Gillian Davis stepped into view, and Dee Hammond focussed until the Chameleon’s torso filled the viewfinder. Satisfied that this was their target, she fired off three quick shots.
Chapter 54
State Route 837, Lynchburg, Virginia, USA, Monday 3:15pm.
Dee and Pete gathered the equipment and stowed it into two elongated cases which had been custom made for the purpose. Pete slung a lap top bag over his shoulder and Dee slipped the scoping sight in her inside Jacket pocket.
Carrying the equipment, they worked their way up the lightly forested hillside and when they reached the peak they descended as quickly as they could down the other side and back to their hire car. The Chrysler 300 was parked in a lay-by, or refuge, furnished with picnic tables, litter bins and a basic toilet block.
They had just reached the car, opening the trunk by remote control, when two cars came roaring towards them, lights flashing, sirens blaring. They were approaching from either direction on State Road 837. By now the wooded hill was between them and the Denton Estate, which was approached by a secondary road off SR837, known locally as Top Ridge Road.
Dee and Pete acted normally, as if they had no idea what the police might want. They also hoped that the cars would keep on going. They didn’t. Just as they were placing the equipment in the boot of the car and closing the lid, a police cruiser pulled up behind their vehicle, soon followed by another marked car pulling up in front. They were hemmed in.
The two operatives glanced at each another and tried to look puzzled. In an instant there was a lot of activity and shouting, as state troopers with hats not dissimilar to those worn by Mounties disembarked from the vehicles and wielded their handguns.
“Stand against the car, facing in, hands flat on the roof, legs apart.” The instructions were yelled and forceful. The two British operatives did as they were told, and two troopers dressed in blue grey shirts, dark grey tie and epaulettes moved towards them. The bright gold woven badges on their shoulders bore the Great Seal of the State of Virginia in a circle at the top and the words ‘Virginia State Police’ below.
Dee and Pete said nothing. Their training had drummed into them the dictum, ‘if apprehended give them nothing, not even an accent, or they may start to reach premature conclusions about your guilt or innocence’. The two were frisked quickly and efficiently.
“OK. Sir. Hand me the keys slowly,” the female trooper requested. She was a good head shorter than Pete. She was a good looking African American and she had a gun aimed right at him. Pete held out the keys, letting them dangle from his thumb and forefinger.
Leaving her colleague to cover the suspects, the female officer holstered her gun and pressed a button on the key fob. The Chrysler 300 trunk lid opened to reveal two cases, a laptop bag and spotting scope.
The female trooper opened the cases very carefully and took a deep breath in.
***
In the case in front of her were two tripods, each with a bracket designed to hold something circular in section. There was also a selection of blue cables and an eyepiece.
In the second case was a long lens. Over a metre long, it had a five inch lens at the front but no camera mount or lens at the back. The trooper looked puzzled and then worried.
The cause of her concern was a silver plate on the inside of the case, which shone brightly against the red velvet interior of the case. It read: ‘Asset Number FBI/Q/S9/123109, Property of the FBI.’
“Ethan, you need to see this,” the trooper said to her companion. The man stepped back slowly, keeping his eyes on the two suspects. Stealing a glance at the case, he issued an expletive.
“Hey, are you two FBI? Do you have any ID?”
Dee responded first in what she hoped sounded like a mid Atlantic accent.
“You need to call our contact at the FBI now, before this gets out of hand. My BlackBerry is in my pocket.”
“OK, honey,” the female trooper said calmly. “Just stay where you are while we sort this out.”
She took the BlackBerry from Dee’s jacket and asked her the number. Dee told her to scroll down to “Steve Post FBI” on the most recent calls list and press the green button. The trooper did as she was asked, and the phone rang out in one long tone at the other end. The trooper pressed the loudspeaker button and Pete and Dee heard the operator pick up.
“FBI Field Office, Charlotte speaking. How may I direct your call?”
The trooper looked at Dee, who spoke loudly. “Special Agent Steve Post, please,” she answered.
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“This is Dee Hammond and I’m with Virginia State Trooper.....”
