Red Wolves

by Adam Hamdy

  Deni considered the revelation. ‘Is this true?’ he asked Pearce.

  ‘Yeah,’ Pearce replied. He desperately wanted to make contact with Leila and let her know he was OK, but he couldn’t leave now without arousing suspicion.

  ‘It was a trap,’ Rasul said.

  Deni gestured to Abbas, who was hovering nearby, and the old man came over.

  ‘Find a way to get a message to Ryan Fox. Tell him we’ve all been set up, his crew and ours. Tell him I want to meet to agree a truce so we can find the people responsible and repay them for this atrocity.’

  Chapter 74

  A dead man walking. A ghost returned to ruin them. That’s all Ziad saw when he looked through the scope and watched Rasul Salamov from the roof of the building on the corner of 37th Avenue. He and Awut had come to watch the Salamovs and the East Hill Mob tear each other apart in the war they thought they’d started. Ziad shot Awut a sidelong glance and saw the man’s jaw set hard, and the glint of anger in his eyes. This wasn’t their plan. Their careful preparation was being ruined by Rasul Salamov, a man who should be lying in a police morgue, a man who should have perished with dozens of others, whose death was supposed to have sparked a war. Instead, Rasul was standing alongside his father and was undoubtedly telling the cunning old Chechen what had really happened in the warehouse on Fontanelle Street.

  Ziad lowered the scope and turned to Awut.

  ‘There won’t be any war now, will there?’

  Awut glared at him coldly. ‘I will take care of it myself.’

  Ziad felt a dread chill at the words. He looked into the scope again, and through the community centre windows he saw Deni and Rasul Salamov talk to Amr, the man he’d introduced to them. He felt a pang of pity for the newcomer. He’d intervened to save Ziad from himself, and had only wanted a job. He had no idea he’d soon be dead.

  Chapter 75

  She packed everything that might be of use, but left Wollerton’s belongings in his holdall on the table in the living room. Guilt, shame and regret stirred whenever she thought of him. She’d seen betrayal as her only option in the circumstances, but now regretted the single-minded drive that was responsible for such reasoning. She wished she’d aborted the mission and that the two of them had left Qingdao as failures. She would never have encountered the Red Wolves and wouldn’t have to live with a death sentence hanging over her. Pity won’t help you, she told herself as she left the apartment to catch a taxi for the airport.

  The mechanical pencil had come from the gift shop. The food concessions offered chopsticks or spoons and Brigitte could not find a blade anywhere in the airport. The sharp metal tip of the 0.7 mm pencil would have to do.

  She hadn’t been able to risk doing this anywhere other than the departures lounge. The apartment had been under surveillance and until she’d passed through airport security, she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t being watched.

  But here, past Qingdao Airport’s extensive security checks, locked alone in a toilet cubicle, Brigitte could be sure she wasn’t being spied upon. She pulled down her trousers and felt the back of her left thigh for the stitched wound. She stuck the pencil nib in, and the pain almost made her pass out. She bit her left forearm to stop herself from screaming, and once the shock and agony of the initial incision had passed, Brigitte dragged the metal point through the stitches, reopening the wound.

  She felt blood trickle down her leg, and it became a stream when she pushed her thumb and forefinger inside. She whimpered as she forced her digits deep within her flesh, searching out the tiny device the Red Wolves had implanted.

  She screamed a thousand silent curses, and her pores oozed with the sweat of misery and pain. She dug deeper and felt the stream of blood run more rapidly. Had she ruptured an artery? Dizziness came over her and she thought she might faint until she felt the hard shell of a capsule that wasn’t much bigger than a painkiller. She got a good purchase, pulled it out, and collapsed instantly.

  She came to in the airport stall and checked her watch. The Paris flight would have been called by now. She picked up the scarf she’d bought from the gift shop and tied it around her bleeding leg. Using the rudimentary first aid kit she’d bought from the airport pharmacy, Brigitte made a bandage and dressed the wound. She searched around the stall for the bug, which she’d dropped when she’d blacked out. She found it behind the toilet, and with the device in hand, she pulled up her jeans and hurried from the cubicle.

