Scorpion: A Group Fifteen Novella

by Mark Dawson

  Only this was not a dump site. It was a fortress. Banks was there. In that house.

  The troublesome agent was there too. He knew it.

  And he was coming for both of them.

  11

  Milton had always hated large English country houses. They spoke of unearned privilege. The floor-to-ceiling oak panelling on the walls, the art, the chandeliers, the parquet tiled floor, all of it a testament to the wealth of the English upper classes, and, by definition, a stark reminder of how little most of the country had by comparison.

  He’d asked for a computer with Internet access and Sanger led him and Hailey up the ornate staircase to the first floor. They stood outside a heavy set of double doors carved from solid oak.

  “This is the heart of Lazarus House. I expect both of you to forget what you see here,” said Sanger.

  He opened the doors to a large room with a cavernous ceiling. It would have been a vast reception room at one time, or perhaps a small ballroom, judging by the chandeliers. As it was, the room had several groups of sofas and chairs in the centre, some with video cameras pointed at chairs. Beyond this, at the back of the room, were row upon row of clothes racks filled with men’s and women’s clothing wrapped in cellophane as if they’d just been returned from the dry cleaner’s. Banks of filing cabinets lined the wall on the left, and computer stations and printers on the right. Sanger led them to a computer on an antique table and logged in.

  He selected an Internet browser and opened it. Hailey sat down and logged on to her email account. She seemed to have moved past the shock of the evening’s events. Milton had often seen the same thing in combat. After the initial trauma of a grenade attack or a barrage of enemy fire, soldiers suddenly remembered that they had a job to do. The task of accessing her emails and finding the article she had been working on seemed to focus Hailey’s mind.

  “What is this place?” said Milton.

  Sanger nodded, beckoning to Milton to step away from Hailey. Milton followed him across the room to the metal filing cabinets. Each cabinet drawer bore a letter of the alphabet, and the cabinets stretched across half the length of the room.

  “This is where we raise the dead,” said Sanger, making sure to keep his voice low so that Hailey wouldn’t hear. “In each drawer is a birth certificate, passport, bank account details, work record and list of addresses for an individual. An imagined life.”

  He opened a drawer, selected a British passport and handed it to Milton. He opened it, found the ID page and noted there was no photograph to match the name and address.

  “Every ID document is created here, apart from the birth certificate. That’s real. Each birth certificate is for an infant who passed away before their first birthday. We have birth certificates from every part of the country, stretching back seventy years. When we need a cover for an agent or source, they come here. This is where we give new life to the dead. It’s a shared facility with MI6. I imagine if you ever think of retiring, you might have to pay us a visit, old boy.”

  Milton nodded. Retirement was the last thing on his mind.

  “Would you and Ms Banks care for tea?” said Sanger.

  Shaking his head, Milton said, “You boys in the service are all the same. I take it you have good Scotch? Make it two doubles.”

  “Splendid,” said Sanger.

  The MI5 man threw up the shutter on a roll top desk in the corner to reveal a decanter and glasses.

  Milton left him to it and returned to Hailey.

  “This is it,” she said, pointing at the screen.

  Milton read the document. He found the article insightful, well written, and interesting on a personal level. It began with an interview of Fred Gould. An eighty-two-year-old man who lived in a tower block in Peckham. He was the last resident of the monstrous tower that had been built in the sixties. He had also been the first. Property developers had bought out the tenants and the land. Fred had been reluctant to leave. The narrative moved to other parts of London and the severe lack of affordable housing. The rich, it seemed, were buying the poor and the middle classes out of London. As a piece of journalism, Milton enjoyed it. It touched upon the political, social and personal levels of the growing housing crisis, and those who would seek to profit from the market.

  Nothing that would result in the author being killed.

  Or was there?

  “In your research, did you notice anything about the companies who were buying up these properties?” said Milton.

  “Nothing especially. There are half a dozen that featured heavily in the biggest deals,” said Hailey.

  “Do you have their names?” said Milton.

  Hailey closed the article and found an earlier email with her sources and research. Opened it. There were a lot of attachments. Some of them were from Companies House. Milton opened them and read the company information, focussing on the lists of directors.

  He stopped when he saw one name and made a call to Control.

  “Where are you?” said Control.

  “Lazarus House. MI5 facility in –”

  “I know it. All quiet?”

  “So far. I’ve been doing some homework. The Saudi prince that Scorpion took out earlier, what was his name?”

  Control said the name, and Milton’s suspicions were confirmed.

  “I think I’ve found the link between the targets.”

  Hailey swallowed. Milton met her eyes as he laid it out for Control.

  “Hailey Banks was working on an article about property tycoons and companies buying up social housing. One of the companies buying up large swathes of property belonged to the prince. Hailey’s search of the company would’ve been logged at Companies House. I’d bet the prince was using the black Russian banks to finance the deals. Any exposure in the press could be catastrophic for those banks and the individuals behind them.”