“Marcia De Vere.” The trooper completed the sentence. A few seconds later Steve Post came on the line.
“Is that Dee or Marcia?” he asked.
“Both of us,” Dee replied.
“OK. What’s going on, Marcia? You’ve extracted me from an important Homeland Security meeting.”
“Sir, we had it reported that a couple of folks were spotted in the woods overlooking a Senator’s house. The citizen was concerned about their intentions.”
“OK. Dee, what were your intentions?” he asked.
“We were bird watching, Special Agent Post. We have some magnificent shots of a Boboling, an American Goldfinch and a Ruby Throated Humming Bird.”
Pete had to stifle a laugh, and the two troopers looked terribly confused.
“OK, Dee, I trust you have evidence of your innocent intentions?” Steve queried, the smile audible in his voice.
“Yep. We have the shots on the laptop.”
“OK. Trooper De Vere, I suggest that you confirm that this is true and then let my people go. They’re very busy.”
“Sir, I have to call this in.”
“Of course you do. You need to call in and explain that you apprehended two innocent citizens bird watching, that you breached their constitutional rights and that you found incriminating pictures of Virginia’s wild birds. Oh, and tell them they can confirm all of this by ringing my number.”
Marcia De Vere looked at her partner, who was shaking his head vigorously. He didn’t want to be the butt of every office joke until the end of the year.
“I don’t think we need to hold these folks up any longer, sir.”
“Thanks, Marcia, I can assure you that I will be having words with them on their return.”
Marcia smiled as he hung up. Five minutes later, Pete was driving the car north on SR837.
“I could have done an American accent as well, you know,” he insisted, and he proceeded to affect a Yankee drawl which merely accentuated his Geordie brogue.
“How y’all doing, hinny?” he said before laughing, as much from relief as from the humour of his remark.
“By the way,” he continued, “if they’d looked at the hard drive of the laptop they would have seen the pictures of the Denton house and Gillian Davis.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Dee assured him. “Those pictures are on here.” She held up an SD card. “They would have seen a variety of Virginian bird pictures lifted from Webshots.com.”
“You are too bloody clever for your own good, Mrs Hammond,” Pete commented wryly. They both laughed this time.
***
Back in the hotel room, Pete set up the equipment one more time to ensure it worked properly before they returned it. He set up the two tripods, one at the front and one behind, and then clamped the 1600mm lens on to them both, securing them with tension screws. He removed the lens cap and moved to the back of the lens. Instead of a lens mount, which would normally attach the lens to a camera, there were a series of computer ports. He slipped a blue data cable into the lens network port and connected the other end to the laptop.
Because the 1600mm lens was so difficult to manoeuvre, he sighted his target with the handheld spotting scope and used the readings to set the trajectory of the main lens. He then sat down at the computer and operated the cross hair focussing automatically from the
trackball in the middle of the keyboard.
Once it was fully focussed, he fired off half a dozen shots. If she had ever seen them, the buxom blonde bar tender in the atrium bar would wonder how anyone had managed to get so close to her with a camera yet remain unseen. So close, in fact, that they could see down her cleavage to her lacy blue wonder bra.
Pete was still cropping the risqué image when Dee slapped him playfully on the back of the head.
“Put that away, you pervert. We have a meeting to go to.”
Chapter 55
Courtyard Marriott Hotel, Lynchburg, Virginia,
Monday 24th January, 7pm.
Steve Post drove into the car park of the Courtyard Marriott at precisely seven in the evening. The drive through the Virginia countryside had been comfortable and traffic free. He swept his new Chevrolet Equinox into one of the marked parking spaces. Inevitably black, the vehicle had evidently caught the eye of the admiring parking attendant. The sleek crossover, something between a saloon and an SUV, was still a rare sight in Virginia, and its flowing lines suggested a European design influence.
The air was damp and cold, his breath visible in a cloud of vapour, and he was not wrapped up well. He scurried across to the lobby, where he encountered Pete chatting to the concierge.
