by Gulvin, Jeff
They drove her to London in silence, talking between themselves, but never addressing a single word to her. She was in the back, with her hands cuffed. Webb and McCulloch chatted about football and the upcoming five nations rugby tournament all the way down to London. At Paddington Green police station, Webb got her out and two WPCs were there to greet her. They frog-marched her to a cell, then strip searched her, put her in a paper suit and somebody else’s shoes, before locking her up for the night. She sat, saying nothing, not allowed to smoke, and biting down on her fingernails.
Webb and McCulloch got into the Yard at six p.m. and met Colson in the squad room. ‘Is she tucked up for the night?’ he asked them.
‘Snug and cosy, Guv,’ Webb said. ‘Snug and cosy. Have we heard anything from Swann?’
Colson looked grave. ‘Yes, we have. That tanker was Queen’s House Mews revisited. Boese wasn’t on board. He blew the anchor chains and set it adrift on the river. Four FBI SWAT teams were trying to do a clear at the time.’
Webb arched his eyebrows. ‘You know, I’d forgotten how clever he was.’
Colson sat down on an empty desk and fisted his hand to his chin. ‘The thing I don’t understand is—what exactly is he doing?’ he said.
They went to get a drink in Finnegan’s Wake. Webb bought Guinness and sucked off the froth. ‘Catherine Morgan’s a tough old bird,’ he said. ‘She’s not going to buckle. Depending what Lambeth find in the car, we can go in hard and then soften if we have to. She says she won the money for the car playing bingo, but SB already checked that out and it’s bullshit. Schedule 7 gave us access to everything financial and we know she’s worth tuppence ha’penny at best.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘She can’t account for the cash, or the holiday she’s just had, so we’ve got a good starting point, even if we blow out on forensics.’ He broke off for a moment then. ‘I wonder why she’s still alive. She’s in a weak position and I wonder why Boese allowed that. He must’ve known we’d catch up with her.’
‘George,’ Colson said, sliding his finger up and down the condensated side of his glass, ‘nothing that bastard does makes any sense to me.’
McCulloch sipped from his pint, his hand like a paw round the glass. ‘Did the search turn anything up?’ he asked.
Colson stood straighter, where he leaned against the bar. ‘Nothing particularly incriminating. There were a few back copies of the International Herald Tribune, which strikes me as odd, though.’
The following morning, Webb and McCulloch interviewed Catherine Morgan. She looked pale and tired, seated across the table at Paddington Green. Next to her, the duty solicitor sat with a pad and pen before him, his suit a little crumpled, as if he had been working all night. They had got the initial swab results from her car from the scientists at Lambeth. Ismael Boese’s fingerprints had been lifted from a road map of France they found in the glove compartment. ‘The map could have been placed in the car, Sergeant,’ the solicitor was saying. ‘You know that. It doesn’t prove he was there.’
‘No.’ Webb held his eye evenly. ‘It doesn’t.’ He reverted his gaze to Catherine. ‘But it’s coincidental in the extreme, isn’t it, Catherine?’ She did not reply, gave a brief twist of her lips and sucked on the cigarette she was holding. Webb glanced at McCulloch, then he said: ‘Where did you get the money for the car, Catherine, and what made you take a trip to France at that particular time?’
McCulloch butted in: ‘How did you pay for the trip? It must’ve been expensive.’
‘I already told you. I won the money at bingo.’ Her solicitor touched her on the arm, but it was too late.
‘No, you didn’t,’ Webb said, teeth set together. ‘We checked with every bingo hall in your area, nobody has won that kind of money in years.’
‘I didn’t win it all at once.’
‘No?’
‘Over how long then?’
‘A couple of years.’
‘Really.’ Webb sat back and folded his arms. ‘Then how was it that your brother had to pay your train fare to visit him with his prison money?’
She glared across the table at him. ‘He wanted to see me.’
‘Did he?’ McCulloch jutted his chin at her. ‘What did he want to see you about?’
She faltered.
‘Come on, Catherine. If he wanted to see you that badly, you must remember what it was about. It was only last year.’
‘Things,’ she said. ‘Just family stuff and that.’
‘Family stuff?’ McCulloch twisted his head sideways.
