Rules of Vengeance (23 page)

“Days, maybe a week—provided, that is, that they get to you. Queue’s about sixty days as it is.”

“Thanks for the tip, Tony.”

“Sorry I couldn’t help.”

“No worries.” Kate patted him on the shoulder and made her way to the stairs. Ambient sound analysis, she thought to herself. There had to be an easier way. She shook her head. Church bells, of all things.

Just then she remembered something about the video message, a detail she’d noted but had dismissed as more grasping at straws. She stopped in her tracks. It was probably nothing, but…

She ran up the remaining stairs and threw open the door before getting hold of herself. No running allowed, she reminded herself. Never let them see you bothered.

Setting her chin against the world, she strode down the walkway and out of the building. She needed to review a copy of the video transmission. She was going back to Thames House, Graves be damned!

   “Keep the lights off!” shouted the besotted voice.

Kate advanced into the recesses of the office on the first floor of Thames House. Squinting, she made out a shadowy form slumped behind the broad desk. “You all right, then, Colonel Graves?”

“What do you want?” The words slurred in a messy polysyllabic swamp.

Kate ran her hand along the wall and flicked on the lights. The room blazed to life. Graves raised a hand to ward off the glare, staring at her hatefully through bloodshot eyes. There was a bottle of whisky on his desk and a cut-glass tumbler filled nearly to the lip.

“I couldn’t reach you. Your assistant said I might find you here.”

“Remind me to sack him.”

“What’s all this, then?” Kate indicated the bottle and the glass and his generally lamentable state.

“Why, nothing, DCI Ford. Everything’s hunky-dory. All quiet on the western front. You may return to your troops forthwith.”

“I thought you’d be halfway to Timbuktu by now. You and your trusty Yankee bloodhound.”

“Ransom? You mean you haven’t heard?” Graves’s throaty laugh echoed through the room, a single forlorn bark.

Kate advanced tentatively toward the desk. “What is it?”

“He’s gone.”

“Gone? Did you hand him over to the Americans? Did they admit to knowing him after all?”

“The Americans? ’Course not.”

“Then what?”

“He escaped.”

“He did what?” Kate asked, certain that Graves was engaging in some sort of twisted practical joke.

“Skedaddled. Went over the wall. He is no longer in police custody. Wipe that damn look off your face. Are you having a problem understanding me?”

Kate fell into the chair facing Graves’s desk. She was furious. Monumentally angry at whatever act of incompetence had allowed a suspect to escape from police custody. “When I left, you had him locked in his room with enough guards to protect the pope. What exactly happened?”

“Chap climbed down the building. Off the balcony and right down the façade. Apparently it’s not as hard as it looks.” Graves pushed his chair back and stood. “You didn’t tell me he was a climber,” he said, circling the desk menacingly. “I only just got that part. If I’d been so apprised, then perhaps I would have put two and two together. Not as dumb as some of the boys upstairs think, actually.”

“So you’re blaming it on me?”

“No,” admitted Graves. “This one’s all mine. When you take off a prisoner’s cuffs and let him wander around the room as if he’s the Prince of Wales and you’re his valet, then you don’t have anyone else to blame. My fault entirely.” He leveled a finger at her. “You may now mention something about my being an arrogant bastard who deserved to be hoisted on his own petard. I yield the floor to the member from Hen-don.”

“Not my style,” said Kate.

“Funny, it’s mine,” said Graves, almost cheerily. “Or should I say it was.”

“You sacked, then?”

Graves shook his head as if it were the furthest thing from the truth. “’Course not. They tend to be diplomatic about this kind of thing. The director will wait a week or so, so as not to draw any more attention to the matter than necessary. Still, it’s a matter of time. You don’t let the prime suspect in a car bombing that took seven lives, including some very important, very nasty Russian diplomats, slip through your fingers. Not when you have him under lock and key.
Sacked?
I’ll be lucky if I’m not crucified.”

“I’m sorry.”

Graves rolled his eyes. “Christ, a sincere one.” He picked up the glass and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Trying to find the woman who contacted Russell.”

“A nonstarter. Didn’t your buddy Tony Shaffer tell you that over at the Aquarium?”

