James Twining - The Black Sun

With a screech of brakes, a large black Range Rover pulled up alongside him. Tom turned on his heel but slipped, the road surface rendered treacherous by the wet cardboard boxes, lettuce leaves and plastic bags that had been generated by the morning’s trading. Before he could scramble back to his feet, the rear passenger door flew open and he caught a glimpse of who was sitting in the back seat.

Archie.

The front passenger window retracted a few inches and a pale hand appeared in the crack clutching a government identity badge.

‘Enough fun and games, Kirk. Get in.’

5th January – 12.56 p.m.

The driver’s square, close-shaved head emerged from a thick grey woollen polo neck. He flicked his eyes up to the mirror and then back to the road, a smile playing around the corner of his mouth as the car accelerated away.

The man in the passenger seat peered back over his shoulder and nodded at them both.

‘I’m William Turnbull.’

He extended his hand back over his shoulder towards them as he spoke, but they both ignored it, staring at him in stony silence. From what he could see of Turnbull, Tom estimated that he must weigh about eighteen stone, little of it muscle. He appeared to be quite young though, about thirty-five, give or take a few years, and was dressed in an urban camouflage of jeans and an open-necked shirt that barely contained the roll of fat around the base of his neck.

‘Sorry about…that.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of the market. ‘I guessed that you probably wouldn’t come if I just asked, so I brought some help. I didn’t quite expect you to make us –’

‘Let me guess,’ Tom interrupted angrily. ‘Somebody’s got knocked off and you think we might know something about it? Am I right? How many times have I got to tell you people, we don’t know anything and, even if we did, we wouldn’t say.’

‘This has nothing to do with any job,’ was Turnbull’s unsmiling response. ‘And I’m not the police.’

‘Special Branch, Interpol, Flying Squad, PC bloody Plod…’ Archie shrugged. ‘Whatever you want to call yourselves, the answer’s still the same. And this is harassment. We’re clean and you know it.’

‘I work for the Foreign Office.’ Turnbull flashed his identity card at them again.

‘The Foreign Office?’ Archie said incredulously. ‘Well, that’s a new one.’

‘Not really,’ said Tom quietly. ‘He’s a spook.’

Turnbull smiled.

‘We prefer “intelligence services”. In my case, Six.’

Six, Tom knew, was how insiders referred to MI6, the agency that dealt with overseas threats to British national security. It wasn’t the sort of organisation Tom wanted to get caught up in. Not again. He’d done five years in the CIA, seen how they worked, and had only just lived to regret it.

‘So what do you want?’

‘Your help,’ came the toneless reply as the car slowed to a halt at a set of lights.

Archie gave a short, dismissive laugh.

‘What sort of help?’ Tom asked quietly. Until he knew exactly what he was up against, he was forcing himself to play along.

‘As much as you want to give.’

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Tom said. ‘None.’ Archie nodded his agreement. ‘Not unless you know something I don’t…’ People like Turnbull never made a move unless they had an edge, some sort of leverage. The key was to flush it out.

‘No reason.’ Turnbull smiled. ‘No threats. No phoney deals. No “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” If you help us it will be because, by the time I’ve finished telling you what I’ve got, you’re going to want to.’

‘Come on, Tom, we don’t have to listen to this shit. They’ve got nothing on us. Let’s get out of here,’ Archie pleaded. But Tom hesitated. Something in Turnbull’s voice had piqued his curiosity, even though he knew Archie was probably right.

‘I want to hear him out.’

The lights changed to green and the car drew away again.

‘Good.’

Turnbull released his seatbelt and turned to face them. He had a flat, featureless face, his cheeks rounded and fleshy, his chin almost disappearing into his neck. His brown eyes were small and set close together, while his long hair parted in two wild cow licks in the middle of his head and fell like curtains which he had draped behind his ears.

In many ways, he looked like the most unlikely spy Tom had ever seen. The best ones always did. Certainly he had an easygoing confidence that Tom had observed in other field agents in the past, and good agents at that.

‘Have you ever heard of a group called Kristall Blade?’ Turnbull asked.

‘No,’ said Tom.

‘No reason you should have, I suppose. They’re a small band of extremists with loose ties to the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands or NPD, the most active neo-Nazi political group in Germany. They’re supposedly run by a former German Army captain called Dmitri Müller, although no one’s ever seen him to confirm it. To be honest, we don’t know a huge amount about them.’

Tom shrugged. ‘And?’

‘And from the little we do know, these aren’t your regular skinheads, cruising around the suburbs looking for immigrants to beat up. They’re a sophisticated paramilitary organisation who are still fighting a war that the rest of us think ended in 1945.’

‘Hence the name?’ It was more a statement than a question. Tom knew his history well enough to guess that Kristall Blade must have drawn their inspiration from Kristallnacht – the fateful night in late 1938 when Nazi-inspired attacks on Jewish businesses had left the streets of Germany’s cities littered with broken glass.

‘Exactly,’ Turnbull said eagerly. ‘They used to fund their activities by hiring themselves out as freelance hit men behind the Iron Curtain, but these days they’re into small-scale drug and protection rackets. They’re suspected of involvement in a range of guerrilla-style terrorist atrocities aimed primarily at Jewish communities in Germany and Austria. There are no more than ten or twenty active members, with a wider group of supporters and sympathisers perhaps a hundred strong. But that’s what makes them so dangerous. They slip under the radar of most law-enforcement agencies and are almost impossible to pin down.’

‘Like I said, I’ve never heard of them.’

Turnbull continued, undeterred. ‘Nine days ago, two men broke into St Thomas’ Hospital and murdered three people. Two of them were medical staff – witnesses, most likely. The third was an eighty-one-year-old patient by the name of Andreas Weissman. He was an Auschwitz survivor who moved here after the war.’ Tom was silent, still uncertain where this was leading and what it had to do with him. ‘They amputated Weissman’s left arm at the elbow while he was still alive. He died of a heart attack.’

‘They did what?’ Archie sat forward at this latest piece of information.

‘Cut his arm off. His left forearm.’

‘What the hell for?’ Tom this time.

‘That’s where we want your help.’ Turnbull smiled, revealing a disconcerting set of overlapping and crooked teeth.

‘My help?’ Tom frowned. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

‘I thought you’d say that,’ said Turnbull, bracing himself against the window as the car turned a corner. ‘The killers stole the surveillance tapes from the ward, but one of them was caught on CCTV as they left the building.’ He produced another photo and passed it back. Tom and Archie took it in turn to examine the image, but both shook their heads.

‘No idea,’ said Archie.

‘Never seen him before,’ Tom agreed.

‘No, but we have,’ Turnbull continued. ‘Which is how we were able to make the link to Kristall Blade. He’s Dmitri’s number two, Colonel Johann Hecht. Last time we caught up with him was in Vienna about three months ago when one of our agents snapped him in a restaurant.’ He handed Tom a third photograph. ‘He’s about six foot seven and has a scar down his right cheek and across his lip, so you can’t exactly miss him.’