Dead Ball by Tom Palmer (snow like ashes series .txt) 📕

don’t talk to anyone from the FA. And especially not the players. The press – and Holt included Danny in that – were not allowed to talk to the players. Not without an FA press officer there.

Danny was feeling a bit flat after the trip round Moscow with Anton. It’d been fun. Seeing the sights. Hearing about the cathedral. There was something about Anton telling him interesting facts that was a lot easier to bear than his mum or his dad doing it.

He’d wanted to know more.

But halfway through the tour, Holt took a call on his mobile – and had taxied Danny straight back to the hotel. He said he had to go and do an interview. With a footballer. But he couldn’t say who. Danny could tell he wasn’t telling the whole truth. So he asked if he could come too. But Holt had said no. Too quickly. Treating him like a kid again, Danny felt.

And now Danny was sitting in the hotel lobby, feeling left out. Still that sense that there was something funny going on.

Where did Holt have to go?

Why so suddenly?

Who had called him?

And what was so secret that Danny wasn’t allowed to go along too? He’d thought Holt was going to take him everywhere on this trip. It wasn’t like he didn’t know how to behave around footballers.

Danny sat back in his seat. He was well aware that his week was getting stranger and stranger. First he witnessed what he was convinced was a murder attempt on an England goalkeeper. Then he was invited to Moscow for a World Cup qualifier as part of his school work experience. Now he was waiting for a journalist to return from a trip that Danny wasn’t convinced he was telling the truth about.

For a moment a cloud passed through Danny’s mind again. Holt. Was he being straight? Was he somehow involved in all this weirdness?

Then he told himself to shut up. He had to stop thinking like this. There was no way Holt would be messed up in something dodgy. Anton was the most straightforward man he knew. And hadn’t he supported Danny in the past?

Three kilometres away in another opulent hotel lobby, Anton Holt was sitting alone.

He was looking at people too. But not just any people. He was waiting for certain individuals in particular.

Most of the tables in this foyer were taken up by groups of men. No women. Many of the men were leaning forward, talking. Some in loud voices, attracting attention. Others in quiet voices, keeping their conversations to themselves.

Holt scanned each table.

The people he was looking for were not here.

But after waiting over an hour he saw a familiar figure. Tall. Thinner than he’d seen him before. With dark, not silver, hair. A deep tan. And dressed in a very expensive suit.

It was him. Holt knew it instinctively.

Although Holt had worked for weeks on the premise that this man was still alive, it was still a shock to see him. It was a man he knew well. A man he’d crossed swords with before. And he was sitting in a hotel that Holt had discovered, after much research, belonged to none other than Dmitri Tupolev, the Russian oligarch. That was what had brought the journalist here: knowing who owned the hotel and thinking that owner might be in league with an old friend.

And now that Holt could see that this man was alive and well, he knew that his theory could be true. That the Englishman and Tupolev were in talks: talks to plan the take-over of City FC and pitch the club into years of scandal and dodgy dealings.

Now he could write the story. The story of Sir Richard Gawthorpe’s return.

Danny was getting bored in the England team hotel. No players to watch. No Holt. Told to wait here like a good little boy.

But now he’d been sitting for more than two hours, some of the things he was looking at had begun to stand out.

He remembered reading a thriller to his dad once. 12:23 by Eoin McNamee. It was all about surveillance. The book described a group of agents watching a famous couple who were visiting Paris. And the thing that had really stuck with Danny was that the agents didn’t watch their targets for a few minutes, see what they needed to, then go home for their tea. They watched them for hours. Days. Weeks even. And that they weren’t looking for dramatic behaviour or sudden moves. They were looking for patterns. Things that stood out: but that didn’t stand out immediately. Things that only appeared obvious when you recognized the patterns of people’s behaviour over a long time.

And that was what was happening to Danny.

There were two men in the lobby. Like Danny, they had been sitting in the lobby for over two hours. And had done nothing but read newspapers. Except they were both reading the same newspaper over and over again. The same page for ten minutes, then another ten minutes an hour later. And – although they sat opposite each other – neither had looked at the other once.

Three things that didn’t sit right.

Who would re-read a newspaper when they were surrounded by the free magazines that were also on the hotel tables?

Who would sit waiting for two hours in the same place, directly opposite someone, without looking at them?

And why were they drinking carrot juice?

Danny immediately suspected who these men were. Agents. Russian agents. KGB – or whatever they were called now. FSB? He was convinced.

He slipped his phone out, and – pretending that he was looking at a text – he filmed the men and sent it to Charlotte with a short message:

Secret agents. Prob KGB? Interesting? D x

He understood who the men were, but what he didn’t understand was: what were they doing in a hotel that was hosting the English first-team squad three days before the crunch Russia–England World Cup qualifying game?

Danny felt glad he’d filmed them.

MONDAY