A Game for Assassins (The Redaction Chronicles Book 1) (34 page)

In the 1950's Scarrick Point had been purchased, via a reputable property broker, on behalf of the Ministry of Defence as part of a resettlement package for one of their senior employees. The owner was one Albert Browning. Browning, a spry bachelor in his early sixties, was a respected engineer at the Rocket Propulsion Establishment, and every Monday morning he would take his small Austin A40 on the long journey from Falmouth to Buckinghamshire for the working week, only to make the return journey on the Friday afternoon. Scarrick Point was his safe haven, his place of comfort and solitude away from his past and his complicated life of deception and double cross.

His nearest neighbors were over a mile away in the village. The postmistress, a stern woman by the name of Mrs. Featherstone, when asked by the village gossips and outsiders from Truro about the lodge at Scarrick Point and its resident would simply say, “Ah well that's Mr. Browning. A very private gentleman. A bachelor who keeps his self to his self and always pays his bills on time. Which is more than can be said for some hereabouts.”

“But where did he come from Fen? What's he doing up there in that lodge all by himself?” brave souls would ask, hoping not to incur the Featherstone wrath.

Fen Featherstone would fix them with a glare, a final warning to the downright insolent. “Well, he's worked away these past ten years or more, serving Queen and country I would imagine, but that's no one else's business but his and Her Majesty… now that'll be three and six, thank you very much.”

And that would be the end of the conversation for any searchers of information. For Mrs. Fenella Featherstone, postmistress and widow of this parish, was Albert Browning's formidable verbal bodyguard and protector of his privacy. It was a duty that she took seriously, even more so as she was paid a regular monthly stipend by those nice gentlemen from the Ministry of Defense's Security Division in London to be their eyes and ears on the ground in Maenporth and to ensure that Senior Executive Engineer Albert Browning was left to his peace.

* * *

The old man filled the tin kettle and placed it on the decrepit cooker. He knew it would take an age to boil, so he sat at the worn kitchen table and waited. He knew patience. He had spent most of his life perfecting and controlling that particular discipline.

To the few neighbors who had met him over the past nine years, he was known as Albert Browning and he worked for the Ministry of Defense in a minor clerical role. That was the cover story he stuck to. He was never rude, he was always polite and courteous as befitted a man of his age.

In truth, he had been born over sixty years earlier in Dresden. His name, then, had been Walter Kauffman and during the years of the Nazi regime, he had been one of the top men in the creation of propulsion-based weapons and a contemporary of Wernher von Braun, the legendary aerospace engineer. In fact, the two men had worked together several times, developing the Nazi's V2 rocket system.

Kauffman had believed in the Nazi ideal, had watched as his country had grown powerful under Hitler, but as a scientist, he knew that his uniform would only ever be that of the lab coat and business suit instead of army fatigues. Following the fall of Berlin, he had escaped to his hometown and had quickly been arrested by allied military counter-intelligence officers, who were on the lookout for any of Hitler's former rocket scientists. Prison and interrogation followed, before he was judged to have sufficient knowledge and expertise in rocket systems to be classed as 'High-Value' to the Allies.

He had worked with the British scientific teams, who had, to his surprise, welcomed him with open arms and treated him with the utmost respect. A bond was forged in the mutual respect of engineering excellence. The British had wiped clean his past, furnished him with a new identity and given him a senior role in the secret Rocket Propulsion Establishment. He had made a new life, albeit one with some restrictions, but had integrated himself smoothly into his post-war life. And while he still loved Germany, it was now England that he considered his home.

Then ten years after he'd first set foot on English soil, he'd been called to Whitehall, seemingly for a standard security check, and had been whisked into a stuffy office on the fourth floor where he'd been approached by a stout little fellow by the name of Porter. The man looked like an Oxford Don, rather than a minion of the MOD.

“You don't need to know who I'm working for just yet, but you'd be doing your adopted country a great favor by taking part in a little bit of subterfuge,” the man had said, as he heaved his bulk out of the chair. The subterfuge had, of course, been Porter's way of describing his future role as a double agent. “Trail your coat alongside the KGB, Walter, show them what you've got and where you work, then we give them just enough for them to take you seriously,” the tubby agent-runner had said.

