Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (32 page)

By eleven fifteen they were on the A30, driving south to Falmouth. At the entrance to the dockyard Luke produced his government ID and signed in his guest. They proceeded past the gatehouse, keeping to the designated 5 m.p.h. speed limit, and parked on the quayside next to where the mini-sub lay tethered beneath its tarpaulin. A pair of armed naval ratings in camouflage stood guard in front of it. Once again, Luke flashed his ID card on its coloured lanyard and the sailors moved aside a barrier to let them pass.

‘That’s a bit pointless,’ remarked Luke, when they were out of earshot.

‘What is?’ said Enriquez.

‘Those sailors on the barrier. Both carrying weapons with no magazines in. Not much use if we were terrorists.’

They stopped just short of the edge of the quay. There, wallowing in the water, lay the salvaged mini-sub, its crude iron hull stained, pitted and streaked with rust. Someone appeared to have given it a coat of dark-green paint some time ago, but most of that had worn off to reveal the scarred metal beneath. At the stern, a pair of tiny propellers was just visible above the waterline between two hydro-vane flaps that protruded on either side, giving it the means to dive or ascend in the water. On top of the hull, slightly aft of centre, there was a round access hatch with its lid open. Luke and Enriquez descended the metal ladder embedded in the wall of the quay then jumped onto the mini-sub’s hull, steadying themselves on its smooth, curved surface with their hands.

‘So, what d’you think?’ asked Luke, as he straightened. ‘How
does this thing compare with the sort of craft you’ve been catching in Colombia?’

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ replied Jorge. ‘If this boat belongs to anyone other than a cartel then it’s a damned good copy. We’ve been busting vessels like this all up and down the Pacific coast for at least seven years.’

‘Which begs the question,’ continued Luke, as he approached the access hatch, ‘what the hell is one of your country’s mini-subs doing all the way over here? Shall we?’ He pointed to the hatch, hauled himself over the lip and started to let himself down the inside of the funnel, rung by rung. Almost immediately, he stopped and came back up. ‘No,’ said Luke. ‘I’ve got a better idea. You go. You’ll know what to look for.’

Enriquez moved past him and paused to extract his wallet from his pocket. ‘Look after this, will you? It’s a tight squeeze down there.’

Commander Jorge Enriquez was big for a Colombian, a well-fed descendant of a long line of Spanish
conquistadores
, and a whole head taller than some of the indigenous Indians in his country. It took him a few seconds to squeeze his broad shoulders through the hatch and into the gloomy interior.

Just as he had expected, it was intolerably cramped. He guessed that whoever had piloted the craft had been chosen as much for their small stature as for their navigational skills. He reached down and took out a small pencil torch that he had brought with him from London with exactly this in mind.

‘You OK down there?’ called Luke.

‘Yeah, no problem.’ He began to scan the interior. Back home, he had crawled into vessels like this to find them stacked high with cellophane-wrapped parcels of pure cocaine, but this one was empty. There was a basic steering-wheel console at the front and a couple of crude metal seats. For whoever had piloted the craft, he noted, there had been absolutely no view, nothing to look at, just a bare metal bulkhead. It was enough to drive a man crazy. Enriquez could see that whatever navigational equipment there had been had vanished.

Jorge Enriquez was about to call it a day when his torch caught something in its beam. He arched his body closer to get a better look. There, on the wall of the coffin-like cabin, someone had used a sharp implement to carve their name. Except it was not a name. It was a phrase, a gang totem, a marking of the turf. Enriquez froze. He recognized it at once. It brought back memories of mutilated bodies dumped in back streets, hostage videos of grown men crying for their mothers as they went to their deaths. It was just two words: Los Inocentes. To Enriquez, that meant everything. It meant that someone, or something, very bad had been in the submarine.

‘Luke?’ he called, a brittle edge to his voice that even he didn’t recognize. He knew in that moment that Colombia’s murderous drugs war had crossed the Atlantic. The narcos had brought their war to Britain.

IN THE STRATFORD
gallery that afternoon, everyone noticed the difference. Elise, only recently back from her extended leave, was unusually happy, even radiant. For days she had appeared drawn and stressed, something clearly playing on her mind, but now she tripped into the gallery from her lunch break with a smile.

‘Someone’s in a good mood today,’ said Samantha on Reception. ‘Care to share?’

