by Eva Hudson
They crossed over Piccadilly and headed into St. James’s. “So, you’re saying Mulroony’s in Russia?”
“Probably got a nice pension and a balcony overlooking the Black Sea.”
Ingrid’s attention was drawn to a poster outside a bookstore. A face on it was familiar. She slowed down as Sol marched ahead. It took a couple of beats for her to work out the face belonged to Daisy Steiner. Younger, more serious looking. ‘Book signing, Monday, 7pm.’ Ingrid skipped a few steps to catch Sol up. “Still doesn’t explain why there are no records of his service.”
Sol sighed. “We had to scrub him from the record. It’s one way of monitoring who knows about him. The moment someone mentions him, a flag is going to be raised.”
She remembered the cold shoulders she got when she first arrived in London and asked questions about him. They entered St. James’s Square where the tall trees sweetened the city air. “Thank you for telling me this, but I am still unclear what I should do with what I have.”
Sol stopped walking. He checked behind him and looked over Ingrid’s shoulder. He took a half step toward her. “Nothing. Nothing is what you should do.” He was close enough for Ingrid to smell the nicotine gum on his breath. “I will find someone for you to talk to. But we still don’t know who his Russian handler was, and we still don’t know why he was pulled.” He rolled his lips over his teeth. “Honestly, Ingrid, without those two pieces of information you gotta sit tight.” He placed a warm hand on her shoulder. “Look, you’re going to get your medal from the president for what you did at Christmas. You’re going to get a commendation from the Director. Right now, whatever you’ve got on Mulroony is a grenade, and the more you poke it, the more likely it is it’s going to blow your career apart. Unless and until you know why Mulroony was vaporized from the record, you risk the same thing happening to you.”
12
Ingrid arrived back at the embassy with a new appreciation for the air conditioning. A brief fantasy about a swim in the Hilton pool further lowered her temperature.
“Hi.”
“Hey, Zeke. How are you settling in?”
“Good, thanks. Something came for you.” He signaled to a package on Ingrid’s desk. It was heavy and rectangular and wrapped up like a cartoon mummy. Zeke crossed the floor and offered Ingrid a pair of scissors.
“Thanks.” Zeke’s nostrils twitched ever so slightly. Ingrid feared he had smelled the limoncello on her breath. Ingrid slid the scissors under several layers of sticky tape.
“So,” Zeke said, excitement inflecting his voice. “You want to know what I found out?”
Ingrid looked up from her task and couldn’t help but smile at Zeke’s enthusiasm. “Shoot.”
“I spoke to HR. They were mighty pleased I wasn’t getting in touch with a request transfer, by the way, and asked them for the names of the people who have worked in this office for the past decade.”
She cut through another tangle of tape as he placed a list of names in front of her. “I figured one of them must have taken the photographs.”
“I like the way you think.” Ingrid scanned the list. Mulroony’s name wasn’t there, just as it wasn’t on any other list in the history of Christendom. Ingrid snipped through the last of the tape and a thick hardback book thudded onto her desk.
National Affront by David Steiner. “You found a copy?”
“I thought that might have been what it was. Definitely not a light read, is it?”
“Good work, Zeke. Really good work.” Ingrid flicked through the densely typeset pages and sighed: it would take a week to plow through it.
It didn’t matter how dry or how dense it was. There was nothing Ingrid wanted to do more than read it now Sol had told her to leave the Mulroony thing alone. Although she respected Sol, she had taken an oath to serve and protect. If it turned out something in the photos could prevent a plot against the US, Ingrid was very clear her duty was to pursue her investigation.
“Zeke?”
“Yep.” His tail was bushy and his eyes were bright.
“Can you see if you can get me five minutes with the Legat?”
“Agent Munsden?”
Ingrid nodded.
“Um, sure. Today?”
“No, I’m out all afternoon. Tomorrow would be great, though.”
“Leave it with me.”