After the initial shock had worn off, Kauffman had flailed against the practicalities of his being a spy. “But what would be my motivation? No, no, no – they will never believe it. Not after all these years working for the British!”

But Porter had soothed him, setting out a plausible hypothesis. “'Course they will, they'll love you. A former Nazi who turned his coat against his colleagues and countrymen to work for their sworn enemy. Anyone who can do that once, can do it again! Who knows, maybe you're sick of England, maybe you're not being appreciated by your British paymasters, maybe you've found the ideology faulty after all these years and have finally decided to embrace communism. We'll find something and make it fit.”

He dangled for a week before he decided to take up Porter's offer and so, as he approached his senior years, he'd decided that the role of a spy would be the next in a long line of experiences.

His double agent work didn't take up too much of his time, hardly any at all really; a weekend away occasionally to meet with his KGB contact, or a drive out to the Home Counties to leave a micro-dot at a dead letter drop beneath a beech tree in an isolated field, followed by regular meetings at his office at the RPE, where Porter would come in disguised as a cleaner or visiting personnel officer from the MOD. The risk to his life was a small price to pay for serving his adopted country and for being allowed to continue his life's work with people he'd grown fond of.

He heard the whistling of the kettle and stood up to remove it from the cooker. It was then that he heard the heavy knock on the wooden door. It startled him. He turned and stared at it for a long moment, disbelieving. In all the years he'd lived here, no one had ever come to visit uninvited. But now, here, on a stormy night, the impossible had happened. His stomach lurched and as he slowly approached the door, his legs began to shake with fear.

He reached out and pulled back the heavy wooden door, only a fraction at first, enough to have a conversation, but also to keep the howling wind and rain out. “Yes, who is it?” He could hear the tremor in his own voice and felt the cold of the night attack his face.

“Mr. Browning. My name is Jack. You need to let me in.” The voice was quiet, but tinged with both urgency and authority.

“Jack. Jack, who? I know no Jacks. Please, I am very busy, it is late. Are you in trouble?”

The same quiet voice came back at him. “Your friends in London sent me. They send you their regards.”

Doubt and confusion riddled the old man's mind. “Friends in London? But I have no friends in London either, young man. Now please I don't wish to telephone the local constabulary.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from the disembodied voice outside, almost as if he'd realized an error in his introduction. “I'm sorry. My mistake, I apologize. If I said the name Scorpius to you, would that make a difference?”

The old man slammed the door shut. Through fear, shock or anger – even he wasn't sure. Then, only when he had regained his full composure did he unlock the bolt on the door, before slowly opening it to its widest aperture. The wind and rain hit him hard and there, illuminated by the kitchen light, stood a small, spare man dressed in a dockworker's black duffel coat, a knitted cap pulled down over his ears and what looked like a shotgun slung over his right shoulder. His face was pale but his eyes blazed with a furious urgency.

“Are you here to kill me?”

“No, Herr Kauffman, I am hopefully here to save you. But can we first start with you letting me in!”

And it was then that Agent Scorpius knew that things had gone very badly wrong indeed, with his career in espionage.

* * *

Scorpius sat at the wooden kitchen table, the heat from the cooker toasting his back, nursing his mug of tea. He was pondering the gravity of his situation whilst Gorilla quickly sauntered around the ground floor, checking if windows and doors were locked and covered. The Remington lay at an angle on the table, extra shotgun cartridges lined up next to it.

“So you are a spy, Herr Jack?” said Scorpius.

“Gorilla.”

“Pardon?”

“You call me Gorilla. It's a nickname. Better than using real names.”

Scorpius raised an eye at that. The espionage business was unusual, to say the least. You weren't anyone unless you had a codename. “Of course, I understand. So you are a spy, Herr Gorilla? Like me?”

The little man turned to him and shrugged. “In a way; I'm more of a specialist in certain areas.”

“Like protecting elderly German engineers from… from what exactly? I am confused.”

