“We should keep moving,” Michael said. “The paramedics will take care of them.”
Livia looked up at him. “Is that ironic, coming from you, Mr. Medic?”
“We have a job we can actually do.” He jerked his head towards the light array. “Let me show you something before the police get here. I realize the ultimate investigation will be up to them or Scotland Yard, but Chad will want to know what’s happening, and I suspect your bosses will too.”
“Five usually have a good working relationship with the Yard and local police,” Livia said. “In this instance, however, we may take over.”
“Still, come look at this.” Taking a pen from one of the metal tables, of which there were two on the platform, he used the end of it to lift the lid of a black case, one of at least ten set out in a row under a table. If she’d been walking by, she would have assumed they each contained light or sound equipment, but when Michael opened the case, he revealed a sleek black automatic rifle protected by foam. “Russian-made.”
She wasn’t up on her weaponry, so she wouldn’t have known that herself, but she didn’t need to know the gun’s name to know it was a serious weapon.
“I heard a pistol too underneath the automatic gunfire,” Michael said. “Did you?”
She shook her head.
Michael grunted, not disapprovingly, but just in acknowledgment. “Likely the shooter took it with him.”
“So we have two shooters?” She met his eyes, seeing the same grim certainty in them that she felt inside.
Then he glanced away, towards the warehouse door. “If we don’t want to be stopped when we’ve barely started, we should go now. We can go out the way the shooters may have.”
“Which is how?”
“Up there.” He pointed to the far end of the catwalk, where there was a stairway going up to a door.
Earlier, she’d noticed the way the catwalk extended from the platform to the far wall, as it did on the other side, but she hadn’t realized that, after it joined the catwalk lining the interior of the building, it connected to another set of stairs that led to the roof. Common sense told her, as it had Michael, that the shooters had left that way, so they wouldn’t be seen and to avoid collateral damage on their way out. The fact that they hadn’t killed the two light technicians indicated they were concerned about civilian casualties.
Livia and Michael walked quickly along the catwalk until they reached the far wall, took a right, and then moved up the stairs to another little platform in front of the door. Michael had never put away his gun, and Livia pulled hers out again to go through the door.
The rooftop was empty.
“Hey! Look at this!” Stopping just outside the doorway, Livia called Michael’s attention to a camera affixed above the frame of the door. But then, stretching up on tiptoes, she fingered its base, and her enthusiasm waned. “The wires have been cut.”
“No surprise, really, since they’ve done everything right so far.” Michael moved in a circuit along the parapet that protected anyone who came up to the roof from falling off.
Overall, the area was small—a forty by thirty foot rectangle—compared to the rest of the warehouse roof, most of which was simple metal roofing. The panels might have supported a full-grown human’s weight, but Livia didn’t relish standing on them—not because she was afraid she might fall through or even dent them, but because the roof was slightly sloped and very high up with no railing. Because of the peak of the roof, she couldn’t see the entrance to the car park, which was on the southern side of the warehouse.
The platform had been built to house the heating and cooling equipment, which took up a portion of the space and was sheltered from the rain by an additional roof, supported by heavy metal pillars, twenty feet above their heads. The rain was loud on the metal and was blowing in at the sides, since there were no walls. The area was lit by three outdoor lights that in the old days might have been halogen. The warehouse wasn’t new, and Wales was a bit behind the times in these things, so perhaps they still were.
“Over here.” Michael stopped at a spot that overlooked the west side of the car park. He pointed to the top of the waist-high wall and, once Livia reached him, showed her what he’d discovered: flecks of sealant, paint, and even stone had come off in two places, about eight inches apart, leaving crumbled bits at the bottom of the wall at their feet.
“I’m thinking that if someone stood right here wearing steel-toed boots, he could have rappelled or parachuted off the wall to the car park and then driven away with nobody the wiser.”
Livia frowned. “You can’t parachute from a four-story building.”
“Not with a normal parachute, but the army has been working on technology that’s a cross between a parachute and a paraglide.”
Livia looked askance at the ground. “A good way to get yourself killed, if you ask me, but I suppose the shooter had to escape somehow.”
“Shooters.” Michael moved along the wall, stopping ten feet away from the first marks, and pointed to the edge. “Same marks.”
“That means they’re really gone.”
Livia and Michael exchanged a thoughtful look, and then Michael tucked his gun into his belt at the small of his back, adjusting his suit jacket over it. Livia found the tension in her own shoulders easing, and she put her gun away too.
Michael put both hands on the top of the wall and looked out. “They were professionals. Unless we catch an early break, from here on out, we’re going to be playing catch-up.”
Chapter Six
3 April 2022
Michael
A sharp, “Michael!” came from his earpiece, and he hastily raised the volume.
“Yes. I’m here. Sorry.”
Reg spoke into his ear. “We hadn’t heard from you for a few minutes. WECTU has arrived. Where are you?” WECTU was possibly one of the most unwieldy acronyms in all of the UK. It stood for Welsh Extremism and Counter-Terrorism Unit and was pronounced wecty.
“Livia and I are on the roof.”
“They’re on their way to you.”
