[Late Summer, Puerto Soller, Mallorca]

‘The Chameleon’s’ email pinged.

The sound of it woke him from an afternoon siesta. He looked out of the window at the bay of Puerto Soller that lay before him and mentally cursed whoever it was who had destroyed his slumber.

He wasn’t sweating thanks to the breeze that was coming off the sea and feeding through his clifftop home. The five weeks that had elapsed since his last job had been nice but for the past few days, he’d started to get itchy feet. It wasn’t that he needed the money but the lure of a different career was starting to take hold in his mind.

He got to his feet and stretched. These weeks of inactivity had taken a lot of the tone off of his muscles. He’d have to rectify that before he accepted a new contract or went looking for a new job…

"I'm getting a bit old for this," he muttered to himself as he walked across the tiled floor to his desk and his phone. He wasn't that old in terms of age but in his line of work, he was positively ancient. It was definitely a young person's game these days. What made it worse was that he was not impressed by the people he was competing for jobs with. In his estimate, they lacked the finesse and delicacy that he and the few of his age that were left, possessed. To him, the art of the assassin was to do the job and be long gone before the crime was discovered. Not many of the current ‘young guns’ were all that. Most adopted the method of blast away and hope that not too many bystanders get caught in the crossfire. He blamed Film and TV for that. Shoot lots and hope was not his style. He’d never used more than two bullets on any job. Less is more in his world. To him, it showed skill in the hunt. Like a skilled animal hunter, a single shot in the right place was the sign of someone cared for the welfare of the animal. If they had to die let it be as quick as possible.

He read the text of the email, or rather tried to read it. On the surface, it appeared to be nothing more than a load of gibberish. The first few characters of the gobbledegook told him that it was an encrypted message.

Swiftly, he selected the gibberish and opened another app. Then he pasted the text into it and pressed ‘decode’.

The gibberish disappeared and was replaced with a lot more of the same.

He smiled and put the phone down. Because the message was not encrypted with his public key, he could not read it until he received the keys from the sender.

The Email header gave him nothing useful. All the fields were easily spoofed if you knew how to do it and he certainly did. The email client that he used had a ‘plug-in’ that allowed him to do just that at will. It is hard to not open a mail that is supposed to come from a President, Prime Minister or your mother. Once opened, you could have put some real nasties in the payload. Luckily his system was firewalled off from the rest of his home network and his systems contained little personal data.

There was nothing more he could do until someone sent him the keys but he was not going to sit around doing nothing until that happened. Instead, he went down to the lower floor of the villa. That's where his gym was located. If there was a job coming then it was time for a workout followed by a swim across the bay to his favourite restaurant near where the Soller Tramway [1] terminated.

He spent the next hour working out. The session concluded with ten minutes of hammering his punchbag. Normally, that was a great stress reliever, but on that day, it failed miserably. The longer the session went on, the more pronounced feelings of impending doom he had felt since the arrival of the text grew and grew.

He knew that none of his usual contacts would have sent an encrypted email without sending the key by a back channel such as a text to his phone but there had been nothing.

He checked his phone when he returned from the restaurant. No new emails had been sent so he went to bed.

Just before 03:00, he woke up with an idea about the message.
As he switched on his bedside light, he muttered,
‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’

He sat on the edge of his bed and opened up his phone whereupon, he pasted the message into the app that encodes/decodes data and instead of applying his private key to the message, he applied the public key to it.

This time, instead of gibberish, a valid message appeared.

“Chameleon,
As you are no doubt well aware, I have your private key. I also have all your messages using this key pair. I don't need to tell you what that means. One call or email to the law in what is it now, nine different countries and you would be done for, big time.

You will do one last job for me then you can retire. Yes, I know about all your plans to stop working. Do this, your thirtieth job, for me and I will let you do just that. You really should not be so trusting of that phone of yours and with all your life on it, it was just too tempting not to clone when you were in Berlin last July.

I didn’t do it in person so don’t even try to recall who you met and where. An operative of mine did the job. Too bad that he met with an accident a few days later.

I own you Chameleon. I'll use that nickname because you have far too many aliases to count. Don't you ever get confused? No matter.

As I said, I own you. I know about your little bolt hole near Rouen and your pied-a-terre in Peterborough. Why did you choose that desolate place? Again, it does not matter unless you fail to do this job for me. Then those places along with your villa in Puerto Soller will be taken care of. They will be no more! Your Spanish home would make a great beacon when I set it alight!

I will send you another message 24 hours after this one with the details of the job.

If you try to run, I will find you. There is nothing about your life that I do not know and now control.