Gorilla was in the final stages of closing the curtains in the living area, before returning to the comforting warmth of the kitchen. He picked up his mug, drained the tea and steeled himself for the bad news he was about to deliver to the old man. “I'll tell you as much as I can, in the short time that we have.”

Scorpius nodded, no less confused, but eager to hear why he'd been rousted late on a Saturday night.

“Your cover, so far, is still intact. You aren't blown, understand? You as an agent are still in play. That's the good news. The bad news, is that men are coming here to kill you tonight. I don't know exactly when they'll be here, but it will be soon. When I left London, I guessed that I had a four-hour head start on them, maybe. That's a conservative estimate,” said Gorilla. His words were coming like rapid-fire, machine gun bullets. He just hoped the old man was alert enough to take in what was about to happen.

Scorpius looked down at his hands, reflecting upon what he'd just been told. “I see. Are they Russians? No, they can't be – you said my cover was intact. Why would the KGB kill me, if I am still working for them?”

Gorilla shook his head. “No, not Russians. All I can say is that these men will be here soon and we need to accept the reality of the situation. The less you know, the less you can betray later.”

“How many are coming? Are they any good, Herr Gorilla?”

“They are professionals, so yes, they're good enough to kill one man on his own certainly. Numbers; more than one and no more than five. They have killed before and will continue, unless—”

“And can we not run to London or somewhere?” said Scorpius, hoping for an escape route.

“No. The plan is to sit it out and let them come to us.”

“And then?”

“And then, we don't let them leave this place,” Gorilla said simply.

Scorpius smiled. “Aha, then we capture them, Herr Gorilla. We call in your secret police and detain them in prison perhaps.”

But Gorilla's face offered no warmth for a legal outcome. “No. They will not be arrested. They will not stand trial. If I do my job right, they'll disappear off the face of the earth here tonight.”

Scorpius seemed to take in the gravity of his new protector's unspoken strategy. “I see, I see… and you are more than a match for these killers, Herr Gorilla? One man. You are experienced in such matters?”

“We'll find out by morning. Which leads me on to my next question; weapons? Do you have any weapons in the house? Guns, knives, coshes, tools; anything you could use to defend yourself with.”

A wide smile spread across the old man's face. “I have my old Mauser from the war, that is all.”

“Good. Do you have enough ammunition?”

Scorpius frowned. “Ah, there we may have a problem. Only a few rounds for the Mauser, I'm afraid.”

The old man disappeared upstairs for a few moments. Gorilla could hear him moving furniture in one of the upstairs rooms. Moments later, he returned with an old and battered biscuit tin which he placed on the kitchen table. He lifted the lid to reveal the Mauser nestled inside, wrapped in an old dust cloth. The weapon had definitely seen better days; old and corroded, Gorilla estimated Scorpius would get two shots out of it before it seized up and misfired.

“It will suffice, Herr Gorilla?” asked Scorpius.

“It will have to. The Mauser, you know how to use it, yes? Then you keep it with you. That is your personal weapon. You may end up needing it, before the night is through.”

They sat there in the dark for the next hour. Waiting and marking time. The faint embers of the fire keeping them warm. Then out in the distance, like a voice struggling to be heard on an untuned radio, came something that was of a different pitch and tone to the raging storm outside. As it came nearer, and even over the howl of the wind, Gorilla could make out the noise as clear as anything.
It was easy for the ear to pick things up, when you know what you're listening to,
he thought. A gentle burring that Gorilla knew from experience was the noise made by an inflatable, high speed motor boat.

“Herr Gorilla, I think, I think they are coming,” said Scorpius, who had his head cocked to the side, listening.

“No,” said Gorilla, picking up the Remington and racking the pump action of the shotgun with a satisfying click. “They're already here.
Move!
”

* * *

The killers moved like ghosts, they were practiced and experienced in such matters. It had been their lifelong career, and so they were experts at approaching a target building. The stormy night assisted them in their stealthy approach, hiding any noise from their movements, and the cloud cover dulled the moonlight which would have normally exposed them.