Nine Lives (25 page)
‘So let’s get this straight,’ said Deakins, leaning against one of the Unit vehicles. ‘We’ve spent the last twenty-four hours going to war with a nine man terrorist cell. Ten, if you include the girl at the airport. And the only injury we sustain is when Archer trips and breaks his own ankle.’
There was laughter, a welcome release from the tension of the last twenty four hours. The team had gathered around in a ragged circle. Archer was being helped by Chalky and Porter into the front seat of one of the cars. He laughed with the other officers, but the jolting jarred pain into his foot, so the laughter changed to wincing.
‘I’m never going to hear the end of this, am I,
’ he mumbled through gritted teeth, shaking his head. The men chuckled as Porter moved around the car to the driver’s seat.
He climbed in and both men pulled their doors shut.
‘C’mon Arch, I’ll take you back to the Unit,’ he said, inside the car. ‘We’ll get you patched up.’
Archer nodded as he grimaced in pain. ‘Thanks.’
Porter fired the engine and the vehicle moved off back towards the Unit’s HQ.
The men watched them go, still grinning. The remaining officers were standing in a circle in the plaza, enjoying a moment of much-needed relaxation. Smiling, Mac looked around his men.
‘Hey, where’s Fox?’
‘I forgot to tell you, Sarge,’ said Deakins. ‘He left with the woman, Agent Shapira, a few minutes ago.’
‘Why? Where’d they go?’
‘She said she’d received an urgent call from her agency. There was some kind of situation at Stamford Bridge.’
‘The football ground? There’s a game there today, isn’t there?’
‘No, it was cancelled, out of respect,’ said one of the other officers, Mason.
Deakins shook his head. ‘No, he’s right, the game’s still on. United-Chelsea. Kick-off's in twenty minutes,’ he added, checking his watch.
Mac frowned, thinking.
‘Why the hell wasn’t it cancelled?’ he asked.
‘The Prime Minister demanded that it take place,’ Chalky said. ‘I think he’s there, with his family. They’re doing a big remembrance ceremony before the game.’
‘Shapira didn’t have a car so Fox offered to take her,’ Deakins told Mac. ‘You know he’s a big United fan. He probably just wanted to be outside the ground before the game.’
Mac frowned again, his brow furrowed.
‘But what the hell do Mossad want down there?’
He paused, thinking.
He didn’t like it.
‘And what situation is there that we don’t know about?’
Just as the officers were discussing this in the plaza, back at the ARU’s HQ Nikki had stolen her first moment of quiet in what seemed like forever.
She was sitting behind her desk in the Operations area. Cobb and Crawford had been standing beside her moments before; the computer system in front of her was hooked up the police radio so they’d heard all the drama unfold in One Canada Square. The building secure, the bomb disarmed and everyone safe, the two men had retreated to catch their breath and take stock of the situation.
Glancing over her shoulder, Nikki saw Cobb sat at his desk. Crawford had said he was going outside for a cigarette.
His presence here was making her curious. The DEA’s arrival and involvement in the Unit’s case had only been explained in passing to her and Cobb and the American had been working side-by-side the whole time, which was unusual for Cobb. Nikki knew he hated to be lumbered with unnecessary operational weight so she was surprised by his apparent willingness to work with Special Agents Crawford and Rivers.
Over the last twenty-four hours, she’d heard snapshots of conversations between them, especially during the times she’d entered Cobb’s office. She hadn’t heard explicit details, but she’d picked up that Crawford was trying to take down some Middle Eastern drug cartel. That was pretty much it.
But she’d also heard one name over and over again. It seemed to be involved in every conversation she caught.
Henry.
It seemed a curious and bizarre name for someone involved in a cartel. It sounded so quaint, and English. Unthreatening. With some time to kill and her curiosity piqued, she clicked onto the Unit’s database and typed in the name
Henry.
The ARU shared a lot of files with MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, not to mention the Met’s database and crime log, so thousands of results came up.
She narrowed the search, typing
Henry Drug
.
This time, hundreds of results. She tried one more time.
She typed
Henry Cartel.
This time, just one file came up.
She clicked it open.
There was a moderate amount of information inside. They had a surveillance photograph of a large man, taken from what looked like the inside of a bar. He was vastly overweight, wearing a beige suit that was bulging at the seams from his excess body fat. He had small dark eyes, a bald head, and was looking in the photographer’s direction, which was unnerving; he had a cold, hard, emotionless face.
