‘That’s all I know. Now get me a bloody doctor.’
‘A deal’s a deal,’ Bronson replied, standing up as the next Northern Line train pulled into the station. ‘I’ll make the call as soon I get out of here.’
52
Angela was waiting for Bronson in the open area of Charing Cross mainline station opposite platforms 5 and 6, from which trains down into the heart of Kent, to Orpington, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, normally departed.
‘What the hell was all that about?’ she demanded, as she walked up to him.
‘That,’ Bronson replied, making sure nobody else could hear what he was saying, ‘was the long arm of whoever organized the killings in Cairo reaching out to you. He grabbed hold of you and was going to push you under the train. I could see what he intended to do, and so I stopped him.’
Angela’s face changed, her complexion turning paler as she absorbed this unwelcome news.
‘I know he got hold of me, but I didn’t know why. At first I thought it was you, just messing about. Are you sure?’
Bronson nodded.
‘I had a chat with him after you’d gone. He told me he’d been offered five thousand pounds to make sure you didn’t see tomorrow.’
From somewhere, Angela summoned a weak smile.
‘Only five thousand? So I’m not exactly in the big league, then.’ She paused for a moment, then asked: ‘Do you think he was the only one after me?’
‘Probably. These people normally work alone. For the moment I think you’re quite safe. And in any case, tomorrow we’ll be in Spain.’
He pulled out the mobile phone he’d taken from the man at the station and checked the log. As he’d expected, neither received nor called numbers were listed, the mark of a man who’s either very careful or very paranoid. Or both. Bronson supposed that the techies might be able to find out more about where the phone had been and which numbers it had been in contact with, but they were all likely to be untraceable pay-as-you-go numbers — and in any case, they didn’t have the time to find out.
He dialled triple nine and, when the operator asked him which service he required, he said ‘ambulance’. When he was connected, he reported that he had seen a man collapse at the Tottenham Court Road Underground station. He thought he might be drunk.
53
‘You can call our man in Cairo and tell him that the target’s in Madrid,’ the Englishman said the moment Morini answered his call, ‘so they can stop looking for him anywhere in Egypt.’
‘How did you find out?’ the Italian asked.
‘He used a credit card to make a purchase at a shop in the city, and we traced him from that.’
‘That sounds as if it might have been a big mistake,’ Morini suggested.
‘I’m not so sure. What he did might have been deliberate, or perhaps he decided that staying hidden didn’t matter any longer. We think he could be intending to go public with the relic quite soon, in which case the whole world will know where he is. And what he’s trying to sell.’
‘Then I hope you can locate him before that happens.’
54
The Englishman had not been a popular choice within the ranks of P2 when he was selected as its new head, not least because he wasn’t Italian and didn’t speak the language. But he’d taken the reins just over three years earlier when an internal revolt, a battle for control, had almost wrecked the lodge, a revolt that he had resolved in one short afternoon. He’d travelled out to Milan unannounced and personally executed the five ringleaders with his bare hands, using a baseball bat on four of the men and a knife on the last one, the man who’d started it. He had taken a long time to die and it had been very messy.
After that, nobody had ever questioned his competence or fitness for the job, and certainly not his ruthlessness.
Having completed the call to the cleric in Rome, the Englishman opened his small briefcase on the café table in front of him and took out the list of names and numbers, the annex to the document he had been instrumental in compiling. He needed to decide who would be the most appropriate person for him to activate in Spain’s capital city.
What he required now was not just some hired thug who would be able to kill Anum Husani — that would be easy enough — but somebody who could first track down the man and recover the relic, and then eliminate Husani. And that, the Englishman knew, wouldn’t be easy; not in a city of well over three million people, with more than double that number in the entire metropolitan area, and especially not when the only clues he had to go on were two credit card transactions that had taken place the previous day. Not to mention that Husani could have taken a flight out of Madrid by now, or possibly even out of Spain.
But, actually, he doubted that was the case. He believed that Husani had chosen Madrid deliberately. It was the third largest city in Western Europe, after London and Berlin, and had the largest metropolitan area after London and Paris. And because of Spain’s Moorish heritage, people bearing an Arabic appearance were not an unusual sight there.
And there were probably other reasons as well. If he was trying to sell the parchment — and that was the only scenario that made any sense — then the most likely potential buyers would be the museums and well-heeled collectors of Western Europe.
What the Englishman was expecting, at almost any moment, was some kind of a news item or press release on the Internet that would alert potential purchasers to the existence of the relic. Tracing the origin of such a posting probably wouldn’t help to track down Husani, because if he had any sense he would travel somewhere in the city that was well away from the hotel where he was staying and use a cyber café there. And so far Husani had proved that he certainly wasn’t stupid.
But if he were to sell the relic, his press release, or whatever medium he decided he was going to use to describe the parchment, would have to include some means of communicating with him — an email address, a mobile phone number, or even a physical location, probably in a public place — and once that information was available, it would only be a matter of time before they found him.
55
The heat hit them as they stepped out of the terminal building in Madrid, a solid wall of warm and muggy air that seemed to suck sweat straight out of every pore on their bodies.
‘God,’ Angela muttered. ‘Please tell me you got a car with air conditioning.’
‘You’re damn right I did. I’ve driven in Spain before, and you need air con here even in the winter.
‘There it is,’ Bronson added, as the lights on a light-blue León began to flash in response to him pressing the button on the car key.
They walked over to the car and placed their bags and laptops in the boot, before setting off through the Madrid streets.
The Spanish city looked very much like any other major city in Europe, a mixture of wide avenues and narrow streets, large and imposing public buildings and rundown apartment blocks. The worldwide economic recession had had a major effect upon the economy of Spain, and they were not surprised to see that quite a number of shops and other businesses were boarded up. But there were still a lot of cars on the road, most of them fairly new and many of them quite expensive makes. Clearly there were still some people in the country who were making money.
‘Of course,’ Angela pointed out as they drove through the streets, ‘Spain has always had a very prosperous black economy. I think the Spanish regard income tax, and most other taxes, in fact, as an optional expense, and if there’s any practical way of hiding funds from business transactions from the Hacienda — that’s the Spanish taxman — then they would do it. They call it mattress money, because under the mattress is the one reasonably safe place where they can hide it.’