The Game (Tom Wood)

FOURTEEN





Dinner consisted of two hotdogs loaded with onions and ketchup bought from a street vendor. Muir settled for a cream donut, along with a black coffee into which she added three sachets of sugar. Two brown. One white. The sun shone through wispy clouds and they walked along the river, where it was quiet. It was windy and Muir wore a band to keep her hair back. Joggers passed them by on occasion.

Victor saw nothing of Muir’s team. There were still three he hadn’t identified and he knew they wouldn’t be far; nor would the young guy who had been waiting at the bus stop, the sportswear-clad fifty-year-old called Beatty, and the one disguised as a businessman. They would be tracking Muir easily enough with GPS via her cell phone. Beatty would have argued they needed to maintain visual contact but she would have insisted otherwise. She knew as Victor had spotted them the first time that he would so again, and she didn’t want to antagonise him. He appreciated that uncommon courtesy.

‘The diplomat who was killed in Yemen was CIA,’ Muir said, looking away. ‘Non-official cover operative. A NOC. Stanley Charters. Guy was a real hero.’

‘What was he doing in Yemen?’

‘He was running agents linked to the black market plutonium trade. Which I’m sure you can appreciate is a very rare and complex operation. Anything radioactive automatically becomes the hardest illicit commodity to identify and track. And not just because the traders go to such great lengths to hide it.’

‘Because more often than not it’s mostly smoke and mirrors.’

Muir nodded. ‘There’s a million bad guys out there who want to get their hands on it so there are countless opportunists claiming to have access to hidden Soviet stockpiles and suitcase nukes. It’s ridiculous. Have these people never heard of a half life? Even the few genuine traders out there are mostly trying to sell junk that stopped being denotable over a decade ago, else it was never weapons grade in the first place. As long as the Geiger counter crackles, most buyers don’t know any better. But ninety per cent of sellers don’t even have access to waste product. They’re just charlatans looking to rip off rich jihadists eager to turn up in the middle of nowhere with briefcases full of cash money.’

‘But your NOC was onto traders who had the real thing?’

‘Charters had a solid gold link to a chain that supposedly ran all the way to the enrichment plants in Pakistan.’

‘Hence why he met with a premature demise.’

Muir nodded again. ‘We don’t know how he got found out, but the body was discovered in his apartment with a straight razor buried in his throat. Yemeni authorities were happy to put it down as a suicide.’

‘How did you identify Kooi as the assassin?’

‘One of the agents Charters was running was terrified he’d be the next victim. He turned up at the US consulate for protection. He was just one of the network’s smugglers, not that he ever came near anything radioactive, but he’d overheard his boss boast that they had a Dutchman on the books who was cleaning up problems for them. Then it was pure grunt work; a process of elimination. Only so many Europeans entering and exiting Yemen in the right time period. Only so many men. Then of those only one travelling from Amsterdam who also happened to have flown into Pakistan the same week as an asset for the Pakistani secret service, who was supplying them intel about plutonium smuggling, committed suicide by slitting his wrists. You’ll never guess what he cut them with.’

‘Sloppy,’ Victor said.

‘Don’t approve of the MO?’

‘A suicide takes some skill to pull off convincingly, especially with someone more prone to violent death than a regular civilian. But to use the same method for two separate targets for the same client is leaving an unnecessary trail. Perhaps the razor is symbolic to these guys. Whoever is in charge is sending a message to everyone in the network: wherever you are, I can get to you.’

‘Makes sense. Kooi likely thought there was enough difference between slit wrists and a razor in the neck that a connection wouldn’t be made, but he could still satisfy the client’s wishes.’

‘His intent would have been to slit your NOC’s wrists as he’d done with the Pakistani asset to create a convincing suicide. A razor in the neck is not. He would have been waiting in the apartment for when he came back. Either he made a mistake or the NOC knew he was there, because they fought. Kooi had no choice but to stab him in the neck. But that wasn’t his plan.’

‘The Yemeni police report mentioned nothing about signs of struggle in Charters’ apartment.’

‘Then they’re lying.’

‘Or Kooi covered his tracks.’

‘Possible, but unlikely. Unless the NOC lived in a soundproof apartment neighbours would have heard the commotion. Kooi wouldn’t have had time to clean up and set the scene. Easier to bribe or threaten the investigator.’

Muir frowned and withdrew her phone. ‘I’ve got to pass this on. Give me a minute, please?’

Victor nodded and stepped away to give Muir a little privacy while she made a call and explained to whoever was on the other end of the line what had just been discussed. She hung up.

‘Thank you for accommodating me.’

‘No problem.’

They walked on for a minute in silence. Then Victor said, ‘Why was I sent to kill Kooi? Why not pick him up and find out who hired him to assassinate your man?’

