by James Craig
‘But now we are moving out of the trial phase. The Home Office is throwing money at us. The Project is due to grow from eight officers to twenty-five in the next three months.’
A thought suddenly flashed across Carlyle’s brain: maybe he wants to recruit me?
Hooper opened his notepad. ‘How did you know about Charlotte Gondomar?’
Show-time. Carlyle sat up slightly in his chair. ‘It was a tip-off.’
Hooper nodded as he wrote down the words. ‘From whom?’
‘From a confidential informant.’ He had already thought about what he would say next; the trick was not to make it sound too rehearsed. ‘Ms Gondomar came onto my radar in the course of an investigation we were doing into complaints that a couple of models had been abused by a local photographer.’ This last was a total fabrication, but the paperwork existed to back it up. ‘I would have handed the matter on, but it became apparent that my sources would only deal with me.’
He paused, checking how this was going down, but Hooper, still busy scribbling, was not giving anything away.
‘There was also the time issue,’ Carlyle continued. ‘I was aware that Ms Gondomar had a significant amount of Class A in her possession on the night in question.’
The night in question. Classic police-speak from a humble plod. Carlyle, amused by the shit coming out of his own mouth, fought back a smile.
‘Also, she was due to return to Brazil the following morning. Therefore I acted in an expeditious manner, by taking advantage of the limited window of opportunity available to me.’
Despite having seen my sergeant shot down in the street only a few hours earlier.
Hooper finished his note-taking and dropped his pen on the desk. ‘And how did you get to know all about that?’
‘Like I said,’ Carlyle repeated, ‘I was fortunate enough to have my source.’
‘One you are not prepared to share?’
Carlyle made a face that suggested that the question was a long way past unreasonable. ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘I have to protect my sources, just like you do. Just like everyone does.’
Hooper looked doubtful.
‘Anyway,’ Carlyle continued, ‘we got a result – a good result. If you’re feeling pissed off that it doesn’t go down on your Project’s scorecard, I’m sure we can arrange to sort that out.’
A cunning light appeared in Hooper’s eyes. ‘You think we should fiddle the stats?’
‘No,’ Carlyle said firmly, ‘I’m not saying that.’ He cursed himself for having given Hooper something to work with. ‘What I am saying is that it was a successful arrest, and you should be pleased about that.’
‘The girl subsequently died.’
‘The IPCC investigation into that is well underway. I have already spoken to them.’
Hooper scratched his head. ‘Don’t you feel responsible for what happened to her?’
Carlyle thought about that for a moment. He knew nothing about Lottie Gondomar, other than the fact that she trafficked drugs and had truly wonderful breasts. He did not know why she was smuggling drugs (for the money, he presumed) nor had he any idea why she’d decide to kill herself in one of his prison cells. He had stuck her in that cell, it was true, but it wasn’t his job to check on her during the night and make sure she was okay. Ultimately, however you looked at it, he had only been doing his job. Lottie Gondomar’s fate was one of the few things in recent days for which he didn’t feel responsible. ‘Everything was done properly. Everything was recorded properly. I left the girl in the care of the duty officer. So, no, Inspector, I don’t feel responsible.’
‘That’s handy,’ Hooper smirked.
Fuck off, thought Carlyle.
‘What about Rollo Kasabian?’ Hooper asked.
‘What about him?’
‘Was he your informant?’
‘No, he wasn’t. I’d never even met him before the other night.’ Carlyle was happy to talk about Rollo. Maybe getting some accurate facts into the conversation now would help him later on.
Hooper picked up the pen and started doodling on his pad.
‘No?’
‘No,’ Carlyle said, ‘Rollo was not the source of my information. I will give you that, but I’m not going to play Twenty Bloody Questions about who it was.’
‘Interesting.’ Hooper thought about his next move. ‘We have had him under investigation for some time.’
‘Rollo?’
‘Yes.’
You’re bluffing, thought Carlyle. You haven’t been watching him. You don’t have shit. ‘Based on what information?’
Hooper smiled. ‘We have our sources too, Inspector.’
