Matthew Dunn - Slingshot

The six men who’d attended the Berlin meeting in 1995.

He put a finger on the photo of one of the four surviving members.

The treacherous bastard who intended to give evidence about Slingshot to The Hague.

He recalled Dugan’s comment to him.

We’re the kind of men who like to have impenetrable security wherever we go.

Lifting Dugan’s profile, he placed his rimless reading glasses on and muttered, “Your security has caused me a lot of trouble.”

At midmorning, Will, Roger, and his men watched the Jeep stop at the side of the deserted country lane on the outskirts of Berlin. The land around them was featureless, flat, and made more dreary by a persistent rain that was turning to hail. Suzy got out of the car, pulled up her jacket’s hood, and approached their stationary vehicles. Despite the weather, all of the men were standing on the side of the road.

Will asked quietly, “What have you got for me?”

She told him about Interpol’s request for any information on Kurt Schreiber, the location of an unknown high-value witness in the Netherlands, and the impending hearing in The Hague.

Will lowered his head, deep in thought. He felt weary, had only managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep each day since the paper escaped his clutches in Gdansk. “You think Schreiber’s the witness?”

“Impossible to know.”

“Still nothing on the word Kronos ?”

“Nothing.”

Will thought about Sarah. Every six hours he received SMSs from Betty to update him on her safety. “We need to go after Rubner’s wife and daughter. Rubner himself will most likely be invisible. But children need schools; wives like to socialize. Find them, we’ll find Rubner. And when we get him, we’ll make him talk.”

Laith spoke angrily. “We’re not in the business of harming women and kids.”

“My sentiments exactly.” Will ignored the hailstones hitting his face. “There’ll be no harm; we’ll just put the fear of God into them. We have no other choice.”

Mark rubbed his stubbly face. “I’m not comfortable with this.”

Nor was Will, though he couldn’t show that doubt to his team. “Could you sell out your country’s agents and do that simply for money?”

The former SBS commando shook his head. “Fuck, no.”

“I doubt any of us could.” Will nodded. “Rubner will stick close to Yevtushenko and the paper. That means his family’s in Europe, possibly Germany itself.” He walked away and stood with his back to the others in the center of the deserted road. He stayed like this for one minute as the others watched him, then turned and looked at Suzy. “Scour Europe, find Rubner’s family.” He turned to Roger. “I need you to do something for me today. After it’s done, rejoin your team and use your men as a hunter-killer unit. Once Rubner’s family has been located, get him, make him talk.”

“You’re not joining us?”

Will shook his head. “Tonight I’m going to visit The Hague.”

Mikhail stayed motionless, prone on the ground. He watched the officer and his men move back toward their vehicles. The paramilitary team and American analyst drove away from him; the MI6 operative came right toward his hidden location.

Who should he follow?

He made a decision.

This time he would not let the MI6 officer out of his sight.

Alina removed Maria from the new baby carriage Will had bought her, put the child into a high chair supplied by the shabby Minsk cafe, and placed her daughter’s food on the table between them. The place was a third full. Outside it was snowing, and the road adjacent to the eatery was a mix of white snow and muddy slush.

A waitress came to her table and snootily asked, “Are you going to buy anything?” She pointed at a sign. In Belarusian, it read ONLY FOOD PURCHASED IN THESE PREMISES MAY BE CONSUMED HERE.

Alina felt angry, unzipped her purse, and saw that it contained barely enough rubles to buy her a mug of coffee. She ordered a drink, and added, “I doubt this shit hole sells baby food, and if it did I wouldn’t poison my child with it.”

The waitress stormed off.

Alina unscrewed a jar of homemade turnip and carrot puree, sat down, and began spooning the meal into Maria’s mouth. “Daddy’s going to come home soon.”

Maria swallowed some of the food as bits of it dribbled over her chin. She grinned and made a chortling sound.

“We have to believe that, don’t we?” She scrapped the mess off Maria’s face, trying to keep her tone light and happy, even though she felt exhausted with worry and over the last few weeks had burst out crying at the most random of moments. “Maybe Daddy could take us out for a picnic. Would you like that?”

The waitress slammed a mug of black coffee on the table and stood expectantly by Alina’s side. Alina sighed, withdrew all her money, and placed it next to the mug.

After the waitress was gone, Alina put her cold hands around the mug, letting the warmth soothe her fingers. “The trouble is, Daddy did something very silly and we won’t be able to do the picnic until he says sorry to a lot of people.”

Maria moved her arm to push away the next spoonful and started speaking unintelligible words.

“Come on, little lady. Just five more spoonfuls.” She tried to put the spoon into her mouth again, but Maria repeated the movement, her face became angry, and she banged a fist on the high chair. “I wish the Englishman were here. You’d eat from him, wouldn’t you?”

She placed the spoon into the jar and took a sip of the coffee. It was weak and acrid. Probably the waitress had deliberately made it that way. She didn’t care and took another sip, glad of its heat. She’d completed the last of the day’s university lectures. Today she’d asked her students to challenge Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s view that poetry was born from the torment of the soul with her own view that it was rather an encounter with truth.

Alina sighed. She still had other chores to do, including going to the jewelers to see if anyone had bought the necklaces she’d left with the shopkeeper a week ago. The deal was, she’d only get cash for them if they were sold, and even then it would only be 60 percent of the retail price. A mental image entered her head of Will Cochrane trimming pork cutlets in her tiny home while she prepared their promised meal of kotleta pokrestyansky . She wondered why.

Perhaps because increasingly she realized that her future was either being alone with Maria, or one day being with a man who could help her with broken baby carriages, could make Maria smile and eat her food, and wanted what she wanted: a break from loneliness.

As she stared out of the window at passersby struggling through the driving snowfall, she knew in her heart that whatever happened, Lenka was never coming back.

Peter Rhodes watched the fire begin to die and shivered as the icy Asian wind came through cracks in the mountain shack. Momentarily, he considered putting the remainder of the logs onto the embers before they were extinguished. He decided there was no point.

His oil lamp flickered, casting shadows over a roll-mat bed, a bench and chair, a horse saddle and luggage, and a portable single-ring gas cooker that was positioned on the soil and straw floor. He got off his bed, opened the front door, and was nearly knocked off his feet by a gust of snow-carrying wind. After steadying himself, he looked around in case there were men on horseback coming for him. The endless mountain range would look beautiful on a postcard, but in person it looked desolate, terrifying, and barren of life.