She stood on a chair, applied the dark powder, laid the cellophane tape over the top and then stuck it onto a white card. As she wrote Amy’s name and date of birth she remembered why she had the kit at home: to show Amy how to dust for fingerprints when she was small. That was when they did things together. She put the card in her inside coat pocket satisfied that she’d captured this faint but identifying vestige of her daughter.
Her mobile rang. It was the assistant to the terminal manager at Heathrow, who had heard back from Barajas Airport. Amy Boxer had arrived there and had not taken an onward flight. They’d checked CCTV cameras in the arrivals hall and identified her going down into the Metro housed within the Terminal 2 building. It seemed likely that she’d gone into the city. She called Boxer, gave him the news.
‘That squares with what I’ve just heard from Simon,’ said Boxer. ‘His guy from Spanish intelligence has confirmed that she checked into the Hotel Moderno near the Puerta del Sol. I’ve just booked a flight. I’ll be on my way to Heathrow in an hour.’
7
11:30 A.M., TUESDAY 20TH MARCH 2012
Rented apartment, Calle Mayor, Madrid
Dennis Chilcott and his son Darren had flown in on easyJet and taken the Metro into the city centre. They were in a fourth-floor apartment a hundred metres down Calle Mayor from Puerta del Sol, in a building which did not have an operational lift. Darren, being young and strong with none of the blood-pressure problems of his father, had lugged the cases up eight flights of stairs and he hadn’t been too happy about it. He was even less happy when he saw the spiral staircase up to the bedrooms.
Darren knew from his tyrannical management of their London dealer network that his father’s crack/cocaine business was turning over a minimum of £20 million a year and felt that a little Club Class with swanky lounge facilities wouldn’t have dented their profit margin in any noticeable way. Dennis Chilcott had been fifteen years in this business and had never even had a visit from the police, apart from when he’d called them in himself after one of his hardware stores had been broken into in the run-up to Christmas last year.
‘You look like me,’ he said by way of explanation, ‘and anybody would know I don’t belong in Club Class. The boys in SOCA know that. You don’t think they’re not looking at everybody going in and out of Heathrow and Gatwick Club Class lounges? Course they are. You got to look like nobody; that way you stay nobody.’ So for his first business trip to Spain Darren was travelling as he’d always travelled, and he wasn’t convinced it was his dad playing safe. He reckoned he was just being a tight old bastard.
‘So who is this guy L. Osito?’ asked Darren, now sitting, huge and slumped, at the kitchen counter, eating fried eggs and chips with ketchup, drinking beer.
‘He’s a Colombian,’ said Dennis from the sofa, lighting up his first cigar of the day. ‘His real name is Carlos Alzate . . . if that helps.’
‘I thought his real name was L. Osito,’ said Darren, who didn’t speak a word of any foreign language, not even cerveza. ‘Like Larry Osito or something.’
‘Larry?’
‘L for Larry or, maybe Lee or Leonardo seeing as he’s South American.’
Christ, thought Dennis. This could be long day.
‘El Osito is his nickname. El means ‘the’ in Spanish. They all have nicknames these guys, like Joaquin Guzman is called El Chapo, which means Shorty, cos—’
‘He’s six foot eight?’
‘No, because you’d never dare in a million years to call him Shorty or he’d have a blowtorch to your balls before you could say boo to a goose.’
Darren stared into his plate, frowned. His father quite often chose the wrong saying for the occasion and nobody ever put him right.
‘I thought you said El meant “the”, so why does El Chapo mean Shorty?’
‘That’s how the English say it. The real translation would be the Short One.’
‘So what does El Osito mean? And do we call him that?’ asked Darren, scratching his shaved head with one hand while the other was daintily poised with chip between thumb and forefinger. ‘I don’t want to balls it up and end up with my tackle under the grill.’
‘It means Little Bear—like Teddy Bear.’
‘So, like old Shorty, he’s a nice cuddly teddy?’
‘No,’ said Dennis firmly. ‘I’m told he is short, but he’s built like a brick shithouse. Pumps iron. There’s something funny about that name of his that I don’t get. So it’s best we just call him Carlos. All right? Remember to shake hands. That’s what they all do every time they meet in this country.’
