Authors: Hector Macdonald
‘I can’t hear anything for now,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me?’
She was staring in horror at the wire hanging from his mouth, at the grisly hole in his neck. Pulling herself together, she nodded.
‘Get Klara to untie you. She can’t hear either. Then find the key for these cuffs. She probably knows where it is. Don’t let her leave.’
He stepped through the open door, gun raised in his cuffed right hand. No one in the corridor. The fire stairs. A few drops of blood on the carpet. He pulled open the door and looked down. Impossible to hear anything more than a dull hum.
He started down the first two flights of stairs, but stopped when he caught a flash of movement. Never before had he been deaf in a combat situation. It was unnerving. Leaning cautiously over the rail, his balance still unsteady, he looked down and saw two black figures walking despondently up.
He made the weapon safe and headed back to the room.
‘You’re not about to trust her?’
Siren was outraged. The full force of her anger was lost on Arkell’s debilitated hearing, but the expression on her face left no room for doubt. Klara stood up and walked to the windows.
A mirror above the bar reflected back the grisly state of his mouth as Arkell worked the steel wire slowly through his tongue. Blood flowed from each side, and he had to pause regularly to spit into a highball glass. ‘She wants to help.’
‘She pointed a gun at you while her boyfriend strangled me!’ Siren’s words sounded a long way off, tinny and muffled.
‘She saved your life.’
‘More than you were ready to do when that monster gave you the choice.’ Angry at herself now, Siren drew closer. ‘Will you let me do that?’
‘It’s done,’ said Arkell, tossing the wire on the bar.
‘Then can we please go find a doctor?’
He looked round, concerned. ‘Is your throat –?’
‘Not
me
– you!’
‘I’m fine.’
‘There’s a bloody great hole in your neck. You are
not
fine.’
Rinsing his mouth with vodka, Arkell spat in the highball and turned to the Brazilians. ‘Felipe, Marcos, you’ve risked your lives. You deserve to walk away now, but I’m going to ask you to come with us. You’ve seen his face. You too, Siren. We’ll need all the eyes we can get in Brasilia. Will you help us find him?’
The two Brazilians nodded without hesitation. Siren said, ‘Of course I’m coming, you stupid bastard, but that woman –’
‘Thank you,’ said Arkell, cutting her off. From his wallet he took a clutch of $100 bills and handed them to Felipe. ‘I’m going to talk to Klara now. Go to hospital and get that leg sewn up. And take Siren with you – have a specialist look at her throat. Then find us a plane to Brasilia. Private jet if necessary. I’m not in the mood to fly economy.’
Siren was staring at him furiously. She didn’t speak as she found her shoes and tidied her hair in the bar mirror. When Klara offered her a scarf, she took it without so much as a glance at the other woman, wrapping it around her bruised neck. ‘You’re making a mistake,’ she told Arkell as she left. ‘Don’t turn your back on her for a second.’
More blood had collected in Arkell’s mouth, and he sat down with a bottle of mineral water and the ice bucket. He spat into the bucket, gargled water, spat again. Klara sat opposite him, back uncomfortably straight and legs pressed together. She watched him as a child might watch a large and drunken stranger – with rapt attention and a hint of fear.
‘How’s your neck?’
She flexed it unconsciously. ‘OK.’
‘Can you hear me all right? We can shout if necessary.’
‘I can hear you.’
He offered her the water. When she declined, he drank half the bottle.
‘My colleagues will tell me the same thing Siren just did. We should lock you up.’
‘You should.’
‘But you’re prepared to help me find and kill Gavriel Yadin.’
She looked down. ‘I can’t say I want you to kill him.’
Arkell set the ice bucket on the floor as a spittoon between his feet. ‘Klara, why are you here?’
‘He contacted me. He said he needed me.’
‘So you flew straight back into his arms?’
‘Yes.’
‘That night in Strasbourg, what we did together . . . that was all fake?’
Swallowing, she said, ‘I understand why you think that.’
‘If you still love him –’
‘I don’t still love him.’
‘So sure?’
There was no reply. Arkell stood up and moved to the closet. He began rifling through Yadin’s clothes, searching the pockets, checking the lining of the jackets.
