A Cold War Spy Novel

A Game For Assassins (The Redaction Chronicles Book 1) by James Quinn

Book excerpt

Vienna - December 1964

Now, four years after their first meeting, the two killers and former partners sat once again face-to-face over coffee and pastries in Viennese cafe society.

Since their time in the Congo, they had worked in Africa, Latin America and had latterly been part of the operations against Castro's Cuba. All had been deniable and all had been successful. However, following the assassination of President Kennedy last year, the two men had been ‘retired’ as contract agents for the CIA. It was hardly surprising given that, with their own President having been the victim of a political assassination, senior CIA officers would want all links to their own assassination operations and operatives removed and hidden from sight. In fairness, the Agency had paid them well and commended them before cutting them both loose.

“How have you been, Juan, busy? You look well,” said Gioradze shaking the other man's hand.

They had last met nearly a year ago on a private contract which Marquez had found for them: the kidnapping of a Turkish drug importer who had double crossed one of the major players in the Middle East heroin distribution network. They had lifted the man in Marrakech, torturing him for several days before the man finally relented and told them that the rest of the money had been spent. Marquez had shot him in the head and then burned the body. Job done.

Marquez nodded. “I did some work for the Corsicans a few months back. Nothing terribly difficult, a small job really. Besides, I have my investments and business back home to keep me busy. And you David, all goes well with you?”

Gioradze smiled and leaned back in his chair. “I too have become a legitimate businessman,” he said proudly. “Nothing in your league, but the bar turns a profit, the weather is pleasant and I have a woman to keep me warm at night.”

“It sounds… glorious,” said Marquez, sipping his coffee and trying his best to sound impressed.

Gioradze nodded, not believing the man's kind words for a moment. Marquez was cut from a different cloth and Gioradze knew that the thought of domestic bliss, especially one with a woman, would have filled the Catalan with revulsion. “It is. I love it. But that's not why you dragged me away from it, all the way to the freezing, pissing rain in Vienna. Something's happened, I can see it in your eyes, Is it a problem? Is someone after us?”

Marquez shook his head. “No, nothing like that, not at all. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. How would you like to get back into the game?”

That statement captured the Georgian's attention immediately and the Catalan spent the next thirty minutes outlining the broad details of their new ‘contract’.” Marquez had spent the previous day with Mr. Knight giving his American controller the broad outline of how he would conduct the contract. What he would need, what his time frame would be and in which order the contract would be completed.

Never the full details of course – never – for no contract man alive ever tells his case officer everything. It is partly borne of a long mistrust of officers safely back home and tied to a desk, but also because Marquez wanted to keep a certain level of control over the running of the operation.

The two killers spent the next hour discussing in detail – as only men of a certain profession can do in their chosen trade – the logistics, tactics and pitfalls of such a unique contract. By the end of the hour Gioradze had made some suggestions which Marquez had decided to incorporate into the planning phase. He knew it had been the right thing to do to bring the little Georgian on board; the man was a natural soldier and spotted an easier way to carry out several of the killings.

“I think we need to talk in more detail back at my hotel,” said Marquez.

Gioradze nodded, began to push his cup aside and started to remove his gloves from his coat pocket. Marquez, however, remained locked in his seat. “You will need to close up shop back home for the next few months David,” he said.

“I'll get Maria to take over running the bar. It's no problem.”

“Good. Hmm… but here in Vienna we have a problem.”

Gioradze cocked his head quizzically and returned to his seat. “We do?”

Marquez nodded. “The American wants us to take care of a small administrative issue, to tie up a few loose ends.”

“Tell me more.”

“There is a man who has been helping the American, running errands, translating, that sort of thing. He knows what the American looks like and he knows what I look like.”

Gioradze smiled. “Ah, I see my friend. I'm glad to see that you haven't lost your cautious streak.”

Marquez shrugged. “I'm just being prudent. Why risk the success of this operation or indeed our liberty on the say so of a man of no importance? It protects the Americans and it protects us.”

“And you, of course, want me to take care of it,” said Gioradze, his mind clicking back into his old ways.

“It shows that you are committed to this contract, a sign of good faith. Besides the target has never seen you, so it will be like shooting a rat in a barrel.”

“A fitting analogy. Okay, when and where?”

“Tonight. Here take this photograph of him that I got from the American,” said Marquez. He slipped a small piece of paper across the table to the Georgian, who quickly glanced at it and placed it inside his glove for future reference. “He is expecting to meet me in front of the Parliament Building at nine o'clock for what he believes is a final payment for his services. When I don't show up, he'll know to go home and wait for a phone call from me as a backup. He will simply think I've been delayed and will wait for a re-schedule time. Follow him.”

“So follow him, finish him.” It was a statement, not a question from the Georgian.

Marquez moved his eyes searchingly over his partner, looking for a clue to his next question. “You are armed?”

“Of course, always,” replied the Georgian.

“Okay. Good. I don't want to know the details, just deal with him.”

“And then?”

“Then meet me at my hotel so we can go over the next stage of the plan. The Hotel Imperial, room number 229. I'll be waiting. If you don't arrive by 11.30, I'll assume that you've been captured or killed. In that eventuality I'll be out of Vienna within the hour.”