But Livia had already pulled her badge from a pocket inside her jacket and started towards the door, hand out and the badge flipped open. She stopped ten feet from the door in a bracing stance and waited. Michael moved to a defensive stance too, having also heard the sound of feet on the metal catwalk.
Sure enough, a moment later, two riot police came through the door, assault rifles at the ready. They were wearing Kevlar vests and caps similar to Livia’s, though theirs proclaimed them to be Heddlu/Police.
“Security Service,” Livia said succinctly, with her badge held near to eye level. “I’m Livia Cross. This is Michael Dawar. You should have been told we were here.”
Michael showed his hands too and was glad his gun remained secreted at the small of his back. He didn’t have formal authorization for the gun—but he found himself incapable of caring. Despite his years in the army, he’d never been very good at taking orders. He’d sought personal autonomy whenever he could get it and wasn’t afraid to improvise—and he supposed that’s essentially what he was doing now.
A large blonde man with a Superman chin edged between the initial two officers and said in lilting English, typical of a native Welsh speaker. “We were. What do you have for us?”
“May I see your badge?” Livia asked.
The man complied. It was protocol, after all, and they were in a warehouse that had just been shot up. Once the badge met her approval, Livia related in clipped sentences what they knew so far and gestured to the space they were in. “We are only guessing they came up here. I still think it’s the most likely exit point, though we were too late to see them leave.”
“You’re sure there were two shooters?”
Livia indicated that Michael should approach. “Michael heard two distinct weapons.”
“A rifle and a pistol. They sound different,” Michael said.
The man nodded. “I caught the distinction on the telly whe
n it happened, but I’m glad you’ve confirmed it.”
Livia made another quick gesture with one hand. “Michael’s former army.”
“Bard Smith.” The man put out his hand to Michael, who shook it, resisting the urge to ask if he could sing. Undoubtedly, it would have been an old joke for Bard. “Good to have you on board.”
“Thanks. Nice to meet you.” With WECTU’s arrival, three different security corps were on scene, all getting along in an unprecedented level of cooperation. Michael supposed that if any occasion called for it, this one did. “Did you find the rifle on the lights platform?”
“Your boss relayed word of it,” Bard said. “Did you find anything up here?”
“The camera was sabotaged, so we won’t get anything from it, but the signs indicate the culprits left this way.” He showed Bard the scrapes and chips of concrete and sealant.
Bard leaned over the wall to look at the car park below them. “If they rappelled down the side, wouldn’t the hooks be left behind?”
Michael chose not to put forth the paraglide theory again. “The army has used electronically retracting hooks in combat situations to rappel down cliffsides when we didn’t want to leave behind gear that the enemy could use. With the press of a button, the hook releases.”
“Great. Robot grappling hooks.” Bard grunted, clearly not a mountain climber.
“At quarter to nine at night, it was dark down there when the shooters went over the wall.” Michael pointed towards the light poles that should have lit this side of the car park. “Three of the four lights are out. We are facing west. The entrance to the car park is to the south. Since the drive runs all the way around the warehouse, in order to leave, the shooters could have taken a route that avoided the main warehouse doors, which face north.”
“Have you seen any surveillance video?” Livia asked Bard.
Bard gave a quick shake of his head. “Not yet. I know only what I saw on the telly. I was watching with my wife when I got the call.”
“Who wasn’t?” one of the other policemen muttered.
Michael ignored him. “There’s a camera on the north side of the warehouse, above the door like this one. I wasn’t involved in the initial reconnaissance, but there ought to be more cameras in the car park. This place has been used for movies. They would have wanted to protect valuable equipment.”
Bard nodded. “My wife’s family is from Conwy, and last year her mother told her about a production company setting up in Gwynedd. Some King Arthur movie.”
Michael turned to Livia. “Who owns the warehouse?”
Livia’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know.” She said the words as if it were a personal affront.
“I didn’t ask if our people had set up any more cameras than the few I saw,” Michael said.
“Mine didn’t.” Livia grimaced. “An oversight.”
Bard took a moment to confer with other WECTU members via walkie-talkie, which his unit was using instead of earpieces, and Livia nudged Michael’s elbow. “We had only two days, and we made mistakes. They will have too.”
Michael wasn’t so sure. “I’m not Amelia, but this could turn into a public relations disaster for both Treadman Global and MI-5.”
Livia grimaced. “We let gunmen almost murder a King of England on our watch, while the world was watching.”
“That said, we weren’t wide open. I can’t see this being the result of blokes plotting in a pub.”
She tsked through her teeth. “Only a sophisticated organization could have pulled this off. If they’re this good, they’re going to be very hard to catch.”
“Could you have done it?”
“I am not fond of heights.” Livia peered over the wall and pulled back. “David jumped off a roof like this one once, leaving Director Callum and his wife, Cassie, behind.” She laughed under her breath. “And he did it without a parachute.”
“We need the security feeds, if there are any. Please let the other cameras not be broken.” Michael said the latter sentence in an undertone as he headed for the door. So far, Bard was taking his involvement for granted, and he wanted to keep it that way. “Downstairs, right?”
