Chasing ivan 2 1, p.1
Chasing Ivan - 2.1, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Links
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Author's Note
Tigner Books Link
About the Author
CHASING IVAN
AN ACHILLES NOVELLA
Tim Tigner
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Tim Tigner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, please address Vontiv Publishing via vontiv.com
For more information on this novel or Tim Tigner’s other thrillers, please visit timtigner.com
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to the GoodReads members whose feedback on the beta version of this novella helped to make is stronger: R. James Bishop, Doug Branscombe, Ian Cockerill, Denny Eckstein, Geof Ferrell, Emily Hagman, Robert Lawrence, Margaret Lovett, Tony McCafferty, Joe McKinley, Bill Overton, Stan Resnicoff, Chris Seelbach, Todd Simpson, Marsha Stutsman, and Slaven Tomasi.
Also by Tim Tigner
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Chapter 1
I love climbing. Give me a cliff face and a bag of climbing chalk and I’ll be whistling all the way to the top. But I had no chalk today. No cliff face either. On this sunny September afternoon, I was hanging in the breeze nineteen stories up the side of one of London’s famous residential towers, the Canaletto, and I was wearing a business suit. Dove gray, by the way. And super-100s wool, the stretchy kind, not that this climb was planned.
For the last eight weeks I’d been tailing a couple of people, waiting for a legend to strike. My boss discovered that Ivan The Ghost had been paid to alter London’s upcoming mayoral election. This was the first lead ever on the world’s most elusive criminal, and the CIA’s new director was eager to exploit it to eliminate him. Covertly. That was where I came in, as a member of the Special Operations Group.
The Ghost’s modus operandi involved coercion, so I was watching the likely pressure points for the inevitable intersection, which was always one step removed, to avoid detection. The target’s daughter was named Emily, his younger brother, Evan.
Like climbing the Canaletto tower, keeping tabs on unsuspecting civilians wasn’t technically challenging. The trick was remaining undetected. The British government doesn’t know I’m here. In fact, I’m screwed if they find out. My government will disavow me to avoid embarrassment. Disavow. What a term. It’s the grown-up equivalent of the boy with a baseball mitt shrugging his shoulders when asked about a broken window. But then that’s politics, which resembles espionage, in that it revolves around lies. The difference, incidentally, is that spies don’t smile while lying to you.
Having reached the Canaletto’s nineteenth floor by climbing an architectural adornment that functioned like a crevasse, I prepared for stage two, which would leave me exposed. It was a clear day, so from that altitude I could see the city skyscrapers to the south, and the sun reflecting off The Regent’s Park boating lake to the west, which theoretically meant millions of people could see me as well. Good thing I was wearing gray.
I got a grip on the lower edge of the nineteenth-floor balcony, and began sliding left, hand to hand, while keeping my legs piked out to the side at ninety-degrees so the residents of the eighteenth floor wouldn’t see them dangling.
To minimize my chance of detection, and maximize the odds I’d reach Evan in time to see what was happening, I needed to cover the forty meters to flat 19-B quickly. As a free-solo enthusiast, I was used to climbing without ropes or tools. The business suit, however, was working against me. It bottled in heat, which brought on the enemy. It wasn’t just job interviews where sweaty palms could be deadly. The pigeon poop on the ledge wasn’t helping either.
Screaming erupted below me as I rounded the corner onto the front face of the building. The mid-day sun had cast my shadow in the wrong place at the wrong time. A silver-haired woman watering geraniums on her balcony had looked up to find a big surprise. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” she was shouting in crescendo, while her eyes bugged wide.
“It’s okay ma’am,” I said. “I slipped, but caught myself.”
I pulled myself up onto the balcony above her with a couple quick, fluid moves, then peered back over. “No worries. I’m safe now.”
Before she could respond, I drew back and ducked down, hoping nobody on nineteen had spotted me yet. Looking over my right shoulder into the flat I’d just invaded, I saw a young girl with blonde braids playing with colorful plastic figurines. She was on the other side of a floor-to-ceiling window, and for the moment was seated with her back turned. Of course, anyone looking after her would also be looking my way, so my secret wouldn’t last. I rolled forward and launched into a smooth, steady low-crawl in the direction of 19-B.
Evan, a plastic surgeon who did a lot of weekend work for the Kensington crowd, had deviated from his planned schedule and lied to his secretary and staff before slipping off to this five-star residential tower. I had no idea who he was meeting, but a mysterious rendezvous smelled of Ivan.
I had a clone and intercept going on both Evan’s and Emily’s cell phones, which gave me access to everything cloud synched, including calendars, notes and emails. I also received transcripts of their phone calls on a real-time feed, and GPS tracking of their whereabouts. All illegal, of course, but done with their best interests at heart. Who wouldn’t choose to endure a little privacy invasion to avoid becoming the slippery Russian’s next victim?