‘Look, Klara, I’m not going to lock you up. But Siren’s right: it would be crazy to involve you tomorrow if I can’t trust you.’ Two empty cases were stacked beside the closet; swiftly he unbuckled each one, running his hands into every crevice and corner. There was nothing inside. On the desk was a sheaf of maps: Brasilia and Rio. The open safe held a set of keys, seven thousand dollars in cash, a passport in the name of René Salvin and a plane ticket to Brasilia. No weapons, no poisons, no dossiers incriminating Tony Watchman. A thorough search of the bed, light fittings, furniture and bathroom yielded nothing.
When she spoke, it was so quiet he had to ask her to repeat herself. The ringing in his ears seemed to be getting worse. ‘I said, I never wanted you to be hurt,’ she said stiffly.
‘You had nothing to do with it. I came for Siren.’
Klara shrank back into her chair and stared at the floor.
‘When I first met you,’ he said, sitting down again, ‘you gave me the impression you knew nothing about Yadin’s job.’
‘You gave me the impression you were a priest.’
‘
Did
you know? Or have you just come to accept the idea?’
She muttered something inaudible. Impatiently, he told her to repeat it.
‘I didn’t know.’
‘So you discover you’ve been sleeping with a hired killer and within a week you’re back in his arms?’
‘I slept with you too.’
He sat back, repulsed. ‘You see no difference?’
‘Weren’t you hired to kill?’
Unable to answer, he spat blood into the bucket. Was there no difference? Was he in danger of turning into Yadin? He had been so young when he killed for the Legion, for Wraye. Too young to know better perhaps. Until Emily died. There had been no formal renunciation, no symbolic laying down of arms. He had simply stopped killing. For nine years. Would Yadin’s funereal existence be his own fate if, wiser now and more mindful of the value of life, he started again?
Klara stretched her neck painfully and said, ‘Haven’t you ever . . . ?’ She stopped. ‘I – I know there’s a difference.’ Raising her eyes at last, she said, ‘Haven’t you ever felt close to someone you shouldn’t?’
Meeting her gaze, he hesitated.
‘You know you should leave, shut them out, but you stay. You let them get close to you. You let them take hold of a piece of your heart.’
‘Klara . . .’
‘So imagine, please, Simon, how much harder it is when you only now find out who they are and what they have done. Especially when you can see they still love you very –’ She stopped herself. ‘When you
think
they still love you.’
‘You can’t believe . . . Klara, he just abandoned you.’
‘I know.’
‘He could have broken your neck.’
‘You think I want to care for him?’ She was suddenly indignant. ‘A
murderer
? You think I want to feel anything for either of you?’
Arkell sat rigidly upright. He would not go down that road. He would not become Yadin. More blood was pooling in his mouth, but he chose to swallow it rather than reach for the ice bucket. ‘I’m not asking you to promise me anything,’ he said softly. ‘I just need to know how you’ll react if you see Gavriel again.’
‘It’s going to take time,’ she said. ‘I don’t want him in my head, OK? Not after this. But he’s been there so long, he’s part of me. Do you understand? I have to exorcize him, cut him out like cancer. I’m trying to be honest with you.’
‘“Like cancer” is good enough for me.’
They sat a long time in silence. Arkell could not say exactly when their gaze ceased to be antagonistic and instead relaxed into something like shared understanding. He became aware that a warmth had permeated his tired, damaged body, and with it a sense of unfathomable optimism that he hadn’t felt in many years. His fingers moved unconsciously to his injured jaw: the pain had been growing steadily as the tension drained from his limbs.
Klara said, ‘Let me look at that,’ and before he could object she was next to him on the couch, easing away his hand and using mineral water and a cocktail napkin to clean the caked blood from the wound.
He could not turn his head to look at her as he wanted to. Feeling her fingers on his skin, he tensed again, unsure now what to do with his hands, his elbows, his feet.
‘It’s bad,’ she said, and kissed his jaw.
He looked at her then. Her disquieting lips, wet with mineral water and a scrap of his blood, shivered slightly, a whisper from his.
