Free The Enemy by Tom Wood

Hungary, where, Victor presumed, either the Hungarian would be an exponentially harder target, or his killing would lose its value. A lifelong member of the Hungarian mob, Farkas was now fifty-two years old and making a name for himself outside the typical organised crime industries of drugs, extortion and prostitution, most notably in international people trafficking, and arms dealing.
    The latter was why, the dossier stated, Farkas was to be removed from existence. In particular it was because Farkas was currently making a lot of money buying assault rifles from manufacturers in Eastern Europe and illegally selling them on to buyers in the Middle East. Farkas didn’t seem like a particularly high-value target on the global scale of bad guys; there was probably more to it than just the arms sales. The absence of a specific motive was further evidence of Victor’s need-to-know status. Farkas was likely part of a chain Victor’s handler wanted disrupting, and killing the Hungarian was either the simplest, or perhaps the only way of stopping the guns he traded killing Americans further along the line. Though, having had saved the life of one arms trafficker already, Victor knew that nothing was necessarily as obvious as it appeared.
    Aside from an exact motive, the rest of the information on Farkas was particularly extensive – a lengthy biography, lists of associates, personal details and so on – but mostly useless. Recent photographs and Farkas’s location were the most important, and sometimes only, information Victor needed. Precious few other facts were relevant tothe completion of the job. And as those who compiled dossiers didn’t operate in the field, what was relevant to them and relevant to Victor could be very different. Still, given the specifics for this particular job, it was better to have too much information than too little.
    Farkas had to be blown up. No accident, no suicide, no gunshot wound, no slit throat. Farkas could only meet his end via high explosives. And only the explosives supplied by Georg would do.
    Again, Victor hadn’t been graced with an explanation, but, as with the motivation for Farkas’s demise, he had a reasonable idea why this death had to be so particular. Blame. His employer wanted the spotlight for Farkas’s murder to shine on some individual or faction, and whoever those people may be, the explosives Victor used would implicate them.
    He examined the cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine he’d acquired in Hamburg. Usually referred to as RDX, the compound was a common military- and industrial-use high explosive and one of the most destructive of all explosive materials. With the addition of some chemicals and motor oil, RDX formed plastic explosives like C-4, which Victor would have preferred to work with, but unfortunately he didn’t have that luxury.
    The fourteen pounds of RDX Victor had collected from Georg’s van was packed in seven two-pound military-use blocks. Whereas plastic explosives were malleable, RDX was a hard white crystalline substance. With the blasting caps that accompanied the explosives, Victor constructed a compact bomb from a single block of RDX that had more than enough power to kill one man from several yards away. Using all fourteen pounds would have formed a devastatingly powerful device, but its larger size would render it problematic to transport, too difficult to plant secretly, and would make if difficult to fulfil one of the contract’s requirements. Despite the obvious risks associated with using a bomb, Victor’s employer had stated there must be no collateral damage. Not that Victor needed to be told. He wasn’t in the habit of killing bystanders, but with explosives that was always a possibility, and the primary reason he didn’t work with them.
    Georg hadn’t supplied any remote detonating equipment, so Victor needed to place the bomb somewhere only Farkas would trigger it.He could form an ad-hoc remote detonator by rigging a cellular