Security at the Canaletto began in the lobby, which was why I’d resorted to the exterior approach. It continued up above, where the architect had made it virtually impossible to use the balconies to hop between flats. I was going to have to go back over the rail and shimmy along the edge again, but between nineteen and twenty this time, since the woman on eighteen was likely still shaken and staring out the window.
Arriving at the corner, I peered through 19-A’s sliding glass door from the low-crawl position. The little girl didn’t have line of sight on me here, but her mother would if she looked up. She was chopping vegetables in the kitchen while a TV talk show played off to her left. I didn’t have time to wait around for her to leave. If Evan left before I arrived, all this fun would have been in vain.
I let mom finish with the knife, and rose the instant she turned for the stove. Climbing up onto the rail, while bracing myself with my left hand against the balcony wall, I mapped out my jump. To reach the ledge above, I was going to have to spring up about two feet and back about one, something rather counterintuitive given my state of vertical jeopardy—but business as usual for us crazy climbers.
People who don’t climb have trouble comprehending the dangerous moves sportsmen make. They freeze with fear at the very thought. Our secret is the ability to disconnect that fear-inducing neural circuit, and operate at height as though on the ground.
I gave my palms a good wipe on my thighs, then crouched down, breathed deep, and rocketed up, my arms swinging into it as they extended, my legs putting everything they had into generating lift, my eyes locked on target and guiding my hands. Just as I was pushing off, a voice sounded in my year. “Who were you talking to?”
Oscar Pincus was my control back at Langley.
I’d forgotten that he was sporadically monitoring my situation via my earpiece.
The startling interruption knocked me off balance, just a bit, but enough that correcting it cost me power. My reach came up a quarter-inch short.
I missed the ledge.
Plunging back down I grasped at the railing I’d just departed . . . and caught it with the tip of my right hand, just the last digit on two fingers, but enough to pull me in given my low momentum. Whew.
“Hold on, Oscar,” I said, hoping he’d appreciate the need for my focus to be elsewhere. Oscar had about as much experience in the field as I had running political campaigns, which was to say, zero.
After a couple deep breaths, I lowered myself out of mom’s sight by dropping to the balcony floor’s edge. This put me right back where I’d been a few minutes earlier, albeit twenty meters closer to target. Hanging there between the eighteenth and nineteenth floors, I could only hope I wouldn’t hear screaming again. Without bothering to check to see if I’d been spotted by the silver-haired gardener, I resumed the hand-to-hand swinging shuffle, and a few seconds later was beneath 19-B.
The Ghost’s modus operandi was creating leverage to coerce the result he wanted. Creative high-stakes blackmail. This technique kept everybody quiet, and allowed Ivan to remain invisible. My hope was that Evan’s off-the-books meeting was part of The Ghost’s cleverly-construed trap.
Pulling myself up and over the railing and into the side wall’s shadow, I saw them immediately. Evan and his secret date were naked on the bed.
Bad news.
Even in a state of undress, I had no problem identifying the petite red-head fifteen years his junior. Sarah Simms was a weather girl at one of the local tv stations.
Crap.
There was no leverage here.
Evan was divorced, and Sarah had been on one of the social rags’ Most Eligible lists.
“False alarm,” I said to Oscar.
“Not a teenage boy?” Oscar asked.
“Or a Mafia wife.”
“Drugs?”
“I can’t be certain without breaching, but I think we can assume that Evan is purely testosterone driven. She’s hot. A local weather girl.”
“I dated a wether girl once,” Oscar said.
As he continued with a sexual pun, my phone vibrated an alert. I heard a simultaneous beep on Oscar’s end. “What is it?” I asked him.
“Tonight’s the night of Emily’s big date, right? Her first encounter with the mysterious Andreas she won’t stop talking about?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, her phone just went dead.”
Chapter 2
Emily yelped as her cell phone flew from her grasp out over the boating lake. Rubbing the back of her hand while the oblivious bike-messenger zipped on to some north-west London business address, she watched her phone frisbee before landing flat. For a joyful second, it looked like it was going to float, but as Emily plunged in after it like a Labrador chasing a stick, her phone went under. By the time she’d snatched it from the lake the display had gone blank. Probably not a good sign, she figured.
Still standing thigh deep in murky water, she pulled off the protective cover and began shaking it like a maraca, trying to expel water from the speakers and ports, while passers by looked on sympathetically.
“Don’t turn it on!” A red-haired boy of middle-school years yelled from the path. “Give it a couple of days to dry out first. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
“Bake it on low in the oven,” his freckled friend added. “That will help.”
She gave them a kind nod and said, “Thanks.”
