The Darkest Day (4 page)

The balcony was narrow and overlooked an alleyway four metres below that ran through the centre of the block. It was clean and tidy with no discarded refuse. Everything had been placed by diligent boutique owners and store workers in bins or boxes. The sounds of the city were muted and quiet. Victor stepped up on to the black iron railing that surrounded the balcony and used a palm to brace against the brickwork while he found his balance.

He extended his arms above his head. The balcony above was just out of reach of his fingertips. He lowered himself into a half-squat, then leapt straight up, catching hold of cold masonry with eight fingertips because it was too high to also catch with his thumbs. Without them, he lost 40 per cent of the strength of his forearms, but he pulled himself up with the remaining 60.

When his head had cleared the lip of the balcony, he released his left hand and shot it up to grab hold of one of the iron bars. He then did the same with his right hand and heaved himself up enough to get a foot on to the balcony edge. He brushed down his suit to get rid of dust and pollution.

The balcony was the same as that of the tailor’s below, but the window led to a private residence. Victor ducked down so as to reduce the chances of being seen by the two figures – a naked man and woman – moving about inside. They were paying too much attention to one another to care about what might be happening outside the window.

He waited anyway, because he still had more than fifteen minutes before the old tailor returned with his finished suit.

Nine minutes later the two figures in the apartment stumbled from the lounge and disappeared into a bedroom. Victor sidestepped to the far edge of the balcony. A metre further along the exterior wall was another window. This one was open a few inches.

Victor sat on the balcony railing and pivoted round. With one hand holding on to the railing he stretched out the other arm until he could grip the windowpane and slide it higher to create a larger opening. When it was high enough to fit through, he gripped the sill in one hand, released the railing, and swung himself across. He pulled himself up and into the bathroom.

Six minutes left. It was going to be tight.

The bathroom was humid from the shower. The floor was wet in places. Victor avoided the puddles and footprints and eased the door open.

He could hear grunts and the knocking of a headboard against a wall. Outside the bathroom door he found a pile of clothes on the same armchair he had used the previous afternoon.

In a pocket of a suit jacket he found the accountant’s smartphone.

It was locked, as expected, but Victor removed the SIM card and inserted it into a credit-card-sized scanner attached to a second-hand phone he had bought for cash that morning. He activated the app and waited while the scanner extracted all of the data from the SIM and copied it on to the empty SIM in his phone. The scanner had been supplied by Muir, his CIA handler.

In his freelance days he had worked with a range of brokers, most of whom he never met or learned their identity. It had been rare to work directly with a client. Both they and Victor preferred to use professional intermediaries who understood discretion and knew how to put the right people on the right job. At other times they would be associates of the client in some capacity. They might be individual free agents or members of intelligence agencies or executives of private security firms or sometimes board members of multinational corporations with a cutesy brand image and beyond-ruthless business practices. In his earlier days he had worked for brokers and clients whom he knew, as they in return knew him, at least as well as anyone could. For years he had avoided any personal connection with his work, and it had helped keep him alive far longer than he had believed he would remain breathing. In recent times the majority of his work had come from individuals within the CIA, even though the wider organisation maintained a termination order for him. The arrangement was a good one, and not only for the intermittent donations to his bank account. His handlers kept him off the radar of the rest of the agency. That alone was worth maintaining the relationship. The jobs he received were infrequent and often dangerous, but that danger was offset by the lack of CIA contractors hunting him. They also paid well.

It was as good a business relationship as Victor could hope to have with anyone.

After a short pause the screen changed to denote the new SIM was now a clone of the accountant’s.

One of the perks of working for the CIA was access to such technology.

He removed the accountant’s SIM from the scanner and replaced it inside the smartphone he had taken it from. He slipped it back into the same pocket.

Four minutes remaining, if the tailor wasn’t faster than expected with the adjustments.

Victor crossed the lounge to the bookshelf and found cash placed between two historical fiction hardbacks.

He put some extra cash between the books to cover the cost of the broken extraction fan and exited the apartment the way he had come in. It sounded as if the accountant was almost finished.

Lowering himself out of the window, he inched along the sill until he could stretch one hand across to grab hold of the balcony railing while he supported his weight with the other.

