About twenty minutes after that, the door to the suite opened again and in walked the assistant. He wasn’t alone. Two men were with him. The Red Cobra didn’t recognise either. Her attention was grabbed. The two men, one dressed smartly, the other casually, roamed through the room. Searching, checking. The Red Cobra knew what they were looking for. Threats. Bugs.
The men spent the best part of half an hour scouring the suite. Then the casually dressed man came up to the window and peered outside across the Berlin cityscape. At first he looked down, then across to the left, past where the Red Cobra was stationed.
Then he turned his gaze straight ahead. He stared across at the Red Cobra.
She pulled away from the camera and looked straight out of the window. Two hundred yards. She could make out the windows of the target’s suite at that distance but no detail of what lay beyond. She could barely even make out the figure of the man, even though she knew he was there.
He couldn’t have spotted her, surely?
She focused back on the small screen on the camera. ‘Shit.’
The man had a pair of binoculars up to his face.
The Red Cobra threw herself to the floor and pulled the tripod on top of her. It crashed down and the camera went scuttling across the floor, the little red recording light still on. She lay there, still, for five minutes, thinking.
When she finally moved, she stayed low. She crawled across the floor, pulling one of the legs of the tripod with her. She grabbed the camera along the way and continued moving until she was up against the door of the apartment, as far from the window as she could get – some twenty feet. She could only hope there was enough shadow in the apartment and glare on the windows to keep her presence obscured, if the watcher was even still there and had eyes on her windows.
Either way, she had to know.
As low to the ground as she could get, she lifted the scope and peered into the eyepiece. She adjusted the focus slightly. It had been knocked out of position when she’d pulled over the tripod. When it was properly adjusted she stared over to the Waldorf hotel and the suite of the target once more. The assistant was still there. Sat in an armchair.
The other two men were gone.
The Red Cobra only took a few seconds to decide what to do. The risk was simply too big. She needed to get in touch with her employer, ask what was happening. And what they wanted her to do next. First, though, she had to get out of there.
CHAPTER 32
Less than a minute later, the Red Cobra was descending the stairs, her bulging backpack over her slender shoulders once more, a baseball cap pulled down firmly on her head.
She reached the bottom of the stairs and moved out into the main foyer of the apartment block, heading left toward a fire exit rather than out through the main entrance. She pushed down on the release bar to swing open the double doors and walked into a dingy and dank back alley. It was raining heavily. The Red Cobra huddled down into her leather jacket and sunk her hands into its pockets.
She kept her head down as she walked along, scanning the area as best she could. She turned left at the end of the alley onto the main street. The pavement was intermittently busy with both locals and the occasional tourist – likely heading toward the nearby Kurfürstendamm, one of Berlin’s busiest shopping streets – though the heavy rain seemed to have deterred most folks from venturing out on foot.
Up ahead, two suited men approached, each carrying ridiculously big umbrellas. The Red Cobra had to stoop to her right to get past unimpeded and without breaking her pace. She stumbled off the pavement into a puddle in the gutter. The men carried on oblivious. She cursed at them under her breath. Then was caught by surprise when she stepped back onto the pavement only for an unseen figure to barge into her. She spun round, her eyes fixed on the man who’d knocked into her.
‘Es tut mir sehr leid,’ he said.
The Red Cobra understood his German: I’m very sorry. She said nothing in return, just stared at him. He wore blue jeans and brown boots, and he had on a rain jacket. The hood partially covered his face, but she saw enough to recognise him.
The man from the hotel.
She felt her body tighten, priming herself for attack. Inside her jacket pocket, her left hand wrapped around the handle of the eight-inch blade she was concealing, her grip so tight it felt like the handle would burst.
The knife, a long-time companion, was sheathed in a specially stitched compartment that ran from the inside of the left pocket across her midriff. She rarely ventured outside without a weapon of some description. The blade, although large, was easily hidden if you knew how, and so much more practical than lugging a gun around. They were cumbersome and noisy, and they needed re-loading. They simply didn’t suit her needs. The knife on the other hand...
A second passed. Then another. The Red Cobra stared at the man. The street was quiet, but not empty. She was in two minds as to whether to gut him right there. She was certain she could do it before he could defend himself.
Before a third second passed, the man stepped back, apologised again, then turned and walked away.
The Red Cobra stood for another beat before she too turned and walked off in the opposite direction. She was calm on the outside, but inside her brain was on fire.
She walked for nearly two hours, taking a circuitous route through the city. She remained wary the whole time, employing every counter-surveillance technique she knew to spot any lurkers, but she saw no indication that the man or anyone else was following her.
Eventually, the Red Cobra headed across the border that had once separated east from west. She’d never known the city as it had been back then; she was only a child in the late eighties when the wall came down. Yet moving into the east of the city, she could still feel the presence of the old regime. Of communism and the Soviet Union. Was it the people, or the architecture? Perhaps it was just the tourist sights, from Checkpoint Charlie to crumbling sections of graffiti-covered wall to the myriad rusting Trabi cars available for hire.
Whatever it was, as the Red Cobra headed through Alexanderplatz back to where she was staying – a nondescript three-star business hotel – she felt more at home in her surroundings in the east than she had in the west.
Under the canopy of the hotel entrance, the Red Cobra shook herself down, removing the excess water that was dripping from her head to her toes. She walked in through the main doors and, head down to avoid her face being caught on the CCTV cameras, moved directly over to the staircase.
With her eyes still busily scanning her surroundings, but not so much as to make her look on edge, the Red Cobra walked along the corridor on the second floor. She was just about at her door when a man stepped out of his room four doors down.