The Paper Factory (Michael Berg Book 1) Read online

  “Jacket, shirt, jeans.”

  “And in the pharmacy?”

  “We couldn’t see.” Before she could react, he wrapped his right hand around hers, under the table, and tightly squeezed her knuckles together. Her face went white.

  “We pay you a lot of money to watch Berg. Do a better job. You understand?”

  Svetlana was finding it difficult to breathe, the pain was so excruciating.

  “Oh God, please stop. Yes. Yes. I understand.”

  “Tell your team to ease off. Keep the tracker operating. Call me if Berg moves.”

  Svetlana watched him depart. She felt as though she’d been touched by death. She traced the knuckles and sinews of her right hand, checking to ensure that nothing had been more permanently damaged. Is working for these people really worth it, in spite of all the money they’re paying us? She picked up her communicator.

  “Kutuzov, Zhukov. Kutuzov, Zhukov. Stand down. Repeat, stand down.”

  What the hell is the dangerous bastard up to?

  Chapter 18

  Rykov entered the hotel lobby as Anatoli Revnik looked on. Anatoli was keeping an eye open for Berg. Svetlana would call him immediately if there was any movement on the tracker. She’d use her left hand to do it. He had no personal animosity towards her. In his experience, when people screwed up it was better not to assume that they would learn from their mistake. It was safer to give them something to remind them not to do it again.

  Extreme pain was the best reminder. He and Anatoli had worked together for a long time. Before they’d gone private, Anatoli Revnik had reported to him as corporal in the FSB. As members of the elite Spetsnaz special forces unit, they had been through a lot of interesting times together. The big Russian did not have to remind Anatoli not to make mistakes.

  He was on the fourth floor. Getting his bearings, he listened for any signs of activity. Berg’s room was down the corridor to the left. It was before midday, so he would need to watch for housekeeping. Most of the guests were likely to be businessmen and so would not be in their rooms. Berg was on the fourth floor. The Russian would have preferred higher, but unless Berg was extremely lucky, he would be killed outright. He would drop Berg by the ankles just to make sure that he landed head first. Given his recent unfortunate run of bad luck, Berg seemed a perfect candidate for suicide.

  He worked his way along the corridor to room four six six and stood half a meter from the door. He knocked twice. Nothing. He could have opened the door with one kick, perhaps two, but why would someone who was about to commit suicide break down their own door? Just as this thought went through his head, he heard the gentle swish of the elevator door opening. A trolley stacked high with bed linen and an assortment of cleaning utensils appeared. The woman pushing it dark skinned, unlikely to be Polish.

  He gestured to her to come towards him. He met her midway.

  “My key in room. Please open.” He looked down at the much smaller woman as he pointed to Berg’s room further down the corridor.

  He thought for a moment that she would refuse and tell him to go back to reception. Then he saw the familiar look of fear and uncertainty in her eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said as she slid the keycard from the lock. She scurried away, determined not to know any more.

  The Russian opened the door quietly but firmly. A brown leather holdall lay on the bed. He moved stealthily towards the bathroom. Door closed. He turned the handle, at the same time barging through the door. Empty. Water dripped from the shower. Soap bubbling from the drain. The pharmacy. Had he changed his hair color? Maybe he he’d just taken a shower.

  He called Revnik.

  “He’s gone. Have you seen him?” he said in his native tongue.

  “No.”

  The tracking device was sewn into the inside bottom of the holdall. He’d called off Svetlana’s team. Didn’t want witnesses. Fuck, fuck, fuck. What the hell was he going to do now?

  “Keep watching, he could still be inside. Tell Svetlana to get her team back on the ground. I’ll do what I can. Be suspicious of everyone, he might have changed his appearance.”

  ---

  Michael half walked, half ran along the street back towards Centralna Station on Jerozlimskie Ulica. On his way out of the restaurant entrance to the hotel, tagging behind a group of four other guests, he’d noticed a large well-built man standing on the opposite side of the road. The man’s gaze switched from one entrance to the other. Was he looking for Michael?

