Whether the tarpaulin that had been placed over the skip was not tied down or whether one of the pieces of sodden wooden flooring had simply worked its way loose was not clear. Somewhere on the motorway a section of wood fell from the vehicle. It had landed on the carriageway with a large woodscrew pointing directly upwards.
The first the pool driver, Tom, driving the BMW at a fraction under eighty miles an hour, knew of what had happened was the sound of a loud ‘bang’. Immediately the car began to weave badly. Tom had been trained for such an incident and knew instinctively what had happened. He knew from the feel of the car that it had been the rear passenger-side tyre that had blown. He knew also that the most important thing was not to brake. Allowing the car to slow down under its own steam, he managed to steer the car in a straight line as much as possible before bringing it to a stop on the hard shoulder. Zeltinger and the driver each muttered their own prayers as the car pulled to a stop.
Kent police had its headquarters in Maidstone. Following a brief call from Tom to his despatcher, contact was made with the Kent constabulary and a car organised to come and collect Zeltinger and take him on his onward journey towards Folkestone. The car was expected to take about fifteen minutes to arrive.
Zeltinger followed correct procedure and got out of the car, moving away from the hard shoulder and onto the other side of the safety barrier. The earlier rain had stopped. Traces of autumn sunshine were even beginning to appear. From where he was standing he could see the shredded tyre.
“You did well,” he said to Tom, an experienced driver in his early fifties. “Thank you. You probably saved our lives just then. That was good driving.”
“It’s what we are trained for, sir. Look at the state of that rubber.”
Zeltinger was about to ask another question when he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He waved a finger at Tom to indicate that he wanted to answer the call and began walking away.
“Zeltinger.”
It was Meilin on the line.
87
Canterbury
The car turns out to be a 2013 registration white Ford Focus, a three-door model. Better than a bike for a long journey with two people, Lewis considers it more than adequate for driving across the Continent. It has fast acceleration and would be fairly inconspicuous in amongst other traffic. It could have been a lot worse.
He lets Holly drive. By his watch he was in her house for no more than four minutes. As they pull away, a white Mercedes van turns into her vacated parking space. Lewis swivels around in his seat as Holly drives off. He isn’t able to see the driver, but the van is identical to the one he’d seen twice the previous afternoon. The first time had been in Berkeley Square and the second by the edge of Green Park.
He has borrowed a New York Yankees baseball cap that he’d seen on Holly’s mantelpiece as they were leaving the house. The cap was, apparently, a souvenir from a recent holiday in Manhattan. Now positioned on his head, the peak towards the back, it is a simple accessory that Lewis hopes might confuse anyone trying to look for him. In particular, any border police looking for Ben Lewis on a motorbike. This man was now flamboyant Italian, Marco Travoni: travelling with his English girlfriend back to Italy in her car.
Lewis has been pondering taking the ferry, but in the final analysis opts for the train. The train is faster and, with a flexible ticket, they can turn up and get on the next available service. Lewis has made this journey several times and knows that border checks on leaving the UK are almost non-existent. The distance to the Eurotunnel terminal is about twenty miles. They make small talk to begin with. Holly is still finding it hard to believe that the threat to her life is real.
“How long is all this going to take, Ben?” she asks. The road is long and straight, the route across open green countryside with plenty of trees on either side. After the rain, the sun has briefly made an appearance, its late afternoon light casting long shadows. Periodically Ben checks to see whether anyone might be following, but sees nothing untoward. Not even a white Mercedes van.
“Who knows? Not long, I hope. Once we’ve been to the bank in Geneva and found this dossier or whatever it is that we are meant to find. I guess a couple of days.”
He turns to look at Holly as she is driving. She has her window open, her hair fluttering with the breeze. Like Lisa, she has a pretty face, slightly freckled and great blue eyes. The previous summer when Holly had driven him to the beach for the day, how had he felt when they had been together? Apprehensive? A little bit. Anxious? Most definitely. He searches for the right emotion, struggling to work out what was different now compared to how he felt before. Finally he gets it. He would have been feeling ashamed. For four years he had had been burdened by shame and guilt for what had happened, for his failure to save Lisa. He’d been carrying this emotional baggage around with him all this time. What had happened to Lisa hadn’t been his fault, just a sad twist of fate. He sees that now. It had been one of those events that could have happened to anyone. Helping the Zamani woman in her hour of need yesterday has suddenly brought it all into perspective. The time has come to get on with his life.
It had taken four, long, years of soul searching. Finally he is feeling in a much better space.
Ben Lewis, the self-confident Marine that everyone had hoped might go the full distance in his military career, is officially back in service.
He is a bit older and a bit wiser, but arguably he is also better for the experience.
88
Near Maidstone
By an ironic co-incidence, the only rental option available to Sui-Lee at the Hertz desk in Maidstone had also been a Ford Focus, similar to Holly’s this too was painted in what the manufacturers called ‘Frozen White’. Sui-Lee had paid using one of her new credit cards, setting off in the direction of the Kent coast at almost the exact same moment as Panich was narrowly avoiding getting himself killed on the level crossing elsewhere in the county. The Yamaha she had left parked up at Maidstone station car park, the keys mailed to an anonymous post office box in central London.
