by A P Bateman
“Have you got good battery? Your signal must be okay.”
There was a pause while she checked. “Yes, good battery, average signal.”
“Location? Approximates and headings?”
“I’d say six miles northwest of Cape Town. It’s a couple roads parallel to the main highway. There are shacks on the approach,” she paused. “Hills, scrub, no immediate buildings.”
“Right, I’m hanging up now. I’ll make a call and ring you back,” he paused. He wanted to say he loved her, to be careful. Instead he said, “Find a weapon, stay alert and keep out of sight,” and hung up. He dialled Simon Mereweather’s number. The call went straight to voicemail. “Alex King. Priority. Agent in distress! Return my call, now!”
A tense two minutes passed, in which time King had paced the nautically themed foyer and ended up climbing the steps to the carpark. His phone rang, and he pressed the answer icon.
“King?”
“Simon, Caroline’s is in trouble. Got a pen?”
“Yes.”
“Good. She’s been abducted, she says she’s taken care of her abductors.”
“Good girl.”
“That’s what I said. She estimated that she’s six or seven miles northwest of Cape Town. She has a good signal and battery life on her mobile.”
“Wait, I’ll run it…”
There was a long pause. King could hear the tapping of a keypad. He knew Mereweather would be searching for her signal. “Got her yet?” he asked impatiently.
“Yes. I have GPS coordinates. I’ll get the MI6 man at the embassy to send an asset to liaise with the locals. Did she say how she got away, or to what extent she has taken care of her abductors?”
“Not really, only that they were down and staying that way.”
“Right…”
“Problem?”
“More than a few, I’d imagine. Look, leave it with me. I’ll call her and put some meat on the bones.”
“Okay.”
“How are you doing down there? It’s all kicking off, isn’t it?”
“It is,” King said. “If only we knew why. Look, I’ll get a report back to you today, an email or airdrop from my iPhone later. Just concentrate on Caroline’s situation for now.” He hung up and called Caroline back. She answered on the first ring, which told King she was scared.
“Hello?”
“Simon Mereweather has your location. He’s calling the embassy and SIS will send a trusted local over to you. I’m not sure what police presence will follow.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s South Africa. If you’re alright and nothing can trace back to you, it might be best to leave things be.”
“What? I’m not having that hang over me. Jesus, you know what it’s like to give the wrong people some leverage!”
King couldn’t argue with that. “How bad did it get?”
“Two men. They didn’t touch me, but they let me know what they were going to do alright,” she paused. “They were going to rape me and kill me.”
“Oh, Caroline…” He gripped the phone tightly, wanted to do some killing of his own. “How did it go down?” he asked. She told him, didn’t leave anything out. He felt helpless, wanted to hold her, comfort her, but by the sound of it she hadn’t needed protecting.
“Ah, there you are, Alex. I asked where you were at reception,” Amanda Cunningham said as she stepped next to him, then looked at the phone in his hand. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know you were on the phone.”
King nodded, turned back to his call.
“Who was that?” Caroline asked.
“It’s the coroner.”
“Where are you? She said, reception…”
“I’m at the St. Michael’s Hotel, in Falmouth.”
“Why?”
“Look, this should be about you. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Look, I’d better go. Simon Mereweather needs to speak to you, he’ll be trying to get through.”
“Why are you at a hotel? I thought you were staying at the cottage.”
“Look, I’ve had problems too,” he said. “The cottage was compromised. Call me when it’s all in hand and you are safe. I’ve got to go back to Snell’s house and check some things out. Mereweather will need to speak to you before he requests MI6’s help. Take care, goodbye.” He waited, but she hung up without another word.
He cursed inwardly at not telling her that he loved her. It had noticeably irked her that he was in the close proximately of another woman. At a hotel. He knew he should have put her mind at rest, but hadn’t wanted Amanda Cunningham listening in. The woman hadn’t given him much space, and certainly no privacy. It had surprised him that Caroline had asked who he had been with, as he hadn’t thought her possessive before. They had worked together for much of the time since King had been drafted into MI5 just over a year ago. He had served his country in MI6 for most of his adult life, recruited from a very different existence and trained to operate in a different sphere from that of his current role. He was a better man now. He could look in the mirror for longer these days.
“Trouble?” Amanda asked.
“It’s nothing,” he replied irritably. He walked out into the carpark, searched for Amanda’s silver hire car. He had parked his at the rear of the hotel, as instructed by the receptionist when he had told her the hire company would be sending the windscreen repair company out to replace both front and rear screens. The receptionist had made arrangement for an end space so that the company could work alongside the vehicle. He had found the reception staff exceptionally accommodating.
“So, they’ll fix your windscreen here?” she asked. She pressed the fob and the lights on one of three identical cars flashed. “That’s a great service.”
