Blue Blooded

by Emma Jameson

  He’d throw her some. Hopefully just enough to hang herself.

  “Look. If you want one final grudge match, I’m up for it,” he lied, making no effort to conceal his disgust. “But first, I need an admission. I’ve stuck my neck out with these rent-a-cops. I’ll be in a spot Monday morning if I don’t have you down for something—trespass, vandalism, petty theft—when the hotel manager rings my guv.”

  “Fine. It’s trespass. I confess.” Kyla’s big dark eyes registered relief. She believed in her power over him, even now.

  “Why were you trespassing?”

  “Ever heard of BASE jumping?”

  He nodded.

  “You’ve discovered my dirty little secret. Urban exploring. Once you start, you can’t stop. Aaron’s famous for it. He’s planning a day jump tomorrow from the Dolphin’s North tower. 700 feet in broad daylight.”

  “Aren’t the upper floors secured?”

  “Of course. Manned cameras, too. Some of the boys tried a dry run, stairs to roof, and got busted,” Kyla said. “So they broke out their laptops, figured out how the key cards work, and cloned a master. They reckoned they got collared because they dress like emo clowns. So Aaron sent me in because I look like I belong here. I crashed the party, took the express guest lift up as far as I could, and used the cloned key for the last few floors. I made it all the way to the roof.”

  “Why?”

  “To drop off my handbag. It’s sitting behind a water tower with Aaron’s chute inside, waiting for him. Backpacks in plain sight are a no-go these days. The easiest way for a jumper to move through the lower half of the building, where all the security is concentrated, is by being unencumbered. Tomorrow, Aaron will slip in dressed like a maintenance man, empty handed.”

  “When you decide to confess, you go all the way, don’t you?”

  “You threatened to bang me up for life if I didn’t. Besides, trespass is a misdemeanor, isn’t it? People love BASE jumping. Aaron’s new chute says GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.”

  “Fine. I still need to see your mobile.”

  “Good luck with that. I left it on the roof, too. Shows what you know about me being willing to give up my phone.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s in a filming bracket, clamped to a pipe. Tomorrow, Aaron will stand in front of it to broadcast his intro, then take it with him to record the drop itself,” Kyla said, voice still husky with apparent desire, never breaking eye contact.

  She’s determined to be perceived as truthful, Paul thought. If I asked, she’d probably go to bed with me. Just to make sure I bought the story.

  Perfect alibi, the usually contrary voice agreed. If a crime more serious than a BASE jump occurs, she can say she was making love to a policeman at the time.

  “Right,” Paul said. “One last thing. Take me up to the roof and prove you’re telling the truth.”

  “Oi!” The security guard called to Paul as he and Kyla passed by. “I’m still trying to get my mate to get me that guest list. Where are you off to?”

  “North tower. Floor 55. The Pavelishchev soirée,” Paul said. “This one insists her phone’s up there. Once I verify it, I can let her off with a caution.”

  “You’re going the wrong way. You want those lifts, by the gift shop. Follow me.”

  When the car arrived, he leaned inside, sticking a plastic card emblazoned with the Dolphin logo into the VIP slot. The wall of buttons lit up. He pushed the one labeled PICKWICK.

  “Ta. The MPS is hiring, you know,” Paul said.

  “Do me a favor,” the guard scoffed. Then the polished gold doors closed and the lift began its swift, smooth ascent.

  “So this party. What’s the occasion?”

  “MPs and lobbyists.”

  “Hope the dress code is business casual,” Paul muttered, straightening his tie.

  “It doesn’t matter. When I left, the Grey Goose was flowing like water and people were wandering in and out of the ballroom. Hooking up behind the potted plants. We’ll fit right in. You look like a gloomy ministry drone and I look like vatrushka.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Dessert. Russian and luscious.”

  The lift binged discreetly on the 55th floor, PICKWICK. Striding confidently off the lift, Kyla led Paul into the quintessential posh hotel venue. Patterned carpet, tasteful wallpaper, and those narrow cherry wood tables that had no function on Earth except to support oversized floral arrangements. All the ballroom’s doors were open, revealing three bars, a circulating wait staff, and what sounded like a swing band.

