Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (35 page)

‘
Entonces?
So?’

‘You need to come down to the signal room, Patrón. There’s something you’ll want to see.’

The drug lord threw a glance at Valentina. ‘Can’t it wait?’ he said.

‘No, it’s happening now. You have to see it with your own eyes. Believe me, Patrón, you won’t want to miss this.’

El Pobrecito threw on a Hawaiian shirt, wrapped a towel round his waist and followed his security chief towards the door. To his surprise, Valentina asked if she could come too. ‘Am I not, as you say, part of
la familia
now?’ she said coyly. García laughed and beckoned her to follow, but Suarez stood where he was and shook his head firmly. What he wanted to show his boss was sensitive and he still didn’t trust the girl. To him, she would always be
una persona ajena
, an outsider. Valentina looked crestfallen but she returned obediently to her station beside the acupuncture table.

Down the steps the two men went, along a corridor damp with humidity, until they came to the door of a room that served as the nerve centre for the cartel’s global operations. The two guards posted outside stood up when they heard them coming, cradling their Galil assault rifles and nodding deferentially to García and
Suarez as they swept into the signal room. Suarez was still working on beefing up the physical security measures for the place, but when it came to online digital security, Morales, the cartel’s cyber wizard, was way ahead of him. Every phone call made over the internet, every text message, every email, incoming and outgoing, was routed and rerouted through a bewildering chain made up of thousands of different IP addresses dotted around the globe. At each stage it was re-encrypted so that anyone thinking of intercepting, like the NSA at Fort Meade, for example, would have to get very lucky: they would need to know exactly what they were looking for. It was not so much a question of searching for a needle in a haystack, more that the haystack was built of needles and nearly all of those needles would lead to a dead end.

‘It started ten minutes ago,’ said Suarez. He was standing next to his boss with his arms folded, watching his reaction. ‘Can you see now why I wanted you to be here?’

‘Incredible,’ whispered García. For once, he was almost lost for words.

The thing about being the boss of a super-rich drug cartel is that when an invention comes out, you don’t have to wait around for it to hit the mainstream retail market. At the urging of Vicente Morales, the cartel had acquired one of the most advanced models yet of a three-dimensional printer and now here they were, in a coffee planter’s discreet villa on a Colombian hillside, watching it do its stuff. In the centre of the room a shape was taking form before their eyes, rising up from the floor like a phantom. Made of pale yellow resin, it was growing and morphing as if it had a life of its own.

‘
Dios mío
,’ breathed García, and crossed himself. He didn’t trust it at first, yet still it fascinated him. ‘Is this the replica of . . .?’

‘
Sí, Patrón.
They phoned to alert us it would be coming through.’

‘My God! This is amazing!’ García erupted into a great belly laugh and hugged Suarez. ‘I want them to tell me all about it. Get them on the line now. Wait! We should give it a name first.’ García’s face bore a mischievous expression. ‘We will call it . . . we will call it La Palomita. The Little Dove.’

WITH CALLOUSED HANDS
García stroked the shape before him. Then he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, held them to his nose, sniffed and wiped them on his Hawaiian shirt. This creation, he decided, was
un monstruo
, but it was a beautiful monster: it was
his
monster. It reminded him, for just a moment, of the container they had put his little brother’s ashes in all those years ago in the
barrio
, after he had swallowed the rat poison someone had placed around the drains. But this replica, this avatar, which had miraculously built itself in quick-setting resin, here in the communications room of his villa, it was a source of pride, not of sadness. It had been Morales’ idea, buying a 3D printer so the boss could see for himself the instrument of his own very personal revenge on the British. And Suarez, never far from his boss’s side, had approved it.

It had taken more than two years to get to this point, two years of mounting bitterness and frustration, as one shipment after another had been stopped and impounded, all due to the meddling of the British spies and their sons-of-bitches informants at the ports. The idea had come to them in 2014, soon after that terrible, terrible April day in Cartagena. Seven tons! Those
malparidos
, those bastards, at Customs had seized the lot, all those sealed packages carefully hidden in an innocuous consignment of pineapple pulp bound for Rotterdam. It wasn’t all his, of
course. A massive shipment like that needed to be shared with other players, like the KIA and and the Yamaha cartels. But it had cost his people dearly. Over US$250 million at a conservative estimate. More, when you took into account the revenues that washed back into the network from the sales on the street.