“Can’t complain,” King said. He watched her closely. She was an attractive young woman. Five-seven, slim and shapely. She had glossy blonde hair and it was tied back in a ponytail. She was similar in appearance to Caroline, but a little younger. At least six or seven years. If he wasn’t in love, he would naturally be attracted to her. If he was honest with himself, he would say she was his type. But looks can be deceptive. There was none of the warmth that Caroline could exude. Amanda Cunningham was driven, but he imagined her treading on people’s toes to get where she was. He had already experienced a few different facets to her character, and he had not liked what he had seen. The drinking aside, she was quick to rise. King’s work had required him to calculate his options carefully, search for the opening, the angle, and devise the best strategy. He had no time for anger and over-reaction, and nor did he have time for this in the people he worked with.
Amanda was an erratic driver with neither the gift of anticipation or humility. She gave no quarter and saw every gap as an opportunity and something she had to swerve the car into. King was starting to wear the mat with his right foot in anticipation of her braking, or rather, lack of it. She also worked the accelerator hard and together with the excessive braking, it made for an uncomfortable ride.
She took the road through Truro. King had thought about telling her of a quicker route, via the King Harry Ferry from Trellisick to the Roseland, but thought better of it. The roads were narrow and driven swiftly by the locals. Tourists tended to hug the white line somewhat nervously, when the secret to driving in Cornwall was to hug the hedge. Not great for negotiating cyclists, but better than meeting a caravan with nowhere to go. At least the city traffic was routed in wide lanes and as he pondered the ferry waiting times along with loading and unloading, it was probably a dead heat for time.
They hadn’t spoken much, and the silence would have been awkward if King had reason to care. He didn’t, but he was curious about her. Her behaviour was beyond what he would have imagined of a pathologist at the top of her game. A young woman who would have had to work twice as hard due both to gender and age, to reach the higher echelons of the Home Office register of forensic pathologists. To be tasked with su
ch an investigation meant she would have been the very best. For all his beliefs in equality, King could just not see it in her.
“I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t agreed to work on this,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. Perhaps she had been doing a great deal of thinking of her own in the long, drawn-out silence.
“Why not?” King asked.
“Well, it’s like you,” she said. “You’ve obviously pissed off enough people that they have given you something like this. I mean, you have been tasked with finding out who has been killing the richest people on the planet, but in doing so, risk cutting off the money the rich have donated to keep themselves off the death list. Charities have never been better off. People at the most basic economic level are actually feeling the benefits, something no government and no country has ever done before, nor likely ever will.”
King had mulled it over enough. He had his detractors, and was sure he had ruffled a few feathers during his brief time with MI5. But nothing unforgivable, nothing drastic. He’d had worse. Some of his own people at MI6 had come after him before, used him, betrayed him and hung him out to dry. Another time, another life.
They were all dead now.
But it wasn’t until she said it out loud, had mentioned it yesterday at Snell’s residence, that he had truly thought of the enormity, the impossibility of the task ahead of him. So, four men had died. Who cared? Millions of dollars and pounds were finding its way into the lives of others every hour. But King cared about more than the money. He cared about the Jameson family. He cared about a little boy suffocated just so a terrorist organisation could shoot and kill a billionaire for some warped socio-political manifesto. That, and the other innocent lives caught up in this organisation’s crusade, was what he would be using for his motivation.
19
The outskirts of Cape Town
South Africa
The South African sun was hot, even for April. Whether it was unseasonably so, Caroline did not know, but it was nudging thirty degrees centigrade and there was little wind. The ground was dry and dusty; and although it had been raining when she had arrived last night, it didn’t look like it had rained in weeks. It was an arid heat that seemed to reflect off the ground and increase in both density and temperature, heating you from all directions like an oven. She had heard that the cape had a microclimate, and she could well believe it.
There were flies around the bodies, which were now starting to smell. There was no smell in the world like spilled blood in the heat. A sickly, sweet and intoxicating putridity that worked its way into the nose and throat and stayed with you for so long, that you never quite noticed it leave. There was the odour of urine and faeces too, the muscles relaxed in sudden trauma and nature took its course. It was a wholly unpleasant experience that went hand in hand with violent death.
It had been an hour since she had spoken to King, although he had sent a short text message saying he loved her. She had texted back, reciprocating, but she needed to keep her phone signal clear and limit the battery’s use. She looked at the body on the ground. Neither man had died quickly or cleanly, which she had found so often to be the case, and there was a great deal of dried blood on the ground which had turned the dust into a crimson-coloured mud.
She had checked both bodies for identification, but neither man had carried anything. Both men had two-thousand Rand on them, just walking about money really. Enough for fuel and a couple of meals. Around one-hundred and twenty pounds Stirling.
They were professionals alright.
Both men carried only cheap mobile phones, both locked, but Caroline suspected there would be no numbers stored, and they would be what law enforcement referred to as burners. Store-bought non-contract phones, entirely untraceable if they had been bought with cash.
The man called Kruger had carried a spare magazine for the 9mm pistol. Caroline had wasted no time reloading the weapon and tucked it into the waistband of her jogging pants. She noted the second man had carried only the knife. She suspected both the gun, the phones and the knife would have been disposed of after they had killed her.
