Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (3 page)

‘
Madre de Dios!
’ The captain pushed them out of the way. ‘Must I do everything myself?’ He grabbed the body by the shoulder furthest from him and gave it a heave, jumping back just too late as it settled heavily on his polished black boots. ‘
Ayee, mierda!
’ he exclaimed in disgust. The man had soiled himself and a thick rivulet of dried blood had run down his neck from where his ear would have been. It was clear that he had not died peacefully. In their green jungle fatigues the policemen stood in a circle, craning their necks for a better view. ‘Search his pockets, find some ID,’ ordered the captain, reaching for his mobile phone.

From somewhere behind them in the village a dog barked, and over on the horizon, towards the lights of Tumaco, a solitary firework arced into the night sky then puttered out, drifting silently to the ground. In this part of Colombia, corpses turned up in all sorts of places. Hell, thought the captain. This was the sixth that
month. He turned away, dialling the number for the duty sergeant at the fortified hotel they used as their base in town.

‘
Capitán!
’ a conscript called, sounding excited. ‘This
muchacho
is not from here. He is a
gringo
! His name is—’

The captain snatched the maroon booklet out of the man’s hands. Slowly he read aloud, straining to make out the italic script in the torchlight, ‘Her Bree-tannic Ma-jess-ty . . . Sec-re-tary of State . . . requests and requires . . .’ One of the younger policemen coughed and turned the first page of the passport for his captain. There was the dead man’s face staring up at him above a suit and tie, both ears still attached. Benton, Jeremy Maynard. British citizen. Date of birth: 14 January 1969. Sex: M. Place of birth: Scarborough, UK. ‘
Mierda!
’ The captain swore again. This was going to be complicated.

Just over eight kilometres away in a secluded whitewashed bungalow with peeling paint and a purple neon light above the door, Major Humberto Elerzon was starting to enjoy himself. La Casa de Dreams was one of the few consolations he had found in this godforsaken dump of a town. He hated Tumaco and its lousy climate, its ravenous mosquitoes, and its casual capacity for violence nurtured by its close association with the drugs trade. He hated it and always had done, since the first day of his posting – a punishment posting, no question. Tipped for promotion to colonel, he had been a rising star in the corridors of power at Police Headquarters in Bogotá, until that one stupid mistake. It was National Day, fiesta time and maybe he had drunk a little too much, but how could he resist her? When they’d thought no one was looking they had left the party together, raced down the steps to his car and checked into a nearby hotel. The receptionist had recognized her and made the call once they were up in the ‘matrimonial suite’. The major shuddered at the memory. The humiliation, the shame, the embarrassment. All those junior cops standing there, grinning in the doorway, the cameras going off and him in his underpants. How was he supposed to know she was the president’s niece, for Christ’s sake?

So here he was, past forty, his career torpedoed, sentenced to eke out his posting in this far-flung corner of the country, running a provincial police station in one of the most dangerous parts of Colombia. His wife had long since lost all respect for him. In truth, they had never been close, and when he had told her of his posting to this coastal backwater she had flatly refused to leave the cool comfort of Bogotá. He suspected another man was involved but, frankly, he was past caring. He paid her a portion of his monthly salary and sought what comfort he could in the dingy bars and brothels of Tumaco. There was money to be made here, no question about that. He had known people in Customs to retire to Miami on what they had made in this part of Colombia, simply from looking the other way at the right moment. But the men from Internal Affairs would be keeping close tabs on him – they had told him as much, practically spelled out that even his own subordinates would be watching him. He was trapped. Which was why he was thinking of making alternative arrangements.

Major Elerzon did not like to be disturbed when he was being entertained in La Casa de Dreams so when his mobile rang from his jacket on the chair by the window he chose to ignore it. Of far more interest was the magenta bra of the woman in his arms. Rosalita was not her real name but she had been his favourite since his first, exploratory visit. True, they had had a brief falling-out last year when she’d given him an unwelcome dose of crabs, but they had kissed and made up, and now he was turning his attention to the clasp at her back. Bloody mobile! Why wouldn’t it stop ringing? Probably some imbecile checking up on him. With a groan he heaved himself off the bed, catching his reflection in the mirror and reminding himself to get down to the police gym. He snatched up the phone. ‘
Sí?
’

By the time he had put down the phone Major Elerzon’s libido had wilted. What the hell was an Englishman doing dead on his patch? This was no place for tourists. Must be a narco.

