A Game for Assassins (The Redaction Chronicles Book 1) (24 page)

“I know him as Marquez. Only that, I swear.”

Gorilla considered the possibility and reasoned that it seemed the most likely. “Alright, I assume that you have the details of the false I.D. on file somewhere, say here in your private office?”

Dumont shook his head. “Alas, I do not keep copies or details of private clients, I—”

Phut!
The explosion between Dumont's legs made the base of the wine goblet shatter and sent the bowl spinning up into the air before landing on his lap. A smoking hole had miraculously appeared where the bullet had blasted through the velvet cushion. The noise this time from Dumont was not a mewl, but a full on scream of terror.

“I'm getting quite good at this, Monsieur Dumont. Unfortunately for you, we are out of glasses.” Gorilla stared at him hard. “The next shot means that our conversation will be over, permanently. And you were doing so well.”

The Belgian forger looked down at the smoking bullet hole, his face pale except for the river of blood streaming down his face. “So what now? Torture ? You're going to torture me, you pig!”

Gorilla shook his head. “Torture? No, not my style, not my style at all. It takes too long and it's far too noisy. I prefer the more direct approach.”

Dumont's eyes began to widen, certain that his imminent death was fast approaching. He watched as his tormenter placed the pistol on the table next to him, close at hand, then reached inside the bag that he'd brought in with him and withdrew the item that was going to make Jules Dumont, eminent art dealer and forger to the criminal fraternity of Antwerp sing like a canary.

“Oh my God,” said Dumont, his voice a hoarse whisper. His eyes widened because there, resting on the table in front of him, and recently removed from the man's Gladstone bag, was the biggest wad of American Dollars the Belgian had seen for a very, very long time…

* * *

Dumont glanced from the pile of money on the table to the man holding the silenced weapon. A trickle of sweat rolled down his upper lip, onto his dandyish pencil moustache. “You mean you aren't going to kill me?” he asked. The question held a tone of disbelief, as if he suspected this was another trick from the small blond enforcer.

Gorilla stared him straight in the eye. “That very much depends on you. The way I see it is, you're a business man and your business, like mine, is very secretive. But on occasions, we can come together to our mutual benefit to assist each other. I need some information, you require money. We can conduct our business covertly and go our separate ways with no outside parties the wiser. Agreed?”

The Belgian nodded, it was the way most of his business was conducted. Through trust and a mutual respect for each other's trade. The question was whether or not he was going to let a foolish sense of professional pride get in the way of an easy payday.

Gorilla stood and watched the terrified man. “Simply put, the choice is yours. You can have a bag full of cash for the information, or you can have a bullet through the head. Either way, I'll get the information I want sooner or later, whether you're dead or alive is of no consequence to me.”

Dumont frowned. “The Mexicans call it silver or lead. Of course I agree, I'm no fool, but why this rather unorthodox way to initiate our… business?”

Gorilla shrugged. “Because I needed to establish my bona fides and get your attention. Time is of the essence, as is the truthfulness of your answers.”

“I see – hence your pistol display.”

“The money I'm authorized to give you will more than recompense you for any discomfort you suffer here tonight. But more importantly, I wanted to focus your mind, and a bullet fired at close range tends to do that,” said Gorilla, the '39 still rock steady.

The forger shuddered, remembering the sensation of the bullet passing mere inches from his groin. That was too close.

Gorilla continued. “Plus, I don't want you to be in any doubt that if you do lead me down the garden path with false information, or you decide to tip off certain parties of mutual interest via a phone call, I will come back here, I will find you and I will, slowly, kill you by using you as target practice.”

Dumont snorted derisively. “I wasn't kidding, my friend, when I said I was protected! I'm under the protection of one of the biggest criminal gangs in Europe. They take threats against their own very seriously; it is bad for both their business and reputation.”

Gorilla smiled and shook his head sadly. “Not important to me. I operate on a much bigger stage than Belgium; global in fact. I can hit you or them whenever I wish and disappear. But then you and your protectors will be dead, and I will be without the information I require. As I say it's your choice; five thousand dollars, or a bullet that costs less than a buck to make. That's the facts.”