‘What happened to the Mexicans? Didn’t you used to deal with Mexicans?’
‘The Mexicans are still here: the brothers Jaime and Jesús. But the big boss, Vicente, told me they’ve moved their cartel guy back to Cuidad Juarez and they’re letting this Colombian run the Spanish end of things for a while. Nothing changes. This is a get-to-know-you meeting.’
‘And what do we know about El Osito?’
‘Not a lot,’ said Dennis, thinking: enough and I’d rather steer clear. ‘It’s just that the Mexicans have done a supply deal with his Colombian clan, which means they give them a share of the demand end in return.’
‘And what does that mean?’ asked Darren, not that interested but knowing he had to ask questions.
‘The Colombians used to sell to the Mexicans for $2,000 a kilo. The Mexicans sold that to wholesalers in the States for $10,000, who sold it to dealers for $30,000, who cut it and split it and sold it for $100,000. Now the idea is to split it a bit more evenly so that everybody in the chain makes decent money and you don’t get resentments building up. It also means that their rival, El Chapo, doesn’t have quite such a big percentage of the European market as before. Vicente’s got his toe in the door; now he’s trying to get his foot in.’
Darren zoned out when his father talked about business, concentrated on sticking his chips into the egg yolk. Dennis kept an eye on him, thinking: is this going to work? He could do violence, could Darren. He was bloody enormous. And he could do numbers if it was to spend money on himself or his girlfriend, but business, logistics, man management, meeting the foreign suppliers? He should have sent him to college . . . then again, he’d got chucked out of school for half-killing some kid in the playground.
The intercom phone buzzed.
‘I’ll take it,’ said Dennis, who knew some Spanish.
He ran a hand over his head, which like his son’s was shaved, but in his case to disguise his baldness. It took him a couple of goes to get to his feet and answer the phone.
‘Buenos dias,’ he said and listened without understanding everything that was said back to him, but let them in from the street anyway and managed to add, ‘No hay ascensor.’
He waited with the door open, heard them pounding up the marble-clad stairs. El Osito arrived first, not even out of breath. The two Mexican brothers arrived panting. Dennis started up in his crap Spanish. El Osito stopped him with his hand.
‘It’s O.K., we can do this in English,’ he said. ‘I am Carlos. You know Jaime and Jesús.’
Dennis introduced himself and his son. They shook hands. Dennis offered coffee, which was accepted. They sat around the small table in the living room while Darren made the coffees with capsules in a machine.
‘This a nice place,’ said El Osito, looking around at the rented duplex apartment. ‘Better than a hotel.’
‘We prefer it,’ said Dennis. ‘Less public, know what I mean?’
The coffees arrived in what looked like doll’s house cups in Darren’s massive hands. El Osito disdained sugar and sipped his coffee with one hand resting on his vast thigh, the muscles of his forearm standing out thick as hawsers. The two Mexican brothers emptied two sachets of sugar each into their coffees, which they stirred meditatively. Jaime was early forties, heavily built with thick, black, unmo
vable hair, very dark eyebrows, a moustache and a permanent shadow on his cheeks. Jesús was thirty, more slightly built, and wore his hair long but tied back into a ponytail to show his smooth, unblemished, good-looking features.
‘Vicente says we going to continue to send you two hundred kilos a month,’ said El Osito. ‘He also want you to know that he sees the UK as a growth market, especially London. They want to start moving much more product this year.’
‘Like how much?’
‘Five hundred kilos a month by the end of the year.’
‘That’s a big jump,’ said Dennis.
‘You know, with the crisis here in Spain they don’t have the money to spend on blow. The market going down. We need to expand in other places. Everybody going to London. A lot of money going out of the euro and into the pound. Twenty billion euros a month leaving Spain. Most of it to London. That’s where the market is. Italians, Greeks all putting their money over there and let’s not talk about the Russians. You sitting on a big market expansion if you want. If you don’t want . . . ?’