Twenty minutes later he was back at the police base in the fortified hotel, just in time to watch the patrol bring in the body.
This was a disaster. If he didn’t move quickly the press would be all over it before he could file his report, and those
cabrones
in Bogotá would hang him out to dry. He retreated to his office to think, retrieving a half-empty bottle of tequila from beneath a crumpled copy of yesterday’s newspaper. Before long there was a knock on the door. The coroner, of whom he had seen far too much in the past year.

‘Well?’

‘
Es complicado
,’ replied the coroner.

‘You mean you don’t know what he died of?’ snapped the major, lighting a cigarette without offering one to his guest. He had never liked the coroner, a respected local family man who seemed to lead a squeaky-clean life.

‘Not yet, no. You see, someone really wanted him dead. I mean, really, really wanted him dead.’

‘Go on.’ The major breathed smoke up to the ceiling in a thin coil and watched it curl around the motionless blades of the fan. It still wasn’t fixed.

‘It’s as if he was killed several times over. He was stabbed in the ribs. I expect you saw that in the patrol commander’s report.’ The major looked down at his desk. ‘There’s the ear, of course, but he didn’t die from that, and then there’s a needle mark in his neck. He may have been injected with something. I’m sending blood samples up to the toxicology lab on the next flight.’

‘Any narcotics on him?’

‘Nothing. But they did find this.’ The coroner reached into his tunic and handed across a plastic evidence bag.

Reluctantly, the major put down his cigarette, opened the bag, took out a small notebook and flipped through the pages. There were scribblings in some foreign script. Japanese? Chinese? He didn’t know. Either way, it probably wasn’t important but he decided he should look after it himself.

THE CALL CAME
through on the secure line to Vauxhall Cross at just after 0600. It was the duty officer who took it, bleary with tiredness and nearing the end of his shift. From more than eight thousand kilometres away, the voice spoke, distorted by clicks and pauses on the line from inside the SIS Colombia station, tucked away in a nondescript farmhouse in the wooded hills just north of Bogotá. The DO stifled a yawn and began to jot notes – then nearly broke his pen. This was unbelievable. The CIA were always carving stars into that wall of theirs at Langley, one for every officer killed in the line of duty, but over here, in the Service? Unheard of. He peered across the desk at the emergency numbers taped to the wall, took a deep breath and dialled.

At 0630 Luke Carlton was in the gym in Battersea when his phone lit up beside him. He liked being up early: after twelve years in the forces it was a hard habit to shake, even if it sometimes infuriated his girlfriend. Although he was out now, a civilian, he still put himself through a punishing hour of CrossFit most mornings, the exhausting, all-round fitness programme of choice for those who had served in Special Forces. Two minutes’ intensive strength and endurance exercise, pause, then repeat for fifty minutes. The memory of the attempted mugging in Mayfair was still fresh and he would do his damnedest to keep up his fitness.

Now his phone was flashing insistently. Before answering, his eyes flicked to the TV monitor on the wall. Had something big happened? Some horror committed by Boko Haram in Nigeria? A hostage crisis in Yemen? ‘Breaking news’ read the subtitled caption. ‘House prices surge in London suburbs.’ No clues there then. But a phone call at this time of day could mean just one thing: the office. Wiping the sweat out of his eyes with his forearm, he glanced at the number on the small screen and recognized it immediately. The voice at the other end asked how quickly he could get over to Vauxhall Cross. In the few months since he’d started working for MI6, he had fitted in surprisingly quickly. If he chose to stay, and many didn’t, he had been told he could go far.

‘How soon can I be in?’ Luke checked his watch. ‘Depends how smartly you need me dressed. I’m in the gym.’

‘I don’t care what you’re wearing,’ said his line manager, Angela Scott. ‘Come dressed as an astronaut, for all I care. Just get in here now.’

He knew better than to ask what was going on. In any case, he’d be briefed soon enough. ‘Roger that.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry. I haven’t quite shaken off the military jargon yet. I’m on my way.’

