The Nemesis Program

Chapter Seventeen

As the Alpina roared off down Rue des Trois Frères, one of the two occupants of the dark Peugeot 508 parked across the street reached for his phone and made a call. ‘Target is on the move. The Priest’s still with her.’

The person on the other end of the secure line had the luxury of not having to spend endless mind-numbing hours on surveillance detail inside a cramped car. Those days were long behind him now. Perched on an enormous chair at his desk in a comfortable office far, far away with a delicate china cup of cocoa at his elbow, the man most people called simply ‘the Director’ gazed through half-moon spectacles at the expanded high-definition onscreen image of the black-clad, blond-haired surveillance target they’d codenamed ‘the Priest’, photographed along with the Ryder woman on the park bench in Little Denton moments before the incident that had taken place there.

Since then, and in the light of that highly unexpected development, the image of ‘the Priest’ had been run through sophisticated facial recognition software and analysed against classified records to produce an identity match. The name that had emerged was Ben Hope.

The Director belonged to an organisation whose reach was extremely wide. Now they knew exactly who they were dealing with, down to the last detail. Details that explained a lot about why what should have been a simple clean-up operation in a sleepy corner of England had turned so messy and resulted in the loss of one of their valuable people. It had been an error of judgement, albeit one they couldn’t entirely be blamed for making. Nonetheless, the Director was still suffering the fallout, and he wasn’t about to let it happen to him a second time.

Two things he’d yet to figure out: first, how the person on his screen had become involved in this situation to begin with. It was hard to see how he could be in any way implicated. Second, the Director was still perplexed as to how exactly their two targets had managed to abscond into France undetected. If it hadn’t been for the surveillance on Pommier’s apartment building, they wouldn’t have picked them up at all. Clever, this Priest.

But then, you’d expect someone with such a background to be very clever indeed. Resourceful, capable and hard to kill, however many years might have gone by since the peak of his operational training. These men didn’t lose their edge. This one, this Hope, least of all.

The Director admired those kinds of men. Once upon a time, in what often seemed like another life, he’d been one of them himself. And when, as he so often did, he remembered the walking sticks leaning by his desk and looked down at his legs, withered, atrophied and virtually lost inside the brown corduroy trousers he was wearing, he envied them.

A pity to kill a man like that, the Director thought. Almost a pity. But there was simply no other way to play the game. So many had died before now, it didn’t really matter any more.

Nor did it matter how hard such a man might be to eliminate. If there was one thing the Director knew intimately well, it was that anyone could be eliminated. Anyone at all: it was just a question of expending sufficient resources, exercising enough power. The Director had exercised a good deal of it in his time. And he had access to all the resources necessary to crush or eliminate anyone at will, just by giving the order.

‘Is the tracking device in place on their vehicle?’ he inquired matter-of-factly.

‘All taken care of,’ was the reply.

‘Stand by for further instructions,’ the Director said, and put the phone down. His legs were hurting him. Damn them. The bullets that had permanently crippled his knees had come from the gun of a Spetsnaz colonel called Oleg Orlov, forty-four years ago. Since then the walking sticks had been his constant companions. One was ivory, the other ebony, custom made for him and intricately hand-carved with solid silver ferrules. If you had to have walking aids, they might as well be nice ones.

The Director leaned back, planted his bony elbows on the arms of the chair, knitted his fingers together and closed his eyes in meditation. Soon it would be confirmed to them where the targets were heading next. When the moment was right, he’d issue the order for them to be neutralised, but not if it meant half of Paris getting shot up in the process. Low profile operations were his speciality, and he’d been a master of them for over fifty years.