Would Jen think Emily had hung up on her? Possibly. They’d been at it again over Andreas. Her best friend had been cautioning her for the hundredth time not to get her hopes up, while Emily reasserted her certainty that he wouldn’t turn out to be a gold-digger like the others. Andreas didn’t know her last name. Therefore, he didn’t know who her father was, and thus he wouldn’t have any ulterior motives. Plus he just felt different. He felt perfect, like he’d been designed with her tastes and interests in mind. In any case, she’d find out for sure in just a few hours. After two months of online dating, of long emails, and shared secrets, and rising expectations, they were finally going to meet. She’d been thinking about little else for weeks.
Emily was determined not to let either Jen’s cautionary words or a ruined phone spoil her mood. Life only gave you so many magical moments. No sense ruining them with mundane worries. It was time for a new phone anyway. Maybe she had a free one coming? The phone companies were always offering something while figuring out how to charge you more.
She slipped the phone and cover into her purse and continued her walk north across the park toward her favorite grocer. Her soggy sandals slapped the pavement with each step, while the water soaking her yoga pants slowly worked its way up toward her crotch. She’d wash both as soon as she got home to get the lake smell out.
Her block of flats, Palace Place, wasn’t nearly as regal as its name, but it did have a nice lobby. Soft reading chairs in a window alcove, and decent original oils on the walls, various English seascapes painted by Widow Cooper in 3B. The white cliffs of Dover. The beach at West Wittering. Sunset over the Isle of Wight. Mrs. Cooper had been updating them over time as her skill increased, and now the familiar sight of them was as welcoming as a wink and a smile.
Emily winced as the shopping bag shifted while she reached for the door handle. The back of her hand was tender where the backpack had whacked it. She hoped it wouldn’t bruise and look ugly for Andreas.
“Let me help you with that,” came a voice from behind as a long arm reached past and opened the front door. “After you.”
For a second Emily thought the gentleman might be Andreas, his earliness expressing the eagerness she felt. Dressed in a summer weight gray suit, he was tall and athletic and about thirty. Check, check, and check. The thick, dark hair wasn’t styled the same as in Andreas’s profile picture, but hair styles changed, and this man’s eyes were the same sparkling blue that had captured her attention. He also had the high Slavic cheekbones. The match was six for six when a distinct chin dimple ruled the gentleman out. She heard disappointment in her voice as “Thank you” left her mouth.
Emily checked her post box while he brushed past with a bow of his head before disappearing up the stairs. She was sure he wasn’t a resident. Probably Justine’s latest. Emily hoped Justine would see Andreas when he arrived. Let her be the jealous one for once.
The knock came as she was putting the last of her purchases in the refrigerator. Again her mind leapt to an early arrival. She reached for her cell to check the time only to be greeted by a black screen. The clock on the microwave showed 1:48. Andreas wasn’t due to pick her up for another four hours. She slipped off her soggy sandals and crept to the peephole.
The man on the other side of the door doffed a chauffeur’s cap with a white-gloved hand as she darkened the lens.
What in the world? Was her father up to something? Or more likely his slippery campaign manager?
She opened the door. “Yes?”
“Hello Emily, I’m Michael. Andreas sent me.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond to that, and Michael continued before she decided.
“I’m afraid he won’t be able to make it this evening.”
Chapter 3
Emily felt her eyes start to tear as her heart sank. Not again. Not Andreas too. Every time she got her hopes up, they were dashed. Every time. Andreas had seemed so different, but Jen had been right. Well, at least it was a classy letdown. She didn’t know he was wealthy—on top of everything else. More salt for her wound. “Thanks for letting me know.”
The chauffeur didn’t move. Was she supposed to tip this guy?
“Andreas was hoping you could join him instead.”
“What?”
“He’s stuck out of town. He’d love you to join him. He’s really been looking forward to meeting you. Honestly, I’ve never seen him so smitten.”
Emily felt her chest reinflate as a smile lifted her cheeks to the sky. “Where is he?”
“About three hours from here. We’ll need to leave right away. The limo is out front.”
The limo is out front. How many times had that phrase passed through her fanciful mind as a schoolgirl imagining her prince charming. What was this guy’s name? Had he said Michael? “I’m nowhere near ready. Look at me.”
“You look lovely, and besides, you’ll have plenty of time to get yourself together on the plane.”
“The plane?”
“Just grab your passport. Andreas has arranged for everything else.”
“What does that mean?” She spoke without thinking, and immediately feared that she’d sounded rude.
In response, Michael just smiled.
Had the bicycle messenger hit her head? Was she in a coma, dreaming all this in addition to her dip in the lake and the flying phone? If she was, she hoped she’d make it to the happy ending before waking. If she wasn’t, would she be crazy to consider this . . . extraordinary proposition? She knew what Jen would say. She’d bring up all kinds of horror stories about murders and kidnappings. Emily didn’t want to hear it, but figured she should at least let Jen know what was happening. She’d make it a quick call.