Pete acknowledged him with a brief nod, and pointed into the bar as he continued his intense conversation with the concierge. Steve saw Dee sitting in a booth at a table by the window and joined her. Sliding along the bench opposite her, this was the first time they had been alone together on this trip, the first time since that fateful night in Quantico.
“You look contented,” he said. Dee was puzzled by the comment, especially as he was aware of the problems she had encountered that day.
“You always looked tense before, even when you were relaxing. Josh must be good for you.”
She didn’t believe her contentment was visible, but she had to accept that married life was far more comfortable than she had imagined it would be.
They talked quietly about their respective spouses; the conversation was easy and relaxed. It seemed that they had both found their soul mates. The conversation turned to the case at hand, and Pete returned to the table brandishing several sheets of printing.
Dee ordered drinks. She had a house white wine, Pete had a Bud and Steve took a diet coke.
As they sipped their drinks they passed the papers around. Each one had a picture of a pretty young woman with short fair hair placed squarely in the middle. The clarity and resolution of the pictures, taken from around half a mile away, was superb.
“That’s some great optics you have at your disposal, Steve,” Dee said, envy in her voice, knowing that Vastrick were unlikely to spring for the ten thousand pounds it would cost to obtain such equipment, given that it would be used only occasionally.
“Obviously you are sure this is our girl?” Steve asked, knowing the answer. He too had seen pictures of Gillian Davis, longer hair, same features, collecting some kind of award in the UK. Dee and Pete nodded.
“These photos were emailed to Scotland Yard, to DCI Coombes and his Sergeant. They are keen to interview her, and not just because it means a taxpayer funded trip to the USA.” Dee lifted the mood of both of her male companions with her smile.
“One thing is for sure. They can’t expect the US to extradite her, not at present and not with her newly found contacts,” Steve confirmed.
“Do we all think that she is exploiting her old man?” Pete theorised. “I mean, she could have sought him out before now. I was wondering whether she had always planned this trip, you know, as a contingency if the whole UK thing unravelled.”
“I’m not so sure,” Dee mused. “That would be pretty cold. And whilst I accept that you have to be cold to be a paid assassin, it has to be different in your personal life. You would go mad otherwise.”
“Pete has a point, Dee. But it gives us a problem. You recall the training at Quantico, with Professor Norton? She might fit his definition of a sociopath. If she is a sociopath she will be able to manipulate those around her and convince everyone that she is just a simple girl who the government trained to kill people.”
“Or that could be the truth; she could be a normal person whose training makes her act intuitively, particularly in terms of self preservation. It’s scary that the UK and the US might have trained hundreds of people who will eventually return home with alleged sociopathic tendencies from Iraq and Afghanistan.” Dee shuddered involuntarily.
They sat for a while, contemplating her words. Silence fell over the table like a heavy blanket.
“I’ll take these pictures and put them with the Scotland Yard request for an interview, to the Special Agent in Charge, the SAIC. We will try to facilitate a formal interview, but even with our ‘special relationship’ it will be down to Gillian Davis and her advisers as to whether she agrees to be interviewed by Scotland Yard. We may have to ask the questions ourselves, based on a crib list from DCI Coombes.”
Steve paused before continuing in a more cautionary tone. “The two of you have done some remarkable work. You have tracked down a murder suspect after she has successfully evaded the authorities, but we still face a great many hurdles.”
Steve counted out the issues on the fingers of his left hand. “One, Gillian Davis was a covert operative for MI5. She worked on secondment to the CIA, the FBI and to other agencies. She is owed a lot of favours and has a lot of embarrassing stories she could tell in a court room.
Two, she is essentially one of us; that is, she is a product of the war against terror and a successful product who could argue that she has probably saved countless lives. There is likely to be considerable sympathy for her in the secret services on both sides of the pond.
