Tuesday pointed again, past Grace’s home in the direction of the square. ‘Second is the plumber’s van parked outside the public toilets. It’s not right. If someone called out a plumber to fix a leaky pipe or whatever, why would it still be there this time of the evening? Plus it’s positioned at a strange angle, so that the back windows can have a line of sight around the corner towards her house. Glass is painted over silver but there are scratches on it that you could see out of. Could be a spotting scope or binocs on a tripod lined up behind it.’
‘How many operatives you reckon on?’ Jeff asked. He had his own thoughts, just wanted to get his colleague’s take on the situation.
Tuesday shook his head. ‘Hard to be sure. Say we’re looking conservatively at two inside the Rover, plus three in the van, at least five. One of them is probably the guy who was taking a cigarette break on one of the park benches, first time we passed. Green jacket, crew cut. Talking on a phone, sitting facing the house. He’s got the look. By the time the old guy with the dog got there, he was gone. Either slipped back inside the van, or maybe into that empty building for let. If they’re using that as an additional stakeout base, then there could be two or three more men inside, relaying each other on watch. They’d most likely be on the upper floor, where the windows aren’t boarded and they’d get an elevated view of the street. I couldn’t make out anything, but doesn’t mean they’re not in there. My spidey sense tells me they are.’
Jeff’s own assessment of the situation was about the same. ‘Could be looking at seven or eight men, maybe even more. I’ve seen better covert setups, back in the day, but I’ve seen worse ones, too. Got the house covered from all angles, with at least one mobile surveillance vehicle to track her when she leaves home. All in contact via phones or radios.’
‘Still think it’s a government op?’ Tuesday asked, frowning.
‘Fuck knows, mate. Whoever they are, it’s a hell of a number, just to keep tabs on one woman.’
‘Unless they’re expecting trouble,’ Tuesday said. ‘As in, if Ben turned up here. If they know who he is, then they’d know to bring extra manpower. Which means you can be sure they’re armed.’
‘Got it stitched up nice and tight and taking no chances, that’s for sure,’ Jeff growled. All trace of his earlier joviality was gone. His eyes were hard and the muscles of his face were all angles and straight lines as he slipped into full-on combat readiness mode.
‘What’s our best move here?’
‘Sit tight and watch the watchers,’ Jeff said.
Darkness fell. The street remained still and silent. Jeff and Tuesday took turns on watch through the night, two hours each, Jeff going first. They’d both been on plenty of missions in their separate roles in the military, Jeff on Special Forces commando raids and Tuesday often spending days on end hunkered down in his sniper’s nest waiting for the perfect shot. The rules were simple. Once you were dug into position, you didn’t break cover. If you needed to pee, you used a convenient receptacle like the two large empty Coke bottles left over from their meal en route. If you needed the other, you held it in or did it in a bag.
And some people thought the warrior lifestyle was all about glamour and excitement.
Grace’s living room window went dark sometime after eleven p.m. An upstairs bathroom light came on minutes afterwards, and stayed lit for twenty minutes while she was taking a shower and getting ready for bed. A dim bedroom light peeked through a narrow gap in the curtains until 11.28 p.m. and then went off too, leaving the whole house in darkness like most of the other homes in the street. Grace’s neighbour two doors down was a night owl, watching TV until well after one a.m.
Later in the wee small hours, Tuesday observed the figure of a man quietly slip out of the plumber’s van parked in the square and take a stroll into the park. Even at this distance Tuesday’s sharp eyes could make out the tiny cigarette glow as the man settled on a bench and lit up. Tuesday decided it was probably the same guy he’d seen earlier. The obligate smoker of the gang. The guy was there for fifteen minutes before he returned to the van. Tuesday noted down the time, wondering whether or not that meant the surveillance team were using the building for rent, and how that might affect his assessment of their numerical strength. Only time would tell.
