Run Around (21 page)

Throughout his long practice with the M21 at Balashikha it had been assembled and every part so perfectly aligned that over four hundred and fifty metres his bulls-eye accuracy ran consistently at ninety nine per cent but the dismantling of the rifle would have disturbed that alignment. Zenin was determined to restore it although such a high accuracy achievement was not strictly necessary: the hollow-nose bullets he intended using flattened upon impact with a body and tore huge exit holes so death was practically automatic from shock, even if the hit itself was no more than a wounding shot.

The largest of the trees was slightly apart from the group he had selected and Zenin chose this to be the target to re-align the weapon. About six feet from the ground he stuck a six-inch square of paper over a jutting twig, pressing it against the rough bark of the tree and then looking back between it and the spot high up in the clearing from which he intended to fire, gauging the sightlines. Satisfied, Zenin moved to the closer-together trees and arranged five more paper markers, at heights dictated by convenient twigs, the highest almost to that on the first tree, the lowest just over three feet from the ground.

Back up in the clearing Zenin squatted again, opening the bag at last and bringing out the parts in the order in which he wanted to rebuild the weapon. He slid the perfectly machined barrel into the modified stock, then connected the gas cylinder and after that the piston. He paused at the remaining fitments, gazing intently around to search for any people: at this moment, if someone stumbled upon him, Zenin could have been mistaken for a hunter, although a rather improperly dressed one. The adapted sight and the elongated sound suppressor identified the rifle as something altogether different and Zenin with it, which was why he had left in the locked security of the garage the most obvious pieces of sniper's equipment. The forest remained dark and silent, but Zenin stayed motionless for a long time until he was sure. He screwed the power-increased sight on to the top of the M21 and finally twisted on the suppressor which extended the barrel practically half as much again, a reamed silencer that deadened the sound of the shot but in no way reduced or impaired the muzzle velocity. Zenin finally clipped in hard-nosed ammunition, not needing this time the shattering effect of the soft bullets.

Using the trunk of the tree against which he had rested as a support, Zenin focused the magnified sight on his first target, adjusting the two stadia to run either side of the paper, with the graticule at its bottom, and from the calibration was able to establish the distance precisely at three hundred and ninety metres. He took his time, snuggling the stock into his shoulder, his eyes unblinking against the magnification. The sound, when he fired, was hardly audible in the vastness of the forest, the merest phut, and Zenin was sure it would be even less in Geneva, masked by the sound of traffic on the Ferney highway. He missed the paper completely, by at least fifteen millimetres, frowning in irritation at the sideways pull. He readjusted the sight against the extension of the barrel and tightened by half a turn the suppressor's linkage. The next shot was excellent, almost in the centre of the paper, re-establishing at once his ninety-nine per cent score. Cautious in everything, he fired again at the same target and again hit practically dead centre, the second shot actually enlarging the penetration of the first. Zenin smiled to himself, pleased at how quickly he had recovered. For the assassination itself the rifle would be further steadied by its mounting on the tripod and his physical attachment to it by the harness.

Zenin shifted slightly, bringing himself around to the tree clump but pulling briefly away from the weapon to establish a timing. He waited until the second sweep hand of his watch marked the twelve before hunching back into his sniper's crouch and loosing off five shots in quick succession, each time having slightly to bring himself around, to the separate pieces of paper. He hit each one, again with ninety per cent accuracy, and when he checked his watch he saw it had taken one minute ten seconds, which was the timing average he had created for himself during the Balashikha training.

Zenin replaced the assembled rifle in the bag, made specifically-to-measure to accommodate it, and walked once more across the tiny valley. Two of the pieces of paper had been blown off the trees by the force of the impact. Zenin collected them and removed the four still attached to their twigs, standing back to examine the bullet holes. Each was neatly drilled into the trunks and from a few metres were practically indiscernible to anyone not positively seeking them. Better, he decided, to leave the bullets embedded than attempt to dig them out. Widening the holes would make them more visible.

