Manhunt (51 page)

The man pulled the door closed, checked that it was locked, and then walked unhurriedly along the corridor to Richter’s room. He paused at the door and glanced in both directions. A few
seconds later, a second man, similar in appearance, strode briskly down the corridor towards him. The first man nodded, then used the master key card he’d taken off the chambermaid to open
the door in front of him. They both stepped inside the room and closed the door behind them.

‘Where’s Mr Simpson?’ demanded Richter, who had arrived at the reception desk to find no sign of the man he had come down to see.

The receptionist looked slightly flustered. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Wilson. He received a call immediately after I finished talking to you, and I think he stepped into the coffee shop to take
it.’ The receptionist pointed towards the open double doors to one side. ‘He should still be in there, I think.’

Richter nodded his thanks, and walked through into the coffee shop. There were perhaps a dozen people in there, sitting at tables, but no sign of Richard Simpson.

He felt the first faint prickle of unease, and strode back out to the reception desk. The receptionist was talking to a middle-aged American couple. Richter simply and unceremoniously elbowed
them aside.

‘This man Simpson,’ he demanded, ‘was he about five-eight, slim build, pink complexion?’

‘No, sir,’ the girl replied. ‘He was about six feet tall with dark hair and he—’

But Richter was already moving, running across the lobby to the bank of lifts. The doors of one were just closing, but Richter thrust his arm through the gap and forced them open again.

On the fifth floor he sprinted down the corridor, the Browning already in his hand, safety catch off and his finger on the trigger.

The room door was closed, he could see that as he approached. He pulled the key card out of his pocket with his left hand, thrust it into the slot, pushed open the door and stepped into the
room, holding the pistol out in front of him.

But, before he could locate a target or pull the trigger, he felt a sudden stabbing pain in his right side as the twin darts from a Taser penetrated his skin. He shot a glance to his right,
straight into a pair of dark, almost black, eyes set in a face that was memorable chiefly because of its ordinariness. He tried to swing the Browning around, but he was a lifetime too late.

Around 120,000 volts of electricity coursed through his body, and Richter tumbled backwards, rendered instantly unconscious.

The Lubyanka, Moscow

A little over four hours after they’d started work on Yevgeni Zharkov, the two interrogators stepped back from the table. The colonel had at last slipped into a
comatose state where what little sanity remained within his conscious mind was finally and mercifully put beyond their reach.

‘I’m not even certain he was guilty,’ one of the interrogators observed. ‘He never changed his story, not once.’

‘Maybe he wasn’t. But we’ll never know now, that’s for sure.’

They glanced back to watch as the doctor prepared a lethal injection. He found a vein on Zharkov’s left arm, which the interrogators had broken in two places during questioning, and slid
the needle into it. As he depressed the plunger, the colonel’s body arched upwards and his face contorted in a sudden rictus of pure agony. Then Zharkov slumped back onto the table, finally
feeling no more pain.

‘One of these days,’ the first interrogator remarked, hanging up his blood-splattered apron, ‘I really must find out what he puts in that syringe.’

Wednesday

London

When Richter came to, it was like surfacing after a long time under water. He became slowly aware of a light, a distant light, somewhere above him, and then of voices. The
faint hum of conversation gradually began to impinge on his consciousness, the noise steadily becoming louder. He tried to move, to sit up, but his limbs seemed unwilling to obey. And he
couldn’t even separate his hands.

Then he began to understand what two of the voices close to him were saying.

‘I think he’s coming round.’

‘Good. We need to talk to him, then get him to hospital for checks.’

Richter’s eyes flickered open, and he stared up into the stern and unsmiling faces of two uniformed police officers.

‘Right, Mr Wilson, now you’re awake, we’ve got a few questions we’d like you to answer.’

Richter tried to ease himself up into a crouching position, and then slumped backwards, his handcuffed wrists making it impossible for him to stand without help. The two police officers grabbed
him under the arms and helped him sit in a chair at one side of the room. His eyes were only now starting to focus properly, but the room – and it was his hotel room, as far as he could tell
– seemed to be full of people. But they weren’t what immediately attracted his attention. What his eyes were drawn to first was the bed, and what lay on it.

Richter stood up and stepped forward, shaking off the restraining grasp of the sergeant. He walked across to the foot of the bed and looked down, utterly appalled at what he saw.

Raya’s naked body lay still and silent in the middle of it, a huge pool of blood surrounding her like an obscene halo. Ropes had been attached to her wrists and ankles, and then tied
around the feet of the divan so as to spreadeagle her across the sheets. It looked as if every square inch of flesh had been cut apart with a scalpel or knife. Her eyes were wide open and seemed to
be staring directly at Richter, her mouth open in a silent scream.

Richter’s eyes filled with tears as he looked down at the ravaged body. He stretched out his hands and stroked what was left of her cheek for the last time.

‘Raya,’ he muttered, ‘I’m so sorry.’

Then he closed his eyes and dropped his head, unable to look at her any more. The sergeant had moved across to stand beside him, and was still talking to him, but Richter hadn’t heard a
single word.

‘Why did you do it, Mr Wilson? Lovers’ tiff was it?’ the man repeated.

