by Eva Hudson
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck off.” A London accent. Then louder. “Fuck the fuck off.”
He was on the move again, back toward the door. Ingrid rotated her shoulders, keeping her aim on where she was betting he was.
More movement. “Fucking hell.” A bright flash from his gun illuminated his silhouette between the boxes, his bullet pinging off the metal shelves. Ingrid returned fire and he stopped. Stock still. She had shot him. Why hadn’t he fallen?
For what felt like a minute she kept her aim on the sliver of stationary torso she could see.
She flinched as a bee landed on her hand. Then another. She instinctively shrugged them away. The hum was permeating her skull, boring in through her ears. The swarm was on the move. The explosions had unsettled them. Her arms trembled. Her aim wavered.
He moved suddenly. A lurch toward the door. One stagger then another. Ingrid winced as several bees circled her head. She lost sight of him through the boxes. She took several slow deliberate steps toward the door.
“You fuckers,” he said. “You fucking fuckers.” The bees were stinging him. The more he swatted them, the more they stung. He started to run. She heard him clatter against the door as he left the building.
Ingrid blinked hard and took a breath. She ran to the open door and looked both ways down the alleyway. She saw the man disappear around the corner into the yard. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest. That explained why her shot hadn’t floored him. But it wasn’t one of the drug gang. It was a cop.
A cop had tried to kill her.
28
“Hey.”
Ingrid lifted her head out of her hands and looked up to see Sam Sherbourne in the doorway of her office. “Hey.”
“I thought I’d see if you needed a drink. You’ve had a helluva day.”
Ingrid was almost too tired to appreciate the gesture.
“You had a helluva day yesterday, too. You must need a drink.”
“Thanks, but I now have to catch up on everything I wasn’t able to get done today.”
Sam nodded. “Every time I left my room, there were either people coming in here, or you going into another meeting.” He leaned against the door frame. “Still, looks like the Tilbury thing was a huge success?”
Ingrid clenched her lips between her teeth and gently shook her head. “Certainly looks that way.”
“Don’t stay too late.” Sam rotated away from the door and disappeared into the bullpen. Ingrid checked the clock. Six forty-six. She had spent seven of the last eight hours in meetings debriefing the Legat, the DEA and the ATF and signing off on paperwork that allowed the Miami drug wholesalers to be indicted on the evidence gathered at Tilbury. Everyone had congratulated her on a job well done. It wasn’t the reaction she had anticipated.
When Ingrid had left Tilbury at two a.m., the consensus of Operation Pinball participants was that it had been a clusterfuck of a disaster. Danszak had moved too early, activating the booby-traps. Her DEA counterpart told her it was something they were seeing more and more; a new and lethal trick to make both rival gangs and law enforcement think twice before wading in. When the first charge detonated, it had triggered a chain reaction. In the chaos that followed, no one was in control, shots were fired indiscriminately and ambulances could not attend because the police could not secure the Napier Yards complex. It was a miracle no one died.
By the time the breakfast news bulletins aired at six a.m., the media was reporting how Met and NCA officers had heroically arrested seven men and seized over £50million worth of cocaine despite a gunfight and a series of explosions. No members of the public had been hurt, and the only serious injuries had been sustained by Met officers, one of whom was Danszak who had lost part of his arm in the initial explosion. Ralph was one of six officers taken to hospital and had already been discharged. When they’d spoken at lunchtime, he’d been well enough to joke that it was excellent timing as he had been given two months sick leave, which was way more than his official paternity allocation.
When the Evening News hit London’s streets at midday, there was already talk of movie rights and who would play Danszak. The Met’s press office had done an exemplary job in glossing over the fact that the Tilbury raid had not gone to plan and that the opportunity to gather evidence on the rest of the network had been squandered.
Also missing from the media coverage was Andy Scott MP. He had apparently fled in the middle of the gun battle to distance himself from what looked like reputational disaster. There were no photos of him in the SWAT gear, though the Evening News ran a quote from his office in praising the heroism of the Met and citing the raid as an example of all that was best about British policing.
