you god of planning? If anyone’s going to be one of the shooters, it’s me.’
Victor ignored him. ‘With Hart and I as the triggermen, and Jaeger dead, that leaves just Dietrich and Coughlin as surveillance, and they’re simply not good enough.’
‘Fuck you,’ Dietrich said.
Coughlin glared.
‘We need more men,’ Victor said. ‘We need at least one more inside the embassy to provide surveillance and backup. Then we need watchers outside the building to keep track of who comes and goes and to provide continuous updates to those inside. That’s at least another two men. Whether it ends up loud or stays quiet, there needs to be another member of the team providing the means of extraction. And ideally another still if we want to disable the embassy’s security cameras and/or delete the recordings. That’s another five required, based on the current level of competence, if any of the operators actually wants to walk away without getting killed or captured.’
‘Don’t listen to him, Mr Leeson,’ Dietrich said. ‘We can do the job, no problem. Kooi is just scared.’
‘And we need more background information on the target. We have a lot about him but nothing about his work.’
Dietrich frowned. ‘What does it matter what the guy does for a living?’
Victor ignored him. He said to Leeson, ‘You said he’s a Russian bureaucrat. That’s a very general term. What part of the government does he work for? What does he do?’
‘You make some interesting points,’ Leeson said to Victor. ‘There are some facts that you aren’t yet privy to that might change your evaluation of the task at hand. Come with me, please. Everyone.’
Leeson motioned for the group to follow him out of the door they had entered through an hour ago. Coughlin followed first, then Dietrich. Victor hung back to let Hart go next.
‘After you, compadre,’ Hart said.
FIFTY-FOUR
Leeson led them back across the main floor of the mill and out of the building. He walked along the corridor of space between the two buildings, then to the older building with the whitewashed walls and red-tiled roof. Leeson pushed one of the dark-stained double doors open and ushered the team inside.
He was in an antechamber attached to the main mill area. It occupied approximately one-quarter of the building’s interior and looked like it had a range of purposes. There was a small kitchenette at one end with a wooden table and benches near it. There were hooks for outside clothing and crates of empty green glass bottles.
‘Through here,’ Leeson said, leading the team into the mill itself.
It was a large space, if about half the size of the modern building’s interior. Like the outside, the interior walls were painted white. The roof peaked above Victor’s head and was supported by a framework of metal posts and struts.
There were two rows of machinery: on the left were stone grinders to pulp the olives; on the right were the presses. Three thick circular stones that had to weigh at least a couple of tons each were arranged together at an angle to a central cog that turned them to crush the olive fruit and pits into a mash. As in the modern mill, all the equipment was dormant and waiting for the next harvest. But unlike the modern mill, not all the equipment was there for the production of olive oil. There were five folding camp beds and sleeping bags, backpacks and sports bags and camp chairs and boxes of ammunition, and a wooden crate with stencilled Cyrillic script sprayed on in red paint.
There were also four men standing in and around the equipment, all facing the doorway through which Victor and the others entered.
They were a mix of ages: the youngest in his mid twenties, two in their thirties and the fourth in his early forties. They weren’t Italians. They wore jeans, T-shirts and sportswear. They were unshaven and unclean because the mill probably didn’t have showers and they had been sleeping on camp beds and washing using only sinks and washcloths. They had the look of civilians not military personnel, but civilians who knew how to fight and kill. As he got closer, Victor could smell the cigarette smoke on their clothes. The room didn’t smell of smoke, so they didn’t smoke in here. He pictured the cigarette stubs by the drain outside.
Four men in the room. Five camp beds.
It didn’t look like the four had just got up on account of Leeson, Hart, Dietrich, Coughlin and Victor. They had already been standing. They