Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (43 page)

Ramirez was shaking hands with the people from Langley and directing them to their vehicles but when he spotted Luke he came over and gave him a bear hug. ‘Glad you made it through, buddy,’ he said. ‘That must have been some ordeal in the Chop House.’

‘Thanks,’ Luke replied warily.

‘But, hey,’ added Ramirez, disengaging himself and raising an admonishing finger. ‘Don’t go solo on us again. We’re here to support you Brits on this mission, so stick with us. Are we on the same page here?’

‘We are.’

‘Good. Then let’s go to work.’

Each vehicle had a Colombian driver and passenger seated up front, fully vetted and paid-up individuals run by the CIA station in Bogotá. Born and raised in Medellín, they knew the best routes around the city. They also knew which of the roads leading out of the valley and into the hills of Antioquia would be watched by García’s people and should be avoided. The journey from the airport to Valentina’s village, normally a four-hour drive, would take closer to six.

It was just past 1630 hours when they moved off in convoy, nosing out of the airfield through a service gate and merging into the traffic on Carrera 81. Back in this country for the first time since his narrow escape in Buenaventura, Luke was having distinctly mixed feelings. This was all happening a lot sooner than he would have liked, given the grisly ending García and his men had had in mind for him. But the professional in him wanted to
see it through. He needed to get García out of his life once and for all. It wouldn’t be easy, given the graffiti he had spotted on the urinal wall at the airport. ‘
Fuera gringos!
’ it read, ‘Foreigners get out!’ and ‘
Muerte a los Americanos!
’
‘
Death to the Americans!’ He had seen similar, many times, painted on peeling walls in Ciudad Juarez up on the US–Mexican border, but Luke realized that whoever had written it at the airport had had access airside. For all he knew, they had even watched them land and leave. And that did not give him a good feeling about the mission.

‘
WE HAVE SOMETHING
of a dilemma here,’ announced Sid Khan. He looked around the faces assembled in the windowless room on the sixth floor at Vauxhall Cross. They were in the ‘SitCen’, one of SIS’s situation centres, designed for exactly the kind of emergency that faced them now. It was the morning after Elise’s kidnap and Khan had called the meeting so early in the day that outside, in the grey half-light of a November dawn, many of the cars along Vauxhall Bridge still had their lights on.

‘Do we do the decent thing,’ he continued, ‘and inform Luke Carlton that his girlfriend’s been kidnapped – which could jeopardize the whole Medellín operation? Or do we quietly let him get on with it and leave the Met to try to resolve it before he gets back?’

Hands and fingers shot up around the table as several people jostled to have their say, but Khan held up a restraining hand, palm outwards, tilting his head to one side. ‘Before you make up your minds, I’d like you to hear what Superintendent Worlock has to tell us. He’s the SIO on the case and he’s come across the road from Cobalt Square to brief us. Chris . . .’

The policeman buttoned his jacket and half rose out of his chair, then thought better of it and sat back down. ‘Thank you.’ He looked around the room as he spoke. ‘As of now, we do not, as such, have an exact location for the hostage, Ms Elise Mayhew. But I do have some details I’d like to share with you from the Green Team at Cobalt.’

‘Excuse me, Green Team?’ interrupted Greg Sanderson, head of Latin America. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Sorry. Police jargon. Whenever we have a kidnap situation – and around half the UK’s kidnappings occur in London – we divvy up into three teams. Green handles intelligence, Blue does surveillance, and Red the negotiating.’

‘I see. Thanks.’

‘So here’s what we know,’ continued Worlock. ‘The individual concerned left her office in central London at seventeen forty-five hours yesterday. She travelled by bus to her home in Battersea. At precisely twenty twelve hours one of her captors made the 999 call that Lambeth passed on to us. We estimate she was lifted off the street some time between eighteen thirty and twenty hundred hours.’

‘Genius,’ muttered a voice down the table. It was Carl Mayne, Operations director. A fiercely ambitious man nearing the end of his career in the Service, everyone knew he saw Khan as his rival.

‘Carl, please,’ admonished Khan. ‘Just hear him out.’

Worlock looked from one man to the other, as if to say, When you two have quite finished . . . Then he went on, ‘So we’re hoping to do the comms exploitation on Ms Mayhew’s mobile, if we can recover it. We’ve accessed her service provider and we’ve built up a clear digital map of where she was taken. For the first twenty minutes.’

