Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (19 page)

‘Look, I’m really sorry about all this,’ she said, snapping out of her trance as they pulled up outside her flat. ‘It was good of you, Hugo, to take me out tonight. I just . . . I had no idea it was going to end like this.’

‘Don’t even think of apologizing. I’m going to get you through this. Now let’s get you inside and sorted while you figure out who you need to call.’ His eyebrows raised in genuine concern as he steered her up the steps and in through the communal ground-floor doors to the building. They rode up in the lift to the fourth floor in silence. He had never seen her so shaken. Hugo wanted so badly to hug her, to envelop her in his arms and tell
her that everything would be all right, but something told him that probably wouldn’t be the case.

‘Where are your mugs?’ he asked, once she had let them into the flat and he was rooting around in the kitchen.

‘Top cupboard,’ she replied, her voice flat and listless. She excused herself, went into the sitting room and to the desk Luke used, in the corner by the window. She remembered him showing her a plastic card, like a credit card, with a government logo printed on the back. It had a phone number on it, he had told her. She was only to use it in a genuine emergency. She rummaged around in the drawers until she found it and dialled the number printed on the front.

Hugo came in and set down a steaming mug of camomile tea. ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘but I’ve added a tot of whisky. I reckon you need it.’

Elise flashed him a smile. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and nearly called him ‘babes’. Then she held up her hand. Someone was answering the phone.

Forty-five minutes later the door buzzer rang and she moved to get up, but Hugo put his hand gently on hers. ‘Let me get this,’ he insisted. He opened the door to a rather plain-looking woman in a raincoat. She was carrying an umbrella.

‘Can I help you?’ Hugo enquired politely.

‘I’m Denise Wilcox, Joint Family Liaison Team. I’ve been sent over from, er, Vauxhall. Is this the residence of Miss Mayhew?’

‘It certainly is,’ replied Hugo, opening the door wide and stepping aside to let her in. ‘She’s just through there on the sofa.’

Denise Wilcox went into the sitting room and sat down next to Elise, turning her back to Hugo. She was kind, she was sympathetic, and she had absolutely no information about Luke. But there was a procedure to follow when anyone from the Service was kidnapped and she was going through the motions of it now.

‘I’ve been asked to come here,’ she began, ‘by your boyfriend’s employers. You do know who they are?’ Denise Wilcox looked meaningfully at Elise as she asked. Elise nodded.

‘I do have to check,’ continued her visitor. ‘It was you who
alerted them this evening?’ She reached for a notebook and glanced quickly through the details she had been given.

‘Yes,’ replied Elise, impatient now. Something about the woman didn’t inspire her with confidence.

‘So, Eleanor—’

‘Elise.’

‘So, Elise,’ she checked her notes again, ‘you did the right thing. Now, you’ll appreciate there was a good deal of concern after you made that call.’ She looked up at Hugo, who was standing in the doorway, not sure what to do with himself. ‘Is this gentleman your next of kin?’ she asked.

‘Hugo? No, he’s a friend. He’s been very kind tonight.’

‘I see.’ Wilcox smiled up at him. ‘It’s probably all right for him to go now. I’ll be staying here tonight and we have a few things to discuss, in private, as it were.’

‘Oh, right. Yes, of course.’ Elise’s voice was distant and mechanical, as if all of this was happening to someone else. She was still finding it hard to get Luke’s scream out of her head. Hugo took his cue and came over to give her a peck on the cheek, then saw himself out, closing the door gently behind him.

‘OK,’ continued Denise Wilcox when he had gone. ‘We’ll have to keep your mobile on the whole time, I’m afraid, in case they call again. If and when they do, we need you to get them to call the landline here in the flat. That makes it easier for us to track and record what’s being said.’

‘But what if I’m at work?’ asked Elise.

‘I don’t think you’ll be going anywhere until this is resolved. You’ll have to let your employers know in the morning. Say it’s a family emergency, nothing more. We don’t want this getting out. What matters now is that we get Luke back unharmed. That’s the outcome we’re all working for.’

Elise studied her. ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said.

‘Please. I’m here to help.’

‘Have you worked on a lot of kidnap cases? I hope you don’t mind my asking, it’s just this is pretty unsettling for me and . . .’ Her voice trailed away.

