Defend or Die

by Tom Marcus

  The gates opened and the SUV drove out. I looked back at the house and the three guys had disappeared. All very slick. I almost felt like applauding.

  That was all the excitement Daisy and I had until lunchtime. Then, promptly at half past twelve, the roller door went up again and a white Range Rover appeared. A second later the front door opened and there was Mrs Shlovsky.

  At least I assumed it was. I’d seen pictures, and very glam they were, too, but although the woman I was looking at certainly carried herself like the lady of the manor, straight back, head held high, just like a ballerina, her face was hidden behind a scarf and big Jackie O sunglasses, almost as if she knew there was a bloke pointing a camera with a great big telephoto at her from across the street.

  Snap, snap.

  She skipped down the steps and the driver nipped out smartly to open the door for her. I was looking forward to seeing how elegantly she managed to fold herself into the car when she stopped, a hand on her hip, and looked back with a frown.

  There at the top of the steps was hubby. No mistaking him: short, iron-grey hair, dark eyes, a little bit jowly and with a slight paunch, but still a powerful-looking man, square-shouldered and solid. Not exactly a gym body, more something forged in the fields or a factory.

  And right now he was looking pissed. He put his meaty hands in the pockets of his tan slacks, less to affect a casual look than to keep them out of harm’s way, I suspected, and let loose with a volley of angry Russian.

  She gave it about three seconds, then responded with a volley of her own, while the driver, hand still holding the door, froze in place as if someone had just hit pause. My Russian wasn’t up to much, but I knew sarcasm when I heard it, and she was giving him a barrel load.

  Shlovsky turned to his left, where another black-suited guy had magically appeared, and started talking quickly, his speech punctuated with little shakes of his head, as if women simply couldn’t be reasoned with.

  Seeing that hubby wasn’t listening to her, Mrs Shlovsky brought the driver back to life with a flick of her hand and got into the car. The driver shut the door then looked questioningly at Shlovsky. Shlovsky gave him a curt nod, then turned on his heel and went back into the house. The Range Rover went through the gates and disappeared up the road, towards Hampstead.

  ‘Well, Daisy,’ I said. ‘What do you think of all that to-do? I think you’re right: that’s definitely not the first time they’ve had that conversation. I’m also pretty sure I know what’s going to happen next.’

  Sure enough, less than a minute later, another Range Rover, black this time, emerged from the underground garage and the guy in the suit jumped in.

  ‘Not too close, Boris,’ I murmured as he sped up the road, ‘or she’ll suss you.’

  After that little drama, things got quiet again.

  At 13.57 a short-haired brunette in what looked like some sort of maid’s uniform went out in a Mini and came back forty-five minutes later with a couple of shopping bags.

  A UPS truck tried to gain admittance at 14.34 but the men in black were having none of it and sent it on its way.

  At 15.15 two men came out and had an animated discussion, with lots of pointing up towards the first-floor windows. Something to do with the security system? They looked too serious to be discussing the double-glazing.

  I was less interested in what they were talking about, though, than who they might be. One guy was heavyset, looking relaxed in jeans and loafers with a navy jumper that did nothing to hide his belly. The other guy was a little bit more dapper: flannel trousers, blazer and tie. Everything about him said ex-Army, and I didn’t mean the Russian Army. He seemed to defer to the big guy, so was the big guy the capo? I kept snapping as they talked, hoping Ryan would be able to get a match.

  Mrs S came back at 16.07, walking up the steps with slightly less balletic grace than she’d gone down them – or was that my imagination? She was clutching a couple of bags, the boxy kind you get in fancy clothing stores, but I didn’t recognize the names.

  Daisy said she didn’t either.

  The black Range Rover returned twenty minutes later.

  And that was it for the day. I imagined a little shut-eye for Mrs S, then perhaps a swim, a massage, try on her new frocks, until it was time for a glass of wine.

  I had to admit a beer would go down well at this end, too. But I still had work to do. Another energy bar, a slurp of water and a quick piss in the bottle while Daisy wasn’t looking, and I was back at my post.