  For over a hundred years, Russia had essentially been two countries. A million miles of rural backwater and towns crippled by communism, and the heavy, rich industrial centre. The latest regime had discovered that loyalty, political ideals and patriotism were flimsy concepts when it came to solidifying power. Money worked a lot better. The corruption at the heart of the Russian state operated on truckloads of money, and a black market banking system where Russian officials of state, oligarchs and mobsters alike could fund their lifestyles. It was easy to make money in Russia if you were corrupt, or powerful enough. The real problem came when you needed to move money out of the country.

  The London property market was the new Monte Carlo for the Russians. It simply wouldn’t do if a British journalist suddenly discovered that the Russian Interior Minister owned half of the property on the South Bank.

  The solution was typically Soviet. The SVR would purge the problem. The journalist who potentially unmasked the scheme, the middleman – the prince – and one other.

  “Who is the third target?” said Milton.

  “That information is above your pay grade. Stay where you are for now,” said Control, and ended the call.

  Hailey rubbed her temples and said, “So I’m a target because of an article I haven’t even published yet? I mean, I didn’t even know about this scheme.”

  “Your background as a conflict correspondent would’ve done you no favours. They weren’t to know what angle you were taking on this story. But they knew the truth, and they couldn’t risk it coming out. The simple thing is to kill the story and the sources. Then move on. There are any number of wealthy men who will act as a front for this kind of money. Money-laundering has to be a risk-averse operation for the Russian government.”

  Sanger placed two crystal tumblers on the desk in front of them. Milton sipped at the Scotch. It was good. Hailey downed hers and grimaced.

  “I don’t normally drink this stuff,” she said. “Can I have another?”

  “Of course,” said Sanger, refilling her glass.

  “I need to talk with these men. Are you alright here?” said Milton.

  H
ailey nodded, took the second glass of Scotch in hand and moved to one of the sofas. Milton and Sanger moved out of the room, onto the balcony overlooking the entrance hall.

  “I need to know about this house. What kind of defences do you have here?” said Milton.

  “There are CCTV cameras all over the property. Front and back. When the Ministry took over the house in the Second World War, they cleared the trees at the front of the house. You can see an approach at a thousand yards. Hidden cameras at the end of the lane, where it meets the main road, of course. The only weak point at the front of the house is the hill on the left. It was simply too big a job. There’s a rocky outcrop up there at the summit, good spot for a sniper, but it would be a hell of a shot from there. You could just about hit the front door if you had serious talent. There’s a line of trees that runs behind the house to the hill, but again it’s a good distance away for a sniper and we have infrared cameras in the trees. There is one point of entry at the rear, and we can cover any approach from the windows.”

  Milton nodded. An attack on this house would not be easy for any force.

  “Do you have an armoury?” said Milton.

  “Follow me,” said Sanger.

  They took their glasses to the ground floor and then to a secure room in the west of the house. On the wall were a dozen antique shotguns in a glass cabinet. A few old hunting rifles and a drawer full of ammunition. A small workroom led off the main armoury. It contained two workbenches and a range of tools.

  “We’re not going after stag, I’m afraid,” said Milton.

  “This facility has never suffered an attack. With my three men, plus me, you have four MP5s at your disposal. Between the five of us, we can cover all approaches to the house. What we have is more than sufficient to deal with one man,” said Sanger.

  Milton drained his glass, put it down on a table and opened the cabinets. He selected two double-barrelled shotguns, two boxes of ammunition and took them to the workroom. He placed the items on one of the benches.

  “Trouble is, I don’t think we’ll just be dealing with one man. If Scorpion knows where we are, which I expect he does, he’ll know that we will have Hailey under armed guard. This man has strong links to the Russian mafia. I already dealt with two of them. Unless I’m mistaken, he’ll come with a force of his own.”

  “We can deal with a few gangsters,” said Sanger.

  “I hope so. Don’t underestimate these men. Many have had paramilitary training. They’re not professional soldiers, but they are professional killers. That can’t be dismissed so easily,” said Milton, checking his Glock. He had eight rounds left in the magazine. That would not be enough.

  He placed one of the shotguns in the vice at the end of the workbench. Tightened the vice, selected a hacksaw that hung above the table and began to saw twelve inches off the double-barrelled weapon.

  Sanger looked on in horror. He said something, but Milton couldn’t hear him over the whine of the saw blade on the barrel. He worked the saw quickly and was pleased that the blade held true and worked fast through the barrel. Within a minute Milton had sawn through the last barrel. There was a loud clang as the offcut hit the floor. Next, Milton flipped the gun around and took off the back of the stock to make it, effectively, into a makeshift pistol grip.

  Sanger covered his mouth and said, “The housemaster will be furious. That’s an antique gun. It’s worth fifty thousand pounds!”

  “Not anymore,” said Milton, with a smile.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Milton had traversed the grounds of the house with Sanger pointing out firing positions and weak spots. The rocky hilltop would be a perfect position for a sniper to pick off anyone leaving the house, but only if the hilltop was three hundred yards closer to the house. There was little light, but Milton estimated that perhaps only a dozen men in the world could make an accurate shot from that range.

  “They’ll hit us from the rear,” said Milton, sitting on the hilltop.

