Pru looked down at her husband. “I didn’t pull the trigger,” she mumbled. “I couldn’t have.” Then, to Jonathan: “Do something.”
“Just call an ambulance!”
Pru rushed into the kitchen and called emergency services.
Jonathan pulled the blanket from the ottoman and used it to wipe away the blood. He pushed his index finger into the hole, feeling for an artery he could stanch.
“Keep trying,” said Meadows, struggling to raise his head. “Don’t worry about the pain. I can’t feel a thing. The bullet must have hit the spinal cord.”
“It’s a little slippery,” said Jonathan, angling his index finger through muscle fascia into the thoracic cavity. “Let me just try on this side.”
“Got it?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t give up.”
Jonathan leaned closer, eyes narrowed. “Hang in there. I’ll get it clamped in a second.”
“I know you will.” Suddenly Meadows went into spasm. His body heaved. His head bolted forward and dark arterial blood pulsed from his mouth. “Jon … help me.”
“Lay back, Jamie. We can do this.” Jonathan lowered Meadows to the floor, took a steadying breath, and recommenced his blind search for the nicked artery.
“Christ, the girls,” said Meadows. “They’re so young.”
“You just worry about yourself. Hang tight. We’ll have you at a hospital in no time. Understand?”
“It’s just…” Meadows’s words trailed off.
“Stay with me!” Jonathan inched his finger to the right and felt a current of blood. Probing more deeply, he located the source of the internal bleeding. “There,” he said. “I’ve got it. Now lay still.”
“Thank God,” whispered Meadows, his eyes meeting Jonathan’s. “That’s a good chap, Ransom. It’s true then.”
“What?”
“Magic hands. You do have them.” Then he gasped and went still.
Jonathan watched as his friend’s pupils dilated and his face drained of color. The change was immediate and dramatic. Gingerly, he removed his finger and sat back on his knees, gazing at the still form.
Pru returned to the living room, her eyes darting between Jonathan and her husband’s corpse. “What happened? How is he? Jamie?”
“He’s dead,” said Jonathan.
“What? But the ambulance is on its way. They said three minutes. It can’t be.” Prudence laid the gun on a side table, knelt and placed a hand on her husband’s cheek. “Jamie,” she whispered close to his ear. “Come on then. Hold on for a little longer. The ambulance is almost here. Division will understand. You’re my husband. They have to.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jonathan.
“No, it’s not possible,” the woman protested. “He can’t be. I didn’t… I mean it was an accident.”
The room grew quiet, the odor of gunpowder fouling the air.
“You did this,” said Prudence, after a moment. Her eyes were wet with tears, but her voice remained flat. “You killed him. You and Emma.”
“No,” said Jonathan, tiredly.
In an instant, she was on her feet, her hand reaching for the pistol.
Jonathan reacted instinctively. There was a flash of silver, a thud, and a sharp intake of breath. He picked up the gun and moved back a step.
Prudence Meadows stared in horror at the letter opener pinning her hand to the side table, but she made no noise. Her eyes met Jonathan’s. In the distance, an ambulance’s siren wailed.
“Jenny,” she called upstairs to her older daughter, with unnerving calm. “Wake up! There’s an intruder and he’s shot Daddy!”
Jonathan ran out the door.
Five minutes later, he was driving Jamie Meadows’s Jaguar along the A4 out of London.
28
Officially it was called the Telephone Information Unit of the London Metropolitan Police, but everyone on the force knew it as the Aquarium. The Aquarium was located on the third underground floor beneath a government building in Whitehall. The building, a dignified assembly of red brick and mortar, might have been designed and constructed in the seventeenth century by a pupil of Inigo Jones, but the Aquarium was strictly twenty-first century. Instead of brick there was stainless steel, and instead of mortar, fiber optic cable. Thousands of miles of it ran through the walls and under the floors and into the warren of cubicles and bullpens and soundproofed conference rooms that covered an area the size of a football pitch. It was the Telephone Information Unit’s job to eavesdrop on the telephone conversations and e-mail traffic of some five thousand people deemed “persons of interest” by Her Majesty’s government.
Kate Ford hurried along the elevated walkway that ran the length of the Aquarium. A pane of soundproof glass separated her from the work area. Every 20 meters there was an exit and stairs that descended from the catwalk to the floor. It was past eleven at night, but the floor bristled with activity. In the digital world, there was no day or night.
She stopped at the third doorway, passed her identification card through the reader, waited for the green pinlight, and applied her left thumb to the biometric scanner. Ironically, security increased once you’d been granted admission to the building. She descended the stairs. The warren was so complex that the walkways that crisscrossed the giant floor had all been given names. She passed pennants denoting Belgravia and Covent Garden, stopping at Pimlico.
Tony Shaffer slouched at his desk, keyboard on his lap as he tapped instructions into his computer. “Oh, hey there,” he said, coming to attention. “Just finishing a little something.”
“Hurry it up,” said Kate, finding an empty chair and rolling it to Shaffer’s cubicle.
Shaffer was young and unshaven, with a head of unruly black hair. “I’ve started working on the info you gave me,” he said.
“Any luck?”