Even now Graves had to let Kate know that he was one step ahead of her. “He said Five wouldn’t cooperate.”

“Better than admitting we were flummoxed,” said Graves. “Russell’s got that message routed through ISPs all over the globe. Before coming to England, it passed through France, Russia, and India. It would take a month to track it down.” Suddenly he guffawed. “The woman’s probably a pro, too. The baby was cover.”

Kate twisted in her chair to follow Graves as he ambled around his office. “Do you have a copy of her message handy?”

“Sure, but I can tell you that my best men have given it a thorough going over and come up with exactly nil.”

“Would you mind playing it?”

Graves opened the AV cabinet and activated the DVD player. A moment later the intercepted message began to spool.

“Stop there,” said Kate, halfway through the woman’s speech.

Graves froze the image. Onscreen, the woman had bent forward an inch or two to quiet her baby. One of her hands brushed the infant’s cheek.

“Look at the ring,” said Kate, pointing to the woman’s outstretched fingers.

“What about it?”

“It has a coat of arms. I think it may be a university ring.”

Graves increased the size of the image and the woman grew larger, her hand positioned in the center of the picture. Kate stepped closer to the monitor. “That’s an Oxford ring, if I’m not mistaken.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“Because I wanted to go there desperately.”

Graves studied the image for a few seconds, then spun and walked back to his desk. “Christ, you just may have something.”

In the space of ten seconds, his gait had regained its authority. His posture was its once rigid self. He plucked the phone from the cradle and put it to his ear. “Roberts,” he said, the slur a bad memory. “Get down to archives. Find the Oxford University yearbooks for…” Graves lowered the phone.

“The last twenty years,” said Kate.

“The last twenty years and bring them right up.” He set down the phone. “Drink?” he said.

Kate shook her head. “Better not. Still recovering.”

Graves perched himself on the edge of the desk. “That was you who blew the Kew Strangler arrest, eh? Tough going.”

“We had him IDed, with enough evidence to put him away for life. Our profiler said he was docile except when acting out his fantasies. We walked up to his front door as if he was any other Joe. We even rang the bell and introduced ourselves. I didn’t think there would be a problem. I’ve arrested twenty murderers. None of ’em made a peep. Gentle as lambs when we brought them in. We got complacent.”

“The chap who was killed—a detective chief superintendent, wasn’t he?”

“Billy Donovan. He was my fiancé.”

Graves winced. “I’m sorry.”

“The Met tried to force me to retire,” explained Kate. “They don’t like embarrassments either. I told them to shove it. I wasn’t going out like that. They stuck me on night shift and look what happened. I’ve got my second chance.”

“I don’t think the director general is so forgiving.”

“You’ve got seven days. It takes that long just for the paperwork to get started. We can prove both our bosses were wrong.”

Graves lifted his glass. “On that inspirational note, DCI Ford, cheers and fuck the lot of you!”

Kate put her hand on his arm. “That’s enough charity for tonight.”

Graves yanked his hand loose. He glared at Kate, then turned and set the glass down on the desk. “Ransom’s dirty. Von Daniken said the same thing. Ransom’s too skilled to be an amateur. And don’t you say he’s just scared.”

“I disagree. He was too close to the blast, for one. And why would he run down the street shouting like a madman at his wife? If he were a pro, he would have managed to alert her more discreetly. He had to know we’d get it on tape.”

“That’s what bothers me,” said Graves. “It’s her behavior that doesn’t make any sense.”

“How so?”

“We know she’s a pro, whether she used to work with the Americans or not. We learned that at Russell’s flat. Someone had to teach her how to defeat that security system. Then you have the car bomb. It’s no easy task to assemble that kind of device and get it into central London without being spotted. But what does Mrs. Emma Ransom do with all her training and supposed years of experience? She stands on that street corner plain as day through two cycles of the traffic signal and practically stares into the camera as she blows the bomb. She wanted us to see her.” Graves slapped his leg in a sign of frustration. “To tell you the truth, the behavior of neither of them makes a lick of sense.”

“Him I understand,” retorted Kate. “He told us that she’d surprised him at the hotel. He knew what she’d done in the past. He put two and two together and realized she was up to something here in London.”