  No one was dancing. The men did look like government drones, in gray suits with blue or black ties. Several of the women rivaled Kyla in youth and beauty. A handful of other females, in skirted suits and sensible heels, stood on the sidelines looking on, murmuring to one another. It didn’t look like a Friday night frolic. It looked like a state function, minus the usual pomp. Something else was missing, too.

  “Hang on,” Paul said. Kyla’s stride was so long, he had to work to keep up. “If those are ministers, where’s RaSP?” he asked, meaning Royalty and Specialty Protection.

  “At home or down the pub, I expect,” she tossed over her shoulder. “I never said this was official. Not everything the MPs get up to with potential donors is approved by the PM. Now smile, you prat. We’re meant to look like a randy pair in search of a dark corner.”

  Finding the express maintenance lift, they took it up through the North tower’s uninhabited service and equipment floors. It deposited them into a long white corridor with florescent lights triggered by motion sensors. CCTV cameras were mounted near the lift, but no one challenged them via the PA speaker. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising. Paul knew from experience that no modern building skimped on camera installation, but plenty cut corners when it came to hiring people to monitor those usually unremarkable feeds in real time.

  “This way.” Kyla started toward an unmarked door at the end of the corridor. It was a two-and-a-quarter-inch security door with a serious-looking electronic lockset.

  Kyla unzipped her wristlet. Withdrawing a plain white key card, she inserted it into the lockset’s slot and punched in five numbers. Paul groaned at the sequence.

  “1, 2, 3, 4, 5,” Kyla agreed. “Convenience over cryptography. The BASE jumper’s best friend.”

  Beyond the heavy door was a clean white stairwell, revealed as another automatic florescent light kicked on.

  “I think we’re good,” she told Paul, starting up the stairs. “Still. Better chop-chop, in case someone playing eye in the sky called the cops.”

  “If they turn up, I’ll show them my warrant card.” Paul struggled to match Kyla’s pace. Clearly, she wasn’t concerned with stealth; the stairwell rang with the pounding of her boot heels. “How much farther?”

  “Six flights. Cardio,” she cried with strange gaiety, taking the stairs even faster.

  After five, Paul’s heart was beating itself against his ribcage, perhaps to break free and seek a better-conditioned body. The situation was strange, but Kyla’s demeanor was stranger.

  She’s manic. Not with fear. Glee.

  At the top of the sixth flight was another door. This had no impressive lock, only a metal push bar that Kyla struck with both hands, throwing the door wide. Paul stopped on the landing as the night air rushed in to meet him. A feeling struck him. Was it the feeling you had just before you got yourself killed?

  I should’ve called for backup. Aaron Ajax could be up there. Or Sir Duncan. Or both of them and all of the No-Hopers, too.

  He didn’t have to step onto the roof. He could turn around. Run for it. He wouldn’t have to make it down to the public levels. All he needed to find was a spot to hole up in and enough bars from bloody BT to call the MPS switchboard. But he’d have to choose that spot well. There was no way to lock or block the roof’s access door. Who knew how many friends of Kyla’s would pour down the stairs in pursuit?

  “What are you waiting for, you great nancy?” she asked b
etween gasping breaths, grinning down at him from the rooftop. “Don’t you want to prove me a liar? Maybe there’s no phone up here. No chute, either. Don’t you want to slap me around when you see I’ve made a fool of you all over again?”

  That jab at his pride meant nothing. But before he could turn to run, a woman cried, “Help! We’re up here. Help! Please!”

  The small hairs on the back of his neck lifted. Kyla’s grin didn’t falter. She looked like Tessa had the last time he’d seen her: stark, staring mad.

  What he did next wasn’t a conscious decision to gamble his life. He simply heard what sounded like the cry of a woman who needed his help and ran toward it, pushing past Kyla to emerge on the roof, under a handful of stars.

  A gust of wind almost knocked him off his feet. The North tower’s roof wasn’t one of those tricked-out urban party zones. There were no built-in tables and chairs, no bandstand, no strands of multicolored fairy lights. This was a Cubist landscape of electrical boxes, rain reservoirs, and air conditioning units. Pipes ran here and there, stenciled with acronyms he didn’t understand. Exhaust ports belched smoke; visibility was only fair. Most light came from the slightly taller, infinitely brighter skyscraper just east of the Dolphin.