  I had a feeling that if Shlovsky was going to make another appearance it wouldn’t be until late. He had the look of a night owl. And if he did go out on the town, would he be accompanied by Mrs S? I reckoned not. A frosty dinner with him wolfing down a steak and her picking at a salad while sipping another large Chablis, then early to bed with a headache was my bet.

  At 22.27 it looked as if I was right. Shlovsky appeared, suited and booted, and with the big guy at the wheel and our ex-Army chap and another security guy in the back, they headed off.

  I wanted to follow. They looked like they were planning on a proper night out. But I contented myself with taking a few more snaps. At least I had all the plates now. We’d see if that turned up anything interesting.

  I wasn’t expecting anything else to happen before they returned, and that wouldn’t be for a while. I thought I could risk a bit of kip and Daisy agreed. I watched the foxes for a while, trotting up and down the Avenue as if on patrol. One of them stopped outside the gates, and I swear he turned and looked at me.

  I put a finger to my lips and gave him a wink.

  11

  ‘You look like shit, Logan.’

  A long, hot shower, a change of clothes and a pint of orange juice chugged down straight from the fridge obviously hadn’t done the trick: I still looked like someone who’d just spent the last seventy-two hours crouched over a camera tripod in a room full of broken glass and rat shit, not to mention the corpse of a young girl with her head bashed in. Still, considering that I’d passed on the full English my stomach was craving so I could debrief the team ASAP, Alex’s reaction seemed a bit harsh.

  ‘Thanks, Alex. Nice to see you, too.’

  I handed over the camera and Alan plugged it into his laptop. Soon he was scrolling through the hundreds of pictures I’d taken. I gave a running commentary as Alex, Ryan and Mrs Allenby huddled round the screen.

  Ryan was particularly interested in the security team, especially the big Russian guy and his British sidekick. ‘Can you get me some decent headshots, Alan? Enhance them a bit?’

  Alan started photoshopping. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘Great, I’ll run them through the system. See what the facial recognition gizmo turns up. Let’s have a gander at those number plates as well.’

  ‘You’re not thinking maybe he hasn’t been paying his parking tickets?’ Alex said.

  Ryan shrugged. ‘You never know.’

  ‘I hope you’ve got more for us than that, Mr Logan,’ Mrs Allenby said, giving me a sour look.

  The truth was, I wasn’t sure if I did.

  I was still sorting through it all in my mind, knowing from experience that you didn’t always know what you had seen until you reviewed it all again from beginning to end, like when you emptied out someone’s bin and laid all the rubbish out on the floor. Things that had seemed significant could turn out to be nothing and things you weren’t even aware of at the time suddenly jumped out at you.

  But nothing was jumping out at me yet, and I had a nasty feeling it wasn’t going to.

  I let them work their way through all the pics, pausing every now and then so I could explain what it was they were seeing. Maybe another member of the team was about to say bingo.

  No one did.

  Mrs Allenby pushed her chair back as Alan scrolled through the last few images. I noticed she was drinking tea out of a fancy cup. She looked at me over her glasses. ‘Would you like to sum up for us, Mr Logan?’

  I
took a breath to clear my head. The last of the adrenaline was long gone and I was beginning to feel properly knackered.

  ‘The first thing is there’s no point looking for unusual visitors, because Shlovsky doesn’t have any. I mean, no one comes to the house. There was the guy in the Range Rover on day one, but he was in and out; I don’t think he put a foot inside. Apart from him, anyone breezing up at the gates gets told to fuck off pretty bloody quickly, unless it’s one of the maids coming back from a caviar run. So if Shlovsky is meeting anyone he shouldn’t, he’s not doing it at the house.’

  ‘Not very helpful,’ Mrs Allenby said.

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But it does tell us something useful: he’s nervous.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she conceded.

  ‘He’s definitely a bit edgy where the wife’s concerned,’ Alex said. ‘What’s going on there?’

  ‘Well, the way it looks to me, she likes going into town with just the chauffeur, and Shlovsky wants her to take the heavy mob along. Hence the screaming match.’

