Sleeping Soldiers: (Tom Marlowe Book 1), page 13
Marlowe shuddered, remembering that his decided way to disable the potential bomb was to hit it very hard with a rock. He could have been killed.
But why would Chechik have such a phone? Surely a willing member of a team wouldn’t need to be controlled. Or was this a bomb given to an unsuspecting Stepan Chechik, ready to be used when the mission was over?
The one thing Marlowe knew for sure was this wasn’t MI5 tech. He’d seen ideas, plans for things like this, designed by large military contractors and corporations, but the Bills to gain approval for such devices had never gone through.
That said, there was a good chance both the Russians and the Americans had items like this.
Time to speak to the American, then, Marlowe thought to himself as he checked Chechik one more time, sitting him up in the seat, and closing the door.
Looking around, Marlowe decided the fields would be his best option for travelling back to the service station. It was a mile by road, but only a quarter the distance as the crow flew. Luckily it’d been a hot month and the ground was dry, so he wouldn’t have to worry about muddy shoes giving him away.
Wiping down the handle of the car, Marlowe pulled off his latex gloves, folding them up and placing them into his pocket until he could find a better place to dispose of them, then left the scene, walking across the fields back to the service station.
13
LONG TERM PARKING
The biggest worry Marlowe now had was the Jaguar, as it would have been seen on too many cameras in Cambridge, and the diner manager would have seen it in the car park, so even if there was no footage, an eyewitness account could link the car from Cambridge with the meeting with Chechik, and therefore the potential assassination.
Marlowe was loath to lose the car, however, as he’d become attached to it. So, rather than leave it to be stolen – his usual plan of choice and a common option for spies that not only gave plausible deniability where and when the car was taken but added a nice cocktail of DNA and fingerprints into the mix – he placed it into a long-term car park, somewhere he could hold it in reserve for when he cleared his name.
Because, if he didn’t clear his name, the chances were he wouldn’t need to worry about the car, anyway.
So, after booking a spot by phone, he’d driven to Maldon, in Essex via Stansted Airport. There were a few options for long-term parking here, and several of them were nothing more than a car park created in a field, around five or ten miles away, where a regular shuttle would take you the fifteen-minute drive to the airport while the car, and many others, was effectively left in the middle of nowhere.
This was fine for Marlowe. Although far from the airport, they still had security, and he knew his car would be all right. And he could drive up to one he knew, explain he’d forgotten to book and pay for the entire month he was “travelling” by cash, using the recently gained twenties from Stepan Chechik to fund the venture. This done, he then caught the shuttle bus to Stansted Airport departures, his two holdalls and rucksack weighing him down, before making his way quickly and quietly to arrivals with the help of a luggage trolley.
He knew very well that here, under the intense security, there was a very strong chance he’d be spotted, but usually the cameras were aimed at the check-in desks, immigration and security, rather than the main doors, so it was worth the gamble. It was also because of this, and the lack of metal detectors at the entrance, that Marlowe felt more comfortable bringing a holdall filled with heavy weapons into the departures lounge, rather than leaving them elsewhere. After all, why would someone come to the airport just to leave again?
Five minutes after he arrived, he was already on a shuttle bus to the aptly named “car rental village”, and five minutes after that he was at a hire car desk, using a fake identity he’d held aside for when things really hit the fan. It comprised passport and credit cards, and for at least a week the cards would show as real, until they didn’t. And again, by then, Marlowe hoped to have everything sorted because if he didn’t, the concern of a hire car company wanting a couple of hundred pounds he owed would be incredibly low on his list of concerns.
‘Would you like a saloon or an SUV?’ the man behind the counter, blue waistcoat over white shirt asked. ‘We have a deal on Peugeots and Skodas today. Or, if you want to upgrade, we can give you a full electric vehicle?’
‘Basic model,’ Marlowe smiled. ‘Just need enough boot space for my luggage.’
The counter assistant looked over the side, peering down at the holdalls.
