Defend or Die

by Tom Marcus

  Mrs Allenby smiled, like a schoolteacher who had nudged her pupils into finally asking the right question. ‘That’s where our Mr Shlovsky comes in. If the Russians can’t bring in their own assets, then they have to use what’s on the ground.’

  Ryan frowned as the penny dropped. ‘You mean they’re going to get Russian billionaires to start planting bombs?’

  ‘Nothing quite as simple as that, Mr Oldfield. But if you think about it, these people have considerable assets. Not just money, but security personnel, often highly trained, some of them ex-Spetsnaz or even GRU and FSB. The expertise is definitely there.’

  ‘But what’s the motivation?’ I asked. ‘You’re living high on the hog, strippers and coke every night, taking full advantage of Her Majesty’s generous hospitality – why piss on all of that? They’d have to be mad.’

  ‘Or someone would have to be twisting their arm,’ Mrs Allenby said. ‘Someone back in Moscow, for instance. We have information that all of Viktor Shlovsky’s assets in Russia have been frozen: bank accounts, real estate holdings, you name it. And a prosecutor has been appointed to investigate tax fraud relating to his businesses. All in all, it sounds as if someone at the very top is holding a loaded gun to Mr Shlovsky’s head.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ I asked.

  ‘We do what we’re best at. We watch. We try and find out if Shlovsky is planning an attack. And if he is, then we stop it.’

  ‘But why us? Why Blindeye?’ I persisted. ‘If HMG knows all this, why don’t they just stick A4 on him?’

  For the first time, Mrs Allenby looked ill at ease. ‘The PM won’t allow it,’ she said tightly.

  We all took a moment with that: so MI5 thinks Russia is planning terrorist attacks through billionaire proxies resident in the UK; Viktor Shlovsky looks like he’s been prepped for the first try-out; and the PM doesn’t want him put under observation. In what universe did that make any sense?

  I was beginning to get a nasty feeling that things at Clearwater Security International were not really clear at all.

  ‘Which is why the DG tasked Blindeye with the job,’ Mrs Allenby concluded, with a tight-lipped smile. ‘Now, if there are no more questions, I suggest you all start putting together a plan of operation.’

  4

  Mrs Allenby closed the door behind her. I wondered if she would now be sitting outside at her desk, playing receptionist again. Something stopped me from opening the door and taking a peek.

  Ryan was the first to break the silence. ‘I can’t believe Craig . . . I mean, how old was he?’

  Alex shrugged. ‘Forty? Bit younger, maybe.’

  ‘Did he have any sort of history of heart problems? Something in the family, maybe?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Alex said.

  But then, the truth was, most of the team hadn’t known anything about each other before we started working together, and we hadn’t found out much more on the job. None of us really talked much about our lives before Blindeye, partly for operational reasons – the less you know, the less you can give away – and partly, perhaps, because throwing ourselves into Blindeye was a way of escaping something. Something you didn’t want to talk about.

  At least, it was for me.

  Ryan shook his head. ‘Bloody hell.’

  There didn’t seem to be anything to add to that. ‘Anyone fancy a brew, before we get down to it?’

  Alan pointed to a kitchen area in the corner. ‘Over there, mate. I might have a decaf soy latte, if you can manage it.’

  ‘No you fucking won’t,’ I said. ‘You’ll have a tea with four sugars as fucking usual.’

  ‘Same for me, minus the sugars,’ Alex said.

  I looked at Ryan. ‘Just a coffee. Black. And out of a jar is fine, before you go off on one.’

  I walked over to the kitchen and put the kettle on. It all looked like a real office, even down to the jokey mugs. Somebody had clearly put a bit of effort into creating our cover. I should have been impressed. Instead, I wondered what it was I wasn’t seeing, what else our new boss was covering up. I was thrilled to bits that that cunt Leyton-Hughes had been given a sideways promotion that left him halfway across the world, of course, but at least he’d been easy to read. One reason he’d never have made a halfway decent surveillance operative, of course.

