Rules of Vengeance

by Christopher Reich

  Finished, he hauled himself from beneath the automobile and stood up.

  It was then that he saw her standing by the door. “Is it ready?” she asked.

  The Mechanic wiped his hands with a chamois cloth. The woman had bottle-green eyes and wavy auburn hair. Her beauty was as unexpected as her stealth. He knew better than to ask her name.

  “Don’t turn on the cell phone until you park it. They have scanners these days.”

  “What’s its number?”

  As he read it off, the woman programmed it into her own phone.

  “Why the nails and bolts?” she asked.

  The Mechanic darted a glance to a corner of the garage, but he did not answer.

  “Why the nails?” she repeated. She had spent a week gathering the necessary materials, and the last-minute addition of nails, buckshot, and bolts bothered her. “The blast will be more than enough to do the job.”

  “To make sure the job is completed to my satisfaction,” answered a gravelly baritone. A short, stocky man rose from the recesses of the garage and walked toward the car. A filterless cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. As always, he was dressed in a gray pinstripe suit of questionable quality. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s a shaped charge. The blast will be confined to the target. Any collateral damage will be minimal.”

  “Hello, Papi,” said the woman.

  “Hello, child.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I came to wish you luck.”

  “Two thousand kilometers for a pat on the back? How nice of you.”

  “I thought my presence would impress upon you our commitment to the mission.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  Papi tossed his cigarette to the floor and ground it under his heel. “Nails, eh? They bother you? It doesn’t surprise me. You always were more sensitive than you liked to admit.”

  “Cautious. There’s a difference.”

  Papi frowned. He did not agree. “I took a risk in bringing you back.”

  “It was you who let me go.”

  “It was not a matter of choice. I could no longer pay you. The system was broken. It was a financial necessity.”

  “But we were family. Remind me, was I your daughter or something else?”

  Papi raised a hand to her face and brushed his rough fingers over her lips. “I see your husband never taught you to shut your mouth. Americans. So weak.”

  The woman turned away brusquely.

  “Many people are relying on you,” Papi went on, fishing in his jacket for another cigarette.

  “Especially you.”

  “Especially me. I admit it. I wanted to make sure you didn’t have any last-minute misgivings.”

  “Why should I?”

  Papi picked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. “You tell me,” he said offhandedly firing his lighter, a dented Zippo that he had owned as long as she’d known him.

  “Are you forgetting Rome?” Emma Ransom untucked her T-shirt and showed off her scar. “Going back isn’t an option.”

  “Just so we both know that.” The stocky man kissed Emma on both cheeks, then pressed the car keys into her hand. “Good hunting.”

  12

  More than twelve hours after Lord Robert Russell’s residence at 1 Park Lane had been declared a crime scene, the apartment bristled with activity. Members of the forensics squad moved through the hallways, carrying evidence bags, cameras, and site-mapping equipment. It was their job to photograph the apartment, dust for prints, and search the premises top to bottom for anything resembling a clue. The work would continue well into the next day before it was complete.

  Reg Cleak was standing by the entry when Kate arrived. He offered a polite smile, but she could see that the day’s labor had tired him. The lines on his face were cut as deeply as a relief map, and his cheeks hung like saddlebags from his jaw.

  “Hello, Reg,” she said, squeezing his arm. “Fighting the good fight.”

  “As ever, boss.” Cleak ventured a smile. “If you’d care to follow me.”

  He walked across the foyer and turned into the kitchen, holding the door for Kate. “I had the team case the joint for anything that could have served as the murder weapon. You know, something hard and heavy. They had a go at the lamps, the odd statuette, tools, kitchen utensils, to see if there was any hair or tissue. Hit someone that hard, you’re likely to take a little something with you.”

  “Anything turn up?”

  Cleak sighed. “Do you think I brought you in here to sample the custard pudding? Have a look.” He opened the freezer door, revealing shelves stocked with frozen meats, precooked meals, and ice cream.

  “Hit him with a bag of frozen peas, did he?” asked Kate.

  “You’re not far off.” Cleak kneeled to open a storage drawer at the bottom of the compartment. When he stood back up, he was holding a bottle of vodka sheathed in an ice collar. “Ever seen one of these?”

  Kate shook her head. “I drink mine warm, or with a couple of ice cubes if I’m lucky.”

  “Go ahead, you can hold it.” Cleak handed over the bottle. “There were two. Evidence took the weapon.”

  “The weapon? You mean he hit Russell over the head with a bottle of Russian vodka?”

  “Not Russian, Polish. Anyway we found no fewer than three blond hairs embedded in the ice. They’re off to the lab for DNA testing, but I reckon we’ll have a match.”

  Kate replaced the bottle in the freezer and closed the door. “Not the first place I’d look for a weapon,” she admitted. “He knew his way around, didn’t he?”

  With a nod, Cleak motioned for her to follow. “That isn’t the half of it. The chute was used for laundry back when the building was a hotel,” he explained. “Made of Manchester steel. Hasn’t rusted a bit since it was built a hundred years ago. There’s an access door on every floor. When the new owners renovated the place, they walled over the chute and patched up the doors.”