‘And?’ said Mayne, a touch impatiently.

‘And here it is.’ Worlock handed round a single sheet printed with a grid map of west London. A thick green line traced a route from Battersea, westwards through Richmond and out to Hanworth, a suburb near the M3 in Middlesex.

‘Well, shouldn’t you be there now?’ suggested Mayne.

The policeman had volunteered to leave the ops room at Cobalt Square to brief these people at Vauxhall Cross, but now he was having second thoughts. They seemed an ungrateful bunch to him. ‘We’ve already sent a team to Hanworth,’ he replied patiently. ‘They’re going through the bins now and knocking on doors. We see this a lot with kidnaps, believe me.’

‘See a lot of what?’ Mayne again.

‘The kidnappers suddenly find a mobile phone on their captive so they rip out the SIM card and chuck it away, then they move off fast. I’m not holding out a great deal of hope we’ll find anything at that location, but we’re going through all the CCTVs in the area, looking for any vehicle passing through in that time frame that’s big enough to hide someone in the back.’

‘But the bottom line, Chris . . .’ Khan wanted to remind everyone why they were there ‘. . . is that you’re broadly confident you can find her, yes?’

‘No, I didn’t say that exactly. What I said was that historically most kidnaps end peacefully within twelve hours to three days. Usually it’s money they want. But this one is different. They’re asking you to close down whatever you’ve got going in whichever country it is these people are from.’

‘Colombia,’ said Khan. He didn’t think there was much point in hiding it: they were all supposed to be on the same side. ‘Anyway, we’ve still got a decision to make,’ he added. ‘Do we tell Luke Carlton?’

Angela Scott let out a strangled snort. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘Did I hear you right? We’re actually debating whether or not we inform Luke Carlton that his girlfriend has just been kidnapped? Are we really having this conversation? Of course we need to tell him! It’s a duty of care!’

‘Angela, please,’ interjected Carl Mayne. ‘It’s a legitimate question. No one’s suggesting we don’t tell him, just that we delay it by, say, twenty-four hours. Do I need to remind everyone we’re running an extremely sensitive op that has a major impact on the current national security threat? And Luke is integral to the success of this op.’

There was a short, awkward silence until Sanderson asked, ‘Do we know exactly where he is right now?’

‘We do,’ replied Khan. ‘He landed in Medellín a few hours ago. He’s with the team from Langley. He should have made contact with Tradewind by now. So, whatever he does is mission critical.’

‘For heaven’s sake!’ exclaimed Angela. ‘He has a right to know! It’s not too late to tell him.’

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’ said Mayne, making a vertical slicing motion through the air with his hand, a legacy of his Army days in the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment. ‘No one’s calling anyone until we’ve thrashed this out. Let’s say we tell him right away. What effect do you think that’s going to have on his operational capability?’

‘I know what the answer would be if it were my wife,’ said the head of HR.

‘Precisely,’ said Mayne. ‘Which is why I don’t think we can possibly tell him until the operation is concluded. There is simply too much at stake. Sid? Any thoughts?’

Khan took his time answering, but it was fairly obvious to anyone in the room that he had made up his mind some time ago. ‘I concur,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the national security adviser ringing me practically every hour to check where we are on this. I don’t think it’s feasible for me to say, Sorry, we’ve pulled the op on compassionate grounds. We’re letting the main player get away.’

But Angela was not giving up without a fight. ‘Is it out of the question,’ she asked, ‘for someone else to fill in on this job instead of Luke? Are we really saying the whole of JSOC and Langley between them have got no one else who fits the bill? Because I find that rather hard to swallow.’

‘OK,’ said Mayne, suddenly standing up and ignoring her question. He, too, had made up his mind. ‘I’m going to take an executive decision here. Wherever anyone’s moral compass happens to lie on this one – and, Angela, for the record, your concerns are duly noted – I’m afraid that the national interest takes priority. We are not informing Carlton until the mission is over. And that . . .’ he paused to look everyone present in the eye ‘. . . is final.’