  But what about Mrs Allenby?

  I brought a tray of mugs over and put it on the big table. ‘Right, then. Where do we start?’

  Ryan flipped through the file on Viktor Shlovsky. ‘Well, we know who he is. Now we need to find out what he does. We need to see the underlying pattern: where he goes, who he talks to – every day, right from taking his first crap to taking his teeth out before bed. Then when we have the whole picture, when we can see it all in three dimensions, we’ll be able to see where something doesn’t fit.’

  ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t do too much jetting around, then,’ I said.

  ‘I dunno,’ Alex said with a grin, ‘I wouldn’t mind checking out the Riviera this time of year. I hear Monaco’s quite nice, too.’

  ‘We’ll just have to hope that Putin’s got him by the balls, and he’s going to stay close to home,’ Ryan said. ‘But from what I can see, he likes to spend most of his time in London, anyway. Plenty of billionaire buddies from the motherland to hang out with, of course. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer and all that. And this is where the money is, don’t forget. Plus all the glitz and glamour of the world’s most exciting city.’

  Alex pulled a face. ‘He needs to spend more time in Lewisham.’

  ‘OK, so first thing, we need to find out what goes on inside that big pile on The Bishops Avenue.’ I turned to Alan, who was sipping his tea suspiciously, clearly not convinced I’d put in the requisite number of sugars. ‘What kind of audio can we get from outside?’

  He put his mug down. ‘Well, that depends. I don’t suppose we’ll be able to set up with a van full of gear parked outside his front door.’

  ‘A bit too conspicuous,’ I agreed. ‘What kind of kit have we got?’ I was aware that however long Mrs Allenby’s reach might be, we no longer had access to any of the specially designed gear that A4 used.

  ‘Anything commercially available, just like any regular security firm. Money’s not a problem, apparently, so I should be able to get my hands on some decent stuff. Depends what you need.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll be able to tell you that after we’ve taken a look at the lie of the land.’

  The truth was, I was itching to get out there. Gathering and analysing as much information as you could while sitting at a desk with a laptop made sense, but there was no substitute for eyeballs on the ground. All the megabytes of data that were freely available floating around the internet if you knew where to look could only tell you so much. I wanted to see Viktor Shlovsky for myself. I wanted to hear his voice, see how he moved, how he walked, how he carried himself – the subtle human behaviours that can only be analysed by the human brain, that evolutionary super-computer designed specifically to work out whether another human being is friend or foe. At least, that was the way I saw it.

  ‘First thing we need then is a decent plan of the property, inside and out. You all right sorting that, Ryan?’ Alan was no slouch when it came to IT, but hacking into other people’s databases was something Ryan did for fun.

  ‘Sure. Should be able to get the estate agent’s specs, plus any surveys – architect’s plans, maybe, depending on how long ago it was built. If they had a security firm come in and look the place over, they might have something useful, too.’

  I nodded. ‘That was my next question. We’ll need to see what kind of systems they’ve got in place. They’re bound to have the usual off-the-shelf stuff, but I’m guessing they might have something a little bit more bespoke as well. Plus plenty of size-twelve boots on the ground, of course. Let’s start with the commercial stuff, find out which company installed it and do some digging around in their files, and we’ll take the mantraps and tiger pit
s as they come.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can find in terms of directional mikes,’ Alan said. ‘And there’s lots of fun stuff you can do with drones these days, of course.’

  ‘Don’t bother with the drones,’ I told him, ‘unless you just want to piss off the dog walkers on Hampstead Heath on a Saturday afternoon. We don’t know how sophisticated his set-up is yet, but we can’t risk him getting spooked before we’ve even started. If he finds himself sitting on the toilet one morning and there’s a fucking drone hovering outside the window, he probably will fuck off to Cannes.’

  Alan looked down despondently.

  ‘Look, if it ends up that there’s someone with a backpack full of plastic explosive climbing up a drainpipe in Buckingham Palace, you have my blessing to blast the fucker to kingdom come with one of those little drone missiles, OK?’