  She found the Paris gate and ignored the complaints that came when she pushed in behind an amorous couple she’d spotted at check-in. The woman had a large Hermès handbag – the kind of bag things got lost in. Brigitte lingered for a couple of minutes, waiting until the couple were stuck to each other’s faces like horny limpets. When they were deep in a kiss, she dropped the bug in the woman’s bag.

  Then, making a play of having forgotten something in duty free, Brigitte left the queue and rushed across the airport to catch another flight. Using one of her other false IDs and credit cards, she purchased a ticket to Seattle with a short stopover in Beijing.

  She sat in row twenty-six, trying to focus on the magazine. The eyes of a happy couple on the cover were visible, but the rest of their faces were obscured by the seat pocket. Large kanji announced the title of the publication, but Brigitte couldn’t make them sharp enough to read. She was sweating profusely and tendrils of darkness probed the edges of her blurred vision. She sensed the man in the aisle seat giving her funny looks, but she didn’t care about him. Her seat was wet and she knew she was losing too much blood.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she slurred, getting to her feet.

  Everything felt disjointed, staccato, as though her passage through time was broken. Had she passed out momentarily?

  The man in the aisle seat tutted, but shifted so she could pass. A flight attendant in a jump seat said something in Mandarin, but Brigitte didn’t catch it as she staggered towards the nearest galley.

  ‘Please, madam, we’re taking off. You have to sit down,’ the flight attendant said.

  ‘Feeling sick,’ Brigitte replied, hoping no one noticed the blood soaking the back of her jeans. She hurried aft and tried the toilet by the middle galley. It was locked, so she popped the external catch and ignored the cries of ‘Madam!’ and ‘You have to go back to your seat.’

  She locked the door behind her and leaned against it to catch her breath. The mirror reflected a ghost. Her albinism meant she was always pale, but her ordeal had made her almost translucent, as though she wasn’t of this world.

  Someone knocked on the door and tried to force it open, but Brigitte kept her weight against it, and the would-be intruder resorted to yelling orders. She wept. She’d never thought much about her future and had been content to take each mission as it came. She had no idea what she wanted from life, but she knew it wasn’t this.

  Brigitte was suddenly alert. Another blackout? She ignored the hammering and took down her jeans. The back of her left leg was soaked in blood and the bandage she’d placed over the wound was drenched. She untied the scarf she’d applied as a tourniquet and repositioned it higher up her leg, running at a diagonal from her groin to just below her hip. She pulled it tight and fought the urge to cry out. This time she was aware when the darkness took her.

  She came to, and sucked down a sharp breath. Her leg was numb. The flow of blood seemed to have stopped and she no longer worried about bleeding out. Her chief concerns were infection, ischemia, neuropathy and pulmonary embolism. But these weren’t immediate threats. She could address some of them during the flight. Feeling slightly better, Brigitte pulled up her trousers, washed her hands and emerged from the toilet to find two angry flight attendants, who escorted her back to her seat as the plane taxied onto the runway. Brigitte sat down as the aircraft started accelerating, and, as the nose pointed skyward, she put her head back and allowed herself to fall into sleep, safe in the knowledge she was on her way to Beijing.

  From there she could reach America.
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  Chapter 76

  Wollerton watched the coverage of the atrocity at the Meals Seattle warehouse with a growing sense of dread. The MSNBC reporter on the scene relayed a mix of speculation and rumour about a story that had become national news. Wollerton suspected the cadre of networks on the scene would be working their law enforcement contacts, so although the Seattle Police Department still hadn’t issued an official statement, certain key elements had been generally accepted by the assembled media. There were multiple fatalities, some were saying up to a hundred dead. They appeared to have been killed by an unidentified chemical agent, and the victims were believed to have links to organized crime. Fox News was reporting a source in the coroner’s office who said at least one body taken from the scene was covered in chalky residue, a revelation that had people asking whether there was a possible link to the Cairo prison break and the Midas Killer. Wollerton was sure there was a connection and was doubly certain the agent deployed was the same one used in the Al Aqarab escape. But his growing unease wasn’t because someone had deployed a chemical agent against civilian targets on two continents; his dread stemmed from his belief Scott and Leila might have been inside that warehouse. Why else would they have failed to respond to my many emails?

