‘He’s out there somewhere,’ D’Angelo said looking beyond the lights blinding him. ‘Ronald? Come up on stage with me…ladies and gentlemen, this is my campaign manager Ronald Browning. Give him a huge round of applause as well.’
Browning hadn’t expected to be joining the great man on stage, and at first thought he had imagined it, but then a spotlight’s beam had fallen on his head and he knew it was his moment to shine, so he wiped his mouth with a napkin and headed to the small platform.
*
The sniper watched as his target walked slowly towards the platform, shaking the hand of the man who had just welcomed him to the stage.
‘Alpha Target is in sight,’ he whispered into the small radio mic, taped to his cheek. ‘Am I clear to shoot, over?’
‘Negative,’ the voice on the other end replied. ‘Bravo Target is in the men’s room. We need him closer before you engage, over.’
‘Received, over.’
The sniper continued to peer through the scope attached to the .308 Winchester rifle that was pointing at the back of Browning’s head as he approached the platform. He watched as his target shook the hand of D’Angelo, before the two men warmly embraced. The applause would be plenty loud enough to cover the sound of the kill shot he was preparing to fire. Dressed head to toe in black, he had been watching the evening’s meal unfolding for more than an hour, from his position behind the ventilation shaft. It was so damned hot in the tight enclosure, but he knew he was nearing the end of the mission.
‘Bravo Target is on the move,’ he heard the voice crackle in his ear piece. ‘Is Alpha Target in sight, over?’
He watched Alpha Target smiling and waving at the applauding crowd on their feet. ‘Awaiting the green light, over.’
‘Bravo Target is approaching the room. You have the green light, over.’
The sniper began to squeeze the trigger with his gloved finger.
The applause continued as the small bullet passed through the air unnoticed and unheard, until it hit its target and a red spot appeared just below Browning’s chin. His hand flew to his throat in shock as warm liquid began to flow down his neck. He reached out for support with his free hand, before his legs gave way beneath him. A woman at the table nearest the podium screamed first. The two security guards closest to her were the first to react, leaping onto the platform and tackling D’Angelo to the floor, diving on top of him as other men in suits and shades rushed to the scene. More screams erupted as the seriousness of what had happened dawned on the crowd. One by one, they began to move backwards out of the restaurant towards the two exits directly beneath where the sniper was shuffling out of his hiding place in the ventilation tube. Using his elbows as leverage he slid backwards until he reached the grate in the ceiling, through which he had originally climbed. He was still gripping the rifle tightly as he lowered himself down to the floor. He carefully placed the weapon and the spent cartridge on the carpet beneath the grate, before pulling the black jumper he was wearing, over his head, revealing a white shirt and black tie. He threw the jumper back through the grate and moved towards the door to his right. He inserted the key and unlocked it, before opening the door and slipping out into the panicked guests who were congregating by the exits.
‘Hey you,’ he heard a voice shout in his direction. He looked up and saw a man dressed in white overalls striding towards him. ‘Hey you,’ the man shouted again, fighting through the wave of bodies separating them. ‘Stop that man! The one with the radio mic.’
The sniper realised he had forgotten to ditch his communication equipment. ‘Bravo Target has made me,’ he sputtered urgently to his contact.
‘Received. Go to plan B, over.’
The sniper didn’t wait for further instruction, tearing the mic from his cheek and pulling the small receiver from his ear. He shoved them into his trouser pocket and headed back through the door from which he had emerged a moment before. He closed the door but did not lock it. He strode across the small room, past the ventilation grate and out of the second door, which led to the kitchen. As he closed the second door behind him, he heard the first door being opened, so he quickened his pace, ducking out of the way just as three uniformed police officers tore past him in the direction of the second door. He watched as they burst through and caught Bravo Target staring at the Winchester rifle.
‘Down on the ground!’ they shouted, their weapons raised.
The sniper emerged from his hiding place and continued on through the kitchen glancing back over his shoulder as the officers cuffed Bravo Target’s hands behind his back.
*
As Cruz had made his way into the restaurant, his instinct had told him that something bad had happened. Waves of men and women in suits and frocks were pushing each other out of the way in a fight for survival. The security men that he had followed into the room were long gone, leaving him fighting against the tide. As he tried to understand exactly what had happened and who had been shot, he had noticed a small door opening away to his right. The door wasn’t a traditional door, in the sense that it looked like the same panelling on the rest of the walls, yet this particular piece of panelling was opening, and a man was stepping through it. The man looked out of place. His face and head were both clean-shaven, and he looked too young and athletic to fit in with the rest of the people who were pouring towards him. There was also the fact that he wasn’t wearing a suit jacket over his white shirt and black tie. As Cruz continued to watch him he noticed the small radio mic taped to the man’s cheek. Instinct had taken over and he had tried to draw attention to the guy, who had panicked and disappeared back through the secret door.
‘Aaron, did you see him? There’s a guy wired up in here. I’m sure he’s something to do with what is going on.’
‘You need to get out of there, Felix. I’m monitoring the police radio network and a report of gun shots at the hotel has just been put out. They’re saying someone has taken a shot at D’Angelo.’
