The London Project (Portal Book 1)

by Mark J Maxwell

  Ouza spun towards Louisa. Another blade had materialised in his right hand. He tensed, ready to spring. Louisa dove into the living room towards where the pistol had fallen. She grabbed it and rolled onto her back, bringing the weapon up to point at Ouza. But he wasn’t there. Louisa frantically swept the pistol left and right, expecting him to jump out at her from the shadows. Then she realised the apartment door was wide open. Ouza was gone.

  ‘We have an officer down,’ Louisa scrambled to her feet, ‘get an ambulance here, now!’ She ran to the door and then slowed before sidestepping cautiously into the corridor, the pistol held up in front of her. She caught a glimpse of Ouza sprinting down the corridor, but he disappeared around the curve before she could even think about getting a shot off. ‘Suspect spotted on the ninth floor heading towards the north end of the block.’ A groan came from inside the apartment. She hesitated, torn between going after Ouza and staying with the DI and the kids. Reluctantly she went back inside. The DI had manoeuvred himself into a sitting position and was staring in shock at the knife embedded in his leg. Louisa knelt beside him. Blood trickled from the wound. The knife didn’t look like it had nicked an artery, but Louisa knew better than to remove it, just in case. The DI had taken off his belt and started to tie it around his upper thigh, but he was all fingers and thumbs.

  ‘Here, let me.’ Louisa pulled the belt strap tight before wrapping it around his thigh and tying it as best she could.

  The DI gasped, but after taking a few deep breaths he nodded his thanks. ‘I’m fine, go on, get after the bastard. I’ll wait here with the kids.’

  Louisa nodded and bolted for the door. She jogged down the corridor and stopped beside the two lifts at the end that led back down to the foyer. One was on the ground floor, according to the readout. The other was still on the ninth. Louisa shoved open the door to the stairwell and peered over the handrail. She caught a flicker of movement on one of the lower floors. ‘Suspect is in the north stairwell heading down.’

  Louisa raced down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. ‘Sloan, where’s the support team?’

  ‘They’re nearly there,’ Sloan said. ‘A minute at most.’

  Louisa paused and looked over the bannister again. There was no sign of Ouza. What floor did he exit onto? She heard a crunch of metal on metal. The fire exit! ‘Sloan, Rick, he’s heading down into the car park.’

  Louisa burst into the car park and looked around wildly but there was no sign of Ouza. She was at the opposite end of the floor to the exit ramp where the SCD7 car was parked. The ramp was the only way for Ouza to leave the building unless he took the other lift or stairs back up to the ground floor. Louisa moved off cautiously. She tried to recall her firearms training. She flicked the safety off and kept her finger to the side of the trigger as she scanned between each car she passed. She couldn’t let him get the drop on her—she was acutely aware of how fast Ouza had moved when he stabbed the DI.

  A gunshot reverberated around the concrete walls and stopped Louisa dead in her tracks.

  ‘Rick?’ Louisa spoke into her sense band. There was no response. Louisa ran.

  The SCD7 car was where they had left it, but the front passenger side door was open. Louisa moved cautiously around the car, keeping her weapon raised. Rick lay sprawled on the ground on the other side. He clutched his throat with both hands, his body convulsing. Bright arterial blood soaked the front of his shirt. He stared at Louisa with wide eyes, silently beseeching her for help.

  ‘Sloan,’ Louisa said. ‘Rick is down, we need medical support here, fast!’

  Louisa was torn. She desperately wanted to help Rick, but she was cognisant of the fact Ouza was still on the loose. She couldn’t see Rick’s pistol either. Then she heard someone running up the exit ramp.

  ‘Sloan, are any of our team on the exit ramp?’

  ‘No, the ARVs are pulling up now.’

  ‘It’s Ouza,’ Louisa said. ‘Brooks, be careful. Ouza could be armed.’

  She knelt beside Rick and set her pistol on the concrete. Her hands shook as she reached out to him. She hadn’t a clue what to do. Rick was shaking uncontrollably. She couldn’t see the wound but Rick wasn’t managing to stem the flow of blood. It was dripping steadily onto the concrete.

