Quickly, Flynn unzipped the shell from its insulating layer and then reversed it to show the black inner lining instead. Next, he pulled off his goggles and stuffed them out of sight in a pocket. This late in the day, they were more hindrance than help anyway. Finally, he tugged a ski hat down over his bare head. Taken separately, none of these tiny alterations were exactly major measures of disguise. But together, he hoped they would alter his visual profile just enough to confuse anyone hunting for the man who’d been seen talking to Khavari right before he was shot.
Satisfied that he’d done all he could for now, Nick Flynn squared his shoulders and skied out from the tree line.
Several hundred meters higher up the Kitzbüheler Horn, Viktor Skoblin finished disassembling the VSS Vintorez sniper rifle he’d used to eliminate the Iranian traitor. The separate components of the silenced weapon, originally designed for use by Russia’s Spetsnaz units, fit easily into an inconspicuous backpack of the type carried by many skiers. He zipped the backpack closed and slid it across his broad shoulders.
Then he glanced over at his spotter, another former Spetsnaz officer like him. “Any sign of movement?”
The other man, slimmer and shorter than the bullnecked Skoblin, lowered his binoculars. “None. Our second bird has flown. There’s no way we can hope to catch up to him now.”
Skoblin scowled. Their orders from Pavel Voronin were explicit: the security leak represented by Arif Khavari must be permanently sealed shut, by any means necessary. Dead men, the Raven Syndicate’s head had reminded them tartly, could tell no further tales. That made this failed attempt to kill the Iranian government official’s unknown foreign contact deeply worrying. Voronin was not known for forgiving those who disappointed him.
Still, the Russian reminded himself uneasily, there were only so many ways out of Kitzbühel. Sooner rather than later, they would get another shot at their second, more elusive target. And in the meantime, he and his spotter still had one more task to complete here on the mountain. He stomped back into his skis. Then, together with the other Raven Syndicate operative, Skoblin moved off down the slope toward the red-stained patch of snow marking the location of Khavari’s bullet-riddled body.
Two
With a friendly wave goodbye to the staff, Nick Flynn stepped out of the shop where he’d just returned his rental skis, poles, and boots. His breath steamed in the cold evening air, a brief puff of fog visible in the warm, golden light from streetlamps and windows. Softly falling snowflakes swirled down out of the sky, deadening sounds.
After a quick glance both ways to make sure he wasn’t being observed, he joined the other tourists sauntering along the little town’s narrow streets. Brightly lit buildings painted in pale blues, yellows, greens, and other colors created a festive atmosphere. From the snatches of different conversations he overheard in multiple languages, most of those who were out and about were headed for dinner or drinks at one or another of the local restaurants and bars. There were a few couples strolling hand in hand, but the majority were clumped in larger groups, abuzz with laughter and good cheer after an enjoyable, active day on the ski slopes.
Conscious that someone obviously on his own in the middle of this convivial scene might draw unwelcome attention, Flynn tucked himself in behind a gaggle of casually dressed men and women around his own age. Casually, he ambled along the sidewalk a few feet from them — close enough to make it seem like he was one of the group to anyone watching, but just far enough away that none of them felt crowded by a stranger. And whenever they stopped to check out shop windows or read one of the menus posted outside different restaurants, he followed their example.
From what he could make out, these people all worked for the different regional offices of a larger multinational enterprise — some of them British, others French or German or Swiss — who’d been invited to Kitzbühel for a corporate “team-building” exercise… which really translated as a lavish ski weekend with lots of late-night partying. One hell of a nice boondoggle if you could wangle it, he decided with a touch of cynical amusement. Maybe he should pitch a similar idea to the sharp-eyed Mr. Fox, his Quartet Directorate boss. But at the thought of his new employer’s likely reaction, one side of Flynn’s mouth quirked upward. Considering the questionable results of his first assignment so far — a dead senior Iranian government informant and at least one unknown assassin on the loose — it might be wiser if he held off on making smart-ass suggestions for the time being.
While he was pretending to be interested in a display of new ski jackets and other winter apparel in a store window, his cell phone vibrated once. It did the same thing again a moment later. Those back-to-back aborted calls were a signal confirming that the brief mission status report he’d sent to Four had been received. Structured as a routine business communication, his text had read: Client meeting productive but no firm agreement reached. Unfortunately, competition reacted fast and beat our price. That was it. Short, simple, and completely dull. But while there were no hidden layers of encryption buried in the message, the ordinary-sounding phrases he’d chosen were sufficient to let Fox know that his rendezvous with Arif Khavari had yielded intriguing intelligence, but no hard evidence… and that the Iranian had been killed before he could say more.
At least the elderly Englishman who’d tutored him in the Quartet Directorate’s covert communications protocols would have applauded his technique, Flynn hoped — though perhaps not the results he was reporting. “Tell me, in your view, what is the very best sort of code?” the other man had asked in a dry, Oxbridge-tinged voice at the very beginning of their lessons.
“One that doesn’t look anything like a code at all,” Flynn had shot back.
“Full marks, Mr. Flynn,” the Englishman had said with a slight smile. The world’s major intelligence agencies, like his old employers in the UK’s premier signals intelligence organization, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), routinely sifted all phone calls, texts, and emails — using powerful supercomputers to scan for anomalies, key phrases and words, and indications of unusually strong encryption. “Which is why those of us in Four, when we communicate amongst ourselves, are very careful to avoid any such nonsense. Plain language messages, innocuous-seeming, thoroughly uninteresting, and perfectly appropriate to your current cover story, are the surest means of flying under the radar of unsympathetic people like my former colleagues at Cheltenham, those in your own country’s NSA, and others working for Russia’s SVR and GRU or China’s Ministry of State Security.”
Flynn winced inside at the painful memory of what had come next. Like most things involving the Quartet Directorate, what had seemed simple at first was actually fiendishly complex. Making this “hidden in plain sight” communications method work in the field required the rote memorization of hundreds and hundreds of seemingly ordinary phrases and words in different languages, each of which had specific secret meanings depending on how they were used in any given sentence. Thanks to a good ear and a near-perfect memory, he’d managed the arduous task over the course of a couple of weeks of intensive practice, but only at the cost of grade-A migraines and dry, bloodshot eyes.
He looked up, suddenly aware that the international group of late-twentysomethings he was tagging along behind had finally decided on a place to eat. Smiling and laughing, they all began filing into a little Asian restaurant next door. Which meant he’d just lost his primary source of camouflage.