El Osito opened his hands as if Dennis was giving it all away. ‘I want,’ said Dennis, conscious of imitating El Osito’s speech patterns. ‘It’s just that I’ve got to expand my end of things. It takes time to develop a dealer network. A safe one, properly vetted so you don’t get infiltrators.’
Dennis could see he was losing him.
‘This the problem here in Spain,’ said El Osito. ‘The costas are dead. Property going down. The buildings empty. The puti clubs are closing. The local government is cutting everything. No money in the economy and Spain gone from being the biggest consumer to almost nothing. We suffering, Dennis. So we looking to the outside. We move our operations away from the costas now. We just keeping a team in Algeciras to take the deliveries, but we all here now. Madrid is the transportation centre for the rest of Europe. Now we looking to send containers direct to Liverpool, forget Algeciras. We looking for markets for like a thousand kilos a month.’
‘I reckon we could manage three hundred a month easy, don’t you, Dad?’
Darren’s first words, and they might as well have come out his arse for all he knew, thought Dennis. Didn’t have the first idea.
‘That’s what I like to hear,’ said El Osito. ‘Positive thinking. Three hundred a month it is.’
‘Maybe we should just analyse thi—’ started Dennis.
‘You a big strong boy,’ said El Osito to Darren, pulling his chair up to the table, putting his elbow on the surface, opening his hand. ‘You like to arm-wrestle?’
Jaime and Jesús sat dead-eyed on the other side of the table as if they had to put up with this kind of thing all the time. Making a quick comparison between his vast but slightly overweight son and El Osito’s evidently powered-up musculature, Dennis thought, at least I don’t have to worry about Darren winning.
They engaged hands, Darren’s not easily swallowed by El Osito’s monstrous grip. The Colombian stared into the Londoner’s blue eyes and with a grunt their shoulders popped and they started. After two minutes they hadn’t moved. The cords stood out in their necks. Jaime’s eyes started shifting in his head. This never happened. El Osito always won inside ten seconds. Dennis was trying not to feel too proud. Slowly the Colombian began to ease Darren down, but no sooner had he dropped him a couple of inches than Darren put him back to upright. A vein stood out in El Osito’s forehead. It throbbed with extra blood. His eyes had gone black with concentration.
Slowly Darren eased El Osito’s wrist back, one inch, two inches, three inches. Jaime was thinking, don’t do this or none of us will get out of here alive. Only when El Osito’s knuckles were just off the surface of the table did Darren relent. The Colombian took advantage and slammed him back down.
El Osito smiled, which was the good news.
‘I thought you a big strong boy,’ he said.
‘Right!’ said Mercy, meaning business. ‘I need to work. I’m no good at this limbo . . . My life is falling apart.’
She was back in Makepeace’s office and had just managed to stop herself saying ‘limbo shit’, Alleyne style.
‘What happens if you start something over here and then there are, let’s say, developments with Amy in Spain?’ asked Makepeace.
‘I’ll stick to the job. Charlie’s more than capable of dealing with anything that comes up. He speaks the lingo for a start, after all those jobs he did in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines. He’s not far off fluent.
‘I spoke to him as soon as I heard from the Spanish, told him that Amy had been seen on CCTV arriving in Barajas Airport and taking the Metro into the city. He’d already spoken to his friend at MI6, who asked Spanish intelligence if they’d help find out where she stayed on Saturday night, and he’s got a hotel name. If anything comes from that, Charlie will deal with it. If I don’t go back to work I’m going to go nuts. You know what I’m like, sir. Need a job to keep me focused.’
‘You’re in an emotional state, Mercy, and that’s no way to be for a kidnap consultancy job.’
‘I was in an emotional state. I’ve come to terms with what’s happened now. I’ve rationalised it. Amy told the police officer she had money and wasn’t going to be on the streets. She’s not in any danger.’
‘Look, I don’t want to distress you unnecessarily but I have to ask you these questions,’ said Makepeace. ‘What if you get bad news about Amy?’
‘No, that’s fair. You’re right. I would not be in a strong mental state.’
‘You’d be devastated.’
