Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (29 page)

‘
Pescadores
,’ the driver explained to the policeman. ‘Fishermen. We are fishermen.’

‘Could I see some identification please?’

The driver turned to his passenger, the man with the gold tooth, who passed over two valid British driving licences. The policeman turned the pink laminated cards over in his hand, checking the ID photos against the two men in the front of the van.

‘So what might you be up to at this time of night?’ he asked. ‘Could one of you step out of the vehicle and open the rear doors.’ It wasn’t a question.

Gold Tooth smiled obligingly, unbuckled his seatbelt, got down from the van and walked round to the back. After a brief fumble with some keys he unlocked the rear doors, pulled them open and stood back to let the policeman shine his torch where he wanted. Neatly stacked, all the way from floor to roof, were plastic crates of fish packed in ice. The policeman tugged at one, pulling it out just far enough to see the silvery forms that glittered and sparkled in his torchbeam. All seemed to be in order. His radio crackled into life and he moved away to take the call as Gold Tooth stood patiently by the open doors of the van.

‘You’d best be on your way,’ said the policeman, when he returned. ‘Don’t fall asleep at the wheel now, will you?’

Gold Tooth returned to his seat in the van. As they resumed their journey, turning left towards Helston, past the clumps of Scots pines and the home of 771 Search & Rescue Wing, where Prince William had served, the two men in the front exchanged a nervous glance and said nothing. That, they both knew, had been way too close for comfort.

From Helston they drove on in silence. After that heart-stopping encounter at Culdrose the men in the van would be extra careful from now on, driving with the saintly obedience of
a nun. They crawled through deserted 20 m.p.h. zones and negotiated empty, darkened roundabouts. Their instructions were simple and they followed them to the letter. Proceed north to Truro, then take the A30 up to Bodmin and on up onto the moor. At Bolventor they were to turn off the dual carriageway, drive under the bridge and proceed to a grey stone inn. The gates to the car park would be locked overnight so they were to carry on to the next layby. When the gates opened at seven a.m. they were to drive to the car park on the left, and head for the furthest corner by the bush that looked like a Christmas tree.

The Jamaica Inn is famous, steeped in the history of contraband changing hands in the dead of night, of deals done on the adjacent moor beneath jagged tors where the mist can hide many things. And as the Colombians drove into the car park, the fog swirled around them, lying low in the troughs and hollows that swept down from Brown Willy, the crag that towers over Bodmin Moor. Visibility was a few metres at most. But through the gloom, the headlights of a parked truck flashed once. It was enough. Five men spilled out of the van, stretching their limbs and stamping their feet in the cold and damp.

‘
Ay, que frío!
’ they complained
.
‘
Esto es lamentable.
’ Some began to compare the weather unfavourably to the home country and the balmy Caribbean heat of Cartagena. But for Gold Tooth, overseeing what was about to take place, the foul weather was exactly what he had hoped for. So late in the season, so early in the morning and on such a miserable day, there should be nobody around to observe them.

Beneath the fir tree in the corner of the car park the two teams made contact, shook hands and embraced. It was a fleeting moment of companionship and human friendship in an otherwise grim endeavour. One by one, the crates of iced fish were removed from the van to reveal the precious cargo: a heavy lead-lined box. Its carrying handles were still in place. It had not been opened since it had left the port of Hungnam in the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, discreetly stowed on the
Maria Esposito
.

It took six of the men twenty minutes to manhandle the box from the van into the small trailer that would be towed behind the truck. The exchange had been made. The first van would be delivered to a recycling depot just outside Bristol and crushed to the size of a suitcase. By the time the gift shop at the Jamaica Inn opened for business, the truck, its trailer and its contents would have vanished into the fog, hurrying north across the moor towards the M5, Bristol and London.