‘Well, we cover them in training, of course,’ replied Wilcox, ‘but no, I suppose you’re my first. I’m currently on secondment to Vauxhall Cross. I actually work for the other lot, down in Cheltenham. GCHQ. Mostly I’m dealing with traffic accidents and breathalysers.’

Elise nodded. A thought occurred to her. ‘But you know where Luke is, right? I mean you know which country and you’ve got some idea where that call came from?’

Wilcox hesitated, unsure of just how much she should say. ‘I believe the people who need to be aware of that do know, yes,’ she replied.

‘Can you at least tell me which country he’s in?’

‘I’m sorry, but I’m not authorized to tell you that.’

Elise was tempted to say that there was not a lot of point to her visit if she had so little to tell her. But she was tired now, so very tired, so she helped the woman make up a bed on the sofa, then went to her room. On Wilcox’s suggestion she swallowed a sleeping tablet and eventually drifted off.

She slept fitfully, passing from one dream to another. In the one she remembered when she woke up the next morning they were Nordic skiing, she and Luke, striding through forests of Norwegian firs on thin, pointed skis that cut parallel grooves in crisp snow. The low Scandinavian sun cast long shadows and she laughed as she tried to push him over. In her dream, Luke was by her side and Elise, asleep in her bed, was happy.

ELISE HAD NO
idea of the train of events triggered by her single phone call to that emergency number at Vauxhall Cross. All through the night and into the morning there was a frenzy of coded electronic activity criss-crossing the Atlantic, between VX and SIS’s Bogotá station. Frantic requests for help went to Washington, to the CIA at Langley, Virginia, and to the headquarters of America’s giant eavesdropping organization, the NSA, at Fort Meade in Maryland. SIS had lost their second man in South America in less than two weeks, and now they were in a race against time to find him, while he was still alive.

Sid Khan had been in Ronnie Scott’s jazz club when he had got the call. Working late, day after day, it was unlike him to give himself a night off, but this was special: it was his brother’s birthday, and they had come to Soho to listen to some authentic Cuban jazz. Stepping outside to take the call on his mobile from the night duty officer, the words in his ear sent a chill down his spine. ‘Carlton’s been taken. The narcos have got him.’

Within thirty minutes Khan was back at his desk at Vauxhall Cross and, despite the late hour, the Chief was demanding answers. Who authorized Carlton’s mission? Why wasn’t John Friend with him? And, most pressingly, what were they doing to get him out? Khan rubbed his palms over his face. To lose one intelligence officer on active duty in Colombia was unfortunate.
But to lose a second? And then there was the unknown device, the weapon to which Luke had alerted them. He was supposed to be giving a proper handover briefing to the relief team Khan had sent out to Colombia. Instead Luke had become the problem. Khan kicked himself for not reeling him in sooner. Well, now it was too late and the Service’s whole South American operation looked like it was starting to unravel.

Shortly before midnight Khan sat down with Craig Dalziel, head of Agent Handling. They were in Khan’s office, each with a mug of Tetley’s tea beside them. Distracted by the business at hand, neither had bothered to remove the teabag. Khan handed him a single-page memo from Clements, now acting head of the station in Bogotá. ‘This just came in,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look good.’

Dalziel started reading then looked up sharply at Khan. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘It was a massacre! They killed everyone there. All those policemen dead.’

‘Everyone except, it seems, our man Carlton,’ replied Khan. ‘They’ll be keeping him somewhere they think we won’t find him. And they’ll be torturing him – we know that from the phone call his girlfriend got. They’ll be doing it first for information, and then for fun.’

‘Christ!’ repeated Dalziel, under his breath.

‘NSA are doing a surge operation on all comms in the area where he was taken,’ continued Khan, ‘but it’s coming up blank so far. The narcos aren’t stupid – they cleared out pretty fast after the executions. Nobody left in that farmhouse but kitchen staff and cleaners. The Colombian military have been through on a sweep and found nothing but bloodstains and spent cartridge cases.’

‘Any word from Tradewind?’ asked Dalziel.

‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ replied Khan, picking up his tea and blowing on it to cool it.

‘Nothing.’ Dalziel had just noticed the teabag floating in his mug and was looking for somewhere to dump it. ‘At least, not yet. The transmissions are infrequent, as you know. There’s no knowing when the next chance will come up.’

