forced it into his throat. He gasped but I kept him
in an iron grip.
‘What are you doing? Poisoning him?’
Tess asked. ‘I want him to confess before he dies.’
‘This is one of Q’s juices, a truth
serum.’
‘Q what?’
‘The quartermaster. He provides us with
gadgets that sometimes have a good use.’
I slapped Tan’s face. ‘Whom are you
working for?’
He grinned and looked at his leg. At
this point, hurting him might still help me more than whatever juice he was
digesting.
‘Talk to me.’ I hit his bad leg with my
fist. He screamed.
Tess was behind me, stretching her right
arm to point the gun at Tan. ‘I can hit the other leg if you don’t talk.’
‘Hear that, Tan or Tu or whatever you’re
calling yourself today? She wants to hurt you even more than I do, so talk.’
He snarled at me. ‘Losers,’ he said in a
strong American accent.
‘That’s not what it looks like from
where I’m standing.’
I hit his leg again. Another scream. He
spat at me. I slapped him in the face with the Glock.
The tube was empty. I had no more truth
serum to pour into him, so I crossed my fingers hoping its effect would soon
appear.
Tess clicked the safety on her gun. I
was dealing with two crises simultaneously.
‘Did you kill Coryn?’
‘I worked for him,’ Tan spat out.
‘You tried to kill us,’ Tess said. ‘You’re
lying.’
‘I was his contact, I cleaned up his
dirty work,’ Tan said. He looked dizzy, his head falling back against the wall
as he desperately tried to stem the bleeding.
‘Who killed Coryn?’ I asked.
‘The Chinese thought he was talking too
much.’
‘The Chinese? What did he have to do
with China
Tan’s
head fell forward. I was worried the end was near so I pulled his head up by
the hair. ‘The truth, Bokey, nothing but the truth.’ I knew the serum must be
working, but I still couldn’t force myself to believe every word that came out
of his mouth.
‘If you want the truth, you need to give
me something in return,’ he said.
‘What do you want? A Porsche, a
retirement home in Marbella Britain
‘Maas
worked with the Chinese. He gave them information, they paid him.’ He spat
blood down his chin.
‘What kind of information?’ From the
corner of my eye, I saw Tess shake her head in disbelief.
‘Anything he could find. Weapons
development, names of agents, commercial information, oil exploration data. They
wanted it all, he had lots to offer.’
‘Why did they kill him then?’
‘He was a socialite, he talked, he
attended parties, he travelled. The Chinese found a better, more trustworthy
source of information.’
‘Where?’
The blood was also flowing out of his
mouth now. I gave him five more minutes before he became useless.
‘Where, Bokey, where is the new source
of information?’
‘He paid me to work for him.’
‘You betrayed Coryn to the highest
bidder?’ Tess asked.
I shut her up by putting a finger in the
air. ‘Where were you going next? Who is your bidder?’
He produced a sound like a pile of wood
collapsing. The end was near.
‘Rouge,’ he said. His head fell forward.
He would never raise it again.
I let him sag to the floor.
‘I didn’t get to kill him,’ Tess said.
‘Yes, you did. He’s dead, so write that
in your plus column.’
‘What was that rouge he was talking
about?’
I went through his pockets. He had the
passport in the name of Toby Tu, a folding knife, a pair of batteries, a pen, a
box of matches which I opened but they only contained, yes, matches.
Down his trouser legs, he had yet
another knife hidden, under his socks. The man was a walking arsenal, yet in
the end he had fallen like a loser. I looked up at the door behind which I had
watched Bill’s introduction of Y.
‘You seem to know your way around here,’
Tess said.
‘This is an MI6 safe house.’
‘How did he find this?’
‘This is exactly something I’d like to
know too,’ I said while I searched his shoes and his jacket. I turned up no
more weapons, but I did get his mobile. ‘Now I know what rouge means,’ I said
as I looked at his contact list.
‘Is it his handler?’
‘It’s not rouge, it’s Bruges Bruges England
‘Will you call it?’
‘I will have Q analyse all the numbers
on the mobile. Let’s get going.’
We left Bokey Tan’s body behind for the
local MI6 station to handle. With Dominic dead, I didn’t know who would be in
charge, but I would tell Beau about the corpse in the safe house. Whether they’d
dispose of it themselves or call in the Belgian police was not my business. Tan’s
mobile was.
Tess wiped blood from my jacket with a
tissue before we took to the street again. I texted the list of phone numbers
from Tan’s mobile to Q with an urgent request to check them for ownership and
call frequencies.
By the time we reached the hotel, I
called Beau to let him know about Tan and about our next destination. He told
me he had called Bill to explain the situation and advised me to do the same. I
never planned to heed it. Talking to Bill Tanner or to any other bureaucrat in London
I would finally get to use the new
machine. The short drive from the airport to the hotel had not been enough to
test the Aston Martin One-77 as the power car that it was, but on the highway
from Brussels Bruges
‘Are you following me to Bruges
‘I won’t rest until I find out who’s
behind Coryn’s death.’
She walked over to her Range Rover
Evoque, I sat down behind the wheel of my Aston Martin. I felt bad for Tess. She
had seen her husband as a victim, and now, if you had to believe Tan, he turned
out to be less than clean either. Coryn Maas had worked for the CIA, but above
all, he had worked for himself.
The drive to Bruges
The road from the motorway into Bruges was clogged by the onset of the evening rush hour.
The tall gothic belfry tower rose in the distance before me. While it looked
like the road led straight to it, it would take me a few roundabouts and a lot
of winding along one-way streets to find my way to the heart of the city and to
my hotel, which was on a leafy square just a short walk from the belfry on the
town’s touristy central plaza.
I parked the car underground, checked
into the hotel under the name of Gareth Mallory, sales manager for Universal
Trading Co. of Cambridge, and walked out in search of dinner.
Tess was not as daredevil as I was on
the road, so I gave her another half hour before she’d be able to join me. I
walked across an empty plaza which the hotel staff had told me featured the
city hall and a chapel where crusaders had put the blood of Jesus Christ they
had found in Jerusalem, about eleven centuries after his death.
I had seen enough blood for the day so I
continued through a narrow street crowded with tourists gaping at the lace
souvenirs typical for this town. The central square was the picturesque heart
of Bruges France
Side streets were always more appealing
to me, if only because it made the crowds more manageable. A watcher or an
attacker would have a harder time hiding if the crowds were thinner and had to
move, especially in a town like this, where the sidewalks were often so narrow
no three people could walk abreast.
Talking of breasts, I saw Tess before
she saw me. I had taken a place inside a dark local restaurant but with my back
toward a wall, facing the street, like a real intelligence agent would.
‘How did you find me so easily?’ I asked
her as she joined me at my table.
‘I know your little world and its dark
habits.’ She had changed into a sleeveless T-shirt that exposed a lot more of
her tanned body than I had seen so far.
‘I’m having the ox tongue with Madeira sauce.’ A typical down-to-earth Belgian dish,
because I didn’t want to spend all evening behind a table.
‘We’ll have two of those tongues,’ Tess
told the waiter.
Just as I wanted to lean over and ask
her about Bruges
‘Good news?’ she asked as I was reading
the message.
‘We’ve got something to go on to find
Tan’s contact. The number marked as Bruges
Chapter
Eleven
We had a Dame Blanche vanilla ice cream
with chocolate sauce and a Cognac
‘Do you know anything about this
Stanislas Blu?’ Tess asked.
‘Q says he has double nationality,
British and Italian. He’s a businessman, but little is known about his
business.
‘That screams shady at me, doesn’t it?’
She snuggled up to me in the lift to the
fourth floor, the hotel’s top level in this city allergic to highrises.
‘You live not far from here, do you?’ I
asked when we reached the room.
‘It’s just a couple of miles, but since
what happened there, I haven’t been back. It’s not safe.’
‘We could still use it if we need it,
though.’
‘I guess we could, but right now, I feel
extremely comfortable here.’
So did I, especially after we had locked
the door behind us and were pressing each other against the wall.
‘Do you know what they called me in high
school?’ she asked me as we tore the clothes off each other.
‘Do I have to know?’
‘Testosterone Tess.’
We laughed. The night only got better
from then on.
The next morning, the alarm on my mobile
phone woke us up at six. I had decided on an early breakfast and an early visit
to Stanislas Blu, just in case we could catch him before he went to work, if
there was such a thing as work for him.
According to Q’s information, the
businessman lived on a quiet street not so far from the hotel. We returned to
our room after breakfast to check our gear and left on foot.
‘It’s nice not to have to rely on a car,’
Tess said. She took my hand and we pretended to be a couple discovering the
romantic city.
I loved cars but I wasn’t going to say
anything to spoil the mood. If Mister Blu was as elusive as Tan, we might find
him slipping away again, leaving us dumbfounded without wheels.
‘It’s the third house past the alley
across the street,’ I told her as we moved forward, shooting looks at the
chocolates in the windows like real tourists would. I pretended to be enthused
about a house made entirely of marzipan in bright colours.
‘Shall we just ring the bell and ask for
him?’ Tess asked.
‘Or we could lie low and observe his
house.’
‘How are we going to do that if we don’t
have a car? There’s no parking space here.’
‘The kind of cars we drive would draw
too much attention,’ I admitted. Plant an Aston Martin in a narrow street full
of tourists and you become the attraction.
Our dilemma was solved when a man in a
sharp suit left the house.
‘Would that be our Mister Blu?’ Tess
asked.
‘We don’t have a picture, until now,’ I
replied as I took a photo with my mobile, ostensibly pointing it at the
protected late-medieval house next door.
‘Let’s follow him.’ Tess pulled me in
the other direction with a smile and a quick kiss. I wished we were back at the
hotel.
Blu, if that was him, took us back to
the central square. He crossed it and seemed to be heading toward our hotel.
‘You think he’s planning to pay us a
visit?’ Tess asked.
‘If he is, I’m glad we’re aware of it before
his arrival. If we had slept in, he would have caught us.’
Blu was not heading for the hotel. He
turned right before he got there, into an alley next to city hall. There was a
structure suspended above the alley which looked a lot like the Bridge of Sighs Venice
Up ahead was a flat bridge crossing one
of the canals or ‘reien’ which had allowed locals to nickname their hometown
the ‘Venice
I slowed down as Blu didn’t seem to be
in a hurry. He was a tall man with a light complexion and a dapper suit. I
wondered which side he was on and why a man looking like a respectable
businessman would be involved in anything as sordid as killings from Croatia Brussels
I didn’t really have to, for I’d met
more than my share of respectable-looking people who turned out to be anything
but. Not all scumbags looked like scumbags, apart from Retep Vane.