AS THE TRUCK
drove, unnoticed, towards the capital, Elise Mayhew was sitting in a Chelsea pub, racked by doubts. Her relationship with Luke was not in a good place. When she thought about it, which she had a lot recently, things had not been right between them ever since he had taken off for South America. Now the clichés came crowding in. It’s just a blip, she told herself. Every couple has them. Put it in perspective. Your relationship is stronger than this. ‘You two are so good together,’ her friends told her, as she confided her doubts to them. ‘We’d hate to see you split up.’ A big part of her was secretly proud of what Luke did for a living. All he had told her was who he worked for, not what he did or how he did it. She had become adept at covering for him in conversations, telling people he worked for the Foreign Office or ‘some boring part of Whitehall’. She quite enjoyed doing that: it made her feel they were a team. But now, with Luke constantly away, and the glaring absence of any calls from him . . .

‘Four days,’ she told Hugo, as they sat at a table hewn of rustic wood in a Chelsea gastropub. It was the sort of place where the simple single-sheet lunch menu belied the exorbitant prices. Elise glanced at it in dismay. Ballotine of guinea fowl: £28? Assiette de jambon en croute: £23.50? She was glad he was paying.

‘Four days,’ she repeated, holding up four elegant fingers.
‘That’s all I’ve had with Luke this month.’ She knew that Hugo, as an interested party, was probably not the right person to confide in, but she was starting to think of him as a dependable elder brother – a generous one too.

He reached out and topped up her glass of crisp white Gavi. He was a good listener too. ‘Where is he now?’ he asked gently.

Elise pursed her lips. ‘I have absolutely no idea. He seems to have gone completely off the grid again.’ She didn’t know why she was so angry. It was unlike her and already she could feel a pang of guilt at her disloyalty. Luke was the man she loved. She just wished he was more there for her. It was all very well dating a good-looking superman but not if he was going to turn into the Invisible Man every few days. She took another sip of her wine as Hugo changed the subject, but her mind was made up. Something in her relationship with Luke, she resolved, had to change.

If Angela could have heard that conversation she might have insisted Luke take some urgent domestic leave. God knows he had earned it. But at that moment she was standing in a pew at St Laurence’s Church in Scarborough, attending a memorial service for someone who had once been quite special to her. Jeremy Benton, long-serving intelligence officer, fluent Spanish speaker, murdered in the line of duty in Colombia. Even now, in the serene Yorkshire church, with its ancient yew trees and its neatly laid out cemetery, she still couldn’t take in the fact that he had been killed.

She looked down at her hymn sheet and silently mouthed the words to ‘Abide With Me’, then sat down for the eulogy. An old schoolfriend had gone up to the pulpit and was starting to tell the congregation about Benton’s early prowess on the cricket pitch. There would be no mention from anyone, of course, of his past affair with Angela, the brief in-house fling before he was married. It had fizzled out soon after, when he had got his next posting, and they had gone on to pursue their own separate lives.

The words from the pulpit washed over her. Right now her concerns were for Luke and the ongoing operation. Sid Khan was
running it but she was Luke’s immediate boss and felt a strong duty of care towards him. As his line manager she was in two minds whether or not to insist that now was the time to take him off the case. No one, not even a superfit operator like Luke, could keep going at that pace indefinitely, and they had ridden him hard ever since the crisis emerged. Maybe HR had been right: maybe she should have sent him off for that re-evaluation course and spared him the ordeal of a night-time maritime interdiction in the English Channel. But set against that was the harsh reality of the situation they were now in, trying to intercept the still unidentified device.

Only the day before Angela had attended a deeply worrying event: a briefing for the directors at VX by the Counter-proliferation team. WMD were right up there with international terrorism as a top priority for SIS. There were people in that building whose entire working lives were dedicated to stopping terrorists and rogue states acquiring WMD. In the case of North Korea, with its plutonium warheads and its fledgling hydrogen bombs, it was already too late. And now they faced the threat they had always feared most, that of a WMD getting into the hands of a non-state organization, a group with no obvious return address to threaten with retaliation. Against this backdrop, she had no choice when it came to Luke. There was no one else in the Service with quite the same skill set as him. Until they could locate and defuse the weapon there would be no let-up for any of them. Angela knew exactly what Benton would have said – she could almost hear him now, whispering it to her in this old Yorkshire chapel:
Keep your eyes on the prize, girl,
and keep going.