‘Where did you keep this money, Catherine?’ Webb asked her then. ‘Not in the bank. We’ve checked your accounts. Not to put too fine a point on it, you’re skint. Hardly a penny to your name, and then suddenly a car, a holiday in France, the works.’
‘I never kept it in the bank.’
‘Why not? You wouldn’t pay tax on it if you won it. What’s safer than the bank? It’s not as if you didn’t have a bank account.’
She did not answer him, looked at her solicitor and looked away again.
‘Gentlemen,’ the solicitor said. ‘Perhaps I could have a word in private with my client.’
Webb slowly nodded, then he leaned across the table and looked Catherine in the eye. ‘Sure you can,’ he said quietly. ‘But maybe you’d like to remind her that, as it stands, I’m looking to charge her with aiding and abetting Ismael Boese’s escape from the SEG in Hanwell Green. Twenty-two people were massacred that day, sixteen of them police officers.’
He stood outside with McCulloch, while McCulloch smoked a cigarette. ‘The brief’s not stupid,’ McCulloch said. ‘She’s going to squawk.’
‘What d’you reckon? She’ll go for the coercion routine, a poor single mother from Scotland, hounded into action by her big bad brother.’
‘Something like that.’
Webb’s face creased in a wide smile. ‘Swallow it, shall we?’
‘I think so. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.’
Swann sat quietly on his own in the FBI squad room in New Orleans. The helicopters had winched off the remaining SWAT team, the crew and six prostitutes from the deck of the tanker, after it was finally shepherded into the riverbank by the big tugs. The evidence response team were now crawling all over it and the reactive squad had begun the initial interviews with the hostages. The one dead man was William Richards, the chief engineer from Gloucester, England. Swann now knew that the voice pleading over the telephone was a recording of him before he was shot. Boese was sicker than ever.
He felt isolated—the procedures, people, alien to him. He could sense the weird atmosphere, almost of mistrust, from the FBI agents, apart, that was, from Logan. But she was isolated too—a woman, a black woman from headquarters. He stared out of the window and across the city. He could see the New Orleans Superdome, a vast enclosed stadium where the Saints played. He suddenly missed his children.
The FBI Hostage Rescue Team had finally landed from Virginia and were currently debriefing the SWAT team members and their supervisors. There was an air of relief, if puzzlement, about the office. The special agent in charge was knee-deep in meetings with other government bodies, and via telephone conference with the FBI Director and Attorney General in Washington. Tom Kovalski had flown down with the HRT, and was using the ASAC’s office upstairs, along with Louis Byrne. They had already put in an affidavit for a UFAP warrant from the district attorney’s office.
Logan touched Swann on the shoulder. ‘You OK, Jack?’
He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Fine, Chey. Just fine.’
‘God, I love your accent. You English guys. It’s so sexy.’
‘Get me the phone book. I’ll read it to you.’
She laughed, then looked up as Harrison came over, still wearing his black SWAT fatigues, sweat dripping from his hairline. ‘They wanna talk upstairs,’ he said. ‘See how this is gonna be played now.’
‘You coming, too, Harrison?’ Logan asked him.
He cocked his head to one side
and laid his body armour on the desk. ‘Anyone with specialist knowledge is requested. I worked the Idaho end of this click, remember.’ He looked briefly at Swann and shifted the roll of chew in his mouth. ‘The sharp end, eh, bubba.’
Swann looked after him as he sauntered away to change his clothes. ‘What’s his problem?’ he said. ‘Is he pissed off because we lost Boese or something?’
‘I don’t know, Jack. I’ll try and find out.’
‘I’d appreciate that, Chey. The man is beginning to irritate me.’
Again she laid her hand on his shoulder. ‘Take no notice, honey. Harrison’s old school. Regular dinosaur.’ She bit down on her lip. ‘The trouble is, people respect the hell out of him, even the ultra-tight suits back at the zoo. We needed a home run against the militia and he hit out of the ballpark.’