  ‘I think it’s nice. It shows he cares,’ Alex said.

  ‘Cares about his bank account, you mean,’ Ryan said. ‘If she gets kidnapped, he could get taken for a couple of billion.’

  ‘No wonder he was a trifle annoyed,’ Mrs Allenby said.

  ‘Of course, it could be that she’s having it off with the driver,’ I suggested.

  ‘Doubtful,’ Mrs Allenby said.

  I shrugged. ‘They say love is blind.’

  ‘But not mentally impaired. I think our Mr Shlovsky would be feeding that young man to the pigs as soon as he got the slightest whiff.’

  ‘Of course, it could be she’s just fed up of being followed round by a bunch of goons wherever she goes,’ Alex said.

  ‘Either way, perhaps that provides us with an in of some sort,’ Mrs Allenby mused. ‘Clearly Shlovsky himself doesn’t step foot outside of the gates without a full complement of minders.’

  ‘Yeah, he doesn’t take a shit without the big guy being right by his side,’ I said.

  ‘Personal bodyguard?’

  ‘Maybe once upon a time, but now I think he’s running the show. More Tom Hagen than Luca Brasi.’

  ‘Konstantin Titov.’

  We all looked at Ryan.

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  ‘The big guy. Konstantin Titov. Formerly Major Titov of the FSB.’

  ‘Christ, that was quick.’

  ‘Well done, Mr Oldfield,’ Mrs Allenby said.

  ‘Wonders of modern technology,’ Ryan said. He shrugged. ‘Or maybe he’s just got one of those faces. Anyway, that’s our guy. Another boy from the wilds of Siberia who made good.’

  I looked over his shoulder at the image of a younger and slimmer man in a spiffy uniform. ‘So maybe they go way back.’

  ‘If they did, he would have been a useful person to know.’

  ‘Or to have in your back pocket. Unless it was the other way round, of course.’

  ‘In Russia, everyone with money is in someone’s back pocket,’ Mrs Allenby said. ‘But where does that get us?’

  ‘If Titov’s ex-FSB, then maybe he’s still getting his orders direct from Moscow. He could be the conduit. Maybe he’s the one we need to be putting under surveillance,’ Ryan suggested.

  ‘The security chief,’ I said, leaning back. ‘You don’t ask for bloody much, do you?’

  ‘I think for now we should be focusing on Mr Shlovsky,’ Mrs Allenby said, pursing her lips. ‘Mr Woodburn? I believe you have something for us?’

  Alan got up from the table and ambled over to one of the desks. I hadn’t noticed until now that it was covered in cables and electronic equipment. I followed along behind.

  ‘Comes in two parts, basically.’ He picked up a smallish black box with an antenna-like projection. ‘You aim this at the window. That’s the laser beam. And then –’ he picked up another, similar-looking box – ‘this is the receiver. You obviously need to get the angle right so it bounces back to you and not into next door’s bathroom. I can show you how to do it.’

  I clapped him on the back. ‘Looks like the business. Thanks, mate.’

  Wait till I show Daisy, I thought. Despite my fatigue, and the lure of a good night’s kip, part of me was already eager to get back.

  ‘Similarly,’ Mrs Allenby said, getting up from the table, ‘there is little point in going to the trouble of setting up this device if we’re aiming it at a broom cupboard. Mr Woodburn?’

  Ryan turned his laptop round so we could all see it.

  ‘OK, here’s the layout, all twenty-four thousand square feet of it. There’s actually a ballroom, if you can believe it.’

  ‘Handy for someone who never has visitors,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe him and Mrs S take a little turn every Saturday night under the chandelier,’ Alex said.

  ‘You are an incurable fucking romantic, you know that?’ I said.

  Mrs Allenby made a tutting sound.

  ‘So,’ Alan continued. ‘Nine reception rooms, twelve bedrooms, grand dining room, slightly less grand dining room, blah, blah, blah – OK, here we go, at the front, first floor, we’ve got two bedrooms, a dressing room and what’s described as an office suite, whatever that is.’