Less than a minute after his return to the fitting room the door opened and the old tailor came in.

‘All done,’ the tailor said as he hung up the suit. ‘And when I say all done what I really mean is the abomination is complete.’

Victor said, ‘I’ll need a tie as well.’

‘Let me guess,’ the tailor said with an exaggerated sigh, ‘something plain? Nothing with even the remotest hint of style? Something insufferably boring?’

Victor raised an eyebrow. ‘How did you know?’

Muir had supplied a lot of intelligence regarding Al-Waleed and the accountant, but what the CIA hadn’t been able to supply was the time and place of the meeting with the Turkish banker, Caglayan. That wouldn’t be arranged until the day of the meet, and with only a short amount of warning. The CIA, via the NSA, were more than capable of intercepting phone calls or emails or any other method of electronic communication, but Caglayan trusted no one, least of all a spoilt Saudi prince who donated money to terrorists to ease his conscience. The Turk would use a prepaid mobile phone purchased that day to contact the accountant, and insisted the accountant did the same. Then, only Caglayan and Al-Waleed himself would be present to make the drop off. The Turk would not tolerate the presence of the prince’s retinue.

It was almost impossible to intercept such communications, which was why Victor had needed to clone the accountant’s new SIM card. When Caglayan sent a message to the accountant stating the time and location for the meeting, Victor received the same message.

The dossier Muir had supplied on Caglayan contained almost as much intel as the one on the prince. Most of it was as inconsequential, but the salient facts were that the Turk was a sadistic, vengeful man suspected of the torture and murder of rivals and betrayers. He was the type who would respond to an attempt on his life with extreme violence. When both Caglayan and Al-Waleed were found dead with all the forensic evidence suggesting they had shot one another, the narrative would suggest a deal-gone-wrong between a terrorist sponsor and terrorist middleman. Muir was more than happy for an individual as unpleasant as Caglayan to be collateral damage in the prince’s assassination.

The meeting was to take place in the basement of a disused office building on the corner of a city block that was in the process of regeneration. The ugly decades-old concrete from the middle of the last century was being torn down and replaced with a sleeker, modern construction. The basement was accessible through the main building or via a side entrance that comprised a wooden gate and through it a doorway.

Victor approached the gate at nine p.m. as instructed in the original message. With little warning, he had not been able to conduct a proper reconnoitre of the area or plan an attack strategy. He would have to improvise.

The street outside the basement entrance was wide and empty. On the opposite side of the road was the rear of a large office building. It was a modern structure, five storeys high, with windows that did not open. Victor liked that. There would be no marksmen sitting out of sight behind high-powered rifles. But maybe someone was waiting on the roof. Victor could see no one, but the sky above was dark and the street below was well lit by street lamps. A sniper on the roof would be all but invisible.

Victor, meanwhile, would be exposed and vulnerable, though only for a short time, because the basement entrance was ten metres from an intersection. But it was still enough time for someone with a rifle to spot him, take aim, and shoot before he made it into the safety of the building.

The taxi arrived on time, pulling up outside the basement entrance as per his specific instructions. He was pleased to see the firm had sent a big people carrier – again as he had asked.

He turned the corner on to the street after a ten-count, imagining if there was a sniper overlooking they would have already settled behind their scope, reticle hovering over the taxi, ready to shoot whomever climbed out of the sliding doors.

Victor walked fast because he knew he would pass through the scope’s magnified viewfinder. His appearance would surprise any sniper, who would have to re-aim, by which time he would be through the door and out of sight.

The wood was old and warped and covered with cracked and flaking paint, but had a new magnetic locking mechanism activated with a keycard. The door had been left ajar.

He pushed it open and stepped through. No shot sounded. No searing pain consumed him.

Either the deception had worked, or there was no sniper to deceive. Prevention over cure.

On the far side of the entrance was an antechamber with a single flight of metal steps leading down to basement level and a trade elevator to lift heavy goods. A single light flickered on a moment after the door opened. He saw the motion detector high on one wall. The light fixture was hidden behind a bulbous shade that looked as ugly as it was out of place. The walls were breeze blocks covered in white gloss that had dirtied to almost grey. They looked as though they had never been cleaned. The ceiling soared above Victor’s head. A card reader to unlock the door glowed green. Insulated wires and pipes created a maze on the wall to his right, leading to a row of enclosed circuit breakers.