POTHOLES. THEY HAD
been travelling for just over two hours and already Luke was sick of them. Along with everyone else in the convoy, he was being pitched forward without warning or thrown sideways, banging the side of his skull against the window, every time they drove over one. Which seemed to be about every twenty metres. Luke pulled back the frilly curtain to peer out through the tinted glass at the darkened scene flashing past outside. There were long stretches of black nothingness as they drove past thick vegetation. Then there would be a kaleidoscope of colours, filtered through the raindrops that splashed against the windowpane, as they passed through tiny village night markets lit by yellow hurricane lamps that hung from rickety wooden stalls. He caught glimpses of pyramids of fruit he didn’t recognize and large, squat women in flowery dresses, fanning smoky braziers or turning over chicken wings spliced on sticks of singed bamboo. Absently, he pulled out a half-melted Snickers bar from the ration sacks they had brought with them and started to eat it. When they went over another pothole he bit his tongue.

His earpiece crackled into life. ‘Stand by, stand by. RV point five hundred metres ahead.’ It was Todd Miller in the lead vehicle. Luke was surprised to find he had been asleep. It was past ten and he rubbed the side of his head where it had banged against
the window. Some of the other operatives had wedged folded scarves between themselves and the glass.

They stepped out into the damp cool of the Antioquia night, a perfect ambient temperature at fifteen hundred metres above sea level. No wonder García had made this province his main operating base. All around Luke people were stretching their legs, some doing lunges to wake numbed limbs, and there was a steady hiss as men relieved themselves into the bushes. They were in a deserted, darkened side road off the main track that led to the village of Naranjo. Two Colombian operatives had guided the convoy in with red-filtered torches and Miller now approached Luke with them in tow.

‘Here’s how it’s going down from here,’ he said. ‘Our Special Ops guys will push forward in a moment to recce the village from a distance. When they give me the signal, these guys here’ – he gestured to the two Colombians, but did not introduce them – ‘will escort you in. Still reckon you can be in and out in under thirty?’

‘I’m aiming to be out in twenty,’ replied Luke. It seemed a world away now, but he had spent most of that morning back at MacDill rehearsing exactly how he would train Valentina to use the specialized acupuncture kit in as short a time as possible.

When Miller moved off to brief the men going forward, Luke squatted on his haunches, adjusting his senses to the night. The cicadas had started up in the trees, and from somewhere inside the tangle of undergrowth an owl was calling softly. Briefly, he closed his eyes and thought about the mission. This was not the same as squeezing the trigger when someone came running towards you intent on ending your life. It wasn’t even the same as killing a man in cold blood. It was teaching somebody else to carry out the job he could not get close enough to do himself. She was certainly brave, Agent Tradewind. He wondered what made her want to risk everything for the mission. Was it the chance of a new life in Britain? Or did she harbour a hidden loathing for the drug lord whose empire was infecting her country?

‘OK, Carlton, you’re up.’ Miller was back, his great quarterback’s frame materializing silently in the dark. ‘Coast is clear. The boys will lead you in. She knows you’re coming.’ He clapped Luke lightly on the back, then spoke quietly into his mike. ‘Beefeater moving now. Over.’

Beefeater? Who had dreamed that one up, he wondered, as they started off down the track, the Travellers’ First Aid box taped to his waist.

They approached Naranjo from behind, moving quietly along the edge of the forest where the foliage crowded in on the village. Just short of their objective one of Luke’s two Colombian guides tapped his arm, pointed up to his own eyes with two fingers spread, then indicated the undergrowth at their feet. It took Luke a second or two to spot him in the darkness: it was one of their own team, a Special Ops sniper with a telescopic nightsight and a long rifle resting on a bipod. Todd Miller certainly had his back covered tonight.

Valentina’s family home looked very much like all the others in the same row. A single-storey brick-built bungalow with pink walls and a corrugated-iron roof. Modest, but not impoverished. Luke could see there was a veranda with chairs at the back, lit by a light on the wall, and flowers climbing up the pillars. Baskets of more flowers hung from the rafters with a set of wind chimes. He took all of this in as he moved forward, but he was focused on the girl sitting on the back patio, wearing a white cotton dress. He recognized her immediately as Valentina. An old transistor radio stood on the table beside her playing salsa music, turned down low. This was not ideal. He would have preferred to get her well away from her parents’ place and the village, but they were working against the clock: García and his henchmen could flee the country at any moment, and Luke needed enough light to show her what had to be done. He checked his watch: 2225 hours. Hopefully her family would be asleep by now.