A Hostile State by Adrian Magson (reading eggs books txt) 📗

pick it up again, muttering to myself, he gave a grunt of triumph and increased his pace, his knife blade now out in front, the way he’d been trained.

The second his feet hit the soap the game changed dramatically. He yelped in surprise as his boots took off and dumped him on his back with a crack. Surprisingly he didn’t drop the blade and scrabbled to get to his feet. But the floor was too slick and whatever he did he couldn’t get a purchase.

I swung the mop handle hard across his head, stunning him, then followed up with another strike, this time on the side of his neck. He dropped the knife and lay still. I leaned forward and grabbed his foot, dragging him clear of the soap, then frisked him for ID. Nothing doing. Some money in his pants pocket and a cellphone. But no photo. I hit the ON button and found myself looking at the same former CIA photo. He’d loaded it as his screen saver so he could check the face easily without having to find the photo gallery.

I pocketed the phone and skirted the soap. His colleague would be waiting outside. I hoped he wasn’t armed with anything that went bang. But this was my only way out and I didn’t have time to wait for him to come in to see where his friend had got to.

I stepped through the door. The second man was standing near the far end of the corridor, his cellphone in his hand. He looked stunned to see me and I could read the message writ clear on his face. This wasn’t how it was supposed to play out.

I had one chance and one chance only. There was nobody else in sight and we were both partially hidden by the janitor’s trolley. I took three long strides and swung the mop handle at his head. He raised a hand to block it and took the full force on his forearm. It should have put him out of the fight but he appeared not to be affected by it.

Instead he dropped his phone and reached inside his jacket. If he was crazy enough to have brought a gun inside the terminal I was in trouble.

I began to swing again but changed tack and jabbed him hard in the face with the broken end of the stick. It made a nasty liquid noise at it entered one eye and he opened his mouth to scream, so I used a round-house swing across the side of his head to knock him out.

I didn’t bother searching him but scooped up his cellphone and walked away. Leaving my picture lying around would be stupid. I scrubbed at my face to give the impression of wiping away tiredness and to conceal my features from the cameras, and headed for the main exit.

As I cleared the building my phone buzzed. It was a text message from Callahan.

Stay and read it or get out of here? There was no option. If what had happened inside got classified as a terrorist incident, they’d shut the airport down tight and I’d be caught inside the cordon.

I opted to get out. Callahan’s message would have to wait.

The queue for cabs outside was low and I got a ride within a couple of minutes and told him to take me to the central station. He nodded without looking at me and we were off. One hurdle cleared.

I checked we weren’t being followed, aware that the two men might have had a stand-by driver in case things got messy and they had to move out fast. But traffic was heavy and I couldn’t tell if any one vehicle was getting too close. In the end I gave up before the driver began to take too much interest. With the current state of fear over terrorist attacks a call from him to the cops was the last thing I needed.

I got the driver to drop me short of the station and took a fast stroll around the block, ducking into a store and allowing a few pedestrians to go by before I exited and walked back the way I’d come.

As far as I could see I was clean.

Back at the station I bought a bus ticket for Paris. It was something like a twelve-hour trip but it meant I’d be unobserved and able to catch up on some sleep. If I was being tagged I was figuring on a team expecting me to take the quickest route possible out of here. But that meant flight schedules, passenger lists and cameras and the possibility that they would be waiting for me at the other end.

Before taking the SIM card out of my phone and going dark, I checked Callahan’s latest message. It was interesting.

One Ur Lebanon attackers Ukrainian national, former Spetsnaz. No known affils but thought contractor for Moscow. Akrotiri attackers no ID but poss same. Where you?

I debated not telling him but thought better of it. It was obvious by now that my every move was being monitored. I had no idea how but my suspicions centred on the impossible: someone had gained access to my locator messages. Nothing else made sense. The only question was, at what point were they picking up on them? The only person who had known where I was at any one time up until we got to Cyprus was Isobel Hunt. Yet she had been in as much danger from an attack as me, so why would she risk it?

Furthermore, although she’d known I was coming to Frankfurt she wouldn’t have known precisely where I would be at any one time.

That left me with the uncomfortable notion that it could only have been someone able to access my text messages to Callahan. But that was a wide field and included an outside intercept or someone on the inside close to Callahan himself. But why?

I decided to push the envelope. If I didn’t take some control over