“’Fraid not.”
Kate frowned. Upon leaving the Dorchester, she’d phoned Shaffer to request that he start tracking down the IP address and location of the woman who’d sent Russell the video message yesterday morning. “Name and address check out?”
“No problem there,” said Shaffer, with an air of apology that made her nervous. “Robert Russell was duly registered with British Telecom and Vodafone. I have the number of every phone and cable line running into his apartment at One Park. Theoretically, it’s just a question of tracing the traffic that came through Russell’s pipe.”
“Then why the long face?”
“Russell’s info is blocked. Can’t get to it.”
“How’s that? I was at Five this morning. They’ve had a clamp on Russell’s numbers for weeks. They’d even made a copy of the transmission.”
“Five’s the problem. They have a filter on the node running into that part of the city. Essentially, they’re capturing every bit of communications traffic in Mayfair, whether they have a warrant for it or not. Russell’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Did you request copies of the traffic to his flat?”
Shaffer nodded. “I did, but they refuse to share it. Fed me a line about national security taking precedence over a local investigation.”
“A homicide investigation, thank you.”
“I told ’em. Didn’t cut me any slack.”
Kate leaned forward, pinching the bridge of her nose. “The woman’s the key. She’s the human connection. It was her source that gave Russell ‘Victoria Bear.’ She’s the one who can tell us who’s behind the bombing.”
“You’ll need to file a request with the Security Service, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
“I thought this was the age of improved cooperation.”
“That is improved cooperation. Believe me. Before, Five wouldn’t even take my call.” Shaffer scratched his head. “Don’t you have any other way of finding your Joe? You said it was a video message. Did you do an ambient sound analysis? Sometimes they can find the craziest things. Radios playing in another room, church bells ringing miles away, all kin
ds of stuff that can help you pinpoint the location of the sender. Then you can reverse-engineer the whole thing. Narrow it down to a few square miles, identify the local cable node, and see who in that area was sending messages to Russell.”
“And how long will that take?”
“Days, maybe a week—provided, that is, that they get to you. Queue’s about sixty days as it is.”
“Thanks for the tip, Tony.”
“Sorry I couldn’t help.”
“No worries.” Kate patted him on the shoulder and made her way to the stairs. Ambient sound analysis, she thought to herself. There had to be an easier way. She shook her head. Church bells, of all things.
Just then she remembered something about the video message, a detail she’d noted but had dismissed as more grasping at straws. She stopped in her tracks. It was probably nothing, but…
She ran up the remaining stairs and threw open the door before getting hold of herself. No running allowed, she reminded herself. Never let them see you bothered.
Setting her chin against the world, she strode down the walkway and out of the building. She needed to review a copy of the video transmission. She was going back to Thames House, Graves be damned!
29
“Keep the lights off!” shouted the besotted voice.
Kate advanced into the recesses of the office on the first floor of Thames House. Squinting, she made out a shadowy form slumped behind the broad desk. “You all right, then, Colonel Graves?”
“What do you want?” The words slurred in a messy polysyllabic swamp.
Kate ran her hand along the wall and flicked on the lights. The room blazed to life. Graves raised a hand to ward off the glare, staring at her hatefully through bloodshot eyes. There was a bottle of whisky on his desk and a cut-glass tumbler filled nearly to the lip.
“I couldn’t reach you. Your assistant said I might find you here.”
“Remind me to sack him.”
“What’s all this, then?” Kate indicated the bottle and the glass and his generally lamentable state.
“Why, nothing, DCI Ford. Everything’s hunky-dory. All quiet on the western front. You may return to your troops forthwith.”
“I thought you’d be halfway to Timbuktu by now. You and your trusty Yankee bloodhound.”
“Ransom? You mean you haven’t heard?” Graves’s throaty laugh echoed through the room, a single forlorn bark.
Kate advanced tentatively toward the desk. “What is it?”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone? Did you hand him over to the Americans? Did they admit to knowing him after all?”
“The Americans? ’Course not.”
“Then what?”
“He escaped.”
“He did what?” Kate asked, certain that Graves was engaging in some sort of twisted practical joke.
“Skedaddled. Went over the wall. He is no longer in police custody. Wipe that damn look off your face. Are you having a problem understanding me?”
Kate fell into the chair facing Graves’s desk. She was furious. Monumentally angry at whatever act of incompetence had allowed a suspect to escape from police custody. “When I left, you had him locked in his room with enough guards to protect the pope. What exactly happened?”
“Chap climbed down the building. Off the balcony and right down the façade. Apparently it’s not as hard as it looks.” Graves pushed his chair back and stood. “You didn’t tell me he was a climber,” he said, circling the desk menacingly. “I only just got that part. If I’d been so apprised, then perhaps I would have put two and two together. Not as dumb as some of the boys upstairs think, actually.”
“So you’re blaming it on me?”
“No,” admitted Graves. “This one’s all mine. When you take off a prisoner’s cuffs and let him wander around the room as if he’s the Prince of Wales and you’re his valet, then you don’t have anyone else to blame. My fault entirely.” He leveled a finger at her. “You may now mention something about my being an arrogant bastard who deserved to be hoisted on his own petard. I yield the floor to the member from Hen-don.”
