Kennard had disappeared off the radar, his phone taunting Alvarez with his all-too-perfectly-well-rehearsed voice-mail message each time Alvarez hit speed dial. The previous evening Alvarez and Kennard had shared a drink in a shitty little Parisian apology of a bar. Alcohol was something Alvarez usually saved for special occasions, but Kennard had been wearing a face like he’d been sucking jalapeños for a couple of days, and Alvarez understood the importance of morale.
It felt good letting his hair down. The week had been an ungodly bitch, and he was feeling the effects. A few beers had chilled him out, but Kennard had been a bundle of nervous energy. Something was definitely under the younger guy’s skin, but Kennard was keeping his lips well and truly locked. Woman trouble, Alvarez guessed. Some slutty French piece of ass not returning his messages or some other bullshit. After draining the last of his beer, Alvarez had suggested finding a burger joint but Kennard shook his head.
“I would,” Kennard had said. “But I’ve got something I need to do.”
Alvarez’s eyes widened a fraction. “Something, or someone?”
“I wish.”
Alvarez was firing up his laptop and onto his second cup of black coffee when his phone rang. Less than sixty seconds later he was heading out the door.
It was a short hop on the metro to the embassy, and he made his way to his office hoping that someone had made a terrible error. They hadn’t. The police report was waiting for him, including photos. Alvarez sat down, unhooked his office phone, switched off his cell, and carefully read through the information.
Kennard was dead. Murdered. Stabbed multiple times in the gut, ultimately dying from loss of blood. Signs of a struggle. His phone was taken and his wallet emptied. No witnesses. Paris’s finest had it down as a robbery. Poor schmuck.
Alvarez had lost people before, albeit rarely, only two in his whole career with the company. They were assets though, not true CIA. He accepted it as an inherent risk of the operational side of the business, but it wasn’t something he’d ever become used to. Alvarez leaned back in his chair and exhaled heavily.
He’d never particularly liked Kennard and wasn’t about to pretend to grieve for his passing, but he was genuinely sorry the guy had been murdered by some fucking snail-eating piece of shit. Probably some homeless junkie so he could score some crack. It was no way for an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency to die. Far better to have been have been killed on duty than while going for a piss.
The way the cops had it and the way it looked in Alvarez’s head too was that the perp had surprised Kennard with a knife and demanded his things. Kennard had tried to draw his gun and had been stabbed repeatedly. Kennard was full of himself enough to have tried something stupid like that. He should have handed over the wallet and waited for the guy to go and then put three in his spinal column.
Alvarez thought for a moment. Kennard, though hardly a lethal weapon, was a fully trained operative. It was hard to see how some lowlife could’ve gotten the drop on him. Alvarez scratched the back of his thick neck. He sighed and shook his head. He was reading far too much into it. The guy had been killed. It happened, even to the best. And Kennard certainly wasn’t the best.
Alvarez was going to have a shitload of extra work to do now that Kennard was out of the picture. The guy gets himself killed when they’re up to the eyeballs on the hunt for a professional contract killer. Perfect timing.
Alvarez put the file down and turned on his phone. He had three missed calls and a voice mail. He listened to the message. It was Noakes telling him about the photographs on Stevenson’s hard drive. He called him back.
“What have you got?”
“I’ve found something in a couple of the photos from Stevenson’s meeting.”
“Such as?”
“In the ones showing the mystery man leaving, we’ve got some shots of his car-”
“But none of the license plate, I know.”
“Yeah, well, that’s right, but on two we get a look at a windshield sticker, once I’d enhanced the image. It’s from the rental-car company.”
“Who are they?”
“They’re based out of Brussels. We didn’t have a clear shot of the sticker, just the first half of the name and phone number, but that was enough to narrow down the list of suspects until I found out who it was. There aren’t that many rental-car companies in Brussels with similar names. I’ve e-mailed you the pertinent details.”
Alvarez hung up a minute later and opened up Noakes’s e-mail expectantly. He pushed the police report to one side. It was a damn shame about Kennard, but he would deal with the bureaucracy of his death later on.
Right now he had more pressing matters.
TWENTY-NINE
Debrecen, Hungary
Friday
20:12 CET
Victor had spent the morning in Zürich emptying his primary bank account before burying the money minus twenty thousand euros. The cash would be his only source of funds for some time. He couldn’t carry any more across borders without attracting suspicion and putting the rest in another bank was not an option.
Going back to Switzerland had been a risk, but if he was going to continue living he would need the money. He had then flown back to Budapest and from there taken the train out to Debrecen as an extra precaution. It was important to keep moving, to avoid staying in one place for too long. The CIA was after him, and he had to do everything possible to hinder its efforts to track him down.
The CIA was extremely well funded and far-reaching, but it was not all-powerful. If he stayed mobile and did nothing to attract its attention, he was confident he could keep out of its crosshairs for now. How long that would remain true, though, he didn’t know.
The temperature was in the low thirties. Victor spent an hour at a coffee shop until he was sure he wasn’t being watched. He then moved on to another similar establishment, where he spent a second hour making doubly sure. A week ago he would have been satisfied that he wasn’t under surveillance, but now he didn’t fully trust his own abilities, especially when they were going up against an organization with twenty thousand full-time employees and many tens of thousands more foreign agents and assets.
Victor took a taxi into Debrecen’s city center, passing through the clean streets with his eyes constantly watching the mirrors for potential tails. He knew his fixation with the mirrors unnerved the taxi driver, and Victor helped relax him by keeping the driver in conversation. They talked about soccer, women, politics, work.
“What do you do for a living?” the driver asked Victor.
They were driving past the grand building of an insurance firm, so Victor said, “I sell life insurance.”
The driver smirked. “Everybody dies, right?”
Victor kept his gaze on the wing mirror. “I seem to have that effect on people.”
Out of the taxi he spent some time walking with the crowds, stopping occasionally, doubling back often. He browsed through a number of stores, not buying anything but watching who came in after him and who was standing outside with a view of the door. When he was satisfied he wasn’t being shadowed he caught another taxi and sat in the back.
Victor climbed out fifteen minutes later in downtown Debrecen. Here the streets were quieter, and although it would be easier for a team to shadow him, it would also be easier for him to spot them. No one set off his threat radar. Another taxi took him back into the city center and to his true destination.
The Internet café was of a fair size and pleasingly full of customers, some of whom smoked. Victor didn’t, but only because he was passively smoking more than enough nicotine to satisfy his craving. He was sure there would be a reply to his e-mail from the broker; he just wasn’t sure what the reply would contain.