Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (45 page)

‘I really need to use the bathroom,’ she said. ‘
El baño?
Please?’

The woman took a step forward and put her face very close to Elise’s, examining her critically as if she were a suspicious package. Elise did not like what she saw in those eyes: hardness, cruelty, a total absence of compassion.

‘You be quiet,’ hissed the woman, ‘or I put your eyes out.’

The words shocked Elise to the core. It was a blunt and horrible reminder of her predicament: these people could do anything they liked to her and apparently no one was coming to save her. She would keep quiet from now on.

The woman turned round to look at the door as it opened. It was Ana María, as immaculate as ever, come to inspect her prisoner.

‘Is she behaving?’ she asked in English.

The other woman didn’t answer, but Elise spoke up.

‘Please. Why are you holding me? I don’t know who you are or what you want. This has to be a mistake. Come on,’ she implored, ‘just let me go and I’ll tell no one about this, and—’

The back-handed slap was so hard it rocked Elise in her chair, cutting her off in mid-sentence. It left her gasping, her eyes stinging and tears welling. She could taste blood at the corner of her mouth where the blow had split her lip. The shorter of the two woman had delivered it and now stood hissing at her like a venomous reptile. She raised her arm, ready to hit Elise a second time, but Ana María placed a restraining hand on her. ‘
Paciencia
,’ she said, as she moved closer to Elise.

‘We’re offering your government a choice. A simple exchange. You for him.’

Elise looked at the two women, so very different yet partners in the same crime. There was no longer any doubt in her mind. They were from the gang who had kidnapped Luke in South America. And they were cruel. They had already shown that, phoning her while they tortured him with an electric drill. Human life clearly meant little to them. Her spirits sank.

Elise could feel a bruise coming up on her cheek where the woman had hit her, but now Ana María was speaking to her once more.

‘And this is my friend.’ She laid a hand on the other woman’s arm. ‘This is Linda. I have things to take care of now so she will look after you.’ What the hell did that mean? Elise had known the woman less than five minutes and already she had threatened to blind her, then hit her. This wasn’t good news. Ana María was sinister, but Elise suspected she was in for a rough ride at the hands of this woman from the
barrios
. Linda was coming towards her now, holding something. She recognized it as the gag in the last moment before it was tied over her mouth. It was so tight that it bit into her cheeks, stretching her lips. Linda looked at her work, grunted in satisfaction, and then the pair left. If Elise could have breathed normally she would have heaved a sigh of relief. Every minute spent away from them was time away from imminent danger. But she was under no illusion: they would be back, and when they came she had to be ready.

IN THE MET’S
specialist operations room, upstairs in Cobalt Square, there was a buzz of excitement. Nearly twenty-four hours after she had been kidnapped the team assigned to the Elise Mayhew case reckoned they might be looking at a breakthrough. Under the direction of Superintendent Worlock and two chief inspectors, they had pulled in every last frame of CCTV footage from every camera on every street within a five-hundred-metre radius of the last-known location of her mobile phone. Trawling through the jerky, monochrome footage, they focused on activity filmed between 1830 and 2000 hours the previous evening. While Elise’s handset had yet to be recovered, the CCTV material had yielded clear images of three vans with enough covered rear-window space to conceal a prisoner. Two vehicles had been traced to their owners, who had been questioned extensively. One turned out to belong to a garden nursery in Cheam, the other to a furniture upholstering company in Staines. But the third vehicle had been bought recently, paid for in cash and, according to the DVLA database, was registered to a Mr Hernando González of 58 Woodlock Avenue, Isleworth.

Superintendent Worlock sat on the corner of a desk in the ops room and peered at a computer monitor, studying the image of a van parked outside a lock-up garage in south-west London. One of the Met’s most experienced hostage-case handlers, his once-neat
sideburns had turned to unruly grey wisps in recent years. He wore reading glasses, these days, and adjusted them now, pushing them further up the bridge of his nose. The Kidnap Unit’s Green team, assigned to exploit the intelligence, was gathered behind him.

‘ANPR?’ asked Worlock.

‘Already done,’ replied a detective sergeant. Following standard protocol, he had run the numberplate through the national automatic numberplate recognition system, a network of at least seven thousand cameras, many of them hidden, that allows police to track the movement of suspect vehicles around the country.