Blu seemed to have an eye on his back or
a particularly sensitive mind. He turned around and stared us in the face. Our
first instinct was to stop and stare back. We needed to be pretending we were
just walking ahead regardless of what he was doing, but we committed the most
stupid error in the book.
He understood the situation and ran. ‘Let’s
catch him,’ I told Tess. I took out my gun and pointed it at Blu, who had
reached the bridge. ‘Stop, we want to talk to you,’ I shouted at him.
He stopped. For a moment, I was
wondering whether he was going to talk, or whether he was preparing to fire at
us. So far, he had produced no weapon.
Blu then did the completely unexpected. He
looked at us and swung one leg over the stone wall on the side of the bridge. He
jumped over before we reached him.
We ran to see where he was swimming. He
wasn’t. A boat loaded with tourists had just passed under the bridge and Blu
had smartly jumped right in the middle of it. The tourists screamed, the boat
wobbled, the guide entrusted with explaining the history of Bruges
Leaping into the water made no sense. I
could never swim fast enough to catch up with him.
‘Follow him on land,’ I shouted at Tess.
She ran off across the bridge and ran on the street parallel to the canal.
I waited for the next boat to appear
from under the bridge and jumped in, only I wasn’t as experienced as Blu. I
landed right on top of a camera-wielding Chinese tourist who spat out insults
at me and fell sideways against the edge of the boat, causing a shudder that
nearly knocked the vessel against the side of the canal.
‘Just passing by,’ I told the guide. ‘Can
you speed up the tour?’
He didn’t, so I shoved him aside, told
him to continue the commentary but leave the steering over to me. Blu’s boat
had picked up the speed and turned left around a bend. I had worked boats
before, so this wasn’t exactly tough work.
I smiled when one of the passengers took
a picture of me, but for the rest I concentrated on keeping the vessel away
from the houses lining each side of the canal and from the boats coming at us
from the other direction. This was basically a two-way dead-end street, with
boats eventually having to turn back and return to their point of origin.
I sped up the pace until I had Blu
within my sights again. He was not steering, he was just sitting tight among
the tourists on his boat. He pretended to be listening to the guide, but I
could tell he saw me approach and was working out a way to escape. There were
only two ways. Either jump into the water and swim away, and I wondered if Blu
wanted to get his suit wet, or force the boat to head for the side and run off.
Either method would not slow me down, but only cut the distance between the two
of us.
I had to lower my head as we passed
under a particularly low bridge into a narrow stretch but I didn’t slow down.
My boat forced waves to slam into a vessel coming the other way, earning me
angry looks from its guide.
There was commotion on Blu’s boat. I saw
it go to the right. There was a staircase leading down to the edge of the water
from the shade of a church. Once, churchgoers must have landed here to go to
mass, I suspected, but I wasn’t listening to our guide’s explanations.
I rammed my boat right into Blu’s just
before he reached the stairway. Tourists screamed and my guide tried to wrest
control back over his boat from me. I pushed him away and jumped across to Blu’s
boat. He leaped over the scared tourists and reached land. He bounded up the
stairs while I pulled my weapon, provoking even worse panic than the collision
had.
Blu reached the top of the stairs but
fell back right into my arms. Tess stood in front of us. She had slapped Blu in
the face with her gun.
I pulled him back on his feet and up the
staircase. There was a bench under the trees where I took Blu. He had not
spoken a word yet.
‘You are Stanislas Blu?’ I asked.
He was bleeding from being smashed in
the face by Tess. He wiped off the blood with a handkerchief but didn’t say
anything. While Tess kept an eye on his movements, I searched him. No weapons,
not even a hidden knife, but he was carrying a mobile phone, which I
confiscated. Tan’s number had been erased.
‘Why did you pay off Tan?’
He sniffed but didn’t say a word.
‘Do you know who we are?’ Tess asked.
Again, he didn’t say a word, but I
guessed he knew. He also knew we could hardly interrogate him seriously in
public, in a park with the tourists below us still wondering who we were and
the guides no doubt ready to call police and file complaints against their
hijackers.
We needed to take Blu off the streets
and fast. The only place we had in this foreign town was our hotel room, but I
wasn’t sure whether he was the kind of person to walk gently through a crowded
city and into a busy hotel.
I stood up and knocked him unconscious.
‘What are you doing?’ Tess shouted.
‘If somebody asks, I’ll just say he was
not feeling too well and we’re waiting for an ambulance or something. Go get
the car.’
‘Where will you take him?’
‘Into the hotel through the underground
parking. That way we might avoid too much attention, unless you have a better
suggestion.’
She hadn’t. I waited for her to bring
around the car. She had the foresight to drive the SUV, not my Aston Martin. We
bundled Blu into the floor space between the front and the back row seats. I
sat with him while Tess drove us back to the hotel.
‘He can’t die and he can’t escape,’ I
said, more to myself than to her.
‘He didn’t seem talkative to me,’ she
said as she drove into the underground carpark.
We lifted him out of the car and I slung
his arm around my neck. An elderly Spanish couple entering the lift on the
ground floor looked at us like we were a couple of early morning drunks, but
otherwise the ride went smoothly.
I threw Blu on our floor.
‘What are you going to do now? Torture
him?’
‘Get your laptop going.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘You’ve never told me what was that
thing you found inside that vase in Tan’s room.’
The black plastic object from Brussels
‘It was a usb wasn’t it, a computer
flash drive.’
She reached into her pocket and showed
it to me.
‘Don’t you think it’s time to be honest
with me?’
‘I just forgot all about it after Tan
nearly killed us and we chased him into that safe house of yours.’
‘It wasn’t my safe house.’
‘It was your company’s.’
‘Maybe this gentleman will be able to
provide us with some answers when I wake him up one minute from now, but you
first need to get your computer going and look at that flash drive.’
Tess threw her arms up in surrender and
slammed her laptop down on the desk table. Before I questioned Blu, I needed
more information to push him into a corner. We more or less knew he had been
pulling the strings behind Tan, but why had he wanted Coryn Maas killed? And
Retep Vane? Dominic must have been collateral damage for having entered Tan’s
room.
‘There are passwords here that will
defeat us.’
‘That’s not what I want to hear,’ I
said.
Tess made a phone call on her mobile.
‘Whom are you calling?’
‘Either you want me to solve this or you
don’t. Sit tight and enjoy the show.’
I had no idea what she was talking about
but I trusted she wouldn’t do anything stupid. It turned out she was calling an
old acquaintance of hers whose hobby was hacking into secure banking web sites
all across Europe .
The hacker, whose name she didn’t want
to reveal, was an expert. At least, he did what he had to do. Tess managed to
bypass the obstacles and enter the file on Tan’s flash drive.
‘So what do you have for me?’ I asked
her as I kept my eyes on Blu’s face for any signs he was waking up. I held the
Beretta in my hands, ready to pounce if he tried any tricks on me.
‘Lists of coded names and numbers. They
look like overseas bank accounts to me,’ Tess said.
‘Anything familiar? Could anything be
tied to Coryn?’
‘You are still desperate to paint him
into the villain of the piece, aren’t you?’
‘There are no villains and there are no
good guys in this game, Tess.’
‘This is not a game. This is my husband’s
life and death.’
Blu stirred.
‘Go on. What else do you have that we
can put under Mister Blu’s nose when he’s ready.’
‘Don’t you have more of that truth serum
you gave to Tan?’
‘I used all of it on him because we
needed results quickly before he died.’
‘He’s got addresses,’ Tess said.
‘Addresses of what? Where?’
‘This one looks a lot like the safe
house where we caught Tan.’
I rushed over to her side to look at the
screen. The Brussels Cologne Hamburg Valencia Milan Athens
Safe houses for MI6 across Europe .
‘Somebody was selling this information,’
I concluded.
‘Who says it was Coryn?’
I didn’t want to offend her, so I
remained silent, but I still pretty much thought it was Coryn. I didn’t know
how he did it, but he must have had the information hidden at his holiday home
in Dubrovnik
I looked back at Stanislas Blu to find
him stirring. His eyelids trembled, his lips shook. Then he opened his eyes and
smiled.
Whatever I had expected him to say, it
wasn’t this.
‘Bond, James Bond,’ he said as if he
were introducing himself. A manic laugh followed.
‘How do you know my name?’
He laughed again but obviously didn’t
deem my question worthy of an answer.
I showed him my gun. ‘You don’t want to
play any games with me, Blu.’
He looked away, at Tess working through
the laptop.
‘What are you going to do with me? Take
me in chains back to MI5?’
‘It’s MI6,’ I corrected him.
‘Who is she?’
‘The wife of the man you had murdered.’
‘Don’t jump to conclusions, Bond. You
have no evidence, and even at MI6, that’s still the main cause for any action.’
‘Why did Coryn Maas have to die?’
‘From what I heard, he got greedy.’
I saw Tess back away from the computer. She
got up, stormed at Blu and delivered him a blow to the face that made him
wince. I put him up, back against a sofa.
‘You’ll be getting more of that if you
don’t tell us the truth,’ I told him.
‘Your training in being able to tell
lies from the truth wasn’t all that successful, was it, Bond?’
I leaned over him and stabbed my finger
into his cheek to make him feel as uncomfortable as possible. ‘Lose the snarky
attitude and you might survive this. If not, we are going to put you in the
bathroom and really start working on you.’ I didn’t intend to tow him into the
bathroom, since those places are not soundproofed as well as they should be. If
you have someone preparing to take a shower just one floor lower, he might hear
what was going on and alert the hotel staff or the authorities. We didn’t want
anybody to come and intervene, because that would only help Mister Blu here
evade our efforts.
‘What’s in it for me?’ he asked after I
released my grip.
‘Now you’re talking like a man. For a
start, you’re leaving this room alive.’
‘Don’t fool me, Bond. Even you can’t get
away with murdering people in hotel rooms overseas.’
‘I had plenty of practice, believe me.
He kept his eyes on the laptop where
Tess was hard at work again, going through all the files. ‘Aren’t you going to
show me what’s in those files and ask me what they mean?’
‘We don’t need your commentary. All we
need is where you got the information and what you were planning on doing with
it.’
‘You seem to be forgetting I had no such
information. I don’t even know where you found the flash drive.’
‘In Tan’s room in Brussels
‘Who’s Tan?’
That witless remark earned him a punch
in the gut. He folded, I grabbed him by the chin and pushed him back until I
thought I could break his neck.
‘I hope the Bruges
‘Something like you reached the end of
your Latin.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Before he could reply, I heard Tess
suppress a shout of joy.
‘What did you find?’ I kept my grip on
Blu while looking at her.
‘Names of people and addresses,
locations, numbers, lots of code words.’
‘Anything helpful for our case?’
