by PETE DAVIES
“Sam, I am so sorry. I will be with you very soon,” said Lori, who had just had the call from the police control room supervisor. “I know you must be angry and upset, but please, please, do not do anything until I get there.”
Again, her calming voice. He looked at the two officers and forced a smile and allowed his body to relax and he saw them take their hands off their side arms. He didn’t know what he had been about to do and that worried him. ‘Was he going to hit them? Really? What the hell good would that do?’
*****
Lori looked at Greg. They had just been about to say goodnight when she got the call. She yelled at him to go with her as she ran to her car.
“They’ve taken Anna!”
“What? Who? The Armenians?”
“Yes, I think so. Sam’s there now. I don’t know what’s happened yet, but I’ll find out soon enough,” said Lori.
It only took ten minutes to get to the villa. On the way Greg rang Terri and broke the news and got her to find out where Tommy and Simon were. No leads, no descriptions. Just keep watching and see if anything stands out.
The police officers at the villa knew they had screwed up and badly. This wasn’t the time for reading them the riot act. Instead Garcia got them to tell her everything they could about what had happened. She was surprised that they had only been knocked out, one with a punch and the other with a smack on the head with a gun. Surprised in as much that kidnapping was a high stakes crime, therefore this suggested those responsible had clearly taken into account the likely rebound effect if they had seriously injured, or even killed the officers. Neither of the officers had seen the second offender and only the officer in the passenger seat had seen the one who had been acting like a drunk.
She could see what had happened. The officers had come on at the shift change and hadn’t picked up on the seriousness of what they were dealing with. It had happened before and would no doubt happen again and she needed to take responsibility if the message hadn’t been clear enough. But all of this would have to wait for the inevitable debrief when, as often was the case, the bosses would be looking for a scapegoat to hang out to dry. What she needed now was to know what one of the kidnappers looked like. She sent the one who had seen the ‘drunk’ back to headquarters and got Nino to find a police artist and get them back into the office and working on an image. This was too urgent to wait till the morning. She needed this picture out and about as soon as possible.
She had asked for and been given the lead on the investigation. She got it, primarily because of the connection with what she was already looking at, but this was also the second high profile incident involving British ex-pats in a week and the local politicos would be looking to allay blame. Therefore off-loading it to the GEO made sense to the local police command team, so it came with a warning that everything rested on her shoulders if things did not go well.
Nino was already setting up a Kidnap Control Room. Kidnaps were ugly things to deal with, but usually the ransom was linked to money or the release of someone else. Garcia suspected that this was a strong-arm intimidation tactic by the Armenian boss, Sonny Sargsyan. But why would he think she would back off? As she thought through what had happened, it occurred to her that Sonny may be focusing on Sam and he was the one he wanted to back off.
“Sam, I think Sonny thinks you are somehow involved in the MacDonald investigation,” said Lori.
“What are you thinking?” said Sam.
“You told him you were a Met cop when we were playing our little charade at his club. He might be thinking that you are out here on some sort of Met investigation and he wants to scare you off.”
“How would that benefit him?” said Sam.
“He knows I haven’t been able to make much progress so far and so he might be thinking he can deal with any threat I can offer. We can’t find the guy who stole the van in the MacDonald murder, so there’s probably a good chance Sonny has sent him off somewhere out of the way, or maybe even got rid of him altogether – that way we never find him and then can’t connect Sonny to the murder,” said Lori.
Greg hadn’t said anything so far. Lori had been talking with Sam as the victim’s son, so she needed to get on and do her job. The first hour of any serious criminal offence like kidnap was really important. Called the Golden Hour, it was a critical time where law enforcement teams could get things very right or very wrong, so he didn’t need to be getting in her way. He saw the way she went about her business and was impressed. Sam was also listening to her. She was good, very good at her job. Sam, like Lori, was an experienced SIO, a Senior Investigating Officer. He had heard her set the overarching investigative strategy and it was sound: to ensure the safety of Anna, secure and gather evidence to the crime and to find and arrest the offenders. She had put this out over the radio, so there would be a recording of the transmission that gave the whole team absolute clarity of what was expected and in what priority.
Greg said, “Sam, your mother was bloody good at what she did. I know it’s a long time ago and she’s a few years older now, but I don’t think she would have forgotten how to deal with something like this. You probably don’t know this, but before I worked with her, she was taken prisoner during an operation and by all accounts she handled everything they threw at her and came out of it in one piece when she was released. I only say this because I want you to know she is some tough cookie.”
Sam looked at him and nodded a thank you. He still worried that it was a long time since she had been in the spy game and to him, she was his sixty-nine year old mum who some bastards had taken as a means of getting to him.
“You know that conversation we had before Greg?”
Greg nodded, “You ready now?”
