Transition Read online

  He decided he would go for a run later and began packing his gym gear into a small black satchel in preparation for going out.

  There was a sharp rapping at the door.

  Room service.

  He let the server in, who wheeled through a large trolley draped with a cream table cloth and festooned with plastic plate covers. Jonathan paid him but decided even as the man was leaving that there was just too much going on and he had lost his appetite.

  The run would come before dinner.

  He finished stuffing the running gear into the small black satchel, grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He would change down in the gym. As he closed the hotel room door behind him with a click, he decided to take the stairs. It was three flights down and would already start warming his body up for exercise.

  Once he got onto the first stairwell he started taking the stairs two at time, almost mini-jumping them. As he hit the first floor, the building shook with an almighty, muted thud.

  Jonathan flattened himself against the wall and away from the stairs.

  What the hell was that? he thought. Earthquake?

  He deliberated whether to keep going down the stairs or poke his head back into the corridor on the first floor to see what was going on. He did not particularly fancy jumping stairs if there were going to be aftershocks.

  His face scrunched up.

  Do you get earthquakes in Paris? he thought.

  His hand was already on the cool metal handle of the door to the first floor, and opening it. He poked his head through. All down the corridor were other heads sticking out of doors.

  An intensely loud fire alarm began trilling nearby, and the sprinklers in the ceiling burst into life to shower the hall with umbrellas of wet. There were large windows nearby, opposite the lift, that looked out onto an outside park and nearby buildings. He gingerly stepped into the hallway and moved to the windows to take a look outside and see if there really was an earthquake.

  As he neared the windows he became puzzled. He could already see other tall buildings across from the hotel, and they looked fine.

  Was it a gas leak that ignited? he thought. I can’t smell any gas.

  As he got to the window, he became even more confused. There were bits of black ash floating downwards from above. He stopped right in front of the windows and pressed his face against the glass, craning his head to look upwards at what was going on. He could see flames licking out of the building a few storeys above.

  Hotels don’t run gas up into the rooms, he thought. Too risky, with leaks and guests; they may use it in the kitchen or basement, in which case the smoke would be coming up from the ground floor.

  He turned his head and looked at the buildings around the hotel again. One of them was almost the same height and the windows were slightly reflective, so in looking at the building opposite he could make out his hotel as though he was looking at a dirty mirror. He could see a black burning square two floors above him. He counted in the reflection the floors upwards from the ground floor of his hotel and then the number of windows along to arrive at roughly where the burning square was in his hotel. His reflection in the glass recorded the changing of his expression from one of puzzlement to absolute horror when he figured it out.

  Holy Shit! That’s my hotel room! That was no gas leak, or any other kind of natural explosion. What natural occurrence would only take out one room on a hotel floor? Was it some kind of bomb? Planted before I got there? Was it on the room service trolley? Actually, who cares how it got there – someone’s trying to kill me!

  His face went ashen as many things fell into place at once.

  Falcus Loader’s plane blowing up was not an accident.

  He looked around him with a mixture of fear and desperation. His mouth was dry and his palms were wet. His heart was pounding in his chest as the fight-or-flight response kicked in.

  Run! his brain screamed. Get the hell out of here!

  He spun and bolted for the stairwell. People had been coming out of their rooms in the interim, and were either looking around for an exit or starting to head towards the fire escape.

  He brushed past the first arrivals at the stairwell to burst through the doors himself and begin leaping down the stairs, taking them three at a time.

  How did they find me so quickly? Why is someone trying to kill me?

  At the bottom of the stairs he forced himself to stop and take deep inhalations of air to even out his breathing.

  Walk out coolly, he told himself, and hide behind other people if you want to get out of this hotel alive.

  As he tried to casually walk out the door, he entered a lobby of pandemonium. Guests were not walking out calmly. Guests were elbowing anyone of a weaker disposition out of the way.

  There was a large group nearby, and Jonathan sidled up to the back of them. Everything and everybody was wet through from the sprinklers. Jonathan flicked the collars on his jacket up, before hunching in with the herd as they went past reception and out of the main doors.

  As his eyes adjusted to the outside light, he resisted the urge to look around wildly. They may still have been watching the exits. He hunched a bit lower and stayed with the group. He reasoned that if anyone was looking for him they would be looking for a lone man, potentially in a panic.

  The areas outside the entrance and on surrounding streets were beginning to clog up with the outpouring from the hotel. Jonathan could hear the ever-increasing wail of sirens, approaching in the distance. The group began to disperse as they walked up the main street, heading directly away from the hotel entrance.

  The group was splitting up fast and Jonathan manoeuvred himself to walk in step with and in close proximity to a red-haired woman, hoping that to the casual observer they would appear as a couple. They were approaching a small side street to the right. Jonathan decided to duck down it and get away from the hotel quickly, then disappear through the maze of small streets off the main thoroughfare.

  As he turned into the street, he glanced back round towards the hotel.

  It was definitely my room that exploded, he thought.

  He resisted the urge to run but was still walking briskly, turning left and right up streets in a random fashion.

