The Old Enemy by Henry Porter (read with me .TXT) 📕

as they were. They went slowly, feeling their way to the supermarket. Naji spotted a coffee stand on one of the deserted cross streets. It was open and serving labourers and farm workers who had parked their vehicles chaotically around the cabin. He suggested they grab something while they waited for her phone to begin sending their location. She still had no signal. ‘We need to speak to them before we move,’ he said.

She reluctantly agreed, and he hopped out at the stand and bought coffee and sweet pastries. The early workers in a gaggle around the cabin window immediately parted, believing, perhaps, that a young Arab in their town meant some sort of trouble. He returned, grinning, with two coffees and a pastry for himself and handed her a cup. Back in his seat, he unstuck the pastry from its paper wrap and looked over at her phone: it still had no reception. ‘Turn it off then turn on again,’ he suggested, with his mouth full.

‘I hate waiting here,’ she said, putting her takeaway cup into one of the holders. ‘Shall we just get to the supermarket and leave the car? I’d feel happier.’ She started the engine, but Naji insisted on finishing his coffee before they moved off, so she did, too.

They reached the supermarket – a long, low building, almost certainly a converted cinema – and circled the block before rolling into the south side of a car park where a man was loading flattened cardboard boxes on to a trolley. He stopped and looked up with interest, then away to the far side of the car park, where there were about half a dozen vehicles. Now messages began flooding into her phone. A glance told her they were from Samson and all more or less said the same thing. KaPo had intercepted phone calls and texts that suggested three separate teams were looking for them. They knew the model, colour and registration of the car and they were aware of the arrangement to leave it at the supermarket. Her only thought, as she slammed the car into reverse, was that the Russian teams may have staked out the larger Alko 1000 to the north of the town on the A3, because maybe that was where they had been meant to leave the Passat.

Naji had the map on his phone. ‘Go right!’ he shouted.

She dropped her phone in her lap and accelerated away, just as a silver saloon appeared in her mirror. At least one member of the Russian team had been waiting in the car park. They had no distance to go, but the pursuing car was already hard on their tail, trying to nudge the rear of the Passat so as to send it out of control on one of the grassy areas on either side. She anticipated the manoeuvre and braked sharply, letting a Mazda with two men inside – the passenger on a phone – shoot ahead of them. ‘Where do I go? Which way?’ she shouted.

‘Left at the end.’

She took off across the grass, causing the Passat to leap into the air when its wheels met a hidden bump. Yet this didn’t stop them, and she was able to cross the rough ground and rejoin the road before a row of lime trees. Now the street was more confined, with buildings on both sides. Another car, a black Mercedes SUV with alloy wheels and darkened glass, appeared from their right and aimed straight for them. She swerved and steered round the back of the SUV. Naji let out a whoop of admiration.

‘Doesn’t feel like there’s a border near here!’ she shouted.

They reached a group of one-storey Communist-era apartment blocks. Naji shouted ‘Left! Left! Left!’ But a third vehicle was heading towards them from the right and she lost concentration for a split second, hitting the kerb and causing the front near-side tyre to burst with a loud pop. But they had momentum still, and there, not a hundred metres away, was a gull-wing canopy straddling the road and a lowered barrier. She put her foot down. The tyre made a rumbling noise, but she reached a good speed. They flashed past three low white brick buildings from which men issued, some with guns, all of them running towards the border post. On the Latvian side of this normally sleepy crossing they knew nothing of what was occurring, however the menace of the three cars in pursuit and the distress of their quarry were plain and they raised their guns. The barrier was two seconds away. Suddenly it rose and the Passat sailed through and came to a halt a few metres on. It was immediately surrounded by men with guns pointing, not at Naji and Anastasia, but across the border to the cars that had pulled up in a line about twenty metres away, all of which was to the astonishment of an elderly tractor driver in a straw hat who had just crossed over from Estonia with a ram tethered to the front bar of his trailer.

Anastasia rested her forehead on the wheel and took deep breaths. Naji rubbed her shoulder. ‘That is last time I am your passenger,’ he said, echoing her complaint of the evening before. ‘Here, you have missed calls.’ He handed her the phone.

Samson had phoned. She called him back. ‘We’re through,’ she said.

‘I’m relieved. Tomas Sikula is there to meet you.’ He paused. ‘You’ll need rest before the funeral. Conversation may not be such a good idea.’

‘Of course,’ she said. She understood exactly what he was saying.

The second call was from Dr James Carrew. He’d just sent a text. ‘Emergency surgery in progress to correct heart irregularity. Situation became critical – we had to move quickly.’

She rang him, but got his message service, and there was no assistant at his office number.

Chapter 26

Funeral in Tallinn

Samson arrived at the headquarters of Kaitsepolitseiamet promptly at 10.30 a.m., an appointment that allowed Tomas Sikula time to travel by helicopter from