En route to Folkestone, the countryside was undulating and uninteresting. She sped past a broken down BMW with a badly burst rear tyre, her speed on the road too quick to notice the man in the sports jacket, checked shirt and spotted bow tie pacing by the side of the road with a mobile phone glued to his ear.
She had a snap decision to make: whether to stay in the UK and wait until she had further information about Lewis’s whereabouts? Or take a gamble and head to France to wait for him there? The latter option was tricky, because there was no guarantee that Lewis was heading to the Continent. However, weighing in that option’s favour was the fact that why else would Lewis have come all the way to Kent after the madness of Heathrow that morning? Also, whilst recognising that the decision should not be solely about her, an additional factor making an early departure to France sound more attractive was that it would minimise the risk of her being caught by the UK police. It was time to contact Cheng once again.
“Cheng, I need your help. What are my ferry and Eurotunnel options this afternoon? I’m about twenty minutes from Dover and less than ten from the Eurotunnel terminal.”
“Sure,” came the reply. Moments later, he was back. “You have tunnel trains at ten to, and twenty past, five this afternoon. You should be able to make both of those certainly the latter. The crossing takes about forty minutes. With the ferry, there are more options but your best would be either the twenty to, or twenty past, five – the journey time almost twice as long as the train. For the twenty to five option, I could arrange priority boarding: that would allow you simply to turn up and drive straight on.”
“What would people expect a wanted fugitive to do if they were leaving the country in a hurry?” Sui-Lee asked.
“Take the train, of course.”
“So book me on the twenty to five ferry and I�
��ll take the gamble that I’ve made the right decision to leave the country.” She read out the Ford’s registration details that were written in ink on the ignition key fob.
She should make Dover Harbour by a little after four-thirty. Enough time, she hoped, to be able to slip on board before the boat sailed.
89
Canterbury
“I am parked outside the house right now. How far away are you?”
“Two minutes. I’ve just been dropped off. I’m heading your way on foot. I can see the van already.”
“I think we might be too late. Her phone is on the move.”
“We should still check the house. I’m nearly there.”
“I’ll wait.”
A short while later Panich climbed into the passenger seat alongside Stefan. They touched knuckles without speaking.
“Are you ready?” Panich said eventually, checking his GSh-18 pistol, satisfied that he had enough ammunition.
“I’m ready. You take the front and I’ll slip around the back. I think I can get access from down that alleyway over there,” he said pointing to the place where Panich had earlier parked his bike.
“I’ll give you a couple of minutes head start, then.”
Panich used his allotted two minutes to light up a cigarette, managing to finish most of it before it was time to get going. He rang the front doorbell twice in rapid succession for the second time that day. As before, there was no reply. He was about to ring a third time when the door was flung open and Stefan emerged.
“It’s clean. Looks like they were both here. His bike is down that side alley.”
“Let’s go. Where did you say the woman’s phone was heading?”
“Looks like the Eurotunnel terminal. With limited traffic, it should take less than half an hour.”
“Let’s try and do it faster,” said Panich, now back inside the van. Once underway, Stefan reached across into the glove compartment and handed Panich a tablet computer.
“Go to the tracker application and you’ll see where the woman’s mobile phone is heading.”
Panich fiddled with the device for a short while. Sure enough, a few moments later a map of the local area appeared on the screen, in the middle a blue dot was pulsating, moving slightly every few seconds.
“That’s her,” Stefan said, glancing across at the device as he drove. “Where the fuck are they heading?”
“Like us, driving us along the back roads towards the Eurotunnel terminal it seems.”
“She’s a stupid fucker. You had thought she would have known to have turned off her phone, silly bitch.”
“Don’t knock it, Stefan. With a fair wind we should be able to make the same train as them. In which case,” Panich then pointing his right index finger and raising his thumb as if firing a gun. “Boom, boom. Bye, bye Lewis, bye, bye pretty girl.”
90
Nr Maidstone
“Meilin, what’s up? Is everything all right?” Zeltinger asked.
“Not really, sir.” Zeltinger heard tremors in her voice. “I am sorry,” she said, her voice cracking. She was beginning to break down. “I need to talk. I’m desperate, really, really frightened. They’ve kidnapped my baby girl. They’re threatening to kill her – and my mother. I’ve no choice but to do what they ask.”
Zeltinger, skilfully and gently, lets the story tumble out. Occasional words of sympathy and support were offered, comforting statements of reassurance and assistance promised.
“Okay, here’s what we are going to do,” he said once he had heard everything. “You are not to do anything that puts your daughter or your mother in any danger, do you understand? Each time this man, Cheng, calls, just tell him everything that you know about Lewis and where we, the police, think he is. No tricks. I am not going to allow you to do or say anything that is going to put your family’s lives at risk.
