Despite these problems, I was gaining slowly on the fleeing asset who was facing the same obstacles but with less training or physical fitness. Like our over-eager companions, he was from the Arabic region. While I wanted to find out what was in his head, they had orders to ensure that those particular secrets remained unuttered. Permanently, if necessary. I wasn’t their target – he was.
Dodging a taxi, which had decided that red lights were purely for Tet decoration, I sidestepped a group of tourists and made to swing my arm out and obtain a moped or scooter. Spying a likely candidate, I swivelled, extended my arm… and rapidly pulled it back in.
As much as my orders were to retrieve this intelligence no matter the cost, I simply was not going to knock a pretty young thing like this moped’s rider flat on her back. It’s just not the done thing.
Instead, I spied two young men pushing a bike up a small ramp onto the pavement. Or “parking area” as it is often referred to by the locals. The keys were still in the ignition and they hadn’t seen me, so I ran up behind them.
Tapping the boy on the left on one shoulder and his friend on the other, I diverted their attention from the bike. As they both turned away from it, I jumped into the saddle and pushed them hard in the back so they stumbled in opposite directions. A twist of the key and a stab of the ignition button and the engine roared into life.
No, it didn’t. It buzzed into live. And rattled a bit. But it was going. Before they could recover, I revved the engine and lifted the front wheel, using the ramp to help me. The bike span round with the front wheel at waist height as I pointed it in the correct direction, let gravity lower the handlebars and twisted my right wrist.
I set off at a surprisingly brisk pace, and decided to use the driving technique I had picked up in my various stays in the region. To whit: floor it and dodge the oncoming traffic because it may decide not to bother dodging you.
Risking a glance over my shoulder, I spotted my two rivals deciding to plagiarise my idea although they were somewhat less subtle about it. One man lay on the ground cradling his nose and another flat on his back having obviously been knocked off his mount.
I made the most of the advantage I had and leaned forward watching the traffic part in front of me like a school of fish avoiding an obstacle.
Very quickly I caught up with the fleeing target. He was running the run of the obviously terrified, not knowing who was chasing him – only that it couldn’t be good news. He was lucky that I was the one who got to him first.
He wasn’t so lucky so as to remain unhurt, though. I throttled hard, hitting one of the pavement ramps at enough speed to get the clapped-out hairdryer I was riding to leave the ground momentarily. As it was about to touch down again, it sideswiped him and knocked him off his feet and into a display of mobile phone cases that one vendor had been urging a passing couple to peruse.
I leapt from the bike as the non-existent suspension caused its trajectory to become impossible to control and rolled to a halt as it crashed into a tree, which took up half the pavement.
My suit was now beyond repair. To say I was angry was an understatement. If the man who was now pushing himself to his knees hadn’t run like a scared rabbit when he’d seen me approach him a few minutes ago we would both have been on the way to a safe house by now. And I would not be looking at another visit to Savile Row when I got back to London.
This was the closest I had been to him and he looked every bit as shifty as his file had suggested when I’d read it on the flight over. Mas’ud Kassis was a fairly young man who’d escalated rather quickly through influential ranks courtesy of a rich and powerful family. The same money had bought him the best education available, and a natural gift for physics had led him into nuclear research.
Given that his home country of Iran was under intense international scrutiny when it came to anything nuclear, he had been hidden away to work on… well, that’s what we weren’t sure of. What we do know is it’s something that wouldn’t benefit anyone other than Iran.
A chance relationship with an American girl seemed to have opened his eyes to the potential for abuse of his work and he’d abandoned his work and family, escaping the country and going into hiding. Actually, the relationship had been anything other than “chance” – the CIA had arranged the whole thing – but it had had the intended effect, other than the fact that he was supposed to run to them. Not in some random direction that it took our combined efforts three weeks to pinpoint.
Before he could take off again, I grabbed him by the collar. “It’s alive with me,” I shouted in his face, “or take your chances with them – and I think they’d be quite happy to see your little secrets spread all over the ground.”
To his credit, he seemed to take this on board fairly quickly and nodded. Not too soon either as a couple of sharp cracks told me that the less friendly of his pursuers had managed to get close enough that they were no longer afraid of taking a few pot-shots.
A window to our left shattered and another bullet ploughed through the wooden door next to it with a hard thunk. The crowd hadn’t yet realised what was going on, but in a few seconds they would see the guns.
Now, where do you go when you’re in need of sanctuary on the street in the middle of one of the most tightly-packed capital cities in South East Asia?
Well, where else? A place of worship.
The nearest western church was a few blocks away, but Hanoi is full of hidden temples squirreled away up narrow alleyways and we were fortunate enough to be near one. An unobtrusive opening in the wall next to the shop we had ruined caught my eye and I pushed Mas’ud into it, shoving him again to ensure he appreciated the urgency of the situation when he hesitated.
After twenty metres, the claustrophobic passageway ended in a square courtyard. A path led round a small statue and up to the doors of a very well tended Buddhist temple.
Both on our feet now, we sprinted for the beckoning doors as screams began to be heard behind us. Our unwanted company had caught up and were obviously waving those firearms around.
We leapt over the threshold as another random bullet tore a chunk out of the frame over my head. Mas’ud whimpered and ducked. I grabbed him and flung him to the side before turning and pulling one door shut. As I did so, I saw the first of the other Iranians burst from the passageway. He raised his gun to fire and I fell to the floor.
Swivelling on my shoulder like a very poor break-dancer, I hooked the other door with my foot and yanked. I heard the gunshot as the two doors shut together and I looked around desperately for a way of bracing them.
Mas’ud was already looking for escape routes as I tilted a huge ceramic pot and attempted to roll it in front of the doors without having it fall right over. Just as I let it settle back down, the doors shuddered as one of the Iranian agents slammed against them. The doors opened a crack, but not enough for him to push a gun barrel through.
“We’ve got maybe a minute before they force the doors,” I told Mas’ud. “What do you see?”
“Nothing! It’s dark. No other doors. We’re trapped!”
I don’t believe in being trapped. There is always a way out, even if it’s a frontal assault on whatever is blocking you in a corner. I had one problem with that this time, though, and that was a lack of firearm.
We had been informed that there was no way that Mas’ud’s home nation could have caught up with him as quickly as we did. To ensure we got him out of the country as quickly as possible, we needed the cooperation of the Vietnamese and they had been insistent that they didn’t want guns on their streets. What was the need, they argued, when I was there to collect an unarmed man?