Run Around by Brian Freemantle

– to be the most successful assassin they’d ever known.
    Which was why the smallest of oversights had to be guarded against. And which was why, after that late evening arrival in Geneva, he had disobeyed the final Moscow briefing instructions and not hired a car to go at once to Bern. Instead he had taken the anonymous airport bus into the city terminal and ignored taxi drivers and their possibly long memories to walk through the avenues and streets until he’d found the small auberge in the side road off the Boulevard de la Tour, safely away from either of the areas of the city in which he was later to operate. He booked in as Klaus Schmidt.
    It was a breakfast-only auberge and he took the meal, although he did not want to, because not to have done so might have attracted attention. It was the type of place in which everyone was existing on the sort of budget where every meal counted. Travelling on an English passport meant he chose the Times and the Independent to hide behind, enjoying the coffee but crumbling the croissant instead of eating it, anxious to get away.
    Zenin disdained any transport, public or otherwise. He got at once on to the Boulevard des Tranchées and stayed on the main and busy highways as he strode towards the lake. He crossed the Rhône feeding from it over the Mont Blanc bridge, making for the area where he was to meet Sulafeh Nabulsi. And almost at once isolated the first mistake. Kuchino had shown the Quai du Mont-Blanc to be a continuous thoroughfare, without the obligatory turn into the Rue des Alpes, and there had been no indication that the Rue Phillippe Plantamour was a oneway system. It was – horrifyingly – the lack of attention to detail which could have got him trapped and caught, if he had chosen to use any sort of vehicle when he made his eventual meeting with the woman and she had been under suspicion. In a rough square that took him as high as the Notre Dame church, to the Voltaire museum and then back in the direction of the lake again, Zenin encountered two more obstructive road systems. He was too highly trained actually to become emotionally angry, but as he had earlier in London he resolved to complain about the information that had been relayed from the Bern embassy and upon which the Kuchino model would have been based.
    There was a pavement café on the corner of the Adhemar-Fabri from which he could gaze across the water, regretting that so late in the year the Jet d’Eau had been turned off. Which had been another mistake, although not a dangerous one: the Kuchino model had shown the decorative water plume in operation. Zenin twisted in his seat, looking towards the unseen area of the Botanical Gardens. Moscow had given him estimates of walking times from various approaches but Zenin resolved to check them all himself, later: there had been too many discrepancies so far in the information provided by the embassy, so everything had to be confirmed and reconfirmed. He hoped the rented room would have the overview that had been demanded for him to get an unobstructed shot.
    Zenin was allowed to make his own choice of meeting places with the girl and chose three possibilities for the initial encounter, the first the café at which he was already sitting, because it was on a corner with three possible escape routes. Smiling at the irony, he decided upon the other two by utilizing the oversight of the Bern embassy, choosing one restaurant on the Rue des Alpes and another on the Rue des Terreaux du Temple: the entrapping imprisonment of a one-way system could as easily be reversed into an escape route and both were restricted highways. He hoped no frantic escape would be necessary because if it were it would mean that the woman was blown and with it the operation. And failed operations – even if they were no fault whatsoever of the operative – always looked bad on the record.
    Precautions, of course, had to be taken. And precautions