The three men walked across the wide expanse of the hotel’s brown and white marble floor, admiring the elegant golden staircase and the grand chandeliers along the way, and headed to the ornate reception desk to check into their rooms.
The security detail assigned to Professor Pavel Zeman consisted of one Personal Protection Officer, one Personal Escort Officer and one locally contracted security driver (complete with S-Class Mercedes) to ferry them around. By contrast to the tall, lanky academic, his two bodyguards were stocky and bullet-like in their appearance and the designer suits that both men wore did nothing to hide their bulk or their aggressive demeanour.
Pavel Zeman was tired and wanted nothing more than to get to his room and relax. They had flown Swiss Airlines Oslo to Paris and then had taken the connecting flight to Vienna. Thankfully, the bodyguards had let him have a seat to himself, but they had sat close by, watching. Pavel decided they were part security and part informers, ready to report anything suspicious to the Serbian Counter-Intelligence Chief at Trillium.
The Hotel Vienna Grand was an institution; a blessed breath of fresh air that was reminiscent of the old Vienna and that these days was in constant battle with the more prevalent series of chain-hotels in the city. Constructed in 1862 and officially opened in 1870, the hotel had quickly acquired a reputation for luxury and for being the epicentre of Viennese social life for the affluent citizens of the city during the early part of the last century. Strauss had played there in the Grand Ballroom, Presidents, Prime Ministers and Royalty had been its honoured guests, movie stars had once been seen in its luxurious dining areas and bars. Its only blight was the ten years it had been forced to close when the Russians had taken control of that part of the city in 1945.
His parents had spent their honeymoon here all those years ago and he remembered coming here with them when he was a boy, his sister only a toddler. It had a special place in his memory and it was his preferred hotel whenever he stayed in Vienna.
While the bodyguards were filling in the forms for the room, Pavel took the opportunity to quietly scan the ground floor and lounge area of the hotel. He wondered if the Fisherman’s people were here, watching, observing and waiting? Maybe they were or maybe they weren’t. He couldn’t spot anything unusual, but then he supposed that was the point, wasn’t it? They had skills that he would never be able to master. But all he could see was well-dressed business executives and wealthy tourists having evening cocktails at the bars and seated areas.
With the formalities completed, he was escorted to the elevator that took him to his suite on the fifth floor. The bodyguards, an intense pair of Hungarians who went by the names of Gergo and Ervin, refused the service of a hotel porter and instead took care of the travel cases themselves; one shared between them and one for the Principal. Their suites were situated at the end of the fifth floor corridor and had been chosen specifically by the bodyguards to provide exclusivity and maximum natural security. Anyone wishing to get to the Principal’s room had to go past their rooms first, both of which were covered by CCTV that was linked to the bodyguards’ smartphones.
Pavel swiped the key card to his room, letting his Personal Protection Officer check the room first for any threats, before letting himself into his suite. Solitude at last. He smiled; it was as he remembered it. The chairs and sofas decorated subtly in light beige, the king-sized bed, the period furniture and all set against the backdrop of the terrace that overlooked the city.
A host of memories came flooding back and for a moment he was rocked by the emotions that had resurfaced just from stepping into a familiar room from his past existence. He lay on the bed, still fully clothed, stared at the ceiling and smiled. It was a liberating feeling, because for the first time in what seemed like years, he felt as if he wasn’t being watched, even for those few moments or, luxury of luxuries, hours overnight.
On the island, there was an endless series of security protocols, CCTV, security personnel, the monitoring of telephone conversations and even email traffic. On the island, there was a culture of fear and paranoia. Even on this trip to Vienna there were the bodyguards, brusque but professional with him, who were partly protectors and partly surveillance. He had felt trapped, suppressed and smothered.
But here, now, lying on this luxurious bed in this beautiful hotel suite, he felt free, like a weight had been lifted. And then out of nowhere it came… the tears, the emotion and the release of pent-up stress. He turned his face into the pillow, buried it deep and wept silently.
“Sailfish has gone complete,” said Luca into the concealed radio mike.
Tom Lyth sat in the rear of an Audi A7 across the road from the hotel. In the dark and with the tinted windows, no one would even know that he was there. He had a concealed earpiece in and was listening to Luca’s running commentary. “Gone complete” meant that Sailfish and his bodyguards were safely situated in their rooms and would probably stay there until the morning.