Wait for the next message Chameleon. I am watching you.

Uncle Vanya.”

He read the message several times without moving an inch. All his deepest fears were about to come true.

Part of the email was pure bluster. He changed his keys on a very regular basis. He'd changed to this particular key pair a little over six months before. That wonderful thing called hindsight was telling him that he’d let his defences slip in recent months.

In that time, he'd done just one job in Croatia and had not been anywhere near Berlin. Nevertheless, the threat was real. Someone who knew him had let this ‘Uncle Vanya’ have access to his encryption key. Only three people in the world had the private key. As far as he knew, none of them would have given it up voluntarily.

Dawn was starting to brighten the sky on the other side of the mountains before he moved. His first stop was in the kitchen and while some coffee was brewing, he looked at his security system. What he found was disturbing. Someone had broken into the villa some eight days previously when he’d gone into Palma for the day by train. They’d tried to cover their tracks but had missed an enhancement he’d made to the system more than a year before. It was pure luck that he spotted the discrepancy in the files that the security system recorded.

The intruder had been into every part of his home and left a whole heap of bugs, both audio and video. Then they’d tried to erase the video of their work but had missed the fact that every half hour, the latest file was archived to a cloud service. When he replayed the original, he saw the face of the intruder. He wasn’t even trying to hide his face. He knew the man or at least his face. He’d come across him in a case in Cannes a few years before. He knew someone who might be able to identify him. He’d give that person a visit later that day.

He sat back and drank some coffee. With bugs in every room, the sender of the message would more than likely by now know if he had decoded it. That was both good and bad.

Bad in that the ‘man’ using the name of a Chekov play, would send him the details of the job. Good in that he had close to nine hours before the message would be sent. He intended to make good use of that time.

One cup of coffee was all that he needed to get going. Then he got dressed and left the house as he normally would on this day of the week. It was market day in Soller so he would walk down the hill and take the tram from the stop outside the Hotel Esplendido, as if nothing untoward had happened.

The tram and its positively ancient tram vehicles were some of the things that attracted him to Soller in the first place. Until that day, he’d never regretted coming here but now, it had been defiled. He’d miss this particular bolt hole after it had been exposed so rudely by this man calling himself ‘Uncle Vanya’. Chekov was never his favourite playwright. Memories of performing ‘The Three Sisters’ at school were not fond ones. He’d been chosen to play the male lead ‘Andrei’ but had been replaced one hour before the performance by the drama teacher. It was not his finest hour. As he waited for the tram, he wondered if his new foe was someone from those dark times? His deliberations were cut short by the appearance of a load of American tourists coming down the steps of the hotel.

They barged past him and climbed onto the tram. Then they embarrassed themselves by not having any Euro coins. He’d hoped that by this late in the tourist year, Puerto Soller would be returning to its out of season, sleepy self by now.
‘Not yet but soon’, he said to himself.

He did his shopping at the market as normal. Anyone watching him would see no deviation from his normal behaviour. His final port of call before he’d normally catch the tram back to the port would be the barbershop. Today was no exception.

“Hola Miguel,” he called out when he entered the shop.
“Hola Senor.”

He smiled at the barber Miguel and went through to the rear of the shop. In the back room, Miguel’s mother ran a small business repairing and altering clothes. After a brief discussion with his mother, he went into a cubicle to change his clothes.

He took off every stitch of clothing and replaced it with some items that were handed to him by Miguel’s mother. Once he was fully dressed and wearing a pair of ill-fitting shoes, he exited the shop out the back door. He’d left his phone and wallet behind and only carried cash. If that man who called himself ‘Uncle Vanya’, was as good as he boasted then nothing of his was safe from carrying a tracker.

Miguel’s mother had given him the keys to her son’s old SEAT car. He was on a mission and did not want to be tracked by anyone. He got into the car and drove out of town on the road to Palma, the capital of Mallorca. He was heading for an industrial complex not that far from the airport.

As he drove up the mountain, he kept an eye out for any vehicles that might be following him. There were none so he relaxed for the time it took him to reach his destination as the SEAT was not exactly a speedy vehicle.

“Ola Mike!” he called out as he entered the premises.

A voice from the back of the store called out.

“Hello Sergei. Long time no see! I’ll be out in a moment.”

“Take your time Mike. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Too darn right you aren’t. I’m the best place on the island.”

“Mike… you are the only place on the island!” said Serge.

“So! I’m still the best supplier of clandestine electronics shop this side of Madrid…” came the voice from the back.

He smiled and shook his head.

