Retribution (13 page)

Parker sipped the coffee, waiting for a reply. It didn't take long.

A Saudi crown prince.
Parker looked at the reply.
Your friend.
So Yousef did more than just kill Americans. Christians of all types were fair game. Parker needed to visit with someone very quickly.

He tossed the still-hot coffee in the trash can near the door to the small shop, pulled up the collar to his coat, and cut across the traffic to the Hammersmith tube station.

In the shadow of the pillar in front of the city hall across the street, a man watched.

 

 

It took some time for Parker to cross back over the city to the neighborhood of Walthamstow. It didn't matter how long he was away. The newspaper would have to wait. Parker had an article in his PDA that was ready to be downloaded, so it wouldn't affect his output. Far more important, he had to get to Zabara's wife.

The flat was on the second floor, a walk-up, with only two bedrooms, each of which was no bigger than the queen-sized beds in them. She would be there with the child. There was really no other place for them to go.

The brick had been painted over and had started to peel back, showing the red clay color under the felt green covering. Tall, cracked, paned windows showed the sheets that were being used for drapery on the second floor. The wood of the windows was painted in a darker green, but that was peeling away as well. The front door was in a stoop. Parker stopped, swept the street with his eyes, and pulled out the key.

“Zdravo!” he yelled up the stairs. She wouldn't expect him this time of day. She didn't go out. Her late sister's child was her life, and these few rooms in this flat were now her entire world.

“Zdravo! Zdravo!”

“Yes. What is it?” She put her hand up to her mouth. “Amirah.” She whispered the name. It was clear that the child must still be sleeping. “You just left. Why are you here?”

“I need to talk to you.” He took two stairs at a time. They were wood, without carpet, a dark wood worn to a polish by years and years of steps. He figured the building survived the blitz, if not more. It creaked like the old lady it was.

“Yes, what?” Her tone serious. She was always serious. Some people never had the luxury of acting any other way.

“There was a man who came to the newspaper.”

“Who?”

“Jovan Knez?”

“Yes, I have heard of him. He was an officer in the
Crni Labudovi
.”

“Did Sadik know him?” His mind raced ahead: Would the mission be derailed in the first few days?

“He knew of him, but no. He spoke of Knez and the other Black Swans always in the third person like in
they
, or
them
.”

Of course. She was here because Zabara was
not
a Black Swan. He and his wife long ago had their fill of the Black Swans and their tactics. In fact, Zabara had begun cooperating with MI6 because he'd dreamed of leaving such violence behind.

“Okay. Good. I need your help.”

“Yes, I know.”

CHAPTER 20

 

“H
ello?”

The international cell phone only had a few minutes on it. She was to call the given number exactly at midnight. She would never know who was on the other end.

“Yes.”

“I was to call.”

“Yes, how is the training?”

“It is fine,” she lied. It had been five days of hell. The Cessna 206 floatplane pulled hard to the right adjusting for the turn of the propeller. It had scared her far more than expected. The landings on the blue waters had to be just right. It was a volcanic lake, deep, with aqua green borders that followed the shoreline. An airplane that flipped over and sunk would be down a thousand feet before they could guess it was even missing.

“Does the land agree with you?”

“It smells.”

“What?”

“It smells like rotten eggs.” She was young, and this world was far from Danish Abad. At night, she slept on the floor in the bathroom. The carpeted floor felt—and smelled—too strange. To bathe, she filled the small trashcan with water and squatted in the tub as she wiped herself. A shower was too foreign. She hated this place.

“You will soon be with your brothers.”

“I have this dream.” Now that she had gained the skill of flying the airplane she saw the mission in her mind's eye every night. “It was snowing. I did not know snow.” In New Zealand she first saw the white peaks and on one flight they flew up into the mountains and through a snowstorm. “Not until I came here.”

“Yes.” The voice was brief and distant.

“You will be proud of me.”

“Yes, Allah be great.”

There was silence. The wording on even this phone call needed to be considered. He said nothing. With the silence, she knew the error.

“You leave Sunday.” The voice was very businesslike. Almost cold. It was not like when she left Pakistan. She left Danish Abad being hailed as a heroine.

“An electronic ticket has been set. Air New Zealand Flight AC6105.” He didn't go into further details. She had been trained to know that was all that was needed.

The phone went dead. She pulled the chip out, tossed the phone into a nearby trash bin behind her motel, and broke the chip into three small pieces. The fragments would be tossed, each separately, onto the side of the road miles apart.