‘You have to see a doctor.’ When he didn’t react, didn’t move, she said, as if by way of negotiation, ‘I’ll come.’
And suddenly, with holes in his neck and tongue, bullet wounds in his arm and leg, and nine long years lost to anonymity, he felt like crying.
Through the night they poured into the capital. To a city laid out in the image of an aeroplane, the people of Brazil came in cars and buses, on motorcycles and the roofs of garbage lorries and cement trucks. Makeshift camps of mourners mushroomed along the 200-metre wide central reservation of the Monumental Axis, the immense ministry-lined avenue that formed the fuselage of the aircraft city. From Mato Grosso and Amazonas, from São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul, from Ceará, Alagoas and Pernambuco, they had travelled days and nights to a capital most had never seen before to pay their last respects.
In a guest bungalow behind the Canadian embassy, Simon Arkell read the AMB file late into the night. Klara was asleep in the room next door, but Madeleine Wraye stayed up until he had finished. In silence, they walked outside to a darkened tennis court, away from the possibility of Canadian bugs.
‘David Atticus served in the US Marine Corps at the same time Tony was in the Royal Marines,’ she explained. ‘They met through a Pentagon exchange programme, hit it off immediately, shared adventurous expeditions up mountains and over polar ice caps, debated politics in the mess. Best buddies, inseparable even by an ocean. So it’s odd that the friendship seemed to come to an abrupt end soon after Tony joined the Firm. No more family visits, no friendly calls.
‘Atticus stayed on as a Marine, rose to the rank of major, then was recruited by AMB to revamp their security division. He performed extremely well, in part because he seems to have had inexplicably good information about threats and opportunities in some tricky parts of the world. From there it’s all speculation, except that Tony has been known to slip off to Louisville from time to time when visiting Langley. And he has twice been observed meeting with Atticus in DC. Odd, given that there has been no overt interaction between the two of them for decades. We can only presume that Tony has been feeding Atticus and AMB critical SIS CX for over twenty years . . . and for at least half that time has been commissioning some very black work on their behalf.’
‘What’s in it for Watchman?’
‘There’s no obvious money trail – Tony hasn’t been buying mansions – but AMB will have made it worth his while. Escrow accounts and stock portfolios Tony will collect on when he leaves the Firm, same way we compensated Soviet defectors who stayed in post. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tony owns a fair chunk of AMB by now. He certainly deserves it, given the military contracts they won as a direct consequence of GRIEVANCE.’
‘And now Think Again is a threat to their counter-narcotics business?’
‘Revenues from domestic border patrol operations have overtaken the combined Middle East and Afghanistan contribution. The Homeland Security work is too important to allow people like Mayhew to turn the heads of congressmen with talk of legalization. It also explains a riddle. Just before he showed up in Strasbourg, Yadin executed a drug baron by the name of Rodrigo Salis who had been eluding AMB’s Gulf operations by shipping cocaine into the US via West Africa. AMB’s credibility now depends on their success in curbing cocaine flows, and Salis was not helpful in that regard. Tony Watchman paid him a visit, I would guess to encourage him back into the more traditional smuggling routes that fall within AMB’s purview. It didn’t work, so Tony had him killed.’ She smiled sourly. ‘I fear for the safety of all drug barons who dare to channel their product around the AMB net.’
‘How much evidence do you have for all this?’
‘Very little. So if you find Yadin tomorrow, do try to extract what you can while he’s still breathing.’
‘I’m not sure he knows much.’ He paused. ‘I guess he could testify to the executions Watchman ordered.’
Wraye looked round sharply. ‘This isn’t going to trial. You know that.’
‘Bad choice of words. If I catch him alive, Yadin can share what he knows with our interrogators.’
‘If you catch him alive in Brazil, it won’t be our interrogators that go to work on him.’
‘All right, but –’
‘Simon, you understand we cannot discuss Anthony Watchman with CSIS or ABIN – or anyone else for that matter. He’s a British problem, a
Firm
problem, that you and I are going to resolve. However interested the Canadians and Brazilians might be in the identity of Yadin’s master, you do see why we can’t air this particular dirty laundry?’
‘Of course.’
