A small group of young twenty-somethings stumbled excitedly past the all-night café at the end of an enjoyable and alcohol-fuelled night of fun, looking like they did not have a care in the world. Jostling with each other and cracking jokes, they barely registered the man sitting patiently at one of the outside tables with a look of sheer boredom, while tapping a single euro coin against its glass surface. John Shroder paused in his tapping to watch the group pass before resuming his boring coin play. He had been sitting here waiting for his Interpol contact for several hours, and although such a wait was to be expected due to the last-minute request for a meeting, he was becoming extremely restless.
After receiving a reply from his contact on the inside, he had left the apartment – and Carter, who was still waiting for his message from Winters – and caught a flight to Nuremberg in southern Germany, followed by a short taxi ride to the chosen meeting place at this café. During the preceding hours he had resisted any urge to call his two new partners, as agreed, but as the time rolled on he was finding it increasingly difficult to hold off from making a call. His main cause for concern was not Harker, because the man had been in enough scrapes to know how to look after himself; David Carter was another thing altogether. An unknown quantity with little experience in such matters, and because Carter had been assigned the most delicate and dangerous job of all three of them it was making the MI6 agent anxious. It was very likely he was walking straight into another of Winters’s traps and it was this thought that was playing on Shroder’s mind the most. Still, the man had guts to even accept his ‘mission’ – as the ex-don had kept calling it – but the idea of him walking unprepared into a trap was something that was now gnawing at Shroder’s innards.
It was with this growing sense of foreboding that Shroder was preoccupied when a hand suddenly tapped him on the shoulder.
‘John,’ a voice said quietly, and Shroder looked back to see the one face he had been waiting for since his arrival here.
‘Andrew,’ Shroder replied, standing up to shake his contact’s hand. ‘Good to see you, and thanks for meeting me.’
Andrew Campus gave Shroder’s shoulder a friendly squeeze and then sat down opposite him, letting out a deep sigh. ‘Sorry for taking so long, but you caught me in the middle of something.’
‘Not a problem, Andrew. I know you’re busy… Nothing too hectic, I hope?’
‘You know the life, John. When is it not?’ Campus replied with a wry smile. ‘There was a flag raised at Interpol, regarding a fugitive. A man had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and his wallet contained ID for the man we’ve been looking for, so off I went.’
‘Was it a solid lead?’
‘My friend, the only thing solid about it was the turd the drunk bastard had shat in his pants.’
‘What?’ Shroder replied, with a confused laugh.
‘Turned out that the wino’s day job is picking pockets, and by complete coincidence he’d lifted the fugitive’s wallet earlier in the day and then proceeded to get blind drunk on the contents before being picked up by some local police working the night shift. What were the odds? I tell you, life is without doubt stranger than fiction.’
At forty-two, Andrew Campus was a seasoned Interpol veteran and one of the few to have worked within the organization for so long. Born and raised in the UK, initially serving in the London Met, this man with short brown hair and the physique of a military drill instructor had jumped at the chance to transfer to Interpol. It was not a conventional career path but Campus came from a police family which had served for generations, and their well-established contacts within law enforcement were something he had made the most of. He had wound up eventually in the narcotics and human-trafficking section of the organization, where he had excelled, and this was the very reason Shroder had contacted him.
‘That’s a shit outcome,’ Shroder observed and added, grinning, ‘literally.’
Campus laughed out loud and, in doing so, released some of the pent-up frustration of a futile night’s work. ‘I tell you, John, even when we do catch a big fish, another larger, meaner and more violent one takes its place. Makes me feel like I’m forever on a damn treadmill.’
‘Actually, it’s one of those big fish I’m currently interested in,’ Shroder explained, wanting now to get to the point, given how many hours he had been waiting.
‘Who?’
‘Jacob Winters.’
The very name elicited a spark of enthusiasm in Campus’s eyes, and the Interpol agent leant forward cautiously. ‘I know him – or at least of him.’