From that moment on, vengeance had been only a matter of time and careful planning. Suarez and those who worked for him had done their research diligently, then trawled through their international contact base until they found the right connections. A meeting was arranged with the North Koreans on neutral ground in Havana. A down payment was made and a ‘memorandum of understanding’ was agreed as to when the material would arrive and how it would be delivered. But when disaster struck again a year later off Scotland, with three tons being seized at sea by Britain’s Border Force and the NCA, García had erupted in fury. That had been the final straw. The project, he had demanded, must be brought forward without delay.

‘Get them on the line,’ he told Suarez now. ‘I want to know how my Palomita will work.’

‘I can explain it to you myself, Patrón, if you would like?’ As the cartel’s security chief, Suarez preferred to avoid unnecessary phone calls whenever he could. He believed he would live longer that way.

‘No!’ insisted García. ‘Call our people in
Inglaterra
right now. Have them explain it to me. I want to hear from the
científicos
, the scientists.’

Minutes later they handed him the phone and the voice crackled through the earpiece from across the Atlantic. García stood there, listening, still in his Hawaiian shirt and with a towel wrapped around his waist. He nodded, impressed and inquisitive at the same time.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘So three component parts . . .
el explosivo
and the nuclear thing and the shield. So what am I looking at here?’ García patted the 3D-printed replica beside him. ‘Which bit did you send us, hmm? . . . All of it? . . . I see. And when will my Little Dove be ready?’

Those in the signals room that morning noticed that it was at exactly this moment that his demeanour changed markedly. For the worse.

‘What do you mean,
un problema
?’

There was a pause on the line and he could hear urgent whispering.

‘Don’t talk when I can’t hear you!’ he shouted at them. ‘What problem?’

The voice at the other end sounded hesitant, even afraid. That was natural: García expected people to be scared of him. He liked it that way. But it was not him they were afraid of.

‘Señor Patrón . . .’ said the voice. ‘The device, it is making people sick. The two
submarinistas
who sailed with it, they are not well, not well at all.’

‘Then prepare it quickly. Waste no time. Suarez will tell you when it is time.’

He cancelled the call and handed the phone back to his security chief. ‘If there are any more problems,’ he said, as he left the room, ‘I don’t wish to hear of them. Just tell me when it is ready.’

AS GARCÍA SAUNTERED
back to his private room in the villa, a midnight-blue BMW eased quietly out of a London side-street and merged into the afternoon traffic on Millbank. It took a right turn at the roundabout, crossed Lambeth Bridge, passed the IMAX cinema, then crossed back over Waterloo Bridge and headed north along Southampton Row and beyond that towards a hospital on Euston Road. In the back sat Luke and Jenny Li, a slew of scientific papers spread on the seat between them. He was unsure why Groves had assigned her to go with him when he really needed a radiation expert from DPRS, not a case officer from MI5.

‘How much do you know about CBRNE?’ he asked. His tone was neutral enough but it was still a loaded question. Not very much, was his guess. When she didn’t answer straight away he added: ‘Sorry, that’s chemical, biological and—’

‘I know what it stands for, Luke. I did a degree in chemical engineering. My thesis was on industry safety protocols.’

‘Ah.’ So that was why Groves had assigned her to this. They had stopped at the lights beside Holborn tube station, and through the tinted rear windows Luke looked out at the streams of pedestrians crossing in both directions, blissfully unaware of what he and his team were striving to prevent.

‘What about you?’ said Jenny.

‘Excuse me?’ He had zoned out there for a moment.

‘I was asking how much you knew about CBRNE?’

‘Only what I picked up in the military,’ he replied. ‘The Cold War was well and truly over by the time I joined up so it wasn’t considered too much of a priority.’

‘Not a problem,’ she replied. ‘The Cabinet Office commissioned quite a good paper on this that you might want to read. It’s among this lot somewhere.’ She rummaged through the papers on the back seat, then handed him a slim pamphlet. ‘Here you go.’

‘
Strategic National Guidance
.’ Luke read the title page out aloud as he took the booklet and started to flip through it.

