Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (44 page)

When Luke closed the distance between them, Valentina’s head jerked up, like that of a deer startled by a predator, alert and
expectant. He pointed towards the house, questioning. She put her head on one side, resting on her hands, her hair hanging down in dark tresses. Good.

‘
Aguapanela?
’ she asked, in a whisper, as Luke pulled up a chair, careful not to scrape it on the veranda’s bare concrete floor. It was the first word spoken between them, and the irony didn’t escape him. Here they were, about to plan a murder, and she was offering him sugarcane water. Valentina was pointing to a cup of what looked like tea with a half-lime resting on the saucer. He remembered
aguapanela
from earlier visits – it was a strong drink, a bit like coffee – and declined: he was buzzing enough already. There was no time for introductions or small-talk: Luke had set a mental stopwatch from the moment he had stepped out of the shadows and thirty seconds had already passed.

He began with the compact communicator. That was the easy part, just plain tradecraft, nothing too far from the comms training she had received after she was first recruited to the Service. Then he untaped the Travellers’ First Aid box from its hiding place and opened it on the table, facing the box towards her. Quietly he talked her through the different needles, the phials of fentanyl citrate and how to attach them.

Then came the moment, a wobble, when she realized exactly what she was being asked to do. Valentina looked up at him and he saw fear in those brown doe eyes. He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘This is so much more than you agreed to do but it’s incredibly important for us and for your country, for your people.’ She held his eyes, waiting for him to say more, to convince her that taking such an immense risk was really necessary. ‘But you know that Nelson García
es un hombre muy malo
,’ Luke continued. ‘He has killed so many people, ruined so many lives. Valentina, his thugs murdered Jerry Benton, remember? The man who gave you a second chance in life?’ It was a cheap shot, but the clock was ticking and Luke needed to be sure she would go through with it. Eventually she nodded her assent and looked down again at the box of poison. As a trained acupuncturist, Valentina knew her job, and when it came to handling the
needles she was way ahead of him. The handover was starting to look easier than he had expected. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen minutes. Not bad. Luke held out his hand and smiled. ‘
Buena suerte
.’ He wished her luck and started to rise from his chair.

And that was when they heard her mother call from inside the house. ‘
Tina, mi chica.
You have visitors. It’s your employers. I’ve sent them round the back to find you.’

IN A FRACTION
of a second, Luke and Valentina exchanged glances. He had known her for less than fifteen minutes and he had no idea how she would react. There was no time to make a plan, no time for him to escape: they would have to wing it. The Travellers’ First Aid kit lay open on the table, its lethal contents on display for anyone to see. The sniper, he knew, would have him covered: a couple of rapid squeezes on the trigger would drop García’s men before they could present a threat. But if it came to that the whole plan would unravel. There would be no chance of getting to García and the mission would fail.

Luke dropped to the floor of the patio, flattening himself against the concrete while reaching for his personal weapon, strapped to his side ever since they had left the base in Tampa that morning. Valentina moved fast: she skipped down the steps into the garden at the back of the house and intercepted the two men just as they rounded the corner. Luke could hear her greeting them enthusiastically – she obviously knew them. Then she called, loudly enough for him to hear: ‘I’ll just go and get my things, then join you at the front. Please, wait for me there.’

They were taking her back to García.

Luke waited a full minute, then lifted himself off the patio floor, walked into the garden at the back and vanished into the foliage, entering the forest exactly where he had left it. Fifteen
minutes later he was back with Todd Miller and the vehicles. He hefted himself into the second row of seats in the lead minivan and brushed a few twigs off his clothes as he sat behind Miller. ‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘Garcia’s people came to take her back. A little close for comfort, I have to say.’

‘So I heard.’ Miller tapped his earpiece: he’d been getting constant updates. ‘We had no intel they’d be coming for her so soon.’ He held up a hand. ‘Excuse me, I have to notify MacDill.’ To the base in Florida, Miller spoke just a single word: ‘Nexus.’ It meant the delivery had been made, the package handed over. Tradewind was on her way back to García.

Luke, Miller and the SIGINT operator with the receiver sat in the minivan waiting for Valentina to confirm she was with García. It was after midnight when the small device buzzed into life. As the message came through, the comms operator scanned it onto his monitor, then passed the device to Miller without a word.