She had taken a walk around the car, filmed the scene with her smartphone and recorded her version of the facts as she had filmed. She uploaded the recording to her iCloud. She would be able to take photographs off the film if she needed to. She was pleased with the documentation.
It always paid to hold the aces.
She had no idea what the local police would make of the situation, nor how thorough their investigation would be. Nor how quickly they would want to tie it up. She hoped it would not get that far. Hoped these two thugs could be lost in the system. But that was for the Foreign Office and their man at the embassy. She just hoped he had both vision and perspective.
She regretted asking King who he had been with. She trusted him, had done so with her life in the past. She knew that he trusted her too. She knew how the game worked, for they always referred to their work for the intelligence services as a game, and she knew that he would need his head in the game and not to be fretting about what she was thinking. It was a two-way street, and so far, they had respected that. The woman had just sounded so damned familiar with him.
So comfortable.
And then there was the hotel. King had told her he had been compromised at the cottage. Now she wanted to know what had happened, but didn’t want to bother him while he was on assignment. She knew she would just have to wait until she was out of this, or indeed, back home.
The car arrived after another thirty minutes. It was a new Toyota Land Cruiser in white with heavy black tints on the windows. The front windows rolled down simultaneously, revealing a man behind the wheel. She stood up and watched as the driver turned a tight circle and parked facing out the way he had come, noted the man had most likely rolled down the windows to put her at ease. That was a good sign, an experienced field professional. But the two dead guys had been too. She was wary, but it was only to be expected.
“Caroline Darby?” the man said. He removed a pair of aviator sunglasses and made eye contact. The gesture counted for a great deal. Especially when the person he was meeting had already shot and killed two men. “Of course, you are. Not many attractive thirty-seven-year olds out here with two dead bodies, I suppose?” He smiled, but waivered when she didn’t reply. She had a hand on the hefty butt of the Beretta and he seemed to realise this. “My name is Ryan Beard, I’m SIS station officer here in Cape Town. I am also unarmed.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said. “Lift up your shirt and show me.”
He did so, high and slow. He turned around, so she could see his back. “Is that okay?” he asked.
“Unarmed?”
“I am unarmed. But there’s a Sig nine-millimetre in the glovebox. This is South Africa after all, but I didn’t want to spook you.”
“A sound idea,” she said. “I’m surprised you’re alone.”
“We’re based up in Pretoria, the embassy, that is. I’m all there is down here.”
She shrugged. “Fair enough. Tell me, who was your contact from MI5?”
“I haven’t spoken with anybody. The SIS section chief called me and passed on your details.”
“And they were?”
“A Security Service agent in distress. Caroline Darby, thirty-seven, blonde, five-seven, approximately ten-stone, athletic build,” he paused. “Abducted by two men. Both of them down. I am assuming they’re both dead?”
“They are.”
“Weapon?”
“A nine-millimetre Beretta. Their own.”
“Nice.”
She took the pistol out from her waistband, held it loosely in front of her. “You’re not telling me more than someone could already know just from standing here,” she said. “The driver knew my name. That indicates that between MI5 and the South African Security Service, there has been a significant leak.”
“But I’m here.”
“And so were they.”
“I’m not c
arrying credentials. Basic security.”
“Yeah, that goes for them,” she said, nodding her head towards the car. “They knew my name, and others could do so just as easily.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“No.”
He shrugged. “Hey, that’s fine. But I got a call from Pretoria telling me to get down here quick-smart and they gave me the coordinates and a description. You’re in the shit, MI5 have no assets out here and you need Six to help you out. Beats me what Box are doing out here. You’re a long way off your own turf.” He turned and walked back to the Land Cruiser, then looked back as he caught hold of the door handle. “Good luck on your own…” he trailed off as Caroline raised the weapon and aimed it steadily at him.
“You’re a little too close to that Sig for my liking,” she said. “I’ve had quite a morning and haven’t even had breakfast yet, so don’t do anything you won’t live to regret.” She had his attention, but she was still no closer to trusting him. This was a pre-arranged point where the men had decided to kill her. They had clearly been working for someone, and that person could well know details like the location they had been taking her to. She waved the pistol, indicating him to step away from the vehicle. He did so, reluctantly. “How long have you been with MI6?”
He shrugged. “Ten years,” he said.
“An embassy man?”
“Pretty much.”
“So, you’ve seen operatives come and go in the dark, small hours? Provided them with sanctuary, equipment or information?”
He shrugged again. “Dark deeds. My job has sometimes been that of a facilitator.”
“All over?”
He nodded. “Europe, Middle-East, Asia,” he paused. “As well as several African countries.”
She fished her phone out of her jogging pants pocket. She thumbed the screen, settled on a picture of her and Alex. A selfie overlooking one of her favourite bays in Majorca. The place King had asked her to marry him. It summed up their relationship perfectly. Alex had supposedly been recuperating in Majorca from an injury. He had taken himself off to buy the ring while she had taken a long swim. He had taken down two Russian agents and held a Russian terrorist for an MI5 snatch-team to whisk him away. A clockwork mission, and he had proposed to her within the hour.