  It was eleven fifteen when he arrived at the station. The place was a maze. It took Michael fifteen minutes to navigate the information booth and the ticket office. He was lucky; there would be an express train to Katowice in only ten minutes.

  Chapter 19

  Konstantin Rykov stood close to the doorway. He was alone. It had been four hours since Berg had managed to escape them. Svetlana’s team and Anatoli were doing their best to look for him, but it was close to impossible. Particularly as Berg could well have changed his appearance.

  Anna Kazinsky appeared through the door. The Russian grabbed her by the throat and squeezed hard, pulling her into the room, against his right shoulder. Not enough pressure to destroy her voice box, but enough to stop her from making a sound. She would have extreme difficulty in breathing. He kicked the door shut.

  He swiftly removed the six-inch knife from his inside right hand pocket before sliding it to the point where it was nicking her lower eyelid. He exerted pressure, gently. The blade pushed against the eyeball. He looked into her petrified eyes. If she’d known what this knife had done to several people over the years, he wouldn’t need to bother with the theatrics.

  “Vy govorite po-Ruski?” he asked.

  “Tag,” she croaked, then she corrected herself, “Da.”

  “I need information. Give it to me or I will cut your throat before you have a chance to think of calling for help. Of course, I’ll remove that beautiful blue eye of yours first. If you breathe a word of what has happened here today, I will hunt you down and kill you. Then I’ll go to work on your family. Blink your right eye if you understand.”

  Her right eye twitched, she was close to fainting. He sat her diagonally opposite him, his elbows resting on the table’s corner, placed the knife across her throat and released her. His right hand grasped her lapel. Her breath came in strong gasps, some color returning to her terrified, pale features.

  “You met a tall British man this morning. Fair hair. What name did he use? What did he want?”

  “His name was John Bingham. No. No. Brightman. It was Brightman. He wanted to know who had leased the Innovation Park building in Katowice.” Her voice was hoarse.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing, there was nothing to tell. He’d already seen the police report.”

  “Did he have a description of the man who signed the contract?”

  “He said he did, but from the look in his eyes I didn’t think so. He made me suspicious.”

  Rykov released the pressure on the knife, a reward for being cooperative.

  “Did you discuss anything else?”

  “No,” but he could see a slight hesitation in her eyes and increased the pressure on the knife.

  “Anything you spoke about could be important. Don’t make the mistake of holding back,” he said, increasing the menace in his tone.

  “I told him the furniture had been left there. He was surprised, interested. I don’t know why. He left straight away.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, nothing, I swear that was all we spoke about.”

  “I’m going to let you go now. Then today’s nightmare will end. Don’t you move for ten minutes. Don’t call for help. Remember your family.”

  He let go of the woman. When he walked through the door, he glanced back to see her upper body collapsed on her arms which were lying on the table. She was silently sobbing. Good, he thought, she’ll be keeping her mouth shut.

  As the elevator descended, he dr
ew the logical conclusion. Berg was heading for Katowice. He had no idea what the significance of the furniture was, but it had certainly seemed important to the man he was hunting down. A helicopter would get them to Katowice in under two hours.

  Chapter 20

  Michael directed the driver to pull up before the fourth building in the row of six. It was occupied. He didn’t want to arouse suspicion or look out of place by taking a taxi to an empty office building. He would have preferred to travel anonymously, but the Innovation Park was a long way from the train station and he didn’t want to waste the time on foot. After paying the driver, he waited until the taxi left and then walked back down towards CEE Outsourcing’s phantom office building.

  Michael strolled confidently past the entrance, glancing to the left for any evidence of security. There was none. He doubled back and stepped up to the electronic doors. They remained shut. He expected this, but walking in was preferable to breaking in. A pathway, bordered by grass, led to the rear of the building. To its right lay an area of fenced-in scrubland. A breadth of lawn stretched behind the rear of the complex, to a forest of pine trees populating a gently sloping hill. Michael decided the best way to gain entry was to the rear, where he was least likely to be observed. If an alarm sounded he would make a break for the forest.