  Deadenfall, Paul thought, but he wasn’t looking toward it. He was looking at the three individuals, sitting quite strangely in the shadow of a mammoth air conditioner unit.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lined up in hotel ballroom chairs, the ones that snapped together for perfect event spacing, the trio looked surreal, like something out of a dream. They were dressed as if they’d come from the Pickwick event. The pair of men, one pensioner-age, the other thirty-five or forty, wore suits and wingtips; the woman, young and pretty, wore a skirted suit, torn stockings, and one high-heeled shoe. Judging by the bloody scrapes on her legs and the clumps of hair matted with blood, she’d fought her captors and lost. The men’s mouths were gagged with duct tape, but the woman’s gag had fallen into her lap. It looked to Paul like she’d chewed through it.

  “We’re sitting on a bomb,” she told him. “We—watch out!”

  Paul spun around. His body automatically assumed the basic stance Kate had drilled into him: Left foot forward. Weight evenly distributed on both legs. Left hand raised to protect his face. Right hand a bit lower, to protect his body.

  Kyla came at him. Perhaps it was the flood of adrenaline that made her seem to move in slow motion. The weapon she pulled from inside her boot, a spring-assisted survival knife, revealed its long, thick blade with the flick of a thumb. She knew his body well enough to go for his shoulder. Part of his mind saw it happen—Kyla reopening the old wound, yanking the knife free as he fell, and then slashing his throat. But his muscles remembered what to do. Stronger and faster, he blocked her with ease.

  “No!” Kyla cried, clinging desperately to her knife.

  He squeezed her wrist until she screamed. The knife dropped. From far away, he seemed to hear Kate saying, “Never leave your opponent upright.”

  “Damn straight,” he muttered, balling up his fist and punching Kyla so hard, he split his knuckles on her teeth.

  She hit the rooftop and lay sprawled on her back, unmoving.

  His hand didn’t pain him. His conscience didn’t pain him, either, even though he’d never hit a woman before, outside of CQB practice. His adrenal dump narrowed his focus to the three hostages.

  “Did you say bomb?”

  The woman nodded. She seemed less frantic, now that Kyla was down, but her dark eyes were still wide with terror.

  “Where is it?”

  “Under us. The man called it Super-Semtex.”

  “There’s no such—oh. Right.” Vaguely Paul recalled a Met in-service on “designer” explosives, which had begun appearing in black markets alongside designer drugs. Many times more potent than PE-4, more commonly called C-4, Super-Semtex was sold in much smaller bricks, making it easier to smuggle across borders. Just last month, terrorists in Italy had used a duffel bag of Super-Semtex to blow up a Carabineri base, killing twenty-four and wounding scores of others.

  Paul knelt to get a look at the bomb. Using Kyla’s knife, he sawed through the duct tape wrapped around the woman hostage’s ankles as he studied the neat pile of plain, deceptively innocuous-looking gray bricks.

  That’s way more than the contents of a duffel bag.

  Just as his muscles remembered his training, some part of his policeman’s brain remembered all those seminars on improvised explosive devices. He didn’t see, or at least recognize, the IED’s detonator, but he saw cords and wires connected to a cheap plastic clock.

  “Did he say when it’s meant to go off,” Paul’s gaze shifted to the woman’s sticky name badge, “er… Neera?”

  “No. At least not that I heard,” she replied. “I fought back until he punched me in the stomach. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me get sick, but it was touch and go for awhile there. By the time I was a hundred percent, he’d bound me to this chair. Said I’d better keep dead still. That even a tiny shift in pressure would make it detonate.”

  “He’s a liar. C-4 is very stable. Super-Semtex is, too.”

  Neera’s arms were folded behind her chair back. Dreading what he might see, Paul ventured a look. As he’d feared, Aaron Ajax and the No-Hopers had used standard police-issue cuffs, the kind with chain-linked steel bracelets. Neera’s right wrist was cuffed to the chair. Her left was cuffed to the right wrist of the man beside her.

  “Can you free my hands with your knife?” she asked.

