“Did you tell him that it may result in the prevention of a terrorist attack on British soil?”
“I did, but the reply was that we cannot simply ignore our laws to suit us.”
“Fine. Go to Petkovic’s club. He is in his manager’s office, locked in a closet.”
“We found him there already. Along with Dragan and a security worker named Kevin Chapman in a supply closet. Petkovic wants to press charges against you. He says you tased him.”
“Criminals, they lie! That is what they do. Where would I have got a Taser from, anyway?”
“And yet for some reason I’m inclined to believe him. Maybe it’s the taser marks on his chest. Regardless, he’s asked for an attorney and refuses to speak with us. He deleted all his text messages; we can’t find anything on his phone that might prove the Ebola vials are at Aleksander’s house.”
“If all you have is bad news, then get off the phone and stop wasting my time,” Violet said.
“All right, I’ll call you in the morning if we have something.”
The call disconnected, and Violet stood up. We left the apartment, closing the door behind us, and made our way back to the streets, where Violet immediately hailed a cab.
“Cresset Road, Hackney,” she told the cabbie. “There’s an extra fifty quid in it for you if you get us there in under twenty minutes.”
The cabbie took off from the curb so fast I felt myself thrown back against the seat. We were definitely going to make Violet’s twenty minute timeline, if we didn’t die in a fiery wreck first.
“Aleksander’s home?” I asked, and Violet nodded, her eyes gleaming with excitement.
“We have a window, here. It is a small window; they are moving the vials soon. If the police will do nothing about it, we will have to.”
“And how, exactly, are we going to break into an apartment filled with gangsters getting ready to move vials of a deadly virus somewhere else?” I asked, quietly enough so that the cabbie wouldn’t hear.
Violet shrugged. “I do not know, but we have just under twenty minutes to come up with a plan.”
This definitely didn’t sound like the sort of thing that was going to end well.
Chapter 17
Hackney was well known as being one of London’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods, and as soon as we got there I could tell it was completely different from the rest of London. Whereas the inner city was made up of classy, gorgeous buildings, the sort of thing you see on postcards, Hackney seemed to mainly comprise of large brick apartment buildings, the sort of thing that were all over the place in the sixties and seventies. If they’d been concrete instead of brick they could have been mistaken for Soviet communist apartments.
The local council had obviously made an effort to clean the place up a little bit by planting large trees with plush leaves, but even their branches looked slightly droopy and depressed in the night.
Litter was scattered along the roads and groups of young men loitered in the shadows. The sound of firecrackers on a street nearby made me jump. This wasn’t the kind of place that I’d want to spend a lot of time around at night, that was for sure.
I tried not to think about that as Violet and I made our way toward the building. The name, Milborne House, made it sound like a classy kind of place. It was the absolute opposite of that. Made of dirty red bricks, about five stories tall, with a front door painted bright blue, the building actually reminded me a bit of my old elementary school, in one of the worst parts of San Francisco. Two men were loitering out the front of the building, smoking pot.
The two men leered at us as we made our way to the front door. Violet smiled seductively at one of them.
“I’m trying to surprise my boyfriend,” she told them, putting the French accent on even more heavily than usual. “Would you mind buzzing us into the building?”
“Yeah, no worries,” one of the men replied, not hiding the fact that he was looking directly down her top. He was so busy staring at Violet’s cleavage that he practically walked into the door himself, and as they let us into the building I could sense the stares of both men on our rear ends.
“If you ladies decide you want some more fun, we’ll be here,” one of them called out after us, and I shuddered.
“Why didn’t you just crack the code yourself?” I asked Violet.
“Did you see the amount of dirt on that keypad? It would have taken me ages; dealing with Mister Charming down there was far more efficient. Aleksander lives in apartment 1F, likely on the first floor.”
We made our way up the stairs–I still didn’t have any shoes and made a mental note to get a tetanus booster tomorrow just in case–and a few minutes later found ourselves in front of the apartment we wanted. Violet pulled out her tools and quietly unlocked the door. If I’d learned anything from being around her, it was that it was way easier to break into places than I’d ever realized. When I bought my own home one day there were going to be like, at least six deadbolts on the door.
I had no idea what we were going to find when we entered the apartment. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised when it wasn’t empty; as soon as we entered the small, one-bedroom apartment it was obvious he’d spotted us, too.
Black hair, tanned face, tattoos all over his arms and chest–what I could see of them, anyway–and eyes that immediately darted toward the window. This guy’s fight-or-flight reaction tended toward flight. At least that boded well for us.
A second later, however, after realizing that rather than being burly gangsters we were two young women, one of whom wasn’t wearing shoes, with neither one of us wearing clothing that was especially handy to be fighting in, he decided that maybe fighting was his best option. He began to run, obviously intending to blow through us and out the door rather than jump out the window.
I froze. After all, this man who weighed probably almost twice what I did was rushing toward me. I had no idea what he was going to do. Was he going to hit us? Knock us out? Did he have a knife hidden that he was going to pull out? No, my fight-or-flight response was apparently completely broken.
