Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (30 page)

‘Her?’ García caught his gaze and waved a hand dismissively at Valentina. ‘You don’t need to worry about my little Valentinita. You can speak freely.’

Still, Suarez lowered his voice as he continued. ‘You asked about the girlfriend of that Englishman, Carlton, who got away.’

García chuckled as he remembered something. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘the one we told them to call while he was our guest in the Chop House?’

‘That one.’ Suarez passed him a photograph, printed out on an A5 sheet of laminated paper. ‘This is her. She works in an art gallery in London. Ana María has the address. She is arranging everything now.’

García held the photo at arm’s length. He did not have his glasses to hand and his eyesight was not what it used to be. He let out a soft whistle, then tutted. ‘What a shame,’ he said sadly. ‘So young and so pretty.’

IN A COLD
and draughty aircraft hangar at RNAS Culdrose, Luke sat sprawled on a folding metal chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him. After the tension of the night-time intercept of the MV
Maria Esposito
at sea, shepherding her into Falmouth harbour had been something of an anti-climax. They had handed her over to the Royal Navy for a fuller inspection in the early morning and now he was back on the base, his kit packed, waiting for the transport that would take him up to Truro and the fast train back to London. A bit more low-key than the ride down in the Chinook. Already that seemed like a lifetime ago. He had phoned Elise that morning, breaking the silence between them, and they had agreed to go for an early Italian once he’d got into Paddington. Luke could tell from her tone there were things she was holding back, for now. Hardly surprising, really, given that he hadn’t exactly been there for her.

The sound of a Land Rover pulling up outside the hangar had him springing up and reaching for his pack. The passenger door swung open and a naval rating half ran towards him.

‘Easy,’ said Luke, ‘No rush. My train’s not till eleven twenty-five.’

‘Don’t think you’ll be catching it, sir. Something’s come up. You’re wanted in the ops room. I’m to take you there right away.’

They were waiting for him: the base commander, a senior policeman from Falmouth and two young men who looked barely out of their teens. Luke took in the scene, noting the serious expressions on the officers’ faces and the lads’ bewildered look. His first thought was that they were trespassers and he wondered why they were involving him. But then he saw what they were wearing: black neoprene dry suits, the sort worn by scuba divers in cold Atlantic waters.

‘These two,’ explained the commander, ‘are from the Porthmorgan Diving Club on the other side of the Lizard. I’ll let them tell you in their own words what they’ve just discovered.’

They both started speaking at the same time, then fell silent. One laughed nervously.

‘Take your time, guys, no rush,’ said Luke.

The taller of the two, his face tanned and wind-burned, his long blond hair knotted into Rastafarian dreads, spoke up, his well-enunciated syllables hinting at a private education.‘Yes, well, we set off this morning just before seven for a drift dive off Porthleven.’

‘We being?’ asked Luke.

‘Oh, right – me and Josh here, and four others from the dive club. We’d been waiting days for the wind to drop so this was our first dive in a while. Got to be careful this time of year. Those rip tides can be totally gnarly.’

A grunt from the senior policeman, his way of saying, ‘Just get on with it.’

‘It took us a couple of hours in the inflatable to get round the Lizard before we moored up off Gunwalloe. It’s
literally
just two kilometres from here.’

Luke stole a glance at his watch – he was going to miss his train at this rate.

‘We’d heard there’s still part of an old trawler down there,’ continued the young diver. ‘It’s twenty-five metres down, part of a wreck from the big storm of ’eighty-seven. Well, we found something, just not what we were expecting.’

‘And?’

‘And we found – you tell it,’ he said, turning to Josh.

‘We found a submarine,’ said the other abruptly. It was his first and only contribution to the conversation so far and it certainly got Luke’s attention.

‘A submarine?’ repeated Luke. ‘You mean, like a Second World War job?’ He turned towards the base commander. This was something for the local history society, surely, not for someone sent by MI6 to work on a national crisis.

‘No!’ Dreadlocks corrected him. ‘Not as big as that. More like a submarine in miniature. You know, a bit like those craft in
The Cockleshell Heroes
, except this wasn’t a kayak, it was definitely a submarine.’

Luke’s pulse was racing. There were only two groups he knew of who used mini-subs: the Russians, off the Baltic coast, and the Colombian narcos. ‘Did it look new or old?’ he asked. ‘How long d’you reckon it had been there?’

