Blind pursuit, p.7
Blind Pursuit, page 7
Jalali was on his phone, looking left and right along the street. Lea was at least still on the other side and she pulled up outside a bookstore and pretended to peruse the display, a reflection of Jalali and Taremi clear to her in the window.
‘Taremi’s going in. Jalali isn’t.’
‘OK. I’m coming down there. I don’t like how this is playing out.’
‘It could be nothing. It could—’
‘I’m coming. Be there in a few minutes.’
She didn’t say anything more. She waited several seconds longer but she couldn’t just stand there at the window all day.
So she moved along, slowly, to the next store.
A smartly dressed man she didn’t recognise walked along towards Jalali. The two of them didn’t indicate any awareness but the next moment, Jalali’s phone call ended and he stepped aside as the man walked past him and into the store.
‘Looks like Taremi’s company just arrived.’
Lea moved again, once more aiming for the next store along, but momentarily glanced across the road…
Right at the same moment that Jalali looked over in her direction.
A pause in his movement. She was sure of it. But the next beat and he’d spun around and moved into the clothes store.
‘Shit,’ she said, admonishing herself, rather than trying to engage Denis.
‘What?’ he replied nonetheless.
She replayed that split second moment several times in her head as she moved away.
‘I think… I’ve been made.’
Would Jalali remember seeing her at the bar the other night? Possibly at the Metropolitan too.
‘He headed into the store, but I think he saw me.’
‘You think?’
She glanced over her shoulder. No one outside the clothes store still.
‘He’s not following me, but—’
‘Move away but keep an eye out. I’m only two streets from you.’
She did exactly that. For fifty yards at least. But she couldn’t just leave the store unwatched. Not even for a few seconds. So she stopped and pulled up against the boarded entrance to a soon-to-open store and looked back down the street. All quiet. At least as far as there was any imminent threat to her.
‘Where are you?’ she asked.
‘Almost on your street. Less than two minutes from you.’
She glanced further along the road, in the direction that Denis would be coming from. Couldn’t yet see him. She moved again, in that direction, head spinning.
‘They may have had an escape route,’ she said, thinking out loud. ‘Out the back of the store.’
‘Just… hold on. We’ll figure this out.’
‘But…’
She never finished the thought, because in front of her she spotted the dark-clothed man striding in her direction, only ten yards away. A man she didn’t know, but it certainly looked like he knew her, holding her eye as he moved, reaching into his jacket…
She did too. For the knife she had there. The only weapon she had. She really wished she had something more now…
Noise behind her. A motorbike. The sound stuck out above the otherwise calm street, the engine highly revved and closing in fast.
She whipped around, pulled the knife out, but not before the bike was nearly on her already. Two riders. Dark clothes, helmets.
She ducked down and dashed right across the front of the bike, flummoxing the driver and the tyres screeched as the driver tried to adjust and slam the brakes and twist the handlebars to follow her move.
The man on the street, though… Perhaps he’d seen the move coming, or perhaps just had rushed forward regardless and as Lea went to slash the driver the man thumped into her from behind and she felt pressure in her side…
A knife.
She swung her elbow out, catching… something. Shouting erupted. Fists flew. Hands grappled. Hers, others.
Shouting.
Her name.
‘Lea!’
Not Denis.
Not at first, anyway.
‘What’s happening?’
That was Denis, in her ear. But the other man? He was closer by.
She spun around, but the man who’d shouted her name grabbed her arm and dragged her towards him. He slingshotted her past him before he bounced forward on his feet and delivered a brutal uppercut that sent the passenger off the back of the bike. A knife clattered away down the street. Then he pounced on the man who’d been on foot, shoved him to the ground before he launched his foot into the guy’s face and—
‘Callum!’ Lea shouted. Warning him of the driver who was reaching into his jacket.
Undeterred, Callum bobbed forward as though about to attack but sirens cut through the air, bringing everyone to a halt. Lea grabbed Callum’s shirt to hold him back and the rider scooped the walker up from the floor and the bike blasted off down the street.
The original passenger lay in a heap on the floor, unconscious.
‘You OK?’ Callum asked, holding her by the shoulders, gently shaking her as though to bring her to reality.
‘Lea, what the hell is happening?’ Denis asked. She didn’t answer, though as she turned, she spotted him jogging towards them, twenty yards away.
Hand out flat, by her side, she signalled to him to not intervene. He got the message. The police car slammed to a stop.
‘Lea? Are you OK?’ Callum asked again before looking down at her side. ‘Shit. You’re bleeding.’
And the next moment her legs were like jelly and had he not been there she likely would have fallen flat on her face. Instead, she ended up on her knees.
‘He stabbed you,’ Callum said, crouching down to her level. ‘Shit, Lea.’
She didn’t say anything. Just watched as Denis casually strode past her towards the clothes store. He went inside.
The police wrestled the helmet off the injured passenger. A young man she didn’t know. Probably only a teenager.