It was not what he was expecting.

IN A NONDESCRIPT
basement beneath a nondescript building in a street that looked exactly like the one next to it, Elise Mayhew sat bound to a wooden chair. The only other person in the room was Ana María and she was standing just two metres away from her, arms folded, head on one side, considering her.

That bitch! I knew it. Elise had suspected there was something not quite right about her when the elegant Spanish woman had wafted into the Stratford Gallery to enquire, ever so politely, about an artist who had never existed. Now she knew. Ana María was clearly part of some horrendous criminal underworld. What the hell did she want? Was Elise about to be trafficked? No. This was tied up with Luke and his work. It had to be. Elise was scared but she willed herself to stay calm, her eyes following Ana María as the Spanish woman started to pace about the room.

She was behind her now. Elise couldn’t see her but she sensed her standing very close. She felt a manicured hand reach down and stroke her cheek as Ana María spoke for the first time since their encounter in the art gallery. ‘What shall I do with you?’ she whispered, her face so close that Elise could smell her perfume. She recognized it as J’Adore by Dior. ‘I have an idea,’ continued Ana María, walking in front to face her square-on, her heels clicking on the wooden floor. Elise watched her smooth the creases in her skirt with both hands. She looked, at a pinch,
almost like some of the people Elise knew from her job at the gallery: elegant, sophisticated, well dressed. So what on earth was a woman like her doing mixed up with the underworld? Someone had to be paying her a lot of money and that, she reckoned, probably meant drugs. Oh, God, how was she going to get out of this?

‘I’m going to ask my partner to keep watch over you,’ announced Ana María. ‘You do exactly as she tells you and you will be fine. Is that understood?’ Elise nodded and mumbled behind the gag.

‘You want me to remove that thing? Well, it’s a little too soon for that, don’t you think? You’ve only just arrived. Why don’t we let my partner decide? Hmm?’ And with that Ana María was gone.

Alone in the room, Elise considered her situation. Breathing slowly and evenly, she was under control and thinking clearly. All those hard hours in the martial-arts
dojo
had taught her qualities she could now draw on: resilience, tenacity and the ability to withstand a few knocks. Up to a point. It depended on what they had in mind for her. That was the big unknown. She knew one thing, though: if she ever got the chance she could take the Spanish woman down. Sweep her off her feet and lay her out cold in two moves. But then what? These people, whoever they were, were hardly going to leave her an open exit to the street. And where the hell were the police? Surely someone must have seen her being snatched and raised the alarm. Elise struggled ineffectually to release her arms but they remained tightly bound. She stopped: she should save her energy for when she needed it.

‘WHAT WE NEED,’
said Alwyn Hughes, the National Security Adviser, ‘is a multi-layered approach. It needs to start at the Cenotaph and work outwards. We’ll need to put a ring of steel around all the royals and VIPs. And I want a counter-terrorism piece written into the public order safety plan for the day.’

With three days to go before the annual Remembrance Sunday parade, preparations were in full swing. On the wide expanse of Wellington Barracks next to St James’s Park the band of the Grenadier Guards had been rehearsing for days, belting out such martial tunes as ‘Heart of Oak’ and the sombre strains of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’. Horse Guards Parade had been swept clean, every item of litter gathered up, and extra security cameras were being installed. Police leave had been cancelled. The national terrorist threat level was still at its highest, although there was little outward sign of anything different. The newspapers and broadcasters had exhausted every possible scenario for what had prompted the government to raise the level to Critical. Most were sourcing it to threats emanating from Syria, Libya or Yemen. None had traced it back to South America.

But in the high-security confines of the Cabinet Office in the heart of Whitehall, where the country’s key decision-makers met on the National Security Council, one question kept coming back to haunt them, with ever greater urgency. Given the catastrophic
threat of a radioactive dirty bomb, should the Remembrance Sunday parade be going ahead? All the searches around Greater Manchester had drawn a blank, the ports had turned up nothing, the human informants run by the Metropolitan Police and MI5 had failed to produce any meaningful leads. Increasingly the NSC was veering towards the view that London was bound to be the target.

