by Cain, Tom
Zhukovskaya laid out a plan that avoided the need for an immediate commitment to any particular course, thereby retaining the FSB’s flexibility to respond to changing events and maximize opportunities as they arose. Gusev made a few small adjustments of his own and then declared himself satisfied. Within a matter of minutes the appropriate orders were on their way to the FSB’s London station.
Walcott only realized that he had fallen asleep when his telephone extension rang and he awoke to find that he was slumped on his desk with his head in his arms. He looked at his watch. It was ten to six. He picked up the handset. ‘Uh-huh . . .’
‘Is that Inspector Keane?’
‘Do I sound like a woman to you?’
‘Oh, sorry, well who am I speaking to, then?’
‘Walcott. I’m her DS. How can I help?’
‘Well, I’m calling from the incident line. I was just checking the messages and there’s a guy who says he saw that Second Man bloke yesterday evening. He’s a waiter, and one of his customers exactly matched the description.’
‘Give me his details then, and I’ll get someone to speak to him.’
‘I will . . . but before I do, there’s something else you need to know. The reason the waiter remembered this bloke is because he was sat with someone famous, having dinner.’
‘Famous? What, like a celebrity?’
‘Sort of . . . It was Mark Adams. You know, the politician. The Second Man was his guest at dinner.’
Walcott groaned. That was all he needed – the most controversial politician getting messed up in the investigation. Then a happy thought occurred to him. There was no way he could go charging off after Adams. This was way above his pay-grade. Even Keane wasn’t in any position to haul Adams in for questioning. It would have to go to Commander Stamford at the very least, almost certainly to the Commissioner of the Met, possibly to the Home Secretary himself. And from Stamford on up, none of them would appreciate being woken up just so they could be dumped in the middle of a political shit storm.
He’d wait till Keane got in, tell her and let her deal with it. And having come to that decision, Walcott laid his head back down on his arms. He told himself it was just for a minute or two . . .
68
IT WAS JUST past six in London. Carver was clear in his mind now about what he had to do to get out, but he needed a little help. There was one man he knew he could count on, an ex-SBS lance-corporal called Kevin Cripps who’d served with Schultz and been tight with him afterwards. It took a while for the call to be answered, and Carver was starting to think that Cripps was off somewhere working as a mercenary or bodyguard when he heard the incoherent grunt of a man woken from a very deep sleep.
‘Morning, Cripps . . . it’s Carver.’
‘Unnhh, morning, boss . . . fuck, me head hurts, and me guts.’
‘Bad night, huh?’
‘You heard about Schultz? Fuckin’ terrible news . . .’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Me and some lads went out, give him a proper send-off . . . It was unreal, you know. I only spoke to him yesterday – he said he was having a drink with you, as it happens. S’pose that never happened, right?’
‘No, it did. I saw him . . .’
Carver said nothing, waiting for the penny to drop through the thick alcoholic fog filling Cripps’s head.
‘Oh fuck,’ Cripps groaned. ‘Was you there, with him . . . ?’
‘Yeah, that’s why I was calling.’
‘What happened? I mean, I heard all the bollocks on the news. But what’s the truth?’
‘We were under siege in that supermarket and we did what we had to do to survive.’
‘’Course you did . . . so what happened to Schultz?’
‘He ran out of bullets. There were too many of them and he only had one working arm.’
‘But he went down fighting, yeah?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Right . . . and then you got stuck into the fucking bastards.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good for you, boss. They killed your mate. You killed them. So . . . what can I do for you?’
‘Do you still have that old Mazda?’
Cripps laughed. ‘Yeah, just about, but it’s well knackered. I mean, it goes all right, but it’s not exactly a luxury ride.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll give you ten grand for it.’
‘That’s a lot more than it’s worth.’
‘The money’s not just for the car. There’s something else I need you to do for me.’
‘What’s that, then?’
‘Shit, shower, shave and put on a proper suit. Then go to Victoria Station and take a train to Shoreham-by-Sea. I need you there by half nine.’
‘What the hell’s in Shoreham-by-Sea?’
It took Carver another ten minutes to tell Cripps what he’d find that was so important in a sleepy little suburb of Brighton, down on the Sussex coast. He talked through the way the financial transaction would work, and what little extras Cripps had to take care of.
Before they hung up, Cripps asked. ‘So where do you want the Mazda?’
‘Anywhere near Victoria will do. Text me the location. Leave the keys in the exhaust and if there’s a ticket to pay, just put that in the glove compartment.’
‘Got it,’ said Cripps. ‘Right then, I’d better get going.’
When the call was over Carver swapped his black body warmer for an old windcheater someone had left on a hook by the front door. It was as miserable and unappealing as everything else in the place: a pallid sky-blue fabric, with a coating of grime that added a depressing grey top note: in short, just the kind of garment a man who looked the way Carver now did would wear. He transferred his wallet, phone and the head cam into its pockets, then screwed up a Tesco shopping bag and shoved that in, too.