Violet’s, on the other hand, was fine. She carefully took a step to the side as the man ran past her, then held out her ankle as he went soaring through the air, completely out of control, crumpling against the wall on the other side of the hallway.
The man groaned as Violet stepped out into the hall, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and dragged him back into the apartment, closing the door behind her, then dropped him back onto the ground, where his head hit the carpet and he writhed around.
“Who the hell are you two?” the man asked groggily. I was fairly certain he had a mild concussion.
“Oh no, I think you do not understand. We are the ones asking the questions. Is the Ebola gone?”
“What Ebola?”
“You do not need to play dumb with me, it is evident you are an idiot already. The Ebola that the others left with, where did they go?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man replied groggily. Violet sighed and reached into her purse, pulling out the Taser.
“And now? Are you still going to pretend to be dumber than you really are?”
“Jesus,” the man said, scrambling along the ground to back further away from Violet. “Look, I don’t know where they went, I swear.”
“Is that your final answer?” Violet asked, leveling the Taser at the man’s chest.
“Yes! Yes, I swear I don’t know where they went. I admit, I had the vials here. They were here until about twenty minutes ago. We were supposed to wait for Filip, but he should have been here an hour ago, so we had to move them without him. But I swear, they did not tell me where they were going. They took the virus in a car. Maybe to give to the buyer?”
“What do you know about the buyer?” Violet asked.
“I… I don’t know anything!” the man said, pressing himself against the wall, as though if he wished hard enough he might simply disappear into it. Violet narrowed her
eyes and moved her finger to the Taser’s trigger, and the man began to panic.
“Wait! Wait! I know… I know he’s from London. I know he’s planning something big. Our guys are doing everything for him, in exchange for the big payday. We’re getting ten million, total, for our role in this. That’s all I know, I swear!”
“Give me your mobile,” Violet ordered, and the man reached into his back pocket with a trembling hand, passing his phone to Violet.
“Do you need the passcode?” the man asked, and Violet smirked.
“Please,” she replied with a scoff, and I couldn’t help but smile. A second later I saw the screen flash to life as Violet had unlocked the phone, and she began to go through it. As she did so, I looked around the apartment. It was fairly Spartan, with a stained couch on one side of the living room, a huge plasma TV on the other side, and mess everywhere. On the ottoman was a pizza box I was pretty sure was at least a few days old, a Chinese take-out menu that had been ripped in half lay abandoned on the carpet and what I was fairly certain was a dirty pair of boxers hung off a plastic chair in the corner of the room. Ew.
Violet scanned through the phone, then, evidently unhappy with what she found, threw it back at the man on the ground as I made my way to the kitchen. I had to check the fridge, just in case, even though the man had already said the others had left with the Ebola vials. Sure enough, the fridge was basically empty.
I sighed and shook my head at Violet.
“And you know nothing else of the man paying you for the vials, nor where the men with the vials have gone?”
The man shook his head and Violet sighed again. She picked up his phone, which was still sitting on the man’s chest. “I am taking this. Do not contact your friends. Also, you should make an effort to visit your mother more often. Just because she lives in Yorkshire does not mean you should ignore her; she obviously cares about you.”
Leaving the man gaping, awestruck, at Violet, we turned and left. I was too worried about the Ebola to even bother asking Violet how she knew that stuff about the man’s mother. Making our way through the streets, I barely noticed the loiterers and catcallers; I was just bummed out that once again we’d missed our chance at finding the vials. Violet checked the man’s phone every five seconds or so; I was sure she was waiting for someone to text so she could reply and hopefully get some more information.
When we finally got into the cab I leaned back against the seat. It was now almost two in the morning.
“Please tell me you noticed something. Anything,” I begged Violet, who shook her head sadly.
“Nothing important. I am afraid that I must admit I am completely at a loss. I do not know where they took the vials.”
She called DCI Williams and put the phone on speaker.
“What do you have for me?” he asked immediately.
“Aleksander is still at his home, although the vials are gone. They left twenty minutes ago. I do not know where.”
DCI Williams let out a loud sigh. “Well, Petkovic and Blagojevic have both asked for lawyers. They’re refusing to speak to us.”
“I am sorry to say that they may be the only two people left to whom we have access to who know what has happened to the Ebola. My suspicion is that if there will be an attack, it will be in the next twenty-four hours.”
“Yes, well, unlike you, I don’t have the liberty of ignoring the law whenever it suits me. I’ll do what I can, Violet. But don’t hold your breath.”
“They are being paid ten million pounds for the theft of the vials,” Violet said. “They have a buyer. This is not a case of extreme nationalism; they are in this for the money. Use that information as you will.”
“Thanks,” DCI Williams said. “Keep me posted if you find out anything else.”
The call ended, along with most of my hopes that we were going to find the vials in time.
“Now what do we do?” I asked.
“Well, you must go to bed. After all, you must go to the presentation Jake is doing tomorrow morning.”
“Ok, one, how did you know I was going to that? I haven’t told you anything about it. And two, how am I supposed to go watch a presentation while knowing that at any moment Ebola might be launched into this town?”