  “Sorry. No.” Paul moved to the next hostage. Positioned in the middle, the younger minister wore a sticky name badge that read JEREMY PILKERTON. His pale moon face was wet with sweat and tears. His trousers were wet, too. Paul didn’t find that unreasonable, considering the bomb beneath him could go off at any second.

  “The bad news,” Paul said, sawing through the duct tape wrapped around Jeremy’s ankles, “is you’re stuck in place for the moment. The good news is, you don’t have to worry about keeping dead still. This stuff is stable. You could beat it with a cricket bat and it wouldn’t go boom. Takes a surge from a detonator—a mini-explosion, really—to make it kick off.” The words came out slowly because he was running mental scenarios so fast. As Paul tried to guesstimate variables like explosive poundage, blast radius, and minimum safe distance, he unthinkingly jerked the duct tape off Jeremy’s face. The man shrieked.

  “Your knife! Try it on our handcuffs,” Jeremy babbled as Paul moved on to the pensioner-aged man. Under the spotty lighting, he looked like Father Time, gray-faced and trembling. His name tag read, The Rt. Hon. Edwin Jacoby. This time, Paul started with the duct tape gag, thinking it might be impeding the old man’s air intake.

  “First time,” Edwin quavered as the gag came out. “This bloody gala. First time I’ve ever taken part in any kind of financial impropriety. I was chair of the ethics committee, three years running.” Tears shone in his blue eyes. “Decades of service and nothing to show for it, not even a thank-you. Can you blame me for wanting a payoff?”

  “Enough of that, Ed,” Neera said. “We fouled up. Now we’re paying for it. Save your confession for Sunday.”

  “Who says we’ll live till Sunday?” Jeremy sounded close to hysterical. “Somewhere, the clock’s ticking. We could be down to one minute for all we know.” To Paul he said, “For God’s sake, man, at least try to get us out of these cuffs.”

  Paul pretended not to hear. His adrenaline-fueled tunnel vision had pushed him to one inescapable conclusion. Folding up the knife, he stuck it in his waistband. Feeling in his coat pockets, he sought the only tool that stood a snowball’s chance of saving him, the ministers, and possibly dozens of people in the Dolphin’s North tower.

  “What are you doing?” Jeremy cried as Paul pulled out his mobile.

  “Calling 999, you great prat,” Neera said.

  “The clock’s ticking! Free us first!”

  “It doesn’
t matter. We’re being punished. We deserve this,” Edwin said shakily.

  “Shut it, both of you,” Neera said. “Or after we make it out alive, I’ll kill you both myself, I swear I will.”

  “Name?” said the Met operator in Paul’s ear. Her preternaturally calm voice, like the mobile’s cool surface against his feverish skin, made him suddenly hope he was dreaming. But if this was a dream, why could he smell exhaust from the HVAC pipes, hear Edwin’s raspy breathing, and feel the fresh wound across his knuckles?

  “I’m the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State,” Jeremy shouted. “Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. We need PaDP. We need RaSP—”

  Paul walked away from the trio, towards the roof’s edge, which was bordered with a waist-high concrete wall. “This is Detective Sergeant Deepal Bhar. I’m calling from the Dolphin hotel, Westminster. North tower. I’m on the roof. There’s a big IED up here. There are hostages handcuffed on the IED and unknown numbers of people in the building,” he heard himself inform the operator with surprising composure. If only Tony or Kate were around to hear. “Explosive capability unknown. Up to ten thousand pounds, if I’m looking at Super-Semtex. Enough to kill the hostages, if I’m looking at ordinary C-4.”

  “SO19 is being contacted,” the operator said, still in that preternaturally serene voice. “Do you have backup?”

  “No.”

  “Status of the perpetrator or suspect?”

  “At large. I subdued an accomplice. As far as neutralizing the device—”

  “Do not attempt—”

  “I won’t. But the Dolphin’s night manager should activate the hotel’s evacuation plan. Don’t have his name, but the deputy head of security is called—”

  “Is that DS Bhar?”

  The interrupting male voice sounded bluff and self-assured: a specialist cop or a soldier patched through from SO19, no doubt. “You have visual on the IED? The detonator and timer, too?”

  “Yeah. Got an iPhone? We could FaceTime it.”