  ‘It’s going to be okay.’ Louisa wrapped her hands around his and pressed hard. She could feel his pulse. With each beat, no matter how tightly she squeezed, a short, sharp, spurt of warm blood escaped from between her fingers. Rick’s eyes bulged in terror as he stared at Louisa.

  ‘Sloan, where’s the fucking ambulance?’

  ‘It—it’s going to be at least five minutes.’

  He hasn’t got five minutes.

  Rick coughed and a bloody foam spattered Louisa’s shirt. Another gunshot echoed, this time from the direction of the ramp. Then short, controlled bursts of semi-automatic gunfire.

  Rick’s convulsions slowed, the staccato jerking of his limbs becoming less frantic.

  ‘Hey! Rick!’ Louisa cried. Rick’s eyes were rolling up in his head. ‘Hold on, now. Just a few more minutes.’

  Louisa had never felt so helpless. Her fingers were slick with Rick’s blood. She squeezed a little tighter, terrified she would choke him. She thought she’d managed to stop the bleeding but she could still feel each heartbeat pumping against her fingers, and each time the pressure was lessening.

  Louisa frantically looked around for help, but there was no-one else with them in the car park. ‘Sloan!’

  No response.

  Rick had stopped struggling. ‘No,’ Louisa whispered, but there was nothing she could do.

  Inexorably, horrifically, the life drained from Rick’s eyes and he lay perfectly still.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Louisa trudged up the ramp out of the car park. She heard the wailing siren of an approaching ambulance. Her hands were still covered in Rick’s blood. She wiped them absently on her suit trousers.

  Why aren’t you more upset? The thought almost made her stumble. Rick had just died in her arms. She should be feeling…something. Instead all she felt was numb.

  Time for tears later. Louisa hoped it was true. Bottling things up didn’t help anyone in the long run. She’d end up taking it out on the kids and she sure as hell wasn’t going to become that stereotype. A workaholic on the job and an alcoholic at home—that’s where bottling things up got you.

  At the top of the ramp two of the TST squad stood over Ouza’s body, cradling their carbines and clad in body armour, helmets, and goggles. The bastard’s dead, then. If he were still alive the squad members would be attempting to stabilise him.

  They both noticed her approach at the same time and as one their weapons trained on her. Louisa froze and kept her hands out to her sides, well away from her body. The DI’s pistol was shoved into the waistband of her suit pants in the small of her back. She knew better than to approach a squad of heavily armed men with a weapon in hand.

  ‘Stand down!’

  The shout came from behind the two men. Another member of the squad ran over. Sergeant Brooks, she assumed, noticing the stripes on his upper arm.

  ‘Detective Drachman?’ Brooks enquired.

  Louisa shook her head. ‘He’s dead.’

  Brooks winced, then nodded to the two officers who set off down the ramp at a jog.

  Louisa walked over to stand beside Ouza. It’s brightening up. Morning already, the kids will need to get ready for school. Such strange, everyday thoughts to be having whilst staring at the body of a man who had killed so many people.

  Ouza’s chest was riddled with bullet wounds. The pistol the DI had given Rick was in his right hand. You should have stuck with the knives. His face was still covered in the slick gel-like substance. Louisa crouched to get a better look but she kept her hands by her sides. It looked like the kind of thick ointment you might apply to a bad burn. There was nothing indicating it was anything out of the ordinary.

  ‘Do you know what the shit is on his f
ace?’ Sergeant Brooks asked.

  Louisa shook her head.

  ‘We tried to scan him, but it was the damnedest thing. He came up as a different person on the sense capture.’

  *

  Louisa accompanied the DI as he was wheeled out of her apartment on a trolley down to the waiting ambulance. The paramedics had left the knife in place, worried that extracting it would cause too much damage to the surrounding tissue.

  The support team was still loitering beside their ARVs, parked in the middle of the street outside the apartment block. The cars hadn’t been moved since they’d pulled up and jumped out to confront Ouza. Three patrol cars had arrived and were rolling out police tape, sealing off the ARVs and the ramp down to the car park. A white sheet covered Ouza’s body, which remained on the tarmac, awaiting the arrival of forensics.