  Alex frowned. ‘Remember who pays for the bleedin’ repairs on that place, Logan. It all comes out of your and my taxes, you know.’

  I grinned, taking a gulp of tea. I looked at Ryan and Alan. ‘How about if me and Alex leave you two here to dig up some more info and see what our tech options are, and we’ll get over there and have a discreet little look-see?’

  Ryan nodded. ‘Sounds good. Alan?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ He was looking a bit happier now, no doubt looking forward to browsing some glossy high-tech catalogues with a few quid in his back pocket.

  Alex was just grabbing her bag when the door opened. We all turned, expecting to see Claire. Instead, Mrs Allenby stood in the doorway with a sombre expression.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve just received some bad news. It appears that Miss Maxwell has been in an accident.’

  I saw Alex pale. ‘What sort of an accident?’

  ‘It appears her car came off the road at high speed on a stretch of the Yorkshire Moors in the early hours of the morning. I’m afraid she’s dead.’

  5

  In the car, Alex stared out of the driver’s side window into the drizzle, chewing meditatively on one of her nails. I left her to her thoughts. No doubt she was doing the same as me – trying to make the pieces fit together.

  As we started the long climb up Fitzjohn’s Avenue towards Hampstead, she finally broke the silence.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘If you’re thinking that losing one member of Blindeye is bad luck but losing two is either very bad luck or something a fuck of a lot worse, then yes.’

  ‘And what about Riaz?’

  ‘As far as we know he’s OK, at least according to Mrs Allenby.’

  She wasn’t convinced. ‘We need to make contact. Get a message to him, at least.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘I don’t know – watch your back?’

  ‘You think he isn’t?’

  ‘Was Claire? Was Craig?’

  I focused on my driving for a minute. ‘Mrs Allenby said no one else was involved in Claire’s accident. She was driving at high speed on a lonely road in the middle of nowhere at one in the morning.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, that’s the sort of thing you do when there’s something on your mind.’

  ‘And that’s why she went off the road?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe she lost concentration for a second.’

  ‘And Craig?’

  I tapped the steering wheel with my fingers. ‘I guess a heart attack’s a heart attack. Maybe that was just bad luck.’

  She gave a dismissive shake of her head. ‘Isn’t there something else you’re forgetting?’

  There was, of course. Not that I’d really forgotten it. It was the big, fat elephant in the room.

  ‘Baldy?’

  ‘You really think he tried to run you over because you made him look like a twat in front of his mates?’

  ‘He might have wanted to give me a scare – maybe just run over my legs or something. Whoever it was behind the wheel wasn’t necessarily trying to kill me.’

  ‘Jesus, Logan, remind me to leave you pissing your pants in the middle of the road next time some arsehole tries to use you as a human speed bump.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  We drove on another fifty yards. The traffic was slowing as cars fed in from the adjoining roads, all headed up the hill.

  ‘OK,’ I said finally. ‘Let’s assume they’re all hits, all connected. Who’d want the three of us dead and why? The only thing connecting us is Blindeye. But who knows Blindeye even exists? Can’t be the brothers, because they’re dead. And they never knew we were on to them until it was too late. They had no way of identifying us, anyway. Their counter-surveillance drills were pretty slick, they were savvy with the comms and all that, but at the end of the day they were just two blokes. That’s how it works.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ Alex said. ‘The whole thing was too sophisticated, with the fake live feed from the killing house and everything. Someone very smart thought all that up. And that someone is still out there.’

  I hit the revs and scooted in front of a big SUV that was trying to nudge out in front of me. Driving in London, you run out of peace, love and understanding pretty quickly.

  ‘Yeah, sure, but how does that person know anything about us? The only other people in the magic circle are the DG and Leyton-Hughes. I can’t exactly see our Old Etonian friend masterminding a purge of his former comrades from his deckchair on Copacabana Beach. So unless the DG has decided he wants to smash up his new toy, who could it be?’