  The two police officers were kneeling inside Robert Russell’s walk-in closet, staring down the beam of a flashlight into a gaping square cut out of the wall. The missing piece of drywall was en route to the lab for fingerprinting and analysis.

  “He came up from the basement,” said Cleak. “Did a nifty job of patching up the wall down there, too. Took his time.”

  “You’re telling me he managed to climb five stories inside this steel coffin?”

  “A regular Spiderman.”

  Kate peered into the bottomless chute, wondering what kind of person had the skill, or the guts, to climb up something so narrow and so dark. It seemed to drop forever. Suddenly her breath left her and she grew dizzy. Yanking her head clear, she stalked out of the closet.

  “You okay?” asked Cleak, following close behind.

  “Fine,” she managed. “It’s nothing. Don’t like tight spaces. That’s all.” She bit her lip until the pain forced her fears back where they belonged, then she said in a stronger voice, “So the killer started here and made his way to Russell’s office. Let’s see how he did it, shall we?”

  Methodically they retraced the steps the murderer had taken eighteen hours earlier. In every room Cleak pointed out the location of the various security devices: motion sensors, thermal detectors, pressure pads. They ended up in Russell’s clean room of an office ten minutes later.

  “How long do you reckon it took him to neutralize this system?” Kate asked.

  “Never mind how long,” said Cleak. “We’re still working on how. The setup is supposed to be undefeatable.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  Once in Russell’s office, Kate’s eyes jumped to the plasma screen. “What about her? Any luck tracking down our mystery woman?”

  “None, I’m afraid,” said Cleak. “We’ve flagged the cable provider, but they want a warrant from the Home Office before even starting to look at who sent that message. Even then it’s an uphill battle. If Russell took measures to hide his tracks, it will be nigh impossible to track h
er down. At least in the short run.”

  “Dammit,” said Kate. “We’ve got to find her. She’s all we’ve got. Lord knows, she may be in danger herself. Russell might not be the only one on their hit list. Pros, Reg. We’re up against some very nasty individuals. Government-trained thugs.”

  “Individuals? I thought we were looking for just one.”

  “Hardly.” Kate left the office and headed down the hall at her usual breakneck pace. As she walked, she explained what she’d learned about Russell’s work at Oxford Analytica. “He was poking his nose where he shouldn’t have been, little Lord Russell was. This operation was planned down to the last detail. They had access to building plans, a schema of the apartment’s security system, everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t at least three men involved. One to watch the building, one to cover Russell, and the murderer himself. Pros, Reg.”

  Cleak stopped at the front door, breathing hard. “Would you slow down a sec? You’re giving me a coronary. Where are you going in such a rush?”

  “Building security,” called Kate over her shoulder.

  “But we already looked at the tapes,” protested Cleak. “We came up empty-handed.”

  Kate was waiting inside the elevator as Cleak managed to sneak past the closing doors. “We didn’t look closely enough,” she said.

  Building security was located on the second floor of One Park. It was a cramped room dominated by a multiplex of video monitors built into one wall and, despite the ordinance prohibiting smoking, reeking of tobacco. Kate stood with her back pressed to the rear wall, her eyes dancing between the sixteen live feeds. Reg Cleak stood to one side. To the other stood the building manager and the chief of security.

  “The reason we missed him earlier is that he was already here,” said Kate as they waited for the first of the disks to be loaded and synched.

  “I’m afraid there’s no camera in the basement,” said the chief of security. He was a former infantry officer with a bristly mustache and a slight limp, which he made sure everyone knew he’d acquired at Goose Green in the Falklands. “We never thought there was a need. There’s no access to it from the street. The only way in is via the elevator or the stairs, which are already covered.”

  “Precisely,” said Kate. “I’d like to start with the disks monitoring the elevators and stairwells. Let’s have a look at the last loop prior to Russell’s murder, beginning last night at midnight.”

  The chief of security found the corresponding DVDs and slid them into the machine. A wide-angle view of the elevators filled the main screen. A time code ran on the bottom left-hand corner. Kate asked that they sync the disks with cameras in the lobby and the carpark. In this manner they could ascertain whether someone had entered an elevator on a high floor and failed to exit at the lobby or the garage.

  At that time of night, most traffic involved residents returning to the building after an evening out. The residents could be seen crossing the garage or lobby, then appearing in one of the elevators. At each sighting, the building manager called out the person’s name. “That’s Sir Bernard,” or “That’s Mr. Gupta.”

  The flow of traffic slowed after one a.m. They ran the DVD at accelerated speed, pausing only when a figure appeared onscreen. When the time code showed 0225, the time of Russell’s death, and every individual viewed onscreen had been accounted for, the chief of security asked if they’d like to take a break.

  “Keep it running,” said Kate. “If he got out through the basement, he had to come back up afterward.”

  They continued viewing the disks. To her consternation, there was no sighting of a man entering the elevator on any floor, basement through eleven, from 2:20 in the morning until Detective Ken Laxton’s arrival at 3:15. At 3:17, they watched as the well-coifed detective entered the elevator and stood beside a woman with auburn hair. It took Kate a moment to realize that something was out of whack.

