The Enemy Read Online Free PDF Page A

that mantle had helped organise an attempt on his life. Victor would never make that mistake again.
    But when his employer knew so much about him and his enemies, Victor had to be careful to keep his paymaster happy. He also knew that when these kind of jobs went wrong the people involved in them tended to prematurely expire. Victor was well aware that hisusefulness could run out without warning and any arrangement made for him could be a potential ambush. But Victor had been honest about keeping his word. He would pay off his debt.
    Outside the hotel, he walked for a while until he found a payphone. He dialled the Hamburg number he’d been given. A woman answered in German. She had the voice of a long-term heavy smoker.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Georg, please,’ he said.
    She coughed and thirty seconds passed before a male voice spoke. ‘Yes?’
    ‘We have a mutual acquaintance,’ Victor said. ‘They tell me you have something for me.’
    ‘At nine p.m. tomorrow get ferry line sixty-two from Landungsbrücken to Finkenwerder. Take a copy of the
Hamburger Abendblatt
with you. Keep it in your left hand. Stay on the top deck, port side. Don’t bring any weapons.’
    The line went dead before he could respond.
    Victor replaced the receiver. He did not conduct business this way. If arrangements could not be made without a face to face, they should be conducted in a neutral location. A ferry could be construed as neutral, but the meeting wouldn’t take place there. Someone would get on and lead him to where Georg waited. That would certainly not be a neutral location. Alternatively, if anything went wrong, the ferry would be a floating trap.
    Back in the hotel room, Victor reset the chair wedged under the door handle, checked the SIG was loaded, tucked it into the front of his waistband, and, fully dressed, lay down on the bed atop the covers. Three more jobs and he could have his life back. Whatever that equated to.
    He thought about the scream until he fell asleep.

CHAPTER 4
    Athens, Greece
    At the same time, approximately nine hundred and fifty miles southeast, Xavier Callo was trying to hide his growing erection from the six feet of blonde Norwegian hotness he’d somehow managed to pick up. The American had set the trap perfectly and she’d fallen straight into it. He’d been sitting at one of the bar’s tables, sipping Krug and tipping the waitresses with a fifty-euro note every time they so much as wiped his table. It was one of his best tactics. Waitresses liked tips, and they liked ridiculously huge tips even more. When such tips came along, they told people about them. People told other people and before long every gold-digger was looking at the small, balding guy sitting alone in the corner.
    The bar had a load of modern art on the walls that looked like something Callo’s niece might make after too many E-numbers. There were no chairs around the tables. Instead there were cushioned stools that were as uncomfortable as they appeared. Behind the bar itself was a huge array of bottles neatly aligned and backlit. They glowed hypnotically to Callo’s ever more inebriated brain.
    Before the blonde had arrived, Callo had let a couple of skanks swoon over him, but when the statuesque Viking goddess appeared through the bar’s door he shooed them away. Callo liked tall women, which he knew was a good thing being much closer to five feet than six, but most of the girls he ended up with only had a few inches on him. In stiletto heels, the Norwegian beauty dwarfed him.
    She was on the seat next to him solely because of the money he was flashing, but Callo didn’t care. What mattered was that she wanted him. She was a good talker too, classy, and she loved that he was American. She wanted to hear everything about him. Where did helive? What did he do for a living? Did he have a family? What was he doing in Athens? What did he like to do for fun?
    ‘I’m a diamond merchant,’ Callo slurred. ‘I live all over. I’ve got an