‘I’m going after him. He looks ex-military.’
‘Wait, the images are only just coming through. I didn’t get a good look at him. Describe him to me.’
Cruz had pushed through the crowd to the secret door and had run his fingers over the panel until he had found the hidden handle, and had then opened it.
‘He’s a hundred and sixty pounds, slim build, close-cropped black hair, and olive-skinned.’
Cruz had stepped into the small room and noticed the ventilation grate hanging down from the ceiling and then he’d seen the Winchester rifle propped up against the wall. He had been about to relay this information when a door at the far side of the room had burst open and three LAPD officers had entered and forced him to the ground.
‘You’ve got the wrong man,’ he had pleaded. ‘The guy you want is over there. Look, Goddamn you!’
But they had ignored his words, instead hoisting him to his feet and removing his ear piece and transmitter. They dragged him back into the restaurant’s lobby and two men guarded him whilst the third went and spoke to hotel security, returning a moment later to confirm that one man had been fatally wounded, but that Senator D’Angelo was safe.
*
Aaron was in two minds on how to proceed. On the one hand, he needed to help Cruz, whom it seemed the LAPD had determined was responsible for the shooting. On the other hand, he knew it wasn’t safe to be found sitting in a former catering van with all the radio equipment and laptop. He was still looking at the images the laptop was receiving from Cruz’s badge. He was focusing on the two images of the man Cruz had identified as the potential perpetrator. The images were heavily pixelated and partially blocked by a large woman in a blue dress. The image certainly wasn’t good enough to run any kind of facial recognition comparison.
‘If you can hear me, Felix,’ he said into the microphone, ‘I’m going to get out of here. Don’t worry, I’ll get the proof we need to clear your name.’
There was no response, and he had no idea whether Cruz had heard him
. He climbed into the front of the van and was about to start the ignition when he saw the door at the end of the alleyway opening. He watched as an athletic-looking man with a shaved head emerged and began to walk along down the road. Aaron ducked down so that he could watch without being seen. As the man got closer, Aaron saw he was wearing a shirt and tie, but no suit jacket, which was unusual given the near-freezing temperature outside. As he walked right past the front of the van, Aaron was certain it was the same man in the images he had just been looking at. Aaron counted to five and then slipped out of the passenger side door and began to walk quietly after the suspect, who turned left at the bottom of the road. Aaron jogged to the corner and peered round, spotting the suspect crossing the road and heading towards a small car park a block away. Aaron stayed on his side of the road, hoping to avoid drawing any attention to his pursuit.
At the end of the block, the suspect turned right and headed into the car park. Aaron quickly jogged across the road, determined to see which car the suspect would use to make his escape. There were a dozen vehicles in the lot, but no sign of the suspect. Aaron moved closer, glancing in the windows of the cars closest to him. He didn’t notice the suspect step out of the shadows even when a rag doused in chloroform was placed over his mouth and nose, and then everything went dark.
THURSDAY 04 DECEMBER
40
LONDON, UK
04:00 (G.M.T.)
Deep beneath the streets of London The Chairman was watching the world’s news unfold. The Cadre’s operations centre, or ‘The Grid’ as he preferred to call it, was alive with flashing lights on the various consoles designed to keep the group one step ahead. When he had first visualised The Grid as a concept, he had dreamed of having a supercomputer as the beating heart of the place. He had all but realised that dream.
Officially the world’s most powerful supercomputer was the Tianhe-2, which was inevitably the work of the Chinese, and was housed at the National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou, in the country's south-eastern Guandong province. It had been allegedly designed for ‘educational and research’ purposes, but The Chairman knew better than that. No nation spent billions developing such a system for the good of mankind, not when there was a battle for supremacy going on behind the scenes. The Tianhe-2 was capable of performing more than thirty thousand trillion calculations at the same time. Why wouldn’t you use that kind of power to spy on your enemies?
The next two most powerful supercomputers were owned by the Americans, not that Britain’s ally had offered to share the benefit of such awesome power. Which was why The Chairman had decided he needed to get one of his own. He knew he could have spent a number of years developing and funding the project, but had instead decided to steal what he needed. Twelve months earlier, he had learned that a new supercomputer was being developed in Taiwan, rumoured to be even faster than Tianhe-2. He had offered a substantial figure to buy the technology, via a shell company, but the offer had been declined outright and the supercomputer’s existence had been vehemently denied. Their lies had been the cause of their own downfall.
It had been easy enough to learn where the technology was being developed. A bribe here and there, and he had the confirmation that significant funding and power had been redirected to the Southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. His analysts has already drawn the same conclusions, given that Kaohsiung was the home of the Republic of China’s Naval Fleet. He had even sent O’Connor to Asia to oversee the operation. Seven weeks ago a series of gas explosions in Kaohsiung had resulted in the deaths of twenty-five civilians, who happened to be working at the research facility at the time. That’s how the news story had been reported: a series of gas explosions. The truth was that several carefully orchestrated bomb blasts at the site had allowed him to arrange for the large servers to be exported unnoticed. Whilst the Chinese may have suspected industrial espionage, they had no way of proving who or what was responsible.
