in the lobby,’ Victor said. ‘But I’m going to get some dinner when I’ve cleaned up. You can join me if you wish.’
She glanced at her watch. ‘Don’t you mean breakfast?’
‘I’m unlikely to get the two confused.’
‘Sure, okay. Let’s go get some dinner. At six a.m.’
FOURTEEN
Dinner consisted of two hotdogs loaded with onions and ketchup bought from a street vendor. Muir settled for a cream donut, along with a black coffee into which she added three sachets of sugar. Two brown. One white. The sun shone through wispy clouds and they walked along the river, where it was quiet. It was windy and Muir wore a band to keep her hair back. Joggers passed them by on occasion.
Victor saw nothing of Muir’s team. There were still three he hadn’t identified and he knew they wouldn’t be far; nor would the young guy who had been waiting at the bus stop, the sportswear-clad fifty-year-old called Beatty, and the one disguised as a businessman. They would be tracking Muir easily enough with GPS via her cell phone. Beatty would have argued they needed to maintain visual contact but she would have insisted otherwise. She knew as Victor had spotted them the first time that he would so again, and she didn’t want to antagonise him. He appreciated that uncommon courtesy.
‘The diplomat who was killed in Yemen was CIA,’ Muir said, looking away. ‘Non-official cover operative. A NOC. Stanley Charters. Guy was a real hero.’
‘What was he doing in Yemen?’
‘He was running agents linked to the black market plutonium trade. Which I’m sure you can appreciate is a very rare and complex operation. Anything radioactive automatically becomes the hardest illicit commodity to identify and track. And not just because the traders go to such great lengths to hide it.’
‘Because more often than not it’s mostly smoke and mirrors.’
Muir nodded. ‘There’s a million bad guys out there who want to get their hands on it so there are countless opportunists claiming to have access to hidden Soviet stockpiles and suitcase nukes. It’s ridiculous. Have these people never heard of a half life? Even the few genuine traders out there are mostly trying to sell junk that stopped being denotable over a decade ago, else it was never weapons grade in the first place. As long as the Geiger counter crackles, most buyers don’t know any better. But ninety per cent of sellers don’t even have access to waste product. They’re just charlatans looking to rip off rich jihadists eager to turn up in the middle of nowhere with briefcases full of cash money.’
‘But your NOC was onto traders who had the real thing?’
‘Charters had a solid gold link to a chain that supposedly ran all the way to the enrichment plants in Pakistan.’
‘Hence why he met with a premature demise.’
Muir nodded again. ‘We don’t know how he got found out, but the body was discovered in his apartment with a straight razor buried in his throat. Yemeni authorities were happy to put it down as a suicide.’
‘How did you identify Kooi as the assassin?’
‘One of the agents Charters was running was terrified he’d be the next victim. He turned up at the US consulate for protection. He was just one of the network’s smugglers, not that he ever came near anything radioactive, but he’d overheard his boss boast that they had a Dutchman on the books who was cleaning up problems for them. Then it was pure grunt work; a process of elimination. Only so many Europeans entering and exiting Yemen in the right time period. Only so many men. Then of those only one travelling from Amsterdam who also happened to have flown into Pakistan the same week as an asset for the Pakistani secret service, who was supplying them intel about plutonium smuggling, committed suicide by slitting his wrists. You’ll never guess what he cut them with.’
‘Sloppy,’ Victor said.
‘Don’t approve of the MO?’
‘A suicide takes some skill to pull off convincingly, especially with someone more prone to violent death than a regular civilian. But to use the same method for two separate targets for the same client is leaving an unnecessary trail. Perhaps the razor is symbolic to these guys. Whoever is in charge is sending a message to everyone in the network: wherever you are, I can get to you.’
‘Makes sense. Kooi likely thought there was enough difference between slit wrists and a razor in the neck that a connection wouldn’t be made, but he could still satisfy the client’s wishes.’