‘What do you think SB-BB means?’
‘Let me think. Stanislas Blu, Bruges , Belgium
‘I wouldn’t be stupid enough to put my
own name on some mystery list, would I? This is your Mister Tan playing games
with you, that’s what it is.’
‘He’s not my Tan and he isn’t a mister,
not anymore, and likely never has been. Neither are you. You feature on his
client list. You wanted him to steal the list from Coryn’s house in Croatia Brussels
‘Who’s Dominic Ronson?’
‘James.’ There was tension in her voice.
‘What?’
‘There’s a DR-BB on this list.’
Dominic Ronson, Brussels , Belgium
‘The plot is getting thicker,’ Blu
sneered.
‘You shut up unless I ask you a question.’
I was ready to pop. What was Dominic doing on the same list as this creature?
‘You need to take this case upstairs,’
Tess said. She meant I needed to talk to Bill Tanner and get his opinion on
whether Dominic Ronson had been playing dirty.
‘Is Coryn on the list?’
She shot me an unsympathetic look but
did what I asked.
‘I have about two dozen names here, but
no CM.’
‘Send the whole lot over to London
When I returned to Blu’s side, he had
that cocky look on his face again.
‘I really can’t help you with any of
that. I’ve never seen those files before.’
‘Because Dominic intercepted the usb
before Tan could deliver it to you.’
‘Maybe he had good reason to do so
considering his name was on that list.’
Blu winced when I hit him in the face
with the weapon. ‘Don’t you take other people’s names in vain. Focus on your
own role in this.’
‘I’m just a middleman.’
‘Who are you working for and why?’
‘For the money, of course.’
‘Why did Coryn Maas have to die?’
Blu looked at Tess and hesitated, as if
fearing she would come over and beat him up again. ‘Why again should I tell
you?’
I slammed my fist into his cheek. He
spat blood and what looked like teeth.
‘If you keep going like this, you’ll
have no teeth left by the time we’re done with you. Can I offer you some
waterboarding to rinse the blood away?’ I was only half joking.
Blu pulled himself back together again
to address my question, at least I hoped that’s why he was making those throat
noises.
‘Why did Coryn Maas have to die?
Remember, this is the last time I’m asking. You don’t give me an answer I can
live with, and I take you into the bathroom where we have a nice chat outside
of this lady’s earshot.’
‘From what I heard from my sources, Maas got too talkative. He started bragging about his
connections, his big deals, his money.’
‘Coryn was not like that,’ Tess
interjected.
I wanted her to stay focused on the
laptop and told her so.
‘I mailed everything to London
‘Who was behind the killing?’
‘It had nothing to do with me. It’s just
hearsay.’
‘We want to hear you say it.’
He wiped the blood from his mouth on the
sleeve of his shirt. A good sign he was losing his inhibitions.
‘The Chinese.’
‘What? Why? Coryn never dealt with
anything Chinese,’ Tess said.
‘That’s not what I heard. He worked in Hong Kong before, about a decade ago, before he set up
shop in Europe .’
‘Why did the Chinese want to kill him?’
I asked, trying to bring the conversation back on the right track.
‘I told you, because he talked too much.
He must have mentioned one of his deals with them to the wrong people, so the
Chinese thought they needed to act before it was too late. They paid some of
his regular customers to remove him from the chessboard.’
‘Tell us something we don’t know.’ I put
my face so close to his he could’ve bitten me, but I didn’t think he was the
type to try that.
‘Retep Vane was the main operator behind
the kill. He hired Tan to do the dirty work on China
‘Why do I keep thinking you’re more
involved in all of this than you say you are?’
‘All of this is what I heard from
contacts. They knew all the players, so they had information I didn’t have.’
‘You’re a player too. Tan called you.’
Blu sighed as if he was giving up. ‘He
wanted to sell me that list your woman friend is looking at.’
‘I’m not his woman friend. I’m just an
angry widow.’
‘What would you have done with that
list?’
‘I would have looked at it to check
whether it was as useful as he said it was.’
‘What did he promise you?’
‘Names and addresses and other
interesting data, like you just saw.’
‘Why was this useful to you?’
‘Blackmail, extortion. If you get a look
at other people’s money, you want some of it for yourself.’
‘Did you ever blackmail Coryn?’
I saw Blu stir. ‘You don’t look to me
like an ordinary sleazy blackmailer. You go much deeper than that.’
‘I never had any business with Coryn,
but we met several times, in the context of cocktail parties and business
meetings.’
‘You’re lying,’ Tess said.
‘I might have spoken to him a few times,
but I never really got social with him. I would have remembered you,’ Blu told
Tess.
‘Now you will, especially if you don’t
tell us the truth.’
‘If you want revenge, you need to seek
out the Chinese.’
‘Which Chinese? Tan?’
‘He’s Taiwanese American. He never dealt
with China Maas , collected the necessary
information and gave the killer an advance and a date. Stop trying to pin this
on me.’
‘There is something seriously missing
from your story,’ I told Blu. ‘Are you still online?’ I asked Tess. She nodded.
‘Look him up.’
‘You’re going to google me to find out
if I have any business connections with Maas ? That’s
hilarious. That’s what a ten-year-old would do.’
‘A ten-year-old doesn’t have MI6
resources at his disposal.’
‘I told you. I collect information and
make money out of it. Blackmail, extortion, buying and selling. It’s all just
business, it’s just that my products are not ball bearings or wheat biscuits,
but lists and names.’
‘Did you sell my husband’s name to Vane
and to Tan?’
‘They knew him, they did business with
him, not with me. There was nothing I could tell them about Maas
that they didn’t already know for themselves.’
‘What was his business with the Chinese?’
‘I don’t know. All I know is, you don’t
want to anger one billion people.’
‘Was he going to sell them this? The
list of names?’
‘What I heard, and again, don’t take
this as evidence, it’s just hearsay – but what I heard, is that he promised
something and didn’t deliver, or he did, but asked for too much.’
‘If you did business with the Chinese,
whom would you talk to?’
Blu pretended he was thinking hard, but I
suspected him of playing a game with us. ‘Don’t you have Chinese names on your
lists?’
I gave Tess a light nod. She searched the
files on the laptop. Was Blu playing for time?
‘Where are you from?’ The question upset
him, as I knew it would. His name was strange, artificial almost, but he spoke
English just like anybody with an Oxbridge education would.
‘I’m from Switzerland
‘How do you know so much about me?’
‘Who was it who said, keep your friends
close but your enemies closer? It must have been some psychopathic dictator,
but I don’t really remember.’
‘Spare me your history lessons and give
replies to my questions, or I might squeeze you again.’ I really had had it
with his games.
‘I was born in Switzerland Britain Europe ,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be well informed about
people you picked off the streets and tortured.’
‘Tortured? That wasn’t torture, that was
child’s play.’ I smacked him in the face just for the sake of it.
‘No Chinese,’ Tess said.
‘Now, you are going to give us names or I’ll
throw you back into those canals.’
‘I’ve never done business with the
Chinese, so I can’t tell you anything from experience, but I heard who was
approachable.’
From the corner of my eye, I saw Tess
stand up and move across the room.
‘Stay away from the windows,’ I said. The
tone of my voice was so grave even Blu sat up and noticed.
‘You’re paranoid,’ he said.
‘Dealing with people like you, you have
to be.’
‘May I remind you that it was you, Bond,
who killed Tan.’
‘Give me the names of the Chinese who dealt
with Coryn.’
‘First let me know when you’re going to
release me and how my lawyer figures in all of this little game of yours, Bond.’
He didn’t see the slap coming. My hand
threw him back against the sofa. I grabbed his throat again and pushed him to
the floor. His throat made some worrying gargling noises.
‘You were talking about torture just
now? If you want to feel what torture is like, just continue like you’re doing
right now. You’re doing fine. No lawyer will ever hear about you again.’
‘I know a fine couple of human rights
lawyers who would bite their teeth into this like in a smooth piece of butter.’
His voice sounded hoarser by the minute.
‘Give me the Chinese names, or you’ll
never see a piece of butter again, let alone a lawyer.’ Hell, I was fed up with
all of this.
‘Amanda Hu,’ he said, before letting his
head drop back. He was lying flat on the floor and closed his eyes.
‘Amanda who?’ Tess asked.
Chapter
Twelve
‘Do you know her?’ I asked.
‘I have a vague impression I heard that
name before.’
My mobile rang. I looked at the screen
and found the information Blu had not wanted to supply me. He was a trader, as I
had suspected, of everything from weapons to secret information, and had on
occasion also purveyed documents to the CIA. There was no reference to MI6 in
his background, though he had been put on a watch list of possible suppliers to
terrorists.
‘You work with terrorists,’ I said.
He opened his eyes to grin in my face. ‘I
work with customers who might or might not have dishonourable intentions, Bond.’
‘What is Amanda Hu like and where can I
find her?’
‘Why don’t you consult your people back
in London
‘Did Coryn know Amanda Hu? Tess asked.
‘Since he dealt with the Chinese, he
must have gone through her, like everybody else.’
‘Who is she? Don’t tell us to google her
again or I shoot you in the leg.’
‘She runs Chinese groceries and evening
schools in Brussels Beijing
‘What kind of enemies does she have?’
‘The obvious ones. Business rivals,
enemies of China Taiwan Tibet
‘Where does she live?’
‘Most of the time, she’s at her offices
above one of her shops in Brussels
‘So it looks like we’ll have to go back
there,’ Tess said.
‘We first need to get rid of this parasite,’
I said, looking down at Blu.
‘I want to call my lawyer,’ he said.
I pulled him up before knocking him
unconscious.
It wasn’t exactly rendition the American
way, but it was good enough to contain Blu. We drove him to the nearest
airport, in Ostend Netherlands London Maas , he might still have other information MI6 would be
interested in. We would squeeze him like a lemon and probably throw him away
just the same.
From Ostend Brussels
On the way I received the information
from Q about the contents of the black plastic flash drive Tess had found in
Tan’s room. Q’s minions had been more successful in cracking the codes and
researching the names and other data.
Coryn Maas had been mentioned five times
in all of the files still present on the usb. Twice he had been singled out to
receive significant amounts of money in accounts based in Singapore British Virgin Islands and Jersey .
Twice more he had been listed as paying significant amounts out of the same
accounts to companies in Liechtenstein Bermuda . Finding out who was behind those
companies and what the payments were for would take more time, Q wrote.
The fifth mention of Maas
named him as CN-BB, but put him in East Asia . In
Hong Kong , Taiwan Cambodia Thailand Malaysia
‘What did Coryn do in Asia ?’
‘I don’t know. We didn’t meet until we
were both working in Europe .’
‘You never worked in Asia ?’