“Not my style,” said Kate.
“Funny, it’s mine,” said Graves, almost cheerily. “Or should I say it was.”
“You sacked, then?”
Graves shook his head as if it were the furthest thing from the truth. “’Course not. They tend to be diplomatic about this kind of thing. The director will wait a week or so, so as not to draw any more attention to the matter than necessary. Still, it’s a matter of time. You don’t let the prime suspect in a car bombing that took seven lives, including some very important, very nasty Russian diplomats, slip through your fingers. Not when you have him under lock and key. Sacked? I’ll be lucky if I’m not crucified.”
“I’m sorry.”
Graves rolled his eyes. “Christ, a sincere one.” He picked up the glass and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Trying to find the woman who contacted Russell.”
“A nonstarter. Didn’t your buddy Tony Shaffer tell you that over at the Aquarium?”
Even now Graves had to let Kate know that he was one step ahead of her. “He said Five wouldn’t cooperate.”
“Better than admitting we were flummoxed,” said Graves. “Russell’s got that message routed through ISPs all over the globe. Before coming to England, it passed through France, Russia, and India. It would take a month to track it down.” Suddenly he guffawed. “The woman’s probably a pro, too. The baby was cover.”
Kate twisted in her chair to follow Graves as he ambled around his office. “Do you have a copy of her message handy?”
“Sure, but I can tell you that my best men have given it a thorough going over and come up with exactly nil.”
“Would you mind playing it?”
Graves opened the AV cabinet and activated the DVD player. A moment later the intercepted message began to spool.
“Stop there,” said Kate, halfway through the woman’s speech.
Graves froze the image. Onscreen, the woman had bent forward an inch or two to quiet her baby. One of her hands brushed the infant’s cheek.
“Look at the ring,” said Kate, pointing to the woman’s outstretched fingers.
“What about it?”
“It has a coat of arms. I think it may be a university ring.”
Graves increased the size of the image and the woman grew larger, her hand positioned in the center of the picture. Kate stepped closer to the monitor. “That’s an Oxford ring, if I’m not mistaken.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“Because I wanted to go there desperately.”
Graves studied the image for a few seconds, then spun and walked back to his desk. “Christ, you just may have something.”
In the space of ten seconds, his gait had regained its authority. His posture was its once rigid self. He plucked the phone from the cradle and put it to his ear. “Roberts,” he said, the slur a bad memory. “Get down to archives. Find the Oxford University yearbooks for …” Graves lowered the phone.
“The last twenty years,” said Kate.
“The last twenty years and bring them right up.” He set down the phone. “Drink?” he said.
Kate shook her head. “Better not. Still recovering.”
Graves perched himself on the edge of the desk. “That was you who blew the Kew Strangler arrest, eh? Tough going.”
“We had him IDed, with enough evidence to put him away for life. Our profiler said he was docile except when acting out his fantasies. We walked up to his front door as if he was any other Joe. We even rang the bell and introduced ourselves. I didn’t think there would be a problem. I’ve arrested twenty murderers. None of ’em made a peep. Gentle as lambs when we brought them in. We got complacent.”
“The chap who was killed—a detective chief superintendent, wasn’t he?”
“Billy Donovan. He was my fiancé.”
Graves winced. �
�I’m sorry.”
“The Met tried to force me to retire,” explained Kate. “They don’t like embarrassments either. I told them to shove it. I wasn’t going out like that. They stuck me on night shift and look what happened. I’ve got my second chance.”
“I don’t think the director general is so forgiving.”
“You’ve got seven days. It takes that long just for the paperwork to get started. We can prove both our bosses were wrong.”
Graves lifted his glass. “On that inspirational note, DCI Ford, cheers and fuck the lot of you!”
Kate put her hand on his arm. “That’s enough charity for tonight.”
Graves yanked his hand loose. He glared at Kate, then turned and set the glass down on the desk. “Ransom’s dirty. Von Daniken said the same thing. Ransom’s too skilled to be an amateur. And don’t you say he’s just scared.”
“I disagree. He was too close to the blast, for one. And why would he run down the street shouting like a madman at his wife? If he were a pro, he would have managed to alert her more discreetly. He had to know we’d get it on tape.”
“That’s what bothers me,” said Graves. “It’s her behavior that doesn’t make any sense.”
“How so?”
“We know she’s a pro, whether she used to work with the Americans or not. We learned that at Russell’s flat. Someone had to teach her how to defeat that security system. Then you have the car bomb. It’s no easy task to assemble that kind of device and get it into central London without being spotted. But what does Mrs. Emma Ransom do with all her training and supposed years of experience? She stands on that street corner plain as day through two cycles of the traffic signal and practically stares into the camera as she blows the bomb. She wanted us to see her.” Graves slapped his leg in a sign of frustration. “To tell you the truth, the behavior of neither of them makes a lick of sense.”
“Him I understand,” retorted Kate. “He told us that she’d surprised him at the hotel. He knew what she’d done in the past. He put two and two together and realized she was up to something here in London.”
Rules of Vengeance Page 18
