Jéjé pulled into a car park beneath a tree, about seventy metres from the black Mercedes-Benz SUV.
‘Doesn’t look like he’s parking,’ said Templar, pulling fold-out binoculars from the inside pocket of his insulated windbreaker. ‘Passenger door is opening.’
Jéjé got out of the Toyota Camry that they’d bought from a youth hostel in Batumi two days earlier and he relieved himself in the trees that surrounded Tbilisi’s Lokomotivi Stadium. He and Templar had been tasked with discovering what Lotus was doing, and who he was speaking to. They’d spent two nights in the Las Vegas of the Black Sea—Batumi—watching Lotus gamble on the blackjack tables, become drunk and then disappear upstairs to the casino’s hotel with a prostitute in tow. Then they’d followed his chauffeured car, the black Mercedes, from Batumi to the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi.
‘Lotus is getting out of the vehicle,’ said Templar, binoculars still at his eyes. ‘He’s heading for the gardens.’
‘I’ll take it,’ said Jéjé, zipping up. ‘He might make you from the casino.’
Jéjé grabbed a Canon D5 SLR camera from the back seat of the Camry and checked the burner phone he’d bought at Batumi International, to ensure it had charge. He aimed for a secondary gate into the park that skirted the stadium, and fell in with a group of Georgian families enjoying the winter sunshine. He wandered like a tourist down the western side of the park, taking a few shots of the gardens and the substantial fountains. The gardens had a north–south rectangular layout ending in a World War II memorial, and Jéjé walked along a hedgerow that gave him a view to the imposing monument. Fifty metres away he saw the tall but wide form of Lotus emerge from the trees on the western boundary and cross the park’s central avenue. He was wearing a black naval pea jacket over a pale blue woollen jumper, and his signature tweed trilby hat.
Jéjé took shots of the trees and fountains, and from the corner of his eye watched Lotus make for a park bench by a line of topiary, where a younger man in a beige windbreaker was sitting. Jéjé moved to the avenue of topiary and sat at another bench, where he pretended to be sorting through shots on his camera. He was now eighty metres diagonally from Lotus, and when he looked up he watched the beige-windbreaker man’s hand drop to the park bench, and Lotus’s hand reaching for the same spot.
Jéjé angled the display screen on the back of the camera, so he could see where it was pointed even as it sat on his lap, and took some shots of Lotus and his friend.
The meeting ended, and Lotus and his friend walked in opposite directions: Lotus away from the entrance he’d arrived through, and the windbreaker man away from the memorial end of Vake Park.
Jéjé deleted his shots and fished the burner phone from his pocket to call Templar. ‘He met with someone. European male, late thirties, dark blond hair, wearing a beige windbreaker. He’s moving away from the memorial, Lotus is walking to the other side of the park.’
‘We have Lotus covered – there’s a tracker on his Mercedes,’ said Templar. ‘Let me know where the POI is going.’
The windbreaker man turned abruptly right from the central avenue and walked down a side path. Jéjé stayed back, building his legend as a tourist, and kept within fifty metres of the man as they moved towards the north-west end of the park.
Jéjé texted Templar: Heading for lion statue.
Templar’s reply was immediate: Copy.
The man in the beige windbreaker walked briskly and Jéjé evaluated his posture as being military or intelligence. Before reaching the lion statue, the person of interest veered to the left, through a small forest. They walked past the Caucasus French School and emerged on a street, where the man in the beige windbreaker walked straight to an idling silver BMW and slid into the back seat.
Jéjé keyed the phone. ‘Our POI just got in a silver BMW X7, heading east. He’s a passenger.’
‘Across from you,’ said Templar.
Jéjé looked across the nature strip and saw Templar sitting in the Camry on the other side of the road.
Walking to the Camry, Jéjé got in and said, ‘He’s going the other way.’
‘Not any more he’s not,’ Templar replied, looking in the side mirror.
The silver BMW accelerated past them, having just done a U-turn, and Templar pulled into traffic behind it.
As they formed a tail, Jéjé reached for the laptop on the back seat and opened it at the screen they’d been watching since the previous night: a map with a blinking red light, showing the whereabouts of Lotus’s black Mercedes.
‘Lotus heading east,’ said Jéjé, aware that the tracker they’d attached to the Mercedes in Batumi would transmit for another twelve hours.
‘He’s not going home,’ said Templar; the men knew that Lotus’s family lived in a mansion on the west side of Tbilisi.
‘Airport?’ suggested Jéjé.
‘Or a brothel,’ said Templar.
As he said it, the BMW they were tailing slowed and turned right opposite Lokomotivi Stadium, and Templar followed suit.
‘He didn’t go far from home,’ said Jéjé, as the BMW abruptly turned left across the side street and stopped in front of a security gate, the driver thrusting a swipe card out the window as the French team swept past.
‘That’s the Russian embassy,’ said Templar, laughing as he accelerated past.
Jéjé shook his head. ‘If these people didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.’
■
They followed the tracker and arrived at Tbilisi International Airport two minutes before 5 p.m.
Templar took his turn tailing Lotus, leaving Jéjé in the car.
Lotus was not in the departures hall, so Templar pulled on his blue baseball cap and wandered to the security screening area and looked through to the airside section. It was a mid-sized, single-terminal airport with only five gates. He moved away from the security screening zone and checked the departures board: two flights imminent, one to Ankara at 17.35, the other to Kiev at 17.45. Templar thought about pushing through the security screening section but he didn’t want the attention when he tried to get out of the locked-down area. Maybe he could find a service door and leave inconspicuously—he’d done it before—but there was a high chance he’d be caught, and this operation had to remain clandestine.
He was about to move back to the screening desks when he saw a movement from the left of his vision. Someone was leaving the male toilets, putting on his tweed trilby as he walked.
Lotus.
Templar put his eyes back on the departure board and let Lotus pass him. The Georgian walked to the screening gates, laid his briefcase on the conveyor belt and held his arms out as the security woman waved her detector wand. Then he sauntered into the airside section and Templar took up a position where he could see Lotus’s disappearing back. He lost sight of him briefly while a family group stood and argued, and then caught a glimpse of Lotus taking a seat at the lounge in front of Gate 2.
Templar looked up at the departures board as he walked out of the terminal. Lotus had just been handed something by the Russian and now he was going to Kiev.