Air New Zealand Flight AC6105 would connect to Air Canada.

CHAPTER 21

 

T
he London taxicab's horn blared as it swerved, just missing William Parker as he crossed over from Green Park. Parker cut across several more lanes of traffic, weaving through the cars, and walked into an alleyway behind Old Park Lane. At the end of the alleyway he kept up his pace, turned the corner, cut through a vegetable market with an old woman wrapped in a shawl standing guard over a table of pumpkins and gourds, stopped, looked behind, and then entered an adjacent street.

Parker stopped at the corner, stepping into the doorway of a flat to avoid the chilly blast of wind before staring across several more lanes of traffic. Calmly, he walked out, slowly, steadily, crossing over South Audley Street to the building on the other side. The front doors to the ornate Victorian structure faced directly to the corner of the block, and above the doors in gold a lion and unicorn held up the crown and standard. The Royal Warrant of the Queen showed the store was on the approved list. Below the warrant and above the doors, the store's name, James Purdey & Sons, was engraved into white marble.

As Parker walked through the doors, both floor attendants looked up. The older one, the one with wavy, pure white hair and a face that had spent most of his life taking hunters north, in the sun on the moors of Scotland hunting grouse, smiled a wide, toothy smile. His eyes, however, squinted in just such a way as to show a degree of doubt. The customer was dressed in a fairly new clover green jacket, but otherwise he looked very common. His pants were baggy and well worn, and his shoes—more like boots, although black—were scuffed so badly as to show cuts into the gray leather below. His early growth beard was starting to show curls; above, a crushed chocolate-brown felt hat pulled down to his ears.

“Can I help you, sir?” The white-haired clerk said the words pleasantly, but the tone was doubtful.

Purdey's sold some of the best shotguns in the world, and Parker looked nothing like their typical customer. The walls were lined with cabinets stacked deep with blue and black steel shotguns in glass cases, engraved with gold and silver pigeons in flight, and outfitted with marbled glossy stocks of walnut and burl. The small white tags on the trigger housing showed prices of 85,000 and 92,000. Some showed 110,000. All of the numbers meant British pound sterling. Above the cases, mounted antelope, stags, and boars looked down.

Parker picked up one of the shotguns. It was an over-under with two barrels riding one on top of the other. It felt light in his hands. He pulled it up into his shoulder and aimed down the line of the weapon. He stroked the stock with his hand, feeling the glass-like finish over the burl wood, his slight smile a show of appreciation for a craftsman's work of art.

He turned to the clerk. “I'm looking for the Long Room.”

“Oh, yes, sir. Please come this way.” The clerk took the shotgun back and put it in the cabinet. He talked as he led Parker. “That one is a favorite. It's a twenty-bore, with rose and scroll engraving, done by Martin Smith.”

“Very nice.” William Parker knew that the 20-bore Purdey would be bought and used and then handed down to generations of sons, followed by their sons. It would kill with perfect accuracy thousands of doves and quail in its life. It would age and be seasoned and smell faintly of burned gunpowder, spending most of its life in some rustic country cabin.

“Eighty thousand pounds, that one.” He led Parker down a hall, to a door on the back corner of the store, twisted the handle, and swung it open for the guest who stepped in. The long room's central space was occupied by a long, red felt table, with the walls of the room adorned with paintings and photographs of the great Purdey men and their royal customers over the centuries.

“Well, here he is!” Sitting at the end of the table was none other than Gunnery Sergeant Kevin Moncrief.

“Gunny.” William Parker walked over and gave him a bear of a handshake.

“Charlie, this is my friend Colonel William Parker.”

The clerk stuck his hand out. “It's a pleasure, sir. A friend of the gunny's is always welcome.”

“Charlie is related to the Purdeys somehow, but what he is known for is his career as a Royal Marine Commando. He's a retired WO-1.”

“I'm impressed. But how did you get to know this troublemaker?” Parker pointed to Moncrief.

“He's one of our best customers.”

“No!”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” tut-tutted Moncrief with a smirk.

“With your new sportster, how many in your collection, Gunny?” asked Charlie. “Six?”

“Well, I have a Holland and a Rigby.” Moncrief was naming some of the best shotguns in the world.

“Yes, we must count those, mustn't we?” Charlie humorously acknowledged the competitive brands.

“Charlie, we need to talk. Can you give us a second?”