Despite all the meetings, the one person Ingrid hadn’t seen all day was her immediate boss, Jacob DeWalt. He hadn’t asked for a debrief on Tilbury, he hadn’t sat in on Munsden’s debrief, he hadn’t even called or popped his head in the door. Ingrid took his absence as an indication that not only was he Skylark, but that he knew she knew. His first attempt to kill her had failed, and he was now planning another method of dispatch.
Ingrid was tired. She was exhausted. But she didn’t think she was delusional. DeWalt’s work in counterterrorism meant he would have plenty of contacts in the Met. Was it too much of a leap to think he had leaned on one of those contacts to take her out at Tilbury? He had stopped David Steiner from unmasking him; now he was making sure Ingrid didn’t either.
Ingrid’s head dropped. On the one hand, it did seem plausible that DeWalt was Skylark, but on the other it was utterly preposterous. She had worked with him for four years. She would know, wouldn’t she?
An involuntary sigh left her chest and drained out from between her lips. Speculation was useless. What she needed—what every case needed—was proof. Hard, concrete evidence that Jacob DeWalt, a Supervisory Special Agent with twenty years’ service in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was a Russian asset. Only then would the diplomatic process to free Mulroony begin.
Mulroony.
Ingrid had never met the man whose desk she’d inherited, but she hoped to God that whoever followed in her footsteps would do the same for her. There was a code. There was a brotherhood. Her lip curled with disgust and her nostrils smarted at the thought the bureau had let Mulroony languish. She shook her head. Languish wasn’t the right word. Fester. Rot. Perish.
Sol had said some people in the organization doubted Mulroony’s guilt enough to leave traps in the system for the real Skylark. The bureau had been willing to sacrifice Mulroony to avoid a PR calamity. Resentment flooded her veins. Heat rose in her neck, making her head fizz. How dare they? How fucking dare they? Her sense of injustice raged like a wildfire: she didn’t just want to rescue Mulroony, she wanted to expose the sniveling cowards who had made the decision to hang him out to dry. Their decision had left DeWalt in place. Their decision had nearly gotten her killed.
What she was about to do would cause one of the biggest scandals in the bureau’s history: she was not going to get any support for what she did next. Not that it mattered. It was her life in danger, not theirs, and that meant she would do things her way.
The longer she waited, the more opportunities DeWalt had to make another attempt on her life. She needed a plan that was quick. Quick and dirty was fine, just so long as it was quick. Ingrid leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling tiles. None of this would have happened, she thought, if we had moved to the new building on schedule. She emptied her lungs. “Okay,” she said out loud. “Think.”
Putting together a meticulous case on her own would take time. Weeks, probably. And every hour she waited was another hour DeWalt had to plan a new way of killing her. That wasn’t an option.
There was one way she knew to speed things up. Cops did it all the time when the deadline to charge drew near. You tell the suspect you’ve got more than you have, and he spills his guts and—bam—confession. To save her own life, to save Mulroony’s, Ingrid knew she had to get DeWalt to confess
.
She had enough to at least make DeWalt talk, didn’t she? And she was a skilled enough investigator to make him say something incriminating, wasn’t she? All she had to do was record their conversation, right?
Right?
Ingrid sat very still for several minutes. It wasn’t a crazy idea, was it? She knew she was exhausted. She knew she had barely slept. But it could work, couldn’t it? She pushed back her chair. It really could work.
Ingrid was back at the Hilton inside ten minutes. She used one of the lobby phones to make a call, then showered and changed. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror to check she was really going to go through with her plan. She nodded at her reflection. Yes. Yes, this was the right thing to do.
The doorman flagged down a taxi for her. She asked to be taken to Kings Cross, with a short detour via a phone repair shop. At the station, she hurried through an underground network of ticket halls and corridors to emerge from another exit, where she hailed a second taxi. At ten past nine, she paid the driver in cash and looked up at the looming block of warehouse apartments in front of her.