‘I think the Peugeot 3008,’ he smiled, already tapping the keyboard. ‘Now, Mister Davison, will you be requiring car breakdown?’
Marlowe had fulfilled everything needed on the paperwork and was eventually given the keys to a grey Peugeot, out in the parking bays beside the office.
‘Hey, do you have a spare terminal I could use?’ Marlowe passed a twenty across as he spoke. ‘My phone’s not connecting since I landed, and I need to send an email. It’s browser based, so all I need is Chrome, or Safari, something like that.’
‘Sure, we can sort something out,’ the counter assistant smiled as he took the money, making it disappear like a magician. ‘There’s a computer at the end for business and gold-level members.’
‘Thank you,’ Marlowe smiled, grabbing the keys and walking over to the computer. It faced away from the counters, so there was a modicum of privacy, but Marlowe was still visible to anyone watching.
Quietly and with minimal fuss, Marlowe took out the USB drive he’d taken from Chechik and inserted it into a USB slot on the monitor.
On the screen, a file appeared.
ЮЛИУС ЦАЕСАР
Marlowe stared at the file for a long moment. His Russian wasn’t great, and he was pretty convinced that this Cyrillic wasn’t one of the more commonly used words or phrases. Copying them, he opened a browser and pasted it, with “translate” written next to it, into the search field. A spilt second later, the result appeared.
JULIUS CAESAR
Marlowe smiled at this, remembering his conversation with Bridget.
‘Apart from the fact it was the river Caesar crossed, hence the phrase “crossing the Rubicon”, as in reaching the point of no return.’
Clicking on the file icon, Marlowe opened up a new file box, expecting to see dozens of files within it. Instead, there was only one.
It was a photo, named caesar.jpg, and when clicked on, opened up a familiar-looking marble bust of a Roman general in armour and a cloak. His hair was short, he looked to be in his mid-forties, and he wore a breastplate with a screaming Medusa, and a Roman Eagle upon it.
The statue was well known and had been made in the sixteenth century by artist Andrea Ferrucci. Marlowe had even seen it in person, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City once.
Why Stepan Chechik had a picture of it on a drive, Marlowe had no idea. But he knew someone who would.
Opening up a games forum page on a long-forgotten message board, he typed a message.
Trix hadn’t brought Tessa straight to her friend’s cottage after they’d left Marlowe at the service station; instead, Trix had driven north, visiting another friend in a lockup in Northampton. There, she’d picked up a black luggage case, the sort of hard case that rock bands carried their equipment in, and loaded it into the back of the van without another word. They’d kept silent for the bulk of this, primarily as both women were tired, and the weight of the previous day was resting heavily on their shoulders.
In fact, it wasn’t until the evening when Trix and Tessa finally arrived at a small cottage nestled into the Chiltern Hills. They’d spent the day casually travelling, making sure they weren’t being followed while Trix met with people to sort out whatever plans she had next before going to ground, and their only breaks had been in service stations, where they ate unhealthy foods while Trix watched her small electronic tablet, shaking her head and groaning now and then.
She’d almost exploded with anger around lunchtime and had explained to Tessa this was because the Cambridge police chatter had gone crazy after they had reported armed men and explosions all over the centre of the academic quarter.
Marlowe.
Tessa had realised at this point Trix had been killing time until the meeting had finished, possibly because she didn’t trust Marlowe not to be caught and give away their destination. But, after she saw he’d made a successful escape, they’d made their way slowly towards the safe house and now, finally there and secure, Trix having spent the last two hours in the garden placing motion detectors and suchlike into the lawn, the two women could finally relax.
‘I’m guessing the garden isn’t a place to pop out for a smoke right now?’ Tessa asked, staring out of the kitchen window. ‘You know, when the lights and sirens go off?’
‘I haven’t set lights and sirens,’ Trix replied while rummaging around in a bag she’d brought into the cottage. ‘It’s claymores and C4 explosive. Sirens don’t scare someone off as much as a leg blown off does.’