Nikki examined him for a moment, then clicked off his photograph, reading on.
There was quite a bit of information about him. Not so much for his apparent involvement in drugs, but for his potential terrorist intentions. The log said that both his parents had been killed when a British missile had hit his house during the Gulf war. Cobb had mentioned yesterday that the attacks in London were designed for Dominick Farha to win back favour with some cartel. She could now see why he’d chosen the UK as a target.
Amongst the detailed commentaries, there was another file. It came from someone called McArthur. She clicked it open.
It contained a series of surveillance shots and a report from 2006. She examined it. It appeared that McArthur had been an undercover detective with MI5. He’d been positioned in a bar in the Upper West Side neighbourhood of New York City. His team were working to bring down a Real IRA cell recruiting and buying weapons. They’d been tipped off that in the bar that night the leader of the cell and a prominent East Coast gun runner would meet.
However, the meeting had never taken place but there had been another surprise. The operative, McArthur, couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw who walked through the door. He emphasised in the report the freak coincidence. He knew of Henry who was a priority foreign target for the agency. The man was renowned for being extremely hard to both track down.
And here he was, inside this bar in New York.
Clicking on a photo, Nikki saw the initial surveillance shot of Henry. McArthur had taken it from his seat in the bar. She continued reading the report. The agent said that someone had entered the bar and met with the drug lord.
Suspected family member,
McArthur had written on the report.
Treats her like such
.
Not a lover
.
Nikki saw that there were more photos in the file. She clicked them open. The person had their back turned in all of them.
But then in one shot they’d turned, her face looking down the bar past McArthur who’d taken a photograph.
Nikki gasped.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
The woman was Agent Shapira.
She was sitting with Henry in the bar.
The man known as Henry had a reputation for being impossible to scare or intimidate. He cared about nothing, nor anybody but himself. He murdered government agents and members of his own crew for fun; he’d even killed his own brother-in-law after he'd once drunkenly mocked him for his weight.
As the head of a cartel, it was impossible to gain leverage on him. Over the years many had tried; rivals, upstarts, young guys from the surrounding areas who, in a state of delusion, thought he could be stopped or dethroned. But each story ended the same way. They all ended up either shot in the face or at the bottom of the sea, seventy pounds of concrete moulded to their feet, screaming as they plummeted into the abyss.
But there was one thing no one knew about him. Not a soul.
Henry had a secret. Only one. But it was powerful enough that he would sacrifice his entire business for it in a heart-beat.
His daughter.
Mia.
Her mother was a maid who’d lived inside his compound. Henry had drunkenly mounted her one night when he was eighteen, still a lieutenant in the business and the next time he’d laid eyes on her, the bitch was three months pregnant. He considered drowning her but decided to wait, curious to see what effect a child would have on him. If it was a boy, he was even considering raising him as an heir, seeing as when the woman was seven months pregnant he’d ascended to his position at the top of the cartel.
But it had been a girl. The first moment he saw her, Henry experienced a feeling that he didn’t like. Attachment. He realised he actually cared about the child much to his surprise.
But he hated it; it felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It also meant one thing, and he knew without a doubt it would mean the same word to his enemies.
Leverage.
After the girl was born he’d kept the maid and baby in the compound, hidden away from the outside world and prying eyes. Only two other people, a pair of other maids, knew of the baby and who the father was so they were quickly disposed of. And one night, twenty five years ago, he’d put the maid and baby on his private jet and flown them to New York, far away from any potential danger. It was a fact of life that if word got out that there was someone he cared about, the child would one day either be held hostage or killed. It was inevitable, like the sun rose and set every day.
He had snuck meetings across the Atlantic to see the child. He couldn’t afford to risk using JFK or Newark, so he used a private airfield in New Jersey and had then taken a limo into the city. He’d set the two of them up in a place in the Upper West Side, on 79
th
and Amsterdam, a safe neighbourhood. It had been dangerous going there alone. He couldn’t take any security with him due to the secrecy and he had a lot of enemies stateside, both Federal and criminal. When the child had been old enough to attend private school, he’d enrolled her and strangled her mother. And with each passing year, Mia was proving to be an increasingly pleasant surprise. She was definitely her father’s daughter.