‘I’m sure that you do,’ Carlyle smiled back. ‘Just not as good as mine.’
THIRTEEN
Carlyle walked into Il Buffone still deep in thought. In some ways, the fact that Hooper hadn’t mentioned Dominic Silver was even more troubling than if he had. At least, that way Carlyle would have had a better idea of what the Middle Market Drugs Project knew. If they didn’t know about Silver they should do, since he was exactly the type of dealer that they were trying to target. And if they did know about him, they clearly didn’t trust Carlyle enough to tell him the whole story. What was it some politician had said about known unknowns? Well, he would just have to wait and see – keeping his guard up in the meantime. Sighing, he slipped onto a stool at the counter and stared vacantly out of the window.
After a minute or so, Marcello appeared at his shoulder and placed a double macchiato on the counter. ‘We’re out of pastries,’ he said. ‘Do you want anything else to eat?’
Having been looking forward to the sugar rush, Carlyle felt a pang of annoyance. He carefully considered his options: he didn’t really care for croissants and the only other cakes on offer – stodgy Bakewell tarts wrapped in plastic with sell-by dates well into next year – were only to be resorted to in times of emergency. ‘No,’ he said finally, ‘it’s okay, Marcello. Coffee’s fine.’
Nodding, Marcello pulled a copy of the Evening Standard from under his arm, unfolded it and placed it carefully on the counter, in front of Carlyle.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked quietly.
Carlyle took a sip of his coffee and glanced at the front page. The headline screamed THE FACE OF A KILLER above a grainy black and white picture taken from a CCTV camera. The image showed the pavement outside the front entrance to the Ritz, moments after Joe Szyszkowski had been shot. Joe himself already lay on the pavement, while Carlyle, turning away from the camera, was looking towards his fallen colleague. The gunman, his face blurry and indistinguishable, appeared to be staring right into the lens.
Carlyle took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Avoiding Marcello’s gaze, he scanned the text: The murdered officer was last night named as Sergeant Joseph Szyszkowski . . . wife and two children . . . the authorities say that they are pursuing several leads . . .
At least there was no mention of Carlyle’s name. He handed the newspaper back to Marcello.
‘I’m sorry. It’s been a tough time.’
‘Sure, sure.’ Marcello gave him a comforting pat on the shoulder. ‘It’s a terrible thing to happen.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Carlyle nodded, finishing his coffee.
Marcello lowered his voice. ‘It could have been you.’
‘That’s what Helen said.’ Carlyle smiled weakly. ‘What can you do? It’s a bit like the lottery in reverse.’
Marcello poked him gently in the chest. ‘You have to be careful.’
‘Marcello,’ said Carlyle, more tired than peeved, ‘I get more than enough of this type of talk at home. I am careful. And, by and large, London is a very safe city.’
‘Not for Joe, it wasn’t,’ said Marcello, crossing himself. ‘God rest his soul.’
‘Yes, well . . .’
Marcello took the empty cup and waved aside Carlyle’s offer of payment. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll make sure to keep some Danish pastries for you, ev
en if you don’t deserve them.’
‘Thanks,’ said Carlyle, heartened by this use of the plural.
‘And give his family my condolences.’
‘I will,’ said Carlyle. Assuming that they ever speak to me again.
FOURTEEN
Tapping his hands on the steering wheel, Ryan Goya sat gazing at the long line of vehicles leading up to the traffic-lights on Lisson Grove. Heading north into St John’s Wood, he was singing along quietly to Rihanna’s ‘Rude Boy’ on the radio.
For the hundredth time that afternoon, Goya glanced down at the newspaper folded on his lap, then looked up to check his reflection in the cab’s wing mirror. Yet again, he concluded that it was impossible to identify him as the man pictured in the paper. A fresh number-one buzz cut under his beanie hat, and several days’ worth of stubble had changed his appearance well enough. Anyway, given the extremely poor quality of the CCTV image, it was going to be impossible to identify anyone as the man in the picture.
Ryan smiled to himself: he was in the clear. This was just as well, given that the work assigned to his team here in London was far from finished.
