Angel in the Shadows Read online

  The mini USB stick was one of those precautions.

  It featured a Linux operating system that Anya had put together herself, which was now communicating with the hardware of Farah’s laptop. All the regular software she’d ever used had been removed by Anya, who claimed it contained built-in back doors. It allowed security services such as the FSB, as well as the FBI and the NSA, to gain easy access and scan her hard drive. Throughout her undercover operation, Farah must never save anything on that drive. The USB stick was protected: the file system was ‘read only’ and the stick formatted as such – no hacker would be able to change anything on it; it was like hardened cement.

  Farah opened the folder Anya had installed for her. It contained the most important data on AtlasNet and the nuclear-energy project the company was hoping to realize in Indonesia.

  Since the hostage-taking, she hadn’t so much as glanced at a newspaper, looked at a book or read a word. Normally, she could read an entire novel in a single evening. She was able to decipher and analyse all the stuff released by the international press agencies faster than any other AND editor. But now the sentences inched past slowly and without meaning, her head refusing to let in the information she needed to do her work.

  ‘You were teetering on the edge,’ Paul had said to her. ‘You had a narrow escape. Now you need to get up and learn to walk again – in every respect.’

  He was right. She could tell by the way she’d floundered when she tried to tell Paul and Anya what had happened to her in the Seven Sisters. Several times she forgot halfway through a sentence what it was she wanted to say. Her memories were all in a muddle, lacking either a beginning or an end. She was trying to put the puzzle together, but kept getting lost in a jumble of fragmented details.

  Feverish with fatigue and overcome by the heat, she swayed back and forth to the monotonous cadence of the hurtling train, without realizing that her eyes were falling shut.

  She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious. Nor did she have the time to linger on the question. A male voice boomed in her ear. Forceful fingers curled around her upper arm. She felt the grip of a hand roughly shaking her awake.

  She reached for the laptop, which was still open. She looked into a pair of bloodshot eyes. Framed by dark circles, they were set deep in the pale, sunken face of a man wearing a faded green uniform with Army-style epaulettes, which looked like it had never been washed. His Russian sounded irritable and insistent. She couldn’t understand a word of it, until she heard the phrase that instantly put her into panic mode.

  Passport.

  ‘Minutuchku!’ she said. ‘One moment, please.’

  With Anya’s help, she’d learned a few Russian sentences by heart. According to her passport, she was a Russian national. At immigration counters, you usually just hand over your passport without saying anything, but Anya reckoned it might be more convincing if Farah produced the occasional simple sentence.

  As she rummaged around for her passport, a second man entered the compartment. He compensated for his skinny colleague’s sickly pale complexion with fleshy, bright pink skin, which was beaded with excessive sweat. Farah made a half-hearted attempt at a smile.

  ‘Tak ziarko segodnja,’ she said – ‘Gosh, it’s hot today’ – and handed him the passport with a small stack of rouble notes between its pages. The man with the bloodshot eyes looked at them disdainfully and casually threw them back at her. The notes whirled down on to her lap.

  He spent a long time scrutinizing her passport and then asked her something she didn’t understand.

  On the off-chance, she uttered her three fictitious names and her equally fictitious date of birth.

  Both men looked at her as if she’d just told them a bad joke.

  ‘Izvinite, ya vas ne ponimayu, ya ne znayu,’ she stammered as sincerely as possible. ‘Excuse me. I don’t understand, I don’t know.’

  The look in their eyes confirmed her worst fears. Before she’d even reached Kiev, before she even realized it, she’d been found out.

  The wiry man slipped the passport into his breast pocket and ordered her to hand over the laptop.

  Reflexively, she slammed the laptop shut and quickly set it down beside her.

  As she did so, he leaned over to grab it.

  The side of her hand shot out and hit the artery in his neck, hard enough to stop the blood flowing to his head for a few seconds; and long enough for Farah to weave the fingers of both hands together, link her arms and sharply ram her right elbow into her assailant’s left temple.

  As he fell over, she stretched out her arm and landed the knuckles of her fist against the back of his head.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw the other man reach for his gun. In the split second it took for him to look down to undo the safety catch, she grabbed his head with both hands and brought it down towards her knee as it shot up.

  She heard the cracking of his nasal bone and gave him the finishing blow against the back of his head with her elbow.

  Then she grabbed the revolver, which had dropped to the floor. She’d never held a gun in her hands before. Unsure what to do with it, she tossed it on the seat and found a set of handcuffs dangling from the second man’s belt. She clicked them open, grabbed the men’s wrists and slapped on the cuffs.

  Panting, she reached for her laptop and pulled the USB stick out. Always take that USB stick with you. Anya’s orders. She reinserted the stick into the casing on her charm bracelet, slipped the laptop into her rucksack, which she hoisted on to her shoulders, and carefully slid open the door.

  To her right, some ten metres away, an elderly man was smoking in the aisle. His head was sticking out of the lowered window.

  As she watched him, all kinds of questions flashed through her mind. How much longer would they be under way? How many officials were on board? Were those two the only ones?