‘I travelled there as a tourist, to China Japan Thailand
I told her about the information from London
‘Do you think he already had links with
the Chinese back then, back there? I don’t believe that for a moment. He would
have mentioned that to me.’
Would he? I thought Coryn Maas held a
lot of secrets from his wife. Secrets people like Stanislas Blu and Bokey Tan
might have known more about.
‘Do you think it’s possible that he
might have met Amanda Hu in Asia ?’ I asked,
hoping not to stir up the hot pot of jealousy.
‘Coryn hated communism,’ Tess said.
That was not the kind of answer I was
looking for. ‘Amanda Hu might be Chinese, but she’s probably more a
businesswoman than a communist,’ I said as I saw the motorway reach Brussels
An hour had elapsed since we had put
Stanislas Blu on the plane, and here we were about to enter another person’s
life. Amanda Hu often stayed at an office above a modest grocery store just to
the west of central Brussels
We walked in pretending we were a couple
looking to prepare our first Asian meal for our friends. One private security
man was standing at the exit to intercept shoplifters, but he wouldn’t be too
much trouble.
Tess asked a shop assistant for Amanda
Hu. She was upstairs doing the bookkeeping and couldn’t be disturbed. No time
for visitors, as the assistant put it bluntly.
‘We’re friends of Bokey Tan,’ I said.
The name didn’t ring a bell but I was
sure it would with Amanda Hu, if she was who everybody believed she was.
I didn’t have to wait too long to see
the consequences of my fraud. An Asian woman in expensive brand clothing exited
from a doorway next to the shop and took place behind the wheel of a dark grey
Mercedes CLS.
‘Tess, let’s go,’ I shouted at her. We
jumped from behind the rows of instant noodles and rice cookers to leap into
the street just as Hu was leaving with screeching tires.
‘My car,’ I said. ‘We can’t afford to
lose her.’
Would Amanda Hu send the whole Chinese
army after me if we didn’t catch her? Of course not, but she might be on the
next flight to Shanghai Beijing
We had parked our cars just an alley
away, so all I needed to do was to fire up mine and leave its space before we
were blocked by a garbage truck doing the rounds of the neighbourhood.
The shop was in the middle of a maze of
narrow one-way streets populated by restaurants, modest snackbars, grocery
stores and shops selling second-hand cartoon albums.
Some of the cartoons had been turned
into huge murals symbolizing the country’s animation culture. Tintin and the
Thomson Brothers – or was it the Thompson Brothers – stared at us from their
three-storey-high perches.
Amanda Hu was an experienced driver. She
knew her way around this area, and she wasn’t afraid of taking risks, like
flying through intersections without stopping. She counted on traffic in this
neighbourhood being slow and she was right. The only speed devils were the two
of us.
‘Would she make a sprint for the Chinese
embassy?’ Tess asked.
‘I don’t think she’s that afraid. She
doesn’t know who we are and probably wants to shake us off. Maybe she just
thinks we’re coming to collect debts.’
‘Coryn dealt with her, and look where he
is now.’
There was nothing I could say to that. If
anything, Amanda Hu would be leading us away from the embassy or from any place
she thought would link her up to her past evil deeds. We didn’t even now how
far her involvement went. Maybe she was just the middlewoman, the contact
person who led potential clients on to the real mastermind inside the embassy.
We were losing her.
‘Too bad you couldn’t have her
laser-painted like you had Tan,’ Tess said.
‘Phone her description and her car and
license plates to this number.’ I threw her my mobile phone. ‘It’s a CLS.’
‘I know my way around cars, thank you,
Bond.’
I looked for the intersection where she
had disappeared. Turned right and then left again, I assumed, that’s how I went
too.
I saw her tail lights go red when she
had to stop behind a slow driver. She honked and overtook the poor chap from
the right in the middle of the intersection. Now we were stuck with him.
In order to avoid him, I turned left on
the intersection, then right again, and I just caught a glimpse of her car. She
had turned right, so she had succeeded in putting more distance between us.
Luckily for me, there was a main road
coming up. A proper street, with traffic lights, but also with more space to
overtake slow vehicles. I slammed a hard right onto the street, and came
immediately face to face with a tram. Tess screamed and pulled at the steering
wheel. I pushed her aside and tore the wheel to the right. My left rear-view
mirror flew away on impact, but otherwise we were safe.
The tram stopped after the accident, but
I couldn’t afford to. I stepped up the pace, flew through a yellow light and
crossed the six-lane ring road.
‘You’re crazy,’ Tess said.
‘Whatever you do, don’t panic, we’ll get
her.’
‘Even if we have to die in the process?’
‘You know what car chases are like.’
I ripped uphill, throwing quick looks
into every street we crossed before I gleaned the grey Mercedes on a circular
road going round the statue of a king on horseback. I turned right and went up
the street against the traffic. I drove to impress.
Within a few seconds, the situation had
completely changed. We were just behind her now, and she knew it. She put out
all the stops, charging into a space to the right, drifting past the next
intersection, turning back into another maze of alleys. I wasn’t going to let
her go this time.
Amanda Hu suddenly backed to the right
into a parking space. I drove to her left, blocking her exit.
Her driver’s side window was down. As we
came level with her, she held a Glock up to cover both of us.
‘Out of the car with your hands in the
air, both of you,’ she shouted in perfect English.
‘There must be some misunderstanding,’
Tess tried.
‘None of the kind,’ she bit back.
I evaluated the possibilities and came
to the conclusion that whatever I tried, either I or Tess might be dead within
a few seconds.
We left the car to stand in the street
with our hands in the air. Hu also came out, unafraid of being seen wielding a
gun in the street.
‘You’re going to need me to drive away
my car if you want to leave this place,’ I told her. My car was still blocking
her exit, but she had nothing but disdain in her eyes.
‘We’re going for a short walk,’ Hu said.
Now that she was level with us, I noted how tall she was. She must be in her
late or middle thirties, long black hair, a shapely silhouette. Tess noted my
interest.
We hadn’t reached the end of the street
yet, or she told us to enter the garage of a dilapidated house. There was a van
waiting. She told us to get in. There were handcuffs in the glove compartment. Hu
threw them at us and told us to cuff ourselves to the metal bars inside the
back of the van. We sat facing each other in the dark. No tricks were possible
because Hu checked up on us. She threw the doors shut, then opened the garage
doors before driving out the van herself.
‘Don’t you think of doing anything
foolish,’ she said. She had taken away our guns and mobiles before driving off.
The journey lasted all of an hour and
was conducted in silence. If I had wanted to, I could have pulled the bar off
the wall, kicked open the back door and jumped out, but Tess would have had a
harder time.
At least, Hu hadn’t blindfolded us, so I
could still take a look at the scenery ahead of the van, past the front seat.
We left the city and headed for the kind
of leafy suburb even the ugliest of European capitals had. She turned left to
face a tall wooden gate. She stepped out of the vehicle.
‘Do something now,’ Tess whispered.
‘We need to go inside to find out what
her game is.’
We shut up as Hu returned and drove us
into the property. All we could see now were trees. This was some kind of
forested domain. As expected, a castle showed up in front of us.
Hu braked hard, the rear doors swung
open, and a couple of men hit us unconscious.
When I woke up, I was hanging from a
wooden beam, my feet just touching the ground.
‘Where is Tess?’
To my surprise, the two men in front of
me were not Chinese. Hu must have hired some local muscle in order to draw
attention away from her diplomatic connections.
Neither of the thugs paid any attention
to my question.
‘I want to speak to your boss, Amanda
Hu.’
Neither of them budged, but the door
flew open and Hu entered, the Glock still in her hands.
‘Do you know who I am?’ I asked her.
‘You’re Bond, James Bond. Your woman
friend was cooperative in giving me all the details.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Safe and sound, somewhere close by, if
that can lighten your pain.’
‘Aren’t you going to give me a tour of
the chateau?’
‘If that’s your last wish, I’m sure I
can arrange that. Right now, I want answers to my questions.’
‘We seem to have a lot in common.’
One of the thugs punched me in the face.
I spat out blood but he was too far away.
‘Charm will get you nowhere, Mister
Bond.’
‘There’s not much charm to go by around
here.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘Ever heard of Stanislas Blu?’ I didn’t
care whether Blu would get into trouble because of my mentioning him. We had
him safely away in Holland
‘He told you about me.’
‘And about Bokey Tan and Coryn Maas.’
‘Thanks for putting all your cards on
the table. I don’t know any of those people.’
‘Don’t fool me, Amanda. Blu told me the
embassy had Maas killed because he knew too
much, and you arranged the hit with Retep Vane.’
‘Another name you fling at me that I don’t
know anything about. Your game is too transparent, Bond.’
‘I want to see Tess before I answer any
questions.’
The bloke who had punched me approached
me again, so I instinctively drew back. Hu said something I didn’t get and the
guy stopped, like somebody had pushed a button to cut off the power.
‘Thanks,’ I smiled at Hu.
‘You make no requests, you give no
orders, you ask no questions. I am the one in control.’
‘Control freaks make bad conversation
partners.’
I was sure that was going to earn me
another punch, but the bloke didn’t as much bat an eyelid. I was safe for the
time being.
‘How much do you know about me, Bond?’
‘I know about your shops, and how you
front bad deals coming out of the Chinese embassy in Brussels
‘You are the spy here, Bond. I am a
dealmaker.’
‘Is that what Coryn Maas was, a
dealmaker? Why did the deal go wrong?’
‘Don’t count on me telling you things
you don’t know already. Maas was a dealmaker,
yes, but he couldn’t guarantee essential elements of the deal.’
‘Confidentiality?’
‘I see you know more than you want to
let on.’
‘Just provoking you into telling me
more.’
She laughed. A short, mean laugh that
told me I was in trouble.
‘What is the embassy telling you to do
with me? I’m not an amateur like Maas , I’m an
agent of Her Majesty’s Government. And I know people within the Chinese
hierarchy.’
‘You’re going to impress me with your
connections in Beijing China
‘I came close a few times. North Korea Vietnam
I watched her mouth harden. She turned
back and left the room without a further word. One of her minions put a jute
bag over my head and fastened it so hard I thought his intention was to
suffocate me.
I heard doors slam. Someone had entered
the room, but I couldn’t tell who it was, until Hu spoke.
‘You stay alive for the time being,
Bond. Just don’t get the illusion you’ll get out of here alive. You might be
disappointed.’
‘Where is Tess?’
‘I promise you she’s alive. She’s still
alive, because she’s as talkative as her late husband. Especially when it comes
to you and what you’ve done to get you here.’
She slapped me and I heard her walk out.
To my surprise, the two goons also left. I closed my eyes, not just to recover
from my ordeal, but also to try and hear signs that Tess was nearby.