Luca had been on watch inside the hotel for the past hour. He was dressed as a tourist visiting Vienna, complete with a day-sack, camera and guide books and he had been perched in the lounge area, adjacent to the main doors and reception desk and which gave him a perfect vantage point to watch the comings and goings in the hotel. Three coffees later, he had felt that his cover was starting to run thin when the trio of men had arrived just before seven pm. He had watched them present themselves to the girl on the reception desk and go through the formalities of checking in. The bodyguards looked alert and on it, thought Luca. Sailfish looked exhausted.
“Roger that,” said Lyth into the microphone on the radio. “End-op.”
Luca gave two clicks on the ‘press to talk’ button to acknowledge that he understood, the surveillance was ended for the night and that he was on the way back to the car. Lyth turned off the radio, removed the earpiece and stared up at the light in the window of the hotel. The rest of the team were at the safe house in Kapfenburg organising everything, ready for the next day’s operation.
But Tom Lyth had wanted to be on the ground and as near to his agent as he could be. He felt he owed it to Sailfish to be with him every step of the way and if that meant sitting in a car into the freezing night, then so be it. This was the part of any operation where he felt the most settled. They had planned and had everything in place, so really there was nothing more that they could do in this pre-operational fugue. Tomorrow would be when they earned their money hard and good. It would either go exactly according to plan or they would have to improvise, but they would never fail, that wasn’t in SCALPEL’s remit.
The driver’s side door opened up and the slim figure of Luca lowered itself in. He removed the baseball cap that he had been wearing, the covert earpiece and began to unhook the radio concealed in a harness beneath his shirt.
“How did they look?” asked Lyth.
“Sailfish looked okay, not great but okay. He looked like he could sleep for a week,” replied Luca, giving a surveillance operator’s honest assessment of the situation.
“And the bodyguards?”
“Switched on definitely, but then again they’ve only been on this task for less than twenty-four hours, let’s see what they are like when routine has set in.”
“Were they armed?”
Luca thought about that, replaying in his mind the details of the two stocky, muscle-bound men. “Certainly not firearms, anyway. Perhaps something smaller, something hand-to-hand combat related, knuckle-dusters, batons, that kind of thing.”
“Were you seen? Any risk of compromise?”
Luca pulled a pained expression in the rear view mirror, as if his Operational Commander had insulted him. “No, I was just a tourist stretching out the last of his money on some coffees. I was fine.”
The Fisherman nodded, satisfied. Luca was a good operator, there was very little chance of him ever being ‘made’; the man was a human chameleon, but the unexpected was never far away on a mission.
“Is everything ready for tomorrow, boss?” asked Luca, starting the engine and then moving the car onto the main road. “Will the girl come through for us?”
Sabina would be taking the overnight train from Berlin and getting into Vienna’s Central Station at around seven in the morning. After that, she would take a taxi direct to the Hotel Vienna Grand, find herself a table and wait for her brother to come down from his room so that she could complete the facial recognition. Lyth had tasked the Spaniard, Alvarez, to be her shadow and carry out protective surveillance on her throughout the journey, making sure that she reached the hotel safely and on time.
Would she come through for them? Yes, he thought she probably would. If she didn’t, or something went wrong, well, they would just have to improvise and adapt. That was what SCALPEL did best.
“She’ll be fine,” said Lyth finally. “Now let’s get back to the safe house. I have to update the Seer.”
His field report to the Seer would be concise and factual, as was his way when he was in the middle of an operation. No field operative likes to hand over all the information straight away to the people sat behind the safety of a desk and Lyth was no exception. He also recognised that the Seer knew and trusted him enough to accept that whatever information the Fisherman was passing her was on a need-to-know basis. Besides, the Seer wanted the hard intelligence data, not the sundry nuts and bolts of running an operation on the ground. That, she left to her trusted spymaster.
It was over three hours’ drive back to the safe house, a rented wooden alpine chalet built into the slopes of the Veitsch-Brunnalm ski area near Kapfenburg. The chalet was surrounded by forests and mountains and allowed the SCALPEL team the seclusion and anonymity that was a prerequisite for a covert safe house. The downside was that if they were discovered, they were pretty much isolated and would have to defend themselves vigorously until they could bug out safely.
Lyth had the top room of the chalet, a large, traditionally furnished room that gave a stunning view of the forest over the rise. Tomorrow, the room would be handed over to Sailfish and the rest of the property would be put into lockdown – nothing in and nothing out – until SCALPEL were ready to evacuate their agent overseas. It would be days, perhaps more than a week, of finishing the final phases of the operation and conducting Sailfish’s immediate de-briefing. Sometimes, mused Lyth, the hardest part of being a spy was to have the ability to sit rock still and do nothing.