Prime Target u-10

by Hugh Miller

  The gunman made off along Cork Street into Burlington Gardens. He ran past witnesses too startled to do anything but stare at the glass and the blood and the blonde-headed corpse, spiked on the edge of the window.

  The policeman who had given the woman directions appeared at the corner of the street. He stood for several seconds, staring like the others, taking in the scene, then he turned aside and muttered urgently to his radio.

  * * *

  The Arab came out of Sloane Street station with his eyes turned to the ground, walking purposefully, not quite hurrying. He stood in a knot of tourists by the crossing opposite the station entrance and waited for the green man.

  ‘Do you know the way to Oakley Gardens, at all?’ a small woman said. ‘I have this map but it’s very confusing.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He kept his face averted, as if he was watching for someone. ‘I’m a stranger here.’ He saw her push the map forward and stalled the next request. ‘I need glasses to read small print,’ he said. ‘I don’t have them with me. Sorry.’

  He pulled up the collar of his windcheater, hiding half his face without obviously obscuring his identity. He breathed deeply, telling himself over and over to be calm and take care to make no eye contact. He forced his mind to stay on the primary need, which was to get to his rented room as fast as he could without arousing interest along the way.

  The green man came on and he stepped into the road, moving fast but no faster than the others, his hands deep in his slit pockets. His right fingers were curled around his gun. The barrel was still warm.

  Hurrying past W.H. Smith’s he could see the pedestrian light at Cheltenham Terrace was green, which meant it would be red before he got to the corner. He put on a spurt, just short of running, and cursed as the light changed. People bunched on the edge of the pavement. He eased in among them.

  ‘Bloody traffic,’ a man next to him said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s no pleasure walking any place these days.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  The light changed. He tightened his grip on the gun, holding on to it like a mascot, and let himself move along at the centre of a group.

  On the opposite pavement he accelerated again, striding smartly, turning left down Walpole Street and right on to St Leonard’s Terrace. One of his many superstitions dictated that if he took the same route back to base on consecutive nights, something bad would happen. Last night he went straight down the King’s Road and got to his digs via Smith Street. It was much quicker than this way, but what was a gain in speed alongside the chance of bad fortune?

  Approaching the bottom of Royal Avenue he looked up and saw two policemen walking towards him. They were 15 metres away but he was sure they were looking at him. He checked his watch. It was twenty minutes since he did the job, long enough for a description to be circulated. He reminded himself his face had been half covered, as it was now.

  But what if they were looking for an Arabic type with half his face covered?

  He decided to go up Royal Avenue. He turned right sharply and bumped into a woman. He hadn’t even seen her. His foot came down on hers and she yelped. He glanced at the policemen. They were definitely looking at him now.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to the woman. ‘Please forgive me for being so clumsy — ’

  ‘Stupid idiot!’

  He tried to move past her and she swung her folded umbrella at him, hitting his shoulder. He smelled whisky. Of all the people to walk into, he had to pick a belligerent drunk. He pushed her away, but she resisted and tried to hit him again. He stepped aside and she stumbled, swinging wildly. She missed and fell over with a heavy bump, howling as the contents of her shopper scattered across the pavement.

  ‘Hoi! You!’

  It was one of the policemen.

  ‘I have done nothing,’ the Arab called. ‘She slipped and fell, that is all.’

  ‘Just stay where you are, mate. Stay put.’

  They were coming for him. His heart began to race. He jumped over the flailing woman and sprinted along Royal Avenue. Leafy branches of garden shrubs slapped his face as he ran.

  ‘Stop! Come back here!’

  He put his head down and pumped his legs furiously, hearing the voice of Ahmad Shawqi: ‘Never be taken by the police,’ he always warned. ‘Avoid all police in all countries. There is no worse mis-fortune than to be taken.’

  It was one of his superstitions, anyway. If the police ever took him, eternal bad fortune would befall himself and his family. As he ran it occurred to him that last night he had gone back to his digs by the route he had just taken; it was the day before that he had gone straight down the King’s Road…

  ‘Right, pal, hold it right there.’