Century Mills was an enormous building. Eight, maybe ten, stories high with a footprint of two football fields. In the Victorian heyday of the British empire, the entire dock would have been surrounded by warehouses just like it, importing and storing goods from across the globe. Now it had been converted into seven hundred apartments offering ‘dockside views’ and ‘urban living’. Recently added wrought-iron balconies studded the massive brick walls at regular intervals.
Ingrid turned toward the water as a propeller plane came into land at London City Airport. The runway was in the middle of the dock and the jet was so close she could see the passengers through the oval windows. The noise was deafening. I bet that didn’t make it into the realtor’s brochure. On the other side of the Royal Albert Dock, just as Sam Sherbourne had said, Ingrid saw West Park and could just make out Lisa O’Shaughnessy’s house.
“I hope you heard that, Sol,” Ingrid said into the tiny lapel mic she had hidden inside her jacket. “Because then that means you can hear me. I’m going in.” Ingrid had no earpiece to hear what Sol said in reply. She’d had to make do with the kit she had in her desk drawer. “Approaching the building now.”
The door was recessed inside a cowled entrance. Ingrid checked the apartment numbers on the panel adjacent to the door. She was outside the wrong entrance. She walked hundred and fifty feet to the next entrance and checked the numbers again. With seven hundred apartments, and only fifty numbers per door, Ingrid figured DeWalt lived on the side of the building facing away from the water. He didn’t have a sight line across the dock to his ex-wife after all.
“Bear with me, Sol. This might take a while.”
A few minutes later, Ingrid walked up the short path to the correct entrance. As she stepped into the cowled recess, something moved at the edges of her vision. Something fell from above. Ingrid flinched as the ground shook. She turned, her breath trapped in her chest.
“Oh my, God.”
It was a body. It was DeWalt. Ingrid ran the few steps to reach him, his arms and legs splayed and crumpled. She crouched down and checked his pulse. His head was twisted to one side in a way that suggested his neck was broken. Blood bloomed from the underside of his skull. His eyes flickered.
“Dear God.” His pulse was weak, but he was alive. “Sol, I need you to call an ambulance. DeWalt’s injured. He fell from his balcony.” A noise from above made Ingrid look toward the sky. “Or he was pushed.”
Sensing there was little she could do to help DeWalt, Ingrid got to her feet and pressed every number on the door panel until someone let her in. The elevator was open and she rode it to the fifth floor. She ran down the cream-colored corridor until she located apartment five-ninety. She didn’t even bother knocking, instead she aimed her right heel at the lock and kicked hard. The door flew open with such speed it was as if it was being sucked inwards.
“Sol, I can’t hear an ambulance.”
A stiff breeze funneled through the doorway and she stepped into a hexagonal vestibule with an identical oak door on each side. The apartment was bland and hotel-like. Shades of beige and concealed LED lighting. A set of keys and a wallet were on the console table. Through the open doors she could see a bathroom, a bedroom and a short hallway that led to the living room.
“Hello.” Her mouth was dry and her voice was scratchy. She cleared her throat. “Hello,” she said again, this time more firmly.
In the living room, long sable-colored curtains framed the open balcony doors. Ingrid ran to the balcony and looked over. Two people stood over DeWalt, mobile phones attached to their ears.
Ingrid made sure not to touch the handrail, then turned to go inside. DeWalt’s golf bag rested in a niche between the windows as if it were a piece of sculpture. The pictures on the wall were framed tickets to sporting events and signed memorabilia. The TV was showing a video game. A beer bottle on the kitchen counter was half full. It looked like a regular guy’s apartment on a regular guy’s night in. There was no upturned jar of pills. No empty whisky bottle. No note for his kids.
Either the breeze got a little stronger, or a chill swept over her skin. “Sol, I don’t know if you’re still there, but there ain’t a snowball’s chance that this was suicide.”