An hour after that, with Jeff on watch and Tuesday snoozing quietly in the rear bunk, one of the occupants of the black Range Rover stepped out and walked down the street on the opposite side from Grace’s house, treading lightly, head bowed, hands in pockets. At first Jeff thought he was heading over for a pow-wow with his pals in the plumber’s van, but then the man disappeared inside the public toilets. Pissing in a bottle obviously wasn’t an option for these guys. He was tall and bulky, with stubbly hair that looked orange in the glow of the sodium streetlight on the corner of the square. Five minutes later, Jeff watched him exit the toilets and return to the Range Rover, trying to make himself look as small and unnoticeable as possible. His companion must have had a stronger bladder or less modesty, because he stayed inside the car for the duration. Jeff noted the enemy’s movements below Tuesday’s entry.
At four in the morning, both Jeff and Tuesday were awake and alert. Four a.m. was the magic hour when the enemy’s circadian rhythms would be at their lowest ebb, making them vulnerable and less capable of reacting quickly to a surprise attack. Tuesday said to Jeff, ‘You want to take them down?’
‘I’d love to, mate. But there are too many of them and we still don’t know if there are more inside the building. It’s too damn risky.’
Nothing more happened until after dawn, by which time the sky had become heavily overcast and a steady rain started drumming on the van roof. At seven a.m. sharp, Grace’s front door opened and she walked out to her Land Rover. Her long black hair was tied back into a ponytail. She was wearing a blue cap, her crisp police-issue trousers and shoes and a light raincoat over her uniform blouse. It was clear she was heading to work. The rest of her uniform and kit would be waiting for her in her locker at the station in Fort William. She appeared calm and unworried as she got into her vehicle, and never once glanced across the road in the direction of the black Range Rover, or back at the plumber’s van on the corner. This indicated to Jeff and Tuesday that Grace had no idea she was being watched.
Her scabby old 4X4 blew out a vast cloud of smog as it coughed into life, then pulled away from the kerb and rumbled off up the street. The black Range Rover remained in place until she was rounding the corner out of sight, then fired up, darted sharply out of its parking space, and went after her. The plumber’s van stayed where it was.
The time was 7.01 a.m. ‘Here we go,’ Jeff said to Tuesday. ‘Going to be an interesting day.’
Chapter 28
Albarracín, Spain
The downdraught from the landing Bell Jet Ranger whipped up a storm of scorched vegetation and still-cooling embers from the site of the burnt-out vehicle. A length of yellow police cordon tape was blasted loose from the flimsy pole dug into the ground and flapped like a dying snake in the wind. The chopper touched down on the rocky, scrubby ground, skids flexing as its weight settled. The side hatch swung open and a man climbed down from the cockpit, leaving his assistant and the pilot in their places as he exited the chopper alone. Not yet eight in the morning, and the sunshine was already burning down on his head. He disliked the heat.
His name was Vaughn, and he’d been travelling hard ever since receiving the call from his superiors in the middle of last night. A private jet had whisked him and his assistant, a man named Caldwell, from London to Zaragoza, where the chopper pilot had been waiting for them.
Vaughn walked from the helicopter towards the blackened, heat-distorted remains of the ancient Peugeot van. In addition to his military background Vaughn was a forensic science expert with a lot of past experience in fire investigations, and he knew what he was looking for. The extreme temperatures that had ravaged the vehicle had left the shell still warm to the touch and gently smoking, even
hours after the fire fighters called out here late last night had extinguished the blaze. The charred body of the vehicle’s single occupant had been removed by the police and taken away to the morgue, which had been Vaughn’s first port of call on arrival in Zaragoza very early that morning. The authority of his high-up connections meant he’d had no trouble whatsoever in having the place opened up for him and breezing through the red tape to gain private access to the body.
When the attendant had slid open the drawer and pulled back the sheet, Vaughn hadn’t flinched at the sight that would have caused most people to throw up violently. Vaughn had waited until he was alone with the corpse, then used a phone to take several photos of it. There were no longer any clothes or hair, just the crispy remains of his leather boots and belt. The body was identifiably male, though that was about as much as you could tell.
The local coroner was yet to make their report but a quick inspection of the corpse revealed to Vaughn that the official cause of death would be put down as gunshot wound. There were at least two bullet holes that he could see in the roasted flesh of the victim’s upper torso. Hence, once rubber-stamped by the officials the man’s death would be written up as a murder, though Vaughn very much doubted that the Spanish police would ever come remotely close to finding a suspect.
