Brian Freemantle - The Run Around

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 cafe 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 cafe, 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.

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.