James Barrington - Overkill

Trushenko stood up abruptly and walked to the large lounge windows, which offered an excellent view to the south-west down a long stretch of the river Moskva, and looked out, his hands on his hips. He stood there for several minutes, looking at, but not seeing, the river traffic, then he turned and walked back to his armchair. He reached over and poured a glass of vodka from the bottle of Stolichnaya on the table beside him, and drank it slowly.

When he had finished, Trushenko put the glass down and got up, walked across to a framed Monet print on the wall beside the fireplace and pulled on the left side of the frame. The picture swung away from the wall to reveal the door of a very expensive and secure safe of Swiss manufacture, one of the finest that money could buy. He entered a ten-number combination into the digital keypad and pressed a button. That didn’t open the safe, merely released a section of the armoured door to reveal the keyhole.

Trushenko unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt and extracted a slim steel key on a chain that he invariably wore around his neck. He inserted the key in the lock and turned it twice, then grasped the recessed handle on the safe door and opened it. Inside were a dozen or so video tapes plus three bulky files. Trushenko removed the top file and took it back to his chair. The name on the file cover was ‘ Podstava ’, and Trushenko already knew the contents almost by heart.

Hammersmith, London

It was eight forty when Richter got out of the lift on the seventh floor, knocked on the dark green door with the word ‘Director’ inscribed in faded gold leaf, and walked in. Richard Simpson – the Foreign Operations Director – was waiting for him, looking pointedly at his watch. ‘You’re late,’ he said, somewhat sourly.

‘I know,’ Richter replied. ‘Traffic,’ he added. He put his briefcase on the floor and sat down in the armchair in front of the desk.

‘I didn’t say you could sit,’ Simpson snapped.

‘That’s true.’

So far, the interview was going more or less as usual. Simpson was small, about five eight, with a pink and freshly scrubbed look about him. He’d headed the Foreign Operations Executive for six years, which was four years longer than Richter had been employed there, and throughout that period he’d almost never been known to praise anyone or anything.

Richter still simmered slightly whenever he met Richard Simpson. Two years earlier Richter had been an out-of-work ex-Royal Navy Sea Harrier pilot with a minimal pension and a gratuity that was leaching out of his bank account at an astonishing rate. He’d spent three irritating months scratching about, trying and failing to find any kind of employment that would pay his mortgage without boring him to death. Then he’d attended an interview in London for a courier job that was so intriguing that Richter had just had to take it. It had sounded too good to be true, and it had been.

Sent into France on a courier assignment that nobody, and certainly not Richter, believed made any sense, he had been set up by Simpson as an unwitting target to trap a high-level traitor in the Secret Intelli-gence Service. Richter had been considered expendable, with no family to make a fuss if he didn’t return. Against all the odds, Richter had survived the encounter, which the SIS officer hadn’t, and his performance had convinced Simpson that he was too useful to lose. The death of the SIS officer was marked ‘unsolved’ by the Metro-politan Police and the French authorities, but the file was still open, and Simpson had made it clear that if Richter ever stepped out of line, he would be only too happy to assist the police with their enquiries into the matter.

Simpson stared at Richter from the opposite side of the desk, and Richter stared straight back at him. Behind the row of cacti on his desk – the cacti were about the only things Simpson seemed to have any affection for, and there were more of them in serried ranks on all three window-sills – his face was all Richter could see, his dark, almost black, eyes unwinking. ‘Come on, then. I haven’t got all day.’

Richter opened the briefcase, took out the notebook he had been using in Moscow and put it on the desk in front of him. The other items could wait until later. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We got the signal about Newman on Tuesday evening. I flew into Moscow – economy class as usual – on Wednesday morning and checked into the Budapesht Hotel under cover name Willis. I rang the Embassy that afternoon and got an appointment for the following morning with the First Secretary, a man called Horne, William Horne.

‘As agreed with Tactics and Equipment, I presented him with the insurance company letter and accreditation, and after a bit of grumbling he passed me on to the Fourth Under-Secretary, Simon Erroll. I inspected the car and the body that morning – the corpse was in the basement fridge – and the office and apartment that afternoon. Then I flew back to Heathrow.

‘I took an abstract from Newman’s file before I left,’ Richter continued. ‘He was five feet eleven, weighed about twelve and a half stone, had fair hair and a fair complexion. There is no mention of any distinguishing marks. The body in Moscow was about the correct height and weight, though obviously it was impossible to measure or weigh the cadaver without Erroll smelling a rat. The hair and skin colour looked correct, but the face was completely unrecognizable, and the burning of the hands had destroyed the fingerprints.’

Simpson opened the personnel file in front of him and looked up expectantly. ‘So how do you know it wasn’t Newman?’

‘I’m coming to that. When people talk about distinguishing marks, they think about scars or birthmarks. Newman had no obvious scars or marks, so they probably didn’t realize. He had had an in-growing toenail on his right foot removed about ten years ago. The body in the basement mortuary in Moscow had all ten toe-nails.’

Simpson studied the file for a few moments in silence. ‘There’s no mention here of a toenail removal.’

‘Yes there is,’ Richter said, ‘in the “Summary of Hospital Treatment”. Newman had only had three operations – removal of tonsils and draining of sinuses when he was a kid, and the toenail job. The effect on the toe is quite unmistakable. The nail never grows normally again, because the nail bed is excised, wholly or partially.’

Simpson finally closed the file with a snap. ‘Two questions. If the body wasn’t Newman, who was it? And where’s Newman?’

‘Two answers,’ replied Richter. ‘I don’t know – at least, I know what he was, but not who he was – and Newman’s dead.’

Le Moulin au Pouchon, St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

The four men had rented the small three-bedroomed house about a mile outside the village some four months earlier, and they had all lived in the property ever since. The reason for this uninterrupted occupation was simple security – although the level of crime in rural France was commendably low, an unoccupied property was still a target and the one thing they couldn’t risk was some French low-life breaking in and stealing any of the equipment or, worse, talking about what he had seen inside.

Actually, there wasn’t very much to attract a thief to the house. No readily saleable items like TV sets or hi-fi equipment. There was a TV set, but it was at least ten years old, big and bulky, and of little or no value. Hassan Abbas had bought it second-hand from an electrical shop in Aire-sur-l’Adour, the local town where they did most of their shopping. There wasn’t even much in the way of furniture. Four single beds, two in each of the largest bedrooms, a table and four chairs in the kitchen. In the living room, two elderly sofas were pushed against opposite walls and on one wall there was a single incongruity – a clear mark showing the direction of Mecca so that prayers could be said correctly. Below the mark there were four highly decorated prayer mats.