  Impossibly, one of the policemen was standing ahead of him, arms spread, clutching his baton. The Arab stiffened his legs, frantically slowing himself as he realized they must have split up and this one had cut through a garden to get in front.

  ‘Don’t do anything silly, now — ’

  The Arab ran off the pavement into the traffic, narrowly missing the front of a taxi. He spun away from the near-impact and found himself with his hands flat on the bonnet of a police car. As the blunder registered, the driver and his partner were out and coming for him.

  He turned to run and saw the first pair of constables heading straight towards him. He turned back, ran, and slammed into the side of a removals van.

  ‘Right!’ a constable shouted, grabbing him. ‘Don’t move a muscle!’

  A strong hand took his shoulder, the other twisted his left arm up his back. He plunged his free hand into his pocket and grabbed the gun. There were four policemen and they were all close. Even if he worked at his fastest, he knew he could never get them all before they took him. There was only one possible course of action.

  ‘Shit! He’s got a gun!’

  He saw frantic hands coming at him, fingers hooked to drag him down. In an instant the muzzle of the gun was in his mouth. He tried to think of something noble, an image that would define his life.

  Nothing came.

  He shut his eyes and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  ‘It is Tuesday 27th February, 1996,’ the fat pathologist wheezed into the tape recorder hanging on his chest. ‘The time is sixteen-thirty-three hours. I am Doctor Sidney Lewis and I am conducting a preliminary examination on the body of an unidentified male. The body was brought to the coroner’s mortuary at Fulham by ambulance from St Agnes’ hospital, where the subject was declared dead on arrival at sixteen-oh-eight hours, this date.’

  Dr Lewis switched off the recorder and waited as an attendant led two constables and a plainclothes policeman into the autopsy room.

  ‘I’m DI Latham,’ the plainclothes man said. ‘These are Constables Bryant and Dempsey. They were in pursuit of the dead man shortly before he died.’

  Lewis looked at them. ‘You’re the two who were chasing him when he panicked and shot himself?’

  ‘If you care to put it that way,’ the taller one, Dempsey, said coldly.

  ‘And why have you come here?’

  ‘I wanted them to look at the body and tell me it’s the man they chased,’ Latham said. ‘There can be identity problems with Middle Eastern types, and since this case could turn messy, I want basic facts established before everything gets obscured by jargon.’

  Dr Lewis waved a hand at the corpse. ‘Well, then, gentlemen, is this the man in question?’

  ‘That’s him all right,’ Dempsey said. Bryant nodded.

  ‘Fine.’ Lewis grasped the handle at the top end of the tray holding the body. ‘Now, tell me before we go any further, are there any mysteries here? I mean, do we know how he died, for sure? Was it the way I’ve been told? He took his own life, without a shadow of doubt?’

  ‘That’s clearly established,’ Latham said. ‘But there’s plenty of mystery, just the same. We don’t know who he is, we don’t know why the gun, or why he shot himself with it.�
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  ‘Shortly after shooting a woman in Mayfair,’ Constable Dempsey added.

  ‘Not yet confirmed,’ Latham snapped. ‘But that’s likely,’ he told Dr Lewis. ‘He appears to have shot and killed a woman as she looked in a gallery window on Cork Street.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘We don’t know that yet, either. All very confused at this stage. There’s a diplomatic angle. American. We’ll know more in an hour or so.‘

  ‘I see what you mean by messy,’ Lewis said. ‘Never mind, in the meantime we can generate paperwork.’ He switched on a bright striplight above the autopsy table. ‘I don’t think we’re going to find much that isn’t obvious already. If one or both of you constables would help me with the clothing, it will speed matters.’

  He saw Bryant scowl and watched Dempsey work up a look of affront.

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  Bryant shrugged sullenly.

  Dempsey said, ‘I don’t remember signing up for anything like this.’