Dumont stared at this strange, tough little man. He was hard and he was no doubt a resourceful operator, but there was also a fairness about him that Dumont instantly liked. He glanced from the silenced automatic to the pile of cash sitting on his dining table.

“Do we have a deal? My trigger finger is starting to get tired, and when it gets tired it gets a little twitchy,” threatened Gorilla, pushing the forger one last time.

Dumont sagged in the chair. “Oh yes, we have a deal, an understanding, or whatever you wish to call it. But right now, I think I need a very large drink to steady my nerves!”

* * *

Ten minutes later, Dumont led Gorilla down into the cellar of his house, where the forger kept his state-of-the-art workshop. Dumont went down the steps first, with Gorilla clutching the scruff of the man's collar with one hand and pushing the '39 into the small of the Belgian's back with the other. Any false moves or any tricks and Gorilla was ready to blow his spine open.

“I normally meet new clients at a bar, initially. Once I've satisfied myself that they're genuine and have paid a deposit, I allow them here to the workshop once the product is complete,” explained Dumont.

The cellar was furnished as one might expect a high end printer, or book binders would be. Workstations, printing presses of various ages. On one wall were a multitude of ink bottles, next to reams of various qualities of papers, and numerous solvents, glues, pens, and pencils. It was from here that Jules Dumont furnished high end criminals with the means to slip in and out of countries unhindered.

Gorilla noted that Dumont seemed to have recovered his composure. He guessed that the introduction of American dollars had brought him back down to earth and shook the fear from his mind. Determined to keep the momentum on Dumont, Gorilla asked about his business relationship with this 'Marquez'.

“Oh yes, I had done work for him before, many years ago. I thought he had retired,” Dumont explained.

“What was he after?”

“The usual; passports, visas, driving licenses; the same things everyone wants.”

“Which means?”

“Which means he evidently wished to travel far and wide,without arousing suspicion.”

“How many?” asked Gorilla.

“There were three sets of passports and driving licenses each. One was French, one German, the other Dutch. One of each for him, and one of each for his business acquaintance,” he said.

“The acquaintance. Who was he?”

“I don't know, I only met with Marquez.”

“How much did they pay?”

Dumont thought for a while. He decided that his best policy, and chance for survival, was to be honest. “In truth, they paid more than the normal going rate. Marquez wanted the material quickly, but he also wanted it to be of the highest quality. This requires a certain degree of craftsmanship, not to mention my costs which are incurred for papers, pickpockets who have to filch the genuine papers, and the inks – my God, the price of some of the inks alone!”

Dumont rifled through a filing cabinet until he found a key, hidden within one of the manila files. He took the key and made his way to a painting which hung on the wall. The forger lifted the painting, revealing that it was hinged on the left hand side and moved it sideways to reveal a safe. He inserted the key and quickly reached inside.

Gorilla tensed, ready to move his finger onto the trigger of the '39. He hoped Dumont wasn't going to be foolish enough to go for a weapon. It would be a bad mistake, as Gorilla would have to ventilate the back of the man's head. Instead, Dumont removed a ledger, old and battered. He flicked through the pages, murmured an “Ah, here we are”, and passed the book over.

Gorilla scanned through the names listed in Dumont's ledger. On the first page were the false names Marquez was using:

On the following page were the names that had been assigned to the as yet unnamed associate:

Gorilla quickly ripped out the page containing the details, placed it in his coat pocket and then turned to Dumont. “What about the photographs they used in the passports?” he asked.

Dumont held up his hands. “He had taken care of the photos himself. He only gave them to me on the day so that I could glue them in, seal them up and run over the fake stamps onto the paperwork. I never saw any negatives or other copies. He was a very careful man, Monsieur.”

That was annoying,
thought Gorilla. He had hoped the false papers would have current photographs with them; instead he'd have to settle for the killer's real name and the aliases on his false documentation.

“Can I ask? Why do you want this man so badly?” Dumont questioned, closing up the files and placing them back in the cabinet.