‘If we cancel Remembrance Sunday in London,’ cautioned Sir William Orgrave, the Cabinet Secretary, ‘we might as well tell the public what’s really going on and press the panic button. The PM will have to go before the nation and people will expect answers that we simply don’t have. No, I wouldn’t advise it.’

‘But by going ahead,’ argued Hughes, ‘surely we’re offering ourselves as a great barrage balloon of a target. The Sovereign will be there, obviously, along with half the royal family, prime ministers past and present – well, you know the score.’ From somewhere down in the street a siren rose in pitch as it passed their building, then faded away as it moved off towards Trafalgar Square.

‘Let me remind everyone what we’re talking about here,’ resumed Hughes. ‘If a dirty bomb were to go off in central London, you’re looking at thousands of square metres getting showered with radioactive particles. There’ll be people with first-degree burns, people with skin peeling off, not to mention all the thyroid cancer and other after-effects down the line. Whole streets, whole blocks would have to be evacuated. It could take weeks to decontaminate.’ His eyebrows arched as he spoke. The Doomsday scenario he described had clearly been playing on his mind.

‘Are you saying we should cancel?’ asked Alan Reynolds, the Home Secretary, his neat black hair as immaculate as ever. His eyes darted around the room, keen as a kingfisher’s, sussing out his other colleagues to see where they stood on the matter.

‘No,’ replied Hughes, in his calming Welsh tones. ‘At least, not yet.’

‘Well, we’re cutting it a bit fine, aren’t we?’ chipped in the Met’s
national coordinator for counter-terrorism, a seasoned deputy assistant commissioner. ‘There’s just three days to go and we’re no closer to locating the device and defusing it. If we can’t find it, surely the public’s safety has to come first.’

‘No one’s arguing with that,’ said the Cabinet Secretary. ‘But can anyone here recall the last time the Remembrance Sunday parade in London was cancelled?’ There was silence. ‘No?’ continued Orgrave. ‘Nor can I. It’s a national bloody institution, part of our calendar. So if we pull the plug, you can be absolutely certain the media are going to get wind of what’s behind it, and then what?’ Again he looked round the room as if to emphasize his point.

The Home Secretary twirled his pen between his fingers but said nothing, averting his gaze.

‘I’ll tell you exactly what,’ continued Orgrave. ‘You’re looking at a mass egress out of London. Every road, every motorway clogged and backed up for miles. And where will they go? Hmm? We simply aren’t set up to deal with a crisis of that magnitude. We’ve had nothing like it since 1940 and the Blitz.’

After forty-five minutes the meeting broke up without consensus. But in the most time-honoured of all Whitehall traditions, a decision was taken: to delay making any decision until there was more information to hand.

ELISE JOLTED AWAKE.
She could hear footsteps approaching. How long had she been asleep? An hour? Two? Longer? Instinctively, she glanced down at her wrist to check the time, but her watch had gone. Of course it had. They had taken it from her when they’d thrown away her mobile phone. A dull, monochrome light was seeping into the room, the colour of November, so it must be morning. Elise’s arms hurt from where she was bound and she had pins and needles in all her limbs. She tensed and relaxed her muscles as much as she could, flexing her fingers and trying to work her circulation. With a shock she realized that the gag was gone – that at least was a plus. They must have removed it while she slept in case she choked on it. Which meant they planned to keep her alive, at least for now.

When the door opened she braced herself. Would it be one of the underworld thugs who had bundled her into the minivan yesterday? No. It was a woman, but a very different one from the fragrant Ana María. She was shorter than average, a little broad in the beam, and wearing a faded red polo shirt above stonewashed jeans. No jewellery, no make-up, no ring, and Elise detected a faint smell of stale cigarettes.

‘Good morning.’ Elise broke the silence. She was remembering something Luke had told her when they were idling away an
afternoon on holiday. ‘If you’re ever taken prisoner,’ he had said – she had laughed at that – ‘try to establish a rapport with whoever’s guarding you. Break the ice, get them talking, get them thinking of you as a fellow human instead of a nameless prisoner. That way you’ll get better treatment, and when the time comes, they may just help you by looking the other way.’ Good advice, she reflected now, but this one appeared a hard case, not exactly a talker.