He saw that she was not intimidated by pain or death. She didn’t mourn her mother’s passing. She was resilient, resourceful and also highly intelligent. Despite his passion for secrecy, Henry had shared more and more with her until eventually, she knew the ins and outs of his entire business. His passion for drowning his enemies. His associates. The obscene profits. Rather than be scared she had often provided surprisingly sound advice for him on ventures and people who needed to be eliminated. And all this while living in New York, anonymous in the city.
To her friends, she was Mia, the college grad.
To Henry she was his pride and joy, the only other person in the world he cared for.
She was also the only person in the world that he trusted implicitly. He’d called her from Riyadh a year ago on a private and secure line. She had never heard him so angry. He informed her of what Dominick had done at the Four Seasons and the new enemies they now had as a consequence. The other organisation had contacted Henry in a rage, demanding answers and blood. Henry had promised them retribution; but he needed Mia’s help.
Unlike her father, there was no black mark against her name on any government databases. She had a fake passport and no one had any idea who she really was.
Henry asked her to fly to England, to track down her idiot cousin.
And to take him out.
The prospect of murder didn’t intimidate her. Henry had helped her kill her first man when she was fifteen. The guy was an informant, so he deserved what he got. Henry had injected the man with an autojet sedative, knocking him out cold and he showed Mia how to cinderblock and cement a victim. He’d let her push the guy into the Hudson from a boat in the early morning, the man’s mouth duct-taped, his eyes wide as saucers, Henry’s proudest moment as a father.
For Mia, finding Dominick had been easy. The guy was a complete idiot. He’d rented a flat in a part of London called Knightsbridge using his real name on the lease, showing just how stupid he really was. As a result she tracked him down quickly, but before she made a move something told her to stay back and observe, just for a few days, to see what he was up to. Slowly but surely, as she tailed him wherever he went, she realised what he was doing. It looked as if he was recruiting some kind of cell. She’d even followed them on a train to a deserted plain in south Wales two months ago, and watched from far away with binoculars as the cell practiced demolitions out there on the moor.
But her interest was fading. She had a job to do. When she got back to London from the Welsh moor she’d called her father, telling him how she’d found Dominick and where. She offered to waste him the moment he got back.
But Henry had been intrigued. The boy had always been a disappointment, just like his father.
Could he finally be about to do something useful?
Mia had reluctantly held back. She was worried for her father. If the police got wise and took Dominick into custody, he knew far too much about Henry’s business to be safe. She’d reminded him of this fact on the telephone three days ago. He’d come to his senses and finally gave the order for her to move in and take him out.
She’d broken into his apartment that night with a silenced pistol, ready to shoot him between the eyes as he slept.
But he wasn’t there.
He’d packed his bags and was gone.
Pulling back from the apartment, Mia had wracked her brains, trying to figure out where he could be. She didn’t have a clue and was angry with herself for letting him slip away. But yesterday morning, as she prowled the street trying to think, she’d caught a glimpse of a television in a shop window. It was giving breaking news of a raid on a house in North London. She’d raced over there as fast as she could, easily getting past the police cordon and breaking into a house opposite the street. From her vantage point, she’d seen police officers arresting two members of the cell that she recognised from the Welsh moor.
She’d contacted Henry, telling him of the situation. If the cops got hold of Farha before they did, he knew enough to bring down the entire cartel. Henry’s response had surprised her. He told her to forget about him. He’d take care of it. But he wanted her to do something else.
For all Dominick’s stupidity and clumsiness, he’d given Henry an idea.
She knew her father hated the UK. He’d been sent to school with his sister during the Gulf war only to return and find a crater where their house should have been. That had planted a seed of hate inside the boy that had grown over time. Aside from Mia, his mother was the only other person he’d ever truly cared about and the British had killed her. Although inept, Dominick’s intentions had been on the money. Henry had never dabbled in terrorism.
But the boy had wet his beak.
He’d arranged for a package to be delivered from Riyadh and contacted a man in the UK who would send it where it needed to go. The guy wouldn’t fail. He was part of Henry’s team. Mia had listened to the plan; it was genius. If it worked, it would go down in history and no one would ever realise their involvement.
But then a major problem had arisen.
One of Dominick’s morons had blown himself up at the Emirates.
