Run Around by Brian Freemantle

Author:Brian Freemantle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-10-15T11:34:36.054000+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

With his habitual and trained caution, Vasili Zenin arrived in Geneva early and by train, as the first rehearsal for what would be necessary later. During its final approaches to Geneva, through the outskirts of the city, the Russian gazed from the carriage windows to the streets outside and occasionally below, watching the rush hour traffic and confirming his earlier impression of the uselessness of a car for his escape. The dossier of complaint against the Soviet embassy in general and Yuri Ivanovich Lyudin in particular was going to be very extensive.

From the Cornavin terminal, Zenin walked in the direction against the clogged traffic along the one-way Rue des Terreaux du Temple and on the side furthest from the café he had specified in the unsigned note to Sulafeh Nabulsi. It was just opening, black-aproned waiters re-arranging stacked chairs around freshly washed pavement tables: three were pulling from its sprung housing the striped canvas canopy to form a protective roof over the outside area. It had started a bright day, despite being autumn, and Zenin hoped the weather would hold so they could later sit at a kerbside table: it would be easier to run, if he had to run, from somewhere already out in the open rather than from inside the more easily sealed café interior.

In the Rue Bautte there was a much smaller place, more a bar and tabac than a café, already open for early morning workers. On the pavement there were three minute tables, each bordered by plastic-ribbed chairs, but Zenin went inside, wanting concealment now. He ordered coffee and from a bench directly against the fronting window looked across at the designated meeting place, studying everything with proper professional alertness. If the note to the woman had been intercepted or found – or if she were not the committed zealot she was supposed to be but some sort of bait – then that afternoon he would be walking into a trap, a trap at this moment being primed and set.

He watched the waiters individually, intent upon establishing that each moved about the café and the tables with accustomed familiarity, with none showing an awkwardness to hint at hurriedly drafted-in counterintelligence officers. Satisfied all the waiters were genuine, Zenin extended the examination, looking for any buildup of loitering groups of Watchers. Or maintenance tents or vans in which they might have been hidden. When he failed to locate any he sought out parked but enclosed vehicles which could have disguised mobile communication centres from which his encirclement could have been co-ordinated once he got to the café. Again there was nothing.

Finally reassured, Zenin left the bar but did not rejoin the Rue des Terreaux du Temple, unwilling to risk association a second time with a street upon which he was later to return for a third. Instead he left the area along the Rue de Mandement, picking up a tramcar at the first available stop to take him to the quais, instinctively checking for pursuit and finding none.

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