Chapter XXXVII

A cell phone, unsolicited, was delivered to Louis at his hotel shortly after seven the following morning. It was fully powered, came with a Bluetooth earpiece, and rang five minutes after it arrived. Louis picked up, and Harris spoke.

‘Marković is on the move,’ he said. ‘We have eyes and ears in his room, but he’s using a clean burner phone. He received a text message about twenty minutes ago, armed himself, and left. We’re trying to get a trace on the sender and the message, but that will take time.’

‘Any idea where he’s going?’

‘We think it’s Gare de Lyon. Our information is that it’s the Vuksans’ preferred final destination for important deliveries.’

‘Okay. By the way, I thought you were retired.’

‘Semiretired,’ said Harris. ‘Plus, I’ve always liked France. We’re going to patch you into the coms group, so keep the earpiece in place and you’ll hear what we hear. The phone has a fifteen-hour battery life, so don’t worry about charging it.’

‘I’m on my way,’ said Louis. He inserted the earpiece and dropped the phone in his coat pocket, but not before muting the microphone on the device. It was one thing permitting himself to be tracked by Harris and his people, another to have them listening in on his conversations. He placed one of the Rohrbaugh pistols in a hip holster under his jacket. The other already had its Osprey suppressor in place because he didn’t want to waste time trying to fit it if he needed to use the Rohrbaugh in a hurry. That gun now hung vertically from a custom Velcro strap beneath his coat, and could be released with a single hard yank. The setup wasn’t ideal, but neither was the world. The remaining two pistols had gone to his guests.

When he was ready, he made a call on his own cell phone.

‘Game on,’ he said.

Aleksej Marković took a seat in the Costa Coffee at Gare de Lyon, which gave him a good view of the station concourse and the exit onto rue de Châlon. At no point would he make direct contact with the two men arriving from Port-Vendres. Their shadows, acolytes of the Vuksans, would stay with them until they left the station, at which point the Syrians’ own people would take over; and that would be the last Marković or anyone else at the Vuksans’ end would see of them, at least until their photographs appeared on BFM, the BBC, or Sky, alongside images of rising smoke and fleeing bystanders, of blood and broken glass.