‘I need to know anything you have,’ Shroder prompted, encouraged by this answer.
Campus mulled over the request, then without any hesitation in his voice, he folded his arms and sucked in a deep breath. ‘He pops up here, then disappears there. In fact we’ve taken to calling him the mole.’
‘Do you have anything other than a nickname?’
‘He’s a genuine man of mystery,’ Campus declared, stroking his bottom lip. ‘Appeared from nowhere some months back with a fully operational syndicate that has established links with most of the major crime families in Europe – including the Russians, and you know how ruthless they are. He’s heavily into narcotics, mostly crack cocaine and heroin, as well as the usual bread and butter of organized crime: prostitution, gambling and extortion. The interesting thing is that, from what we can tell, he has no criminal history up until recently, and no previous indication of a budding organization either. Like I said, he just popped up, and astonishingly quickly took over rackets everywhere, and made them his own like in a bloody cooperate takeover.’
This was nothing that Shroder did not already know and he found himself edging towards acquiring information on the man rather than his deeds. ‘When did he first appear?’
‘You should know that better than me, John, as it was your office that was the first to clock him.’
‘Really?’ Shroder replied, genuinely surprised at the fact.
‘Yes, some German national was offering arms – and not any old calibre, but nuclear. The seller got entrapped in a MI6 sting operation and gave up the Winters’s name as being the supplier. Of course, that’s just gossip, nothing official.’
‘Always is,’ Shroder said, now extremely curious. ‘What happened to him?’
‘He died in custody. I don’t know the details but his arrest led to revealing Winters’s links in the narcotics web and all the other lovely trades he’s involved in. That’s where I came in, and Interpol have been building a case against him ever since.’
‘A case?’ Shroder spluttered, almost choking on the words. ‘Something as big as that is going to take years to put together.’
Campus said nothing at first and just raised his eyebrows, but as Shroder craned forward with an insistent expression, the Interpol agent began to nod. ‘There is something else…something you may want to see.’
Without another word, he got out of his seat and began making his way across the road. Shroder dropped a couple of euros onto the coffee table and followed him with a renewed skip in his step.
They did not need to go far, just fifty metres away from the all night-café to a quaint-looking residential building with a red wooden door, whereupon Campus pulled out a Yale key from his pocket and let himself in.
‘This is convenient,’ Shroder remarked, surprised by the proximity of whatever Campus wanted to show him.
‘Why do you think I asked you to meet me at that café?’ Campus replied before ushering Shroder inside and then onwards into a small lounge located at the front of the house. ‘I live here.’
The room was exactly what one would expect of a single working man. There were no paintings on the walls and just a three-seat black leather sofa with side tables supporting lamps on either side of it, while in the corner a new sixty-inch HD Panasonic flat-screen television on a bracket protruded from the wall.
‘Love what you’ve done with the place,’ Shroder commented sarcastically at the décor, or lack of it.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Campus said dismissively with his eyelids drooping, ‘the rest of the house is a lot nicer, believe me.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Shroder replied as Campus reached behind the sofa and pulled out a small cardboard box that had been taped shut. He placed it on the sofa and then pulled a narrow switchblade from his pocket, which he tossed over to Shroder.
‘Go on.’ He nodded. ‘Open it and see for yourself.’
Shroder paused and shot him a wary look.
‘You’re getting skittish in your old age, John. Don’t worry, it won’t bite.’
With a shrug, Shroder cautiously made his way over to the brown box and flicked open the switchblade before picking up the container and gently shaking it.
‘I warn you, it’s not pretty,’ Campus cautioned him.
Shroder glanced back and offered an unconcerned smile. ‘Takes a lot to get under my skin,’ he said, and began to cut away at the red tape covering the box’s corners. ‘Damn it, Andrew, how long have you known me?’
Shroder felt something hard being prodded into his lower back and instantly his whole body went stiff, before collapsing in a heap on the floor – as, above him, Campus brandished a blue plastic Taser in his left hand.
‘Not long enough, it would seem, John.’