The Game (Tom Wood)

SIX





Victor withdrew a pair of sunglasses from his inside jacket pocket and slipped them on. He stood outside the grand townhouse that housed Schule’s practice. The early afternoon sun was bright and warm. The building was whitewashed, like every building on the wide boulevard. A wrought iron fence, painted black and topped with brass spikes, flanked a set of marble steps that led down to the pavement. A light wind blew against his face. He descended the steps as he instinctively swept his gaze across his immediate environment.

The building was located on Wiener Street in central Vienna, opposite the Stadtpark. The neighbourhood was one of almost identical streets, with identical rows of expensive townhouses, all gleaming white with red-tiled roofs and beautifully maintained. Few were residences. Most served as offices for accountants, lawyers and doctors. The park’s maple trees on the far side of the road cast dappled shadows across the pavement and offered shade for parked high-end sedans and hulking luxury SUVs. Victor couldn’t see a single piece of litter or trace of gum.

Every thirty metres or so a bench was positioned on the wide pavement opposite. Men and women in business attire made use of them to eat their lunches and drink coffee, or just to enjoy the sunshine while chatting on their phones.

A bus stop on the far side of the road was the only sign the neighbourhood did not exist in a world of pure affluence. Only two buses stopped there because those who lived and worked here shunned public transport, but the stop was useful for visitors to the park. Victor imagined he was one of the few people in the area, if not the entire city, who considered a bus the ideal method of urban transport. His life was one of assumed identities, but if he could avoid it he preferred not to compromise them with the trail of documentation required to buy or rent a car. Stealing one posed an unnecessary risk, significant enough that it was only to be undertaken when there was no other option. Cars also trapped him, both by confining him physically and by demanding the concentration necessary to drive them. Riding the subway meant he could maintain more vigilance, but at the price of being held captive at least thirty metres underground. A bus, however, was a mode of transport that let him preserve vigilance, yet one via which he could depart frequently and easily without leaving behind a paper trail.

He planned to take a bus out of the neighbourhood as the first step of his counter-surveillance routine, but not from the stop opposite his destination. A handful of people were waiting – three heavy-set men in business suits, an elderly couple holding hands, a young man in a cap, and a woman with two small children – and they stood up from their seats or shuffled forward into a rough line as both buses that stopped there neared, one after the other.

Except for the man in the cap.

Victor slowed his pace and dropped his gaze to the medical notes in his hand while the buses pulled up, the first in front of the stop, the other directly behind the first. A minute later they set off again, the second bus pulling out ahead of the first because they largely shared the same route and most of the waiting people had not wanted to walk the extra distance to the second bus.

The first bus joined the traffic after the second, leaving the bus stop empty.

Except for the man in the cap.

He wore walking boots, jeans and a sports jacket. Earbuds rested in his ears and the wires extended down and disappeared beneath the jacket. The brim of a cap hid his eyes. There was some logo on the cap Victor didn’t recognise. The cap was navy blue and the logo black. The sports jacket was grey. The jeans were faded but dark. The walking boots were brown.

He looked to be in his late twenties, but it was hard to be exact when his face was half hidden by the navy blue cap. He wasn’t tall or short. He wasn’t broad or thin. His clothes were ordinary. Most people wouldn’t have looked at him twice, if they had noticed him at all. But he’d let both of the only two buses that served the stop leave and there was a bench less than ten metres away that would have been far more comfortable to sit on than the small plastic stools of the bus stop.

Victor crossed the street to the same side as the man in the cap and headed west. He didn’t look back: either the man was still sitting at the bus stop and therefore was of no concern, or he was now walking west as well, in which case Victor had nothing to gain by letting the man know he was on to him.

After one hundred metres the pavement turned ninety degrees to follow the border of the park. Victor waited in the small crowd that had gathered at the road’s edge, waiting for the crossing light to change. If the man in the cap was behind him he would have slowed down or even stopped to maintain a tactical shadowing distance. Again, there was no point looking to confirm if he was there, and equally no point if he was still sitting at the bus stop.

Victor saw the traffic slowing and crossed a few seconds before the lights changed. The crowd followed. He hurried across – just a man who didn’t like to wait. If the man in the cap was alone he would now be rushing to close the gap, because he wouldn’t want to get trapped on the far side of the road when the lights changed back again.

But as Victor reached the other side of the road, he turned left, and in doing so saw the man in the cap on the far side, walking in the opposite direction alongside the park, not rushing because he knew he would draw attention by dashing across the road alone. But in attempting to stay undetected he had put a busy road between them. If Victor took a turning then he could easily lose his shadow.

So the man in the cap couldn’t be alone. There was a team.

There was no one nearby that registered on Victor’s radar, but they wouldn’t have known whether he was going to go left or right after leaving Schule’s and so couldn’t have put watchers ahead of him. So they were mobile. Two cars, because he would have easily noticed one car doing laps in an area of light traffic. Therefore there were at least five in the team, a passenger in each car as a driver couldn’t drive and watch out for Victor and also communicate with the man on foot. But cars couldn’t go everywhere, while they couldn’t use the same pavement artist for too long and not expect Victor to spot him. So there would be another team member in the back of each car, ready to be dropped off and follow Victor as necessary. That made at least seven, but with two cars there were most likely eight.

A sizeable team, and both a serious and telling statement. They knew who he was, or at least they knew of his capabilities, because no one hired eight men or women for a job they felt could be done by fewer.

They were proficient and resourceful, because they must have followed him to the doctor’s office and he’d only spotted one so far of at least seven, else they had known of his appointment in advance and had good intel. But no better than proficient, because the man in the cap shouldn’t have been waiting at the bus stop and no team put its worst member in such a primary role.

He maintained his walking speed. They weren’t a surveillance team of some Austrian agency, because if they were there would be no need to follow him so closely. They could have used a helicopter or the city’s CCTV network. This team wanted to keep close to him for a reason, but they weren’t going to try anything on a crowded street in the middle of Vienna in broad daylight. If they were unconcerned about witnesses they could have ambushed him outside the doctor’s offices. Instead they were following him, waiting for an opportunity that matched whatever criteria they had to meet.

He didn’t know what that consisted of, and there was no way of knowing for sure until it was too late. He’d identified one of the team. He needed to identify the others.

Their reservations about making a move in a crowded locale worked to his advantage. If he stayed where there were people he would stop them putting their plan into action. It would force them to improvise. When people improvised, they made mistakes.

He continued walking and calculating, his gaze sweeping across every person to judge and evaluate. He memorised vehicles that passed him. No one stood out. No vehicle passed twice. They were holding back, or the others were a lot better than the guy at the bus stop. Or both.

People walked by. He walked by others. The streets were crowded, but not crowded enough to hide him effectively, and the ever-changing mass of faces made it impossible to keep track of potentials. He could take any number of turnings onto less busy side streets, but maybe that’s what they were waiting for so they could move into action. A numerically superior force could not be combated in the open. They had too many advantages.

His best chance was at close range, where he could pick them off. One by one. But Victor didn’t want the fallout from another bloodbath in the middle of a capital. Better to avoid a threat than neutralise it.

He needed to get indoors, somewhere they couldn’t all follow, yet some could. There were plenty of bars and cafés nearby, which might work, but he needed somewhere that wasn’t too busy.

A black and gold sign told him he’d found what he was looking for.