They went upstairs and sat in the padded blue chairs in the conference room. The room was pleasantly cool, air conditioning on. Outside, the pavement steamed. Mayer came in with Fitzpatrick. The SWAT team leader was there from the tactical arm of the critical incident response group they had set up, together with the senior agents from the evidence response team, although nothing forensically was back from the ship as yet. The criminal investigation people, who were still interviewing hostages downstairs, sent Cochrane up, as the violent crime co-ordinator.
They sat round the table and drank coffee. Mayer passed a hand through his fine, grey hair. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘What was all that about?’
Nobody responded at first. Swann rested his elbows on the tabletop. ‘He’s done it before,’ he stated. ‘Announced himself publicly, before disappearing.’ He glanced at Byrne. ‘He did it to us in London, remember.’
Byrne nodded.
Logan sat forward. ‘Jack figured he wasn’t aboard that tanker back at the spillway, Charlie,’ she said.
Harrison looked closely at Swann then, something like surprise in his eyes. Swann seized his opportunity. ‘You found three separate weapons mounted strategically, right?’ He spoke directly to Harrison. ‘They had slave flash units attached to them, the type that pick up a radio signal.’
Harrison stared back at him.
‘Boese was on shore all the time,’ Swann continued. ‘He probably set himself up with a TV van or something, sat in the back with a couple of mobile phones, so you couldn’t get his electronic serial number. His accomplices, one of whom could be Tal-Salem, stood outside with cameras and all the press paraphernalia. They took pictures using a flashgun. The day was bright and clear, no need to use a flash. But it sent a radio signal to the slave unit and turned the cam in the trigger guard on the guns. Double tap. Then again, double tap. Your snipers are suddenly under fire.’ He rapped the table lightly with his fingernail. ‘PIRA have used the same method to remotely detonate IEDs in Ulster.’
Kovalski cleared his throat. ‘You told this to the on-scene commander?’
Swann looked down the table at him. ‘I did, yes.’ He glanced at Fitzpatrick then. ‘But he was right. As far as we knew, the tanker was under siege and there were hostages. What could he do but go with it?’
Fitzpatrick steepled his fingers. ‘The question is, why did he go to all that trouble? He didn’t make any demands.’
Swann wrinkled his lip. ‘He’s got something else planned, Kirk. This is just his way of saying hello.’
‘Reserved kinda guy, ain’t he,’ Harrison muttered.
Mayer scratched his head. ‘What else could he have planned? Jesus, he had Waterford 3 right there.’
Swann spoke to Byrne. ‘Why your wife, Louis?’
Byrne looked back at him, sitting slightly slumped in the chair. ‘I don’t know. I need to listen to the tapes.’ He broke off and glanced at Kovalski. ‘I guess this is a domestic deal now, Tom. I’d like to stay closely involved though, however you decide to play it.’
‘Of course.’ Kovalski held his fountain pen between the ends of his fingers. ‘New Orleans is the OO, so we’ll run the investigation from here, but with heavy D.C. input. It’s a specialist field and this guy is like nobody we’ve ever seen.’ He looked at Swann then. Office of origin, Jack. That’s how we play things over here.’
Harrison interrupted him. ‘A team on the ground?’
‘Probably.’ Kovalski looked again at Swann. ‘If Jack is right, then we’re looking for a TV van. Let’s go public on that. Get Fugitive Publicity to spread the word on the six o’clock news.’
‘Are we gonna name Boese?’ Logan asked.
Kovalski pursed his lips, and looked for opinion around the table. ‘I don’t think we should,’ he said. ‘He didn’t announce himself to the press or the Coastguard, so I think we’ll stick with “unknown subject” for now.’
‘What about the crew?’ Cochrane put in. ‘The coke whores and the crewman running them out there told us he called himself Storm Crow.’
‘Ask them to keep quiet for now,’ Kovalski said. ‘If one of them lets it out, then we’ll have to go public’ He frowned. ‘But it looks like we’re in some kinda game and we need to know what the rules are before we show our hand.’
Boese lay back against the pillow in his room at the Holiday Inn, in Meridian, Mississippi. His eyes were closed but he was not sleeping, merely resting his limbs and allowing his mind to clear. The van was parked outside. Across the road was a Howard Johnson bar and a diner where he could eat later. The Puerto Ricans, old Machetero contacts from days gone by, had gone back to New York, and the girl back to her compound in Arkansas. He had asked the Macheteros openly, but they knew nothing of El Kebir.