‘You might want to go straight to page forty-four,’ she told him. ‘It’s an appendix on radiological substances. Gives you the basics.’ She flashed him a superficial smile and went back to sorting through the documents on her lap. Luke read on.

‘Gamma rays are the most energetic of the three types of radiation and can pass through the body. Gamma rays can penetrate most materials and require a substantial thickness of lead or concrete to provide an effective barrier.’ How the hell had the two submariners been poisoned? Had the protective shield broken? And what about Jorge Enriquez? Luke was seriously worried about him. And now he was probably going to bump right into him at the hospital. This was getting messy.

‘And there’s this one.’ Jenny handed him the confidential report on the various stages of Alexander Litvinenko’s terminal decline. ‘It’s all in there,’ she told him. ‘The urine tests, the hair falling out, the attempts to reverse it with Prussian blue. I think we should brace ourselves to expect something similar with our guy.’ She looked up as the car slowed. ‘Oh, we’re nearly there.’

The MI5 driver let them out in the forecourt of University College Hospital, parking just behind a St John’s ambulance. They pushed through the double doors, making room for a woman being wheeled in on a gurney, then approached Reception. A man emerged from behind the desk to meet them. ‘Luke Carlton? Jenny Li?’ he asked. ‘Welcome to UCH. Follow me this way, please.’

Through a set of swing doors and down a spotless corridor, where every few seconds a disembodied voice in the wall above them admonished everyone, in a stern, matronly way, ‘Please help us to protect our patients. Gel . . . your . . . hands.’ Up in a lift, along another corridor, then they came to an abrupt halt outside a room. Two armed uniformed policemen stood guard at the door.

‘They’re here to see the patient brought up from Falmouth,’ said the receptionist quietly, as if confiding a secret, even though no one else was around.

‘Sorry, can’t let you in.’ It was the older of the two policemen who spoke.

‘I think you can,’ said Luke, his voice carrying an authoritative hint of his years as a Royal Marines officer. He produced his Security Service pass and Jenny Li did the same. ‘Someone should have told you we were coming,’ he added.

‘No one’s told us anything,’ replied the policeman, studying Luke’s ID and handing it back like an unwanted flyer. He might as well have shown him a library card for all the good it did. ‘We’re going to have to ask you to move back now. This is a secure area.’

‘Seriously?’ said Luke. This was unbelievable.

‘Seriously,’ replied the policeman, moving closer to Luke now and squaring off opposite him. They were about the same height but the policeman was heavier, his body made bulkier still by his stab vest and utility belt. ‘No one goes through unless we get told by Gold Command. Now, please, sir, I’m asking you once more to move along.’

The man who had escorted them from Reception seemed suitably embarrassed. Clearly this was above his paygrade too. ‘Can I suggest,’ he said to Luke and Jenny, ‘that I take you both down to the cafeteria while we sort this out? It shouldn’t take long. Really, I’m very sorry.’

Jenny Li had a face like thunder. ‘I’ve taken that man’s badge number,’ she hissed to Luke, as they walked away. ‘He’s not heard the last of this.’

Precious time was lost as they sat in the café on the ground floor, drinking weak tea and making small-talk while the receptionist worked the phone, chasing authorization. Luke’s mobile vibrated twice with an incoming text message from Jorge Enriquez. He read it and felt like shouting for joy.
Had the scan. All clear
. That was a massive burden lifted off his conscience.

An hour later, when authorization had arrived, all three returned to the isolation room and saw, with some satisfaction, that the policemen had changed shift. They were let in immediately.

The smell hit them as soon as the door closed behind them.

‘Sorry about that,’ said a voice behind them. ‘It’s glutaraldehyde. We use it as a broad-spectrum disinfectant. I’m Tomasz Kracjek, the consultant here.’ He smiled but kept his hands at his sides. ‘We operate in a sterile zone,’ he added. His white medical coat was partially open, revealing a crisp Charles Tyrwhitt shirt and designer jeans. His patent brown leather shoes looked strangely out of place in the clinical, aseptic environment. ‘Look,’ he seemed to be gathering his thoughts, ‘I’m afraid our patient is not in a good way. His immune system is heavily suppressed so any infection could finish him off. We’re having to take every precaution.’