She was hoping that by the time she got in the room with Peter Munsden, she’d be able to talk about the photos without sounding like a basket case. Ingrid checked the clock on the wall. 14:55. She had ten minutes before she had to leave for her meeting with the Met. She logged into Court TV where a caption stripped across the bottom of the screen told her the judge was meeting in chambers. There was no way of knowing how significant that was, but Svetlana would definitely ask for her take on the significance when they spoke later on. She listened to her messages, replied to the urgent emails, but her concentration never totally left David Steiner’s book. She pulled it closer and read the back cover. ‘A comprehensive analysis of the past, present and future of the far right in Britain.’ It was published by a university press and looked as dry as a cracker without the cheese. She flipped it open and scanned the chapter headings.
Mosley and the Cable Street Riots. Powell and his Rivers of Blood. Punk vs Mods. Moscow on Thames.
Ingrid stopped flipping at the mention of Russia. Daisy had said her father had been pilloried for claiming Russian rubles funded a group called England for the English. She turned to the index. Mulroony wasn’t in it, but EFE had seventeen references. She suddenly had an idea.
“Zeke?”
“Hi.” Her eager new assistant beamed at her across the office.
“Can you find something else for me?”
“Shoot.”
Ingrid picked up the book. “Can you get me the author’s death certificate? David Steiner. Maybe also the coroner’s report?”
“Sure thing.”
Ingrid skimmed the rest of the index, flipping through from the back, looking for anything that suggested why a Russian double agent had deliberately taken a photograph of the book’s Amazon listing.
She stopped at a name she recognized. More than that, it was someone she knew. Angela Tate, former chief reporter of the Evening News, was someone Ingrid had crossed paths with a few times. Tate got three mentions, so Ingrid thumbed through to the relevant chapter. It was about a former Prime Minister’s ties to EFE that Tate had reported on. Angela had always told her she’d brought down the government: seems she hadn’t been lying.
Ingrid never relished the prospect of dealing with Angela Tate—the journalist was brash, opinionated and slightly out of control—but there wasn’t much she wouldn’t do in exchange for a story. Ingrid made a mental note to call her.
Ingrid found the key to her drawer and took out the packet of photos. She flicked through them without removing them from the wallet. Now that Sol had confirmed Mulroony was a Russian asset, she looked for a Kremlin connection to each of the images.
She came to the photo of Jen and the other women holding a birthday cake. She was about to photograph it on her phone and send it to Jen, but then remembered the lengths Mulroony had gone to so as to not leave any digital breadcrumbs. Sol had made her paranoid, and the air conditioning suddenly felt very fierce. The hairs on her forearms perked up. A twitch troubled her jaw. She pulled out the photo with the case file number on it: she had already left a digital trace, hadn’t she? Sol’s warnings swirled through Ingrid’s thoughts. There was one way to find out if he was right. She logged into the system and called up the file.
Ingrid blinked at her screen. E411 error code. No such file.
She checked the number against the photograph. She typed it in again. Same error code. Her jaw dropped. Her mouth dried. Two days ago, there had been a file on the system called the Threat Assessment of Far-Right Groups in the UK. Now it wasn’t there. Erased like every other trace of Mulroony.
Ingrid swallowed hard. Fear trembled her top lip. This
wasn’t a coincidence. She had walked into someone’s trap. She’d laid the same trap for others numerous times. You create a file, or a web page, that only people with specific knowledge would know to look for, and when they access the file, or visit the website, an alert is triggered. She was in no doubt. She was being watched.
13
Ingrid checked over her shoulder and kept running. The asphalt was sticky in the sun, but she drove her legs into the surface and accelerated. The fire escape was up ahead: if she was quick she’d be gone before Danszak made it to the roof. A loud clattering erupted behind her as the roof hatch opened. She twisted her neck: Danszak wasn’t alone. Two men gave chase. The bulges on their thighs were Glock 17s.
This was kind of fun.
She vaulted over the ventilation ducts and access hatches that dotted the roof, noting that they were perfect foxholes to drop into if she wanted to take a shot at them. But she didn’t. Her task was to evade capture.