The man sitting in the back of his cab was Noor Gyula Teleki, a known associate of Omid Jarragh Ajab. Both men were important members of Hamas’s military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and part of a four-strong cell that Mossad had been tracking through Europe for the last six months. Reliable intelligence from an informer inside the Palestinian Authority in Gaza had told them that the Hamas crew were presently in London to buy a cache of Chinese QBZ-95 rifles from an Armenian arms dealer. The guns were thought to be intended for Hamas’s Executive Support Forces in their ongoing squabble with the Preventive Security Force of the rival faction, Fatah. Palestinians shooting each other seemed like a good idea to Goya; he often wondered why his bosses didn’t just let them get on with it. But he knew that was considered an exotic notion. Anything that put arms into the hands of the Palestinians was to be stopped – by any means possible.
The other reason why Noor Gyula Teleki had to be killed was Itay Kayal. Kayal had been an eighteen-year-old conscript in the Israeli army who, ten years earlier, was standing, dressed in his uniform, at a bus stop near the southern Israeli town of Ashkelon when a battered white Mercedes drove past. Inside the car were Omid Jarragh Ajab, Noor Gyula Teleki and a third man, Karrar Shawqi Aboud. Turning the car around, they drove up to the bus stop, shot the boy in the legs, then bundled him into the boot and drove off.
Three weeks later, the Ha-Televizia Ha-israelit television channel had received a video of Itay Kayal’s execution. On his knees, bound and gagged, he had been decapitated with a sword. Itay’s body was only recovered seven years after the kidnapping, buried under a road near the border with Gaza.
Before leaving for London, Goya and his team had met with Itay’s sister, Tal. She told them how her parents had died broken-hearted soon after their son’s death. She told them how she herself had hosted a party to celebrate the death of Karrar Shawqi Aboud, after he had been killed three years later, shot by troops from the Israeli Defence Force, the Border Guard and the security service Shin Bet. And she told them how she prayed every night that Mossad would now step forward to complete the job and fully avenge her brother’s death by killing the other men responsible.
‘The memories continue to haunt us,’ Tal Kayal had said, holding Goya’s gaze with eyes devoid of any light. ‘We will always remember Itay, so I very much hope that you can find these terrorists and kill them.’
‘We will,’ affirmed Goya, bowing his head.
‘Kill them like dogs,’ she pleaded, her eyes welling up, ‘just like they killed my brother.’
By the end of that meeting, everyone present had been in tears. Goya was relieved when they were finally able to leave the room after faithfully promising Tal that they would bring about the answer to her prayers.
London was an extremely suitable place for the Mossad operation to take place. The risks were negligible here: even if they fucked up – which they already had – the British would do nothing. The Israeli Ambassador might get a talking-to, some minor ‘diplomat’ might get expelled, but that would be it. No one in Israel would admit to anything, and that would be all. It was because the British were such pussies that they’d been kicked out of the Middle East in the first place. Nowadays . . . well, if they allowed arms dealers and terrorists to operate out of their capital, they deserved everything they got.
Goya stole a quick glance in the rear-view mirror. He was amazed that Teleki hadn’t run straight for the airport once his brother-in-arms had been eliminated. Hamas must need those weapons badly – or maybe he just had balls of steel. He was a big man, much stronger than Ryan, and doubtless felt that he could look after himself.
Whatever, he had taken a big risk there, and now he was going to pay the price.
Teleki was still talking away on his mobile phone. Ryan’s Arabic wasn’t up to much but he realized this was not a business conversation. Teleki was laughing and joking, talking about a couple of ‘English whores’ he had ordered for later in the evening. Ain’t life funny, Ryan grinned to himself. You’re lining yourself up a threesome and I’m sitting here safe in the knowledge that you’ll never get to shoot your load again. There was the sound of a horn behind him; the car in front had advanced about three feet. Releasing the handbrake, he let the cab roll slowly forward.
The car in front was some kind of Toyota mini-SUV. A young girl, maybe nine or ten, bored with being stuck in the traffic, was staring out of the back window. Catching Ryan’s eye, she pulled a face. Keeping eye-contact, he casually flipped the kid the finger. Laughing, she copied the gesture with both hands, before slipping back into her seat. Watch out for ricochets, little bitch, Ryan hissed silently.