“Absolutely, the long room is yours for as long as you need it.”

“And let us know if you see anyone.”

“Our security system covers two blocks. We saw the colonel from the alleyway on.” Charlie closed the door as he left. Besides making shotguns, discretion was another Purdey skill.

Parker pulled up the seat at the corner of the table. “Good friends to have, I'd say.”

“Charlie's been a pal for years. The room is one of the most protected rooms in downtown London. And there is no chance that the wrong type will wander into this store. Hell, they probably have fifty million in inventory in this little building alone.”

“Does Scott know you're here yet?”

“No, he thinks I'm coming in tonight.”

“Good. I need you. But remember: Both Yousef and Scott will be shadowing me. No phone calls, no e-mails, nothing that we can't assume isn't being read or listened to.”

“How'd you do getting here?”

“Switched the tube six times in six different directions. If they followed me here, they are very good.”

Moncrief laughed.

“What more do we know on Yousef?”

“Well, he's a first-class bastard. That's one thing. He'd throw his four-year-old under the bus if it helped the cause. The Semtex I told you about had a chemical marker that tracks directly from a Czech factory. The chemical gave the explosive a unique smell that could be easily detected by the dogs. It's called DMDNB.”

“So what does that do for us?”

“We know that the explosives in Lockerbie and in Doha had the same tracer. Both were part of the original sale of seven hundred pounds that went through Libya. And both bombings were arranged and financed by Yousef. Oh, one other thing: the same tracer showed up in UTA Flight 772.”

“UTA 772?”

“A passenger jet blown out of the sky in Africa to get back at the French. And my source found something else.”

“The guy we spoke with?”

“Sorry, Colonel, yes.”

“The Mossad source?”

“Yeah.”

“What else?”

“There's a theory that the CIA
let
the Samsonite containing the Semtex onto 103. Witnesses said it passed through customs that day without anyone even lifting a finger to inspect it.”

Parker sunk down into the leather chair.

“Why?”

“They thought they were running a tag on a heroin cell. Pure dope from Afghanistan being used in New York to raise bucks for the jihad.”

Parker didn't want to believe that his own country shared culpability in the death of his parents. But it made sense. No one would ever admit it, though. It would remain buried deeper than the Mariana Trench.

“MI6 was working with the Agency at the time.”

“I'd say they had to be. Flight 103 coming out Heathrow.” This was the one fact that didn't cause Parker much surprise.

“And guess who was assigned to Heathrow out of MI6 at that time?” Instead of his usual smug look, Moncrief looked dead serious.

“Who?”

“One James Scott.”

Parker shook his head in disgust. Nothing surprised him anymore. But it wasn't like he had trusted Scott implicitly to begin with. This served as an important reminder, though, that the only people Parker could trust were Moncrief and his own team.

“I am going to be off the net tonight.” Parker switched the subject.
Off the net
meant he was going somewhere beyond communication, somewhere off the communications net.

Moncrief gave him a puzzled look.

“It's nothing.” Parker didn't want to tell Moncrief the details. “You go ahead and check in with Scott like you just came in.”

“Yeah. Will do.”

Parker nodded, stood, and clapped Moncrief on the shoulder. “And let's keep our ‘partner' in front of us at all times.”

As they left the room, Parker's phone vibrated in his pocket. He entered the pass code and scanned down to the text. It was labeled
P-Message
. The P stood for “plasma.” The identifier meant the message was hot, very hot. At six thousand degrees Celsius, plasma was hotter than the sun and, as a consequence, it was their flag for the most important of messages.

“What's up?” asked Moncrief.

“Speak of the devil,” said Parker, reading the message. He shook his head, then handed it to Moncrief.

Moncrief raised his eyebrows and whistled long and low.

The text meant that it was a
for your eyes only
, a 411 message, regarding the Mossad:
People are watching, you are target, meet as early as possible, Scott
.

Evidently the Mossad had just initiated surveillance on Sadik Zabara, whom they no doubt considered part of a hostile new cell in Britain.

In all likelihood, this had been part of Scott's plan from the beginning. After all, there would be no better way of establishing Zabara's credentials for Yousef 's people than by having the Mossad declare him a hostile target. The Mossad would serve as the perfect reverse character reference. Unfortunately for Parker, the Mossad would be swallowing the Zabara identity in earnest—one more lethal pitfall for Parker to avoid on a daily basis, as his situation grew ever more fragile.