  He checked the ancient digital clock on his rickety bedside table: 10.23 p.m. He’d been in his cheap hotel room for almost five hours and apart from short breaks for the toilet or to send yet another email from the computer terminal in the lobby, he’d been glued to the developing story. The receptionist’s willingness to accept a week’s rent in cash with no questions had helped Wollerton choose the Regal Knights Hotel in Licton Springs, a short cab ride from the centre of Seattle, although he had no intention of spending a week holed up like a fugitive and had to find Scott and Leila, even if that meant taking risks. He slid off the heavily stained satin bedspread and left the run-down museum of battered furniture that passed for his hotel room. He avoided the tiny box elevator and went down three flights to the lobby, where he nodded at the disinterested receptionist who sat behind a Plexiglas screen.

  Wollerton hurried out of the hotel and walked for fifteen minutes, zig-zagging through the city until he reached a Safeway supermarket on 85th Street. Certain he hadn’t been followed, he went inside and found a pay phone near the vending machines. He dialled a number he’d committed to memory back in Huxley Blaine Carter’s house in the French Alps, and prayed he wasn’t making a terrible mistake.

  Chapter 77

  Leila shifted on the uncomfortable hard plastic chair. The police had made no allowances for her disability and had handcuffed her to an anchor point in the centre of the table, which forced her to lean forward, putting a strain on her back and hips. The pain was really starting to get to her and she’d lost track of how long she’d been left to stew in the small interview room.

  She’d been booked on an immigration charge that hadn’t been fully explained to her. They’d tested her for Covid-19 and taken all her belongings, including her Ghostlink, which the custody officer had logged as a cell phone. After a long spell in a holding cell, she’d been brought for interview, but she hadn’t seen anyone for ages and recognized the standard police tactics, which were designed to break down a suspect’s resolve by subjecting them to uncertainty and delay. Detective Evan Hill was in for a surprise if he thought standard tactics would work on her.

  Leila’s only real concern was that her fingerprints, which had been taken when she’d been booked, would lead to the false identity she’d used to enter the United States. If Hill ran a search with Homeland Security, her prints would name her as Susan Samuels rather than Maria Grattan, but Leila already had an answer for the detective. Maria Grattan was a pseudonym she used to protect herself from the criminal elements she wrote about as a security correspondent. She was reasonably confident she could explain away the anomaly but was still wondering why he’d lied about speaking to Il Giustizia.

  The door opened and Detective Evan Hill entered, his face stern, a manila folder tucked under his arm. He wore a white shirt that was rolled up at the sleeves, a pair of black trousers and heavy boots that looked like they were a throwback to his days as a beat cop.

  He dropped the folder on the table and sat beside it so that he towered over Leila.

  ‘Miss Grattan,’ he began, ‘or should I say Mrs Samuels –’ he’d run the Homeland Security search on her prints – ‘we have a real problem.’

  Leila said nothing.

  ‘Because neither of those is your real name.’ He paused. ‘Leila Nahum.’

  The words shot down Leila’s pained spine like a jolt of electricity. Of all the things he could have said, those were the only words she was afraid of; the odds of him knowing her real name were so slim as to be virtually non-existent. She hadn’t even countenanced the possibility and so, like a noxious spell, the two familiar words filled her with panic. How did this Seattle detective have access to information that was beyond all but the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agencies?

  ‘I see I have your attention,’ Hill said. ‘That’s good, because your name is only the first of your problems.’