‘It’s Luke,’ she replied, putting her bag on the desk, brushing her hair back then retying it. ‘He’s coming back tonight!’

If Elise had known the true circumstances of Luke’s return to London that day, it might have tempered her good mood. The inscription found inside the mini-sub at Falmouth dockyard had triggered a flurry of frantic phone calls to London. The Colombian naval attaché had rung his ambassador, and Luke was on the phone to Vauxhall Cross, speaking to his boss. Los Inocentes, he told Angela, was another name for García’s cartel, the very people he had gone after in Colombia. Angela, in turn, told him about the man who had collapsed the previous evening in Plymouth A&E with acute radiation sickness. Khan had yet to return from the COBRA crisis meeting but, one by one, the pieces of the jigsaw were slotting into place. At least now they had some idea of what they were up against: a radioactive dirty bomb,
smuggled into Britain. A task force was being set up, she told him, inside Thames House, the headquarters of MI5, to coordinate the hunt for the radioactive material and the people behind it. Luke was to represent SIS and he was to report there first thing the next morning.

Luke chose to share none of this with Elise when he rang her on her lunch break. Instead he tried hard to keep the tension out of his voice. He wanted more than anything to put a soft cocoon around her, an invisible blanket that shielded her from all the unpleasantness he had to deal with in his job. It was bad enough that he had come back into their Battersea flat nursing a weeping hole drilled into his foot by psychopathic criminals. He certainly didn’t want her having nightmares about the full horrors of a dirty bomb.

Elise retrieved her bag from Samantha’s desk in the gallery. ‘Any messages while I was out?’ she asked.

‘No – but I almost forgot. There’s a lady here to see you. Wants to take a look at those new watercolours. She’s in the Quiet Space.’

Elise walked through to the inner room. As an art dealer, she had acquired the knack of knowing if someone was serious or not about buying. Of course, these days you couldn’t always tell for certain where the money was. More than once she had nearly made the mistake of ignoring some unshaven young man in a T-shirt and trainers, only to find he was a dotcom millionaire with a black Amex Centurion credit card or something similar. But this lady definitely had money, Elise concluded. Mulberry oxblood handbag, pearl earrings and matching necklace, a tailored jacket that looked like Armani and killer heels – were they Christian Louboutin? Probably.

‘Hello! How can I help you?’ Elise greeted her with a warm smile and a practised familiarity, intended to make customers feel at ease.

The woman was still studying the softly lit paintings on the wall as Elise held out her hand. ‘Elise Mayhew, head of International Sales.’ It was a pretentious title, really, given that there
were only three of them on the sales side, but it sounded suitably grand.

The woman turned to face her and removed her glasses, which had ultra-modern thin steel rims. She seemed to be studying her, which Elise now found a little disconcerting.

‘Ah, yes, thank you,’ said the woman. A faint trace of an accent, and a slight lisp, Elise noticed. ‘I am looking for works by the Portuguese artist, Agostinho Bacalao. You have him here?’

‘Agostinho Bacalao?’ Elise’s forehead furrowed into a frown. ‘I don’t think I know him. Is he in the catalogue? Let me go and check.’

But the woman was already moving towards the door. ‘Is all right,’ she said. ‘I have to go now. Maybe I come back later.’

How odd, thought Elise, as she walked her to the door. ‘Do you have a card, maybe? Then we can let you know if we come across any of his work? Oh, and I didn’t catch your name.’

‘It’s Ana María,’ said the woman, and closed the door softly behind her.

THE NEXT MORNING
the taxi dropped Luke in the forecourt of Millbank Tower on the north bank of the river and he covered the final hundred metres on foot. Thames House is an imposing sight, a stolid Grade II-listed building that sits like a grumpy uncle, guarding the western approaches to Whitehall, a fitting place for the headquarters of MI5. As he walked up the wide, sweeping steps, he knew immediately he had made the wrong call on dress. He was wearing a suit, and almost everyone else here was in casual clothes.

What with the Colombia trip, the MV
Maria Esposito
debacle and, yesterday, the mini-sub, it felt like an age since he had set foot inside an office. It was not a prospect that filled him with joy. But, physically, he felt on top of the world. His injuries from Buenaventura had almost healed and last night had been brilliant: a tentative reunion with Elise that had culminated in their cancelling their dinner reservation and staying in bed for nearly ten hours. He smiled. This morning he ached in places he had almost forgotten about.