But while the corpse’s most identifiable feature would have no meaning for the cops, it was of prime interest to Vaughn. He’d donned a pair of surgical gloves to remove the gold and titanium denture from the dead man’s mouth. It was perfectly undamaged. After taking several photos of it, he’d dropped it in an evidence bag to take away with him. He’d also used a scalpel to slice off a chunk of the dead man’s thigh – one of the few relatively unburnt parts of his anatomy – to give to the lab in London for DNA testing. Calls had been made to ensure that nobody here in Spain would quibble over the interference with evidence. When he’d finished with the body, Vaughn had rejoined his assistant and the pilot, and asked to be brought here to the death scene.
Vaughn walked around the destroyed van, noting details. It was obvious that the intensity of the blaze had been due to the more volatile effects of gasoline, rather than diesel. He took pictures of the shattered windscreen and the bullet holes punched into the front of the van, which looked to match in size the ones in the body, and were correctly positioned. In his estimation they had been made by a nine-millimetre pistol.
He walked away from the front of the van, determining the range at which the shots had been fired. Then he hunted around in the bushes to the right of where he reckoned the shooter might have been standing, and found three fired shell casings. The brass was shiny and new, headstamped 9MM FEDERAL. He sniffed the mouths of the cases. Recently fired. He dropped them into a bag as additional evidence.
Next Vaughn skirted back along the side of the van and peered through the sliding door into the rear compartment, noticing the mess of what had been a green plastic jerrycan, now little more than a puddle of melted plastic. That made him wonder. He stepped around to the fuel tank and crouched down to examine it. Taking out a scalpel he carefully scraped away some of the charring and flakes of rust. What he saw was potentially interesting.
Soon afterwards, he’d seen enough to satisfy him for the moment. He walked further away out of sound range of the idling helicopter, and took out his phone. He was under instructions to call his employers immediately upon finishing his tour of the scene.
Vaughn’s boss had been waiting for the call. He snapped up the phone instantly on the first ring. ‘Well?’
Vaughn ran through his initial assessment. ‘The gold teeth match the description of those belonging to the subject, and appear to be the genuine item, although of course we won’t know for sure until the tests are run back in London. Likewise, the tissue sample from the corpse. Cause of death was two, possibly three, nine-millimetre Parabellum gunshot wounds to the upper chest. I haven’t been able to obtain the bullets from the body but I have shell casings that we can use to search for fingerprints and match to a weapon, if the opportunity arises.’
‘Prints will be good enough,’ his boss replied. ‘If they’re a match with Hope’s. Who else’s could they be?’ Moving impatiently on, he asked, ‘So what’s your professional judgement, pending further tests?’
‘In general it looks like what it purports to be,’ Vaughn said. ‘There’s just one thing.’
‘Which is?’
‘On closer inspection of the burnt-out vehicle I found a small hole in the fuel tank. Small enough that it could be easily missed at a glance, but big enough to allow approximately half the tank’s contents to leak out all over the ground. Which would render the vehicle unroadworthy and basically unusable until the hole was plugged or the tank replaced. But I don’t think it was being driven in that condition. I think the hole was made more recently, with something sharp. Like a very slim, needlepoint knife blade.’
‘For what reason?’
Vaughn replied, ‘Well, it could have been done deliberately to drain part of the tank’s contents into a container, such as the melted jerrycan I found on the scene. Which would imply to me that the fire was started on purpose, and not the result of a bullet accidentally getting into the electricals. The corpse might have been doused in petrol after being shot.’
‘Why would Hope do that?’
‘Potentially, to conceal the identity of the body from us. I’m not saying that’s the case. It’s just a theory, based on a hunch.’
His boss reflected on this. ‘I hear you. We’ll know soon enough, when we DNA the tissue sample and examine the teeth.’
‘The teeth alone wouldn’t necessarily prove anything,’ Vaughn said. ‘Except that Hope was able to obtain a similar denture.’
