“I don’t have a copy of the birth certificate, but the research is in my laptop. I scanned it in, remember? I’ve got our passports and all your money, too.”
“Thank God,” replied Alex.
“Yes, because it’s too late to get them now. Plus, I don’t know what this is my hand is on, and I don’t want to find out.”
Slowly, quietly, they continued to lower the dumbwaiter inside the black shaft as they listened to Colin Brown’s angry voice echoing down to them as he shouted in the room.
Colin paced the suite, watching as his men tore it apart room by room, searching for the fugitives. His radio crackled to life and he clicked it on, “Speak.”
“The lobby’s locked down. The stairwells are secure. No movement in any of the corridors. They must still be in their room,” informed the voice on the radio.
Colin was furious, “Listen, Simon, I’m in the room, goddamn it, and they’re not here! Find them. You have the girl’s cell number in your files. Get Five to run a satellite tracker on her phone and pull up their location. I want it now!” He snapped the radio off and yelled to the team scouring the suite, “What do you have? Report.”
The officer closest to him stopped and raised the visor of his assault helmet so he could be heard, “We’ve got nothing, sir. We swept the entire suite and found a couple of small bags containing clothes and toiletries, and a few papers. The room and the balconies are clear.”
“How could they be clear?” Colin spun from the officer and scanned the room for the hundredth time, “Where did you go? You couldn’t just vanish.”
He stormed across to the long dining table and kicked over a chair in frustration, “Damn it, damn it, damn it.” He whirled around and punched the wall violently with his gloved hand. The strength of his blow moved the wall slightly. But not inwards from the impact of his fist, instead, it slid sideways.
Colin stared in surprise and realized the intricately patterned design was not simply a part of the room’s décor, it was a moveable board. He jumped forward, grabbed its edge and wrenched hard, and the panel rolled across revealing a door behind. He pulled it open and saw the vertical shaft dropping into a black hole. He ripped the LED flashlight from its Velcro holster on his chest and shone it into the darkness, illuminating the cables running up and down.
He jerked back out of the concrete shaft and shouted to summon his men, “On me now. They’ve got a way out.”
In seconds, the tactical squad assembled, waiting for their orders.
“They’ve gone down this shaft. Sergeant, find out where it goes and have a team from the lobby get there yesterday. Two men will stay in this room in case it’s a diversion. The other three, head to the ground floor now, double time. I’m going in there after them myself.”
Colin stretched into the shaft, grabbed the first of the two heavy cables and swung himself into the tight, vertical chute. Instantly, he was climbing down the rope, hand over hand, with the speed only years of field experience can give.
It took him less than thirty seconds to make the one-hundred-foot descent, and his steel-toed boots thudded onto the roof of the dumbwaiter now locked in place on the ground floor, blocking his way. He stabilized himself by keeping a grasp on the rope and kicked. The ninety-year-old wooden frame was no match for his ferocity and his reinforced military issue footwear, and crumbled before his violent onslaught, turning the antique fixture into worthless kindling.
As it fell apart, Colin let himself drop into the shattered box and crawled quickly through the dumbwaiter’s opening.
He sprung to his feet and found himself alone in the original kitchen of the Dorchester, now an unused storage area since the 1989 renovation. He spun the beam of his flashlight around the dark room, piled with boxes, tables, and chairs, and saw on the far side, an open door and outside light filtering in. Damn it, he thought, a way out.
Ignoring the automatic rifle strung across his back, he pulled his polymer-framed Glock 17 pistol from its holster and sprinted to the exit. He ran through it, into a long, dark alley stretching behind the Dorchester and the multiple hotels lining Park Lane, an alley with a hundred possible exits leading on one side to a myriad of narrow streets, mews, and even international embassies, and on the other to Hyde Park, big enough to hold festivals and gatherings for a million people, and full of trees, lodges, lakes, and rivers. An easy place for three scared Americans to disappear at night.
Colin pulled off his headgear and flung the carbon-fiber tactical helmet to the ground. As it clattered and rolled across the paved passageway, he glanced down and saw a smashed cell phone lying there. He screamed a single word that echoed in both directions between the high walls of the almost endless alley, “FUCK!”
CHAPTER NINE
Whitechapel
The derelict bandstand in Hyde Park had once again been Eddie’s shelter for the night, but along with the half-dozen homeless people curled up there, keeping him company, were Alex and Cate.
As the early morning light swept across the massive grounds, Alex stirred, forcing himself awake. He willed his eyes to open and saw Cate sitting up against the wooden rail, staring around.
“How did you sleep?” asked Alex.
“Don’t ask. I kept dreaming about those four-poster beds at the hotel. I got two hours, maybe a little longer.”
“It was the same with me. I’m going to wake Eddie. We should get moving.”
The sun was higher now, and the three of them ate an unhealthy breakfast of powdered doughnuts and instant coffee as they sat in front of a small café overlooking the sparkling, centuries-old man-made lake, the Serpentine, snaking its way through London’s largest Royal park.
Eddie looked up from his third doughnut, “Do I have to wear this?” He tugged at the cheap, white T-shirt he had on with the enormous logo, I Love London, exploding across his chest.