  From this position, they could see the house and the line of trees that began behind the hill and ran down around the back of the house.

  “There’s no cover here. A frontal assault would be suicide. We’ll have to move the cars into the garage. Don’t want to give them an opportunity for cover right in front of the building. If we do that, they’ll come around and use the trees at the back of the house for cover,” said Milton.

  He lit a cigarette and looked back down the lane towards the road.

  “If all five of us took up positions at the rear, we could pick them off pretty easily,” said Sanger.

  Milton shook his head. “That only works if there’s a small number. Eventually we’d run out of ammunition. No, that won’t work.”

  “Excuse me, but there are contingency plans in place for an attack. We have three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views from the east and west towers. Two or three men in the lower windows, spread out, and this place is impregnable.”

  “Only if you have five hundred rounds per man. How many rounds do you have?”

  “Each shooter has twenty rounds,” said Sanger.

  “Exactly, that’s the problem. There’s a better way to defend this house,” said Milton.

  “How?”

  “We attack them,” said Milton.

  * * *

  It was an hour before sunrise. Both men had moved the vehicles into the garage, and they stood in the entrance hall with Hailey. Milton had briefed Sanger and Hailey before the rest of Sanger’s men. He’d given Hailey the other shotgun, which he’d left unaltered. Told her how to load it.

  “Don’t worry about aiming,” said Milton. “Just point it and squeeze the trigger.”

  Hailey nodded, felt the weight of the gun and practiced pointing it at the wall. She tucked the stock deep into her shoulder, adjusting her footing as Milton had explained. Gently, Milton put his hand on the gun and pushed it toward the floor.

  “Be careful, these old guns are powerful. Don’t point at anything unless you are prepared to shoot.”

  “Okay, I think I’ve got it,” said Hailey. She was shaking again. Milton had a plan. He had training. He’d been in worse spots before. He was calm. An iron rod in a hurricane. It seemed to Milton that Hailey took comfort in his determination. She blew out her cheeks, closed her eyes and stopped the wave of panic.

  “You’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever met,” said Milton.

  Hailey stared at him, dumbfounded. “That doesn’t fill me with confidence. Have you met me? I’m a nervous wreck. John, I’m so scared. I’m bloody terrified. And you… you’re not even remotely frightened, are you?”

  “No, I’m not. I do this for a living. And that doesn’t make me brave. You can’t be brave if you’re not scared. That’s what bravery is, Hailey. It’s the men and women who go on despite their fear. Now, you two know the plan. When I give the signal, you get to the garage and you run. Sanger will take you.”

  Without another word she threw her arms around Milton, holding him tightly. He whispered to her, and she broke the embrace.

  “I’ll make sure she makes it out,” said Sanger.

  Milton then spent time briefing the other agents. Jones was a former Welsh Guardsman. A tall man with a slow, steady manner. He would be a good man to have at the security cameras. Then there was Connolly – shorter than Jones by a foot but much more aggressive. The last man was Piper. He had the least hands-on experience and was more of a pure analyst than the others. Still, Milton sensed Piper would not desert him in a firefight, and indeed the man handled his MP5 well.

  “You all know what to do?” said Milton.

  They did.

  A distant alarm sounded in a room just off the main hallway. Jones set off towards it. He reached the threshold of the room and stared at the monitors.

  “They’re here,” he said.

  12

  The lead van pulled up and stopped at the entrance to the private lane that led to Lazarus House. Scorpion had used the time on the r
oad wisely. He’d found Google Earth images of the property and the layout of the surrounding grounds. He’d then cross-referenced the satellite imagery with Ordnance Survey maps and even managed to access the local council website and obtained plans of the building from before it was acquired by the government.

  Scorpion knew the layout of the building, the grounds and the terrain.

  He always went prepared.

  “Turn around, go back down the road a few hundred yards and stop there,” said Scorpion to the driver of the van. He didn’t question his orders, simply turned the vehicle and trusted the second driver to follow suit.

  They drove back the way they’d come until Scorpion told the driver to stop. The rural, country road was deserted this time of night. It had been ten minutes, at least, when they’d last seen a house or farm before they hit Lazarus House. So there was no one to see Scorpion and seven burly men with automatic weapons pouring out of two black vans in the middle of the English countryside.

  Vitali had chosen to stay behind, but his driver, the giant Russian who went by the name of Marko, came in his stead.

  One by one, they climbed the fence that separated the road from the line of trees. Scorpion would not allow any torchlight. It was close to sunrise. Perhaps only an hour until the sun crested the horizon. The sky had a purplish, bluish hue. Not full dark. But as soon as they stepped into the forest, they were all but blind. Visibility was down to less than ten feet in some parts, but in the most densely wooded areas, some of the Russians couldn’t even see to the end of their machine guns.

  Scorpion led them slowly through the trees. He grimaced at every step. The Russians were deadly, no doubt, but they were noisy in this environment. Even though they didn’t speak, their boots were heavy on the ground, and if there was a twig to be snapped underfoot, they snapped it. And a twig or branch breaking in a forest sounded almost like a gunshot.