  He opened the folder and revealed something that tightened the noose around Leila’s panic-stricken gut. She felt as though she might be sick when she studied the photograph that lay on top of a pile of documents. The image had been taken on a camera situated inside the addicts’ house on Kenyon Street. Or rather, the house of the two dead cops who’d been pretending to be addicts. The photo showed Leila holding Jared Lowe at gunpoint, forcing him to carry the body of Dean Ollander out to the Yukon.

  ‘Two police officers, Jared Lowe and Dean Ollander, are missing,’ Hill said. ‘They look a lot like these men,’ he pointed to Jared and Dean’s body. ‘Can you tell me what’s happening here, Miss Nahum?’

  Leila couldn’t have answered even if she’d wanted to. She was nauseous and her mind was tormented by frightful thoughts. If they could tie her to the deaths of these men, she’d face a double murder charge and a lengthy prison sentence. She couldn’t afford to be locked up, not with her sister out there. Not now she finally had hope for something she’d thought she’d lost forever: her family. She flushed with the heat of primal fear and if Hill had pressed at that moment she would have given him anything.

  ‘I did some digging and found these,’ he moved the first photo to reveal three others. They showed Leila going inside the Leadenhall Building with Artem Vasylyk’s bodyguard, a man Pearce had referred to as Prop Forward because he looked like a rugby player. ‘The Metropolitan Police issued these, appealing for information on a person of interest in the investigation into the death of Artem Vasylyk. He was killed in this building the very day these pictures were taken.’

  Leila should have been terrified, but the tumult subsided and she took a couple of deep breaths to compose herself. The detective had overreached himself and had no idea he’d made a mistake. She would play his ignorance to her advantage.

  ‘Did you get assigned the Midas Killer case? Or did you volunteer for it?’ she asked.

  ‘What the heck—’ Hill began, but she cut him off.

  ‘My guess is you asked for the case. You wanted to be assigned the Richie Cutter murder investigation,’ she said, referring to the dead port supervisor.

  ‘My case allocation isn’t at issue here. If you don’t want me to drop a murder charge on you, or turn you over to the British government, you’d better start telling me what I want to hear,’ Hill responded.

  ‘What do you want to hear?’ Leila asked insolently.

  ‘What you’re doing in Seattle? Who you’re working for?’

  Leila leaned forward so she was directly beneath Hill. He recoiled slightly as she stared up at him, her eyes blazing. ‘Maybe you should tell me who you’re really working for,’ she said. ‘Because it isn’t the Seattle Police Department.’

  Hill hesitated.

  ‘I see I have your attention,’ Leila said. ‘That’s good, because that�
��s only the first of your problems.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Hill blustered. ‘I’m a Seattle police detective and I’m giving you a chance to come clean. I don’t know what you think is happening here.’

  Hill couldn’t have known she’d hacked the Metropolitan Police after Vasylyk’s death and had a standing query for any intelligence reports featuring her name or likeness. She’d also checked the Leadenhall Building’s surveillance system and found it had been erased the day of the shooting. The people Vasylyk worked with had no desire to help the police catch his killer, which meant the image in Evan Hill’s folder could only have come from those same people. Leila stopped worrying about Detective Hill’s empty threats and wondered what and who connected a dead Ukrainian billionaire and a Seattle police detective.

  ‘You’re out of your depth, Evan,’ Leila said. ‘Charge me, or let me go.’

  Leila could see Hill struggling with his change of fortune. He was desperately trying to think of a way to regain command of the situation, but Leila knew he’d lost it and it was only a matter of time before he caught up. Maybe she could help him?

  ‘Charge me, Detective. You’ve got me on film with your missing cops. Charge me.’ Leila stared at Hill. ‘I don’t think you can. Now they’re gone, you want them to stay gone. An investigation would get people asking questions about what they were doing at that house and who really sent them there.’

  Hill flushed and Leila sensed his anger. She felt the fire of the hunt rising within her and closed for the kill.

  ‘I think you sent them there. I think you sent them there because the people you really work for told you to make sure no harm came to the occupants of that green house, and I don’t think you want people finding out you’re just another dirty cop who’s sold his department out for a gangster’s dollar.’