‘And?’ Worlock asked.

‘It didn’t spend long at that address in Hanworth. It drove out thirty minutes later. We’ve clocked it passing a camera in Walton-on-Thames, then moving on to an address in Weybridge, just south of where the M3 meets the M25.’ The DS sat back, scanning his boss’s face for a reaction.

‘When was this?’ asked Worlock.

‘Well, the vehicle movements were last night. But we’ve just received the data now.’

‘Get Blue team onto all three of these addresses. I want to know every single movement in and out of each of them.’

‘Will do, Boss.’

Superintendent Chris Worlock returned to his glass-walled office, mulling over two decisions he needed to make, and very soon. Should he contact SIS and give them the latest developments, or wait till he had something more concrete to tell them? Was Elise Mayhew in such imminent danger – a Grade 1 situation – that he needed to call in a tactical firearms officer to advise the teams on the options available to them? But something else was also nagging at the back of his mind.

There was no return address, not even a digital one, for him to reply to the hostage-takers’ demands, even if he chose to. That meant he could not deploy Red team, his negotiators. But it also meant the hostage-takers didn’t want to be contacted. They’re jacking us around, he thought. His mind made up, he reached for the phone to call the tactical firearms officer.

SOMETHING HAD CHANGED.
She could sense it the moment they pulled up at the gates of the planter’s villa. Valentina had sat patiently in the back of the jeep as García’s henchmen drove her along the darkened forest roads at what seemed to her an unnecessary speed. They had given her no reason for this late-night summons, but she was used to that. García kept unpredictable hours. But she had an inkling of what it meant, given all the preparations to leave: he must want her to accompany them. Finally she had earned her passport into his inner circle.

The guard on the villa gates was drunk. It was obvious, in fact he was making no attempt to hide it. Wearing a faded American combat jacket, a chequered Arab scarf round his neck and a flat green Mao cap, he held his Galil assault rifle in one hand and a half-empty bottle of
aguardiente
in the other.

‘They left without you,
chica
,’ he sneered, resting his arms on the open passenger window of the jeep. ‘They clearly don’t give a damn about you.’ It was Luis Fernando, Valentina’s least favourite security man on García’s payroll. She would never forget what had happened on her first day, his scrawny hands all over her, pawing at her breasts as he pretended to pat her down for weapons. Now he appeared to be almost triumphant. Valentina might have won the confidence of El Pobrecito but, clearly, she was not so special that he had thought to take her with him. This now left
her exposed, and she knew it. The guard craned his head inside the vehicle, addressing her in the back. She found his breath intoxicating, and not in a good way.

‘Señor Suarez left instructions for us,’ he told her. ‘He said we were to take extra care of you.’ He erupted into laughter, playfully punching the driver’s shoulder and winking at him.

Valentina was no fool. She knew exactly what was going on. Without her patron, her protector, she was now at the mercy of others at the villa who had always resented her. This was their payback time. She was going to have to fight for survival. ‘I need the toilet,’ she said. ‘Urgently.’

‘Of course,’ replied Luis Fernando. ‘I will escort you myself.’ He led the way towards the gatehouse, his feet shuffling, but the assault rifle still firmly in his grasp.

It was a basic room attached to the hut, sealed with a flimsy wooden door. He made a half-hearted attempt to follow her inside, but she pushed him gently back as she closed the door behind her and bolted it. The room whined with mosquitoes and she noticed one of the men had scrawled his name on the wall. Using his own excrement. These people were barbarians, she thought. But now she had just seconds to make a plan. All too aware of the enormity of the task entrusted to her, Valentina took out the compact transmitter Luke had given her less than an hour ago. She had to get word to them about García. The light inside the cubicle was dreadful, just a single weak bulb dangling on a flex, but she held up the compact to it so she could make out the keys and typed in a single sentence: ‘
Se ha ido al extranjero.
He’s gone abroad.’ She pressed transmit, replaced the powder puff and snapped the compact shut.

There was a sharp rap on the door. That sleazy bastard Fernando again, growing impatient. ‘Come on out,
chiquitita
,’ he called. ‘It’s time to play with the boys.’