“Secondly, you have to understand that you have done exactly the right thing in telling me. Cheng forbade you from talking to the police, so apart from me, no one else in the police is going to know about this for the moment. That doesn’t mean that nothing is going to happen: it just won’t be the police doing it. Behind the scenes, very urgently and quietly, I will be asking the security services to help trace where this person Cheng is keeping your mother and daughter hostage. I know just the individual, someone who excels at this sort of thing. The less you know what is going on, the less you can be coerced by Cheng or anyone else into talking. Does that make sense?”
In a weak, but slightly less emotional voice, Meilin said that it did.
“Now, I have a problem I need some help with. I want someone to tell me why Lewis might have headed to Canterbury this afternoon rather than travel directly to the Kent coast. Does he know someone in the area, possibly family or maybe a friend? He might be planning to go to ground, hoping he can drop off our radar. If so, why Canterbury? Or maybe there’s some other reason? Could you ask someone at Savile Row to see what they can dig up?”
“I’ll do it. I need something to stop me from worrying incessantly.”
“Only if you feel up to it.”
“I’ll manage, I promise.”
“All right them. One more thing. Whatever happened to Lewis’s mobile phone records? Did you have someone trawl through his call list?”
“They should have come back when I was off duty. They’re probably on your desk already.” Zeltinger raised his eyes to the sky, silently shaking his head.
“Please locate them urgently and see if they yield any clues. Call me back if you find anything.”
Meilin said that she would and ended the call. It sounded to Zeltinger as if Sui-Lee had wasted no time since escaping from her Heathrow captivity. It was time for Zeltinger to call Jake Sullivan. He would know exactly how to sort this out. He thumbed through the address book on his phone until he found the right number and hit ‘dial’.
91
Eurotunnel Terminal, Folkestone
“Can I take a look at that iPhone? I might be able to find something, you never know.”
They are both sitting in a holding lane at the Eurotunnel terminal having cleared all the departure formalities. Having just missed the previous train by a matter of minutes, they are waiting for the next one. There hadn’t been any obvious additional security checks in operation that Lewis could discern and the French border police had simply waved them through without asking to see their passports. Both of these Lewis took as good omens.
“Sure,” he says removing the device from his jacket pocket and unlocking it, the four-digit code already well engrained in his memory. He hands it across and she scrolls through the various applications. Lewis leans across to try to see what she is doing. They touch heads. He gets wafts of her perfume that are pleasantly distracting.
“It all looks so normal and uninteresting,” Holly says after a few moments exploring various places. “There don’t even appear to be any photos or anything.”
“What about the applications themselves? We can’t get into the French banking App since we don’t know her login details. What did you make of that bar code reader or whatever it is?” Lewis briefly takes hold of the phone and moves to the application he is talking about. It is labelled CrontoSign and when it opens, the phone’s camera is activated. “It looks like the camera is searching for something it wants to recognise. I thought it might be a QR-code reader. What do you think?”
“Let me search for Cronto on my phone,” Holly says, taking her device from out of her pocket and typing quickly on her flat screen keyboard.
“Bugger,” Lewis exclaims. “I completely forgot. You need to turn that damned thing off, Holly. Anyone on the planet can discover where we are if your mobile is switched on and hooked up to a network.”
“Are you serious?” Holly looks appalled.
“How do you think some of those goons found me earlier today?”
“Okay, I’ll do it in a moment, but look. CrontoSign is a Swiss banking encryption device. It says here that ‘once a particular mobile device has been registered to a customer, then that device is uniquely enabled to read and decrypt a three colour dot-matrix symbol, in turn allowing the device to be used for transaction verification and customer identification purposes’.”
“Which in plain English means what, do you think?” Lewis asks, his eyes glued to the rear view mirror as several other vehicles join a growing number of different boarding lanes waiting for the train.
“Well, I think it means that this phone and only this phone will be able to read a particular Cronto symbol, whatever they look like, when we get to the bank in Geneva. Ignoring the fact that you also have a little golden safe deposit box key, my hunch is that without this particular device, no one gets access to the box or whatever is in it.”
“Which might explain why it has become so valuable to everyone.” Lewis’s eyes remain glued to the rear view mirror.
“Turn your phone off, Holly,” he says suddenly. “Do it right now. I think we have company.” The tone of his voice is different, commanding and authoritative. “Look, the lights in our lane have turned green, we are about to board the train. Just drive ahead, follow the arrows, and ignore everyone else. Let’s try and be first on. That way we will be first off at the other end.”
“What did you see, Ben? Was it the people you met earlier?”
Lewis doesn’t answer, instead staring ahead, watching in the wing mirrors for signs that the white Mercedes van he had seen arrive moments earlier might be following them. Not just any white Mercedes van. This one contains two very unpleasant passengers. Both are male and both, as Lewis knows to his cost, are Russians.
The Dossier (Ben Lewis Thriller Book 1) Page 20