It had been such a relief to see the fire back in her belly. He’d even enjoyed her calling him on his pigheadedness like that, even though on the surface it meant losing face with the others. Frost had been around the block often enough to grasp Sir Charles’ game, and Lethe was too in awe of the whole spy culture they had going on to dare jeopardize his place in it. Noah was Noah. Unpredictable. Difficult to read. Konstantin was different. He came from a culture that respected power, even when that power was incontrovertibly wrong. Still, he had fled for a reason. So even the Russian would find something admirable in the old man being persuaded by her arguments. In truth her flare up only served to cement his position rather than undermine it.
He looked at the grandfather clock, with its tarnished brass pendulum swinging slowly to and fro, tick, tock, tick, tock. It made time sound so real, so vital. He heard Maxwell ushering them out, heard Noah saying something deliberately antagonistic to him, the car doors slam and then a moment later the peel of tires spitting gravel as the Daimler accelerated toward the airfield. They would be in the air in twenty minutes and halfway to Berlin, their first stop, before the sun was full in the sky.
How many hours did they have until the first attack? He knew he should have handed everything they had over to MI6. It was stupid not to. But it was 4 a.m. There was nothing the spooks could do that his people couldn’t. Indeed, free of the constraints of protocols and hierarchy, there was plenty the Forge Team could do that an MI6 operative legitimately couldn’t.
He was tired. There were still a few hours until dawn, and as he had told the others, these few hours might well be their last chance to sleep soundly for the foreseeable future.
Undressing, something that he had taken for granted for so long, was a physical trial. He was gasping and panting as he heaved himself out of the wheelchair and levered himself onto the hard mattress. There was nothing graceful about it. He writhed and wriggled like a beached whale trying to get beneath the covers. Sweat peppered his skin. He lay there staring up at the ceilg. Sleep did not come.
The sun did.
6
First Blood
Ronan Frost made the ride to Newcastle in a little over four hours, hitting the rush-hour traffic just as it was getting into full, air-polluting swing. The Ducati didn’t adhere to the same rules of motion that stifled the steady flow of people carriers and rusty, old cars. Ronan accelerated along the white line, weaving in between the bottlenecked Fords and Volvos. He skirted the edge of the city, coming in from Gateshead, over the Tyne Bridge and the redeveloped Quayside, swept around the Swallow House roundabout and leaned hard into the corner that took him beyond the university buildings toward the more affluent suburbs of Jesmond and Gosforth.
Lee had given him the names and addresses of the suicides. Three of them were in the Tyne Valley, making it the obvious place to start. Catherine Meadows, the Trafalgar Square suicide, had lived in Queens Road in West Jesmond; Sebastian Fisher, the Barcelona victim, around the corner on Acorn Road. He turned off the main drag and drove slowly passed Catherine’s apartment. It was a huge white building on the corner that had almost certainly been a nursing home or some such before being converted into luxury apartments.
Luxury didn’t extend to the fire escape, which looked like it was held together by rust and a prayer. The street outside was lined with parked cars, but there was a small private parking lot beside the building. Three identical black sedans were lined up side by side. They had government plates, not that Ronan needed to see them to know exactly what the three cars meant. MI5 were already here. Bureaucracy was the only thing in his favor right now.
Five and Six were curious beasts, different sides of the spooks coin, and if Ronan’s experiences with the left and right hands of the Secret Services were anything to go by, it would take a little while for the bureaucratic wheels to grind and their forced cooperation to come into effect. So, for the moment at least, they would be at crossed purposes. In an hour or two they would have joined the dots and would be singing from the same hymn sheet. That gave him an hour’s head start at best.
Ronan throttled the Monster, gunning the engine before giving the bike its head, and roared down the length of the one-way street. He wove between a series of concrete posts meant to stop cars from entering a quieter pedestrian street, took a left and a second left, doubling back on himself. Acorn Road was on the other side of the main road. It was an oddity of English living, cluttered with shops-everything from the usual slew of estate agents, off-licenses, two faux Italian restaurants and an Indian; the obligatory hairdressing salon and a grocery store side by side with the pretension of an art gallery; a high-cost antique shop with marble statuary in the tinted window; and half a dozen chic, high-fashion boutiques with lines imported from all over the world. There was a pub on the corner, The Three Turtles, and beyond the pub, the entrance to the local subway station.
Sebastian Fisher lived above one of the estate agents with a black horse passant on its racing-green billboard. The building was like the countless others the Irishman had driven past in the last hour. They called them Tyneside Flats, a 1920s blueprint for mass-housing projects, and like Ford’s Model T, where you could have any color you liked as long as it was black, with the Tyneside Flats you got a standardized design. That standardized design meant that without having to step through the front door, Ronan knew the precise layout of Fisher’s home.
Ronan pulled in beside the white door in the white facade of the maisonette and hung his helmet on the handlebars. He didn’t chain the Monster up.