  People were looking at him, as his clothes and hair were completely soaked.

  I stand out a damn mile, he thought. Need to get out of these wet clothes.

  He dived into an unused alley and stopped behind a large waste container, before pulling the satchel off his back and opening it. Inside was his gym gear and a towel taken from the hotel. He realized he had to change his appearance as quickly as possible.

  He stripped off his jacket and shirt, stuffed them in the satchel, towelled himself dry as far as possible, and put his white running T-shirt on.

  Better than nothing, he thought.

  He left his hair messy in the vague hope that it looked ‘tousled’ and different enough from his neatly combed office haircut. As he finished stuffing the towel back into the bag, a realization hit him.

  Did they have me followed from London? he thought. Or did they find me through the passport that the hotel swipes at check-in? That means they have access to some kind of security service, or Interpol, or whatever. But if they have access to that, what the hell else do they have access to? And who the hell are they?

  Now was not the time for burdensome analysis. Now was the time for survival.

  Jonathan ran through a mental checklist of what he had left the hotel with. He could feel the comfortable bulk of his wallet and mobile phone in each pocket.

  He knew what he had to do and was surprised at how calm he felt in the circumstances, considering that highly efficient, well-funded and well-connected killers had just attempted to exterminate him, and would probably try to do so again.

  The sun did not shine directly into the Parisian back streets he was criss-crossing. Everything was bathed in a soft grey light; on the surface everything appeared as normal: shopkeepers stood scowling beh
ind their tills, locals sat in the odd café with their coffee and cigarettes.

  But everything was not normal.

  Jonathan could never look at anyone the same way he had done, until he knew he was safe. Anyone walking toward him could be a merciless killer. As he walked he found himself quickly eyeing up everyone he saw – identifying each one as a potential threat.

  Eventually he saw what he was looking for, the subtle glow of promise inhabiting a cash machine built into a wall. He withdrew as much cash as the machine would allow – eight hundred euros. It would be the last time he used his card, if at all possible.

  He had watched enough spy movies to know that if they have access to banking systems, they would know immediately that someone was accessing his card at this location. It dawned on him while he was using the machine that he had often wanted his life to be like a spy movie and to experience some excitement, and now it seemed to be happening. But the incident at the hotel had scared him, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted this new level of eventfulness in his life to continue, or just stop.

  It doesn’t matter anyway, he thought. I’m already in too deep to stop it – I have to take this on if I want to stay alive.

  Walking away and stuffing the cash into his pockets, he hailed a passing taxi. He jumped in and ordered the driver to take him to an electronics store. There, he bought a small device with a screen that made a backup of the contacts in his mobile phone. With this, he could scroll through contacts and numbers without any communication waves being sent out by the phone. He knew that if he turned on his phone or put the SIM card into another phone, they would pinpoint him again immediately.

  If they could access where his passport was being scanned, he was taking no chances. Just to make sure his phone was completely out of service, he removed the back cover and took the battery out. He put the powerless phone in one pocket and the battery in another.

  He would keep his phone with him, in pieces, but from now on would only make calls from payphones. As he walked back into the city under a darkening sky, he wondered how long to make the calls for. Normally in the movies it was something like two minutes. He would make it one minute.

  Jonathan had an idea.

  I can check with Harry!

  He walked until he found a payphone in a covered cowling against the wall of a small shopping centre. After buying a sweatshirt and scarf and asking for change in coins, Jonathan was soon at the phone with Harry’s mobile phone number on the screen of the backup gizmo.

  There was an intermittent buzzing as the receiving phone rang.

  ‘Hello?’ asked a tentative voice.

  ‘Harry! It’s me! Jonathan!’

  ‘Is there an emergency with the flat?’ Harry sounded truly alarmed.

  ‘No ...’

  ‘I told you to only call this number in emergency.’ Harry sounded unashamedly annoyed.

  ‘It is a damn emergency, you nitwit! How long before someone can trace a call if they’ve got the resources?’

  ‘What? How the devil would I know?’

  ‘Because you work in the secret service!’

  ‘No I don-’

  Jonathan lost his patience and yelled: ‘How long?’

  ‘Thirty seconds.’

  ‘Call you back.’

  ‘Wha-’ Harry was cut off. Jonathan immediately punched in his number again.

  The phone rang.

  The line connected.

  ‘Have you gone completely and utterly mad?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Shut up and listen. I’m in deep shit. I need your help. You know the plane that blew up over Algeria today?’

  ‘Yes, we-’

  ‘And the bomb that went off in Paris a few hours ago?’ Jonathan continued.

  ‘Yes, it’s ...’

  ‘The first one killed my boss, and the second was my hotel room!’

  ‘What?’ Harry exclaimed.

  ‘Call you back,’ Jonathan said, then hung up.

  More change went into the payphone. There was someone waiting behind him now. Jonathan could feel the presence of a person.

  He turned quickly to see a middle-aged woman with a scarf wrapped around her head; she was tutting silently.

  He gave her his worst psychotic death stare. She stepped back, before slowly moving away.

  The phone rang.

  The line connected.

