Matthew Dunn - Spycatcher

Will smiled a little. “I came here to face a demon.”

The priest nodded and narrowed his eyes. “Who sent you?”

Will glanced at the altar and muttered, “I answer to no one.” He looked back at the priest.

A bead of sweat was trickling down one side of the man’s face. “What do you want?”

Will smiled fully. “Your life.”

Anger flashed in the priest’s eyes before he grinned. “I’m sorry that I am going to have to disappoint you.”

Will’s face grew cold. “Did you expect to go unpunished? Did you expect that your crimes of two decades ago would be forgotten?”

The man sneered. “You know nothing about me.”

Will stared at him. “I know that you were once a captain in a Bosnian Serb paramilitary unit called the Panthers and that you led your men on killing sprees that involved rape and mutilation of your victims before you murdered them. You personally slaughtered hundreds of women and children and threw them into unmarked mass graves. You cut unborn babies out of living wombs and then strangled them with your bare hands. You degraded their good in favor of your evil.” He gestured at the church. “Hiding in a place like this was meaningless. Its fortified walls and sacred grounds could never protect a man like you from a man like me. But for all your abhorrent crimes, I am here to prosecute you for one crime and one crime alone.”

The priest sniggered. “Too bad, because I am the one holding the gun.”

Will nodded. “True.”

The man pressed the barrel against Will’s head. “Which crime?”

“You and four of your men raped an honorable woman a few kilometers outside Sarajevo while it was besieged by your compatriots.”

“A single rape?” The man sniggered again. “There are too many to remember.”

“A Muslim woman. You took her coat because you knew that in doing so she would likely freeze to death. The four men with you later died in the war, but that does not matter to me, because it was you who gave them their instructions.”

The priest frowned thoughtfully, then brightened. “Yes, now I remember. A peasant, a woman asleep in the woods. We woke her and brutalized her.” He laughed loudly, and the noise filled the church. “You represent that woman?”

“I represent the need for justice.”

The man leaned close to Will and pressed the gun harder against him. “Then it is a shame that justice could not find a better representative.”

“So it seems.”

In a movement that was quicker than any man’s trigger finger, Will grabbed the priest’s gun hand and twisted his arm to lock the muscles. With his other hand, he seized the back of the priest’s head and punched it down at the oil lamp. Glass from the lamp’s flame shield shattered and splintered into the man’s face and exposed the lamp’s flame to his head. Will stood and yanked the head with tremendous force, so that the priest flew from the pew to the church’s central aisle. Then Will walked up to his writhing body and punched him very hard on the side of the face.

He looked down at the man. “I know why I came here. While demons still exist, I have to take a stand against their evil. And I have been given the ultimate power to stop creatures like you.”

He withdrew his handgun and pointed it at the man’s head. “I did not lie to you. I came here for your life.”

He pulled the trigger.

“There they are.” Roger grabbed Will’s forearm, looking down from their vantage point high in an upper balcony inside Zagreb Cathedral. “One’s walking down the central aisle, and the other two are taking positions in the rear of the cathedral.”

Will looked at the large floor area beneath him. There were seated men and women in prayer, groups of tourists, as well as Lana, two members of the Iranian surveillance team, and the three new men whom Roger had identified.

“The fourth member of their team is outside.” Roger’s voice was so hushed that Will could barely hear him.

Saying nothing, Will focused his gaze on Lana. She’d done as he had previously instructed her and positioned herself toward the center of the cathedral floor. While he couldn’t see it from his perch, Will knew that she would be carrying a tourist guide and occasionally referring to it between her observations of the cathedral surroundings. He looked back at the three men, the two Iranians, and then again at Lana. He saw her turn and walk toward the exit. She would now be heading for the Preradoviceva flower market.

“Let’s see what happens,” Roger was saying. “One of the Iranians moves in behind Lana, the other stays where he is, but what are our new friends going to do?”

Will watched the three men and saw one remain motionless while the other two moved deeper into the cathedral, in the opposite direction from where Lana was going.

“Okay.” The CIA paramilitary man continued his narration of the scene unfolding below. “They’re allowing the fourth member of their team to get onto Lana when she’s outside. Their new position also suggests they’re fully aware of the Iranian team around her.”

“But can we tell if the Iranians are aware of these other men?” Will kept his own voice very quiet.

“It depends. If the Iranian and the other three men stay here for more than ten minutes, we can be confident that both teams know about the other and that the Iranian is sending them a message to stay put. But if the Iranian leaves in under that time, it tells us nothing. He could be oblivious to the other men, or he could want the other men to think that the Iranians haven’t spotted them.”

Will and Roger just watched, saying nothing for the next five minutes. Finally Will saw the last Iranian surveillance man walk slowly toward the exit and leave the cathedral. A minute later one of the three men also left, and after a further three minutes the remaining two men followed him.

Roger turned to face him. “We have a very serious situation.”

Will ran his fingers through his hair and thought for a moment. Roger had summoned him to this place after the CIA team leader had spotted not only the fact that the Iranian surveillance team had acquired new members to bolster its head count back up to seven but, more important, that another team of four unknown persons had positioned themselves around Lana this morning. Will knew that his operational use of Lana was now in dire jeopardy.

Roger pulled out his cell phone to read a new message. “I sent Ben to check up on them. They’re French.”

Will frowned. “DGSE?”

Roger nodded once and said, “They must be.”

The Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure was France’s equivalent of the CIA and MI6, and it was the only French covert organization authorized by its government to conduct overseas surveillance and other intelligence activities.

“But how the hell did they get onto Lana?” Will’s mind was working rapidly.

“We don’t have the time to be certain,” Roger replied, “but I’d say it started with the discovery of the Iranian surveillance team. We know they’re staying at the Hotel Dubrovnik, so maybe the local DGSE representative in Zagreb has recruited one of the hotel’s reception staff. That person alerts the DGSE man that seven Iranians have just checked into the hotel. The DGSE person wants to find out more about them, so he has his hotel spy look in their rooms. Maybe the hotel gets lucky and finds covert photographs of Lana, but assuming that the Iranian team is better than that, certainly the spy should be able to find bus or train tickets, store or restaurant receipts. That data would show patterns, and those patterns would tell where the Iranian group goes. So our DGSE person looks for the most frequented location and then just waits there. He or she will also choose the location because of visibility and because it is a bottleneck, meaning high levels of exposure for the group. It may not happen on the first day or the second, but odds are the Iranians will come through that place eventually. The DGSE person observes their formation and behavior. He or she establishes with certainty that they’re a surveillance team. If I were in that situation, I’d be able to positively identify which person was the team’s target, so let’s assume that’s what happened.”