Revenger (30 page)

There was a forced, fake cough from behind Keane’s left ear. She turned to find a uniformed WPC holding out a piece of
A4
paper on which a grainy photograph had been printed.

‘What’s that?’ Keane asked.

‘It came in a few minutes ago with a covering note that said this was a picture of the Second Man, taken shortly before four a.m.’ The WPC handed the piece of paper to Keane and went on: ‘As you can see, he’s entering a building. And you’re not going to believe it, ma’am, but it’s less than half a mile from here.’

‘Do we know who sent it?’

‘No, it was an email attachment from a Hotmail account. The sender’s name was just a jumble of numbers and names.’

‘Get the tech people to trace who it belongs to and where it was sent from. Tell them it’s their top priority.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Keane got straight on to her boss, Commander Stamford, to discuss the best way to handle the situation. There was absolutely no time to waste. Both leads had to be followed up as soon as possible. The suspect was presumed to be carrying the weapon taken from the armed officer at St Thomas’ Hospital. Since there was a possibility that he could be at either the hotel or the apartment block, both operations would require support from SCO19, the Met’s Specialist Firearms Command, the London equivalent to an American SWAT unit.

Still, they had to exercise extreme caution. As Stamford pointed out, ‘Wherever he is, there are going to be people about. So we can’t just go charging after him, guns blazing. We don’t want another slaughter on our hands.’

Keane was landed with the task of organizing a mission that was fast, heavily armed and, if necessary, violent, whilst making sure that the full requirements of health and safety, in terms of both the public and police personnel, were fully observed. And she still hadn’t managed to finish her toast.

Celina Novak didn’t give a damn about anybody’s safety apart from her own. If the completion of a mission involved collateral damage, so be it. As she set herself in the optimum position to take the shot
when
the moment came, she did not care how many bullets hit the wrong people, just so long as one of them took out Samuel Carver.

And when he was dealt with she would turn her attention to her dear friend and former comrade, Alexandra.

Robbie Bell hammered out a press release. It was headlined, ‘Mark Adams MP, Leader of the United People’s Party, Leads Police to Second Man Suspect.’

Beneath that the text read,

At approximately 7.30 a.m. this morning, a member of Mark Adams’s staff contacted the Metropolitan Police on his behalf to provide information as to the possible identity and whereabouts of the so-called Second Man suspect in the Lion Market Massacre.

Mr Adams believes that he encountered the suspect shortly after his triumphant and mould-breaking speech at the O2 Arena last night.

He will be giving a press conference at 10.00 a.m. at the headquarters of the United People’s Party, Shepherd’s Bush Road, London W6. Accredited media only.

He emailed the release to his entire address book, tweeted it, made it the morning’s status update on the party’s Facebook page and his own, and blogged it on the party’s official website.

Ten minutes later he was frantically calling every staff member who wasn’t already in work to get their arses into the office immediately, or the next thing they’d get from him would be their P45. The party office had a conference room with a lectern and UPP backdrop at one end that was perfectly adequate for most media briefings. But this was different.

‘I think we may have to find somewhere bigger for your press call,’ Bell told Mark Adams. ‘Like the Hammersmith Apollo.’

70

ALIX HAD FLOWN
in from Washington DC barely forty-eight hours earlier. Her body was still on American East Coast time, the suite’s bedroom curtains were heavy and the double-glazing kept out all the street noise. What with one thing and another it was past eight by the time she woke up.

It took her a second to register that Carver wasn’t lying beside her in the bed, and another to remember why. He had gone. She might not see him again for months, if she ever saw him at all. And meanwhile she was feeling wretched with morning sickness.

She turned on her phone and listened to Carver’s message. He was talking about Plan B but she didn’t get it at first. Her mind was so overwhelmed by what was happening to her body that she couldn’t quite focus on the world at large. Then she remembered what Carver had told her last night. She switched on the TV and flicked through the news channels. Every single one of them was covering what they were calling the Lion Market Massacre. Until then she hadn’t grasped the reality of what Carver had been talking about: she’d seen it all in terms of his pain and confusion. She’d
had
no concept of the scale or horror of it all. And then she saw the picture of him come up on the screen and knew that she couldn’t afford to be a helpless pregnant woman for a single second.