  ‘Someone is trying to kill me!’ Jonathan hissed into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Holy shit! You’re involved in the Dalton case,’ Harry said. ‘We’ve just been trying to figure out if they were connected.’

  ‘Well, they bloody well are – the connection is me!’

  ‘Classified. What else do you know?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Nothing. Just that I seem to be being hunted like some bloody trophy animal.’

  ‘All right. I think you may be suffering from shock,’ Harry said. ‘Get to a cheap hotel and hole up for the night. Pay cash only. Call me tomorrow, and I’ll inform upstairs. Where exactly are you now?’

  ‘Classified,’ Jonathan said, and hung up.

  It was not that he didn’t trust Harry, but the whole point of good spies was that you never knew who they really worked for. There would be no commitment to anyone until he had more information himself.

  He had to find out who was trying to kill him, and more importantly, why? If he was going to die – he wanted to know the reason.

  He walked away from the phone and through the dusk-lit streets until he found a small hotel with three green stars shining in neon over the evening pavement.

  It would do.

  He paid the surly manager in cash for one night and locked himself in a room on the first floor. He dragged all the moveable furniture against the door, then smashed a glass water bottle in the sink and placed it next to his bed as a weapon.

  All night he tossed and turned – trying to block out from his mind the noise of explosions.

  12

  Paris

  Jonathan was angrily punching numbers into a payphone on the street.

  He had slept only fitfully last night, continually jerking awake at the slightest noise. He became incredibly irritable when he didn’t get enough sleep.

  He had finally got out of bed at around six, left the hotel an hour later, and started roaming the streets of the suburbs again, trying to figure out what to do next.

  The feeling of shock, which had almost wiped out his mental resources the previous night, had now abated. It was replaced by fury that someone was trying to kill him.

  Lying in the darkness for hour, there had been plenty of time to mull it all over.

  It was Falcus’s damn report that had triggered all this, Jonathan thought. It was the only explanation. Falcus was always as sloppy with confidential documents. Who knows who he’d sent it to in his quest for personal glory. It might even have gone outside of the company, and then anybody could have got hold of it and identified me as the author. Meaning any number of organisations could be after me now.

  He was angry because he had just been doing his job – and now someone was trying to kill him because of it.

  The phone he was calling started ringing, and he drummed his fingers on top of the phone casing as he waited for the other person to pick up.

  ‘Yesh?’ Answered a deep voice with a thick Dutch accent.

  ‘It’s Marshall,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? You were supposed to check in yesterday.’

  Nice to speak to you too, Dutch Mentalist, thought Jonathan.

  The Dutch Mentalist was Jonathan’s current boss. The Dutch Mentalist was the name everyone called him, apart from to his face. He was a six-foot-five Dutchman with a brush cut and steely blue eyes. He personified a particular type of Dutchman that always got promoted in the organisation: tight-fisted, mean, with no sense of humour and even less people skills.

  Jonathan was definitely not in the mood for any of his crap today. Almost being killed, he felt, gave one a sense of impun
ity against one’s bosses.

  ‘That analysis I did for Falcus. Where did it go?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the Mentalist.

  ‘Who … did … it … go … to?’ Jonathan said slowly, as though explaining something complex to a child.

  There was sharp intake of breath at the other side of the line.

  The Mentalist did not get humour, irony or sarcasm, but still did not like being spoken to in such a manner by an underling.

  ‘I didn’t see it myself,’ he answered defensively. ‘You know I don’t do that. It went to Mr Willis on the top floor.’

  ‘You need to find out who it went to after that. And you need to do it quietly,’ Jonathan told him.

  A sharper intake of breath down the line.

  The Mentalist had had enough of this.

  ‘Marshall, what the hell are you on about?’ The Mentalist’s voice rose.

  ‘Are you at your computer?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Pull up a news website. You see the story about an explosion in central Paris?’

  ‘Yes …’ The Mentalist answered, sounding unsure.

  ‘Well, that was my hotel room! Twenty-four hours after I sent that report off, Loader’s plane explodes over Algeria, and my hotel room explodes in Paris!’ Jonathan was almost yelling, and made a conscious effort to calm himself down.

  ‘The only reason I wasn’t in it was that I’d left for a run,’ Jonathan continued. ‘Now don’t try to tell me these things aren’t connected. Some pretty vicious wheels have been set in motion, and we don’t know who’s involved. I’m guessing you aren’t. But I’m on the run here with a price on my head.’

  Jonathan knew he had gone over the thirty-second limit in making this call, but he was so worked up he didn’t care. He would take a taxi out of this neighbourhood as soon as he’d hung up the phone.

  He also knew, or at least believed with certainty, that the Mentalist was not involved in whatever was going on. He may have been the boss of the company unit Jonathan worked for, but he was still a minion. He had hit his limit of progression in the organisation. Everybody knew this would be his last assignment. Then they would put him out to pasture on ‘project’ work, or working on ‘divestment’ analysis for another couple of years, before palming him off with early retirement. Consultants working on projects knew more of what was going on in the company than the Mentalist.