Once I breathed regularly again, I began
the task of getting out of here. I moved my arms but they were linked tightly
to the beam by a rope. I moved my feet until half my soles were on the floor.
My next move was to pull as hard as I
could. It hurt, and I want to spare you the story of how long it took me to get
things to improve. To cut a long story short, I ripped the rope on my right hand
to pieces first. I removed the bag from my head, breathed in deeply, and then
went to work on my left hand.
Nothing was going to stop me now. I
looked around the dark room and found a piece of chain in the dust under a
wooden table.
I listened at the door for any signs of
life on the other side. There were none. I pulled and pushed at the wooden
door, but of course it was locked and wouldn’t budge. I tried making noises to
attract attention from outside.
One of the blokes who had been guarding
me, not the one who punched me but the other one, obliged and came in to look
what was going on. Stupid thing to do, because I put the chain around his neck,
and after some pushing and shoving he was no longer able to stop me.
I walked out with the man’s Glock, Blackberry
and the chain dangling from my shoulder. I wasn’t one for needlessly wasting a
weapon.
Outside the room I had been kept, I
found a hallway. To the right was a dead end, to the left, light shone from the
windows in a wide door. These had been the horse stables of whatever wealthy
person used to live here.
Even MI6 agents had to pee, so I took
care of that first. For the first time, I thought I heard some noise
penetrating from outside. I needed to find Tess before they hurt her
irreparably.
I tried to pull open the door without
making a sound. Your worst enemy in those old houses were the creaks and
shrieks of wooden stairs, floors and doors. I saw two towers outside. A small
reddish tower which I suspected had once housed chickens or pigeons or birds of
some kind. The other tower was the size of a church bell tower but stood apart
from the main building, about 30 feet away in the forest.
Two options were before me. Either I
entered the main house, which was a 19th century villa with a size
that warranted it being called a castle, or I went over to the tower on the
hunch that Tess might be kept there, away from the house and away from my place
of captivity.
Whatever I did, I needed to do it fast. If
the bloke I had given a hammering did not return, Hu and her friend might come
and check out the situation. I couldn’t stay around the stables, and wandering
outside in the open also made me extra vulnerable if someone looked out of a
window.
The Blackberry shook in my pocket but I
decided not to pay it any attention until I knew they knew I had escaped. Instead,
I pressed my right side against the wall of the castle and ventured in the
direction of the front door. The van now stood on the space in front, but there
was nobody guarding it.
I bent my back to pass under the
windows, but I couldn’t hear a sound. Maybe Hu and her henchman had already
knocked out Tess. I couldn’t let negativity spin its way around my brain, so I
decided to do the next best thing. Go in with all guns blazing. Right through
the front door. Stupid? Maybe, but in an emergency situation, the rashest
approach might bear fruit because of its brazenness.
I crouched on the blocks of granite
leading up to the front door. I pushed. The door didn’t budge. Instead, I moved
to the closest window, smashed it to pieces with my elbow, threw it open and
jumped inside.
My stupid move made me stumble across a
sofa that had been placed just inside the window and fall to the floor with the
chain hitting my own face. Smart stuff.
I was standing up in no time and
covering the room with the Glock. There had been no need to fear anything
because the room looked like it hadn’t been dusted in a decade.
There were no sounds but for my
footsteps crackling on the broken glass. I poked my head into the main hallway
and came to the conclusion that my first hunch had been the right one. Since
the house was so quiet, they must have taken Tess to the tower.
I checked the inside of the front door
for alarm systems, but there were none apparent. I had come in through the
window, I was leaving through the front door. The sky had turned grey and I was
expecting a drizzle to start falling any minute now.
I ran across to the van which I used as
cover before running behind a pair of huge rhododendron plants. Botanics had
never been my forte, but I knew enough about plant life to discern beauty from
danger. Plants were a bit like humans.
Barely a second after reaching my cover
in the bushes, I heard steps, so I dropped even lower. Through the leaves, I
saw the bloke who had punched me marching through the forest. I knew
immediately where he was going.
If the Glock I had taken from his mate
had had a suppressor attached to it, I wouldn’t have hesitated one second and
downed him right there on the spot, but I didn’t want to make any noise to
alert Hu to the fact I had escaped and would be over to free Tess in a minute.
I just let him live and walk over to the
stable to find what was left of his mate. In the meantime, I rushed ahead to
the tower, waiting outside its door, listening. The only sounds were of birds
flying up and around the domain.
The door was open but hard to push open
without a sound. I put my shoulders against it and it moved, inch by inch.
The ground floor obviously functioned as
a shed for unnecessary agricultural implements. The only thing I noticed was
the value of these rakes and shovels as potential weapons of attack and defence
should I need them.
Just as I put my foot on the first step
of the spiral staircase, I heard a muffled sound somewhere above me. I checked
the Glock once again and moved up at one side of the stairs, my left shoulder
against the railing, both hands on the gun.
The Blackberry buzzed again. Either Hu
or her henchman was trying to reach the bloke I had removed from the game. The
thing was turning out to be a liability rather than an asset.
As I set foot on the first floor, the
narrow window to my left caught my attention. I threw a look out and that was a
terrible mistake. A shape flew out of the dark space on my right and knocked me
against the railing of the staircase. I swung the gun in its direction but the
attacker struck it out my hands and slammed into me.
Just before we both were about to roll
down the stairs, we recognized each other and held on to the railing.
‘You don’t want to be my damsel in
distress?’ I asked Tess.
‘Stop living in the Middle Ages, James.’
She was wielding a knife that might have
damaged me more with its rust than with its blade.
‘Where are they?’ she asked.
‘That’s exactly what I wanted to know.
The big guy is off to where they kept me locked up, and I thought she was
torturing you.’
Tess showed me the bruises on her arms. ‘She
was, but she got a phone call and walked out.’
‘Did you hear what they discussed?’
‘It was something about you. ‘Keep Bond
out of the loop,’ were the words I thought I heard.’
‘It’s too late for that. Both of us are
already deep inside the loop. We need to find Hu before she leaves the
property.’
‘She won’t leave until she’s killed both
of us.’
I brushed the dust off my clothes and
took her hand to lead her back to the ground floor. ‘Remember, we can kill her
obnoxious companion, but we need her alive. If not, I want to look at her
mobile phone.’
There went the Blackberry again. This
time I took it.
It was Amanda Hu but she didn’t know
whom she was talking to. Her first words were ‘How much longer is it going to
take?’
‘That depends on you, Amanda,’ I
replied.
There were three seconds of total
silence before she replied.
‘You’ll never get out of this alive, Bond.’
‘Too late for that. I’m already slipping
out of your grip and guess what? I’m coming after you.’
‘Now I’m really scared.’ She was
taunting me to go after her and fall into a trap. ‘I’ll be out of this country
in a while and you won’t be able to follow me.’
‘I wouldn’t count on that.’ I finished
the conversation because my own mobile was singing like wild.
Bill Tanner hadn’t called me in a while,
but the news he brought was not what I wanted to hear. ‘Blu has gone.’
I wished he were less cryptic. ‘What’s
the story?’
‘Someone knew the location of our safe
house in the Netherlands
‘Are you sure Blu didn’t die in the
incident?’
‘My first idea was also that they might
have wanted to silence Blu by just finishing everybody off inside that place,
but no, his remains were nowhere to be found.’
‘Do we know if Blu was a victim or a
perpetrator?’
‘I thought you’d be better placed to
answer that question, James.’
Blu as a victim? If he was important
enough to launch a military-style attack on an MI6 safe house, he must have
been more involved than I had thought he was. I believed his story about being
an outside dealmaker, but it now turned out he must have been right in the
middle of things.
I suppressed the urge to call Hu and ask
her about the level of his involvement, but I knew she wasn’t the sharing type.
Tess raised her hand, pointing at the
sky. I looked up but there was nothing to see.
Chapter
Thirteen
A Castle in
Belgium
Tess was referring to a sound. The familiar chopping
of metal blades through the air. We couldn’t see it, but a helicopter was
approaching the grounds.
‘She’s going to escape by air,’ I
hissed. I was angry at myself for letting a target slip out of my fingers once
again, but maybe, if we ran, the situation might yet still be salvaged.
Tess had been disarmed so all we could
rely on was the thug’s Glock. It was a good thing I hadn’t been forced to waste
any bullets so far.
We ran across the forest, no longer
worried about making any noise as the sound of the helicopter grew louder by
the second. Before we hit the spot where we could see the aircraft, a shot rang
out from our right, just loud enough to warn us to duck. Tess squealed. The
bullet had hit the back of her neck. I crouched, swung my arm with the Glock to
the right and fired off a volley into the bushes hiding our view.
Someone had counted on us heading for
the sound of the helicopter and had prepared an ambush for us. I couldn’t see a
thing. Our assailant had a panoply of vegetation to choose from as a hiding
place.
I kept one eye on the target area and
one eye to diagnose Tess’s injury. The bulled had only grazed her, so apart
from some blood there was no damage. She was still able to help me out, even if
she had no weapon.
The next moments would change all that. I
whispered to her to keep still while I crawled on the forest floor away to the
right in a movement that brought me to the side of our attacker.
Too bad it wasn’t Amanda Hu. I
recognized the bloke who had punched me. This time, I wouldn’t let him get
away. As I raised my arm to fire off the fatal shot, I hit a branch which
cracked. That was enough to warn him so he swung around and fired. I pulled the
trigger almost simultaneously, pressing my chin against the humid soil.
I felt his bullet pass right above my
hair, but he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what he felt. The bullet from his
colleague’s gun planted itself in the centre of his forehead with a red dot to
mark it.
As soon as I saw I had done my work, I
ran over to him and prized the gun out of his hands. This was my present for
Tess. She was still lying where I had left her, a painful grimace on her face.
‘I can’t relieve your hurt, but here is
something to make sure it won’t happen again,’ I said, handing her the other
Glock.
The sound of the helicopter had grown to
deafening proportions.
As we rushed off in the direction of
where we thought it was about to land, I snuck off a text message to our
communications man, Henry Willows. I told him I wanted satellite surveillance
of the spot I was messaging him from, wherever that was. I knew we were still
in Belgium
‘Any idea where we are?’ I asked Tess. After
all, she had lived in or near this country for a couple of years already.
‘Just north or northwest of Brussels
We ran forward, guns drawn just in case
we suddenly came up against Hu or any of her minions we hadn’t met yet. I
guesses the whole crowd was now resigned to having lost us and would be
standing by to evacuate by air.
We needed Amanda Hu but she didn’t need
us, except dead perhaps.
‘There’s the chopper,’ Tess shouted at
me.