‘Fucking petty thieves,’ Callum said. ‘Lea, say something.’
Denis had already come back out of the bookstore. He glanced over in her direction. Shook his head. She knew what that meant. Taremi and Jalali had already moved on. Probably out the back and on to wherever they needed to be. Head down, Denis walked away.
A police officer was barking something. At the boy on the ground? Or at her and Callum? She couldn’t be sure, her awareness fading.
‘Lea? Shit. She’s hurt!’ Callum shouted. ‘She’s hurt bad. We need help. Lea… say something.’
She dropped into his lap. Was only vaguely aware of him above her, gazing down.
‘You… really wanted my number, huh?’ she said before her head lolled, eyes rolling back as she drifted into unconsciousness.
8
Lea hadn’t been unconscious for long, out on the street in the old town. Not fully unconscious, at least. She could vaguely remember the paramedics tending to her, the agony as they lifted her onto a stretcher and clattered it – and her – into the back of an ambulance. Probably they’d been a lot more careful than it felt to her. She also could remember snippets of the journey, the hospital corridors, but it really was just snippets, as were the more than twenty-four hours that followed. Mostly she drifted in and out of sleep, much preferring the sleep because the pain was less intense, her mind disconnected from reality even if she wouldn’t say there was anything restful about the experience.
Denis had been to visit her more than once in the days that followed, but really, she didn’t want to have to make the effort to speak to him, and really, really didn’t want to have to think about what had happened. Not because she was necessarily traumatised by the experience – although she knew that she definitely was – but because she was hugely embarrassed by it.
How the hell had she got herself into that position in the first place?
Of all the stupid things…
A knock on the door and it opened before she could say anything and Denis walked in. She noted the uniformed police officer on the outside still. Not usual for a victim of a mugging gone wrong to have around the clock police protection, and the officer likely wouldn’t know why this victim was being treated differently, but the order had come through at least.
‘How you feeling?’ Denis asked, face full of concern.
She hated people talking to her like that. It only confirmed all her worst thoughts about how damn useless she was right now.
‘Like shit.’
He took a seat without being invited.
‘Give me the latest,’ she said, battling through the fog in her mind and the pain in her side to try and sound and feel like her normal self.
‘You seem more with it,’ he said, brightening a little. ‘Last time I was here you could barely keep your eyes open. Couldn’t string a sentence together.’
‘I snuck out in the night. Found the medicine storage. Got myself a nice stash of extra morphine.’
He sniggered. She would have too but knew it’d only send pain shooting through her if she contracted the muscles in her abdomen like that.
‘So?’ she prompted.
He sighed. ‘You won’t like this.’
She pulled herself up a little in the bed but immediately regretted it and had to fight through the pain for a few seconds. ‘Go on.’
‘The kid they arrested—’
‘Jamal Kone?’ That was the name Denis had given her last time he was here. An eighteen-year-old local.
‘There was an… incident last night. He was found dead this morning in his prison cell. Hanged.’
‘Fucking bullshit.’
‘Yeah. I know. Reynolds is pushing to try and get as much detail as we can from the police, but it’s already been a huge headache getting anything at all, even the security for you, given we were here without the knowledge of the DGSI.’
The DGSI being France’s internal security service. Likely they’d be seriously pissed off at the fact MI6 agents were on their soil on an operation they had zero knowledge of, but that was, unfortunately, the way espionage worked.
‘The kid was murdered, clearly,’ Lea said. ‘I was a target too. Isn’t that enough to get the DGSI to wake up and—’
‘Take it easy,’ he said, putting his hand onto her shoulder. Panting heavily from the exertion, the pain stabbing away all the time, she slowly got her surging adrenaline back under control. ‘We will figure this out.’
‘I’m not sure I have the strength to.’
‘In a few days—’
‘Seriously, Denis. This… I don’t know. Maybe I need a break.’
He held her eye several beats, neither of them really knowing what to say.
‘The other two kids… no one knows,’ he said. ‘The bike was found burned out. It was stolen. With Kone dead and no fingerprints and nothing else to help identify the others, maybe we’ll never know who they are. Were.’
‘But we know why they were there. Most likely the hit came from the Iranians.’
‘Yes. Jalali, we’re guessing, given who he is. But all four of them left the country—’
‘How the hell—’
He put more pressure on her shoulder, pushing her back into the bed, a more forceful way of telling her to calm down.
‘You know how this is,’ he said. ‘By the time we convinced anyone that they needed to stop these guys, they were already on a plane out of here. Jordan first, but I’ll bet they’ve moved on already, most likely simply back to where they came from.’
‘Probably not because of me, though. Probably because they already did what they came here for. And right under our noses.’
Denis said nothing.
‘And Hadjam?’ she asked.
‘We’ll keep tabs. The French police, DGSI have nothing on him. At least nothing that they’re willing to disclose to us. So right now, he’s a free man. No one’s even brought him in for questioning.’