The taxi would leave after a few minutes when it was obvious the fare was a no-show. He felt guilty for wasting the driver’s time.

The steps were steep and narrow. Wooden handrails ran on either side of them, the varnish worn down in places to bare wood. At the bottom of the steps the entrance chamber narrowed and then opened out into a room that served as a junction for the two halves of the basement. A narrow-fronted elevator provided access to the main offices above ground. Adjacent to it was an even narrower staircase leading to the upper floors. Under the stairs was a door plastered with labels and signs warning of the danger of electrocution on the other side. Much of the floor was taken up with a haphazard pile of unused pallets, broken chairs and unwanted tables. On the far side he could see a door with fat copper pipes snaking into the wall next to it. No sign denoted the purpose of the room beyond, but Victor pictured a massive gas boiler system.

A set of glass double doors led to an area where the renovation work had been completed. A floor plan had been tacked to the left-hand door. He spent a moment memorising the image, noting the uneven walls and protrusions that created odd angles and areas that could be used as cover and concealment if necessary. The beige carpeting in the refurbished room was new and unmarked. Victor could detect the scent of fresh paint and cleaning chemicals. The air tasted metallic.

The main office space comprised two areas of similar size arranged in a rough L-shape. Half a dozen large desks were dotted about the first area, with room for maybe twice that number. There was also a small kitchenette, complete with sink, cupboards, refrigerator and coffee machine. A leather sofa sat before a coffee table nearby. Unlike the rest of the furnishings, the sofa appeared to have been there forever. The leather was worn and frayed, but still looked comfortable. Victor imagined stressed workers slumping on it in exasperation or taking a nap while everyone else was out to lunch. For all the dangers of his profession, being chained to a desk five days a week seemed a far worse kind of hell. It might prove even more dangerous too – at least he knew he would not miss when he pushed the muzzle of a pistol against his temple to end the misery.

No sign of Caglayan. No sign of the prince.

Victor backtracked and entered the second half of the basement, accessible through the other set of double doors. This half was in the process of being renovated. No floor plan had been fixed to the wall to show the layout, because that layout had yet to be finished. On the other side of the open doors were neat piles of building materials – cement, tools, piping, shelves and boxes of screws and nails. Opposite, leaning against one wall of an adjoining antechamber, was a huge mound of waste material that had been stripped out from the depths of the basement – insulation, dry wall, ceiling tiles and rolls of soiled carpet. Plastic hazard tape had been stretched across the pile and tied to pipes on either side to keep the whole lot from falling over.

The antechamber opened out to a corner of the basement with no light fixtures. It was illuminated by a free-standing lamp that struggled to push back the gloom. The area had no floor in places, the dark holes marked off by hazard tape, the weak light failing to reach the bottom of the foundations below. A cold draught found Victor’s ankles. Yellow-painted stepladders leaned against one wall next to a fire escape on the other side of the chequerboard floor.

Fluorescent strip lights ran along the ceiling of the central corridor, flickering into life as soon as Victor crept through the opening. Pipes and cables were fixed to the ceiling above them. The corridor was about three metres wide and twenty long, with several closed and open doors and doorways, some with plastic sheeting hanging before them to limit the transfer of dust and fumes, leading off to unused rooms yet to be furnished or areas that were little more than construction sites.

The corridor opened out on to a large area in a partial state of construction. As with the area at the other end of the antechamber there were no permanent light fixtures here. More free-standing lamps were spread out to light the space in a dim white glow. Victor’s shadow stretched out far behind him.

Holes in the floor were marked with tape. In some places plastic barriers provided temporary walls around areas that had no flooring at all. Pillars held up the ceiling, some covered with new dividing walls. Steel pipes and copper pipes ran from ceiling to floor in places. Replacement piping was stacked and laid out on the floor nearby, ready to be used to reroute the existing systems to free up more space. Plastic sheeting suspended from girders on the ceiling sealed off areas by their level of renovation.

No Caglayan or Al-Waleed here either. The whole basement was empty. Victor drew his handgun – an FN Five-seven – because he knew he’d walked straight into a trap.

A second later, the lights went out.