The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [115]
Without thinking, he had thrown his mobile phone into the back of the Saab, an awkward armt-wist and stretch behind his seat. As a consequence he spent most of the journey wondering if the constant stream of voice calls and text messages was important Libra business or yet more attempts by his brother to get in touch. Mark was aware, too, that Randall might be trying to make contact, but he was committed to acting alone tonight, without interference or advice from his controller. He felt that things had worked best in the past when he had been left to his own devices; when you introduced a third party, it seemed, the business of spying became altogether more complicated.
On Ball’s Pond Road he opened an A to Z and realized that he would have to make an immediate right-hand turn at the next junction to avoid the one-way system on the approach to the restaurant. Flicking out an indicator, Mark pulled the Saab quickly into an adjacent lane, catching the eye of a pretty young girl who was weaving on foot across the traffic. She smiled at him and he grinned back, making the turn at speed. Somebody behind him blasted their horn: the noise was loud and relentless and it smothered the first and second rings of another call on his phone. Steering with his right hand, Mark stretched into the back seat and began padding around for the mobile, hitting papers, freebie T-shirts, a map, cans and bottles. He could not find the phone without looking.
‘Where are you?’ he muttered, his bicep starting to ache. Then the traffic came to a halt and he was able to twist right round in his seat. The phone was buried in his coat and Mark wrenched it out of the folds, seeing ‘Rand’ on the read-out in black.
‘Hello?’
A motorbike pulled up parallel to the driver’s door, its engine a soothing pulse. The first shot, fired by the passenger riding pillion, obliterated the window of the Saab and passed three inches behind Mark’s neck.
Taploe said, ‘Mark?’
The sound he could hear from the room in Thames House was at first indistinguishable from squelch or static. Then he heard traffic noise, and the blast of a distant horn.
The shooter could see clearly now, watching Mark turn dazed in his seat, looking up at the bike and reaching for the handle of the door. His hair and his clothes were covered in glass, shards like roughened diamonds that bit deep into his skin. The second shot killed Mark outright, a sound Taploe heard as a sustained scream because a woman had stepped out of a nearby shop and was approaching the Saab from the pavement. The bike moved off immediately, up to forty miles per hour inside five seconds and gone before Ian could see it. Alerted by the first shot, he had come around the corner on foot, and it was just as if the world had ceased to move on a switch.
47
Taploe’s colleagues gave him a lot of credit for volunteering to break the news to Ben; that was a brave thing to do in the circumstances, a grim taskhe might easily have delegated to someone junior on the team. Taking three Special Branch officers to Elgin Crescent, he put Alice and Ben in a vehicle en route to a Kensington safe house where he informed them of Mark’s death. He thought Ben had recognized his face from the night of Keen’s murder, but perhaps the shock of the news deflected any suspicions he might have had. Watching his reaction, Taploe was reminded of Tamarov’s remark in the club on Friday night -they were screaming, like animals on the floor- and he was glad that Alice seemed to provide some comfort to her husband, a wife’s consoling touch. It looked as though things had improved between them since the end of her affair with Roth. God knows he would need her now. God knows Ben will not want to be alone.
Juris Duchev made it to Moscow