‘That’s true,’ said Mercy, changing tack. ‘And for that reason I would not ask you to put me on any consulting job where negotiations could be jeopardised. I’d be quite happy with a role on a special investigation team. Just as I did on the D’Cruz case when Charlie was the lead consultant.’
‘You’re happy with that?’
‘Anything that takes me outside my head. I need process, sir, more than anything else. Logical process to counteract emotional turmoil.’
‘Are you happy working with George Papadopoulos again? He said he learned a lot from you.’
‘Did he?’ said Mercy. ‘O.K., I’ll take him under my wing again, sir.’
‘This is an extremely sensitive job,’ said Makepeace. ‘I got a call from a Home Office official yesterday morning telling me that he needed someone from my department to consult on negotiations for the release of a ten-year-old boy. His name is Alexander ‘Sasha’ Bobkov. He was kidnapped on his way to school in Hampstead at around eight thirty yesterday morning.’
‘I assume we’re talking Russian.’
‘Mixed. His father, Andrei Bobkov, was married and is now separated from Tracey Anne Dunsdon. The boy lives with his mother in Netherhall Gardens and attends Northwest International School, which is down the end of the street.
‘It’s only just come to light that for the last few years the boy has been getting himself up and out of bed every morning, dressing himself, making his bed and his own breakfast and going to school on his own. I know it’s only down the end of the road but you know what parents are like these days.’
‘So what’s wrong with the mother?’
‘Alcoholic.’
‘And the kid’s been hiding that from the world?’ said Mercy. ‘Where’s the father in all this?’
‘Until yesterday he didn’t know how far gone she was. When the boy didn’t show for school they called the mother. Tracey was incomprehensible. Someone from the school went to the house, couldn’t gain entry. The father was called. He had keys. They went in. Tracey was in her nightie on the living-room floor, surrounded by bottles, with the telly going. Her bed had been slept in so they think the call woke her and she’d gone straight back to the booze. The living room and bedroom were a tip. The rest of the house is unused except the boy’s room, which was described as “heartbreakingly neat and tidy”.
Bobkov senior was stunned to find this state of affairs, but because he is who he is he reckons his son’s disappearance has nothing to do with the chaos at home.’
‘So who is he?’
‘We’re getting to that. The school told him to call the police and report the boy missing, but Bobkov can go one better than that. He has a special number which puts him in touch with all sorts of people—the intelligence services, the Home and Foreign Offices—you name it. The police are round there in fifteen minutes treating it like an ordinary disappearance to start with. A bit later on a “close friend” of Bobkov’s turns up. An English guy, businessman, speaks fluent Russian and is Bobkov’s chess partner in London. His name is James Kidd.’
‘And what’s he? A spook, or something like it?’ said Mercy.
‘It’s not meant to be quite that obvious, and we don’t know, but we assume. What we do know about Andrei Bobkov is that he’s an old friend of Alexander Tereshchenko, and we’re talking proper close friend. Bobkov named his son after him.’
‘Are we talking about the same Alexander Tereshchenko who fled Moscow, came to London, made all sorts of uncomfortable revelations about the Russian government’s involvement in the Moscow apartment bombings, the Beslan school hostage debacle, the Russian mafia and the assassination of crusading journalists. And who then had a tea party in the Millennium Hotel where two of his old FSB mates stirred in something a lot more radioactive than two sugars?’
‘Yes, that Alexander Tereshchenko. Bobkov and Tereshchenko were in the FSB together. Bobkov left the security service before it got really ugly while Tereshchenko did some time in prison for giving an unauthorised press conference about FSB activities. On his release in 2000 Tereshchenko came to London with his wife and son and has lived here ever since. Meanwhile Bobkov got a job in the Russian oil and gas company Gazprom, before moving out in 2001 and setting up his own business. He now trades in chemical gases from an office in London. In 2002 Bobkov married Tracey and their son was born later that same year. Tereshchenko was at the christening. In 2006 Bobkov was graveside in Highgate cemetery when they lowered Tereshchenko’s sealed coffin into the ground.’
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