  “Hold on,” she said sharply. “Who’s she?”

  “You mean Pretty Kenny?” said Cleak, chuckling as he rubbed his eyes.

  “I mean who’s the lady accompanying him in the lift?”

  “Don’t know,” said the security chief. “Not a resident, I can tell you that much. I’d have remembered.”

  Kate exchanged glances with Cleak. “Where in heaven’s name did she come from at three-seventeen in the morning?”

  “I imagine she must have driven into the garage,” said the security chief.

  “I didn’t see anyone drive in, did you, Reg? Rewind it.”

  The security chief froze all screens, then rewound the loop showing the parking garage. Kate was right. No automobile had entered the garage. “Go back to the elevator. We must have missed her getting on.”

  They backed up the disk and watched as Ken Laxton walked backward out of the elevator. The unknown woman remained inside, which meant that she was there when Laxton had gotten on. The frames went back further. Eleven seconds earlier, at 3:16:45, the door opened again and the woman retreated. “She got on in the basement,” said Kate.

  Reg Cleak pursed his lips, as if he were uncomfortable accepting everything that went along with Kate’s conclusion. She thrust her hands in her pockets and turned away from the screen. “But how did she get in?”

  The chief of security shook his head. “We checked our log and accounted for all visitors these last four days.”

  Kate considered the information. “Get me the disks covering the garage.”

  It took them another hour, but they found what they were looking for. At two o’clock the previous afternoon, Russell had pulled his Aston Martin DB12 into the garage, parked in his reserved space, and walked to the elevator. Five minutes later the garage lights dimmed. And five minutes after that, the Aston Martin’s trunk sprang open. Out climbed a woman in fashionable attire, slinging a leather bag over a shoulder. The bag appeared to be the right size to heft the tools required to cut through the basement wall and patch it up again afterward. The light was too dim, however, to get a good view of the woman. She crossed the garage briskly, keeping her face angled away from the camera.

  Kate studied the woman as she entered the elevator and rode up one floor to the basement. Never once did the intruder lift her face so that the camera might get a good look at her. A pro, Kate reminded herself. Maybe more than that.

  “She’s our ‘man.’”

  13

  Frank Connor did not like England. The food was lousy, the weather was dismal, and the place was more expensive than God. The English liked their beer warm and their roast beef cold. Worst of all, they insisted on driving on the wrong side of the road. Twice he’d nearly been run over after forgetting to look to his right before crossing the street. Draining the last of his Coke, he chomped on an ice cube and watched as the quilt of green pastures and rolling foothills rose up through the gathering dusk to greet him. It was only after the wheels touched down and the jet drew to a halt that it came to him why he disliked the country so. It wasn’t America.

  A car and driver from the office waited on the tarmac at Stansted Airport, 48 kilometers northeast of London. Connor deplaned and handed his passport to a waiting official. The pilot had radioed Connor’s details ahead. A cursory check was made of his passport to confirm his identity and he was waved through. No one inspected his luggage.

  “And so?” asked Connor as he climbed into the front seat.

  “She’s here,” said the driver, a bluff, slope-shouldered Scot, steering the car onto the motorway.

  “Did you get a visual?”

  “No, but your boy Ransom’s up to something. He put the dodge on us.”

  “Explain.”

  “He checked in to the hotel at eight this morning. Took a run around the park at lunch, then spent the afternoon in his room. At six he came downstairs for a cocktail party. Did a little mingling. Had a few beers. He’s a civilian, and it shows. He didn’t give neither me nor Liam a look. After thirty minutes, he made a run to the WC. We couldn’t get too cl
ose, so as not to spook him. When he came out, he was with one of the docs at the conference. Tall gent. Distinguished. The two of them ducked into a conference room down the hall. We weren’t suspicious right off. After all, Ransom had been acting normally until that point.”

  “And?” asked Connor.

  “After about five minutes, the doc comes out, but Ransom doesn’t.”

  Connor winced, then reminded himself that this was what he had wanted. A sign, even if he was unable to capitalize on it. “Where did he go?”

  “The only way out of the room was a window that dropped him onto Park Lane. We got a man outside and around front in time to spot Ransom heading down Piccadilly. He was pretty far off by then. We caught him going into the Underground three blocks down the road. That’s where we lost him.”

  “Where he ‘put the dodge on you’?”

  “It’s a zoo in there,” the Scot protested. “It was rush hour. We’ve only got two warm bodies to do the job, not a saber squadron.”

  Connor grunted. He could add another reason that he hated this country. They couldn’t follow anyone worth a damn. “It’s all right,” he said consolingly, because it was his policy always to encourage his men. “I’m sure you did your best.”

  Division’s agents were drawn from all four corners of the intelligence world. Some came out of the Army’s Special Operations Command and had previously qualified as Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Rangers, and the like. Others transferred laterally from the Defense Intelligence Agency, from the Office of Consular Operations at State, or even from the Secret Service. Finally, there were those who drifted in from foreign shores. One of Division’s best-kept secrets was that it contracted international operatives off the freelance market: foreign-trained intelligence agents who had lost their billets by dint of budget cuts, ideological disagreements, misbehavior, or any combination of the above.