Andrew Britton - The Assassin

He kept moving, letting the crowd carry him forward. Having spotted the courier, Vanderveen was now looking hard for signs of surveillance. The green Opel appeared on schedule, and this time, he got a good look at the license plate. He was slightly chilled to see that Raseen had been right; it was the same car. The sedan passed him once more in the space of five minutes, but it was the only visible sign. Vanderveen couldn’t pick out any familiar faces on foot, but that didn’t mean a thing; he could be surrounded by watchers and never know it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t drop back in the hopes of picking them out; Charing Cross was less than five minutes away. If he was going to act, it had to be now.

The courier was 30 feet ahead of him. He picked up the pace, closing the distance rapidly.

In the driver’s seat of the Opel, Ian Haines leaned on the horn, angrily scanning the traffic that was currently snarled along Maiden Lane. The rain had started to slow, so he flicked off the wipers and leaned back in the seat, where he took a deep breath and tried to resign himself to a long wait. He still couldn’t believe the Arab had decided to leave the hotel before the shift change. The fucking nerve of these people… If the inconsiderate bastard had stayed in his room for another five minutes, they would have had time to move the next team into position. Unfortunately, it hadn’t worked out that way. Now they could easily end up spending the next several hours trailing him around the city, just waiting for an opportunity to switch out the surveillance teams. Judging by the terse, humorless transmissions coming over the radio, Scott was just as unhappy with the situation as he was.

“Ian, he’s still moving southwest on the Strand. Where the hell are you?”

“Maiden Lane. Some kind of accident… Christ, I don’t know. Any idea where he’s going?”

A crackle of static, then, “Your guess is as good as mine, mate. But I’ll tell you one thing. If he gets on the tube, we’re fucked.”

“Got that right,” Haines muttered to himself. In spite of the situation, he could console himself with one fact: if they ended up losing Banker, it probably wouldn’t mean much to the people in charge of “A” Branch, Section 4 at Thames House. After all, he reasoned, the man couldn’t be that important; if he was, a full team would have been tasked with trailing him. Then again, that might have been wishful thinking on his part. Haines knew the Service was spread too thin on the ground, despite the constant threat of terrorist activity and a marked upsurge in public interest following the London bombings of July 7, 2005. Manpower wasn’t the only problem, either. The Service was also badly in need of additional funding; the annual budget, which was shared with MI6 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), had risen a scant 250 million pounds over the past year. At the same time, expectations had risen tenfold.

Yet another impediment was the public’s ignorance when it came to matters of national security. Many people tended to forget that MI5 had no arrest powers, which meant that it was entirely dependent on actual government entities, such as Special Branch, to act on domestic intelligence. Haines had learned firsthand how hard it was to let others take the credit after months of thankless surveillance, but generally speaking, he didn’t mind operating in the shadows, and he didn’t mind the hard work… at least not most of the time. Right now, however, he wanted nothing more than to get on with the weekend; the Temple Bar was calling his name. He shifted in his seat wearily. If the little shit would just sit down for a meal somewhere, they could bring in the next shift and get this over with…

Haines was jolted out of his daydream by a horn blared from behind. The traffic had cleared up ahead. Easing his foot off the clutch, he rolled forward and turned onto Southampton. Twenty seconds later, he stopped at another light, ready to make the right turn onto the Strand. He had just finished relaying his position to Scott when the light turned green, and he swung onto the busy street for the fifth time that day.

Vanderveen had closed to within 5 feet. Everything else had fallen away: the jostling crowd, the cacophony of voices, and the constant roar of the cars sweeping by. All he could see was the man named Khalil: the elegant cut of his Savile Row suit, the attache dangling from his right hand, the hair curling over the back of his collar. He had stopped somewhere to purchase an umbrella, a lime green monstrosity, which was now bobbing over his head. If he had put it up earlier, it would have made Vanderveen’s task much easier, but the rain was only now starting to increase in tempo and force.

He paused to sweep some water out of his eyes. The courier, clearly accustomed to large cities, was an expert at navigating the packed sidewalk, sliding from left to right, avoiding the crowd with surprising grace and agility. Vanderveen realized he was falling behind. Adjusting his pace, he looked to the left, waiting for the right moment. The vehicular traffic was moving far too fast for these narrow roads. The city officials seemed to have considered this inevitable, as their preventative measures were mostly passive. Police constables were positioned at the major crosswalks, and white letters on the cement warned tourists to “look right.” Khalil was passing one of the crossings now, and with a start, Vanderveen realized that they were drawing close to Villiers Street. The entrance to the station at Charing Cross was less than two blocks away.

As if reading his mind, the courier dipped a hand into his suit jacket and came up with a cell phone. He held it in front of his body as he dialed, obscuring Vanderveen’s view. Then he lifted it to his ear. Vanderveen looked past his target, checking the road. Traffic was hurtling past him at full speed. Coming up were a white Rover sedan, a Renault wagon, a black cab, and beyond that, a double-decker bus. Khalil stepped to his left to avoid an elderly woman with an armful of bags, and Vanderveen seized the chance. Coming up on the courier’s right side, he let the Rover go racing past, along with the Renault and then the cab. Khalil, with the phone raised to his ear, was giving Raseen instructions when his head turned to the right and his eyes went wide. At the moment of recognition, Vanderveen used both arms to shove him as hard as he could, directly into the path of the bus. Then he turned and disappeared into the crowd as the brakes squealed and the screams rose behind him.

“Fucking hell!”

Haines swore viciously and slammed on the brakes as the cars fishtailed in front of him. Craning his neck, he could see people running toward a double-decker bus. The vehicle was three cars ahead of his own, and every instinct he had told him that this was relevant. Pulling out his earpiece, he turned off the ignition and got out of the car, jogging toward the commotion. As he approached, he could see a few people stumbling away from the scene, their faces white, eyes wide in shock. To his right, a young woman was bent over at the waist, vomiting noisily onto the pavement. Her friend, looking nearly as sick, was standing by her side, rubbing her back and murmuring calming words.

Pulling his eyes away from this strange scene, Haines skirted another car and pushed to the front of the building crowd. An older man in uniform was standing front and center, hands wrapped in his ginger hair. He was screaming something that didn’t make sense. Listening closely, Haines heard a few words cutting through the hysterical rant: “…wasn’t my fault. I swear to God, it wasn’t my fault. They just fell right into the road. You all saw it…”

And then he saw the front of the bus.

It looked as if somebody had splashed red paint all over the grill. Despite the obvious signs, it took him a few seconds to realize what had happened. His eyes involuntarily moved down to the wheels, and he saw the twisted remains of a human body, part of it wrapped up in the axle, the rest scattered along the street. Moving forward, Haines caught sight of another body, that of a teenage boy. He was lying behind and to the right of the bus, his limbs broken and resting at strange angles. A middle-aged woman — presumably the mother — was draped over the lifeless form, sobbing uncontrollably. As he watched, a pair of police constables moved out of the crowd. One went to the woman, gently lifting her up and away from her son, while the other started ordering people back from the scene of the accident. Haines felt somebody tap his arm, and he turned. It was Scott. His animated expression was difficult to read; there were equal measures of horror and excitement on his young, unlined face.