“And now?”

“And now he’s trying to save her.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

“What would you do if it was your wife?”

“I’d have chosen a bit more carefully,” said Graves.

Just then Roberts knocked and entered the office. He was followed by another man, and between them, they were carrying the requested university yearbooks. Graves took the topmost yearbook and compared the shield on its spine to the one visible on the monitor. The two matched. “Set them on my desk,” he directed.

“Anything else, sir?” asked Roberts.

“An urn of coffee and two cups, sugar, cream, the works. Anything else you can think of, DCI Ford?”

“If you can find a chip shop that’s open, I wouldn’t mind a piece of cod.”

“Wrapped in newspaper?” said Graves, with the hint of a smile.

“Newspaper would be fine,” answered Kate sternly. She was in no mood to be Graves’s newly appointed buddy.

“You heard the lady,” barked Graves. “Fish and chips. Get me some, too. I’m starved. Now get out of here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Roberts with a sharp nod.

“Good,” said Graves, settling down at his desk. “That’s taken care of. Now let’s get to work. We’ve a helluva lot of faces to look at.”

   “Keep your eyes on the ground,” shouted Den Baxter, chief of the London Metropolitan Police’s Evidence Recovery Team, as he walked up Storey’s Gate. “The pieces are all here. No one better even think of going home until we find them!”

It was eleven o’clock. The sun had slipped below the horizon ninety minutes earlier. Across London, the curtain of night had fallen. Everywhere except Storey’s Gate.

Along Storey’s Gate, it was as bright as midday. Up and down the 500-meter band of pavement, from Victoria Street to the west to Great George Street to the east, tall halogen work lamps illuminated the area where the car bomb had been detonated twelve hours earlier. There were over one hundred lamps in all, each with a brash 150-watt flood trained on the asphalt. Half again as numerous were the members of the Evidence Recovery Team, or the ERT, as it was better known. Clad head to toe in white Tyvek bodysuits, they swarmed up and down the street with the single-mindedness of army ants.

“Chief, over here!”

Baxter circled the husk of one of the burned automobiles and hurried toward the sidewalk, where a man stood with his hand raised. Baxter was a fireplug of a man, with flaming red hair and a boxer’s broken nose. A thirty-year veteran of the force, he’d arrived at the scene shortly after the first responders—the initial police, firemen, and paramedics called in to deal with the casualties. It was his job to locate, preserve, and catalogue any and all evidence having to do with the blast, and he carried it out with a zeal bordering on the fanatical.

“What’ve you got?” he asked.

The man held up a jagged piece of metal the size of a pack of cigarettes. “Bit of treasure. Piece of the car that went up. Got a nice dab of residue.”

Baxter examined the hunk of metal, quickly spotting the blackened crust on one corner. A scrape of his thumbnail revealed a field of white powder beneath the surface. He walked to the mobile command center at the corner of Victoria Street. The rear doors were open, and he climbed inside. “Got a present for you.”

Two men sat inside at an elaborate bank of instruments. Using a cotton swab, one freed a dab of explosive and prepped it for testing. One of the machines at his disposal was a Thomson gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer capable of analyzing the chemical composition of every commercially manufactured explosive compound known to man, and plenty that were homemade, too.

With an admonition to inform him as soon as any results were received, Baxter jumped out of the van and looked to see where he might be of some use. Twelve hours on the scene and he was still as charged up as a bantam cock.

When he arrived at 11:35, barely twenty minutes after the blast, his first task had been to clear the scene of casualties and establish a secure perimeter. His fellow officers were often his worst enemy. In their haste to help the injured, they stomped around the scene with little regard for evidence. It was three hours before all casualties were cleared from the scene, and another two before the last uniformed policeman had been escorted off-site. Only then was Baxter able to begin his real work.

The perimeter of a bomb site was established by the size of the blast area. The majority of car bombs employed one form or another of plastic explosives which, when detonated, expanded at a rate of nearly five miles per second. Baxter grew angry when he saw movies where the hero outran a fireball emanating from a detonation. Not likely. Thankfully, Storey’s Gate was a narrow street. The blast wave had ricocheted between the buildings, dissipating rapidly, and remained largely confined to its length.