  He edged along the wall. He tried each window in turn. None opened. There was nothing he could see that would help him to break in. He wrapped his leather jacket around his elbow and thrust it against the glass. It bounced back. He tried again, harder. The glass shattered. He took off his shoe and used it to knock out the more lethal shards that remained protruding from the frame. He laid his jacket across the bottom and hoisted himself through the window. If the building was alarmed, he’d have heard something by now.

  Michael was in an ante room behind the reception area. He strode purposefully to the door leading to the stairwell, assuming that if he looked as though he was meant to be there, anyone spotting him would assume that he was. He couldn’t risk using the elevator on the off chance that it got stuck with him inside it.

  He exited the stairwell onto the third floor, everything exactly as he had remembered it. Anna Kazinsky had been right. He was standing exactly in the same place that he had been when he’d caught the gaze of the mysterious dark-haired woman not much more than two months before. Five rows down, and the nearest desk to the open corridor. He was sure of it. Michael looked at his watch. Four forty-five. He didn’t want to be here for much longer than another ten minutes. He walked over to the desk. It was clear, with the exception of a dusty computer monitor. He stooped and looked under the desk, then lay on the floor underneath it and examined the underside carefully. He then pulled the desk away from the others it was grouped tightly with and swept his hands around its sides. Finally he examined all the surfaces of the desk once more, with even greater care.

  In the few seconds that he and the woman had caught each other’s gaze, Michael had been struck by the pity reflected in her eyes. At the time it had meant nothing. However, when Anna Kazinsky had mentioned that most of the furniture had been left in the building, Michael had an epiphany. The woman had known exactly what was going to happen to him. At least that was how it seemed. Perhaps she had left him a sign, a note, any clue that would help him make sense of what had happened.

  Michael had been too carried away with the only thin thread of possibility open to him. It was a dead end. He made his way back to the stairwell. He paused, realized that he hadn’t looked in the most obvious place. He returned to the desk and hit the standby button on the hard drive.

  The screen luminously flickered to life. His heart skipped a beat. On the desktop there was one file. Miska. He duly steeled himself, the file most probably completely irrelevant. He clicked on it. Miska opened.

  aksim lajvih allun tah cnimrah zit tah cloyn to ygen

  Nonsense. In the vague hope that the script had some meaning, he took a pen from an adjacent desk and scrawled the text onto a receipt that he found in his wallet. He walked to the window, catching his foot on the uneven flooring. He took another look at the meaningless scrawl offered by the brighter light streaming through the windows.

  The silence was broken. The chattering blades of a helicopter. He had been too preoccupied with the contents of the file to have noticed it before. The interruption from the outside world reminded him that he had been in the building longer than he’d intended.

  Chapter 21

  “Put it down close to the first building,” Rykov shouted into the pilot’s ear, gesturing downwards, aggressively, with his index finger.

  “Can’t go too close,” came the reply, “… waste ground …” was all that the Russian could hear over the furious whirring of the blades.

  He grunted in frustration but positioned himself while the pilot gently lowered the Sikorski to the ground. Both men jumped from the aircraft before it landed. The bemused pilot took her back up, glad to be away from the two overtly menacing men he had met only two hours before. He would wait for their call at Katowice Airport.

  Jumping the low fence that separated the wasteland from the manicured lawns of the office park, the two men separated. If Berg was still in the building, they didn’t want him to leave through the back door while they walked in through the front. Rivello wouldn’t tolerate a second screwup.

  He tried the main entrance. It was closed and wouldn’t slide open. He received a text from Revnik: rear window broken.

  proceed, secure lobby. Rykov replied.

  Revnik confirmed that the reception area was secure. Rykov then made his way to the rear of the building. There was no way out.

