One thirty p.m. Calvary sipped coffee. He wore pullover and jacket, cargo trousers, running shoes. Dull colours, but he’d avoided the all-black look. It was too obvious. The umbrella shaft in its sleeve stood propped against the wall at his feet.
After half an hour a waitress – young, plain, tired-eyed – came over. He gave her his most winning smile, tried Russian: he was sorry, but he had no Czech. She warmed immediately, responded in kind. Went off to fill up his cup.
Calvary was fluent in Russian, a tongue he’d learned from his mother who had come to England from Moscow in the late seventies. She hadn’t defected, quite; the application her own parents had made for permission to emigrate had suddenly been granted to her after more than a decade of consistent refusal. It was probably something to do with a brief period of détente at the time in the run up to the SALT talks. His mother had met and married his father and gained permanent residence in Britain, and had brought Martin up with just enough respect for her own culture that he didn’t feel like a misfit among his peers. By the time he joined the forces at eighteen, the Russian side of his lineage wasn’t a drawback any longer.
The waitress came back with his refilled coffee cup and he took it gratefully. He was going to be there a while.
*
By two o’clock he’d identified one of them.
The middle-aged silver Audi up on the pavement hadn’t moved, even though there was a man in the driver’s seat. A head that turned every now and again towards the block where Gaines lived. There was nobody else in the car, as far as Calvary could see.
The car was on Calvary’s side of the road, parked facing the coffee shop and far enough back that the driver didn’t have to crane round to watch the entrance. The plates were those of the Czech Republic. SIS might use a car like this.
A street cleaner with elaborate equipment blasted the pavement with water, making two slow passes. Calvary though he looked genuine.
At three fifty he stiffened. A mousy man swaddled in a heavy coat emerged from the entrance. But a woman followed close behind and linked arms with him, and as they sauntered by Calvary saw the man was at least twenty-five years younger than Gaines. He forced his breathing under control. The lashings of caffeine were making him hypersensitive.
Four fifteen. He risked a trip to the lavatory, stretched, bounced on his toes, rolled his head on his neck. When he got back to his stool, where he’d riskily left the modified umbrella, he saw the watcher in the Audi was still there. Which meant Gaines probably hadn’t left either.
At five forty-two, as the shadows in the street stretched to breaking point, four people emerged from the doors, smiling and gesturing as though acknowledging that they’d reached the entrance together and now deferring to one another’s right to leave first. The second one was in his seventies, small and slightly stooped. Face round and closed in on itself beneath the brim of an old-fashioned trilby.
Gaines.
*
‘Visual,’ Arkady’s voice erupted in her ear through a blurt of static, and Krupina recoiled. She’d been hunched over the desk, head close to the teleconference device, but there had been silence for so long that the intrusion took her by surprise.
‘Subject turning right down Ostrovni Street. On foot and unaccompanied.’
Oleg’s voice came through: ‘I have him too.’ He was on foot, in the window of a department store several blocks up the road.
‘Hold off.’ This was Tamarkin, cruising off to the west in his Toyota, his role that of a floater, ready to move in as and when the net began to close and they needed assistance.
‘Thank you for that, Gleb,’ she muttered. ‘Keep your distance, all of you, at least one visual contact at all times. Oleg, you’re the principal at the moment. Arkady, follow in the car. Ditch it if you have to.’
After a moment Lev confirmed visual contact, having eased in from the back. She leaned back in the swivel chair.
‘All right. Oleg’s in charge now. Do us proud, people.’
She fired up a fresh smoke.
*
Llewellyn’s briefing had mentioned that although Gaines used the city’s extensive public transport network with ease and to great advantage, he was a walker who sometimes favoured his legs even when he had a long distance to travel. After fifteen minutes, when Gaines had passed several bus and tram stops, Calvary concluded the man had chosen today for a constitutional.
The late afternoon was chilly and crisp, the dimming sky smudged with cloud but clear for the most part. Modern architecture began to give way to the more venerable lines of the medieval Old Town. Calvary kept a distance of close to a block, closing in when the crowds grew thicker, dropping back when they slimmed down. Gaines had an odd gait, rapid with a slight lope. Calvary wondered if he’d been injured, or if he was nervous. From time to time the head turned and he caught the face in profile, the glasses thick and flashing. The mouth was small and pinched shut.
Gaines passed two Metro station entrances. Calvary was hoping he wouldn’t use the Metro. It could become difficult to track him, and he didn’t want to carry out the hit on one of the trains. The opportunities to make a quick exit would be limited.
The crowds were becoming more consistently dense as they moved into the heart of the Old Town. Calvary watched the man lope across a large, breathtakingly picturesque square, which he took to be the Old Town Square from what he remembered of his perusal of his guidebook. One edge was dominated by a pair of Gothic towers, the Týn Church. Across from this stood the Old Town Hall and its astronomical clock. Calvary decided the place deserved some exploring. Pity about the circumstances.
He made his way across the square, dodging piles of manure from the horses that drew the tourist-trap carriages, before he could lose Gaines.
That was when he spotted the two tags.
*
‘There’s someone else in the field.’
Krupina sat up again. It was a cliché, but her scalp crawled.
‘Tell me.’
A second’s silence, then Oleg’s voice came again. ‘One man. European, exact nationality difficult to be sure of. Thirties. Medium height, compact. Moves like a soldier.’
‘How do you know he’s in the field?’
‘He’s been behind the target for at least the last kilometre. That’s when I first noticed him, anyway. Could be longer. Using tradecraft, keeping back.’
European, exact nationality difficult to be sure of. That meant he was possibly British. It was as she’d feared.
‘He’s definitely tagging Gaines, not one of you?’
‘Almost certainly.’
Her fingers reached for the almost empty pack of coffin nails. ‘All right. Maximum discretion. One of you drop back if need be. You’re using a box?’ A box formation: two shadows behind the target and two in front, all moving in the same direction as the target.
‘Yes.’
‘Drop a spider on the target when you have a chance.’ The spider was the microtransmitter they favoured, a speck with leglike hooks that would cling to clothing. It transmitted location data via satellite up to a range of ten kilometres.
A slight pause. ‘Yes, tovarischch.’
Damn. Being a control freak. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to tread on your toes.’
‘No harm done.’
Krupina clasped her hands as if in prayer, absurd though that would be.
Don’t lose him. For the love of God.
*
The square heaved with gawking tourists in pairs and small groups, rushing waiters, hustlers pushing rip-off tours or taxi services. For a moment Calvary felt a flare of panic, thinking Gaines had slipped away. But there he was, disappearing down a narrow cobbled souvenir alley.