  Sergeant Brooks moved to join them as they wheeled the DI towards the waiting ambulance. ‘A moment with you, sir?’ He glanced at Louisa. ‘Alone, if possible.’

  Louisa took the hint and walked back to sit on the kerb. The gunshots and police activity had drawn quite a crowd. Worried looking apartment residents mixed with the usual gawkers, Guerrilla Casters, and newscast crews. She was attracting some attention herself—she hadn’t managed to change her clothes and her blouse was stained with Rick’s blood. She absently picked at the dried blood under her fingernails. She had tried to wash it off back in her apartment but some stubbornly remained.

  Someone was asking her a question. She looked up. A reporter stared down at her, his wrist outstretched with a sense band attached and his irises blinking red. Louisa shook her head, stared straight ahead, and eventually he left her alone.

  The sergeant handed something to the DI who was sitting up on one elbow on the gurney. He looked at it, then glanced at Louisa, as did the sergeant. Her skin prickled. She didn’t like the way they were staring at her. The DI motioned her over.

  ‘The Sergeant found this on Ouza’s body.’ The DI held out a small piece of card.

  It was a scan ripped from sense footage, a head and shoulders shot of a woman. The quality wasn’t great. The sense strip was likely quite a distance from the woman given the degradation in resolution. But there was no mistaking who it was. Louisa was looking at a scan of herself.

  ‘Why do you think Ouza was targeting you next?’ the DI asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Have you ever had any dealings with Victor Korehkov?’

  ‘What? No, of course not. I’d never even heard of him before today.’

  He stared at her with the same careful, appraising look she recalled from the meeting when DI Vaughn was raking her over the coals. Louisa didn’t appreciate it then and she sure as hell didn’t like it now. ‘If you’re going to accuse me of something, sir, at least have the decency to give it to me straight.’

  The DI scowled and gripped the top of his thigh, hissing through his teeth. Whatever painkillers the paramedics had given him must have been wearing off. ‘I believe you, Detective. Korehkov’s not going to get away with targeting you, or for the murder of DC Drachman. An internal gangland feud is one thing, but Korehkov’s crossed the line. I’m just pissed off I won’t be the one to bring him in.’

  ‘What do you mean? Have they taken you off the case?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. Now we have material proof Ouza obfuscated his profile, it’s out of our hands. Any cases involving profile forgery are the domain of the National Crime Agency. Profile forgery trumps organised crime these days, I’m afraid. It’s the NCA’s investigation now.’

  *

  ‘Another newscast crew has arrived,’ Charlie said. His face was pressed against the living room window.

  ‘There’s an aerial shot of our apartment block on one of the newscasts.’ Jess pointed at the wall screen.

  Charlie tilted his head upwards. ‘I see a helicopter!’ He started waving his arms.

  ‘Charlie,’ Louisa said, ‘come away from the window and sit down.’

  ‘Aw.’ He reluctantly joined Louisa and his sister on the sofa. He beamed up at Louisa. ‘This is really cool. Everyone in school is so jealous.’

  The kids had been bouncing round the living room in excitement since Louisa returned to the apartment. Jess had dutifully kept Charlie in their room during the whole episode, even while the paramedics were stabilising DI Lenihan. Louisa was truly thankful they hadn’t seen the DI and the knife in his leg. She glanced over at where the he had lain. She’d managed to mop up the blood before the kids came out, thank God.

  She’d carefully explained to the kids that there had been a bad man in the apartment, but he was gone now and they were safe. She wanted to protect Jess and Charlie from the worst of what had happened. She’d seen first hand the psychological trauma witnesses to violent crime suffered.

  She needn’t have worried. Immediately they started surfing news feeds for all the gory details, revelling in the scans someone had taken of Ouza lying bloody on the exit ramp before the support team had covered his body. A friend of Jess’ sent her a link to a first-person feed of a resident of the apartment complex who witnessed the gunning down of Ouza. Luckily she managed to stop Jess showing it to Charlie before he suffered nightmares for a month. Although maybe it wouldn’t have affected him badly at all. Violent feeds were limited to certain profile age-ranges but she knew for a fact it didn’t stop Charlie’s schoolmates from accessing them. Louisa hated the thought that Charlie could become desensitised to such violence, but for once she was thankful for it.

