The Enemy

CHAPTER 29

Zurich, Switzerland

In a dark room two men who were not Swiss stood before an antique wooden desk. The first man was in his early thirties and wore jeans and a windcheater. The second was old, very short, wearing a suit. He stood slightly hunched over. Before them a laptop computer sat on the desk. Video footage filled the laptop’s screen. The footage had been recorded with state-of-the-art infrared cameras, of a hotel suite. The recording showed three men, acting shocked and confused. The laptop’s speakers played strange sounds.

‘He’s shooting through the door,’ the man in the windcheater explained.

The older man nodded and watched as one of the three men jumped down behind a sofa a second before the suite door burst open and a man with a sub-machine gun and night-vision goggles charged in and opened fire, mercilessly gunning down the two standing men, and then the third through the sofa. There was no sound of gunfire, only the results of it.

The man in the windcheater said, ‘Silenced FN P90. He’s using subsonic ammo. That’s why we can’t hear it.’

The video footage cut to another camera as the man with the P90 continued his assault, shooting through a bedroom door and lying down next to it, before opening the door and killing those in the room beyond.

The man in the windcheater rubbed his tired face and said, ‘My team is next.’

The gunman was then shot by two men arriving behind him, and played dead until they had passed him, then killed them also. He exchanged fire with a final man, before shooting him and leaving. The video jumped forward in time, and the man had returned to squat down next to the last man he’d shot, who wasn’t dead. He stayed squatted down for almost half a minute.

‘Is he questioning him?’ the old man in the suit asked.

‘I expect so. The microphones didn’t pick it up. He wouldn’t have told him anything.’

‘How else are we exposed?’

The man in the windcheater answered. ‘The authorities will have found the surveillance equipment, of course, but I retrieved and disposed of the plane tickets and passports of the others. Our computer was destroyed — I believe by the assassin as a precaution. Not that it helped him, as we had the footage continuously backed up to the safe-house server, otherwise we wouldn’t have anything of him.’

‘Show me the other part.’

The younger man tapped some keys on the laptop and used the track pad. The infrared footage was replaced with colour footage of the hotel suite. Two men were visible, conversing in Russian.

‘Which is the one who killed my boys?’ the old man in the suit asked, leaning closer.

‘The guy on the left is a member of Petrenko’s entourage. The man on the right claims to be from hotel management, but he doesn’t work there and does nothing except look around the suite. Reconnaissance, of course.’

‘So we have his voice, and his face.’

‘And nothing else. I’m so sorry, Father.’

‘But that’s enough,’ the old man in the suit said as he reached for his phone.