“He owes me money,” said Gorilla, not even trying to hide the lie.

Dumont frowned. “Monsieur, please, I have one question. Can you give me your word that this will never be traced back to me? It could ruin my reputation and my life if this Marquez ever discovered what I have told you.”

Gorilla placed a fatherly hand on the shoulder of the other man. “Don't worry. It's a fair bet they won't be coming back this way again. Ever!”

“And I can trust you on this?”

“You'll have to,” barked Gorilla. “But never mind. Now that we know each other professionally, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Jules Dumont doubted that very much. And like one who can slowly feel the hangman's noose slipping tightly around his neck, he knew that this wouldn't be the last he would see of this devil.

* * *

Ten minutes later, the small man had packed up his belongings and told Jules Dumont to stay in his workshop for the next half an hour. “Don't try to follow me or call anyone. If you do, I'll take that as a breach of our agreement,” Gorilla had told him.

And so the Belgian forger had sat in the darkness of his studio, his hands still shaking, and waited until his newly-discovered nemesis for the evening had long gone. Eventually he staggered up the stairs to his lounge in desperate need of a very large drink to steady his nerves. He glanced around the semi-darkness of the room and noted that his phone line had been cut, but everything else was in its place and undamaged.

It was only when he turned to sit at the table and stare at the piles of dollar bills he'd just earned, when he noticed the small, shiny 9mm bullet which had been left for him. His hand started to shake again as he held up, and inspected, what was both a warning, and the calling card of a ghost in the darkness.

Following the successful interrogation, and the subsequent recruitment of the forger as an agent, the word from London, and more specifically Masterman, was for the fire-team to not rest on their laurels.

In the space of one evening Gorilla had successfully found the names, both real and false, of his future target and had also, albeit unwittingly, recruited Dumont as a potential source for the future. He'd burned the forger once; he could certainly do it again. Gorilla passed the man's details to the Head of Station in Brussels, who he was sure would be happy to have one of Europe's most successful forgers 'on the hook' as a confidential informant.

Gorilla's persuasive methods had yielded not only a list of the false passports, but also the name of the contractor who they'd listened to on the tape recording. Marquez!

The name was quickly run through the files at Broadway. With a name, the files soon spilled out the limited information SIS had about Juan Raul Marquez. His war record, interrogation after the war, the information he gave to the prosecutors at Nuremburg and after that, pathetically little. There were only passing references and rumors from friendly intelligence services and a blurred photo of him taken post-war during his internment, before he ratted out his fellow Nazi's.

“Get out there and start tracking down even the smallest clue. Find out what you can about this man – anything – no matter how small. Better that, than you two sitting on your backsides enjoying the good life at the tax payer's expense,” chided Masterman to the two Redaction agents. “But play it subtle, behind the curtains, no mention of a manhunt. If anybody asks, we're looking for him to offer him some work, nothing more – understood?”

The Burrowers dug deeper and more laterally. They checked through agents' reports that they hadn't previously considered; British mercenaries recently returned from the Congo were paid a visit and questioned by local SIS station officers, a number of European agents with underworld connections were also run to ground and discreetly interrogated. All provided snippets of rumors; a name here, a location there, but nothing which could help them nail the killer's location. The most likely, and plausible, source details were passed to the team in Paris, and over the following fortnight the MACE fire-team set about touring Europe in the hope of scrounging a lead or a piece of intelligence that might put them on the man's scent.

In Amsterdam, there was a onetime confidence trickster who had allegedly worked for Marquez on a smuggling job years ago. But the man hadn't seen him since the payoff. “He was a smooth operator,” the conman told Gorilla as they sat having a drink in a bar. “If you're going to work with him, you won't go far wrong. He's not a man to cross, though. But if you see him, tell him that Remy was asking after him.”

There was a similar story from a former art thief turned legitimate businessman, who was now based in Berlin. After hanging around all day, Gorilla and Nicole had managed to arrange a meeting with the man at his offices. The story they went with was that they had some 'merchandise', which may or may not have been diamonds, and they wanted to smuggle them out of Africa.