Zenin reclimbed the hill to the clearing for the last time, at its top finding the narrow trail that would eventually return him to Brienz. Not much longer now, he thought. And tomorrow the meeting with Sulafeh Nabulsi.

A twice-daily courier system was established between the US embassy in Bern and the advanced American contingent, to ferry back and forth by car the restricted contents of the diplomatic pouch and it was on the second delivery that Roger Giles received the letter from Barbara, setting out the lawyer's opinion that there were insufficient grounds for the divorce. It was a long letter: freed from the constraining embarrassment of a personal confrontation the woman put on paper what she had been unable so far to say. She wrote that she did not know what had brought about the crisis of their marriage but that she did not want it to end: that she was apportioning neither blame nor responsibility to anything or anybody but that if he had complaints about her she would do her best to rectify them, if only they could talk instead of letting things drift, pulling them further apart.

It was a plea Giles recognized. And to which he responded because he, too, found it easier to write than he did to talk. He said he did not want their marriage to end, either: that he had gone along with the idea of dissolution because he'd imagined that was what she had wanted. He assured her the faults weren't her's, not any of them. The problem was his absolute and precluding ambition within the Agency, which he realized now to be wrong and for which he apologized, in a plea of his own, asking her to forgive him for his stupidity. He was due leave, he reminded her: and not just this year's allocation but time he'd refused to take the previous year because he did not want to be away from Langley for longer than a couple of weeks. He'd already told her the job in Switzerland had a definite cut-off date. Why didn't she fly to Europe and they'd take the vacation they'd always talked about but never achieved, driving to Italy and to France and maybe Germany, too? Nothing planned, just handling each day as it came.

‘I love you, my darling,' he wrote. ‘Forgive me. Learn to love me again.'

There was another communication addressed personally to him in that second delivery, official this time. It had been easy to trace Klaus Schmidt from the arriving flight immigration form, as the Englishman had predicted. Schmidt was a 65-year-old Swiss-German banker with scarcely any head hair but a neatly clipped and precise beard and could hardly have been more different from the picture that had been taken in London's Primrose Hill. The man was staying at one of the larger suites at the UN Plaza Hotel, which he customarily did during his quarterly visit to New York for business meetings with his bank's Wall Street division. He'd never heard of Geneva's Bellevue Hotel and certainly never stayed there.

Giles discarded the report onto the table of his own hotel suite, shaking his head at the ease with which the apparent Swiss breakthrough had been demolished. Charlie Muffin had been damned smart, seeing through it as quickly as he had. A clever guy. Giles thought of his sealed and sincere letter to Barbara, with its promises to resist in the future the 24-hour-a-day demands from the CIA. It was a CIA demand that he rejected the Englishman, he remembered: treat as hostile had been the message. Giles recognized that to be a demand he could not resist but he would have liked to have done. He thought Charlie Muffin was a funny looking son-of-a-bitch, like a rag picker on a Calcutta rubbish tip, but the guy sure as hell appeared to know his business. If this conference were as important as Langley and the State Department kept insisting and the threat to it were as real as it could easily be, Charlie Muffin seemed to be the sort of person whom they should have taken on board with open arms, not given the bum's rush. What was past was past: Giles was concerned with the immediate future. And worried about it.

*

Sulafeh Nabulsi tingled with anticipation, walking out of the post office with the letter tight beneath her arm. She found the café where she had sat, legs outstretched, that first day and was aware of the slight shake in her hand when she opened the envelope. It was just a single, unsigned sheet of paper, with the name of another café, one on the Rue des Terreaux du Temple. Against it was the time of 3 p.m. Beside the name of her hotel 2 p.m. was written. And there was a date, that of the following day. She stared down at it, memorizing every curve in the script, for several moments. Then, at last, she crumpled it into a ball, touched it with a lighted match advertising the place in which she sat and watched it burn into blackened ashes, which she crumbled into dust between her fingers.