It was flying low over the trees,
hanging still for a while as if looking for a prey, and then descending. We
rushed ahead to find a clearing, a shallow field in the middle of the forest. The
spot looked like it had been prepared especially for the comings and goings of
a helicopter, so Hu and the Chinese must have used it before.
The chopper was a relatively light make,
seating a total of four people. I could see there was a European man seated
behind the pilot, and I was wondering whether it was Stanislas Blu, fresh from
his escape in the Netherlands
‘Do we fire at the chopper?’ Tess asked.
‘Not if you want to find out what happened
to Coryn.’ An exploding helicopter might look good on film, but it didn’t do us
any good to kill Hu right now. Talking of film, I took a picture of the scene
with my victim’s Blackberry and also sent it to Willows.
As soon as the aircraft touched the
ground, Hu emerged from under the tree cover to run toward the helicopter. Contrary
to what I expected, the pilot cut off the engine, allowing the blades to slow
down.
That’s the moment I had been waiting
for.
‘Cover me,’ I told Tess.
I ran forward from the right rear side
of the chopper, where Hu would not be able to see me. She was coming from the
left and heading for the cockpit.
That plot didn’t work, because somebody
from inside the helicopter, I don’t know whether it was the pilot or the
passenger, fired three shots at me. None of them hit me, but they were enough
to make me realize I needed to keep a low profile.
Rapid firing followed from inside the
bushes where I had left Tess. Countermanding my orders, she was shooting at the
helicopter directly and giving me cover. I got up and sprinted toward the
engine’s back, out of sight from the cockpit.
Just as Hu came into view, the pilot started
up the craft again. The blades went chopping as I fired a warning shot in front
of the Chinese woman’s feet. She hesitated just enough to allow the helicopter
to pull up. She jumped up to put her feet on the undercarriage. I ran at her,
pulled at her leg, but she gave me a mean kick she could only have picked up in
martial arts class.
I nearly dropped the gun but I held on
to the undercarriage. She was standing on it while trying to clamber inside
through the open door. I couldn’t see anybody helping her.
From my precarious position, I still
tried some bravado. ‘Tell the pilot to put the helicopter down,’ I shouted at
Hu, pointing my gun at her. I don’t know if she could hear me over the noise of
the engine and the blades. I could see the castle and the tower looming in the
background.
A bullet hit the side window, the shards
of glass spouting around Hu like a fountain. She screamed but held on to the
craft. Finally, an arm reached from inside to haul her in, but I fired at it. Now
the scream came from the passenger, because my bullet had pierced his tailored
coat and lodged itself into his right arm, which vanished inside the craft
again, leaving Hu struggling to hang on.
To be fair, I was struggling my own
struggle too. We were flying low over the trees, and I suspected the pilot was
using this stratagem to try and shake me off. With the gun in my hand, I wouldn’t
be able to hold on much longer, but it was my only weapon against Hu. I let
myself hang from one hand just long enough to stuff the gun between the front
opening of my shirt and then grabbed tight on to the undercarriage, pulling
myself up to become level with Hu.
She was still doing her utmost to climb
inside while shaking the glass out of her hair and face. My luck she was so
busy, because I could come to within an arms’ length of her. I didn’t want to
shove her off the helicopter, but a bit of intimidation might do the trick with
the pilot.
In the end, if the man inside was giving
the orders, he could tell the pilot to ditch both Hu and me as excess baggage,
but I counted on their humanity and their curiosity to allow at least the woman
to live.
‘If you’re a dealmaker, prove it to me
and make a deal with me,’ I shouted at her.
She shook her head. I didn’t know
whether she meant she couldn’t hear me or whether there was no deal. Maybe it
was both because this was a preposterous location to be making a deal.
The helicopter had lowered speed and was
still hovering over the castle area. I imagined the pilot was pondering whether
it was wise to fly over populated areas with two people standing outside. People
on the ground would look up at the rare noise of a helicopter and see there was
something wrong, I thought.
Inch by inch, I moved closer to Hu. I
wasn’t so much interested in grabbing her, which would a dangerous game at this
altitude anyway, as in seeing who the passenger was. If it was Blu, he would no
longer be able to play the outsider card with me. It also meant he was not a
victim in this plot but one of the main perpetrators. It must have been Blu who
had been working with the Chinese and with Retep Vane to kill Coryn.
As I came within touching distance of
Hu, she reached out and tried to push me away with her left. I didn’t
vacillate, but the gun fell out of my shirt and dropped to the ground between
the trees. Goodbye, gun.
I still had my fists and my feet, but in
my current position, they were pretty much useless. I moved closer to Hu again.
‘Stop this game. They don’t want you anymore. They’re going to kill you just
like they want to kill me.’
She spat the word ‘liar’ at me.
This wasn’t the optimal start to a
decent exchange of ideas.
Just as I wanted to ask her why she didn’t
climb inside, the chopper began to veer sharply to the right, making us lose
our footing. Both of us were strong enough to hang on.
At first, I had suspected a change of
direction, but the pilot was playing games with us. He was trying to shake us
off, thereby proving that whoever was inside had decided that Hu was no longer worth
the trouble of keeping alive.
‘Give me your last words,’ I shouted at
Hu as we both struggled to hang on to the helicopter. ‘Who is behind this?’
She leered at me like I had made an
indecent proposal.
‘You tell me everything and we give you
protection.’ I needed at least to consult Bill Tanner before making such
promises, but I didn’t have many other cards left to play.
‘You’re a fool, Bond. You’re the last
person able to protect me. I need protection against you and your kind.’
The helicopter pulled forward with a
shock while still hanging over to the right. It made a brutal turn to the left.
For a while, I thought the blades would chop off the top of the trees, but the
pilot proved to be an expert at this game. He moved left and right, up and down
just enough to stay clear of any danger.
The only danger was to us, as we fought
to cling on to the undercarriage. If the passenger had wanted, he would have
let Hu climb inside long ago, but his shooting injury might have made him
decide to cut his losses and run.
The next jolt was fatal. Amanda Hu lost
her footing. I reached out for her to help her, she thought I was trying to
finish the job. She waved her right hand trying to lift herself up but it was
too late. The helicopter changed course again, prying her left hand loose. ‘Who?’
I shouted after her, but she was long past caring about my questions.
I don’t know where Tess was. If she
could recover Hu’s mobile and enough of it was still salvageable, we would
still have a view of whom she had called, where she had gotten the helicopter
from.
I wondered if Willows had positioned the
satellite in the right place to view my predicament. Either the techs were
still fiddling, or the whole MI6 command was admiring my dangling from a
helicopter above a Belgian forest. It was always all or nothing.
I wasn’t expecting them to mobilize the
Belgian Air Force and send in F-16s to force the helicopter down, but at least,
I was expecting some kind of practical help before I smashed off to the ground.
After losing Hu, the pilot tried increasingly
crazy moves to try and get rid of me. I felt like an ant clinging to the body
of a ballet dancer in the middle of The Nutcracker.
The pilot wanted to throw me off, but I
couldn’t fly so I wrapped my arms and legs around the sidebar of the undercarriage.
If they wanted to get rid of me, they would have to land, and then I would be
back in my element and ready to take them on.
When I saw the helicopter head straight
for the castle, I was contemplating the possibility of the pilot trying a
suicide mission. He would crash into the building, leave me dead, but him as
well, his passenger most likely too. Was the secret worth that much?
The chopper drew up to the roof of the
building until the undercarriage nearly touched a chimney. Would I take the hint
and get off? Either I refused to, and he would continue to try and shake me
off, succeeding sometime before he reached his destination, or I would leap
off. He would get rid of me, but I would still be alive, so this was kind of a
win-win situation.
Jumping on to the roof also meant I
would not find out the identity of the passenger in the back seat, whose injury
would force him to seek medical care.
I made the only decision humanly
possible. I jumped on to the roof, sliding down one yard before coming to a
stop just before reaching the edge. The helicopter pulled up and left.
I found my way down and went looking for
Hu’s body. Before I found it, Tess ran from the forest and embraced me.
‘You’re alive,’ she said.
‘Barely. We need to look at Hu’s body.’
She had found it and took me to see it. As
I reached for her mobile, it suddenly dawned on me that I should be asking Willows
about his surveillance of the helicopter.
‘Where is the chopper?’
It took him several seconds to formulate
a reply.
‘We called off the search.’
‘Why? Who?’
‘You know how it works, James. Orders
from above.’ Willows had never called me James.
‘Did you at least get satellite coverage
of the helicopter’s route?’
‘We stopped following it when it left
the area you’re in now.’
While I carried out this brutally insane
conversation, Tess and I moved back to the castle to get our hands on the only
vehicle left. The van Hu had brought us here in. Tess took control while I sat
down next to her while trying to subdue a rising tide of anger and hate.
‘Are you saying Bill ordered this
operation shut down?’
‘It came from even higher.’
‘I want to talk to him.’
‘Call Bill, he’s somewhere around here.’
I wondered if that meant he was standing
right behind Willows listening in to the conversation. I called Bill, as he
suggested.
‘James. Let me explain,’ he said even
before I uttered a single word.
‘How can you explain leaving me hanging out
to dry like this? Amanda Hu is dead, so whoever is in that helicopter is the
only chance of us capturing Blu and whoever else might be behind this plot.’
‘James, do you even have any idea what
the plot is?’
‘Coryn did things for the Chinese but
started bragging about to others, so they went through this whole row of
middlemen to call on Vane to finish him off.’ I regretted my rough language
where Tess was present.
‘The problem is, what did he do?’
‘Thanks to you, we’re not going to find
out, are we?’ I snapped.
A less generous man than Bill Tanner
could have me fired for that kind of insubordinate language.
‘James, turn the thermostat down a few
notches. We want to reassess the implications of this operation. If the Chinese
are involved, it might take us to a whole different level.’
‘Who is we? I’m not used to you being so
careful on my previous operations, never mind Russians, Americans or Chinese.’
‘Times have changed, Bond. We need to
exert caution. One loose wire some place might send another part of the
equation crashing down in a most unpleasant manner.’
That definitely did not sound like Bill
Tanner.
‘I’m calling you back to London Brussels
‘Can I talk to Y about this?’ If Tanner
acted so out of turn, the new chief of MI6 must be the reason behind it.
‘He’s not in the country right now.’
That surprised me. He had only just
taken over the leadership, and he was already off jetsetting or holidaying. ‘Don’t
tell me he’s gone off on a holiday with some rich mates on a yacht?’
‘It’s nothing like that, James. He is
rounding off some business before he returns to take the lead on our
operations.’
That sounded like he was packing up his
luggage to move into new quarters, though why would that involve an overseas
trip?