At the top of the steps he fished out his Intelligence Service ID on its coloured lanyard, pressed the pass to the electronic reader and keyed in the code that Angela had told him to memorize. For a split second he caught sight of his reflection. He hardly recognized himself in a suit. The cylindrical Perspex door slid open
and he stepped forward onto a round black mat. The door closed behind him with a click. He felt as if he was on the set of a sci-fi film, walking into a teleporter to be beamed onto some alien planet. In front of him another Perspex door opened. On either side of him, men and women, mostly young, some in jeans and trainers, were streaming into work. How many of them knew about what García and his narcos had sent to these shores? How many of them were still chasing the jihadists, the Russian spies, the Chinese cyber hackers and the ‘Real IRA’ diehards that accounted for MI5’s daily workload? And how many would now be redirected to this latest, most terrifying priority? He would soon find out.

From the lobby, a corridor extended to both left and right, and he could see several widescreen LCD televisions on the wall, showing a silent rolling stream of Sky and BBC twenty-four-hour news.

A woman was coming forward to greet him. She was short and neat, dressed in a dark blue jacket and skirt and no-nonsense black shoes. Perhaps his suit had not been a mistake after all.

‘Luke Carlton?’ she checked.

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘Hi, good morning. I’m Sangita Lal, from Task Force Support. Welcome to Thames House. I’ll take you through to meet the team.’ She led him through a set of swing doors, then into the lift, up to the second floor and along another corridor. Somehow, possibly because this building was so much older than MI6’s 1990s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, Thames House felt more institutional, with its cream-painted corridors and massive walls. It reminded Luke of any one of a dozen Defence Ministry sites he had had the displeasure to walk into. Invariably he couldn’t wait to get out.

‘Here we are,’ said Sangita. They had stopped outside an unmarked door. ‘You’re going to need an extra security code to get in here,’ she told him, indicating the swipe reader on the wall. ‘It’s printed on the card I’m going to give you now. Can I ask you to memorize it? We prefer it that way.’

‘Sure.’ Luke took the card, glanced at the numbers on it, then handed it back to her.

‘Coffee and tea are just down the hall there,’ she added. ‘Do you want to give that code a try? We’ll go in and meet the team.’ Love it, Luke thought. I’m being tested like I was at school. After all he had been through, there was something strangely comforting about this. Sangita, he suspected, would probably not have been told about his ordeal in the Chop House.

Luke swiped his ID card through the reader and keyed in the code. After a series of beeps a tiny light flashed green and the door clicked open to reveal a room crammed with desks and a window that looked out onto a blank wall. The first thought that came into his head: This looks exactly like a classroom. No view, not much natural light, just walls of pale, fluorescent-lit, lavatorial green. The desks were arranged in a U round the room, all facing towards the principal workstation at the apex. Around fifteen people were at work, most of them staring intently at computer screens; at each desk there were printed title cards with roles like ‘Team Leader A’, ‘Investigative Desk Officer’, ‘Support Worker’ and so on.

‘Let’s get you introduced, then I’ll leave you to it,’ said Sangita, leading him to the man at the head of the room. ‘This is Damian Groves, the group leader on this investigation,’ she said. ‘Damian, this is Luke Carlton. From across the river.’

To Luke, the man bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor who played Harry Pearce, the spymaster in the TV series
Spooks
. A red lanyard hung around his neck with ‘National Security Council’ printed on it. ‘Thanks for joining us,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the Crisis Cell. In fact, welcome to the Security Service. We’re still just setting up in this room, as you can see. I’ve come across from G Branch myself, our agent-handling division – sorry, I expect you knew that.’ Luke shrugged. He hadn’t known it. ‘We’ve allocated you a workspace over there by the printer. I’ll get someone to give you the log-ins for the secure network. That way you’ll be able to talk directly to VX from your laptop.’ He turned to Sangita. ‘Before I forget, Sangita, can you tell Cheltenham we’ll book the line from here for the video conference call at three?’ He turned back to Luke. ‘Sorry about that. Got rather a lot
going on today. I’ll let you get settled in. I’m addressing everyone in ten minutes, so best not to take any comfort breaks just yet.’