The Georgian stood and made ready to leave, pulling his gloves tighter. “Don't worry, I won't fail. I'll be back as quickly as I can.”

Marquez nodded and watched the little mercenary make his way to the door of the Cafe, and for a brief moment he felt a pang of pity for the man who would be the target of the Georgian killer tonight. A brief pang only, before the moment passed.

* * *

Max Dobos, wearing a black cap, polo neck and knee length leather coat, stood freezing in the dark, beneath the statue of Pallas Athene, the Greek goddess of wisdom, strategy, war and peace, in front of the Parliament Building on the Ringstrasse.

The time was 8.55pm by his old and tattered wristwatch and he had five minutes to wait before he met Marquez for his final payment for the ‘American job’. It would, he hoped, be a brief meeting as the less time he spent in the Catalan killer's company, the better. This would be the third time he would have met Marquez in person.

The first was when he had been recruited by the American, Mr. Knight, and he had made a personal visit to the little antiques store that was the ‘front’ for the assassin's more lucrative business. He had not liked the man from the moment he had set eyes on him. Cold and aloof, he turned Max Dobos's blood to ice.

The next time had been when he was in charge of security during Marquez and Mr. Knight's meeting in Clervaux. He had liked him even less then; again the eyes looked at you as though they were figuring out the most effective way to kill you.

But tonight was to be the last. A brush past meeting with minimal conversation and after that he would never work with them again. If his little plan worked out well this would be his last job in the intelligence marketplace for a very long time. If his plan worked out. But in the meantime, he waited.

Waiting! Waiting was the bane of intelligence work, he decided. You made an arrangement, you went, you waited. Your guest didn't show, so you went for the fall back location. Then sometimes they didn't make that meeting and you had to start the whole thing all over again. He glanced at his watch again. 8.58pm.

The other rule of the waiting game was that you didn't give them a few minutes after the allotted time. That was bad security and could turn out to be lethal, as so many had found out to their cost. But not Max Dobos. When the time was up it was up. So you gave them, up to and including the minute that had been agreed upon, then you simply walked away ready for the next rendezvous.

He had been working as a peddler of intelligence information since the end of the war, when as a displaced person he had been allowed to settle in Austria, and thus far he had made a successful career moving information around from one spy service to the other. And while it was true that he was something of a whore in who he worked for, he had always had a close affinity with the British station in Vienna.

The Americans were good payers, certainly, the Germans were thorough and demanded respect, even the Russians provided him with the odd chores, but it was the British that he had chosen to make his first among equals. They had picked him up after the war and employed him, first as a translator and had pulled the necessary strings to enable him to live a relatively unmolested life in Vienna. Over time they had used him more and more, latterly as an informant and taught him the ropes of working at the coal face of the intelligence game.

He slowly paced up and down in front of the statue, impatience irritating him and the cold seeping into his lame leg that was travelling carelessly behind him. The leg! That and his eye were remnants of the war when he had been beaten mercilessly by a sadistic SS officer in an interrogation cell who, wrongly, assumed that he had some long forgotten piece of information.

He had worked first for the fascist government of Hungary as a communications technician, but as a Jew, he had no doubt that the Germans would soon implement the same treatment to Hungarians as they were doing to the rest of Europe. He was right and in 1944 he found himself in the hellhole that was Auschwitz.

The beating had left him blind in his right eye and lame in his left leg; an awkward combination in anyone's book. When he looked in the mirror these days he saw an old, old man and though his age was actually fifty, most mornings he looked nearer to seventy. A harsh life can take its toll most certainly, he thought.

But he was a survivor. He had survived the fascist politics of early Second World War Hungary, the hunting down and subsequent incarceration of the death camps of Auschwitz and the new war between the Soviet and western forces. He stayed below the radar, he was invisible and he thrived.

He gave another look at the watch. 9.01pm.

That's it, he decided. Head back home and wait for the call for the backup rendezvous. Despite his misgivings regarding the Catalan, he hoped that nothing had happened to him. If Marquez was caught, captured or even killed, then the last of the money was gone forever.

So he walked, determined to get home quickly and put as much space between himself and the Parliament Building rendezvous.

In truth, he was sick and tired of peddling intelligence to the great and good of Vienna's covert marketplace, sick of his menial job working at the university as a repairman, and tired of Vienna. What had once seemed like a vast stage for him to work on was now in his eyes, a crowded Babel that he had long since become weary of. He dreamed of an apartment in Paris, warm nights, a simple life with no looking over your shoulder or wondering where the next double cross was coming from. He had gone the length of the rope with this phase of his life and he knew that he needed to reinvent himself or risk becoming an outdated player. So Paris sounded just the right spot to while away his days.

The kernel of an idea for his retirement had come when he had been approached by the American, Mr. Knight. He knew the moment that the CIA man had offered him a well-funded stipend that whatever it was he was planning; it was going to be big. This was more than double his usual fee and experience told him that with a well-funded purse came an operation of great importance – and risk, of course, as risk was an elemental part of the trade.