‘I need to talk to him as soon as he’s back
in the country, Bill. We need to complete this operation.’
‘You need to return to London
There was nothing more left to say. Bill
had changed. I had always counted on him to back me up 100 percent, but now the
environment was changing and I was being marginalized.
‘Did they find the helicopter?’
‘They’re ordering me back to London
‘What?’ Tess braked hard which was not a
wise thing to do on a busy road to Brussels
‘They cut off surveillance as soon as it
left the castle’s airspace.’
‘That’s so stupid in a million ways. I
should have called in the CIA.’
‘To accomplish what the stupid Brits are
unable to do? Would they have listened to you, mobilized a satellite for you?’
‘There’s always Echelon.’ The National
Security Agency eavesdropping programme which apparently was able to overhear
any phone conversation and look in on any e-mail correspondence in the world,
if you had to believe our American cousins.
‘Do you really have connections that
high up, from the CIA to the NSA?’ My disbelief was written large.
‘If I could convince them the Chinese
are involved, they will at least sit up and take notice.’
‘I never stopped you from trying.’
‘I need an encrypted phone and right
now, all we have is Hu’s cell.’
That reminded me. I needed to go through
Hu’s calls and find out if she had been in touch with Blu or with any other
suspicious characters. I was lucky the Chinese woman had believed in storing as
many information in her mobile as possible. That was one thing I would never
get over. If you’re into crime or confidential intelligence, do not leave
anything where it could be seen by others. Not on a piece of paper in the
garbage can, not on a computer or a mobile phone. That was more than a habit or
a rule, it was a commandment.
‘You keep driving, I’m going to phone
all Hu’s numbers,’ I told Tess.
‘Is that wise? You will alert people we’re
on to them.’
‘At this stage, I don’t really care. Do
you want to get Coryn’s murderer or not?’
‘You keep reminding me you’re doing
everything for a good cause. Are you really that much into self-confirmation,
James?’
I wanted to explain how I just did what
came instinctively. Hu’s phone was all we had left, and if we wanted to move
this case forward before Y or Bill stopped us, this was what we had to do. It
was not about choices, it was about the only way out of a mess. ‘This is my
last game, Tess. Do you really want to continue on your own?’
She shook her head. ‘Go ahead, James. Do
what you have to do.’ She smashed her foot down and we surged forward.
I made the first call. A man’s voice
replied in Mandarin Chinese. My knowledge of that language was limited, so I
hung up.
‘Do you speak Chinese?’ I asked Tess.
‘Coryn did.’
‘Why?’
‘I told you, he worked in several Asian
countries before we met.’
‘Could he have been in touch with the
Communists then? Making deals with China
‘The country’s been open for business
for more than two decades, James. Don’t they teach you that at MI6?’
Four calls out of the first five were
either responded to in Chinese or ended with an answering machine in that
language. The odd one out was the call where I heard a familiar voice.
Chapter
Fourteen
‘Bond. So glad to hear you’re alive,’
Blu said.
I noted there was no helicopter sound in
the background. They must have landed already or it wasn’t him at the castle.
‘The feeling might not be mutual. I
wished you hadn’t escaped from your safe house.’
‘It wasn’t all that safe after all so I
decided to upgrade to a better standard. Why are you calling me?’
‘You probably saw this was Amanda Hu’s
phone I used. You’re aware she’s no longer with us.’
‘As I told you, I didn’t really have any
business with her.’
‘Enough to feature on her list of recent
calls. We’ll catch you again soon, Blu.’
‘Did you have something to talk to me
about or are you just playing around to try and locate me? I can spare you the
effort and tell you right now I’m neither in Holland Britain
‘I will find you, Blu.’
I switched off the connection and turned
to Tess. ‘Do you know a hacker we can trust?’
‘Give me the phone,’ she told me. She
called someone she referred to as ‘Champ,’ asked for a trace on Blu’s mobile
and threw the phone back at me.
‘Let’s hope he really is a champ with
electronic gear.’
‘He’s a champ in so many ways, James.’
She was making me jealous, on purpose.
The next five numbers were again less than
helpful.
‘We could make a run at the Chinese
embassy,’ Tess suggested.
‘And get us all shot or carted off to
the police station as invaders or terrorists. Nice try, but subtlety has never
been the CIA’s forte, has it?’
Before she had the time to make any
further unrealistic suggestions, Hu’s phone made a sound like water gurgling. I
took the call without saying a word.
It was Champ. Tess put him on speaker
phone and told him to talk to me. The hacker, who sounded to me like an obese
greasy guy sitting somewhere in a basement with a supersized portion of fried
chicken on his lap, had more information than I had ever hoped for.
‘The target’s phone was located on the North Sea coast, in a town called Knockie or Knock in Belgium
‘It’s called Knokke and you have to
pronounce the k in front. I know it,’ Tess said.
‘One more thing. His cell number is
registered to one Sebastian Brookes, also with an e between the k and the s.’
‘Can you help us find out who that is? We
don’t have a computer right here.’
‘Thought so. Be with you in a while,
governor.’
The connection was cut. Governor?
‘Should we change course for Knokke?’
Tess asked.
‘If we have to head over there, we’ll do
it in my car, not in this.’ We had reached the outskirts of the Belgian
capital, but Knokke was again back in the direction of Bruges
Champ was back on the phone within two
minutes.
‘Sebastian Brookes is officially registered
as a business consultant with a London
I shook my head. Never heard of them,
but the London
‘They are one and the same person,’ Champ
said. ‘Brookes moved out of Britain
‘What did you find out about the
company? Where does it fit in and what is Blu or Brookes exactly doing for
them?’
I told Tess with a hand signal to keep
her eyes on the road. Traffic was busy and undisciplined.
‘As I said, he’s a consultant. He
arranges deals for them. Trade, export, import, construction projects and so on
all over the world. He’s at home in Brussels
‘Any links to Coryn?’ Tess interjected.
‘Are you still with that schmuck?’ Champ
fired off, sounding like a jealous boyfriend.
‘Answer my question,’ Tess said.
‘No official links that I can see, but
those guys would probably use pseudonyms, wouldn’t they?’
‘Do you have other names for me, the
company’s board members and shareholders?’ I interjected.
‘Sir, I’m not working for the Wall
Street Journal here.’
‘You don’t have to sir me but how long
would it take before you get the information I ask for?’
‘One second. I’ve got it all saved in a
special file here, with compliments of several friends I strong-armed over the
past few minutes.’
Why didn’t you say so from the start, I
thought. Champ started off reading a list of names and titles that didn’t mean
anything to me at all. Until he came to one name that did sound familiar.
‘Can you repeat that one?’
Champ did. And he gave me the title of
the person. Special consultant international relations.
‘All this information is up to date?’ I
just had to make sure. Champ confirmed my suspicions.
By the time our three-way conversation
ended, Tess had driven us to the police compound where the car was ready for
me. MI6 – I supposed Beau Bradwick – had already called ahead to tell them
about our arrival.
The Aston was in a perfect condition. I
checked all the gadgets and they were present, even though I didn’t have the
time to find out whether they still worked. We raced off.
‘Where are we headed, James?’
‘England
‘So you’re pretending to be driving back
to London
‘That’s the general idea.’
‘How are you going to find Blu? I know
Knokke, our home – my home – is just a couple of miles away. You can’t expect
to just walk along main street and hope to see Blu there.’
‘That’s where I thought your connections
might come in handy.’
‘Send in the Marines?’
‘Something like that.’ We smiled at each
other. ‘If you have someone like Champ in your arsenal, you must have friends
who can have Blu located as well.’
‘How are you going to do that?’ she
asked while I steered the Aston out of Brussels
I showed her the mobile phone, Hu’s
phone.
When we were approaching Bruges
‘Bond. What kind of trick are you up to
now? Ran out of ideas, have you?’
‘We can talk about a deal.’
‘The only deal I’m interested in, is the
one keeping you away from me. Whatever your deal is, the present works fine for
me.’
‘You cannot say the same about your
future.’
‘Did Q equip you with a crystal ball
now?’
‘How do you know so much about me? You’re
really full of surprises, Blu.’ I didn’t want him to know that I knew his real
identity.
‘Stop annoying me or I’ll cut the
connection and throw this mobile away into the water.’
I grinned because he had just revealed
his whereabouts.
‘Nothing like a weekend on the coast to
pick up the mood, is there?’
‘Tell me about that deal of yours. I
guess it’ll have some amusement value for a few more seconds.’
‘Asylum in Britain
‘Why would I want to live in Britain Caribbean islands would be a lot more fun.’
‘It’s the intention that counts.’
‘I told you, Bond, I don’t know what the
Chinese were up to with Coryn Maas. He was dealing with them, I wasn’t.’
‘You and I both know that isn’t true. Amanda
Hu had you on her call list and I bet she wasn’t providing you with advice on
what Ming vase to buy for your holiday villa in Brighton .
You tell us who did what to whom and I promise you, MI6 will look favourably on
your requests, even though I don’t know which Caribbean
island you’ll end up on.’
‘Not Haiti Cuba
‘That sounds more like the CIA. You’ve
been watching the wrong movies, Blu.’
Tess pointed at the exit for Knokke. We
were fewer than 20 minutes away from our target but I still had to keep
talking.
‘The deal is not on, whatever you say,
Bond. You talk rubbish and you know I’m not believing one word of it. You’re
just trying to gain time but I can tell you again right now. The fish isn’t
biting. Goodbye.’
He cut the connection and I swore under
my breath. I looked at Tess to see what her reaction was. She mumbled something
unintelligible. I gave her the phone and she called her connection, whoever it was.
‘Do you have a location?’ she asked. Whatever
the reply was, Tess smiled.
‘Got him,’ she told me and gave me
directions. This had been part of her world for the past several years.
Knokke was on the far north of the
40-mile-long Belgian coast, right on the border with the Netherlands Bruges Brussels
I had never visited Knokke before
because the Belgian weather had a reputation only marginally better than Britain
As we drove into Knokke, I felt more at
ease. Even though my Aston still caused some heads to turn, the local car
population was certainly more in tune with my vehicle. We didn’t see any Astons
or Rolls Royces yet, but there was a Maserati and a Bentley Continental,
designed by a Belgian, by sheer coincidence.
Our destination was not the centre of
Knokke, so I turned right into a side street in the direction of what Tess told
me was the most expensive part of this expensive town. We drove past hotels
with sunny terraces full of pensioners and boutiques selling brand-name
handbags that were not available in Bruges
Once past the luxury villas with views
of the sea, the scenery changed to complete countryside. Grass fields, low hard
trees, hillocks, ditches and canals. We had entered a different world.
Tess went all quiet. I put my hand on
her arm.