29
Ingrid waited for the cops to come and answered their questions. No, she didn’t think he was suicidal. No, she didn’t know who might push him. No, she hadn’t seen anyone acting suspiciously. No, she had no reason to think the timing of her arrival and his exit was anything other than a coincidence.
The uniforms immediately called in CID. Even though there were no signs of a struggle or a break-in, they had to rule out a grudge from either his ex or a connection to a case he had worked. As DeWalt was a federal employee, his death fell under the bureau’s jurisdiction, so Sergeant Paphides agreed that someone from the embassy could be attached to his inquiry. “Just not you,” he said. “You’re a witness. You can’t also be part of the investigation.”
At least he hadn’t said she was a suspect.
“I’m going to ask you again,” Paphides said as the forensics team arrived. “If he was pushed, do you have any idea of who might want to kill him?”
Ingrid didn’t like that this was the question he asked twice. It suggested he hadn’t liked her first answer, or that he expected her to change her story. She felt confident in her decision to not mention Skylark. If the bureau would disapprove of her investigating, they sure as hell didn’t want the Met sticking their noses in. Detective Sergeant Alexis Paphides was disheveled, hesitant, and dressed like a man twice his age, which Ingrid estimated to be early thirties. He did not impress her, and that was a good thing: she hoped she could rely on him to do a less than thorough job.
“I don’t, no,” she said. “I think things were a little tense with his ex, but DeWalt’s a big guy… was a big guy. If he was pushed, it would have been by someone very strong.”
Ingrid told Paphides that DeWalt’s ex lived on the other side of the dock and persuaded him to let her accompany him when he broke the news. Ingrid knew it would count for something if a representative of the FBI was there when Lisa O’Shaughnessy learned that the father of her children had died. She also thought Paphides’ interpersonal skills would add to the woman’s trauma.
Lisa O’Shaughnessy didn’t seem too surprised that the police were on her doorstep.
“Can we come in?” Paphides asked.
“I was literally just speaking to your colleague.” O’Shaughnessy’s long, dyed blonde hair was scraped back into a ponytail. If she had worn make-up, she had already taken it off. She had the harassed look of a single mother who was fighting to get her sons to bed and looking ahead to a glass of wine on the couch before zonking out before the clock struck eleven.
Ingrid stepped forward. “This isn’t about the boy who’s gone missing.”
“You’re American?” O’Shaughnessy w
as confused.
“I work with Jacob at the embassy.”
O’Shaughnessy’s eyes widened. Her body softened slightly. “Right. Yes. You better come in.”
Lisa O’Shaughnessy took the news stoically. Ingrid suspected the magnitude would hit her in a few hours. Perhaps when she woke up the following day. She answered their questions fully and didn’t know of anyone with a grudge against her ex-husband. She was also doubtful that he would take his own life. “In fact, he seemed a little happier lately. I think he had a girlfriend.” That was new information.
Ingrid asked if there was anyone she could call for her, and was relieved when she said no. None of Ingrid’s contacts were in the burner phone she had on her, and she had managed to keep that fact from the Met up until that point.
“Can I give you a lift somewhere?” Paphides asked when they left Lisa’s house.
“No, thanks. I might just walk for a bit. And then I better start calling my co-workers.”
“I’ll be in touch tomorrow,” he said.
“Let me know if forensics find anything. Or the CCTV produces the goods.”
“Will do.”
Ingrid stepped over the low wooden fence and into the park where a man walking his bull terrier had stopped to read the missing poster for eight-year-old Mason. For the first time in weeks, Ingrid felt cold. A breeze suggested the weather was finally going to break. She sat on a bench and looked at number thirty-six. She saw a light go on in an upstairs window and knew that Lisa was telling her sons that their father was dead. Ingrid slumped forward, her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands.
The thought that she was responsible for DeWalt’s death made her feel hollow. Like a tree being gnawed by a beaver, she felt her core weaken and sway. It took her a while to realize the unfamiliar ring tone was the burner phone in her bag.
“Sol?”
“How are you doing?” His gruff voice was comforting and reassuring, like a camp fire.