Gunfire at street level. Shouting.
Change of plan: if she took the fire escape, she’d run into the crossfire. She turned sharply right and headed north toward the river. The two cops behind her shouted, but she couldn’t make out any actual words. It’s not like anything they said would stop her. She powered forward, and her vision lasered in on the edge of the building. Seven strides, six, five… she filled her lungs, three, two… Ingrid pushed her right foot down and launched herself into the air.
The building opposite was further than she’d calculated. She wasn’t going to make the roof. Her outstretched arms reached for the windowsill on the top story. She gripped it, tensing her body so her knees didn’t slam into the wall. Her sneakers hit the brickwork a little more heavily than she’d have liked, but she quickly hauled herself up and scrambled through the open window.
It felt like cheating when there wasn’t any glass. But, she reasoned, if they glazed every window in this place, they’d have to re-glaze them every damn week.
It was cooler inside. Darker too. Her eyes couldn’t adjust quickly enough, but she figured it would be an empty shell, like all the other buildings on the Metropolitan Police’s training center. Some of them were just flat fronts, like the ones she’d seen on the Universal Studios tour as a kid. Ingrid craned her neck and saw Danszak and his mate through the window. They stood on the roof of the building opposite, their bodies silhouetted against the bright sky as they looked for her at ground level. When they didn’t see her, they turned back. Now she had a real advantage: no one knew where she was.
The fake building smelled of kerosene. In a previous exercise, it must have been the Molotov cocktail factory. Her vision adapted, and she saw the entire building was hollow: on the outside it looked like a row of houses, but the inside was barn-like with exposed struts and trusses. It wouldn’t be long before Danszak would figure out where she was. Her footsteps on the bare boards would give her location away to anyone at ground level. She needed an escape.
Ingrid ran through the darkness until she heard voices enter below. She climbed out of the next window she came to and stood on the ledge. A lone officer walked down the fake street, moving his MK5 in an arc. Her chest bellowed as she pressed herself against the sun-warmed bricks. Please don’t look up. At the far end of the street was a car repair shop and a convenience store, painted with generic signage. If she squinted, they looked real, but the lack of painted lines on the road gave the place a surreal quality, like a dream or a distant memory.
“Get back,” he shouted.
Ingrid turned her head slowly and saw two participants playing the part of civilians had entered the street, pushing a buggy with a doll in it. Their arrival meant his job was now to protect them: he wasn’t going to be looking two floors up and spot her. The ack-ack-ack of rapid gunfire from the next street split the air, followed by shouting from the other side of the block.
Behind her, through the window opening, someone clattered up a ladder.
“Where are you?” Danszak’s voice. “Where the fuck did you go?”
“She’s gotta be in there,” his mate said.
Ingrid breathed hard. It was too far to jump to ground level, but she didn’t want the exercise to end like this. Keeping her back against the wall, she slowly reached out for the drainpipe two feet to her right. She didn’t know if it was fake, or if it could take her weight.
“Shit, we’ve lost her.”
“There’s nowhere else for her to be.”
They would be humiliated at the debriefing if they’d let one of the officers posing as the drug smugglers get away. They’d never live it down. Ingrid heard their footsteps as they moved toward her. She pushed against the drainpipe. It seemed solid. She slid a foot sideways, off the window ledge and onto a metal bracket holding the pipe in place. Her body made an X against the wall.
Ingrid filled her lungs and spun around, clinging on with one arm until she could grab it with both hands.
“Ow.” The black metal was baking hot to the touch.
“What was that?” Danszak said.
“Sounded like it came from outside.”
Clenching the pipe between her knees, Ingrid shimmied upwards, reaching up for the guttering. She pulled herself onto the sloping roof tiles just as Danszak stuck his head through the opening.
“How the fuck?” He was open mouthed.
Ingrid beamed at him. “Gotta try harder, sucker.”