‘So then you understand why Yadin cannot be captured alive on Brazilian soil. Why it is your duty – as well as your
right
– to kill him.’
He looked away. ‘Of course,’ he said again.
‘What we have to accept is that the threat to our prime minister’s life is not the topmost security concern in the minds of our Brazilian friends.’ Nathaniel Henderson gazed around the alert faces of the Prime Minster Protection Detail and Margrave’s CSIS team. ‘Enemy action has taken down their president. The vice president has assumed the office. He and the other three individuals able to fulfil the role of acting president will be present in the Praça today. A single attack could eliminate all four of them, plunging Brazil into a constitutional crisis. We will have the full cooperation of the federal police, ABIN and the military police – we just shouldn’t expect to have much of their attention.’
‘So we’re looking for this guy in a crowd of thousands,’ said one of his officers, ‘in a city we don’t know, with law enforcement who don’t speak our language or share our priorities.’ Like his colleagues, he was grim faced and wan. Daybreak was still a few minutes away. All of them had been awake since 4 a.m.
‘Might not even be him we have to worry about,’ said another. ‘He used an accomplice in Lourdes.’
‘The Praça is so exposed,’ said a third. ‘Couldn’t we move this thing indoors?’
‘The only buildings around the square are government facilities,’ said Henderson. ‘Their windows and rooftops will be fully controlled by the Feds.’
‘And if TARQUIN impersonates a Brazilian officer? In a police uniform, he could get himself a sweet sniper’s position on the roof of the Supreme Court.’
‘Or he impersonates a presidential guardsman. Or a congressional aide. Or a grieving relative. Shit, apart from a few seconds of side-profile video, we don’t even know what he looks like!’
Henderson held up a hand to halt the growing discontent. ‘We’re going to have some help with that. Some of you have met this gentleman before.’ He turned to Arkell. ‘You want to bring in your friends?’
Simon Arkell opened the door. Felipe, Marcos, Siren and Klara walked in. Both women looked tense; he wondered what had passed between them.
‘These folks have all seen TARQUIN close up,’ said Henderson brusquely. ‘They have kindly volunteered to accompany us today.’
‘No disrespect,’ interrupted one of the RCMP officers, ‘but who are these guys? How exactly do they know TARQUIN?’
‘Fair question,’ said Arkell. ‘Siren is my assistant. Yesterday we had an unpleasant encounter with . . . TARQUIN. Felipe and Marcos, both former members of the Rio state military police, came to our rescue. They had no knowledge of TARQUIN until yesterday.’ He hesitated. ‘And this is Klara, who . . .’ He caught Siren’s damning stare, and was aghast to find himself blushing. ‘Who . . .’
‘The man you’re looking for was my lover.’
Astonishment marked every face in the room. Siren’s glare turned triumphant. A CSIS officer hurriedly swept up and concealed a set of papers laid out on one of the tables. ‘Who the fuck let her on site?’ muttered someone.
‘You had a physical relationship with TARQUIN?’ demanded Henderson.
Nervously, she tugged at her charcoal beret. ‘For four years.’
Turning on Arkell, the PMPD chief said, ‘Clearly this individual must be excluded immediately and detained for her own protection until the threat is past.’
But as two RCMP officers started forward Shel Margrave, who had been silent thus far, said, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear from the lady.’
Henderson looked thunderous. ‘We’re on a tight schedule. We don’t have time to –’
‘It seems to me,’ observed Margrave, ‘that we have almost no usable intel on the man we’re trying to find. Ms . . .’
‘Richter.’
‘Ms Richter knows him a thousand times better than anyone else in this room. If she is willing to help us identify him, perhaps she might also share with us some insight into the man’s character. That would seem to me as good a use of the next ten minutes as a weather briefing or whatever else it is we have scheduled before we head on out there.’
Henderson shook his head in silent protest. Of Arkell he demanded, ‘Do you vouch for her?’
Madeleine Wraye stepped forward. ‘I vouch for her.’
‘All right, then,’ said Margrave. ‘Ms Richter, please, tell us what you can.’