Mike appeared in the front of the shop a few minutes later.
“This is a pleasant surprise Sergei. It has been a while since you graced my humble premises with your presence. What can I do for you on this fine day?”

Mike’s strong Mancunian accent came through even though he’d been living on the island for more than forty years.

“I need a bug zapper. Optical and audio.”

“Man, that is some serious shit. Off on a job?”
Mike thought that Sergei was a security consultant. Close enough but it allowed him to acquire bits of kit that joe public would never need.

Sergei shook his head.
“Unwelcome visitors at home.”

“Ouch! That is not good.”

He pulled out the photo of the man who’d planted the bugs and showed it to Mike.
“I know him from somewhere but I can’t place him.”

That was a lie. He knew very well where he’d seen the man before but he was not as far as he knew, on the island or hadn’t been until now.

Mike looked at the photo. The smile that was on his face disappeared in a flash.

“Stay right there. I’ll be right back.”

Mike went into the back room and returned with a laptop. He pulled up the front page of the Island’s English Language newspaper.

Both of them read the headlines. The photo in the bottom corner told them both a story that they didn’t need to be told out loud.

“Ronnie Roberts. I remember him now. Useless grifter. Last I heard of him, he tried it on a head of police in Gerona,” said Mike.

“I ran into him briefly a few years back in Cannes before the Gendarmerie National ran him out of town. He tried to nick the Mayor's Car from in front of the Conference Centre.”

“Now his body was found floating in Palma harbour a few days ago.”
“What have you gotten yourself into my friend?” asked Mike.

“The less you know the better. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“And I’m the King of Siam. Whoever they are, they don’t leave loose ends behind. Just like someone else I know, eh?”

“True. Can you supply my needs?”

“I can but I’m not going to charge you for them and you were never here. If anyone asks, I had a break in, ok?”

The man smiled and nodded his head.

Mike disappeared into the back office for a few moments. He returned with two devices.
“Do I need to tell you how to use them?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Then good luck man. Someone nasty is on your case so take care and come and see me when it is all over.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence Mike. It is much appreciated.”

Sergei’s next destination was to purchase a new but second-hand phone and a new but second-hand laptop. Ever cautious, he used different shops on different sides of the island capital, Palma for his purchases. At a third shop, he bought two new SIM cards for the phone.

He wasn’t going to take any chances that the old laptop had been infected with malware and spyware. If he had time, he could take it to someone in Barcelona who could do a deep dive into it but given the circumstances, it was quicker and easier to start again.

A little over two hours after leaving Mike’s shop, he was back on the road to Soller, his mission away from home complete.

When Sergei arrived back at his villa, he didn’t go in the front door. Instead, he went directly to the basement and cut the power to the building. Then he physically disconnected the cable that provided him with his internet connection.

He breathed a sigh of relief but he didn’t stop for long. He tripped all the breakers before turning on the supply again. He stood still for a while and watched the electricity meter. It didn’t move. So far, so good. Using the cellar as a base, he powered up the audio and video sniffer devices and checked the place for bugs. There were none in the cellar which pleased him no end.

His next job was to sweep each room for cameras after powering up the supply to only the room being swept.

When that first sweep was done and the devices disabled, he powered up the whole house and swept it again. The last sweep uncovered two more audio devices embedded in the ceiling of the kitchen and his bedroom and one camera in the bathroom. No room had been free of at least one bug. As a precaution, he shut off all the circuits in the house with the idea of ‘not tempting fate’ if it could be avoided.

The table in the basement contained no less than ten cameras and eight audio bugs. Some of them had been hard to find but he was still not confident that he'd found them all. He doubted that the late Ronnie Roberts had the skills to do all the planting on his own. There had to have been more than one person involved. Ronnie was just the break-in artist and was as the report in the newspaper indicated, expendable.

The sophistication of the devices impressed him. That confirmed his initial impression, that the man he was up against was going to be a worthwhile opponent.

The gathering gloom told him that it was almost time for the next email from who? Perhaps, there would be something in it that would give away the identity of his new nemesis?

Before leaving the basement with the groceries that he’d purchased at the market in Soller, he switched on the kitchen power supply. At least he could prepare something to eat and drink before getting his next set of instructions.

As he fried off some chorizo, garlic and peppers for an omelette, he wondered what his last meal would be?

[to be continued]

[1] The Soller-Puerto Soller Tramway on the island of Mallorca
https://trendesoller.com/eng/routes/tram

[Authors Note]
This story is a little different from most of my work. Please bear with me on this as not a lot really happens rapidly for most of it but Chameleon’s don’t move very fast, do they? (apart from their tongue which moves faster than you can blink)