Chapter three
He was running down the street into the tunnel. Yellow street-lamps painting stripes onto the asphalt. The pillars that divided the street into two lanes looming forebodingly to his left, shadowy shapes, seemingly moving as he ran past.
He knew what was going to happen. But he couldn't stop, couldn't turn. His body was running on autopilot, until he had passed the spot.
The sound of the gunshots bounced off the stone walls, seemingly amplified with every echo, making it impossible to determine how many there were. He could feel something hit his stomach, but no pain.
Surprised, he looked down expecting to see blood, but there was nothing. Then his gaze wandered further down.
Brandt had shoved him aside and was now lying at his feet, a hole gaping in his chest. His eyes seemed to look right through him in a sad accusation.
"Why didn't you tell me, Ethan?" he whispered in a hoarse voice. "I trusted you..."
Ethan woke with a start and reflexively reached behind his back where he had had a gun tucked away earlier, but wasn't surprised to not find it there. After leaving the safe-house he had set out to acquire some supplies: Money, passport, a bag with a change of clothes. All those things he could have gotten much more easily in the IMF flat but he hadn't wanted to leave any hint he had walked out of there on his own.
After that he had considered his next move, and once he had settled on taking the first international train out as the best option, he had ditched everything that wouldn't have passed through the metal detector. He would have to get a new handgun in London, but that wasn't a problem.
Outside fields rolled past behind a curtain of rain that was relentlessly drumming against the windows. The overhead display in the corridor told him they had just passed Lille Europe. He had slept hardly half an hour. Ethan leaned back in his seat with a sigh and was about to close his eyes again, when he realized that it was his phone that had woken him. A message had arrived, time-coded two minutes earlier. A single word:
Glasgow.
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Good morning, Agent Brandt.
Their new instructions had come in a few hours after he had given his report to Hunley in form of a pepperoni pizza they had subsequently shared for breakfast while discussing the situation. The file they had been supposed to secure the previous night had been tracked to Felix van Hauenstein, a journalist who had a habit of selling information and who was apparently planning to sell the virus to the highest bidder.
Brandt's idea was to infiltrate the auction, reprising Benji's role as Jonathan Baker, an alias Hauenstein was familiar with from the last two times they had run into him. What made him slightly nervous was that so far they had next to no information. That was supposedly being collected by the two agents they had been assigned as their backup.
Agents Leandre and de la Vega both had very standard files. Enough field experience to not count as rookies, but nothing outstanding, good or bad.
Adrienne Leandre was a certified pilot and an expert sniper. Subsequently she had worked mostly backup in the five years she had spent with the IMF, but her record showed she could also handle herself in hand-to-hand combat.
Ricarda de la Vega seemed to be the absolute opposite. She excelled in several close quarter fighting styles and had experience with handling explosives, but also advanced skills in makeup and disguise, an interesting mixture that might come in handy.
With Benji, Luther and himself it was a good team-up, diverse skill-set, solid experience. Still he felt nervous, wishing it was just him and the techies. Or at least someone he knew, someone he trusted. Keeping secrets from his own team was something that just shouldn't happen, not when it could impact their mission. This was what got people killed.
He took a deep breath and leaned back, pushing the thought away. They had all decided to catch some sleep on the flight to Glasgow but only Luther had actually done it, dozing quietly in a tipped back seat a few rows in front. Benji was sitting across from the analyst and looked up, flashing him a quick smile, before he returned to his relentless typing. For a moment Brandt considered closing his eyes at least for a little bit, but just then the fasten seatbelt signs came on. They were landing.
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Leandre and de la Vega were waiting for them outside the airport next to a black BMW. It was hard to discern who of them was the more curious looking. Ricarda definitely stood out with a red leather jacket over tight black jeans and studded boots. Her seemingly flawless ocher complexion was framed by a crown of dark brown hair which she had managed to secure in a bun without loosing any of its natural volume.
Adrienne was the polar opposite. She had very fair skin, her warm, round face dotted with tiny freckles. Her tight red curls were barely contained in her ponytail and in her heels stood even taller than Benji or Brandt, making the other woman look petite in comparison. Her outfit consisted of a blue shirt blouse that was tucked into a dark pencil skirt that made Benji wonder how she could even walk in it.
She proved that she could not just walk but also drive in it, when she automatically took the driver's seat a moment later. De la Vega rode shotgun, confining the men to the back-seats. The short car ride was spent in silence after she told them that the details of what they had found would be better explained in the safe-house.
"This is where the auction is going to be," de la Vega said, tapping at the circled spot on the large map that was spread over the table. "The Lighthouse, an art gallery and event venue. Specifically the tower room."
On the wall behind her a three-dimensional representation of the building appeared, a large, square construction with an octagonal tower at one corner that reached above the roof. A slice of that tower was marked red. "That's the room," Leandre explained. "First floor, small windows, thick walls, solid stone, no vent shafts, one exit. One way street on one side, narrow but busy alleyway on the other."
"The room seats a maximum of ten people, so van Hauenstein has set the maximal number of bidders at ten on a first come first serve basis," de la Vega continued. "That means only one of us can actually go in. The auction is set for today at 13:00 local time."
Brandt checked his watch. That would give them less than four hours of preparation.
"So one of us goes in and buys the thing," Luther proposed.
"That's not going to work," de la Vega replied, as if she had waited for it. "Van Hauenstein has set the starting price at 52 million pounds and he will only take cash. We have checked our supplies, but we can't turn up enough money, especially considering the price will rise during the auction."
"What if we kidnap one of the other buyers and take his money?" Benji suggested.
Leandre shook her head. "We don't know who the buyers are until they're in the room and in that kind of tight space with that many people it's going to be impossible to snatch anything."
"We go in, tag the buyer and get the disc later," Brandt decided with a grimace. There were so many options that could go wrong. If they lost the buyer. Or they couldn't get at the disc before the virus was uploaded somewhere. And there was that feeling of foreboding in the back of his head that just wouldn't go away.
"Alright," he announced. "We got three hours. How do we do this?"
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The safe house was a thin two story building south of the city center, just over the river, blending in to the surrounding houses so much it was hard to tell from the outside where one started and the other ended. The house on the opposite side of the road was taller and had dormer windows sticking out of the roof like small towers. Behind one of those windows someone sat with a pair of binoculars, noting down every detail.