“Right.” Livia walked double-time to catch up to him, with Bard following, though he left the two men who’d come with him on the roof. A glance back before the door closed showed them overlooking the landscape, their assault rifles pressed to their chests. With different weapons, they could have been members of a castle’s garrison, guarding the entrance to their citadel.
In contrast to when he and Livia had last been inside the warehouse, the lights platform was full of people. Rather than go through them, Michael led Livia along the catwalk that followed the wall, while Bard peeled off to talk to someone who’d beckoned to him from the platform. Below them, the investigation was already in full swing, and Michael made out Chad Treadman’s sandy brown head near the main door.
Livia saw Chad too and hesitated. “Chad was looking up at the lights before the shooting started. He made a motion with his hand that seemed like a signal.” She swallowed hard. “You don’t think this could be Chad’s doing, do you?”
“No. Absolutely not.” But though Michael’s words themselves showed certainty, his voice lacked conviction.
Livia spread her hands wide. “The shooters had to have known about the interview.”
Michael laughed. “So did everyone on the planet.”
“But that person also needed to know exactly where we were filming in time to set up an ambush. That information was not common knowledge. They also would have needed access to weaponry that isn’t available in this country to just anyone—certainly not to the average lunatic.”
“I was right beside Chad when the shooting started,” Michael said. “He didn’t expect bullets, I’m sure of it.”
“Everyone is shocked when guns go off, if only because of the noise. I realize Chad Treadman is your boss, and you want to think the best of him, but we have to take him seriously as a threat.”
“Chad Treadman has the resources, I’ll grant you that, and it strikes me as his style to leave people alive,” Michael said. “But we could equally suspect the CIA ... or MI-5.”
That set Livia back on her heels. “No. We didn’t do this.” But like Michael’s earlier, her tone wasn’t as certain as her words.
Michael studied her. “You know the history. If not Philips himself, there may be rogue elements within Five. MI-5 have been accused in the past of being, as the Americans say, a bunch of cowboys.”
“That’s the CIA, not Five.” Then she paused. “Nobody in the CIA has a connection to David personally, and they’ve been jealous of Five’s relationship with him and his family from the start. They believe him to be their property, since he’s American in origin. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility that they hired someone to shoot at him just to see what would happen.”
“Just what we need, the CIA, though—” he gave her a wry grin, “—it would be convenient for both of us, if true. We won’t be the only ones to think it has to be an inside job.”
By now they’d reached the stairway, this one nearest the stage and on the opposite side of the warehouse from the one by which he and Livia had come up.
Michael put out a hand to her. “You showed real guts standing in front of that door. Those two men could have panicked and shot you.” Guts wasn’t quite the term he would have used to his army buddies.
“I only thought of that after they came through the door with guns. Really, you see them on the telly but very rarely in real life, even working for Five.”
He gave a low laugh. “I need to get a badge holder like the one you have, just to stop people in their tracks.”
“You do work security for Chad Treadman,” Livia said. “I imagine that can be arranged.”
They were almost to the bottom of the stairs. “By the way, thanks for introducing me the way you did. You didn’t have to.”
She shrugged. “I told the truth. You are liaising wi
th me, and thus Five.” She coughed a laugh. “It would be foolish to cut you out at this point. You were the first one on scene. And I didn’t want to see you shot, badge or no badge.”
They stepped off the bottom step and moved towards the only enclosed area in the warehouse, located in the southwest corner, diagonal from the main door. The building-within-the-building was perhaps forty feet by twenty and contained several offices, one of which was the security station, which they knew because it said so beside the door.
“Am I the only one who finds it odd I was the first person on scene?” Michael stopped in front of the door. “Reg said it wasn’t his job to pursue the shooter, which I get, but where were your men?” He refrained from calling them goons, as David had done. David had said it as a joke, but it was a very different thing for a King of England, whose family had been chased across the planet, to make a joke like that than for him to do it.
“I still haven’t seen them, not since maybe an hour before the show started. They said they were going to do another circuit of the area, which I was glad about. I knew they hadn’t returned, but with everything that was going on, I didn’t worry until after the shooting.”
“Could they have been called off the job?”
“That would have been unprecedented, unless there was some other threat nearby that made them the closest team. And why not tell me?” She bit her lip. “Until I hear from them, I can’t say one way or the other, but I am worried.”
“Have you let your boss know what’s happened?”
“The circuits were busy when I tried to telephone right after I reached the car park. I haven’t tried again.” Livia put a hand on the doorknob and twisted. “There hasn’t been time.”
Again, it struck Michael as strange that he and Livia were first in line. They couldn’t be the first people to think to look for the security feeds. Then again, he’d never been first to a disaster like this, and it was probably just too early for anyone to have their ducks in a row.
Except he was wrong. The security office contained two people: Dennis, Chad’s unimaginative head of security, which gave Michael a better feeling about him, and a woman sitting at a six-foot-wide desk in front of him. She had a keyboard beneath her fingertips and a bank of computer screens on the wall in front of her. The office lights glowed sickly yellow. With no windows, even were it day, the artificial light would be all that was on offer. The furniture was a yellowish pressboard, which contrasted poorly with the brown and gray speckled industrial carpeting. All in all, it wouldn’t have been a place Michael would have liked to work on a regular basis.
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