Scorpia Rising

soon as that connection had been made, the red lights had begun to flash and the file had been passed here, to Special Operations.
    It seemed almost incredible that such a senior member of Scorpia would have been murdered and, even more so, that his body would have been allowed to be found. It raised all sorts of questions. What was Kroll doing in London to begin with? Was it in some way connected to the appearance of Zeljan Kurst, just a few months before, and the violence at the British Museum? There were no records of Kroll having entered the country, although that was hardly surprising, as he would have had at least a dozen different identities, each one with its own passport. Who had killed him? According to the reports, he had taken a .300 Winchester Short Magnum bullet in the back of the neck, possibly fired by a Belgian FN Special Police Rifle from a distance of around seventy yards. Could a rival organization have declared war on Scorpia? Blunt considered the possibility. There was no doubt that Scorpia’s reputation had declined in the past twelve months. Another group could well have decided to steal its territory.
    There were several clues mentioned in the report. Blunt had underlined them in red ink, putting a star beside them in the margin. To begin with, the MI6 investigators had suggested that Kroll might have been in Egypt. The shirt that he had been wearing when he died had been purchased at a shop in the Arkadia Mall, overlooking the Nile. It was made by Dalydress, an expensive Egyptian manufacturer, and it was part of their new spring collection, so it must have been bought recently. Of course, the shirt could have been a present, but they had trawled through hundreds of hours of closed-circuit television footage from all four of London’s airports, concentrating on flights that had come in from Egypt, and finally the work had paid off. A man with a beard and an eye patch had indeed come off a British Midlands flight from Cairo the day before Kroll had been washed up.
    He had been carrying two items that gave the MI6 men plenty to play with. The first of these was a crocodile-skin wallet in his inner pocket, purchased from Cartier in Paris and fairly new. It contained several credit cards in the name of Goodman, which must have been the identity he had chosen for this visit to England. The cards had been checked for their credit history. Only one purchase had been made. “Goodman” had bought three magazines and a newspaper at Heathrow Airport. The newspaper was the Times Educational Supplement —normally read by teachers and academics. Blunt had drawn a line beside this and added a question mark.
    The wallet also contained a magnetic key card such as might be used in any hotel in the world, but it was unmarked and, Blunt knew, very hard to trace. Kroll had been carrying $350 in different currencies: English pounds, American dollars, and Egyptian pounds, another connection with Cairo. Finally, the wallet held the stub of a ticket to the Milan opera house dated from one month ago, a receipt for dinner at Harry’s Bar in Venice, and a photograph of a ten-year-old boy with his arm around a Rottweiler dog. His son? It wasn’t even known if Kroll was married.
    But of even greater interest was the Apple iPhone that had been found in the same pocket as the wallet. Of course, the water had almost completely destroyed it, but even so, the MI6 technicians had managed to retrieve a few tiny scraps of information from its memory. These had been printed on a separate sheet for Blunt and he laid it out in front of him.
    . . . progress . . . the vicar
Shafik (43) . . . payment
31st May—4th Ju
. . . target . . .

    Blunt examined the words, searching for any possible associations. Assuming this referred to a Scorpia operation, Kroll would have been unusually careless to enter anything into his mobile phone. But then of course he wouldn’t have known he was about to die. The dates, three weeks from now, rang a faint bell—although were they referring to June or July? Shafik was an Arabic name; 43 might be his age. Was he the target mentioned in the last line? Or could he be an assassin? That would certainly explain the need for payment. And what of the vicar? The word sat at the top of the page, underlined. That would suggest some sort of operation involving religion, but frankly, church was the last place you would expect to find anyone from Scorpia.
    It was a puzzle, but Blunt didn’t need to waste