“It’s better than the filthy doctor’s jacket. Having that over your jumpsuit was a beacon to alert everyone looking for us,” said Alex.
“Now you look like a regular goofy tourist enjoying their European vacation,” grinned Cate.
“With orange pants!” He raised a leg to show his jumpsuit below the T-shirt.
“I’m sorry, but the café only had a few things like souvenir T-shirts and baseball caps for sale, no jeans. Hardly haute couture. We’re lucky the doughnuts are edible,” said Cate.
“Keep it on, and the sunglasses and hat, otherwise you’re too recognizable.” Alex brought his companions back to earth, “We must decide on what to do next and put together a plan of action. Obviously, we have to go to the American Embassy, but without a copy of Eddie’s birth certificate, we need to know how to explain to them what has happened, otherwise they may just take Eddie away and turn him over to whoever was after us at the hotel. Let’s go through this, what do we know?”
“Apart from the fact last night was the most miserable and scary of my life, you smashed my beloved cell phone, and Global Pharmaceuticals has an army at their disposal? Nothing,” said Cate.
“If you buy another phone, get one of those cheap pay-as-you-go ones. It won’t have a listed number they can track us with. My friends and me used to get those so the cops couldn’t listen in and bust us. We called them burners,” offered Eddie.
Alex raised his eyebrows as he learned more than he wanted to know about the teen’s troubled past.
Cate was more upset about losing her phone than bothered by Eddie’s dubious tips, “At least I had my contacts and photos backed up to the cloud so I can download them from there.”
“I hope it won’t come to that and we can take care of everything today and put all of this behind us,” Alex was trying to keep them focused on the task ahead.
Eddie kicked in a thought, “One thing I can’t stop thinking about is, how did you know where I was when the Colin dude wanted you to find me?”
“He didn’t say ‘find Eddie York’; he was looking for any surviving descendants of one particular person. We be
gan back in 1892 with your great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Kelly. Did you know your family’s roots are here in London?”
Eddie shook his head, “I barely knew my own folks, never mind some great-great from the stone age.”
“Right,” agreed Alex. “I think we should start over and check if we missed anything that could give us a clue to what is going on and gather as much information as we can. Let’s go to where Mary lived and see if we are able to find something there which could help.”
The taxi rank at Marble Arch was packed with cabs waiting for a fare. As the trio approached, the driver at the head of the orderly line called out, “Where are you off to today?”
Alex answered the cheerful, ruddy-faced cabbie, “I’m not sure what part of London we’re going to. All I have is a street address, 13 Miller’s Court.”
“I can tell you where that is, it’s Whitechapel. And this is a cab, not a TARDIS, mate.”
“A TARDIS? I don’t know what that is?”
“It’s a bleedin’ time machine. You’d need one to get to where you want to go.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not following?”
The cabbie slowed down his cockney delivery to make himself understood, “Miller’s Court ain’t been there for more than a century. And everyone’s safer with it gone.”
“Why would that be?” Alex still didn’t understand.
“Now that’s a story. They called it the wickedest street in all of London. In the end people got so scared they bulldozed the whole bloody thing to get rid of it. Tore down more than two hundred houses. Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, all of it, gone and reduced to rubble. Did a better job with their bulldozers than Jerry did with the Blitz.”
“Some pretty awful things must have happened there,” Cate found it hard to comprehend how bad it would have to be to merit the destruction of so many homes.
“The worst. The city had never seen the likes of it. The devil himself walked those streets and they never caught him. Some say even now, Jack’s out there, waiting, watching.”
“Jack?” Alex had not come across a Jack in his lineage research.
“Jack the Ripper. I thought you knew that? I get a lot of Yank tourists like you asking about old Jack. I could make a bloody fortune and do me own private tours if 13 Miller’s Court was still standing.”
“Why there?” asked Alex.
“It’s where he did in his final victim. Chopped her up a treat, he did. There were bits of her all over the room. They found what was left of her body on the morning of the ninth of November. And it was the last time he killed. No one heard from Jack again after he turned the place into a slaughterhouse back in 1888. It’s like poor Mary was his masterpiece.” The driver was proud of his knowledge of London’s dark history.
“Mary?” The name gave Alex pause.
“Mary Kelly. The whore who lived at 13 Miller’s Court. She was the Ripper’s final victim.”
The massive road split apart and slowly lifted in two sections into the air. A thousand tourists captured the moment on their cell phone cameras and then took videos of the sailing barge passing beneath the iconic structure of Tower Bridge.
Cate, Eddie and Alex had a clear view of the occurrence that only happened on average twice a day, but they were not concerned with recording the spectacular event and texting the pictures to jealous relatives on the other side of the world. They were at the river because they knew they had to keep moving and stay invisible, and this was the perfect place. The fortress-like structure over the Thames, with its magnificent hanging blue cables, gave them a chance to disappear unnoticed into a crowd because all the attention was focused away from them and onto the monument and the majesty of the bridge opening, a sight which always attracted vast numbers of tourists.
Alex was still running through what the cabbie had told him and trying to find a meaning to it, “I didn’t think to put Mary’s name together with Jack the Ripper’s killings, because the letter was sent four years after the last murder was committed. How could our Mary Kelly have been killed in 1888 when she wrote the letter in 1892?”