She pushed herself upright and started to run. A tile slipped under her foot, and she stumbled, sliding downward and tumbling over the edge. She stretched for the guttering and held on with both hands.
“Look up there,” the man with the buggy said.
Ingrid strained over her shoulder as she dangled from the gutter. The armed officer took up a position. The gutter dug into her hands. She was going to fall.
“Come on!”
Ingrid curled her body and hooked her right leg over the half pipe. She hauled herself back onto the roof just as a rubber bullet bounced off the tiles.
“You bastard,” she shouted. This was an exercise. If he’d hit her, she could have fallen. She could have been seriously injured. There was no way they were going to catch her now. Ingrid scrambled up the roof as more rubber bullets flew at her. She reached the apex, then dropped down on the far side of the roof, out of sight from the officer in the road. She lay flat against the tiles, and her chest heaved as she replenished her oxygen.
She was right at the northern edge of the training center. Ahead of her was the center’s perimeter fence topped with razor wire, guarded by a regiment of floodlights on thick metal poles. Beyond the fence were the grassy banks of the Thames, which curved its way slowly toward the sea. On the opposite bank of the river was the Napier Yards complex and Tilbury docks where cranes reached up out of the flat landscape. Colored shipping containers stacked like LEGO bricks glinted in the sun. She looked east where a huge cargo ship approached from the North Sea. Next week, one of Tilbury’s arrivals would be the MSC Laussat.
The shouting from ground level told her the building was now surrounded. She checked the Glock 19 in her holster. New magazine. Seventeen shots. She had another mag in the leg pocket of her fatigues. Ingrid calculated the odds. She had the perfect vantage point. Unless they had ladders, or a helo, or an officer who also did parkour, they couldn’t shoot at her. How many officers could come for her? Six? Eight. If she hit her targets, she had the ammo to shoot her way out of it. She rolled over onto her front and crawled up to the apex of the roof. And then she stopped. The moment she popped her head over the roofline, a marksman would take a shot. She had the wrong weapon. An AK would do it, but the Glock couldn’t fire rapidly enough. Ingrid felt her heart thunder against her ribcage. She had forgotten how exhilarating these exercises could be.
She looked again at the perimeter fence and had an idea. She was not going to let them capture her, even if it did mean breaking the rules. Her pursuers would find their way to the back of the building soon enough, and that meant she didn’
t have a second to waste. Ingrid scrambled to her feet and ran. She needed to pick up speed if her plan was to work. Using the slope to her advantage, Ingrid ran toward the apex, then used gravity as she curved back down toward the guttering. As she neared the edge of the roof, she bent her knees and powered herself at the pole holding a floodlight. She used her momentum to swing round the pole and vault over the fence, dropping down onto the grass beyond.
The earth was still soft from the river water, and she rolled on impact. She came to a halt and lay prone in the grass, unseen by the black-clad officers who had finally made their way round the building. MK5s shouldered, they stalked the perimeter, calling to each other as they passed each hiding place.
Ingrid buried her face in the grass and smiled.
Ingrid helped herself to a Pepsi from the fridge and stood in front of the pedestal fan in the corner of the conference room. Her mobile phone vibrated on the table, jiggling until it bumped into the Glock.
“Hi.”
“Where are you?” Ralph asked, breathless.
Ingrid smiled. “Where you should be.”
Ralph held the phone away from his mouth. “She’s okay,” he said. “You can stop looking.” There was a pause. “Yep. Yep, that means it’s over.”
Ingrid sat down at the head of the table, put her feet up, and waited for the door to open. Danszak was the first one through. Sweat dripped off his face. “What the fuck? How the fucking hell did you escape?”
One by one, as each officer tumbled into the room, their eyes widened, expletives dripped from their lips and half of them slammed a palm against the wall. The split between admiration and loathing was also fifty-fifty.
“How the hell did you do it?” Ralph asked when he stepped in, his cheeks red with heat and exertion. “Minty on the gate says you walked through half an hour ago. How the hell did you get over the bloody fence?”