He took a moment to reconnoiter the place. He still had an hour before the estate agents would be open for business, which meant probably thirty minutes before anyone was in the office to hear him walking about upstairs. The bakery across the street was open, the aroma of fresh pastries a tug on his hungry stomach. They were playing “Handbags and Gladrags” over the tinny speakers. Ronan bought himself a still-warm croissant slathered in melted butter, traded smiles with the young girl behind the counter and, eating as he walked, went around to the alley behind Fisher’s place.
A black Labrador pissed up against a green trash can. The dog was all slack skin and stark bones. It obviously hadn’t been fed for ages. Ronan tossed what was left of his croissant at it. The mongrel sniffed it suspiciously, then set about it with laving tongue and sharp teeth.
Ronan counted out the gates, stopping outside the ninth one down. It was painted the same bright green of the door on Acorn Road. He tried the latch. It was locked. The top of the gate was lined with four-inch-long metal spikes meant to stop the city’s starlings from nesting, but had the added bonus of perforating would-be burglars. The back patio was walled off, the top of the wall cemented with broken glass. Not that that was a problem. Ronan pulled off his leather jacket and laid it over the shards of glass before he boosted himself up over the wall. He came down on the other side lightly and reclaimed his jacket.
It was like he had climbed the wall back into his Derry childhood. The outdoor toilet was there, and beside it the coal shed, though in this case neither had been used for years. The toilet was filled with the odds and ends of abandoned DIY projects of several tenants. There were two doors, one facing him, that obviously led up a steep back staircase, and one set into the side, which opened into the estate agent’s office downstairs.
He tried Fisher’s backdoor, not expecting it to be unlocked.
It was.
That immediately set his heart to thumping. Even in the better neighborhoods of the city the door should have been bolted at the very least. He eased it open just wide enough for him to slip through, willing it not to groan as he did so. The place smelled musty, as though it had been a while since anyone had opened a window. That answered at least one question Ronan had been wondering about. He climbed the back stairs slowly, one step at a time, letting his weight settle before he moved up to the next, until he was in the small galley kitchen. The unwashed plates of Sebastian Fisher’s last meal
were still stacked up on the draining board. There were four dinner plates and they had begun to mildew. How long would it take for mildew to claim the sauce on an unwashed plate? A week? No more than ten days, for sure. It gave him a timeframe at least. Fisher had been here a week ago, and he hadn’t been alon.
Ronan stood absolutely still, and listened to the sounds of the apartment.
For a moment there was nothing to hear, then the soft groan of a floorboard in one of the other rooms confirmed he wasn’t alone.
He had two choices: go back the way he had come, find somewhere to hide and wait for the burglar to make his getaway, then follow him; or try and sneak up behind the intruder, take him down and find out just what the hell was going on. It wasn’t much of a choice.
Ronan moved silently to the door and listened. He had the layout in his head. The galley kitchen opened into the living room. In the standard Tyneside layout the living room would have three doors: one to the second bedroom, one to the hall and the master bedroom, box room and bathroom, and the one he was coming in through.
He opened the door.
The room was spartanly furnished and looked like any of the many that cluttered up the daytime television rosters with their bland interior decorating tips. Sebastian Fisher hadn’t stamped his personality on the room-unless his personality was cookie-cutter design and IKEA furniture. The one concession to quality was the Onkyo receiver and Jammo speakers beside the tower of CDs. The sound system was probably worth the same as everything else in the room combined. Curiously, there was no television.
The four unwashed plates suggested Fisher didn’t live alone, so the second bedroom was probably just that. He moved cautiously toward the door and listened before easing it open. Bunk beds and cluttered toys explained two of the four plates. There were posters on the wall of soccer players Ronan didn’t recognize side by side with costumed superheroes and all of the other obsessions of young boys: dinosaurs, space ships and the death masks of Egyptian pharaohs. The beds were unmade, action figures scattered across the floor. The kids had left in a rush.
Ronan felt his skin prickle, a sixth sense flaring, and turned straight into a clubbing right fist. The hammer blow took him in the temple and shook the world around him. He staggered back a step and felt his legs go out from beneath him. Instinctively, he reached out, trying to catch himself before he fell. He caught at his attacker’s coat and earned himself a second straight-arm punch. This one hit low, slamming into the side of his neck and choking him. Frost fell to his knees even as his attacker drove a final merciless knee up into his face to batter the last shreds of fight out of him.
He was only down for a few seconds, but it was enough for the intruder to flee. Ronan heard the back door slam and tried to stand. He needed the doorframe to stay on his feet while the apartment swam around him. He felt the warm trickle of blood down the side of his face and saw where it stained the shoulder of his leathers. He shook his head, slapped his face to sting life back into his senses, and took off after the man who had cold-cocked him.
Ronan took the narrow stairs three at a time and threw the back door open in time to see the intruder going over the wall. He reasoned the next move out in the two seconds it took him to cover the distance from the door to the gate. There were two bolts-one top, one bottom-and a latch on the gate, which would take no more than ten seconds to slip. Going over the glass-topped wall would take no more than three seconds but would almost certainly tear his hands up. In those seven seconds the intruder would have to be an Olympic sprinter to hit the end of the alley and disappear out of sight before Ronan could see which way he had gone.
Ronan slammed back the bolts and threw the gate open.
The alley was empty.
