Two separate telephone calls had been made to two different numbers, each with a Moscow dialling code, within about an hour of the events that had taken place in Cambrils. The responses from the recipients, one based at the new GU headquarters at Khodinka airfield, and the other some distance further out from the centre of Moscow at the SVR building at Yazenevo, were identical in substance and remarkably similar in tone. Both superior officers were incredulous that their team of four highly-trained operatives, sent out, respectively, one to snatch and the other to kill, an elderly English scientist, had failed to achieve their objective.
The SVR senior officer had been particularly scathing when he learned that not only had his men been outwitted and outgunned by a combined team of at least twelve American and British agents – the SVR operatives would obviously never admit that they actually only faced two armed men on the streets of the Spanish city, but claiming to be outnumbered three-to-one at least made their abject failure explicable in terms any military officer could understand – but they had also been forced to surrender both their pistols and their passports. Losing their weapons was one thing but being deprived of their passports generated a veritable mountain of paperwork that greatly increased the irritation factor at Yazenevo and served to significantly deepen the depth of the ocean of shit in which they were going to find themselves.
The upshot of it all was that coincidentally both the four-man GU team and the four-man SVR team discovered they were occupying neighbouring seats in the economy class section of the same aircraft as it headed for Moscow. On arrival, each group was collected by a uniformed driver and guard in a small van and driven away for separate protracted, pointed and painful debriefing sessions.
In the end, all eight men walked away, which was a rather better result than any of them had realistically been expecting, but they all knew that their chances of advancement or promotion in their chosen organisations had catastrophically slipped from ‘good’ to somewhere between ‘nil’ and ‘extremely unlikely’.
Nobody was going to be able to debrief the surviving Syrian hitman, Marfan, for some considerable time. He was in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Tarragona having so far endured two emergency operations to repair the damage that the nine-millimetre bullet, fired at almost point-blank range, had caused to his stomach and other internal organs. His prognosis was good, but even when he was released from the ICU he would still be in hospital for some weeks.
When he could talk, no doubt the Spanish police would wish to interview him about what had happened on the streets of Cambrils. They would also be interested in learning his name and nationality, because the only thing the hospital staff had found in his pockets when he was pulled out of the back of the emergency ambulance was a billfold containing a couple of hundred euros. No passport or driving licence or any other sort of identification, and no indication of how he might have arrived in Spain, unless he had been either the driver or a passenger in the abandoned Vauxhall on English plates that had been right next to him on the street when the medics had arrived. There had been no identification on either of the dead bodies that had been recovered from the scene.
Even that looked like it wasn’t going anywhere. The Spanish had obviously checked with the British authorities to identify the owner of the Vauxhall, but that hadn’t helped. Their records stated that the vehicle had been the subject of a private sale for cash about a month earlier, according to the previous keeper, but the new owner hadn’t bothered registering it and the name and address he’d given the seller – who had been questioned by the British police about the vehicle – both appeared to be false.
They hadn’t got any idea of his nationality because when Marfan did finally regain consciousness he had refused to say a word to anyone. The doctors tried talking to him in Spanish, obviously, as well as Catalan, French, German and English, which exhausted their combined linguistic repertoire, but the man didn’t respond to any of them. None of them spoke Arabic, but even if a speaker of that language had been available, Marfan would not have responded, because although he had been badly injured he certainly wasn’t stupid. The only option he had, one he knew almost from the first moment when he woke in the unfamiliar surroundings of the hospital’s ICU, was to say nothing to anybody.
In fact, and as anybody familiar with the murky workings of the world of intelligence and the even murkier world of contract killing would know perfectly well, the Syrian could not and would not say anything useful to anybody, simply because he daren’t. If he did let slip anything relating to what he was actually doing in the Spanish seaside town, or who had employed him, or almost anything about his mission, then not only would the Spanish have probable cause to prosecute him for something, but his employer would almost certainly take steps to ensure that he said nothing else. To anyone. Ever.
Lying in a hospital bed would make Marfan a static and helpless target, and if by chance he was prosecuted and ended up in prison, he would still be a static target but this time behind bars, and the kind of people who employed contract killers to do their work for them tended to have a vindictive nature, long memories and an extremely long reach.
When the Syrian was sufficiently compos mentis to work all this out for himself, he made sure that his silence appeared to be because he spoke none of the languages the doctors had used. And if and when the Spanish police did turn up at his bedside with an Arabic-speaker, he would simply claim to have been an innocent bystander – despite the arguable circumstantial evidence against this suggestion – or to have suffered traumatic amnesia and to have no recollection whatsoever of what happened in the hours, or probably days, leading up to him being shot. That way, once he was released from the tender care of the Spanish medical system, he might be able to walk out of the hospital and just keep going because ultimately he genuinely was a victim: he had been shot rather than having shot anyone himself. And after that, he would say nothing voluntarily, and make sure that certain people he knew were aware that he was keeping silent. If that worked, he might just manage to stay alive.
Whichever way you looked at it the Syrian at was a dead end.