The man had greeted their story with a serious response. “Marquez is a top man. If you are coming to me looking for a reference, then I will certainly give it with pleasure. He has many talents, he is a born operator, which in our business is a rarity. He will go the full length of the rope for his clients, but I should warn you that if you attempt to double cross or cheat him… well… let's just say he has a reputation for revenge.”

“And how do we get in touch with him?” Nicole had asked.

The art thief shrugged. “The last I heard, he had moved to Luxembourg, but that was years ago. Besides, Marquez is the type of man who finds you, not the other way around. I understand he takes his privacy very seriously and is an expert at disappearing.”

In Madrid, there lived a cancer-ridden, former SS intelligence officer by the name of Helf, who had known Marquez in Paris when he had been an agent of the SD. Gorilla and Nicole had phoned ahead to see the old man. Their cover story was that they were conducting background checks on a certain Marquez, whom SIS were interested in recruiting for an operation, and would Señor Helf be interested in answering a few questions about his experience of the man?

“I still occasionally have a use for your service here in Madrid,” said Helf. “I pass them the odd piece of intelligence. Titbits, really. Tamzin, Oscar, come to heel, damn you!” Two Dobermans sat on either side of the old man's chair, resembling lions bookending a royal throne. The house was humbly decorated; a photo of a much younger Helf, taken on his wedding day, took pride of place on a stone fireplace. Next to it was a dust-covered urn.

“I shall tell you a story about Marquez that will, perhaps, help you understand what kind of man he is. He was working for us in Paris as an active agent – no matter what he said later, he was in it up to his neck. He would run sources for us, conduct surveillance on possible resistance leaders and yes, he did a little throat-slitting for us when the occasion was called for. Anyway, Marquez had a lover, a young man. We all knew Marquez was queer, but he didn't like to admit it openly. He got into a relationship with this young married man, who was obviously conflicted about his sexuality. Marquez became more and more obsessed with his lover and despite his pleas for this young man to leave his wife, the man wouldn't. As I understand it, this went on for quite some time, until one day, the wife and her children were shipped off to the Avenue Foch for interrogation. It seems that the wife had been helping the resistance in Paris. She had been informed upon and arrested.”

“Was there any proof against her?” asked Nicole, thinking of her own mother suffering a similar fate at the hands of the Nazi's. It sent a chill down her spine.

The former SS man shook his head. “No, but the arresting officer was Marquez. We let the senior agents do that sort of thing for us from time to time. It saved us from getting our hands dirty when there were willing agents to act as proxy.”

“What happened to her?”

Helf shrugged. “She died under questioning. Tortured, sodomized – until eventually her heart gave out. I understand the interrogator was very, how shall we say –
exuberant
in his methods.”

Gorilla frowned. “Don't tell me, the interrogator was…”

The old man nodded. “That's right – Marquez. He had eliminated his love rival, had her children thrown into an orphanage and all because of his lust for another man. He is both ruthless and cold.”

“What happened to the husband?” asked Gorilla.

“As far as I remember, he was found murdered a few weeks later, with a bullet to the back of the head, execution style.”

Both Nicole and Gorilla dropped their gaze to their feet. The old man's implication was obvious. Had Marquez argued with, or simply grown tired of his lover after all?

Then, as an afterthought Helf said, “Are you really going to use him operationally?”

Gorilla looked at Nicole and then back to the old man. He shook his head. “No.”

Helf thought about this and nodded. “Good. I hope you find him, for whatever it is that's going to happen to him. He's a psychopath. I think you people should remember that if it wasn't for willing agents like Marquez and others, we would never have been able to do the things we ended up doing.”

* * *

Two days later, Nicole and Gorilla were back in their Paris apartment, exhausted after a fortnight of travelling. That night, they sat in the lounge, each nursing a glass of wine as they went over everything they'd learned about the man they were hunting.

“Do we chance a visit to Luxembourg?” asked Nicole. “It could be that he's returning between the contracts.”