  ‘Blame your own bad timing,’ Lewis said. ‘You drove this poor soul to kill himself at approximately the same time a debt collector in Parsons Green pushed two of his targets against the plate-glass window of a betting shop with rather too much force. The glass gave way and the debtors were cut almost in half. They’re through in the other room being stripped at this moment by my only assistant — the bloodstained one who showed you in.’

  ‘I don’t think you have the right to say we drove this man to — ’

  ‘It was a joke, for God’s sake!’ Lewis said. ‘A bloody joke, of which we need plenty in this charnel house.’ He shook his head at DI Latham. ‘A sense of humour should be a prerequisite for the job.’

  The body was stripped and the clothes bagged for examination at the police forensic laboratory. The big tray with the body still on board was then transferred to the roll-on scales. Dr Lewis read off the weight, hooked a measuring pole over one foot and read the height at the point where the pole touched the head. That done, he moved the body back under the light, switched on his recorder and proceeded with the preliminary examination.

  ‘The body is that of a well-nourished man of Middle Eastern appearance, between twenty-five and thirty years old. He weighs seven-nine-point-three kilograms and measures one-eight-five-point-two centimetres, from crown to sole. The hair on the scalp is black and wiry with a natural curl. The sclerae and conjunctivae are unexceptional, the irises appear light brown and the pupils are dilated and fixed. Hairline scars under the ears and on either side of the nose suggest extensive and skilful cosmetic surgery. Apart from considerable damage to the head, to be described below, there are no other apparent injuries.’

  Dr Lewis picked up a length of wire and pushed it into the dead man’s mouth. The end appeared from the back of the head with a grape-sized clot of blood attached. Lewis withdrew the wire and spoke to his recorder again.

  ‘The head is normocephalic, with extensive traumatic damage. A visible bullet-entry wound to the rear of the hard palate connects, on probing, to a gaping area of parieto-occipital bone loss, approximately ninety millimetres by sixty, with significant absence of intervening brain tissue.’

  He switched off the recorder and looked at DI Latham. ‘That does it for the preliminary. Nothing more until we have an order for a post-mortem.’ He put a finger into the dead man’s mouth and felt around the edge of the bullet wound. ‘What kind of gun did he have?’

  ‘Austrian Glock automatic.’

  ‘Nine millimetre?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Registered?’

  ‘Not in this country.’

  ‘Foolish of me to ask. You’ve no idea at all who he is?’

  ‘We fingerprinted him at the hospital and got several mug shots. The PNC is working on it, so is Interpol, and we’ll be uploading all the details to ICON this evening. But the short answer is no, we haven’t a clue who he is.’

  The blood-smirched attendant appeared in the doorway and said there was a phone call for Detective Inspector Latham. Latham went to the office and was back in less than two minutes.

  ‘Apart from some money and the gun,’ he told Dr Lewis, ‘the only thing the dead man had on him was a snapshot, a picture of two women sitting in a bar. Somebody has just noticed one of the women in the picture is the woman who was shot in Mayfair this afternoon.’

  ‘Why do you think there’s a hold-up on identifying her?’

  ‘The American Embassy is involved. They probably know all about her, and no doubt so do our top brass, but they have an agreed process whereby information trickles down slowly from the top, and we can’t rush them. Not if we know what’s good for us.’

  ‘Intriguing.’ Lewis was examining the body again. ‘He’s very muscular.’ He lifted an arm, hefting it, pinching the flesh. ‘He probably worked-out a lot, or he’s recently been in the army.’

  He hoisted the arm higher and stared.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Abdul has a tattoo. It’s just visible through the undergrowth in his armpit. Look.’

  The pattern was indistinct. Lewis picked up a knife with a straight blade and used it to shave away the armpit hair.

  ‘What would you say it is, Doc?’

  ‘It’s nearly spherical, it’s orange and brown and yellow with a sharp blue border. It could be some kind of Egyptian talisman, for all I know.’

  ‘Or a Muslim symbol,’ Latham suggested.

  Constable Bryant was standing at the top end of the table. ‘If you look at it from here, it’s not too mysterious,’ he said.

  Lewis tilted his head and inched around the table. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said.