‘Definitely new,’ interjected Josh.

‘And you know that because?’ said the base commander.

‘There were no barnacles. Anything we find down there is usually covered in them after just a few weeks. I could show you photos of things growing down there you wouldn’t believe.’

‘So,’ said the senior policeman, ‘the craft they found has been in the shallows for a day or two at most. Somebody’s abandoned it.’

Luke exchanged glances with the base commander. As the senior officer at Culdrose, he would have been well aware of last night’s abortive maritime interception of the
Maria Esposito
. He would also know this was a Tier One national priority. The discovery of a mini-sub so close to where she was sailing was now a potential game-changer. ‘Does Major Loames know about this?’

‘He’s getting the Fleet divers on to it right now. They should be deploying on-site as we speak. Then they’ll go for a recovery and bring the hull into Falmouth. Fleet Intelligence are sending a couple of experts down from HMS
Collingwood
in Hampshire.’

Luke’s mind was busy fitting the pieces into place. An abandoned mini-sub. Only there a day or two. Uncovered just hours after the
Maria Esposito
raid. No wonder that ship’s captain was
so bloody sure of himself. He must have known he was clean. They would have launched already.

Luke’s earlier despondency and fatigue were gone, the news had hit him like a double shot of espresso, waking him up.

Dreadlocks and Josh were still standing there, unsure what do with themselves but vaguely aware that they had probably done something right.

‘Any chance of a coffee?’ asked Josh, but the older men in the room weren’t listening.

Luke addressed the base commander again. ‘There’s someone else you need – we need – on this.’

‘Who’s that?’ The commander was a seasoned Navy man on his final posting. He had known a fair few dramas on his watch, but now he wore the wary look of someone whose patch was about to be invaded by a lot of people from London.

‘Commander Jorge Enriquez,’ replied Luke. ‘He’s the naval attaché at the Colombian Embassy in London. Knows all about mini-subs, which boats can carry what cargo. He can even match them to the cartels. We’re going to want him ASAP in Falmouth the moment they bring this thing in. I wouldn’t mind getting him to give the ship the once-over too. Trust me, he’s the real deal.’

The base commander hesitated. Evidently he wanted to play it by the book.

‘Well, that’ll have to be cleared with the FCO and the MoD. It might take some time.’

‘It really shouldn’t,’ said Luke. ‘I’ll get it cleared right now.’ He moved away to make a phone call.

‘So, um . . .’ he heard Josh say as he went towards the door ‘. . . do we, like, get any kind of reward?’

Luke hurried down the corridor and into a side room, where he called Khan, who was already on his way back from Poole to Vauxhall Cross.

‘Yellow,’ came the response. It sounded as if Khan was travelling at speed in the back of a car.

Yellow?

‘What?’ said Luke.

‘I said, yeah, hello,’ replied Khan. ‘Go ahead. Who is this?’

‘Luke Carlton. There’s been a development. And it’s a pretty major one.’

THE EVENING SHIFTS
were often busy in A&E. In the five years she had been working at Plymouth General Hospital, Nurse Jovelyn Flores couldn’t remember a week without some drunk stumbling in, bloodied and bruised, his knuckles broken or his face cut. She had seen a lot worse in her native Philippines. She shuddered to think of the knife wounds she had dressed in her time at the Golden Gate General Hospital in Batangas. Plymouth was tame by comparison. Of course, there were always the teenagers, dumped half-conscious in the doorway by their mates who roared away in cars with souped-up engines. She had seen some bad cases, boys barely out of school overdosing on chemical pills sold in cellophane wrappers, probably by some unscrupulous dealer in a thumping nightclub.

Tonight was set to be no different. As the triage nurse, Jovelyn sat in her booth behind a glass window, neat and organized, wearing her regulation blue uniform with white trim, making those all-important decisions on who got to see the doctor and when. The words ‘Take a seat, please. We’ll call you when it’s your turn’ tripped off her tongue like a mantra – she practically mouthed them in her sleep. Looking up from her computer she surveyed the waiting room. At least three of the faces she recognized, serial brawlers. They would not be top of her list tonight.

Then something caught her attention. A man had just come through the sliding doors, stumbling, confused. She was about to mark him down as another drunk when she caught her breath. His face and hands were covered with red blotches, like blisters or welts. Burns? She couldn’t tell, but it was obvious that he needed immediate attention. He stood swaying, just inside the doorway, as others in the waiting room noticed him and recoiled.