He didn’t want to be weighted down by the satchel and its contents, so he reset the iPad to its factory settings, deleting everything on it, wiped it clean of fingerprints and stuck it in a drawer in the kitchen. Satisfied that he had done everything his plans for the day required, he went into the bedroom and, still fully dressed, with the Glock beside him on the bedside table, lay down for an hour’s sleep, his first in almost twenty-four hours. It was a long way from a proper night’s kip, but it would have to do.
Novak was woken at half past six and told to get ready. Carver had been located. His current location would be virtually impossible to penetrate. But plans were underway to force him to move. He would be driven towards her, just as dogs drive game towards the hunters’ waiting guns. It would not be long now.
69
SHORTLY AFTER SEVEN o’clock Robbie Bell, who had already been up for over an hour, received a call from Hartley Crewson: ‘I presume you’ve seen the police pictures of the Second Man suspect.’
‘Of course,’ Bell replied. ‘And so will everybody who was in that restaurant last night. I can’t believe the police don’t know that he was sitting at dinner with Mark Adams.’
‘Well, we’ve had one stroke of luck. None of the blogs have picked up on it. There’s not even a grainy photo on Twitter.’
‘Then we need to make the first move. We have to be proactive, contact the police ourselves and then go public as soon as possible.’
‘Agreed. Get on to Adams immediately. Explain the situation. Tell him what has to be done, and then do it fast. You have to call the police before they call you.’
‘What’s your view on Sam himself? It sounds like you want him caught.’
‘Absolutely. I was thinking about it overnight. The fact is, we didn’t have any connection with him, and it was pure bad luck he turned up at your dinner table. The sooner he’s in a police cell, the sooner the facts can be independently verified.’
‘So you’re not planning anything more, ah . . . drastic, then?’
‘Good Lord, no!’ Crewson exclaimed. ‘What kind of man do you think I am? The last thing we want is for the public to discover that the pri
me suspect for the Second Man had dinner with Adams, only for him to turn up dead somewhere. Everyone would immediately blame us. Hell, no . . . I don’t want to harm a hair on that man’s head.’
Bell gave himself two minutes to fix a cappuccino before he called Adams. But before the milk had even stopped frothing, Adams was on the line to him.
‘What are we going to do?’ he asked.
Bell did not need to be told what his boss was referring to. ‘Go to the police immediately. Nip any hint of a conspiracy theory in the bud. Just think what it will look like: you having dinner with the Second Man, cracking open bottles of vintage Bordeaux . . . Well, it looks like a celebration, doesn’t it?’
Adams sounded perturbed. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Robbie, but there are just a couple of problems. For one thing, we don’t know for sure that Sam really was the Second Man. He might just bear an unfortunate resemblance to the real one. And then there’s the whole issue of me, an ex-Para, grassing up another old soldier. All those white working-class males you keep telling me we need to get voting for us won’t take kindly to that at all. From what I can see, there are plenty of people who think he was a hero for standing up to the rioters. If a load of them got killed, too bad; they were asking for it. That’s quite a common view, and I have to say I have some sympathy for it.’
‘Fine, then say so at the appropriate time. But right now we can’t afford to be standing up for him. “Let the courts decide” – that has to be our motto.’
‘I tell you what, though,’ mused Adams, conceding defeat. ‘That Alexandra Vermulen was a stunner. I’ll miss the chance of working with her, I must say.’
‘Maybe you can bring her in when you’re the next Prime Minister . . . which you won’t be unless I make the call. So, are we agreed?’
‘Yes, I can see you’re right. Make the call.’
Walcott was filling Keane in on the developments of the past few hours while she stood opposite him, chewing on a piece of toast. Once she was up to speed, he could head home for a very badly needed rest, but he’d saved the big news till last. ‘We got a tip-off, a waiter who works at—’
‘Hold on . . .’ Keane held up a hand. The phone had started ringing halfway through Walcott’s last sentence. She answered it and was astounded to hear Robbie Bell, Mark Adams’s campaign manager, telling her that his boss had been joined at dinner last night by a man introduced to him as ‘Sam’ who had looked exactly like the Second Man picture released by the police.
‘What was he doing at Mr Adams’s table?’ Keane asked.
‘He was invited as the partner of a political consultant from America, with whom Mr Adams was discussing the possibility of raising his profile as an internationally respected statesman on that side of the Atlantic.’
‘So who was this “political consultant”, then?’
‘Her name is Alexandra Vermulen, and she’s currently staying at the Hyde Park Palace Hotel. To the best of my knowledge, the man you want is there with her.’
‘That was Mark Adams’s campaign manager,’ Keane told Walcott a few seconds later. ‘Apparently he had dinner with our suspect last night.’
To her surprise, Walcott did not seem fazed by that extraordinary information. ‘I know. There was a witness. But how come Adams is coming straight to us before we’ve even tried to contact him? Suggests he didn’t have anything to do with the riot.’
‘Or he knows we’re going to find out about the dinner anyway, but this’ll make him look good.’
There was a forced, fake cough from behind Keane’s left ear. She turned to find a uniformed WPC holding out a piece of A4 paper on which a grainy photograph had been printed.
‘What’s that?’ Keane asked.
‘It came in a few minutes ago with a covering note that said this was a picture of the Second Man, taken shortly before four a.m.’ The WPC handed the piece of paper to Keane and went on: ‘As you can see, he’s entering a building. And you’re not going to believe it, ma’am, but it’s less than half a mile from here.’
