Page 144 of Everything That Kills Me
But that’s not what I’m doing.He needed to leave before he couldn’t. Jack levered himself out of bed. “I have to go.”
He put on his clothes and kept his back to Zeph. Something he never did. All his training forgotten when he was with him.
“Please come back,” Zeph said. “If you really want out, then make this the last job. We can go somewhere together. Start again.”
“I’ll try.” It was as much as he dared say. Not a lie, though he lied all the time. He was always pretending to be someone he wasn’t, except with Zeph. Mostly.
“There’s been no one else for me,” Zeph whispered. “I told you that before. There never will be. I told you that too.”
Jack should have turned and said the same to Zeph. It was true. But he didn’t utter another word before he left.
Thomas had booked Jack a room in the same hotel as him. When Jack knocked on Thomas’s door, he opened it and gestured for him to come in.
“How did it go?” Thomas asked. “Is he going to make sure you’re not identified?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
Thomas raised his eyebrows.
“It’s not worth the risk. We know Al-Talib is being watched. Zeph knows now that there are people with him or soon will be. I expect he’ll identify them tomorrow. They’ll be the ones they keep under surveillance.”
“I didn’t spot anyone on Oxford Street when I was tailing him.”
“That’s probably because Al-Talib thought he could behave like any other tourist. He’s arrogant. That’s good because he’ll make a mistake.”
“This is supposed to look like natural causes. The CIA don’t want any blame being thrown their way and the Brits would be furious about an assassination on their soil.”
“You still think we’ll manage natural causes or accident? I don’t. Next time he appears, he’ll have his full retinue with him.”
Thomas sighed. “I couldn’t strike on Oxford Street. You couldn’t do it at Heathrow. We can’t take a step in most areas without being caught on camera.”
“So what now?”
Jack listened carefully. Thomas’s plan was good. Jack would have expected nothing less. Al-Talib was seeing his Georgian banker tomorrow morning. The meeting was due to take place in a dilapidated office block in Gravesend. Both men would be heavily guarded. They might be doing business together but they wouldn’t trust each other, largely because Thomas had planted seeds of doubt in both camps. If they killed each other, it would be a loss to no one. Not an accident or natural causes but it still worked.
“Three floors, a basement and no cameras,” Thomas said. “Broken walls, discarded furniture. It’s slated for demolition. Meeting due to take place on the second floor. The top floor isn’t sound. The ground floor is more of a mess. The basement is dark and damp. Doors at the front, side and rear. Rickety fire escape I wouldn’t want to trust, but an option. The building isfenced off. No surrounding roofs from which a shot could be taken. Well, we both know you could fire from an extraordinary distance, but that’s not useful in this instance. They all have to die without any evidence we engineered it. I’ll be inside to make sure no one walks out.”
“I should do that.”
“No. You outside. Me in.” Thomas opened a suitcase and showed Jack the weapons he’d procured.
Then they went over the details of the plan.
The following morning, as dawn broke, Jack was already at the site in Gravesend doing his own reconnaissance because even the most thorough preparations could prove useless. The ability to improvise was essential, so the closer inspection Jack gave his surroundings, the better.
Thirty-Seven
When he went into work the next day, Zeph felt as if what he’d done and what he was thinking were written all over his face. Clearly not because no one gave him a second glance. It was really difficult not to look guilty.
The first thing he did was delete the file with Thomas’s photo and make sure it was as unrecoverable as he could manage without it looking as though he had something to hide. Thomas was in the system, because both Zeph and Evan had spotted him, but hadn’t been tagged as a person of interest.For the moment, Zeph had to leave that observation in place.
The night team working on Al-Talib’s surveillance hadn’t had a busy time, though the Saudi had cancelled his booking at one of the top hotels in London, and instead stayed in a smaller boutique hotel near Canary Wharf. He’d not moved from there all night.
Zeph and Evan were still using Zeph’s program to check CCTV, but this time for the minders who’d driven Al-Talib from one hotel to the other. Zeph found three of them coming into Heathrow a couple of days earlier, one had been on the Eurostar with the Saudi. Zeph sent the details to his boss who messaged him back to check out a guy called Tamaz Dolidze, a Georgian banker.
“Why did he change his hotel?” Evan asked over the partition. “To keep us on our toes?”
“That assumes he knows he’s being watched.”