  Either way, she had to get as far away from this compartment as possible. It was the front carriage she wanted to get to. Kiev was a terminus station. It meant that when they arrived, she’d be able to get off close to the main concourse. Farah closed the doors behind her and walked into the aisle, quickly glancing over her shoulder at the smoking man. He was fully concentrated on Kiev’s passing suburbs.

  In the aisle of the third carriage, she saw two other men in uniform heading her way. She turned around and sought refuge in a toilet. It might be another fifteen minutes to the station, twenty at most. She could lock herself in and wait until everybody had left the train. But the officials would undoubtedly spot the red ‘occupied’ sign, knock on the door, and ask her to come out and show her ticket, maybe even her passport.

  Her passport.

  She’d forgotten her passport.

  She made her way back to her compartment as quickly as she could. The smoking man in the aisle had gone. As she slid the doors open, the man on top stirred ever so slightly. She pushed him aside. The thin man lay motionless on the floor. Worried that he might be dead, she pressed her fingers against his carotid artery and was relieved to feel it beating.

  With a great deal of difficulty, she managed to turn him over so she could retrieve her passport from his jacket pocket. She heard footsteps in the aisle. Two men walked past, talking loudly. She listened carefully and heard them disappear. She put her passport into her rucksack and checked for sounds in the aisle; only when it was completely quiet did she find the courage to slide open the doors.

  This time, she walked all the way to the back of the train, straight into the restaurant car. There she spotted the same officials she’d seen earlier in the front part of the train. They were the men who’d passed her compartment while she retrieved her passport from the pocket of their unconscious colleague. She recognized them by their loud voices.

  Keep moving now. Don’t turn around. If she turned around, she’d attract attention.

  The younger of the two winked at her as she walked past and shouted something at her for ignoring him. She kept going, but, realizing it
might be a mistake not react to him, treated him to a cheery smile before disappearing through the connecting doors and into the next carriage.

  How much longer before they’d arrive in Kiev? How much longer before the two men in her compartment were discovered?

  She stopped in the vestibule of the next-to-last carriage and looked outside. They were entering the centre of Kiev now. Passengers with hand luggage, suitcases and backpacks emerged from the various compartments. They thronged around her. It felt uncomfortable in the heat, but at least they also provided some protection.

  A couple of minutes later, the train entered the station. The platform slipped past. She tried the door handle. It wouldn’t budge. She had no choice but to wait until the train came to a complete standstill and the doors centrally unlocked.

  Farah was the first to get out. She looked towards the front, but was unable to see the end of the platform because it had a gentle curve. She started walking, trying to stop herself from breaking into a run. When she saw the customs officials get out, she slowed down and mingled with the men and women pulling their noisy rolling suitcases so as to draw as little attention to herself as possible. Cleaners in blue overalls entered the empty carriages with brooms and rubbish bags. When she passed the one that contained her compartment she noticed the screen was still down.

  At the sound of animated voices from a walkie-talkie, she stiffened. She kept staring straight ahead and quickened her pace. Two station guards came towards her and walked past at a trot.

  By now the men must have been discovered. They’d be able to give a very accurate description of her. Not long now before the alarm would be raised.

  Don’t run. Whatever you do, don’t run.

  Once she reached the top of the platform, she entered the main concourse and headed straight for the escalators leading to the metro line that ran in the direction of Boryspil Airport. Where she could, she mingled with groups, constantly scanning her surroundings for unexpected movements. In the metro carriage she stood next to a small band of backpackers as she waited for it to pull away. From where she was standing, she could see something of a commotion at the bottom of the escalators. A man extricated himself from the crowd and ran towards the train at full tilt. He was young, wore a dark suit and carried something black in his hand. He ran in her direction. When he squeezed in through the closing doors, she was relieved to see the logo of an airline company on his lapels.

  The train started moving and ten minutes later it arrived just below the international departures hall for Terminal D. She took the escalator up and looked around. Perhaps it was the calming voice of the female announcer, the soft echo of the many footsteps and luggage carts, and the muffled voices of the passengers, but it all seemed quiet – too much so for her liking. It was as if something were hiding behind that layer of stillness.

  She walked over to the Qatar Airways check-in desk and handed the ground stewardess a printout of her reservation and her passport. A few seconds after checking Farah’s data on her computer, the stewardess asked her to wait a moment. With a hint of nervousness, the woman checked something on another screen.

  That’s when Farah realized that she might have walked into a trap.

  They’d want to pick her up without a disturbance. Given the large numbers of passengers in the hall, there was a realistic chance of chaos breaking out. Instead they’d escort her to a quieter place. She’d have nowhere to turn.

  She looked around. To her right, some twenty metres away, she saw two armed police officers lurking unobtrusively behind a group of tourists. It was the same story to her left: two more with automatic weapons trying to keep a low profile. At the main entrance to the hall she saw another two carrying rifles.

  For a moment, she was unable to breathe, think or move. She was completely and utterly panic-stricken.

  ‘Madam?’

  She turned to face the stewardess.

  ‘We’re able to offer you a free upgrade to business class, if you like.’