‘Where from?’
Vaughn shrugged. ‘The subject could have provided him with one. Maybe a spare that he carried with him. Again, I’m not basing that on any kind of cast-iron evidence. I wouldn’t even call it a suspicion. But it’s worth remembering who you’re dealing with here.’
His boss reflected a moment longer. ‘Good work, Vaughn. Hurry back to London with those samples. The sooner we start running these tests, the better.’
‘On my way,’ Vaughn said, and ended the call.
In London, the man whom Ben Hope knew as Saunders put down the phone and leaned back in his chair, his high forehead crinkled into a pensive frown as he weighed up what he’d been told. If his man Vaughn’s hunch was in any way plausible, the logical implications were concerning.
The only reason ‘Saunders’ could think of as to why Hope might have deliberately started the fire after killing the driver of the van was because the burned body now lying in the morgue in Zaragoza was in fact not that of Jaden Wolf at all, and that Hope was attempting to pull a fast one. ‘Saunders’ considered how such a hypothetical deception would play out. Assuming that the gold denture that Vaughn was bringing back to London was the genuine article, there was indeed only one place Hope could have got such a bespoke, custom-made item from: Wolf himself. In which case, whether Wolf was now dead or alive, Hope had succeeded in locating his target with great speed and efficiency. Perhaps too much, even for a man of his undisputable talents. ‘Saunders’ now wondered whether perhaps Hope had known Wolf’s location all along. Maybe the two had been in contact from the start.
Whatever the case, ‘Saunders’ reasoned, if Wolf was still alive, there were two possible options. One: the pair had conspired to fake the assassination so that Hope could get himself and the Kirk woman off the hook and Wolf could disappear forever into some hidden recess of the world, never to be seen again. Wolf most certainly had the knowhow to do so, and probably the financial means as well. Hope had taken the risk to feed a lifeline to his former SAS comrade, and would presently be returning home to France in the belief that he’d pulled the trick off successfully.
Or Two: after joining Wolf in Spain, Hope had convinced him that they should team up together, with the intention of somehow turning the tabl
es on their mutual adversaries. That possibility was of greater concern to ‘Saunders’, but was it feasible? Did these men have the sheer bloody balls to attempt such a strategy? And if attack was Hope’s plan, where might he strike first? It was a bold move. Also a foolish one, if Hope had any genuine affection for the Kirk woman. He must surely realise that he’d be signing her death warrant. Could it be that they had underestimated the man’s ruthlessness?
Or perhaps Hope had other intentions. At this stage it was too early to know for certain. Everything hinged on the outcome of the DNA test on the tissue sample currently en route back to London. For the first time, ‘Saunders’ experienced a fleeting moment of nervousness. His suspicions might come to nothing, but he had no intention of letting Hope get the jump on him. He reached out across his desk and picked the phone back up to make a call to another of his people, a man named Turnbull. Turnbull was his second-in-command overseeing the surveillance team in Scotland, as well as the various other operations they had in play.
When Turnbull’s voice came on the line, ‘Saunders’ said, ‘Give me a situation report on Kirk.’
‘Subject is on her way to work. Left home at oh-seven hundred hours. Team are mobile and maintaining observation.’
‘The time has come to make our move,’ ‘Saunders’ told him. ‘At the first available opportunity, I need them to take her.’
Turnbull didn’t sound fazed by the order. ‘Take her, as in take her out?’
‘No, I’m calling a change of plan. They’re to take her alive and move her to a secure place, pending further instructions.’
‘Okay, copy that. Texting the team leader now.’
‘Saunders’ knew that making their presence known to Grace Kirk in this way was turning her into a potential witness against them. It didn’t matter to him, though, because he’d never intended for her to live. Nor Hope. If there was one thing ‘Saunders’ had learned during the course of his long career, it was that you could kill anyone you liked. It was just a question of exerting the requisite amount of power. And he had command of all the power anyone could wish for. His initial nervousness was fast subsiding. He could feel the drumbeat of war throbbing in his veins. If Hope thought he could pull the wool over his eyes, he would soon have to think again.
The Demon Club Page 15