Under the hostile gaze of more than twenty intelligence and police personnel, the apprentice physiotherapist from Hamburg seemed momentarily dumbstruck. Glancing helplessly at Arkell, she stammered, ‘I – I don’t know what I can tell you. I’m only now finding out the truth for myself.’
Gently, Arkell suggested, ‘You could describe how you met.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s too sad.’
‘OK, enough,’ interrupted Henderson. ‘If we have to wait for Ms Richter to get over her feelings for this murderer –’
‘I
am
over him!’
The outburst drew a fascinated silence from the room.
‘Don’t you people understand it’s not easy? Finding out the worst possible truth about someone you love . . . knowing you have to stop loving them . . . but you can’t just switch it off in one day. I don’t think any of you understand this. I
loved
him! He was intense, angry, withdrawn. But he was . . . he is human. And he can be kind, generous. There is so much intelligence in his eyes and depth in his soul. More than I see in any of you. I know you have to kill him today. Perhaps that’s right. Perhaps it’s what he wants. There is something in him that is new. Like he’s empty. How do you say . . . a
death wish
? No, that’s not what it is. But maybe now he looks forward to death. I don’t know if he was ever afraid before. I know he will not be afraid of anything again.’
‘What makes you say that?’ asked Margrave. ‘Has he talked about fear?’
‘It’s the way he moves, the way he breathes. Sometimes in Rio I thought he had stopped breathing completely.’
‘I’m getting a picture of an increasingly unstable individual,’ murmured one CSIS officer.
‘He’s not unstable,’ said Klara simply. ‘But I think he has been depressed for a long time. Before, I believed it was a midlife crisis, but now . . . knowing what he is . . .’
‘Do you have any idea what’s he planning today?’
‘No.’
‘See any equipment while you were with him? Long cases, perhaps? Syringes? Bottles? Strange devices?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Did he meet with anyone?’
‘In Rio there was a man. He approached us in a café on Avenida Atlântica. They knew each other. The man was called . . . Olavo. Gavriel told him we were busy and he should come to the hotel the next day.’
‘And did he?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there most of the time.’
‘Why not?’
‘Gavriel sent me out every day: “go shopping”, “go to the beach”, “take a tour to Pão de Açúcar”. He didn’t want me around. Maybe he was sick of me. I don’t know.’
‘When you returned to the hotel from these excursions, was anything different? New luggage? Had the toiletries in the bathroom been moved?’
‘No.’
‘Signs of cleaning? Grease or oil marks?’
‘Nothing like that. Only . . . once there was an odour.’
‘An odour?’
‘Like . . . in science class.’
‘Some kind of chemical? Chlorine? Ammonia?’
‘No, not chemistry. I remember the smell from the physics classroom. More like a . . . burning smell.’
The Canadians stared at each other in bemusement. ‘What physicists burn stuff?’ remarked one.
An RCMP officer at the back of the room cut through the speculation: ‘She’s talking about solder. That burning smell you get from a soldering iron.’ He paused. ‘TARQUIN is doing electronics.’
‘Jesus,’ growled Henderson. He turned to Arkell. ‘Was there anything electronic in the room when you searched it? Transistors, switches, any little components at all?’
‘No.’
‘Has he built himself a vest? He’s depressed, she says. Looks forward to death. Are we dealing with a suicide bomber?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ mused Margrave. ‘In his past life he encountered a few.’
‘Can we find out who this Olavo guy is? If he came to the hotel, maybe there’s CCTV.’
‘ABIN are all over TARQUIN’s hotel room,’ said Sarah Winter, the officer responsible for liaison with the Brazilian intelligence service. ‘They’re checking the faces of everyone entering the hotel during his stay. A big job – thousands of people coming and going.’
Margrave nodded. ‘Have them prioritize anyone arriving and leaving within two hours, carrying a bag or a case, on . . . what day would this have been?’
‘Wednesday,’ answered Klara.
‘Wednesday. And check their files for any local hoods with access to explosives by the name of Olavo.’
Henderson turned to his own team: ‘This doesn’t mean we stop looking for the guy with the dart gun or syringe. But Ms Richter has given us a valuable steer: we also need to keep our eyes open for bags and bulky jackets. We all know how to do that.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time to move.’