Pavel was once more the package that was to be delivered.
They reached the safe house more than an hour over schedule, after having taken the third route and spent the majority of the time running anti-surveillance drills and double-checking that a tracker hadn’t been placed on the vehicles surreptitiously.
The cars pulled into a large interior carport on the ground floor underneath the main building, he heard the electric shutters close behind him and then the garage was temporarily in darkness. He was aware of bodies, the Fisherman’s team, moving, organising and, in the words of the tall grey haired driver, they were “locking down”. Pavel was led out of the car, past stone-cold faces, up a set of wooden stairs and into a beautifully furnished lounge area.
He barely had time to take in the expansive sofas, traditional hearth, bookcases and dining table before he was once again led up a second set of stairs, this time to a landing with multiple rooms leading off from it. Downstairs, he could hear the tall, grey-haired driver barking orders at the rest of the team, something about a “Crisis Debrief… NOW.”
“This way,” said the Fisherman, directing him to the last bedroom at the end of the corridor where a young Italian-looking man was waiting on guard. It was the same man who had opened the garage when the team had arrived.
“This is Luca. He’ll be with you while you are our guest. If you need anything, you go through Luca,” said the Fisherman. “Make yourself comfortable, get some rest, we have a busy few days ahead of us.”
Pavel looked around the room. It was well-furnished, spacious and felt… safe. There was even a small tray of food on a platter for him, an Austrian supper of bread, cheese and smoked sausage. He thought if he ate he would throw up everywhere.
“Thank you. I will,” he said, but his voice didn’t sound like his own, it sounded as drained and exhausted as he felt.
“Try to put what happened tonight out of your mind. We will deal with it. While you are here, you are safe,” said the Fisherman.
A nod from both of them and they left him in peace. Pavel sat down on the bed, then laid his body down and within minutes he was asleep.
When Lyth went into the lounge that was being used as the de-briefing room, the conversation was in full flow. Wolf Beckwith, as Team Leader, was adjudicating and controlling the flow of information.
“Okay,” he said, sipping at his mug of coffee. “What do we know? What are the facts about what just happened?”
“Minimum six-man team, we took four of them out, so now they are much depleted. They had Tac-Shotguns, so they weren’t expecting the level of resistance that we put up otherwise they’d have carried heavier artillery,” said Jax. She had changed out of her hooker’s mini dress and was now in jeans, baggy jumper and hiking boots. The team had put away the MP5K’s but still carried Glocks in their covert carry holsters on their right hips, even inside the house. They were, after all, on war footing.
“Yeah, their tactics were a little rough around the edges,” agreed Tanner.
“Was this Trillium?” asked Wolf
“I don’t think so, at least not directly. I heard Arab voices, plus they weren’t clinical in their tactics like we know Trillium agents are, at least the ones we’ve encountered in the past,” replied Tanner.
Lyth raised an eyebrow at the mention of hearing Arabic and his mind immediately went to the man hiding in the shadows by the vehicle barricade. But for now he kept his own counsel.
“So what? Could be sub-contractors? Possibly, but it seems unlikely given the setting of Austria. I’d have thought Russian or German maybe… but Arab mercenaries seems unlikely? Okay, what about pre-extraction, in the build-up phase… did we spot anything?” asked Wolf.
“I saw nothing on the days leading up to this, not even a sniff. But they knew our routes. That wasn’t random. So if it wasn’t surveillance on us, if it wasn’t a tracker on the vehicles, then that can only mean that they were given the information beforehand,” said Luca, coming down the stairs. With his Principal safe and secured he could now, temporarily, turn his attention to the ambush and what had happened.
“A leak in our system? Someone further up the chain of command?” said Jax.
“We kept the details close about which routes,” said Lyth.
Jax nodded. “Okay, even if the routes are secured, this team knew that we were in Austria and knew what we were doing. That means an information leak, what… in the Prism?”
“Possibly, but that’s an investigation for another day when we are out of this,” said Lyth. The gravity of what had just been said stunned them all into momentary silence. A leak inside the Prism was just unthinkable!
“Does this mean that the safe house is compromised, too? Is it safe to stay or do we bug out?” asked Tanner.
The only people who knew about the safe house were those connected to the extraction part of the operation; that meant Lyth himself, Beckwith, Tanner, Luca, Alvarez and Jax. That was the way that SCALPEL operated, on a strict compartmentalisation of information, so no one on the next tier up at the Prism would have known about that. The team looked around at each other. They knew and trusted each other with their lives, but in the espionage game there was always the very real possibility of betrayal. It went with the territory.
“I’m going to call it that, for now, we stay in place,” said Lyth, looking at each of them in turn. “Tomorrow, we can start looking for a back-up location if we need to, but for now we hold our position. If an attack comes tonight… well, we protect Sailfish and hold our ground for as long as we can. We still have the emergency escape protocol in place for Sailfish and that still stands currently…”
Then Lyth felt a constant buzz in his coat pocket. All heads turned to him as he pulled the smartphone out. The screen name said Jose, which was the work name that Alvarez was using. Of course, he had been trying to get in touch with the Spaniard on the journey here, but Alvarez hadn’t been picking up or answering his messages about the situation with Sabina. In all the chaos of the attack and the fire-fight, it had been pushed temporarily to one side.
Lyth swiped the green phone icon to one side and said, “Jose, good of you to get back in touch.”
The voice, when it spoke, was thick, basso and menacing. It was definitely not Alvarez.
“We have the girl. We will be in touch.”
Click. The call ended.