The Remote Accelerated Virtual Enterprise Network, or RAVEN as he called her, was not fully operational yet. The servers had been installed in The Grid, but required major reconfiguration before they would be ready for the war to come. He believed that the supercomputer would enable him to accurately predict how his enemies would react to any situation, whilst simultaneously monitoring every phone call, news programme, blog, email and text message sent anywhere in the world. It had been suggested that RAVEN would be capable of twice the calculations that Tianhe-2 could manage. For The Chairman, RAVEN represented the keystone of The Cadre’s plans.
The cinema screen-sized monitor in the command suite was streaming live news from across the globe, with twenty stations on the screen. CNN was broadcasting live from Beverly Hills on the alleged assassination attempt on Senator Joseph D’Angelo, which had culminated in the tragic execution of the senator’s campaign manager, Ronald Browning. The newscaster was describing Browning as a hero for stepping into the path of the bullet, even though The Chairman knew better. BBC news had briefly mentioned the incident in America but was now focusing on adverse weather conditions in Scotland. Al-Jazeera TV was focusing on seismic tremors that had been felt near Qeshm in Southern Iran.
It was hard to imagine that The Grid had once been a fully functioning London Underground tube station, and that it had been used as an air raid shelter during The Second World War. Although he had wanted to maintain some of the station’s former history, it had been impractical to do so, and now it more closely resembled his office in Canary Wharf than it did a tube station. He had made the decision to relocate to The Grid, late last night. He’d received a coded message from the Russian, Stratovsky, warning him that Taylor has escaped the block of flats before the explosion. It was a further irritating loose end that would need to be taken care of.
He despised Stratovsky, but he had to admit that the Russian’s family connections had proved useful on more than one occasion. Certainly the revenue created by the network Partridge and McManus had created would not have been so successful without the wily Russian. As much as it appalled him to work with such a lowlife, he accepted that Stratovsky was a necessary element; a yang to his yin. Unfortunately, to bring true world peace, there were going to be dirty jobs that needed taking care of; that’s why you had someone like Stratovsky on the payroll. The Chairman knew there would come a time when the Russian was no longer of benefit to him, and at that time the appropriate steps would be taken to remove him.
The large projection screen flashed red to warn him that there was an incoming call. He pressed a button on his remote control to answer it.
‘Good morning Mr Chairman,’ a man’s voice echoed around the room, as the screen filled with Dillinger’s face.
‘Ah, Dillinger, good morning. How are the world’s intelligence branches reacting to the attack on D’Angelo?’
‘The C.I.A. are going ballistic because they knew nothing about it! Officially, they are claiming that the F.B.I. should have been more active in supporting D’Angelo’s private security detail, but behind closed doors they are hoping a congressional hearing won’t be called to investigate what happened. I have to say Mr Chairman that you really caught the world by surprise with this move. I was surprised you kept me out of the loop.’
The Chairman shrugged. ‘It was a late call if I’m totally honest, Dillinger. There wasn’t sufficient time to consult the group.’
‘Not even D’Angelo looked like he was expecting the attack. Was anyone in the loop?’ he asked angrily.
‘It had to look real. D’Angelo had no idea, but he was perfectly safe. The man hired to undertake the job came highly recommended and he carried out his orders to perfection.’
‘So killing Browning was intentional? Can I ask why?’
‘Ronald Browning was a wasteful gambler whose sloppiness could have proved costly.’
‘I don’t understand, Mr Chairman. What sloppiness?’
‘He inadvertently allowed details of D’Angelo’s inauguration speech to be seen by persons outside of our
group. The incident was swept under the carpet, but if a copy of that communication ever resurfaces, serious questions will be asked about the reasons why McHale stepped down from office. It has also come to light that Browning had started to gamble online again. He was using a proxy server to disguise his I.P. address, but there are always ways to track such activity. He has accrued quite a debt and it was only a matter of time until the wrong sort of people would come knocking at his door. He was a useful servant, but in recent weeks, he had become too much of a liability. Besides, D’Angelo’s election has already been taken care of, so Browning was just a loose end waiting to be tied.’
Dillinger gulped at the thought of his own expendability. ‘So everything is still on track?’
The Chairman nodded. ‘In the space of a day there has been a terrorist attempt in London and an assassination attempt in the US. This morning the people of Britain and America will be quietly seething about the war on terror. The momentum is growing nicely. We’ll allow things to quieten down over Christmas. We need the people to generate happy memories, so that when the darkness falls in 2015, they will demand action is taken.’
‘Are you going to share your ideas for the next phase with me?’ Dillinger asked, the anticipation in his voice all too obvious.
The Chairman tapped on his keyboard and the screen filled with a map of Austria. Dillinger looked puzzled. ‘What’s so special about the Interalpen-Hotel in Tyrol? Are you planning to go skiing in the Austrian mountains?’
Double Cross: A gripping political thriller (The Cadre Book 3) Page 26