Three, even when operating with her colleague as the Chameleon, they continued terminating bad guys under contract. Until they took out the Israeli Minister, they had an unblemished record, and in all honesty he had been a terrorist himself in his younger days. Mossad were understandably angry but our diplomatic section say that the Israeli population, now largely émigrés, hated the sight of the man and were glad to see him gone. In our own Delta Force there is admiration for the work the Chameleon did in taking out that Somali pirate leader. The Chameleon was right under their noses and they didn’t see him until he wanted to be seen. The man is a legend.
Four, this lady has skills that the FBI, CIA, ATF and numerous other US agencies would kill for. She is one of the world’s best snipers, yet she looks like a kindergarten teacher. She speaks with a clipped English accent that could place her in situations we could never get an American into, and she is unknown in the international arena. We could send her anywhere and she wouldn’t attract any attention at all.
Five, and finally, I only have five fingers, she is connected. Her dad is a contender for the presidency. He is third generation politician. There won’t be a politician in the US who doesn’t owe Denton Miles III, his daddy or his grand-daddy a favour.”
Pete and Dee looked depressed.
“So what we are saying is that the Hokobus will never get justice.” Dee’s voice was tight with anger.
Steve shrugged. “I hope they do get justice, Dee, but I don’t want the two of you feeling that you failed that couple in any way if the machinery of government grinds the case against Davis to dust.”
Chapter 56
Terminal 5, Heathrow Airport, London. Tuesday 8:30am.
The UK’s newest international terminal was thronged with people eager to escape the frigid London weather. The fully glazed edifice would have been bathed with light if there had been any outside, but it was another cloudy and drizzly day. The magnificent curved roof, designed by the world renowned Richard Rogers and engineered by Arup, set the tone for the interior where curves and ellipses dominated the decor. A miserable DCI Coombes was not unduly impressed, however.
“I told the floor supervisor that we were with Scotland Yard and that we were on urgent
business, but the best they could do was upgrade us to World Traveller Plus, a sort of premium economy,” Coombes grunted. He hated the States, although he had never actually been there. Full of criminals and brash Americans, he thought glumly.
DS Scott, on the other hand, was excited. This was his first business trip outside the UK and he was determined to make the most of it.
***
Dean Harrison was an ex policeman himself, and so when he heard that the two detectives were in his airport he used his position, as head of security, to usher them quickly past security using the fast track lane.
A few minutes later the three men were sitting in the ultra modern, not so comfortable break out area, reserved for security staff. While they were waiting for the flight to be called, they spent their time reminiscing over a hearty breakfast. Scott had ordered yoghurt, fresh fruit and pain au chocolat, to accompany his orange juice, whilst DCI Coombes was making headway through a full English breakfast. He had cheered up considerably.
“So, you are hoping to interview a suspect in the USA. Lucky you. Furthest I ever got was Hemel Hempstead on the kidnapping and murder of young Gemma Drake. Nasty one, that was.” The two men from the Yard nodded in acknowledgement, but would add nothing more about their assignment.
***
At the time the Detective’s flight to Dulles was making its final approach, 11am in Virginia, Gil Davis was sitting down with some very important people. One of those people was Martin K Sherman. He was a justice of the Supreme Court and an old school friend of Denton Miles Jr, Gil’s grandfather. A man with an imperious manner, white haired and distinguished in appearance, he spoke American with an accent that could have been nurtured at Eton. Despite his stern appearance and manner, he was putty in the hands of attractive young women, including his own grand-daughters who he spoiled mercilessly. As a result he was kindly and affectionate to the assassin who sat before him, baring her soul with tears welling in her eyes.
The second man felt a little uncomfortable. Not as closely linked to the family, he had been asked to repay and old debt by witnessing the meeting. His presence would be helpful as he was currently highly placed in the US Department of Justice.
Gil had explained everything, in her own words, and then had surprised them both by sharing a prepared ‘suggested’ affidavit. It was brief but comprehensive. What they did not know, and could only suspect, was that it was a carefully constructed framework of lies and half truths. Nonetheless, such was the skilful presentation that every negative fact that could have condemned Gillian Davis - Miles to a life sentence was explained away, leaving the inevitable impression that the one-time assassin was just another victim of the system.
Chameleon - A City of London Thriller Page 26