‘Nice,’ Tessa said as Trix pulled a Glock out of the bag, a magazine of ammo in her other hand.
‘You know how to use one of these?’ Trix asked, tossing gun and ammo across. Tessa caught both in one hand and, in quick, calm motions, loaded the Glock, placing one in the chamber.
‘Good,’ Trix smiled, taking it from Tessa and walking over to the front door. There, she placed it to the side, easy to grab if anyone knocked. ‘I trust you’ll not miss if you need to use it.’
‘Dad taught me at a very early age,’ Tessa smiled. ‘Mum, too.’
‘I saw your dad’s record,’ Trix said as she pulled out another claymore device from her bag with an abandon that made Tessa twitch. ‘To fall in love with an enemy agent … that’s cool. Romantic and possibly insane, but real cool. Must have been tough, though.’
‘You have no idea,’ Tessa took a scope, looking through it. ‘Dad couldn’t visit mum’s family, as they thought she was a traitor. So, mum and me, we’d have to go alone. And when we got back, we’d be debriefed by MI5, just in case we’d sold dad out.’
‘Harsh.’
‘I didn’t understand at first, but I got there in the end,’ Tessa shrugged. ‘It’s why I moved into law rather than following them.’
‘Wanted to be a solicitor?’
‘Wanted to work in politics.’ Tessa was walking over to the kitchen area now, opening the fridge. ‘I thought I could do well in Parliament. Maybe as an MP.’
‘Couldn’t do worse than the current lot,’ Trix replied. ‘So, how did you and Marlowe meet?’
‘Through Dad.’ Tessa pulled out a bottle of cheap beer, using a bottle opener to pop the top off. ‘They worked together about ten years ago and they stayed in touch; he became a friend. Probably one of the few people who’d put up with dad’s bullshit stories.’
‘You didn’t believe them?’
‘I believed them, to a point,’ Tessa smiled sadly. ‘Dad had a bit of a hero complex. He had to be the saviour in every mission, and unfortunately I knew the truth about a couple of them. Anyway, weirdly, Tom was close to my age, and we had the same tastes in music, films, all that. We got on well. And that terrified dad.’
‘Didn’t want you to fall for him?’ Trix was unspooling network cable wires onto the floor.
‘I think it was more a case of seeing too much of himself in Tom,’ Tessa said. ‘And he blamed himself for mum’s death, thought I’d have the same problems.’
‘Your mum died?’ Trix looked up. ‘I skipped that part.’
‘Committed suicide when I was a teenager.’ Tessa stared at the bottle as she talked, as if visualising the scene in the amber liquid. ‘Drove off a cliff like Thelma and Louise. Left a note, saying she couldn’t do it anymore. As I said, she was hated by her family, and distrusted by dad’s. It was a tough life.’
Tessa placed the bottle on the table, walking back to the window, staring out of it.
‘How about you? How did you and Tom meet?’
‘Work,’ Trix grinned. ‘I was in trouble for screwing up a police enquiry my then bosses wanted closed. I was expecting jail, but Wintergreen liked how I worked. I got stuck in Section D and Marlowe was the first person who didn’t treat me like a screwup.’
‘And why are you helping him?’
Trix stopped working, straightening up.
‘Because he didn’t treat me like a screwup,’ she repeated. ‘I owe him.’
There was a beep and a flash of light, and the hastily erected network station Trix had been building burst into life.
‘At last,’ she said, forgetting Tessa and the conversation, as she sat at the dining table the computer array had been created on. ‘We can now see what we have here.’
‘Can you get in?’ Tessa asked, avoiding the window now as if worried someone was outside, walking to the front door and staring through the peephole. ‘Into Rubicon?’
‘Possibly. Looks like Marlowe left me a note on a forum.’ Trix read the scraped data, writing numbers on a Post-It note. ‘It’s a sat-nav set of coordinates. And it looks like there’s more in the message, as he says on the forum he’s got a fake file that’s possibly a NOC list of agents in the UK. We need to download it, open it up and—’
She stopped as the muzzle of the Glock, previously on the table beside the front door, now rested against the back of her head.