He watched the clock on the dashboard tick round another thirty seconds. His mouth was dry and his heart-rate elevated. Licking his lips, he again flicked his eyes to the rear-view mirror. Teleki was still gabbling away about the hookers, oblivious to the fact that they had been heading away from his intended destination for the last ten minutes. Not that they had managed to get very far. When they’d decided to steal a taxi, Goya reflected with a sigh, they should have factored in more time to get to their intended location, a lock-up garage in the expensive neighbourhood behind Lord’s Cricket Ground. The clock on the dashboard told him that it was now almost three hours since they’d picked up this cab from outside a café in Victoria while the cabbie – a guy called Allan Johnstone according to the licence Ryan had removed from the glass partition between the front and back seats – was munching on a bacon roll and watching a Chelsea game on television.
Ryan knew that the cab must have been reported stolen by now. However, they had been careful to target an independent cabbie; Johnstone was not part of a collective like Radio Taxis or Dial-a-Cab, so there would be no one tracking the vehicle’s whereabouts in an office somewhere. Moreover, with hundreds if not thousands of black cabs on the roads of Central London at any one time, the chance of their being stopped by the police was statistically zero. Still, to be on the safe side, they’d changed the licence-plates and stuck on some decals advertising holidays in Malaysia. If he saw it driving past right now, Allan Johnstone himself wouldn’t recognize it.
Acquiring the cab was the easy bit. The biggest challenge in the whole operation was making sure that Teleki got into the right taxi as he left his hotel. As he came through the lobby of his Park Lane hotel, one of the Mossad team masquerading as a member of the hotel staff ushered him away from the official taxi rank and into the back of Ryan Goya’s vehicle. The click of the door locks confirmed that they had their man safe and secure. Pulling quickly away, Ryan nodded when Teleki gave him an address in Notting Hill. Cutting across a couple of lines of traffic, he skipped through a red light heading north. In less than a minute, he was past Marble Arch and heading up the Edgware Road. Passing a massive police station on his right, he smiled, before turning east onto Frampton
Street. Almost immediately, however, he hit the traffic caused by the roadworks on Lisson Grove itself. Since then, they’d taken almost fifteen minutes to crawl barely 500 yards.
In the back of the cab, Teleki ended his call and sat forward. Peering through the windscreen at the stationary traffic outside, he cursed loudly in Arabic. ‘Faster!’
Ryan looked at him in the rear-view mirror, gestured at the cars in front of them and shrugged.
‘Faster!’ the man repeated. It was just about the only English that the bastard seemed to know.
Ryan shrugged again.
Teleki tried to open the door, yanking on the handle, oblivious to the small red light signalling that it was locked. Cursing more quietly this time, he pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his trousers and thrust a twenty-pound note through the small gap in the partition.
‘Stop now,’ he instructed.
Ignoring the money, Ryan put a confused look on his face. ‘We are stopped.’
‘I get out.’ Teleki pushed the note through the gap in the partition.
Ryan let the money fall to the floor.
‘Money,’ Teleki grunted. ‘Is enough?’
Ryan glanced at the twenty. His pulse was racing now; he was sweating heavily despite the cold, and he felt a migraine brewing at the base of his spine.
‘How much?’
Ryan looked at the meter and realized that he hadn’t switched it on.
‘Hey!’ Teleki banged on the partition with the palm of his hand. Twisting in his seat, he pulled at the door handle again, more vigorously this time.
‘Damn!’ Ryan felt that his heart was about to burst out of his chest. He fumbled under his seat for his SP-21 ‘Barak’ semi-automatic. Sliding his fingers round the grip, he flicked off the safety catch and pushed the silencer through the partition, pulling the trigger twice.
The first round shattered the cab’s rear window, missing the target completely.
The second shot hit Teleki in the neck, sending a spray of arterial blood right across the glass partition. Clutching his neck, Teleki fell across the back seat, screaming and gurgling at the same time.