  Before DI Lenihan left in the ambulance he made her promise to take a protection detail. A SCD7 detective was on his way to guard her, or keep an eye on her, or maybe a mixture of the two. DI Lenihan might be off the case officially but he wasn’t done with it yet, or with her for that matter. But she’d accepted his offer gratefully. Not for her sake, but for the kids. Ouza had known where she lived. It wasn’t safe for the kids to be at home, or with her. They’d have to go and stay with their father.

  The NCA would be wanting to grill her as well. Their cyber crime unit’s role had expanded under Portal. They didn’t just investigate phishing scams or people trying to sell prescription drugs on the global web any more. Their remit included any illegal activity carried out on Portal, profile forging being their main area of interest. They liaised with the intelligence services as well, Louisa had heard. Especially the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

  There’s going to be an endless barrage of questions. Louisa massaged her eyes with the palms of her hands. Why did Victor Korehkov order a hit on her? What did she know about the technology Ouza had used? She wished she had the answers. She’d been wracking her brains to try and come up with a reason why Korehkov would want her dead, or how he even knew of her existence. The only theory Louisa had so far was that it was related to the Baz Waters arrest. Was Korehkov trying to hide the existence of the substance Ouza had used on his face? Maybe someone tipped off Korehkov about the report on Baz’s arrest Louisa submitted. It was the only mention in the case file of the technology Baz used. If Korehkov found out about her from the report, it meant someone within the MET was working for him. DI Lenihan hadn’t mentioned it but they both knew the scan of Louisa Ouza carried was taken from a sense log. A sense log only SIU and the intelligence services had access to. It was starting to look more and more likely one of her colleagues was working for Korehkov. But now that Ouza had failed and the technology was exposed she shouldn’t be a target any longer, should she? After all, what would Korehkov have to gain from her death now?

  She’d called DI Fuller to tell him about Rick. When he said he would inform Rick’s wife Louisa felt an immense burst of relief and then guilt in equal measures. He wanted a full report from her ASAP. Blame and recrimination for Rick’s death would surely follow. Office politics. The thought disgusted her. She wanted no part of any of it.

  The newscasts were still dominated by the Portal breach and the riots. But the rioters had been
brought under control, or had gone home for the day to sleep, and Portal was in the middle of a full-scale PR offensive designed to counter any negative coverage of the breach. Ouza’s death played right into the Portal newscasts’ hands. Now they had something really juicy to promote as their top news item. A detective dead, and his killer, a gangland hit man, gunned down in a residential area by armed police. A vibration came from her jacket pocket. She groaned and reluctantly retrieved her terminal, not wanting to speak to anyone. When she saw it was a video call request from Ed she moved into the kitchen and thumbed an acceptance.

  ‘Professor Michael Keenan,’ Ed said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He’s who created the genome fragment you sent me.’

  ‘You found something?’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult. He wasn’t trying to hide it or anything. His name was encoded in plain English along with “The Vanstone Institute”. He used to work at the place. There’s more data but it seems to be encrypted with some sort of AES variant. I could try and brute-force it with the help of one of our server farms but it might not be crackable.’

  ‘No, that’s okay,’ Louisa said. ‘Wait—you said he used to work there?’

  ‘Yeah, I did some digging around. He was the director of the Vanstone Institute until they were bought over four years ago.’

  Louisa waited for Ed to continue but he remained silent, wearing an infuriatingly smug smile on his face. He’d quite happily let her ask a hundred questions in order to prize the information out of him, just to prove how clever he was. She took a deep breath and bit her lip. ‘Okay, genius. Spill it. What did you find? In full, this time.’

  ‘You’re no fun. All right. Michael Keenan was a professor at Imperial College London specialising in genetic research until he left seven years ago to found the Vanstone Institute. He took a good number of his postgraduate research students with him as well. I can’t imagine he was too popular with the university after. He kept the professor title but strictly speaking, once he left he wasn’t entitled to retain it. Why do you think he kept it? My guess is—’