  ‘Maybe the DG wasn’t as clever as he thought he was,’ Alex suggested. ‘Maybe someone in the Service found out what he was doing, rang the alarm, and the PM saw her damehood in the balance and let the dogs of war loose on us.’

  ‘In that case we’re well and truly fucked,’ I said.

  We finally made it to the top of the hill, then along Heath Street, past the tube station and up another hill towards Jack Straw’s Castle.

  ‘Look, all we can do is crack on, watch our drills. In the meantime, let’s get Ryan to see what he can find out about Craig and Claire: police reports, post-mortems, toxicology – all of that. Just in case we’re jumping at shadows.’

  ‘And Mrs Allenby? The DG?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Let’s keep them out of it for the moment. She might look like Miss Marple, but we don’t even know if she really was his PA yet, do we?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Alex said.

  We turned right past White Stone Pond with a view of Hampstead Heath sloping down to our right and onto Spaniard’s Road, the long, straight road that would lead us to Viktor Shlovsky’s mansion. Conversation stopped as we both tried to clear our heads and get into operational mode.

  There was no more time to worry about someone hunting us down.

  It was time for us to become the hunters.

  6

  Millionaire’s Row, they used to call it. Billionaire’s Row now, of course. A million might buy you a garden shed on this street, but not much else. Snaking its way gently north from the edge of Hampstead Heath, The Bishops Avenue was still the only street in London where you could buy a property big enough to house an extended family, plus all the servants and bodyguards, along with the pool and the tennis court, the gym and the cinema, without having to dig down halfway to Australia. Every mansion sat on its own two or three acre plot, giving the impression of a country estate slap bang in the heart of London. Definitely no need to worry about noisy neighbours.

  No need to worry about neighbours, period. As we drove slowly down the road, most of the properties looked uninhabited, locked up tight behind steel gates and bolted window shutters. Some of them looked as if they’d been empty so long they were actually falling down.

  ‘Fucking hell, Logan, does anybody actually live here? It’s like something out of a zombie movie.’

  We passed a vast, odd-shaped mansion that looked as if it had been constructed out of giant sandstone blocks. You could imagine gangs of slaves dragging them along the A1, being me
rcilessly whipped by men in loincloths and hard hats.

  ‘Maybe they’re like the pyramids,’ I suggested. ‘You know, they lock you in with all your servants, your concubines, your Lamborghini and your favourite Rottweiler, and you never see the light of day again.’

  ‘Jesus, I can believe it.’

  ‘A lot of them were bought as bolt-holes by Saudi royals when it looked like Saddam was going to seriously fuck up the region. But in the end they never had to use them. So they just left them to rot.’

  ‘And increase in value, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Most of them were just bought as investments or tax dodges, anyway. The owners were never planning to live there.’

  Alex nodded to herself. ‘You can see why.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have you seen a corner shop anywhere? Where are you supposed to go for a pint of milk or a bottle of Chardonnay at ten o’clock on a Saturday night?’

  ‘You want to see inside, Alex. Some of these places have wine cellars bigger than your average offie. You may have a point about the milk, though.’ I nodded to our left. ‘There we are: Wyvern Lodge.’

  Architecture wasn’t my thing. Anything with central heating and indoor plumbing was a palace as far as I was concerned. And if the roof didn’t leak and the windows weren’t broken, that was a bonus. I guess for me the bar had been set pretty low early on in life.

  But when I looked at Viktor Shlovsky’s mansion, even I wondered if you couldn’t get something a bit classier-looking for forty-seven million. Sure, it was big: a sweeping driveway leading up to a pillared entrance with all sorts of fairy-tale castle bits on top; but something told me a genuine toff would have turned his nose up at it. It certainly didn’t look anything like a stately home that had been in the family for generations: more like a cookie-cutter McPalace for people with more money than style.

  We carried on down to the junction. I turned left onto the A1 and then first left onto Winnington Road, Billionaire Row’s slightly poorer cousin. I parked halfway up, near the entrance to Hampstead Golf Course, and we both got out.