“Bollocks,” he cursed, looking left and right frantically. He reached for his cell phone to call it in to Nonesuch, slipping the Bluetooth earpiece into his ear. Lethe could hit the Eye in the Sky and track the bastard over every inch of the city if he had to. That was the joy of technology. He hit the speed dial on the earpiece and slipped the phone itself back into his pocket.
“Go for Lethe,” the voice in his ear said. The kid liked to play at soldier.
“Jude, it’s Frost. There was someone inside Fisher’s place. I’m in pursuit on foot. I could really do with some eyes here, so do whatever it is you do.” “Understood, boss. I’ll have visuals in a few seconds.”
Ronan braced his hands on his knees, using those few seconds to catch his breath.
“Come on, come on,” Lethe muttered.
Ronan was breathing hard. He looked up at the sky, as though looking for the satellite looking for him.
“It’s like looking for a mouse in a bloody great maze. Maybe a bit of cheese would help. You couldn’t have picked a busier time could you?”
Ronan looked anxiously one way down the street, then the other.
Finally Lethe half-shouted, “Yes! I see you. Okay, so what am I looking for?”
There was no way the man could have made it to either end of the alley, which meant he had to have gone over another wall and was hiding in one of the many back enclosures.
“Anyone else out here?”
Before Lethe could answer Ronan heard the sound of breaking glass. The walls were too high for him to see which house it was, but they couldn’t hide him from Lethe’s godlike perspective. “Five doors down. Your side of the street. He’s going in through one of the downstairs windows.”
It made sense. It was exactly what Ronan would have done if the roles had been reversed. The shops were empty-less chance of coming head to head with an angry homeowner with a baseball bat-and there was a 50–50 chance the shop was on a silent alarm, meaning he could try and exit with the semblance of normality, making it look like there was nothing more natural than him coming out of the closed shop.
And if he couldn’t open the door on the other side, couldn’t do it the low-key way, a chair out through the window, onto the Monster and away before anyone could stop him.
A moment later the screech of a burglar alarm kicked in and he knew exactly which house the man was in. He ran toward the sound of the siren. There was blood on the glass where the man had gone over the wall. He didn’t have a lot of choice except to follow. He boosted himself up. The shards of glass shredded his hands as his weight came down on them. Ignoring the pain, Ronan Frost heaved himself over the wall and dropped down onto the other side. The place was cluttered with empty cartons stamped with names that meant nothing to him. He tried to visualize the business side of Acorn Road and realized it was the hairdressers sandwiched between the antique store and the last of the estate agents.
“Has he come out the other side?”
“Not yet,” Lethe told him. “So watch yourself.”
He didn’t need telling twice, not with the memory of the man’s fist still imprinted on his face. He clambered in through the broken window.
There were no lights on inside, giving the other man plenty of shadows to hide in. The silhouettes of selfd-fashioned hairdryers looked like something out of an alien movie as they loomed in the darkness, with their bulbous heads and spindly skeletons all lined up against the wall. He strained, peering left and right into the darkness. He couldn’t rely upon his eyes, not in the thick darkness of the salon, so he was forced to listen harder and trust his instincts. “I know you’re in here,” he called out, not expecting an answer.
“Well aren’t you the clever one,” a woman’s voice whispered, so close to his right ear he nearly jumped out of his skin. She had an accent. It wasn’t distinct. In fact it was as though she had deliberately tried to hide it, even in those few words. He turned, reaching up a fist as she drove another sucker punch at the side of his head. He caught her wrist and wrenched it savagely downwards. He felt the small bones snap. She didn’t scream as he had expected her to. That heartbeat of expectation cost him.
Instead, she drove the heel of her left hand over the top and slammed it into his mouth, snapping his head b
ack. She wrenched her broken arm free as Ronan stumbled back an involuntary step. He released his hold, reaching around his back instinctively for his Browning Hi-Power 9mm. Even as his hand clasped around the Mil-Tac G10 laminate grip the woman double-fisted his face, screaming when the broken bones in her right wrist grated back across each other. The agony of the blow should have knocked her out by rights. It didn’t so much as slow her down. As he doubled up she drove her knee up between his legs. He went down hard.
The pistol spilled from his fingers and skidded across the floor.
She stood over him while he tried to reach it. It was more than two feet beyond his fingertips.
“Have you made your peace with God?” she asked, walking across to the Browning. She picked it up, turned it left and right in her hand, then leveled it, drawing a steady aim on Ronan’s face. She was wearing a black balaclava. Curls of black hair crept out from beneath the hood. Cradling her broken wrist, she walked toward him slowly, kneeling until the barrel nestled up against his forehead. All it would take was the slightest shift in pressure and she would open a soul-sucking hole in the middle of his skull. With only the black wool of the balaclava around them her eyes stood out, ice-cold cobalt blue.
He could feel her breath on his face. He could feel the slight tremor of the gun against his skin. She wasn’t as cool as she made out. She was going to kill him, no doubt about that, but she wasn’t a killer. Pulling the trigger wasn’t instinctive. She had to think about it. And thinking about it meant he had a chance, even now with the gun pressed up against his skull.
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