  Chapter 22

  Michael opened the door leading from the stairwell to the reception area. He heard a scraping noise followed by the sound of something hitting the floor. Someone had climbed through the window below.

  “Shit,” he said, a bit louder than he meant to.

  His tail from Warsaw? He couldn’t hang around to find out. His first thought was to get back up the stairs and find somewhere to hide, but he knew that with no elevator the stairs were the only way up or down. If there were two of them, one of his pursuers could search the building floor by floor while the other stood guard over the stairwell.

  Michael backed up through the doorway, gently closed the door and took the stairs two at a time on the balls of his feet, to minimize any noise. If he was going to jump, it would have to be from the first floor. Would have to be fast. Even then it was a four-meter drop. If he lowered himself with his hands he could reduce it to almost two. He came out of the stairwell onto the first floor. Where was the best place to jump from? From the rear, where he wouldn’t be seen by workers in adjacent offices. Where would he go? Into the forest and they would most likely catch him, particularly if he hurt himself in the fall. He might not even make it that far. He could sprint for one of the other buildings, but his pursuers would certainly see him. They had obviously tired of merely observing and now had something else in mind.

  There was only one option. If he failed he was a dead man. Michael sprinted down the open corridor between the banks of desks towards the windows at the rear. As he ran he tore off his jacket. He was relieved to see the floor plan was identical to that on the third floor. As he reached the end of the corridor, in front of the window, he hoisted a computer from the nearest desk, swung it over his head and threw it with everything he had straight at the center of the window.

  Chapter 23

  Konstantin Rykov followed Revnik through the broken window on the ground floor. They covered the three empty rooms and made their way to the stairwell, first activating the STOP button on each elevator.

  “If he’s still here, this won’t be difficult,” Revnik said.

  “Let’s make it quick then,” said Rykov, dropping his left hand to his outside jacket pocket, satisfying himself that his knife was where it should be. “Let’s go. I’ll clear each floor. You cover the stairs.”

  They climbed
. There was the distant crash of something breaking. Glass.

  “Outside now, he’s jumped,” Rykov bellowed. ”I’ll follow him.”

  Revnik swung around and charged back down into the stairwell while Rykov leapt up the remaining stairs leading to the first floor. When he burst through the door, he instinctively swung from left to right, searching for the exit point. It took him a split second to notice the black leather jacket left hanging across the windowsill at the far end of the room. It took him approximately eight seconds to reach the broken window. He knew that Berg would have had time either to make it into the cover of the forest or make it out onto the road in front of the building.

  Rykov hadn’t stopped moving while these thoughts were running through his head. In one fluid movement, he had gone from a sprint into a dive, his hands grabbing onto the jacket covered window ledge and, having slowed his own momentum, he dropped to the ground in a parachutist’s roll, successfully absorbing most of the impact. He came up fast and ran the ten meters to the edge of the forest, crouching on the way to pick up a black object sitting in the grass. At the edge of the forest line he stopped, completely still, barely breathing. He listened. Not a sound. He looked down at the object in his hand. He opened the black wallet. Five thousand dollars cash. He slid a laminated card from the card holder to find Berg’s face looking back at him. Driving License. Not as much of a desk bound mummy’s boy as you look. It irritated him that he had underestimated Michael Berg twice now. To have done so went against all his Spetsnaz training.

  I am the one who has become soft. He had been away from real action for too long. Berg’s time would come though. Now or later, and when it did he would make sure he took his time and enjoyed it. This had become personal.

  The Russians spent more than two hours searching the forest. It would be impossible to cover the whole area without either significantly more time or more men. The sky was darkening. There was no way Berg could have gotten past both him and Revnik, or hidden within the radius they’d both covered. Rykov didn’t believe that Berg could have made it to the next building in the time that it had taken him to exit, although he couldn’t be sure. The location of the wallet indicated heavily that Berg had run for the cover of the trees. And vanished.