The Hunter

CHAPTER 22

Paris, France

Thursday

15:16 CET

Alvarez took a big slurp of his three-sugar black coffee and typed clumsily on the keyboard resting on his thighs. He sat with his feet up on the desk, shoes on the floor. A mostly empty plastic ballpoint was wedged between his teeth, slowly being chewed. He was in his temporary office of the CIA’s Paris station on the second floor of the US Embassy.

The office was barely big enough for him and his desk and was so small he liked to refer to it as his shoe box. It was quiet, though, and Alvarez could do without distractions. Near to his feet sat a photograph of Christopher from the school nativity play. He’d been a shepherd. The little trouper had nailed it perfectly, even if the kids playing sheep couldn’t baa worth a damn.

Tracking down Ozols’s killer was going nowhere fast. If he was travelling under Alan Flynn’s passport, then, according to the Czechs, he hadn’t left the country, but Alvarez thought it more likely he’d just switched passports and gone who knows where? Alvarez didn’t have the time or the manpower for a Europe-wide manhunt, so he had focused his efforts on investigating the seven dead shooters. If he could find out who hired them, maybe that would reveal enough about Ozols’s killer to lead to who hired him. Then maybe there would be a shot at getting the missiles or at least stopping the technology from ending up in the hands of America’s enemies.

He’d discovered a lot over a couple of days. Mikhail Svyatoslav, who the killer had impersonated, had been a former member of the Spetsnaz. He served in Afghanistan during the eighties before doing a brief stint with the KGB. He got shown the door when the Cold War ended, and went freelance, mainly working the Eastern bloc, taking out the trash for crime lords and other scum.

With him had been a few Hungarians, ex-mob by the looks of it, and some Serb irregulars, including a woman. Alvarez had to shake his head at that. In short, he had compiled a list of the world’s worst assholes from every cesspit from the Balkans to the Urals. Hired guns, ex-soldiers, mercenaries, killers. Two of the bastards were wanted for war crimes in Kosovo. It’s good that they’re dead, Alvarez thought. Only dead they couldn’t be questioned. They were a bunch of typical Eurotrash hitmen. Alvarez had expected nothing less.

What he didn’t expect was to find out that one of the hitters was an American, James Stevenson, and a former US Army Ranger. Stevenson had even tried out for Delta but hadn’t made the grade — not only that, but he applied to get into the CIA after he dropped out of his unit, but once again didn’t make the cut. He had an aptitude for fieldwork, but he was a discipline problem waiting to happen, too much of a risk to go on the agency payroll. He got into the private sector through an old army buddy and was based out of Belgium. Stevenson did a lot of protection work and other unspecified jobs for a security firm in Brussels.

On the computer screen Alvarez had bank records, phone records, e-mails, memos, even utility bills. They belonged to the recently-shot-twice-in-the-face James Stevenson, former soldier, former mercenary, former scumbag. The guy had deposited a huge amount of euros in cash into an account at a not-proneto-asking-difficult-questions type of bank. This had happened two weeks before he’d become closely acquainted with a pair of 5.7s.

A quarter of that money had then been wired to seven separate bank accounts belonging to the other members of the team. Alvarez assumed they would each have received the same amount again after the job, with Stevenson pocketing half the total for himself. Now the money was sitting gathering interest in the name of dead guys.

Who the hell had given Stevenson the cash in the first place? was what Alvarez wanted to know. Stevenson hadn’t been the shrewdest operator in the history of contract killings and had left several clues on the hard drive of his personal computer, a portable copy of which was now plugged into Alvarez’s laptop.

Stevenson liked to keep things organized, and he had details of each of the other members of the team in a spreadsheet, complete with email addresses and phone numbers where appropriate. This information helped identify a couple of the more elusive corpses but didn’t help track down who had hired Stevenson.

He referred to the job itself as ParisJob, a rather unimaginative title in Alvarez’s opinion, but Alvarez supposed it hardly mattered what it was called. The private security firm in Brussels, through which Stevenson had done several protection jobs, had already been grilled and claimed they had nothing to do with Paris. Alvarez believed them. They made too much money hiring out mercenaries legitimately to have had a hand in a risky contract killing.

It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, though, to think that whoever had hired Stevenson had been a previous client for the security firm. The list of potential suspects was huge and spread worldwide: private businessmen, multinational corporations, Saudi oil barons, African governments. Stevenson himself had worked with all sorts of clients, any one of whom could be the person Alvarez was after, or maybe the individual had nothing to do with the firm. If so, the list of suspects had risen exponentially.

Alvarez’s gut told him that whoever had hired Ozols’s killer had also hired Stevenson and his crew to kill him after the job’s completion. Maybe he’d screwed up, maybe it was to tie off loose ends — it hardly mattered. But if Alvarez was right, and the killer had figured out that it was his own employer who’d tried to have him killed, there was a chance he still had the information. That meant the missiles were still out there and still attainable.

The phone rang and he answered with a blunt, ‘Yeah.’

It was Noakes, one of the CIA officers who worked out of the embassy. Noakes worked in the basement along with all the other technophiles. He was an okay guy, if a little too hyperactive on caffeine and sugar for Alvarez to have much patience for.

‘I’ve got something you might be interested in,’ Noakes said with his usual hundred-mile-per-hour speak. ‘Stevenson tried to be sneaky with his hard drive and used a piece of software for deleting files securely. It’s the kind of thing my dad would use. I mean, for Christ-’

Alvarez jumped in. ‘Let me guess, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.’

‘Not quite,’ Noakes said. ‘Or at least it doesn’t do it as well as it’s supposed to. I’ve managed to extract some of the more recently deleted files, but the older ones are going to take longer, if they’re still there somewhere, which I don’t know. They could be. Or they might truly be gone for good.’

Alvarez held the phone a fraction farther away from his ear. ‘What did you find?’

‘Oh yeah.’ Noakes laughed. ‘Almost forgot to tell you. I’ve dug up some deleted e-mails between Stevenson and an unidentified person. We’ve only got the last few in what appears to be an ongoing conversation. They’re discussing payment for something called ParisJob.’

‘Good,’ Alvarez said. ‘Get those e-mails to me as soon as possible.’

‘On it now.’

Alvarez put the phone down, pleased to be making some progress but aware of how little he really knew. He stood and walked to the window. Alvarez stared out through the glass, through Paris, to the person out there who’d started this whole mess.

‘Where are you?’ he whispered.