‘Because he wasn’t there and probably had nothing directly to do with what happened to me. And we still have no bloody idea what he and the Iranians were up to together.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. But we’ll keep on him anyway, I can assure you that, Lea. We’ll figure this out. Find out what they’re up to. And we’ll make them pay. I promise you.’
He reached down and squeezed her hand.
‘A lot of we in that statement,’ she said.
‘Because you’ll be by my side for it, right?’
She didn’t answer.
Both of them went silent, Lea’s mind conflicted between chasing to the corners of the earth to find the Iranians and figure out what they’d been plotting here – and to get even with them, obviously – versus wanting to bury herself away somewhere quiet, warm and cosy. Safe.
‘I fucked up,’ she said.
His face creased over. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I tipped them off. Somehow. In the bar that first night. In the Metropolitan. Or when I was following them around the streets. Somewhere I dropped the ball. But do you know the worst thing?’
‘What?’
‘I genuinely don’t know at what point it was. And that’s what scares me the most. Because I should know. And if I don’t, how could I ever trust myself to be out there in the field again? How could any other agent, you included, trust to work alongside me when my next slip-up could cost them their life?’
She really wanted him to fight that statement. To tell her she was wrong. That she hadn’t made a mistake. That what happened was simply the consequence of the high-stakes jobs that they held.
But he didn’t say anything because both had heard the heightened voices outside the room. Not a threat, Lea soon realised. She recognised one of the voices.
Callum Murphy.
Denis glared at her and took his hand back.
‘Please?’ she said to him and hoped he’d understand what that meant.
He got to his feet and moved to the door and opened up.
Callum, remonstrating with the police officer, glanced into the room. First at Denis – with confusion – but then at Lea.
‘Lea, it’s me. I don’t know what’s going on, but—’
Denis rattled off something in French to the police officer. A simple explanation telling him to back down. She could tell Callum didn’t understand.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ Denis said to Lea before heading on out.
Callum sheepishly came in and shut the door.
‘You… don’t mind me being here, do you?’ he asked.
‘No. No, I don’t.’
The confused look came back. ‘That… guy…’
‘His name’s Denis, I—’
‘He’s staying at the hotel too, isn’t he?’
Very observant. Very suspicious, too.
‘He’s at the same conference.’
‘I thought you didn’t know anyone else.’
‘I didn’t. At first. But he saw what happened too. The police spoke to him, and… you just saw, he’s fluent in French so he’s helped me out, you know?’
He looked like he didn’t really, but he didn’t question it any more.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘Like crap.’
‘I mean… what’s the damage?’
He blushed at his own question, perhaps at the lack of eloquence, and she tried really hard not to laugh.
‘Lacerated kidney, liver. Apparently, I’m lucky not to have bled out on the street. Blood poisoning is still a risk but… the risk reduces every hour I make it through. Still… it could have been worse. If you hadn’t been there.’
‘I just… I reacted. I didn’t even think about what I was doing.’ He sighed and huffed and looked like he was struggling with something. ‘Maybe I made it worse. They probably only wanted your handbag or something. So… I’m sorry.’
‘Callum, that’s ridiculous. Come on.’
‘But I’m glad you’re OK.’
‘I will be.’
‘Did they catch the other guys?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Maybe the one they arrested will talk.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, instead of going into the real details. Too complicated. Too many lies to fabricate that way.
He looked at his watch. ‘The police said they’re done with me, so…’
‘You’re going home?’
‘That was the plan. Everyone else is at the station already, but…’
‘But what?’
‘If you needed me to stay for anything—’
‘You’ve helped me more than enough already. Callum, you saved my life.’
‘Yeah… I…’
‘I’ll be going home soon enough.’
‘You never did give me your number,’ he said, rubbing the back of his neck, all sheepish and nervous. Kind of cute.
‘Then get your phone out,’ she said.
It was in his hand as quick as a gunslinger in the Wild West.
She read off the numbers. He called. Her phone vibrated on the nightstand.
‘And now you’ve got mine,’ he said, wide smile spreading up his face, perhaps relief too that she hadn’t just given him a bogus number. He checked his watch again.
‘I really have to—’
‘It’s OK. Don’t miss your train.’
‘I’ll see you soon?’
They both held eye contact, and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel something in her chest, even above the pain in her side.
‘Yeah. I’ll see you soon.’
Four months later
The bang woke her with a start, body primed and at the ready…
No need.
The bedroom door remained closed, and she was alone in the room.
A sliver of light spilled in from the gap in the curtains. A light on in the bathroom too, that door partly ajar, the shower running.
The door opened a few inches further and Callum poked his head out of the gap. Cringed when he saw she was awake.
‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb you. I dropped the mouthwash.’
‘Ever wondered what an elephant sounds like trying to tap-dance?’
He looked really confused.
‘Sorry,’ he said again before retreating.
