The Old Enemy Henry Porter (best black authors txt) 📖

She went towards him. ‘You took their car key!’

‘It was on the desk.’

‘What if they are perfectly innocent businessmen?’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said, with absolute certainty. ‘I know a killer when I see one.’

He did, too. She shook her damp hair, brushed the rainwater from her jacket and climbed in on the passenger side. Naji groped for the lever to adjust the driver’s seat, exclaimed in Arabic and pulled out a small handgun. ‘Businessmen with no bags and plenty of guns.’

‘Okay, you’re right. Should I drive?’

‘You have been drinking. Two glasses of wine.’

‘One!’

‘Two! Mini-bar!’ It was true. She’d forgotten the quarter bottle she opened while trying to get hold of Tulliver and Dr Carrew.

‘Do you drive? I mean, do you have any experience?’

‘Yes, I am the most excellent driver.’

‘You stole a policeman’s car when you were a kid and crashed it. I know that. Have you done any driving since then?’

‘Of course.’

‘Where?’

‘All over.’

‘What are we going to do with the car?’

‘Drive to Riga in Latvia and burn it. Then my sister Munira will bring us to Tallinn. She will enjoy that.’

‘Why would we burn a perfectly good car?’

‘Those men came to murder us, and I do not want the car to be found in Riga. Seat belt, please.’

‘Then you should not stop in Riga. We should go straight to Tallinn. We have to think of the two borders between here and Tallinn.’

‘Not a problem. Our car has Latvian registration and I know driver’s name. I saw it on registration card.’ He started the engine, moved sedately towards the exit and fed the ticket he’d found in the sun-visor clip into the machine. They thought they heard a shout before the barrier rose, but they couldn’t be sure because of the noise of the rain. Naji didn’t hang around. In the first few seconds of the journey, Anastasia decided she would never let him drive her again. Her phone told her that it was exactly six hundred kilometres to Tallinn. They’d be there by morning if Naji didn’t kill them first.

‘I like this car,’ shouted Naji, ‘Audi Q7 has good economy and great driver engagement. Mr Stepurin has good taste.’ He winked at her.

‘Stepurin!’

‘Name on the hotel registration card with car registration. That is why I know we should leave.’

Chapter 24

Wet Grass

Ulrike handled the book with a kind of reverence; it was intensely important to her husband and therefore almost sacred to her. She moved through it, brushing its pages with the flat of her hands and smiling. ‘It really is a work of art, the way it’s laid out and with the references to colour found in nature,’ she said. ‘Poetic, in its way.’

She let it rest open in her lap and laid her hands on the end papers, then glanced down with a look of enquiry. ‘What is this?’ she said, picking up the book and examining the endpaper pasted to the back cover. ‘Aha! Bobby has left something for us. Can you get me a knife from the kitchen, dear Samson?’

She slipped the knife into the almost invisible slit between the endpaper and the hard cover and retrieved a single sheet of thin marker paper, looked at it and handed it to Samson. ‘Here are some more names for you.’

There were another twelve, each of them filed under one of the colours. These were the people working for, or associated with Jonathan Mobius, Erik Kukorin, Chester Abelman and Elliot Jeffreys. Apart from Mobius, none of the four original names or the dozen hidden in the back of the book meant anything to them.

‘This is Mila Daus’s network,’ said Ulrike, taking back the paper. ‘And you see Bobby has dated each addition, and the last one was made three months ago, which is when I believe he decided that he had done enough and he was going to concentrate on the show.’

‘Let’s start at the top,’ said Samson, reaching for his computer. ‘With Mila Daus.’

There was very little on the Web about her under any of her three married names – Muller, Mobius and Gaspar. A legal dispute with her first husband Muller’s children over a $30 million fortune in 1996 was almost expunged, and the lone court document they found was buried with numerous similar references that led to ‘404 Page Not Found’ or ‘DNS error’ notices. This was Düppel, the chaff that Francis, the young member of the tech team at GreenState, had spoken about. Anyone researching the court case would have given up. It was even a challenge to find the names of Muller’s two children, Karen and George, because they too had been more or less airbrushed from the internet. Mila Daus did not exist, and, when they went back to 1989 and accounts of the Stasi, they found nothing that would link her to the programme of mass psychological torture – nothing that would impede the progress in American society of the icy young beauty from the GDR.

‘It’s going to be tough to prove that this woman is the same person you saw in prison,’ said Samson. ‘Identification at thirty years’ distance won’t be accepted.’

‘It was for Nazi war criminals,’ said Ulrike sharply.

‘But we will need ways of connecting her to that past.’

‘If she’s running a Russian spy ring, which is what Bobby knew this to be, does it really matter if we don’t link her to the Stasi?’

‘Still, we have to prove the purpose of the network,’ said Samson. ‘There’s nothing in the book to say what these seventeen individuals are actually doing.’

‘The proof exists. Bobby had it; Denis had it.’

‘And this is what Denis was going to reveal in Congress.’

She frowned, searched frantically for her cigarettes. ‘Bobby didn’t know about that. I’m sure Denis didn’t tell him, and in fact I’m certain that he would have informed Bobby because they worked so closely together. They were very fond of each other, respected each other’s life experience.’ The packet revealed itself