“Maybe the cops got it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t her,” suggested Eddie.
“The driver said Jack the Ripper did terrible things to his victims, that she was cut up and bits of her were all over the room,” Cate shuddered at the thought. “What if she couldn’t be recognized?”
“And the cops made the wrong ID?” added Eddie.
“That’s possible. They didn’t have forensics in the nineteenth century like we do today, and usually relied upon witness statements and word-of-mouth identification. And the name and address definitely matches, along with the letter Mary wrote which says she was haunted by what happened to Joy that night, so we know she was there. Could Jack have killed Joy instead of Mary, and for some reason he thought, or the police thought, the victim was Mary Kelly? Though why that mistake would happen, I don’t know,” Alex racked his brain to make sense of it.
“But it was more than a hundred years ago. None of it’s got anything to do with me. I want to go back to the States.”
“And back to Juvie Hall?” asked Cate.
“Yeah, better than this shit.”
“I understand,” Alex was sympathetic to the young boy’s plight. “But before we go to the Embassy, we have to be able to give them an explanation. You’ve got no passport, no birth certificate and you escaped from a detention center in California. They’ll ask how you got here and what your point of entry into the UK was. Without that, even with our word,” he glanced at Cate, “it will all mean nothing. They’ll hand you over to the British authorities for charges and deportation. And they want you for more than illegal entry, after last night we can be certain of it. I feel responsible for what is happening to you. Why are you so important to them, Eddie? That’s what we have to find out. We must learn more, and fortunately it all seems to lead right here, to London. And there’s one place close by that will have the answers we need.”
The taxi dropped them on Great Russell Street, and as they climbed out of the cab, they gazed up in awe at the building sprawling in front of them.
“It’s like a Greek temple,” said Cate.
“It was built to look that way, but as much as I would enjoy standing here, appreciating the design, we need to go inside and find the library,” suggested Alex.
“The library?” Eddie was not excited at the prospect.
“It’s called the Round Reading Room. I’m told it is quite something.”
The three of them joined the crowds pushing through the wrought-iron gates into the long, paved courtyard leading to the dozen steps marking the entrance to the British Museum, a treasure trove containing the history of the world.
The museum was always packed, as visitors from across the globe were drawn there to not only admire the magnificent architecture but also to explore the labyrinth of unique exhibits on display within. Alex led the way past the sculptures, marbles, paintings, and exhibitions as he followed the signs to the venerable British Library.
They entered the immense circular room featuring three levels for the two million-plus books housed there, and stared up at the enormous dome arching one hundred and forty feet across, lined with curved windows allowing the natural light to filter in on them.
“This is unbelievable,” Cate was stunned by the room’s beauty.
“It’s always been a place I wanted to visit,” said Alex. “Definitely one of the world’s great libraries. I have read so much about it.” He reluctantly forced himself to look away from the intricacies of the construction design, “If only we had more time. But we don’t, we have to get to work and find the section dealing with London in the late eighteen hundreds and Jack the Ripper.”
They started toward the librarian’s circular desk in the dead center of the gigantic room, when Eddie began to drag his feet. Alex looked at him curiously.
“Hey, guys. I’m not into libraries and stuff. Books kind of give me the creeps. I saw a sign for
a race car exhibit upstairs. Can I check it out while you do this?”
“If you must,” said Alex. “But meet us back here in thirty minutes.”
“Will do!” Eddie was all smiles as he ran off through the crowd.
Alex turned to Cate, “Books give him the creeps? There’s something very wrong with that boy!”
He started toward the shelves containing the reference files on The Ripper’s case and related murders in Whitechapel.
Cate grabbed his shoulder, “I’ll be here at this table. I need to charge my laptop and they’ve got power outlets. I’m going to do an online search.”
“That makes sense. I’ll find the books we want and come back with them. We’ll go through them together.” Alex continued to the shelves.
Cate sat and pulled the laptop from her backpack, plugging it in. She flipped open the screen and clicked on view available networks.
The British Museum home page filled the screen with a prompt asking for a charge card number for internet access. Cate found her credit card and keyed in the details. After a few seconds charge accepted appeared and Cate began her search by typing in Jack the Ripper.
Less than a mile away, in the stone and glass building at Vauxhall Bridge overlooking the Thames, ten operatives monitored individual screens and giant floor-to-ceiling displays showing watch lists and locations from around the world.
An alarm sounded at one of the desks and the staffer immediately focused on the information coming across her screen. She hit a series of keys to confirm what she was seeing, then picked up her internal phone. When it was answered, she spoke quickly and succinctly, “It’s them, sir.”
The staffer was overwhelmed to be in Colin Brown’s office. Access to this area of the building was highly restricted, and employees with her lowly clearance designation never had the chance to see it, but she had been summoned, so she seized the opportunity to find out what actually happened on this hallowed floor. She tried to conceal her excitement as the man, a section chief and top-ranking agent with the Overseas Operatives, far above her almost entry-level position, faced her.
Birthright: Pray your past stays hidden (Alex Turner Book 1) Page 10