  Latham was still frowning at the mark. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The face of a cat,’ Lewis said. ‘And it’s smiling, in a ghastly kind of way.’

  2

  On Wednesday 28 February at 10.10 a.m. Eastern time, thirteen hours after the Arab had been declared dead at a London hospital, a startlingly clear image of a cat-face tattoo appeared on the ICON information screen in the UNACO Command Centre at UN headquarters in New York. It accompanied a case summary with a picture of the dead Arab male, complete with an investigative précis and inset shots of the dead man’s property. Tom Gilbert, the duty Newsline Monitor, made high-definition printouts and spent another twenty minutes gathering peripheral information. He then took everything to the office of the Director of UNACO.

  That morning was as busy as any other in the complex of offices and technical suites that made up UNACO’s headquarters. UNACO — the United Nations Anti-Crime Organization — occupied an entire floor of the Secretariat building which dominated the UN’s East River site. More than two hundred employees, many of them highly trained specialists, handled the administration of the world’s most efficient crime-fighting body. Thirty prime-rated field agents, drawn from police and intelligence agencies around the world, formed the core of ten teams known as strike forces which, by agreement among the majority of nations, were able to cross national boundaries freely. They could also bypass police administrations and, where necessary, override laws and the diplomatic process. The organization’s avowed aim was to counter crime at the international level, using personnel and resources funded by the UN member nations. UNACO was not a secret body. On the other hand it did not publicize itself. Its offices were unmarked, all telephone numbers were unlisted and agents and employees never openly acknowledged their affiliation. The Director of UNACO, Malcolm Philpott, was accountable only to the Head of the Security Council and to the Secretary General of the United Nations.

  As Tom Gilbert entered the office, Philpott was staring at a letter printed on CIA notepaper.

  ‘Hope I’m not intruding, sir.’ Gilbert crossed the big room, his feet soundless on the carpet. He put the folder on Philpott’s desk. ‘This could be relevant.’

  ‘So could this.’ Philpott tapped the letter. ‘Remember Tony Prine and his one-man mission to Bolívar?’

  ‘Prine?
’ Gilbert thought for a moment. ‘Specialist in industrial sabotage — that Prine?’

  ‘The same. A highly resourceful chap. He’s been trying to uncover a solvent-manufacturing plant, crucial to the production of cocaine, located somewhere in the region of Cartagena. Well, a satellite surveillance officer at Langley has spotted a big bang in the heart of the Bolívar region. He says if it’s got anything to do with us, we should tell the people upstairs to get ready to counter complaints from the Colombian government about unscheduled anti-drug activity on their urban turf.’

  ‘Looks like Prine found his target.’

  ‘Let me know as soon as he makes contact. Some kind of pat on the back will be in order.’

  At that hour Philpott still looked puffy, a side-effect of the beta-blockers he now had to take for his heart condition. Otherwise, he looked fit and alert. He pointed to a mini espresso machine on a table at the side.

  ‘Help yourself to Milanese blend, Tom. Bad for the heart so early in the morning, but it does wonders for the soul.’

  Gilbert poured himself a cup and sat down to wait. Philpott looked at the pictures he had brought and read the sketchy case details. He looked up.

  ‘No identification on the Arab?’

  ‘Not at present. He’s had recent plastic surgery to alter vertical and horizontal facial alignment.’

  ‘Perhaps a seriously wanted man then. Is there anything more than you’ve given me?’

  ‘The woman the Arab is believed to have killed — ’

  ‘She’s the one on the left in the picture he was carrying. I read that and I’ve looked at the picture.’

  ‘Don’t you recognize her?’

  Philpott held the print under the desk lamp. The woman had a pallid, delicate face, small-featured and framed by soft-curled blonde hair. Her companion, no less attractive, had a strong face and rich dark hair.

  ‘You must have met her,’ Gilbert said.

  ‘Really?’ Philpott shook his head. ‘I meet a lot of good-looking females. Nowadays it’s never a memorable frisson.’ He sighed. ‘Her jacket is a Donna Karan, I believe, but I don’t know the wearer at all.’