‘I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t do that,’ Tessa icily stated, cocking the Glock’s hammer, the click it made echoing in the now quiet room. ‘I’d appreciate it a lot.’
Finding a spy when they don’t want to be found is almost impossible if the spy is experienced in tradecraft. Finding a spy when they want someone to find them, and when they’ve sent some kind of message, is a different matter.
Marlowe had nothing on Brad, apart from the fact Marshall Kirk had once fought with him on a boat a good twenty years earlier; about what, or even whether they were on the same side at the time, Marlowe didn’t have a clue.
What he had, however, was information on the town of Maldon. It was once a significant Saxon port, and even in modern times, Hythe Quay was the mooring location of several Thames sailing barges, the last cargo vessels in the world still operating under sail, and now used mainly for leisure.
Marlowe knew this because Marshall had once taken him to the Maldon Mud Race, a charity event where entrants competed to complete a five-hundred-metre dash, in thick mud, over the bed of the River Blackwater. Marlowe had lost a bet and had to run it dressed like a seagull. He’d hated every second, but he’d seen the barges, the Quay, and the docks as they started and finished during the race. He’d also, after changing out of that bloody mud-splattered torture corset, sat in the sun with Marshall and downed a few pints, laughing about the seagull costume, the race, and the whole insane day.
And because of this, he had a solid idea of where Brad was hiding. Because Marshall Kirk had explained he knew of this event because of a friend. A friend who knew the area well.
It was evening by the time Marlowe pulled up at Hythe Quay; the car parking, usually one hour only, had passed by this time of day, and he could find a spot to pull up in with little hassle. And, on the side of the road, with the Thames barges to his left, floating on the River Chelmer’s tide, Marlowe stared at the possible location of Brad Haynes.
Grabbing his gun and hiding it inside his jacket, Marlowe climbed out of the Peugeot, locking the door and walking across to the pub that faced him. His stomach was growling, and the only real food he’d eaten in the last twenty-four hours was a half-eaten sausage and a mixed grill the previous night, so he hoped that if Brad Haynes was here, and he classed Marlowe as a threat, he’d at least wait until he’d eaten before trying to kill him.
The Jolly Sailor was actually beside a bed-and-breakfast named Fish on the Quay, and Marlowe watched the door to the building as he walked up the road, wondering whether Brad was one of the several men that sat outside, eating their dinner in the warm evening air.
The bar itself was recently redecorated, the walls painted green, while the floors were almost bare wood. A large clock, easily two, maybe three feet in size, was on one wall behind a table, and to its side was a further section of the pub, running into the back with two-person tables lining the far wall.
In front of him, it looked as if the surface of the bar was made from buffed-copper sheeting, and the old timbers had been tidied up and painted black. It was a nice-looking pub, but it felt claustrophobic.
It was a tight space, and this wouldn’t help Marlowe if there was a problem. And he knew the same would have gone through Brad Haynes’s head.
But this had to be the place.
Marlowe ordered a cod and chips for the outside dining area and, with a pint of IPA in his hand, walked out into the evening, sitting with his back to the building so he could see all angles. He was in a chokehold, and his car would be behind anyone attacking, which blocked off using anything from his holdalls within it, but he felt safe for the moment. And, when the waitress walked over with his dinner, some cutlery and some condiments, he chanced his luck.
‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ he said before she left. ‘Old guy, late sixties, retired, American. Goes by Brad.’
‘Sorry,’ the waitress pursed her lips as she tried to recall anyone with that description. ‘I could ask at the bar, but …’
‘Please,’ Marlowe smiled. ‘He was a friend of my dad. And my dad recently passed.’
‘Your dad’s name?’
‘Marshall.’
The waitress walked off, and Marlowe smiled. When someone mentioned a family member passing, it wasn’t usual to ask for the name. Usually, you’d give a small message of condolence, or, more likely, the morbid curiosity section of your brain would pop out and ask how the member died.