Security would have been tough to infiltrate before, but now it would be like breaching Fort Knox. That was even if the game ever took place. Mia and Henry had been about to give up, thinking the whole plan was finished, but then they got a stroke of luck. The Prime Minister hadn’t cancelled the other matches that weekend. Better still, he was going to be attending the Chelsea-Manchester game with his wife; it was as if fate had intervened for Henry and Mia.
Through her surveillance photographs from the raided house, she’d learned that the squad of policemen who made the bust were known as the Armed Response Unit, some new police detail set up by the English government. Judging by the way they took charge at the crime scene, Mia figured they had access everywhere. She’d followed one of their cars back to what she assumed was their headquarters.
When the bomb had gone off at the stadium, she’d tailed them there too. Across the car park, she’d seen four of them separate and run back to one of their vehicles, jumping in and speeding off. She’d followed them all the way to a shopping centre, but there was a logistical problem when she got there. The police had parked on Parkfield Street, but there was nowhere for her to go.
There was a gathering crowd outside and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, thus she’d been forced to drive around the block, ending up on the other side of the shopping mall, on Upper Street. And just as she was preparing to get out and move in to see what was happening, she couldn’t believe her luck.
One of Farha’s men was right there in front of her on the street.
He was standing beside an ambulance. She watched him attempt to detonate something and saw that it failed. He’d jumped into the ambulance and she followed him to the stadium. She figured out his plan the moment she saw him approach the Emirates, so she held back and took him out just before he could detonate the device. She had considered detonating it herself, but then the police officer had appeared. It was perfect. She pulled the fake badge Henry’s guys had made her a few months previously.
Agent Shapira. Mossad
, she’d said. She’d watched the cop look at her badge, then at the unconscious terrorist.
She’d saved the day.
Infiltrating the police unit had been surprisingly easy. She knew enough about Dominick’s cell to back up her Mossad story and she’d already earned their trust by busting up the ambulance bomber. Her plan was to lay low until Sunday when she’d need their help to get past security at the football stadium. But when she’d taken out the guy with the rocket launcher, they were practically throwing her a party.
But one thing had taken her by surprise. She was keeping to herself inside the Unit’s headquarters but she couldn’t help notice the presence of the two American agents. Crawford and Rivers. From the DEA. Through overheard conversations and snippets of trusted detail from Rivers, she pieced together that they’d been building a giant case against Henry. But not only him. The evidence they’d gathered incriminated other cartels. She knew of such a method of trial. They called it a RICO case.
Trial by association, in other words.
After she’d whacked the kid with the rocket launcher on the roof, Rivers was totally on her side. She’d used her increased standing to ask him for details about the DEA operation’s situation, and he’d told her that they had two men tailing a drug buy at an airfield outside Paris. It was the culmination of their entire operation he told her. Henry was never seen present at a deal.
If they captured him tonight, it would be the closure they needed to bring down the cartel and all those around it.
Panic had kicked in then. She’d managed to sneak a phone call to Henry, warning him off, and he’d sent some of his men to fix the problem. Soon after, she’d received a phone call from a private number. A man she didn’t know. He’d confirmed that Henry’s package from Riyadh was in place.
The rest was up to her.
Where Dominick had screwed up was his rationale. He had figured the more bombers he had, the bigger the destruction. That wasn’t true. What he should have done was pick his targets carefully. Like Mia. Stamford Bridge football ground was the home of Chelsea football club. It had a maximum capacity of 41,837. Over 41,000 souls in one place, every single one of them distracted, focused on events on the pitch.
And today the Prime Minister would be there.
So would his wife.
How ironic,
she thought.
They all gather to mourn the dead, yet every single one of them will die before the end of the first half.
She smiled to herself at the thought.
She was sitting alongside one of the ARU officers in his car, making their way to the stadium. She’d given him some bullshit story about how Mossad needed her help at the ground. Some kind of situation, she’d said vaguely, but much to her pleasure the idiot had driven her down willingly.
She was planning to kill him, but wouldn’t get rid of him yet.
She still needed him to get her inside.
Beside her, the cop pulled to the kerb on Fulham Broadway. Around the car, fans in blue and red shirts were pushing forward, heading to the entrance turnstiles of the large football stadium. This was as close as they could get to the stadium without walking.