  So that was the plan. Business-class passengers were always allowed to board first. They’d be waiting for her in the jet bridge, or perhaps even on the plane itself. With nobody else around, they’d be able to detain her discreetly. She wouldn’t stand a chance.

  She heard a voice inside her head – her father’s voice. She could picture him too, towering above her. She was still a little girl. Never take a step back, he said sternly. As soon as you yield for your opponent, you’ll have lost the fight. There is only one way to victory, and that is forward.

  ‘Fine,’ she said to the stewardess.

  After receiving her ticket, along with the necessary information, she made her way to the gate. Fifteen minutes to go until boarding.

  At immigration, the official checked her passport, the way he must have done hundreds of times that day, and wished her a pleasant journey.

  This is what it must feel like, she thought to herself, as she walked through the still empty passenger bridge on to the plane. This is how people headed for the scaffold or a firing squad feel. You know it’s over, yet you hope for a miracle that will never come.

  A steward had been stationed by the entrance to the plane. Everything seemed normal. His uniform fitted perfectly and she couldn’t detect a weapon anywhere. When she showed him her boarding pass, he escorted her inside, where she took her place in one of the luxury business-class seats.

  Passengers started trickling in, finding their seats and stowing their luggage in the overhead bins. The plane was still only half full when the doors were locked. Even now, she couldn’t believe everything was fine.

  They taxied to the runway. The roar of the starter engines sounded like cheering rising up from deep within the plane.

  When they took off, she knew for certain that she’d chosen the only path she could have taken.

  Her way now was that of the attack, and it lay before her, wide open and welcoming.

  Part Two

  * * *

  RITUAL

  1

  Radjen Tomasoa listened to the wind doing its best to yank loose the clay roof tiles. He lay on his back; it’d become something of a habit. Something he did when he couldn’t sleep. This storm, which seemed to be announcing the early arrival of autumn, reminded him of the past, of days long gone. Lost to him forever.

  He was in his early twenties then, lying on his back in a tent on the shores of Lake Trasimeno. A hefty thunderstorm burst loose directly above him. Pelting rain drummed on the canvas. He imagined himself floating in the eye of the storm, unreachable by anything that might harm him. He wasn’t the least bit afraid he’d be hit by lightning or that the wind would blow him, tent and all, into the lake. He shut out the chaos; his thoughts were crystal clear. He felt in complete control of life. His life. There, in the eye of the storm, he was powerful enough to accomplish everything he set his sights on.

  Everything.

  He stared at the crack in the ceiling. Like a river with narrow tributaries, it ran diagonally to both corners of the bedroom – it had been there for more than thirty years. By now he could draw every millimetre, much like he could sketch the years of his marriage. There was no more energy left to repair cracks like these. And, even if he were inclined to do so, it would then be etched in his memory as a tedious and rather unpleasant time in his life.

  The question of who was at fault for the loss of what was once young love wasn’t even the issue. He’d decided it was nobody’s fault. Anyway, marriage was primarily meant to camouflage the fact that the love between two people seldom lasts a lifetime. What was the alternative? The lonely life he’d undoubtedly lead after a divorce in his mid fifties seemed unbearable. For him, divorce was the equivalent of admitting that little or nothing was left of everything he’d dreamed about in his twenties.

  But that was not the reason Radjen was still awake. Voices echoed in his head. The voices of the men who’d led the internal investigation of his detective team. In a room at headquarters, made especially availa
ble for the occasion, they’d sat to his left and right on either side of a camera. Each had one leg crossed over the other. A perfectly symmetrical set-up. They carefully formulated their questions. And, who knows, perhaps they’d orchestrated the long, painful silences even more carefully. Silences in which Radjen could hear the blood coursing through his veins, feel his temples throbbing. Silences in which his heart irregularly skipped the occasional beat like a clock ticking out of control.

  So you were not aware of the duplicitous role Detective Diba played in your department?

  Detective Marouan Diba, who’d once achieved nationwide fame because of his discovery of 600 kilos of cocaine in the belly of a plane, who’d caused a stir as one of the first minority detectives in the police corps, who was young and bursting with ambition, but who, as he got older, was weighed down not only by his BMI but by life itself. Yes, he, Radjen Tomasoa, Chief Inspector of the Amsterdam Police Force, had tried pumping new life into his demoralized detective. A year earlier, he’d appointed the young up-and-coming investigator Joshua Calvino as Diba’s partner. The combination had ultimately ended in disaster.

  No, I was not aware of the kind of contacts Detective Diba had outside his unit. How could I have been?

  Is that a question, Chief Inspector?

  Rhetorical.

  So, not a question.

  Again silence. Radjen’s blood boiled, his temples pounded, his heart felt like a time bomb attached to a tightly wound clock run amok.

  What do you think happened in that interrogation room?

  Arseholes! How should he know? Control yourself, breathe, breathe deeply, take a sip of water, pick your words carefully, describe what happened that evening as objectively as possible. That fatal evening.

  Again, I was not present at that interrogation. I can only deduce what might have happened from the facts.