Nurse Flores buzzed the intercom to the receptionist. ‘Can you take his personals then send him straight to me?’ But the man didn’t even make it across the floor to Reception. He collapsed where he was, his body seemingly turning to jelly before her eyes. There were gasps of horror from the waiting patients. She raced over to where he lay and saw that his lips were perforated with unsightly ulcers. They were moving – he was trying to say something – but no words came out. She bent over to hear better but he was seized by a series of convulsions. Then he was violently sick on the pale green floor, with flecks of tell-tale crimson in his vomit. He was very ill indeed.

Other patients nearby had abandoned their seats and were standing with their backs against the far wall, keeping as far away as possible. A young boy, sitting with his mother, started to film the scene on his mobile phone. ‘Wicked,’ he kept saying, until she took it off him and put it in her handbag. Nurse Flores told Reception to summon a cleaner, and after a few minutes, a man in overalls emerged with a mop and an angry frown.

Oblivious to the pool of vomit at her feet, the nurse examined the red welts on the man’s skin. On his wrist she found a blue mark, like a bruise. She looked more closely and saw that it wasn’t a bruise but a tattoo of an anchor. And then she noticed something else: a clump of his hair had fallen out and lay matted and sodden in the vomit. He had lost almost half the hair off his scalp, but not evenly. It was falling out even as she watched.

Something was very wrong. ‘Get the house doctor in here now!’ she called. The man twitched at her feet and vomited again, feebly this time. Then he lay perfectly still.

IN THE A&E
waiting room at Plymouth General there was a ripple of excitement. Cuts, bruises, sprains and fractures were all temporarily forgotten – everyone was more interested in the man who lay silent on the floor. While she waited for the doctor to arrive, Nurse Flores stood over him, like a bird defending her brood, scolding anyone who tried to sneak a picture on their mobile phone. He was in a dreadful state. In addition to the vomit that had pooled around his head, he had soiled himself and the stench filled the room. People were clamping their sleeves over their noses, a child wailed, and several patients got up and left.

The duty matron was the first to arrive on the scene. A tough but kind-hearted woman in her late forties, Rhona Braddock had seen it all, or so she thought. As a clinical professional, she did not flinch when the smell hit her nostrils. Symptoms, treatments, cures, this was her world. She leaned down, touched the man’s forehead with her gloved hand and nodded. ‘He’s running a fever. Must be at least forty degrees. Get him into isolation and page Dr Patel,’ she said. ‘I want a clinical nurse specialist on this one. See who’s in tonight.’

Nurse Flores spoke to her as quietly as she could. With so many people listening in, she didn’t want to start a panic. ‘Is it . . . Ebola?’

The matron shook her head vigorously, then motioned the nurse to follow her out into a side room. She spoke in low tones, almost conspiratorially: ‘Without the burns,’ she told her, ‘I’d
have said Ebola was near the top of the list. He’s haemorrhaging badly and he has a high fever. Classic symptoms.’ She peeled off the purple latex gloves and dropped them into a bin, then pressed hard on the disinfectant dispenser on the wall and rubbed the gel into her hands. ‘But this is something else. It’ll be for the doctor to make the call, but I can tell you one thing. We’ve never had anything like this before at Plymouth General. It’s one for Public Health England. We’ll need to inform the authorities.’

After that, things happened very quickly. The senior medical staff at Plymouth included a number of military medics on secondment and at 10.30 p.m., as the two women returned to the collapsed patient on the floor, the sliding doors hissed open and a team swept in, led by a surgeon commander. He took one look at the scene and issued a terse order. ‘Clear the waiting room. Move everyone away from this man and keep a three-metre cordon from him. Do it now.’

In the early hours of the morning a convoy of vehicles drew up outside, escorted by police outriders. It was just as well that the public didn’t see what followed, which could have been a scene from a Hollywood disaster movie. Four figures, dressed from head to toe in white bio-hazard protection suits, entered the now-evacuated waiting room, breathing loudly through their respirators. Methodically and efficiently, they passed red-and-black contamination monitors over the prone man as he lay breathing weakly, starting at his head and working their way down to his feet. They paused to check the digital readings, then passed the devices over him once more. One spoke briefly into a radio-mike attached to the inside of his helmet.