“Yes,” said Sam quietly.
Lori looked at Sam and then at Greg. “Now listen to me guys. I do not need you two, or presumably three with Terri, running around the island in some sort of vigilante action group.”
Greg started to try to say something, but she held up her hand.
“No, I’m serious on this. Do not get in my way. I will keep you completely in the loop and I’m not completely stupid, so if I think there’s anything you can do that maybe I can’t, then I will tell you. Do you understand?”
Greg and Sam looked at each other. They knew she was right and Sam would be saying exactly the same if he was in her shoes. It didn’t make it any easier to hear though, although they both heard the potential was there to help in some way that she seemed to be hinting at. She stood waiting for their acknowledgement.
“Yes, agreed,” said Sam.
“Greg?”
“Yes, yes, of course, I was just thinking how we might start helping,” said Greg with a smile.
She had needed to say it and she knew they probably expected her to say it as well. Whether or not they took any notice of her? She very much doubted it.
SEVENTEEN
The sweet taste of the chloroform was still in her head as she woke the first time. She lay still, just sensing her environment and mentally checking her body for injury. Nothing.
She was lying down on her back on a bed with her hands bound in front of her. Better than behind her she thought and far more comfortable. Her feet were free, so she made the assumption that her kidnappers, and she guessed it must be the Armenians, weren’t experienced in kidnapping. She knew that you didn’t want your victim having the freedom to move around. You wanted total control of them. From there, kidnappers could then relax things if the victim became compliant. She thought back to a different time. ‘You used to train this stuff. So come on think!’
She started again. This time working methodically through each of her senses. She had done taste with the chloroform, so she took time to work through what she could see, hear, smell and feel.
She looked around the room. It was about ten foot by twelve. One bed, a single with what felt like a light duvet, the sort you would have for summer. Difficult to see anything below her eye line because
of the lack of light. There was a window. It was small. Too small for anyone to crawl through. She looked again squinting through the darkness trying to get her eyes to adjust. She could just make out what looked like a bar or a rod running vertically down the centre of the window, so no chance of getting out of there. The door was opposite the bed. No niceties like a bedside table or toilet. That might be useful if she needed to ask to go to the toilet unless they’d left a bowl, but she couldn’t see one. She knew that kidnappers didn’t usually like their victims to have no toilet options at all. If they were forced to go in the corner of the room the smell soon became abhorrent in the rest of the premises, directly impacting on the kidnappers. Therefore, it was far easier to give them a bowl or just take them to a toilet, especially for someone like Anna who posed a low threat. She paused for a moment and realised she still felt tired or maybe it was the lingering effects of the chloroform. She fell asleep again.
*****
She was usually good at estimating the time when she woke, but her head was fuzzy. She lay there listening. At first it seemed quiet. No apparent traffic noise, but then she heard something. It seemed quite far away, a car or maybe a truck because the road noise was louder. It was dark in the room and she could see through a small window that it was dark outside, so presumably the road noise was echoing with the night air. It was loud enough to think that the window must be at least slightly open. She listened again. Maybe a radio or television. No talking or dogs barking. Kidnappers didn’t all sleep at once and generally they had a TV to take away the boredom if they weren’t the ones on watch.
She eased herself off the bed. She wasn’t wearing any shoes as she had been in bed when they had grabbed her. However, she was a runner and so her feet were pretty tough. She felt the floor with her toes. Some sort of tiling. That suggested she was maybe in a finca or something like that, where they would have used tiles on the floor. She could just see out of the window if she stood on her toes. First thing she noticed was the air, so the window was slightly open. Looking out, she saw no other buildings, but to her right, she could see a corner of the rear of a car. She wasn’t sure what it was. It didn’t look to have any slope, so perhaps it was a saloon and in this light, it looked dark in colour. Was it the dark coloured BMW Bill had seen? She went back to her bed. The level of darkness told her that it was still the middle of the night and she should try to sleep. ‘Remember, you’ve done this before. Relax your breathing and deal with things in the morning.’ Luis had always marvelled at how she managed to get herself off to sleep so easily. It had been something she had trained herself to do when she was in the Service as she never knew when she might get her next opportunity to sleep. She smiled and closed her eyes, ‘Oh my darling Luis, at least I haven’t got you worrying about me.’
*****
Alex had tried a few times to ring Sonny but hadn’t got a reply. He knew where he was. He was with the Indian woman at the Glòria, so he probably shouldn’t try to disturb him anymore he thought to himself. He sent a text. ‘It’s done’ and about an hour later he got the call back from Sonny.
“Any problems?”
“No. Simple in and out job and no issues with the cops,” said Alex.
“Well done Alex. We’ll leave them all stewing until the morning and then see how co-operative Señora Martínez is when she wakes up,” said Sonny.