She hung up.

In sweat pants and trainers, Luke took the lift down from the gym to the underground garage. Elise and he lived in one of those modern steel-and-glass apartment blocks that had sprung up on the south bank of the Thames. Mussels Wharf, it was called – they’d had a few laughs about that. Renting for now, but maybe they’d look to buy something next year – if they were still together, of course. He got a few funny looks as he pulled out into the traffic, but he always did, driving a scratched Land Rover Defender out of a flash Thameside apartment block. His London friends liked to claim that it stank of manure but Luke didn’t give a monkey’s. This was his way of staying in touch
with his country roots. Besides, there was something pleasingly familiar about its blunt, functional lines and its quasi-military practicality.

Past the New Covent Garden fruit-and-veg depot, and the hideous concrete statue at Vauxhall Bridge – what were they thinking, building that? – then his windscreen gradually filled with the imposing green-and-sandstone fortress that now paid his salary, Vauxhall Cross, known to those who worked there as VX. It was the publicly declared headquarters, since 1994, of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. What a difference from Century House, the dingy old tower block in Lambeth where his uncle had worked before the move to Vauxhall. What a soulless dump that had been. Once, Luke had gone there with him. He had been just old enough to take it all in: the petrol station at street level, the brown raincoats hanging on pegs, the brown suits, even the brown soup in the canteen. To him it seemed a monochrome world inhabited by chain-smoking men in suits and typing girls with names like Betty who stooped to stroke his cheek. But he remembered his uncle talking about some real characters there. A woman who knew every detail in every file, back in the Stone Age before it was all digitized and encrypted. His uncle had talked, probably more than he should have, about the occasional ripple of excitement when a Soviet defector was reeled in, and the brief, intense feeling of camaraderie as he and his colleagues had stood together and sung Christmas carols. ‘Nothing like it,’ he had told his nephew, ‘all of us working for a common cause. One day you’ll understand.’

The lights were changing now and Luke tried to focus on what he was about to walk into. But still his uncle’s stories kept flooding back to him. A tea trolley had come round every day at eleven o’clock and four, pushed by an East End lad called Charlie. It was an open secret, said his uncle, that his close relatives were linked to the notorious Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, the kings of London’s violent underworld in the 1960s. Someone must have decided it was better to have those guys onside. There had been a rough edge to Service employees in those days, thought Luke,
unlike the polished smoothies in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Charlie had been there so long that he knew everything about everyone’s private life. They’d given him an MBE and he’d retired to Margate to bask in his glory. Then, said his uncle, there was the old caretaker who could recognize people by their footsteps. He had come back into Century one day, after years stationed in Warsaw, and this old boy had had his back turned away from him but he said, ‘Welcome home, Mr Carlton, nice to have you back.’ Amazing. And then there was the Cut, said his uncle, the Lambeth side-street with its Greek-run brothels and tawdry Italian restaurants where well-spoken Service secretaries met their intelligence officer lovers to share their hopes and dreams of postings to distant embassies, far away from SE1 and the dismal clank of trains pulling into Waterloo on a rainy afternoon.

Luke stopped at the large green-painted steel gate. High on a wall, a camera swivelled towards him, the CCTV feeding his image back to the security officers’ control room inside. On tiny oiled wheels, the gate slid open and he nudged the Land Rover forward. A man emerged from a sentry box with an inspection mirror, gave the vehicle the once-over, then waved him on. Inside the building he got out of the car and locked it, then pressed his electronic swipe card to a reader, prompting an automatic door to hiss open for him. ‘Carrying sensitive material like documents?’ read the notice on the wall. ‘Then check security procedures.’

Luke strode quickly past the royal coat of arms and the official commemoration plaque. ‘The Secret Intelligence Service,’ it read. ‘Opened by Her Majesty the Queen on July 14th 1994.’ Incredible to think that in his uncle’s day MI5 and MI6 had officially not existed.

‘Shocking, isn’t it?’

He turned. Springer, a young intelligence officer he barely knew, was holding open the lift doors for him. ‘I mean, what
are
they going to tell his family? Nice bloke, Benton. He was an instructor on my course down at the Base. Useful squash player too.’