“You will go because there is nothing to be done. There is no point in worrying about anything, because you cannot do anything about it. Going about your normal life is the best thing you can do. As to how I know, I saw the email that Jake sent you.”
I narrowed my eyes. “When did you see it?”
“I was doing some mindless computer exercises the other night, as I was thinking about this case. I would have seen it then.”
“So in normal people terms, you hacked my email?”
“Yes. But do not worry, I only read the one from Jake.”
“Oh, well as long as you only invaded my privacy a little bit,” I replied, rolling my eyes.
“I needed something easy to hack, as a palette cleanser,” Violet explained. Of course it was just like her to justify it rather than apologize.
“So you’re saying my email was easy to hack. You’re not making things better for yourself, here.”
Violet shrugged. “You are the one who uses your cat’s name and birth year as a password. I cannot be blamed if anyone with a passing knowledge of your life can figure it out.”
Making a mental note to change my password, I leaned my head back against the headrest. The adrenaline from the night was wearing off, and my body was overcome by a sudden wave of pure exhaustion.
“You know, I’m too tired to deal with this right now,” I said. “Stop reading my emails.”
“That is fine, all you had to do was ask,” Violet said.
“And don’t hack any of my private accounts in the future, either,” I added, glaring at her.
“All right, all right,” she said, putting her arms up. Sometimes, dealing with Violet was absolutely impossible.
Chapter 18
I remembered to set my alarm in time to get to Jake’s presentation the next morning, which thankfully wasn’t until eleven. Even so, I was so tired when the alarm finally went off that I mashed the snooze button enough times so that when I finally got up, I was running late.
Throwing my hair up into a ponytail rather than shower, I quickly took off all the makeup from the night before that I’d been too tired to remove before going into bed, replaced it with much more daytime-appropriate shades and amounts, fed Biscuit and ran out the door.
Glancing at my phone when I reached Euston station, I saw I had just enough time to grab a quick latte from a cart vendor on the street before making my way to where Jake was holding his lecture: the UCL Cruciform Building.
Now, as a proud Stanford student, I was always ready to tell anyone, anywhere, anytime about the beauty of the campus and how no other University campus on earth came close to the incredible beauty of where I went. But I had to admit, as I came across the Cruciform building, my breath caught in my throat.
It was incredible. Five stories high, the gothic-style building towered over the street. Built with bricks in so deep a shade of red they were almost brown, the roof was topped with copper that had long since oxidized green. White brick made decorative accents, and the white frames of the windows added even more class to the building. Brass letters across the top entrance announced ‘University College London’ and above that was a seal with the letters MDCCCV. It took me a minute to remember my roman numeral conversions, and realize this building dated from 1805.
I realized I was staring and was going to be late, and quickly made my way inside.
The interior of the building was like a cross between a modern building and a historic one. In some ways, it felt like I’d just been transported to Hogwarts. Roman arches, mosaic floors, brick walls and iron balustrades, combined with warm lighting gave the interior a magical feel, while at the same time the wooden doors, occasional tiled floors and plastered walls did remind me that this was the twenty-first
century after all. It was a beautiful mixture of modern and ancient, and I found myself looking around in awe as I made my way toward the classroom where Jake was giving his speech.
When I walked into the room, I had to admit I was surprised. It was completely modern; six rows of long tables with benches ran in a semi-circle around the room; the center had a large projection screen, with purple carpet flooring. Small lights in the ceiling beamed down on the room, which was filled with maybe one hundred and fifty students, their voices as they chatted to one another filling the room with a low, buzzing sound. I knew this scene all too well.
Finding a seat near the back of the room, I pulled out my phone to see if I’d received any last minute texts from Violet, telling me she had solved everything and saved the country from a potential terrorist attack. Unfortunately, my screen’s background–a picture I’d taken of Biscuit trying to steal a slice of pizza from the counter–announced no new text messages. I sighed as I turned my phone to silent just as Jake walked into the room.
True to form, the buzzing didn’t exactly stop, but it dropped in volume significantly as Jake made his way to the front of the room. I smiled to myself as I noticed the groups that had stopped talking and were now giving this new speaker their undivided attention were almost exclusively female–and one group of obviously gay men.
“All right everyone, if I can get your attention,” Jake said, his voice carrying across the room without need for a microphone. He waited for a minute and the noise slowly dimmed to silence.
“Thank you. First of all, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Jake Edmunds, and I’m a pathologist at the Westminster Public Mortuary.”
An excited buzz passed through the room at those words. Obviously this was the first time these students had encountered someone who worked with the dead, rather than the living.
“That’s right,” Jake said. “When you guys screw up, they send them to me, and I’m the one who’s going to nail you to the wall for it.”
“I’d let you nail me against the wall any day,” one girl called out, as the whole class burst out into laughter. I saw a blush creeping up Jake’s face as he looked around the room and his eyes locked on mine. I laughed and waved. Evidently relieved, Jake cleared his throat.
Whacked in Whitechapel (A Cozy Mystery) (Cassie Coburn Mysteries Book 3) Page 10