Richter turned his head round and stared at him as if he was mad. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, you simple-minded idiot? This is nothing to do with me. Give me my phone. I need to
make a call.’

‘You can call your solicitor once we’ve got you down at the station,’ the sergeant snapped.

Richter glanced back once more towards the bed, then stepped towards the officer. ‘I’ll give you one chance,’ he said. ‘If you still want to have a job tomorrow, get me
my fucking phone, and get it now.’

For a long moment, the sergeant just stared at him, then he shrugged. He must have seen something in Richter’s eyes that told him this man wasn’t making an idle threat.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘You can make one call, but I’m going to dial the number for you and listen to what you say.’

‘Fine with me.’

The sergeant picked up the mobile, and Richter gave him the emergency number Simpson had provided him with, what seemed like weeks before, outside the casino in Ax-les-Thermes. Within seconds,
he was connected.

‘Yes, Richter. What is it?’ Simpson sounded almost cheerful.

‘The shit has really hit the fan. Raya’s dead, and it looks like she was tortured to death. And I’m still in the hotel near Heathrow surrounded by woodentops who think that I
did it. I need you and whatever people are needed to get here as soon as possible and get this situation under control.’

To give Simpson his due, he asked no questions, just one regarding the address of the hotel. He then promised he’d have a team there as quickly as he could, certainly within thirty
minutes.

‘Now let me talk to whichever plod there seems to be in charge,’ Simpson ordered.

Richter moved the phone away from his ear and looked at the sergeant. ‘My boss,’ he said, ‘wants to talk to your boss.’

Three minutes later, the sergeant was removing Richter’s handcuffs.

Simpson and half a dozen men arrived well within the promised half-hour. Simpson took one look at the butchered body lying on the bed, and pulled Richter out of earshot of
everyone else.

‘What happened here, Paul? Who did this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Richter replied. He explained about the phone call from the reception desk, and then briefly seeing the man with the Taser.

‘That knocked me cold, but I’ve got a puncture mark in my left arm, so I guess they pumped me full of something to keep me unconscious while they performed their butchery. But the
phone call, Simpson? The man at the reception desk used your name. That’s the only reason I bothered going down. You know what that means, don’t you?’

‘Yes, you don’t need to spell it out. Holbeche knew I was running this operation, and he knew who you were as well, because I told him. I had to: I was reporting to him. He must have
passed on everything he knew to Andrew Lomas. That’s why whoever appeared downstairs – and there was obviously more than one of them – could use my name to put you off your
guard.’

Richter glanced back towards the bed, where Raya’s mutilated corpse was now mercifully covered with a sheet already stained crimson in several places.

‘I still don’t really know why they left me alive,’ Richter said. ‘Or why they had to do what they did to Raya.’

‘I think I do,’ Simpson replied. ‘That was Moscow sending us a clear and unequivocal message. In the space of a week, we’d identified and eliminated their two most
important penetration agents in Britain. That would be bad enough for the Russians, but instrumental in that operation was Raya Kosov, and the files she’d copied from the Yasenevo database.
Killing her, and especially killing her the way they did, was Moscow – in the persona of Andrew Lomas – demonstrating that they possessed the reach and the resources to track her down
and make her pay the ultimate price for daring to betray the SVR and Mother Russia. She was the target. You were incidental, just a bystander, a person of no consequence.’

‘So you think Lomas did this?’ Richter asked.

Simpson nodded. ‘I’m certain he did. But, don’t worry, we’ll find him sooner or later.’

Richter shook his head. ‘Is that job offer still open?’ he asked, in an apparent non sequitur.

‘Yes,’ Simpson said. ‘Why?’

‘Because I’m going to take it, for one very simple reason. If I’m working inside British intelligence, some day I know I’ll come across Andrew Lomas again. Because
you’re wrong about one thing, Simpson: you won’t find him. That’s because I’m going to beat you to it, if it’s the last thing I ever do. I’m going to track down
Lomas and finish him myself, and I can guarantee that it’ll take him a long time to die.’

Simpson studied Richter for a long moment, then nodded. ‘Welcome to FOE,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘I think you’re getting the hang of things now.’

James Barrington is a trained military pilot who has worked in covert operations and espionage. He now lives in Andorra and this is his sixth novel. His previous novels,
Overkill, Pandemic, Foxbat, Timebomb
and
Payback,
also feature Paul Richter.

Also by James Barrington

OVERKILL

PANDEMIC

FOXBAT

TIMEBOMB

PAYBACK

As always, my friend and agent Luigi Bonomi has given me his unflinching support, guidance and encouragement in this and other literary adventures. He’s the man who really
calls the shots. At Macmillan, I’m delighted to be working with Jeremy Trevathan and Catherine Richards – an impressive and organized team – and my grateful thanks are also due to
Peter Lavery for his meticulous editorial eye.

To readers who’ve been following the various exploits of ‘Paul Richter’, a brief word of explanation is needed.
Manhunt
is chronologically the first
volume of this series, despite its publication date, and introduces a number of characters who reappear later in the series.

First published 2011 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2011 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-1-4472-0508-1 EPUB

Copyright © James Barrington 2011

The right of James Barrington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital,
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liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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