He pondered the FBI in New Orleans. An interesting footnote had developed. While seated in the back of that van, watching through the tinted windows as the panic slowly developed, a face from the past had climbed out of one of the Suburbans. Sergeant Swann from Scotland Yard.
Lazily, he got off the bed and leant on one elbow. He switched on the TV and watched CNN. The main story was his of course and they showed shots of the tanker, complete with the dead Englishman, hanging by his neck from the side. They now knew, of course, that he’d been shot, but that did not matter. Nobody was mentioning him by name, there was nothing of feathers or his calls to Byrne’s wife. The three of them that had been seen by the crew, the two ‘Mexicans’ and a black-haired girl, had been sketched by an FBI artist. The drawings were pretty accurate, but his disguise had changed. He was a negro once more.
He slept till six o’clock and then watched the news again. Things were getting interesting. The FBI were looking for a TV company van, either abandoned, or parked in an odd place—motel parking lots, outside diners, on the roadside, perhaps. He looked through the window at the taxi van, the magnetic KYZ Radio signs were missing. He glanced at the clock again; six o’clock in Mississippi meant five in Washington D.C. He picked up his cellphone and dialled.
Angie Byrne was working in her office on the eleventh floor of 1440 New York Avenue. Bill Trellis poked his head round her door. ‘How long you gonna be here till, Angie?’
She looked at her watch. ‘Seven, seven-thirty, I guess. Why?’
‘Just the Williams & Howells deal. I wanna brief you on it before you go.’
‘Today?’ Angie clicked her tongue. The matter should’ve been discussed two days ago, but Trellis had a habit of putting things off. ‘I can give you a half-hour at best.’
‘That’ll work. Conference room at six-thirty?’
She went back to her keyboard, then looked up again as Joe Dunn came in, a tall white-haired man in his sixties, who’d spent twenty-two years as a Washington PD lieutenant before getting the job as head of security here. ‘Hey, Joe. What’s up?’
‘Just about to go, Mrs Byrne. Anything I can do for you first?’
‘Nope. We’re set for the senator’s deposition?’
‘Yes, we are. Saturday, eight o’clock.’
‘I don’t want anyone here except you and me,’ she said. ‘He’s particular about the situation, and he’s a United States senator with an eye
on the Democratic nomination.’
‘Yes, mam.’ Dunn half saluted and left her alone. The phone rang and she clicked her tongue in exasperation. ‘Hello. Angie Byrne,’ she said.
‘Hi, honey. It’s me. How are you?’
‘Busy, Louis. Any developments?’
‘We found a dead black man in the river. Apart from that, nothing. I was just checking you were OK.’
‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me, Louis. I’m a big girl.’
‘You talk to anyone there about it?’
‘No.’
‘OK. Great. We want to keep it under wraps for now.’
‘No problem. When you coming home?’
‘I don’t know. Couple of days, I guess.’
‘Talk to you later, then.’ She hung up and went back to work.
The phone rang again and she was almost tempted to switch to voice mail, but didn’t.
‘Angie Byrne.’ More than a hint of irritation in her voice.
‘My attorney.’
A coldness dripped through her. ‘What do you want?’
‘Fair representation.’
‘Get yourself a lawyer, then.’
‘I’ve got one.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘Did you see the news just now? They’re looking for a TV van. The unknown subject got away, they believe, in a television van.’
Angie sat back, the tape running on her phone. She taped all her calls as a matter of course. ‘Why d’you think they called me “unknown”?’ he said.
‘You tell me, asshole.’
She heard him click his tongue. ‘That’s no way to speak to a client.’
‘You’re not a client. You’ll never be a client. I’m busy, so what do you want?’
‘We can talk about that later. For now, just remember the parable of the jackal and the crow.’
He hung up then, and Angie sat back, shook her head and switched off her computer screen. Concentration gone, that ball of knots in her stomach for the second time today. She rewound the tape and picked up the phone to New Orleans. ‘Louis,’ she said. ‘He’s got my office number. I received a call right after you put the phone down.’