Chapter Twenty

The London passport files are computerized so it took less than half a day for the response to Charlie's query, an assurance that no British document had been issued to anyone in the name of Klaus Schmidt during the preceding two years. Another bet won, thought Charlie; pity he wasn't as good with the bloody horses. It was still useful, though, giving him an excuse, albeit slim, to seek a further meeting with the other intelligence chiefs. He wouldn't give them a reason, of course: just hint at some additional information to keep them curious until they were all in the same room. And there was also what he hoped to achieve from the meeting with the night clerk at the hotel off the Boulevard de la Tour.

The Bellevue was a hotel small enough to miss, lost in a long and continuous block with shops and offices extending either side, the entrance no bigger than that into an ordinary house. There were four steps up into a minute vestibule, where the reception desk fronted the door. A breakfast area was to the right, an alcove of round tables and toadstool-like chairs, with a bar to the left, zinc-topped and dwarfed by the espresso machine that provided the breakfast coffee, and incapable of accommodating more than two tables. The television had to be suspended from a supportive arm, high on the wall, to get it into the place at all. Well chosen, judged Charlie, expertly. Discreetly inconspicuous, a hotel without regulars, none of the staff knowing the guests or guests knowing the staff.

The night clerk was a bonily thin man named Pierre Lubin who tried his best by wearing a dark jacket with dark striped trousers carefully brushed to hide the shine of constant use. The collar was the hard, detachable sort that enabled a shirt to be worn more than once, provided the cuffs were properly reversed.

Lubin smiled in instant recognition when Charlie produced again the photograph and said: ‘Drugs, isn't it? That's what the other policeman said.'

Lubin was enjoying the attention, after a lifetime of being ignored, guessed Charlie. He said: ‘The investigation is international; that's why I'm here from England.'

‘Important then?'

‘Very much so. I'd like you to help me all you can.'

‘Of course,' offered the man, eagerly.

‘He said his name was Klaus Schmidt?'

‘Yes.'

‘German?'

‘Certainly not Swiss-Deutsch.'

‘Why are you so certain?'

‘I know the accent, of course; the difference.'

‘Definitely German, then?'

Lubin put his head to one side, doubtfully. ‘There
was
an accent,' he said. ‘In his German, I mean. A blur in some of the words that I had not encountered before. But it was very precise: very grammatical.'

‘As if it were a learned, carefully studied language you mean? Not his first or natural tongue?'

‘I suppose so,' said the clerk. ‘Until you mentioned it, I hadn't thought about it.'

‘He signed a registration card?'

‘Yes.'

‘With an address?'

‘Yes.'

‘What was it?'

‘I can't remember,' said Lubin. ‘The police took it.'

Another demand he could make upon Blom, thought Charlie. He said: ‘Tell me the system of registration?'

‘System?'

‘A guest has to complete a card?' said Charlie, knowing how it was done from his booking into the Beau Rivage.

‘Yes,' agreed the clerk.

Knowing the answer again from his own experience, Charlie said: ‘But isn't it a requirement that the passport number is given and actually lodged, here at reception, at least overnight.'

Lubin trapped his lower lip between his teeth and visibly coloured. ‘Yes,' he admitted.

‘But you didn't do that?'

‘No,' said the man, in further admission.

‘Why not?'

‘It was late when he arrived,' said Lubin. ‘He complained at having travelled a long way and to be in a hurry to get to his room. And it's such a time-wasting regulation: I've always found it so pointless.'

Until now, the very moment it mattered, thought Charlie. There was nothing to be gained by openly criticizing Lubin. Charlie said: ‘Tell me about him. What he looked like.'

Lubin did so hesitantly, someone anxious to compensate for an acknowledged mistake, determined to leave nothing out. Charlie counted off the descriptive points against those he already knew, slotting one set perfectly into the other. This
was
the man, thought Charlie; he could smell it! Coming to the most important part of the interview, Charlie said: ‘I want you to take your time, don't hurry. But tell me what he was carrying.'