She could almost see the leer on his face.

Valentina yanked the flush to play for time, then a thought occurred to her. The Travellers’ First Aid kit. It was her only weapon, and since García was gone what was there to lose? She
might as well put it to use. The rapping on the door was growing insistent. ‘If you don’t come out,’ shouted the guard, ‘I’m gonna come in there and wipe your pretty little arse myself.’

Valentina grimaced. Was it possible to despise this creep any more than she did already? She shook her head in disgust and took a deep breath. She was ready.

When she unlocked the door Fernando pushed it open and barged into the tiny cubicle. He seized her roughly by the shoulders but she wriggled free and wrapped her right arm around his neck, as if in a lover’s embrace. The needle must have stung when it went in because he leaped back and howled in pain, clapping his hand to where she had stabbed him. ‘
Puta!
’ he hissed. Incensed, he raised his arm to smash his fist into her face then held it poised in mid-air, as he fought for breath. He didn’t know it but his respiratory system was failing. He had absorbed a lethal dose. As he collapsed in the doorway, his torso heaving, Valentina stepped over him and started to run, aiming to cover the shortest distance between the gatehouse and the edge of the forest.

Perhaps, if she had been wearing different clothes, something more practical, she might have stood a chance. But her white dress and mid-heel court shoes were working against her that night: she was lit up like a beacon as she raced across the courtyard towards the safety of the trees. The first three bullets hit her in the small of the back, pitching her onto the gravel. Her bag hit the ground a split second later, spilling out a small green rectangular box. Valentina was still breathing when García’s men emptied the rest of the magazine into her. They checked her pulse, then reached under her armpits and dragged her lifeless body into the forest for the dogs to find. Valentina Gómez, Agent Tradewind, would never see England.

IN HIS TEMPORARY
office in the Grade 1 listed building overlooking Horse Guards Parade, Major General Rupert Milton (retired) put on his spectacles and studied the document in his hand. It read well, he concluded, because he had written almost every word himself. General Milton took his responsibilities extremely seriously. He had been planning this for nearly twelve months and now, with just three days to go before the event, he wanted every
t
crossed, every
i
dotted. That, he told himself, was why they had put a Guards officer in charge. You want something like this to go by the book? Then you call on someone like him from the Household Division. It isn’t every Tom, Dick and Harry who gets asked to take charge of organizing Britain’s Remembrance Sunday parade in Whitehall.

‘This,’ read the report, ‘is a supporting detail page of the main policy document.’ How those Whitehall types loved expressions like that. ‘At 1100 hours on Sunday, 13 November, the National Service of Remembrance will be held at the Cenotaph on Whitehall to commemorate the contribution of British and Commonwealth servicemen and -women in the two World Wars and later conflicts.’

So far, so good. The retired general read on, searching for errors. A heading in bold print announced who would be attending and taking part.

• 0845: Royal British Legion (RBL) detachments form up on Horse Guards Parade and in Whitehall
  
• 0945: All detachments march out from Wellington Barracks
  
• 1100: Two minutes’ silence marked by the firing of guns from King’s Troop, on Horse Guards Parade. Cenotaph Service commences
  
• 1120: Cenotaph Service concludes and RBL detachments disperse past the Cenotaph
  

‘Members of the public,’ it continued, ‘may observe the ceremony from the pavements along Whitehall and Parliament Street. Orders of Service will be distributed to the public by Scouts. Whitehall was to be opened to the public at precisely 0800. Those attending are advised not to bring large bags. Security in the area remains tight and the Metropolitan Police have powers to remove obstacles (such as camera tripods) where they obstruct public access.’

General Milton put down the paper. He realized he was grinding his teeth again, a habit he had acquired all those years ago as a fresh-faced young cadet at Sandhurst. ‘Security in the area remains tight.’ Ha! That was an understatement if ever there was one. Milton was one of the few ‘in the know’. Only the week before he had been summoned to the MoD across the road and briefed by the Defence Secretary herself, no less. Yes, there was an ongoing threat, she had told him, but the situation was contained. There was no hard intelligence to indicate that London was the target, although units were poised to move anywhere in the city the moment they got a lead. No need for alarm, she told him, just thought he ought to be aware.