‘Well, can we fire off a request anyway?’ said Khan. ‘See if the agent has any clue where Carlton’s been taken? If García’s people are holding him there must be gossip, surely.’

‘We can but try,’ said Dalziel, getting to his feet. He still hadn’t found anywhere to put his teabag and Khan obviously hadn’t noticed so he left the mug on his desk. ‘Let’s stay closely in touch,’ he said, and left.

There was a sofa in Khan’s office and he went over to it now, plumped up a couple of cushions, lay down, stretched out his legs and closed his eyes. Two hours later the phone on his desk purred and he rolled off the sofa to answer it. It was the night duty officer again, with more bad news, this time putting through a call from the substantial SIS station in Washington DC. It seemed the NSA had managed to triangulate the approximate origin of the call Elise had taken in the restaurant barely five hours ago. The NSA analysts had pinned it down to a town called Buenaventura on Colombia’s Pacific coast. The SIS man in Washington added, rather unhelpfully, that Buenaventura was considered to be the most lawless and dangerous city in the whole country, if not the whole of South America.

Khan remembered that name from Luke’s briefing to the board on the morning after Benton’s body had been discovered. He went over to his computer and pulled up the most recent security advisory on it. ‘Parts of this port city,’ it read, ‘are no-go zones even for Colombian security forces. UK government staff advised to avoid at all times. Entry into Buenaventura only to be undertaken in extremis and with reinforced security envelope.’

From the river outside his window he heard a long, mournful blast on a horn. A barge passing by. Right now, Khan wished he was on it.

THE MAN STOOD
over Luke and leered into his face. ‘Do you know why they call this the Chop House?’ he asked. Luke looked up through his unswollen eye and saw one of García’s men swaying, swigging from a beer bottle. Behind him, packing cases, lots of them, were stacked on top of each other in untidy piles. They appeared to be in some kind of warehouse.

‘No?’ continued the man with the beer.

Luke knew the answer but said nothing. He was trying not to think about it, but the screams he had heard from beyond the packing cases had left little to his imagination. The pain in his own left foot was still excruciating from where they had taken the drill to him. The last thing he remembered, after they had smuggled him into the place and strapped him down, was a man holding a mobile phone up to his face. It was his. Then the drill was biting into his flesh, churning through skin and sinew, spraying everyone with blood. He had blacked out then and he still didn’t know who had been at the other end of the phone. He just prayed it wasn’t Elise.

‘So, let me give you a clue as to why they call it the Chop House,’ said Beer Bottle. He wasn’t going to let this one go. Luke strained his head to look round at a circle of men, all narco thugs, standing there watching, with their Uzis, their MAC-10s and their stolen M4 assault rifles. They wore filthy ragged surf shorts
mostly, and stained white singlets, the tropical coastal heat coating their dark, muscled skin in a constant, glistening sheen of sweat. He was struck by how young they seemed, and how desperate. Some had wild, staring eyes, tinged with pink. How many were hooked on some toxic drug?

Luke could see Beer Bottle ambling slowly to a corner of the room, then selecting something. From where Luke lay, strapped tightly to a hospital gurney, he couldn’t make out what the man was doing but he had an inkling. And for the first time he felt real fear.

The man returned with a sickly smile, displaying prematurely yellowed teeth. He must have discarded his bottle somewhere in the corner, because now he was using both hands to carry something else. ‘So,’ he said, presenting his burden to Luke as if it were a gift. ‘Here is one we made earlier.’ He winked at the men standing around watching and then, with a slight heave of his wiry frame, he tossed something wet and heavy onto Luke’s chest.

They say that the adult human eye can focus clearly on an object as close as eleven centimetres away but that the distance grows longer with age. Luke had good eyesight, even with one eye swollen shut from the beating, and he had no difficulty in making out what had been dumped on top of him. It was a human arm, severed high above the elbow, the skin thick with black hair, the blood still only half congealed, the jagged white bone sticking out from where it should have joined a man’s shoulder. The lifeless hand was reaching out towards his face, as if the broken fingernails were scrabbling for purchase on his chest. He struggled to suppress the urge to vomit. Who the arm had belonged to, he had no idea, probably some nameless gangster on the losing side of a narco turf war. This was Buenaventura’s calling card: its ‘chop houses’ were the rat-infested sheds down by the waterside where rival gangs lopped limbs off their living victims, before killing them.