If the police knew about Carver, then they would surely know where he was staying. How long would it be before they arrived? Not long, surely.

She needed to get out. But she couldn’t just run, thoughtlessly. First she had to get dressed: practical clothes that would allow her to move fast and if necessary defend herself. Then she needed her passport, wallet and laptop: there were too many leads to Carver on that to let it anywhere near the police.

The night she’d met Carver he’d given her precisely sixty seconds to change, grab her possessions and get out of an apartment in Paris before the whole place blew up. She made allowances for the passing years and gave herself ninety seconds this time. She was already dressed and piling her possessions into her tote bag when the phone rang.

Keane’s car was no more than a minute from the hotel, siren blaring and lights flashing, driving other traffic before it as it raced towards its destination. She was talking to the hotel security manager.

‘We have key-card confirmation that Mrs Vermulen’s companion exited the hotel at one twenty this morning. We have not seen any sign of him since, nor has his key been used to re-enter the hotel, so we must assume that he has not returned. Mrs Vermulen has not left the room since she returned to it shortly before midnight.’

Keane thanked him for the information and passed it on to the SCO19 officer who would be leading the active phase of the operation. It looked as though they would, once again, fail to capture their prey. But her frustration was mixed with a certain relief: a standoff between armed police and a dangerous man in a crowded hotel was a potential recipe for disaster.

‘We have no reason to believe that Mrs Vermulen is armed or likely to pose any threat,’ she said. ‘So we need to show restraint. She’s a US citizen with influential contacts in Washington – that’s
why
Adams wanted to hire her. We don’t want a diplomatic incident on our hands.’

‘I still have to go in hard,’ the officer said. ‘If there’s any chance at all that chummy’s there, I can’t afford not to.’

‘Fine . . . but I don’t want that woman to get so much as a torn fingernail if he isn’t.’

The officer didn’t reply. He was too busy ordering his men out of their vehicles.

‘We’ve got the green light. Go, go, go!’

71

CARVER WAS STILL
asleep when a police driver in a hurry, blocked by drivers who refused to clear a path for him, turned on the siren he had hitherto kept silent. It was only a short blast – five seconds, maybe: ten at most – and the driver killed it the moment that the first fractional gap appeared in the traffic in front of him, but it was all the alarm clock Carver needed. As he woke he was already processing the subconscious awareness that the noise had been getting closer. Seconds later he learned something else: the reason that the driver had turned on his siren was that he’d been left behind by his mates.

The MI6 flat was located on the top floor – the third – of a low-rise, redbrick development, a mix of flats and small terraced houses arranged in a rectangle around a central courtyard. The only way in by car was through an arched entrance. The bedroom was directly above the arch.

Carver heard the sound of an engine passing beneath him through the arch and stopping in the courtyard. Blue lights flashing thirty-five feet below danced across the bedroom ceiling. He could
hear
men piling out on to the tarmac, the sound of pounding on the outside door and a voice shouting, ‘Police! Open up!’ Lights were being turned on in windows all around the courtyard.

Downstairs the police crashed an Enforcer battering ram, otherwise known as a ‘big key’ into the outside door. When they smashed through that, they would have six short flights of stairs and the door to the apartment itself to deal with.

Now they were on the stairs.

Carver didn’t rush. He picked up his gun, walked out of the bedroom, turned right and went into the open-plan kitchen and living area where he’d been working earlier. There were windows either side of the room, facing towards the courtyard on one side and the slip road down to the entrance on the other. The courtyard was filled with police vehicles. Carver opened the window on the slip-road side and looked out. God bless the Plod, they’d not left anyone to keep watch from the road. He looked up: no helicopter. Not yet.