He put the phone down and turned back to look at Jaz.
“Now where were we?”
*****
Lori was still busy going through the actions for her initial investigative plan with her team. Greg and Sam left her to it and went through to the kitchen and Sam made some coffee, before leaving the cops some space in there and going through to the family dining room.
“I’ve dealt with a fair number of these things Greg, but I can honestly say I now know what it’s like for the families involved and it’s a damn site worse than I ever imagined,” said Sam.
“I get that, but Anna, your mum, is going to need you to be right on your game Sam. We need to think through what we can do to support Lori. I think we can both see that she’s got everything in hand here, but there’s going to be other stuff that we can do that might be beyond the police’s operating parameters.”
“What are you thinking?” said Sam.
“Sonny is the key here. But if we, and I include Lori in this, if we can’t find out where they are holding Anna, then we’re screwed,” said Greg.
Sam looked at him. “So, instead of going after Sonny, you’re thinking we go for the snake’s head? Go for Sergei Grigoryan?”
Just at that moment Lori came into the room. “Ah, found you.” She stopped and looked at them. “What are you up to? You were talking about something and I have specifically told you to do nothing to get in the way of what I am trying to do.”
She was, well, not angry, but definitely annoyed. They had agreed not to do anything and the first minute her back is turned, she finds them plotting something.
“It’s just an idea,” said Greg. “But I promise we won’t act until we have spoken to you. We won’t get in your way and we’ll just scope things out for the time being.”
This was probably the best she was going to get from them, so she nodded and then said, “Sam, can we have your phone for a while? There’s a good chance they will ring you and I want to be able to patch any calls through to the control set-up to record the conversations and try to track the phone they are using. And before you say anything, I know there’s only a slim chance of tracking any phone calls in, but it’s a Standard Operating Procedure as you well know.”
“Yes that’s no problem Lori and I’ve seen how you have been running things and I am very reassured, so thank you,” said Sam.
He knew the SOP and yes, it was only a slight chance, but it was vitally important to make sure you covered the basics. He had seen too many mistakes made when SIOs hadn’t done this in the Golden Hour and they had bitterly regretted it later. He handed her the phone and she left them, closing the door behind her.
As soon as the door closed Greg rang Terri. She had Tommy and Simon walking the streets in Palma, doing the rounds in the clubs watching for any suspicious activity and taking pictures of anyone who looked like Armenian Security and any cars they were using. They hadn’t seen any dark blue BMWs that seemed to be connected to the gang, but they had seen Sonny’s black Porsche Cayenne parked up close to one of the clubs with the driver sat in it. He was still there an hour later and so it looked like he was waiting for someone, presumably Sonny.
“The guys need a tactical decision on whether to deploy the tracker on the Porsche Dad. There’s a risk they may be surveillance conscious but if they are, we haven’t seen any evidence that they scan the cars before they leave the clubs. That suggests they aren’t scanning, as they wouldn’t wait till they got back to their safe house before checking. Worst-case scenario? Two possibilities if they find it. One is low risk and Sonny just gets a little bit more paranoid but the second one is they think it is Sam or the police trying to find Anna. I reckon we go for it, if only because it would be exactly what they’d think the police would try to do.”
Greg was thinking about the possible outcomes for Anna. He needed to detach himself from the emotions. ‘Easier said than done,’ he thought.
“You’re right Terri. Even if they find it, Sonny is only going to expect the police to have done something like this. If he was that surveillance conscious he would have dumped the Porsche by now but I think he’s the sort of guy who likes being seen out and about in it,” said Greg. “Just so you know, I won’t tell Lori what we’re doing. Best she doesn’t know I think.”
“You know I don’t usually question you Dad, but what happened to transparency and trust? What’s she going to think if she finds out?” said Terri.
“I knew there was a reason I asked you to join the firm. We need one sensible head running the show. You’ve got a really good point there, so here’s what we’ll do. Get the guys to fit t
he tracker on his Porsche if they can and then text me. I can then break the news as a fait accompli.”
“Reckon she’ll fall for that?” said Terri.
“Not in a million years,” laughed Greg out loud, making Sam look at him.
“I’ll get it done,” said Terri, “and then I’ll get back to you.”
“Who won’t do what in a million years?” said Sam.
“I might as well tell you now. We’re trying to get a tracker on Sonny’s Porsche,” said Greg.
“And you’re not asking Lori first?”
“Do you think she’d go for it?” said Greg.
“No, neither would I in her shoes. But I’m not, so I think it’s a bloody good idea, both to fit it and not to ask her first,” said Sam.
Terri was still on the phone and had been listening to them.
“Okay, so that’s Sam on board. I’ll get it done and then come and pick you up.”
*****