NELSON GARCÍA WAS
in a genial mood. Dressed in nothing but a pair of black silk shorts, a thick fuzz of hair covering his back from the nape of his neck to the cleft of his buttocks, the man they called El Pobrecito lay face down on the bed. Protruding from the back of both of his knees was a pair of ultra-slim needles, so thin that anyone walking in would easily have missed them. The girl leaned over him and, with great care and precision, placed two more acupuncture needles right behind his kneecaps. ‘Meridians,’ she said softly. ‘What I am doing here is all about your meridians. You have fourteen meridian lines inside your body. The Chinese call this one
wei-zhong
. It means “urinary bladder meridian”.’

He grunted, his face resting sideways on the pillow. How did this girl from the village know so much about what went on inside his body? It surely wasn’t natural. Well, it didn’t matter as long as she could fix his problem. As far as his people were concerned, even his closest confidants, like Suarez, she had come to fix an intestinal issue. Three sessions every week, cash in hand, and he was generous because she was the only one he could share his secret with. No one else must know. It would be disastrous for his reputation in the cartel, a big man like him, running a multi-billion-dollar global operation, a man who could choose at the click of his fingers if someone lived or died, and whether it
was a swift or slow and painful end. No, it would not do for them to know that in the last few months El Pobrecito had become impotent.

‘Stay still,’ she commanded. ‘I’m going to place more needles close to your spine.’ The drug-lord did as he was told, a great slab of meat beached on the bed, putty in her hands. ‘This one,’ she continued, ‘is called
shensu
. It reaches the two meridians that run either side of your spine. Like a railway track.’ He laughed, and she placed a warning hand on his shoulder blade. ‘Don’t move,’ she scolded him. ‘This is delicate work and I have no wish to hurt you.’ No one in the cartel could speak to El Pobrecito like that, and Valentina had only been around a few weeks but already he was growing fond of her, in an almost paternal, protective way. The girl from the village, with her nimble fingers, her soft touch and her surprising knowledge of Chinese medicine, was like an island of innocence amid the sea of violence in which he swam. She was careful never to ask him about his business and he respected that. Perhaps she reminded him a little of his sister when they were growing up together in the
barrio,
before she’d married that idiot from Cali and moved away to have his babies.

Twenty minutes later Valentina plucked the needles out, one by one, and laid them carefully in the box with the clasp. ‘
Terminamos
,’ she announced. ‘We’re all done.’

García let out a contented sigh and rolled onto his side, propping his head up with his fist and considering her carefully as she tidied away her things. ‘Really,
chica
, you are
una
artista
with your hands,’ he told her. ‘You are becoming almost a part of
la familia
here. Listen, I have a proposition for you.’ He looked down at his free hand, examining his fingernails. Valentina had slowed her movements to listen to what he was about to say. ‘Why don’t you move in here with us? You can have a room of your own, with a balcony. Would you like that? No more trudging back and forth from the village? No more patting down at the gate from my . . . over-enthusiastic guards?’ García was giving her his most charming smile as he said this but the undertone was clear. This was not an offer, it was an order, and it would not be wise to turn him down.

Valentina tilted her head ever so slightly before she answered. ‘You know I have to get back now,’ she replied. ‘My
papi
will be expecting me. He gets worried if I am late. But . . .’ she gave him a coy smile in return ‘. . . if the kind
señor
is serious, then that would be a most generous offer. I will fetch my things from home tomorrow.’

He was about to tell her they would send a car for her, but someone was approaching on the other side of the door. It was Suarez – he recognized his footfall even before he knocked. After years of working together, you get to know someone’s traits.

‘
Venga
,’ he called. ‘Come in.’

The heavy wooden door swung open, and his security chief came over and spoke quietly to him as Valentina put away the last of her things, folding towels and wiping down surfaces. ‘I have the information you asked for, Patrón,’ he said. He paused, staring meaningfully at the girl. It was in his nature to be suspicious, and the
chica
who had found her way into his boss’s inner sanctum – well, in his view she was still on trial.