‘Do we know who sent it?’
‘No, it was an email attachment from a Hotmail account. The sender’s name was just a jumble of numbers and names.’
‘Get the tech people to trace who it belongs to and where it was sent from. Tell them it’s their top priority.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Keane got straight on to her boss, Commander Stamford, to discuss the best way to handle the situation. There was absolutely no time to waste. Both leads had to be followed up as soon as possible. The suspect was presumed to be carrying the weapon taken from the armed officer at St Thomas’ Hospital. Since there was a possibility that he could be at either the hotel or the apartment block, both operations would require support from SCO19, the Met’s Specialist Firearms Command, the London equivalent to an American SWAT unit.
Still, they had to exercise extreme caution. As Stamford pointed out, ‘Wherever he is, there are going to be people about. So we can’t just go charging after him, guns blazing. We don’t want another slaughter on our hands.’
Keane was landed with the task of organizing a mission that was fast, heavily armed and, if necessary, violent, whilst making sure that the full requirements of health and safety, in terms of both the public and police personnel, were fully observed. And she still hadn’t managed to finish her toast.
Celina Novak didn’t give a damn about anybody’s safety apart from her own. If the completion of a mission involved collateral damage, so be it. As she set herself in the optimum position to take the shot when the moment came, she did not care how many bullets hit the wrong people, just so long as one of them took out Samuel Carver.
And when he was dealt with she would turn her attention to her dear friend and former comrade, Alexandra.
Robbie Bell hammered out a press release. It was headlined, ‘Mark Adams MP, Leader of the United People’s Party, Leads Police to Second Man Suspect.’
Beneath that the text read,
At approximately 7.30 a.m. this morning, a member of Mark Adams’s staff contacted the Metropolitan Police on his behalf to provide information as to the possible identity and whereabouts of the so-called Second Man suspect in the Lion Market Massacre.
Mr Adams believes that he encountered the suspect shortly after his triumphant and mould-breaking speech at the O2 Arena last night.
He will be giving a press conference at 10.00 a.m. at the headquarters of the United People’s Party, Shepherd’s Bush Road, London W6. Accredited media only.
He emailed the release to his entire address book, tweeted it, made it the morning’s status update on the party’s Facebook page and his own, and blogged it on the party’s official website.
Ten minutes later he was frantically calling every staff member who wasn’t already in work to get their arses into the office immediately, or the next thing they’d get from him would be their P45. The party office had a conference room with a lectern and UPP backdrop at one end that was perfectly adequate for most media briefings. But this was different.
‘I think we may have to find somewhere bigger for your press call,’ Bell told Mark Adams. ‘Like the Hammersmith Apollo.’
70
ALIX HAD FLOWN in from Washington DC barely forty-eight hours earlier. Her body was still on American East Coast time, the suite’s bedroom curtains were heavy and the double-glazing kept out all the street noise. What with one thing and another it was past eight by the time she woke up.
It took her a second to register that Carver wasn’t lying beside her in the bed, and another to remember why. He had gone. She might not see him again for months, if she ever saw him at all. And meanwhile she was feeling wretched with morning sickness.
She turned on her phone and listened to Carver’s message. He was talking about Plan B but she didn’t get it at first. Her mind was so overwhelmed by what was happening to her body that she couldn’t quite focus on the world at large. Then she remembered what Carver had told her last night. S
he switched on the TV and flicked through the news channels. Every single one of them was covering what they were calling the Lion Market Massacre. Until then she hadn’t grasped the reality of what Carver had been talking about: she’d seen it all in terms of his pain and confusion. She’d had no concept of the scale or horror of it all. And then she saw the picture of him come up on the screen and knew that she couldn’t afford to be a helpless pregnant woman for a single second.
If the police knew about Carver, then they would surely know where he was staying. How long would it be before they arrived? Not long, surely.
She needed to get out. But she couldn’t just run, thoughtlessly. First she had to get dressed: practical clothes that would allow her to move fast and if necessary defend herself. Then she needed her passport, wallet and laptop: there were too many leads to Carver on that to let it anywhere near the police.
The night she’d met Carver he’d given her precisely sixty seconds to change, grab her possessions and get out of an apartment in Paris before the whole place blew up. She made allowances for the passing years and gave herself ninety seconds this time. She was already dressed and piling her possessions into her tote bag when the phone rang.
Keane’s car was no more than a minute from the hotel, siren blaring and lights flashing, driving other traffic before it as it raced towards its destination. She was talking to the hotel security manager.
‘We have key-card confirmation that Mrs Vermulen’s companion exited the hotel at one twenty this morning. We have not seen any sign of him since, nor has his key been used to re-enter the hotel, so we must assume that he has not returned. Mrs Vermulen has not left the room since she returned to it shortly before midnight.’
Keane thanked him for the information and passed it on to the SCO19 officer who would be leading the active phase of the operation. It looked as though they would, once again, fail to capture their prey. But her frustration was mixed with a certain relief: a standoff between armed police and a dangerous man in a crowded hotel was a potential recipe for disaster.