  ‘If that’s where he makes important phone calls, that could be what we’re looking for,’ I suggested.

  ‘Worth a crack,’ Ryan agreed.

  I turned to Alan. ‘I think I know the answer to this, but there’s no chance of getting the other end of the phone call, is there?’

  Alan wiped a lock of hair out of his eyes. He looked genuinely pained. ‘Sorry, mate. We don’t have the resources to jump on the landline – not that he probably uses it for anything confidential, anyway; he’d assume it’s got a tap on it. And mobiles . . . in theory, if I had the number, I might be able to do something, switch the audio on and listen in to that, but it’s going to take time.’

  ‘No point,’ Ryan said.

  Mrs Allenby looked at him quizzically. ‘Because?’

  ‘I’ve pulled up his mobile account. He stopped making calls a week ago.’

  ‘Maybe he just switched to another provider?’ Alex suggested.

  ‘No, I think he ditched the regular phones altogether. I’ll bet you anything you like they’re using burners.’

  ‘Fuck me, they’ve gone to the mattresses,’ I said.

  Mrs Allenby looked at me pointedly. ‘Then I think you’d better get back there as soon as you can.’

  12

  Ryan sat on the tube and thought about patterns. He’d left Logan and Alan messing about with the laser microphone set-up. Mrs Allenby was sitting at one of the work stations doing admin; whether for Blindeye or Clearwater Security it was hard to tell, which was presumably the point. Alex was doing some research of her own, based on the visuals from Wyvern Lodge.

  Ryan felt he had been staring at a screen all day, soaking up information; now it was time to let everything settle in his mind while he focused on something else. It was like those pictures that looked, at first sight, like one thing, but if you managed to flip a switch in your mind, a totally different image appeared. But you had to step back and look away first; otherwise you’d always be stuck seeing only what was on the surface.

  If Ryan had a skill, he supposed that was it: the ability to see the face when all everyone else could see was the tree. The picture he was looking at right now, however, was nothing to do with Viktor Shlovsky.

  Claire. Craig. Logan. Put them together and what did the picture show?

  Two deaths, one near miss. Was that two murders and one failed attempt? Or one accident, one natural causes and a random altercation in a pub that got out of hand? Or, of course, a different combination; Craig’s heart attack could be genuine but that didn’t mean the other two weren’t hits.

  There were two ways to approach it: look at each individual incident on its own terms, drilling down into the detail as far as you possibly could; or try to see the connection first, the t
hing all three had in common, and then work back, seeing the separate incidents in a new light.

  Part or whole. Thread or pattern.

  He had begun the first process, hacking into police and coroners’ reports, anything that was online and accessible, which, though he said it himself, meant pretty much everything. Now it was time to have a go at the second.

  He put that thought on hold as the train pulled into the station. Time for some counter-surveillance drills. Nothing very fancy; it was a while since he’d been in the field, and his skill set was probably a bit rusty, but it was better than nothing. He’d certainly look like a fool if someone jabbed him with a poisoned umbrella just at the moment he figured out who was trying to kill him.

  He found an unoccupied bench and sat down, waiting for the next train. When he’d got on the train at Victoria he’d clocked the other passengers in the carriage. Logan had been impressed by the way Major Titov had been identified by a computer algorithm, but our own natural ability to recognize faces was actually more astonishing, as far as Ryan was concerned. Every day, just walking down the street, we were processing this vast mass of visual information, scanning every face we saw without even knowing we were doing it, then storing the data away, ready to access it at a nanosecond’s notice when we came across the same features again. The evolution of this ability quite possibly explained the impressive size of the human brain.

  And that’s what Ryan had been doing on the train. The idea was that if you were being followed by one person, or even a basic team of two, then when you got out at a stop, they would too. And when you got on another train, so would they.

  Do that enough times, make your journey complicated enough, and when you got to your final destination (carefully selected so there was a convenient observation point, a bottleneck through which every exiting passenger would have to pass), all you had to do was wait for a visual data match.