Gorilla considered this. It would be tempting to get close to where this man lived, but operationally, they would be better staying in Paris, ready to jump when the false passports were finally flagged as being used in a different country. “No, it's better if we stay here. We'll get the Luxembourg Station to run a trace.”

So they put in a request, via London, for SIS Luxembourg to run a search for the man. The answer came back within a day. Gorilla made his regular visit to one of his tame telephone boxes and called direct to Consterdine in the Paris Station.

“By all accounts, he's a respectable businessman, at least in Luxembourg he is,” said Consterdine. “SIS Luxembourg's contact with the local police said that as far as he was concerned, the man was not known to them.”

“What about his home address?” asked Gorilla, scribbling notes on his pocket pad with a worn-down pencil.

“Actually, it's both his home and business address: a shop at the front and an apartment at the back. Marquez runs a fine art and antique business, does quite well by all accounts. Keeps himself to himself and is there most days.”

“Most days?”

“The neighbors say that he occasionally goes away on business, for anything up to a week at a time, like now. The shop's been closed for the past month or so, which they admit is a tad unusual.”

Gorilla wrote down the address in Luxembourg, thanked Consterdine and hung up. He stared at the notes. The man was definitely 'active' and was loose somewhere in Europe, either laying low or getting ready to go after the next target. Time was a factor. Unless they got a lead on their whereabouts soon – say in the next few days – the MACE fire-team would have to uproot and go and sit on the shoulder of the next possible target on the hit list. Keeping at a distance and staying well back, hoping they'd picked the right agent to protect, and remaining in the shadows waiting for the assassins to make a move. It would be an unenviable task, too much to go wrong and too risky for both the protectors and the protected.

So it would be here in Paris, head to Italy, or back to England. It was a gamble and in truth, it would very much be guesswork as to which one to pick. Gorilla needed a lucky break and he reasoned that the only way to trace the hit-team was to catch them during what the spy-catchers called 'transitions'. Moving from one place to another, it meant catching them when they were most at risk and most vulnerable as they left one country and entered another. This option involved travel, and travel meant that you had to have passports, flight tickets, train tickets, car hire vouchers, and all the things that left a trail, no matter how well you tried to hide or disguise them.

Now that London had the names on the false travel documents, it was only a matter of time before they turned up somewhere. The question was though; would his fire-team be able to move quickly enough to intercept them? He hoped so, because at the moment the sand in the hourglass was quickly draining away.

* * *

In the end it was the Burrowers who got a 'hit' on the flagged passports.

The 'flagging' of the airport watch lists was a slow, grinding process and the French authorities had missed the 'Joosen' passport by several days. The call had gone out from SIS to friendly intelligence and police agencies, that the British were looking for a couple of suspected 'couriers' working for the Bulgarians. At least, that was the story fed to the liaison offices across Europe.

Toby and his Burrowers insisted on an 'Observe and Report Order', which was jargon for 'watch them and let us know where they go'. They had sat around the office and sweated over the past week, waiting, praying and hoping that they hadn't been too late and missed the quarry.

The breakthrough came in early March, when a tired and overworked intelligence officer of the French Security Service, the DST, was backtracking through the airport watch-lists. Late at night and armed with only a ruler and a pencil, his job was to match the passenger lists from every airline which came in or out of France to the ever growing 'watch-list' of suspected terrorists, spies and international organized crime figures.

He moved the ruler carefully down the printout list, lest he should miss his place, and then would tick off the name if it wasn't flagged. He was well into his second hour, with still another thirty minutes before his next break, when he noted the name of a passenger who had travelled from Orly to Marseilles a week earlier, a Dutch citizen by the name of Vincent Joosen.

His eye flicked over the watch list. He looked away and then looked back. A rub of his eyes to make sure that he had a match. Vincent Joosen. The same!

The intelligence officer flicked through the operations order file to see what his response should be. He ran his finger down to the 'J's' and noted the Observe and Report Order, confirming he should immediately contact an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service by the name of Tobias Burrows at Century House, London.