There was a crash from the door to the apartment. It had a steel frame and Banham locks top and bottom as well as the regular Yale. It wasn’t going to be broken down without a fight. Whatever the flat lacked in aesthetic appeal it gained in security. It was a safe house, after all.

Which begged the question . . . No, no time to think about that now. Concentrate on the job in hand.

Carver opened the window and climbed out on to the window ledge. A steady drizzle was falling, leaving a slick of water on the glossy white-painted ledge. There were two steel handholds, one above the other, hammered into the brickwork immediately above the window frame. Carver grabbed the cold, wet metal with one hand and used the other to close the window behind him. He pulled himself up: one handhold, then the other. He grabbed hold of the gutter above his head and it twisted a little in his hand, sending a splash of cold rainwater on to his head and down the back of his neck. Carver swung his legs up, scrambled for purchase on the gutter and pulled himself up on to the roof.

Perching low on the slate tiles Carver watched more police vehicles racing down the road towards the apartment block. In a few seconds they would be close enough to see him, even if the first arrivals had not. He made his way across the roof in a crouching, simian lope, turned the corner on to one of the short sides of the rectangle and stopped by the junction between the guttering and a downpipe. Another quick look around. The street below him was empty. Anyone living in the apartment block would have rushed to their windows on the other side of the building, overlooking the courtyard.

The far side of the street, directly opposite him, was dark and lifeless: a new development of luxury townhouses, abandoned half-built when the builders had gone bankrupt. There wasn’t much of a demand for luxury these days. Survival was the best anyone could hope for.

Carver climbed down the drainpipe and crossed the road. The development where he’d been staying had its own basement garage. The only cars left out on the streets were rusting, burned-out wrecks, little different to the ones in Netherton Street, relics of an earlier, long-forgotten civil disturbance.

A chain-link fence surrounded the abandoned construction site, but great holes had been punched in it. Several of the poles had been knocked down. Carver walked unimpeded into the site and then picked up speed, wanting to clear the area as soon as possible. He jogged between the hollow shells of the unfinished buildings, sticking to the shadows, staying alert to any signs of pursuit. The rain eased up a little, the clouds began to part. As he ran, Carver kept turning his head to look behind him, making sure that there was no one on his trail.

The site was littered with unused concrete building blocks. Carver wasn’t watching where he was going. He tripped on one of the blocks, catching his shin painfully on the edge. He uttered a sharp, quickly stifled gasp of pain, lost his balance for a second, half-fell on to the stony ground, stuck a hand out to support himself, and for a second found himself perched like a sprinter rising
from
the starting blocks. His head was up, his eyes looking down the path ahead of him, and at that moment a shaft of sunlight shone through a keyhole of clear sky and glinted off something bright and metallic up ahead.

Carver did not need to be told what that was. Even before the first shot had been fired he was flinging himself to his right, splashing in a puddle as he landed, and rolling towards the gaping empty doorway to one of the unfinished buildings while the gun made the characteristic hammer-tapping-on-metal sound of a suppressed .22 pistol, and bullets ricocheted around him. Somehow he survived unscathed for long enough to reach the shelter of the bare brick walls. He crouched beside a hole where a window should have been and looked out across the site. At first he could see nothing, but then a sudden movement caught the corner of his eye and he turned quickly enough to see the slender black flicker of a female silhouette darting between two buildings, topped by a streaming red mane of red hair.

Novak!

He’d had no idea she was still alive. Alix had told him about her fight with Novak at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, the night that Malachi Zorn had died, but he’d simply assumed that Novak had ended up as one of the unidentifiable bodies lying pulverized in the rubble. More fool him.

Carver scampered to the back of the building, looking for a way out. He was spoiled for choice: there were spaces for French windows and a back door. He got to the doorway, pressed his back against the brick beside it, moved his head fractionally into the opening to give himself a view of the surrounding area and then jerked it back again as the whipcrack of a passing bullet skimmed past his newly shaved scalp.