‘Our home is in just such a place. All rustic
and quiet. Why did he have to leave and do all those things?’
The roads became narrower and the
scenery flatter and emptier. It felt like we had left civilization, and the
glitter and glamour of the city had moved to another world.
Tess signalled me to stop by the side of
the road, where she got out of the car and made a few last-minute calls while I
kept the engine running.
We moved on until we reached a huge,
mostly empty car park.
‘Is this it?’ I noticed about five
sedans, one minibus and one SUV. I imagined the last vehicle might be Blu’s,
unless he had arrived here by helicopter.
‘You bet. We’ll find him here.’
‘Do we need to buy a ticket?’
There was a ticket booth to our right. This
was the Zwin, Belgium North Sea ’s high tides.
I was worried about its status as a
destination for tourists and school outings, because that meant both cover and
collateral damage if we had to get rough with Blu.
We checked the guns. I had a new Walther
from the glove compartment of the car, while Tess would use one from Hu’s
thugs. I also took some complementary gear with me from the Aston.
We behaved like an ordinary couple of
tourists and bought the tickets with a smile.
In front of us, we had a square flat
area with wet and muddy patches, the sea off to the left, and all around the
other sides sand dunes covered in vegetation.
‘It’s low tide,’ Tess remarked.
‘Where do we find him?’
‘He could be anywhere, strolling in
between the bird cages, hiding in the dunes, walking around the outer
perimeter.’
There was a group of families and
children wading through the central low area with a guide. I checked to see
whether Blu hadn’t mingled in with them to look less conspicuous, but I saw
nobody who matched his description.
‘If he’s not here, where is he?’
A large white cloud passed before the
sun. It made our job easier.
‘If I’m not mistaken, there’s a man
walking alone in the dunes at two o’clock .’
I saw him too. A shape in a dark blue
overcoat, stomping through the sand on his way out. One of the items I had
picked up in the car was a miniature pair of binoculars. They confirmed our
suspicions. It was Blu and he was far ahead of us.
‘Let’s go,’ Tess said. She was eager for
revenge.
‘We need to take him alive,’ I reminded
her.
We ploughed to the right, but I was
barely able to catch up with her.
‘I often came to Knokke for my morning
jog,’ she told me. ‘Looks like more sea air could do you a lot of good too,
James.’
As if that needed saying. Just because
she was off like a rocket didn’t mean I couldn’t follow. I may be a slow
starter, but it’s the permanence and continuity that were my strong points.
We saw Blu vanish behind the dunes.
‘What’s on the other side?’
‘More of the same. A couple of dunes,
then grassy hills, then the grass plains we saw driving here.’
‘What on earth is he doing there? Looking
for a buried treasure?’
‘He’s the treasure. And before you tell
me again. Don’t worry, I won’t kill him. I want to see him suffer for what he
did to Coryn.’
‘You don’t know if he’s the mastermind
behind all this. It might be the Chinese ambassador in Brussels
‘It was you who said he’s the key
figure,’ Tess said.
‘I did, but I could be wrong.’
‘Whatever the truth, we need to catch up
or we’ll lose him again. God forbid, he has a helicopter waiting for him behind
that dune. I don’t want to go half around the world again to find him, James.’
Neither did I, but I didn’t think Blu
came here to board a helicopter.
As we climbed the dune, I looked back
over the nature reserve. The guide and his followers had moved on in the
direction of the sea. A couple was sunbathing on the side of a dune, sheltered
from the wind.
Near the top, Tess crouched and looked
across to the other side. There was no helicopter, but there was something far
more interesting.
Chapter
Fifteen
Blu had arrived by a chunk of concrete
that stuck out of the sand. He slipped through a narrow slit to disappear
inside.
We had been spared that kind of
construction on our side of the Channel, but I knew what it was. Part of the
Atlantikwall the Nazis built all along the coast of occupied Western
Europe to prevent the Allies from landing. It hadn’t worked, but
some parts of it were still standing, mainly in France
‘He can see us from in there, but we can’t
see him,’ Tess whispered, as if he could overhear us.
We lied still in the sand. ‘Don’t worry,
I brought something from the car.’
The object looked like your average
smartphone but Q had made sure its capabilities went much beyond chatting,
messaging and taking pictures. If you went into its option lists, which was
what I was doing right now, you found a microphone icon. The recording however
was not just for sounds and voices right next to the device, but could
eavesdrop on goings-on up to half a mile away. At least, that was what the
manual had said.
I pointed the top side of the device at
the bunker and plugged a wire into my left ear. I gave the other wire to Tess
so she could listen in as well.
Unless Blu had entered the bunker to dig
up something or to hide a piece of evidence, I suspected it was a perfect
meeting place, out of the way of prying eyes. The tour groups that stomped
around the nature reserve would never think of heading so far into the dunes,
and only the most morbid of visitors would ever want to enter a remainder of
the Second World War.
We waited precisely one minute until my
suspicions were proven right. There was somebody else inside the structure.
‘Bond called me,’ we heard Blu say
without introduction.
The other voice was a man’s, resonating
in the hollow of the bunker. ‘Does he know where you are?’
‘I told him I was far away from Britain Holland Belgium Europe
by now.’
‘If his mind is set on something, he’ll
follow you everywhere, Sebastian.’
This was the first mention I had ever
heard of Blu’s real name. The other man must be a good acquaintance of him.
‘He was using Amanda’s phone,’ Blu said.
‘The end of a beautiful friendship. This
was for the best. Sooner or later, our deals with the Chinese would have landed
us into hot water. Having Amanda leave now is an early realization of something
that would have had to happen anyway.’
‘You sent her to her death?’
‘She tried to leave with me, but I had
Bond to shake off. I couldn’t have one or the other, so she fell to her death.’
‘But you let Bond go.’
‘He has his uses. I can control him better
from where I am now.’
‘They’re going to be all over Amanda’s
organization.’
‘The worst they can do is expelling the
Chinese ambassador, but the Belgians need to agree first, and there is no sign
they will bow down to MI6.’
‘So our deal is safe?’
‘The Taiwanese have their submarines,
the Chinese have the specifications, and Maas
is dead. Most of those involved are dead. Except you and me.’
I knew where this was going, but I
wondered whether Blu was not too involved to figure all of this out. When the
man mentioned Coryn, I looked sideways at Tess and I saw her go all tense. I
was worried she would shoot up and run toward the bunker to kill Blu’s
conversation partner.
‘Where do we go from here?’ Blu asked.
‘This is our final meeting. We can’t
afford to be seen together anymore. The consultancy should be disbanded, I
start my new life, my new job.’
‘I wished I had a new job to start.’
‘It’s too late for that now.’
The pop was meant to be silent, but the
hollowness of the room and the strength of the listening device made it still
sound like someone had dropped a tonne of bricks. We knew it was a suppressor. The
man had shot Blu and we heard his body fall to the ground.
Tess was already half way up when I
pulled her arm and signalled her to get down behind the dune instead of
exposing herself.
I left her behind and rushed toward the
opening in the bunker.
The moment must have blinded me, because
just before I reached the slit, a voice called out to me to throw my weapon
down.
‘Stop right there where you are, Bond.’
‘What are you going to do, stay inside
the bunker all day? There is no other exit, you are caught.’
‘I fought off the mastermind behind this
case, and he didn’t survive it. We are allies, Bond. Throw down your gun before
there is any mindless violence.’
I nearly laughed at the expression but I
still put down my gun. I watched him crawl out of the split. He wiped the sand
off his perfectly tailored suit and stood upright, holding the Walther PPK in
his left hand, because his right arm was still in a sling.
‘Embarrassing, a small accident on the
ski slopes in the middle of summer.’
‘You’re responsible for her death as
well, Benedict.’ I addressed Y with his real first name, unaware if it would
make any impression on him.
‘You and I can work together as the
perfect boss and the perfect employee, or you can die here in a shootout with
the evil mastermind inside this German bunker.’
I moved around until I was to his right.
His eyes, his gun, his stance, they all followed me around. Don’t kill him, I
thought.
The shot was perfect. It hit his left
arm just like the shot on the helicopter had hit his right. Y gritted his teeth
but had to let the gun go. It all happened in a split second, but it was like a
slow motion scene in a bad action movie. Tess came running, her gun in her
outstretched hand. I dived for Y’s gun first, for mine second.
The widow of Coryn Maas stood over Y,
who had dropped into the sand, blood flowing out of his left arm while his
right arm was unable to do anything about it.
‘Don’t kill him.’ I didn’t hear myself,
but it must have been like a scream.
Tess had her gun pointing straight at
the top of Y’s head, ready to avenge the death of her husband.
‘If we keep him, he’ll rot in jail after
we get all the information about his bad deals. If you shoot him, we lose all
that and you are finished. What do you want?’
I wasn’t a praying man, but this time, I
really wanted inspiration from above to help her make the right choice.
She kicked him in the leg to relieve her
energy and put away the gun. I called Bill for assistance.
‘You should have chosen M as your name,’
I told Benedict Yarborough.
Epilogue
I took leave of Tess the next morning. We
had spent the night at one of those fancy hotels we had driven by in the centre
of Knokke. English breakfast, the menu said. It almost felt like home.
After the shootout in the dunes, I had
asked if she was alright.
‘I’m shaken, but not stirred,’ she had said.
Good catch phrase, I might use it myself.
I didn’t know anything about her future.
Would she be my new Felix Leiter? A person I bumped into from time to time, who
helped me when I needed it most, who I could trust to go against authority out
of pure friendship. I sincerely hoped so.
The Chinese ambassador was expelled from
Belgium China London
What was the inheritance of Coryn Maas?
He had sold secrets about the purchase of submarines by Taiwan China Maas and Beijing
We would never find out all the details
about who did what to whom, but the main story was enough. Tess did not have a
clean husband. She would remember him, but the bad sides would keep intruding.
Y and Blu – or Benedict Yarborough and
Sebastian Brookes – had been close since Eton .
One stayed in Britain
Huffington, Loude & Parkinson, the
consultancy bureau in London
When Yarborough became Y, major riches
were ahead. Were it not for Coryn Maas who had to be removed, the duo would
have been looking forward to using confidential MI6 information from all over
the world for their deals.
Coryn Maas threw a spanner in the works,
and I stopped the works altogether.
Yarborough had now moved to an island to
live a life at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, but not the Caribbean
island Blu had had in mind. The government was loath to admit it had made a
major mistake by picking Benedict Yarborough so the selection process would
last longer this time around. I didn’t mind having Bill Tanner around for some
time.
THE END
Labels: 007, Bond, James Bond, M, NaNoWriMo, Q, Rio Moss, Skyfall, Y
posted by The Nude Guru at
1:10 PM
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