‘If only it were that simple. Kooi was a citizen of the Netherlands with no criminal record. He ran a small charity that required him to travel all over the world as an alibi. There was no evidence against him that would stand up in court or would convince the Dutch authorities to extradite him. And we couldn’t just lift him from the middle of Amsterdam and smuggle him out of the country without risking stirring up a hornet’s nest. More importantly, however, we didn’t need to sweat him for intel. The Pakistani asset who turned up crying at the embassy gave us everything we needed to track the client down. He’s now rotting in a prison that doesn’t exist, wishing he was dead, and spilling his guts of everything he knows in the hopes he’ll be let out one day. He won’t, of course. We think we’ve identified about sixty per cent of the plutonium smuggling network so far. It’s only a matter of time until we get the rest. We didn’t need Kooi and we like old school justice at the agency when it comes to our own. We had the opportunity to deal out a little karma that wouldn’t lead back to us, so we took it.’

‘In other words: you had me.’

‘Yes,’ Muir admitted. ‘And I’d like to thank you for that. Charters was a good guy. We worked together some time ago.’

‘You didn’t just work though, did you?’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean you’ve lost fifteen pounds. Recently, because your clothes don’t fit and you haven’t had the time to go shopping for ones that do, except for that leather jacket.’

‘Stan and I had a thing while on an op together a couple of years ago. It hurt when he died. It still hurts. So what? I’m still objective here.’

‘I didn’t say you weren’t. But you said you’d be honest with me.’

‘It was personal information. It’s got nothing to do with this conversation.’

Victor finished off the last hotdog and used a napkin to clean his fingers. Muir said, ‘For a guy who works out so much I’m surprised you’re not more careful about what you put inside you.’

‘I’m not without my vices.’ He dropped the napkin and the greaseproof paper from the hotdogs into a bin. ‘Perhaps it’s about time you told me what I have to do with this sequence of events, aside from Kooi’s death.’

Muir watched him, then took a breath and said, ‘A few weeks ago the client informed us that he hadn’t hired Kooi directly. He’d used a broker. After Kooi was dead we had some of our people go searching for proof through his personal laptop and phone, but they were clean. We hadn’t expected to find anything, but it doesn’t hurt to be thorough, right?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘But they didn’t find a link to any broker to support the client’s claims, and we dismissed it as hot air to try and shift some of the blame.’

‘Until you checked out Kooi’s charity.’

‘Correct. It was more than just a front so he could jet all over the place without drawing suspicion. It was how he handled his business too.’

‘Let me guess: Kooi had erased anything that might link to a previous job. But since his death, the broker, not knowing Kooi’s dead, has made contact.’

She nodded. ‘Just once.’

‘A new contract?’

‘It’s instructions for a meeting: a date and a time and a location. I think it must be a follow-up: part of an ongoing dialogue. There’s nothing about a job. Nothing about a target. The title of the email is “First Date”.’

‘How romantic.’

‘I think the title is significant. I think it’s their first face to face.’

‘I made the same association.’

‘The client who hired Kooi said he never met the broker. Never saw him. Never spoke to him. We know absolutely nothing about him except for the fact Kooi is supposed to meet him.’

‘And you would like me to go instead.’

She nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ even though he hadn’t been asking a question. ‘This isn’t a contract. You just have to go to the meeting in Kooi’s place. You don’t have to kill anyone.’

‘Then have a team stake out the location and see who turns up thinking they’re going to meet Kooi. I’d recommend using different people than the ones you put on me yesterday.’

‘That isn’t going to work. I don’t believe the broker will be at the location to meet up with Kooi personally. At least, not initially.’

‘What is the location listed in the email?’

‘Budapest International Airport.’

‘Ah,’ Victor said.

‘Exactly. The airport isn’t random, is it? There’s going to be someone waiting in arrivals with a card to collect Kooi. That person isn’t going to be the broker. I pick them up and when they don’t turn up where they’re supposed to when they’re supposed to or make the scheduled call or email or whatever, the broker is going to vanish. And the guy I pick up? Maybe they’re only there to ferry Kooi and they know nothing about the broker. What if they’re just a taxi driver? It’s just not going to work. I need someone to go in Kooi’s place. I can’t just send one of my guys because I don’t know what has or hasn’t been discussed between Kooi and the broker. I can’t brief the person I send in. They’ll have to improvise.’

‘Which is why you need someone who knows the industry well enough to bluff their way through the encounter.’

‘I’m authorised to pay you your agreed fee,’ Muir said. ‘Whether the meeting lasts all day or three minutes, whatever the outcome, you’ll get the money.’

‘What are you hoping to achieve?’

‘It’s about taking down a bad guy and preventing an assassination. Plain and simple. I don’t want the broker hiring some other killer when no one turns up to meet him. These guys aren’t exactly knocking off bad guys.’

‘That’s not all you want.’

‘Kooi may have killed Charters, and the guy rotting in a black site jail wanted him dead, but this broker made it possible. He shouldn’t be the only one who gets away with it. We look after our own at the Agency, and we make sure they get justice.’

‘You need an answer now, don’t you?’

‘I do.’

‘Desperation is stamped all over your face. So this meeting is going down soon. Don’t tell me, tomorrow?’

She shook her head. ‘Tonight.’